MP3 does not sound "noticeably worse"; all codecs have their artifacts at low bitrates. A well-tuned MP3 encoder like LAME in ~128kbps VBR mode will give very comparable results to AAC, with no statistical difference in a double-blind listening test. Hell, in an earlier test LAME beat WMA Standard (the most common version of the codec). And LAME in "--preset standard" mode gives nearly transparent results at around 180-200kbps.
AAC, WMA and OGG all have their advantages, but MP3 is truly a "jack of all trades". You want your audio to play in any player or portable you choose, like iTunes/iPod, WMP, Winamp, foobar2000, AmaroK, etc. etc.? You encode to MP3. Heck, both iTunes and WMP both ship with MP3 encoders now. Like JPEG, MP3 simply isn't bad enough to forsake compatibility for a superior codec.
Secondly, the author clearly doesn't have a solid background in audio technology. I am mystified as to why s/he thought he'd need "full-sized headphones" compared to Shure canalphones to hear the "benefits" of surround sound, when the fact is that with any stereo headphones more than 2 source channels of audio is essentially pointless!
As for surround sound systems, AC3 in the 384kbps+ bitrate is already the standard there. I can't see why MP3 surround will displace it; MP3 surround isn't, as far as I know, mentioned in any of the current or next-gen DVD specs.
7-Zip
A free, open source Windows zip utility with support for several archive formats, and comparatively great compression. Small and fast too; it's my personal choice at the moment.
IZArc
Not open source, but supports a few more formats
ICEOWS
Formerly ARJFolder, integrates very cleanly into Windows Explorer.
There's more out there, but really, I can't see how Winzip is as relevant today as it was during the Win3.x days when it was the only good zip GUI out there. I guess scheduling is nice, but then again, all operating systems come with a schedular these days anyway.
Re:Congratulations on your site
on
DHTML Utopia
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· Score: 1
I haven't read the book myself, but well done on a coherent review that covers the resurgence of unobtrusive scripting. The author is quite well respected in the community, and I can only hope books like these begin to replace the "omg dhtml netscape 4!!11one" fare usually found on shelves.
I think AJAX et. al. could be a bit of a diversion though from the ideals of "unobtrusive scripting" though. Many sites using XMLHttpRequest and similar techniques aren't easy to degrade in older, non-JS-supporting browsers. GMail, for instance, had to write another whole separate version using plain HTML for legacy useragents; this seems a little beyond the "progressive enhancement" ideals in which JavaScript adds to, rather than replaces, essential page functionality. I'm putting together my own LGPL'd AJAX library that operates via plain HTML links and forms (and yes, those IFRAME hacks you speak of are really hard to get right!). So in theory it should degrade well.
And what the heck, while I'm self promoting, here's my free event manager script that works around IE memory leaks, as well as making the whole cross-browser-event-handling stuff easier (which is still the main annoyance when writing cross-browser code -- hurry up and implement DOM Events, MS!). Hope any other JS coders here find it useful.
Re:I give up
on
DHTML Utopia
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· Score: 2, Informative
Long story short, to make effective use of XHTML you have to serve it as "text/html" to the browser, as IE doesn't support its proper MIME type (thanks, Microsoft!). Here's a good summary of the issues surrounding XHTML vs HTML 4.
Personally, I don't mind using XHTML 1.0 as text/html, as although it's not quite "ivory-tower" perfect, it's still IMHO a little cleaner and more elegant. Either way, (X)HTML+CSS still beats the living daylights out of "any-old-HTML + tables".
OK, so as sort of a meta-reply to all the posters asking about IE and PNG support, here's 2 interesting hacks you can use to get your PNG magic rolling in MSIE.
MSIE (as of v6) doesn't support 32 bit transparent PNGs natively, but there is a cool hack where you can dither them down to 8 bits, retaining translucenct for browsers that support it, and using 1-bit transparency in MSIE, so it still looks OK.
Alternatively, you can use the AlphaImageLoader() filter for near native IE PNG support -- that's a link to my own free CSS behavior that automatically adds IMG and background-image support for PNGs to MSIE 5.5+.
Either way, PNGs rock, except for the lack of a cross-platform gamma standard -- if you need to match other colours on your site, just use JPEGs/GIFs.
As a scientists, I hope the day will never come in which only "qualified researchers" can publish on controversial issues.
Relax, I agree he has the right to write articles on the issue regardless of his qualifications; it's a free world. I do, however, think that he should fairly represent the current state of research, or at least acknowledge that the point is undecided, rather than writing as if the evidence is 100% against thimerosal. Quoting Page 2 of his article:
From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming.
That's not exactly balanced. Furthermore, above that he writes:
It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's preeminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real.
It's unethical for someone who has studied the "leading scientific research" and talked "nation's preeminent authorities" to so misrepresent the preponderance of evidence and the positions of those who disagree with him; he cites and dismisses "some skeptics" in the paragraph after my quote as believing the increase in autism prevalence is due to better diagnosis, which may be true, but doesn't even mention such "skeptics" may think the cause of the increase remains totally unknown!
In addition there's a lot that contravenes common sense. For instance:
In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to 22 patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected.
Patients with terminal meningitis died? As in "terminal" meaning "incurably near death"? Who would've thought?
I could go on and on for a while, but I hope my point has been made. If you're a notable public figure writing on a contentious issue, you have an obligation to present the evidence in a balanced manner, rather than picking and choosing your sources to prop up your own biases and conclusions.
Now, don't get me wrong; it may still be the case that thimersol or some other vaccine ingredient contributes to autism. However, the balance of evidence from qualified medical researchers is against this viewpoint at the moment, and it's unethical of Mr Kennedy to start spreading what is essentially FUD unless he has the epidemiological data to back it up.
I own one of these; it's basically a regular gamepad with a tilt sensor embedded into it. It works quite well for driving and flying-type games; you can toggle between using the tilt sensor as the primary X/Y axis or the D-pad (which becomes a "joystick hat" when the tilt controller is active).
(Insert troll about quality Microsoft Innovation trumping Apple's feeble copying attempts here...;). Seriously, MS's hardware division has always been the best part of the company.
Still "UNCONFIRMED", although it's only been a month or two;).
I'm not really a C coder, but I did manage to drag up the documentation for what would be a pretty minor fix (correctly importing message replied/forwarded status from Outlook Express; the only thing holding me back from switching over).
I'm as much of a Mozilla fan as the next guy (and every time I hack some CSS layout to work in IE, an even bigger fan), but they could really do with letting more people handle the bug and patch workflow.
I'd suggest syndicating new BugZilla bugs by RSS, and letting the community sort out the initial feedback. Nominate a bunch of bug handlers from said community, whose job is to nix duplicates and detritus. Those bug handlers forward final patches onto the main developers, who review and apply them.
I'm amazed that this even made Slashdot; Google often takes care to reduce the bandwidth usage of its pages (view source on google.com sometime....)
I do a fair amount of JS coding, and I've taken to distributing the majority of my scripts in two separate "commented" and "compressed" JS files for exactly that reason. My guess is that Google in fact has a fully commented and readable copy of their JavaScript code that they run through a preprocessor/compressor; I use my compressor (basically a hacked up bunch of Regexes) in that form. There are numerous other script processors out there too.
So in conclusion, this isn't really obfuscation (or at least not primarily obfuscation), just bandwidth saving. I'd be very suprised indeed to learn that they were dynamically generating JavaScript via Python (where did the submitter get that idea?). Writing a JS parser and compressor though is pretty simple regex work, and if you couple it together with a table of variable name replacements, you can easily autogenerate slimmed down script for the web.
The Network Is The Computer (tm)
on
Ethernet at 10 Gbps
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· Score: 4, Insightful
OK, so for stuff like streaming MP3s and so forth, this is a little overkill for the current style of usage. However, where I think this will come in useful is for stuff like remote disk and memory access over IP.
With a 10G LAN, you'd be able to come up with a great distributed computer system (e.g. for compiling software). IIRC protocols are in the works now for native-ish memory access over networks, turning a network into one huge computer, and you can already access remote disks with the right software. Imagine the simultaneous distributed encoding of several HDTV streams to redundant archives on several different computers, and you'll probably find that more bandwidth = better.
So yeah, there'll definitely be possibilities for this sort of stuff, even if it is only as a base requirement for the post-Longhorn Windows version:).
Why stop at Konq for X11? I'd love to see Konq Embedded or whatever variant is best suited for the task ported to Windows as well as general *NIX usage!
Seriously, it would make another great alternative browser to IE, along with Firefox and Opera. One guy started a port but got waylaid. If any skilled C++ developers are reading and interested in a project, there you go:).
I see a lot of posts complaining "blah, 1% is nothing" but hey, it's a good start, especially for one month! Lots of websites and forums I frequent are now sporting "Get Firefox" buttons, so this comes as no real surprise -- awareness of Mozilla and other alternative browsers is slowly seeping into the mainstream.
Here's hoping that over the next few years Mozilla usage will increase to around 15-20% market share or so. We need more standards-compliant browsers out there if the web is ever going to move forward from IE6-compatible site layouts (allowing things like translucent PNGs and CSS2), and the sooner we start the better. Plus, it'll help stop the proliferation of IE-only sites.
An alliance is exactly what they should be doing. Well, ideally it would be under the auspices of the W3C, but it's a great start.
The reason is XAML. Microsoft has basically thrown in the towel with its (X)HTML rendering engine (the last release, IE6, was three years ago, and the differences from IE5.5 were not huge -- it still doesn't support stuff like translucent PNGs and much of CSS2). When Longhorn is released, expect a massive push towards the use of their proprietry XAML for web application deployment tied with their.NET development tools.
If Mozilla, Opera and hopefully Safari (which shares a few key developers with Mozilla and is implementing the Mozilla XUL box model in places) can push open standards and hopefully get a combined ~20-30% desktop share in the next 5 years before Longhorn is released and becomes semi-ubiquitous on the desktop, they'll be a large thorn in MS's side. Major businesses won't be able to ignore them, and with their focus on backwards-compatible specifications that expand upon existing CSS/JS/DOM technology and degrade well in older browsers (unlike XAML), they'll be the new default for client-side developers.
So start pushing those copies of Firefox onto friends' computers once v0.9 is released in a week or so with its auto-update notification. The more people who are aware that "web browser" does not equal "the blue 'e' icon", the better...
Thanks, Mr A.C., for injecting a little local perspective! While I'm not a Telecom NZ subscriber, allow me to explain a little more...
The two main phone networks in NZ are Vodafone and Telecom. Vodafone initially dominated the texting market, with 20c-per-text prices using its GSM network. In order to reclaim some marketshare, Telecom introduced its "$10-per-month for unlimited texting deal" last year, and advertised it nationwide.
Here's the kicker. Telecom's network is based on CDMA, and to switch from Vodafone to Telecom you have to purchase a new phone and get a new phone number. Lots of people I know were spending hundreds of dollars a month on text charges with Vodafone, so justifying the expense of ~$300NZD for a midrange Telecom phone and switching over made sense economically.
During this period, I don't recall Telecom mentioning any time limit on the deal whatsoever. Anyone who paid more attention than I to the extremely small print at the bottom of their TV screens can feel free to post a rebuttal, but many people received an assurance from Telecom store clerks in person that the $10 deal was guaranteed for a long time (years to decades) and correspondingly switched over to the Telecom network, expecting their initial outlay for a new phone to eventually pay for itself.
Fast forward to 2004, and Telecom pulls the bait and switch on its subscribers, causing a lot of them to get very angry and send as many text messages as they could before the $10 deal terminated as a protest.
I can see where Telecom is coming from, as they do pay interconnect agreements with Vodafone and have to pay approximately 8c to 14c (can't recall the exact figure) per text message that terminates on Vodafone's network, and as such the $10 deal is uneconomic in the long term. And they do still have a monthly deal, but it's capped at ~500 messages last I heard, which is less than many people require (especially when forwarding one message to several people; it adds up rapidly!). However, I still feel that Telecom's behaviour with regards to advertising their phone deal was a little unethical, and I can see exactly where the person in the article is coming from...
Here's another great but little known technique: the PAC file ad-blocker. Cross-browser, easy to install, and much more lightweight than a HOSTS file, plus it can match paths on servers like "/ads*/" rather than just server domains themselves.
...that you would be absolutely gutted if your surgeon had just lost badly to a script kiddy:).
Ah! Bad puns! Sometimes, I just kill myself. And if I had the patients to play more games, I would.
P.S. Random offtopic bit: I'm actually a Med student on a surgical team at Dunedin Public Hospital in NZ. A couple of weeks back I saw some guys browsing Slashdot from the computers in the main operating theatre complex. So you never know who'll be reading this...;).
And what's more, it doesn't even fully support CSS1, which was released in 1996! Try the ComplexSpiral demo, which is a neat demo of the effects possible in Mozilla, Opera and Safari with the 'background-attachment:' CSS1 property, which IE supports only on the BODY tag. Also, let's add 'position: static' support onto our wishlist (for watermarks/menus on pages) and PNG alpha support, and a whole bevy of regular CSS rendering bugs that have remained unsolved for years. MS claims "full CSS1 compliance", but in reality they only support the reduced CSS1 core spec.
And to think it'll be a wait of several years before IE is updated with Longhorn... until then, writing pure CSS sites is going to remain a bug-whacking chore. Let's all be collectively glad that MS fought so hard for their "Freedom to Innovate" back in the anti-trust days;).
I'm late to this discussion, as I've just read part of the patent. If you click the patent link, and hit the "descriptions" tab, you'll see it's fairly routine ("save a file, allow another application to modify it, open file in the word processor again").
However, I'm a New Zealander, and I'd love to actually try and shoot down this at the NZ patent office based on the wonderful prior art that is OpenOffice.org. However, I saw these two "claims" in the patent:
[0008] According to yet another aspect of the invention, hints are provided within the XML associated files providing applications that understand XML a shortcut to understanding some of the features provided by the word-processor. By using the hints, the applications do not have to know all of the specific details of the internal processing of the word-processor in order to recreate a feature.
[0009] According to yet another aspect of the invention, the word-processing document is stored in a single XML file. An application will be able to fully recreate the document from this single XML file. This includes all the images and other binary data that may be present in the document. The invention provides for a way to represent all document data in a single XML file.
The rest of the patented method applies to OOo, as OOo provides schemas and writes out a well-formed XML document etc. etc. etc. However, I'm not sure if OOo provides "hints" in the files (anyone care to comment what MS is on about there?).
The kicker is claim [0009]. If you save a.SXD document, rename it to.ZIP, and open it, you'll see there's several XML files in there, and binary data like images are stored as their original filenames in a separate folder within the ZIP archive.
IANAL, but this appears to mean that this patent is "sufficiently original" (haha) that it can probably slip past the rubber-stamp-brigade at the patent office as OOo won't be citeable as prior art. Apparently the NZ patent office is sufficiently stupid that they recognise the "one-click" patent, so I don't hold high hopes for this one.
So, has anyone heard of a word processor that has an XML file format that contains all its binary data? If so, post links under this thread:).
P.S. And NewtonsLaw, if you're reading this, I hope to see a plan of action on Aardvark tomorrow:). Has anyone got a link/reference to this at the NZ patent office as yet?
As another poster mentioned, the whole KDE environment has been ported to Cygwin. It works, but it's a pain as it has to run inside a whole X session.
However, I know what you mean... and yes I would love a Windows-native Konqueror port! There's one guy who is (supposedly) starting a port. It looks impressive on the front page, but has been stalled for a year and if you browse through the project forums, the guy admits he isn't really a Windows developer and is still deciding on what compiler to use. So basically, are there any skilled C++ hackers out there who would like to get involved in a KHTML -> Windows port? There's a few good reasons:
1) Choice of browsers on Windows. Even if you just ported KHTML rather than the full Konqueror, the KHTML engine rocks and could make great inroads against IE (compared to Mozilla/MozFirebird, which doesn't seem as fast as IE to load or as responsive on low-end hardware, even though it's a superior browser/renderer engine).
2) Porting all of Konq would rock too, as it offers a lot over plain vanilla EXPLORER.EXE.
3) Development, as the parent pointed out. I'm a XHTML/DHTML/CSS/JavaScript/etc. coder, and would like to certify that my projects work in KHTML. It's damn hard currently. And once Windows developers can get pages working perfectly in KHTML, all Konqueror/Safari users win.
4) Giving average desktop users more exposure to OSS. I'm looking at chucking Linux on this box again (last I tried was Mandrake 6 or 7) and wouldn't mind familiarising myself with its apps on a day-to-day basis first.
5) Why not? It's there;).
Re:Similar techniques are in use already
on
Javascrypt
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· Score: 1
...to calculate the challenge response you need both the 'challenge value' (a.k.a. a nonce) and your password. The server needs the same thing.
I suppose it depends on how the backend works. I imagine Yahoo for instance have a heckload of servers; perhaps if they have dedicated authentication servers that do all the hashing and authentication, a compromised web server still wouldn't allow password retrieval if it was just a pass-through of the hash.
I know what you mean though, the password must be stored on a server somewhere in plaintext for MD5 authentication to work. Still, it's better than nothing.
The only way that they wouldn't need some shared secret is if you used some sort of asymmetric signing protocol, but then key distribution is a problem...
Yeah, that'd rock. I wonder if anyone's working on a JS implementation of Diffie-Hellman encryption... coupled with the XML2HTTP libraries available in IE5+ and Mozilla for data transfer (or a hidden Java applet/IFRAME), you could have some seriously interesting applications using that in lieu of (or in addition to) full SSL. Diffie-Hellman is an asymmetric cipher that can auto-generate keys without a pre-existing shared secret (if my vague recall of crypto theory is working, any crypto mavens out there feel free to post corrections:) so it should be quite applicable to server-client work over an untrusted network.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, this is rubbish for several reasons.
MP3 does not sound "noticeably worse"; all codecs have their artifacts at low bitrates. A well-tuned MP3 encoder like LAME in ~128kbps VBR mode will give very comparable results to AAC, with no statistical difference in a double-blind listening test. Hell, in an earlier test LAME beat WMA Standard (the most common version of the codec). And LAME in "--preset standard" mode gives nearly transparent results at around 180-200kbps.
AAC, WMA and OGG all have their advantages, but MP3 is truly a "jack of all trades". You want your audio to play in any player or portable you choose, like iTunes/iPod, WMP, Winamp, foobar2000, AmaroK, etc. etc.? You encode to MP3. Heck, both iTunes and WMP both ship with MP3 encoders now. Like JPEG, MP3 simply isn't bad enough to forsake compatibility for a superior codec.
Secondly, the author clearly doesn't have a solid background in audio technology. I am mystified as to why s/he thought he'd need "full-sized headphones" compared to Shure canalphones to hear the "benefits" of surround sound, when the fact is that with any stereo headphones more than 2 source channels of audio is essentially pointless!
As for surround sound systems, AC3 in the 384kbps+ bitrate is already the standard there. I can't see why MP3 surround will displace it; MP3 surround isn't, as far as I know, mentioned in any of the current or next-gen DVD specs.
Here's some good freeware ones:
7-Zip A free, open source Windows zip utility with support for several archive formats, and comparatively great compression. Small and fast too; it's my personal choice at the moment. IZArc Not open source, but supports a few more formats ICEOWS Formerly ARJFolder, integrates very cleanly into Windows Explorer.There's more out there, but really, I can't see how Winzip is as relevant today as it was during the Win3.x days when it was the only good zip GUI out there. I guess scheduling is nice, but then again, all operating systems come with a schedular these days anyway.
Cheers, I'm glad you found the scripts helpful :).
I haven't read the book myself, but well done on a coherent review that covers the resurgence of unobtrusive scripting. The author is quite well respected in the community, and I can only hope books like these begin to replace the "omg dhtml netscape 4!!11one" fare usually found on shelves.
I think AJAX et. al. could be a bit of a diversion though from the ideals of "unobtrusive scripting" though. Many sites using XMLHttpRequest and similar techniques aren't easy to degrade in older, non-JS-supporting browsers. GMail, for instance, had to write another whole separate version using plain HTML for legacy useragents; this seems a little beyond the "progressive enhancement" ideals in which JavaScript adds to, rather than replaces, essential page functionality. I'm putting together my own LGPL'd AJAX library that operates via plain HTML links and forms (and yes, those IFRAME hacks you speak of are really hard to get right!). So in theory it should degrade well.
And what the heck, while I'm self promoting, here's my free event manager script that works around IE memory leaks, as well as making the whole cross-browser-event-handling stuff easier (which is still the main annoyance when writing cross-browser code -- hurry up and implement DOM Events, MS!). Hope any other JS coders here find it useful.
Long story short, to make effective use of XHTML you have to serve it as "text/html" to the browser, as IE doesn't support its proper MIME type (thanks, Microsoft!). Here's a good summary of the issues surrounding XHTML vs HTML 4.
Personally, I don't mind using XHTML 1.0 as text/html, as although it's not quite "ivory-tower" perfect, it's still IMHO a little cleaner and more elegant. Either way, (X)HTML+CSS still beats the living daylights out of "any-old-HTML + tables".
OK, so as sort of a meta-reply to all the posters asking about IE and PNG support, here's 2 interesting hacks you can use to get your PNG magic rolling in MSIE.
MSIE (as of v6) doesn't support 32 bit transparent PNGs natively, but there is a cool hack where you can dither them down to 8 bits, retaining translucenct for browsers that support it, and using 1-bit transparency in MSIE, so it still looks OK.
Alternatively, you can use the AlphaImageLoader() filter for near native IE PNG support -- that's a link to my own free CSS behavior that automatically adds IMG and background-image support for PNGs to MSIE 5.5+.
Either way, PNGs rock, except for the lack of a cross-platform gamma standard -- if you need to match other colours on your site, just use JPEGs/GIFs.
From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming.
That's not exactly balanced. Furthermore, above that he writes:
It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's preeminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real.
It's unethical for someone who has studied the "leading scientific research" and talked "nation's preeminent authorities" to so misrepresent the preponderance of evidence and the positions of those who disagree with him; he cites and dismisses "some skeptics" in the paragraph after my quote as believing the increase in autism prevalence is due to better diagnosis, which may be true, but doesn't even mention such "skeptics" may think the cause of the increase remains totally unknown!
In addition there's a lot that contravenes common sense. For instance:
In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to 22 patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected.
Patients with terminal meningitis died? As in "terminal" meaning "incurably near death"? Who would've thought?
I could go on and on for a while, but I hope my point has been made. If you're a notable public figure writing on a contentious issue, you have an obligation to present the evidence in a balanced manner, rather than picking and choosing your sources to prop up your own biases and conclusions.
This smells fishy. Especially considering most of the authors of the original 1998 study suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism have apologised and had their paper retracted by the Lancet due to a conflict of interest. Furthermore, a recent study of Danish children has shown rates of autism continued to increase even after the removal of thimersol from vaccines (via a MetaFilter discussion of this topic).
Now, don't get me wrong; it may still be the case that thimersol or some other vaccine ingredient contributes to autism. However, the balance of evidence from qualified medical researchers is against this viewpoint at the moment, and it's unethical of Mr Kennedy to start spreading what is essentially FUD unless he has the epidemiological data to back it up.
I would give most anything for a working media player for OS X that plays oggs, flacs, and maybe shns.
Merry Christmas. Seen on HydrogenAudio -- the owner of that forum, Dibrom, is also looking at writing his own Mac player.
Prime95. Available for numerous OSs.
Furthermore... I can't believe no-one has mentioned the Microsoft Sidewinder FreeStyle Pro gamepad!
;). Seriously, MS's hardware division has always been the best part of the company.
I own one of these; it's basically a regular gamepad with a tilt sensor embedded into it. It works quite well for driving and flying-type games; you can toggle between using the tilt sensor as the primary X/Y axis or the D-pad (which becomes a "joystick hat" when the tilt controller is active).
(Insert troll about quality Microsoft Innovation trumping Apple's feeble copying attempts here...
Same story here. My Thunderbird bug is 279450 (cut and paste this into your URL bar):
9 45 0
;).
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27
Still "UNCONFIRMED", although it's only been a month or two
I'm not really a C coder, but I did manage to drag up the documentation for what would be a pretty minor fix (correctly importing message replied/forwarded status from Outlook Express; the only thing holding me back from switching over).
I'm as much of a Mozilla fan as the next guy (and every time I hack some CSS layout to work in IE, an even bigger fan), but they could really do with letting more people handle the bug and patch workflow.
I'd suggest syndicating new BugZilla bugs by RSS, and letting the community sort out the initial feedback. Nominate a bunch of bug handlers from said community, whose job is to nix duplicates and detritus. Those bug handlers forward final patches onto the main developers, who review and apply them.
Exactly.
I'm amazed that this even made Slashdot; Google often takes care to reduce the bandwidth usage of its pages (view source on google.com sometime....)
I do a fair amount of JS coding, and I've taken to distributing the majority of my scripts in two separate "commented" and "compressed" JS files for exactly that reason. My guess is that Google in fact has a fully commented and readable copy of their JavaScript code that they run through a preprocessor/compressor; I use my compressor (basically a hacked up bunch of Regexes) in that form. There are numerous other script processors out there too.
So in conclusion, this isn't really obfuscation (or at least not primarily obfuscation), just bandwidth saving. I'd be very suprised indeed to learn that they were dynamically generating JavaScript via Python (where did the submitter get that idea?). Writing a JS parser and compressor though is pretty simple regex work, and if you couple it together with a table of variable name replacements, you can easily autogenerate slimmed down script for the web.
OK, so for stuff like streaming MP3s and so forth, this is a little overkill for the current style of usage. However, where I think this will come in useful is for stuff like remote disk and memory access over IP.
:).
With a 10G LAN, you'd be able to come up with a great distributed computer system (e.g. for compiling software). IIRC protocols are in the works now for native-ish memory access over networks, turning a network into one huge computer, and you can already access remote disks with the right software. Imagine the simultaneous distributed encoding of several HDTV streams to redundant archives on several different computers, and you'll probably find that more bandwidth = better.
So yeah, there'll definitely be possibilities for this sort of stuff, even if it is only as a base requirement for the post-Longhorn Windows version
Why stop at Konq for X11? I'd love to see Konq Embedded or whatever variant is best suited for the task ported to Windows as well as general *NIX usage!
:).
Seriously, it would make another great alternative browser to IE, along with Firefox and Opera. One guy started a port but got waylaid. If any skilled C++ developers are reading and interested in a project, there you go
I see a lot of posts complaining "blah, 1% is nothing" but hey, it's a good start, especially for one month! Lots of websites and forums I frequent are now sporting "Get Firefox" buttons, so this comes as no real surprise -- awareness of Mozilla and other alternative browsers is slowly seeping into the mainstream.
Here's hoping that over the next few years Mozilla usage will increase to around 15-20% market share or so. We need more standards-compliant browsers out there if the web is ever going to move forward from IE6-compatible site layouts (allowing things like translucent PNGs and CSS2), and the sooner we start the better. Plus, it'll help stop the proliferation of IE-only sites.
An alliance is exactly what they should be doing. Well, ideally it would be under the auspices of the W3C, but it's a great start.
.NET development tools.
The reason is XAML. Microsoft has basically thrown in the towel with its (X)HTML rendering engine (the last release, IE6, was three years ago, and the differences from IE5.5 were not huge -- it still doesn't support stuff like translucent PNGs and much of CSS2). When Longhorn is released, expect a massive push towards the use of their proprietry XAML for web application deployment tied with their
If Mozilla, Opera and hopefully Safari (which shares a few key developers with Mozilla and is implementing the Mozilla XUL box model in places) can push open standards and hopefully get a combined ~20-30% desktop share in the next 5 years before Longhorn is released and becomes semi-ubiquitous on the desktop, they'll be a large thorn in MS's side. Major businesses won't be able to ignore them, and with their focus on backwards-compatible specifications that expand upon existing CSS/JS/DOM technology and degrade well in older browsers (unlike XAML), they'll be the new default for client-side developers.
So start pushing those copies of Firefox onto friends' computers once v0.9 is released in a week or so with its auto-update notification. The more people who are aware that "web browser" does not equal "the blue 'e' icon", the better...
Thanks, Mr A.C., for injecting a little local perspective! While I'm not a Telecom NZ subscriber, allow me to explain a little more...
The two main phone networks in NZ are Vodafone and Telecom. Vodafone initially dominated the texting market, with 20c-per-text prices using its GSM network. In order to reclaim some marketshare, Telecom introduced its "$10-per-month for unlimited texting deal" last year, and advertised it nationwide.
Here's the kicker. Telecom's network is based on CDMA, and to switch from Vodafone to Telecom you have to purchase a new phone and get a new phone number. Lots of people I know were spending hundreds of dollars a month on text charges with Vodafone, so justifying the expense of ~$300NZD for a midrange Telecom phone and switching over made sense economically.
During this period, I don't recall Telecom mentioning any time limit on the deal whatsoever. Anyone who paid more attention than I to the extremely small print at the bottom of their TV screens can feel free to post a rebuttal, but many people received an assurance from Telecom store clerks in person that the $10 deal was guaranteed for a long time (years to decades) and correspondingly switched over to the Telecom network, expecting their initial outlay for a new phone to eventually pay for itself.
Fast forward to 2004, and Telecom pulls the bait and switch on its subscribers, causing a lot of them to get very angry and send as many text messages as they could before the $10 deal terminated as a protest.
I can see where Telecom is coming from, as they do pay interconnect agreements with Vodafone and have to pay approximately 8c to 14c (can't recall the exact figure) per text message that terminates on Vodafone's network, and as such the $10 deal is uneconomic in the long term. And they do still have a monthly deal, but it's capped at ~500 messages last I heard, which is less than many people require (especially when forwarding one message to several people; it adds up rapidly!). However, I still feel that Telecom's behaviour with regards to advertising their phone deal was a little unethical, and I can see exactly where the person in the article is coming from...
Here's another great but little known technique: the PAC file ad-blocker. Cross-browser, easy to install, and much more lightweight than a HOSTS file, plus it can match paths on servers like "/ads*/" rather than just server domains themselves.
:).
Enjoy
...where's my particle accelerator drive?
:P.
On your shelf, inbetween the flux capacitor and the warp core
...that you would be absolutely gutted if your surgeon had just lost badly to a script kiddy :).
;).
Ah! Bad puns! Sometimes, I just kill myself. And if I had the patients to play more games, I would.
P.S. Random offtopic bit: I'm actually a Med student on a surgical team at Dunedin Public Hospital in NZ. A couple of weeks back I saw some guys browsing Slashdot from the computers in the main operating theatre complex. So you never know who'll be reading this...
And what's more, it doesn't even fully support CSS1, which was released in 1996! Try the ComplexSpiral demo, which is a neat demo of the effects possible in Mozilla, Opera and Safari with the 'background-attachment:' CSS1 property, which IE supports only on the BODY tag. Also, let's add 'position: static' support onto our wishlist (for watermarks/menus on pages) and PNG alpha support, and a whole bevy of regular CSS rendering bugs that have remained unsolved for years. MS claims "full CSS1 compliance", but in reality they only support the reduced CSS1 core spec.
;).
And to think it'll be a wait of several years before IE is updated with Longhorn... until then, writing pure CSS sites is going to remain a bug-whacking chore. Let's all be collectively glad that MS fought so hard for their "Freedom to Innovate" back in the anti-trust days
P.S. redesign slashdot using modern web standards, editors!
However, I'm a New Zealander, and I'd love to actually try and shoot down this at the NZ patent office based on the wonderful prior art that is OpenOffice.org. However, I saw these two "claims" in the patent:
The rest of the patented method applies to OOo, as OOo provides schemas and writes out a well-formed XML document etc. etc. etc. However, I'm not sure if OOo provides "hints" in the files (anyone care to comment what MS is on about there?).
The kicker is claim [0009]. If you save a
IANAL, but this appears to mean that this patent is "sufficiently original" (haha) that it can probably slip past the rubber-stamp-brigade at the patent office as OOo won't be citeable as prior art. Apparently the NZ patent office is sufficiently stupid that they recognise the "one-click" patent, so I don't hold high hopes for this one.
So, has anyone heard of a word processor that has an XML file format that contains all its binary data? If so, post links under this thread
P.S. And NewtonsLaw, if you're reading this, I hope to see a plan of action on Aardvark tomorrow
As another poster mentioned, the whole KDE environment has been ported to Cygwin. It works, but it's a pain as it has to run inside a whole X session.
;).
However, I know what you mean... and yes I would love a Windows-native Konqueror port! There's one guy who is (supposedly) starting a port. It looks impressive on the front page, but has been stalled for a year and if you browse through the project forums, the guy admits he isn't really a Windows developer and is still deciding on what compiler to use. So basically, are there any skilled C++ hackers out there who would like to get involved in a KHTML -> Windows port? There's a few good reasons:
1) Choice of browsers on Windows. Even if you just ported KHTML rather than the full Konqueror, the KHTML engine rocks and could make great inroads against IE (compared to Mozilla/MozFirebird, which doesn't seem as fast as IE to load or as responsive on low-end hardware, even though it's a superior browser/renderer engine).
2) Porting all of Konq would rock too, as it offers a lot over plain vanilla EXPLORER.EXE.
3) Development, as the parent pointed out. I'm a XHTML/DHTML/CSS/JavaScript/etc. coder, and would like to certify that my projects work in KHTML. It's damn hard currently. And once Windows developers can get pages working perfectly in KHTML, all Konqueror/Safari users win.
4) Giving average desktop users more exposure to OSS. I'm looking at chucking Linux on this box again (last I tried was Mandrake 6 or 7) and wouldn't mind familiarising myself with its apps on a day-to-day basis first.
5) Why not? It's there
I know what you mean though, the password must be stored on a server somewhere in plaintext for MD5 authentication to work. Still, it's better than nothing.
Yeah, that'd rock. I wonder if anyone's working on a JS implementation of Diffie-Hellman encryption... coupled with the XML2HTTP libraries available in IE5+ and Mozilla for data transfer (or a hidden Java applet/IFRAME), you could have some seriously interesting applications using that in lieu of (or in addition to) full SSL. Diffie-Hellman is an asymmetric cipher that can auto-generate keys without a pre-existing shared secret (if my vague recall of crypto theory is working, any crypto mavens out there feel free to post corrections