The browser should decide, and unless you actually specify pixel-exact layout constraints in CSS, you shouldn't expect to get that, of course. But I don't see how that is relevant. Soft hyphens are a standard feature in HTML, and have been for a long time. What's more, they're actually used, too; not so much in English, but then, there's more languages in the world than that.
Still, Firefox doesn't support them, even though people have been requesting it for literally years. Why not?
And "just submit a fix" isn't really an argument, either. Has it ever occured to you that not everybody who notices a bug may know enough C/C++ (not to mention Gecko internals) to be able to create a working fix?
That still won't necessarily lead to (literally) gigabytes of memory being used, and I'm speaking from experience; I spend a lot of time on http://www.newgrounds.com/ , and thus see a lot of flashes each day, man of them in the four to five MB range.
Mozilla (Seamonkey, in my case) does have memory leaks that are large enough to drive a truck, through, that's for sure - after a day, its memory usage will typically be up to somewhere between 150 and 300 MB -, and it crashes a lot, too - once a day on average, and that's using 1.7.12, the last version in a branch that should be in deep maintenance mode.
But I can't say it's using *gigabytes* of memory, and it's never done that for me, either.
Ah, yes... of course you know better. That's why you're an AC on Slashdot, and the people who made this decision are just engineers working at Lockheed-Martin. This'll show them!
Microsoft uses their profit for positive benefits to society as well:
Ah, yes, but a thief who spends part of what he steals from you on good causes is still a thief, isn't he? If someone breaks into your house, steals a thousand dollars, and then donates ten dollars to the red cross, would you laud him for his positive benefit to society? Or would you say "that darn thief stole a thousand dollars from me"?
Microsoft is just like that, only on a larger scale.
I think you're wrong. Dismissing a study based solely on who commissioned it (which is different from just funding it) is not fallacious, it's common sense. Think about it for a moment.
If you can't see why it is, consider this analogy from sports: if an athlete gets doped prior to an important event, they'll get disqualified. That is common sense, too, and arguments like "he would've won even if he hadn't taken anything" or "the substance he took didn't actually do anything" would be laughed at. It's obvious that doping is a no-no, and that when a competition involves doping, there is no level playing field on which to compete anymore, so the only thing that really can be done is to categorically disqualify anyone who uses doping, period.
The same thing is true here. It might well be that windows is a better server OS than Linux, but the fact that Microsoft commissioned this study makes it worthless *no matter* which conclusion it comes to. And it's not even necessary to look at the study's findings or how it was done to know that, just like it's not necessary to check a doped athlete's time / points /... to know whether they should be disqualified or not. Sportspeople who use doping are always disqualified, and studies that are commissioned by a certain party to examine that party's product and its competitors are always worthless.
Of course the browser component had features ripped out. Have you ever tried to view an MNG or JNG image in Firefox? Admittedly, it won't work in Seamonkey, either, but there's lots of things that are not supported in Mozilla (either browser) by default, so the idea that everything that relates to web browsing is actually going in isn't true.
Unfortunately, one might add. I'm not sure whether a new proprietary tag like <canvas> is a good idea, but I'd appreciate it if I could create animated images for my webpage that aren't limited to 256 colours or a 1-bit alpha channel...
Of course there are. I have one, for example - it's a relatively handy way to keep things organised. If I actually want to buy a book or another item on my list, I'll get it from a local bookstore, but for organising purposes, it's quite nice.
Well... MySQL *is* a toy system. Yes, Access is even worse, and it's not like MySQL doesn't have its uses; but any database that will silently alter data you're inserting into a table if it doesn't fit the specified constraints instead of returning an error is unusable for serious work.
If you want a good database, why not look into PostgreSQL?
It's not released at all, yet. What the article states is false (boy, I wish I had a dollar for every time *that* happened on Slashdot in the last year or two...)
Is it? How do you know? Maybe it's just me, but I've uploaded about 150 GB in the past 7 months on BT on my measly 192 kbps uplink, and not a *single* bit of that was infringing on copyright. Why do people always think that BT doesn't have any uses besides copyright infringement? It's not true, and while it *seems* that copyright infringement accounts for a significant part of BT use, there simply is no data that would show that it's actually the #1 use (of course, there's no data that shows it's not the case, either, but without any data at all whatsoever, you shouldn't pull numbers out of your ass).
There's a GIMP fork called CinePaint (formerly known as Film Gimp, as it focused on features needed by the movie/special effects industry) that has CMYK support, IIRC. The features it adds were originally supposed to get merged into GIMP 2.0, but the GIMP developers later told the Film Gimp guys that they didn't want these things in the main branch after all.
For me, this is one of the biggest mistakes the GIMP developers ever made, but it also shows a fundamental problem in their attitude: instead of welcoming additions and new users scratching their own itches, they locked them out and told them they weren't welcome. Of course, you do have to focus on what you want to accomplish in a project and avoid feeping creaturism, but rejecting features that are clearly useful and within the scope of a project... that's arrogance.
As someone else said, it actually shows that GIMP is 10 years old by now. It's still a useful tool, and I actually use GIMP 1.2 almost daily (I also have GIMP 2.2 installed, but I always found it slower and more clumsy than the earlier versions), but the idea to produce a free Photoshop replacement... that was missed long ago, and without some radical changes on both the code and the project management level, I doubt it's ever going to happen.
I hate to say it, but GIMP is looking old, and considering that it's still considering a kind of flagship among open source application, it's making us all look bad. Is this really the best we can come up with?
So what? I'm not sure, but I don't think that he's doing this because he's personally worried about Holly wood movies being shared on BitTorrent - he's doing it to cover his own rear. He's quite obviously making money with BitTorrent, enough to be able to afford a life for himself and his family, and I think he wants to preserve that, which is perfectly understandable.
Adding a torrent search engine is a good first step to make BitTorrent even more widespread and ubiquitious as it already is. Striking a deal with the *AA is a logical next step, if only to prevent them from suing him. Nothing wrong with that, and everyone who wants to download a movie can still get it from the Pirate Bay.
Well, I don't know about you, but if I buy systems with a *pre-installed* OS, no matter whether it's Linux or Windows or OS X or Plan 9 or whatever, I expect the system to be in a usable state. There is such a thing as quality control.
This is even more true when you consider that a console is not like a PC - from a customer's point of view at least, it's much closer to any regular home appliance. To give an example, if you bought a new toaster and it didn't work, would you then say "that's OK, it might not have worked if I had installed NetBSD on it myself, too"? I don't know about you, but if I buy a toaster, I kinda expect it to be able to produce toast. And if I buy a game console, I kinda expect to be able to play games.
And seriously, how many console models have you seen in your life that had this kind of failure after the initial launch? I've been buying consoles ever since the mid-80's, and I don't recall something like this happening ever, so I definitely would say that it *is* news indeed, in the truest sense of the word. Or is it just that it shouldn't be reported because it's Microsoft and you're a drooling fanboy who cries "M$ bashing! unfair! everytime he sees something that might be construed as being critical of M$?
I don't think you understand. It's not about someone being *aware* of whether the metaphorical cat is dead or alive - it's about the quantum state being disturbed. Measuring it can disturb it; whether the measurement is presented to a human mind afterwards or whether it's thrown away, for example, is irrelevant. So, yes, if an ant crawls into the box, the cat will either be dead or alive.
As for QM not making any testable hypotheses - that's also not true. Quite the opposite, in fact; QM works exceptionally well so far, and our findings continue to match its predictions. Do read up on it a bit - it's a very fascinating topic.
Maybe it's because "less scratch-prone" is a nonsensical argument. I've got more than 300 audio CDs, and none of them have any visible scratches (as far as I know, anyway) - scratches on the CD just aren't something you're concerned about when you buy music.
Sure, you get a free USB flash drive when you buy this thing, but seriously, it's not worth the price difference. One store chain here just had a sale on 512 MB flash drives for 20 EUR - that's 5 EUR for 128 MB, which is nowhere near the extra 15 USD you'd pay for the flash drive here compared to the CD.
What you *do* get is music in a lossy format, which is a genuine disadvantage over a CD. Why didn't they use FLAC instead? Sure, they might have used a larger drive then, but at least then it just *might* have been a good deal when you compare the price to what a USB flash drive and a CD cost, together.
No, there's no further effect - the karma bonus for comments is pretty much the only goodie you get. You might still try to get as many +5 comments as possible, for example, but that's sportiness rather than anything else. (Slashdot golf?)
I think it's worth pointing out that F-Secure at least has reported and criticised this from day one on - in fact, they say in their blog that they were working on this even before Mark broke the news (and they even supplied some evidence, such as photos of amazon orders for rootkitted CDs sent to them that were made in September or so).
I wouldn't trust McAfee or Norton here, and the fact that some people say they might have been in violation of the DMCA removing this software only adds to it, but F-Secure is a Finnish company and most likely doesn't care about the DMCA.
I think they deserve some more attention here - people often say "where are the AV vendors?", but they tend to forget that there's at least one who actually *did* care.
No, he didn't. The DMCA only applies to effective copy prevention mechanisms - i.e., the company in question has to make an effort to actually prevent copying. If you can copy the disc by doing *nothing at all* (I turned autorun off on my windows box right after getting it, several years ago), then you're not violating the DMCA.
Some part of me is almost disappointed that a couple of adolescents with an axe to grind/haven't/ yet found way to exploit the rootkit and thus come into posession of the first corporate-created zombie botnet (make Windows security jokes all you want, this is for real).
Slashdot Mirror
But these already exist, don't they? Or have I been imagining websites like http://www.x.org/ all along?
The browser should decide, and unless you actually specify pixel-exact layout constraints in CSS, you shouldn't expect to get that, of course. But I don't see how that is relevant. Soft hyphens are a standard feature in HTML, and have been for a long time. What's more, they're actually used, too; not so much in English, but then, there's more languages in the world than that.
Still, Firefox doesn't support them, even though people have been requesting it for literally years. Why not?
And "just submit a fix" isn't really an argument, either. Has it ever occured to you that not everybody who notices a bug may know enough C/C++ (not to mention Gecko internals) to be able to create a working fix?
That still won't necessarily lead to (literally) gigabytes of memory being used, and I'm speaking from experience; I spend a lot of time on http://www.newgrounds.com/ , and thus see a lot of flashes each day, man of them in the four to five MB range.
Mozilla (Seamonkey, in my case) does have memory leaks that are large enough to drive a truck, through, that's for sure - after a day, its memory usage will typically be up to somewhere between 150 and 300 MB -, and it crashes a lot, too - once a day on average, and that's using 1.7.12, the last version in a branch that should be in deep maintenance mode.
But I can't say it's using *gigabytes* of memory, and it's never done that for me, either.
Ah, yes... of course you know better. That's why you're an AC on Slashdot, and the people who made this decision are just engineers working at Lockheed-Martin. This'll show them!
Ah, yes, but a thief who spends part of what he steals from you on good causes is still a thief, isn't he? If someone breaks into your house, steals a thousand dollars, and then donates ten dollars to the red cross, would you laud him for his positive benefit to society? Or would you say "that darn thief stole a thousand dollars from me"?
Microsoft is just like that, only on a larger scale.
I think you're wrong. Dismissing a study based solely on who commissioned it (which is different from just funding it) is not fallacious, it's common sense. Think about it for a moment.
... to know whether they should be disqualified or not. Sportspeople who use doping are always disqualified, and studies that are commissioned by a certain party to examine that party's product and its competitors are always worthless.
If you can't see why it is, consider this analogy from sports: if an athlete gets doped prior to an important event, they'll get disqualified. That is common sense, too, and arguments like "he would've won even if he hadn't taken anything" or "the substance he took didn't actually do anything" would be laughed at. It's obvious that doping is a no-no, and that when a competition involves doping, there is no level playing field on which to compete anymore, so the only thing that really can be done is to categorically disqualify anyone who uses doping, period.
The same thing is true here. It might well be that windows is a better server OS than Linux, but the fact that Microsoft commissioned this study makes it worthless *no matter* which conclusion it comes to. And it's not even necessary to look at the study's findings or how it was done to know that, just like it's not necessary to check a doped athlete's time / points /
It really is that easy.
Of course the browser component had features ripped out. Have you ever tried to view an MNG or JNG image in Firefox? Admittedly, it won't work in Seamonkey, either, but there's lots of things that are not supported in Mozilla (either browser) by default, so the idea that everything that relates to web browsing is actually going in isn't true.
Unfortunately, one might add. I'm not sure whether a new proprietary tag like <canvas> is a good idea, but I'd appreciate it if I could create animated images for my webpage that aren't limited to 256 colours or a 1-bit alpha channel...
That's the way I'd read it - and it's probably true, too (which is certainly a new twist as far as FUD is concerned).
Isn't the whole USA built on this - people emigrating from places they don't like to live in anymore?
You just *might* have found out if you had clicked on the article link. They're there for a reason, y'know?
Of course there are. I have one, for example - it's a relatively handy way to keep things organised. If I actually want to buy a book or another item on my list, I'll get it from a local bookstore, but for organising purposes, it's quite nice.
Well... MySQL *is* a toy system. Yes, Access is even worse, and it's not like MySQL doesn't have its uses; but any database that will silently alter data you're inserting into a table if it doesn't fit the specified constraints instead of returning an error is unusable for serious work.
If you want a good database, why not look into PostgreSQL?
Maybe it's just me, but that kinda makes me think of dialogues like the following:
Phone: *ring*
User: *picks up the phone* Hello?
Marketing drone: Hi! Have you ever thought about switching to Firefox?
It's not released at all, yet. What the article states is false (boy, I wish I had a dollar for every time *that* happened on Slashdot in the last year or two...)
Is it? How do you know? Maybe it's just me, but I've uploaded about 150 GB in the past 7 months on BT on my measly 192 kbps uplink, and not a *single* bit of that was infringing on copyright. Why do people always think that BT doesn't have any uses besides copyright infringement? It's not true, and while it *seems* that copyright infringement accounts for a significant part of BT use, there simply is no data that would show that it's actually the #1 use (of course, there's no data that shows it's not the case, either, but without any data at all whatsoever, you shouldn't pull numbers out of your ass).
There's a GIMP fork called CinePaint (formerly known as Film Gimp, as it focused on features needed by the movie/special effects industry) that has CMYK support, IIRC. The features it adds were originally supposed to get merged into GIMP 2.0, but the GIMP developers later told the Film Gimp guys that they didn't want these things in the main branch after all.
For me, this is one of the biggest mistakes the GIMP developers ever made, but it also shows a fundamental problem in their attitude: instead of welcoming additions and new users scratching their own itches, they locked them out and told them they weren't welcome. Of course, you do have to focus on what you want to accomplish in a project and avoid feeping creaturism, but rejecting features that are clearly useful and within the scope of a project... that's arrogance.
As someone else said, it actually shows that GIMP is 10 years old by now. It's still a useful tool, and I actually use GIMP 1.2 almost daily (I also have GIMP 2.2 installed, but I always found it slower and more clumsy than the earlier versions), but the idea to produce a free Photoshop replacement... that was missed long ago, and without some radical changes on both the code and the project management level, I doubt it's ever going to happen.
I hate to say it, but GIMP is looking old, and considering that it's still considering a kind of flagship among open source application, it's making us all look bad. Is this really the best we can come up with?
So what? I'm not sure, but I don't think that he's doing this because he's personally worried about Holly wood movies being shared on BitTorrent - he's doing it to cover his own rear. He's quite obviously making money with BitTorrent, enough to be able to afford a life for himself and his family, and I think he wants to preserve that, which is perfectly understandable.
Adding a torrent search engine is a good first step to make BitTorrent even more widespread and ubiquitious as it already is. Striking a deal with the *AA is a logical next step, if only to prevent them from suing him. Nothing wrong with that, and everyone who wants to download a movie can still get it from the Pirate Bay.
Well, I don't know about you, but if I buy systems with a *pre-installed* OS, no matter whether it's Linux or Windows or OS X or Plan 9 or whatever, I expect the system to be in a usable state. There is such a thing as quality control.
This is even more true when you consider that a console is not like a PC - from a customer's point of view at least, it's much closer to any regular home appliance. To give an example, if you bought a new toaster and it didn't work, would you then say "that's OK, it might not have worked if I had installed NetBSD on it myself, too"? I don't know about you, but if I buy a toaster, I kinda expect it to be able to produce toast. And if I buy a game console, I kinda expect to be able to play games.
And seriously, how many console models have you seen in your life that had this kind of failure after the initial launch? I've been buying consoles ever since the mid-80's, and I don't recall something like this happening ever, so I definitely would say that it *is* news indeed, in the truest sense of the word. Or is it just that it shouldn't be reported because it's Microsoft and you're a drooling fanboy who cries "M$ bashing! unfair! everytime he sees something that might be construed as being critical of M$?
I don't think you understand. It's not about someone being *aware* of whether the metaphorical cat is dead or alive - it's about the quantum state being disturbed. Measuring it can disturb it; whether the measurement is presented to a human mind afterwards or whether it's thrown away, for example, is irrelevant. So, yes, if an ant crawls into the box, the cat will either be dead or alive.
As for QM not making any testable hypotheses - that's also not true. Quite the opposite, in fact; QM works exceptionally well so far, and our findings continue to match its predictions. Do read up on it a bit - it's a very fascinating topic.
Maybe it's because "less scratch-prone" is a nonsensical argument. I've got more than 300 audio CDs, and none of them have any visible scratches (as far as I know, anyway) - scratches on the CD just aren't something you're concerned about when you buy music.
Sure, you get a free USB flash drive when you buy this thing, but seriously, it's not worth the price difference. One store chain here just had a sale on 512 MB flash drives for 20 EUR - that's 5 EUR for 128 MB, which is nowhere near the extra 15 USD you'd pay for the flash drive here compared to the CD.
What you *do* get is music in a lossy format, which is a genuine disadvantage over a CD. Why didn't they use FLAC instead? Sure, they might have used a larger drive then, but at least then it just *might* have been a good deal when you compare the price to what a USB flash drive and a CD cost, together.
No, there's no further effect - the karma bonus for comments is pretty much the only goodie you get. You might still try to get as many +5 comments as possible, for example, but that's sportiness rather than anything else. (Slashdot golf?)
Maybe ask them why they're opposed to evolution when even the pope (both the current one and the last one) accepts it.
I think it's worth pointing out that F-Secure at least has reported and criticised this from day one on - in fact, they say in their blog that they were working on this even before Mark broke the news (and they even supplied some evidence, such as photos of amazon orders for rootkitted CDs sent to them that were made in September or so).
I wouldn't trust McAfee or Norton here, and the fact that some people say they might have been in violation of the DMCA removing this software only adds to it, but F-Secure is a Finnish company and most likely doesn't care about the DMCA.
I think they deserve some more attention here - people often say "where are the AV vendors?", but they tend to forget that there's at least one who actually *did* care.
No, he didn't. The DMCA only applies to effective copy prevention mechanisms - i.e., the company in question has to make an effort to actually prevent copying. If you can copy the disc by doing *nothing at all* (I turned autorun off on my windows box right after getting it, several years ago), then you're not violating the DMCA.
How do you know they haven't?