"...like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick."
My e-mail.sig has for several years now been: "...a liquid which was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.", and I nearly stopped posting to/. after my karma hit 42 (I'm jeopardizing this by posting, I know...)
I've always enjoyed his writings ever since I first discovered them about 8 years ago. I feel sad that he won't be around to write more of them. I will drink some very expensive alcohol later and mourn the loss. May he rest in peace.
This is actually already available in the browser I use daily; Opera (yes, it has some good ideas built into it too).
You can specifiy time periods for when it should check whether the document, image or "other" has been modified in days, hours, mins and also "always" and "never". I've seen it cache CGI-output and not bother to contact the server, which of course gives a blazingly fast loading of pages.
It's already been thought of, at least on the client-side, but not in one of the "major two" browsers.
It'll be interesting to see if anyone's still playing Tomb Raider fifteen years from now...
Someone will find the ancient graphics a turn-on, and use it as foreplay. Sort of the Internet-version of old pinups. Variations will be "play it one-handedly" and "in groups".
Re:It's not far behind from the windows version
on
Opera 4.0b1 For Linux
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· Score: 2
Both the Mac and Linux ports with v4.x are using the same core browser as the Windows version, so it's only minor details that should separate them. It's one of the design choices they made with 4.0, that they'd have a common core and then create port-specific code for the rest.
Does Opera support Java/SSL/JavaScript/DHTML though?
JavaScript & DHTML is a field where Opera clearly lacks support. They've componentized the ECMAScript engine, but it currently runs just as slowly as the 3.62 engine (tested on Windows). A definite area where there's much room for improvement.
http://www.opera.com/new.html lists the improvements in the current beta for Windows (4.0b5), and JavaScript 1.3 and ECMAScript are mentioned. I'm not sure if they mean "Netscape's JavaScript 1.3 object model" when they say JS v1.3 though. Since they separate ECMAScript and JavaScript it wouldn't surprise me if they do.
Support for the W3C DOM level 1 (and 2) is non-existant in the Windows beta as far as I've been able to tell (from doing simple tests).
They're aware of the problem though, several Opera users (including myself) are keeping an eye on these features and bug the Opera staff whenever possible.
Somewhere down the line Opera will have JavaScript/ECMAScript and DOM-support. How far down the line it seems that nobody knows though.
I wish somebody at Opera could please answer me this though: why, oh why use an MDI interface for a web browser?
As far as I remember SDI has been mentioned several times in the opera.linux newsgroup, but I believe it was said to be dependant upon the window manager. It's a recurring subject so I think they've already got the point. (I'd like Opera for Linux with SDI too:)
(Desired feature for Mozilla: A "minimum font size" config tag which triggers a "display everything in Times-Roman 12, period, no exceptions" rule.)
Already existing feature in Opera 3.62: User mode (Ctrl-G).
Can be set to override nearly any presentation done by the page author, and apply the user's own style sheet. Images can be turned off using the G key. I have it, I use it, and I totally love it.
PS JavaScript, BTW, is not a very good language IMHO. If x and y are both 2, then what is x+x? It could be 4 or 22, neither variables nor operators are typed. Bad decision.
umm... it's a script language, and it's loosely typed. what's your problem? Since when did Perl have strictly typed variables?
Just because it doesn't understand that "2" is a number and not a string doesn't mean that the language is bad.
And btw, the answer to your question is simple. if x is 2 then x+x is 4. If you meant to say that x is 2 and y is 2 and x+y is the question, then the answer is still 4. If either x or y is "2" (a string) the answer will be "22" (a new string with length 2, containing "22").
Anyone know where I can download the *real* installer? I'm behind a big scary proxy, and the installer never gives you a chance to specify proxy settings, thus it can't download.
I poked around on Netscape's FTP-servers, and pulled down the 16MB (yes, 16MB) full download. ftp?.netscape.com/pub/netscape6/english/6_PR1/wind ows/win32/sea/NetscapeSetup.exe replace ? with 1-8, I used 7. used WS_FTP to pull it down, Netscape refused to do it itself.
...does the Single Instance Store scan all of the files in the system to check if there's an exact copy of my new file somewhere?
sounds like Microsoft Office FindFast all over again. you know, that program runs in the background every 2 hours and searches all your harddrives for Office documents (I believe it also searches network drives, just to make it more fun). It'll leave some information files (hidden) in the root directory.
The beauty of this program is of course that it uses _all_ available CPU when it does this. Multithreading & multitasking OS my a...
When the web was young, elements of presentational nature were few and far between. This of course gave focus to the content (no way to do table based designs without tables).
Lately I've seen several sites which in my opinion try to give the visitor a richer experience by (re)creating a(/the) user interface for them (using a lot of CSS, DHTML, CSS-positioning, Java, etc) which shifts quite a bit of the focus from the content part to the presentational part. It looks really nice, but suffers slightly on the content side.
Do sites like these represent a step in the wrong direction regarding usability? Is it wrong by them to explore the boundaries of the medium like they do?
What ever happened to link rev, and the heirarchy of documents? Is this the current implementation of it?
Even though the browser support for using LINK for other things than style sheets is nearly non-existant, it's still in the HTML 4.0 spec. See Document relationships: the LINK element
Actually, I think the idea of rendering them as tooltips isn't such a bad idea. I mean, what do you usually put in the alt tag anyway? Usually you don't want to describe what the picture is in an alt tag, you want to tell them what would happen if they clicked on that picture.
There's two things that need to be kept as separate entities here. One is the ALT attribute, which is to be used as alternative content shown to those who do not see the image.
Then there's the tooltip (or an equivalent thereof), which can tell a user what to expect behind a link.
HTML 4.0 takes care of both of these. The IMG element has an ALT attribute, which is defined to be used as alternative content (not surprisingly). The A (anchor) element has a TITLE attribute which is to be used to describe what lies behind the link. This can again be rendered as a tooltip, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4/5 does that.
This is to keep two things separate. Not all images are links, and not all links are images. By doing it this way it's easy to give useful content to those without images, and it's also easy to describe what's behind a link. Then it's up to the user agent (e.g. browser) to render the information in a useful way.
The rumours of Usenet's death...
on
Is Usenet Dying?
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· Score: 4
...is probably greatly exaggerated. *smile*
As others have stated previously, newbies think that Internet == Web, and they don't know that Usenet exists. So what? Does it really matter, that Usenet isn't a place where newcomers gather?
In my opinion, no. Usenet is a nice little service where some people feel comfortable, and those that don't can go elsewhere. I started out on BBSes back in '92 (yes, I'm a "newbie") and enjoyed the discussion taking place in various groups. Some BBSes carried international networks (RIME springs to mind) and that made us able to talk with people in other parts of the world.
When I first came online in '95, starting my college education, I didn't know about Usenet. I quickly got to know about IRC though, and #chatzone (or some other chat-channel) was my starting place. Around new-years '96 I found out how Usenet worked, and was happy to know that it was more or less like my old BBSes. Since then I've been an irregular poster to various newsgroups (mostly Norwegian ones).
I've tried participating on various web-based message boards, and there's always something I miss. Threading, ease of reading, and Gnus' incredible score-capabilities spring to mind. Things I am used to having around, things that make my everyday Usenet experience better. Not to mention that once those message boards reach a certain size it's fairly impossible to quickly read through it (in my opinion). Browsers (and the web) wasn't created with message boards in mind, I think.
The newbie/experienced ratio on Usenet is probably somewhat consistant, but those newbies are still easy to notice. I understand those who feel that Usenet has lost its usefulness because there's too much spam and clueless newbies. Trying to educate the general public is somewhat difficult, but it can probably be done (but lets not get into that discussion here).
I think Usenet is going to be around for quite a while. In Norway the traffic on Usenet is slowly but surely becoming larger. There's room for this kind of service.
I just read over on the Norwegian newspaper Nettavisen that the film industry considers the "DVD bomb" a "minor incident" (or something to the equivalent of that). The article is in Norwegian, and I'm not sure if this is really news (couldn't find anything about it on CNN even though they quote CNN in the article), but I'll try a quick translation.
(Start of article)
"Norwegian" DVD bomb a minor incident
First Hollywood postponed releasing new DVDs. Then several DVD-manufacturers filed against a group of hackers, among them a 16-year old Norwegian. But now Hollywood doesn't care that the DVD-codes are broken.
When 16-year old Jon Johansen and the rest of a hacker group found the codes necessary to copy DVD movies and distribute them on the Internet, it created a riot in the film industry.
To trial...
Several manufacturers postponed the release of both discs and new players to find new ways to encrypt them. The companies filed suit against the 16-year old and the rest of the group that took part in the production and distribution of the software, without gaining ground.
Johansen removed the link to the software from his home page, by his own saying because he didn't have time or resources to fight.
As expected...
Now the large movie studios in Hollywood say the software that removes the copy protection is a minor thing.
- We expected the protection code to be broken sooner or later. We were actually surprised that it took so long, says vice president of Warner Home Video, James Cardwell, to CNN.
- There is little or no gain in hacking our products. Blank DVDs cost more than our already made discs, and it takes hours to download the movies over the Internet, claims Cardwell.
DeCSS...
DeCSS is the name of the software that makes it possible to copy the discs directly from a DVD-ROM player to a computer's harddrive. the DVDs have a capacity of 4,7GB, which makes it impossible to copy it to a regular CD. Other software also available on the 'net makes it possible to alter the DVD-files to a regular CD format.
Since the VHS format for VCRs was launched, movie piracy has been a huge problem for the movie companies. They hoped that DVD would finally end this. Now it's clear that copying DVDs is as easy as copying regular videotapes.
(End of article)
Besides the usual mistakes about what this is all about, it seems that the movie industry is now trying to calm things down, turning around a bit. Trying to calm down the fire, maybe?
They mentioned making it available for download without notice, it's on the page about the Linux version:
"Initially we released this version to the public without any notice or formal press. We appologize for this. We wanted to first see the feedback we received from the public users likely to find this program on their own. We learned about many issues we need to address on this page."
The intro to this feature read "...released his first rant with the new domain." I think Scott's trying to create some controversy in the community, and being featured on Slashdot means "get lots of hits" which is good. So, mock User Friendly and Scott Adams.
As someone else pointed out: If you don't find it funny, stop reading it.
Same thing is true for Javascript date/time functions in web browsers. Though IE and Netscape handle it differently. I believe IE works like Perl does above, but netscape, once it gets to "2000" just jumps from 99 to 2000.
That's not totally correct. My IE 4.0 on Windows NT behaves just like Netscape, provided it's the getYear() method we're talking about. Later versions of Netscape & IE support getFullYear() which returns the full four-digit year.
The problem with getYear() is that in early implementations of JavaScript it returns a two-digit year for dates between 1900-01-01 and 1999-31-12, while for all other dates it returns a four-digit year. See Netscape's Client-Side JavaScript Reference getYear under "Backward Compatibility". Later implementations always return the year minus 1900, just like Perl does. Netscape's reference says the turnover came with JS v1.2, so Netscape 4.x, IE4 & IE5 should in theory all do it right.
they got the domain sometime this fall. there used to a short snippet about it on their front page, but it's gone now, and there doesn't seem to be any mentioning of it anywhere on their site (nothing shows up through searching).
Having one big window just makes it harder to click quickly to other programs. The taskbar in Windows or the Mac's Finder menu help, but don't make up for the waste of screen real-estate by non-essential backing store.
Alt-Tab has always been my friend. I rarely drop the cursor down on the taskbar to switch applications.
The biggest problem with Opera is that it doesn't to table background colours (not even with stylesheets).
Have you got a URL that shows this? Through testing here w/3.61, reading Opera's supported CSS documentation, and checking webreview.com's CSS Master support list I haven't found any mentioning of this.
I'm not sure if I'm babbeling sh*t here or not, but I am ABSOLUTLY SURE I have seen that paper before, reported on/. 6 or 12 months ago. It *MAY* have been the origional but I am fairly certain it was an addendum to the origional reporting the effects of the/. effect on the report of the/. effect.
I'll do a "Me too" to that. When I saw it I immediately remember that I had seen it before here on/. not the paper itself, but the addendum.
It's quite interesting that a paper that has a Last Modified header saying "Tuesday, February 16, 1999" suddenly appears on/. as "news". That's slightly scary.
Slashdot Mirror
You're either incorrect or a lucky recipient. The largest infected e-mail I've received so far had an attachment of 17.5MB.
Oh, I forgot, that's the average size of a Windows-binary.
"...like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick."
My e-mail .sig has for several years now been: "...a liquid which was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.", and I nearly stopped posting to /. after my karma hit 42 (I'm jeopardizing this by posting, I know...)
I've always enjoyed his writings ever since I first discovered them about 8 years ago. I feel sad that he won't be around to write more of them. I will drink some very expensive alcohol later and mourn the loss. May he rest in peace.
This is actually already available in the browser I use daily; Opera (yes, it has some good ideas built into it too).
You can specifiy time periods for when it should check whether the document, image or "other" has been modified in days, hours, mins and also "always" and "never". I've seen it cache CGI-output and not bother to contact the server, which of course gives a blazingly fast loading of pages.
It's already been thought of, at least on the client-side, but not in one of the "major two" browsers.
Both the Mac and Linux ports with v4.x are using the same core browser as the Windows version, so it's only minor details that should separate them. It's one of the design choices they made with 4.0, that they'd have a common core and then create port-specific code for the rest.
http://www.opera.com/new.html lists the improvements in the current beta for Windows (4.0b5), and JavaScript 1.3 and ECMAScript are mentioned. I'm not sure if they mean "Netscape's JavaScript 1.3 object model" when they say JS v1.3 though. Since they separate ECMAScript and JavaScript it wouldn't surprise me if they do.
Support for the W3C DOM level 1 (and 2) is non-existant in the Windows beta as far as I've been able to tell (from doing simple tests).
They're aware of the problem though, several Opera users (including myself) are keeping an eye on these features and bug the Opera staff whenever possible.
Somewhere down the line Opera will have JavaScript/ECMAScript and DOM-support. How far down the line it seems that nobody knows though.
Can be set to override nearly any presentation done by the page author, and apply the user's own style sheet. Images can be turned off using the G key. I have it, I use it, and I totally love it.
Would be a worthwhile addition to Mozilla indeed.
Just because it doesn't understand that "2" is a number and not a string doesn't mean that the language is bad.
And btw, the answer to your question is simple. if x is 2 then x+x is 4. If you meant to say that x is 2 and y is 2 and x+y is the question, then the answer is still 4. If either x or y is "2" (a string) the answer will be "22" (a new string with length 2, containing "22").
The beauty of this program is of course that it uses _all_ available CPU when it does this. Multithreading & multitasking OS my a...
Lately I've seen several sites which in my opinion try to give the visitor a richer experience by (re)creating a(/the) user interface for them (using a lot of CSS, DHTML, CSS-positioning, Java, etc) which shifts quite a bit of the focus from the content part to the presentational part. It looks really nice, but suffers slightly on the content side.
Do sites like these represent a step in the wrong direction regarding usability? Is it wrong by them to explore the boundaries of the medium like they do?
Then there's the tooltip (or an equivalent thereof), which can tell a user what to expect behind a link.
HTML 4.0 takes care of both of these. The IMG element has an ALT attribute, which is defined to be used as alternative content (not surprisingly). The A (anchor) element has a TITLE attribute which is to be used to describe what lies behind the link. This can again be rendered as a tooltip, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4/5 does that.
This is to keep two things separate. Not all images are links, and not all links are images. By doing it this way it's easy to give useful content to those without images, and it's also easy to describe what's behind a link. Then it's up to the user agent (e.g. browser) to render the information in a useful way.
As others have stated previously, newbies think that Internet == Web, and they don't know that Usenet exists. So what? Does it really matter, that Usenet isn't a place where newcomers gather?
In my opinion, no. Usenet is a nice little service where some people feel comfortable, and those that don't can go elsewhere. I started out on BBSes back in '92 (yes, I'm a "newbie") and enjoyed the discussion taking place in various groups. Some BBSes carried international networks (RIME springs to mind) and that made us able to talk with people in other parts of the world.
When I first came online in '95, starting my college education, I didn't know about Usenet. I quickly got to know about IRC though, and #chatzone (or some other chat-channel) was my starting place. Around new-years '96 I found out how Usenet worked, and was happy to know that it was more or less like my old BBSes. Since then I've been an irregular poster to various newsgroups (mostly Norwegian ones).
I've tried participating on various web-based message boards, and there's always something I miss. Threading, ease of reading, and Gnus' incredible score-capabilities spring to mind. Things I am used to having around, things that make my everyday Usenet experience better. Not to mention that once those message boards reach a certain size it's fairly impossible to quickly read through it (in my opinion). Browsers (and the web) wasn't created with message boards in mind, I think.
The newbie/experienced ratio on Usenet is probably somewhat consistant, but those newbies are still easy to notice. I understand those who feel that Usenet has lost its usefulness because there's too much spam and clueless newbies. Trying to educate the general public is somewhat difficult, but it can probably be done (but lets not get into that discussion here).
I think Usenet is going to be around for quite a while. In Norway the traffic on Usenet is slowly but surely becoming larger. There's room for this kind of service.
(Start of article)
"Norwegian" DVD bomb a minor incident
First Hollywood postponed releasing new DVDs. Then several DVD-manufacturers filed against a group of hackers, among them a 16-year old Norwegian. But now Hollywood doesn't care that the DVD-codes are broken.
When 16-year old Jon Johansen and the rest of a hacker group found the codes necessary to copy DVD movies and distribute them on the Internet, it created a riot in the film industry.
To trial...
Several manufacturers postponed the release of both discs and new players to find new ways to encrypt them. The companies filed suit against the 16-year old and the rest of the group that took part in the production and distribution of the software, without gaining ground.
Johansen removed the link to the software from his home page, by his own saying because he didn't have time or resources to fight.
As expected...
Now the large movie studios in Hollywood say the software that removes the copy protection is a minor thing.
- We expected the protection code to be broken sooner or later. We were actually surprised that it took so long, says vice president of Warner Home Video, James Cardwell, to CNN.
- There is little or no gain in hacking our products. Blank DVDs cost more than our already made discs, and it takes hours to download the movies over the Internet, claims Cardwell.
DeCSS...
DeCSS is the name of the software that makes it possible to copy the discs directly from a DVD-ROM player to a computer's harddrive. the DVDs have a capacity of 4,7GB, which makes it impossible to copy it to a regular CD. Other software also available on the 'net makes it possible to alter the DVD-files to a regular CD format.
Since the VHS format for VCRs was launched, movie piracy has been a huge problem for the movie companies. They hoped that DVD would finally end this. Now it's clear that copying DVDs is as easy as copying regular videotapes.
(End of article)
Besides the usual mistakes about what this is all about, it seems that the movie industry is now trying to calm things down, turning around a bit. Trying to calm down the fire, maybe?
As someone else pointed out: If you don't find it funny, stop reading it.
The problem with getYear() is that in early implementations of JavaScript it returns a two-digit year for dates between 1900-01-01 and 1999-31-12, while for all other dates it returns a four-digit year. See Netscape's Client-Side JavaScript Reference getYear under "Backward Compatibility". Later implementations always return the year minus 1900, just like Perl does. Netscape's reference says the turnover came with JS v1.2, so Netscape 4.x, IE4 & IE5 should in theory all do it right.
they got the domain sometime this fall. there used to a short snippet about it on their front page, but it's gone now, and there doesn't seem to be any mentioning of it anywhere on their site (nothing shows up through searching).
I haven't checked out 3.61 yet though, haven't had the time to install it.
It's quite interesting that a paper that has a Last Modified header saying "Tuesday, February 16, 1999" suddenly appears on /. as "news". That's slightly scary.
thanks, will try out. I don't read Japanese though, so the English version is preferred. :)