I installed KDE/Linux quite some time ago on a Powerbook because I wanted... real 3-button mouse support. (Not that half-assed 2-button support in MacOSX)
Could you explain this please? Apple's laptops all ship with one-button trackpads, and installing Linux and KDE doesn't change that. I'm using a three-button mouse plugged into my iBook running Mac OS X, and have absolutely no complaints about support (except for Firefox, which is fixed in 1.1).
Now that I think about it, I suppose I don't use my middle button outside of a browser. It never really occurred to me that I should want to. Enlighten me - how do you use yours, other than for pasting text you've highlighted? (I absolutely HATE HATE HATE that behavior in X11, by the way.)
Agreed. I have the current released binary version of Safari (2.0, build 412) on Mac OS X 10.4.1 (build 8B15) and it does NOT pass. I wouldn't be surprised if Safari 2.0.1 is included with Mac OS X 10.4.2 in a few weeks... but I also wouldn't be surprised if it isn't, and Konqueror ships first.
The fact that a browser can display broken css is nice, but isn't displaying proper CSS properly a bit more important?
No.
Actually, others have pointed out that Acid2 tests several things, and error handling is only one of the areas it tests for, so yes, it DOES test whether a browser can display proper CSS, as well as whether it can handle broken CSS properly.
But remember when Internet Explorer 4 started pulling ahead in the previous browser war? One reason was, when Netscape tries to render HTML that is completely horribly broken (e.g. table cells that have no closing tags) it just gives up in confusion and displays nothing (good behavior according to the spec), but MSIE would make a "best guess" at what the web designer meant, and render it anyway. This led to web designers and users thinking "hey, this page works fine in MSIE but not in Netscape, Netscape must be broken", instead of "this page is broken, which is why Netscape doesn't render it the way it was intended". This encouraged web developers to start ignoring Netscape and just go ahead and write broken code (that MSIE could still understand), which encouraged users to use MSIE because web sites wouldn't work in Netscape.
So yes, handling broken code properly (according to the spec, which other browsers will strive to adhere to eventually as well) is just as important as handling good code properly (which the other browsers don't currently do either). It's a good goal to shoot for, and I think even Microsoft is starting to move in that direction (I certainly don't expect IE7 to pass Acid2, but I bet there are at least some engineers at Microsoft who think they should try to get as close as they can, and I doubt anyone there actually believes making IE pass Acid2 would hurt their business in any way).
I just blew all my mod points, but this is exactly it - if this rumor is true, it means Intel will start making PowerPC chips.
The idea that Apple would switch to x86 simply doesn't make sense. There are no drivers, and no applications. Of course Apple would continue using their own hardware and would port their own applications, so such a machine wouldn't be a complete paperweight, but seriously, without backwards-compatibility (via PearPC etc.), why would someone want one?
Exactly! They also took Fast user switching, among other things.
Erm, no, Apple took fast user switching from Microsoft; Steve Jobs admitted this when the feature was announced in OSX (but Apple's implementation is prettier, with a 3-D rotating cube effect when you switch desktops).
Sounds like Javascript is being turned into a client-side version of PHP. Do we need another version of PHP?
PHP is server-side, so this is a completely stupid comparison. "Do we need another...?" On the client side, JavaScript is pretty much all we've got, so yeah, if we want more client-side functionality, JavaScript is the place to put it.
Besides, PHP is a terrible language. Sure, it's a lot nicer than C, and people with no background in either C or UNIX find it initially less confusing than Perl (which borrows a lot from both C and UNIX conventions), and the php.net documentation is very nicely presented. But here's why PHP sucks. Personally I find JavaScript's syntax for, say, handling regular expressions to be far less awkward and confusing than PHP's. JavaScript feels much more consistent to me.
Great more exstentions, more media I want to block, ugh...
I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about. These extensions to JavaScript will make the language easier to program in, which will be nice for the parts of Mozilla that are written in JavaScript (quite a bit, actually) and for things like Firefox extensions. It doesn't sound like they'll provide any undesirable functionality - we're not talking about floating popup windows here.
Why can't anyone write something to block all of this stuff out, I don't want to see graphics, or animations, or hear sounds,
That's precisely what several Firefox extensions do, and these additions to JavaScript will make extensions like that easier to write and maintain (and probably faster to use and smaller to download).
I love Opera, and it is my browser of choice but I still have to deal with unwanted flash animations.
Well, maybe you should switch to Firefox with the FlashBlock extension. Or if you really never want to see Flash animations, you could always uninstall the Flash plugin...
I also middle-click to open new tabs in Safari (this is broken in Firefox 1.0 but will be fixed in 1.1, see bug 151249), and I can scroll both horizontally and vertically.
Yes, Apple makes one-button mice, because they're much less confusing to inexperienced users. Get over it.
Yep, I worked in Phoenix; got out before the worst came (McQ was still there, but I think they had stopped listening to him by then). I recommended Earthlink's service at the time, but I sure as hell don't now.
Someone just pointed me to StarterSSL which is $20/yr with no chained-root hassle. Wish I'd heard of them before paying $30 at GoDaddy (which does have the chained-root hassle).
Couldn't the same be said about internet browsers? I want a browser to do just that.... browse. I don't need it to fix my spelling, that's what my dictionary is for.
Ah, you're obviously not a Mac user. The browser IS simple; the browser doesn't fix your spelling. The browser uses standard system APIs for text input, and the OS checks your spelling using the same standard dictionaries. The same spell checker is used whether I'm posting to Slashdot in Safari, writing an e-mail, chatting in iChat or X-Chat, or typing in TextEdit. This means that if I right-click a word and select "Learn Spelling", I'll never be bothered about that word again, no matter which application I happen to be using. It also means that if I change my preferred language in System Preferences (or just change to a different dialect, like British English instead of U. S. English) and relaunch my applications, spell check works with the new language automatically.
Finally, who in their right mind would host any type of server on a Windows or Macintosh machine? Hence the Linux boxes.
I use Linux for my dedicated servers too, but the fact that things like Apache, Samba and sshd are installed by default on my laptop comes in awfully handy from time to time. Not to mention a local copy of the complete Apache documentation, which is nice when I'm trying to remember the syntax for some obscure mod_rewrite thing while I'm on the road.
Also you cant simply unlock a configuration option temporary, no you have to be an administrator.
On XP, right-click, "Run as..."
It's not as smooth as OSX for control panel settings, but it DOES work. You don't have to log out and log in as another user - and if you did, there's fast user switching for that (the feature so handy, Apple copied it from Microsoft).
This page was on a public web page (so that my fellow Konqueror or Safari users can use it too), but eventually the page got noticed by the bank, and I got a rather threatening call from them about this violation of their intellectual property....
Next time, set up some JavaScript-based browser detection on your page that denies them access if they're running IE.
If it is illegal for children to view the restricted materials, charge the person who gave them access with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Which person is that? The parent or other adult whose card number the child stole while the adult was asleep or otherwise occupied? The librarian who wasn't looking over the child's shoulder? The IT people who designed the computer system to require an adult's library card number?
The solution is to tell those parents to watch their own stinking kids.
Parents cannot and should not monitor their children 100% of the time. They can, however, make sure their children are going to places and doing things that the parents approve of - for example, going to the library, but only if they're not allowed unrestricted access to the Internet while they're there. Obviously censorship software has many flaws, but most people don't understand that, and that's not really the issue here (that's a separate discussion).
The problem is this: a parent decides that it's OK for their kids to go to the library unsupervised (as I often did when I was young), and trusts them to not cause problems. The parent trusts the library's staff and computer systems to prevent the child from browsing porn. These assumptions are both reasonable. What the parent doesn't know is that the child has stolen the parent's library card bar code number, and is using that to gain unrestricted access to the computers.
How about making sure that the computers the kids use have big screens, clearly visible to all?
How about respecting privacy, when a child wants to look up non-offensive information on embarrassing subjects?
Any techie at a company remembers many others' passwords, especially if its like their last name etc.
Not necessarily. I've sorta trained myself not to remember other people's passwords, unless I need to use them on a recurring basis, which a good techie shouldn't have to. I DON'T WANT other people's passwords clogging up my brain.
This is why the Avalon Graphics system of Longhorn is so important. Scaling of both text and images are no longer limited to a pixelated basis as the current version of WindowsXP and YES, even OSX.
Yeah, Mac OS X 10.5 will have better support for scaling stuff, and Apple has been encouraging developers to design their apps with this in mind for nearly a year now (and providing a tool for testing it)... but it does require application support, in order to not completely suck. Small graphics scaled up look like crap, especially at odd sizes (e.g. scaling from 100dpi to 160dpi), no matter how good your scaling algorithm is. So, apps need to be designed to use large hi-res graphics that can be scaled down, and designed with a layout that isn't constrained to pixel sizes. This is more challenging than it may sound.
You would do a better job using the "National Enquirer"s fact finding teams, or even the "Weekly World News". You would get a much more accurate report.
Has the $10,000 reward been claimed, then? Cuz last I heard, he was still offering that to anyone who could find a factual error in Fahrenheit 9/11.
Like Jordan Hubbard, who is continuing to work on FreeBSD in his spare time, but also has a good paying job doing work he presumably enjoys and putting food on his table. Yeah, giving him a job was a real blow to the community.
forking OSS projects
Like forking WebCore off from KHTML to produce the first browser to pass Acid2, and inspiring interesting (if bizarre) things like the Gtk+ WebCore Project, which is a port of Apple's fork to Gtk+. Meanwhile, Konqueror has gotten a lot of positive press, for example:
When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup performance...
Meanwhile on the Konqueror News page you'll see things like "ships with most of the khtml improvements which Apple supplied" and "this release ships more WebCore merges." Yeah, sure looks like a lot of harm was done there!
Slashdot Mirror
I installed KDE/Linux quite some time ago on a Powerbook because I wanted... real 3-button mouse support. (Not that half-assed 2-button support in MacOSX)
Could you explain this please? Apple's laptops all ship with one-button trackpads, and installing Linux and KDE doesn't change that. I'm using a three-button mouse plugged into my iBook running Mac OS X, and have absolutely no complaints about support (except for Firefox, which is fixed in 1.1).
Now that I think about it, I suppose I don't use my middle button outside of a browser. It never really occurred to me that I should want to. Enlighten me - how do you use yours, other than for pasting text you've highlighted? (I absolutely HATE HATE HATE that behavior in X11, by the way.)
Agreed. I have the current released binary version of Safari (2.0, build 412) on Mac OS X 10.4.1 (build 8B15) and it does NOT pass. I wouldn't be surprised if Safari 2.0.1 is included with Mac OS X 10.4.2 in a few weeks... but I also wouldn't be surprised if it isn't, and Konqueror ships first.
The fact that a browser can display broken css is nice, but isn't displaying proper CSS properly a bit more important?
No.
Actually, others have pointed out that Acid2 tests several things, and error handling is only one of the areas it tests for, so yes, it DOES test whether a browser can display proper CSS, as well as whether it can handle broken CSS properly.
But remember when Internet Explorer 4 started pulling ahead in the previous browser war? One reason was, when Netscape tries to render HTML that is completely horribly broken (e.g. table cells that have no closing tags) it just gives up in confusion and displays nothing (good behavior according to the spec), but MSIE would make a "best guess" at what the web designer meant, and render it anyway. This led to web designers and users thinking "hey, this page works fine in MSIE but not in Netscape, Netscape must be broken", instead of "this page is broken, which is why Netscape doesn't render it the way it was intended". This encouraged web developers to start ignoring Netscape and just go ahead and write broken code (that MSIE could still understand), which encouraged users to use MSIE because web sites wouldn't work in Netscape.
So yes, handling broken code properly (according to the spec, which other browsers will strive to adhere to eventually as well) is just as important as handling good code properly (which the other browsers don't currently do either). It's a good goal to shoot for, and I think even Microsoft is starting to move in that direction (I certainly don't expect IE7 to pass Acid2, but I bet there are at least some engineers at Microsoft who think they should try to get as close as they can, and I doubt anyone there actually believes making IE pass Acid2 would hurt their business in any way).
I just blew all my mod points, but this is exactly it - if this rumor is true, it means Intel will start making PowerPC chips.
The idea that Apple would switch to x86 simply doesn't make sense. There are no drivers, and no applications. Of course Apple would continue using their own hardware and would port their own applications, so such a machine wouldn't be a complete paperweight, but seriously, without backwards-compatibility (via PearPC etc.), why would someone want one?
How does volume help Apple?
Apple hasn't been able to produce enough high-end PowerMacs to keep up with demand in YEARS, due mostly to availability of the CPUs.
Exactly! They also took Fast user switching, among other things.
Erm, no, Apple took fast user switching from Microsoft; Steve Jobs admitted this when the feature was announced in OSX (but Apple's implementation is prettier, with a 3-D rotating cube effect when you switch desktops).
This one costs $20?
Sounds like Javascript is being turned into a client-side version of PHP. Do we need another version of PHP?
PHP is server-side, so this is a completely stupid comparison. "Do we need another...?" On the client side, JavaScript is pretty much all we've got, so yeah, if we want more client-side functionality, JavaScript is the place to put it.
Besides, PHP is a terrible language. Sure, it's a lot nicer than C, and people with no background in either C or UNIX find it initially less confusing than Perl (which borrows a lot from both C and UNIX conventions), and the php.net documentation is very nicely presented. But here's why PHP sucks. Personally I find JavaScript's syntax for, say, handling regular expressions to be far less awkward and confusing than PHP's. JavaScript feels much more consistent to me.
Great more exstentions, more media I want to block, ugh...
I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about. These extensions to JavaScript will make the language easier to program in, which will be nice for the parts of Mozilla that are written in JavaScript (quite a bit, actually) and for things like Firefox extensions. It doesn't sound like they'll provide any undesirable functionality - we're not talking about floating popup windows here.
Why can't anyone write something to block all of this stuff out, I don't want to see graphics, or animations, or hear sounds,
That's precisely what several Firefox extensions do, and these additions to JavaScript will make extensions like that easier to write and maintain (and probably faster to use and smaller to download).
I love Opera, and it is my browser of choice but I still have to deal with unwanted flash animations.
Well, maybe you should switch to Firefox with the FlashBlock extension. Or if you really never want to see Flash animations, you could always uninstall the Flash plugin...
Yes, I said right-click, on a Mac.
I also middle-click to open new tabs in Safari (this is broken in Firefox 1.0 but will be fixed in 1.1, see bug 151249), and I can scroll both horizontally and vertically.
Yes, Apple makes one-button mice, because they're much less confusing to inexperienced users. Get over it.
Yep, I worked in Phoenix; got out before the worst came (McQ was still there, but I think they had stopped listening to him by then). I recommended Earthlink's service at the time, but I sure as hell don't now.
Someone just pointed me to StarterSSL which is $20/yr with no chained-root hassle. Wish I'd heard of them before paying $30 at GoDaddy (which does have the chained-root hassle).
Couldn't the same be said about internet browsers? I want a browser to do just that.... browse. I don't need it to fix my spelling, that's what my dictionary is for.
Ah, you're obviously not a Mac user. The browser IS simple; the browser doesn't fix your spelling. The browser uses standard system APIs for text input, and the OS checks your spelling using the same standard dictionaries. The same spell checker is used whether I'm posting to Slashdot in Safari, writing an e-mail, chatting in iChat or X-Chat, or typing in TextEdit. This means that if I right-click a word and select "Learn Spelling", I'll never be bothered about that word again, no matter which application I happen to be using. It also means that if I change my preferred language in System Preferences (or just change to a different dialect, like British English instead of U. S. English) and relaunch my applications, spell check works with the new language automatically.
Finally, who in their right mind would host any type of server on a Windows or Macintosh machine? Hence the Linux boxes.
I use Linux for my dedicated servers too, but the fact that things like Apache, Samba and sshd are installed by default on my laptop comes in awfully handy from time to time. Not to mention a local copy of the complete Apache documentation, which is nice when I'm trying to remember the syntax for some obscure mod_rewrite thing while I'm on the road.
1) hire cool web search programmers to infect the OSX
I see this as being the most likely thing. I'm not saying Microsoft will hire them, but malware will come to OSX within the next few years.
Also you cant simply unlock a configuration option temporary, no you have to be an administrator.
On XP, right-click, "Run as..."
It's not as smooth as OSX for control panel settings, but it DOES work. You don't have to log out and log in as another user - and if you did, there's fast user switching for that (the feature so handy, Apple copied it from Microsoft).
This page was on a public web page (so that my fellow Konqueror or Safari users can use it too), but eventually the page got noticed by the bank, and I got a rather threatening call from them about this violation of their intellectual property....
Next time, set up some JavaScript-based browser detection on your page that denies them access if they're running IE.
If it is illegal for children to view the restricted materials, charge the person who gave them access with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Which person is that? The parent or other adult whose card number the child stole while the adult was asleep or otherwise occupied? The librarian who wasn't looking over the child's shoulder? The IT people who designed the computer system to require an adult's library card number?
The solution is to tell those parents to watch their own stinking kids.
Parents cannot and should not monitor their children 100% of the time. They can, however, make sure their children are going to places and doing things that the parents approve of - for example, going to the library, but only if they're not allowed unrestricted access to the Internet while they're there. Obviously censorship software has many flaws, but most people don't understand that, and that's not really the issue here (that's a separate discussion).
The problem is this: a parent decides that it's OK for their kids to go to the library unsupervised (as I often did when I was young), and trusts them to not cause problems. The parent trusts the library's staff and computer systems to prevent the child from browsing porn. These assumptions are both reasonable. What the parent doesn't know is that the child has stolen the parent's library card bar code number, and is using that to gain unrestricted access to the computers.
How about making sure that the computers the kids use have big screens, clearly visible to all?
How about respecting privacy, when a child wants to look up non-offensive information on embarrassing subjects?
Yeah, I was hoping for this too - mine doesn't hold a charge as long as it did when it was new. No free replacement for me, though!
Well, you know what they say...
Kinky is using a feather.
Perverse is using the whole chicken.
Any techie at a company remembers many others' passwords, especially if its like their last name etc.
Not necessarily. I've sorta trained myself not to remember other people's passwords, unless I need to use them on a recurring basis, which a good techie shouldn't have to. I DON'T WANT other people's passwords clogging up my brain.
This is why the Avalon Graphics system of Longhorn is so important. Scaling of both text and images are no longer limited to a pixelated basis as the current version of WindowsXP and YES, even OSX.
Yeah, Mac OS X 10.5 will have better support for scaling stuff, and Apple has been encouraging developers to design their apps with this in mind for nearly a year now (and providing a tool for testing it)... but it does require application support, in order to not completely suck. Small graphics scaled up look like crap, especially at odd sizes (e.g. scaling from 100dpi to 160dpi), no matter how good your scaling algorithm is. So, apps need to be designed to use large hi-res graphics that can be scaled down, and designed with a layout that isn't constrained to pixel sizes. This is more challenging than it may sound.
You know it's not kosher to paint KDE's users as idiots.
:-)
Well, the word I used was naïve; the word Zack Rusin used was clueless.
However, perhaps I misspoke when I said KDE users - I should have said jackasses on Slashdot.
You would do a better job using the "National Enquirer"s fact finding teams, or even the "Weekly World News". You would get a much more accurate report.
Has the $10,000 reward been claimed, then? Cuz last I heard, he was still offering that to anyone who could find a factual error in Fahrenheit 9/11.
Like Jordan Hubbard, who is continuing to work on FreeBSD in his spare time, but also has a good paying job doing work he presumably enjoys and putting food on his table. Yeah, giving him a job was a real blow to the community.
forking OSS projects
Like forking WebCore off from KHTML to produce the first browser to pass Acid2, and inspiring interesting (if bizarre) things like the Gtk+ WebCore Project, which is a port of Apple's fork to Gtk+. Meanwhile, Konqueror has gotten a lot of positive press, for example:
Meanwhile on the Konqueror News page you'll see things like "ships with most of the khtml improvements which Apple supplied" and "this release ships more WebCore merges." Yeah, sure looks like a lot of harm was done there!
selling their expensive hardware
Hardware like the cheapest PowerPC system you can buy.
what they claim to be the best OS/Desktop ever.
Show me an OS vendor who doesn't claim theirs is the best ever.
Meanwhile they contribute crap back to the FOSS projects
Crap which those projects then incorporate into their future releases, because the project maintainers think it's a good idea.
A lame way to sell hardware apple.
How would you suggest they sell their hardware?