That user doesn't sound too far off - of course you can receive a fax on your computer if it has a fax-capable modem installed. Where the user was wrong was in assuming Dell would know his phone number. (Also, the software supplied with Dell PCs probably doesn't include something to receive faxes. But it's reasonable to assume that if you're sold a '56K fax/modem' you can use it to send and receive faxes.)
Concorde flies at Mach 2.02. Boeing's Sonic Cruiser is not 'almost as fast', in fact it is less than half as fast. (And not built yet of course.)
I feel that the next kewl feature in passenger aviation must be vertical takeoff and landing. Airports are much too big with those long runways. If passenger jets could do the Harrier thing, then airports could be almost like bus stops. (Although some clearance round the side of the aircraft would still be needed.)
Trouble is, for a heavy passenger jet this kind of takeoff might use a lot of fuel.
It is official; Slashdot poster confirms: China is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Chinese community when an AC confirmed that Chinese student participation in Amnesty International meetings has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all attenders. Coming on the heels of recent news stories which plainly state that China has lost more world influence, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The Chinese community worldwide is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing to speak out against the occupation of Tibet.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
An Anonymous Coward states that there are virtually _NO_ Chinese faces in an Amnesty International meeting. How many Chinese people are there altogether? Let's see. The number of Amnesty International-related versus sex-related queries on Google is roughly in ratio of 1 to 100000. Therefore there are about 'virtually _NO_' * 100000 Chinese people. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot troll posts written in the Chinese language.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Hong Kong went out of business and was taken over by the PRC who sell another troubled brand of autocratic government. Now Deng Xiaoping is also dead, his corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that China has steadily declined in market share. Chinese people are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If China is to survive at all it will be among oriental exoticisim dilettante dabblers. Chinese moral standards continue to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes,
A missing alt attribute isn't an HTML error - you can write valid HTML without alt attributes. It's more of a warning from some lint-type tool. A smiley face should warn about things that are definite, unarguable errors, like HTML that doesn't validate. Really this is a yes or no question.
It does appear to be based on the 'ACS Java 5.x' code inherited from ArsDigita. According to Red Hat's pages it uses the same Java object persistence layer for accessing the database (as opposed to the original ACS's design of coding close to the DB) and the same 'Bebop' XML/XSL system for generating HTML. Since they have made a release, I imagine it's now in much better shape than it was when I worked on it in 2001. (Diary and report; the second half talks about the design of ACS Java. See also the OpenACS project's thoughts on Java which is a coded reference to the design of Red Hat's platform. It says 'DO NOT LINK' but it comes #1 in Google search results for 'openacs java' so I don't think I'm giving away any secrets.)
In that case, 415 is not random either, nor is any other three-digit number. Or would you care to name the numbers in [0,1000) which you consider 'random'? Surely a random number generator is just as likely to generate 999 as 415 or anything else.
Slight nitpick: energy does not cost N cents per watt, but rather N cents per joule. A watt is a joule per second, as you know, so a particular electrical device costs a certain number of cents per second to run.
Although to construct a power plant you can count the cost of capital in cents per watt.
Perhaps exploit code should be released a couple of weeks after the bug has been fixed. Then people can (if they want) check for themselves that the fix works. It's like a test case for that particular bug.
(4, Insightful)? Write to your congressman and complain that some companies don't have clearly marked feedback email addresses? Inform your senator that SMP support is a make-or-break issue for installing OpenBSD? Lobby against talk radio?
An accomplished Slashdot parody, karmawarrior - a pity that moderators lack any sense of humour. Or perhaps they just read the first few sentences of each post.
But clicking on 'next page' is much more of a PITA than turning the page of a book. To scroll through a long article you can just hit Space, which disturbs your reading a lot less. Plus of course you can easily scroll back up again.
It might not be so bad if browsers had 'next' and 'previous' buttons to complement the existing 'back' and 'forward': these two new buttons would follow the structure of the document, taking you to the next or previous section. It would require document authors to add some thingy to their HTML. But if they did, and if I could easily skip from one page to the next by hitting Ctrl-Space or something, then I wouldn't find those 25-part Tom's Hardware articles quite so annoying.
This is personal preference, YMMV. But I'd be very surprised if many readers actively preferred the five-page 'click here for the next part' style of presentation over having the whole article on one page. At least for fairly short articles like the ones Slashdot normally links to.
But consider also the Slashdot effect of thousands of people going to the article, seeing the first page, then clicking on the 'printable version' link for themselves. Twice as many page fetches, for that group of people, as if Slashdot had linked directly to the printable version.
Apart from articles which contain many photos, the single-page version is not significantly longer than the first page of the 'ordinary' version. Most of the space is taken up with sidebars, banner ads and so on. So the printable version may even be shorter once you allow for the effect of gzip http compression and fewer images being served. Maybe this, however, is the reason not to link to a printable version - to be 'considerate' and give more advertising revenue to the sites linked to. That doesn't sound like an especially convincing reason however.
What exactly counts as 'legacy'?
on
Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 1
Kinda ironic to see Intel pushing 'legacy free' systems... as if the 8086 instruction set weren't the biggest legacy technology affecting the PC market. (Yes I know x86 assembler has its defenders, but really, if you started from scratch today and knew what you were doing, you'd come up with something rather better.)
I think the standard definition of a legacy system is one that is currently installed and working... legacy shouldn't necessarily be a pejorative term. There are good and bad legacies.
I don't understand why Slashdot doesn't always link to the 'printable version', I doubt that many people prefer to click through pages 1 to 5 rather than just scrolling through the whole article.
Perhaps the browser developers could let you control plugins on a site-by-site basis, in the same way as Javascript or images. Or perhaps a Flash animation could appear as an icon and you click on it to load the Flash plugin for *just that animation*.
However, there's a limit to how much effort the browser writers should expend to work around limitations in a plugin that doesn't come with source. Perhaps it is better just not to run binary-only malware inside the web browser.
No I'm not "forced" to if I visit the site frequently - I can assign it to a zone (with Explorer) that prevents scripting/flash etc. I don't have Flash installed on Mozilla, so it's not an issue there. However, if I'm visiting a site for the first time, I won't know about it until it's splattered across the page!
Quite. For some kinds of 'content' which are frequently abused to annoy and spam the viewer, such as Flash animations, the browser should not display the content without an explicit say-so. So when you visit the site for the first time you just get a little icon in the corner of your browser window saying that there is an animation.
(And when the animation does play, a few basic rules to ensure sanity should apply - such as, it runs only in its own area of the page and isn't allowed to 'crawl' over other parts; there is a 'close' or 'kill animation' button displayed by the browser itself and visible at all times. Again, these rules could be turned off for individual sites you trust but should be set to the more strict mode by default.)
I DO blame the individual site - Flash itself is not the problem, I enjoy a lot of Flash sites so why the hell should I disable it because some coke-head in "Web annoyances inc." dreamed up this latest marketing tool to piss of the public at large?
You could equally ask 'why should I disable my ten-year-old telnetd just because some script-kiddie has an exploit for it?'. Unfortunately there will always be unscrupulous people waiting to take advantage of bugs or design flaws in the software you run. It's up to you to use software that is secure. Again, I stress that being annoyed during web browsing is much less serious than computer security, but the same principles apply.
In this case, disabling Flash altogether is the answer I would choose. But if you like Flash then the answer is to disable it for said marketing-cokehead-infested sites. Since the names of such sites are not known in advance, the most sensible answer is to block animations on all new sites until the user has specifically enabled them.
I assume you disable images etc since they're used to insert huge ads in pages too? After all, it's not the fault of those sites, but those evil gif/jpg/png files!!
It's certainly the fault of the browser if it does silly things like animating images with no way to make them stop. And that's why many browsers now have a way to control whether you want animated GIFs to keep pulsating. On the whole, images don't have the same annoyance problem as Flash or Javascript, because they are confined to their own bit of the page and they cannot take over your browser by disabling the Close button or spawning additional windows.
Personally, yes - but it would also make sense to allow Flash animations for limited cases, for example, where the animation is confined to a particular rectangular area of the screen and cannot crawl over the top of text. Perhaps Flash could be off by default but with a button that appears allowing you to play the animation and choose whether to show animations on that site in future.
At the moment browsers seem to come configured to allow all the most annoying things - 'insecure by default'. It should be the other way round.
You're not forced to see the Flash advertisements, you know...
Whenever you come across some annoyance on the web - pop-ups, stupid Flash sequences, blinking text, or whatever - don't blame the individual site, instead blame the badly designed web browser that allows sites to inflict these things on you.
Switch to a browser like Phoenix which blocks popups by default - or even one like Dillo which doesn't run any scripts at all - and make sure you don't have the Flash plugin installed.
If you choose to run a lot of junky software embedded into your web browser, don't be surprised when some (or many) websites exploit it. 'Annoyance holes' should be considered as a less serious form of security holes, where the emphasis is on fixing the buggy browser software, not leaving it unfixed and just trying to stay away from sites with exploit code.
(BTW I do not think it is necessary for any troll, on reading the newly-minted term 'annoyance hole', to offer an appropriate example by linking to a certain well-known website. Thank you very much.)
Is this sort of thing still funny? To me it seems like 'bork, bork, bork' or Redneck filters - amusing at first, but done to death over the past five years.
Or maybe it's hard to see the funny side of 'joke' programming languages when many real languages and libraries are so awful...
Can someone explain why it's called OpenOffice.org rather than just plain OpenOffice? It seems a bit peculiar to me, I mean, you'd then expect the domain name to be openoffice.org.org.
Is it going to be another project like GTK+ where there's an 'official' name with some random suffix, used by almost nobody except the project web page?
I thought that drivers would be specific to a particular hardware family and so not much use to Nvidia's competitors, who have their own different and incompatible hardware. After all, the point of 3d graphics cards is to do all the clever stuff in hardware on the card, taking the burden off software.
In the worst case it would be possible for Nvidia to release drivers which perform the basic 3d acceleration functions - those which are implemented wholly in hardware on the card. This would keep the free software zealots (and associated hangers-on like Red Hat, who don't want to include binary-only software in their distribution) happy. The more advanced features, which might be implemented using a combination of software and hardware, could be implemented in a binary-only library which calls the more basic driver interface. This would also have the practical advantage of putting the binary-only code into user space and not loading it into the kernel.
I don't know whether this is possible, but surely there is nothing to be learned by competitors by seeing Nvidia's hardware call to 'draw some polygons'.
True; but OTOH there are many network cards, SCSI host adaptors, and so on where the manufacturer has been helpful in providing specifications and the Linux developers have written high-quality drivers. It's these manufacturers that deserve to be praised for 'dedication' (although I'd rather just say that my hardware purchases are influenced by whether free drivers are available).
But free driver releases aren't considered worthy of a Slashdot story - only proprietary ones with their cumbersome workarounds for not coming with source code.
Er... the drivers are no use unless you have one of Nvidia's cards. To get such a card you have to pay money to Nvidia. This is capitalism.
The reason for binary-only drivers suggested by another poster to this story - that they allow Nvidia to maintain a nonexistent distinction between 'consumer' and 'professional' hardware - is, if true, an example of market segmentation, a monopolistic practice. That is not capitalism or at least not well-functioning capitalism.
Slashdot Mirror
That user doesn't sound too far off - of course you can receive a fax on your computer if it has a fax-capable modem installed. Where the user was wrong was in assuming Dell would know his phone number. (Also, the software supplied with Dell PCs probably doesn't include something to receive faxes. But it's reasonable to assume that if you're sold a '56K fax/modem' you can use it to send and receive faxes.)
'The monitor monitors you'? 'You monitor the monitor'?
Concorde flies at Mach 2.02. Boeing's Sonic Cruiser is not 'almost as fast', in fact it is less than half as fast. (And not built yet of course.)
I feel that the next kewl feature in passenger aviation must be vertical takeoff and landing. Airports are much too big with those long runways. If passenger jets could do the Harrier thing, then airports could be almost like bus stops. (Although some clearance round the side of the aircraft would still be needed.)
Trouble is, for a heavy passenger jet this kind of takeoff might use a lot of fuel.
Taco's Law: any story about massive scalability will be posted on a web server which craps out due to 'too many connections'.
Anyone got a mirror?
It is official; Slashdot poster confirms: China is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Chinese community when an AC confirmed that Chinese student participation in Amnesty International meetings has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all attenders. Coming on the heels of recent news stories which plainly state that China has lost more world influence, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The Chinese community worldwide is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing to speak out against the occupation of Tibet.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
An Anonymous Coward states that there are virtually _NO_ Chinese faces in an Amnesty International meeting. How many Chinese people are there altogether? Let's see. The number of Amnesty International-related versus sex-related queries on Google is roughly in ratio of 1 to 100000. Therefore there are about 'virtually _NO_' * 100000 Chinese people. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot troll posts written in the Chinese language.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Hong Kong went out of business and was taken over by the PRC who sell another troubled brand of autocratic government. Now Deng Xiaoping is also dead, his corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that China has steadily declined in market share. Chinese people are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If China is to survive at all it will be among oriental exoticisim dilettante dabblers. Chinese moral standards continue to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes,
Fact: China is dying
A missing alt attribute isn't an HTML error - you can write valid HTML without alt attributes. It's more of a warning from some lint-type tool. A smiley face should warn about things that are definite, unarguable errors, like HTML that doesn't validate. Really this is a yes or no question.
It does appear to be based on the 'ACS Java 5.x' code inherited from ArsDigita. According to Red Hat's pages it uses the same Java object persistence layer for accessing the database (as opposed to the original ACS's design of coding close to the DB) and the same 'Bebop' XML/XSL system for generating HTML. Since they have made a release, I imagine it's now in much better shape than it was when I worked on it in 2001. (Diary and report; the second half talks about the design of ACS Java. See also the OpenACS project's thoughts on Java which is a coded reference to the design of Red Hat's platform. It says 'DO NOT LINK' but it comes #1 in Google search results for 'openacs java' so I don't think I'm giving away any secrets.)
You could try getting the source packages, particularly for the Perl modules. Then run 'rpm --rebuild whatever.src.rpm'.
In that case, 415 is not random either, nor is any other three-digit number. Or would you care to name the numbers in [0,1000) which you consider 'random'? Surely a random number generator is just as likely to generate 999 as 415 or anything else.
Slight nitpick: energy does not cost N cents per watt, but rather N cents per joule. A watt is a joule per second, as you know, so a particular electrical device costs a certain number of cents per second to run.
Although to construct a power plant you can count the cost of capital in cents per watt.
Perhaps exploit code should be released a couple of weeks after the bug has been fixed. Then people can (if they want) check for themselves that the fix works. It's like a test case for that particular bug.
(4, Insightful)? Write to your congressman and complain that some companies don't have clearly marked feedback email addresses? Inform your senator that SMP support is a make-or-break issue for installing OpenBSD? Lobby against talk radio?
An accomplished Slashdot parody, karmawarrior - a pity that moderators lack any sense of humour. Or perhaps they just read the first few sentences of each post.
But clicking on 'next page' is much more of a PITA than turning the page of a book. To scroll through a long article you can just hit Space, which disturbs your reading a lot less. Plus of course you can easily scroll back up again.
It might not be so bad if browsers had 'next' and 'previous' buttons to complement the existing 'back' and 'forward': these two new buttons would follow the structure of the document, taking you to the next or previous section. It would require document authors to add some thingy to their HTML. But if they did, and if I could easily skip from one page to the next by hitting Ctrl-Space or something, then I wouldn't find those 25-part Tom's Hardware articles quite so annoying.
This is personal preference, YMMV. But I'd be very surprised if many readers actively preferred the five-page 'click here for the next part' style of presentation over having the whole article on one page. At least for fairly short articles like the ones Slashdot normally links to.
But consider also the Slashdot effect of thousands of people going to the article, seeing the first page, then clicking on the 'printable version' link for themselves. Twice as many page fetches, for that group of people, as if Slashdot had linked directly to the printable version.
Apart from articles which contain many photos, the single-page version is not significantly longer than the first page of the 'ordinary' version. Most of the space is taken up with sidebars, banner ads and so on. So the printable version may even be shorter once you allow for the effect of gzip http compression and fewer images being served. Maybe this, however, is the reason not to link to a printable version - to be 'considerate' and give more advertising revenue to the sites linked to. That doesn't sound like an especially convincing reason however.
Kinda ironic to see Intel pushing 'legacy free' systems... as if the 8086 instruction set weren't the biggest legacy technology affecting the PC market. (Yes I know x86 assembler has its defenders, but really, if you started from scratch today and knew what you were doing, you'd come up with something rather better.)
I think the standard definition of a legacy system is one that is currently installed and working... legacy shouldn't necessarily be a pejorative term. There are good and bad legacies.
I don't understand why Slashdot doesn't always link to the 'printable version', I doubt that many people prefer to click through pages 1 to 5 rather than just scrolling through the whole article.
Perhaps the browser developers could let you control plugins on a site-by-site basis, in the same way as Javascript or images. Or perhaps a Flash animation could appear as an icon and you click on it to load the Flash plugin for *just that animation*.
However, there's a limit to how much effort the browser writers should expend to work around limitations in a plugin that doesn't come with source. Perhaps it is better just not to run binary-only malware inside the web browser.
Quite. For some kinds of 'content' which are frequently abused to annoy and spam the viewer, such as Flash animations, the browser should not display the content without an explicit say-so. So when you visit the site for the first time you just get a little icon in the corner of your browser window saying that there is an animation.
(And when the animation does play, a few basic rules to ensure sanity should apply - such as, it runs only in its own area of the page and isn't allowed to 'crawl' over other parts; there is a 'close' or 'kill animation' button displayed by the browser itself and visible at all times. Again, these rules could be turned off for individual sites you trust but should be set to the more strict mode by default.)
You could equally ask 'why should I disable my ten-year-old telnetd just because some script-kiddie has an exploit for it?'. Unfortunately there will always be unscrupulous people waiting to take advantage of bugs or design flaws in the software you run. It's up to you to use software that is secure. Again, I stress that being annoyed during web browsing is much less serious than computer security, but the same principles apply.
In this case, disabling Flash altogether is the answer I would choose. But if you like Flash then the answer is to disable it for said marketing-cokehead-infested sites. Since the names of such sites are not known in advance, the most sensible answer is to block animations on all new sites until the user has specifically enabled them.
It's certainly the fault of the browser if it does silly things like animating images with no way to make them stop. And that's why many browsers now have a way to control whether you want animated GIFs to keep pulsating. On the whole, images don't have the same annoyance problem as Flash or Javascript, because they are confined to their own bit of the page and they cannot take over your browser by disabling the Close button or spawning additional windows.
Personally, yes - but it would also make sense to allow Flash animations for limited cases, for example, where the animation is confined to a particular rectangular area of the screen and cannot crawl over the top of text. Perhaps Flash could be off by default but with a button that appears allowing you to play the animation and choose whether to show animations on that site in future.
At the moment browsers seem to come configured to allow all the most annoying things - 'insecure by default'. It should be the other way round.
You're not forced to see the Flash advertisements, you know...
Whenever you come across some annoyance on the web - pop-ups, stupid Flash sequences, blinking text, or whatever - don't blame the individual site, instead blame the badly designed web browser that allows sites to inflict these things on you.
Switch to a browser like Phoenix which blocks popups by default - or even one like Dillo which doesn't run any scripts at all - and make sure you don't have the Flash plugin installed.
If you choose to run a lot of junky software embedded into your web browser, don't be surprised when some (or many) websites exploit it. 'Annoyance holes' should be considered as a less serious form of security holes, where the emphasis is on fixing the buggy browser software, not leaving it unfixed and just trying to stay away from sites with exploit code.
(BTW I do not think it is necessary for any troll, on reading the newly-minted term 'annoyance hole', to offer an appropriate example by linking to a certain well-known website. Thank you very much.)
Is this sort of thing still funny? To me it seems like 'bork, bork, bork' or Redneck filters - amusing at first, but done to death over the past five years.
Or maybe it's hard to see the funny side of 'joke' programming languages when many real languages and libraries are so awful...
Can someone explain why it's called OpenOffice.org rather than just plain OpenOffice? It seems a bit peculiar to me, I mean, you'd then expect the domain name to be openoffice.org.org.
Is it going to be another project like GTK+ where there's an 'official' name with some random suffix, used by almost nobody except the project web page?
I thought that drivers would be specific to a particular hardware family and so not much use to Nvidia's competitors, who have their own different and incompatible hardware. After all, the point of 3d graphics cards is to do all the clever stuff in hardware on the card, taking the burden off software.
In the worst case it would be possible for Nvidia to release drivers which perform the basic 3d acceleration functions - those which are implemented wholly in hardware on the card. This would keep the free software zealots (and associated hangers-on like Red Hat, who don't want to include binary-only software in their distribution) happy. The more advanced features, which might be implemented using a combination of software and hardware, could be implemented in a binary-only library which calls the more basic driver interface. This would also have the practical advantage of putting the binary-only code into user space and not loading it into the kernel.
I don't know whether this is possible, but surely there is nothing to be learned by competitors by seeing Nvidia's hardware call to 'draw some polygons'.
True; but OTOH there are many network cards, SCSI host adaptors, and so on where the manufacturer has been helpful in providing specifications and the Linux developers have written high-quality drivers. It's these manufacturers that deserve to be praised for 'dedication' (although I'd rather just say that my hardware purchases are influenced by whether free drivers are available).
But free driver releases aren't considered worthy of a Slashdot story - only proprietary ones with their cumbersome workarounds for not coming with source code.
Er... the drivers are no use unless you have one of Nvidia's cards. To get such a card you have to pay money to Nvidia. This is capitalism.
The reason for binary-only drivers suggested by another poster to this story - that they allow Nvidia to maintain a nonexistent distinction between 'consumer' and 'professional' hardware - is, if true, an example of market segmentation, a monopolistic practice. That is not capitalism or at least not well-functioning capitalism.