You have hit the nail on the head there, for sure.
Me, I use netscape 4.7. I can't be bothered with 4.72 (where is the Changelog??) and as for mozilla / NS6b1, eurgh!!
That said, both the above support PNG to some extent. (Check the image at the TL of my homepage. If it's "broken" or a solid pink block then your browser doesn't understand transparent PNGs. Mozilla and IE4/5 appear to, though.)
And of course, lynx supports png! (Through the 'alt' modifier;8) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
If someone wants to be reliant on e.g. RedHat they do that from the moment they buy the box onwards, including as and when bugs become issues.
I'm thinking of a department-sized unit here: if someone isn't up to the job of running a linux box and yet are expected to do so, then the next level manager should take the rap, just as with anything else. That doesn't stop there being clueful folks out there who can fix things very quickly on demand, for which one should be grateful. (And hopefully seek to emulate or avoid the risky situations.) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"You might not have wanted the Quake servers; many others (including myself) did, and do. I doubt your tenner would exactly make a big contribution to any of their bills anyway.:)"
Of course, you're welcome to your quake servers. If I weren't wasting twice as much a month on mobile bills, I'd point out that it's MY £10/month that could go toward MY bills instead, though!:)
What is with "legally responsible" though? Are you interested in screwing money out of the blighter who cracks your machine, or in running a machine that's more secure next time round? While it might not be explicit, I have a feeling that the open-source approach lends itself more towards the latter - some poor geek is going to have to fix the silly box while the company (per)sues the cracker... yippee.
While I'm here - how is this article anything but a reflection on the fact that the linux user base has become more user than coder?
The thing is, not all exploits are backdoors, which the article seems to neglect. Anyone can write code with *bugs* in, and the most obvious will be ironed out by the world-sized community, all to the good. But then you've got minor bugs left, and there's no easy way to guarantee that a large lump of software is without those, some of which could combine to constitute an exploit. (Or a performance slow-down or resource hog, of course. Let's not over-focs on the security side.)
Consider: "Security through obscurity is not something you should depend on, but it can be an effective deterrent if the attacker can find an easier target". The logic behind this is also only half-complete: if something is closed then you can still throw yourself at it AND you get "clever" folks trying to reverse-engineer it and everything. The real problem bites when you have to wait 2 days for the company to supply a fix that doesn't work, when if you have the source you can *fix it yourself*! ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
You can't even post as a followup to something demon decide to mark as defamatory these days, because they're trying to censor "links" ie References: headers. Have a look at another report on what's going off. I used to be with Demon as an ISP - I gave up a few months ago because they squandered my UKP10/month on quake servers without asking whether I wanted them or not - I don't! In the process of leaving I sent a mail saying "I'm off, because I don't like this" and got a stupid mail back asking why... 'nuff said! Glad to be out, now.
At the moment the UK is not looking like a good place to stay. I think the RIP bill working its way through parliament is an evil abomination (basically escrow to screw the nation over some poxy criminals - and Jack Straw expected me to believe this!), and with censorship on the rise as well... you can hardly say we're one of the 'Net's leading countries, can you? ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
So `strings d*.dll` produces something you'd find in a dictionary, therefore there's a secret backdoor and all IIS servers are unsafe and if M$loth put the wrong content up on a webserver they could trigger WW3...
Er. Yeah, right. Next? ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
If either side either wins or loses in their respective suings then the message that goes out is that "software / technology patents are OK"; that message is totally wrong!
So far from being a remotely good thing, it now means there are twice as many (count them;) suits that need *throwing out*, not settling in any way.
Quite apart from both sides just digging their heels in and getting more entrenched in their freedom-violating nonsensical legalistic battles, that is... ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I liked that one too. Along with the paragraph before, "There are a small number of countries where strong domestic controls on the use of cryptography exist. These are mostly countries where human rights command little respect, most notably Russia and China. Many of these countries place strict controls on the Internet, satellite dishes and other new communications devices."
This guy should have a look at Stand.org.uk. I for one have done my bit - I faxed (GPG-signed:) my MP, who forwarded it to Jack Straw, who sent me a letter (ick, snailmail) back saying that it's "to track down criminals" and that I should go read the text of the RIP bill myself rather than rely on commentary. What he does not say is that for the sake of a few stupid criminals he's locking up the rest of the country - there can never be a Verisign in the UK if the government can demand keys/decryption. So much for e-commerce, then. Oh, and I note a distinct absence of open letter with point-by-point rebuttal of any of the "commentary", on Stand. So IOW, the UK is just as bad (read "braindead") as one of these "communist countries" in the EPIC report.
Make of that what you may, but like hell will I be respecting politicians... ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
There is nothing wrong with "*Sigh*!". Nor with my chosen initial-caps means combining quotation and block-whassit effect. The comma+ellipsis on the end is because I can't be arsed repeating it several times over but would rather you had so done.
There is nothing wrong with ending a sentence on an adverb.
I'll give you +1 for the.sig tweak and -1 for not spotting it as poetry. It's from a Runrig song, and I strip them all out in preferences anyway.
You have somehow, miraculously, managed to spot your own error to which I referred originally, "farther" v "further". Yet you still cannot sort out your "your" and "you're" (" hope, after your done being pissed at me"). And you can't even spell "definitely".
If you want to laugh, start with *your*self by all means. Then try applying it to other folks before getting all shitty-minded and missing irony in others' comments. THEN make sure you make your point in the best way possible, grammatical cockups included as they only detract.
Perfection had no part in the original point. Failure to spot irony and inability to express self in accepted/acceptable fashion were. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Agree entirely. What I *do* want is something that's 100% HTML-4.01 and CSS2-compliant, preferably with XML in there as well to rival (rival? *better*!) IE5. Java is optional. Javascript is a disable-by-default option. And small, and fast, and using a decent native GUI interface like GTK+.
So far the best option is Konqueror (kfm) under KDE. There are also such things as gzilla as well though.
Knocking one of these together should not be hard - there are SGML and XML parsers a-plenty out there, glade for "visual GTK+", and a few jolt colas later...
If you're really feeling perverse, check out "mmm" - written in ML. Anyone know of anything in Scheme? (*Not* emacs lisp, please!) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Actually I have other reasons for disliking Demon - having to pay for something and them then taking the tenner a month and squandering it on quake servers, for example, which I do not particularly want, that sucked. And they're pathetically beaurocratically incompetent, too - I've been for 2 job interviews with them which they've screwed up. And they can't even close down an account without appearing incompetent either. But enough of that.
Another interesting example: freeserve and telinco. Both pick up your outgoing SMTP and/or web stuff and feed it through their own mail server and/or web cache as appropriate. Taking SMTP, this is protecting people against the effects of the DUL, except unfortunately it's also maintaining folks' ignorance of the DUL. (If you knew your ISP was censoring your mail based on the IP# it came from in such a blanket ban, would you still use them? Quite.) It's just that I consider it preferable to do like spamcop do, and "prevent spam through technology not legislation" - as a general principle. Legislation (as an approach) is so out of date and crabby it's incredible.
I'm not saying any of the ISPs in the UK are ideal - arguably quite the opposite, that there's always a catch somewhere. But I suggest losing freedoms for a tenner a month isn't worthwhile. ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"It wasn't a flame, it was a lie. There's a million miles between the two."
Yup, I've since read up on and remembered a bit more about the case, and the idea of forging a posting... well amongst other things, *sign the post*!. As well as complain to the ISP for breach of usenettiquette if it persists.
"Freedom of speech is not freedom to malign and impugn."
Actually I think that's wrong. Freedom of speech is to say whatever you like - the *responsibility* for it is a separate idea that I wouldn't deny. (This is one of the reasons I don't flame as much as I'd like!)
"Demon didn't even try, that's where they went wrong. They didn't even look into the problem and say "we don't have an issue with this", they just ignored it."
Indeedie, that's a bad thing.
However, I stand by my point - I don't want legislation on the 'Net at all. Governments that don't know anything about the Internet and its operation should not be making decisions about what they can/can't do with the Net, let alone what ISPs should/shouldn't do. This is why I'd quite like a 'data safehaven island' (as in Cryptonomicon). ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
No good comes from pandering to folks who can't cope with "defammatory postings" at all. You should be allowed to flame away to your heart's content, IMNSHO - if you don't like being flamed, don't go out of your way to deserve it!
While you're at it, pay a visit to Stand.org.uk, and if you're UK-based send your MP a fax (preferably GPG-signed, too).
How do we go about getting the government out of the 'Net once and for all? Anyone got a small island to spare? ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Hmmm, yeah. There are several considerations in the choice of colour. I'm typing this in netscrapie on linux though and this text box is black on white, the rest of the page being grey. And this box is awful to look at.
One approach I've been playing with (and it's all too obvious from my page:) is to take a multi-coloured backdrop and remove one colour, e.g. green, from it, and then use that as a main text colour for those bits where the font is small enough to get 'lost' in the backdrop. Then you stand back a couple of feet and if you can't read it, try again:)
As for opening new windows - please don't! I have a very serviceable middle button that does it for me, or I can right-click+"open in new window"; if I get the impression that some pages will screw up my left-click, I'll be very unhappy...;| ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
"Why pages of legal mumbo jumbo instead of just fixing the error for the defendant, telling the plaintiff that there is no longer a problem, and go out for beers?" <p> There is an answer to that... because companies only operate in their own interest at the expense of customers, and somehow the legal systems and governments are interested in "companies" rather than the ideas of "right" and "wrong".
Feel free to consider how stupid the MD of Easyspace is in twice refusing a simple refund of a "service" I didn't even realise I didn't want, and phoning me up to be abusive late on a Saturday night: an appropriate link <a href="http://www.glutinous.custard.org/sleasyspace /">is here</a>.
Colour choice: go for contrast any time. I prefer dark backgrounds with light text, too, and find (for example) standard M$loth-produced black-on-bright-white painful to think about.
Widths: no-one in their right minds browses at 800x600 "full-screen" whatever that might mean; and to press the point I *like* something that resembles an A4 page in aspect ratio, with minimum usable browser-"isms" at the top. So any page that pushes its content off the right and gives me a horizontal scroll-bar is out of the question. (It boils down to using "width=90*" in your tables, for example. Or better yet, not using tables at all.)
Front pages: the "click here to enter this site" stuff is abhorrent. I entered the URL, so give me the content. I do not want a "web-surfing experience", surprisingly enough.
Javascript: don't bother, it's disabled. I find too many sites out there abuse it with gratuitous pop-ups and stuff (even whole new browser windows) to bother with it.
Images: ALT attribute or forget it.
Broken mime-types: do NOT do what themes.org do and make everything a CGI-link to the file with a perverse mime-type. If it's closest to "octet-stream", send it that way and I'll handle it - that's my problem. If you give me the filename I'll be able to download it in bulk mode later, or use shift+click to force a download. Honestly, people who expect left-click to do everything for them... *sigh*!
Let's remember that the Web is a document-dissemination medium and how it looks is determined by the browser, NOT the other way round. If you write valid HTML then there's no excuse for folks not to be able to read it - after all the rule for browsers is, "if you don't know the tag, ignore it and don't lose content", which allows a site designer to adopt the approach of "valid HTML+CSS" instead of "works OK on all but 20% of browsers".
Roll on the W3C and DOM, any day! ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Let's take an ancient example: unix fingerd. Bugs, can get root exploits, and all that stuff. But note, NOW FIXED! You do still get "sysadmins" who think that "just not running a fingerd" is to save on the bugs; but it's really no excuse to deny people a reasonable service (in the tcp sense if not legalistic!) just because "it used to have bugs". *Every* piece of software out there "used to", and every piece of software out there "still might have". So run it if you want and keep it up to date and pass on what you know and implement security fixes.... Oh look. Did I just describe something compatible only with keeping the whole thing open? Oops;) ~Tim -- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
That's not a problem. What is "a user" doing being able to write into a directory in root's PATH ? If you allow that kind of thing, you get your just desserts;]
You've also got the solution: PAY ATTENTION. If you're only running your own box at home, sure you can get away with anything you like. Try scaling that up to a small work-group in e.g. in a university, and you're effectively being paid to be awake...
That's not the only way - try Debian, you might like it too:)
(RPMs should jolly well say what the required dependencies are - and if you don't have a package of that name and/or version to match you can override it with rpm --no-deps, of course. Even so you probably shouldn't if you're going to keep your machine clean.)
One of the major reasons for there being a distinct lack of linux viruses is that by and large, it will most likely only be executed by a local user as themselves, therefore spreading to system binaries is nigh-on impossible.
There are two threats to that, of course: (a) people start running every silly thing as root (which will rise the more of a "desktop OS" "linux" becomes) and (b) folks who hack cracking become virus writers and use exploits to propogate stuff around.
You're absolutely right about that - Linux-the-OS is not a distribution thing, it's a "set of package versions" thing.
I can't abide this slow release idea, where to upgrade you invariably end up rebooting (often only to start the upgrade) and fixing broken packages / dependencies and so on. Heck, if I wanted *that* I'd run MacOS!;)
Shamless plug: this is why I live at the cutting edge of Debian 'unstable' (currently known as 'woody'). I maintain a local mirror of all the packages I have installed, automatically updating itself at 0317hrs every night, and I upgrade the whole distribution at a stroke every day. Of course, it costs - I had to 'fix' some emacs problem today, but for the privilege of watching libc6 upgrade itself while still running X... anything goes:)
Then again, sometimes I think, maybe not everyone is like me. (Maybe they're grateful for small mercies, too.)
How's about the other perspective: anyone who takes a look at one distribution and deduces "linux sux" from its foibles OUGHT to go back to windoze??
Of course, the idea that Linux is the kernel and GNU/linux is the set of utilities + kernel that constitutes an OS, and that distributions are Linux distributions, does mean that there's some conformity. All you need is reasonable testing both of all the packages (by the authors and other users) and of the sum total distribution (particularly the distinguishing features like linuxconf / yast / debconf / whatever), and then it'll all work bar the bugs they let through.
Has anyone noticed that "it should work" has got further than "we tested on X and Y and will support it on X"?
Slashdot Mirror
You have hit the nail on the head there, for sure.
;8)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Me, I use netscape 4.7. I can't be bothered with 4.72 (where is the Changelog??) and as for mozilla / NS6b1, eurgh!!
That said, both the above support PNG to some extent. (Check the image at the TL of my homepage. If it's "broken" or a solid pink block then your browser doesn't understand transparent PNGs. Mozilla and IE4/5 appear to, though.)
And of course, lynx supports png! (Through the 'alt' modifier
~Tim
--
If someone wants to be reliant on e.g. RedHat they do that from the moment they buy the box onwards, including as and when bugs become issues.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I'm thinking of a department-sized unit here: if someone isn't up to the job of running a linux box and yet are expected to do so, then the next level manager should take the rap, just as with anything else.
That doesn't stop there being clueful folks out there who can fix things very quickly on demand, for which one should be grateful. (And hopefully seek to emulate or avoid the risky situations.)
~Tim
--
"You might not have wanted the Quake servers; many others (including myself) did, and do. I doubt your tenner would exactly make a big contribution to any of their bills anyway. :)"
:)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Of course, you're welcome to your quake servers. If I weren't wasting twice as much a month on mobile bills, I'd point out that it's MY £10/month that could go toward MY bills instead, though!
~Tim
--
What is with "legally responsible" though? Are you interested in screwing money out of the blighter who cracks your machine, or in running a machine that's more secure next time round?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
While it might not be explicit, I have a feeling that the open-source approach lends itself more towards the latter - some poor geek is going to have to fix the silly box while the company (per)sues the cracker... yippee.
While I'm here - how is this article anything but a reflection on the fact that the linux user base has become more user than coder?
The thing is, not all exploits are backdoors, which the article seems to neglect. Anyone can write code with *bugs* in, and the most obvious will be ironed out by the world-sized community, all to the good. But then you've got minor bugs left, and there's no easy way to guarantee that a large lump of software is without those, some of which could combine to constitute an exploit. (Or a performance slow-down or resource hog, of course. Let's not over-focs on the security side.)
Consider:
"Security through obscurity is not something you should depend on, but it can be an effective deterrent if the attacker can find an easier target".
The logic behind this is also only half-complete: if something is closed then you can still throw yourself at it AND you get "clever" folks trying to reverse-engineer it and everything. The real problem bites when you have to wait 2 days for the company to supply a fix that doesn't work, when if you have the source you can *fix it yourself*!
~Tim
--
I used to be with Demon as an ISP - I gave up a few months ago because they squandered my UKP10/month on quake servers without asking whether I wanted them or not - I don't! In the process of leaving I sent a mail saying "I'm off, because I don't like this" and got a stupid mail back asking why... 'nuff said! Glad to be out, now.
At the moment the UK is not looking like a good place to stay. I think the RIP bill working its way through parliament is an evil abomination (basically escrow to screw the nation over some poxy criminals - and Jack Straw expected me to believe this!), and with censorship on the rise as well... you can hardly say we're one of the 'Net's leading countries, can you?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
So `strings d*.dll` produces something you'd find in a dictionary, therefore there's a secret backdoor and all IIS servers are unsafe and if M$loth put the wrong content up on a webserver they could trigger WW3...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Er. Yeah, right. Next?
~Tim
--
If either side either wins or loses in their respective suings then the message that goes out is that "software / technology patents are OK"; that message is totally wrong!
;) suits that need *throwing out*, not settling in any way.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
So far from being a remotely good thing, it now means there are twice as many (count them
Quite apart from both sides just digging their heels in and getting more entrenched in their freedom-violating nonsensical legalistic battles, that is...
~Tim
--
This guy should have a look at Stand.org.uk. :) my MP, who forwarded it to Jack Straw, who sent me a letter (ick, snailmail) back saying that it's "to track down criminals" and that I should go read the text of the RIP bill myself rather than rely on commentary.
I for one have done my bit - I faxed (GPG-signed
What he does not say is that for the sake of a few stupid criminals he's locking up the rest of the country - there can never be a Verisign in the UK if the government can demand keys/decryption. So much for e-commerce, then. Oh, and I note a distinct absence of open letter with point-by-point rebuttal of any of the "commentary", on Stand.
So IOW, the UK is just as bad (read "braindead") as one of these "communist countries" in the EPIC report.
Make of that what you may, but like hell will I be respecting politicians...
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
You can't count OR spot errors.
.sig tweak and -1 for not spotting it as poetry. It's from a Runrig song, and I strip them all out in preferences anyway.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
There is nothing wrong with "*Sigh*!". Nor with my chosen initial-caps means combining quotation and block-whassit effect. The comma+ellipsis on the end is because I can't be arsed repeating it several times over but would rather you had so done.
There is nothing wrong with ending a sentence on an adverb.
I'll give you +1 for the
You have somehow, miraculously, managed to spot your own error to which I referred originally, "farther" v "further". Yet you still cannot sort out your "your" and "you're" (" hope, after your done being pissed at me"). And you can't even spell "definitely".
If you want to laugh, start with *your*self by all means. Then try applying it to other folks before getting all shitty-minded and missing irony in others' comments. THEN make sure you make your point in the best way possible, grammatical cockups included as they only detract.
Perfection had no part in the original point. Failure to spot irony and inability to express self in accepted/acceptable fashion were.
~Tim
--
Agree entirely. What I *do* want is something that's 100% HTML-4.01 and CSS2-compliant, preferably with XML in there as well to rival (rival? *better*!) IE5. Java is optional. Javascript is a disable-by-default option.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
And small, and fast, and using a decent native GUI interface like GTK+.
So far the best option is Konqueror (kfm) under KDE. There are also such things as gzilla as well though.
Knocking one of these together should not be hard - there are SGML and XML parsers a-plenty out there, glade for "visual GTK+", and a few jolt colas later...
If you're really feeling perverse, check out "mmm" - written in ML. Anyone know of anything in Scheme? (*Not* emacs lisp, please!)
~Tim
--
You seem unable to comprehend that
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
a) your post had grammatical fuckups
b) mine did not
c) your second comment had yet more grammatical fuckups
d) you are an arrogant ignorant fuckwit
e) triple-digit? It takes one to know one. Now fuck off.
~Tim
--
"Asshole" yourself - you can't even spot the grammatical error and go and post a couple more yourself.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Run away, little fuckwit...
~Tim
--
"I don't believe such behavior helps the cause(s) any farther, and only makes the people who do contribute look bad."
....
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
*Sigh*! Learn to spot irony, dammit! Repeat after me: Irony Is Funny,
Or if you're going to moan, at least do it grammatically.
~Tim
--
Actually I have other reasons for disliking Demon - having to pay for something and them then taking the tenner a month and squandering it on quake servers, for example, which I do not particularly want, that sucked. And they're pathetically beaurocratically incompetent, too - I've been for 2 job interviews with them which they've screwed up. And they can't even close down an account without appearing incompetent either. But enough of that.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Another interesting example: freeserve and telinco. Both pick up your outgoing SMTP and/or web stuff and feed it through their own mail server and/or web cache as appropriate. Taking SMTP, this is protecting people against the effects of the DUL, except unfortunately it's also maintaining folks' ignorance of the DUL. (If you knew your ISP was censoring your mail based on the IP# it came from in such a blanket ban, would you still use them? Quite.) It's just that I consider it preferable to do like spamcop do, and "prevent spam through technology not legislation" - as a general principle. Legislation (as an approach) is so out of date and crabby it's incredible.
I'm not saying any of the ISPs in the UK are ideal - arguably quite the opposite, that there's always a catch somewhere. But I suggest losing freedoms for a tenner a month isn't worthwhile.
~Tim
--
"It wasn't a flame, it was a lie. There's a million miles between the two."
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Yup, I've since read up on and remembered a bit more about the case, and the idea of forging a posting... well amongst other things, *sign the post*!. As well as complain to the ISP for breach of usenettiquette if it persists.
"Freedom of speech is not freedom to malign and impugn."
Actually I think that's wrong. Freedom of speech is to say whatever you like - the *responsibility* for it is a separate idea that I wouldn't deny. (This is one of the reasons I don't flame as much as I'd like!)
"Demon didn't even try, that's where they went wrong. They didn't even look into the problem and say "we don't have an issue with this", they just ignored it."
Indeedie, that's a bad thing.
However, I stand by my point - I don't want legislation on the 'Net at all. Governments that don't know anything about the Internet and its operation should not be making decisions about what they can/can't do with the Net, let alone what ISPs should/shouldn't do. This is why I'd quite like a 'data safehaven island' (as in Cryptonomicon).
~Tim
--
Thank heavens I'm not with Demon any longer!
No good comes from pandering to folks who can't cope with "defammatory postings" at all. You should be allowed to flame away to your heart's content, IMNSHO - if you don't like being flamed, don't go out of your way to deserve it!
While you're at it, pay a visit to Stand.org.uk, and if you're UK-based send your MP a fax (preferably GPG-signed, too).
How do we go about getting the government out of the 'Net once and for all? Anyone got a small island to spare?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
Hmmm, yeah. There are several considerations in the choice of colour.
:) is to take a multi-coloured backdrop and remove one colour, e.g. green, from it, and then use that as a main text colour for those bits where the font is small enough to get 'lost' in the backdrop. Then you stand back a couple of feet and if you can't read it, try again :)
;|
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I'm typing this in netscrapie on linux though and this text box is black on white, the rest of the page being grey. And this box is awful to look at.
One approach I've been playing with (and it's all too obvious from my page
As for opening new windows - please don't! I have a very serviceable middle button that does it for me, or I can right-click+"open in new window"; if I get the impression that some pages will screw up my left-click, I'll be very unhappy...
~Tim
--
"Why pages of legal mumbo jumbo instead of just fixing the error for the defendant, telling the plaintiff that there is no longer a problem, and go out for beers?"
e /">is here</a>.
<p>
There is an answer to that... because companies only operate in their own interest at the expense of customers, and somehow the legal systems and governments are interested in "companies" rather than the ideas of "right" and "wrong".
Feel free to consider how stupid the MD of Easyspace is in twice refusing a simple refund of a "service" I didn't even realise I didn't want, and phoning me up to be abusive late on a Saturday night: an appropriate link <a href="http://www.glutinous.custard.org/sleasyspac
Colour choice: go for contrast any time. I prefer dark backgrounds with light text, too, and find (for example) standard M$loth-produced black-on-bright-white painful to think about.
Widths: no-one in their right minds browses at 800x600 "full-screen" whatever that might mean; and to press the point I *like* something that resembles an A4 page in aspect ratio, with minimum usable browser-"isms" at the top.
So any page that pushes its content off the right and gives me a horizontal scroll-bar is out of the question. (It boils down to using "width=90*" in your tables, for example. Or better yet, not using tables at all.)
Front pages: the "click here to enter this site" stuff is abhorrent. I entered the URL, so give me the content. I do not want a "web-surfing experience", surprisingly enough.
Javascript: don't bother, it's disabled. I find too many sites out there abuse it with gratuitous pop-ups and stuff (even whole new browser windows) to bother with it.
Images: ALT attribute or forget it.
Broken mime-types: do NOT do what themes.org do and make everything a CGI-link to the file with a perverse mime-type. If it's closest to "octet-stream", send it that way and I'll handle it - that's my problem. If you give me the filename I'll be able to download it in bulk mode later, or use shift+click to force a download. Honestly, people who expect left-click to do everything for them... *sigh*!
Let's remember that the Web is a document-dissemination medium and how it looks is determined by the browser, NOT the other way round. If you write valid HTML then there's no excuse for folks not to be able to read it - after all the rule for browsers is, "if you don't know the tag, ignore it and don't lose content", which allows a site designer to adopt the approach of "valid HTML+CSS" instead of "works OK on all but 20% of browsers".
Roll on the W3C and DOM, any day!
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
I agree entirely.
;)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Let's take an ancient example: unix fingerd. Bugs, can get root exploits, and all that stuff. But note, NOW FIXED!
You do still get "sysadmins" who think that "just not running a fingerd" is to save on the bugs; but it's really no excuse to deny people a reasonable service (in the tcp sense if not legalistic!) just because "it used to have bugs". *Every* piece of software out there "used to", and every piece of software out there "still might have". So run it if you want and keep it up to date and pass on what you know and implement security fixes....
Oh look. Did I just describe something compatible only with keeping the whole thing open? Oops
~Tim
--
That's not a problem. What is "a user" doing being able to write into a directory in root's PATH ? If you allow that kind of thing, you get your just desserts ;]
You've also got the solution: PAY ATTENTION. If you're only running your own box at home, sure you can get away with anything you like. Try scaling that up to a small work-group in e.g. in a university, and you're effectively being paid to be awake...
That's not the only way - try Debian, you might like it too :)
(RPMs should jolly well say what the required dependencies are - and if you don't have a package of that name and/or version to match you can override it with rpm --no-deps, of course. Even so you probably shouldn't if you're going to keep your machine clean.)
One of the major reasons for there being a distinct lack of linux viruses is that by and large, it will most likely only be executed by a local user as themselves, therefore spreading to system binaries is nigh-on impossible.
There are two threats to that, of course: (a) people start running every silly thing as root (which will rise the more of a "desktop OS" "linux" becomes) and (b) folks who hack cracking become virus writers and use exploits to propogate stuff around.
You're absolutely right about that - Linux-the-OS is not a distribution thing, it's a "set of package versions" thing.
;)
:)
I can't abide this slow release idea, where to upgrade you invariably end up rebooting (often only to start the upgrade) and fixing broken packages / dependencies and so on. Heck, if I wanted *that* I'd run MacOS!
Shamless plug: this is why I live at the cutting edge of Debian 'unstable' (currently known as 'woody'). I maintain a local mirror of all the packages I have installed, automatically updating itself at 0317hrs every night, and I upgrade the whole distribution at a stroke every day. Of course, it costs - I had to 'fix' some emacs problem today, but for the privilege of watching libc6 upgrade itself while still running X... anything goes
Then again, sometimes I think, maybe not everyone is like me. (Maybe they're grateful for small mercies, too.)
How's about the other perspective: anyone who takes a look at one distribution and deduces "linux sux" from its foibles OUGHT to go back to windoze??
Of course, the idea that Linux is the kernel and GNU/linux is the set of utilities + kernel that constitutes an OS, and that distributions are Linux distributions, does mean that there's some conformity. All you need is reasonable testing both of all the packages (by the authors and other users) and of the sum total distribution (particularly the distinguishing features like linuxconf / yast / debconf / whatever), and then it'll all work bar the bugs they let through.
Has anyone noticed that "it should work" has got further than "we tested on X and Y and will support it on X"?