How else do you expect a site to store your preferences, then? I'd rather have a cookie on my computer than have the site force me to make an account (e-mail address and all) with them and store it on their server. (Of course, "bone-headed defaults" are another story...)
I think it would be good if sites that store cookies on your computer (especially keys into a server-side databases) were required to describe what information was associated with that cookie, both client-side and server-side. I don't mind them storing preferences for what skin to use for the website UI (OK, I mind that none of them are tasteful, but that's a whole 'nother story) but if there's a large profile of me behind it all, I'd like to know!
I'd also like to know that information for session cookies.
Don't ever store a cookie by default on websites that don't have a login.
But they're an excellent way to tell apart humans from bots, which is important for performance reasons since they've got completely different browsing profiles. You'd think that using the browser version string from the HTTP request header would work, but it doesn't. Some bots are stealthed. However, a session cookie is fine for these purposes; if you're distinguishing between session cookies and expiring cookies, then you need to make that clearer; both are still cookies.
Don't ever, ever, ever store cookies on a different domain than the one in the address bar.
Does that even work at all? Shouldn't browsers block it?
If you want to store something in a cookie, make it opt-in (as mentioned above).
That's tricky. Easier to have the browser do the enforcement there (how could the server know what your preference for cookie storage is without setting a cookie?)
If you want to store something in a cookie, but I block it, make sure the website still works correctly.
As long as you don't expect to log in or high performance browsing, you'll be OK.
If you "need" to store a cookie, but I block it, make it obvious what has happened, and on what domain. Make sure I can see that domain in the address bar, and decide whether to unlock it.
Again, take that up with browser makers. It's not the business of website owners.
Be aware that forcing a cookie on me has about a 75% guarantee that I'll leave and never return.
Goodbye.
(If your rant is directed only against expiring cookies, should it include ones with an expiry time of less than an hour? It's quite possible that session cookies for most people will persist longer than that...)
You're comparing business class machines (MacBook pro) to consumer shit (Dell). Buy business notebooks (elitebook/thinkpad lines for example) and I think they are as solidly built as a Mac.
I had a Dell laptop for many years. Corporate grade. It wasn't a bad machine, but it had rather a lot of quirks and there were a number of places where Dell's heritage as a cheap box shifter still shone through (the keyboard was a particular issue). So far, the MacbookPro that replaced it has held up much better, with the exception of two issues. (One was fixed in minutes after taking it in for service, and the other took around a week.)
To summarize, Dell have a bit better quality control (or did at the time that laptop was bought) and Apple have much better design.
You can also get a better resolution then 1440x900, but I don't think you would consider that a problem.
You pay for larger screens with weight. If you're moving around, reduced weight is really nice. Which isn't a point for or against any particular manufacturer; it's a personal choice thing. (If only more OS desktops coped with really small displays. On one particular Dell netbook I was looking at recently, both Windows and Gnome/Ubuntu insisted on popping up dialogs where you couldn't see the OK/Cancel buttons... Oops! I suspect this is an area where OSX copes better because its graphics are trivially fully scalable; not tested it though so I might be wrong.)
Are you going to pay me for comments? Refund my overpriced monthly subscription fee?
Sure, but there will be an administration fee (say... $10k/y) to cover first. As soon as you have generated enough content in a year to pay the fee, I'm sure Big Media will be very happy to let you have your reduction in subscription costs. After all, we know how excellently they handle the equivalent with musicians...
For instance, take the whole mess with BitKeeper: The pragmatic option was to use a product with really obnoxious licensing terms, because it was good and worked at the time. Then one day Larry McVoy got really annoyed with Andrew Tridgell, and decided to refuse to even sell licenses to people associated with the OSDL, including Linus Torvalds.
But it was pragmatists that fixed it. Indeed, purists would have kept Linux using a tool like CVS or SVN because going to a distributed versioning system would have let them to giving up their principles. It was the experience with BK that enabled the creation of git.
I suppose that this just illustrates a deeper truth: the world needs a mix of both purists and pragmatists. It's called "creative tension".
The purist seeks to change the world to fit him, whereas the pragmatist changes himself to fit the world.
Ergo all progress relies on the purists.:-)
While the purist is sounding off about some moral crusade for cuter kittens or something, the pragmatist will have finished what they're doing and be in the bar with a beer. The purists see this as proof that they are right. The pragmatists see this as proof that they've got a beer.
Personally, I don't think you should be able to copyright object code.
Speaking as someone who has written object code by inputting the bytes directly with cat, of course you should be able to copyright it! But normally it's a work that is derived from the source code, and so the copyright vests with that source.
(No, I don't recommend writing object code directly. It's a very silly thing to do. Find another way. Really. I only ever did it because I had no other tools at all at the time. Assembler is enormously more easy to use...)
But that doesn't mean that BSD isn't Open... I would argue that it is instead less Free.
Technically, it enforces a different set of freedoms. Whether or not this trade-off is OK with you is the decision you need to take when you choose a license for the code you've written.
Not all freedoms are enforceable at once. For example, the right of someone to use some library code by embedding it in a product is often very difficult to support (especially with offline devices) at the same time as the right of a user of that device to upgrade the library code. Which should be the superior right? Tricky. I like user rights, but who is the user? Who is doing the support? (Ultimately, diversity is a good thing of course as different people really do pitch the balance differently.)
The Sun will be going red giant in just 5 billion years. That's plenty of time to prepare.
There's a fair chance that the Earth will only remain habitable for another 500 million years. Of course, that's roughly as long again as there's been vertebrates on Earth, so it's still not very urgent...
Templates are what makes programming in C++ a joy compared to other languages. And concepts would have completed the generic programming framework in C++. Concepts are like typechecking for templates. With templates + concepts, programming in C++ would have been almost as elegant as Haskell, except 10 times faster.
You mean that templates don't already enforce sane subtype constraints? In the immortal words "what were you guys thinking?"
User-defined operators. Without them, a crapload of other ill-considered features are unnecessary. (Of course, if you do that then you're a long way towards Java or maybe even Objective-C.)
The problem with the current proposal is that it tried to be too many things to too many people. Concept supporters need to regroup and come up with a streamlined concepts proposal that concentrates on making the language easier and simpler.
Did I miss a memo or something? I thought the purpose of C++ standards was to make the language more difficult and complex.
I remember C++ from way back when it really was C-with-classes. Plus some operators. (I think the rot set in with operators.) Back then, one person (who already knew C) really could grok the language in a day or two. Sometime in the intervening years, the vision of simplicity got lost. Nowadays, all the people who might want the language kept understandable are using something else (probably Java, Objective-C or, possibly, C#; all are rejections of C++'s way of doing things despite having a closely-linked heritage).
What the Industry sometimes fails to realize is that it is IT people who make or break the products. [...] Most businesses will be very very adverse to giving up control of their data, and somehow I don't see that ever changing, even when they claim the risk is almost 0%.
Don't forget to factor in the "costs" (in a broad sense) of doing stuff the old way too. While putting stuff out there definitely does carry a risk, so does keeping it in-house where it is subject to a lot of bumbling incompetence. Let's be honest. Not all IT staff are amazing superheroes who instantly enable their users to do anything they want while simultaneously upholding all corporate policies.
(FYI, a number of big businesses are looking hard at running internal clouds, which muddies the picture a lot.)
Truth is, SaaS is evolutionary, not revolutionary. That's been true for everything in the past 20 years of computing.
Yes and no. Evolutionary doesn't mean that you never get sudden shocking change. You can get get long slow changes that suddenly lead to a catastrophic change (in a mathematical sense) to a new stable state. I don't claim to be wise enough to say that SaaS is such a tipping point though. Maybe it's just same-old-same-old. Maybe it's even a response to a tipping point, and we didn't notice the world crashing around our ears...
I doubt any actual gamers would have given money for DNF's production. No, a debacle like that can only be financed by monkeys in suits who are completely disassociated from reality in every way.
A sane businessman wouldn't have funded it for that long either. What you had there was the crazies in charge of the madhouse. They appeared to believe that they could go on forever, and the only surprising thing was how long it took for someone to pull the plug.
There's an old engineering saw about the perfect being the enemy of the good. It applies absolutely to product development.
Maybe the reason [corporations] exist is that it's the worst way of producing something - apart from all the others we've tried.
They seem to be one of the less terrible ways (along with smaller scale commercial setups) in that they don't oppress their employees nearly as much as alternatives like forced labor camps or slave driving. I suppose religion could be used as a motivator too, but I don't honestly see making game development into a commandment...
Of course, nobody at Opera bothered to find and fix the problems that prevented the sub-contractor from supporting it in the first place.
Which isn't to say that such a bug actually exists. It's entirely possible that someone put the test in on the basis of hearsay or stupidity or laziness.
While I do find this quite hilariously ironic, I find it even more ironic that Opera's incompatibilities came back to bite... Opera itself.
It irritated them, but it's the vendor of the hardware that it's biting: they've lost the contract.
There needs to be some way for people to bail out too. Otherwise there'll be idiots like 3D Realms out there, all too ready to piss away our money on another DNF debacle. Guess what, this is called investment. All the developers have to do is to sell shares in the game. (And yes, this sort of thing does need to be protected by the usual rules for investments.) Of course, there's always a chance that this'll mean that developers get squeezed out of working on their own creations, but if they can't knuckle down and deliver a product, they deserve to get shafted.
All the studies that have been published show that it isn't the act of holding a phone up to your ear that causes a driver to be distracted, it is simply talking on the phone that matters. But all of the laws give free passes to anyone with a handsfree phone.
While you are correct about what the danger comes from, the free passes given to handsfree phones is about enforcement. It's very hard to prove that someone on handsfree is actually behaving unsafely in that specific way, but much easier if the cops have video of you holding a phone to your ear.
The one thing that statute books don't need is yet another unenforceable law.
While cellphone use is definitely a potential distraction and reduces focus on driving, I claim that most people who can drive properly can actually learn to talk over the phone while driving safely.
I really doubt your claim. There have been studies done, and apparently talking on the phone makes your reaction times slow more than having drunk quite a lot of alcohol. It's not exactly rocket science to go from "slower reactions" to "more accidents", especially when you consider that one person's inattention can cause a lot of damage to others.
Illegality or not, get off the phone while driving. If not for your own sake, then for mine and everyone elses. OK?
Actually she's planning on flying overhead in a chopper and shooting it. We she gets bored of that she'll probably upgrade to a flamethrower or a rocket launcher.
To me the problem is the Wikipedia rule of public use,' says Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer. 'If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.'
Apparently they care more about freedom than having the highest quality images available. What more is there to say?
Not much. The only thing to note is that if the copyright holder - whoever that is - won't release the image under a suitable compatible license, then Wikipedia can't and mustn't use it. If the people who want high quality images on wikipedia and the people capable of producing them can't agree and get the licensing sorted out, then that's hardly Wikipedia's fault.
I suggest offering a contract with a photographer to take the pictures with an explicit clause in it that states that the copyright will rest with the hirer, and not with the photographer. Be prepared to pay extra for this, but that's OK as it is for publicity purposes. If the photographer won't play ball at a price you can stomach, kick him out and talk to the next one. In a down economy, it should be possible to find someone who will do what you want. And refuse to pay them a cent unless you get the full rights to the images. The photographers will wail and scream as they will be denied their "right" to exploit you, but that's not your problem.
Oh, and encourage lots of other celebrities and/or their publicists to do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
How else do you expect a site to store your preferences, then? I'd rather have a cookie on my computer than have the site force me to make an account (e-mail address and all) with them and store it on their server. (Of course, "bone-headed defaults" are another story...)
I think it would be good if sites that store cookies on your computer (especially keys into a server-side databases) were required to describe what information was associated with that cookie, both client-side and server-side. I don't mind them storing preferences for what skin to use for the website UI (OK, I mind that none of them are tasteful, but that's a whole 'nother story) but if there's a large profile of me behind it all, I'd like to know!
I'd also like to know that information for session cookies.
Don't ever store a cookie by default on websites that don't have a login.
But they're an excellent way to tell apart humans from bots, which is important for performance reasons since they've got completely different browsing profiles. You'd think that using the browser version string from the HTTP request header would work, but it doesn't. Some bots are stealthed. However, a session cookie is fine for these purposes; if you're distinguishing between session cookies and expiring cookies, then you need to make that clearer; both are still cookies.
Don't ever, ever, ever store cookies on a different domain than the one in the address bar.
Does that even work at all? Shouldn't browsers block it?
If you want to store something in a cookie, make it opt-in (as mentioned above).
That's tricky. Easier to have the browser do the enforcement there (how could the server know what your preference for cookie storage is without setting a cookie?)
If you want to store something in a cookie, but I block it, make sure the website still works correctly.
As long as you don't expect to log in or high performance browsing, you'll be OK.
If you "need" to store a cookie, but I block it, make it obvious what has happened, and on what domain. Make sure I can see that domain in the address bar, and decide whether to unlock it.
Again, take that up with browser makers. It's not the business of website owners.
Be aware that forcing a cookie on me has about a 75% guarantee that I'll leave and never return.
Goodbye.
(If your rant is directed only against expiring cookies, should it include ones with an expiry time of less than an hour? It's quite possible that session cookies for most people will persist longer than that...)
Well, the X-BOX is kind of cool...
So they're going to fill the space with unwashed thieving teens with hardly any money? Way to go making it cool and effective as retail space...
You're comparing business class machines (MacBook pro) to consumer shit (Dell). Buy business notebooks (elitebook/thinkpad lines for example) and I think they are as solidly built as a Mac.
I had a Dell laptop for many years. Corporate grade. It wasn't a bad machine, but it had rather a lot of quirks and there were a number of places where Dell's heritage as a cheap box shifter still shone through (the keyboard was a particular issue). So far, the MacbookPro that replaced it has held up much better, with the exception of two issues. (One was fixed in minutes after taking it in for service, and the other took around a week.)
To summarize, Dell have a bit better quality control (or did at the time that laptop was bought) and Apple have much better design.
You can also get a better resolution then 1440x900, but I don't think you would consider that a problem.
You pay for larger screens with weight. If you're moving around, reduced weight is really nice. Which isn't a point for or against any particular manufacturer; it's a personal choice thing. (If only more OS desktops coped with really small displays. On one particular Dell netbook I was looking at recently, both Windows and Gnome/Ubuntu insisted on popping up dialogs where you couldn't see the OK/Cancel buttons... Oops! I suspect this is an area where OSX copes better because its graphics are trivially fully scalable; not tested it though so I might be wrong.)
Are you going to pay me for comments? Refund my overpriced monthly subscription fee?
Sure, but there will be an administration fee (say... $10k/y) to cover first. As soon as you have generated enough content in a year to pay the fee, I'm sure Big Media will be very happy to let you have your reduction in subscription costs. After all, we know how excellently they handle the equivalent with musicians...
For instance, take the whole mess with BitKeeper: The pragmatic option was to use a product with really obnoxious licensing terms, because it was good and worked at the time. Then one day Larry McVoy got really annoyed with Andrew Tridgell, and decided to refuse to even sell licenses to people associated with the OSDL, including Linus Torvalds.
But it was pragmatists that fixed it. Indeed, purists would have kept Linux using a tool like CVS or SVN because going to a distributed versioning system would have let them to giving up their principles. It was the experience with BK that enabled the creation of git.
I suppose that this just illustrates a deeper truth: the world needs a mix of both purists and pragmatists. It's called "creative tension".
The purist seeks to change the world to fit him, whereas the pragmatist changes himself to fit the world.
Ergo all progress relies on the purists. :-)
While the purist is sounding off about some moral crusade for cuter kittens or something, the pragmatist will have finished what they're doing and be in the bar with a beer. The purists see this as proof that they are right. The pragmatists see this as proof that they've got a beer.
Personally, I don't think you should be able to copyright object code.
Speaking as someone who has written object code by inputting the bytes directly with cat, of course you should be able to copyright it! But normally it's a work that is derived from the source code, and so the copyright vests with that source.
(No, I don't recommend writing object code directly. It's a very silly thing to do. Find another way. Really. I only ever did it because I had no other tools at all at the time. Assembler is enormously more easy to use...)
But that doesn't mean that BSD isn't Open... I would argue that it is instead less Free.
Technically, it enforces a different set of freedoms. Whether or not this trade-off is OK with you is the decision you need to take when you choose a license for the code you've written.
Not all freedoms are enforceable at once. For example, the right of someone to use some library code by embedding it in a product is often very difficult to support (especially with offline devices) at the same time as the right of a user of that device to upgrade the library code. Which should be the superior right? Tricky. I like user rights, but who is the user? Who is doing the support? (Ultimately, diversity is a good thing of course as different people really do pitch the balance differently.)
The Sun will be going red giant in just 5 billion years. That's plenty of time to prepare.
There's a fair chance that the Earth will only remain habitable for another 500 million years. Of course, that's roughly as long again as there's been vertebrates on Earth, so it's still not very urgent...
Templates are what makes programming in C++ a joy compared to other languages. And concepts would have completed the generic programming framework in C++. Concepts are like typechecking for templates. With templates + concepts, programming in C++ would have been almost as elegant as Haskell, except 10 times faster.
You mean that templates don't already enforce sane subtype constraints? In the immortal words "what were you guys thinking?"
I know Java has generics, but sometimes for wildly different structures it can lead to reimplementation.
Tends not to be needed in Java. Objects are a single-rooted hierarchy there, and you've got interfaces for when things get ugly.
C++ can only be fixed by removing features.
Like what?
User-defined operators. Without them, a crapload of other ill-considered features are unnecessary. (Of course, if you do that then you're a long way towards Java or maybe even Objective-C.)
The problem with the current proposal is that it tried to be too many things to too many people. Concept supporters need to regroup and come up with a streamlined concepts proposal that concentrates on making the language easier and simpler.
Did I miss a memo or something? I thought the purpose of C++ standards was to make the language more difficult and complex.
I remember C++ from way back when it really was C-with-classes. Plus some operators. (I think the rot set in with operators.) Back then, one person (who already knew C) really could grok the language in a day or two. Sometime in the intervening years, the vision of simplicity got lost. Nowadays, all the people who might want the language kept understandable are using something else (probably Java, Objective-C or, possibly, C#; all are rejections of C++'s way of doing things despite having a closely-linked heritage).
What the Industry sometimes fails to realize is that it is IT people who make or break the products.
[...]
Most businesses will be very very adverse to giving up control of their data, and somehow I don't see that ever changing, even when they claim the risk is almost 0%.
Don't forget to factor in the "costs" (in a broad sense) of doing stuff the old way too. While putting stuff out there definitely does carry a risk, so does keeping it in-house where it is subject to a lot of bumbling incompetence. Let's be honest. Not all IT staff are amazing superheroes who instantly enable their users to do anything they want while simultaneously upholding all corporate policies.
(FYI, a number of big businesses are looking hard at running internal clouds, which muddies the picture a lot.)
Truth is, SaaS is evolutionary, not revolutionary. That's been true for everything in the past 20 years of computing.
Yes and no. Evolutionary doesn't mean that you never get sudden shocking change. You can get get long slow changes that suddenly lead to a catastrophic change (in a mathematical sense) to a new stable state. I don't claim to be wise enough to say that SaaS is such a tipping point though. Maybe it's just same-old-same-old. Maybe it's even a response to a tipping point, and we didn't notice the world crashing around our ears...
I doubt any actual gamers would have given money for DNF's production. No, a debacle like that can only be financed by monkeys in suits who are completely disassociated from reality in every way.
A sane businessman wouldn't have funded it for that long either. What you had there was the crazies in charge of the madhouse. They appeared to believe that they could go on forever, and the only surprising thing was how long it took for someone to pull the plug.
There's an old engineering saw about the perfect being the enemy of the good. It applies absolutely to product development.
Maybe the reason [corporations] exist is that it's the worst way of producing something - apart from all the others we've tried.
They seem to be one of the less terrible ways (along with smaller scale commercial setups) in that they don't oppress their employees nearly as much as alternatives like forced labor camps or slave driving. I suppose religion could be used as a motivator too, but I don't honestly see making game development into a commandment...
Of course, nobody at Opera bothered to find and fix the problems that prevented the sub-contractor from supporting it in the first place.
Which isn't to say that such a bug actually exists. It's entirely possible that someone put the test in on the basis of hearsay or stupidity or laziness.
While I do find this quite hilariously ironic, I find it even more ironic that Opera's incompatibilities came back to bite... Opera itself.
It irritated them, but it's the vendor of the hardware that it's biting: they've lost the contract.
There needs to be some way for people to bail out too. Otherwise there'll be idiots like 3D Realms out there, all too ready to piss away our money on another DNF debacle. Guess what, this is called investment. All the developers have to do is to sell shares in the game. (And yes, this sort of thing does need to be protected by the usual rules for investments.) Of course, there's always a chance that this'll mean that developers get squeezed out of working on their own creations, but if they can't knuckle down and deliver a product, they deserve to get shafted.
All the studies that have been published show that it isn't the act of holding a phone up to your ear that causes a driver to be distracted, it is simply talking on the phone that matters. But all of the laws give free passes to anyone with a handsfree phone.
While you are correct about what the danger comes from, the free passes given to handsfree phones is about enforcement. It's very hard to prove that someone on handsfree is actually behaving unsafely in that specific way, but much easier if the cops have video of you holding a phone to your ear.
The one thing that statute books don't need is yet another unenforceable law.
While cellphone use is definitely a potential distraction and reduces focus on driving, I claim that most people who can drive properly can actually learn to talk over the phone while driving safely.
I really doubt your claim. There have been studies done, and apparently talking on the phone makes your reaction times slow more than having drunk quite a lot of alcohol. It's not exactly rocket science to go from "slower reactions" to "more accidents", especially when you consider that one person's inattention can cause a lot of damage to others.
Illegality or not, get off the phone while driving. If not for your own sake, then for mine and everyone elses. OK?
Actually she's planning on flying overhead in a chopper and shooting it. We she gets bored of that she'll probably upgrade to a flamethrower or a rocket launcher.
Don't do that! You'll just make it mad...
I save mine in Arial, Times New Roman and Wingdings.
Is this sufficient?
No. Use Symbol as well to pick up the Greek effect.
Apparently they care more about freedom than having the highest quality images available. What more is there to say?
Not much. The only thing to note is that if the copyright holder - whoever that is - won't release the image under a suitable compatible license, then Wikipedia can't and mustn't use it. If the people who want high quality images on wikipedia and the people capable of producing them can't agree and get the licensing sorted out, then that's hardly Wikipedia's fault.
I suggest offering a contract with a photographer to take the pictures with an explicit clause in it that states that the copyright will rest with the hirer, and not with the photographer. Be prepared to pay extra for this, but that's OK as it is for publicity purposes. If the photographer won't play ball at a price you can stomach, kick him out and talk to the next one. In a down economy, it should be possible to find someone who will do what you want. And refuse to pay them a cent unless you get the full rights to the images. The photographers will wail and scream as they will be denied their "right" to exploit you, but that's not your problem.
Oh, and encourage lots of other celebrities and/or their publicists to do the same.