Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1
flash's.... almost ubiquitos distribution, and cross-platform support is the tops.
I use Firefox on Linux and occasionally see "Click here to download plugin" - for sites that use Flash. I'm glad I don't have it because such websites (which I used to view from a Windows machine) generally waste the visitor's time by making him/her watch some cute "intro sequence".
There are websites which use SVG. I'll never use Flash on my own sites - SVG will do the job.
No, that isn't the solution, because the present leaders of the Conservative party follow almost exactly the same line as Blair's Labour party. For example, they supported Britain's involvement in the Iraq war.
The Liberal Democrats oppose ID cards, and opposed the Iraq war, so to that extent seem a little more likely to preserve some independence for Britain, from the madmen currently occupying the White House. They are also in favor of a saner voting system (did you know that Blair's overwhelming majority in Parliament - which is big enough to give him dictatorial powers, he can ignore the opposition - resulted from a general election in which his party received just 36% of the votes cast?). However, they have other policies that you may not like (and that I certainly don't like) - they are more socialist than the Labour party.
My present opinion is that the Lib Dems are the least bad of a bad set of choices.
There is also the "British National Party" which seems to me to be a bunch of lunatic racists, and the "UK Independence Party", which has been accused of racism, but possibly wrongly. The UKIP seems less likely to win seats in Parliament than the Lib Dems, though, hence a vote for them is less likely to have any effect.
You know that Slashdot has gone down the tubes ...
on
Web Turns Fifteen (again?)
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
Even the BBC understands the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web - but evidently, Slashdot editors don't.
Anybody know of a forum that's a bit like/. , but run by clueful editors?
The issue isn't people who want to go to aaa.cm accidently typing aab.cm, it's people wanting to go to aaa.com and forgetting the 'o'.
I think you are missing the point. The owner of, say, neimanmarcus.com would be a victim of typosquatting if someone else took the domain name niemanmarcus.com, because someone typing in the latter spelling would really be deceived if it went to the wrong page. He could look carefully at what he typed and think, "yes, niemanmarcus.com, that's right." But if you type neimanmarcus.cm, the mistake is obvious when you look again.
When trying to allow for users' mistakes, at some point you have to draw a line. Beyond a certain point, the user has to take responsibility to type what he or she means. For example, philips.com and phillips.com are different domains. Neither is typosquatting; the user has to get it right. Top-level country domains are a much clearer case than that.
Quite so, but that's not what this/. story is about. The story is about typosquatting.
To quote from the document to which you posted the link: "Proposed guideline: If you want to use wildcards in your zone and understand the risks, go ahead, but only do so with the informed consent of the entities that are delegated within your zone."
when you try to go to a non-existent domain, you should get a name resolution failure.
.cm is not a nonexistent domain. It is a well-defined domain, owned by Cameroon.
The owner of a domain is free to divide it into subdomains as he, she or it pleases; including delegating some or all of the subdomains, which is what is usually done by owners of top-level domains.
Cameroon is not typo-squatting anything. If you type in a domain name ending in.cm that hasn't been specifically assigned to someone, you get a fairly innocuous default page with links to ads. So what?
The article is very verbose. It has some value, I suppose - it helped me to decide I didn't want to buy the book. There are more concise introductions to Ajax
here and here
There is also an interesting library of Javascript/ECMAscript functions to perform common Ajax chores
here
Renew your passport at a consulate overseas. Incidentally, this is also much quicker than renewing it in the UK (typically takes 2 weeks). The only snags are the obvious ones that you need to stay out of the UK for long enough to get your new passport, and you need an overseas address (maybe a friend's).
I would not advise trying the obvious trick of just mailing your old passport to a friend in country X with all the forms, and asking them to post them to the consulate as though you were in X, then post the passport back to you when it arrives at their address. Cross-border postal mail is checked more often than most people realize, and I have heard of cases where identity documents have been removed.
Telecommuting sounds a great plan until you analyse it.
One: Which region sets the competitive salary for telecommuters? Obviously, the cheapest. Welcome to Bangladesh salary levels. Oh, you wanted to live in the USA? How unreasonable of you!
Two: Even if you are willing to take a Bangladesh salary, there are about a zillion people competing with you for the 2 telecommuting jobs currently open. Most people in jobs that don't require personal contact would like to telecommute. Why wouldn't they? It beats commuting on rush-hour roads...
There is only one way I know of to get a telecommuting job, and that is, to get an ordinary non-telecommuting job, then after a few years, persuade your boss to let you work from home. It works until your boss wakes up to the fact that he/she is overpaying you.
You may be wondering why, in view of the cost advantages, most firms do not let their knowledge workers telecommute. You have to remember that managers do not make decisions for the good of the stockholders; they make decisions that benefit themselves. It strokes a manager's ego to be surrounded by peons at his beck and call. Having them sit at home where he cannot see them is just not the same.
This problem is as old as doing business - and the solutions were found a very long time ago.
For example, how did a company keep its accountants honest, in the days when the accountants kept the books and made all the payments?
The solution was, basically, twofold: firstly, any transaction requires two people. (For example, the employee who actually issues checks is never the same as the employee who authorizes an expenditure.) Secondly, there is an "audit trail", i.e. for each transaction, there is a record of who authorized that transaction and what it was for. Verifying that a company does these things is part of a standard audit, that every public company must have.
The same principles can be applied to any area of a business. Companies which do not apply them to financial IT systems are asking for trouble.
Wait... how is arresting 12-year-olds for playing in a tree
They weren't just "playing in a tree". They were destroying an ornamental tree in a public place. That is vandalism, and some police action is appropriate. To you maybe it's just a "fucking tree", but some of us value the beauty of our environment.
The action taken was "over the top", but vandalism is a serious problem and some action needed to be taken.
AMD has taken 25 percent of the server market for itself,
During the time period that this data refers to, AMD's products had a clear lead in price/performance. But they only got a quarter of the market, instead of >90%, which they would have got if purchasers had been knowledgeable and rational.
but don't expect me to care what you have to say when you can't make your voice heard in a public and legal forum.
Surely part of the point of the protest is that the mainstream media in the US is very biased? And that the horrors of the attack on Lebanon (it's not a war, because Lebanon hasn't any significant military forces) are being downplayed? Personally, I do care when a reasonable viewpoint is effectively denied a voice in mainstream forums.
just a correction, the internet wasn't invented in the US. it was developed by Tim Berners-Lee
You're confusing the internet with the (world-wide) web. The internet grew out of Arpanet, which was funded by the US, in (IIRC) about 1970. It quickly grew beyond the borders of the US, and people from several countries contributed to its development, but in the early days, most contributors were American.
The Web is what Berners-Lee developed at CERN, much later. It's just one application of the internet, others being ftp, telnet, and email.
If you've designed the site with IE6 in mind, try it in Firefox, if there are any mistakes in the rendering, try it in IE7.
If you've designed a website "with IE6 in mind" and it doesn't work with Firefox, that probably is not a "mistake in the rendering" but a mistake in your website.
I've found that IE7 will mangle IE6 pages in almost EXACTLY the same way Firefox does.
Translation: your crap pages do not comply with W3C standards.
Despite colonial occupation that bled our country for hundreds of years
That's what your politicians tell you. Find a non-politician who's 80 years old, who was there, and talk to them. India was better off under "colonial occupation" than it is today. The Brits didn't "bleed" India, on the contrary they unified it, built infrastructure (especially railways) and gave it a legal system.
A country should govern itself, not be governed by foreigners. But you have nothing to be proud of in what your politicians have done in the last 50 years.
Why do "Plan 9 web browsers" have to exist?
on
Driving Plan 9
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· Score: 1
Why can't you just recompile Firefox for Plan 9?
If there's some reason you can't take pretty much any open source application, and recompile it for Plan 9, then Plan 9 would a pointless waste of time.
I do not for a moment believe that Plan 9's creators would make such a stupid mistake.
I don't really care about features (except tabbed browsing, a must-have, but they all have that). I care about standards compliance. Apparently Opera is in the lead here, with the rest nowhere.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
The quotation is the general principle, which enables you to understand a lot of different things, some of which are more important than others. It explains, for example, why the American people are subject to the Patriot Act, DMCA, and eternal copyrights. None of these have much in common with either of the things youi mentioned.
If that were all that the patent said, Microsoft's team of top lawyers would have ripped it to shreds in seconds. The fact is that Claim 1 just describes a component, for which no originality is claimed. The essence of the patent is that it takes a bunch of things, none of which are novel, and combines them in a way which is claimed to be novel. The patent itself says "its individual elements respond to prior art in the following areas: decision-support software and executive information systems, expert systems and expert system building tools,..." and it cites 7 examples of prior art just in the area of decision-support software.
The patent is bad because it is a software patent. But if software patents are allowed, then combining known elements in a new way qualifies for a patent, because there is over 100 years of precedent in awarding patents for just that in other fields.
Cost to Microsoft: Negligible. (Microsoft's net income was over $12 billion last year).
Cost to the inventor: 14 years of his life spent fighting a legal battle.
Message to anybody else whose work Microsoft steals: if you take us to court, figure on losing 14 years of your life fighting a legal battle, and by the way you'd better have a lot of money before you start, because Microsoft won't hesitate to spend a few tens of millions on the best legal talent available.
Slashdot Mirror
flash's .... almost ubiquitos distribution, and cross-platform support is the tops.
I use Firefox on Linux and occasionally see "Click here to download plugin" - for sites that use Flash. I'm glad I don't have it because such websites (which I used to view from a Windows machine) generally waste the visitor's time by making him/her watch some cute "intro sequence".
There are websites which use SVG. I'll never use Flash on my own sites - SVG will do the job.
No, that isn't the solution, because the present leaders of the Conservative party follow almost exactly the same line as Blair's Labour party. For example, they supported Britain's involvement in the Iraq war.
The Liberal Democrats oppose ID cards, and opposed the Iraq war, so to that extent seem a little more likely to preserve some independence for Britain, from the madmen currently occupying the White House. They are also in favor of a saner voting system (did you know that Blair's overwhelming majority in Parliament - which is big enough to give him dictatorial powers, he can ignore the opposition - resulted from a general election in which his party received just 36% of the votes cast?). However, they have other policies that you may not like (and that I certainly don't like) - they are more socialist than the Labour party.
My present opinion is that the Lib Dems are the least bad of a bad set of choices.
There is also the "British National Party" which seems to me to be a bunch of lunatic racists, and the "UK Independence Party", which has been accused of racism, but possibly wrongly. The UKIP seems less likely to win seats in Parliament than the Lib Dems, though, hence a vote for them is less likely to have any effect.
Even the BBC understands the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web - but evidently, Slashdot editors don't.
Anybody know of a forum that's a bit like /. , but run by clueful editors?
The issue isn't people who want to go to aaa.cm accidently typing aab.cm, it's people wanting to go to aaa.com and forgetting the 'o'.
I think you are missing the point. The owner of, say, neimanmarcus.com would be a victim of typosquatting if someone else took the domain name niemanmarcus.com, because someone typing in the latter spelling would really be deceived if it went to the wrong page. He could look carefully at what he typed and think, "yes, niemanmarcus.com, that's right." But if you type neimanmarcus.cm, the mistake is obvious when you look again.
When trying to allow for users' mistakes, at some point you have to draw a line. Beyond a certain point, the user has to take responsibility to type what he or she means. For example, philips.com and phillips.com are different domains. Neither is typosquatting; the user has to get it right. Top-level country domains are a much clearer case than that.
Quite so, but that's not what this /. story is about. The story is about typosquatting.
To quote from the document to which you posted the link: "Proposed guideline: If you want to use wildcards in your zone and understand the risks, go ahead, but only do so with the informed consent of the entities that are delegated within your zone."
when you try to go to a non-existent domain, you should get a name resolution failure.
.cm is not a nonexistent domain. It is a well-defined domain, owned by Cameroon.
The owner of a domain is free to divide it into subdomains as he, she or it pleases; including delegating some or all of the subdomains, which is what is usually done by owners of top-level domains.
Cameroon is not typo-squatting anything. If you type in a domain name ending in .cm that hasn't been specifically assigned to someone, you get a fairly innocuous default page with links to ads. So what?
Torvalds complained that the FSF didn't listen to people's comments.
What he really meant was, "The FSF listened to everybody's comments, instead of just doing what I told them to do."
The experience of being a benevolent dictator in one area has given him the idea that he should be a benevolent dictator in other areas.
The article is very verbose. It has some value, I suppose - it helped me to decide I didn't want to buy the book. There are more concise introductions to Ajax here and here
There is also an interesting library of Javascript/ECMAscript functions to perform common Ajax chores here
Renew your passport at a consulate overseas. Incidentally, this is also much quicker than renewing it in the UK (typically takes 2 weeks). The only snags are the obvious ones that you need to stay out of the UK for long enough to get your new passport, and you need an overseas address (maybe a friend's).
I would not advise trying the obvious trick of just mailing your old passport to a friend in country X with all the forms, and asking them to post them to the consulate as though you were in X, then post the passport back to you when it arrives at their address. Cross-border postal mail is checked more often than most people realize, and I have heard of cases where identity documents have been removed.
Telecommuting sounds a great plan until you analyse it.
One: Which region sets the competitive salary for telecommuters? Obviously, the cheapest. Welcome to Bangladesh salary levels. Oh, you wanted to live in the USA? How unreasonable of you!
Two: Even if you are willing to take a Bangladesh salary, there are about a zillion people competing with you for the 2 telecommuting jobs currently open. Most people in jobs that don't require personal contact would like to telecommute. Why wouldn't they? It beats commuting on rush-hour roads ...
There is only one way I know of to get a telecommuting job, and that is, to get an ordinary non-telecommuting job, then after a few years, persuade your boss to let you work from home. It works until your boss wakes up to the fact that he/she is overpaying you.
You may be wondering why, in view of the cost advantages, most firms do not let their knowledge workers telecommute. You have to remember that managers do not make decisions for the good of the stockholders; they make decisions that benefit themselves. It strokes a manager's ego to be surrounded by peons at his beck and call. Having them sit at home where he cannot see them is just not the same.
This problem is as old as doing business - and the solutions were found a very long time ago.
For example, how did a company keep its accountants honest, in the days when the accountants kept the books and made all the payments?
The solution was, basically, twofold: firstly, any transaction requires two people. (For example, the employee who actually issues checks is never the same as the employee who authorizes an expenditure.) Secondly, there is an "audit trail", i.e. for each transaction, there is a record of who authorized that transaction and what it was for. Verifying that a company does these things is part of a standard audit, that every public company must have.
The same principles can be applied to any area of a business. Companies which do not apply them to financial IT systems are asking for trouble.
Wait ... how is arresting 12-year-olds for playing in a tree
They weren't just "playing in a tree". They were destroying an ornamental tree in a public place. That is vandalism, and some police action is appropriate. To you maybe it's just a "fucking tree", but some of us value the beauty of our environment.
The action taken was "over the top", but vandalism is a serious problem and some action needed to be taken.
AMD has taken 25 percent of the server market for itself,
During the time period that this data refers to, AMD's products had a clear lead in price/performance. But they only got a quarter of the market, instead of >90%, which they would have got if purchasers had been knowledgeable and rational.
a fake database or two, some Word documents showing that the US has a secert base in the middle of the everglades....
You'll then get pulled in by Homeland Security and shipped to Gitmo for revealing that the US has a secret base in the middle of the Everglades.
but don't expect me to care what you have to say when you can't make your voice heard in a public and legal forum.
Surely part of the point of the protest is that the mainstream media in the US is very biased? And that the horrors of the attack on Lebanon (it's not a war, because Lebanon hasn't any significant military forces) are being downplayed? Personally, I do care when a reasonable viewpoint is effectively denied a voice in mainstream forums.
No one talks about the pyramid they built 5100 years ago that fell down after 21 years
That's just because it's no longer news: Collapsed pyramid
just a correction, the internet wasn't invented in the US. it was developed by Tim Berners-Lee
You're confusing the internet with the (world-wide) web. The internet grew out of Arpanet, which was funded by the US, in (IIRC) about 1970. It quickly grew beyond the borders of the US, and people from several countries contributed to its development, but in the early days, most contributors were American.
The Web is what Berners-Lee developed at CERN, much later. It's just one application of the internet, others being ftp, telnet, and email.
If you've designed the site with IE6 in mind, try it in Firefox, if there are any mistakes in the rendering, try it in IE7.
If you've designed a website "with IE6 in mind" and it doesn't work with Firefox, that probably is not a "mistake in the rendering" but a mistake in your website.
I've found that IE7 will mangle IE6 pages in almost EXACTLY the same way Firefox does.
Translation: your crap pages do not comply with W3C standards.
Despite colonial occupation that bled our country for hundreds of years
That's what your politicians tell you. Find a non-politician who's 80 years old, who was there, and talk to them. India was better off under "colonial occupation" than it is today. The Brits didn't "bleed" India, on the contrary they unified it, built infrastructure (especially railways) and gave it a legal system.
A country should govern itself, not be governed by foreigners. But you have nothing to be proud of in what your politicians have done in the last 50 years.
Why can't you just recompile Firefox for Plan 9?
If there's some reason you can't take pretty much any open source application, and recompile it for Plan 9, then Plan 9 would a pointless waste of time.
I do not for a moment believe that Plan 9's creators would make such a stupid mistake.
I don't really care about features (except tabbed browsing, a must-have, but they all have that). I care about standards compliance. Apparently Opera is in the lead here, with the rest nowhere.
The quotation is the general principle, which enables you to understand a lot of different things, some of which are more important than others. It explains, for example, why the American people are subject to the Patriot Act, DMCA, and eternal copyrights. None of these have much in common with either of the things youi mentioned.
If that were all that the patent said, Microsoft's team of top lawyers would have ripped it to shreds in seconds. The fact is that Claim 1 just describes a component, for which no originality is claimed. The essence of the patent is that it takes a bunch of things, none of which are novel, and combines them in a way which is claimed to be novel. The patent itself says "its individual elements respond to prior art in the following areas: decision-support software and executive information systems, expert systems and expert system building tools, ..." and it cites 7 examples of prior art just in the area of decision-support software.
The patent is bad because it is a software patent. But if software patents are allowed, then combining known elements in a new way qualifies for a patent, because there is over 100 years of precedent in awarding patents for just that in other fields.
Cost to Microsoft: Negligible. (Microsoft's net income was over $12 billion last year).
Cost to the inventor: 14 years of his life spent fighting a legal battle.
Message to anybody else whose work Microsoft steals: if you take us to court, figure on losing 14 years of your life fighting a legal battle, and by the way you'd better have a lot of money before you start, because Microsoft won't hesitate to spend a few tens of millions on the best legal talent available.