You know that embed is no longer in the HTML w3c specs, and the applet ist deprecated in HTML 4.01 and not in the XHTML 1 strict? It is deprecated and not allowed, but still needed by many browsers. The reason you have to write that embed object applet kombination comes from the browser wars.
But you are right, that's really bad code and it is needed to make it cross-browser compatible. Sad part is that it wont validate against any common HTML standard - but i don't know who to blame for this, w3c had to set one tag as standard for embedding objects (Media-files, Flash, JavaApplets, you name it) and browsers exist that wont be changed for some time cannot be blamed. I wonder when Mozilla will display a flash movie without using the embed tag. so this obfuscated (or redundant) code will be in pages for a long time from now on...
I think it's better to find pages that use such code. example - the www.europcar.com.de.fr pages the use a javascript menu that does ONLY work in MSIE on windows. No MacIE, Mozilla(choose your platform), Opera 7 or other alternative browsers. You simply cannot see the menu or cannot use it - therefore you cannot navigate. There are more pages out there, writing this code on purpose is pointless, because it has already been written;) Find those pages and complain, make a publicly available list of invalid non-working HTML pages. Write the webmasters about your problems. And of course show workarounds so that those "programmers" can see and change their mistakes.
A good reason for coding obfuscated (be it valid or invalid) HTML would be to create a repository of "real world" code for Browser developers out there to check if it works with their product. Then of course a "desired output" image should be attached to the code.
Creating a blacklist of corporate pages using invalid html is my favourite idea, but the mentioned repository would help a lot coders out there...
Well here in Austria the Raiffeisen Bank had a few incompatibilities with Netscape 6 (when it came out) and Opera 5. I just called them, told them what it was and how to fix it and a week later the online banking thingy worked with all last generation browsers.
On the other side there are banks here that still use custom windows software with dial-in (cool for all Linux, Apple, DSL and Cable users/owners isn't it) or bet on Java Applets which of course only work in one browser be it Netscape or MSIE. Don't ask me how they manage to get applets working only on one platform and browser. Well i would switch bank if my online banking solution does not work for me - so switch and tell your bank why you switched, then things might change.
somebody gave me an old compaq presario with a Pentium 133 cpu. It has no fan on the cpu, but some huge metallic radiator. The powersupply was so quiet that i first thought it doesn't work (these old compaqs take a few secs before they display something on screen). Anyway the box now runs with 3 realtek pci nics and floppyfw w/o any problems. I think u can remove the fan from your cpu and replace it with some real big metallic cooler like the Mac G4 machines have inside. dunno where to get such things though (from old compaqs, hehe).
but, i think the biggest problem is that it isn't easy to use for a musician. On Mac/Windows just start some downloaded setup tool and your new drivers are installed. same goes for audio-software updates. Even this seems to be a problem as the FAQ pages show on most manufacturer pages. Installing Alsa drivers isn't that easy. I mean there's a 40KB text file that explains howto install them, you need at least 6 steps. Also you must know which chip your audio-card is based on. Then there's 4 different things to get off the alsa page (Driver, Library, Utilities, OSS Compat. Library) but you actually need all of them to get audio software going - why isn't this one package? For my card using the ice1712 chip i currently must use OSS emulation for most audio-tools (except Ardour). speaking of Ardour - If i were a normal pc-using musician and i want to try out some new software i heard of, I'd try to get some demo version of it and test the tool. to get Ardour i must know howto use CVS and of course howto compile under linux. I know Ardour isn't finished yet, but this is another point that keeps joe average off linux-audio. for me it's fun to try out howto tweak my linx box and to see linux have super-low latency with some kernel patches (approx. 2ms). A lot work and time is necessary to get these things going (time a professional musician can't afford). MacOSX can provide similar latency and much better usability. Recoding some tool like Samplitude Studio which has a usability level that i never saw with any other software is nearly impossible. I once put a friend of mine in front of my machine running Samplitude - he is a musician only knowing something about his hardware like mixing-desk, compressors, amplifier... - he figured out howto use the most important functions within 5 minutes, and actually made the mixdown himself w/o needing my help afterwards. That's the actual difference between opensource apps and professional apps (which are sadly not available for linux). So its usability not features, there shouldn't be a distro for audio, there should be some foolproof system for drivers and software installation.
Um just under a Terabyte, are u sure?
When i calculated it assuming they meant 3Mbit/sec (and not megabyte, who knows, they used an abbreviation and are americans...) taking 30 as the average average of days in a month;) makes 972000000000 bytes a month (says windows calculator) this divided by 1024*1024*1024*1024 gives me approx 0.75186 Terabyte. which is not just under a terabyte i'd say. it's nevertheless a lot - too much for almost any company in europe i think.
out of curiosity - how were they able to afford this until now? What's traffic price in the states, or asked different how hard is it to get a green card these days;)?
Well Apples design is nice and all, but where do power users put their hardware? I currently have 7 Harddisks, a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW in my box. show me any apple box coping with this stuff w/o using some fancy external firewire stuff. Next thing is SCSI - why for heavens sake have they removed SCSI from their systems? I'd like to see some NLE video editor working on a single 60GB IDE drive without screaming. i run 3 LVD 17gb disks@10000rpm and i want to see which systems faster - even the best future G5 can't be faster when the harddisk sucks. Next thing is macs filesystem - no journalling. I repeat - no journalling. let this machine crash and you're fucked... The keyboards suck - there're no {[]} brackets visible on those, now go and find them being a pc programmer(german keyboard mac and pc). Then they replace the @ sign with every OS release? some of the keyboards even have no number-block. OSX is working very well as far as i can see at my co-workers G4, so what i'm waiting for is enough software natively running on OSX, a customizeable huge loud box, a keyboard that has ALL special chars viewable on its buttons, no starting sound when i power on the machine and of course dualprocessor at a reasonable price. dual athlon 2000MP would cost me 2000Euro including watercooling excluding peripherals like screens mouse,...
Slashdot Mirror
You know that embed is no longer in the HTML w3c specs, and the applet ist deprecated in HTML 4.01 and not in the XHTML 1 strict? It is deprecated and not allowed, but still needed by many browsers. The reason you have to write that embed object applet kombination comes from the browser wars.
But you are right, that's really bad code and it is needed to make it cross-browser compatible. Sad part is that it wont validate against any common HTML standard - but i don't know who to blame for this, w3c had to set one tag as standard for embedding objects (Media-files, Flash, JavaApplets, you name it) and browsers exist that wont be changed for some time cannot be blamed. I wonder when Mozilla will display a flash movie without using the embed tag. so this obfuscated (or redundant) code will be in pages for a long time from now on...
I think it's better to find pages that use such code. example - the www.europcar.com .de .fr pages the use a javascript menu that does ONLY work in MSIE on windows. No MacIE, Mozilla(choose your platform), Opera 7 or other alternative browsers. You simply cannot see the menu or cannot use it - therefore you cannot navigate. There are more pages out there, writing this code on purpose is pointless, because it has already been written ;) Find those pages and complain, make a publicly available list of invalid non-working HTML pages. Write the webmasters about your problems. And of course show workarounds so that those "programmers" can see and change their mistakes.
A good reason for coding obfuscated (be it valid or invalid) HTML would be to create a repository of "real world" code for Browser developers out there to check if it works with their product. Then of course a "desired output" image should be attached to the code.
Creating a blacklist of corporate pages using invalid html is my favourite idea, but the mentioned repository would help a lot coders out there...Well here in Austria the Raiffeisen Bank had a few incompatibilities with Netscape 6 (when it came out) and Opera 5. I just called them, told them what it was and how to fix it and a week later the online banking thingy worked with all last generation browsers.
On the other side there are banks here that still use custom windows software with dial-in (cool for all Linux, Apple, DSL and Cable users/owners isn't it) or bet on Java Applets which of course only work in one browser be it Netscape or MSIE. Don't ask me how they manage to get applets working only on one platform and browser. Well i would switch bank if my online banking solution does not work for me - so switch and tell your bank why you switched, then things might change.
somebody gave me an old compaq presario with a Pentium 133 cpu. It has no fan on the cpu, but some huge metallic radiator. The powersupply was so quiet that i first thought it doesn't work (these old compaqs take a few secs before they display something on screen).
Anyway the box now runs with 3 realtek pci nics and floppyfw w/o any problems.
I think u can remove the fan from your cpu and replace it with some real big metallic cooler like the Mac G4 machines have inside. dunno where to get such things though (from old compaqs, hehe).
but, i think the biggest problem is that it isn't easy to use for a musician. On Mac/Windows just start some downloaded setup tool and your new drivers are installed. same goes for audio-software updates. Even this seems to be a problem as the FAQ pages show on most manufacturer pages.
Installing Alsa drivers isn't that easy. I mean there's a 40KB text file that explains howto install them, you need at least 6 steps. Also you must know which chip your audio-card is based on. Then there's 4 different things to get off the alsa page (Driver, Library, Utilities, OSS Compat. Library) but you actually need all of them to get audio software going - why isn't this one package? For my card using the ice1712 chip i currently must use OSS emulation for most audio-tools (except Ardour).
speaking of Ardour - If i were a normal pc-using musician and i want to try out some new software i heard of, I'd try to get some demo version of it and test the tool. to get Ardour i must know howto use CVS and of course howto compile under linux. I know Ardour isn't finished yet, but this is another point that keeps joe average off linux-audio.
for me it's fun to try out howto tweak my linx box and to see linux have super-low latency with some kernel patches (approx. 2ms). A lot work and time is necessary to get these things going (time a professional musician can't afford). MacOSX can provide similar latency and much better usability. Recoding some tool like Samplitude Studio which has a usability level that i never saw with any other software is nearly impossible. I once put a friend of mine in front of my machine running Samplitude - he is a musician only knowing something about his hardware like mixing-desk, compressors, amplifier... - he figured out howto use the most important functions within 5 minutes, and actually made the mixdown himself w/o needing my help afterwards.
That's the actual difference between opensource apps and professional apps (which are sadly not available for linux). So its usability not features, there shouldn't be a distro for audio, there should be some foolproof system for drivers and software installation.
Um just under a Terabyte, are u sure? When i calculated it assuming they meant 3Mbit/sec (and not megabyte, who knows, they used an abbreviation and are americans...) taking 30 as the average average of days in a month ;) makes 972000000000 bytes a month (says windows calculator) this divided by 1024*1024*1024*1024 gives me approx 0.75186 Terabyte. which is not just under a terabyte i'd say. it's nevertheless a lot - too much for almost any company in europe i think.
out of curiosity - how were they able to afford this until now? What's traffic price in the states, or asked different how hard is it to get a green card these days ;)?
Well Apples design is nice and all, but where do power users put their hardware? ...
I currently have 7 Harddisks, a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW in my box. show me any apple box coping with this stuff w/o using some fancy external firewire stuff. Next thing is SCSI - why for heavens sake have they removed SCSI from their systems? I'd like to see some NLE video editor working on a single 60GB IDE drive without screaming. i run 3 LVD 17gb disks@10000rpm and i want to see which systems faster - even the best future G5 can't be faster when the harddisk sucks.
Next thing is macs filesystem - no journalling. I repeat - no journalling. let this machine crash and you're fucked...
The keyboards suck - there're no {[]} brackets visible on those, now go and find them being a pc programmer(german keyboard mac and pc). Then they replace the @ sign with every OS release? some of the keyboards even have no number-block.
OSX is working very well as far as i can see at my co-workers G4, so what i'm waiting for is enough software natively running on OSX, a customizeable huge loud box, a keyboard that has ALL special chars viewable on its buttons, no starting sound when i power on the machine and of course dualprocessor at a reasonable price. dual athlon 2000MP would cost me 2000Euro including watercooling excluding peripherals like screens mouse,