According to the article, the ‘evolution’ is in their behaviour. “Guests will witness the robots in their natural environment, fighting for survival, learning and evolving as time goes on.”.
There is no breeding or natural selection, by the looks of it. Calling it ‘evolution’ is stretching things a little bit.
What killed it was when one of the drops landed on the head and caused it to dig in to the platter. It still booted but scandisk reported a problem w/ the fat.
Now remember boys and girls: to avoid clogging up your read head, only drop monounsaturated fats on your hard disk platter...
I’d better answer this one, as I started the discussion. Thanks, afidel, for raising the web standards issue.
Actually, I wasn’t referring to how Mozilla renders particular websites. I think web standards are important, and I’m broadly in favour of the Browser Upgrade initiative. The sooner we can banish table layout hacks (and worse) the better. Mozilla is a website developer’s dream from that point of view.
My issue is with the unsatisfactory way that Mozilla renders certain fonts and certain glyphs. I refer in particular to bug number 86563, which is about the incorrect rendering of ’, ” and „. I had this problem on my system (MDK 8.1). In this context, “properly” means displaying the correct glyph— fairly fundamental really. There was a great deal of discussion of the problem on bugzilla, which finally cumulated in it being closed as “WORKSFORME”. Except that it doesn’t. You really need to read the full discussion.
(I take back my earlier remark about Helvetica being substituted for certain truetype fonts. It appears that it may only affect symbol-type fonts, which are not really within the web standards.)
I’d still like to see antialiasing of the quality found in Konqueror though.
P.S. My own workaround was to completely remove support for iso8859-13 character sets from my system by editing some of the FreeX86 configuration files. Ok for me, as I don’t need the Baltic Rim characters set. But it is not the kind of thing you can expect Joe User to know how to do. It took me several days to figure it out.
Quite true— from a developer’s point of view, page rendering is really quite hard.
But from the user’s point of view, it is probably the most basic feature of a www browser. Forget built-in email, widgets that match the OS, spell-checkers, address books, business cards and maps, theme switching (dynamic or otherwise), favicons,... If it doesn’t display web pages properly, what’s the point of all these additional niceties?
One could be cynical and say that it’s much easier (and more fun) to work on the niceties than the really hard rendering stuff. But that’s probably unfair.
I actually think Mozilla does a bloody good job, especially on pages like Eric Meyer’s Edge pages. But I wish that these font niggles would be sorted out. If not, some will inevitably perceive a lack of priorities in the development, whether rightly or wrongly.
I haven't upgraded yet, but one of the reasons I prefer Konqueror is that on my machine, Konqueror's font rendering looks much better than Mozilla's. Firstly, the fonts get antialiased very well in Konqueror. My installation of Mozilla doesn't seem to do antialiasing.
Secondly, and more importantly, Mozilla seems to have a terrible habit of replacing many of my truetype fonts with Adobe Helvetica, and of substituting characters from a different font when it thinks it can't find the right glyph in the selected font. I threw together a test page once that was supposed to display a line of text in each of all the truetype fonts installed on my system. Konqueror, while not perfect, had little difficulty. Mozilla rendered nearly half of them as Helvetica.
Is this just me, or have others experienced this problem?
I want a simple X-terminal with a flat-panel touch screen that mounts under the cabinets like this one does
I've been wanting one of these for a while. A flat touch screen running an X server, built-in wireless networking, no disk. I could check my email and read Slashdot while eating breakfast, or sit in the living room reading as if it were a book.
(I know I'll get mod'ed down for this, but please don't just write this off as an anti-american troll before reading it. Some of my best friends are american.)
Only in the United States of America could anyone think that this is a good idea. How is it that anyone can think that a symbolic action like this could change the reality of whether the kernal is actually 'Free Speech' or not?
It strikes me as in some ways similar to those people who secretly walk along an overgrown and disused public right-of-way once every 20 years just to make sure it can't be closed down. It doesn't actually achieve anything - it's just fiddling about with legal technicalities.
Why only the United States? Well, similar things might happen here in the UK, but we have not yet become quite such a litigation- and legally-obsessed nation as the USA. Also, the US preoccupation with 'free speech' is something most Brits just don't get.
Ok, now watch all that hard-earned karma evaporate...
I wouldn't want to live in a transparent house. Think of the lack of privacy. People'd be able to see when I was in the bedroom, when I was in the bathroom... They'd be able to see all my movements.
C is good as a learning language, and... C is not good for making well-designed programs.
I'm with you all the way on the first comment. On the second, it depends what you mean by 'good'. C does not prevent you from writing well-designed programs. But is it good for that? In the end, the responsibility for good-design rests with whoever is using the tools.
Because C is easy to learn. Anyone can get their head around it in a few weeks part-time effort. C++ is much harder, because you have to think about design.
I thought the article was pretty content-free too. It didn't really seem to know what it was aiming for. The subtext was clearly that marketing/research/suits - bad, real-world problem solving - good. If that had been made the main point and it had been illustrated with a few more examples and anecdotes, it could have been an interesting read.
Schneier and Shostack are trying to pull one of the oldest tricks in the book. They agree with and welcome Microsoft's new intentions. Then they set out what they think Microsoft will need to do to put it into practise. The trouble is, the very things they list as the first vital steps are exactly the things that are most abhorrent to Microsoft. If Microsoft are going to change anything, these are the last things they would ever consider.
It may be that Schneier and Shostack are trying to pull a very old trick, but they are also very right.
Consider:
Data/Control Path Separation. Would Microsoft really remove macro functionality from Outlook Express? And completely U-turn on integration of the internet with the desktop?
Default Configurations. (This involved separate tools for separate tasks rather than monolithic applications.) Such a move would force Microsoft to accept that IE should not have been bundled with Windows, that users should be able to choose a 3rd party spell-checker for Word... If you can perform powerful operations by stringing together a series of small tools that do a single task very well, you can get those tools from wherever you like. That's bad news for Microsoft because they lose control.
Separation of Protocols and Products. Again, this strikes at the very heart of Microsoft's monopoly position, allowing a mix-and-match approach.
Advance Publication of Protocols and Designs. This would give competitors the ability to beat Microsoft to the market place by taking a protocol that Microsoft has published and writing their own implementation. Again, a strike right at the heart of Microsoft's monopoly.
Amusingly, in these recommendations, which are anathema to Microsoft, Schneier and Shostack seem to have rather neatly told us what Linux looks like. (I particularly liked the bit about scrapping the monolithic Registry...)
Slashdot Mirror
According to the article, the ‘evolution’ is in their behaviour. “Guests will witness the robots in their natural environment, fighting for survival, learning and evolving as time goes on.”.
There is no breeding or natural selection, by the looks of it. Calling it ‘evolution’ is stretching things a little bit.
What killed it was when one of the drops landed on the head and caused it to dig in to the platter. It still booted but scandisk reported a problem w/ the fat.
Now remember boys and girls: to avoid clogging up your read head, only drop monounsaturated fats on your hard disk platter...
Is that 'went away when you upgraded to a new version'? You refer to old config files... Thanks for the hint, anyway.
I’d better answer this one, as I started the discussion. Thanks, afidel, for raising the web standards issue.
Actually, I wasn’t referring to how Mozilla renders particular websites. I think web standards are important, and I’m broadly in favour of the Browser Upgrade initiative. The sooner we can banish table layout hacks (and worse) the better. Mozilla is a website developer’s dream from that point of view.
My issue is with the unsatisfactory way that Mozilla renders certain fonts and certain glyphs. I refer in particular to bug number 86563, which is about the incorrect rendering of ’, ” and „. I had this problem on my system (MDK 8.1). In this context, “properly” means displaying the correct glyph— fairly fundamental really. There was a great deal of discussion of the problem on bugzilla, which finally cumulated in it being closed as “WORKSFORME”. Except that it doesn’t. You really need to read the full discussion.
(I take back my earlier remark about Helvetica being substituted for certain truetype fonts. It appears that it may only affect symbol-type fonts, which are not really within the web standards.)
I’d still like to see antialiasing of the quality found in Konqueror though.
P.S. My own workaround was to completely remove support for iso8859-13 character sets from my system by editing some of the FreeX86 configuration files. Ok for me, as I don’t need the Baltic Rim characters set. But it is not the kind of thing you can expect Joe User to know how to do. It took me several days to figure it out.
Quite true— from a developer’s point of view, page rendering is really quite hard.
But from the user’s point of view, it is probably the most basic feature of a www browser. Forget built-in email, widgets that match the OS, spell-checkers, address books, business cards and maps, theme switching (dynamic or otherwise), favicons, ... If it doesn’t display web pages properly, what’s the point of all these additional niceties?
One could be cynical and say that it’s much easier (and more fun) to work on the niceties than the really hard rendering stuff. But that’s probably unfair.
I actually think Mozilla does a bloody good job, especially on pages like Eric Meyer’s Edge pages. But I wish that these font niggles would be sorted out. If not, some will inevitably perceive a lack of priorities in the development, whether rightly or wrongly.
I haven't upgraded yet, but one of the reasons I prefer Konqueror is that on my machine, Konqueror's font rendering looks much better than Mozilla's. Firstly, the fonts get antialiased very well in Konqueror. My installation of Mozilla doesn't seem to do antialiasing.
Secondly, and more importantly, Mozilla seems to have a terrible habit of replacing many of my truetype fonts with Adobe Helvetica, and of substituting characters from a different font when it thinks it can't find the right glyph in the selected font. I threw together a test page once that was supposed to display a line of text in each of all the truetype fonts installed on my system. Konqueror, while not perfect, had little difficulty. Mozilla rendered nearly half of them as Helvetica.
Is this just me, or have others experienced this problem?
In fact, one of these, only make it run X.
I want a simple X-terminal with a flat-panel touch screen that mounts under the cabinets like this one does
I've been wanting one of these for a while. A flat touch screen running an X server, built-in wireless networking, no disk. I could check my email and read Slashdot while eating breakfast, or sit in the living room reading as if it were a book.
(I know I'll get mod'ed down for this, but please don't just write this off as an anti-american troll before reading it. Some of my best friends are american.)
Only in the United States of America could anyone think that this is a good idea. How is it that anyone can think that a symbolic action like this could change the reality of whether the kernal is actually 'Free Speech' or not?
It strikes me as in some ways similar to those people who secretly walk along an overgrown and disused public right-of-way once every 20 years just to make sure it can't be closed down. It doesn't actually achieve anything - it's just fiddling about with legal technicalities.
Why only the United States? Well, similar things might happen here in the UK, but we have not yet become quite such a litigation- and legally-obsessed nation as the USA. Also, the US preoccupation with 'free speech' is something most Brits just don't get.
Ok, now watch all that hard-earned karma evaporate...
I wouldn't want to live in a transparent house. Think of the lack of privacy. People'd be able to see when I was in the bedroom, when I was in the bathroom... They'd be able to see all my movements.
C is good as a learning language, and ... C is not good for making well-designed programs.
I'm with you all the way on the first comment. On the second, it depends what you mean by 'good'. C does not prevent you from writing well-designed programs. But is it good for that? In the end, the responsibility for good-design rests with whoever is using the tools.
Because C is easy to learn. Anyone can get their head around it in a few weeks part-time effort. C++ is much harder, because you have to think about design.
I thought the article was pretty content-free too. It didn't really seem to know what it was aiming for. The subtext was clearly that marketing/research/suits - bad, real-world problem solving - good. If that had been made the main point and it had been illustrated with a few more examples and anecdotes, it could have been an interesting read.
Schneier and Shostack are trying to pull one of the oldest tricks in the book. They agree with and welcome Microsoft's new intentions. Then they set out what they think Microsoft will need to do to put it into practise. The trouble is, the very things they list as the first vital steps are exactly the things that are most abhorrent to Microsoft. If Microsoft are going to change anything, these are the last things they would ever consider.
It may be that Schneier and Shostack are trying to pull a very old trick, but they are also very right.
Consider:
Amusingly, in these recommendations, which are anathema to Microsoft, Schneier and Shostack seem to have rather neatly told us what Linux looks like. (I particularly liked the bit about scrapping the monolithic Registry...)