Don't be a moron. Proxiweb can't make any use of that positioning because THERE ISN'T ENOUGH SPACE ON PALM SCREEN. Just to be more or less readable text must be re-formatted, and actually developers of that browser went a long way to make it usable with all kinds of tables, images, etc. that in most of cases wouldn't be readable at all if the screen was just a scrollable window into "perfectly correctly" rendered page -- I will get RSI just from trying to scroll through that monstrosity.
So, developers of the browser are right, and
pixel-positioning/overCSS'ing/flash/javascript based design is wrong -- not because of standards but because browser developers made a genuine and mostly successful effort to make their product usable. In the original spirit of the HTML ideas they tried to accomodate whatever will be possible to accomodate into the form that is most useful for the user. And both "standardizators" and stupid "web designers" did their parts in a job that bastardized the web, and made it impossible to accomplish browser's task on their pages, no matter how hard its developers would try to do that. Unless a browser runs on high-resolution screen that I can't put into my pocket, and uses countless megabytes of memory to do the rendering and interpreting.
Positioning anything 'pixel' wise requires a lot of coding trickery, Table and cell backgrounds render
incorrectly - the list goes on.
You want pixels? How about displaying on my PalmIII? Why Yahoo works absolutely perfectly with my PalmIIIc and Browse-it (aka Proxiweb), and a bunch of sites written "pixel-positioned" looks like a pile of dog shit? Why every gorilla with a keyboard wants to make his stupid page display like it's a freaking laminated brochure? Aren't you and your company the real source of the problem?
It doesn't work on those platforms. It crashes and hungs, and in brief periods of time between crashes it doesn't behave properly. Ports are broken beyond repair, and all their development was abandoned.
The "problem" is, NETSCAPE 6 DOESN'T EXIST! No such thing, and won't appear for months. No one uses prereleases. There is no product yet, and when there will be one, most likely it will be based on whatever Mozilla developers will have by then -- and even now most of mentioned bugs are fixed.
Slightly OT, but slightly related... Tell me this: how is it that I can have a FULLY functioning X11 server in
win32 in about 2 megs of RAM when XFree86 takes like 30? What a piece of shit.
Because in Windows all system memory is accounted separately, plus you are looking at it with no bitmaps loaded. Think of it, if you have loaded a fullscreen background, how much memory will be 1024x768x24bpp? That's more than 2M already.
Why would anyone want to do such a stupid thing? Especially considering that your arguments about NT kernel being "better" are, to say least dubious? Why would anyone want to waste time just to make such a monster?
8ball.federated.com probably gets a lot of traffic unrelated to Slashdot -- authors describe mechanical problems caused by constantly pouring requests. As for Mozilla, now it supports mime multipart just fine -- I know because my webcam uses it.
The fact that standards will be published changes nothing -- convoluted enough standards (most of XML-related standards are convoluted, and ALL standards made with Microsoft's involvement are extermely convoluted) can't be implemented properly, completely and with satisfactory interoperability unless resources involved are significantly larger than ones available.
So corner-cutting will be rampant (and no two implementations will work with each other because properly implemented subsets will differ), or data model involved will mirror internal data model of some proprietary system (COM is most likely candidate), leaving others with huge and painful work of shoehorning everything else into that model. Or both.
Copyright ownership does not protects the owner from fair use. Only if material is not available to the public at all in any form, its author or owner can determine, what can be done with it, as that means that he possesses all copies, but as long as copies are sold, they are owned by whoever bought them, and all limitations to what copyright does and doesn't protect can be applied -- the same mechanism that prevents me to duplicate all my CDs (or DVDs) and sell copies, thus competing with copyright owner prevents copyright owner from determining, how I can quote their work, what devices I can use to view or listen to them, or even from making copies for my own use.
Fair use, what in turn is an equivalent property rights. Obtaining copyrighted information gives receiver the ability to use it within fair use limits (what obviously includes viewing -- or otherwise nothing at all is obtained, but in exactly the same manner includes fair use). If obtaining anything copyrighted or containing copyrighted works will give the buyer anything less, very basic rights are violated. Without DMCA, even if seller does something to prevent some kind of fair use, it is a nuisance that buyer can suffer, yet it will be perfectly legal to go through some, possibly painful and time-consuming process and still exercise fair use rights. With DMCA such process suddently becomes illegal.
As for central control: this explains why a.) Soviet housing was superior to housing in the west, b.)
migration from NT to W2K is painless. (Both false, of course. Just spoke with someone whose
application/site went down for two weeks after migrating from NT to W2K.
Believe it or not, as a person who moved from xSU to US in 1993 I can confirm that most of Soviet apartment buildings were superior to almost anything available at any reasonable cost in US. The reason was the fact that cost cutting at the expense of quality and durability was absolutely pointless in the economy where government paid for everything, so while extreme luxury was unavailable, and nothing was obtainable fast, reasonable quality was maintained. In Gomel, Belarus my family (me + parents + grandparents) lived in an apartment with two living rooms, two bedrooms, large kitchen, separate bathroom and tiolet, in nice-looking, clean, 9-floors all-concrete building with central heating, working ventilation system in kitchen (that had nothing to do with windows or heating), large windows with two layers of glass in separate frames, and two balconies in both living rooms. In US my parents and grandparents live in a "standard" wooden frame+panels house (parents call dry walls "cardboard", as they are not accustomed to walls shaking and making hollow sounds when something falls on them) with more space yet less convenience, and I rent one-bedroom apartment in SF Bay Area, with the second worst heating system that I have seen in my life, ventilation implemented by myself by placing a temporary fan into half-open window, and barely usable kitchen. Of course, both my rent and parents' mortgage far exceed anything that ever was paid by Soviet government for apartment in Gomel, however apparently american economy produces vast majority most of things at the worst level of quality that can be tolerated by consumers without causing large number of those consumers to start making things by themselves.
Wait, now I get it, that applies to operating systems, too.
Corel promised to support Microsoft's ".NET", whatever it really is. I have no idea how, and what will Corel do with its Linux software -- ".NET" is supposed to be tied to Windows.
It can send redirection responses instead of forwarding the request, and this is exactly what I see on all IP addresses that www.hotmail.com corredponds to -- it sends redirects to other Local Directors, with "IIS 5" in the header, but without touching any IIS box. That kind of response is hard to miss -- it violates HTTP standard by not waiting for the empty line at the end of the header. Initial redirects cause users to be scattered over a number of hosts where their sessions continue, and those hosts are actually other Local Directors, distributing requests among boxes that appear to be W2K.
Actually they run two layers of Cisco Local Directors. www.hotmail.com box _is_ Local Director (configured with "Server:" line in its header saying "IIS"), doing redirections to all other Local Directors, who in their turn do load-balancing over unknown (however probably ridiculously large if they needed two layers of Local Directors) number of Windows 2000 boxes. That configuration probably would work at existing load even if they had PC/XT running DOS 2.20 as servers.
And please, explain me, what do you think, I owe you? "Opportunity" to work for you? I was paid for my hard work, company made good profit, government got taxes from both, and if anyone still owes something it's definitely not me. Oh, BTW, I am one of those people who are waiting for their immigration papers after H1B expired, and I will get a green card even if you don't like it.
First, 8-bit computers are still in use now, and their bus width does not prevent them from dealing with data of any format.
Second, DNS already is in use, and NOONE BUT "UNICODERS" EVER COMPLAINED about ASCII use in it. There is no demand for this feature, only some people's desire to break all existing software to sell "updates".
Domain name is an address. Address should be reachable from everywhere and everything. This works even for postal addresses -- I can write them in English, and they will reach the intended destination in any country, be it US, Spain, Russia or Japan. The same functionality is available now with DNS, but if this proposal will be implemented, it won't be available from every computer unless everyone will switch to Unicode -- and that won't happen until Hell freezes over (being Russian I have all reasons to be sure about that).
If someone is too concerned about "good-looking" addresses, they should implement some name-translation service like AOL keywords for people who don't like DNS, but the basic architecture of the Internet should not lose interoperability just because someone wants to add one useless feature to his shitty software.
This is a bad idea -- domain names must be interoperable on all systems, with or without Unicode or any other charset support, with or without keyboard capable of entering certain characters. The ASCII subset allowed in DNS now is the only subset supported by absolutely all computers (even ones that natively use EBCDIC), and no matter how the use of other charsets (and/or Unicode) will expand, this is not going to change. I see it as an attempt to just promote "unicodefication" of existing standards for no good reason.
And if anyone cares, my native language has nothing to do with ASCII.
While this may seem like a heavily Draconian method, the question is: what else
can they realistcally do to curb piracy?
They can do nothing, wipe foam from their faces and start thinking, what model they can use to still benefit from that even if it will drastically reduce their profits. And if they will find none they can just leave music alone and let other, more smart people, get into that field.
There is nothing in the nature of music that gives them right to make their current amount of profit from it, and even IP laws are not cast in stone, and must be adapted to changing situation in technology and society. They were lucky that they were able to profit from it, but luck ran out, and their privilege will be taken away -- just like it happened thousands of time in history. Magical word "property" doesn't matter -- slaves were "property", too, yet social progress made slavery obsolete, and more advanced relationships between employer and employees taken its place, and now no sane person would justify restoration of slavery by applying the idea of "property rights" that former slave owners had over slaves and their families. The same thing will happen with intellectual property -- when existing model stops working new one takes its places, regardless of old laws, dogmas, threats and propaganda.
An operating system is the software that
comes with a computer (or OS distribution) that programmers and users need to make
themselves productive.
This is not a valid definition -- it's just some arbitrary opinion shaped as one, and the whole article is written around this. I, and probably a lot of other people, disagree with it and consider it to be just as ridiculous as a definition of lunch as a meal packed in a brown bag that one gets from relatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be a moron. Proxiweb can't make any use of that positioning because THERE ISN'T ENOUGH SPACE ON PALM SCREEN. Just to be more or less readable text must be re-formatted, and actually developers of that browser went a long way to make it usable with all kinds of tables, images, etc. that in most of cases wouldn't be readable at all if the screen was just a scrollable window into "perfectly correctly" rendered page -- I will get RSI just from trying to scroll through that monstrosity.
So, developers of the browser are right, and pixel-positioning/overCSS'ing/flash/javascript based design is wrong -- not because of standards but because browser developers made a genuine and mostly successful effort to make their product usable. In the original spirit of the HTML ideas they tried to accomodate whatever will be possible to accomodate into the form that is most useful for the user. And both "standardizators" and stupid "web designers" did their parts in a job that bastardized the web, and made it impossible to accomplish browser's task on their pages, no matter how hard its developers would try to do that. Unless a browser runs on high-resolution screen that I can't put into my pocket, and uses countless megabytes of memory to do the rendering and interpreting.
Positioning anything 'pixel' wise requires a lot of coding trickery, Table and cell backgrounds render incorrectly - the list goes on.
You want pixels? How about displaying on my PalmIII? Why Yahoo works absolutely perfectly with my PalmIIIc and Browse-it (aka Proxiweb), and a bunch of sites written "pixel-positioned" looks like a pile of dog shit? Why every gorilla with a keyboard wants to make his stupid page display like it's a freaking laminated brochure? Aren't you and your company the real source of the problem?
It doesn't work on those platforms. It crashes and hungs, and in brief periods of time between crashes it doesn't behave properly. Ports are broken beyond repair, and all their development was abandoned.
The "problem" is, NETSCAPE 6 DOESN'T EXIST! No such thing, and won't appear for months. No one uses prereleases. There is no product yet, and when there will be one, most likely it will be based on whatever Mozilla developers will have by then -- and even now most of mentioned bugs are fixed.
Slightly OT, but slightly related... Tell me this: how is it that I can have a FULLY functioning X11 server in win32 in about 2 megs of RAM when XFree86 takes like 30? What a piece of shit.
Because in Windows all system memory is accounted separately, plus you are looking at it with no bitmaps loaded. Think of it, if you have loaded a fullscreen background, how much memory will be 1024x768x24bpp? That's more than 2M already.
Why would anyone want to do such a stupid thing? Especially considering that your arguments about NT kernel being "better" are, to say least dubious? Why would anyone want to waste time just to make such a monster?
8ball.federated.com probably gets a lot of traffic unrelated to Slashdot -- authors describe mechanical problems caused by constantly pouring requests. As for Mozilla, now it supports mime multipart just fine -- I know because my webcam uses it.
The fact that standards will be published changes nothing -- convoluted enough standards (most of XML-related standards are convoluted, and ALL standards made with Microsoft's involvement are extermely convoluted) can't be implemented properly, completely and with satisfactory interoperability unless resources involved are significantly larger than ones available.
So corner-cutting will be rampant (and no two implementations will work with each other because properly implemented subsets will differ), or data model involved will mirror internal data model of some proprietary system (COM is most likely candidate), leaving others with huge and painful work of shoehorning everything else into that model. Or both.
Copyright ownership does not protects the owner from fair use. Only if material is not available to the public at all in any form, its author or owner can determine, what can be done with it, as that means that he possesses all copies, but as long as copies are sold, they are owned by whoever bought them, and all limitations to what copyright does and doesn't protect can be applied -- the same mechanism that prevents me to duplicate all my CDs (or DVDs) and sell copies, thus competing with copyright owner prevents copyright owner from determining, how I can quote their work, what devices I can use to view or listen to them, or even from making copies for my own use.
Fair use, what in turn is an equivalent property rights. Obtaining copyrighted information gives receiver the ability to use it within fair use limits (what obviously includes viewing -- or otherwise nothing at all is obtained, but in exactly the same manner includes fair use). If obtaining anything copyrighted or containing copyrighted works will give the buyer anything less, very basic rights are violated. Without DMCA, even if seller does something to prevent some kind of fair use, it is a nuisance that buyer can suffer, yet it will be perfectly legal to go through some, possibly painful and time-consuming process and still exercise fair use rights. With DMCA such process suddently becomes illegal.
Really? Then I am the same guy who spent hours copying pieces of screenshot into Director, just to avoid using the real thing.
Very few. A lot of them were high-profile though.
As for central control: this explains why a.) Soviet housing was superior to housing in the west, b.) migration from NT to W2K is painless. (Both false, of course. Just spoke with someone whose application/site went down for two weeks after migrating from NT to W2K.
Believe it or not, as a person who moved from xSU to US in 1993 I can confirm that most of Soviet apartment buildings were superior to almost anything available at any reasonable cost in US. The reason was the fact that cost cutting at the expense of quality and durability was absolutely pointless in the economy where government paid for everything, so while extreme luxury was unavailable, and nothing was obtainable fast, reasonable quality was maintained. In Gomel, Belarus my family (me + parents + grandparents) lived in an apartment with two living rooms, two bedrooms, large kitchen, separate bathroom and tiolet, in nice-looking, clean, 9-floors all-concrete building with central heating, working ventilation system in kitchen (that had nothing to do with windows or heating), large windows with two layers of glass in separate frames, and two balconies in both living rooms. In US my parents and grandparents live in a "standard" wooden frame+panels house (parents call dry walls "cardboard", as they are not accustomed to walls shaking and making hollow sounds when something falls on them) with more space yet less convenience, and I rent one-bedroom apartment in SF Bay Area, with the second worst heating system that I have seen in my life, ventilation implemented by myself by placing a temporary fan into half-open window, and barely usable kitchen. Of course, both my rent and parents' mortgage far exceed anything that ever was paid by Soviet government for apartment in Gomel, however apparently american economy produces vast majority most of things at the worst level of quality that can be tolerated by consumers without causing large number of those consumers to start making things by themselves.
Wait, now I get it, that applies to operating systems, too.
Water is recycled, waste is placed in used cargo ships and burned with them in the atmosphere.
(they don't take showers, for example)
Actually they do. Space station != shuttle.
Corel promised to support Microsoft's ".NET", whatever it really is. I have no idea how, and what will Corel do with its Linux software -- ".NET" is supposed to be tied to Windows.
It can send redirection responses instead of forwarding the request, and this is exactly what I see on all IP addresses that www.hotmail.com corredponds to -- it sends redirects to other Local Directors, with "IIS 5" in the header, but without touching any IIS box. That kind of response is hard to miss -- it violates HTTP standard by not waiting for the empty line at the end of the header. Initial redirects cause users to be scattered over a number of hosts where their sessions continue, and those hosts are actually other Local Directors, distributing requests among boxes that appear to be W2K.
Actually they run two layers of Cisco Local Directors. www.hotmail.com box _is_ Local Director (configured with "Server:" line in its header saying "IIS"), doing redirections to all other Local Directors, who in their turn do load-balancing over unknown (however probably ridiculously large if they needed two layers of Local Directors) number of Windows 2000 boxes. That configuration probably would work at existing load even if they had PC/XT running DOS 2.20 as servers.
Yeah. Like certain immature act of vandalism in Boston harbor, that involved throwing imported tea in the water.
You will see it all when they will design solar panels after Pikachu's tail.
And please, explain me, what do you think, I owe you? "Opportunity" to work for you? I was paid for my hard work, company made good profit, government got taxes from both, and if anyone still owes something it's definitely not me. Oh, BTW, I am one of those people who are waiting for their immigration papers after H1B expired, and I will get a green card even if you don't like it.
First, 8-bit computers are still in use now, and their bus width does not prevent them from dealing with data of any format.
Second, DNS already is in use, and NOONE BUT "UNICODERS" EVER COMPLAINED about ASCII use in it. There is no demand for this feature, only some people's desire to break all existing software to sell "updates".
Domain name is an address. Address should be reachable from everywhere and everything. This works even for postal addresses -- I can write them in English, and they will reach the intended destination in any country, be it US, Spain, Russia or Japan. The same functionality is available now with DNS, but if this proposal will be implemented, it won't be available from every computer unless everyone will switch to Unicode -- and that won't happen until Hell freezes over (being Russian I have all reasons to be sure about that).
If someone is too concerned about "good-looking" addresses, they should implement some name-translation service like AOL keywords for people who don't like DNS, but the basic architecture of the Internet should not lose interoperability just because someone wants to add one useless feature to his shitty software.
This is a bad idea -- domain names must be interoperable on all systems, with or without Unicode or any other charset support, with or without keyboard capable of entering certain characters. The ASCII subset allowed in DNS now is the only subset supported by absolutely all computers (even ones that natively use EBCDIC), and no matter how the use of other charsets (and/or Unicode) will expand, this is not going to change. I see it as an attempt to just promote "unicodefication" of existing standards for no good reason.
And if anyone cares, my native language has nothing to do with ASCII.
While this may seem like a heavily Draconian method, the question is: what else can they realistcally do to curb piracy?
They can do nothing, wipe foam from their faces and start thinking, what model they can use to still benefit from that even if it will drastically reduce their profits. And if they will find none they can just leave music alone and let other, more smart people, get into that field.
There is nothing in the nature of music that gives them right to make their current amount of profit from it, and even IP laws are not cast in stone, and must be adapted to changing situation in technology and society. They were lucky that they were able to profit from it, but luck ran out, and their privilege will be taken away -- just like it happened thousands of time in history. Magical word "property" doesn't matter -- slaves were "property", too, yet social progress made slavery obsolete, and more advanced relationships between employer and employees taken its place, and now no sane person would justify restoration of slavery by applying the idea of "property rights" that former slave owners had over slaves and their families. The same thing will happen with intellectual property -- when existing model stops working new one takes its places, regardless of old laws, dogmas, threats and propaganda.
An operating system is the software that comes with a computer (or OS distribution) that programmers and users need to make themselves productive.
This is not a valid definition -- it's just some arbitrary opinion shaped as one, and the whole article is written around this. I, and probably a lot of other people, disagree with it and consider it to be just as ridiculous as a definition of lunch as a meal packed in a brown bag that one gets from relatives.