Who will MS backstab and what will happen after that?
Look at history. They will backstab whoever they can, and 5-10 years later, when the lawsuit gets in progress, they won't care if they win or lose, because the competition will be long gone.
The problem is that you have to explicitly ask for something to be "unbanned". Gutenburg etc are the obvious examples that show how ridiculous the filtering is, but the base issue is that the government (assuming a publically-funded library) is not only deciding what you can and can't see, but spending your money to do it.
Imagine you were researching a touchy subject (insert taboo of choice here). Would you want to be the one to ask for relevent sites to be unbanned? Or, given the choice, would you prefer to research something else instead?
Current automated turing tests reject users behind text terminals
That may be common practice, but it is in no means inherent to turing tests. Aural turing tests (spelling out a word with a bit of white noise overlaid, for example) would cater to blind users, but I don't think that techniques to distinguish between humans and computers would be that hard to come up with.
Old timers might remember what slashdot was like 2-3 years ago when trolls represented something like %50 the posts here.
They still do, don't they? I've adjusted my settings to only browse at 2+, so I don't see a lot of it any more. Perhaps you have done the same.
Then I remember seeing the same posts over and over again with nicks like "asfdd3456-troll". I guess the trolls liked what the spammers were doing so they actually wrote scripts to generate tens of thousands of "..hot gritz down my pants..and Natalie Portman petrified.." posts with a different name each! Unbelievable.
Simple to solve, use a turing test to prevent automated registrations.
This became unbearable then cmd Taco put in IP address bans.
Yeah, I remember that. I (and presumably every other user of my isp) was banned for months after I went to the trouble of emailing them the details of my isp's proxy servers (to avoid the "you can't post" page).
Last trolls began to experiment with page widening with lots of "."'s so an annoying horizontal scroll would be needed to read all the posts. Very very annoying indeed. A few lines of code to slashcode made that problem go away.
And created a new problem in its place: the "phantom space" bug, that breaks urls. A better solution would be to only allow long text from registered users, and only once per day, or perhaps warning them before posting something that is broken. Or (heaven forbid) actually using css to lay out the page instead of that nasty table hack.
Anyway Patrick should use slashcode for his forum or write scripts that are similiar to slashdot's to get rid of the obnoxious trolls and use a karma system. This is the only way to ban them.
Slashdot's system for coping with trolls sucks. Deliberately annoying people is against the t&cs of most isps, when it started to be a problem, the admins should have started notifying the trollers' isps.
XUL is the future, because it brings GUI's closer to the masses.
Last time I checked, GUIs were already available for the masses.
Such a claim can't be made about QT or GTK. Someone had to step into the future.
Yes, and why should it have been a project that was originally slated to be a browser suite? Why should it have been a project where a long time out of the market was liable to kill it?
There's nothing particularly revolutionary about xul, it's handy, and it leverages existing technologies fairly well. Virtually killing mozilla to get it doesn't seem worth it.
As I said, it's a shame they didn't use something that was already available, cheap, and proven.
The word standard implies that it is unwaivering and uniform. XHTML is most definitely NOT that!
I don't believe the w3c has ever claimed xhtml as a standard. Or any of their html specifications either. I think the only "standard" html is ISO-HTML.
I believe it was available under the QPL and the GPL. Whilst the GPL is fine for Mozilla (you can dual-license easily), Netscape would have had to purchase QT licenses to release Netscape as closed-source. That's hardly a big deal compared with the developer costs associated with doing it yourself.
It always easier in hindsight to chastise anyone's decision, especially when you're not the one who has to make it.
Chastise? Read my post again. I said it was a shame they didn't use something that was already available, cheap, and proven.
The gtk thing has nothing to do with the core Mozilla project
They chose to use it. One of their stated goals was to have a cross-platform browser. GTK wasn't very cross-platform at the time, it was quite unstable on Windows, and I don't even know if it supported the Mac back then. It was definitely inferior to the job at the time, and many people would argue it still is.
QT isn't a replacement for Javascript. Totally different problem domains.
Javascript, in combination with XUL, is used to build the Mozilla application. They eschewed traditional toolkits, and developed a user interface based around xml and javascript. To say that Javascript is unrelated to their decision to not use QT is ill-informed at best.
Serious Question: How much influence does our favorite pet, Microsoft, have in the W3C?
On an organisational level? Little, I believe, it certainly doesn't seem like Microsoft's participation in the w3c is putting forth the typical Microsoft nastiness.
On a specifications level? They were intimately involved in a couple of crucial recommendations, I believe, including CSS (which of course, originated within Opera).
On a day-by-day basis? Tantek Ãelik is usually found hanging around the w3c mailing lists and commenting on current affairs in his blog. He seems like a smart guy, he worked on IE5/Mac, which was one of the first decent CSS1 implementations.
I mean, if the Apple folks were able to port KHTML to OpenStep^WMac OS X from that whole Linux-QT-KDE mess, it can't be that bad, can it?
Exactly. Everybody here seems to be using the excuse that mozilla is cross-platform, and can expect to be bloated. Well khtml works across unix/x, linux/framebuffer, and now osx as well. it's based on qt, which works on windows just fine. The Safari developers even noted how easy it was to port (all they basically did was sit it on top of a small framework that was a substitute for the kde-specific bits).
The QT toolkit is one of the reasons this can be done in an efficient, easily understandable way. It's a great toolkit, and it's a shame the mozilla project decided to ignore it in favour of gtk/xul/javascript/etc.
Let's call it like it is -- Gecko, while a noble effort, is really a failure. It was YEARS late, and completely missed its goal (a lightweight, fast. cross-platform rendering engine). One bit of that (cross-platform) does not a success make.
I wouldn't go that far. It's a very useful, very standards-compliant, cross-platform rendering engine. The fact that somewhere along the line the project fell prey to creeping featuritis doesn't change this.
On the other hand, this usenet post sums up how I feel about the whole thing.
The same applies the the web as a whole. When you think about it, there's a hell of a lot of crap on here. But you aren't looking at the whole lot, you only care about your specific bits of it.
Likewise with blogs. Nobody reads them all. People read the ones that are interesting to them.
I notice that on the Safari page, Apple are claiming it supports XHTML. khtml does not support xhtml properly - does anybody know if this is an addition by Apple, or merely a mistake (XHTML support involves more than simply chucking it through a tag soup parser)?
Specifically, does it throw a fatal error on this testcase (it should if it supports XHTML)?
without the ip addresses they are useless for finding people
Not necessarily. If you are logging referrers or other information, that can be used to track down some people. For instance, what about people clicking on links in their webmail? Some of those webmail urls contain a lot of information, and all you'd have to do is subpoena the webmail provider to get the ip/personal information of those people.
If you really care about your fonts that much (people rarely do), then use a user stylesheet. Everybody else can get what the page author suggests (which can have usability benefits; serif is easier to read at larger sizes, sans-serif at smaller sizes, for instance).
Quite. You have to wonder about the quality of a website that claims to offer advice on scripting (both on and off the web), yet cannot even cobble together a decent website (not just the aesthetics, I'm talking about <font> elements, etc).
I really think that as soon as we start screwing around with nature, we throw the balance out the window.
So you've never shaved or cut your hair? Never brushed your teeth? Never received any immunizations? You don't refridgerate your food? Do you use any electricity at all? What about modern medicine? Ever had surgery?
Or have you defined screwing around with nature as "things that I'm not familiar with and don't understand"? It seems that's what everybody else who says screwing around with nature means.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at history. They will backstab whoever they can, and 5-10 years later, when the lawsuit gets in progress, they won't care if they win or lose, because the competition will be long gone.
The problem is that you have to explicitly ask for something to be "unbanned". Gutenburg etc are the obvious examples that show how ridiculous the filtering is, but the base issue is that the government (assuming a publically-funded library) is not only deciding what you can and can't see, but spending your money to do it.
Imagine you were researching a touchy subject (insert taboo of choice here). Would you want to be the one to ask for relevent sites to be unbanned? Or, given the choice, would you prefer to research something else instead?
Ask these guys.
Well that depends on the viewport size, doesn't it? Not everybody surfs at fullscreen 1024x768, do they?
That may be common practice, but it is in no means inherent to turing tests. Aural turing tests (spelling out a word with a bit of white noise overlaid, for example) would cater to blind users, but I don't think that techniques to distinguish between humans and computers would be that hard to come up with.
No, and I'd imagine most don't give a rat's ass about spammers either. But it's part of their jobs to deal with abuse.
Not at all. I expected them to do it as soon as it became a problem, when there were a dozen or so. It's far too late now.
They still do, don't they? I've adjusted my settings to only browse at 2+, so I don't see a lot of it any more. Perhaps you have done the same.
Simple to solve, use a turing test to prevent automated registrations.
Yeah, I remember that. I (and presumably every other user of my isp) was banned for months after I went to the trouble of emailing them the details of my isp's proxy servers (to avoid the "you can't post" page).
And created a new problem in its place: the "phantom space" bug, that breaks urls. A better solution would be to only allow long text from registered users, and only once per day, or perhaps warning them before posting something that is broken. Or (heaven forbid) actually using css to lay out the page instead of that nasty table hack.
Slashdot's system for coping with trolls sucks. Deliberately annoying people is against the t&cs of most isps, when it started to be a problem, the admins should have started notifying the trollers' isps.
The obvious solution is to only post to point out that a story isn't a duplicate. Much less effort.
What about Tony Blair's email address then?
Last time I checked, GUIs were already available for the masses.
Yes, and why should it have been a project that was originally slated to be a browser suite? Why should it have been a project where a long time out of the market was liable to kill it?
There's nothing particularly revolutionary about xul, it's handy, and it leverages existing technologies fairly well. Virtually killing mozilla to get it doesn't seem worth it.
As I said, it's a shame they didn't use something that was already available, cheap, and proven.
I wasn't aware of that, I was under the impression that he was working at Opera at the time. Thanks for the info.
I don't believe the w3c has ever claimed xhtml as a standard. Or any of their html specifications either. I think the only "standard" html is ISO-HTML.
Neither. How about you read the specification? It certainly doesn't seem very ambiguous.
Yes, it had been for years.
Yes, again, for years.
Check it out yourself.
I believe it was available under the QPL and the GPL. Whilst the GPL is fine for Mozilla (you can dual-license easily), Netscape would have had to purchase QT licenses to release Netscape as closed-source. That's hardly a big deal compared with the developer costs associated with doing it yourself.
Chastise? Read my post again. I said it was a shame they didn't use something that was already available, cheap, and proven.
They chose to use it. One of their stated goals was to have a cross-platform browser. GTK wasn't very cross-platform at the time, it was quite unstable on Windows, and I don't even know if it supported the Mac back then. It was definitely inferior to the job at the time, and many people would argue it still is.
Javascript, in combination with XUL, is used to build the Mozilla application. They eschewed traditional toolkits, and developed a user interface based around xml and javascript. To say that Javascript is unrelated to their decision to not use QT is ill-informed at best.
On an organisational level? Little, I believe, it certainly doesn't seem like Microsoft's participation in the w3c is putting forth the typical Microsoft nastiness.
On a specifications level? They were intimately involved in a couple of crucial recommendations, I believe, including CSS (which of course, originated within Opera).
On a day-by-day basis? Tantek Ãelik is usually found hanging around the w3c mailing lists and commenting on current affairs in his blog. He seems like a smart guy, he worked on IE5/Mac, which was one of the first decent CSS1 implementations.
It was always misused anyway. An acronym is pronouncable.
They were only special cases of the <object> element anyway, which is still there, and far more flexible.
Remember, they are called elements, not tags. The tags are the funny things in angle brackets, elements are the whole things.
The question remains, why are there deprecated elements in a non-backwards compatible markup language?
Exactly. Everybody here seems to be using the excuse that mozilla is cross-platform, and can expect to be bloated. Well khtml works across unix/x, linux/framebuffer, and now osx as well. it's based on qt, which works on windows just fine. The Safari developers even noted how easy it was to port (all they basically did was sit it on top of a small framework that was a substitute for the kde-specific bits).
The QT toolkit is one of the reasons this can be done in an efficient, easily understandable way. It's a great toolkit, and it's a shame the mozilla project decided to ignore it in favour of gtk/xul/javascript/etc.
I wouldn't go that far. It's a very useful, very standards-compliant, cross-platform rendering engine. The fact that somewhere along the line the project fell prey to creeping featuritis doesn't change this.
On the other hand, this usenet post sums up how I feel about the whole thing.
The same applies the the web as a whole. When you think about it, there's a hell of a lot of crap on here. But you aren't looking at the whole lot, you only care about your specific bits of it.
Likewise with blogs. Nobody reads them all. People read the ones that are interesting to them.
I notice that on the Safari page, Apple are claiming it supports XHTML. khtml does not support xhtml properly - does anybody know if this is an addition by Apple, or merely a mistake (XHTML support involves more than simply chucking it through a tag soup parser)?
Specifically, does it throw a fatal error on this testcase (it should if it supports XHTML)?
Not necessarily. If you are logging referrers or other information, that can be used to track down some people. For instance, what about people clicking on links in their webmail? Some of those webmail urls contain a lot of information, and all you'd have to do is subpoena the webmail provider to get the ip/personal information of those people.
Anybody else automatically assume that it had ended because they found the key?
If you really care about your fonts that much (people rarely do), then use a user stylesheet. Everybody else can get what the page author suggests (which can have usability benefits; serif is easier to read at larger sizes, sans-serif at smaller sizes, for instance).
Quite. You have to wonder about the quality of a website that claims to offer advice on scripting (both on and off the web), yet cannot even cobble together a decent website (not just the aesthetics, I'm talking about <font> elements, etc).
Please troll elsewhere:
Yahoo Embraces PHP, Expands Open-Source Commitment
PHP Usage Stats
So you've never shaved or cut your hair? Never brushed your teeth? Never received any immunizations? You don't refridgerate your food? Do you use any electricity at all? What about modern medicine? Ever had surgery?
Or have you defined screwing around with nature as "things that I'm not familiar with and don't understand"? It seems that's what everybody else who says screwing around with nature means.