Was I wrong to get ordinary users to start using a pre-release version of a great browser???
Yes, since they're ordinary users and not technical types who understand what you're getting them into...
You mention problems with upgrading Firefox but version 1.0 is the first version that the general public should be using. There have been no upgrades from that yet.
We at Dialog (and parent company Thomson) do, imbecile. We rely on firewalls and anti-virus (on desktops and e-mail servers). I personally use Mozilla Suite.
Although we are permitted to keep our Windows desktop PCs updated (our IT support department don't do it for us despite having several remote management systems) we have been told to not install XP SP2. After reading various reports of problems being caused, I can see why.
And only a tiny minority of our desktop PCs (one in ten or less) are using XP in the first place. Most of the remainder are 2000, some are 98 and there's even a few 95 around.
This is the corporate world. They don't like change, and- if they're wise- avoid the latest versions of things because they won't want four thousand employees immobilised and calling IT support for help.
You can have a "good centralised, computer system" if you want. All it will be is a single repository for information which already exists in various repositories. If people can't, don't or won't follow correct procedures for using the existing repositories, what makes you think they'll behave any differently with a new "good centralised, computer system"? True, computers never make mistakes. But people are the weak link here, and they'll still be part of any new system so a new system won't fix anything.
And don't forget, the average criminal is smarter, more inventive and much more motivated than the average non-criminal. Your "good centralised, computer system" will be cracked and compromised (and thus rendered unreliable and useless) within hours or days of going live, regardless of what 'security' measures are implemented, because it'll be such a high-profile high-value target. The ID cards will be forged too, because anything which can be manufactured and read can be copied and an ID card will be a similarly high-profile high-value target.
If you're being modded down then it's because you're wrong, not because people merely disagree with you.
And what if the "tin-foil hat brigade" are *right*..?
> eliminate (or severely reduce) state benefit fraud
Why don't current facilities already do this? What makes you think that the flaws in current systems won't also affect a system based on ID cards?
> prevent so-called NHS tourists sponging off our already over-stretched health system
You're opposed to helping those in need? And the main problem affecting the NHS is poor and mismanaged funding. Their money is misused to fund expensive unnecesary technologies or tiers of ineffective management. And imagine what they could be done if the taxpayers' money (at least [GBP]3,000,000,000.000) which would be wasted on the ID card system is instead given to the NHS...
> prevent punk-ass 15-year old kids getting into pubs, getting pissed and then tearing up town centres
Oh, please, the pub landlords and off-licence operators should already be preventing this and they don't. There are already several usable methods of proving age, including a photocard. Just having a new form of ID won't make them suddenly do their job properly.
> allow people that don't want to learn to drive to have some form of ID card that is actually accepted everywhere
I can't drive. I already have plenty of forms of ID which are accepted everywhere (credit cards, bank statements, utility bills, passport...).
> prevent known peadophiles from being able to get jobs anywhere near children
Another fiction. You seem to feel that an ID card is a magic wand which can do all sorts of things which existing procedures and forms of ID don't do, and will fix all the flaws in existing procedures (e.g. checking whether someone is a registered sex offender).
> cut down on illegal immigration
Eh? How? Currently someone can sneak into the country and take a job with a morally dubious employer who is more interested in maximising profit than in following employment law. You believe that if ID cards are introduced then the morally dubious employer will suddenly decide to follow employment law?
ID cards are not needed to solve these problems, or cannot solve the problems, or the problem doesn't even exist.
Here's a clue: The problem with the numerous current forms of ID is not the IDs themselves- it's *people* who fail to follow the relevant procedures properly. We absolutely don't need ID cards, what we need is for people to be more responsible and to do their jobs properly. And, yes, to fix flaws in existing procedures. An ID card, or associated laws and punishments, can't and won't magically cause any of those things to happen.
I'd *love* to hear/ watch the Christopher Lee interview, but I'm using a web browser which correctly does what servers tell it to do (I know of only one which doesn't, and I don't have access to it).
The interview is apparently in plain text (the server says "text/plain") so my web browser displays it. It's gibberish, certainly not plain text. What is it? I don't know, and why should I know. Why isn't their server telling me what it *really* is?
This kind of sloppiness puts me off a company's products. Bye, Sony.
I can't, offhand, think of a country I'd consider a democracy. There are some which allow their citizens to have a limited influence on a limited number of issues, but I can't think of a democracy.
So... your electorate is duped into following this plan;
* Vote for the person most likely to get more votes than the person you don't want to see in power
Whereas they should be following this plan;
* Vote for the person you most want to see in power
That's... really broken. I mean, what's going on there? How can it work properly?
And no, neither the UK nor USA is a democracy. Increasingly I see them as dictatorships, where we merely get to elect the prettiest dictator every few years. Man, that sucks.
It seems to me that 'terrorists' is merely a label used by the media, politicians, et al to describe people fighting a war they don't understand, or acknowledge. Perhaps they arrogantly don't realise that they themselves can be perceived as an enemy.
True, 'terrorist' actions harm, murder, innocent people- but so do conventional army actions. I'd be curious if anyone can tally up the number of innocents who died in American military actions versus the number of innocent Americans who died in 'terrorist' actions over the last, say, ten years. I have no idea what the result would be; I'm genuinely interested.
As for whether the 'terrorist threat' is ever growing, or even exists... well... here in England we've recently had peaceful protesters scale Buckingham Palace and The London Eye, 'invade' the house of commons, and been shocked at the shambolic and fraudulent security procedures at Manchester Airport. If there are billions, millions, thousands, hundreds or even merely tens of terrorists waiting to pounce on us- why hadn't they taken advantage of those opportunities?
Are you saying that no matter who you vote for, only the two 'big' candidates/ parties are eligible to win? So if 90% of voters voted for Michael Badnarik (I believe he represents your Libertarian Party), Dubya would win regardless?
I'm confused. Apparently I don't understand your American version of 'democracy'.
Extrapolation: Inventing information which wasn't stored before. How do you know whether what you've invented (read: guessed) correctly matches what was present but not stored?
I know they're getting really good at guessing accurately, but it's still *guessing*! Often it's better to stick to information which you know is correct than to add a guess which is only *probably* correct (even for large values of "probably").
Do the restored movies look better? Or just different in a way that aesthetically pleases him?
#5 Some day, the Mozilla development teams, will find a way to Integrate Thunderbird, Firefox, and Sunbird into something more productive. Just not today.
Presumably the integration framework will be called Sunderfox.
Apparently you've bullied Matthew Somerville into removing a perfectly harmless and very useful web site which made up for the failings of your own web site.
Shame on you, you big bullies. How very pathetic of you.
Couldn't you have shown some wisdom and maturity and negotiated a mutually beneficial compromise with him? Have I misread the e-mail which offers to work to just such a compromise, and reminds you that Matthew already helped you fix security on your own site? How can you be so ungrateful?
I would have thought that you'd want as many people as possible to have as much access to information about your cinemas (movies, show times, etc.) as possible.
I exclusively use Mozilla (Seamonkey) 1.6 for web browsing due to the vast number of security flaws and broken/ missing features in Internet Explorer. Because your site is broken I cannot see it in Mozilla, so sites like Matthew's are invaluable.
I won't be visiting the Odeon cinemas in Leicester Square or Hemel Hempstead until you've apologised to Matthew for your poor attitude and worked with him to restore his site in a form which is legally acceptable.
Hell, give him a job fixing and/or maintaining your site! He seems to know what he's doing better than your own web developers!
Duncan, appalled in London
PS. Don't waste your time trying to change my attitude or decision.
Some people (possibly including you) have a strange idea of what's at fault if something dioesn't work. Here's a summmary of symptoms and the conclusions which some people leap to;
Hardware doesn't work under Windows
hardware is shitty
Hardware doesn't work under Linux
Linux is shitty
Hardware is old
hardware is shitty
Well, that's what underlies Unix's 'magic' file type recognition. That's fine for local files, but where communications are concerned it's the *server* (or source of the file) which is in charge, and the *browser* (or other destination) should meekly do as it's told.
It always irritates me when I send an XML file as MIME type text/plain so that a user can see it's contents, and IE etc. ignores what I tell it to do and renders it instead. If you see what I mean. It's just wrong, but Microsoft did it for a good reason- too many web servers are misconfigured (e.g. sending everything as text/plain or application/octet-stream) and that was ruining people's 'browsing experience'. Unfortunately the better solution was to get the servers configured correctly rather than compensate for them.
England is a country. As is Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Bits of those countries do share government and law in various combinations (and in some cases "England" is the name of a single entity comprising England and Wales), but they're still separate countries.
Man alive, you could not be more wrong if you attended a degree course in being wrong and failed it. I wouldn't hire you if you were the last 'web developer' on the planet.
If you code to standards- even the subset which Internet Explorer supports (badly)- and don't tie your content (the important bit of a web site!) to some specific feature then you're coding for 100% of the market. Including those who are still tolerating Internet Explorer. And you can still make the site look good, if eye candy is important to you.
And before you get this wrong as well, there's no more effort involved. Indeed, there's less effort because instead of;
Read books on CSS, DOM, JavaScript and HTML
Design standards-compliant code
Find out what equivalent IE-specific features are available
Re-design and write standards-non-compliant code
... you have;
Read books on CSS, DOM, JavaScript and HTML
Design and write standards-compliant code
I'm doing the UI for a big web-based system and because I'm following standards it's going very well. Except when QA bump into an unsolvable IE bug (randomly yellow text boxes- why?!?).
I'd be more than happy to pay artists a fair price (1.00 or so seems fair to me, CD singles are hugely overpriced) for their music in a convenient portable format (e.g. MP3- if I want higher quality I'll buy a CD). I don't want to upset artists. I won't redistribute files if the artist doesn't want me to. I don't particularly care what the record labels want, they don't make the music and as far as I know they don't have a god-given right to make money from someone else's creativity.
Napster's pricing seems fair but they're treating everyone as a potential criminal, guilty until proven innocent, by insisting on Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. So they're imposing their rules rather than trusting their customers to follow them. I would feel insulted if they would even let me be a customer! I can't afford Windows. It's very overpriced software for what it does (badly), even without the cost of hardware which can run it and the cost of cleaning up after the constant virus attacks.
Where Napster is concerned I feel like I have 3 options;
Pirate Windows so that I can use Napster
Illegally download music from some other site
Legally download music by some artist I don't like as much
... those are the only options this new Napster offers me. I don't like any of them.
So, I want a non-Windows (Java?) Napster (or a Napster client) which will let me *buy* and listen to music without assuming that I'm trying to rip off the artist. How about it, hackers? The world wants some code which masquerades as IE and WMP so that Napster subscribers can legally download the music they want to listen to. This shouldn't even try to circumvent the subscription.
I suppose I could just listen to music on the radio, then no one gets any revenue from me... Or try to save up for an iBook and use iTunes (still DRM etc., but avoids Microsoft)...
... their target readership dreams only of guzzling litres of lager while watching clones of Pamela Anderson playing topless football. Phwoar! etc.
Just look at the quote- "they control these like surfboards". Wow... sounds plausible. Sigh. I strongly suspect that whatever actually happens in this scene, the 'insider' or The Sun felt they had to dumb it down so that their readership could understand it- and distorted it in the process. Surfboards!?! Hah!
Personally, I'm hoping to see "Star Wars: Episode III: Return Of The Sith" scroll up the screen. That would follow George's professed style of making movies 'like music', echoing the same riffs and themes throughout the Star Wars sextology.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, since they're ordinary users and not technical types who understand what you're getting them into...
You mention problems with upgrading Firefox but version 1.0 is the first version that the general public should be using. There have been no upgrades from that yet.
We at Dialog (and parent company Thomson) do, imbecile. We rely on firewalls and anti-virus (on desktops and e-mail servers). I personally use Mozilla Suite.
Although we are permitted to keep our Windows desktop PCs updated (our IT support department don't do it for us despite having several remote management systems) we have been told to not install XP SP2. After reading various reports of problems being caused, I can see why.
And only a tiny minority of our desktop PCs (one in ten or less) are using XP in the first place. Most of the remainder are 2000, some are 98 and there's even a few 95 around.
This is the corporate world. They don't like change, and- if they're wise- avoid the latest versions of things because they won't want four thousand employees immobilised and calling IT support for help.
See HEY - I have SO got this sorted., posted 17 minutes earlier than your post.
Didn't you do *any* research?
You can have a "good centralised, computer system" if you want. All it will be is a single repository for information which already exists in various repositories. If people can't, don't or won't follow correct procedures for using the existing repositories, what makes you think they'll behave any differently with a new "good centralised, computer system"? True, computers never make mistakes. But people are the weak link here, and they'll still be part of any new system so a new system won't fix anything.
And don't forget, the average criminal is smarter, more inventive and much more motivated than the average non-criminal. Your "good centralised, computer system" will be cracked and compromised (and thus rendered unreliable and useless) within hours or days of going live, regardless of what 'security' measures are implemented, because it'll be such a high-profile high-value target. The ID cards will be forged too, because anything which can be manufactured and read can be copied and an ID card will be a similarly high-profile high-value target.
If you're being modded down then it's because you're wrong, not because people merely disagree with you.
And what if the "tin-foil hat brigade" are *right*..?
I can easily refute your 'benefits';
> eliminate (or severely reduce) state benefit fraud
Why don't current facilities already do this? What makes you think that the flaws in current systems won't also affect a system based on ID cards?
> prevent so-called NHS tourists sponging off our already over-stretched health system
You're opposed to helping those in need? And the main problem affecting the NHS is poor and mismanaged funding. Their money is misused to fund expensive unnecesary technologies or tiers of ineffective management. And imagine what they could be done if the taxpayers' money (at least [GBP]3,000,000,000.000) which would be wasted on the ID card system is instead given to the NHS...
> prevent punk-ass 15-year old kids getting into pubs, getting pissed and then tearing up town centres
Oh, please, the pub landlords and off-licence operators should already be preventing this and they don't. There are already several usable methods of proving age, including a photocard. Just having a new form of ID won't make them suddenly do their job properly.
> allow people that don't want to learn to drive to have some form of ID card that is actually accepted everywhere
I can't drive. I already have plenty of forms of ID which are accepted everywhere (credit cards, bank statements, utility bills, passport...).
> prevent known peadophiles from being able to get jobs anywhere near children
Another fiction. You seem to feel that an ID card is a magic wand which can do all sorts of things which existing procedures and forms of ID don't do, and will fix all the flaws in existing procedures (e.g. checking whether someone is a registered sex offender).
> cut down on illegal immigration
Eh? How? Currently someone can sneak into the country and take a job with a morally dubious employer who is more interested in maximising profit than in following employment law. You believe that if ID cards are introduced then the morally dubious employer will suddenly decide to follow employment law?
ID cards are not needed to solve these problems, or cannot solve the problems, or the problem doesn't even exist.
Here's a clue: The problem with the numerous current forms of ID is not the IDs themselves- it's *people* who fail to follow the relevant procedures properly. We absolutely don't need ID cards, what we need is for people to be more responsible and to do their jobs properly. And, yes, to fix flaws in existing procedures. An ID card, or associated laws and punishments, can't and won't magically cause any of those things to happen.
Troll.
I'd *love* to hear/ watch the Christopher Lee interview, but I'm using a web browser which correctly does what servers tell it to do (I know of only one which doesn't, and I don't have access to it).
The interview is apparently in plain text (the server says "text/plain") so my web browser displays it. It's gibberish, certainly not plain text. What is it? I don't know, and why should I know. Why isn't their server telling me what it *really* is?
This kind of sloppiness puts me off a company's products. Bye, Sony.
Well, what about all that equipment we're carrying to catalogue gaseous anomalies? The thing's gotta have a tailpipe.
... and did not exist. Try to find a non-fictional example!
What the..?
Whoever moderated the parent and grandparent as "Funny" needs help.
Whoever moderated the parent as "Funny" needs help.
I can't, offhand, think of a country I'd consider a democracy. There are some which allow their citizens to have a limited influence on a limited number of issues, but I can't think of a democracy.
Does that have any relevance to my previous post?
So... your electorate is duped into following this plan;
* Vote for the person most likely to get more votes than the person you don't want to see in power
Whereas they should be following this plan;
* Vote for the person you most want to see in power
That's... really broken. I mean, what's going on there? How can it work properly?
And no, neither the UK nor USA is a democracy. Increasingly I see them as dictatorships, where we merely get to elect the prettiest dictator every few years. Man, that sucks.
It seems to me that 'terrorists' is merely a label used by the media, politicians, et al to describe people fighting a war they don't understand, or acknowledge. Perhaps they arrogantly don't realise that they themselves can be perceived as an enemy.
True, 'terrorist' actions harm, murder, innocent people- but so do conventional army actions. I'd be curious if anyone can tally up the number of innocents who died in American military actions versus the number of innocent Americans who died in 'terrorist' actions over the last, say, ten years. I have no idea what the result would be; I'm genuinely interested.
As for whether the 'terrorist threat' is ever growing, or even exists... well... here in England we've recently had peaceful protesters scale Buckingham Palace and The London Eye, 'invade' the house of commons, and been shocked at the shambolic and fraudulent security procedures at Manchester Airport. If there are billions, millions, thousands, hundreds or even merely tens of terrorists waiting to pounce on us- why hadn't they taken advantage of those opportunities?
Eh?
Are you saying that no matter who you vote for, only the two 'big' candidates/ parties are eligible to win? So if 90% of voters voted for Michael Badnarik (I believe he represents your Libertarian Party), Dubya would win regardless?
I'm confused. Apparently I don't understand your American version of 'democracy'.
From reading the article I get the impression it was shot here, in England, and the overseas version is still to come.
Extrapolation: Inventing information which wasn't stored before. How do you know whether what you've invented (read: guessed) correctly matches what was present but not stored?
I know they're getting really good at guessing accurately, but it's still *guessing*! Often it's better to stick to information which you know is correct than to add a guess which is only *probably* correct (even for large values of "probably").
Do the restored movies look better? Or just different in a way that aesthetically pleases him?
Presumably the integration framework will be called Sunderfox.
Subject: http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/
Hello,
Apparently you've bullied Matthew Somerville into removing a perfectly harmless and very useful web site which made up for the failings of your own web site.
Shame on you, you big bullies. How very pathetic of you.
Couldn't you have shown some wisdom and maturity and negotiated a mutually beneficial compromise with him? Have I misread the e-mail which offers to work to just such a compromise, and reminds you that Matthew already helped you fix security on your own site? How can you be so ungrateful?
I would have thought that you'd want as many people as possible to have as much access to information about your cinemas (movies, show times, etc.) as possible.
I exclusively use Mozilla (Seamonkey) 1.6 for web browsing due to the vast number of security flaws and broken/ missing features in Internet Explorer. Because your site is broken I cannot see it in Mozilla, so sites like Matthew's are invaluable.
I won't be visiting the Odeon cinemas in Leicester Square or Hemel Hempstead until you've apologised to Matthew for your poor attitude and worked with him to restore his site in a form which is legally acceptable.
Hell, give him a job fixing and/or maintaining your site! He seems to know what he's doing better than your own web developers!
Duncan, appalled in London
PS. Don't waste your time trying to change my attitude or decision.
Some people (possibly including you) have a strange idea of what's at fault if something dioesn't work. Here's a summmary of symptoms and the conclusions which some people leap to;
Hardware doesn't work under Windows hardware is shitty Hardware doesn't work under Linux Linux is shitty Hardware is old hardware is shittyWell, that's what underlies Unix's 'magic' file type recognition. That's fine for local files, but where communications are concerned it's the *server* (or source of the file) which is in charge, and the *browser* (or other destination) should meekly do as it's told.
It always irritates me when I send an XML file as MIME type text/plain so that a user can see it's contents, and IE etc. ignores what I tell it to do and renders it instead. If you see what I mean. It's just wrong, but Microsoft did it for a good reason- too many web servers are misconfigured (e.g. sending everything as text/plain or application/octet-stream) and that was ruining people's 'browsing experience'. Unfortunately the better solution was to get the servers configured correctly rather than compensate for them.
England is a country. As is Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Bits of those countries do share government and law in various combinations (and in some cases "England" is the name of a single entity comprising England and Wales), but they're still separate countries.
Man alive, you could not be more wrong if you attended a degree course in being wrong and failed it. I wouldn't hire you if you were the last 'web developer' on the planet.
If you code to standards- even the subset which Internet Explorer supports (badly)- and don't tie your content (the important bit of a web site!) to some specific feature then you're coding for 100% of the market. Including those who are still tolerating Internet Explorer. And you can still make the site look good, if eye candy is important to you.
And before you get this wrong as well, there's no more effort involved. Indeed, there's less effort because instead of;
I'm doing the UI for a big web-based system and because I'm following standards it's going very well. Except when QA bump into an unsolvable IE bug (randomly yellow text boxes- why?!?).
I'd be more than happy to pay artists a fair price (1.00 or so seems fair to me, CD singles are hugely overpriced) for their music in a convenient portable format (e.g. MP3- if I want higher quality I'll buy a CD). I don't want to upset artists. I won't redistribute files if the artist doesn't want me to. I don't particularly care what the record labels want, they don't make the music and as far as I know they don't have a god-given right to make money from someone else's creativity.
Napster's pricing seems fair but they're treating everyone as a potential criminal, guilty until proven innocent, by insisting on Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. So they're imposing their rules rather than trusting their customers to follow them. I would feel insulted if they would even let me be a customer! I can't afford Windows. It's very overpriced software for what it does (badly), even without the cost of hardware which can run it and the cost of cleaning up after the constant virus attacks.
Where Napster is concerned I feel like I have 3 options;
So, I want a non-Windows (Java?) Napster (or a Napster client) which will let me *buy* and listen to music without assuming that I'm trying to rip off the artist. How about it, hackers? The world wants some code which masquerades as IE and WMP so that Napster subscribers can legally download the music they want to listen to. This shouldn't even try to circumvent the subscription.
I suppose I could just listen to music on the radio, then no one gets any revenue from me... Or try to save up for an iBook and use iTunes (still DRM etc., but avoids Microsoft)...
... their target readership dreams only of guzzling litres of lager while watching clones of Pamela Anderson playing topless football. Phwoar! etc.
Just look at the quote- "they control these like surfboards". Wow... sounds plausible. Sigh. I strongly suspect that whatever actually happens in this scene, the 'insider' or The Sun felt they had to dumb it down so that their readership could understand it- and distorted it in the process. Surfboards!?! Hah!
Personally, I'm hoping to see "Star Wars: Episode III: Return Of The Sith" scroll up the screen. That would follow George's professed style of making movies 'like music', echoing the same riffs and themes throughout the Star Wars sextology.