The shortcoming is for refreshing iframes via javascript, which could be based on events that have nothing to do mouse clicks. Why don't you check out their specs, where they admit this shortcoming, among others.
Not even a little bit. There's nothing to prevent a M$ from implementing their own version of a program and using that as the basis for an e&e tactic. The most commonly cited example of this, Kerberos, isn't even an example...
Whoa. What are you talking about? There's nothing to prevent M$ or the like from writing competing software... but why should there be? The kerberos example is extending specs, quite a different matter. The GPL merely prevents competitors/others from breaking your code without disclosing how they did it, unless they wnat to keep it to themselves.
Here, "parasites" making copies of our work doesn't reduce our ability to use our own copies. (This is one of the founding principles of the GPL, in fact.) Therefore, parasites aren't much like parasites at all.
What if you're selling software? The GPL prevents other companies from using the old "embrace and extend" trick.
More generally, by allowing others to incorporate your work into closed source products, you make market conditions more difficult in the exact area of your experrtise. However, your competitors aren't competing really, they're parasites.
Opera has plenty of problems. My favorite is the inability of Opera5/Windows to reset the SRC attribute of an iframe. I know of certain sites that make Opera 5 users refresh everything instead. that sucks.
So now Shockwave.com doesn't like my fsck'ing operating system? WHY? Why should it care about my OS, if my browser is up to the task?
Well, a lot of these plugins require communicating with the browser (which is in another process), for things like POST operations. If they had that functionality built-in, then/. would be complaining about the download time to get the plugin.
All licences, by definition, are issued by the controlling party (i.e. author or legal rights holder) to the users.
True, but once you release code under the GPL you can't change the license. Sure you can release later versions under a different license, but the code released under the GPL remains so.
I really want to understand how the GPL is better than other Open Source licences. I understand why some people consider Open Source licences superior to commercial licences (I release software under both types of licences depending on business objectives). This is about understanding why people get so hot and bothered about the GPL.
It's not that the GPL is superior on some objective basis, it's a license that reflects a particular set of values, like being able to extend or modify software, without the fear of it being taken over by an entity leveraging its position in other areas. Other Open Source licenses allow companies to "embrace and extend". For some developers that's not an issue, for some it is.
Your post may not have been intended as a flame, but it smells like a troll to me. I'll bite.
The GPL is a choice. Some developers choose closed source. Some choose public domain. Some choose the BSD licence.
The GPL ensures that no one has more (or less) control over the code than the author. You might prefer a different license, and you're free to use it on your code. If you have problems with the GPL, just don't use GPL programs. Write some new ones yourself.
In Windows, a great many machines that are not servers in any way run the "server version'' OS (NT or 2000). Mostly these are machines that require the NTFS for whatever reason, video editing would be one example. I don't know much about the world of cubicles, but don't a lot of companies have NT or 2000 on everyone's desktop? So how's that for an overcount?
The "serverness" of the machine should probably be determined by the hardware, like RAID arrays and such.
I like those CD "transports" that are supposed to be all stable. Those have got to be the dumbest things. Why not use a fast CD-ROM drive and buffer? Art At Home
Re:The Net content players- some winners, some los
on
Suck Stops Sucking
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· Score: 3
I think you're right to compare plastic and slashdot with regard to demographics. But I disagree with your analysis that
The broader the subject matter, the less compelling the appeal to a broader base of people. The narrower the subject matter, the stronger the potential appeal to a smaller base of people. They are failing because they thought if they focused on broad subjects...
There used be this idea that quality editorial vision could unite a wide variety of subjects and be interesting to a wide variety of people. Automatic Media is/was very much in the tradition of Harper's, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic. At least they tried to do it with a minimum of snobbery. I don't think that Automatic Media's editorial vision was brilliant, but it wasn't bad.
What is the Plastic.com POV? There isn't one, really. It isn't created BY a certain specialized community FOR a specialized community. It is a created by a conglomerate of differently-minded interests, lacking in a coherent POV, and it feels like it.
I consider Plastic to be an alternative to the "ra-ra America" mainstream media. General interest sites like Plastic will be important alternatives in an AOL/Time-Disney.NET future. If there are only special interest sites out there, then we'll move towards what my high school poly-sci teacher called "issue voters". People who vote based on one hot-button issue (abortion, environment, etc.). So maybe there's something to that article about the Net and polarization of POV. The first thing it would point to is the elimination of general interest sites. Maybe what's needed are moderation systems that better encourage, um, moderation.
I think another demographic issue that's at work here is bandwidth. I bet Slashdot's readership is much more likely than Plastic's to have high-bandwidth access. Any site works better when users have fat pipes. So maybe Slashdot is the only site that's really thriving, but with the current bandwidth situation, it may be the one of the only ones that could.
They're a good price and will heat up to 100F I believe. Which, also, happens to be the temp you'll need if you ever decide to do color processing (which coincidentally, isnt as hard as you may think).
It's not difficult to process color film, but it's very unhealthy. Take it to the lab and pay $3. Have you ever seen the stuff that photographers die from? Scary.
The reason to buy a G4 is to get MacOS, otherwise, what's the point?
You've never heard of testing? What if you wrote an app that worked in OS X, but you wanted to make it more portable? After you tried it on some other *BSD, YellowDog or some other PPC Linux would be the next step. Needless to say, it would also help with identifying the nature of whatever bugs might be encountered.
Linux, from everything I've heard and seen, runs quite well on older hardware- yet there's no mention of said hardware on the YDL page. Anywhere. MKLinux is ass (from a Mac user's perspective), LinuxPPC took a huge shit when I tried to drop it on my 8500, and the Debian installer is going nowhere unless you already know how to partition and format a disk from the command line, 'cuz from firsthand experience, there is NO help for the damned formatting utility.
You can use a MacOS hard drive utility to partition and format your disks ahead of time. Just make an A/UX partition. Some, but not all, versions of Drive Setup will do this. I believe other utilities like Silver Lining can also do this.
So... is that "legal"? I am not a programmer, but if I was, I'd be very upset that they are selling my work but not obeying the terms of the license I released under.
It follows the GPL to the letter. Go to www.fsf.org and read up a little. The GPL never requires anything to be free (as in beer). It only requires that they include the source to GPL programs with their distributions.
I know there is no requirement that they actually make an.iso for you, but don't they have to at least make the source available?
The source is available, from the sites of the included programs. The reason you pay them money is that they put everything together correctly.
What I find particularly interesting about this whole deal is how their distributed network setup has worked against them. Reading the wording of that email closely, you notice that you are being asked to change your password because you MAY have used the system that was compromised. They don't actually know.
They might know exactly whose passwords were stolen and on which machine, but there's a good reason not to limit the password resets to that group. Since the intruder evidently has access logs, they probably include his own valid logins, which may have been different for each machine he tried. If he received an email verifying his success, this could give him even more information than he has already. The most dangerous possibility is that there are other breaches that SourceForge hasn't spotted yet. It seems prudent that they sent the email to everyone who used the system, using the term "MAY".
Well so does Ruby on the server, and a whole lot more. I think that Flash is too proprietary to make it as yet another language paradigm.
Misunderstanding alert...
What I meant was that the Flash client can communicate with server middleware without reloading, making things like stock tickers possible. If you wanted, you could use Ruby to communicate with Flash. I don't much about Ruby, but it seems suitable. Most people use Perl, Java Servlets, PHP, Cold Fusion, or ASP.
The actual communication with the client is fairly simple, so I think the decision is mostly based on what you're already using for everything else. As far as language paradigms go, ActionScript isn't new, it's pretty much identical to ECMAScript (Javascript).
I can't even tell what physics has to do with all this...
It was just a reference to what web design sites call "flash experiments", where actionscript is used to create motion effects like bouncing balls, explosions, pseudo-3d space, etc. A lot of actionscript sites and books focus on this type of stuff, which isn't very experimental if you've ever programmed in any other graphics environment.
As for OOP discussions in the book (the only on-topic part of your post, the rest was just bad advocacy) I thought the reviewer made the point that the book was rare in that it/did/ talk about OO metaphors in the language. I can't really tell what the model is though, does it use interface inheritance?
I think it uses a combination of implementation and interface inheritance (class inheritance?). If methods are defined in the "prototype" property of the superclass, then Flash will use the superclass method unless it's overided in the subclass, but you don't have to override all of the superclass methods. Flash also supports encapsulation, via "SmartClips". None of this is earth shattering, but what is cool is that the authoring tool allows you to manipulate objects graphically or programmatically. Flash stuff looks good because you can draw something by hand, and then manipulate it's attributes and instances in ActionScript.
ActionScript obviously isn't suitable for everything, which is when you pass the task back to the server middleware. However, this has to be balanced with bandwidth considerations. It may be more convenient to manipulate the given data on the server, but is it worth the overhead of passing the data back and forth? What I would like to see in a Flash book are case studies of data driven Flash apps. Flash can be pretty cool for data visualization over the web. Another good thing Flash does is what-you-see-is-not-what-you-print, allowing your data to presented in both a screen- and print-appropriate manner. I'd like to see some (Flash specific) strategies of splitting business logic between the client and server.
In fact, I'll just rebut your response to the second criticism of flash. You miss the point that those areas where Flash might possibly be stealing ground from Java are exactly in those areas where Java has been found to be inappropriate. Cute animations and framing techniques add zero value to the content of a site. Content is presumably what brings the eyeballs there in the first place.
Flash is more than cute animations and framing techniques. Since it now supports XML transfers and sockets, database driven content is now possible. It's "stealing ground" from java because it's easier on CPU resources and has a smaller file size than an equivalent applet.
Java has a real GUI toolkit that behaves in ways people expect of GUI toolkits.
I agree that Flash does lack here, and the problem is that people are writing their own interfaces. Macromedia has already included prebuilt pull-down menus and checkboxes that behave specific to platform. Hopefully they'll bundle a whole toolkit next time.
It's too bad discussion of OOP is so limited in this book, I was looking forward to it. I've found flash to be a very interesting to program in. I really enjoy being able to create objects by drawing and/or coding in the same environment. It's often overlooked that Flash has some pretty advanced OOP stuff going on, like inheritance built right into the interface.
Unfortunately, Flash books rarely discuss such things. Most of them are devoted to making UI thingys or physics algorithms. Worst case, you've got UI thingys and physics together (navigate my website with a parametric EQ!).
Flash does have some great effects, my favorite is that it gets new types of people programming. It's too bad that/. readers will keep their no doubt keep their blinders on. On Slashdot, there seems to be three main gripes about Flash:
1.)Flash websites are badly designed. It's true, Flash sites are often badly designed. The thing is, they're often trying to accomplish fairly complex goals. A DHTML site trying the same type of thing is bound to be at least as bad, if not worse.
2.)Flash is unnecessary.
For you, maybe. Don't forget that Flash is taking over a lot of territory from Java applets rather than HTML. Which would you rather have?
3.)Flash is not Free
The authoring tool is not free in any sense, but the players are, and the file format is open. People are doing some really cool things with SWFs on the server side, like JGenerator or Flash2XML. While I agree it's unlikely that the authoring tool will ever be open source, there may one day be a linux version, since there will certainly be a MacOS X version. Anyway, I'm not convinced that Open Source could create products that compete with Adobe or Macromedia. It's possible, but it hasn't happened yet (I like the GIMP too, but it's no PhotoShop), especially when it comes to publishing.
A lot of video editors don't watch much full motion video on the monitor screen. They just use it for pallettes, timelines, and 320x240 edit windows. Then they watch their work on an external NTSC monitor.
Most graphics professionals I know will not go to LCD.
Most graphics professionals never bought Apple monitors anyway. My guess is that Apple did some market research, unlike the majority of Slashdot posters.
I can't believe all the whining about "but I'm a graphic artist and LCD doesn't give reliable colors!" Well, DUHHH, you don't have to be a mind numbed robot and only buy monitors from the same company that made your computer! And if you only use Pantone colors, it doesn't really matter how accurate the monitor is; you should be picking colors out of your swatch book.
I sort of agree. No one who cares about color ever used Apple Monitors anyway. Since Radius disappeared from the CRT market there's been quite a gap between the Mitsubishi/Sony/NEC range and things like Barco. At any rate, color calibration on Apple CRTs is damn near impossible, since they are consumer grade monitors. Pricing out a monitor is pretty simple, you have to find a price range that pays for itself. That's why service bureaus tend to have $5000 Barco monitors. They pay for themselves because they speed up workflow.
Graphic artist types should get a nice Sony/Mitsu/NEC type thing, set their inkjet to SWOP, and calibrate that way. You'll never get too far off. For vector stuff, you proof it and tweak the color list, which should take very little time. In Photoshop, save the fiddling for the end, while you're proofing. Adjust as much as you can via histograms and such, rather than what you see.
I think Apple's strategy is pretty sound, especially considering their plans to open up retail stores:
They've eliminated CRTs from their supply chain, saving a ton of space and shipping costs.
They've simplified the purchasing process, at least in their stores. There's a simple ratio of size to price.
Only the Cube and the tower use these. You know those cube owners want LCDs, and tower people who would want a third party monitor probably aren't their target market.
CRTs are great for color, but not for geometry.
CRTs break easy, they're heavy, and it's hard to fit a boxed CRT of decent size in a car. Apple wants people to drive to the store, pick out their computer, and put in the back seat next the kid and the dog.
Maybe most/. readers have noticed, but buying a computer can be a very unfriendly experience for our Slashdottirs (women). It's a lot like buying a car, only you have to deal with pimply faced CompUSA teens (who I'm sure are perfectly nice) instead of car salesmen. Ever notice how many Saturn drivers are women? Apple is trying to make buying a computer more like the GAP. I'm not trying to say women are unsophisticated buyers, I just think the current retail experience is one that's geared towards males.
Slashdot Mirror
HAVE A NICE DAY!
Art At Home
Whoa. What are you talking about? There's nothing to prevent M$ or the like from writing competing software... but why should there be? The kerberos example is extending specs, quite a different matter. The GPL merely prevents competitors/others from breaking your code without disclosing how they did it, unless they wnat to keep it to themselves.
Art At Home
What if you're selling software? The GPL prevents other companies from using the old "embrace and extend" trick.
More generally, by allowing others to incorporate your work into closed source products, you make market conditions more difficult in the exact area of your experrtise. However, your competitors aren't competing really, they're parasites.
Art At Home
Opera has plenty of problems. My favorite is the inability of Opera5/Windows to reset the SRC attribute of an iframe. I know of certain sites that make Opera 5 users refresh everything instead. that sucks.
Art At Home
Well, a lot of these plugins require communicating with the browser (which is in another process), for things like POST operations. If they had that functionality built-in, then /. would be complaining about the download time to get the plugin.
Art At Home
True, but once you release code under the GPL you can't change the license. Sure you can release later versions under a different license, but the code released under the GPL remains so.
I really want to understand how the GPL is better than other Open Source licences. I understand why some people consider Open Source licences superior to commercial licences (I release software under both types of licences depending on business objectives). This is about understanding why people get so hot and bothered about the GPL. It's not that the GPL is superior on some objective basis, it's a license that reflects a particular set of values, like being able to extend or modify software, without the fear of it being taken over by an entity leveraging its position in other areas. Other Open Source licenses allow companies to "embrace and extend". For some developers that's not an issue, for some it is.
Art At Home
The GPL is a choice. Some developers choose closed source. Some choose public domain. Some choose the BSD licence.
The GPL ensures that no one has more (or less) control over the code than the author. You might prefer a different license, and you're free to use it on your code. If you have problems with the GPL, just don't use GPL programs. Write some new ones yourself.
Art At Home
The "serverness" of the machine should probably be determined by the hardware, like RAID arrays and such.
Art At Home
I like those CD "transports" that are supposed to be all stable. Those have got to be the dumbest things. Why not use a fast CD-ROM drive and buffer?
Art At Home
I think another demographic issue that's at work here is bandwidth. I bet Slashdot's readership is much more likely than Plastic's to have high-bandwidth access. Any site works better when users have fat pipes. So maybe Slashdot is the only site that's really thriving, but with the current bandwidth situation, it may be the one of the only ones that could.
Art At Home
What's wrong with re-selling GPL software? At least there are few businesses out there making money this way.
Art At Home
We've seen this before at NBCi with their QuickClick thing. Here's an article from MSNBC (!) about why such things are evil.
Art At Home
It's not difficult to process color film, but it's very unhealthy. Take it to the lab and pay $3. Have you ever seen the stuff that photographers die from? Scary.
Art At Home
You've never heard of testing? What if you wrote an app that worked in OS X, but you wanted to make it more portable? After you tried it on some other *BSD, YellowDog or some other PPC Linux would be the next step. Needless to say, it would also help with identifying the nature of whatever bugs might be encountered.
Art At Home
Art At Home
It follows the GPL to the letter. Go to www.fsf.org and read up a little. The GPL never requires anything to be free (as in beer). It only requires that they include the source to GPL programs with their distributions.
I know there is no requirement that they actually make an .iso for you, but don't they have to at least make the source available?
The source is available, from the sites of the included programs. The reason you pay them money is that they put everything together correctly.
Art At Home
Art At Home
Misunderstanding alert...
What I meant was that the Flash client can communicate with server middleware without reloading, making things like stock tickers possible. If you wanted, you could use Ruby to communicate with Flash. I don't much about Ruby, but it seems suitable. Most people use Perl, Java Servlets, PHP, Cold Fusion, or ASP. The actual communication with the client is fairly simple, so I think the decision is mostly based on what you're already using for everything else. As far as language paradigms go, ActionScript isn't new, it's pretty much identical to ECMAScript (Javascript).
I can't even tell what physics has to do with all this...
It was just a reference to what web design sites call "flash experiments", where actionscript is used to create motion effects like bouncing balls, explosions, pseudo-3d space, etc. A lot of actionscript sites and books focus on this type of stuff, which isn't very experimental if you've ever programmed in any other graphics environment.
I think it uses a combination of implementation and interface inheritance (class inheritance?). If methods are defined in the "prototype" property of the superclass, then Flash will use the superclass method unless it's overided in the subclass, but you don't have to override all of the superclass methods. Flash also supports encapsulation, via "SmartClips". None of this is earth shattering, but what is cool is that the authoring tool allows you to manipulate objects graphically or programmatically. Flash stuff looks good because you can draw something by hand, and then manipulate it's attributes and instances in ActionScript.ActionScript obviously isn't suitable for everything, which is when you pass the task back to the server middleware. However, this has to be balanced with bandwidth considerations. It may be more convenient to manipulate the given data on the server, but is it worth the overhead of passing the data back and forth? What I would like to see in a Flash book are case studies of data driven Flash apps. Flash can be pretty cool for data visualization over the web. Another good thing Flash does is what-you-see-is-not-what-you-print, allowing your data to presented in both a screen- and print-appropriate manner. I'd like to see some (Flash specific) strategies of splitting business logic between the client and server.
Art At Home
Art At Home
I agree that Flash does lack here, and the problem is that people are writing their own interfaces. Macromedia has already included prebuilt pull-down menus and checkboxes that behave specific to platform. Hopefully they'll bundle a whole toolkit next time.
Art At Home
Unfortunately, Flash books rarely discuss such things. Most of them are devoted to making UI thingys or physics algorithms. Worst case, you've got UI thingys and physics together (navigate my website with a parametric EQ!).
Flash does have some great effects, my favorite is that it gets new types of people programming. It's too bad that /. readers will keep their no doubt keep their blinders on. On Slashdot, there seems to be three main gripes about Flash:
1.)Flash websites are badly designed.
It's true, Flash sites are often badly designed. The thing is, they're often trying to accomplish fairly complex goals. A DHTML site trying the same type of thing is bound to be at least as bad, if not worse.
2.)Flash is unnecessary.
For you, maybe. Don't forget that Flash is taking over a lot of territory from Java applets rather than HTML. Which would you rather have?
3.)Flash is not Free
The authoring tool is not free in any sense, but the players are, and the file format is open. People are doing some really cool things with SWFs on the server side, like JGenerator or Flash2XML. While I agree it's unlikely that the authoring tool will ever be open source, there may one day be a linux version, since there will certainly be a MacOS X version. Anyway, I'm not convinced that Open Source could create products that compete with Adobe or Macromedia. It's possible, but it hasn't happened yet (I like the GIMP too, but it's no PhotoShop), especially when it comes to publishing.
Art At Home
A lot of video editors don't watch much full motion video on the monitor screen. They just use it for pallettes, timelines, and 320x240 edit windows. Then they watch their work on an external NTSC monitor.
Art At Home
Most graphics professionals never bought Apple monitors anyway. My guess is that Apple did some market research, unlike the majority of Slashdot posters.
Art At Home
Graphic artist types should get a nice Sony/Mitsu/NEC type thing, set their inkjet to SWOP, and calibrate that way. You'll never get too far off. For vector stuff, you proof it and tweak the color list, which should take very little time. In Photoshop, save the fiddling for the end, while you're proofing. Adjust as much as you can via histograms and such, rather than what you see.
I think Apple's strategy is pretty sound, especially considering their plans to open up retail stores:
Art At Home
Additional screenshots at LucasArts.
Art At Home