There should be some comments in the article, as you can read CmdrTaco talking about re-enabling comments. Perhaps when the original static.shtml files the articles and comments were archived in were parsed, the comments in this one were missed. There's also another, unrelated article that came after this into which people first started posting comments of protest. I can't seem to find it, however.
I can remember using Macs in high school and the damn things were always showing that damn "system bomb" message "Sorry, a system error occurred." Of course, the Macs and MacOS of today are a hell of a lot more stable and don't do stupid shit like that, but still, that brought back memories!
Man, who was the waste of flesh who modded that down as "offtopic"? Maybe it was Pudge! I've noticed just about all posts even remotely critical of Apple or the Mac are summarily modded down, very quickly. Definitely editor moderation. Perhaps Slashdot is trying to create their own little Mac-zealot community here, and suppressing the dissidents is necessary to make the Mac zealots comfortable. Perhaps they're trying to become the Apple weblog. Perhaps they're the ones who "stole" the original MacSlash domain, in an attempt to hobble the competition...!
"A MACINTOSH WILL NOT CRASH, EVER!" I sure hope Apple doesn't attempt to use a slogan like that...
OK, you can mod me down now and continue living in your fake little Mac world.
Too bad Capcom weakened him in the Turbo Hyper Fighting version.
Also, there was nothing like nailing your opponent with the scissor kick, which they later slowed down and eventually made it knock the opponent down (as opposed to leave them standing so you could mess them up more).
A lot of people called him a "cheap" character. Cheap? No, he's efficient and effective! Easy to beat other people with! What the hell's wrong with that? Sure, they tried to "balance" the characters but always failed, usually leaving Ken or Guile too powerful and making Dhalsim and Balrog (M. Bison in the Japanese version) too weak. Oh yeah... Balrog was fun, too. Nothing like running across the screen and smacking your opponent in the face. The Dashing Uppercut was cool, too. Jumping characters never knew what hit them!
There a story a while back, where Slashdot linked to some website... I think it was "somethingawful.com". The story is here.
Basically, the owner, who called himself LowTax, was having trouble paying for his bandwidth, and was trying various tactics to reduce his readership so he could keep the site up.
Then Slashdot linked to him, and he started getting a ton of traffic. He couldn't take this, so he set up his server to redirect people coming from Slashdot to the infamous gay-porn site "goatse.cx", the crapflooder favourite. You can see CmdrTaco partially acknowledging this in his update, "Links were randomly redirecting people, so I dropped them." This was, apparently, LowTax's way of telling Slashdot to fuck off.
There was a comment in the Slashdot story which explained the situation a lot better, but it was moderated down and not archived. Strangely enough, all but two of the comments in the story which mentioned the redirection were editor-moderated down. Strange.
My point is, the Slashdot Effect is a mild DDoS attack. Don't pretend it isn't. Want to beat up a site? Get the Slashdot editors to link to it from the front page of the site.
I don't think Slashdot fully appreciates what it does to some of these smaller sites. I could even see Slashdot getting sued for taking down a site. That seems like a stretch, but if, for example, someone was going to demo a site to a manager or higher-up in a company, and it wasn't responding being it was getting trampled by Slashbots... Or perhaps, the Slashdot Effect took down an e-commerce site and caused the owners to lose business... It's quite chauvinistic; you're assuming everyone has the infrastructure to handle the load. It's like sending huge, 20-meg files as email attachments and beating up the mail servers or using up all of their disk space. (I realize, in this case, the mail server could simply be configured to refuse large attachments, but I hope you see my point.)
So, what's Slashdot to do? I don't know. It's really a shame that people have to pay by the meg. It's undoubtedly part of what killed a lot of dotcoms. This is especially a problem if you run a streaming media website or a site with lots of large downloads. I've sadly witnessed a lot of such sites close. But on the other hand, if you have two sites with the same hosting plan, but one is hugely popular and gets loads of traffic, and the other is hardly ever visited, is it really fair to charge the sites' owners the same amount?
I don't have any definitive answers, but I will say that since you have the courtesy not to send huge, 20-meg files via email, consider having the courtesy to think about what the Slashdot Effect will do to a website.
I'm not sure how well it fits, but some good anti-Microsoft propaganda can be found at KMFMS. KMFMS apparently stands for something in German. I don't know what it means, so I just use the words "Kill Mother-F***ing MicroSoft" to remember the letters.
Netscape 4.x Is the Problem, Not 6.x
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The perceived slowness is inversly proportional to your level of zealotry. You'd be suprised what the die hards will tolerate.;)
The same formula can be applied to IE zealots' perceived standards compliance in IE.
I'm no IE zealot, but I have been doing web development with DHTML and JavaScript for the last year, and I can say that Netscape 4 vs. IE is the problem most people are referring to when they say "Netscape isn't (as) standards-compliant (as IE)." Netscape 4 is a bloody dog for anything above DOM-level-zero -- <LAYER>, <ILAYER>, etc... Brrr... I'll pass.
Netscape 6, on the other hand, has greatly impressed me. I'm so glad the Netscape crew has acknowledged the problems of Netscape 4.x and is making a concerted effort to be standards-compliant in version 6.
If my pages look good and operate well in IE but badly in Netscape 4, it's Netscape's fault. But if they look good and operate well in IE and badly in Netscape 6, it's my fault or IE's fault.
I just wish Netscape 6 could load faster and didn't use so much much memory (both in Windows; don't know about other platforms). Someone mentioned that Mozilla 0.94 had a "turbo" option which loaded it into memory when Windows starts to give it the same speed advantage as IE. I hope that's in Netscape 6.2 and can be easily turned on by the user. That would certainly help. Can you believe that for all my complaints about it, I'm using Netscape 4.x to post this? Why? Because it's fast, and for me, it's faster than IE. I'll have to try Netscape 6.2 so I can get this clunker off the web and reduce (if only slightly) the headaches it causes developers everywhere.
I also wish Netscape hadn't changed the plug-in architecture, too, but that's not as relevant to the problems of Netscape 4.x, which largely concern its "DHTML".
Hey, I'm a Canadian, too, but I think the parent poster is right. The UK is a much better friend. Where's Chrétien? What's he doing? Is he pledging the same kind of support as Mr. Blair? Is he rallying our military? No!
I don't want to hear any of my fellow Canucks whining about this. If we want to be internationally recognized, we have to work get that recognition. Bush isn't going to say "Canada r00lz" just because we're his neighbour!
Don't let Chrétien have a fourth term in office. This third term is bad enough. Vote Conservative or Alliance (or whoever has the best chance) and kick the bum out. I especially hope a new prime minister will ditch that left-wing hippie bitch of a governer-general Adrienne Clarkson. She sucks! Oh, and the plural of "governer-general" is governer-generals, not "governers-general". She doesn't govern shit!
Anyway, I digress. UKians everywhere, I salute you and your prime minister! You must be proud! You're also really kind and helpful. I was having a bit of trouble with the London Underground when I visited your country a while back, and you helped me out. Thank you, UK!
...Your two singular examples are statistically insignificant.
What a horribly insensitive thing to say. What if it was your friend who got hit by a car in an area with loads of cameras? What if it was you who got beaten up by bouncers in a night club in front of a camera, but was told the recording "disappeared"?
The cameras were installed to help protect you and bring your assailants to justice, and, especially in the latter case, they failed. You're lying in a hospital bed, and a police officer tells you you'll never be able to prove the bouncers beat you up because the tape "disappeared".
And, yet, all you can say is that this is "statistically insignificant"? Have you ever had anything even remotely bad happen to you?
RDS is used by a very small number of stations in North America. This is largely because there are so few radios that support it here. I know of only one person who has an RDS radio and only one station that uses RDS. I live in Canada, and my local CBC affiliate uses RDS to display their call letters continuously (nothing else) on their station. No other station on my FM dial uses it. (By the way, RDS only works on FM.)
It's really stupid. I walk into a stereo shop and ask the salesman if he has any new receivers with fancy new features. RDS? No. L-Band digital radio? American "IBOC" digital? No. They have these receivers with slick LED displays and chrome finishes with 1970s radio technology inside.
Back in the '60s and '70s, the governmental radio authorities would mandate things like, "All radios above a certain price must have FM stereo reception," etc. to promote the growth of FM, or "All TVs must have high-quality UHF tuners," to ensure UHF TV stations would not suffer. Now, they don't do shit. AM stereo radio died as a result of their idleness, and RDS will die, too.
Remember back in the '80s when your local top-40 station ID'd themselves as "KXYZ 800 AM stereo"? They weren't jerking you around; they really were stereo. But because the government never demanded radio manufacturers include AM stereo on their radios and took 10 years to decide on a standard, the AM band is rapidly becoming a ghost town. Everyone wants an FM station instead, and in many major radio markets, the FM band is completely full.
I don't see why the RIAA isn't pushing for deployment and proper use of RDS for displaying artist and title information. In the late '80s, they would slap stickers that said "When you play it, say it," on records sent to radio stations, to promote artist recognition.
The next thing to die: digital radio. Canada wants to use the L-Band (1452 to 1492 MHz) for digital radio (same as in Europe), the United States wants to use a system called In-Band-On-Channel digital, in which the digital and analogue signal will share the same frequency. Neither of these will become standard in North America.
Without government intervention, only a technology that makes a huge, radical difference (like colour vs. black-and-white TV) can ever become commonly used.
Well, this is strange. I'm sitting on a Windows 98 box with McAfee VShield v4.0.3 installed and virus definition files from 2001/06/13. Whenever I try to go to http://www.veridian.com/upload/ with either IE 4.01 or Netscape 4.70, McAfee pops a warning dialogue saying I have just downloaded a worm called "SunOS/BoxPoison.worm". I also have a small Perl program I can use to perform command-line HTTP downloads, and with it, I can download the page at http://www.veridian.com/upload/ without any problems.
I'm probably getting the warning because something in the HTML code matches the signature for a known worm. But still, if the message on the site isn't enough to scare people, the warning from their virus scanner certainly will!
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Content-Location: http://www.veridian.com/upload/index.htm
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 03:51:47 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Wed, 09 May 2001 12:53:30 GMT
ETag: "6a8163c87d8c01:943"
Content-Length: 289
(Slashcode has inserted a few spaces into the following HTML... I hope this doesn't trip your virus scanner...)
It may seem petty, but I must take exception to this one item listed in the user information pages:
"Show your real email address without cowering behind childish anonymity or obfuscation."
Excuse me, but the last time I posted my email address on Slashdot (by mistake), it started a torrent of spam that still has not stopped. Email filters can only go so far.
What in the world is wrong with wanting to avoid useless email? I'm not posting as "Anonymous Coward"; isn't that good enough for you?
There's also the fact that some people prefer to creatively obfuscate their email address their way and post clues or instructions on how to decode it in their signature. I think that's pretty cool... Oh well...
Sorry for the repeat posting, but an Anonymous Coward posted a very astute reply to the parent of this post, and since it has not been moderated up, I fear it will be lost when this story is archived. So, here it is:
You know, it would help if you could read your own link.
According to your own source, 3.4 and 3.5 MHz are not the bandwidths of the two formats. They are the center frequencies of the FM modulated Y (luminance or video level) signal. The peak Y signal encoding for Beta I was 4.8 Mhz, yielding a 1.3 MHz half bandwidth for the upper side lobe. With a 3.4 MHz center and 4.4 MHz peak, the upper sidelobe bandwidth for VHS was only 1.0 Mhz. In other words, Beta effectively had a 30% higher signal to noise ratio resulting in better contrast and less noise. Further, the slightly higher center frequency of Beta provided 100 KHz more bandwidth in the lower sidelobe, and 200 KHz more in the case of Beta II and Beta III, which provide increased sharpness or a seemingly higher resolution.
But that's only part of the story. With standard length tapes, VHS SP mode only provided 2 hours recording time, so people rarely used it. With the slower tape speed of SLP/EP mode, you only get 220 lines of resolution and you run into the limits of the tape's frequency response, resulting in a tapering dropoff of the upper sideband of the Y signal, which you can see here. That's why EP mode looks like crap, with poor resolution & contrast and lots of bleed.
Beta II and Beta III speeds offered 3 and 4.5 hour recording times at no loss in vertical resolution and very little loss in video bandwidth (still 20% better than VHS in SP mode). If you've ever made a visual comparison of a Beta III tape and a VHS SLP/EP tape, you'll see the difference is dramatic. One major reason why Beta retains more of its quality at lower speeds is that it's head/tape speed is considerably higher.
In theory, SVHS should be a lot better than Super Beta, but in practice (comparing my 2 VCRs) it seems to be only a tiny bit better than Super Beta II in SP (2 hour) mode, and is much worse than Super Beta III in SLP/EP mode. One problem with SVHS is that it requires high quality tapes and really pushes the tape to the limits. Another problem is that it trades off too much horizontal bandwidth for increased vertical resolution.
Finally, SVHS was introduced about 5 years after Super Beta, so during the height of the format wars you were typically comparing a Super Beta unit at BIII speed to a VHS HQ unit at EP speed. Frankly, there was no comparison.
In audio quality, there is no comparison. Beta Hi-Fi allocates 500 MHz for audio while VHS Hi-Fi only allocates 150 MHz. Beta Hi-Fi has a lot better dynamic range and a low noise floor without using a noise reduction scheme like VHS Hi-Fi, and VHS Hi-Fi tapes only sound good on the same machine they were recorded on.
There. Please consider getting an account, whoever you are. I'm afraid "Anonymous Coward" is apparently just for trolls these days.
NS4 "DHTML" vs. NS6 DHTML
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 1
Hey! My job is mostly centred around DHTML, too, and I have to say that while I'm glad Netscape 6 has finally adopted proper DHTML (<IFRAME>, <DIV>, etc.), I noticed that the document.frames array in Netscape 6.0 doesn't seem to be present. That's really stupid. I'm sure it's part of the official specification. Hopefully Netscape 6.1 will correct this, tho they should have got it right the first time!
I wish I could tell my users to ditch Netscape 4.x and get Netscape 6.x, but Netscape6 is such a big RAM/disk space/processor power hog that they probably wouldn't. Furthermore, there's the missing support for document.frames[], the fact that Netscape6 can't run LiveConnect plug-ins from Netscape4, the huge download, etc. I don't know what Netscape's goal is with this, but they do appear to moving in one particular direction: to get the whole world to switch to IE.
I suppose I'm a big hypocrite, because I'm sitting here composing this in Netscape 4, the very browser I wish the world would drop. However, it's fast to load and doesn't use a lot of RAM or require a really fast processor, so it's good for small stuff. IE 4.0 and even 5.0 (and especially the dog's breakfast known as IE 5.5) don't have those qualities. But Netscape 6 really takes the cake. It makes IE 5.5 look fast and un-bloated. I'm not worried about holding back the transition away from NS4, because if the browser usage stats from the websites at my workplace are any indication, IE already rules the world. I'm talking about a >95% market share.
Anyway, the "DHTML" in Netscape 4.x is garbage. <LAYER>?? What the hell is that?? Have you noticed that if you try to load documents into two layers in quick succession, only the first one loads? If you have two <LAYER> tags on a page named "Layer1" and "Layer2" and two documents named "doc1.html" and "doc2.html", this code, which should load doc1.html and doc2.html into Layer1 and Layer2, will only load Layer1 most of the time:
You actually have two wait a bit after Layer1 is finished loading before Layer2 can start. I think that's because Netscape can only load one thing at a time, and while one thing is loading, all other JavaScript or other activities must wait...
Anyway, Netscape 4.xx continues to exist. They just released 4.78 about a week ago! Why don't they put that stupid thing to bed?
By the way, were you ever able to get the <ILAYER> tag to work? I couldn't; it would either crash the browser or just not appear.
...Most sites are...frustrated with the...Slashdot Effect, and it often infuriates the system administrators, because they wish they had the resources to handle it, but the upper management types find that their only regret was not being able to serve their content to everyone who came to look.
I see. I also think the ASP coding in use on that site is a little less than efficient, or at least not designed for high-volume usage. Judging by the form of the filename and query string ("display-management101.asp?ContentID=603"), it sounds like an article is being pulled from a database and displayed in a template. Changing the "ContentID" to something else might serve up a different article. I'd think a better way to do it would be by storing the article in a file and using server-side includes to show it inside a template file, using style sheets to adjust the formatting of the article (making it a.shtml file instead of a.asp file). Files with.shtml extensions are a lot less work for the server to deal with. It would be less error-prone, too. Cutting the database out of the loop would really help. Furthermore, a caching solution like XCache would help.
I suppose there's nothing CmdrTaco and the Slashdot crew could do. They can't email and wait for permission to link. They'd be waiting too long. They might as well ask for permission to mirror the article! I just thought that they might one day get into trouble in this litigation-infested world.
Anyway, the article came up when I clicked a few minutes ago, albeit slowly, and I'm sure someone else has mirrored the text of the article in this discussion, so this is a moot point for now...until the next Slashdotting...
There are other ways to deface websites even if you aren't fortunate to have the administrator link to one of your images. For example, if the website has a search feature and lists the "top-10 search queries", just search for "fuck you" or "this website sucks" over and over.
Websites with open submission queues for stories allow easy defacement by filling them with profanity.
Open discussion boards like Slashdot but without Slashdot's antitrolling features (the lameness filter) are big targets:
post a long string of M's or W's (or any character) to force the browser to display a horizontal scrollbar and possibly make the discussion hard to follow
if HTML is enabled, or the title or your account name aren't filtered, enter HTML <IMG> tags to link to disgusting images, or if you're really clever, make some JavaScript to do naughty things. Don't forget style sheets! Try <P STYLE="background-image: url(http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg);"> or just obnoxiously large text using <P STYLE="font-size: 250px;">.
Post HTML to disrupt the tables containing the comments (like "Last post!! </TD></TR></TABLE>
Obscene ASCII art
Basically, if the Slashdot lameness filter traps it, make sure your target board doesn't!
Linking to an image another site is unwise for another reason -- the administrator of the other site can delete the image. If it's not a commonly-found image, you've lost it! But if you copy it locally, you may get into copyright-related trouble. So it's kind of a dilemma. But in your case, you should have definitely copied it locally...
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're thinking of this article from late 1998 by Sengan.
There should be some comments in the article, as you can read CmdrTaco talking about re-enabling comments. Perhaps when the original static .shtml files the articles and comments were archived in were parsed, the comments in this one were missed. There's also another, unrelated article that came after this into which people first started posting comments of protest. I can't seem to find it, however.
Man, I laughed so hard at that!
I can remember using Macs in high school and the damn things were always showing that damn "system bomb" message "Sorry, a system error occurred." Of course, the Macs and MacOS of today are a hell of a lot more stable and don't do stupid shit like that, but still, that brought back memories!
Man, who was the waste of flesh who modded that down as "offtopic"? Maybe it was Pudge! I've noticed just about all posts even remotely critical of Apple or the Mac are summarily modded down, very quickly. Definitely editor moderation. Perhaps Slashdot is trying to create their own little Mac-zealot community here, and suppressing the dissidents is necessary to make the Mac zealots comfortable. Perhaps they're trying to become the Apple weblog. Perhaps they're the ones who "stole" the original MacSlash domain, in an attempt to hobble the competition...!
"A MACINTOSH WILL NOT CRASH, EVER!" I sure hope Apple doesn't attempt to use a slogan like that...
OK, you can mod me down now and continue living in your fake little Mac world.
M. Bison (Vega in the Japanese version) was pretty, um, fun in the Champion Edition:
Round one... Fight!
Whooosh!!
Smack!
Whooosh!!
Smack!
Whooosh!!
Smack!
Whooosh!!
Smack!
Whooosh!!
Smack!
Whooosh!!
Smack!
Aaaaaahhh!!
You win! Perfect!!
Too bad Capcom weakened him in the Turbo Hyper Fighting version.
Also, there was nothing like nailing your opponent with the scissor kick, which they later slowed down and eventually made it knock the opponent down (as opposed to leave them standing so you could mess them up more).
A lot of people called him a "cheap" character. Cheap? No, he's efficient and effective! Easy to beat other people with! What the hell's wrong with that? Sure, they tried to "balance" the characters but always failed, usually leaving Ken or Guile too powerful and making Dhalsim and Balrog (M. Bison in the Japanese version) too weak. Oh yeah... Balrog was fun, too. Nothing like running across the screen and smacking your opponent in the face. The Dashing Uppercut was cool, too. Jumping characters never knew what hit them!
There a story a while back, where Slashdot linked to some website... I think it was "somethingawful.com". The story is here.
Basically, the owner, who called himself LowTax, was having trouble paying for his bandwidth, and was trying various tactics to reduce his readership so he could keep the site up.
Then Slashdot linked to him, and he started getting a ton of traffic. He couldn't take this, so he set up his server to redirect people coming from Slashdot to the infamous gay-porn site "goatse.cx", the crapflooder favourite. You can see CmdrTaco partially acknowledging this in his update, "Links were randomly redirecting people, so I dropped them." This was, apparently, LowTax's way of telling Slashdot to fuck off.
There was a comment in the Slashdot story which explained the situation a lot better, but it was moderated down and not archived. Strangely enough, all but two of the comments in the story which mentioned the redirection were editor-moderated down. Strange.
My point is, the Slashdot Effect is a mild DDoS attack. Don't pretend it isn't. Want to beat up a site? Get the Slashdot editors to link to it from the front page of the site.
I don't think Slashdot fully appreciates what it does to some of these smaller sites. I could even see Slashdot getting sued for taking down a site. That seems like a stretch, but if, for example, someone was going to demo a site to a manager or higher-up in a company, and it wasn't responding being it was getting trampled by Slashbots... Or perhaps, the Slashdot Effect took down an e-commerce site and caused the owners to lose business... It's quite chauvinistic; you're assuming everyone has the infrastructure to handle the load. It's like sending huge, 20-meg files as email attachments and beating up the mail servers or using up all of their disk space. (I realize, in this case, the mail server could simply be configured to refuse large attachments, but I hope you see my point.)
So, what's Slashdot to do? I don't know. It's really a shame that people have to pay by the meg. It's undoubtedly part of what killed a lot of dotcoms. This is especially a problem if you run a streaming media website or a site with lots of large downloads. I've sadly witnessed a lot of such sites close. But on the other hand, if you have two sites with the same hosting plan, but one is hugely popular and gets loads of traffic, and the other is hardly ever visited, is it really fair to charge the sites' owners the same amount?
I don't have any definitive answers, but I will say that since you have the courtesy not to send huge, 20-meg files via email, consider having the courtesy to think about what the Slashdot Effect will do to a website.
Well... That's pretty cool. I'll have to figure out a way to make in broadcast in AM stereo.
I'm not sure how well it fits, but some good anti-Microsoft propaganda can be found at KMFMS. KMFMS apparently stands for something in German. I don't know what it means, so I just use the words "Kill Mother-F***ing MicroSoft" to remember the letters.
I'm no IE zealot, but I have been doing web development with DHTML and JavaScript for the last year, and I can say that Netscape 4 vs. IE is the problem most people are referring to when they say "Netscape isn't (as) standards-compliant (as IE)." Netscape 4 is a bloody dog for anything above DOM-level-zero -- <LAYER>, <ILAYER>, etc... Brrr... I'll pass.
Netscape 6, on the other hand, has greatly impressed me. I'm so glad the Netscape crew has acknowledged the problems of Netscape 4.x and is making a concerted effort to be standards-compliant in version 6.
If my pages look good and operate well in IE but badly in Netscape 4, it's Netscape's fault. But if they look good and operate well in IE and badly in Netscape 6, it's my fault or IE's fault.
I just wish Netscape 6 could load faster and didn't use so much much memory (both in Windows; don't know about other platforms). Someone mentioned that Mozilla 0.94 had a "turbo" option which loaded it into memory when Windows starts to give it the same speed advantage as IE. I hope that's in Netscape 6.2 and can be easily turned on by the user. That would certainly help. Can you believe that for all my complaints about it, I'm using Netscape 4.x to post this? Why? Because it's fast, and for me, it's faster than IE. I'll have to try Netscape 6.2 so I can get this clunker off the web and reduce (if only slightly) the headaches it causes developers everywhere.
I also wish Netscape hadn't changed the plug-in architecture, too, but that's not as relevant to the problems of Netscape 4.x, which largely concern its "DHTML".
Hey, I'm a Canadian, too, but I think the parent poster is right. The UK is a much better friend. Where's Chrétien? What's he doing? Is he pledging the same kind of support as Mr. Blair? Is he rallying our military? No!
I don't want to hear any of my fellow Canucks whining about this. If we want to be internationally recognized, we have to work get that recognition. Bush isn't going to say "Canada r00lz" just because we're his neighbour!
Don't let Chrétien have a fourth term in office. This third term is bad enough. Vote Conservative or Alliance (or whoever has the best chance) and kick the bum out. I especially hope a new prime minister will ditch that left-wing hippie bitch of a governer-general Adrienne Clarkson. She sucks! Oh, and the plural of "governer-general" is governer-generals, not "governers-general". She doesn't govern shit!
Anyway, I digress. UKians everywhere, I salute you and your prime minister! You must be proud! You're also really kind and helpful. I was having a bit of trouble with the London Underground when I visited your country a while back, and you helped me out. Thank you, UK!
What a horribly insensitive thing to say. What if it was your friend who got hit by a car in an area with loads of cameras? What if it was you who got beaten up by bouncers in a night club in front of a camera, but was told the recording "disappeared"?
The cameras were installed to help protect you and bring your assailants to justice, and, especially in the latter case, they failed. You're lying in a hospital bed, and a police officer tells you you'll never be able to prove the bouncers beat you up because the tape "disappeared".
And, yet, all you can say is that this is "statistically insignificant"? Have you ever had anything even remotely bad happen to you?
RDS is used by a very small number of stations in North America. This is largely because there are so few radios that support it here. I know of only one person who has an RDS radio and only one station that uses RDS. I live in Canada, and my local CBC affiliate uses RDS to display their call letters continuously (nothing else) on their station. No other station on my FM dial uses it. (By the way, RDS only works on FM.)
It's really stupid. I walk into a stereo shop and ask the salesman if he has any new receivers with fancy new features. RDS? No. L-Band digital radio? American "IBOC" digital? No. They have these receivers with slick LED displays and chrome finishes with 1970s radio technology inside.
Back in the '60s and '70s, the governmental radio authorities would mandate things like, "All radios above a certain price must have FM stereo reception," etc. to promote the growth of FM, or "All TVs must have high-quality UHF tuners," to ensure UHF TV stations would not suffer. Now, they don't do shit. AM stereo radio died as a result of their idleness, and RDS will die, too.
Remember back in the '80s when your local top-40 station ID'd themselves as "KXYZ 800 AM stereo"? They weren't jerking you around; they really were stereo. But because the government never demanded radio manufacturers include AM stereo on their radios and took 10 years to decide on a standard, the AM band is rapidly becoming a ghost town. Everyone wants an FM station instead, and in many major radio markets, the FM band is completely full.
I don't see why the RIAA isn't pushing for deployment and proper use of RDS for displaying artist and title information. In the late '80s, they would slap stickers that said "When you play it, say it," on records sent to radio stations, to promote artist recognition.
The next thing to die: digital radio. Canada wants to use the L-Band (1452 to 1492 MHz) for digital radio (same as in Europe), the United States wants to use a system called In-Band-On-Channel digital, in which the digital and analogue signal will share the same frequency. Neither of these will become standard in North America.
Without government intervention, only a technology that makes a huge, radical difference (like colour vs. black-and-white TV) can ever become commonly used.
Well, this is strange. I'm sitting on a Windows 98 box with McAfee VShield v4.0.3 installed and virus definition files from 2001/06/13. Whenever I try to go to http://www.veridian.com/upload/ with either IE 4.01 or Netscape 4.70, McAfee pops a warning dialogue saying I have just downloaded a worm called "SunOS/BoxPoison.worm". I also have a small Perl program I can use to perform command-line HTTP downloads, and with it, I can download the page at http://www.veridian.com/upload/ without any problems.
I'm probably getting the warning because something in the HTML code matches the signature for a known worm. But still, if the message on the site isn't enough to scare people, the warning from their virus scanner certainly will!
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Content-Location: http://www.veridian.com/upload/index.htm
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 03:51:47 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Wed, 09 May 2001 12:53:30 GMT
ETag: "6a8163c87d8c01:943"
Content-Length: 289
(Slashcode has inserted a few spaces into the following HTML... I hope this doesn't trip your virus scanner...)
<html><body bgcolor=black><br><br><br>< ;br><br><br><table width=100%><td><p align
="center"><font size=7 color=red>fuck USA Government</font><tr><td><p align="cen
ter"><font size=7 color=red>fuck PoizonBOx<tr><td><p align="center"><font size=4 color=red>contact:sysadmcn@yahoo.com.cn</htm l>
It may seem petty, but I must take exception to this one item listed in the user information pages:
"Show your real email address without cowering behind childish anonymity or obfuscation."
Excuse me, but the last time I posted my email address on Slashdot (by mistake), it started a torrent of spam that still has not stopped. Email filters can only go so far.
What in the world is wrong with wanting to avoid useless email? I'm not posting as "Anonymous Coward"; isn't that good enough for you?
There's also the fact that some people prefer to creatively obfuscate their email address their way and post clues or instructions on how to decode it in their signature. I think that's pretty cool... Oh well...
Just curious, but why wasn't this on Taco Hell ( http://slashdot.org/tacohell/ )? It seems like that would be the apropriate testing area.
I think that's because it's a totally new version of Slash... If I understand correctly...
Speaking of Taco Hell, Taco hasn't updated it in ages... Maybe he's stopped using it...
Sorry for the repeat posting, but an Anonymous Coward posted a very astute reply to the parent of this post, and since it has not been moderated up, I fear it will be lost when this story is archived. So, here it is:
You know, it would help if you could read your own link.
According to your own source, 3.4 and 3.5 MHz are not the bandwidths of the two formats. They are the center frequencies of the FM modulated Y (luminance or video level) signal. The peak Y signal encoding for Beta I was 4.8 Mhz, yielding a 1.3 MHz half bandwidth for the upper side lobe. With a 3.4 MHz center and 4.4 MHz peak, the upper sidelobe bandwidth for VHS was only 1.0 Mhz. In other words, Beta effectively had a 30% higher signal to noise ratio resulting in better contrast and less noise. Further, the slightly higher center frequency of Beta provided 100 KHz more bandwidth in the lower sidelobe, and 200 KHz more in the case of Beta II and Beta III, which provide increased sharpness or a seemingly higher resolution.
But that's only part of the story. With standard length tapes, VHS SP mode only provided 2 hours recording time, so people rarely used it. With the slower tape speed of SLP/EP mode, you only get 220 lines of resolution and you run into the limits of the tape's frequency response, resulting in a tapering dropoff of the upper sideband of the Y signal, which you can see here. That's why EP mode looks like crap, with poor resolution & contrast and lots of bleed.
Beta II and Beta III speeds offered 3 and 4.5 hour recording times at no loss in vertical resolution and very little loss in video bandwidth (still 20% better than VHS in SP mode). If you've ever made a visual comparison of a Beta III tape and a VHS SLP/EP tape, you'll see the difference is dramatic. One major reason why Beta retains more of its quality at lower speeds is that it's head/tape speed is considerably higher.
In theory, SVHS should be a lot better than Super Beta, but in practice (comparing my 2 VCRs) it seems to be only a tiny bit better than Super Beta II in SP (2 hour) mode, and is much worse than Super Beta III in SLP/EP mode. One problem with SVHS is that it requires high quality tapes and really pushes the tape to the limits. Another problem is that it trades off too much horizontal bandwidth for increased vertical resolution.
Finally, SVHS was introduced about 5 years after Super Beta, so during the height of the format wars you were typically comparing a Super Beta unit at BIII speed to a VHS HQ unit at EP speed. Frankly, there was no comparison.
In audio quality, there is no comparison. Beta Hi-Fi allocates 500 MHz for audio while VHS Hi-Fi only allocates 150 MHz. Beta Hi-Fi has a lot better dynamic range and a low noise floor without using a noise reduction scheme like VHS Hi-Fi, and VHS Hi-Fi tapes only sound good on the same machine they were recorded on.
There. Please consider getting an account, whoever you are. I'm afraid "Anonymous Coward" is apparently just for trolls these days.
Hey! My job is mostly centred around DHTML, too, and I have to say that while I'm glad Netscape 6 has finally adopted proper DHTML (<IFRAME>, <DIV>, etc.), I noticed that the document.frames array in Netscape 6.0 doesn't seem to be present. That's really stupid. I'm sure it's part of the official specification. Hopefully Netscape 6.1 will correct this, tho they should have got it right the first time!
I wish I could tell my users to ditch Netscape 4.x and get Netscape 6.x, but Netscape6 is such a big RAM/disk space/processor power hog that they probably wouldn't. Furthermore, there's the missing support for document.frames[], the fact that Netscape6 can't run LiveConnect plug-ins from Netscape4, the huge download, etc. I don't know what Netscape's goal is with this, but they do appear to moving in one particular direction: to get the whole world to switch to IE.
I suppose I'm a big hypocrite, because I'm sitting here composing this in Netscape 4, the very browser I wish the world would drop. However, it's fast to load and doesn't use a lot of RAM or require a really fast processor, so it's good for small stuff. IE 4.0 and even 5.0 (and especially the dog's breakfast known as IE 5.5) don't have those qualities. But Netscape 6 really takes the cake. It makes IE 5.5 look fast and un-bloated. I'm not worried about holding back the transition away from NS4, because if the browser usage stats from the websites at my workplace are any indication, IE already rules the world. I'm talking about a >95% market share.
Anyway, the "DHTML" in Netscape 4.x is garbage. <LAYER>?? What the hell is that?? Have you noticed that if you try to load documents into two layers in quick succession, only the first one loads? If you have two <LAYER> tags on a page named "Layer1" and "Layer2" and two documents named "doc1.html" and "doc2.html", this code, which should load doc1.html and doc2.html into Layer1 and Layer2, will only load Layer1 most of the time:
document.layers["Layer1"].src = "doc1.html";document.layers["Layer2"].src = "doc2.html";
You actually have two wait a bit after Layer1 is finished loading before Layer2 can start. I think that's because Netscape can only load one thing at a time, and while one thing is loading, all other JavaScript or other activities must wait...
Anyway, Netscape 4.xx continues to exist. They just released 4.78 about a week ago! Why don't they put that stupid thing to bed?
By the way, were you ever able to get the <ILAYER> tag to work? I couldn't; it would either crash the browser or just not appear.
I see. I also think the ASP coding in use on that site is a little less than efficient, or at least not designed for high-volume usage. Judging by the form of the filename and query string ("display-management101.asp?ContentID=603"), it sounds like an article is being pulled from a database and displayed in a template. Changing the "ContentID" to something else might serve up a different article. I'd think a better way to do it would be by storing the article in a file and using server-side includes to show it inside a template file, using style sheets to adjust the formatting of the article (making it a .shtml file instead of a .asp file). Files with .shtml extensions are a lot less work for the server to deal with. It would be less error-prone, too. Cutting the database out of the loop would really help. Furthermore, a caching solution like XCache would help.
I suppose there's nothing CmdrTaco and the Slashdot crew could do. They can't email and wait for permission to link. They'd be waiting too long. They might as well ask for permission to mirror the article! I just thought that they might one day get into trouble in this litigation-infested world.
Anyway, the article came up when I clicked a few minutes ago, albeit slowly, and I'm sure someone else has mirrored the text of the article in this discussion, so this is a moot point for now...until the next Slashdotting...
There are other ways to deface websites even if you aren't fortunate to have the administrator link to one of your images. For example, if the website has a search feature and lists the "top-10 search queries", just search for "fuck you" or "this website sucks" over and over.
Websites with open submission queues for stories allow easy defacement by filling them with profanity.
Open discussion boards like Slashdot but without Slashdot's antitrolling features (the lameness filter) are big targets:
- post a long string of M's or W's (or any character) to force the browser to display a horizontal scrollbar and possibly make the discussion hard to follow
- if HTML is enabled, or the title or your account name aren't filtered, enter HTML <IMG> tags to link to disgusting images, or if you're really clever, make some JavaScript to do naughty things. Don't forget style sheets! Try <P STYLE="background-image: url(http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg);"> or just obnoxiously large text using <P STYLE="font-size: 250px;">.
- Post the same thing over and over.
- Post HTML to disrupt the tables containing the comments (like "Last post!! </TD></TR></TABLE>
- Obscene ASCII art
Basically, if the Slashdot lameness filter traps it, make sure your target board doesn't!Linking to an image another site is unwise for another reason -- the administrator of the other site can delete the image. If it's not a commonly-found image, you've lost it! But if you copy it locally, you may get into copyright-related trouble. So it's kind of a dilemma. But in your case, you should have definitely copied it locally...