Depends on what kind of text the designer uses : It is perfectly possible to have text selections within Flash documents.
And why on earth should it even be possible for there to be any text on any computer system which cannot be selected? More importantly, why should that be the designer's decision, rather than mine?
Ohwait, now we -aren't- looking for uniformity in browsers anymore ? What did I miss ?
Um, apparently the part where "we" never started looking for any such thing in the first place? Why should your mouse-only browser and my text browser and my blind friend's browser and my colorblind friend's browser and my five-year-old PDA's browser be "uniform"? The whole sodding point of HTML was to have formatting be a set of loose suggestions, and allow the displaying system to adapt that to its capabilities and the user's preferences.
Yep, I agree: ecmascript is also pretty thoroughly pointless, and accomplishes much much more evil than good. That's why I generally have it disabled, or use a browser which doesn't support it in the first place.
And since when is looking the same in all browsers a feature? In fact, isn't that pretty contrary to the entire point of the Web, which allows <strong> on my system to mean something entirely different than <strong> on yours?
I'd say that any design which only works when things look precisely the same everywhere is flawed beyond hope. Why do designers expend such a monumental amount of effort trying to turn the flexible, adaptable medium of the Web back into an invariant brochure?
And as I've pointed out before, your "rebuttal" is a pointless straw man. The arguments you list are a tiny subset of the myriad of arguments against this hideous anti-technology. Here are a different small handful which you haven't addressed:
Flash defeats the most fundamental design goals of the Web: flexibility, implementation-independence, and content over presentation.
Flash allows web designers--not me--to choose how things look on my system.
Flash interferes with most of the functions usually performed by a web browser: in-page searching, history, bookmarking, content filtering. If the blinky-flashy-advertising part of this huge flash monstrosity were a separate image, I could just choose to not display it. But because it's part of the same single giant spooge of "content", I have to just live with it, eh?
But more fundamentally, the burden of proof is not on those making the argument that Flash is vile and tainted. That burden rests on the shoulders of those who assert that Flash is vital and useful and worthwhile.
Your feeble example of using flash to save a few reloaded bytes does not justify even all those endless extra bytes that flash interfaces use in the first place, much less the extensive array of tacky and ill-conceived things which are generally done with them. Flash would have to buy me a hell of a lot more than some faster edge-case refreshes for me to be willing to put my browsing at the mercy of every antisocial designer out there.
The best case is of imperceptible value, and the worst--and most common--case is astoundingly bad.
Out of curiosity, what's inflexible about "AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible, AIFF, Apple Lossless and WAV", and a tendency for more formats to become supported over time? It might not include a format you specifically want (vorbis or flac, I suppose?), but "inflexible" seems like an odd way to characterize it.
Uh, you mean I should just drag it into "drwxrwxr-x 40 root admin 1K 16 Jun 10:54/Applications"?
Nothing magic about this, just good old unix permissions. The closest thing to magic is that if I attempt to drag something in there as a non-admin user, the Finder won't just fail with an error; it will pause, ask me for an admin user's auth, and proceed if I can supply it. Which of course is not technically groundbreaking, just good design.
Reboot your imac and hold down the T key just after the chime. You'll get a grey screen with the firewire logo on it; your system is now an external firewire hard drive.
Plug it into any other system with a dvd reader. Run the installer on that system, installing onto the "disk" that is your imac.
Unmount the imac, and hit its power button to turn it off.
"Originating from" back orifice's default port? Bah! Spoken like a whippersnapper with an uid in the seven hundred thousands.
Elite/eleet/3l33t/leet/31337 had been a running joke for many a year before back orifice. When cDc announced bo at defcon, the carefully-casual mention of its default port drew quite a laugh from the crowd.
The quantity of options doesn't matter, only the quality of the best one. Once I've selected the most appropriate choice, I don't care whether I turned down two inferior ones or fifty; I'm still just using the one.
And no matter how many choices an intel box might offer me, it doesn't offer me osx.
As to why a mac might be the best choice, you're right that the grandparent didn't point out any. But that's because he was doing an admirable job of sticking to the topic at hand, which was refuting all of your inaccurate claims about the ways in which macs are inferior.
Now, if you want to now concede all your misinformed points and have a new conversation about why macs might be the best choice for very many circumstances, we could do that. But given how many discussions, including this one, are filled with enthusiastic descriptions of why people find their macs quite so enthralling and wonderful, I can't help but think we'd be returning to ground that's been very well covered.
Huh. I'm actually a little surprised that both of those would be considered by the same person. I have a Mini with which I'm extremely happy, but I've always found the Scion (and Honda's Element) to be deeply, profoundly, laughably, painfully, siezure-inducingly ugly.
We all know the value of anecdotal evidence, but I was completely uninterested in buying the CD changer. I'd always intended to use my ipod as a source, I'd just been planning on using the icelink; six CDs just isn't enough to be worth the bother.
(Conveniently, I seem to have a 2003 mini cooper without the optional navigation system, CD changer, cassette player, or satellite radio. So I know what _else_ I'm buying in July, after the Airport Express.)
At the time apple dropped floppies, there already was a global and universally accepted alternative: networks.
There had been previous attempts to replace floppies, by companies like iomega and syquest. They eventually failed not because of anything related to the implementation details of their products, but because the entire premise of removable storage was already on its way out, obviated by universal network connectivity.
Actually, tinydns's syntax is immensely easier than bind's.
In either case, someone could easily take a look at an existing zone and add a few A records. But creating a new bind zonefile from scratch is filled with intricacies, subtleties, and just plain weirdnesses that no sane person should have to know. Yes, you have to put the domain contact's email address at the top, and yes, that looks like another record, because we decided to substitute another . for the @, for some random-ass reason. Yes, you have to manually create your own forward and reverse records, even though there is only one valid combination that could exist. Yes, reverse entries (usually) need to use the fqdn and end in a trailing dot, even though the forward entries don't. Yes, you have to get the every syntax detail correct in every file, or the nameserver will refuse to serve any queries at all.
The problem with tinydns is djb's suckass documentation. And the first problem with djb's suckass documentation is that it makes the syntax look immensely harder than it is. The only examples he gives are of crazy edge cases, obscure and complex things that most people would never want to do. Presumably he's more interested in showing off the flexibility of his software, and all the unusual things it can handle, than just clearly showing people how to specify a goddamn A record.
Unfortunately, nothing untoward needs to happen at the network layer for these attacks to work. For example, I could stick an ssh:// uri into any web page you access, and use ssh's proxycommand to casually mention, "oh, and to connect to the outside world I need to run 'rm -rf/'."
The only network traffic which took place was a perfectly valid http get from your machine to mine over port 80, but you're still shy a homedir.
Just type ssh://your.favorite.host/ into your browser's location field. If you get a new terminal window which attempts to ssh there, obviously Mallory could do something similar to you. If you instead get safari complaining that it doesn't know what to do with ssh urls, it would seem that you're safe from this particular attack.
Unless you're suggesting that Moore was personally responsible for Al Qaeda's faith-based initiatives, I don't find the notion of him profiting from them all that bothersome.
Halliburton, on the other hand, has demonstrated an ability to create the situations in which they will profit by the deaths of thousands.
The difference seems the same as that between an undertaker and a hitman. They both profit from death, about which I don't care. But one of them causes death, about which I do.
This is an important distinction, and one I remember noticing when seeing other people use Windows 2000 (I think) after I'd been using osx for a while.
Windows's idea of eye candy was that menus (and submenus) would all slowly fade in. The process of navigating deep into hierarchical menus was maddeningly slow--at least until everyone turned it off.
In osx, menus appear immediately, and then fade out after you select something. This is not only pretty, but functional: it gives you visual confirmation that you've selected a menu item, which can be helpful if whatever you've asked for doesn't produce obvious or instant results.
Microsoft's cargo cult design process often leads them to such mistakes. They manage to take the wrong lessons from other people's work, and conclude that what people want is snazzy looking things which tax hardware. The real lesson is that people want visual continuity and feedback in order to speed up their use. But Microsoft never seems to get as far as understanding the point of anyone else's design, just the appearance.
If things get smaller when your display's dpi increases, that's a failing of your software. Resolution and physical size of displayed objects should vary completely independently.
Reading two layers of text for more than a few words is pretty futile, yes. But I've run into many functional uses for window transparency which don't rely on doing so:
Seeing when that slashdotted web page finally loads in a backgrounded window. I don't need to be able to read it clearly to see that stuff has been drawn in it.
Seeing when long-running processes like compiling have finished. Ditto with not needing to read it to see whether it's still spewing.
Seeing the artist of the current itunes track without needing to shift windows. Sometimes reading even a few words is enough to be informative.
Watching movies or television behind terminal windows in which I'm getting work done. While text-over-text doesn't do much good, text-over-video works surprisingly well.
Obviously there are other window arrangement or notification methods that can be used to accomplish most of these. But they're all examples of transparency adding genuine functionality, not just ornamental eye-candy.
I would expect people to know a firewall because they are mentioned in almost EVERY statement from all A/V vendors plus Microsoft itself.
You seem to be having a hard time separating your perspective from that of someone who reads slashdot. In what context would you expect normal computer users to ever receive "statements" from software vendors? They go to a local store and buy a computer which has an operating system installed; that, and what that operating system subsequently does, are the only "statements" from the vendor they usually receive.
They assume that if there are security measures that are so globally appropriate that everyone should be using them, the OS vendor will have already enacted them. This assumption is perfectly reasonable, though often sadly inaccurate.
They WILL be turned on by default in future releases by MS and SP2 will enable them in XP for you,but watch the screaming from users when this happens and their favorite file sharing program stops working.
Ah.. So now you're saying that there may be consequences and downsides to firewalling? That it may break existing functionality?
How exactly does that jibe with your earlier assertions that firewalling is so universally easy and appropriate that it's ludicrous to think that any biped won't have already done it?
There was a little bit of tooth-cutting on an Atari 520ST, but the first computers I used very regularly were macs, and I eventually ended up with a job doing mac desktop support. After a few years of spending time with macs only, I started using and adminning linux. Redhat 3.03 was my first, newbie that I am.
Then for quite a while I was very torn about the two. Linux was clearly the sane choice for servers, but I found that they each frustrated me in about equal measures as a workstation. I went back and forth between running macos and linux on my macs. (Well, and a little beos.)
So when macosx was released, it felt as if it were written pretty precisely for me. There are still a few ways here and there in which it's not quite as good a unix as linux is, nor quite as good a desktop as paleo-macos was. But being almost as good at _both_ is truly a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Honestly, Windows never even came into it. By the time I had enough familiarity with computers to be able to make any kind of judgement about platforms, it seemed very clear to me that Windows users were pretty regularly unhappy, and struggled with things that I'd just always taken for granted.
Slashdot Mirror
And why on earth should it even be possible for there to be any text on any computer system which cannot be selected? More importantly, why should that be the designer's decision, rather than mine?
Um, apparently the part where "we" never started looking for any such thing in the first place? Why should your mouse-only browser and my text browser and my blind friend's browser and my colorblind friend's browser and my five-year-old PDA's browser be "uniform"? The whole sodding point of HTML was to have formatting be a set of loose suggestions, and allow the displaying system to adapt that to its capabilities and the user's preferences.
Yep, I agree: ecmascript is also pretty thoroughly pointless, and accomplishes much much more evil than good. That's why I generally have it disabled, or use a browser which doesn't support it in the first place.
And since when is looking the same in all browsers a feature? In fact, isn't that pretty contrary to the entire point of the Web, which allows <strong> on my system to mean something entirely different than <strong> on yours?
I'd say that any design which only works when things look precisely the same everywhere is flawed beyond hope. Why do designers expend such a monumental amount of effort trying to turn the flexible, adaptable medium of the Web back into an invariant brochure?
- Flash interferes with most of the functions usually performed by a web browser: in-page searching, history, bookmarking, content filtering. If the blinky-flashy-advertising part of this huge flash monstrosity were a separate image, I could just choose to not display it. But because it's part of the same single giant spooge of "content", I have to just live with it, eh?
But more fundamentally, the burden of proof is not on those making the argument that Flash is vile and tainted. That burden rests on the shoulders of those who assert that Flash is vital and useful and worthwhile.Your feeble example of using flash to save a few reloaded bytes does not justify even all those endless extra bytes that flash interfaces use in the first place, much less the extensive array of tacky and ill-conceived things which are generally done with them. Flash would have to buy me a hell of a lot more than some faster edge-case refreshes for me to be willing to put my browsing at the mercy of every antisocial designer out there.
The best case is of imperceptible value, and the worst--and most common--case is astoundingly bad.
Fine.
Done.
Here you go.
Does this mean we get to stop listening to you whine now?
Out of curiosity, what's inflexible about "AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible, AIFF, Apple Lossless and WAV", and a tendency for more formats to become supported over time? It might not include a format you specifically want (vorbis or flac, I suppose?), but "inflexible" seems like an odd way to characterize it.
Uh, you mean I should just drag it into "drwxrwxr-x 40 root admin 1K 16 Jun 10:54 /Applications"?
Nothing magic about this, just good old unix permissions. The closest thing to magic is that if I attempt to drag something in there as a non-admin user, the Finder won't just fail with an error; it will pause, ask me for an admin user's auth, and proceed if I can supply it. Which of course is not technically groundbreaking, just good design.
Reboot your imac and hold down the T key just after the chime. You'll get a grey screen with the firewire logo on it; your system is now an external firewire hard drive.
Plug it into any other system with a dvd reader. Run the installer on that system, installing onto the "disk" that is your imac.
Unmount the imac, and hit its power button to turn it off.
Boot the imac, and enjoy tiger.
Sun:
24.1"
1920x1200
$3600
Apple:
23"
1920x1200
$2000
(Neither of which require an unusual video card.)
"Originating from" back orifice's default port? Bah! Spoken like a whippersnapper with an uid in the seven hundred thousands.
Elite/eleet/3l33t/leet/31337 had been a running joke for many a year before back orifice. When cDc announced bo at defcon, the carefully-casual mention of its default port drew quite a laugh from the crowd.
The quantity of options doesn't matter, only the quality of the best one. Once I've selected the most appropriate choice, I don't care whether I turned down two inferior ones or fifty; I'm still just using the one.
And no matter how many choices an intel box might offer me, it doesn't offer me osx.
As to why a mac might be the best choice, you're right that the grandparent didn't point out any. But that's because he was doing an admirable job of sticking to the topic at hand, which was refuting all of your inaccurate claims about the ways in which macs are inferior.
Now, if you want to now concede all your misinformed points and have a new conversation about why macs might be the best choice for very many circumstances, we could do that. But given how many discussions, including this one, are filled with enthusiastic descriptions of why people find their macs quite so enthralling and wonderful, I can't help but think we'd be returning to ground that's been very well covered.
Huh. I'm actually a little surprised that both of those would be considered by the same person. I have a Mini with which I'm extremely happy, but I've always found the Scion (and Honda's Element) to be deeply, profoundly, laughably, painfully, siezure-inducingly ugly.
No offense. =)
We all know the value of anecdotal evidence, but I was completely uninterested in buying the CD changer. I'd always intended to use my ipod as a source, I'd just been planning on using the icelink; six CDs just isn't enough to be worth the bother.
(Conveniently, I seem to have a 2003 mini cooper without the optional navigation system, CD changer, cassette player, or satellite radio. So I know what _else_ I'm buying in July, after the Airport Express.)
Um, you've never tried to move an e450, have you? Especially one loaded with disks?
Would-be thieves would probably have an easier time walking away with his transmission. Hell, the added weight probably makes the car harder to steal.
At the time apple dropped floppies, there already was a global and universally accepted alternative: networks.
There had been previous attempts to replace floppies, by companies like iomega and syquest. They eventually failed not because of anything related to the implementation details of their products, but because the entire premise of removable storage was already on its way out, obviated by universal network connectivity.
If you know of a way to upgrade kernels without rebooting, or bind without restarting the daemon, I'd love to hear about that.
If you don't have such fu, then either your systems and services have needed to be rebooted and restarted, or you're using years-exploitable versions.
Actually, tinydns's syntax is immensely easier than bind's.
In either case, someone could easily take a look at an existing zone and add a few A records. But creating a new bind zonefile from scratch is filled with intricacies, subtleties, and just plain weirdnesses that no sane person should have to know. Yes, you have to put the domain contact's email address at the top, and yes, that looks like another record, because we decided to substitute another . for the @, for some random-ass reason. Yes, you have to manually create your own forward and reverse records, even though there is only one valid combination that could exist. Yes, reverse entries (usually) need to use the fqdn and end in a trailing dot, even though the forward entries don't. Yes, you have to get the every syntax detail correct in every file, or the nameserver will refuse to serve any queries at all.
The problem with tinydns is djb's suckass documentation. And the first problem with djb's suckass documentation is that it makes the syntax look immensely harder than it is. The only examples he gives are of crazy edge cases, obscure and complex things that most people would never want to do. Presumably he's more interested in showing off the flexibility of his software, and all the unusual things it can handle, than just clearly showing people how to specify a goddamn A record.
Unfortunately, nothing untoward needs to happen at the network layer for these attacks to work. For example, I could stick an ssh:// uri into any web page you access, and use ssh's proxycommand to casually mention, "oh, and to connect to the outside world I need to run 'rm -rf /'."
The only network traffic which took place was a perfectly valid http get from your machine to mine over port 80, but you're still shy a homedir.
Just type ssh://your.favorite.host/ into your browser's location field. If you get a new terminal window which attempts to ssh there, obviously Mallory could do something similar to you. If you instead get safari complaining that it doesn't know what to do with ssh urls, it would seem that you're safe from this particular attack.
Halliburton, on the other hand, has demonstrated an ability to create the situations in which they will profit by the deaths of thousands.
The difference seems the same as that between an undertaker and a hitman. They both profit from death, about which I don't care. But one of them causes death, about which I do.
Windows's idea of eye candy was that menus (and submenus) would all slowly fade in. The process of navigating deep into hierarchical menus was maddeningly slow--at least until everyone turned it off.
In osx, menus appear immediately, and then fade out after you select something. This is not only pretty, but functional: it gives you visual confirmation that you've selected a menu item, which can be helpful if whatever you've asked for doesn't produce obvious or instant results.
Microsoft's cargo cult design process often leads them to such mistakes. They manage to take the wrong lessons from other people's work, and conclude that what people want is snazzy looking things which tax hardware. The real lesson is that people want visual continuity and feedback in order to speed up their use. But Microsoft never seems to get as far as understanding the point of anyone else's design, just the appearance.
If things get smaller when your display's dpi increases, that's a failing of your software. Resolution and physical size of displayed objects should vary completely independently.
Seeing when that slashdotted web page finally loads in a backgrounded window. I don't need to be able to read it clearly to see that stuff has been drawn in it.
Seeing when long-running processes like compiling have finished. Ditto with not needing to read it to see whether it's still spewing.
Seeing the artist of the current itunes track without needing to shift windows. Sometimes reading even a few words is enough to be informative.
Watching movies or television behind terminal windows in which I'm getting work done. While text-over-text doesn't do much good, text-over-video works surprisingly well.
Obviously there are other window arrangement or notification methods that can be used to accomplish most of these. But they're all examples of transparency adding genuine functionality, not just ornamental eye-candy.
They assume that if there are security measures that are so globally appropriate that everyone should be using them, the OS vendor will have already enacted them. This assumption is perfectly reasonable, though often sadly inaccurate.
Ah.. So now you're saying that there may be consequences and downsides to firewalling? That it may break existing functionality?How exactly does that jibe with your earlier assertions that firewalling is so universally easy and appropriate that it's ludicrous to think that any biped won't have already done it?
There was a little bit of tooth-cutting on an Atari 520ST, but the first computers I used very regularly were macs, and I eventually ended up with a job doing mac desktop support. After a few years of spending time with macs only, I started using and adminning linux. Redhat 3.03 was my first, newbie that I am.
Then for quite a while I was very torn about the two. Linux was clearly the sane choice for servers, but I found that they each frustrated me in about equal measures as a workstation. I went back and forth between running macos and linux on my macs. (Well, and a little beos.)
So when macosx was released, it felt as if it were written pretty precisely for me. There are still a few ways here and there in which it's not quite as good a unix as linux is, nor quite as good a desktop as paleo-macos was. But being almost as good at _both_ is truly a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Honestly, Windows never even came into it. By the time I had enough familiarity with computers to be able to make any kind of judgement about platforms, it seemed very clear to me that Windows users were pretty regularly unhappy, and struggled with things that I'd just always taken for granted.