Here's an idea: use the ICQ protocol for your ICQ contacts and use the AIM protocol for your AIM contacts. I know, I know, it doesn't make any sense, but it works, believe it or not!
Now if only I could figure out how to put on these damn pants. I can never seem to get them past my shoulders...
I guess I didn't make it clear in my previous comment that the problems I described (such as the problems with positioning dropdown menus), even though they were technically layout issues, were caused by box model issues. For example, the reason the menus would never show up in the right position is that IE ignores this very important part of the W3C's box model recommendation:
"The box width is given by the sum of the left and right margins, border, and padding, and the content width. The height is given by the sum of the top and bottom margins, border, and padding, and the content height."
You're going to tell me once more that IE6 in strict mode doesn't have this problem and I must be in quirks mode, but I assure you that in the circumstances I described, IE6 in strict mode most definitely does calculate box widths incorrectly, resulting in incorrect positioning of those boxes.
If you're interested in continuing this discussion, please contact me by email. I'm way too busy at the moment to create a demonstration for you, but if you're willing to wait a few weeks, I'll see if I can throw something together.
I'd link to examples if I could, but the only good examples I have on hand aren't open to the public. It's a little hard to be specific; there's so much wrong with IE's box model that you can pretty much pick something at random and there's a good chance it's broken.
I assure you IE really was in strict mode. I write fully conformant XHTML and CSS with proper DTDs, and I've often stripped off the DTD line just to confirm that I'm not imagining things and IE is actually in strict mode. Strict mode is better than quirks mode, but it's still nowhere near bug-free.
Two things I run into all the time are the peekaboo bug (where having one or more floating boxes on a page causes other boxes to disappear until, say, a:hover is triggered) and broken percentage-based widths. IE's refusal to respect width: auto, max-width, min-width, and other standard CSS attributes is also pretty frustrating.
I think the most frustrated I've ever been is when I've implemented dropdown menus using unordered lists and CSS. I once spent days trying get IE to behave properly with floated boxes, then relative-positioned boxes, and finally absolute-positioned boxes, but nothing worked. IE just refused to put the boxes where I told it to. Meanwhile, Firefox, Opera, and Safari all worked just fine.
And oh dear Lord, let's not even get started on how evil IE can be when you try to do anything useful involving the box model with JavaScript and the DOM. Ugh.
Four years ago, when IE6 was released, I loved it. It was a big improvement over IE5, and it was better at most things than the competition. But that was four years ago! Things are completely different now. Other browsers have improved by leaps and bounds while IE has stayed the same, and IE sucks in comparison.
The box model has been fixed since IE6 was released 4 YEARS ago. The problem, of course is that it's only fixed in strict mode (not quirks mode).
Ha! And the moon is made of cheese.
IE6's box model is a buggy piece of ass whether or not you're in strict mode; it's just buggy in different ways. I reckon I've spent the equivalent of several weeks worth of my life just trying to work around bugs in IE's box model in strict mode. Those are weeks I'll never get back.
I've answered my own question: MOND has indeed been considered as a possible explanation for the Pioneer anomaly, as described on page 44 of Study of the anomalous acceleration of Pionieer 10 and 11. According to the authors, the anomalous acceleration is too large to be explained by MOND or similar theories.
I was mostly referring to consistency in the operating system, as opposed to the kernel. I haven't spent much time comparing the Linux and FreeBSD kernels, so I can't comment on that angle. But in my dealings with Linux and FreeBSD, I've found that it's much easier to find documentation (official or otherwise) for things I need to do with FreeBSD (or for obscure problems I run into), because everyone's using the same distribution. With Linux, the signal to noise ratio is lower because there are hundreds of distributions, all subtly different, and documentation for one may or may not apply to another.
In this respect, I have to praise Gentoo again. Gentoo has the best documentation of any Linux distribution I've used, and when the official docs aren't enough, there's almost always something useful on a mailing list or unofficial Gentoo wiki somewhere. It's not quite as easy as finding FreeBSD help, but it's close.
I'm no physicist, but has anyone with access to the data considered that this could be nothing more than modified Newtonian dynamics in effect? The theory (which, among other things, provides an alternative explanation to the dark matter theory) proposes that Newton's second law of motion is inaccurate for objects undergoing very little acceleration (see the Wikipedia article for a more thorough explanation).
Within the solar system, the effect isn't observable due to the acceleration caused by the sun's gravitational pull, but the Pioneer probes may be far enough from the sun's gravitational influence that the low-acceleration dynamics proposed by MOND could be in effect.
From what I've read, I'm not entirely convinced that MOND would have as large of an effect on the probes as has been observed, but has anyone actually crunched the numbers? They've already theorized that dark matter could be responsible, but I'd be very interested in seeing whether MOND could provide a more reasonable (and less astonishing) explanation.
Re:Kernel performance
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It would be very interesting to see an updated version of those benchmarks performed on FreeBSD 5.4 with debugging off. In those tests, FreeBSD 5.1 scaled almost as well as Linux 2.6, but FreeBSD kernels prior to 5.3 had some major problems. There have been huge improvements between 5.1 and 5.4.
Personally, I'd say that 5.3 was the first of the 5.x branch that was actually production-ready, and 5.4 is even better. However, the 5.x branch is still a bit of a disappointment compared to 4.x, which was an absolute gem in terms of stability and scalability. Thankfully, it looks like 6.x is shaping up nicely and a great effort is being made to avoid making the mistakes that were made in the 5.x branch (namely cramming in too many big new features without sufficient testing).
For my money (or lack thereof, teehee), if the FreeBSD kernel performs about as well as the Linux 2.6 kernel, then I'd choose FreeBSD hands down, merely because I prefer the FreeBSD Way. It's the oldest argument in the FreeBSD vs. Linux game: I like the consistency, the elegance, the ease of keeping third-party software updated via the ports system, and the knowledge that the project is in the hands of good, intelligent, trustworthy people. I don't mind Linux at all; in fact, I really like Gentoo. But it doesn't give me the same warm fuzzy feeling of stability, security, and elegance that FreeBSD does.
If you liked the trailer even a little bit, then you'll absolutely love the movie. At least, that's my opinion after having attended two preview screenings.
Actually, that's not true. According to the author of the mod, the nude models were already in the game, they just weren't being used. If you download the mod, you'll find that it's actually just a modified mission script file (according to the author, all he did was flip a single bit). There are no models or other files included with the mod, so it's pretty clear that all of this stuff is in the original game resources somewhere.
Everyone seems to think the mod only unlocks fully-clothed sex. It also optionally unlocks completely nude female models, which is what I was referring to with my softcore porn comment.
If you're seeing naked breasts on primetime TV in the US, someone made a mistake. What channel are you watching? I ask purely out of, um, curiosity. Frankly, I'm shocked and appalled that there are breasts on TV that I'm not watching.
The "sex" in God of War doesn't take place on-screen; it's only implied. The GTA:SA hot coffee mod unlocks fully visible softcore porn-style sex.
Ironically, God of War is way more violent than GTA and has boobies all over the place, but that's okay with the ESRB because you don't see anyone making love.
A few years ago I was doing some Christmas shopping at Fry's. This was a horrible, horrible idea because everyone does their Christmas shopping at Fry's, resulting in a mile-long checkout line and a huge traffic jam at the exits where receipts are being checked.
After finally making my way through the checkout and purchasing my items, I made a beeline for the door, bypassing the twenty or thirty people standing around waiting to have their bags inspected. There was no way I was going to stand around for another twenty minutes after having stood in line for an hour already. As I approached the exit, a Fry's employee stepped in front of me and said, "I need to check your receipt, sir."
I ignored him, sidestepped, and kept walking. The moron actually grabbed my left shoulder from behind -- not forcefully, but even so it startled the crap out of me because I wasn't expecting to be grabbed. Completely by reflex, I yanked my shoulder away and punched the poor guy in the throat with my right fist (my bag was in my left hand).
It surprised me as much as it did him, and I felt kinda bad about it for a moment, but I hadn't hit him hard enough to do any real damage. He gave me a very unhappy look and made some strained coughing noises, and I walked away. In hindsight, I don't really feel bad about it at all. I had nothing personal against the guy until he touched me, but as soon as his hand landed on my shoulder, he overstepped his authority. If I'd seriously injured him, I would have felt terrible, but as it is, I think he got a good lesson in how to respect a customer's personal space.
Sure, an extension could do the trick, but how many corporate users are going to know how to install extensions?
Besides, relegating a standard feature like mail redirect to a third-party extension while including a completely unnecessary feature like an RSS reader is just absurd.
The review doesn't provide any information that couldn't be discovered with a few simple Google searches. It's basically just a comparison of the advertised features of various mail clients with some subjective scoring based on these features. The reviewer doesn't seem to have verified that the features actually work.
Both The Bat and PocoMail (the email component of Barca) have buggy and incomplete IMAP support, and the IMAP implementation in MS Outlook is prone to some really weird quirks that can render it unusable with certain IMAP servers. I haven't personally used Eudora or Pegasus, so I can't vouch for either of them, but Thunderbird and Pine both have excellent IMAP support.
Open Firefox. Browse to "about:config". Customize to your heart's content. All of these settings are also found in text files in your user profile directory. It would be a piece of cake for a vendor to distribute highly customized versions of Firefox without any recompiling.
As for the IEAK, bleh. It's virtually unusable. When it works, it's passable, but more often than not it crashes whenever you try to do anything useful with it. I'd much rather edit a few text files.
I used a hiptop for over a year and wanted desperately to write applications for the platform, but I didn't want to write applications that nobody would be able to use and, furthermore, I didn't want to cripple my phone by installing the developer OS, which meant that I wouldn't even be able to use the applications I wrote. After waiting around forever in the hopes that Danger and T-Mobile would finally begin allowing third-party freeware/open source developers to distribute applications, I finally got fed up and bought a Nokia 6600.
Now I have a phone that actually works like a phone should, I have a GPRS connection that lets me do whatever I want without proxying through Danger's servers, and I can install and run all the third-party applications I desire. The only things I miss from the hiptop are the keyboard and the mail client. I could easily remedy the former by buying a bluetooth keyboard, and I've already remedied the latter by writing my own mail client.
I'm confused as to why the hiptop is so popular when there are similarly-priced phones with better features and more open development platforms. Is it just better marketing?
The source code for Danger's SSH client is included in the hiptop SDK. If you suspect it's doing something shady, why not sign up for a developer account at http://developer.danger.com and download the source?
That said, I've used the SSH client myself and even glanced through the source briefly, and nothing struck me as suspicious. As for the hiptop lacking the power to do the encryption, that's why it takes the client a good thirty seconds or so just to perform the initial handshake.
I've used my 17" widescreen Sager laptop in coach before, and for writing code no less. The space was a little tight, but it was still perfectly usable. Either you're larger than you let on, or you're flying on the wrong airline.
I had a Sidekick for over a year. The good: nice UI, good design, useful keyboard, good email app, excellent SSH client. The bad: terrible antenna, unable to run non Danger-approved third-party apps, horrible as a phone, very fragile.
I replaced it last week with a Nokia 6600, which, with the exception of the full keyboard, does everything the Sidekick could do and more, only better. Plus it actually works well as a phone.
WME doesn't have that functionality built in, but it wouldn't be a huge undertaking to write a PHP app that would call a COM object to allow you to switch channels via a web interface while watching the stream.
Microsoft's very own freely-downloadable Windows Media Encoder will do this, and it'll take about five minutes to get set up and working. Of course, something tells me you're running Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if only I could figure out how to put on these damn pants. I can never seem to get them past my shoulders...
"The box width is given by the sum of the left and right margins, border, and padding, and the content width. The height is given by the sum of the top and bottom margins, border, and padding, and the content height."
You're going to tell me once more that IE6 in strict mode doesn't have this problem and I must be in quirks mode, but I assure you that in the circumstances I described, IE6 in strict mode most definitely does calculate box widths incorrectly, resulting in incorrect positioning of those boxes.
If you're interested in continuing this discussion, please contact me by email. I'm way too busy at the moment to create a demonstration for you, but if you're willing to wait a few weeks, I'll see if I can throw something together.
I assure you IE really was in strict mode. I write fully conformant XHTML and CSS with proper DTDs, and I've often stripped off the DTD line just to confirm that I'm not imagining things and IE is actually in strict mode. Strict mode is better than quirks mode, but it's still nowhere near bug-free.
Two things I run into all the time are the peekaboo bug (where having one or more floating boxes on a page causes other boxes to disappear until, say, a :hover is triggered) and broken percentage-based widths. IE's refusal to respect width: auto, max-width, min-width, and other standard CSS attributes is also pretty frustrating.
I think the most frustrated I've ever been is when I've implemented dropdown menus using unordered lists and CSS. I once spent days trying get IE to behave properly with floated boxes, then relative-positioned boxes, and finally absolute-positioned boxes, but nothing worked. IE just refused to put the boxes where I told it to. Meanwhile, Firefox, Opera, and Safari all worked just fine.
And oh dear Lord, let's not even get started on how evil IE can be when you try to do anything useful involving the box model with JavaScript and the DOM. Ugh.
Four years ago, when IE6 was released, I loved it. It was a big improvement over IE5, and it was better at most things than the competition. But that was four years ago! Things are completely different now. Other browsers have improved by leaps and bounds while IE has stayed the same, and IE sucks in comparison.
Ha! And the moon is made of cheese.
IE6's box model is a buggy piece of ass whether or not you're in strict mode; it's just buggy in different ways. I reckon I've spent the equivalent of several weeks worth of my life just trying to work around bugs in IE's box model in strict mode. Those are weeks I'll never get back.
God that's depressing.
I've answered my own question: MOND has indeed been considered as a possible explanation for the Pioneer anomaly, as described on page 44 of Study of the anomalous acceleration of Pionieer 10 and 11 . According to the authors, the anomalous acceleration is too large to be explained by MOND or similar theories.
In this respect, I have to praise Gentoo again. Gentoo has the best documentation of any Linux distribution I've used, and when the official docs aren't enough, there's almost always something useful on a mailing list or unofficial Gentoo wiki somewhere. It's not quite as easy as finding FreeBSD help, but it's close.
Within the solar system, the effect isn't observable due to the acceleration caused by the sun's gravitational pull, but the Pioneer probes may be far enough from the sun's gravitational influence that the low-acceleration dynamics proposed by MOND could be in effect.
From what I've read, I'm not entirely convinced that MOND would have as large of an effect on the probes as has been observed, but has anyone actually crunched the numbers? They've already theorized that dark matter could be responsible, but I'd be very interested in seeing whether MOND could provide a more reasonable (and less astonishing) explanation.
Personally, I'd say that 5.3 was the first of the 5.x branch that was actually production-ready, and 5.4 is even better. However, the 5.x branch is still a bit of a disappointment compared to 4.x, which was an absolute gem in terms of stability and scalability. Thankfully, it looks like 6.x is shaping up nicely and a great effort is being made to avoid making the mistakes that were made in the 5.x branch (namely cramming in too many big new features without sufficient testing).
For my money (or lack thereof, teehee), if the FreeBSD kernel performs about as well as the Linux 2.6 kernel, then I'd choose FreeBSD hands down, merely because I prefer the FreeBSD Way. It's the oldest argument in the FreeBSD vs. Linux game: I like the consistency, the elegance, the ease of keeping third-party software updated via the ports system, and the knowledge that the project is in the hands of good, intelligent, trustworthy people. I don't mind Linux at all; in fact, I really like Gentoo. But it doesn't give me the same warm fuzzy feeling of stability, security, and elegance that FreeBSD does.
If you liked the trailer even a little bit, then you'll absolutely love the movie. At least, that's my opinion after having attended two preview screenings.
Actually, that's not true. According to the author of the mod, the nude models were already in the game, they just weren't being used. If you download the mod, you'll find that it's actually just a modified mission script file (according to the author, all he did was flip a single bit). There are no models or other files included with the mod, so it's pretty clear that all of this stuff is in the original game resources somewhere.
If you're seeing naked breasts on primetime TV in the US, someone made a mistake. What channel are you watching? I ask purely out of, um, curiosity. Frankly, I'm shocked and appalled that there are breasts on TV that I'm not watching.
Ironically, God of War is way more violent than GTA and has boobies all over the place, but that's okay with the ESRB because you don't see anyone making love.
Sure, if you're running it on a Mac Classic.
If you've mastered thermodynamics, perhaps you should tackle the English language next. I suggest you start with capital letters.
After finally making my way through the checkout and purchasing my items, I made a beeline for the door, bypassing the twenty or thirty people standing around waiting to have their bags inspected. There was no way I was going to stand around for another twenty minutes after having stood in line for an hour already. As I approached the exit, a Fry's employee stepped in front of me and said, "I need to check your receipt, sir."
I ignored him, sidestepped, and kept walking. The moron actually grabbed my left shoulder from behind -- not forcefully, but even so it startled the crap out of me because I wasn't expecting to be grabbed. Completely by reflex, I yanked my shoulder away and punched the poor guy in the throat with my right fist (my bag was in my left hand).
It surprised me as much as it did him, and I felt kinda bad about it for a moment, but I hadn't hit him hard enough to do any real damage. He gave me a very unhappy look and made some strained coughing noises, and I walked away. In hindsight, I don't really feel bad about it at all. I had nothing personal against the guy until he touched me, but as soon as his hand landed on my shoulder, he overstepped his authority. If I'd seriously injured him, I would have felt terrible, but as it is, I think he got a good lesson in how to respect a customer's personal space.
Besides, relegating a standard feature like mail redirect to a third-party extension while including a completely unnecessary feature like an RSS reader is just absurd.
Both The Bat and PocoMail (the email component of Barca) have buggy and incomplete IMAP support, and the IMAP implementation in MS Outlook is prone to some really weird quirks that can render it unusable with certain IMAP servers. I haven't personally used Eudora or Pegasus, so I can't vouch for either of them, but Thunderbird and Pine both have excellent IMAP support.
However, despite being an excellent IMAP client, Thunderbird still lacks support for mail redirect, a basic feature of most mail clients and one that is frequently used in corporate environments.
As for the IEAK, bleh. It's virtually unusable. When it works, it's passable, but more often than not it crashes whenever you try to do anything useful with it. I'd much rather edit a few text files.
I used a hiptop for over a year and wanted desperately to write applications for the platform, but I didn't want to write applications that nobody would be able to use and, furthermore, I didn't want to cripple my phone by installing the developer OS, which meant that I wouldn't even be able to use the applications I wrote. After waiting around forever in the hopes that Danger and T-Mobile would finally begin allowing third-party freeware/open source developers to distribute applications, I finally got fed up and bought a Nokia 6600.
Now I have a phone that actually works like a phone should, I have a GPRS connection that lets me do whatever I want without proxying through Danger's servers, and I can install and run all the third-party applications I desire. The only things I miss from the hiptop are the keyboard and the mail client. I could easily remedy the former by buying a bluetooth keyboard, and I've already remedied the latter by writing my own mail client.
I'm confused as to why the hiptop is so popular when there are similarly-priced phones with better features and more open development platforms. Is it just better marketing?
That said, I've used the SSH client myself and even glanced through the source briefly, and nothing struck me as suspicious. As for the hiptop lacking the power to do the encryption, that's why it takes the client a good thirty seconds or so just to perform the initial handshake.
I've used my 17" widescreen Sager laptop in coach before, and for writing code no less. The space was a little tight, but it was still perfectly usable. Either you're larger than you let on, or you're flying on the wrong airline.
Um, that is the actual line.
I replaced it last week with a Nokia 6600, which, with the exception of the full keyboard, does everything the Sidekick could do and more, only better. Plus it actually works well as a phone.
WME doesn't have that functionality built in, but it wouldn't be a huge undertaking to write a PHP app that would call a COM object to allow you to switch channels via a web interface while watching the stream.
Microsoft's very own freely-downloadable Windows Media Encoder will do this, and it'll take about five minutes to get set up and working. Of course, something tells me you're running Linux.