The hacker was able to exploit the fact that most currently college-aged kids born in Texas have socials beginning with 420 through 480. If you graduated years ago, chances are your social is not in this range.
1) They're not changing CORBA/Bonobo/IDL for DBus any time in the immediate future.
2) GNOME's architecture and it's design are independent of whether or not there is an agreed upon spec for developers to create consistent looking applications.
3) The redundancies between GTK and BonoboUI are discussed in the posts, including the toolbar redundancies. As far as a fileselector, while a missing piece from the puzzle of a complete desktop environment (not to mention one of the highest priorities for 2.4), it's not exactly an integral part of the architecture, compared to, say, atk or Pango.
4) GConf's only similarity to the Windows Registry is that it is a centralized repository for various configurations. Please do not confuse it with a systems crticial piece of the OS like the Windows Registry. GConf is a bunch of XML files that control user preferences. It's a way for application designers to use a standardized method for something they already have to do anyways: store user preferences. If your GConf directory gets b0rked, you lose your preferences in GNOME. You don't have to reinstall the OS.
*Insert clever retort including some reference to "the pot calling the kettle black"*
It's a shame the submitter of the link to GNOME's mailing list didn't read it well... and definitely didn't read Havoc's previous email or his response to Miguel's...
The real story is a glimpse at a conversation about the philosophy and direction of GNOME between two of it's most respected personalities. Havoc has positioned himself as the effective authority on usability and the user-experience. Miguel has and continues to be a driving force behind the vision of what GNOME can become.
The points to garner from this discussion are hardly about the GNOME vs. KDE flamewars of late... in traditional fashion, the GNOME developers are quite confident that they're doing the Right Thing and pay only passing regard to the dogmatic flamefests.
1) The goal of GNOME is not only focused around GNOME but about bringing about a revolution in desktop computing where on the x86 platform there are viable and attractive alternatives to Microsoft. KDE's success bolster's GNOME's success and vice versa. Interoperability lets everybody win.
2) GNOME2's infrastructure is well thought out and well designed and in fact needs little more before it hits maturity. It has minimized bloat (Havoc and Miguel highlight some of the redundancies between GTK+ and libbonoboui, but these are known and on their way out the door). And for the most part it has gotten good reviews from the developers using it.
3) GNOME spends a lot of time concerning itself with enterprise customers, whose needs are often very different from those of your local Slashdot user.
4) Much of the desktop development world, including Mac and Windows are moving towards simpler, cleaner interfaces. GNOME is a member of this camp.
To quote Havoc: "In short, my opinion is that we have done many of the hardest tasks very well. We've scaled the devel organization and release process to a large number of people. We've sorted out how to manage corporate participation/contribution. We've addressed usability and simplicity. We have nice HIG. We have years of effort completed for Section 508 compliance. We have best depth of application functionality. We are on course to have the devel platform unified/unbloated by GTK+ 2.4, rather than two duplicating layers. We have the most credible enterprise OS vendors involved. We have clean and maintainable code with strong maintainers for nearly all the key components. We've properly modularized those components so we can spread out release cycles and maintenance."
GNOME feels it's doing things right. It will continue to do things in this manner. Flamefests and Slashdot are the least of its concerns.
There are two *garganutan* differences between Google and spyware:
1) Google provides a very, very useful service that as of yet is unmatched on the Internet.
2) Google collects this sort of information not only to sell advertising in a non-intrusive, actually semi-useful way but also to learn how to provide you with a *better* service.
If Google sold its data to other companies or used its data to advertise through other media (email, snail mail, telephone solicitors), then Google would be lambasted by everybody on the entire Internet. But since Google serves advertisements in a pertinent and non-intrusive way to fund the free, unequivocally useful service to the entire Internet, they will continue to receive my gratitude for showing taste, restraint, and ethics in a corporate world lacking all three.
Actually, Google has much more license to be pro-geek than you might think solely because they are still a privately held corporation... only publicly traded corporations have the burden of due diligence to necessarily do what's going to increase stockholder value by the most... as long as Google stays privately owned, they can have corporate policy manuals that stipulate "do no evil" and they can reject listing anything they like and all of the other interesting morals over money choices they make all the time...
Phew... that's a load off my mind... cause I'm sure the RIAA or their equivalent in Finland (unlike cab drivers) are *really* hurting for money... and I hope this serves as a precedent for anybody that plays music in their workplace... because God forbid, when I go see my accountant, and he's got the radio playing in the background, that filthy pirate is stealing the fruits of hard labor by the record executives...
Granted all of the problems stated with PGP over webmail, I'll pitch Novell's webmail service myrealbox.com... they're running a free implementation of their latest directory service to test and debug in a production like environment... no banner ads... web access over SSL... IMAP, POP, and SMTP access over SSL... so I use Evolution as my local client on my desktop... and when I'm away from my desktop, I read (and only in an emergency respond) to my email using the web interface...
Only downside is occasional downage for software and hardware upgrades...
I'm gonna drop the "if you don't like it, use your money to vote" argument here, but in a different way... if you have a banned mod-ed xbox, then really make microsoft hurt and go buy another xbox... they lose $150, you're not going to buy the games for the additional xbox so they won't "make up the loss in game sales" and you get to use xbox live if you want to... if everybody who had a modded xbox did this, microsoft's gaming division would lose even more money...
My last employer was a non-profit that still hosts some of my web work that I list at the top of my resume... the guy that replaced me is only part time and doesn't really have the time to learn my system... and if I don't help him out, that increases the likelihood of the group deciding to scrap my work and replace it with some pre-packaged deal... so when they need help, time permitting, I help out as much as I can because 1) it's a non-profit and 2) I still need the code online as a demonstration of my work...
But that's just me... in your case, I would have asked for a consulting fee...
This article was qualified as "informative"? True, it does give much factual information about the history of BSD, it does take quite an editorial stand... and the author calls Linux advocates dogmatic... talk about the pot calling the kettle black...
Other criticism: 1) Linux isn't an operating system... true... RMS is preaching as much... GNU/Linux is however an operating system...
2) "Proponents of Linux tend to take a 'revolutionary' stance, seeing their work as a war to compete with, and destroy, Microsoft and other commercial software vendors." This is a bit of an exaggeration combined with an oversimplification.
3) "only one security hole that would allow an intruder to break in from the Internet has been discovered in the past 6 years" I'm just guessing, but I'd think this only includes software as part of the BSD operating system, and not third party contributing software... Hell, the Slapper worm is a port of a BSD worm over to the GNU/Linux system...
4) "Unlike most other operating systems (including most distributions of Linux), FreeBSD is extremely easy to install directly via an Internet connection." Maybe if you go by raw numbers of Linux distros, but I've installed RedHat over the network for years...
I could go on, but I don't feel like it... I just wish the article could be more neutral and not bash every other operating system out there, including GNU/Linux...
What they're doing "wrong" is relying on Mac hardware. It's just too expensive for the average Joe. I don't make enough to afford a TiBook. I have to make do with the Dell 4100 I got with my student discount and my free memory upgrade.
It seems to me that some basic precautions close this hole before you are even vulnerable... first, only root should be able to run gcc... and second, the webserver daemon should not be running as root anyways... I've never administered an apache server, only AOLServer, and it won't even *let* you run it as root... so if you can't get the server to run code as root and only root can run gcc, then you've got no problems...
-jag
A statistic they forgot...
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 1
"51% of Americans support the curtailing of First Amendment rights... of course 98% of Americans are complete and total fucking morons..."
I believe Microsoft's historical stance on Service Packs is that they're not fixing problems (remember Bill Gates saying that Windows doesn't have any bugs?) but are improving the original product...
Re:Um... not really a big deal...
on
KDE Gets The Hat
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· Score: 1
Not really... I find it funny how my first post got rated insightful by one moderator and troll by another... I guess it just depends on whether you're a diehard KDE person... cause the only trollish thing I did which really wasn't trollish was criticize the posture of the KDE developers...
Um... not really a big deal...
on
KDE Gets The Hat
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· Score: 1, Troll
Let's keep in mind here we're only talking about a desktop environment and not a religion... so @!$#ing what if RedHat changes the icons and changes default applications? Change them back if you don't like them... Good lord, if I somehow were able to release a different distribution of Windows, I might not want IE to be the default browser... I might not want Outlook to be the default mail client... Maybe I want Mozilla instead... that'd be my perogative... but you're bitching the way Microsoft would be if Kollar-Kelly makes them allow alternate distros of Windows...
Anyways, there's really two parts to the desktop environment: the libraries used by the applications supporting the environment and the basic desktop tools such as the panel/taskbar and the desktop/file browser... As far as the applications, use the best application for the job regardless of the environment... if you ask me, that's Evolution and Galeon right now... As far as the desktop tools, log into the environment that has the one you like the most... I think Nautilus still leaves much to be desired so I use Konq...
Get off the damn high horse, KDE developer folk... GNOME isn't nearly as bad as you make it out to be, so cut that out... and as a user, I use the right tool for the right job... Konq is a crappy browser compared to the Gecko based ones, and KMail doesn't compare to Evolution... RedHat went with a desktop neutral solution (Mozilla), and you're still giving them shit about it...
At least the GNOME people are more concerned about the user experience...
I truly applaud this ISP's efforts. Right on, y'all.
There've been a slew of comments about how maybe AOL will adopt this policy given enough consumer pressure or maybe RoadRunner will or any other major ISP. Think for a second about that.
There is a reason these groups are called media conglomerates. They have faces across many different media. Those who provide the Internet connectivity medium also provide the musical content medium. AOL and Time Warner are all owned by a conglomerate that makes records.
But again, right on to those smaller ones who take a stand like this. Maybe if we reward them with our business, we'll put the conglomerates in their place.
The fact that the threats posed against Felten or 2600 or whomever may have little legal merit was never the issue with the DMCA. I was a Rice student when the Felten thing went down, and three of the seven co-authors of the Felten paper were from Rice. I can say the University was scared $hitless about the possible expense and negative PR that could follow from having to defend a civil suit by the media conglomerates.
The EFF is right. The chilling effects are real. That research can be stopped or quashed simply by a law firm's letter head containing the four letters DMCA is an egregious tragedy.
Declan says the law is bad. I agree. It is used to do evil things by evil corporations. Throw it out. Don't defend it. And certainly don't chastize the EFF.
The community resource of the open-source community has long been one of the selling points of Linux and BSD. You don't necessarily have to pay for an expensive support contract when you can ask experts on listservs, newsgroups, and irc. I think Microsoft's just trying to eliminate reasons for choosing open source. It's a trend. You don't like proprietary solutions? Portions of.NET are submitted to ECMA to eliminate open source's claim to industry standards. Want a strong advocacy community? Microsoft pays for them. The Borg do nothing but assimilate.
When I first came to webdb programming four years ago and looked at the open source options available (I was a poor student who couldn't even begin to consider affording anything else), I couldn't see any real reason to adopt MySQL over PostgreSQL other than the extremely tight intertwining of MySQL with Apache/PHP. Given that PostgreSQL has some basic features that MySQL does not, e.g. MVCC, transactions, etc., why do people choose MySQL over PostgreSQL anyways other than its relationship to Apache? Not trying to start a flame war, but I'm just genuinely curious why somebody would make that decision.
I'll give you a wonderful example of how the DMCA has affected my life. I use Linux on the desktop. I legally own several DVDs. I purchased them. I did not download them. I did not burn them. The studio got their money. I would love to take them with me on trips and view them on my laptop. However, I cannot; alas there is no DVD player for Linux that includes a CSS decoder. Not that there aren't projects that can't; Xine is in a great position to. But they are legally not able to because of the DMCA. I can't watch a movie I bought on my laptop because of the DMCA. That sucks. That's freedom being lost. And that's an example of how it affects my life. And I'm not profiting off the copyright infringement of others either.
Losing what?! Losing what?! The issue has absolutely nothing to do with regional encoding... that's merely a very mild symptom... Hollywood is winning the ability to use the DMCA to coerce individuals and corporations to bend to their will... and we are losing the ability to have freedom with the information that we've legally paid to have access to (e.g. the information on a region-encoded DVD)... that is why people better start caring... because the day may not be distant when your CD player, your PC, your DVD player, even your car stereo will have to ask permission from the MPAA or RIAA before being able to play a piece of media, even if it's legally obtained... freedom is at risk... I @!$#ing care about that...
"Standard" does not mean "what the most commonly used" or "what is most popular" or even "what web designers design towards". It means that there is some published guidelines that anybody can look at so that designers of rendering engines as well as designers of web pages can be assured that any page written to those standards will be rendered properly by any rendering engine written to those standards. When there are unpublished rules, such as in the case of Internet Explorer, that deviate from existing standards, such as those set by W3C, standards are meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
The hacker was able to exploit the fact that most currently college-aged kids born in Texas have socials beginning with 420 through 480. If you graduated years ago, chances are your social is not in this range.
-jag
1) They're not changing CORBA/Bonobo/IDL for DBus any time in the immediate future.
2) GNOME's architecture and it's design are independent of whether or not there is an agreed upon spec for developers to create consistent looking applications.
3) The redundancies between GTK and BonoboUI are discussed in the posts, including the toolbar redundancies. As far as a fileselector, while a missing piece from the puzzle of a complete desktop environment (not to mention one of the highest priorities for 2.4), it's not exactly an integral part of the architecture, compared to, say, atk or Pango.
4) GConf's only similarity to the Windows Registry is that it is a centralized repository for various configurations. Please do not confuse it with a systems crticial piece of the OS like the Windows Registry. GConf is a bunch of XML files that control user preferences. It's a way for application designers to use a standardized method for something they already have to do anyways: store user preferences. If your GConf directory gets b0rked, you lose your preferences in GNOME. You don't have to reinstall the OS.
*Insert clever retort including some reference to "the pot calling the kettle black"*
It's a shame the submitter of the link to GNOME's mailing list didn't read it well... and definitely didn't read Havoc's previous email or his response to Miguel's...
The real story is a glimpse at a conversation about the philosophy and direction of GNOME between two of it's most respected personalities. Havoc has positioned himself as the effective authority on usability and the user-experience. Miguel has and continues to be a driving force behind the vision of what GNOME can become.
The points to garner from this discussion are hardly about the GNOME vs. KDE flamewars of late... in traditional fashion, the GNOME developers are quite confident that they're doing the Right Thing and pay only passing regard to the dogmatic flamefests.
1) The goal of GNOME is not only focused around GNOME but about bringing about a revolution in desktop computing where on the x86 platform there are viable and attractive alternatives to Microsoft. KDE's success bolster's GNOME's success and vice versa. Interoperability lets everybody win.
2) GNOME2's infrastructure is well thought out and well designed and in fact needs little more before it hits maturity. It has minimized bloat (Havoc and Miguel highlight some of the redundancies between GTK+ and libbonoboui, but these are known and on their way out the door). And for the most part it has gotten good reviews from the developers using it.
3) GNOME spends a lot of time concerning itself with enterprise customers, whose needs are often very different from those of your local Slashdot user.
4) Much of the desktop development world, including Mac and Windows are moving towards simpler, cleaner interfaces. GNOME is a member of this camp.
To quote Havoc: "In short, my opinion is that we have done many of the hardest tasks very well. We've scaled the devel organization and release process to a large number of people. We've sorted out how to manage corporate participation/contribution. We've addressed usability and simplicity. We have nice HIG. We have years of effort completed for Section 508 compliance. We have best depth of application functionality. We are on course to have the devel platform unified/unbloated by GTK+ 2.4, rather than two duplicating layers. We have the most credible enterprise OS vendors involved. We have clean and maintainable code with strong maintainers for nearly all the key components. We've properly modularized those components so we can spread out release cycles and maintenance."
GNOME feels it's doing things right. It will continue to do things in this manner. Flamefests and Slashdot are the least of its concerns.
-jag
There are two *garganutan* differences between Google and spyware:
1) Google provides a very, very useful service that as of yet is unmatched on the Internet.
2) Google collects this sort of information not only to sell advertising in a non-intrusive, actually semi-useful way but also to learn how to provide you with a *better* service.
If Google sold its data to other companies or used its data to advertise through other media (email, snail mail, telephone solicitors), then Google would be lambasted by everybody on the entire Internet. But since Google serves advertisements in a pertinent and non-intrusive way to fund the free, unequivocally useful service to the entire Internet, they will continue to receive my gratitude for showing taste, restraint, and ethics in a corporate world lacking all three.
-jag
Actually, Google has much more license to be pro-geek than you might think solely because they are still a privately held corporation... only publicly traded corporations have the burden of due diligence to necessarily do what's going to increase stockholder value by the most... as long as Google stays privately owned, they can have corporate policy manuals that stipulate "do no evil" and they can reject listing anything they like and all of the other interesting morals over money choices they make all the time...
-jag
Phew... that's a load off my mind... cause I'm sure the RIAA or their equivalent in Finland (unlike cab drivers) are *really* hurting for money... and I hope this serves as a precedent for anybody that plays music in their workplace... because God forbid, when I go see my accountant, and he's got the radio playing in the background, that filthy pirate is stealing the fruits of hard labor by the record executives...
-jag
Really? Wow. That sucks. Since when?
-jag
Granted all of the problems stated with PGP over webmail, I'll pitch Novell's webmail service myrealbox.com... they're running a free implementation of their latest directory service to test and debug in a production like environment... no banner ads... web access over SSL... IMAP, POP, and SMTP access over SSL... so I use Evolution as my local client on my desktop... and when I'm away from my desktop, I read (and only in an emergency respond) to my email using the web interface...
Only downside is occasional downage for software and hardware upgrades...
-jag
I'm gonna drop the "if you don't like it, use your money to vote" argument here, but in a different way... if you have a banned mod-ed xbox, then really make microsoft hurt and go buy another xbox... they lose $150, you're not going to buy the games for the additional xbox so they won't "make up the loss in game sales" and you get to use xbox live if you want to... if everybody who had a modded xbox did this, microsoft's gaming division would lose even more money...
So yeah, vote with your money!
-jag
My last employer was a non-profit that still hosts some of my web work that I list at the top of my resume... the guy that replaced me is only part time and doesn't really have the time to learn my system... and if I don't help him out, that increases the likelihood of the group deciding to scrap my work and replace it with some pre-packaged deal... so when they need help, time permitting, I help out as much as I can because 1) it's a non-profit and 2) I still need the code online as a demonstration of my work...
But that's just me... in your case, I would have asked for a consulting fee...
This article was qualified as "informative"? True, it does give much factual information about the history of BSD, it does take quite an editorial stand... and the author calls Linux advocates dogmatic... talk about the pot calling the kettle black...
Other criticism:
1) Linux isn't an operating system... true... RMS is preaching as much... GNU/Linux is however an operating system...
2) "Proponents of Linux tend to take a 'revolutionary' stance, seeing their work as a war to compete with, and destroy, Microsoft and other commercial software vendors." This is a bit of an exaggeration combined with an oversimplification.
3) "only one security hole that would allow an intruder to break in from the Internet has been discovered in the past 6 years" I'm just guessing, but I'd think this only includes software as part of the BSD operating system, and not third party contributing software... Hell, the Slapper worm is a port of a BSD worm over to the GNU/Linux system...
4) "Unlike most other operating systems (including most distributions of Linux), FreeBSD is extremely easy to install directly via an Internet connection." Maybe if you go by raw numbers of Linux distros, but I've installed RedHat over the network for years...
I could go on, but I don't feel like it... I just wish the article could be more neutral and not bash every other operating system out there, including GNU/Linux...
-jag
I'll call it GNU/Linux from now on in writing and in speaking if RMS will please shut the @!$# up. I'm really tired of his rants.
What they're doing "wrong" is relying on Mac hardware. It's just too expensive for the average Joe. I don't make enough to afford a TiBook. I have to make do with the Dell 4100 I got with my student discount and my free memory upgrade.
It seems to me that some basic precautions close this hole before you are even vulnerable... first, only root should be able to run gcc... and second, the webserver daemon should not be running as root anyways... I've never administered an apache server, only AOLServer, and it won't even *let* you run it as root... so if you can't get the server to run code as root and only root can run gcc, then you've got no problems...
-jag
"51% of Americans support the curtailing of First Amendment rights... of course 98% of Americans are complete and total fucking morons..."
I believe Microsoft's historical stance on Service Packs is that they're not fixing problems (remember Bill Gates saying that Windows doesn't have any bugs?) but are improving the original product...
Not really... I find it funny how my first post got rated insightful by one moderator and troll by another... I guess it just depends on whether you're a diehard KDE person... cause the only trollish thing I did which really wasn't trollish was criticize the posture of the KDE developers...
Let's keep in mind here we're only talking about a desktop environment and not a religion... so @!$#ing what if RedHat changes the icons and changes default applications? Change them back if you don't like them... Good lord, if I somehow were able to release a different distribution of Windows, I might not want IE to be the default browser... I might not want Outlook to be the default mail client... Maybe I want Mozilla instead... that'd be my perogative... but you're bitching the way Microsoft would be if Kollar-Kelly makes them allow alternate distros of Windows...
Anyways, there's really two parts to the desktop environment: the libraries used by the applications supporting the environment and the basic desktop tools such as the panel/taskbar and the desktop/file browser... As far as the applications, use the best application for the job regardless of the environment... if you ask me, that's Evolution and Galeon right now... As far as the desktop tools, log into the environment that has the one you like the most... I think Nautilus still leaves much to be desired so I use Konq...
Get off the damn high horse, KDE developer folk... GNOME isn't nearly as bad as you make it out to be, so cut that out... and as a user, I use the right tool for the right job... Konq is a crappy browser compared to the Gecko based ones, and KMail doesn't compare to Evolution... RedHat went with a desktop neutral solution (Mozilla), and you're still giving them shit about it...
At least the GNOME people are more concerned about the user experience...
I truly applaud this ISP's efforts. Right on, y'all.
There've been a slew of comments about how maybe AOL will adopt this policy given enough consumer pressure or maybe RoadRunner will or any other major ISP. Think for a second about that.
There is a reason these groups are called media conglomerates. They have faces across many different media. Those who provide the Internet connectivity medium also provide the musical content medium. AOL and Time Warner are all owned by a conglomerate that makes records.
But again, right on to those smaller ones who take a stand like this. Maybe if we reward them with our business, we'll put the conglomerates in their place.
The fact that the threats posed against Felten or 2600 or whomever may have little legal merit was never the issue with the DMCA. I was a Rice student when the Felten thing went down, and three of the seven co-authors of the Felten paper were from Rice. I can say the University was scared $hitless about the possible expense and negative PR that could follow from having to defend a civil suit by the media conglomerates.
The EFF is right. The chilling effects are real. That research can be stopped or quashed simply by a law firm's letter head containing the four letters DMCA is an egregious tragedy.
Declan says the law is bad. I agree. It is used to do evil things by evil corporations. Throw it out. Don't defend it. And certainly don't chastize the EFF.
The community resource of the open-source community has long been one of the selling points of Linux and BSD. You don't necessarily have to pay for an expensive support contract when you can ask experts on listservs, newsgroups, and irc. I think Microsoft's just trying to eliminate reasons for choosing open source. It's a trend. You don't like proprietary solutions? Portions of .NET are submitted to ECMA to eliminate open source's claim to industry standards. Want a strong advocacy community? Microsoft pays for them. The Borg do nothing but assimilate.
When I first came to webdb programming four years ago and looked at the open source options available (I was a poor student who couldn't even begin to consider affording anything else), I couldn't see any real reason to adopt MySQL over PostgreSQL other than the extremely tight intertwining of MySQL with Apache/PHP. Given that PostgreSQL has some basic features that MySQL does not, e.g. MVCC, transactions, etc., why do people choose MySQL over PostgreSQL anyways other than its relationship to Apache? Not trying to start a flame war, but I'm just genuinely curious why somebody would make that decision.
I'll give you a wonderful example of how the DMCA has affected my life. I use Linux on the desktop. I legally own several DVDs. I purchased them. I did not download them. I did not burn them. The studio got their money. I would love to take them with me on trips and view them on my laptop. However, I cannot; alas there is no DVD player for Linux that includes a CSS decoder. Not that there aren't projects that can't; Xine is in a great position to. But they are legally not able to because of the DMCA. I can't watch a movie I bought on my laptop because of the DMCA. That sucks. That's freedom being lost. And that's an example of how it affects my life. And I'm not profiting off the copyright infringement of others either.
Go figure.
Losing what?! Losing what?! The issue has absolutely nothing to do with regional encoding... that's merely a very mild symptom... Hollywood is winning the ability to use the DMCA to coerce individuals and corporations to bend to their will... and we are losing the ability to have freedom with the information that we've legally paid to have access to (e.g. the information on a region-encoded DVD)... that is why people better start caring... because the day may not be distant when your CD player, your PC, your DVD player, even your car stereo will have to ask permission from the MPAA or RIAA before being able to play a piece of media, even if it's legally obtained... freedom is at risk... I @!$#ing care about that...
"Standard" does not mean "what the most commonly used" or "what is most popular" or even "what web designers design towards". It means that there is some published guidelines that anybody can look at so that designers of rendering engines as well as designers of web pages can be assured that any page written to those standards will be rendered properly by any rendering engine written to those standards. When there are unpublished rules, such as in the case of Internet Explorer, that deviate from existing standards, such as those set by W3C, standards are meaningless.