There's an ironic post. George Bush upset because these scientists are using science rather than religion?
How do we gaze back to the infant universe? The cosmic microwave background is a fossilized record of what occurred way back when. Embedded in this light are subtle patterns that point to very specific conditions about the early universe.
So...subtle patterns from something that happened long ago that may or may not have been affected by external forces on the way towards us. Patterns for which we are extrapolating initial conditions on the basis of what is equivalent to a very, very small number of observations in the grand timeline, and for which we only have a single location (this solar system) to sample from.
All this to describe an event whose happening we don't really understand and which we have no way to either predict or test. What can we really do now that we couldn't before?
We can see into space with a higher degree of accuracy, and finally, perhaps, test a few of the theories that we couldn't before (which are based on other theories that we still can't yet test). Don't get it wrong, though: Deciding that the universe is a particular age is still taking a leap of faith, no matter what age you think it is.
. There is no good way, for instance, to have proper-looking scientific/exponential notation on a graph in either Excel or OO.o calc.
Three words: open document format. Actually, let me make that six: open document format in plain text
There's an API for it for C++, Java, and python. All your moves can be documented. I believe that there are also several other APIs in other languages that write directly to the docs.
Of course, given the fact that it's all in XML, it wouldn't be so bad to do something simple, like just figuring out where the data is stored and write your own little SAX parser to change the numbers and position of things around.
Horribly complicated? To start with, but the results may be worth it. Doing all the things that you can do with a GUI without one takes more time up front. Otherwise, more people would be using Latex, and fewer would be using its vastly inferior (in capabilities) cousins, the WYSIWYGs.
You seem to take it as self-evident that there should be ways to escalate privileges, and that this is to be expected. This is most of the problem that causes nightmares for Windows users, and its not supposed to be a problem for OSX or any other form of Unix.
If I bought OSX, I'd do it so that I could have a server, and maybe give things out to other people. If all it takes is one remote exploit (such as, for instance, giving out ssh accounts) to allow any manner of local exploit, then its not secure! Security has to happen at every level. The escalation of priveleges is supposed to be one of the most highly protected things. There shouldn't be any programs running in privileged mode that haven't been audited, period.
Sure, it's going to hurt Apple's rep. But it looks like they deserve it, if separation of privileges is that bad.
Why is this funny instead of "wrong?" (and why isn't that a possible moderation yet)?
He's got his directions mixed up.
At the south pole, which is as far south as you can go, every direction is north not west.
You're thinking about the earth kind of like its flat, and kind of like its a globe, and drawing wrong assumptions. Directions such as east and west are still meaningful. Generally, when you talk about east and west, you're talking about what direction you would have to go to get to somewhere from the point of origin - that being a longitude line. When you're talking about north or south, you're talking about the direction you would have to move from a latitude line.
Unlike the latitude lines, longitude lines do not shrink to a single point at the south pole. So you can talk about going east and west even though you can't talk about going north and south. You just have to pick a line as the "closest," since they all bunch up there. I'm guessing they picked the Prime Meridian. It would be a logical choice. West of the Prime Meridian => west; east of the prime meridian => east.
Corporate donations should be out, as should corporate lobbying.
Corporations will just pay private citizens to make their donations and do their lobbying. This changes nothing. Requiring people to not be affiliated with a corporation in order to influence their representatives means that the corporate employed have fewer rights than the non-corporate employed, which is arguably a violation of equal rights.
"Local funds only" is equally bad. I could easily funnel my money to a local business and have them give it. Its not like the representative wouldn't know where the money really comes from.
Which gets to the only solution that would actually work: the only way to keep corporations from influencing politicians is to remove their incentive to do so. I see two ways to do this: either you have to pay everybody when you want to contribute, or you have to do so anonymously (so that the politicians don't know who's doing it). Of course, both policies would virtually eliminate honest campaign contributions, which means that either it'll never happen, or people will just give money illegally.
Nobody with that as their election stance would ever go far enough to get on the local news, much less the seat of real power.
I want to be able to do a little organizing on my MP3 player and phone and listen to mp3s on my phone and PDA, and be able to share any kind of anything between them.
I want everything to be able to do everything, but each should also do one thing well.
That way, if one of them breaks, I can use the other one...kinda.
My PDA is my bookreader, and my phone is my mp3 player but in a pinch either will do the other thing. It's just that the phone has an understandably small screen, and the PDA has an understandably bad set of speakers.
Stop thinking about getting screwed three times over. Start thinking about how easy it is for manufacturers to add certain additional limited functionality for almost no cost for certain devices.
The point I was making is that the risk of expense is there. If you have an especially large site, it may cost you tens of thousands of dollars to move over to using a new library. So that's not really a viable option. In that case, treating GPL a bit like the plague ahead of time may be well worth it.
I don't see how you're justifying this offhand as an edge case. The internet is exploding with activity, and all kinds of little scripts are being used all over the place. This is a classic example of something that could come up (did for me, actually). It's likely to come up for large firms that are putting themeselves on the internet (where an expense report takes all day, but using a free script you find on the internet doesn't). Its also right in the middle of the ambiguous portion of the GPL (what is linking, and what is not?), and its the part that probably scares these people.
If an author of some code came after me with a lawsuit, I'd rather be absolutely certain that the license that they gave me is ironclad in my favor based on either the disambiguity of the license itself or on past court cases. Neither apply to the GPL, as much as I wish they did.
Of course, this is a lot of work. So you want to avoid it whenever possible.
As much as you and the parent poster would like it to be, its not a cut-and-dried issue.
If, for example, I write a page in PHP that uses a javascript menu-building library which is GPL (because the author didn't think enough about it to make it LGPL and clear up the whole issue), do I have to give out the PHP code that I wrote to anyone who asks for it? Is what I wrote a derivative work of that library, or does this merely count as aggregation as defined in the GPL?
This is only one such question in an area where it gets hazy. I may believe that I've got it all sorted out, and I've got the right answer, but that doesn't mean I've got the One True Correct Interpretation of the Law. Things could end in horrible lawsuits for me if I'm not walking on eggshells where these things are concerned. Consequently, it makes sense that orgs have an official policy that handles this sort of thing.
There aren't tons of exploits for phones. Only a few of the Smart Phones run Windows Mobile (which is arguably the only one that going to get many exploits), and even then the ability to communicate with the outside world is so limited that there aren't that many viruses.
Add to that the fact that there are multiple underlying architectures, and a company that is bound by the FCC to enforce fairly strong limitations of their commications devices, and you get a pretty tightly controlled system.
Heck, my phone won't even let me send packets with any non-approved apps.
And as for regression testing, have you even used a cell phone? These are hardware devices that were...hold on let me reiterate that HARDWARE. That means that there are tons and tons of regression tests. Because when hardware crashes, you don't often get a nice friendly "its crashed, so I need to restart." You get a horrible, nonresponsive "Its broken, and I want another one for free."
Your stock price goes down, you lose your house in Aruba, and ice weasels kill and eat your children.
Everyone knows that there are no ice weasels in Aruba. It's the zombie chickens that you have to be afraid of if you end up living on the streets there.
I propose a new slogan for the rebellion that will strike fear into Aruba-living executives everywhere: "Down with the HD-DVD Consortium! Long live zombie chickens!"
...And people will then give you there attention. Then you can get them to do what you-hold on a moment. I see something shiny....Now what was I talking about?
Microsoft Office format is pretty much the standard.
No, it's not. Any given MS document only renders correctly with the Microsoft Office edition in which it was made, and in no other renderer does it render perfectly. Further, this rendering is not guaranteed to be the same because there is no specification. Also, you can't embed fonts in it. To top it off, even RTF, which Microsoft renders a spec for, isn't correctly rendered by any version of Word. So essentially there is no standard for any Microsoft document format.
To go further, though, office documents are not easily editable! In fact, they're almost more difficult to edit than PDFs are! Its a closed-source, binary file format with lots of quirks. You're not going to be editing it with a 50KB WYSIWYG editor like you can with HTML.
The point isn't that they're not easy to edit. The point is that they always look the same no matter how use 'em. Otherwise, Adobe wouldn't have released Acrobat (which can not only write, but also edit PDFs), would they? The only reason that they're not easy to edit is because the document format is a functional subset of PS, and that is more of a drawing format with built-in text writing than it is a document format. Its a technical limitation, not a designed feature. Acrobat would be a real cash-cow if Adobe could suddenly create a decent document writer for it that competes with Word.
Yeah, a do-all format should be easily edited and universally standard. But sometimes the do-all product isn't the best. If I send a file in PDF, it's in PDF for a reason. If I just wanted to make sure it was readable, I'd send it as.DOC.
I take it you're not a programmer. Or if you are, then you're a Microsoft junkie. There are PDF libraries for virtually every programming language for free or cheap. There are almost no DOC generating libraries. Even if there were, doc is not a standard as I have said.
Why is that everyone wants the "do-it-all" product?
Its not that. The problem is that neither format is right for what people want out of a document format: editability and universal layout. HTML is easy to edit, but looks different depending on what you use to view it. PDF, on the other hand, looks the same but isn't easy to edit.
Of course, this solution provides nothing new. You can encode images, flash files, etc. directly into the page as javascript variables that can be read by Mozilla-based browsers. Microsoft has a compressed html format that can handle almost anything, though not as much as the Mozilla browsers. I'd be very interested in seeing if they've found a way around Microsoft's limitation. Anyway, if you're willing to limit everyone to using only one application for viewing (which is what you're doing if you're making everyone use this program to view) then its rather trivial to make this happen. I personally wrote something that did that for fun; it took me 15 hours because I also added public key encryption.
You can just tell everyone to use Firefox or just IE, depending on your preference.
This solution still doesn't add the pieces that are missing from HTML to make it work with printing. There is no way to specify headers, footers, widow or orphan rules, forced pagebreaks, or odd/even margins (well...outside of doing horribly intrusive things to the browser). I could care less if everything is one file or not. I use PDF writers because I can get this stuff in a ubiquitous format.
So where will we get an easily editable document format that we can use for printing? My money is on the OASIS open document format. Either that, or somebody finally implementing those things as part of CSS.
svn import: oops, there is a some experiment data in the directory, or an AAP subdirectory. Shit, the repository has grown by another 100 MB. No way to get it out again, unless you convert the whole BDB database to text, find your accidental additions, cut it out, rebuild the database, do svnadmin recover, fix all the permissions.
If you use fsfs, you can just delete the last revision. 1 revision=1 file in that one. Otherwise, I'd say that you've hit upon the point of having a revision control system. From a technical standpoint, not having 1 to 1 mapping of files in the repository to files in the system allows you to make cheap copies, do directory versioning, do branching easier, and make backups easier. Really wrong error messages.
svn add *
svn rm *.log (oops added some test runs)
svn commit
" unable to get lock on file blabla". You'll now have to manually do svn rm... on every file you accidentally added. The only way to know which ones, is by committing and waiting for the error.
FUD. You was probably some other error in there too. I've done exactly this and it worked. Or it could be that whole "not using Berkley DB" thing.
Having moved our repository to another server, we have had situations where a subdirectory was pointing to the new server, and its parent to the old server. When we did an svn update in the subdirectory, the updates would not happen and no error whatsover was given. Worse, to prevent this kind of problems, we had renamed the repos directory on the server, so that there was no way some dangling old links could accidentally access it.
In the subdirectory: svn switch --relocate [new server]
The subdirectory will update to the new place; rest of it will update to the old place. Don't blame subversion that you can't be bothered to learn how to use basic commands in it.
The Berkeley DB format keeps changing. You can't just copy one to a server with a slightly different svn version. Worse: it will not tell you that there is a version difference, it will just try, and come up with the most irrelevant error messages.
I guess its just me. The solution seems obvious: don't use Berkeley DB as the backend. I don't. I wouldn't even touch a database format that only works right on ext2 partitions. That's already far too picky for me. What if my ext2 partition dies and I don't have another handy?
And the fact that you can do incremental backups and actually get only new data is a nice plus.
Google has the content, and the means to index it. It owns the technology to make this happen. Verizon, on the other hand, has the right to run their phone lines through lots and lots of privately owned and government owned land that isn't theirs. Even the tech that makes it possible to have the internet does not belong to Verizon; there are many other ways of connecting to Google, and Verizon can easily be replaced.
In other words, Google has something to offer, and Verizon is mostly just an administrator of something that belongs to the public. The tech that makes it possible to have the internet does not belong to Verizon; there are many other ways of connecting to Google, and Verizon can easily be replaced.
If Google goes away we're back to the days where Yahoo ruled, and it takes months to index the internet, and millions of man-hours. Unless you want bad results, of course. The other crawlers can give you those.
The point is that I think maybe I'm sick of Verizon not having to pay google to use its service. Do they really deserve a free lunch from Google?
I'm with you in the skepticism. It's quite likely you're right.
The thing that nags at my mind is that we have found wonderdrugs in the past.
Penicillin, which could cure most kinds of bacterial infections, could be taken orally or as a salve, and it just got rid of the bacteria. It really was a wonder drug.
And cowpox was just perfect. You just inject some, and you become immune to smallpox with basically no ill effects. These things weren't found by years of research; they were stumbled upon, and they just worked. So I'm not conceding the thing as impossible. I'm quite willing to admit that they've got something.
All they'd have to do to convince me is to inject themselves with a pint or so of HIV infested blood.
ActiveX lets you run native Windows code in the browser.
XUL lets you access things that are part of the browser itself. XUL is still in the sandbox of the browser; ActiveX isn't.
Further, XUL applets can only be installed via the extension installer interface, and then only by approved sites. So its quite difficult to trick someone into installing an extension that they don't want.
Finally, XUL is for extending the browser. ActiveX is for plugins. An example of a XUL applet I have on my system is a debug panel that lives on the status bar and pops up for each page if I click on its status-bar icon.
The dev tools are fine. Eclipse can debug perl and even javascript seamlessly - allowing you to watch variables, stop on a given line, etc. with an embedded webserver and webbrowser. What isn't is the ActivePerl repository. Its almost entirely built by scripts, and the scripts are easily tripped up.
Hopefully, they'll put a bit of effort into actually converting CPAN packages to ActivePerl so that ActivePerl enjoys a more complete collection of packages. Its not just the little, barely used packages that are missing. For example, Template-Toolkit isn't on ActivePerl. Maybe they could get packages from others who are currently maintaining ActivePerl repositories of tons of missing packages.
Then maybe I can stop maintaining my virtual *nix workstation at work just to create ActivePerl packages.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?
on
A History of Firefox
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· Score: 3, Insightful
IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.
Its not really fair to lump Firefox with the big corporations. Its entirely because they rebelled against their roots that they got where they are today.
And its not really fair to talk about "out of the box" only when Firefox and Mozilla's key innovation is XUL. The fact that you can actually create applications or applets specificially for it is its unique innovation - an innovation not ever used by Opera. And its not at all fair to say that all the rest of the innovation in Firefox came from Opera, or that all of Opera's innovation came from Opera itself. The "innerHTML" property always springs to mind as one heckuva convenient thing that came out of Microsoft's browser.
There are some things I have always really liked about Opera. In the bad old days, it didn't render nearly as well as Mozilla. I couldn't find any ways to do the neat things with javascript that I was pulling off in IE or Firefox in Opera. But Opera was fast - something I attributed to not actually having the ability to support these features.
Those days are gone, though, and Opera has most of the capabilities that the other two browsers have. The only thing missing from the current version that I'd like are: 1) iframes. You can't put one on top of another. z-indexes don't work with iframes. 2) opacity. Both of the other two browsers have a mechanism for blending layers. Opera doesn't, AFAICT.
Those are deal-breakers for me. I can't work around them.
Of course, Opera isn't alone in missing features. Firefox won't let you change the color of the scrollbar or status bar, but Opera and IE will. IE has serious problems doing vertical layouts, and all of them have their issues with CSS3. These are all issues I can live with, though.
I 'spose most people see the past with rose-colored glasses, though. Hopefully I haven't shattered them too much.
She's (Allegedly a woman) 80 years old (Allegedly), PCs didn't become widespread (and ceratinly not practical) until she was about 60 (Allegedly he or she used a PC to distribute music. Could be she used a crude computer fashioned out of used pinball-machine parts.)
I know plenty of 80 year olds in nursing homes that still listen to the RADIO, because they prefer it to TV. (No you don't. All old people like TV better. Its well-known fact to those who know it well.) Not everyone is moving as rapidly into the "technology age" as Slashdot readers. (Lies. Everyone reads Slashdot. People who don't aren't people.)
Clearly the 14 year old male who built an internet theft machine out of pinball machine parts is going to be going to jail for a long, long time.
Yeah...I'm sure that'd work out for them. Keep in mind that it is obvious that they didn't invent the idea of a virtual machine (it was one of the very first ways of doing things). What they have to fear is the new hardware based virtualizers.
What would the title be?
"PATENT FOR USING AN ARCHITECTURE THAT WE DIDN'T WRITE IN A WAY THAT IT WAS INTENDED TO BE USED" comes to mind.
You don't think that'd fly, do you? You don't think that perhaps that AMD and Intel might have problems with that?
I guess they could brag about the clever things they did to make an all hardware based virtualizer. That doesn't really help, though, does it? After all, Xen (and whatever else comes along) don't handle those cases anyway; it's not where they are competing.
All of those things are terribly non-unique. In fact, most people I know run either Firefox or IE with a resolution of 1024x768.
Subnet mask is obviously non-unique.
That's not much in the way of variety there.
I guess you add some resistance to XSS, but you don't stop it entirely using that.
While you're at it, though, why didn't you include IP address? That's a lot more unique than all of the other things you mentioned. Obviously it'll change in the case of dynamic stuff, but probably not as fast as session cookies do.
The fact that MD5 is broken can also be a problem if you don't store all the user data on the server side to validate against the specific instance of the client (and under certain other cases it can also be a problem).
Of course, then you'll run into problems if they use two browsers. I actually regularly use IE, Firefox, and Opera, so that site wouldn't be for me.
You didn't need a TV. It should be noted that almost all shuttle launches are visible for most of Florida, and the sonic boom during reentry shakes the entire State. If you lived in Florida, you could see the smoke for hours. And it was common practice at most business, schools, and homes to go out an watch the shuttle take off.
I was six at the time. It was clearly visible from Central Florida, even though that's not where it happened. It was a BIG explosion.
So "everyone saw it" may be wrong, but "millions of people saw it" is certainly correct, and probably "almost everyone in Florida" saw it" is not necessarily wrong.
And it was obvious what happened. The small flame thing in the sky (which is all we actually see during shuttle launches) turned into much larger cloud of something.
The refutation of myth #2 is a bit questionable. Pieces went everywhere. They were found all over the place. And the size of the thing in the sky was big enough to be visible all over the state. Sure, there was no "bang," but it did explode.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an ironic post. George Bush upset because these scientists are using science rather than religion?
How do we gaze back to the infant universe? The cosmic microwave background is a fossilized record of what occurred way back when. Embedded in this light are subtle patterns that point to very specific conditions about the early universe.
So...subtle patterns from something that happened long ago that may or may not have been affected by external forces on the way towards us. Patterns for which we are extrapolating initial conditions on the basis of what is equivalent to a very, very small number of observations in the grand timeline, and for which we only have a single location (this solar system) to sample from.
All this to describe an event whose happening we don't really understand and which we have no way to either predict or test. What can we really do now that we couldn't before?
We can see into space with a higher degree of accuracy, and finally, perhaps, test a few of the theories that we couldn't before (which are based on other theories that we still can't yet test). Don't get it wrong, though:
Deciding that the universe is a particular age is still taking a leap of faith, no matter what age you think it is.
. There is no good way, for instance, to have proper-looking scientific/exponential notation on a graph in either Excel or OO.o calc.
Three words: open document format.
Actually, let me make that six: open document format in plain text
There's an API for it for C++, Java, and python. All your moves can be documented.
I believe that there are also several other APIs in other languages that write directly to the docs.
Of course, given the fact that it's all in XML, it wouldn't be so bad to do something simple, like just figuring out where the data is stored and write your own little SAX parser to change the numbers and position of things around.
Horribly complicated? To start with, but the results may be worth it. Doing all the things that you can do with a GUI without one takes more time up front. Otherwise, more people would be using Latex, and fewer would be using its vastly inferior (in capabilities) cousins, the WYSIWYGs.
You seem to take it as self-evident that there should be ways to escalate privileges, and that this is to be expected. This is most of the problem that causes nightmares for Windows users, and its not supposed to be a problem for OSX or any other form of Unix.
If I bought OSX, I'd do it so that I could have a server, and maybe give things out to other people. If all it takes is one remote exploit (such as, for instance, giving out ssh accounts) to allow any manner of local exploit, then its not secure! Security has to happen at every level. The escalation of priveleges is supposed to be one of the most highly protected things. There shouldn't be any programs running in privileged mode that haven't been audited, period.
Sure, it's going to hurt Apple's rep. But it looks like they deserve it, if separation of privileges is that bad.
Why is this funny instead of "wrong?" (and why isn't that a possible moderation yet)?
He's got his directions mixed up.
At the south pole, which is as far south as you can go, every direction is north not west.
You're thinking about the earth kind of like its flat, and kind of like its a globe, and drawing wrong assumptions. Directions such as east and west are still meaningful. Generally, when you talk about east and west, you're talking about what direction you would have to go to get to somewhere from the point of origin - that being a longitude line. When you're talking about north or south, you're talking about the direction you would have to move from a latitude line.
Unlike the latitude lines, longitude lines do not shrink to a single point at the south pole. So you can talk about going east and west even though you can't talk about going north and south. You just have to pick a line as the "closest," since they all bunch up there. I'm guessing they picked the Prime Meridian. It would be a logical choice. West of the Prime Meridian => west; east of the prime meridian => east.
Corporate donations should be out, as should corporate lobbying.
Corporations will just pay private citizens to make their donations and do their lobbying. This changes nothing. Requiring people to not be affiliated with a corporation in order to influence their representatives means that the corporate employed have fewer rights than the non-corporate employed, which is arguably a violation of equal rights.
"Local funds only" is equally bad. I could easily funnel my money to a local business and have them give it. Its not like the representative wouldn't know where the money really comes from.
Which gets to the only solution that would actually work: the only way to keep corporations from influencing politicians is to remove their incentive to do so.
I see two ways to do this: either you have to pay everybody when you want to contribute, or you have to do so anonymously (so that the politicians don't know who's doing it). Of course, both policies would virtually eliminate honest campaign contributions, which means that either it'll never happen, or people will just give money illegally.
Nobody with that as their election stance would ever go far enough to get on the local news, much less the seat of real power.
I want to be able to do a little organizing on my MP3 player and phone and listen to mp3s on my phone and PDA, and be able to share any kind of anything between them.
I want everything to be able to do everything, but each should also do one thing well.
That way, if one of them breaks, I can use the other one...kinda.
My PDA is my bookreader, and my phone is my mp3 player but in a pinch either will do the other thing. It's just that the phone has an understandably small screen, and the PDA has an understandably bad set of speakers.
Stop thinking about getting screwed three times over. Start thinking about how easy it is for manufacturers to add certain additional limited functionality for almost no cost for certain devices.
The point I was making is that the risk of expense is there. If you have an especially large site, it may cost you tens of thousands of dollars to move over to using a new library. So that's not really a viable option. In that case, treating GPL a bit like the plague ahead of time may be well worth it.
I don't see how you're justifying this offhand as an edge case. The internet is exploding with activity, and all kinds of little scripts are being used all over the place. This is a classic example of something that could come up (did for me, actually). It's likely to come up for large firms that are putting themeselves on the internet (where an expense report takes all day, but using a free script you find on the internet doesn't). Its also right in the middle of the ambiguous portion of the GPL (what is linking, and what is not?), and its the part that probably scares these people.
If an author of some code came after me with a lawsuit, I'd rather be absolutely certain that the license that they gave me is ironclad in my favor based on either the disambiguity of the license itself or on past court cases. Neither apply to the GPL, as much as I wish they did.
Of course, this is a lot of work. So you want to avoid it whenever possible.
As much as you and the parent poster would like it to be, its not a cut-and-dried issue.
If, for example, I write a page in PHP that uses a javascript menu-building library which is GPL (because the author didn't think enough about it to make it LGPL and clear up the whole issue), do I have to give out the PHP code that I wrote to anyone who asks for it? Is what I wrote a derivative work of that library, or does this merely count as aggregation as defined in the GPL?
This is only one such question in an area where it gets hazy. I may believe that I've got it all sorted out, and I've got the right answer, but that doesn't mean I've got the One True Correct Interpretation of the Law. Things could end in horrible lawsuits for me if I'm not walking on eggshells where these things are concerned. Consequently, it makes sense that orgs have an official policy that handles this sort of thing.
There aren't tons of exploits for phones. Only a few of the Smart Phones run Windows Mobile (which is arguably the only one that going to get many exploits), and even then the ability to communicate with the outside world is so limited that there aren't that many viruses.
Add to that the fact that there are multiple underlying architectures, and a company that is bound by the FCC to enforce fairly strong limitations of their commications devices, and you get a pretty tightly controlled system.
Heck, my phone won't even let me send packets with any non-approved apps.
And as for regression testing, have you even used a cell phone? These are hardware devices that were...hold on let me reiterate that HARDWARE. That means that there are tons and tons of regression tests. Because when hardware crashes, you don't often get a nice friendly "its crashed, so I need to restart." You get a horrible, nonresponsive "Its broken, and I want another one for free."
Your stock price goes down, you lose your house in Aruba, and ice weasels kill and eat your children.
Everyone knows that there are no ice weasels in Aruba. It's the zombie chickens that you have to be afraid of if you end up living on the streets there.
I propose a new slogan for the rebellion that will strike fear into Aruba-living executives everywhere:
"Down with the HD-DVD Consortium! Long live zombie chickens!"
...And people will then give you there attention. Then you can get them to do what you-hold on a moment. I see something shiny. ...Now what was I talking about?
Microsoft Office format is pretty much the standard.
.DOC.
No, it's not. Any given MS document only renders correctly with the Microsoft Office edition in which it was made, and in no other renderer does it render perfectly. Further, this rendering is not guaranteed to be the same because there is no specification. Also, you can't embed fonts in it.
To top it off, even RTF, which Microsoft renders a spec for, isn't correctly rendered by any version of Word. So essentially there is no standard for any Microsoft document format.
To go further, though, office documents are not easily editable! In fact, they're almost more difficult to edit than PDFs are! Its a closed-source, binary file format with lots of quirks. You're not going to be editing it with a 50KB WYSIWYG editor like you can with HTML.
The point isn't that they're not easy to edit. The point is that they always look the same no matter how use 'em. Otherwise, Adobe wouldn't have released Acrobat (which can not only write, but also edit PDFs), would they? The only reason that they're not easy to edit is because the document format is a functional subset of PS, and that is more of a drawing format with built-in text writing than it is a document format. Its a technical limitation, not a designed feature. Acrobat would be a real cash-cow if Adobe could suddenly create a decent document writer for it that competes with Word.
Yeah, a do-all format should be easily edited and universally standard. But sometimes the do-all product isn't the best. If I send a file in PDF, it's in PDF for a reason. If I just wanted to make sure it was readable, I'd send it as
I take it you're not a programmer. Or if you are, then you're a Microsoft junkie. There are PDF libraries for virtually every programming language for free or cheap. There are almost no DOC generating libraries. Even if there were, doc is not a standard as I have said.
Why is that everyone wants the "do-it-all" product?
Its not that. The problem is that neither format is right for what people want out of a document format: editability and universal layout. HTML is easy to edit, but looks different depending on what you use to view it.
PDF, on the other hand, looks the same but isn't easy to edit.
Of course, this solution provides nothing new. You can encode images, flash files, etc. directly into the page as javascript variables that can be read by Mozilla-based browsers. Microsoft has a compressed html format that can handle almost anything, though not as much as the Mozilla browsers. I'd be very interested in seeing if they've found a way around Microsoft's limitation.
Anyway, if you're willing to limit everyone to using only one application for viewing (which is what you're doing if you're making everyone use this program to view) then its rather trivial to make this happen. I personally wrote something that did that for fun; it took me 15 hours because I also added public key encryption.
You can just tell everyone to use Firefox or just IE, depending on your preference.
This solution still doesn't add the pieces that are missing from HTML to make it work with printing. There is no way to specify headers, footers, widow or orphan rules, forced pagebreaks, or odd/even margins (well...outside of doing horribly intrusive things to the browser). I could care less if everything is one file or not. I use PDF writers because I can get this stuff in a ubiquitous format.
So where will we get an easily editable document format that we can use for printing? My money is on the OASIS open document format. Either that, or somebody finally implementing those things as part of CSS.
svn import: oops, there is a some experiment data in the directory, or an AAP subdirectory. Shit, the repository has grown by another 100 MB. No way to get it out again, unless you convert the whole BDB database to text, find your accidental additions, cut it out, rebuild the database, do svnadmin recover, fix all the permissions.
... on every file you accidentally added. The only way to know which ones, is by committing and waiting for the error.
If you use fsfs, you can just delete the last revision. 1 revision=1 file in that one. Otherwise, I'd say that you've hit upon the point of having a revision control system. From a technical standpoint, not having 1 to 1 mapping of files in the repository to files in the system allows you to make cheap copies, do directory versioning, do branching easier, and make backups easier.
Really wrong error messages.
svn add *
svn rm *.log (oops added some test runs)
svn commit
" unable to get lock on file blabla". You'll now have to manually do svn rm
FUD. You was probably some other error in there too. I've done exactly this and it worked. Or it could be that whole "not using Berkley DB" thing.
Having moved our repository to another server, we have had situations where a subdirectory was pointing to the new server, and its parent to the old server. When we did an svn update in the subdirectory, the updates would not happen and no error whatsover was given. Worse, to prevent this kind of problems, we had renamed the repos directory on the server, so that there was no way some dangling old links could accidentally access it.
In the subdirectory: svn switch --relocate [new server]
The subdirectory will update to the new place; rest of it will update to the old place. Don't blame subversion that you can't be bothered to learn how to use basic commands in it.
The Berkeley DB format keeps changing. You can't just copy one to a server with a slightly different svn version. Worse: it will not tell you that there is a version difference, it will just try, and come up with the most irrelevant error messages.
I guess its just me. The solution seems obvious: don't use Berkeley DB as the backend. I don't. I wouldn't even touch a database format that only works right on ext2 partitions. That's already far too picky for me. What if my ext2 partition dies and I don't have another handy?
And the fact that you can do incremental backups and actually get only new data is a nice plus.
One turbine in the ocean is, literally, a fart in a hurricane.
I think not! An ocean turbine is literally an mechanical device, while the ocean is literally a body of water.
Turbines are not now - nor have they ever been - farts. And while a hurricane is also mostly water, an ocean is not one.
Literally is not another word for figuratively; it's the opposite.
Literally.
Google has the content, and the means to index it. It owns the technology to make this happen. Verizon, on the other hand, has the right to run their phone lines through lots and lots of privately owned and government owned land that isn't theirs. Even the tech that makes it possible to have the internet does not belong to Verizon; there are many other ways of connecting to Google, and Verizon can easily be replaced.
In other words, Google has something to offer, and Verizon is mostly just an administrator of something that belongs to the public. The tech that makes it possible to have the internet does not belong to Verizon; there are many other ways of connecting to Google, and Verizon can easily be replaced.
If Google goes away we're back to the days where Yahoo ruled, and it takes months to index the internet, and millions of man-hours. Unless you want bad results, of course. The other crawlers can give you those.
The point is that I think maybe I'm sick of Verizon not having to pay google to use its service. Do they really deserve a free lunch from Google?
I'm with you in the skepticism. It's quite likely you're right.
The thing that nags at my mind is that we have found wonderdrugs in the past.
Penicillin, which could cure most kinds of bacterial infections, could be taken orally or as a salve, and it just got rid of the bacteria. It really was a wonder drug.
And cowpox was just perfect. You just inject some, and you become immune to smallpox with basically no ill effects. These things weren't found by years of research; they were stumbled upon, and they just worked. So I'm not conceding the thing as impossible. I'm quite willing to admit that they've got something.
All they'd have to do to convince me is to inject themselves with a pint or so of HIV infested blood.
ActiveX lets you run native Windows code in the browser.
XUL lets you access things that are part of the browser itself. XUL is still in the sandbox of the browser; ActiveX isn't.
Further, XUL applets can only be installed via the extension installer interface, and then only by approved sites. So its quite difficult to trick someone into installing an extension that they don't want.
Finally, XUL is for extending the browser. ActiveX is for plugins. An example of a XUL applet I have on my system is a debug panel that lives on the status bar and pops up for each page if I click on its status-bar icon.
The dev tools are fine. Eclipse can debug perl and even javascript seamlessly - allowing you to watch variables, stop on a given line, etc. with an embedded webserver and webbrowser. What isn't is the ActivePerl repository. Its almost entirely built by scripts, and the scripts are easily tripped up.
Hopefully, they'll put a bit of effort into actually converting CPAN packages to ActivePerl so that ActivePerl enjoys a more complete collection of packages. Its not just the little, barely used packages that are missing. For example, Template-Toolkit isn't on ActivePerl. Maybe they could get packages from others who are currently maintaining ActivePerl repositories of tons of missing packages.
Then maybe I can stop maintaining my virtual *nix workstation at work just to create ActivePerl packages.
IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.
Its not really fair to lump Firefox with the big corporations. Its entirely because they rebelled against their roots that they got where they are today.
And its not really fair to talk about "out of the box" only when Firefox and Mozilla's key innovation is XUL. The fact that you can actually create applications or applets specificially for it is its unique innovation - an innovation not ever used by Opera. And its not at all fair to say that all the rest of the innovation in Firefox came from Opera, or that all of Opera's innovation came from Opera itself. The "innerHTML" property always springs to mind as one heckuva convenient thing that came out of Microsoft's browser.
There are some things I have always really liked about Opera. In the bad old days, it didn't render nearly as well as Mozilla. I couldn't find any ways to do the neat things with javascript that I was pulling off in IE or Firefox in Opera. But Opera was fast - something I attributed to not actually having the ability to support these features.
Those days are gone, though, and Opera has most of the capabilities that the other two browsers have. The only thing missing from the current version that I'd like are:
1) iframes. You can't put one on top of another. z-indexes don't work with iframes.
2) opacity. Both of the other two browsers have a mechanism for blending layers. Opera doesn't, AFAICT.
Those are deal-breakers for me. I can't work around them.
Of course, Opera isn't alone in missing features. Firefox won't let you change the color of the scrollbar or status bar, but Opera and IE will. IE has serious problems doing vertical layouts, and all of them have their issues with CSS3. These are all issues I can live with, though.
I 'spose most people see the past with rose-colored glasses, though. Hopefully I haven't shattered them too much.
She's
(Allegedly a woman)
80 years old
(Allegedly),
PCs didn't become widespread (and ceratinly not practical) until she was about 60
(Allegedly he or she used a PC to distribute music. Could be she used a crude computer fashioned out of used pinball-machine parts.)
I know plenty of 80 year olds in nursing homes that still listen to the RADIO, because they prefer it to TV.
(No you don't. All old people like TV better. Its well-known fact to those who know it well.)
Not everyone is moving as rapidly into the "technology age" as Slashdot readers.
(Lies. Everyone reads Slashdot. People who don't aren't people.)
Clearly the 14 year old male who built an internet theft machine out of pinball machine parts is going to be going to jail for a long, long time.
Yeah...I'm sure that'd work out for them. Keep in mind that it is obvious that they didn't invent the idea of a virtual machine (it was one of the very first ways of doing things).
What they have to fear is the new hardware based virtualizers.
What would the title be?
"PATENT FOR USING AN ARCHITECTURE THAT WE DIDN'T WRITE IN A WAY THAT IT WAS INTENDED TO BE USED" comes to mind.
You don't think that'd fly, do you?
You don't think that perhaps that AMD and Intel might have problems with that?
I guess they could brag about the clever things they did to make an all hardware based virtualizer. That doesn't really help, though, does it? After all, Xen (and whatever else comes along) don't handle those cases anyway; it's not where they are competing.
You're both wrong. You don't get to the real truth until you're two replies deep in a thread.
And I was an orphan so I learned that myself, you insensitive clods.
All of those things are terribly non-unique. In fact, most people I know run either Firefox or IE with a resolution of 1024x768.
Subnet mask is obviously non-unique.
That's not much in the way of variety there.
I guess you add some resistance to XSS, but you don't stop it entirely using that.
While you're at it, though, why didn't you include IP address?
That's a lot more unique than all of the other things you mentioned. Obviously it'll change in the case of dynamic stuff, but probably not as fast as session cookies do.
The fact that MD5 is broken can also be a problem if you don't store all the user data on the server side to validate against the specific instance of the client (and under certain other cases it can also be a problem).
Of course, then you'll run into problems if they use two browsers. I actually regularly use IE, Firefox, and Opera, so that site wouldn't be for me.
You didn't need a TV. It should be noted that almost all shuttle launches are visible for most of Florida, and the sonic boom during reentry shakes the entire State. If you lived in Florida, you could see the smoke for hours. And it was common practice at most business, schools, and homes to go out an watch the shuttle take off.
I was six at the time. It was clearly visible from Central Florida, even though that's not where it happened. It was a BIG explosion.
So "everyone saw it" may be wrong, but "millions of people saw it" is certainly correct, and probably "almost everyone in Florida" saw it" is not necessarily wrong.
And it was obvious what happened. The small flame thing in the sky (which is all we actually see during shuttle launches) turned into much larger cloud of something.
The refutation of myth #2 is a bit questionable. Pieces went everywhere. They were found all over the place. And the size of the thing in the sky was big enough to be visible all over the state. Sure, there was no "bang," but it did explode.