Well, you got the Puerto Rico situation correct. The citizens there are US citizens, have a US passport, and all that. But PR is not yet a state, and may never be. Similarly with native of the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and a few other small chunks of land. I wonder how many people have been born in the Guantanamo base?
You got one "commonwealth" right, Virginia. Also Pennsylvania and Kentucky call themselves that. Not that it makes any difference whatsoever. To the federal government, they're all "states". Nobody has the time to say "states and commonwealths (and territories and...)".
Also, the District of Columbia is a really funny beast, not a state or a territory or anything like that. There are similar "federal districts" in a number of other countries, such as Mexico, whose inhabitants are also in a funny sort of limbo. In the DC case, the natives may be citizens of the US and the city of Washington, but not of any state (unless they move out of the District).
(And the District of Columbia is about 3000 miles from Washington State. This confuses a lot of Americans, too. I'm a native of Washington - the state not the city - so I'm somewhat familiar with the confusion.;-)
You're right, of course; that's why I called it a "trivia" question. What a state calls itself in its own official docs isn't too relevant; the federal government calls them all states. This has no consequences whatsoever, other than to produce silly discussions of terminology.
If Puerto Rico ever becomes a state, it's official docs will probably be in Spanish, so it won't use the 5-letter English word "state", but it'll still be a state.
Of course, Puerto Riqueños might continue to have the good sense to not turn their island into a US state. They have a somewhat better deal with the current arrangement, confusing as it might be to a lot of us.
You know, that collection of 50 STATES of which people are citizens of.
That reminds me of a cute trivial question I ran across some time back. It was "In a strict legal sense, how many states are there in the United States of America?"
The answer was 46. The explanation is that four of the states legally refer to themselves as a "commonwealth". I live in one, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Related trivia question for Americans: Can you name the other three (without googling for it;-)?
Also, some American citizens aren't citizens of any state (or commonwealth). Why not, and where do they live?
Any American who has passed their high-school civics classes should be able to answer all these, of course. I wonder how many actually can? Not that any of it matters at all for our daily lives.
There are similar legal situations in many of the other countries that are federations of smaller semi-independent entities. People are good at making their government overly complex.
Excuse me, but how does a decision to change suppliers of future purchases make currently owned equipment "of no use?"
You haven't worked out many multi-computer deals, have you?
The special-price deal they got with Dell probably included the condition that they get rid of all their non-Dell computers.
Salesmen routinely make deals like this. Usually they're "privately-arranged" deals that are not explicit in the written contract. But the contract is carefully phrased so that they can legally demand more money if they discover any of the old computers on the premises. Some admins resist this sort of deal; many don't.
(Dell and Microsoft aren't the only companies that play games like this. A year or so back, I got into a bit of a "discussion" with Apple's support people. They insisted that I disable the linux machines on my network before they'd help with a problem. The problem wasn't even related to the other computers; it was a difficulty getting a Mac to talk to a printer via an Airport Extreme. They wouldn't accept isolating the Mac+airport+printer from the network; they insisted that the linux boxes not be on the local network, and refused to talk to me until I disabled them all. This did backfire on them a bit, though. I recommended to management that we not use Apple equipment as infrastructure in in our network, and described this support problem as my reason. They accepted my recommendation.)
In reality, letter-sending is probably (yes, I'm making an informed guess here) handled the same way phone calling is handled: some peon in the administration tallies up "yea" letters and "nay" letters and gives the bureaucrat for whom he works a number.
Hey, what country do you live in, where they do such a good job?
Here in the US, the usual procedure is: You sent your rep a letter for or against his policy on something. You get back a letter thanking you for your support. The peons count the letters that mention each topic on their list (and ignore letters on other topics). They give those counts to the rep, one number per topic. He declares a "mandate" for his policies.
In a few cases, he's a she, so you can change all the pronouns in the above paragraph.
surely a vpn over the open internet can't properly support QOS
Actually, it can, in the practical sense that it can either deliver the desired QOS or tell you that the QOS can't be guaranteed and offer a few choices (try again, try TCP, abort).
A lot of the Internet now implements RTP. Not everywhere, of course. There's lots of VoIP now, and that is often done with RTP, falling back to TCP if RTP rejects the connection. With threads, you can try both connections in parallel, use the first one that works; if it's TCP, the RTP thread keeps trying just in case the bandwidth opens up. It's a bit more programming, and not for an utter net newbie or the faint of heart.
How about slashdot? It *still* doesn't render correctly in Firefox.
Hmmm... I keep reading comments like this, but I haven't yet seen the problem. I have a collection of browsers, and alternate which one I use for slashdot (sometimes using several at once;-). I haven't noticed anything "broken" in slashdot with any of them, including firefox. Well, there is the one weirdness about messages that are obviously attached as replies to the wrong message, but that happens with all browsers.
So what's this alleged incorrect rendering with FF?
(I do have all the pretty pictures turned off, since they add no content. If that's where the problem is, I wouldn't see it.)
And people like you are the reason Linux sucks for the end user.
Heh. One thing you're missing: I've never had a Windows user complain because a web page of mine doesn't work on IE. And I've never heard a single user even complain because some page renders slightly differently on their browser than some other.
I strongly suspect that nobody ever makes such a comparison. Yes, I do make such comparisons of my own pages, while I'm developing them. But I've personally never checked another site's pages to see if they work differently in different browsers. Why would I, except out of professional curiosity? (Maybe I should; I might learn something.;-)
The idea that pages have to render exactly to the pixel the same on different browsers is a total red herring. Users don't check that, and they don't refuse to deal with you if your pages work in some other browser than their favorite. What's important is that they render sensibly with each user's browser. And this is best achieved by writing to the "least common denominator", i.e., the standards that are implemented everywhere (though not necessarily the same everywhere).
It's not difficult to learn how to do this. And personally, I'd consider any commercial web developer a fool if they did anything differently. People keep asking "Why would you exclude 90% of the users?" But rather, you should ask "Why would you exclude 10% of your customers, when you can deal with all of them?" I'd think this is what a sensible businessman would do. And it just ain't all that difficult.
I'm not sure what this has to do with linux. How many IE users know or care how something looks on a linux screen? Linux doesn't suck for Windows users, because very few Windows users have ever touched a linux box, so they'd have no idea whether it sucks or not. Most of them don't even know that other computers systems exist.
... the thing that most bothers me is that what they really mean to say is "code to the standards that Firefox supports."
Actually, that's not always true. I've worked a lot lately with web stuff that has to work with various PDAs. For example, gadgets like this, especially Blackberries, are rapidly becoming part of the standard pocket fillings for a lot of medical people. If your web pages don't work on them, you are more and more excluding a growing part of your potential client population. They can't even come close to a "pixel perfect" rendering of a lot of web content, because they their screen is just too small.
On such small device, a very common browser is Opera. It does a fairly good job of rendering pages designed for large screens. It's also one of the most standards-compliant browsers. So I tend to use firefox when I'm writing new pages, but for the serious testing, opera is the more important test browser. If it works there, it'll also work with other browsers, including IE. I also test against a random set of other browsers. But the important thing is whether it will render on a PDA's small screen.
I also do some "artsy" stuff, where the most popular platform is the Mac. So I test against safari and camino, too. And for the tech crowd, konqueror is a good test tool; this is important if your non-consumer-grade product must sell to people who aren't ashamed to admit that they understand computers.
And on and on.... Firefox isn't nearly the only browser that some of us need to consider.
Unless you're willing to restrict yourself to people with a desktop or laptop MS-Windows system, IE isn't really a very good test tool. It's just too easy to slip up and write MS-only HTML, and you've just restricted yourself to only IE users. Some of us can't afford to do that.
Myself, I sorta with more people would use BrowseX (though I have often wondered what BrowSex might be like;-).
Actually, government agencies often have a good reason to ignore market pressure: They are usually subject to laws that businesses can casually ignore.
Thus, in the US and many other countries, it's illegal for government agencies to discrimiinate against the handicapped. On the Web, this mostly means the visually impaired (though the deaf sometimes have problems, too). Building a government web site that isn't usable by the blind is a good way to lose the inevitable court case and be forced to do a rewrite. You're better off making sure it's accessible from the start, so you don't have to do it over.
Again, this was something that was publicly discussed during the early days of HTML, and part of its design was an attempt to make it easy to produce web pages that would "render" (perhaps by voice synthesis) for the visually impaired and other handicapped people.
It's true that commercial sites often disregard handicapped access. I've worked on several projects where we had explicitly orders (but not in writing, of course) to ignore handicapped access. I'm well aware that bosses are often contemptuous of such needs.
But government agencies shouldn't be allowed to get away with this, and in in many countries, we have the power to force them to behave decently. If that's a violation of someone's ideas of "the market" well, so be it. It's the market that's wrong in this case.
You have never actually met a customer or an end user, have you? Excluding 90-odd % of the market just isn't an option.
I've met and talked with lost of customers/user. And I've never yet had one demand a web page that only works with IE.
Making your web site standards-compliant doesn't exclude anyone. And those IE users won't even notice if things render slightly differently with firefox or opera. They certainly won't refuse to look at your site due to slightly different renderings in some other browser that they're not using.
I have had bosses make such demands. That makes the job a bit more difficult. But still, I've always managed to produce HTML that looks like the boss wants, and also renders sensibly (if not identical to the pixel) with other browsers. Since bosses like this never test the site against any other browser, there's little danger in offending them by following standards.
Most of our customers think we are nuts when we suggest spending more time (their money) so we can get those 2-5% chunks of the browser market, each of which behaves a bit differently.
So don't suggest that, because there's no need. All you need to do is test your pages for standards compliance. There's plenty of software around to do that, much of it free. In my experience, all the HTML standards tests are fast and easy to use. And if IE users have a problem with some page, just suggest that they get a standards-compliant browser. There are several available for MS Windows, either free for us cheapskates, or for sale to those suckers who believe "You get what you pay for". Any can be downloaded and installed from IE in seconds; MS hasn't (yet) included code in IE that blocks access to competitors' sites.
Also, complaining about browsers that behave differently is a red herring. HTML was designed from the start to work differently with different browsers. The folks who invented it were well aware of the differences of screens, and wanted something that could be displayed sensibly on both large and small screens. There's also the question of the visually impaired, so HTML should also work with a speech generator. There's very good reason to not want HTML to behave the same everywhere.
It's arguments like your that make your pages not work sensibly on my Blackberry or my wife's Treo, or for blind people. And you're making the bogus claim that you'd have to test for all of them. Nonsense. All you have to do is use some standards-testing software, and make sure your pages pass their tests. That's cheap and easy, easier than testing against N non-standard browsers.
Heh. Nowadays, the problem is figuring out how to block flash.
For instance, I've installed FlashBlock and PrefBar several times in mozilla and/or firefox. They both test out ok, and work for a week or two. Then one day I find a movin' pitcher running in a moz or FF window, check, and sure enough; it's flash. F'r instance, flash was blocked a few days ago in FF, but when I pasted this comic's URL into a FF window, it came up and ran instantly.
Anyone got any other good clues about killing this cpu sinkhole? This comic was one of the rare cases where I'd actually want to watch a flash movie. 99% of the time, flash is only used for obnoxious, intrusive ads that take over the cpu.
Is there a browser where you can actually block flash, and keep it blocked, while still being able to play an occasional flash movie or game?
(I tend to collect browsers; I have 7 or 8 on both my linux box and my Powerbook. It's interesting to see how effective the advertisers are at bringing your cpu to its knees from any of them. Of course, when an ad does this, I add the company to my list of companies to never buy from if I can at all avoid it.;-)
This is exactly what so many IT professionals miss when they evaluate Microsoft's products. They just work for the users, plain and simple.
Hmmm... You must be among a totally different population of Microsoft users than I've ever seen. In my experience, watching them using their computers shows a long stream of obscenities, complaints and general frustration unlike anything you'll see with any other consumer product (except maybe VCRs). To a person, they invariably hate their computers, and aren't shy of telling you about it.
I've frequently tried a few queries to find out why they use such awful computers. The answers can be summarized as: What choice is there? They are honestly ignorant of any choice. I've often asked how many other brands of computers they've considered or tried, and invariably the answer is "None". They think that "computers" are difficult to use and hostile to users, and there's nothing that can be done about it. They never even considering that the problems might be with the brand they've chosen, because they don't know of any others.
Maybe a few are aware of Macs, but of course those are only used by weird, artsy types who are mostly gay; real people wouldn't be interested in them, and they don't have any normal software anyway.
This belief system is so widespread that you see it all the time in the media. Computers are now the standard media metaphor for poorly-designed, difficult-to-use gadgetry. There are constant reports of "hacking" that does nasty things to computers' owners. And the reporters almost never mention that the computers involved are running Microsoft software. This is simply because, to the reporters, there is no other kind of software. Software comes from Microsoft. If there's a nasty virus going around, it effects "computers". And all software is user-hostile; that's just the nature of software.
So where do you find Microsoft users for which their computers "just work"? Do you live on some other planet maybe? Are you maybe watching Mac users and not realizing that they don't come from Microsoft?
(Actually, I have a Mac, and I'd strongly dispute their "just works" mantra. Yeah, it's better than Ms Windows. That's not great praise.;-)
Yeah; that was my reaction from the start, too. CNet really just did a google search or three, and published some of the returned data. They were using google's search the way it was designed to be used. I do the same thing several times per day. Well, I don't "publish" the results anywhere they're likely to be widely read, but that's a minor point.
So why are we even discussing this?
The only thing at all unusual here seems to be that someone high up in google got miffed by CNet using the results of a google search. I'd think the classification for this would be "It's funny; laugh". It's very strange that this can lead to a significant discussion. I'd think a grin and a shrug would be more appropriate.
And speaking of "bullshit", did you know that bovine flatulence is a major soure of atmoshperic methane?
Actually, we've known for some time that it's mostly burps rather than farts, though they do produce both. Those complex 4-chambered stomaches in cattle are fairly good at reducing leafy input to simpler molecules, which includes a fair amount of methane. Most of that methane escapes through the esophagus.
What's even funnier though is that it took a long time to verify the other major source of atmospheric methane. It turns out to be termites. You probably wouldn't believe the total world-wide termite biomass. Their digestive systems have a lot of chemical similarities to those of cattle, for much the same reasons, and they produce a lot of waste methane. This had been a conjecture for some time, but has been verified only in the past couple of decades.
Current estimates are that ungulates and termites each contribute roughly 1/3 of the annual methane output. All other single sources are much smaller.
I haven't read whether the termite methane comes primarily from burps or farts. I'd guess burps, but maybe some day we'll read a report from someone who has studied the little critters, and then we'll know.
The science says NOTHING conclusive concerning what part of global warming is natural and what part is due to human activity. Jury's still out on this one, at least to people who care about empiricism.
Almost but not quite correct. The general consensus among the scientific crowd is that roughly 50% of the increase so far is due to human activity. The other 50% would have happened anyway.
Now, this is admittedly only accurate to about 2 or 3 bits, depending on the model, and this isn't what you'd call engineering accuracy. When they say 50%, it could be 40% or 60% and still be within the error bars. They're hard at work adding another bit or two, but it's slow going.
Two bits is slightly different from nothing.
Hell, I have lots of fields in my data structures that are only one bit. Very few programmers would consider that "nothing". Sometimes one bit is all you need to get the job done right.
I believe---must believe, actually---that humans have the ability to learn from their mistakes.
This is true mostly at the individual level. It's much less true at the organizational level. Group intelligence in humans seems to be some inverse function of the group's size. The exact function isn't known and may be different for different kinds of organizations. One common suggestion is that it's around 1/log(N).
So learning from mistakes is mostly something that individuals do. Organizations (government, corporations, churches, etc) mostly don't learn. They just react to events that they didn't forsee, although many of their members did. Changing them requires pressure from much smaller groups of people who are capable of learning. This can be difficult when, for example, your government is run by a group of oil men and other industrialists who have strong motive not to learn anything that contradicts the source of their family fortunes.
The archaeological record does include societies that have died because of climate change, exhaustion of resources, etc. We probably have the ability to solve most such problems now, but we don't have to solve them. We can choose to die instead. People have done so in the past.
We do have one valuable new tool, which we're using right here. In the past, it was easy for the rich and powerful to keep most information away from the general population, maintaining general ignorance and blocking any general learning from experience. Most people have never had access to reliable information outside their immediate environment. This has changed radically in the past couple decades. Now we not only have a lot of valid scientific data and theories; we also have a system that makes it all available to nearly anyone who wants to learn.
We just have to push more, to complete the process of making all the world's information available to everyone. Of course, along with it comes a lot of misinformation. But people, as individuals, are often able to handle that quite well.
It is indisputable that there has been global warming over the last 50 years (we have explicit and detailed data).
Actually, the scientific record of the warming goes back quite a bit farther than that.
50 years ago, I was a kid growing up in the Seattle area. One of the local stories then was the fact that in that part of the world (the "Pacific Northwest", roughly Oregon, Washington and British Columbia), the glaciers had been growing during the 20th century. This was considered curious by scientists, because in most of the world, glaciers had been retreating fairly consistently for several centuries, and even faster in the 20th century.
Glaciers were generally considered a good measure of such things, because they respond very slowly, averaging the local temperature over several years. There were other measurements that agreed, such as slight changes in the tree line on mountains without glaciers. In most of the world, the tree lines had moved up and north, while in the Pacific Northwest, the tree lines had moved down. Also, range changes in a lot of species of plants and animals were being documented; these were consistent with the Pacific Northwest becoming cooler, while most of the world was warming.
Articles about this generally commented that the Pacific Northwest was a local anomaly with poorly-understood causes. It would probably eventually reverse and join the general warming trend of the rest of the planet. This happened in the 1970's, and since then the local glacier terminators and tree lines have been moving upwards.
There were several other small parts of the world that showed local cooling. The Pacific Northwest probably got more attention simply because it was in a part of the planet with a local population of people with the technical ability to document it. (But this hadn't been true before around 1900.)
Scientists have been documenting and theorizing about the global warning trend for more than a century. Of course, 100 years ago they had a lot less data, and the mathematical models were quite primitive. 50 years ago, the trend was quite well documented, and real mathematical models were starting to appear. Computers helped a lot, as they became available to scientists.
[H]e is also the CEO of one of a number of new companies that make large amounts of personal information available...
Just to be picky, I'll point out that google doesn't actually make that information available. That's all done by the owners of a million other web sites. Google's job is merely to index it all so you and I (and CNet) can find it quickly.
Granted, the boundary between "index" and "content" is getting thin these days. Google even measures this, typically in small fractions of a second.
But still, google's data is much like what the legal system calls "hearsay". It's one or more hops away from the actual data.
I mean, if CNet were to publish the same sort of info about me, I'd probably just shrug - but I'd also be likely to not answer their calls for some time thereafter. Why would I be obligated to talk to them?
Like many people, I routinely screen calls from marketers, run anti-spam software so that I never see the spam, and so on. This is all to avoid the waste of time that such things usually are. Why would I be expected to talk to CNet? An organization like that may have the right to publish what they want about me (short of the libel laws). But they don't have the right to impose on me and demand that I spend my time talking to them, no more than any marketer has such a right.
So what's the big deal here? Why would it matter if Dave and Sergei decide to screen calls from CNet or any other organization? They've got their own lives to live, after all. If they want to keep their time free by filtering out representatives of various news organizations, well, why shouldn't they?
Anyway, I'll bet that CNet has the home numbers of some "unnamed sources" lower down the google heirarchy. If not, google can probably supply the numbers. There's probably lots of good inside stories there.
It's hard to love a computer company, after they've all let you down so many times.;-)
Once, a lot of us felt a kind of love for Digital, but she was taken over by "GQ" Bob Palmer, who took her whoring after the PC market that rightly belonged to the likes of Dell and Compaq. It was her undoing, of course, and we haven't forgotten.
Many of us have a friendly, supportive feeling for Apple, but we don't trust her not to jilt us.
Maybe the growing feeling we have for linux i,s because of all this. She is legally bound to maintain her independence and not drop us when a wealthy suitor comes along. And she's a strong, smart sort, who can take care of herself, but who also needs friends and companions. Who could be better for a geek? Maybe we can learn trust again...
It's really better to use things that other people have made for parsing html. For example, if you use perl, HTML::Parser works pretty well, though there's a signifigant learning curve in using it.
Well, I've tried that; more often than not, I gave up.
The problem is that I usually had to use it with HTML that came from a Microsoft product. HTML::Parser did pretty well with well-formed HTML, but when it came to the malformed stuff, it usually couldn't handle it sensibly. I found too many cases where some critical part of the text was simply missing from HTML::Parser's parsing. Or if it was there somewhere, I couldn't find it.
I've found that a better approach is to use HTML::Parser initially, but when it fails on the real-world input, don't waste too much more time. Just write a quick-and-dirty parser that handles the minimal markup needed to get the information out. Pass on a few tags; delete the rest. Don't worry about doing a perfect job of every little detail, and especially don't endanger your own sanity by complaining about the garbaqe that passes for HTML these days.
This saves a lot of time and grief in the long run.
I've often wished I didn't have to say such things. But I have no power over Microsoft's developers...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you got the Puerto Rico situation correct. The citizens there are US citizens, have a US passport, and all that. But PR is not yet a state, and may never be. Similarly with native of the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and a few other small chunks of land. I wonder how many people have been born in the Guantanamo base?
...)".
;-)
You got one "commonwealth" right, Virginia. Also Pennsylvania and Kentucky call themselves that. Not that it makes any difference whatsoever. To the federal government, they're all "states". Nobody has the time to say "states and commonwealths (and territories and
Also, the District of Columbia is a really funny beast, not a state or a territory or anything like that. There are similar "federal districts" in a number of other countries, such as Mexico, whose inhabitants are also in a funny sort of limbo. In the DC case, the natives may be citizens of the US and the city of Washington, but not of any state (unless they move out of the District).
(And the District of Columbia is about 3000 miles from Washington State. This confuses a lot of Americans, too. I'm a native of Washington - the state not the city - so I'm somewhat familiar with the confusion.
You're right, of course; that's why I called it a "trivia" question. What a state calls itself in its own official docs isn't too relevant; the federal government calls them all states. This has no consequences whatsoever, other than to produce silly discussions of terminology.
If Puerto Rico ever becomes a state, it's official docs will probably be in Spanish, so it won't use the 5-letter English word "state", but it'll still be a state.
Of course, Puerto Riqueños might continue to have the good sense to not turn their island into a US state. They have a somewhat better deal with the current arrangement, confusing as it might be to a lot of us.
You know, that collection of 50 STATES of which people are citizens of.
;-)?
That reminds me of a cute trivial question I ran across some time back. It was "In a strict legal sense, how many states are there in the United States of America?"
The answer was 46. The explanation is that four of the states legally refer to themselves as a "commonwealth". I live in one, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Related trivia question for Americans: Can you name the other three (without googling for it
Also, some American citizens aren't citizens of any state (or commonwealth). Why not, and where do they live?
Any American who has passed their high-school civics classes should be able to answer all these, of course. I wonder how many actually can? Not that any of it matters at all for our daily lives.
There are similar legal situations in many of the other countries that are federations of smaller semi-independent entities. People are good at making their government overly complex.
Excuse me, but how does a decision to change suppliers of future purchases make currently owned equipment "of no use?"
You haven't worked out many multi-computer deals, have you?
The special-price deal they got with Dell probably included the condition that they get rid of all their non-Dell computers.
Salesmen routinely make deals like this. Usually they're "privately-arranged" deals that are not explicit in the written contract. But the contract is carefully phrased so that they can legally demand more money if they discover any of the old computers on the premises. Some admins resist this sort of deal; many don't.
(Dell and Microsoft aren't the only companies that play games like this. A year or so back, I got into a bit of a "discussion" with Apple's support people. They insisted that I disable the linux machines on my network before they'd help with a problem. The problem wasn't even related to the other computers; it was a difficulty getting a Mac to talk to a printer via an Airport Extreme. They wouldn't accept isolating the Mac+airport+printer from the network; they insisted that the linux boxes not be on the local network, and refused to talk to me until I disabled them all. This did backfire on them a bit, though. I recommended to management that we not use Apple equipment as infrastructure in in our network, and described this support problem as my reason. They accepted my recommendation.)
... the Copyright Office, as a Government entity, shouldn't be mandating any sort of restriction of access to Government services.
They should especially not require that citizens use a proprietary product produced by one of the Bush/Cheney campaign's largest contributors.
But it shouldn't come as a surprise that they would do this.
In reality, letter-sending is probably (yes, I'm making an informed guess here) handled the same way phone calling is handled: some peon in the administration tallies up "yea" letters and "nay" letters and gives the bureaucrat for whom he works a number.
Hey, what country do you live in, where they do such a good job?
Here in the US, the usual procedure is: You sent your rep a letter for or against his policy on something. You get back a letter thanking you for your support. The peons count the letters that mention each topic on their list (and ignore letters on other topics). They give those counts to the rep, one number per topic. He declares a "mandate" for his policies.
In a few cases, he's a she, so you can change all the pronouns in the above paragraph.
surely a vpn over the open internet can't properly support QOS
Actually, it can, in the practical sense that it can either deliver the desired QOS or tell you that the QOS can't be guaranteed and offer a few choices (try again, try TCP, abort).
A lot of the Internet now implements RTP. Not everywhere, of course. There's lots of VoIP now, and that is often done with RTP, falling back to TCP if RTP rejects the connection. With threads, you can try both connections in parallel, use the first one that works; if it's TCP, the RTP thread keeps trying just in case the bandwidth opens up. It's a bit more programming, and not for an utter net newbie or the faint of heart.
How about slashdot? It *still* doesn't render correctly in Firefox.
... I keep reading comments like this, but I haven't yet seen the problem. I have a collection of browsers, and alternate which one I use for slashdot (sometimes using several at once ;-). I haven't noticed anything "broken" in slashdot with any of them, including firefox. Well, there is the one weirdness about messages that are obviously attached as replies to the wrong message, but that happens with all browsers.
Hmmm
So what's this alleged incorrect rendering with FF?
(I do have all the pretty pictures turned off, since they add no content. If that's where the problem is, I wouldn't see it.)
And people like you are the reason Linux sucks for the end user.
;-)
Heh. One thing you're missing: I've never had a Windows user complain because a web page of mine doesn't work on IE. And I've never heard a single user even complain because some page renders slightly differently on their browser than some other.
I strongly suspect that nobody ever makes such a comparison. Yes, I do make such comparisons of my own pages, while I'm developing them. But I've personally never checked another site's pages to see if they work differently in different browsers. Why would I, except out of professional curiosity? (Maybe I should; I might learn something.
The idea that pages have to render exactly to the pixel the same on different browsers is a total red herring. Users don't check that, and they don't refuse to deal with you if your pages work in some other browser than their favorite. What's important is that they render sensibly with each user's browser. And this is best achieved by writing to the "least common denominator", i.e., the standards that are implemented everywhere (though not necessarily the same everywhere).
It's not difficult to learn how to do this. And personally, I'd consider any commercial web developer a fool if they did anything differently. People keep asking "Why would you exclude 90% of the users?" But rather, you should ask "Why would you exclude 10% of your customers, when you can deal with all of them?" I'd think this is what a sensible businessman would do. And it just ain't all that difficult.
I'm not sure what this has to do with linux. How many IE users know or care how something looks on a linux screen? Linux doesn't suck for Windows users, because very few Windows users have ever touched a linux box, so they'd have no idea whether it sucks or not. Most of them don't even know that other computers systems exist.
... the thing that most bothers me is that what they really mean to say is "code to the standards that Firefox supports."
.... Firefox isn't nearly the only browser that some of us need to consider.
;-).
Actually, that's not always true. I've worked a lot lately with web stuff that has to work with various PDAs. For example, gadgets like this, especially Blackberries, are rapidly becoming part of the standard pocket fillings for a lot of medical people. If your web pages don't work on them, you are more and more excluding a growing part of your potential client population. They can't even come close to a "pixel perfect" rendering of a lot of web content, because they their screen is just too small.
On such small device, a very common browser is Opera. It does a fairly good job of rendering pages designed for large screens. It's also one of the most standards-compliant browsers. So I tend to use firefox when I'm writing new pages, but for the serious testing, opera is the more important test browser. If it works there, it'll also work with other browsers, including IE. I also test against a random set of other browsers. But the important thing is whether it will render on a PDA's small screen.
I also do some "artsy" stuff, where the most popular platform is the Mac. So I test against safari and camino, too. And for the tech crowd, konqueror is a good test tool; this is important if your non-consumer-grade product must sell to people who aren't ashamed to admit that they understand computers.
And on and on
Unless you're willing to restrict yourself to people with a desktop or laptop MS-Windows system, IE isn't really a very good test tool. It's just too easy to slip up and write MS-only HTML, and you've just restricted yourself to only IE users. Some of us can't afford to do that.
Myself, I sorta with more people would use BrowseX (though I have often wondered what BrowSex might be like
Actually, government agencies often have a good reason to ignore market pressure: They are usually subject to laws that businesses can casually ignore.
Thus, in the US and many other countries, it's illegal for government agencies to discrimiinate against the handicapped. On the Web, this mostly means the visually impaired (though the deaf sometimes have problems, too). Building a government web site that isn't usable by the blind is a good way to lose the inevitable court case and be forced to do a rewrite. You're better off making sure it's accessible from the start, so you don't have to do it over.
Again, this was something that was publicly discussed during the early days of HTML, and part of its design was an attempt to make it easy to produce web pages that would "render" (perhaps by voice synthesis) for the visually impaired and other handicapped people.
It's true that commercial sites often disregard handicapped access. I've worked on several projects where we had explicitly orders (but not in writing, of course) to ignore handicapped access. I'm well aware that bosses are often contemptuous of such needs.
But government agencies shouldn't be allowed to get away with this, and in in many countries, we have the power to force them to behave decently. If that's a violation of someone's ideas of "the market" well, so be it. It's the market that's wrong in this case.
You have never actually met a customer or an end user, have you? Excluding 90-odd % of the market just isn't an option.
I've met and talked with lost of customers/user. And I've never yet had one demand a web page that only works with IE.
Making your web site standards-compliant doesn't exclude anyone. And those IE users won't even notice if things render slightly differently with firefox or opera. They certainly won't refuse to look at your site due to slightly different renderings in some other browser that they're not using.
I have had bosses make such demands. That makes the job a bit more difficult. But still, I've always managed to produce HTML that looks like the boss wants, and also renders sensibly (if not identical to the pixel) with other browsers. Since bosses like this never test the site against any other browser, there's little danger in offending them by following standards.
Most of our customers think we are nuts when we suggest spending more time (their money) so we can get those 2-5% chunks of the browser market, each of which behaves a bit differently.
So don't suggest that, because there's no need. All you need to do is test your pages for standards compliance. There's plenty of software around to do that, much of it free. In my experience, all the HTML standards tests are fast and easy to use. And if IE users have a problem with some page, just suggest that they get a standards-compliant browser. There are several available for MS Windows, either free for us cheapskates, or for sale to those suckers who believe "You get what you pay for". Any can be downloaded and installed from IE in seconds; MS hasn't (yet) included code in IE that blocks access to competitors' sites.
Also, complaining about browsers that behave differently is a red herring. HTML was designed from the start to work differently with different browsers. The folks who invented it were well aware of the differences of screens, and wanted something that could be displayed sensibly on both large and small screens. There's also the question of the visually impaired, so HTML should also work with a speech generator. There's very good reason to not want HTML to behave the same everywhere.
It's arguments like your that make your pages not work sensibly on my Blackberry or my wife's Treo, or for blind people. And you're making the bogus claim that you'd have to test for all of them. Nonsense. All you have to do is use some standards-testing software, and make sure your pages pass their tests. That's cheap and easy, easier than testing against N non-standard browsers.
Heh. Nowadays, the problem is figuring out how to block flash.
;-)
For instance, I've installed FlashBlock and PrefBar several times in mozilla and/or firefox. They both test out ok, and work for a week or two. Then one day I find a movin' pitcher running in a moz or FF window, check, and sure enough; it's flash. F'r instance, flash was blocked a few days ago in FF, but when I pasted this comic's URL into a FF window, it came up and ran instantly.
Anyone got any other good clues about killing this cpu sinkhole? This comic was one of the rare cases where I'd actually want to watch a flash movie. 99% of the time, flash is only used for obnoxious, intrusive ads that take over the cpu.
Is there a browser where you can actually block flash, and keep it blocked, while still being able to play an occasional flash movie or game?
(I tend to collect browsers; I have 7 or 8 on both my linux box and my Powerbook. It's interesting to see how effective the advertisers are at bringing your cpu to its knees from any of them. Of course, when an ad does this, I add the company to my list of companies to never buy from if I can at all avoid it.
This is exactly what so many IT professionals miss when they evaluate Microsoft's products. They just work for the users, plain and simple.
... You must be among a totally different population of Microsoft users than I've ever seen. In my experience, watching them using their computers shows a long stream of obscenities, complaints and general frustration unlike anything you'll see with any other consumer product (except maybe VCRs). To a person, they invariably hate their computers, and aren't shy of telling you about it.
;-)
Hmmm
I've frequently tried a few queries to find out why they use such awful computers. The answers can be summarized as: What choice is there? They are honestly ignorant of any choice. I've often asked how many other brands of computers they've considered or tried, and invariably the answer is "None". They think that "computers" are difficult to use and hostile to users, and there's nothing that can be done about it. They never even considering that the problems might be with the brand they've chosen, because they don't know of any others.
Maybe a few are aware of Macs, but of course those are only used by weird, artsy types who are mostly gay; real people wouldn't be interested in them, and they don't have any normal software anyway.
This belief system is so widespread that you see it all the time in the media. Computers are now the standard media metaphor for poorly-designed, difficult-to-use gadgetry. There are constant reports of "hacking" that does nasty things to computers' owners. And the reporters almost never mention that the computers involved are running Microsoft software. This is simply because, to the reporters, there is no other kind of software. Software comes from Microsoft. If there's a nasty virus going around, it effects "computers". And all software is user-hostile; that's just the nature of software.
So where do you find Microsoft users for which their computers "just work"? Do you live on some other planet maybe? Are you maybe watching Mac users and not realizing that they don't come from Microsoft?
(Actually, I have a Mac, and I'd strongly dispute their "just works" mantra. Yeah, it's better than Ms Windows. That's not great praise.
Yeah; that was my reaction from the start, too. CNet really just did a google search or three, and published some of the returned data. They were using google's search the way it was designed to be used. I do the same thing several times per day. Well, I don't "publish" the results anywhere they're likely to be widely read, but that's a minor point.
So why are we even discussing this?
The only thing at all unusual here seems to be that someone high up in google got miffed by CNet using the results of a google search. I'd think the classification for this would be "It's funny; laugh". It's very strange that this can lead to a significant discussion. I'd think a grin and a shrug would be more appropriate.
And speaking of "bullshit", did you know that bovine flatulence is a major soure of atmoshperic methane?
Actually, we've known for some time that it's mostly burps rather than farts, though they do produce both. Those complex 4-chambered stomaches in cattle are fairly good at reducing leafy input to simpler molecules, which includes a fair amount of methane. Most of that methane escapes through the esophagus.
What's even funnier though is that it took a long time to verify the other major source of atmospheric methane. It turns out to be termites. You probably wouldn't believe the total world-wide termite biomass. Their digestive systems have a lot of chemical similarities to those of cattle, for much the same reasons, and they produce a lot of waste methane. This had been a conjecture for some time, but has been verified only in the past couple of decades.
Current estimates are that ungulates and termites each contribute roughly 1/3 of the annual methane output. All other single sources are much smaller.
I haven't read whether the termite methane comes primarily from burps or farts. I'd guess burps, but maybe some day we'll read a report from someone who has studied the little critters, and then we'll know.
The science says NOTHING conclusive concerning what part of global warming is natural and what part is due to human activity. Jury's still out on this one, at least to people who care about empiricism.
Almost but not quite correct. The general consensus among the scientific crowd is that roughly 50% of the increase so far is due to human activity. The other 50% would have happened anyway.
Now, this is admittedly only accurate to about 2 or 3 bits, depending on the model, and this isn't what you'd call engineering accuracy. When they say 50%, it could be 40% or 60% and still be within the error bars. They're hard at work adding another bit or two, but it's slow going.
Two bits is slightly different from nothing.
Hell, I have lots of fields in my data structures that are only one bit. Very few programmers would consider that "nothing". Sometimes one bit is all you need to get the job done right.
George Dubya'a right on it. Here's the news report.
I believe---must believe, actually---that humans have the ability to learn from their mistakes.
This is true mostly at the individual level. It's much less true at the organizational level. Group intelligence in humans seems to be some inverse function of the group's size. The exact function isn't known and may be different for different kinds of organizations. One common suggestion is that it's around 1/log(N).
So learning from mistakes is mostly something that individuals do. Organizations (government, corporations, churches, etc) mostly don't learn. They just react to events that they didn't forsee, although many of their members did. Changing them requires pressure from much smaller groups of people who are capable of learning. This can be difficult when, for example, your government is run by a group of oil men and other industrialists who have strong motive not to learn anything that contradicts the source of their family fortunes.
The archaeological record does include societies that have died because of climate change, exhaustion of resources, etc. We probably have the ability to solve most such problems now, but we don't have to solve them. We can choose to die instead. People have done so in the past.
We do have one valuable new tool, which we're using right here. In the past, it was easy for the rich and powerful to keep most information away from the general population, maintaining general ignorance and blocking any general learning from experience. Most people have never had access to reliable information outside their immediate environment. This has changed radically in the past couple decades. Now we not only have a lot of valid scientific data and theories; we also have a system that makes it all available to nearly anyone who wants to learn.
We just have to push more, to complete the process of making all the world's information available to everyone. Of course, along with it comes a lot of misinformation. But people, as individuals, are often able to handle that quite well.
It is indisputable that there has been global warming over the last 50 years (we have explicit and detailed data).
Actually, the scientific record of the warming goes back quite a bit farther than that.
50 years ago, I was a kid growing up in the Seattle area. One of the local stories then was the fact that in that part of the world (the "Pacific Northwest", roughly Oregon, Washington and British Columbia), the glaciers had been growing during the 20th century. This was considered curious by scientists, because in most of the world, glaciers had been retreating fairly consistently for several centuries, and even faster in the 20th century.
Glaciers were generally considered a good measure of such things, because they respond very slowly, averaging the local temperature over several years. There were other measurements that agreed, such as slight changes in the tree line on mountains without glaciers. In most of the world, the tree lines had moved up and north, while in the Pacific Northwest, the tree lines had moved down. Also, range changes in a lot of species of plants and animals were being documented; these were consistent with the Pacific Northwest becoming cooler, while most of the world was warming.
Articles about this generally commented that the Pacific Northwest was a local anomaly with poorly-understood causes. It would probably eventually reverse and join the general warming trend of the rest of the planet. This happened in the 1970's, and since then the local glacier terminators and tree lines have been moving upwards.
There were several other small parts of the world that showed local cooling. The Pacific Northwest probably got more attention simply because it was in a part of the planet with a local population of people with the technical ability to document it. (But this hadn't been true before around 1900.)
Scientists have been documenting and theorizing about the global warning trend for more than a century. Of course, 100 years ago they had a lot less data, and the mathematical models were quite primitive. 50 years ago, the trend was quite well documented, and real mathematical models were starting to appear. Computers helped a lot, as they became available to scientists.
But politicians hadn't much noticed it back then.
[H]e is also the CEO of one of a number of new companies that make large amounts of personal information available ...
Just to be picky, I'll point out that google doesn't actually make that information available. That's all done by the owners of a million other web sites. Google's job is merely to index it all so you and I (and CNet) can find it quickly.
Granted, the boundary between "index" and "content" is getting thin these days. Google even measures this, typically in small fractions of a second.
But still, google's data is much like what the legal system calls "hearsay". It's one or more hops away from the actual data.
I don't think I follow the reasoning here.
I mean, if CNet were to publish the same sort of info about me, I'd probably just shrug - but I'd also be likely to not answer their calls for some time thereafter. Why would I be obligated to talk to them?
Like many people, I routinely screen calls from marketers, run anti-spam software so that I never see the spam, and so on. This is all to avoid the waste of time that such things usually are. Why would I be expected to talk to CNet? An organization like that may have the right to publish what they want about me (short of the libel laws). But they don't have the right to impose on me and demand that I spend my time talking to them, no more than any marketer has such a right.
So what's the big deal here? Why would it matter if Dave and Sergei decide to screen calls from CNet or any other organization? They've got their own lives to live, after all. If they want to keep their time free by filtering out representatives of various news organizations, well, why shouldn't they?
Anyway, I'll bet that CNet has the home numbers of some "unnamed sources" lower down the google heirarchy. If not, google can probably supply the numbers. There's probably lots of good inside stories there.
It's hard to love a computer company, after they've all let you down so many times. ;-)
...
;-)
Once, a lot of us felt a kind of love for Digital, but she was taken over by "GQ" Bob Palmer, who took her whoring after the PC market that rightly belonged to the likes of Dell and Compaq. It was her undoing, of course, and we haven't forgotten.
Many of us have a friendly, supportive feeling for Apple, but we don't trust her not to jilt us.
Maybe the growing feeling we have for linux i,s because of all this. She is legally bound to maintain her independence and not drop us when a wealthy suitor comes along. And she's a strong, smart sort, who can take care of herself, but who also needs friends and companions. Who could be better for a geek? Maybe we can learn trust again
(Gack! This is getting too deep for me.
It's really better to use things that other people have made for parsing html. For example, if you use perl, HTML::Parser works pretty well, though there's a signifigant learning curve in using it.
...
Well, I've tried that; more often than not, I gave up.
The problem is that I usually had to use it with HTML that came from a Microsoft product. HTML::Parser did pretty well with well-formed HTML, but when it came to the malformed stuff, it usually couldn't handle it sensibly. I found too many cases where some critical part of the text was simply missing from HTML::Parser's parsing. Or if it was there somewhere, I couldn't find it.
I've found that a better approach is to use HTML::Parser initially, but when it fails on the real-world input, don't waste too much more time. Just write a quick-and-dirty parser that handles the minimal markup needed to get the information out. Pass on a few tags; delete the rest. Don't worry about doing a perfect job of every little detail, and especially don't endanger your own sanity by complaining about the garbaqe that passes for HTML these days.
This saves a lot of time and grief in the long run.
I've often wished I didn't have to say such things. But I have no power over Microsoft's developers