Zip is an aging format, and it badly needs to be reinvented. Not mindlessly extended, but respecified openly to remove the accumulated cruft. I remember reading about some guy doing this a while ago; however AFAIK the project never really got off the ground. But the format does have severe limitations which need to be addressed, and a new open specification (and preferably implementation) would save a lot of headaches.
And to those claiming we should just use tar variants instead: they're two separate formats to perform separate jobs. Zip is fast for random access of given files; tar variants are a pig for that. See OpenOffice formats and JAR for previous examples.
Any more specific examples of this OS integration? For people who have used neither OSX nor Safari, this tells us nothing; obviously, we probably won't get the full coolness without using it, but we can get an idea of why OSXers might find it cool.
If you want to write Unix-only applications, it hardly makes sense to use C# at all.
Note that GTK+ works on Windows since 2.0, and looks nice given appropriate theming. I don't know about Mac OS X, but considering it's built on BSD, surely it's only a matter of time? (It's entirely possible that it's happened already, actually. If I wasn't so lazy I'd google it. ("But you are lazy, right?" "Aww, don't get me started...")
Once opened it then runs mailing itself to all your Linux friends. It then deletes all your files
As far as I know, no Linux mailer opens attachments automatically. Even those with desktop integration (shell scripts associated to sh) require explicit user action to run something, and it would also need to be chmodded first. But yeah, in the future, as desktop environments try to become "friendlier", we do risk this, and I would advise developers to stay clear.
Text child pornography is illegal? How does that work? I thought the rationale for video child porn being illegal was that an illegal act had been committed in its creation - how do they justify making something illegal that is purely the product of an author's imagination?
Disclaimer: I have never read a child porn story, but I have seen them around the seedier places on the net.
This looks pretty cool. I've always thought that the internals of Mozilla were quite hideous; anything that makes them less so can only be good. The most exciting thing for me is the further development of the GRE. At the moment, to get an HTML rendering engine in your own code, you have to use desktop-biased KHTML or GTK HTML rendering code; being able to link with libgecko.so and render pages simply would be a huge boost to the development of web applications.
One thing that's always confused me a little about Mozilla, however, is the divide between the XUL and native widget approach. I can't see why you can't have the best of both worlds: use XUL, but render it to native widgets. This would allow abstraction into a XUL library which programs that wanted cross platform widgets could use. This seems like it would combine the coolness of XUL with the speed of native widgets. Is there a problem with this approach? Why hasn't it been done?
A considerable amount of people still don't know that magnets and floppies don't go well together, and most people I know are too lazy to backup, then complain when their disk dies. (Actually, that's also a function of messy Win32 programs, but that's another issue.) Nice one, Mr Browne.
Don't know about the solution in other languages, but Tim should give XML::Twig a try. Memory efficient tree parsing, and a joy to use if you're used to thinking in Perl. You can get over your fear of callback-based APIs by using anonymous subroutines. The only thing it doesn't do is standards - which Tim seems to discard anyway. So go get it from CPAN, and be happy.
A thought occurs re.NET: I understand from an informative Ars Technica article that applications targeted to.NET are compiled to an intermediary bytecode format, a la Java. Now, I've heard from many sources that compiled Java class bytecode can be easily decompiled to source. Is this not fundamentally the case with any bytecode mechanism?
Surely this will be a big concern for Microsoft. Ignoring their anti-OSS FUD, fact is most companies considering.NET probably don't want a sixteen year old kid publishing their top secret eternal life algorithm on the net. How are they (by which I mean Microsoft) going to stop this happening?
the inability to tailor the browser string to be whatever I want without recompiling (at least one website I *have* to use will ban you if your browser doesn't say "MSIE" in its string).
Random sidenote: look here, about halfway down is an option you can put in user.js to change the UA string. Your point is still valid, though, since it doesn't have a UI.
I thought the point of the parent was that Ogg doesn't suffer from buffer overflows in the comments section as much as MP3s, because the Ogg format defines unlimited space for UTF-8 comments, and anything that doesn't accept this is not an ogg decoder as per the spec. The quality of the music doesn't affect your ability to be hit by a buffer overflow bug. (Subsititute "Ogg" for "Vorbis" as appropriate, people with knowledge.)
Of course, the ability of the software to deal with comments of unlimited length is the real bottleneck...and Winamp plugins for Ogg support are widely available, in fact, Winamp3 comes with support by default. (IMHO winamp-2.81 is far superior, but that's outside the scope of this discussion.)
Underworld are the best act in electronica, ever, period. They meld together all the different styles of electronic music into one heart-squeezingly beautiful whole, and the lyrics...well. Just buy any of their albums, listen to it for a month, you won't be disappointed.
Regardless of the original intent, the end felt tacked-on. Up until the third act, I thought that the point was that artificial intelligence never *could* become real intelligence, and if that had been the message, the result would have been a better picture. Having "aliens" come in just to make the unnatural point work doesn't do much for the film's credibility.
They should have stopped it when David jumped into the sea.
Pros and cons of the /x regex modifier
on
Perl 6 Synopsis 5
·
· Score: 1
I must admit to only just having gained a handle on some of the more esoteric features of Perl 5 regex. But I have a definite opinion on the use of the/x modifier on regex - contrary to (what seems like) popular belief, I find it makes regex harder to read, not easier.
Having to mentally scroll a line after each token impairs my parsing of the regex as a whole. It seems much easier to me to compare a sample of the input to the regex, and see how it looks. I realise it won't be mandatory to lay regexes out like this in Perl 6, but it worries me that this is seen as good programming practise. Don't even get me started on people who comment after every token...
Still, there's hope that the introduction of this modifer as the default will work against this mindset, rather than for it. Perhaps with its common usage will come enlightenment amongst the Perl posse. I also notice that Larry doesn't use the monstrously verbose regex form during his Apocalypse. So I'm not really sure whether this is a good or a bad thing - but I'm certain that people in the Perl community need to stop preaching that excessive commenting of regexes makes for maintainable code.
(This probably should have been posted in response to the original Apocalypse 5 thread. Tough titty. BTW, I thought Slashdot would wait for the Exegesis, and how come this is a few days late. Bah, humbug.)
Actually, Radio 1 from eight till two pm has some pretty quality new music. (Lamacq/Peel/Mary Anne Hobbs). Maybe you don't like that music, but binning the whole station for its daytime playlist is a little harsh. I do admit, however, that a lot of its playlist is entirely worthless, and that its DJs are irritating beyond irritation.
Slashdot Mirror
Aah, here's the ZIP2 homepage. If anyone likes the sound of it, I urge you to get involved.
Zip is an aging format, and it badly needs to be reinvented. Not mindlessly extended, but respecified openly to remove the accumulated cruft. I remember reading about some guy doing this a while ago; however AFAIK the project never really got off the ground. But the format does have severe limitations which need to be addressed, and a new open specification (and preferably implementation) would save a lot of headaches.
And to those claiming we should just use tar variants instead: they're two separate formats to perform separate jobs. Zip is fast for random access of given files; tar variants are a pig for that. See OpenOffice formats and JAR for previous examples.
I thought it was called ECMAscript. Gah, this committee design thing is so confusing.
Any more specific examples of this OS integration? For people who have used neither OSX nor Safari, this tells us nothing; obviously, we probably won't get the full coolness without using it, but we can get an idea of why OSXers might find it cool.
Note that GTK+ works on Windows since 2.0, and looks nice given appropriate theming. I don't know about Mac OS X, but considering it's built on BSD, surely it's only a matter of time? (It's entirely possible that it's happened already, actually. If I wasn't so lazy I'd google it. ("But you are lazy, right?" "Aww, don't get me started...")
Yes. But probably music to the ears of unemployed tech support guys. :-)
This:
As far as I know, no Linux mailer opens attachments automatically. Even those with desktop integration (shell scripts associated to sh) require explicit user action to run something, and it would also need to be chmodded first. But yeah, in the future, as desktop environments try to become "friendlier", we do risk this, and I would advise developers to stay clear.
Text child pornography is illegal? How does that work? I thought the rationale for video child porn being illegal was that an illegal act had been committed in its creation - how do they justify making something illegal that is purely the product of an author's imagination?
Disclaimer: I have never read a child porn story, but I have seen them around the seedier places on the net.
This looks pretty cool. I've always thought that the internals of Mozilla were quite hideous; anything that makes them less so can only be good. The most exciting thing for me is the further development of the GRE. At the moment, to get an HTML rendering engine in your own code, you have to use desktop-biased KHTML or GTK HTML rendering code; being able to link with libgecko.so and render pages simply would be a huge boost to the development of web applications.
One thing that's always confused me a little about Mozilla, however, is the divide between the XUL and native widget approach. I can't see why you can't have the best of both worlds: use XUL, but render it to native widgets. This would allow abstraction into a XUL library which programs that wanted cross platform widgets could use. This seems like it would combine the coolness of XUL with the speed of native widgets. Is there a problem with this approach? Why hasn't it been done?
I'm ashamed to live among people who place such high value in "patriotism".
A considerable amount of people still don't know that magnets and floppies don't go well together, and most people I know are too lazy to backup, then complain when their disk dies. (Actually, that's also a function of messy Win32 programs, but that's another issue.) Nice one, Mr Browne.
Don't know about the solution in other languages, but Tim should give XML::Twig a try. Memory efficient tree parsing, and a joy to use if you're used to thinking in Perl. You can get over your fear of callback-based APIs by using anonymous subroutines. The only thing it doesn't do is standards - which Tim seems to discard anyway. So go get it from CPAN, and be happy.
Technically, can any physical object be a cube?
Someone designs a robotic brain surgeon, and the interesting part is that it's running Linux?
Jesus. Some of these posters really need to sort their priorities out.
A thought occurs re .NET: I understand from an informative Ars Technica article that applications targeted to .NET are compiled to an intermediary bytecode format, a la Java. Now, I've heard from many sources that compiled Java class bytecode can be easily decompiled to source. Is this not fundamentally the case with any bytecode mechanism?
Surely this will be a big concern for Microsoft. Ignoring their anti-OSS FUD, fact is most companies considering .NET probably don't want a sixteen year old kid publishing their top secret eternal life algorithm on the net. How are they (by which I mean Microsoft) going to stop this happening?
Random sidenote: look here, about halfway down is an option you can put in user.js to change the UA string. Your point is still valid, though, since it doesn't have a UI.
Oops. Of course, it was referring to the WinXP bug. Well, consider the parent an informative aside. :-)
-- amoe, blushing
I thought the point of the parent was that Ogg doesn't suffer from buffer overflows in the comments section as much as MP3s, because the Ogg format defines unlimited space for UTF-8 comments, and anything that doesn't accept this is not an ogg decoder as per the spec. The quality of the music doesn't affect your ability to be hit by a buffer overflow bug. (Subsititute "Ogg" for "Vorbis" as appropriate, people with knowledge.)
Of course, the ability of the software to deal with comments of unlimited length is the real bottleneck...and Winamp plugins for Ogg support are widely available, in fact, Winamp3 comes with support by default. (IMHO winamp-2.81 is far superior, but that's outside the scope of this discussion.)
Underworld are the best act in electronica, ever, period. They meld together all the different styles of electronic music into one heart-squeezingly beautiful whole, and the lyrics...well. Just buy any of their albums, listen to it for a month, you won't be disappointed.
Regardless of the original intent, the end felt tacked-on. Up until the third act, I thought that the point was that artificial intelligence never *could* become real intelligence, and if that had been the message, the result would have been a better picture. Having "aliens" come in just to make the unnatural point work doesn't do much for the film's credibility. They should have stopped it when David jumped into the sea.
I must admit to only just having gained a handle on some of the more esoteric features of Perl 5 regex. But I have a definite opinion on the use of the /x modifier on regex - contrary to (what seems like) popular belief, I find it makes regex harder to read, not easier.
Having to mentally scroll a line after each token impairs my parsing of the regex as a whole. It seems much easier to me to compare a sample of the input to the regex, and see how it looks. I realise it won't be mandatory to lay regexes out like this in Perl 6, but it worries me that this is seen as good programming practise. Don't even get me started on people who comment after every token...
Still, there's hope that the introduction of this modifer as the default will work against this mindset, rather than for it. Perhaps with its common usage will come enlightenment amongst the Perl posse. I also notice that Larry doesn't use the monstrously verbose regex form during his Apocalypse. So I'm not really sure whether this is a good or a bad thing - but I'm certain that people in the Perl community need to stop preaching that excessive commenting of regexes makes for maintainable code.
(This probably should have been posted in response to the original Apocalypse 5 thread. Tough titty. BTW, I thought Slashdot would wait for the Exegesis, and how come this is a few days late. Bah, humbug.)
"R1 is for teeny-boppers"
Actually, Radio 1 from eight till two pm has some pretty quality new music. (Lamacq/Peel/Mary Anne Hobbs). Maybe you don't like that music, but binning the whole station for its daytime playlist is a little harsh. I do admit, however, that a lot of its playlist is entirely worthless, and that its DJs are irritating beyond irritation.