I haven't any idea either why it is so cumbersome. The only reasons I can see why loading a png as the src ignores the alpha channel is because either:
Developers rely on the alpha-channel brokenness in past versions; or
Microsoft engineers never thought to have the AlphaImageLoader filter functionality the default when loading pngs.
I think (2) is more likely, but it's still pretty surprising.
It's not complicated to use, it's just awkward, and you need to use PHP (or Javascript, or some other solution) if you want it to work in both IE in Mozilla. Here's an example of how I've done it in the past:
I assume the poster means per-pixel alpha in the PNG format - not per-image alpha in CSS.
Yes, and so did I. It works great; it's just a bit cumbersome syntax-wise.
Jason.
Re:It's obvious where this is going.
on
JPEG2000 Coming Soon
·
· Score: 3, Informative
(*) I'm still annoyed that IE doesn't support alpha-transparency though.
It does, you just have to use the IE-proprietary AlphaImageLoader filter (it's a CSS extension). I agree this is a pain in the ass, and why they just don't support the alpha channel with regular img tags is beyond me, but at least with a little PHP or Javascript you can make it work.
Did some scenes of the fights (specificaly the parts up in the air) seems almost like they used clay animation or something?
You didn't imagine that. It was in the fight scene between a masked Nyssa (who is quite hot) and Blade near the beginning. The camera took a wide angle and two near-silhouettes were fighting against the vampire-repelling lights in the background. If it was even CG, it was pretty horribly done. Me and my friends let out a groan when we saw that, and I, like you, wonder how in the hell it made it into the final cut.
The biggest developments are around email prevention, experts say. Elaborate content filtering software, which can run upwards of $30,000 to install, can block all but the tamest incoming emails, and most attachments, said Trend Micro's Genes.
Funny, I did it with $0, plus about a few hours of my time.
The security officer said employees are gradually adjusting to the strict policy. It has already scored points with management though, he said, as no virus or worm has infiltrated the firm's defenses during the past three years.
We haven't either since I installed the virus scanner on the mail server (again, a $0 price tag, plus an hour of time).
I think the whole premise of the article is to find non-"worker efficiency" justifications for imposing nazi-like restrictions on Internet usage at work. The technical/security rationale is flawed, and preventing workers from spending personal time on the web or email is only likely to make them miserable, not more productive.
Most importantly, I want a boss who is not a fucking moron.
I want a boss who realizes I know more than him when it comes to technical things.
I want a boss who shares information with me, and keeps me informed about the politics at upper management, but also shelters me from the bullshit that comes with it.
I want a boss that defends me and looks out for me within management.
I'm lucky. I have a boss that does all those things. Not to mention, since he's a retired Colonel in the US military who works in Canada now (he used to work at the Pentagon, even), he has _lots_ of really cool war stories to share!:)
The only reason I am replying to this is that I accidentally modded you down (Overrated) when I meant to mod you up (underrated). So because there is no "undo moderate" feature I am forsaking moderating this discussion in order to fix my mistake.:)
Tapper! Wow that takes me back. In fact, not too long ago I was struggling to remember the name of that game, which I played along with Alley Cat on my PCjr.
I had been running 2.4 on our router for many months. That's not to say those months were consecutive running.:) I had so many problems. I reached the point where I had to reboot the box at least once a week (usually twice) or else it would suddenly become unresponsive. If I had an uptime over 10 days I was doing REALLY well. I tried about 10 different 2.4 kernels (up to 2.4.13), as well as RedHat's 2.4.7 kernel. (I was forced to use 2.4 because of features I required.) At any rate, after about 6-8 months of this, I was resigned to putting either freeBSD on the router or recommending we buy a hardware solution next fiscal year (i.e. cisco router).
Well, I put 2.4.14 on the box and I haven't rebooted since. I have 61 days of uptime and that's the most I've seen on that box ever. It is finally stable. The only thing I can conclude is that it's AA's VM that is doing the trick. And in hindsight, it makes sense. The behaviour of the box was that it was thrashing, but at the time it didn't seem that way because I hadn't noticed the HDD light was disconnected from the box and I couldn't hear the disk in the noisy server room.
So, Linux 2.4 is (knock on wood) stable for my servers, now.
Algoma University is fully accredited and affiliated with Laurentian University in Canada. (Yes, I work for them.;)
Jason.
Re:Value added or just paying for bandwidth?
on
Ximian Adds Subscription
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, for a company RCE sure is dirt cheap. But as a home user, my RCE subscription would be about 1/3 of my entire internet bill, and that's a bit steep, IMO.
You should note that the free Red Carpet seems every bit as fast as it has for the past month or so [...]
Maybe if you use one of the fast mirrors, which are never synced anyway. Try installing from one of those mirrors and you'll see what I mean -- most (all?) of them fail during the install due to missing files.
Of course, I can get 500k/s from those mirrors, which is nice. But if I want to install Ximian GNOME and have it work, I have to use Ximian's servers, and I get about 3k/s from there. Same thing with RC updates.
I think $10/mo is too expensive for something I'd use maybe once a month. If it was say $75/year, I think I'd pay that.
If you do find yourself in the situation where you bought a broken CD and the store would not give you a refund, do up a simple flyer and hand them out to people entering the store. Explain to them that they should be very cautious about what they buy, because there's no guarantee the CDs they buy will work on their CD players, and if they don't, the store will not cooperate in giving a refund.
If enough people did this, at enough record stores, maybe the stores would vote with their wallets for us. I don't know if there are any legal issues in doing this, but it is free speech after all, and we might as well use it while we still have it.
It works wonderfully, and has worked on every kernel I've tried it on. It doesn't patch the kernel and require a rebuild (except that it requires you do not use the kernel's standard loop device).
It requires a little bit of extra work in that you need to patch util-linux. I used to use cfsd, but I've not been able to get it to work on recent kernels, so I've moved my encrypted volumes to loopAES. I've had no problems at all with it.
Jason.
Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...
on
80 Gig MP3 Player
·
· Score: 1
The problem with sending files over email is that base64 bloats your attachments by 33%. This amounts to quite a bit when you're dealing with those 60MB attachments you talked about.
However, as a medium, email is very convenient for moving files around. If only it weren't for that 33% bloat, it would be perfect.
I fully agree. Performance is just one factor of usability, but it is nonetheless a factor. And, for my usage, Nautilus' performance is painful to the point that it is not usable. Nautilus may have a great UI design and be completely intuitive, but all the great UI design in the world doesn't help software that is not being used due to bad performance.
I thought that everyone knew n^2 was a Bad Thing and to avoid it and bubble sorts like the plague.
It's not as if it is any effort to use an already written better data structure/sort algorithm that is in some library of which there are hundreds!
I get the impression that you think n^2 strictly refers to sorting algorithms or something. n^2 can refer to a measure of any algorithm's efficiency, and from what I can see in the change log, this case has nothing to do with sorting. [FYI, this may also be written in Big-Oh notation, as in O(n^2) (although note that O(n^2) is not necessarily equivalent to n^2).]
And yes, sometimes n^2 is needed. Sometimes x^n is needed, and sometimes even n! is unavoidable. Maybe you ought to revisit those computer science texts.:)
I haven't used Nautilus in a while. I want to like it. I mean, it looks great, that's for sure. But I have been following nautilus-list, and the word is that 1.0.5 is actually slower than 1.0.4. There were some serious performance issues just a few days ago, but Darin Adler made some significant improvements and the others were excited to see that CVS nautilus was only 10% slower (yes, _slower_!) than 1.0.4. (Reference here.) Good enough for a release, apparently, and here we are.
Performance, if you ask me, has to be their #1 priority. There may be fewer bugs, but bugs in software I don't use due to bad performance doesn't affect me any. I have a 1.4Ghz/512MB system and it remains significantly too slow for me to use productively.
I can't help but think of Mozilla about this time last year. It was horridly slow. And the typical tune on slashdot was something like "Mozilla is so slow it's useless garbage! They should scrap it all and start over." And now the tune has changed, and the general opinion about Mozilla is very positive. Given that, maybe in a year or two Nautilus will pick up in performance and reach a state of usability. I hope, anyway!
I can't say myself if Nautilus is really much slower because I haven't used it myself. If anyone has used it, can you post your observations here?
Slashdot Mirror
- Developers rely on the alpha-channel brokenness in past versions; or
- Microsoft engineers never thought to have the AlphaImageLoader filter functionality the default when loading pngs.
I think (2) is more likely, but it's still pretty surprising.Jason.
Jason.
Yes, the reference is on MSDN's site.
It's not complicated to use, it's just awkward, and you need to use PHP (or Javascript, or some other solution) if you want it to work in both IE in Mozilla. Here's an example of how I've done it in the past:
<img src="blank.gif" style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.A
<? } else { ?>
<img src="imagewithalpha.png">
<? } ?>
The implementation of this in IE seems to be pretty good -- at least I haven't run into any problems with it.
Jason.
Yes, and so did I. It works great; it's just a bit cumbersome syntax-wise.
Jason.
It does, you just have to use the IE-proprietary AlphaImageLoader filter (it's a CSS extension). I agree this is a pain in the ass, and why they just don't support the alpha channel with regular img tags is beyond me, but at least with a little PHP or Javascript you can make it work.
Jason.
You didn't imagine that. It was in the fight scene between a masked Nyssa (who is quite hot) and Blade near the beginning. The camera took a wide angle and two near-silhouettes were fighting against the vampire-repelling lights in the background. If it was even CG, it was pretty horribly done. Me and my friends let out a groan when we saw that, and I, like you, wonder how in the hell it made it into the final cut.
Jason.
Funny, I did it with $0, plus about a few hours of my time.
We haven't either since I installed the virus scanner on the mail server (again, a $0 price tag, plus an hour of time).
I think the whole premise of the article is to find non-"worker efficiency" justifications for imposing nazi-like restrictions on Internet usage at work. The technical/security rationale is flawed, and preventing workers from spending personal time on the web or email is only likely to make them miserable, not more productive.
Jason.
Hear, hear! :)
Most importantly, I want a boss who is not a fucking moron.
:)
I want a boss who realizes I know more than him when it comes to technical things.
I want a boss who shares information with me, and keeps me informed about the politics at upper management, but also shelters me from the bullshit that comes with it.
I want a boss that defends me and looks out for me within management.
I'm lucky. I have a boss that does all those things. Not to mention, since he's a retired Colonel in the US military who works in Canada now (he used to work at the Pentagon, even), he has _lots_ of really cool war stories to share!
Jason.
The only reason I am replying to this is that I accidentally modded you down (Overrated) when I meant to mod you up (underrated). So because there is no "undo moderate" feature I am forsaking moderating this discussion in order to fix my mistake. :)
Sheepishly,
Jason.
Tapper! Wow that takes me back. In fact, not too long ago I was struggling to remember the name of that game, which I played along with Alley Cat on my PCjr.
:)
Oh, the nostalgia.
Jason.
I had been running 2.4 on our router for many months. That's not to say those months were consecutive running. :) I had so many problems. I reached the point where I had to reboot the box at least once a week (usually twice) or else it would suddenly become unresponsive. If I had an uptime over 10 days I was doing REALLY well. I tried about 10 different 2.4 kernels (up to 2.4.13), as well as RedHat's 2.4.7 kernel. (I was forced to use 2.4 because of features I required.) At any rate, after about 6-8 months of this, I was resigned to putting either freeBSD on the router or recommending we buy a hardware solution next fiscal year (i.e. cisco router).
Well, I put 2.4.14 on the box and I haven't rebooted since. I have 61 days of uptime and that's the most I've seen on that box ever. It is finally stable. The only thing I can conclude is that it's AA's VM that is doing the trick. And in hindsight, it makes sense. The behaviour of the box was that it was thrashing, but at the time it didn't seem that way because I hadn't noticed the HDD light was disconnected from the box and I couldn't hear the disk in the noisy server room.
So, Linux 2.4 is (knock on wood) stable for my servers, now.
Jason.
For those of you who ask "What's wrong with X?" think about those who said "What's wrong with Minix?" back in 1991.
Jason.
Algoma University is fully accredited and affiliated with Laurentian University in Canada. (Yes, I work for them. ;)
Jason.
Yes, for a company RCE sure is dirt cheap. But as a home user, my RCE subscription would be about 1/3 of my entire internet bill, and that's a bit steep, IMO.
Jason.
Maybe if you use one of the fast mirrors, which are never synced anyway. Try installing from one of those mirrors and you'll see what I mean -- most (all?) of them fail during the install due to missing files.
Of course, I can get 500k/s from those mirrors, which is nice. But if I want to install Ximian GNOME and have it work, I have to use Ximian's servers, and I get about 3k/s from there. Same thing with RC updates.
I think $10/mo is too expensive for something I'd use maybe once a month. If it was say $75/year, I think I'd pay that.
Jason.
If you do find yourself in the situation where you bought a broken CD and the store would not give you a refund, do up a simple flyer and hand them out to people entering the store. Explain to them that they should be very cautious about what they buy, because there's no guarantee the CDs they buy will work on their CD players, and if they don't, the store will not cooperate in giving a refund.
If enough people did this, at enough record stores, maybe the stores would vote with their wallets for us. I don't know if there are any legal issues in doing this, but it is free speech after all, and we might as well use it while we still have it.
Jason.
- From: Rik van Riel
Since Linus is comparing biological selection to the way things work in Linux, these are ironic words coming from Rik.Subject: Re: Coding style - a non-issue
[...]
Biological selection does nothing except removing the weak ones, it cannot automatically create systems which work well.
[...]
Well I only said it looked like there were 1000 in that picture. Does that picture capture the entire population?
Jason.
Jason.
I use loopAES:
http://loop-aes.sourceforge.net/
It works wonderfully, and has worked on every kernel I've tried it on. It doesn't patch the kernel and require a rebuild (except that it requires you do not use the kernel's standard loop device).
It requires a little bit of extra work in that you need to patch util-linux. I used to use cfsd, but I've not been able to get it to work on recent kernels, so I've moved my encrypted volumes to loopAES. I've had no problems at all with it.
Jason.
The problem with sending files over email is that base64 bloats your attachments by 33%. This amounts to quite a bit when you're dealing with those 60MB attachments you talked about.
However, as a medium, email is very convenient for moving files around. If only it weren't for that 33% bloat, it would be perfect.
I fully agree. Performance is just one factor of usability, but it is nonetheless a factor. And, for my usage, Nautilus' performance is painful to the point that it is not usable. Nautilus may have a great UI design and be completely intuitive, but all the great UI design in the world doesn't help software that is not being used due to bad performance.
Regards,
Jason.
I get the impression that you think n^2 strictly refers to sorting algorithms or something. n^2 can refer to a measure of any algorithm's efficiency, and from what I can see in the change log, this case has nothing to do with sorting. [FYI, this may also be written in Big-Oh notation, as in O(n^2) (although note that O(n^2) is not necessarily equivalent to n^2).]
And yes, sometimes n^2 is needed. Sometimes x^n is needed, and sometimes even n! is unavoidable. Maybe you ought to revisit those computer science texts. :)
Jason.
Performance, if you ask me, has to be their #1 priority. There may be fewer bugs, but bugs in software I don't use due to bad performance doesn't affect me any. I have a 1.4Ghz/512MB system and it remains significantly too slow for me to use productively.
I can't help but think of Mozilla about this time last year. It was horridly slow. And the typical tune on slashdot was something like "Mozilla is so slow it's useless garbage! They should scrap it all and start over." And now the tune has changed, and the general opinion about Mozilla is very positive. Given that, maybe in a year or two Nautilus will pick up in performance and reach a state of usability. I hope, anyway!
I can't say myself if Nautilus is really much slower because I haven't used it myself. If anyone has used it, can you post your observations here?
Cheers,
Jason.