Why fiddle around with a $200 XBox and load Linux on it after circumventing a 100 security holes, when a Linux PC can be had for the same price on Walmart?
Apart from the fact that people who already own xboxes don't have to fork out for a new computer, the big thing is third-party software, as far as I can see. If there was an easy, fully functioning Linux port to the xbox, you could write a game, or any other kind of application, and have it run on an xbox without any kind of licensing from Microsoft. You wouldn't need to use directx or any of their other non-portable libraries either.
Scroll wheels may be indispensable to you, but obviously not to the poster.
What does a scroll wheel accomplish that holding down the third mouse button and dragging does not, apart from the fact that a wheel doesn't operate horizontally as well?
Compulsory licensing has a precedent. For instance, the only reason there is a competitive Unix market is because the original copyright holders were forced to license their works to other people.
The recording industry is in a similar situation, as they essentially have a monopoly on the popular music of today, and it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an independent artist to gain the exposure a signed artist gets.
Ummm, no. If Neo-nazis can parade down the street, hate-mongers can publish their diatribes, crosses can be burnt, and flags defecated on then by God the first amendment should protect academic discussion on security holes and their implications.
Yes but none of this has an impact on a specific company's bottom line, it can't be quenched with a lawsuit, and you can't discredit the Neo-nazis by calling them "hackers".
Or are you under the impression that individual rights are as important as those of a corporation? What kind of commie are you?
Note to the less intelligent and more rabid Slashdotters: no I am not serious.
Windows is the dominant operating system, so there is a double-standard that applies. What is acceptable for Windows is not acceptable for Linux in the eyes of a newbie. Especially if they only installed Linux because they heard how stable it was compared to Windows.
Unfortunately, since every site uses a slightly different "width=", and since CSS does not allow you to say "width=[400..800]" or something like that, you have to have a seperate entry for each site
Scenario: newbie installs unfinished 1.0. Newbie gets frustrated by a buggy, incomplete product. Newbie thinks that Linux is trash and never installs it again.
But you're building those bridges with binary drivers and closed source. What's the point?
I would have thought that was blindingly obvious. It makes the system far more viable and attractive for many people. Video drivers are often a make or break deal - Linux doesn't support your graphics card? Linux doesn't get installed.
It's not the price because BeOS didn't get any attention even when they made it cost-free.
As I recall, the primary complaint against BeOS was that it lacked drivers. When they made BeOS free, I would have tried it out, but it wouldn't even have been able to connect to my ISP (it lacked CHAP authentication, I think). You want the same complaint levelled against Linux too?
The primary reason why Linux is winning is because Linux is open source. That's the distinguishing feature of Linux. It's the whole POINT of Linux.
No. People don't install Linux so they can fire up their favourite text editor and look at the source. They install it to get something done.
Now, the open development model greatly increases the rate at which Linux improves - which is responsible for the features people use to get something done. But the second Linux doesn't get things done for people, it'll be thrown out for something that does.
If you take a look at Linus' policies, you will find that he is essentially pragmatic. He recognised the need for binary-only kernel modules, he also made it clear people using them were on their own, and the kernel hackers will not touch tainted bug reports.
Much better to let the vendors know our rules up front.
...and you think companies like NVidia are going to turn around and say "Oh my God! We'll get right on that, because we can't possibly
afford to lose our primary market of Linux geeks"? Get real.
If they decide that their specs and/or source are more important than selling their hardware, doesn't bother me, Linux will do just fine without them.
It might not bother you, but video drivers are a make or break deal for a hell of a lot of people.
Another vendor will always appear who is willing to release the code or the specs.
...and this may shock you, but those people aren't going to go out and buy a new graphics card to run Linux either.
Pragmatism is all well and good - it gets the job done - but a pragmatist has no ideals.
Bollocks. They are just ideals you don't like in this situation. Namely, it's better to have a system that is 99% Free and works very well for people, rather than a system that is 100% Free and works adequately for a small number of people.
But if you want Linux to win then you'll demand code for your drivers.
Demand away. And what's this about Linux "winning"? What a juvenile attitude. It isn't a competition.
What exactly is wrong with an RS232 port? Why is it "worse" than a USB port?
There is a need for USB that cannot be fulfilled by RS232. The inverse is not true. Now, as a developer, would you rather learn how to use a single interface, or two (or three, or four, and so on)?
If you are a computer newbie, would you rather have a mess of a couple of dozen different ports in the back of a machine, all of which look confusingly similar, and yet not quite the same, or would you prefer a single type of lead, that no matter where you plug it in, it works?
If you are an average user who just likes his gadgets, would you prefer to plug in your keychain disk into the powered port on your keyboard, or mess around with extension cables or plugging it into the back of the machine?
No, there is nothing wrong with legacy components per se, it's just consolidating the mess that exists at the moment will just make life simpler in the long run. Where there is a special need for a different interface (e.g. the high data transfer rate associated with video needs an AGP slot), yes, the interface should be different. But if you can entirely replace one interface with a more capable one at little or no extra cost, yes, it should be done.
Wow, I think you've successfully managed to miss the entire point of the DevEdge interview.
Which was what? That there is a business case for complying with published specifications? I think it's completely appropriate to point out that you can't promote "web standards" without actually conforming to them.
I'd love to pick your site apart right now to the degree that you've cherry-picked ESPN
Why? That website is not the subject of a case-study, it's just a place to stick a few files from time to time. Sounds to me you are attacking me rather than the points I am making. Feel free to do so, but you lose credibility when you resort to ad-hominem attacks. You'll notice I specifically referred to the details of the case study in my post - you, however, have not.
I am so sick of engineers giving the profession in general a reputation of being unable to relate to business concepts.
In any other type of engineering, I'd imagine that ignoring the relevent standards would be a sacking offense. It's a big business risk, and that was one of the primary reasons I posted what I did. It seems to have gone completely over your head though.
Now, was there a specific point that you wanted to address?
Positioning footers is a huge Achilles heel of absolute positioning. It is ridiculous that you cannot embed three absolutely positioned columns within a master div and then position a footer below that master div. This is a well known problem of absolute positioning and there are a few workarounds, none of which are very elegant.
Actually, it's dead simple to do this with css 2. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn't support a decent amount of css 2. Having said that, there are plenty of workarounds that work in Internet Explorer that aren't anywhere near as bad as this:
The workaround we settled on for the front page was simply positioning our partner's footer a concrete pixel value from the top of the screen. Since our front page is always roughly the same length, we don't need to worry about any of our columns creeping down into the footer.
Excuse me? How on earth can they possibly know how high their home page is? That would depend on the size of the text, which depends on the font size I've picked to surf with.
Then there's validation. Telling me my site needs to validate in order to be standards-compliant is like telling me I need a flag in my lawn to call myself an American.
What a fucking idiot. Validation is a mechanical syntax checking of the document. If your site doesn't validate, you aren't conforming to the rules of HTML/XHTML. It's more like saying he needs to be an American citizen to call himself an American.
For a simple, small, text-heavy site like a blog, validation may come relatively easily, but when you have a site like ours which dynamically writes out a lot of content, uses third-party statistical tracking, makes liberal use of Flash, and offers complex and flexible advertising modules, validation is simply a pie in the sky.
Okay, let's take these things one at a time:
Sometimes we dynamically open divs and other tags with document.write and the validator can't figure out why we're closing a tag which appears not to be open.
If you are closing an element (not tag), then it had better be open. If you open the element via a script, close it via a script, otherwise you are not following the specifications. The validator can't "figure it out" because it isn't compliant code. This guy seems to think that the use of client-side scripting somehow makes invalid documents magically valid.
Our ad server requires us to send ampersand-delimited variables to it which are not URL-encoded and the validator treats any ampersands in your code as invalid.
It's a one-liner in most languages to fix this. If you are using a third-party ad server, then ask them to give you compliant code, it should be part of your contract to reduce business risk anyway.
Our statistical tracking code puts id attributes to certain script tags, which the validator claims is not valid.
Sounds like exactly the same thing. Ask your suppliers to give you code that follows the specifications.
We sometimes do not include alt tags for images which aren't important unless they are physically seen. Some people will say "Just include alt=''", but I simply don't agree with including alt tags for the heck of it.
Well existing user-agents treat empty alt attributes differently to missing alt attributes, and for good reason. It may mean little to him, because he doesn't use that software, others do. That is why you follow specifications, so all user-agents get a good deal.
We display all of our Flash elements using a home-spun JavaScript delivery method which is way more flexible and compatible than even the method Macromedia recommends.
If someone in India can do the same job as me, for 1/10 of the price but just as well, then apparently at least one of us has got our expectations wrong.
The cost of living in India is far less than the cost of living in Silicon Valley. The salaries in the States are high by necessity, it isn't just greed.
Keeping computers functioning after infection only serves to increase the propogation of the virus. Successful viruses keep the host healthy enough to aid transmission.
For instance, if word viruses stopped you from opening word, they'd find it difficult to move from host to host. What would be better - an outlook virus that disabled email, or one that couldn't?
Of course there aren't going to be too many people interested in working on mainframes - the average person hasn't even seen one. Compare that with the near unbiquitous PC, and you can see why a lot more people go for the "traditional" computer jobs - people can get comfortable and experienced with them without spending a lot of money.
You could alse specify your style sheet link in a way that ns4 doesn't understand (I think there are a couple, but you lose the ability to provide a different style sheet for print media).
There are quite a few ways of hiding css from browsers, but there's nothing specifically preventing media-specific stylesheets. For exmaple, Netscape 4.x wouldn't see the contents of a print stylesheet referenced in this way:
You could also make your style sheet served dynamically and have an alternate or blank style sheet returned to NS4.
Bad idea for caching, http pipelining, and cpu time, unless you are willing to put a fair amount of effort into working around the various problems this causes.
If NS 4 doesn't get a style sheet, the page is rendered as if it came out of the 1994 internet. But for folks who use an old browser, I say too bad.
Ditto.
The things I like to use most that NS4 doesn't like are floating elements (div {float:left;width200})
What do you expect? You could at least have the decency to give it correct code. Go validate.
We use mod_gzip for the "non-standards compliant" Work Complaint Center. We tried using xhtml + stylesheets in a mockup, but found that the redesign time would be enormous.
Redesign or reimplementation? You certainly don't have to redesign a site to use XHTML and CSS. If existing content is the problem with reimplementation, have you considered that you are only creating more work for yourself in the long run? Implementing redesigns when you already have XHTML + CSS is far easier than doing the same with tag soup, and the longer you put off moving to a better structure, the more content you'll have to change over.
Additionally, our logs show most of our readership uses older browsers, and we can't force them to upgrade.
Some older browsers have problems with gzip encoding (yes, even though they say they can handle it). Specifically, you'll want to avoid encoding your external files (js, css) in this way.
Furthermore, the bandwidth savings were minimal.
Is your content mostly static or mostly dynamic? when 40% or so of the markup in a page is presentational, and those pages also go stale frequently, it can make a large difference. Four or five static css files can be cached very efficiently, especially as they can be used across the whole site.
There would still be no reason for pirates to distribute the source code, then have each user compile it separately. No, they'd just distribute the binaries, just like how they already do.
It would also be legal for them to do so.
Re:How immature of Mr. Packard...
on
XFree86 Politics
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· Score: 2, Informative
Some people here seem to think that forking is unconditionally a good thing about open source development, but if everyone started forking the kernel, glibc, gcc, and XFree among other core packages, where would that leave us?
Remember that multiple forks of the linux kernel already exist (e.g. the -ac tree) that are fairly important, and that the gcc 2.9x/3.x series is based on the old egcs fork.
I'm not saying that forking is always good, but forks in major packages do happen, it's not the end of the world, and a lot of good things can come from it. As major packages, the improvements made possible by a fork can have much more effect than forks of small, insignificant packages.
Windows on the other hand, like it or not, is a catalyst of profitable software firms. Where would Adobe, Veritas, heck even Electronic Arts be without MS? Sure the OS is buggy, and fixes aren't released lightning fast... But who can say that without Windows, these company would be just as successful today?
Hell, what about anti-virus firms? An entire industry has sprouted from Microsoft's role in the computer world.
Microsoft sure does a lot of wrong things when it comes to Windows... but one thing it got right from the beginning was how to drive the market to complement their invention
What about Stacker? What about the fact that they killed Netscape's market? What about the umpteen other markets that were slowly consumed by the ever expanding "OS"?
It's not always practical to build a tree in-memory.
I'm not sure what that means. At some point you have to grab the information you want, and that may or may not mean building a tree.
Sorry, I guess I could have been clearer. The author feels that there are really only two widespread, implemented options for parsing XML "properly" - callback-style, and in-memory-tree-style. One was inappropriate, and he didn't like the other, so he fell back on regexps. I have to say, I sympathise, but there's no way I would chuck away a proper parser for a few regexps.
I'm still not sure what advantage XML has over Lisp. I'm near certain that the hype and giddiness is overdone.
Oh, XML is definitely overhyped, even its most staunch supporters would agree with you there. I did read a very good article not too long ago about the benefits of XML over LISP, but google is being uncooperative right now. I think that the main reason is more to do with the human aspect of it - there's something human-friendlier about XML than LISP.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from the fact that people who already own xboxes don't have to fork out for a new computer, the big thing is third-party software, as far as I can see. If there was an easy, fully functioning Linux port to the xbox, you could write a game, or any other kind of application, and have it run on an xbox without any kind of licensing from Microsoft. You wouldn't need to use directx or any of their other non-portable libraries either.
Scroll wheels may be indispensable to you, but obviously not to the poster.
What does a scroll wheel accomplish that holding down the third mouse button and dragging does not, apart from the fact that a wheel doesn't operate horizontally as well?
Compulsory licensing has a precedent. For instance, the only reason there is a competitive Unix market is because the original copyright holders were forced to license their works to other people.
The recording industry is in a similar situation, as they essentially have a monopoly on the popular music of today, and it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an independent artist to gain the exposure a signed artist gets.
I think he means compulsory licensing, not compulsory taxation. In other words, the music industry must offer this service to people.
I can think of two conspiracy theories:
Yes but none of this has an impact on a specific company's bottom line, it can't be quenched with a lawsuit, and you can't discredit the Neo-nazis by calling them "hackers".
Or are you under the impression that individual rights are as important as those of a corporation? What kind of commie are you?
Note to the less intelligent and more rabid Slashdotters: no I am not serious.
Windows is the dominant operating system, so there is a double-standard that applies. What is acceptable for Windows is not acceptable for Linux in the eyes of a newbie. Especially if they only installed Linux because they heard how stable it was compared to Windows.
Have you tried:
body > table {width: 100%;
}
Perhaps. It depends which browser you use. Some browsers (including mozilla, I believe) don't load images that are hidden using { display: none; }.
Scenario: newbie installs unfinished 1.0. Newbie gets frustrated by a buggy, incomplete product. Newbie thinks that Linux is trash and never installs it again.
I would have thought that was blindingly obvious. It makes the system far more viable and attractive for many people. Video drivers are often a make or break deal - Linux doesn't support your graphics card? Linux doesn't get installed.
As I recall, the primary complaint against BeOS was that it lacked drivers. When they made BeOS free, I would have tried it out, but it wouldn't even have been able to connect to my ISP (it lacked CHAP authentication, I think). You want the same complaint levelled against Linux too?
No. People don't install Linux so they can fire up their favourite text editor and look at the source. They install it to get something done.
Now, the open development model greatly increases the rate at which Linux improves - which is responsible for the features people use to get something done. But the second Linux doesn't get things done for people, it'll be thrown out for something that does.
If you take a look at Linus' policies, you will find that he is essentially pragmatic. He recognised the need for binary-only kernel modules, he also made it clear people using them were on their own, and the kernel hackers will not touch tainted bug reports.
It might not bother you, but video drivers are a make or break deal for a hell of a lot of people.
Bollocks. They are just ideals you don't like in this situation. Namely, it's better to have a system that is 99% Free and works very well for people, rather than a system that is 100% Free and works adequately for a small number of people.
Demand away. And what's this about Linux "winning"? What a juvenile attitude. It isn't a competition.
A validator would be a better choice. It's a proper syntax checker, not just a linter.
There is a need for USB that cannot be fulfilled by RS232. The inverse is not true. Now, as a developer, would you rather learn how to use a single interface, or two (or three, or four, and so on)?
If you are a computer newbie, would you rather have a mess of a couple of dozen different ports in the back of a machine, all of which look confusingly similar, and yet not quite the same, or would you prefer a single type of lead, that no matter where you plug it in, it works?
If you are an average user who just likes his gadgets, would you prefer to plug in your keychain disk into the powered port on your keyboard, or mess around with extension cables or plugging it into the back of the machine?
No, there is nothing wrong with legacy components per se, it's just consolidating the mess that exists at the moment will just make life simpler in the long run. Where there is a special need for a different interface (e.g. the high data transfer rate associated with video needs an AGP slot), yes, the interface should be different. But if you can entirely replace one interface with a more capable one at little or no extra cost, yes, it should be done.
Which was what? That there is a business case for complying with published specifications? I think it's completely appropriate to point out that you can't promote "web standards" without actually conforming to them.
Why? That website is not the subject of a case-study, it's just a place to stick a few files from time to time. Sounds to me you are attacking me rather than the points I am making. Feel free to do so, but you lose credibility when you resort to ad-hominem attacks. You'll notice I specifically referred to the details of the case study in my post - you, however, have not.
In any other type of engineering, I'd imagine that ignoring the relevent standards would be a sacking offense. It's a big business risk, and that was one of the primary reasons I posted what I did. It seems to have gone completely over your head though.
Now, was there a specific point that you wanted to address?
One step forward, two steps back:
Actually, it's dead simple to do this with css 2. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn't support a decent amount of css 2. Having said that, there are plenty of workarounds that work in Internet Explorer that aren't anywhere near as bad as this:
Excuse me? How on earth can they possibly know how high their home page is? That would depend on the size of the text, which depends on the font size I've picked to surf with.
What a fucking idiot. Validation is a mechanical syntax checking of the document. If your site doesn't validate, you aren't conforming to the rules of HTML/XHTML. It's more like saying he needs to be an American citizen to call himself an American.
Okay, let's take these things one at a time:
If you are closing an element (not tag), then it had better be open. If you open the element via a script, close it via a script, otherwise you are not following the specifications. The validator can't "figure it out" because it isn't compliant code. This guy seems to think that the use of client-side scripting somehow makes invalid documents magically valid.
It's a one-liner in most languages to fix this. If you are using a third-party ad server, then ask them to give you compliant code, it should be part of your contract to reduce business risk anyway.
Sounds like exactly the same thing. Ask your suppliers to give you code that follows the specifications.
Well existing user-agents treat empty alt attributes differently to missing alt attributes, and for good reason. It may mean little to him, because he doesn't use that software, others do. That is why you follow specifications, so all user-agents get a good deal.
The cost of living in India is far less than the cost of living in Silicon Valley. The salaries in the States are high by necessity, it isn't just greed.
Keeping computers functioning after infection only serves to increase the propogation of the virus. Successful viruses keep the host healthy enough to aid transmission.
For instance, if word viruses stopped you from opening word, they'd find it difficult to move from host to host. What would be better - an outlook virus that disabled email, or one that couldn't?
Of course there aren't going to be too many people interested in working on mainframes - the average person hasn't even seen one. Compare that with the near unbiquitous PC, and you can see why a lot more people go for the "traditional" computer jobs - people can get comfortable and experienced with them without spending a lot of money.
There are quite a few ways of hiding css from browsers, but there's nothing specifically preventing media-specific stylesheets. For exmaple, Netscape 4.x wouldn't see the contents of a print stylesheet referenced in this way:
<style type="text/css"> @import "/styles/print.css" print; </style>Bad idea for caching, http pipelining, and cpu time, unless you are willing to put a fair amount of effort into working around the various problems this causes.
Ditto.
What do you expect? You could at least have the decency to give it correct code. Go validate.
Redesign or reimplementation? You certainly don't have to redesign a site to use XHTML and CSS. If existing content is the problem with reimplementation, have you considered that you are only creating more work for yourself in the long run? Implementing redesigns when you already have XHTML + CSS is far easier than doing the same with tag soup, and the longer you put off moving to a better structure, the more content you'll have to change over.
Some older browsers have problems with gzip encoding (yes, even though they say they can handle it). Specifically, you'll want to avoid encoding your external files (js, css) in this way.
Is your content mostly static or mostly dynamic? when 40% or so of the markup in a page is presentational, and those pages also go stale frequently, it can make a large difference. Four or five static css files can be cached very efficiently, especially as they can be used across the whole site.
"Open source" is more than "comes with source". The term open source only applies to software that you can share with other people.
Take a look at the Open Source Definition for more information.
It would also be legal for them to do so.
Remember that multiple forks of the linux kernel already exist (e.g. the -ac tree) that are fairly important, and that the gcc 2.9x/3.x series is based on the old egcs fork.
I'm not saying that forking is always good, but forks in major packages do happen, it's not the end of the world, and a lot of good things can come from it. As major packages, the improvements made possible by a fork can have much more effect than forks of small, insignificant packages.
Hell, what about anti-virus firms? An entire industry has sprouted from Microsoft's role in the computer world.
What about Stacker? What about the fact that they killed Netscape's market? What about the umpteen other markets that were slowly consumed by the ever expanding "OS"?
How about XIP: XML Iterating Parser?
Sorry, I guess I could have been clearer. The author feels that there are really only two widespread, implemented options for parsing XML "properly" - callback-style, and in-memory-tree-style. One was inappropriate, and he didn't like the other, so he fell back on regexps. I have to say, I sympathise, but there's no way I would chuck away a proper parser for a few regexps.
Oh, XML is definitely overhyped, even its most staunch supporters would agree with you there. I did read a very good article not too long ago about the benefits of XML over LISP, but google is being uncooperative right now. I think that the main reason is more to do with the human aspect of it - there's something human-friendlier about XML than LISP.