Hang on a second. I thought that even if you let other people review your source code, they're highly unlikely to do so. Isn't that one of the arguments that the anti-OSS crowd march out all the time? Now, Microsoft are doing it, and they're telling people it's for security purposes. Aren't they conceding that this argument is flawed, if they themselves can see some merit in doing so?
Coming up in the news, Microsoft will announce it will start making good design choices, writing good documentation, publishing their binary file formats, and giving away their flagship software for free. For the government. Foreign ones, even. Probably.
As "Insightful" as the parent post might be, it doesn't answer a few obvious questions:
Yes, Iraq did have chemical and biological weapons, some 20 years ago - provided by the US for the war against Iran. Yes, weapons inspections were a problem throughout the 1990s. However, in the lead-up to the war, there were weapons inspectors combing Iraq for months, and they found nothing - in fact, they had to cut short their search because of the invasion. Where was the urgency?
Are you at all sure that "... all the while Saddam Hussein himself thought he was increasing his investment in WMD"? If he had thought that, he would need some evidence of it, just as the weapons inspectors needed and never found.
If "the war in Iraq wasn't about WMD", why was this peddled to the public for so long? Paul Wolfowitz even declared that WMDs were a convenient and believable excuse, rather than a good one. More to the point, why was it only recently that Tony Blair said the WMDs might never be found, or that John Howard still believes they might?
If the strategy is supposed to include "encouraging free government with a free flow of information... as well as full, unfettered access to news, information, and education", why are we seeing the opposite in Iraq?
What makes you think that your common-or-garden radical Islamic preacher is any less of a nutcase than a common-or-garden Christian fundamentalist (or Fox News presenter)?
How does abusing prisoners of war show that US military intervention is for the best interest of the people living in the countries being invaded? Recall that the memorandum informing that combatants captured in Afghanistan were not protected by the Geneva conventions was signed by President Bush himself (although it probably wasn't his idea).
You say the war is about "exerting influence, forcibly when necessary, in the middle east", rather than greed for oil. Could you argue the same way about countries that aren't in the Middle East, such as East Timor, Afghanistan and Venezuela? All of those interventions are about oil as well, aren't they?
If the Middle East is so important, why is Iraq more of a problem than Israel? Why spend a hundred billion dollars and years of work on Iraq when the real test of Middle East stability is that of resolving Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Here are a few small-minded, sound-bite-friendly answers, planted deliberately to provoke small-minded, sound-bite-friendly hatred:
Oil.
Saddam is an evil man. (I'm fully aware that this doesn't answer the question.)
Saddam is an evil man. As for Blair and Howard, complicity was wrung out of them by US bullying tactics and threats of trade restrictions.
Government control of the media - as per every other damned country.
Actually, I'm open to suggestions on this one, especially from people who watch The O'Reilly Factor.
It's for the good of the world. Just ask the PNAC.
So sandbox chrome URLs - only allow them from local pages. OSS advocates wouldn't want to deride insecure software platforms, such as Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, and create another platform with the same problems.
Obviously, the spoof page is using chrome-type URLs to load your current theme. Contrary to some posts above, you can use a non-default theme and verify this; alternatively, you can still view the source.
Is the solution really any harder than restricting the use of chrome URLs? If not, why are people suggesting convoluted JavaScript restrictions that still only allow a trained eye to spot the difference?
I do have mod points to burn, but I'd rather ask a question that seems worth asking but that has not been addressed in the discussion. Besides, the intent of the question is to establish why we're all proposing to fix the symptoms of the problem, rather than its cause.
Each time you convert someone you're bringing Firefox one step closer to being the dominant browser. Then what?
You'll have one more user using the real implementation of JavaScript, not supporting VBScript at all, using proper DOM and CSS without resorting to browser-specific hacks, not installing spyware from malicious pages, not reading most banner ads, not viewing pop-up windows (unless s/he specifically requests them), and not having ActiveX turned on.
No browser is perfect, but if you're using Internet Explorer, you're probably using a browser that's fucked up in all the ways I've listed above. I absolutely love tabs, mouse gestures and clean interfaces, and I could talk about them until I'm blue in the face, but the bottom line is that IE just doesn't do the job properly, and pretty much everything else does. Switch browsers - to anything except IE - and tell everyone you know why you did it.
Mozilla 1.7 has been pending for a couple of months now, and I reckon something specific must be holding everything up for 1.8 to be in alpha before 1.7 is finalised. Does anyone know what these things are?
I've been following Bug 18574 (no links allowed from Slashdot), which concerns restoring support for MNG and JNG image formats. The debate about this bug has been long and arduous, and heated at times: essentially, it's the same old nobody-supports-it and it's-just-code-bloat arguments versus the same old it's-a-good-format and Web-pages-will-use-them-if-browsers-do arguments. However, people are starting to get it to work on their own builds, with some crashing still on some systems (eg. OS/2) with some image files.
If there are specific issues holding up 1.7, I'm starting to suspect this is one of them. Officially, there is no target milestone for Bug 18574. Of course, if it doesn't make it into 1.7, it may end up as an XPI (eg. Mngzilla) and all will be well. Does any one know for sure?
Try playing through the games in chronological order of when they were released. You'll be able to see then how the series has evolved.
To this end, I can wholeheartedly recommend buying a Game Boy Advance - for A Link To The Past, Link's Awakening DX (hard to find, but definitely worth it), and two parallel Oracle games. Similarly, if you get a Gamecube, hunt down the TLOZ Collector's Edition, which has Ocarina Of Time and Majora's Mask, as well as the two NES games.
Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, but the classic Zelda gameplay spans generations. I still can't think of anything better in video games than playing a Legend Of Zelda game, and I don't care which one.
I always liked the way the story unfolded in Metroid Prime. The essence of the game is in exploring your surroundings, and in doing so, you got little pieces of the plot unveiled to you (eg. Chozo Lore, Pirate Data). It gives the game a bit more background and a bit more scale.
Apart from the dramatic opening sequence (very reminiscent of Super Metroid's first few minutes), I have particularly fond memories of a few certain Pirate Data entries late in the game that are intentionally very subtle but nonetheless scary as hell. In fact, when you know this twist in the plot in coming, and play through the game again, the rest of the story takes on new meanings. It's a very clever plot device and adds greatly to the game's atmosphere and replay value (not that it needs any more of either).
Anyone remember Primal Rage? That was a (fairly average) fighting game with dinosaurs. If you started using the same move (or combo, in some cases) over and over again, it would flash a No Cheese icon on the screen and disallow that move for a while. Pretty cool - it made you mix things up a bit, and kept the game interesting.
Maybe that's the point. If the game gets too repetitive, it gets too boring, and people get too pissed off with it to have any fun.
I can already see a review of tie-in Phantom Menace wine, with its annoying character and just a hint of midichlorians.
A subsequent Attack Of The Clones wine would probably try to invoke the passions a bit more, but that, like Hayden Christensen's acting, will probably end up wooden and stale, and a bit on the nose.
Of course, they both lack the complexities of previous vintages, and both are acetic enough not to age well...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, wait. That spoiler is on the DVD cover as well. Never mind.
Hang on a second. I thought that even if you let other people review your source code, they're highly unlikely to do so. Isn't that one of the arguments that the anti-OSS crowd march out all the time? Now, Microsoft are doing it, and they're telling people it's for security purposes. Aren't they conceding that this argument is flawed, if they themselves can see some merit in doing so?
Coming up in the news, Microsoft will announce it will start making good design choices, writing good documentation, publishing their binary file formats, and giving away their flagship software for free. For the government. Foreign ones, even. Probably.
Is it running Linux?
You should have put your money on Longhorn not having any security patches in the month before its release - that's only 1000000:1.
Must be how flame wars get started. [rimshot]
As "Insightful" as the parent post might be, it doesn't answer a few obvious questions:
Here are a few small-minded, sound-bite-friendly answers, planted deliberately to provoke small-minded, sound-bite-friendly hatred:
Strangely, according to its table of contents, the article on Howstuffworks has a chapter called "Shop or Compare Prices".
I couldn't find any prices for a solar-sail-powered spacecraft, though. I guess if you have to ask, you probably can't afford it.
So sandbox chrome URLs - only allow them from local pages. OSS advocates wouldn't want to deride insecure software platforms, such as Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, and create another platform with the same problems.
Obviously, the spoof page is using chrome-type URLs to load your current theme. Contrary to some posts above, you can use a non-default theme and verify this; alternatively, you can still view the source.
Is the solution really any harder than restricting the use of chrome URLs? If not, why are people suggesting convoluted JavaScript restrictions that still only allow a trained eye to spot the difference?
I do have mod points to burn, but I'd rather ask a question that seems worth asking but that has not been addressed in the discussion. Besides, the intent of the question is to establish why we're all proposing to fix the symptoms of the problem, rather than its cause.
You'll have one more user using the real implementation of JavaScript, not supporting VBScript at all, using proper DOM and CSS without resorting to browser-specific hacks, not installing spyware from malicious pages, not reading most banner ads, not viewing pop-up windows (unless s/he specifically requests them), and not having ActiveX turned on.
No browser is perfect, but if you're using Internet Explorer, you're probably using a browser that's fucked up in all the ways I've listed above. I absolutely love tabs, mouse gestures and clean interfaces, and I could talk about them until I'm blue in the face, but the bottom line is that IE just doesn't do the job properly, and pretty much everything else does. Switch browsers - to anything except IE - and tell everyone you know why you did it.
Prior art
Mozilla 1.7 has been pending for a couple of months now, and I reckon something specific must be holding everything up for 1.8 to be in alpha before 1.7 is finalised. Does anyone know what these things are?
I've been following Bug 18574 (no links allowed from Slashdot), which concerns restoring support for MNG and JNG image formats. The debate about this bug has been long and arduous, and heated at times: essentially, it's the same old nobody-supports-it and it's-just-code-bloat arguments versus the same old it's-a-good-format and Web-pages-will-use-them-if-browsers-do arguments. However, people are starting to get it to work on their own builds, with some crashing still on some systems (eg. OS/2) with some image files.
If there are specific issues holding up 1.7, I'm starting to suspect this is one of them. Officially, there is no target milestone for Bug 18574. Of course, if it doesn't make it into 1.7, it may end up as an XPI (eg. Mngzilla) and all will be well. Does any one know for sure?
Try playing through the games in chronological order of when they were released. You'll be able to see then how the series has evolved.
To this end, I can wholeheartedly recommend buying a Game Boy Advance - for A Link To The Past, Link's Awakening DX (hard to find, but definitely worth it), and two parallel Oracle games. Similarly, if you get a Gamecube, hunt down the TLOZ Collector's Edition, which has Ocarina Of Time and Majora's Mask, as well as the two NES games.
Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, but the classic Zelda gameplay spans generations. I still can't think of anything better in video games than playing a Legend Of Zelda game, and I don't care which one.
I always liked the way the story unfolded in Metroid Prime. The essence of the game is in exploring your surroundings, and in doing so, you got little pieces of the plot unveiled to you (eg. Chozo Lore, Pirate Data). It gives the game a bit more background and a bit more scale. Apart from the dramatic opening sequence (very reminiscent of Super Metroid's first few minutes), I have particularly fond memories of a few certain Pirate Data entries late in the game that are intentionally very subtle but nonetheless scary as hell. In fact, when you know this twist in the plot in coming, and play through the game again, the rest of the story takes on new meanings. It's a very clever plot device and adds greatly to the game's atmosphere and replay value (not that it needs any more of either).
Anyone remember Primal Rage? That was a (fairly average) fighting game with dinosaurs. If you started using the same move (or combo, in some cases) over and over again, it would flash a No Cheese icon on the screen and disallow that move for a while. Pretty cool - it made you mix things up a bit, and kept the game interesting.
Maybe that's the point. If the game gets too repetitive, it gets too boring, and people get too pissed off with it to have any fun.
Democrats: 516,833 votes
79, 87, 78, 51, 68, 33 ... geddit?
Why do we need 103 words? I'm sure there's a Perl programmer out there that can say exactly the same thing in about 15 or 20.
I downloaded Linux from SCO's FTP site.
Actually, deja vu is common when using a new version of Windows - especially among Mac users, who have of course seen it all before.
I can already see a review of tie-in Phantom Menace wine, with its annoying character and just a hint of midichlorians.
A subsequent Attack Of The Clones wine would probably try to invoke the passions a bit more, but that, like Hayden Christensen's acting, will probably end up wooden and stale, and a bit on the nose.
Of course, they both lack the complexities of previous vintages, and both are acetic enough not to age well...
The mod points say "troll"?
Maybe that's South African
For "really hard drugs"
Wow, we sow the seeds,
Then nature grows the seeds, and
Then we eat the seeds
What do we have here?
All of Ms Kendall's knickers
That need a good wash
Stickiest bogey
Made by Toxteth O'Grady
Of the USA
The world's stupidest
Bottom-burp is Vyvyan?
No, it says Rik here...
Crop rotation in
The 14th century was
Widespread after... John
And, for a limited time (because I'm at work), a haiku rendition of the theme song!
Once in a lifetime
Comes love like this; I need you,
And you me - you see?
The young ones, darling,
We're the young ones, and young ones
Shouldn't be afraid
To live, love, there's a
Song to be sung, we may not
Be young ones for long