Slashdot looks EXACTLY the same as it did when it first started 6 years ago.
The same godawful color schemes, ugly nexted tables, awful HTML code, etc.
Ever tried to switch to the "mobile" or plaintext version (I can't remember what it's called but it's in the prefs)?
It gives you plain, nice HTML 2.0ish content, works fine with Links and with Mozilla you can set the browser window as narrow/wide as your eyes want it, without getting horizontal scrollbars.
Been using that for ~ 4 years now, didn't take two months to switch back at the time.
Just a thought: considering the amount of http hits they get daily/hourly/minutely or even every second, it just makes sense to serve as simple pages as possible. If not only for the bandwidth but also processing time: creating a 60KB HTML page out of a template takes only slightly more than a 5KB HTML page but considerably more when you multiply that by a few thousand hits per second, divided by the available processing power (even if they have much of that, too), it all starts to matter again.
Because it IS hard and has very few ubiquitous engineering disciplines and practices to support creating a distinguished craft out of it.
It also offers lucrative fallacies to explain further the lack of those qualities. First, as opposed to "programming" (the real craft) "coding" (a more common practice) is NOT hard and almost any technical person can write code. And coding is unfortunately commonly mistaken for programming. Designing and writing maintainable programs that are as simple and elegant as possible, and then actually maintaining them is not included in the skillset of many people in the business. Most of the commercial software sucks and has a relatively short life.
Secondly, companies not investing in quality helps creating a breeding pit of bad, non-sustaining program-making habits. Sadly enough, customers are kind of used to the unfunctionality of computer programs, they won't demand standards on software quality. Therefore, it's not profitable to do a good job since technically inferior products often conquer the markets and set actually good products aside due to non-technical factors (as it was with Microsoft Windows).
If my memory serves me correctly, didn't they stop developing their Linux tree a year or two ago? Because of some stupid ruling at political level, IIRC?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, as I can't remember. I'm happy to see them continue, as it now seems.
I work in the Network/System Admin team for an ISP.... has mandated that my team's desktops be switched over from Linux to Windows XP in the next few weeks.... we won't be allowed to install random programs... may not have admin access.
You're on the network/system admin team and you're not going to have root on your boxen? They have admin-administrators then, or what? Usually it takes a huge company to actually have separate departments for IT support/admin and network support/admin.
We're not happy with the change but we're unable to stop it.
Professionals need appropriate tools, not toys. The bosses should be interested in you getting the job done with minimum hassle. Tell them that using Windows is going to cause delays and disrupt you from doing the work they're paying you to do, if that's true for your case.
There is one similarity to the NS vs. IE battle. Back in those days, you'd have to go download Netscape whereas IE was quite soon not only free to download but force-fed along with Windows. That lead to people who didn't even understand the concept of a browser application, as IE \equal WWW for them -- which put NS to a quite unfair position.
With search engines, people still have to go to google.com. Getting a googlebar installed requires finding, downloading and installing it. When Microsoft adds a large "SEARCH INTERNET" button on the Windows desktop (in their next service pack or Windows Next), people don't even need to fire up IE to click the "SEARCH" button on its toolbar, not to mention go to a URL in order to make a web search. (I'm not familiar with the current Windows desktop, they might already have something like this.)
Many people will still find Google. Also, the 10KB Google frontpage is much less to download than the 10MB Netscape binary. However, there is an alarmingly high number of people who might once again lose the concept of a web-based search engine and go for "Internet Search" instead. Then again, it'll be hard for Google search engine and MSN search engine to compete, as people won't, by default, see or know of either.
...don't they kinda wished that they ran linux on it?
and if it where buggy, they'd at least have a patch within a couple of hours;-)
However, it's less hard to imagine a force-fed MS IE bringing the rover down to a bluescreen a few times a day.
MS salesrep: "No, sir, we can't do that. IE is an integrated part of the WindowsCE SpaceGear Edition and cannot be totally removed. However, you can make the icon disappear from your rover's desktop with a few mouse clicks. Just make a Windows Remote Desktop connection to the rover's Terminal Server..."
DRM is not "Digital Rights Management"--it does nothing to protect anyone's rights. [...] "Digital Restrictions Management" is much more accurate--it does nothing in regard to the rights of the company, but restricts the rights of the user.
DRM might bring good options too, although what's good for citizens isn't usually good for companies and there are even many laws that aren't for the best of the citizen. But, in a daydream, I would love to DRM-flag any of my personal data I give out to the next airline company or an internet shop. Then, when they'd try to sell or give it up to the U.S. government (which seems to reside everywhere these days...), they'd just get a nice dialog saying:
"This personal information is digitally protected and it's only allowed to be used by the certified company $TICKETSOFTWARE|$BILLINGSOFTWARE. These restrictions can only be changed by the owner of the information."
Of course, they could refuse to sell me goods if I do that but then it could more easily become a legal/constitutional issue. For example, European privacy laws are quite strict so using DRM to ensure their enforcement would therefore be backed by the law.
Anybody remember Amiga and ReqTools file requesters? They were the fastest you could imagine: in the dialog window there was one listbox that switched between volumes (unixworld equivalents of root dir, desktop, home dir etc.) and dir+file list. Good keyboard control that grabbed all relevant keypresses (like up/down) directly to the listbox, no need to worry about widget focus. Now *that* would be something I'd like to see in GTK+ too.
I wonder if this is the next step in the "Trusted Secure Computing" world? Routers won't accept traffic from non-trusted computers?
Suppose this is the way it'll be in five years. There's another bad thing related: it'll still be the same Windows Next! boxen that spread viruses around, just like before. TCPA doesn't help if your un/trusted OS still leaks like a sieve.
What about those 5%? What did they dislike about Linux, why did they switch (back?) to Windows? - We need to get in touch with folks who switched from Linux to Windows and ask them these questions.
Things aren't that bad always. I could say we switched our webserver from Linux/Apache to Windows/IIS, or at least in the sense how Netcraft would see it. Our company outsourced the webpages to a hosting company that also provides web-based maintenance of the site. Partly a management decision, partly because we didn't have enough content creators with HTML skills.
Now, the Apache webserver isn't however gone: actually most stuff we run on it wasn't the static company webpages but a lot of server based applications (which couldn't be moved) and a few virtual hosts (which weren't moved) etc. The box is still running, and has a few more virtual hosts and gadgets running on it.
There's nothing to say that Linux is losing its share: if the webhosting company providing the application we needed had been a Linux shop, we wouldn't have contributed to this "statistics".
...find out what works well, what doesn't work, how it interoperates with other software, how it performs, and how hard it is for normal users to use. Then they are going to take that data and use it to improve their products and marketing.
Did you mean "take that data and use it to make sure it'll be much harded for Linux to interoperate with Windows in Longhorn?"
The GPL does not in any way cover internal distribution. This is not the same as public distribution. Making modifications and keeping them within your company, but not releasing the source, is completely uncovered by the GPL.
This is interesting. I'd interpret the GPL as not covering different distributions means that there aren't such things as different distributions. If you distribute the binary to anybody, even your own employee, that anybody has the right to ask for the source and you'll have to give it to him/her, even if that's your own employee.
If you must distribute the source code to every government agent or military person using the GPL'ed code it may constitute a shady security risk. You can't even forbid the employees from redistributing the in-house version of the software; sure the house owns the copyright to the modifications, but it must release them under GPL too, which grants the distributees the right to modify and distribute the software and the source.
Sure there is, it's called copyright law. In order to make an XBox game you need to have the license to use certain copyrighted code in order to work with the system.
The copyright law states nothing about having to license any code from anywhere in order to make a game for XBox. Keys are not copyrighted either. Hacking the key, writing a game using your own code and libraries and selling it is legal. No code or property of MS is illegally copied at all.
Wine is free, too, and that's completely legal.
Sure, MS wants you to sign a developer contract (or whatever) so that they can pull strings on you but if you don't, they can only sue you into oblivion over not-so-related issues, like over DMCA (for breaking their copy protection) and other acronyms.
This rule is saying that the author of the page thinks that the page looks best when viewed with font face called "verdana" with a font size of 85% of the size the user has selected she is comfortable with.
This helps me a lot: the reason I wrote this is that there are web developers who ask questions like this Ask Slashdot.
Re:Is it still crippleware?
on
The Be Lives!
·
· Score: 1
FYI: It never was crippleware in how you described it. You could format a partition on your harddisk for BeFS, install the OS there (there was an installer binary in the 512MB HD image partition). Even the HD image booted nicely without Windows or Linux, you just had to put the image file to some ext2/fat partition where the bootdisk could find it. The only things missing from the personal edition was the lack of licensed MP3 codec and SSL-support for NetPositive.
Re:Devil's advocate
on
Fritz's Hit List
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...hackers in Germany could give a shit, because they will still able to buy DRM-free hardware and software
I wonder if these things will become global eventually. It didn't take many years for DMCA to arrive in Europe. And I'm pretty sure the media companies and DRM-pushers have already thought of ways to make these draconian laws and DRM a worldwide standard. They could threaten to stop distributing music and movies in a non-DRM format, or just delay the distribution into unacceptable level. The Microsoft will tout the secure Palladium all over the world to protect your computer ("from yourself" will be left unsaid, of course). The rest of the world will be DRM/Palladium pressurized and it only takes a big enough critical mass to tilt the course where the rest of the countries will be going, too. International trading without electricity and transportation? Computers? Palladium? Perhaps I'm just a pessimist cynic here.:/
The reason Windows embraces its horrible MDI is that it has lacked virtual desktops since the year 0. MDI is mostly about grouping related windows. As someone already pointed out, Mozilla does this with tabs and I think running Gimp on one desktop is comparable to running Photoshop in one MDI window.
MDI is just the result of philosophy of MS Windows:
Thou can run one app at a time, fullscreen, since our windowing management is so bad you can't efficiently operate with multiple windows at the same time -- oh yes, we didn't do multitasking either in the beginning so we had to "switch between applications" and reflect this in the UI.
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I'll never chdi^H^H^H^Hwalk() to a CD mount point again!
There was a horde of files, all immortal! No matter how much led and plasma I pumped into them, they didn't go down! Fsck!
Then, a lot of people will become unemployed and eventually.. yeah, homeless.
Ever tried to switch to the "mobile" or plaintext version (I can't remember what it's called but it's in the prefs)?
It gives you plain, nice HTML 2.0ish content, works fine with Links and with Mozilla you can set the browser window as narrow/wide as your eyes want it, without getting horizontal scrollbars.
Been using that for ~ 4 years now, didn't take two months to switch back at the time.
Just a thought: considering the amount of http hits they get daily/hourly/minutely or even every second, it just makes sense to serve as simple pages as possible. If not only for the bandwidth but also processing time: creating a 60KB HTML page out of a template takes only slightly more than a 5KB HTML page but considerably more when you multiply that by a few thousand hits per second, divided by the available processing power (even if they have much of that, too), it all starts to matter again.
Because it IS hard and has very few ubiquitous engineering disciplines and practices to support creating a distinguished craft out of it.
It also offers lucrative fallacies to explain further the lack of those qualities. First, as opposed to "programming" (the real craft) "coding" (a more common practice) is NOT hard and almost any technical person can write code. And coding is unfortunately commonly mistaken for programming. Designing and writing maintainable programs that are as simple and elegant as possible, and then actually maintaining them is not included in the skillset of many people in the business. Most of the commercial software sucks and has a relatively short life.
Secondly, companies not investing in quality helps creating a breeding pit of bad, non-sustaining program-making habits. Sadly enough, customers are kind of used to the unfunctionality of computer programs, they won't demand standards on software quality. Therefore, it's not profitable to do a good job since technically inferior products often conquer the markets and set actually good products aside due to non-technical factors (as it was with Microsoft Windows).
I read "creme brulee". I'm a nerd but I cook, too. Hence that.
If my memory serves me correctly, didn't they stop developing their Linux tree a year or two ago? Because of some stupid ruling at political level, IIRC?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, as I can't remember. I'm happy to see them continue, as it now seems.
You're on the network/system admin team and you're not going to have root on your boxen? They have admin-administrators then, or what? Usually it takes a huge company to actually have separate departments for IT support/admin and network support/admin.
Professionals need appropriate tools, not toys. The bosses should be interested in you getting the job done with minimum hassle. Tell them that using Windows is going to cause delays and disrupt you from doing the work they're paying you to do, if that's true for your case.There is one similarity to the NS vs. IE battle. Back in those days, you'd have to go download Netscape whereas IE was quite soon not only free to download but force-fed along with Windows. That lead to people who didn't even understand the concept of a browser application, as IE \equal WWW for them -- which put NS to a quite unfair position.
With search engines, people still have to go to google.com. Getting a googlebar installed requires finding, downloading and installing it. When Microsoft adds a large "SEARCH INTERNET" button on the Windows desktop (in their next service pack or Windows Next), people don't even need to fire up IE to click the "SEARCH" button on its toolbar, not to mention go to a URL in order to make a web search. (I'm not familiar with the current Windows desktop, they might already have something like this.)
Many people will still find Google. Also, the 10KB Google frontpage is much less to download than the 10MB Netscape binary. However, there is an alarmingly high number of people who might once again lose the concept of a web-based search engine and go for "Internet Search" instead. Then again, it'll be hard for Google search engine and MSN search engine to compete, as people won't, by default, see or know of either.
Damn it, they don't make enough Mac compatible viruses.
Somebody please wrap it into RPMs and DEBs, too!
However, it's less hard to imagine a force-fed MS IE bringing the rover down to a bluescreen a few times a day.
MS salesrep: "No, sir, we can't do that. IE is an integrated part of the WindowsCE SpaceGear Edition and cannot be totally removed. However, you can make the icon disappear from your rover's desktop with a few mouse clicks. Just make a Windows Remote Desktop connection to the rover's Terminal Server..."
DRM is not "Digital Rights Management"--it does nothing to protect anyone's rights. [...] "Digital Restrictions Management" is much more accurate--it does nothing in regard to the rights of the company, but restricts the rights of the user.
DRM might bring good options too, although what's good for citizens isn't usually good for companies and there are even many laws that aren't for the best of the citizen. But, in a daydream, I would love to DRM-flag any of my personal data I give out to the next airline company or an internet shop. Then, when they'd try to sell or give it up to the U.S. government (which seems to reside everywhere these days...), they'd just get a nice dialog saying:
"This personal information is digitally protected and it's only allowed to be used by the certified company $TICKETSOFTWARE|$BILLINGSOFTWARE. These restrictions can only be changed by the owner of the information."
Of course, they could refuse to sell me goods if I do that but then it could more easily become a legal/constitutional issue. For example, European privacy laws are quite strict so using DRM to ensure their enforcement would therefore be backed by the law.
Also, today's Dilbert got a good one on this: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/imag es/dilbert20024398640114.gif
Looks like a kind of windows rip-off again.
Anybody remember Amiga and ReqTools file requesters? They were the fastest you could imagine: in the dialog window there was one listbox that switched between volumes (unixworld equivalents of root dir, desktop, home dir etc.) and dir+file list. Good keyboard control that grabbed all relevant keypresses (like up/down) directly to the listbox, no need to worry about widget focus. Now *that* would be something I'd like to see in GTK+ too.
Suppose this is the way it'll be in five years. There's another bad thing related: it'll still be the same Windows Next! boxen that spread viruses around, just like before. TCPA doesn't help if your un/trusted OS still leaks like a sieve.
I can only imagine: "Honey, have you asked the neighbours to water our server while we're on the vacation trip yet?"
Things aren't that bad always. I could say we switched our webserver from Linux/Apache to Windows/IIS, or at least in the sense how Netcraft would see it. Our company outsourced the webpages to a hosting company that also provides web-based maintenance of the site. Partly a management decision, partly because we didn't have enough content creators with HTML skills.
Now, the Apache webserver isn't however gone: actually most stuff we run on it wasn't the static company webpages but a lot of server based applications (which couldn't be moved) and a few virtual hosts (which weren't moved) etc. The box is still running, and has a few more virtual hosts and gadgets running on it.
There's nothing to say that Linux is losing its share: if the webhosting company providing the application we needed had been a Linux shop, we wouldn't have contributed to this "statistics".
Just being curious, how do you know?
Did you mean "take that data and use it to make sure it'll be much harded for Linux to interoperate with Windows in Longhorn?"
This is interesting. I'd interpret the GPL as not covering different distributions means that there aren't such things as different distributions. If you distribute the binary to anybody, even your own employee, that anybody has the right to ask for the source and you'll have to give it to him/her, even if that's your own employee.
If you must distribute the source code to every government agent or military person using the GPL'ed code it may constitute a shady security risk. You can't even forbid the employees from redistributing the in-house version of the software; sure the house owns the copyright to the modifications, but it must release them under GPL too, which grants the distributees the right to modify and distribute the software and the source.
The copyright law states nothing about having to license any code from anywhere in order to make a game for XBox. Keys are not copyrighted either. Hacking the key, writing a game using your own code and libraries and selling it is legal. No code or property of MS is illegally copied at all. Wine is free, too, and that's completely legal. Sure, MS wants you to sign a developer contract (or whatever) so that they can pull strings on you but if you don't, they can only sue you into oblivion over not-so-related issues, like over DMCA (for breaking their copy protection) and other acronyms.
Here's my userContent.css from Mozilla:
* { font-size: 16px !important; line-height: normal !important; text-decoration: none !important; }
H1 { font-size: xx-large !important; font-weight: bolder !important; }
H2 { font-size: x-large !important; font-weight: bolder !important; }
H3 { font-size: large !important; font-weight: bolder !important; }
A,A * { text-decoration: underline !important }
SMALL { font-size: smaller; !important }
This helps me a lot: the reason I wrote this is that there are web developers who ask questions like this Ask Slashdot.
FYI: It never was crippleware in how you described it. You could format a partition on your harddisk for BeFS, install the OS there (there was an installer binary in the 512MB HD image partition). Even the HD image booted nicely without Windows or Linux, you just had to put the image file to some ext2/fat partition where the bootdisk could find it. The only things missing from the personal edition was the lack of licensed MP3 codec and SSL-support for NetPositive.
I wonder if these things will become global eventually. It didn't take many years for DMCA to arrive in Europe. And I'm pretty sure the media companies and DRM-pushers have already thought of ways to make these draconian laws and DRM a worldwide standard. They could threaten to stop distributing music and movies in a non-DRM format, or just delay the distribution into unacceptable level. The Microsoft will tout the secure Palladium all over the world to protect your computer ("from yourself" will be left unsaid, of course). The rest of the world will be DRM/Palladium pressurized and it only takes a big enough critical mass to tilt the course where the rest of the countries will be going, too. International trading without electricity and transportation? Computers? Palladium? Perhaps I'm just a pessimist cynic here. :/
The reason Windows embraces its horrible MDI is that it has lacked virtual desktops since the year 0. MDI is mostly about grouping related windows. As someone already pointed out, Mozilla does this with tabs and I think running Gimp on one desktop is comparable to running Photoshop in one MDI window.
MDI is just the result of philosophy of MS Windows:
.