"I promise to meta-moderate every +insightful or +interesting comment which mentions grammar or spelling."
Vous êtes français? Je ne peux pas dire que je partage vos sentiments à propos de l'orthographe (en anglais ou bien en français), mais à chacun ses opinions (comme vous pouvez le voir, mon français est loin de parfait). Moi, je le trouve utile lorsque je fais de fautes et quelqu'un d'autre me corrige, en fait il y a pas mal d'Anglo-Saxonnes ici qui ont besoin d'amelioré sur ce plan-là!
Meta-data is the answer yes, but it needs to be implemented in a way that doesn't break existing systems *and* follows the file when it crosses OS boundaries. Resource forks failed for this reason, and caused no end of pain when exchanging files with other systems (I say this because I've used Mac OS 8-X for my work for the last 8 years). As it is macs sometimes pollute servers at the moment with.DS_Store files which aren't hidden (perhaps they've fixed this).
In the best of all possible words files would all be folders/bundles (as in many apps on Mac OS X) - that way you could have whatever OS-specific meta-data you wanted within the bundle (though hopefully everyone could standardize on common ones like mime-types). You could just have a structure like this
"mypicture" (bundle)
"metadata.xml" ( xml file with tags)
mypicture.jpg (file with name referenced in metadata.xml)
Resources (optional folder with embedded files)
People with operating systems that didn't conform would instead see the files within a folder, so it'd still be accessible for them.
This would also have the benefit of allowing html pages to be saved with resources (jpegs etc) inside the package (bit like MHTML but more general), and many other types of files which refer to external resources (eg pdfs or word docs) could save the external resource untouched inside the package instead of trying to wrap them and making them inaccessible to other programs.
Perhaps you should reconsider your unsafe habits or set up an untrusted account for testing software then... If you download a malicious executable, no 'anti-virus' program is going to stop it damaging your system when you run it.
This would be trivial to fix as it's a problem with the Finder. The finder should check if the file extension matches what it thinks the file should be (based on the resource fork information or other meta information). If not, it chooses the least dangerous option and/or warns the user. That or refuse to run carbon apps using code in the resource fork - it's an old kludge from the 68k transition I think.
I take issue with your insistence that anti-virus software is necessary. I was forced to run virex when visiting a client site recently, just to 'prove' that I didn't have any viruses on my machine. It spent about 1 hour 'scanning' for viruses which don't exist on this platform.
If there's a security issue with an OS or an app I'd rather the problem was fixed than be told to run anti-virus software to attempt to fix it after the fact. Virus definitions are always going to be sufficiently out of date to let the first example of a virus slip through, unless you have it phone home every hour or something. Relying on that kind of protection (especially for home users on modems who don't dial up very often) is folly.
Care to give some examples? I haven't done any Java development (yeah, I know, I'm a bit late on that bandwagon : ). Was wondering what sort of things you miss?
Having come from C++ the delegation and bindings stuff are the things I like about Cocoa/Objective-C.
I quite like the Collection classes in cocoa BTW, NSArray (or EDSortedArray if you want a sorted version), NSDictionary and NSSet. They are quite basic though I guess.
every heard of IM borne viruses? If people were forced to move to FTP to transfer files, you'd get a spate of FTP viruses instead. I can imagine it now, a friendly FTP service from MS. hi I'm clippy, I have received a file from 'john your friend' and it needs extra steps to run would you like to a> launch the file b> try to open the file in word
Welcome to your future.
The problem is at the other end of the client (of whatever type), and thus the client program needs to protect the simpliest users (that has a nice ring to it, I know, a typo) by making informed decisions about the content it accepts for them. For example an IM program could refuse connections from unknown people (many do), refuse executable attachments or render them harmless, or an email program could refuse to save executable attachments (not many do unfortunately), disable javascript, refuse remote urls unless the user intervenes, etc etc. Unfortunately not many make the effort.
Your problem isn't with HTML per se, but with the consequences of the interaction of sloppy HTML email clients and the simpliest users. Actually, I think structured markup in emails could be a big plus (for the recipient, not the sender), it's just unfortunate it's being used for 20px red type at the moment. Of course text email will be with us for a long time too, and has its uses, but would you rather read this web-page (for example) as a stream of text or as a marked up set of text? A long email with a report and several quotes in it? Meta-data is not evil, data that executes like code without strict control is evil.
For the record, I wouldn't touch windows or explorer with a barge-pole, and I think we're in agreement on your fourth point, but HTML email and attachments aren't going to go away, because the users want it that way (ie if you try to stop them sending stuff, they will replace them with equally dangerous tools).
well, I'll tell you what, I had exactly the same idea as this guy last night and tried to download the subversion package, and gave up half way through recompiling the new version of Fink (WTF, I just downloaded it as binary and it wants to download (AND COMPILE!!?!?!?!?!?!) a new version of itself??). You're about as helpful as the myriad documents I had to plough through to get that far.
It's a mess, and if you're used to that kind of software deployment and want to put up with it, great, but frankly, it's about 10 years behind the rest of the world. I don't mind messing around on the command line to get a command line tool up and running, but what's with this 'auto-update' that actually has to compile most of the software again and a graphical client that doesn't even manage to hide the command line (please type in your response (what, you mean, like on a command line but with a little dialog that gets in the way?)) and has lots of cryptic menus (selfupdate-rsynch)? Yes, I *can* go away and find out what the menus in the app mean, but it's a tool for getting new software, not photoshop; I'd expect the menus etc to be straightforward and legible for someone who's not familiar with the program. It could at least have chosen a default update method rather than sticking at that point. The flat file layout (just like on the command line then, how about nested trees of categories at least?) and basic GUI I could put up with, but it took two hours to get software that should have been painless to install.
Why exactly should I have to download and compile a new version of software and all the libraries it depends on just after I've downloaded the binary?? Then it gives me messages like this... (note the mistake (at least I damn well hope so) in file size). The only advantage is the dependency checking, which it doesn't even seem to work all the time.
Need to get 4933kB of archives. After unpacking 1980MB will be used.
Take a look at bundles on OS X (ship the used version of the library with the app, in a nice neat package), then look at fink and tell me it *just works* if you know what you're doing. For certain values of knowing what you're doing, yes it just works. I think the point of the parent poster was that he doesn't want to have to go through all that pain just to try out some software. Not that he can't 'learn fink' but that he doesn't see the benefits which repay all that effort. Ah, I must go, I have another 'please provide your response to the command line' message.
No advancements can eliminate differences in the abilities of men, or the differences in how men value the abilities of their fellow man (which is what causes inequality of prices and hence of incomes).
The sound of the 200 years since the industrial revolution, Marx & Engels, Smith, colonialism, rushing by unheeded. Things are just a *little* bit more complicated than this. If I hadn't read this kind of simplified 'libertarian' nonsense so many times on the internet I wouldn't believe people still gave credence to it.
So the differences between incomes in the first world and the third world are dependent on differences in abilites??
Doesn't seem like good value, not *A* good value. A plague on all your misplaced 'a's. Thriftiness for example is a good value to cultivate, Dell DJs are not that kind of value.
Seriously though, I think you'll find this will sell as well as, if not better than, the more expensive iPods, despite geeks whining about it. Remember the first reactions to the iPod here?
Of course the fact that it is a rambled spew of ideas, it definately has something smart to say!
Maybe you should raise your expectations of yourself and others a little. If you don't feel you have the background to understand his article, show a little humility and accept it, or do something about it. Alternatively you could continue to insult his writing (have you read any of his books?), safe in the knowledge that you'll never be challenged by something you can't be bothered to understand.
Rambled is an interesting adjective, and definite has two 'i's (like finite). I'm still not sure what your first sentence means, but it was an interesting way to criticise something for being obtuse.
at the root of the problem.
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
No kidding, I just got the following email from the US (one of many others, I rarely receive spam from anywhere else).
Perhaps when your country does something about the flood of spam from within its own borders someone might listen to your bleating.
{spam changes="emails removed"} From xxxx@freemail.lt Thu Oct 16 00:29:12 2003 Return-path: Received: from mac.com (smtpin03-en2 [10.13.10.148])
by ms22.mac.com (iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 HotFix 1.21 (built Sep 8 2003))
with ESMTP id for xxxxx@mac.com; Wed,
15 Oct 2003 14:09:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: from freemail.lt (dsl-200-95-84-88.prodigy.net.mx [200.95.84.88])
by mac.com (Xserve/smtpin03/MantshX 3.0) with ESMTP id h9FL9TKI020792; Wed,
15 Oct 2003 14:09:30 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 17:16:02 -0400 From: Subject: uS Pharmacy Will Write your Prescriptions bsnfpdvq To: xxxx@mac.com Message-id: MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Original-recipient: rfc822;xxxx@mac.com
Our US Pharmacy is Open to You!
We Now Have Xanax, Valium, and Levitra From US Pharmacies, not Mexico or Pakistan
- Discreet and Fast Next-Day Shipments - Prescriptions written by US Doctors
Look at our Huge Selection
Do Not Send Future Mailings
the political sense, Cicero, and St. Augustine after him, from the village, and over the fields the larks rose trilling, one the forehead, turned down on the nose, and heals in the new position. {/spam}
Slashdot Mirror
To fix your sig, perhaps change it to
"I promise to meta-moderate every +insightful or +interesting comment which mentions grammar or spelling."
Vous êtes français? Je ne peux pas dire que je partage vos sentiments à propos de l'orthographe (en anglais ou bien en français), mais à chacun ses opinions (comme vous pouvez le voir, mon français est loin de parfait). Moi, je le trouve utile lorsque je fais de fautes et quelqu'un d'autre me corrige, en fait il y a pas mal d'Anglo-Saxonnes ici qui ont besoin d'amelioré sur ce plan-là!
Meta-data is the answer yes, but it needs to be implemented in a way that doesn't break existing systems *and* follows the file when it crosses OS boundaries. Resource forks failed for this reason, and caused no end of pain when exchanging files with other systems (I say this because I've used Mac OS 8-X for my work for the last 8 years). As it is macs sometimes pollute servers at the moment with .DS_Store files which aren't hidden (perhaps they've fixed this).
In the best of all possible words files would all be folders/bundles (as in many apps on Mac OS X) - that way you could have whatever OS-specific meta-data you wanted within the bundle (though hopefully everyone could standardize on common ones like mime-types). You could just have a structure like this
"mypicture" (bundle)
"metadata.xml" ( xml file with tags)
mypicture.jpg (file with name referenced in metadata.xml)
Resources (optional folder with embedded files)
People with operating systems that didn't conform would instead see the files within a folder, so it'd still be accessible for them.
This would also have the benefit of allowing html pages to be saved with resources (jpegs etc) inside the package (bit like MHTML but more general), and many other types of files which refer to external resources (eg pdfs or word docs) could save the external resource untouched inside the package instead of trying to wrap them and making them inaccessible to other programs.
Unfortunately this will probably never happen.
Perhaps you should reconsider your unsafe habits or set up an untrusted account for testing software then... If you download a malicious executable, no 'anti-virus' program is going to stop it damaging your system when you run it.
This would be trivial to fix as it's a problem with the Finder. The finder should check if the file extension matches what it thinks the file should be (based on the resource fork information or other meta information). If not, it chooses the least dangerous option and/or warns the user. That or refuse to run carbon apps using code in the resource fork - it's an old kludge from the 68k transition I think.
I take issue with your insistence that anti-virus software is necessary. I was forced to run virex when visiting a client site recently, just to 'prove' that I didn't have any viruses on my machine. It spent about 1 hour 'scanning' for viruses which don't exist on this platform.
If there's a security issue with an OS or an app I'd rather the problem was fixed than be told to run anti-virus software to attempt to fix it after the fact. Virus definitions are always going to be sufficiently out of date to let the first example of a virus slip through, unless you have it phone home every hour or something. Relying on that kind of protection (especially for home users on modems who don't dial up very often) is folly.
Care to give some examples? I haven't done any Java development (yeah, I know, I'm a bit late on that bandwagon : ). Was wondering what sort of things you miss? Having come from C++ the delegation and bindings stuff are the things I like about Cocoa/Objective-C. I quite like the Collection classes in cocoa BTW, NSArray (or EDSortedArray if you want a sorted version), NSDictionary and NSSet. They are quite basic though I guess.
er,
every heard of IM borne viruses? If people were forced to move to FTP to transfer files, you'd get a spate of FTP viruses instead. I can imagine it now, a friendly FTP service from MS. hi I'm clippy, I have received a file from 'john your friend' and it needs extra steps to run would you like to
a> launch the file
b> try to open the file in word
Welcome to your future.
The problem is at the other end of the client (of whatever type), and thus the client program needs to protect the simpliest users (that has a nice ring to it, I know, a typo) by making informed decisions about the content it accepts for them. For example an IM program could refuse connections from unknown people (many do), refuse executable attachments or render them harmless, or an email program could refuse to save executable attachments (not many do unfortunately), disable javascript, refuse remote urls unless the user intervenes, etc etc. Unfortunately not many make the effort.
Your problem isn't with HTML per se, but with the consequences of the interaction of sloppy HTML email clients and the simpliest users. Actually, I think structured markup in emails could be a big plus (for the recipient, not the sender), it's just unfortunate it's being used for 20px red type at the moment. Of course text email will be with us for a long time too, and has its uses, but would you rather read this web-page (for example) as a stream of text or as a marked up set of text? A long email with a report and several quotes in it? Meta-data is not evil, data that executes like code without strict control is evil.
For the record, I wouldn't touch windows or explorer with a barge-pole, and I think we're in agreement on your fourth point, but HTML email and attachments aren't going to go away, because the users want it that way (ie if you try to stop them sending stuff, they will replace them with equally dangerous tools).
well, I'll tell you what, I had exactly the same idea as this guy last night and tried to download the subversion package, and gave up half way through recompiling the new version of Fink (WTF, I just downloaded it as binary and it wants to download (AND COMPILE!!?!?!?!?!?!) a new version of itself??). You're about as helpful as the myriad documents I had to plough through to get that far.
It's a mess, and if you're used to that kind of software deployment and want to put up with it, great, but frankly, it's about 10 years behind the rest of the world. I don't mind messing around on the command line to get a command line tool up and running, but what's with this 'auto-update' that actually has to compile most of the software again and a graphical client that doesn't even manage to hide the command line (please type in your response (what, you mean, like on a command line but with a little dialog that gets in the way?)) and has lots of cryptic menus (selfupdate-rsynch)? Yes, I *can* go away and find out what the menus in the app mean, but it's a tool for getting new software, not photoshop; I'd expect the menus etc to be straightforward and legible for someone who's not familiar with the program. It could at least have chosen a default update method rather than sticking at that point. The flat file layout (just like on the command line then, how about nested trees of categories at least?) and basic GUI I could put up with, but it took two hours to get software that should have been painless to install.
Why exactly should I have to download and compile a new version of software and all the libraries it depends on just after I've downloaded the binary?? Then it gives me messages like this... (note the mistake (at least I damn well hope so) in file size). The only advantage is the dependency checking, which it doesn't even seem to work all the time.
Need to get 4933kB of archives. After unpacking 1980MB will be used.
Take a look at bundles on OS X (ship the used version of the library with the app, in a nice neat package), then look at fink and tell me it *just works* if you know what you're doing. For certain values of knowing what you're doing, yes it just works. I think the point of the parent poster was that he doesn't want to have to go through all that pain just to try out some software. Not that he can't 'learn fink' but that he doesn't see the benefits which repay all that effort. Ah, I must go, I have another 'please provide your response to the command line' message.
Iain M Banks Isaac Asimov Wells (The war of the worlds) Orwell (1984)
The sound of the 200 years since the industrial revolution, Marx & Engels, Smith, colonialism, rushing by unheeded. Things are just a *little* bit more complicated than this. If I hadn't read this kind of simplified 'libertarian' nonsense so many times on the internet I wouldn't believe people still gave credence to it.
So the differences between incomes in the first world and the third world are dependent on differences in abilites??
Doesn't seem like good value, not *A* good value. A plague on all your misplaced 'a's. Thriftiness for example is a good value to cultivate, Dell DJs are not that kind of value.
Seriously though, I think you'll find this will sell as well as, if not better than, the more expensive iPods, despite geeks whining about it. Remember the first reactions to the iPod here?
Maybe you should raise your expectations of yourself and others a little. If you don't feel you have the background to understand his article, show a little humility and accept it, or do something about it. Alternatively you could continue to insult his writing (have you read any of his books?), safe in the knowledge that you'll never be challenged by something you can't be bothered to understand.
Rambled is an interesting adjective, and definite has two 'i's (like finite). I'm still not sure what your first sentence means, but it was an interesting way to criticise something for being obtuse.
uh. caching?
No kidding, I just got the following email from the US (one of many others, I rarely receive spam from anywhere else).
Perhaps when your country does something about the flood of spam from within its own borders someone might listen to your bleating.
{spam changes="emails removed"}
From xxxx@freemail.lt Thu Oct 16 00:29:12 2003
Return-path:
Received: from mac.com (smtpin03-en2 [10.13.10.148])
by ms22.mac.com (iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 HotFix 1.21 (built Sep 8 2003))
with ESMTP id for xxxxx@mac.com; Wed,
15 Oct 2003 14:09:31 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from freemail.lt (dsl-200-95-84-88.prodigy.net.mx [200.95.84.88])
by mac.com (Xserve/smtpin03/MantshX 3.0) with ESMTP id h9FL9TKI020792; Wed,
15 Oct 2003 14:09:30 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 17:16:02 -0400
From:
Subject: uS Pharmacy Will Write your Prescriptions bsnfpdvq
To: xxxx@mac.com
Message-id:
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
Original-recipient: rfc822;xxxx@mac.com
Our US Pharmacy is Open to You!
We Now Have Xanax, Valium, and Levitra
From US Pharmacies, not Mexico or Pakistan
- Discreet and Fast Next-Day Shipments
- Prescriptions written by US Doctors
Look at our Huge Selection
Do Not Send Future Mailings
the political sense, Cicero, and St. Augustine after him, from the village, and over the fields the larks rose trilling, one the forehead, turned down on the nose, and heals in the new position.
{/spam}
For several minutes, as I ploughed through the wandering monologue above I was almost tempted to respond to this trolling 'article'.
Next time Jon Kantz posts something quite as wrong-headed, confused, and directionless as this, I suggest no one bothers to respond at all.
The solution--Implement moderation of articles on slashdot.