Rendering HTML in text mode is one thing. Add CSS, Javascript, DOM etc and it's an whole nother story.
I'm not saying that all these technologies are so great, but a large amount of sites rely on it today. Being able to render a document that contains all that stuff properly is unique by itself. There are only a handful of browsers that can get close.
What Opera does is difficult because not only are they trying to support all these technologies, but they also have to deal with these other trivialities that Lynx can conveniently ignore, called graphics/images.
While on the subject, can anyone comment on what their experience is with satellite based internet connections? How fast, what sort of latencies, downtime, weather impact etc.
I'm interested to get a DirecWay system, but one of the things that worries me is that it requires special software (supposedly).
These types of devices will never make it into my home entertainment system until they at east fit in my AV cabinet with my other components.
I don't care too much about the size but I do care about the bloody FANs (or harddrives for that matter).
I'd much rather stuff a box like this in a closet and have a fanless, diskless box in my AV setup for playback over network.
Should I care about the f*cking business model?
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 3
Dana Chase, director of acquisition and retention in Sprint's consumer long-distance marketing division, said its property tax surcharge "reflected the cost of our business that we needed to recover." Chase added: "We felt it was better for the customer to add a special line item than adding it into the permanent rate."
Yeah, and I feel that it would be better if you could itemize your entire business model on my bill. I mean WTF? Do I really need to know how they run their business? No; I really don't give a rat's ass.
Oh, but that would mean you would have to raise the price that we agreed to in our contract, doesn't it. The same contract that is 500 pages long, all worded in _your_ favor, but you couldn't find one single section that allowed you to increase the rate that was agreed upon. And now you decided that your business 'needed to recover' some cost so you just 'added a special line'.
I know I'm on a long rant here, but let me say this: I'm getting SICK AND TIRED of these f*cking companies that make me agree to pages and pages of agreements and yet there is no credibility on their side. What's wrong with people? It's like no-one is willing to stand behind their product. If they screw up I am turning out to be the person to pay for it. Damn that pisses me off.
Anyways, I'd like to thank/. For giving me the opportunity to vent from time to time.;)
Here I am going through life, thinking it's all fine and dandy and stuff.
I believe that the occasional guy starring intently at me is part of normal life. I figure that it happens to every guy that a girl will walk up to them insisting she'd show him her boobs.
I conclude that I must have a worse memory for people recognition than the average person because the phrase "don't I know you" is mostly used by others about me and not the other way around.
Then finally one day a friend walks over after a conversation with someone (during which they had been looking at me intently, but as I said, what's new?) and says,- that guy I was talking to thought he saw you in a movie last night at his hotel. *grin*
"Uhm, ok, I don't think so, whazup with the silly grin?"
"Well, twas a pr0n movie!"
And then it slowly starts to daunt on me, there is this guy that is in practically all American made pr0n movies that does look a lot like me. (oops, did I just confess?)
So now when someone asks me "don't I know you?", I just grin. And I'm always sure to inspect those boobs.:-)
I asked why no MPEG4/Divx compression and didn't get a decent answer.
The answer would be that at least until recently no hardware compression chips where available. Because the data is sent over the slow USB bus, it has to be compressed by the device, before it goes over the bus.
If they had used Firewire, any compression could have been used, provided that the Mac's CPU can handle it in real-time.
Thanks very much for taking the time to reply. The following is just a rant, don't feel you need to read it.
Every reverse engineering project I've done involved trying to figure out how proprietary code initialized/utilized hardware (such as MPEG decoders, or the cache subsystem of Intel CPUs).
For some reason, hardware vendors still feel that such information needs to be held confidentially, making it practically impossible to use the hardware with anything but a predefined set of software (Award BIOS & Windows).
This is the exact reason why projects such as LinuxBIOS (or whatever the current name is) frequently run out of steam. Just figuring out how to configure the graphics hardware to display _anything_ can be a major undertaking as reverse engineering is the only practical option. Documentation and/or source is either not available to anyone but a select few companies or requires hefty NDAs to be signed making it impossible to release code based on it under GPL.
My suggestion was to consult a lawyer before reverse engineering. In some instances it is legal and in others not
I realize this is getting off-topic, but in your statement you said: Reverse engineering may be done only if Microsoft allows it in their licenses
In other words you imply that the legality of reverse engineering is depending on the license one agreed to.
It was my understanding that this is not necesarrily true for the same reason that statements in contracts which are not supported by the law are considered void.
Thus, if the law does not support restrictions in how a software is used, since it is 'owned' by the buyer (except perphaps the rules in the DMCA) then no license can change that.
So what I'm asking is, do you believe that it is possible to prohibit reverse engineering in a license, like you said in your statement, or are you uncertain and is that why you advice us to consult a lawyer?
I'm very curious to know, because I frequently run into situations where I have to reverse engineer software. (and yes; I will take your advice and contact a lawyer next time around:-))
Thanks! (sorry for any mis-use of terms, my native language is not English...)
Out in California, there are mammoth junk yards of nothing but a century of airplanes gone to waste
Uhm, actually I went searching for these and could only find one in California: Mojave. True, it's gotten a bit busy after 9-11 but they don't have _that_ many planes. The largest one is in Arizona.
However, $300,000 is a bit steep
The auction says: This is the first of its kind and has been drastically reduced from the normal sales price of $295,000.
Instead of selling them to the eccentric, the planes out in the junk yards of California should be given away converted into homeless shelters and low-income housing using the company's swivel technology.
Yeah, I'm sure the owners of those planes would love that idea. FYI: these aircraft still contain parts that can be used, which is the sole purpose of keeping them around. A majority of aircraft however is just mothballed until better times come around. There are times it's not economical to operate them but that doesn't make them worthless. Even if they'd give away the fuselage, who would pay for (a)removing all sellable parts (b)transportation (c)the swivel system (d)the interior??
In other words, plenty of Karma Whoring but nothing substantial to say.
They want you to use DOM methods such as insertNode etc.. It's much more cumbersome, and that's why a lot of people think innerHTML should be part of the W3C draft.
Does the this mean that one can expect browsers to behave in a predictable manner when playing around with HTML documents?
One simple example: innerHTML. This 'property' is not part of ANY W3C draft, yet many, many websites use it because both IE and Mozilla (Netscape) support it.
Even though M$ is on the committee, their own browser still has plenty of features that are not defined in XHTML 1.0, DOM (level 2 or 3), CSS or whatever. And of course 99% of all web 'developers' are more than happy to use these features.
Sorry about that, when I started programming in assembler(sic, apparently) I thought that was the correct name. Maybe it's a translation thing or so, I'm from the Netherlands originally... I suppose the assembler is the assembler and the language is assembly. Anyways...
Regarding the optimizations, I'd have to admit that I don't remember the details. It's about time I do an other comparison. It's important to note that when I did it, it was C++ code. I compared the M$ compiler, the GNU compiler and the Intel compiler. I tried to find the max optimizations and tried several different combinations of command-line options for each because (especially for the Intel compiler) it wasn't very obvious to me what combination should really give the best optimization.
I basically did the comparison because we just purchased the Intel compiler and I was very dissapointed by the performance improvements that we saw (like 0%) when I compiled a huge project with it instead of VC++.
In any case, I'm sure I tried a pre 3.0 gcc, so I will give her an other try before I speak again:-)
I've seen the exact same thing with the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler. Yeah, shoot me, I use it (to compile a non-M$ operating system). It's a pretty f*cking good compiler. (no offense but the assembler output surpassed the GCC compiler easily last time I checked, which is about a year ago)
I only use the command-line compiler and from time to time I look at the assembler output. It's amazing. Proper object oriented C++ design is being translated in assembler that you could only equal by extensive use of macros and other 'tricks' that would make the assembler practically impossible to read/maintain.
The whole trick is knowing how code is generated by the compiler. I remember from the good ole days that Torvalds would do the exact same thing: see what code is generated. This way, after a while, you know instinctively what's the best way to design and write code.
I'm sure there are situations where a human could write better assembler than what's generated by a compiler, but if you are talking anything less trivial than an 'hello world' example, the perceived 'overhead' from a compiler would be required in assembler just as well in order to maintain readable/understandable code and design.
Actually Windows 3.1 is closer to an RTOS than you think. In most RTOS's, a task can starve any other task running at the same priority (or lower). Same as the cooperative multitasking model in Windows 3.1.
Except for the fact that under an RTOS a task with a higher priority get's to run when it needs to. Not so in Win 3.1.
I'm working on an RTOS everyday and in the past I've actually worked for M$ (shoot me) and did a bug fix on Win 3.1 (yes, I've seen the source, no I didn't do anything major). There is nothing close about Win 3.1 and an RTOS.
Talking about ketchup, when I read "The Helix(TM) DNA client is the universal playback engine designed to support the decode and playback of any data type desired" I wondered if I could have fries with mine.
Well, obviously this opt-in business is crap anyways.
I receive spam all the time on email addresses that I have given to exactly one single company (like amazon@mydomain.com) and I NEVER EVER opt in on any thing. In fact I make sure to read things carefully so I don't get screwed.
So what I'd like to know, whenever I receive one of these, where it was exactly that I opted in.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, Lynx has been doing it with text for ages
You are joking, right?
Rendering HTML in text mode is one thing. Add CSS, Javascript, DOM etc and it's an whole nother story.
I'm not saying that all these technologies are so great, but a large amount of sites rely on it today. Being able to render a document that contains all that stuff properly is unique by itself. There are only a handful of browsers that can get close.
What Opera does is difficult because not only are they trying to support all these technologies, but they also have to deal with these other trivialities that Lynx can conveniently ignore, called graphics/images.
I don't own a TV, nor do I want one
:-) You just picked that up from waiting at the bus-stop in front of Circuit City I bet, uh? ;-)
Followed by:
it seems that 90% of the content on TV is dictated by the Fortune 500 companies...
Alrighty then
TCP doesn't send an ACK for every packet.
Try this link for more info
Cheers
While on the subject, can anyone comment on what their experience is with satellite based internet connections? How fast, what sort of latencies, downtime, weather impact etc.
I'm interested to get a DirecWay system, but one of the things that worries me is that it requires special software (supposedly).
You know, /. has gotten things wrong before, but mixing up Checkers with Connect Four is a first.
I bet the Connect Four page is only for IE because it crashed on the Checkers.
I'm not trying to start a browser war here, but Mozilla is much better.
Use the proper tools. By now if you're still swamped in spam/popups/adware, then you're an idiot.
No offense, but that's band-aid engineering. It will work for a while, but the core problem isn't solved.
These types of devices will never make it into my home entertainment system until they at east fit in my AV cabinet with my other components.
I don't care too much about the size but I do care about the bloody FANs (or harddrives for that matter).
I'd much rather stuff a box like this in a closet and have a fanless, diskless box in my AV setup for playback over network.
Dana Chase, director of acquisition and retention in Sprint's consumer long-distance marketing division, said its property tax surcharge "reflected the cost of our business that we needed to recover." Chase added: "We felt it was better for the customer to add a special line item than adding it into the permanent rate."
/. For giving me the opportunity to vent from time to time. ;)
Yeah, and I feel that it would be better if you could itemize your entire business model on my bill. I mean WTF? Do I really need to know how they run their business? No; I really don't give a rat's ass.
Oh, but that would mean you would have to raise the price that we agreed to in our contract, doesn't it. The same contract that is 500 pages long, all worded in _your_ favor, but you couldn't find one single section that allowed you to increase the rate that was agreed upon. And now you decided that your business 'needed to recover' some cost so you just 'added a special line'.
I know I'm on a long rant here, but let me say this: I'm getting SICK AND TIRED of these f*cking companies that make me agree to pages and pages of agreements and yet there is no credibility on their side. What's wrong with people? It's like no-one is willing to stand behind their product. If they screw up I am turning out to be the person to pay for it. Damn that pisses me off.
Anyways, I'd like to thank
I kid you not.
:-)
Here I am going through life, thinking it's all fine and dandy and stuff.
I believe that the occasional guy starring intently at me is part of normal life. I figure that it happens to every guy that a girl will walk up to them insisting she'd show him her boobs.
I conclude that I must have a worse memory for people recognition than the average person because the phrase "don't I know you" is mostly used by others about me and not the other way around.
Then finally one day a friend walks over after a conversation with someone (during which they had been looking at me intently, but as I said, what's new?) and says,- that guy I was talking to thought he saw you in a movie last night at his hotel. *grin*
"Uhm, ok, I don't think so, whazup with the silly grin?"
"Well, twas a pr0n movie!"
And then it slowly starts to daunt on me, there is this guy that is in practically all American made pr0n movies that does look a lot like me. (oops, did I just confess?)
So now when someone asks me "don't I know you?", I just grin. And I'm always sure to inspect those boobs.
I asked why no MPEG4/Divx compression and didn't get a decent answer.
The answer would be that at least until recently no hardware compression chips where available. Because the data is sent over the slow USB bus, it has to be compressed by the device, before it goes over the bus.
If they had used Firewire, any compression could have been used, provided that the Mac's CPU can handle it in real-time.
Don't worry, I'm Karma cap'd.
But yes, it wasn't very funny.
1) replace rot13 with xor
2) ???
3) profit!!!
Thanks very much for taking the time to reply. The following is just a rant, don't feel you need to read it.
Every reverse engineering project I've done involved trying to figure out how proprietary code initialized/utilized hardware (such as MPEG decoders, or the cache subsystem of Intel CPUs).
For some reason, hardware vendors still feel that such information needs to be held confidentially, making it practically impossible to use the hardware with anything but a predefined set of software (Award BIOS & Windows).
This is the exact reason why projects such as LinuxBIOS (or whatever the current name is) frequently run out of steam. Just figuring out how to configure the graphics hardware to display _anything_ can be a major undertaking as reverse engineering is the only practical option. Documentation and/or source is either not available to anyone but a select few companies or requires hefty NDAs to be signed making it impossible to release code based on it under GPL.
Anyways, enough ranting...
My suggestion was to consult a lawyer before reverse engineering. In some instances it is legal and in others not
:-))
I realize this is getting off-topic, but in your statement you said: Reverse engineering may be done only if Microsoft allows it in their licenses
In other words you imply that the legality of reverse engineering is depending on the license one agreed to.
It was my understanding that this is not necesarrily true for the same reason that statements in contracts which are not supported by the law are considered void.
Thus, if the law does not support restrictions in how a software is used, since it is 'owned' by the buyer (except perphaps the rules in the DMCA) then no license can change that.
So what I'm asking is, do you believe that it is possible to prohibit reverse engineering in a license, like you said in your statement, or are you uncertain and is that why you advice us to consult a lawyer?
I'm very curious to know, because I frequently run into situations where I have to reverse engineer software. (and yes; I will take your advice and contact a lawyer next time around
Thanks! (sorry for any mis-use of terms, my native language is not English...)
Out in California, there are mammoth junk yards of nothing but a century of airplanes gone to waste
Uhm, actually I went searching for these and could only find one in California: Mojave. True, it's gotten a bit busy after 9-11 but they don't have _that_ many planes. The largest one is in Arizona.
However, $300,000 is a bit steep
The auction says: This is the first of its kind and has been drastically reduced from the normal sales price of $295,000.
Instead of selling them to the eccentric, the planes out in the junk yards of California should be given away converted into homeless shelters and low-income housing using the company's swivel technology.
Yeah, I'm sure the owners of those planes would love that idea. FYI: these aircraft still contain parts that can be used, which is the sole purpose of keeping them around. A majority of aircraft however is just mothballed until better times come around. There are times it's not economical to operate them but that doesn't make them worthless. Even if they'd give away the fuselage, who would pay for (a)removing all sellable parts (b)transportation (c)the swivel system (d)the interior??
In other words, plenty of Karma Whoring but nothing substantial to say.
They want you to use DOM methods such as insertNode etc.. It's much more cumbersome, and that's why a lot of people think innerHTML should be part of the W3C draft.
look here for more info
Does the this mean that one can expect browsers to behave in a predictable manner when playing around with HTML documents?
One simple example: innerHTML. This 'property' is not part of ANY W3C draft, yet many, many websites use it because both IE and Mozilla (Netscape) support it.
Even though M$ is on the committee, their own browser still has plenty of features that are not defined in XHTML 1.0, DOM (level 2 or 3), CSS or whatever. And of course 99% of all web 'developers' are more than happy to use these features.
\r\n wrote:
:-)
"assembler[sic]"
Sorry about that, when I started programming in assembler(sic, apparently) I thought that was the correct name. Maybe it's a translation thing or so, I'm from the Netherlands originally... I suppose the assembler is the assembler and the language is assembly. Anyways...
Regarding the optimizations, I'd have to admit that I don't remember the details. It's about time I do an other comparison. It's important to note that when I did it, it was C++ code. I compared the M$ compiler, the GNU compiler and the Intel compiler. I tried to find the max optimizations and tried several different combinations of command-line options for each because (especially for the Intel compiler) it wasn't very obvious to me what combination should really give the best optimization.
I basically did the comparison because we just purchased the Intel compiler and I was very dissapointed by the performance improvements that we saw (like 0%) when I compiled a huge project with it instead of VC++.
In any case, I'm sure I tried a pre 3.0 gcc, so I will give her an other try before I speak again
I've seen the exact same thing with the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler. Yeah, shoot me, I use it (to compile a non-M$ operating system). It's a pretty f*cking good compiler. (no offense but the assembler output surpassed the GCC compiler easily last time I checked, which is about a year ago)
I only use the command-line compiler and from time to time I look at the assembler output. It's amazing. Proper object oriented C++ design is being translated in assembler that you could only equal by extensive use of macros and other 'tricks' that would make the assembler practically impossible to read/maintain.
The whole trick is knowing how code is generated by the compiler. I remember from the good ole days that Torvalds would do the exact same thing: see what code is generated. This way, after a while, you know instinctively what's the best way to design and write code.
I'm sure there are situations where a human could write better assembler than what's generated by a compiler, but if you are talking anything less trivial than an 'hello world' example, the perceived 'overhead' from a compiler would be required in assembler just as well in order to maintain readable/understandable code and design.
Actually Windows 3.1 is closer to an RTOS than you think. In most RTOS's, a task can starve any other task running at the same priority (or lower). Same as the cooperative multitasking model in Windows 3.1.
Except for the fact that under an RTOS a task with a higher priority get's to run when it needs to. Not so in Win 3.1.
I'm working on an RTOS everyday and in the past I've actually worked for M$ (shoot me) and did a bug fix on Win 3.1 (yes, I've seen the source, no I didn't do anything major). There is nothing close about Win 3.1 and an RTOS.
On the 26th September ... ... they were eager to show their product. I can assure you that the Pogo hasn't been vapourware for at least 6 months
No offense, but I fail to see how the 26th of September was 6 months ago.
Talking about ketchup, when I read "The Helix(TM) DNA client is the universal playback engine designed to support the decode and playback of any data type desired" I wondered if I could have fries with mine.
Well, obviously this opt-in business is crap anyways.
I receive spam all the time on email addresses that I have given to exactly one single company (like amazon@mydomain.com) and I NEVER EVER opt in on any thing. In fact I make sure to read things carefully so I don't get screwed.
So what I'd like to know, whenever I receive one of these, where it was exactly that I opted in.
Exactly.
And even a document that conformed to an XML Schema could be just as hard to reverse-engineer as a binary file.
We've all seen the obfuscated C contest (or the obfuscated JavaScript scripts in certain webpages).
At the end of the day all that matter is if the company _really_ wants to document the format or not.
Your arrogant reply is out of context.
Well, you are right about one thing,- I am arrogant.