Okay, perhaps I put it badly. I meant that if a site chooses to serve up different HTML depending on what browser (it thinks) I'm using, whether that substitution is necessary or not, then I'm suspicious. Because IME, in most of those cases, the substitution is not really necessary. Both FireFox and Safari do a pretty good job of handling standard HTML, thank you. And if fewer sites made substitutions, then browsers might get fixed a little more promptly...
On the one mind, I agree it's ghastly that Opera (or Safari, or Firefox, or whatever) has to pretend to be MSIE just to get served certain web pages. Changing the string might inconvenience some users in the short term, but it'll encourage web authors to better support other browsers, which is a Good Thing(tm) in the longer term.
But on the other, aside from stats, why should it have to identify itself at all? What's wrong with something like
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible) Exact browser name none of your business
or similar? Groucho Marx is quoted as saying that he wouldn't want to belong to any club that'd have him as a member; I feel the same about web sites; if a site has to customise its pages for my browser, whatever that browser is, then I'm suspicious of it.
I still find it sad that most people seem to be interested only in 3- or 4-minute songs.
Some of my albums have continuous music throughout. Some have three or four long tracks. Some have long pieces divided into 30 or 40 separate sections. Some have pieces that average 6 or 7 minutes each. Some have 4-minute songs too, of course, but there's far more to music than just that. Why not try something different once in a while?
Don't you think that Google itself is functioning like a bibliography? The important pages, the ones most worth seeing, are likely to be the most linked-to, and so appear at the top of the list. The rating is done by every web site creator, and the collation by Google; doesn't that make PageRank effectively a bibliographic tool?
Agreed. For one thing, with all the anti-US sentiment about these days, surely his being head of the New York Centre for English or whatever it was might be more relevant?
Well, yes, forcing me to see ads for products that I might actually ever buy is better than forcing me to watch nauseating ads for baby products, investment plans for the retired, kiddy toys, or feminine hygiene products...
But have they considered that I might not want to be forced to watch any ads at all?
Even for products that I am sometimes interested in, I'm not always looking to buy more. Last time I had a HD die on me, I was very interested in finding a replacement quickly, but that doesn't mean I'm happy to watch HD ads all the time.
From my point of view, good marketing is marketing that I can go and find when I want to, not that finds me when I don't.
Hold the cover so that two of its sides are exactly vertical. Hold it directly over the hole's diagonal. It should fit in fairly comfortably.
Shapes that won't do this are shapes of constant width. The circle is the most obvious example, but there are many others -- here in the UK, our 20p and 50p coins have seven rounded sides, and also have constant width (which is why they work in vending machines).
I think that these are the only shapes which are 'manhole-safe' (so to speak). Any shape which does not have constant width could presumably be held like the square one above, with a shorter width fitting through the hole's longer width. Though of course it'd have to be sufficiently shorter to fit inside the ledge of the hole.
I've learnt to show some minor activity in such situations: I change my facial expression from time to time (I can look puzzled, confused, irritated, pleased, &c as I find problems and then solve them); I move my gaze between different things out of the window, or across at the far size of the office; I move my lips a bit as if muttering to myself...
Of course, you have to judge carefully between looking busy and looking like you're hearing voices.
And you don't *HAVE* to use operator overloading in your own code..
I hope you're happy on your little island.
Here in the Real World(TM), we have to work with other people's code too. Code from our team or project members, code from other projects, code from third-party systems, code from libraries and plug-ins, code from that ghastly project from a couple of years back where they were all incompetent and have now moved on but we still have to use it and we haven't got the budget to rework all the code...
So yes, unless you have very strict standards and the power to enforce them come what may, if a feature's in the language, you'll probably have to deal with it, whether you like it or not.
Keyloggers may well be useless on some sites. For example, the already-mentioned Barclays site asks you (amongst other things) to enter two letters from a special password not by typing them in, but buy selecting them from comboboxes. I suspect that's designed specifically to foil keyloggers.
The trouble with R&D is that it's a long-term investment. When a company's doing well, it's happy to spend money there, and months or years later it reaps the rewards. But when a company's doing badly, it tends to think more short-term. Cuts to R&D may give an immediate financial gain, but in a year or two, when the company's doing lousy and competitors are overtaking it left right and centre, will anyone have a long enough memory to realise why?
It's a commonly-held belief that half an hour after eating a Chinese meal, you tend to get hungry again.
I've no idea why it's commonly-held, coz I've never experienced it myself. Half an hour after eating a Chinese meal (which I like to do regularly), I find myself still stuffed. Maybe I'm just a pig...
Where do you draw the boarders between one 'computer' and another?
Well, I've never been known for my artistic skills, but if I had to, I'd probably choose to draw them waiting outside the headmaster's office. In a corridor with good lighting. And maybe a dictionary.
Nice idea, but anarchy is an inherently unstable system. Deep down, in some respects people want authority; they want someone to take charge, someone to stop the Bad Guys, or just someone to blame.
Let's look at what happens if there's no authority on security, no laws or rules. To start with, the knowledgeable few protect themselves very well; many people do so badly; and many more don't at all. Some Bad Guys come in and have a field day. What happens then? Well, several possibilities. One is that the ignorant masses try to learn how to secure themselves. How do they do that? They don't all know a techie to ask. Maybe some techies decide to publicise their techniques (whether for money, respect, or whatever). But then all it takes is some bad guys to publicise the wrong techniques; how do people know who to trust? The situation is ripe for a central knowledge base -- an authority. Of course, at first it probably wouldn't dictate policy, but that's a strong possibility for where it would go; and then maybe start enforcing that policy too.
Or take another possibility: maybe the ignorant masses cry to their government or other authority, and get it extended to cover this area too. Or maybe they form vigilante groups or whatever, which become a form of authority.
Yes, in an ideal world, people would be responsible for their own security; but in an ideal world, there wouldn't be anyone to be secure against. Unfortunately, the Real World(tm) is awkward, and makes us choose between unpleasant alternatives.
I'm probably being totally naive here, but I thought a patent was supposed to apply to a particular process. A method or mechanism for doing something. Not just the end result! Of course, it wouldn't appear in the 'Janet and John' abstract at the front, but it'd be there in the actual claims themselves.
So Amazon could patent their way to remind customers, but anyone else could do the same if they use a different method.
Either this is being blown out of proportion, or the US patent system is even more screwy than I thought...
I've never understood the point of that sort of Googlebomb - it always seems the wrong way around. I mean, who goes around typing 'litigious bastards' into Google (unless they already know about this)?
What we want is for people to type 'SCO' into Google, and get a web page on 'litigious bastards' as the top match. Wouldn't that actually mean something?
All heartily seconded. For comedy series, I'd also mention Red Dwarf, The Day Today and its successor Brass Eye. Going back a bit, everyone knows Monty Python and Fawlty Towers but The Fall And Rise of Reginald Perrin is worth a quick look, and Not the Nine O'Clock News had some excellent bits. I have a soft spot for The High Life and Big Train. And Father Ted is good enough to be honorary BBC:)
For drama, I think Neverwhere deserves far more recognition.
Oh, please... 'Macs are too expensive' is up there with 'You can only use a one-button mouse' and 'Mac OS X is dying' as a line that even the trolls are getting fed up with.
Yes, you can get dirt-cheap grotty little PC clones. But if you price up something equivalent to a Mac (not just the speed or size, but all the other features too), you'll find, like everyone else who's done the comparison, that Macs are fairly competitive, and in some cases cheaper. And now there's the Mac Mini, you can't complain about the absolute price either.
If you want a Mac, get one. If you don't, at least be honest about your reasons.
Even under those conditions, there are better alternatives. For example, Shell sort. The code is relatively simple, not totally different from Bubble sort, but it has significantly better performance (something like n^4/3).
I've used it with great success in an app in an interpreted language where function calls (especially recursive ones) were terribly slow, and we were dealing with tens to hundreds of items.
Where I was (fairly near Aldgate), there was no O2 service pretty much all day. I couldn't get any SMSs through, and attempts at voice calls all said 'Call barred'. When I made the mistake of turning my phone off and on again, it stuck on 'Connecting to network' and got no further. Only when I was on the train outside London could I connect (and picked up waiting SMS).
In the crush waiting for the train, I spoke to several other people who couldn't get their phones to work, and they were all on O2 as well.
Only anecdotal evidence, of course, but then so's yours...
Slashdot Mirror
On the one mind, I agree it's ghastly that Opera (or Safari, or Firefox, or whatever) has to pretend to be MSIE just to get served certain web pages. Changing the string might inconvenience some users in the short term, but it'll encourage web authors to better support other browsers, which is a Good Thing(tm) in the longer term.
But on the other, aside from stats, why should it have to identify itself at all? What's wrong with something like
or similar? Groucho Marx is quoted as saying that he wouldn't want to belong to any club that'd have him as a member; I feel the same about web sites; if a site has to customise its pages for my browser, whatever that browser is, then I'm suspicious of it.Some of my albums have continuous music throughout. Some have three or four long tracks. Some have long pieces divided into 30 or 40 separate sections. Some have pieces that average 6 or 7 minutes each. Some have 4-minute songs too, of course, but there's far more to music than just that. Why not try something different once in a while?
(I don't have anything intelligent to add at this point; just wanted to express strong agreement and, er, moral support with all of that :)
And the 'Reply-To:' field. That's the kicker. (The one which got me into serious trouble...)
But have they considered that I might not want to be forced to watch any ads at all?
Even for products that I am sometimes interested in, I'm not always looking to buy more. Last time I had a HD die on me, I was very interested in finding a replacement quickly, but that doesn't mean I'm happy to watch HD ads all the time.
From my point of view, good marketing is marketing that I can go and find when I want to, not that finds me when I don't.
Shapes that won't do this are shapes of constant width. The circle is the most obvious example, but there are many others -- here in the UK, our 20p and 50p coins have seven rounded sides, and also have constant width (which is why they work in vending machines).
I think that these are the only shapes which are 'manhole-safe' (so to speak). Any shape which does not have constant width could presumably be held like the square one above, with a shorter width fitting through the hole's longer width. Though of course it'd have to be sufficiently shorter to fit inside the ledge of the hole.
I've learnt to show some minor activity in such situations: I change my facial expression from time to time (I can look puzzled, confused, irritated, pleased, &c as I find problems and then solve them); I move my gaze between different things out of the window, or across at the far size of the office; I move my lips a bit as if muttering to myself...
Of course, you have to judge carefully between looking busy and looking like you're hearing voices.
I hope you're happy on your little island.
Here in the Real World(TM), we have to work with other people's code too. Code from our team or project members, code from other projects, code from third-party systems, code from libraries and plug-ins, code from that ghastly project from a couple of years back where they were all incompetent and have now moved on but we still have to use it and we haven't got the budget to rework all the code...
So yes, unless you have very strict standards and the power to enforce them come what may, if a feature's in the language, you'll probably have to deal with it, whether you like it or not.
I've no idea why it's commonly-held, coz I've never experienced it myself. Half an hour after eating a Chinese meal (which I like to do regularly), I find myself still stuffed. Maybe I'm just a pig...
Well, I've never been known for my artistic skills, but if I had to, I'd probably choose to draw them waiting outside the headmaster's office. In a corridor with good lighting. And maybe a dictionary.
Let's look at what happens if there's no authority on security, no laws or rules. To start with, the knowledgeable few protect themselves very well; many people do so badly; and many more don't at all. Some Bad Guys come in and have a field day. What happens then? Well, several possibilities. One is that the ignorant masses try to learn how to secure themselves. How do they do that? They don't all know a techie to ask. Maybe some techies decide to publicise their techniques (whether for money, respect, or whatever). But then all it takes is some bad guys to publicise the wrong techniques; how do people know who to trust? The situation is ripe for a central knowledge base -- an authority. Of course, at first it probably wouldn't dictate policy, but that's a strong possibility for where it would go; and then maybe start enforcing that policy too.
Or take another possibility: maybe the ignorant masses cry to their government or other authority, and get it extended to cover this area too. Or maybe they form vigilante groups or whatever, which become a form of authority.
Yes, in an ideal world, people would be responsible for their own security; but in an ideal world, there wouldn't be anyone to be secure against. Unfortunately, the Real World(tm) is awkward, and makes us choose between unpleasant alternatives.
So Amazon could patent their way to remind customers, but anyone else could do the same if they use a different method.
Either this is being blown out of proportion, or the US patent system is even more screwy than I thought...
What we want is for people to type 'SCO' into Google, and get a web page on 'litigious bastards' as the top match. Wouldn't that actually mean something?
For drama, I think Neverwhere deserves far more recognition.
Okay, maybe you can't tell just yet. But I gather that when previous HP books came out, there were all sorts of impostor versions around.
Yes, you can get dirt-cheap grotty little PC clones. But if you price up something equivalent to a Mac (not just the speed or size, but all the other features too), you'll find, like everyone else who's done the comparison, that Macs are fairly competitive, and in some cases cheaper. And now there's the Mac Mini, you can't complain about the absolute price either.
If you want a Mac, get one. If you don't, at least be honest about your reasons.
I've used it with great success in an app in an interpreted language where function calls (especially recursive ones) were terribly slow, and we were dealing with tens to hundreds of items.
In the crush waiting for the train, I spoke to several other people who couldn't get their phones to work, and they were all on O2 as well.
Only anecdotal evidence, of course, but then so's yours...