It doesn't. I've whined about this to Google several times, without result. There is no way to distinguish search terms which are critically different *because* of punctuation. The same applies to "common words" like a, an, and, the.
It's very frustrating when you have an exact phrase that *needs* these elements to be found, and the lack of said elements makes every sort of shit that you specifically DIDN'T want to see come up instead. And no amount of quote signs or plus signs changes that.:(
Was this the phone company's stupid decision or some stupid state or federal regulation? (Kinda sounds like a PATRIOTic ACTion, doesn't it?)
Either way, it's completely insane -- yeah, they're in a position where once you're a customer they have a hard time cutting you off and may take a couple months' loss on you if you don't pay on time, but even so, this is hardly the calibre of loss as, say, if you wrote a bad check for a bigscreen TV. The most they'd be out would be about $100.
I sometimes wonder if we'd be better off if everyone were forced to make do "the old-fashioned way" (candles and outhouse) for a few months. Not to "show 'em how the other half lives", but to force them to learn some basic survival-mode thought processes, the sort that teach you what really is or isn't necessary, and that some stuff has to be done RIGHT if you want to keep on living.
And yes, I *have* lived without electricity (several months), phone (7 years), running water (24 years), and central heating (29 years). You figure out how to work with or around it and life goes on, if less conveniently. I wouldn't willingly go back to it, but I *can* if I have to, and I don't come unwound if something isn't working for a while.
And sometimes a quiet evening by candlelight, far from civilization, is just plain nice.
As I understand it, that only applies if you're within some telco's designated service area. If not, you're SOL.
I've lived two places where I could not get phone service (both in Montana, 1977-1984). And to this day, just about any part of California that is more than 1500 feet from an existing line (which for practical purposes means a paved road) is likewise SOL -- that's the farthest they'll run it for "free", and you'll have hell's own time getting 'em to run it beyond that if you don't pay for it (as I recall, the way they interpret the regs, there have to be at least 8 customers available before they're "required" to comply).
Another problem: there is no utility easements to many properties (even if they have legal road access). And this little Catch-22: Above-ground lines are now prohibited in this part of Calif., but permits for buried cable are withheld by local gov't, because they aren't taxable, whereas above-ground lines ARE taxed.
Waving around threats to file a complaint with the PUC used to get instant results, but now the PUC's power has been diluted (to essentially nothing, here in Calif.), so the utilities foot-drag forever and nothing gets done.
Ancient Netscape 3.04 (likewise on Slashdot-Lite... can't use the regular pages, too hard on aging eyes and too slow on dialup) will sometimes just overflow stuff like overwide banners, and leave the text alone; probably a table-handling quirk, that I haven't bothered to pin down. Anyway, so it always behaves here on/. regardless of the banner-vs-window width.
Scaling pixel values to fit the window isn't a bad idea, so long as it can be configured to affect only tables and frames, which are normally the culprits when a page insists on being NNNN-wide (or with unscrollable frames, NNNN-high) regardless of your window or screen size.
Doing it to images as well would likely cause all sorts of mess-ups, and generally isn't necessary, so should be a separate option (turned off by default, whereas scaling structural HTML structures should likely be turned on by default).
Okay, so which browser will be the first to include this nifty new feature?:)
AFAICT "document contains no data" relies on an interaction between a browser bug and a server bug. I don't know it as "the webObjects bug", but I do know that Novell issued a patch for Netware 4, exactly because of such an issue. Solaris 9 and one particular webserver (I forget which) also triggers it.
I dunno, but I had a similar issue in my preferred older Netscape (javascript disabled) -- no way to just view the damned ad and go on by to the content. It was subscribe or nothing. I chose nothing, in the hope that some kind soul would post the content here. I wouldn't have had a problem with viewing a plain old text ad on an interstitial page, but this must have wanted to load something I don't use. Telling me my browser isn't good enough to view their ads is adding insult to injury.
Probably indicates a good script for "dump this dead address outta the database, which is worth more when it has a max percentage of confirmed live addresses".
Horizontal scrollbars for ordinary pages is a Stupid Webmaster Trick. Frex, on the article of the moment (which I'm embarrassed to admit, I did read:) he's got the table hardcoded to a minimum 1024 width screen. Even on my big monitor, I find 800x600 to be a much more comfortable reading size (and more friendly to the plethora of windows I usually have open -- I don't like tabs), and I'm sure I'm not alone. So hardcoded size leads to sidescrolling, and swearing.
To prevent that, the browser would have to know enough to kill certain HTML elements, in this case the WIDTH parameter on the table structure. ISTM this wouldn't really be that much harder than ignoring unclosed tables errors, which most browsers do already. It would need to be a user-on-the-fly setting, tho -- RClick, and tick or untick "display at current window width". And the user would have to be aware that it may wreak havoc on poorly-floated layouts.
Actually, now that you mention it, I think I rather like the concept.
As to the article, ISTM he brought up good points, then negated them by proceeding to canter off in the opposite direction... *sigh*
My Netscape bookmark file is 8 years old this month; I have over 5000 bookmarks. A lot of them are "I want to remember this place exists even tho I'll never go there again", or "someday when I have time (ha ha) I want to come back", or "I know this site is dead, but this is to remind me of its topic," etc, etc. Beyond the topmost twoscore worth that are used every day, I've long since given up on organizing them, and just use CTRL-F to search the list as needed.
I did run the Xenu linkchecker on the mess lately, and was rather amazed to find that over half are still live links.
So how DO you get Acrobat to spawn in its own window -- I mean for when you're dealing with a stupid page that won't let you RClick-OpenInNewWindow, but tries to force it on the current window. (With polite pages, I download PDFs and view 'em in plain standalone Acrobat.)
Generally I agree... a lot of this crap does not need to happen IN the browser. Frex... By preference I use an old browser that never heard of PNG, so I view the odd PNG with QuickView when I need to. In the rare event that I need to view flash, I yank it across with Getright, then use the standalone player. I find this less annoying than having to exchange my browser for one I don't like, or having crap taking over my browser when I don't expect it.
I couldn't read the thing as it was, it formatted too wonky in any browser, and is hardcoded to a very large screen. And the Print link didn't sensibly go to a single unencumbered page, or even a series of unencumbered pages. Noooo, it went to a "tries to print for real" popup for EACH page, which then didn't sensibly link to the next PRINTABLE page, but rather, back to the *original* bloated version of the next page -- which then displayed IN the popup window. Its behaviour is obviously designed to *ensure* that each and every pageview WILL include ads, and that there will be no workarounds like going directly to an all-pages-in-one printable page. IOW, it's designed rather like adware.
Whoever designed this site's so-called navigation obviously never tried to use it, nor was the layout tested beyond the most cursory glance. [eyeing docsource, from a safe distance] And I *think* the layout was mostly dumped from a page layout program, not from an HTML app.
Yep... you'd think that 1) if his principles are correct (which I think to some extent they are, from what I've observed), and 2) if people were inclined toward predicate logic in the first place -- such a language would have naturally evolved without anyone's help!
As to the "problems", from what I saw on the description page and your comment, it reeks of control freakery and not a little of NewSpeak, so "issues" with the creator should have surprised no one!!
AOLserver What is AOLserver. AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server.... Site Search. Latest News. AOLserver 4.0.8 released. dossy - Tue, 07 Sep 2004 17:51:27 GMT... http://www.aolserver.com/
BTW, AOL.COM runs on Solaris 8/AOLserver 3.something. From what I've heard, AOLserver is supposed to be reasonably secure and robust.
Anyway, my point is that sometimes they DO release stuff, and it's not out of the realm of possibility that they'll eventually opensource AIM as well, especially since it's long since "not just for AOLers anymore".
I actually use AIM sometimes. I have an ancient version (1.6something) with ads disabled. It's small, well-behaved (it's NEVER crashed and it doesn't leak) and it can be handy as hell when I need to talk to a bunch of ordinary folks.
That aside, having my main aliases reserved to MY use via AIM accounts helps prevent some nimrod from trying to masquerade as me on AOL.
Ah yes, I'd forgotten about how Klingon is under the Paramount umbrella (I've reminded other folk about this re "who actually owns your fanfic" often enough... musta had a brain breeze).
Given the current IP climate, if you speak in a constructed language, someone else could wind up owning whatever you said!:(
[finds loglan site, eyes it from a safe distance] What the heck is THAT grown from? It looks vaguely like it wanted to be Spanish mixed with perhaps... Czech?? Not my idea of an easily learned language. Never heard of it before, nor this infamous split -- wha'happened??
Interesting project! I'll have to go look again when I have time.
As to GPL, I had the same thought -- words and their meanings are *by their very nature* in the public domain. So while the presentation method may rightfully be GPL'd, I can't see that the content should or even could be. That would be like GPL'ing English, or Latin. Say what??
As to made-up languages like Klingon and Esperanto... I'm not sure what the heck applies. Is Klingon under copyright??
That's what synonymies are for -- displaying the fine nuances between words. The old Funk and Wagnall's complete dictionary also contain synonymy entries -- very useful.
Of course, sometimes you do wind up realizing that the word that means exactly what you want, is one that average folk won't understand. Frex, "chary" is not quite the same as "wary", but how many people reading this know the difference without having to look it up?? (Hint: I learned the diff from my beloved synonymy.) Then the question becomes.. do you use the accurate word, or the word that more folk will understand? At that point, you have to know your audience.
Slang dictionaries are similarly useful, especially those that give examples in context.
(I collect every volume of both types that I can lay hands on... well, at reasonable prices, tho I did special-order my fave synonymy.)
That sort of thing happens (translated or not) whenever someone tries to be excessively formal, rather than just sticking to idiom.
Read some beginner fanfic, or anyone's first attempt at a scientific paper, and you'll see the same thing -- overuse of fancy formal language, to the point of being laughable.
I used to read a lot of ancient Greek stuff translated into English. The average translator didn't have a clue about idiom, so the results were painfully stiff, sometimes to the point of obscuring content. But there were a few who got that idiomatic language needs to remain idiomatic even in translation, and the result was that their translations were every bit as pleasant to read as if they'd been written in my native English to begin with.
Witness that English can be mangled every which way and still be tolerably understandable, even among ESL persons of completely different native tongues. You don't HAVE to get English *right* to make yourself understood, just "close enough". You can mix tenses and cases without destroying meaning, and use all sorts of wrong words and weird misspellings, yet nearly everyone will get what you meant. (Witness slashdot:)
Whereas if you merely get the gender wrong in some languages, you may have said something contrary to what you meant, or even a mortal insult. In tonal languages, you've got yet another layer of complication in that your ear and voice have to be good enough to distinguish what was meant.
BTW my high school Latin teacher told us that idiomatic spoken Latin was much like English, in that it used simpler structures than what we were learning as classical written Latin. Much as when modern folk talk face to face, they don't bother using using precise grammar.
That's because Esperanto is a religion first, a language second. Like all artificial constructs, it doesn't care what's already evolved to a functional state, only about imposing its own state.
English has already evolved into the modern lingua franca; there's no real point in forcing people to learn yet another language if they wish to communicate outside of their mother tongue.
And Latin would be a better choice, if the world still needed a cross-cultural language; despite its reputation, it's a logically-constructed language that can take a lot of abuse and still be understandable.
In fact, I think that's why English overtook French (the previous "most international" language). As Slashdot amply demonstrates, English can be hacked and mangled every which way, yet average folk, even those whose first language is NOT English, can still extract the sense of what someone is saying or writing. English is *very* forgiving of user error, and can readily deal with "unknown input".
(Even if some grammar and spelling Nazis aren't, and can't.;)
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't. I've whined about this to Google several times, without result. There is no way to distinguish search terms which are critically different *because* of punctuation. The same applies to "common words" like a, an, and, the.
:(
It's very frustrating when you have an exact phrase that *needs* these elements to be found, and the lack of said elements makes every sort of shit that you specifically DIDN'T want to see come up instead. And no amount of quote signs or plus signs changes that.
Was this the phone company's stupid decision or some stupid state or federal regulation? (Kinda sounds like a PATRIOTic ACTion, doesn't it?)
Either way, it's completely insane -- yeah, they're in a position where once you're a customer they have a hard time cutting you off and may take a couple months' loss on you if you don't pay on time, but even so, this is hardly the calibre of loss as, say, if you wrote a bad check for a bigscreen TV. The most they'd be out would be about $100.
I *live* in BFE.... the SoCal desert!
Tho formerly I lived in what I called BFSiberia (Montana).
I sometimes wonder if we'd be better off if everyone were forced to make do "the old-fashioned way" (candles and outhouse) for a few months. Not to "show 'em how the other half lives", but to force them to learn some basic survival-mode thought processes, the sort that teach you what really is or isn't necessary, and that some stuff has to be done RIGHT if you want to keep on living.
And yes, I *have* lived without electricity (several months), phone (7 years), running water (24 years), and central heating (29 years). You figure out how to work with or around it and life goes on, if less conveniently. I wouldn't willingly go back to it, but I *can* if I have to, and I don't come unwound if something isn't working for a while.
And sometimes a quiet evening by candlelight, far from civilization, is just plain nice.
As I understand it, that only applies if you're within some telco's designated service area. If not, you're SOL.
I've lived two places where I could not get phone service (both in Montana, 1977-1984). And to this day, just about any part of California that is more than 1500 feet from an existing line (which for practical purposes means a paved road) is likewise SOL -- that's the farthest they'll run it for "free", and you'll have hell's own time getting 'em to run it beyond that if you don't pay for it (as I recall, the way they interpret the regs, there have to be at least 8 customers available before they're "required" to comply).
Another problem: there is no utility easements to many properties (even if they have legal road access). And this little Catch-22: Above-ground lines are now prohibited in this part of Calif., but permits for buried cable are withheld by local gov't, because they aren't taxable, whereas above-ground lines ARE taxed.
Waving around threats to file a complaint with the PUC used to get instant results, but now the PUC's power has been diluted (to essentially nothing, here in Calif.), so the utilities foot-drag forever and nothing gets done.
Ancient Netscape 3.04 (likewise on Slashdot-Lite ... can't use the regular pages, too hard on aging eyes and too slow on dialup) will sometimes just overflow stuff like overwide banners, and leave the text alone; probably a table-handling quirk, that I haven't bothered to pin down. Anyway, so it always behaves here on /. regardless of the banner-vs-window width.
:)
Scaling pixel values to fit the window isn't a bad idea, so long as it can be configured to affect only tables and frames, which are normally the culprits when a page insists on being NNNN-wide (or with unscrollable frames, NNNN-high) regardless of your window or screen size.
Doing it to images as well would likely cause all sorts of mess-ups, and generally isn't necessary, so should be a separate option (turned off by default, whereas scaling structural HTML structures should likely be turned on by default).
Okay, so which browser will be the first to include this nifty new feature?
AFAICT "document contains no data" relies on an interaction between a browser bug and a server bug. I don't know it as "the webObjects bug", but I do know that Novell issued a patch for Netware 4, exactly because of such an issue. Solaris 9 and one particular webserver (I forget which) also triggers it.
I dunno, but I had a similar issue in my preferred older Netscape (javascript disabled) -- no way to just view the damned ad and go on by to the content. It was subscribe or nothing. I chose nothing, in the hope that some kind soul would post the content here. I wouldn't have had a problem with viewing a plain old text ad on an interstitial page, but this must have wanted to load something I don't use. Telling me my browser isn't good enough to view their ads is adding insult to injury.
Probably indicates a good script for "dump this dead address outta the database, which is worth more when it has a max percentage of confirmed live addresses".
"The Law(tm) isn't like source code; slashdotters seem to have trouble understanding that. It is open to interpretation..."
Well then, The Law[tm] should get a better compiler!!
Erm... Hollywood is roughly 30% Jewish, per the last stats I saw about who's what in the industry.
Horizontal scrollbars for ordinary pages is a Stupid Webmaster Trick. Frex, on the article of the moment (which I'm embarrassed to admit, I did read :) he's got the table hardcoded to a minimum 1024 width screen. Even on my big monitor, I find 800x600 to be a much more comfortable reading size (and more friendly to the plethora of windows I usually have open -- I don't like tabs), and I'm sure I'm not alone. So hardcoded size leads to sidescrolling, and swearing.
To prevent that, the browser would have to know enough to kill certain HTML elements, in this case the WIDTH parameter on the table structure. ISTM this wouldn't really be that much harder than ignoring unclosed tables errors, which most browsers do already. It would need to be a user-on-the-fly setting, tho -- RClick, and tick or untick "display at current window width". And the user would have to be aware that it may wreak havoc on poorly-floated layouts.
Actually, now that you mention it, I think I rather like the concept.
As to the article, ISTM he brought up good points, then negated them by proceeding to canter off in the opposite direction... *sigh*
My Netscape bookmark file is 8 years old this month; I have over 5000 bookmarks. A lot of them are "I want to remember this place exists even tho I'll never go there again", or "someday when I have time (ha ha) I want to come back", or "I know this site is dead, but this is to remind me of its topic," etc, etc. Beyond the topmost twoscore worth that are used every day, I've long since given up on organizing them, and just use CTRL-F to search the list as needed.
I did run the Xenu linkchecker on the mess lately, and was rather amazed to find that over half are still live links.
So how DO you get Acrobat to spawn in its own window -- I mean for when you're dealing with a stupid page that won't let you RClick-OpenInNewWindow, but tries to force it on the current window. (With polite pages, I download PDFs and view 'em in plain standalone Acrobat.)
Generally I agree... a lot of this crap does not need to happen IN the browser. Frex... By preference I use an old browser that never heard of PNG, so I view the odd PNG with QuickView when I need to. In the rare event that I need to view flash, I yank it across with Getright, then use the standalone player. I find this less annoying than having to exchange my browser for one I don't like, or having crap taking over my browser when I don't expect it.
I couldn't read the thing as it was, it formatted too wonky in any browser, and is hardcoded to a very large screen. And the Print link didn't sensibly go to a single unencumbered page, or even a series of unencumbered pages. Noooo, it went to a "tries to print for real" popup for EACH page, which then didn't sensibly link to the next PRINTABLE page, but rather, back to the *original* bloated version of the next page -- which then displayed IN the popup window. Its behaviour is obviously designed to *ensure* that each and every pageview WILL include ads, and that there will be no workarounds like going directly to an all-pages-in-one printable page. IOW, it's designed rather like adware.
Whoever designed this site's so-called navigation obviously never tried to use it, nor was the layout tested beyond the most cursory glance. [eyeing docsource, from a safe distance] And I *think* the layout was mostly dumped from a page layout program, not from an HTML app.
Yep... you'd think that 1) if his principles are correct (which I think to some extent they are, from what I've observed), and 2) if people were inclined toward predicate logic in the first place -- such a language would have naturally evolved without anyone's help!
As to the "problems", from what I saw on the description page and your comment, it reeks of control freakery and not a little of NewSpeak, so "issues" with the creator should have surprised no one!!
[paste from first google result for "aolserver"]
... Site Search. ...
AOLserver
What is AOLserver. AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server.
Latest News. AOLserver 4.0.8 released. dossy - Tue, 07 Sep 2004 17:51:27 GMT
http://www.aolserver.com/
BTW, AOL.COM runs on Solaris 8/AOLserver 3.something. From what I've heard, AOLserver is supposed to be reasonably secure and robust.
Anyway, my point is that sometimes they DO release stuff, and it's not out of the realm of possibility that they'll eventually opensource AIM as well, especially since it's long since "not just for AOLers anymore".
I actually use AIM sometimes. I have an ancient version (1.6something) with ads disabled. It's small, well-behaved (it's NEVER crashed and it doesn't leak) and it can be handy as hell when I need to talk to a bunch of ordinary folks.
That aside, having my main aliases reserved to MY use via AIM accounts helps prevent some nimrod from trying to masquerade as me on AOL.
Hey, cool, using your link produced the list of results -- even with javascript turned off! It comes back as plain text, but fast as hell. Nifty.
Ah yes, I'd forgotten about how Klingon is under the Paramount umbrella (I've reminded other folk about this re "who actually owns your fanfic" often enough... musta had a brain breeze).
:(
... Czech?? Not my idea of an easily learned language. Never heard of it before, nor this infamous split -- wha'happened??
Given the current IP climate, if you speak in a constructed language, someone else could wind up owning whatever you said!
[finds loglan site, eyes it from a safe distance] What the heck is THAT grown from? It looks vaguely like it wanted to be Spanish mixed with perhaps
Interesting project! I'll have to go look again when I have time.
As to GPL, I had the same thought -- words and their meanings are *by their very nature* in the public domain. So while the presentation method may rightfully be GPL'd, I can't see that the content should or even could be. That would be like GPL'ing English, or Latin. Say what??
As to made-up languages like Klingon and Esperanto... I'm not sure what the heck applies. Is Klingon under copyright??
That's what synonymies are for -- displaying the fine nuances between words. The old Funk and Wagnall's complete dictionary also contain synonymy entries -- very useful.
Of course, sometimes you do wind up realizing that the word that means exactly what you want, is one that average folk won't understand. Frex, "chary" is not quite the same as "wary", but how many people reading this know the difference without having to look it up?? (Hint: I learned the diff from my beloved synonymy.) Then the question becomes.. do you use the accurate word, or the word that more folk will understand? At that point, you have to know your audience.
Slang dictionaries are similarly useful, especially those that give examples in context.
(I collect every volume of both types that I can lay hands on... well, at reasonable prices, tho I did special-order my fave synonymy.)
That sort of thing happens (translated or not) whenever someone tries to be excessively formal, rather than just sticking to idiom.
Read some beginner fanfic, or anyone's first attempt at a scientific paper, and you'll see the same thing -- overuse of fancy formal language, to the point of being laughable.
I used to read a lot of ancient Greek stuff translated into English. The average translator didn't have a clue about idiom, so the results were painfully stiff, sometimes to the point of obscuring content. But there were a few who got that idiomatic language needs to remain idiomatic even in translation, and the result was that their translations were every bit as pleasant to read as if they'd been written in my native English to begin with.
Witness that English can be mangled every which way and still be tolerably understandable, even among ESL persons of completely different native tongues. You don't HAVE to get English *right* to make yourself understood, just "close enough". You can mix tenses and cases without destroying meaning, and use all sorts of wrong words and weird misspellings, yet nearly everyone will get what you meant. (Witness slashdot :)
Whereas if you merely get the gender wrong in some languages, you may have said something contrary to what you meant, or even a mortal insult. In tonal languages, you've got yet another layer of complication in that your ear and voice have to be good enough to distinguish what was meant.
BTW my high school Latin teacher told us that idiomatic spoken Latin was much like English, in that it used simpler structures than what we were learning as classical written Latin. Much as when modern folk talk face to face, they don't bother using using precise grammar.
That's because Esperanto is a religion first, a language second. Like all artificial constructs, it doesn't care what's already evolved to a functional state, only about imposing its own state.
;)
English has already evolved into the modern lingua franca; there's no real point in forcing people to learn yet another language if they wish to communicate outside of their mother tongue.
And Latin would be a better choice, if the world still needed a cross-cultural language; despite its reputation, it's a logically-constructed language that can take a lot of abuse and still be understandable.
In fact, I think that's why English overtook French (the previous "most international" language). As Slashdot amply demonstrates, English can be hacked and mangled every which way, yet average folk, even those whose first language is NOT English, can still extract the sense of what someone is saying or writing. English is *very* forgiving of user error, and can readily deal with "unknown input".
(Even if some grammar and spelling Nazis aren't, and can't.