Yeah, it's just something I threw together when I first hit the Gamespot.com columns bug. Turns out to work great for any site with incremental-draw errors. If you want to post it in a high-visibility spot, be my guest:)
Here is a short javascript bookmarklet that fixes table rendering. To prevent Slashcode from mangling it, I've inserted some linebreaks. Condense it back into one line and then use it as a bookmarked URL; whenever you select it, it will fix all of the incremental-display bugs on the current page.
javascript:(function(){ var s=document.body.style; var x=s.display; s.display='none'; s.display=x; })( )
This "release candidate" is really just an interim release between 1.0PR and 1.0 final. The Firefox team knows that there are still significant bugs that must be addressed before 1.0-final. See The Burning Edge for a small taste of what's been fixed since 1.0PR, and what is still left to do.
A word of caution: there will be significant bugfixes between now and the final release, but there may or may not be automatic update notifications. If you decide to install this on the computers of your friends and family, make sure to upgrade them again later;)
I've had this argument before with people who were better informed than you. At least they had the sense to worry about things like market inertia, uneducated consumers, and brand loyalty.
But just to clear this up, let's play a little thought experiment -- a hypothetical situation that demonstrates the flaw in your logic.
You believe that innovation will continue under your system. Let's say that ten years from now, some company designs and sells a self-contained fabricator that takes any blueprint and turns out a fully formed widget. Within another five years, dozens of companies around the world are making these fabricators. Within another twenty years, every person in the world has access to such a machine.
Now I ask you, what is the benefit of bring a new widget to market if everyone in the world can duplicate it immediately?
Your theoretical world says that innovation occurs because some things will always be difficult. Surprise, surprise: a side effect of innovation is that things get easier with time. It doesn't hold up.
And for the record, the nuclear reactor was patented in 1955 by Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard.
No, I don't agree with you at all. What you describe leads to an creative stall, where recycling old ideas or making minor improvements is far more effective than creating new innovations.
If you spend the labor costs to develop something, your opponents gain it for free and place you at an economic disadvantage. No company would invest in something which it could have for free if someone else develops it first; what you have is a stalemate.
Patents and copyright drive innovation, if only through the selfish desire for the originator to make money through short-term exclusive use.
If you want to bring patent and copyright length down to 10 years, then I'm all for it. But if you want to abolish patents and copyrights completely, you're on your own.
You and I have such radically different views that there's no point in continuing this conversation.
Not so, at least not from the perspective of trade which is the only angle we are discussing here. Trade is applicable to two classes of concepts: labour and "private property", one being defined as change of state of physical objects due to one's actions and the other as a certain class of physical objects.
I take it you are against all concept of "intellectual property" then, such as patents or copyrights? Trade does not apply to ideas, by your defintion, so the concept of "selling an idea" doesn't exist either. Books are just words strung together, so the only person who should be paid is the printing company and not the author? I'm sorry but I can't buy into that idea. If you don't have any reward for creativity, there is no incentive to create. You're describing a world where authors/musicians/architects/engineers starve to death or work at McDonalds to pay their rent.
To be pendantic about it, music is not vibrations of air. Music is the amplitude and frequency of various wavelengths which is/conveyed/ by vibrations of air. The physical medium is just a transport; music itself is just information.
At some level, everything is information. The whole "information should always be free" concept is a nice mantra, but it does not hold up to scrutiny.
Ahem: Blizzard has publically stated that there will be some way for guildmates to play with each other internationally some time after the European launch.
Nobody claimed it was a perfect solution. The European launch will be much later than the US launch, probably delayed by 4-5 months. I'm not exactly thrilled about that. No doubt that Vivendi has something to do with that.
But, all you need a North American billing address to play the US version of the game. It shouldn't be too hard for trans-atlantic guilds to figure that one out.
WoW is hardly a "clusterfuck". You're basing your opinion on two misconceptions.
1) The rest system is not a big deal. It doubles the EXP for kills for a short while, but it's not a free ride. If you don't log on for a whole week, you might gain enough "free" doubled EXP for a single level. (Also, I disagree with your premise is that the point of an MMORPG is to "work" at the game. WoW is not a level grind to be the first Warrior to hit 60. We'll always have EQ for that.)
2) The servers are split as follows: Asia, North America, Europe. There is no case where two people from the same continent will be unable to play with each other. The reasons are partly practical and partly business; aside from language barriers and the late European launch, the non-US servers are being run by different divisions and even different companies. Even considering that, Blizzard has publically stated that there will be some way for guildmates to play with each other internationally some time after the European launch.
Really, these are non-issues. WoW is a very enjoyable game, not a "clusterfuck". I do have some issues with the way that Vivendi is handling the launch, but this is not a SOE-level disaster.
He's not making fun of you, and in fact I doubt he could know that you're not a native speaker. It just so happens that the idiom you used, in combination with the name WiX, is hilarious to anyone who speaks german;)
They could have chosen beta submissions by random. But they gave 'passes' to the priveleged few to pass around. That is NOT FAIR beta or not.
"Wah! Mommy, Johnny won't let me join his club!"
OK, sorry for being obnoxious. But Google has absolutely no obligation to be "fair" about who they allow to use their private service.
The first invites were given only to Blogger users, since they were 1) already using a Google service, 2) known to be tech-savvy, and 3) a highly influential group of people. A random lottery would have given Google a random smattering of grandmothers, computer newbies, middle-management execs, and twelve-year-olds. Not exactly a strong audience for testing or marketing purposes.
Your argument reminds me of the people who complain when they don't get into beta tests for video games. It all boils down to sour grapes.
On the other hand, by now the invites have made it to everyone you could imagine. If you want one, all you need to do is ask around. I'm sitting on three extra invites myself, because literally everyone I know already has a GMail account (or else can't be trusted with a two-button mouse).
No, Valve wasn't derided over their engine choice, because they did quite a bit of hacking on it. The overall architecture may be borrowed from Quake, but the Half-Life renderer is significantly better than the original. (I am not sure, but I believe that Valve also had access to the Quake 2 engine source, though they did not base their game around it.)
The Half-Life netcode is also vastly improved over Quake's, and patches have kept it on par with the industry's latest multiplayer games.
Um, no. Janus represents beginnings and endings, and was also the god of doors and gateways (hence looking back and looking forward). He was not related to hypocrisy.
The modern connotation of "two-faced" didn't appear until much, much later (middle ages, I believe).
"Lost" and probably still being used by the person you lent it to is another.
If the poster who started this subthread had kept his CD-KEY or his original installation, I wouldn't have a problem with that. But now he feels obligated to pirate a new copy instead of finding out where his copy went.
Fair use is fair use, and piracy is piracy. The "loan it out and don't get it back" situation is not fair use.
I was just saying that his friend owes him for the game that he lost, not that he owes Valve anything. Valve doesn't lose money when you download a copy, Valve loses potential sales when you give a copy to someone who might have bought the game.
Breaking copyright and then paying for it later doesn't justify the original infringement, by the way. If you've commited copyright infringement, paying Valve doesn't make that go away.
If the great-grandparent poster wanted to play the game, then he could lend it out, but he can't play it while it's not in his posession. That's copyright infringement. Shifting (moving the game to another computer or another location) is legal; keeping a copy is not. This has nothing to do with RIAA logic. It's how copyright law has always worked.
My question for you: what the heck are you doing with 3 purchased copies of HL? Did you get your WON ID banned a few times, or do you run LAN parties out of your house?
For those who do not have a Half-Life CD key or simply lost it, Steam is not free. (Lent original copy of Half-Life to friend about 3 years back, never got it back. Playing game with a downloaded copy, a CD key generator, and no-CD crack.)
You don't get it. Steam is free, Half-Life is not. Steam is just a content-delivery system. Half-Life is the content being delivered, or in your case, not delivered.
By the way, you're breaking the law. If you gave a friend your copy and didn't get it back, you don't have a copy anymore. Your friend owes you $35, but that doesn't give you the right to download and crack a copy. It just makes you a dumbass for loaning out the game.
needless to say, I didn't like them very much and propmptly deleted the music files (within 24 hours i assure you!)
Please stop perpetuating the 24-hour myth. Length of posession has absolutely nothing to do with copyright law. 30 seconds is just as illegal as 24 hours.
Thanks to my parent (modded -1?) for this link, looks like a fork of thttpd with performance-enhancing updates. Still not ideal for large filesets but a lot more efficient than plain thttpd, and full keep-alive support.
... last time I checked you can't "remove" content from already sent emails.
<paranoid>
You say that now, but give your imagination a little room and think a little harder. Thanks to the PATRIOT act, the government can tell exactly who received the email, and where all of those people live.
They would be delighted to subpoena your hard drive, your computer, and all your on-site storage media. Sure, you think that it'll never happen... but since the case is sealed, nobody will be able to hear you when you reverse your opinion.
A word of caution: thttpd is not the brilliant solution that a lot of people think that it is. The best features of thttpd are its low CPU and memory footprints, and its simplicity for virtual hosting. But those are pretty much its only features.
For sites without too many dependencies per page (javascript, images), it's great. But for most people, there's a huge shortcoming: it does not support persistant (Keep-Alive) connections. Every file request has to wait for a new TCP connection to be established. When your average ping time is 250+ ms, that hurts BAD. Broadband users don't notice so much but modem users get shafted.
Also, thttpd has serious issues if your total fileset exceeds 1GB. It keeps a cache of last-used files via mmap(), but if you exceed your VM address space (lets say, a couple dozen 200 MB videos), you're in a world of hurt.
There are commercial versions like Premium THTTPD that cure many of these shortcomings, and include a host of other features like FastCGI for running PHP, etc.
But in the realm of free software, there is no one-size-fits-all best server. Apache isn't THAT hard to configure, and it beats thttpd in a lot of important areas.
Just wondering, how do you care for your battery? I find that people who keep it charged all the time tend to have much shorter life than those who let it run down. Probably some property of lithium-ion batteries.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's just something I threw together when I first hit the Gamespot.com columns bug. Turns out to work great for any site with incremental-draw errors. If you want to post it in a high-visibility spot, be my guest :)
Here is a short javascript bookmarklet that fixes table rendering. To prevent Slashcode from mangling it, I've inserted some linebreaks. Condense it back into one line and then use it as a bookmarked URL; whenever you select it, it will fix all of the incremental-display bugs on the current page.
( )
javascript:(function(){
var s=document.body.style;
var x=s.display;
s.display='none';
s.display=x;
})
This "release candidate" is really just an interim release between 1.0PR and 1.0 final. The Firefox team knows that there are still significant bugs that must be addressed before 1.0-final. See The Burning Edge for a small taste of what's been fixed since 1.0PR, and what is still left to do.
;)
A word of caution: there will be significant bugfixes between now and the final release, but there may or may not be automatic update notifications. If you decide to install this on the computers of your friends and family, make sure to upgrade them again later
I've had this argument before with people who were better informed than you. At least they had the sense to worry about things like market inertia, uneducated consumers, and brand loyalty.
But just to clear this up, let's play a little thought experiment -- a hypothetical situation that demonstrates the flaw in your logic.
You believe that innovation will continue under your system. Let's say that ten years from now, some company designs and sells a self-contained fabricator that takes any blueprint and turns out a fully formed widget. Within another five years, dozens of companies around the world are making these fabricators. Within another twenty years, every person in the world has access to such a machine.
Now I ask you, what is the benefit of bring a new widget to market if everyone in the world can duplicate it immediately?
Your theoretical world says that innovation occurs because some things will always be difficult. Surprise, surprise: a side effect of innovation is that things get easier with time. It doesn't hold up.
And for the record, the nuclear reactor was patented in 1955 by Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard.
No, I don't agree with you at all. What you describe leads to an creative stall, where recycling old ideas or making minor improvements is far more effective than creating new innovations.
If you spend the labor costs to develop something, your opponents gain it for free and place you at an economic disadvantage. No company would invest in something which it could have for free if someone else develops it first; what you have is a stalemate.
Patents and copyright drive innovation, if only through the selfish desire for the originator to make money through short-term exclusive use.
If you want to bring patent and copyright length down to 10 years, then I'm all for it. But if you want to abolish patents and copyrights completely, you're on your own.
You and I have such radically different views that there's no point in continuing this conversation.
Not so, at least not from the perspective of trade which is the only angle we are discussing here. Trade is applicable to two classes of concepts: labour and "private property", one being defined as change of state of physical objects due to one's actions and the other as a certain class of physical objects.
I take it you are against all concept of "intellectual property" then, such as patents or copyrights? Trade does not apply to ideas, by your defintion, so the concept of "selling an idea" doesn't exist either. Books are just words strung together, so the only person who should be paid is the printing company and not the author? I'm sorry but I can't buy into that idea. If you don't have any reward for creativity, there is no incentive to create. You're describing a world where authors/musicians/architects/engineers starve to death or work at McDonalds to pay their rent.
To be pendantic about it, music is not vibrations of air. Music is the amplitude and frequency of various wavelengths which is /conveyed/ by vibrations of air. The physical medium is just a transport; music itself is just information.
At some level, everything is information. The whole "information should always be free" concept is a nice mantra, but it does not hold up to scrutiny.
Ahem: Blizzard has publically stated that there will be some way for guildmates to play with each other internationally some time after the European launch.
Nobody claimed it was a perfect solution. The European launch will be much later than the US launch, probably delayed by 4-5 months. I'm not exactly thrilled about that. No doubt that Vivendi has something to do with that.
But, all you need a North American billing address to play the US version of the game. It shouldn't be too hard for trans-atlantic guilds to figure that one out.
WoW is hardly a "clusterfuck". You're basing your opinion on two misconceptions.
1) The rest system is not a big deal. It doubles the EXP for kills for a short while, but it's not a free ride. If you don't log on for a whole week, you might gain enough "free" doubled EXP for a single level. (Also, I disagree with your premise is that the point of an MMORPG is to "work" at the game. WoW is not a level grind to be the first Warrior to hit 60. We'll always have EQ for that.)
2) The servers are split as follows: Asia, North America, Europe. There is no case where two people from the same continent will be unable to play with each other. The reasons are partly practical and partly business; aside from language barriers and the late European launch, the non-US servers are being run by different divisions and even different companies. Even considering that, Blizzard has publically stated that there will be some way for guildmates to play with each other internationally some time after the European launch.
Really, these are non-issues. WoW is a very enjoyable game, not a "clusterfuck". I do have some issues with the way that Vivendi is handling the launch, but this is not a SOE-level disaster.
While this may be true, are you seriously suggesting that a digital copy of music recording (a string of zeros and ones) is a thing ?
I don't know. Are you serously suggesting that anything which can be represented digitally is NOT a thing?
I'm not sure what's more frightening: DRM and copy controls, or the public attitudes that make them necessary.
He's not making fun of you, and in fact I doubt he could know that you're not a native speaker. It just so happens that the idiom you used, in combination with the name WiX, is hilarious to anyone who speaks german ;)
They could have chosen beta submissions by random. But they gave 'passes' to the priveleged few to pass around. That is NOT FAIR beta or not.
"Wah! Mommy, Johnny won't let me join his club!"
OK, sorry for being obnoxious. But Google has absolutely no obligation to be "fair" about who they allow to use their private service.
The first invites were given only to Blogger users, since they were 1) already using a Google service, 2) known to be tech-savvy, and 3) a highly influential group of people. A random lottery would have given Google a random smattering of grandmothers, computer newbies, middle-management execs, and twelve-year-olds. Not exactly a strong audience for testing or marketing purposes.
Your argument reminds me of the people who complain when they don't get into beta tests for video games. It all boils down to sour grapes.
On the other hand, by now the invites have made it to everyone you could imagine. If you want one, all you need to do is ask around. I'm sitting on three extra invites myself, because literally everyone I know already has a GMail account (or else can't be trusted with a two-button mouse).
No, Valve wasn't derided over their engine choice, because they did quite a bit of hacking on it. The overall architecture may be borrowed from Quake, but the Half-Life renderer is significantly better than the original. (I am not sure, but I believe that Valve also had access to the Quake 2 engine source, though they did not base their game around it.)
The Half-Life netcode is also vastly improved over Quake's, and patches have kept it on par with the industry's latest multiplayer games.
Um, no. Janus represents beginnings and endings, and was also the god of doors and gateways (hence looking back and looking forward). He was not related to hypocrisy.
The modern connotation of "two-faced" didn't appear until much, much later (middle ages, I believe).
Lost while in your posession is one thing.
"Lost" and probably still being used by the person you lent it to is another.
If the poster who started this subthread had kept his CD-KEY or his original installation, I wouldn't have a problem with that. But now he feels obligated to pirate a new copy instead of finding out where his copy went.
Fair use is fair use, and piracy is piracy. The "loan it out and don't get it back" situation is not fair use.
I was just saying that his friend owes him for the game that he lost, not that he owes Valve anything. Valve doesn't lose money when you download a copy, Valve loses potential sales when you give a copy to someone who might have bought the game.
Breaking copyright and then paying for it later doesn't justify the original infringement, by the way. If you've commited copyright infringement, paying Valve doesn't make that go away.
If the great-grandparent poster wanted to play the game, then he could lend it out, but he can't play it while it's not in his posession. That's copyright infringement. Shifting (moving the game to another computer or another location) is legal; keeping a copy is not. This has nothing to do with RIAA logic. It's how copyright law has always worked.
My question for you: what the heck are you doing with 3 purchased copies of HL? Did you get your WON ID banned a few times, or do you run LAN parties out of your house?
For those who do not have a Half-Life CD key or simply lost it, Steam is not free. (Lent original copy of Half-Life to friend about 3 years back, never got it back. Playing game with a downloaded copy, a CD key generator, and no-CD crack.)
You don't get it. Steam is free, Half-Life is not. Steam is just a content-delivery system. Half-Life is the content being delivered, or in your case, not delivered.
By the way, you're breaking the law. If you gave a friend your copy and didn't get it back, you don't have a copy anymore. Your friend owes you $35, but that doesn't give you the right to download and crack a copy. It just makes you a dumbass for loaning out the game.
needless to say, I didn't like them very much and propmptly deleted the music files (within 24 hours i assure you!)
Please stop perpetuating the 24-hour myth. Length of posession has absolutely nothing to do with copyright law. 30 seconds is just as illegal as 24 hours.
Thanks to my parent (modded -1?) for this link, looks like a fork of thttpd with performance-enhancing updates. Still not ideal for large filesets but a lot more efficient than plain thttpd, and full keep-alive support.
t tpd-2.21b-pNN/index.html
http://xoomer.virgilio.it/adefacc/httpd/thttpd/th
... last time I checked you can't "remove" content from already sent emails.
<paranoid>
You say that now, but give your imagination a little room and think a little harder. Thanks to the PATRIOT act, the government can tell exactly who received the email, and where all of those people live.
They would be delighted to subpoena your hard drive, your computer, and all your on-site storage media. Sure, you think that it'll never happen... but since the case is sealed, nobody will be able to hear you when you reverse your opinion.
</paranoid>
MSDN is a great collection... when you search it with google. Toss "site:microsoft.com" in with your keywords and you're good to go.
A word of caution: thttpd is not the brilliant solution that a lot of people think that it is. The best features of thttpd are its low CPU and memory footprints, and its simplicity for virtual hosting. But those are pretty much its only features.
For sites without too many dependencies per page (javascript, images), it's great. But for most people, there's a huge shortcoming: it does not support persistant (Keep-Alive) connections. Every file request has to wait for a new TCP connection to be established. When your average ping time is 250+ ms, that hurts BAD. Broadband users don't notice so much but modem users get shafted.
Also, thttpd has serious issues if your total fileset exceeds 1GB. It keeps a cache of last-used files via mmap(), but if you exceed your VM address space (lets say, a couple dozen 200 MB videos), you're in a world of hurt.
There are commercial versions like Premium THTTPD that cure many of these shortcomings, and include a host of other features like FastCGI for running PHP, etc.
But in the realm of free software, there is no one-size-fits-all best server. Apache isn't THAT hard to configure, and it beats thttpd in a lot of important areas.
It's a little late for the buffer overflow to be hitting Slashdot's Apache news. The fix was known and published back in December 2003.
Red Hat backported the fix into their custom 1.3.27 version in this errata, released 12/18:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2003-405.html
That's right mods, let's all encourage copyright violation.
If you want to read a NYTimes article, why don't you read it from the New York Times? "Free registration required" doesn't mean "Theft permitted".
Just wondering, how do you care for your battery? I find that people who keep it charged all the time tend to have much shorter life than those who let it run down. Probably some property of lithium-ion batteries.