I wish this were funny, but it's not. Many, many sites (including lots of big name sites--Yahoo anyone?) look for "Firefox" and the Firefox version they want, rather than the Gecko version that has been available in the UA since before Firefox was called Firefox, and if your browser isn't called Firefox (and isn't Netscape, IE, or Safari), tough luck.
It really sucks for anyone trying to use (or build) a Gecko-based browser that's not Firefox.
> Firefox 2.0.0.10 fails the test > Camino 1.0.3 crashes when starting the test > Safari 2.0.4 doesn't even get started.
Those aren't the current versions of any of those browsers--not even close in the case of Camino and Safari--so that's not a terribly interesting test list.
And don't you think that a 60% greater chance of disease due to vitamin D deficiency would be a strong evolutionary pressure? Strong enough to act over relatively short time periods on the evolutionary scale perhaps?
Why would it? How many people die of cancer before they reach childbearing age?
You can try arguing about it on bugzilla but from my experience it's usually pointless. Somebody states that this is the way it should work now and the bug is closed as WONTFIX/INVALID or ignored.
Or you could follow the published bugzilla etiquette and not make pointless arguments in a bug that is WONTFIXed. You are ignored when you do because making the same arguments over and over again doesn't add anything to the discussion.
In this case, unless you have a technical solution for the fact that the option currently doesn't work as it was described, there's nothing useful you can add to that bug.
The simple fact is that if you want the mainstream world to join your movement they need to be able to make money at it.
What makes you think that mainstream acceptance is what people who are part of the FOSS "movement" want? I've done open source software development, and I couldn't care much less about whether it goes "mainstream". I like the software more than the other options out there, so I got personal satisfaction out of working on it. As an added bonus, I knew that other people were benefiting as well. End of story.
The idea that if others benefit from something you do as a hobby for fun, you suddenly need to start charging money for it and/or "win", is not one that everyone subscribes to.
You are missing the point. The issue isn't people who want to go to aaa.cm accidently typing aab.cm, it's people wanting to go to aaa.com and forgetting the 'o'.
I don't think anyone has suggested that they not be allowed to read the kids blog.
No one except, you know, the post I was replying to in the first place.
Various organizations will have to be banned from acting based on any information obtained from them -- perhaps even banned from actively searching them out without legal cause.
That's not what I said. Try reading my entire comment.
What I'm saying is absurd is the idea that the administration at the school shouldn't be allowed to *read* the sign.
however I think blogs will eventually have to be considered as something between public and private.
That doesn't make any sense. If you want a private blog, you use a system that has accounts and access controls. If you want something between private and public, you use an alias that's not linked to your name in any way, and don't post identifiable things. If you post things under your name on publicly accessible sites, for the express purpose of making that content available to the rest of the world, you cannot possibly have any expectation of privacy. Something you broadcast globaly, indiscriminantly, is by definition not private. Saying that people shouldn't be able to "search" public blogs without legal cause is like saying that if you stand on the street and shout that you are selling drugs, and a police officer overhears you, that constitutes an illegal search.
Not acting on personal speech is completely different, and there are already various protections relating to speech. The idea of people saying things that, e.g., their employer may disagree with (but that their employer can't legally take action against them for) is not new to blogs.
Even Safari, which passes the Acid test, still doesn't allow web developers to replace the goofy Aqua buttons on a site with standard ones.
The CSS spec specificially exempts form controls from having to follow style, so I'm not sure what that has to do with "standard valid CSS handling". It's also silly to say that it can't replace the Aqua buttons with "standard" ones--those buttons are standard, both in the browser and in the entire OS. What you really mean is that it doesn't allow you to replace them with goofy custom non-standard ones. Whether the fact that it will be possible in a future version of the browser is a good thing or not depends on whether you trust web developers not to completely sacrifice usability for making their site purdy (which is a hard thing to trust in once you use the internet for any length of time...).
The linked post was written by Dave Hyatt. He's been a Safari developer since the beginning of the Safari project, before which he worked on Mozilla, Chimera, Camino, Firefox, etc. The idea that he doesn't know that browsers control rendering is absurd.
What you seem to be missing is that rendering is a cooperative effort, where the developer of the page does have some input into the rendering process. This post is describing two things: first, some best practices for looking good when your page is scaled by the browser (e.g., use SVG where possible), and second, ways the standards could help things look good.
The idea of being able to tailor your page when you know something about the rendering is not new to CSS. Take printing for example: you could just as well say that printing is something the browser decides how to do, so it's irrelevant to site developers--but it's not; developers can use a different style sheet to tailor the page in order to give the user a better experience of the site in print form.
The entire world of web development is a combination of browser design and web design; trying to solve every problem in just one place or the other ignores the reality of the web, and leads to suboptimal solutions. "Just render the page as you would then blow everything up by a factor of x" would be a browser-only solution, but it would give uglier results than the cooperative approach being proposed here.
it looks like this only affects CSS and not pictures/spacers some developers use
It sounds like you didn't read the article. It's talking about scaling up the entire page--text, images, CSS offsets, etc. The point is that scaling up text and positioning offsets is pretty easy, but scaling up images just gives you images that look like they have been scaled up. This isn't about making scaled-up websites work, it's about making them look better (in terms of image quality) than they would using a simple "just take everything and blow it up by a factor of two" scaling system.
As an example, imagine you have an 800x600 source image, and you scale it to 400x300 in photoshop for 400x300 display on your website. When someone comes along with their browser view in 2x scale mode, which do you think would make the site look better: a scaled up 400x300 image shown at 800x600 pixels, or swapping in the 800x600 original? From a layout perspective it doesn't matter, but from an image-quality perspective it's important.
Yes, they can--but scaled graphics will never look as good as higher-resolution source graphics. The entire point of what he's talking about is enabling web developers to have pages with images that look fantastic when scaled up, rather than looking like a page with small images that have been automatically scaled by the OS/browser.
Whether he was paid or not has absolutely no bearing on the accuracy of his statements.
Of course it does. It doesn't invalidate his opinions (again, I never said it did), but it certainly has some bearing on why he might hold those opinions.
Huh? The reason someone holds an opinion and the accuracy of a statement are completely separate concepts; I fail to see how you think your statement refutes the point you are replying to. Here's a little illustration:
a) The sky is blue. (I was paid to say so.)
b) The sky is blue. (I was not paid to say so.)
c) The sky is green. (I was paid to say so.)
d) The sky is green. (I was not paid to say so.)
Statements a) and b) are accurate. Statements c) and d) are inaccurate. The paranthetical comments have, as has been previously said, absolutely no bearing on the accuracy of the statements. Only if you had no way to determine the color of the sky for yourself would it be interesting to know whether my message was funded by Convince People the Sky is Green Coalition.
Bias can change motivation for saying something, but it cannot possibly change the fabric of reality to make something more or less true. The reason people use source criticism is because some statements are not independently verifiable or refutable (some historical documentation, for example) so understanding motivations for something having been written help people guess how accurate the statement might be. If you can verify the accuracy of a statement yourself, there's no need for source criticism and guessing.
The quotes in the article are easily verifiable (or refutable), which leaves only what is clearly opinion. So in this case, unless someone is a sheep who is totally unable to decide if they agree or disagree with an opion based on merit, and simply blindly adopt the opinions of other who come from a blessed source and discard all others, there's no need to consider the source while reading the piece.
It is a precedent. Imagine for example giving the police the right to arrest anybody they deem necessary and trust them to make correct judgement every time because they are good guys after all - I mean they are not just going to start arresting people at random, right ? If there is a power to be abused, it probably will be, sooner or later...
Because a search engine in an open and competitive market determining how best to return results to its users is just like a police state.
Where's my option to choose a different police force if I don't like the one that wants to arrest me?
The scientific framework of ideas is well-established and the theories are interdependent. This is why we can readily reject challenges like "Intelligent Design".
I'm not a proponent of ID, but if you want to argue against something it's best to understand it--and your argument has nothing to do with ID. While ID my be embraced by some literalist creationists as a way to slip in the side door, ID itself has no contradiction with things like the fossil record or carbon-dating results. At the core, evolution says "we evolved over time, through a combination of pure random chance and natural selection", whereas ID says "maybe it wasn't all random chance".
The more crackpot end is where people try to prove ID, when it clearly isn't provable scientifically. But keep in mind that we also can't prove that what is attributable to random chance is truly random, and isn't actually at least sometimes influenced by some outside force with motivations that we don't understand.
In short, it's perfectly possible to believe in a higher power guiding the development of life at some level without the slightest contraction with accepted scientififc observations. Lots of religious people do; you just don't hear about them because they aren't raising a big stink or proposing crackpot 'science' to try to make others accept that view.
In Objective-C, everything is again passed by reference (as opposed to by value).
That's not technically correct. Everything in Objective-C is passed by value (unless you explicitly pass by reference) just like in regular C. It's just that the values you pass are mostly pointers. BOOLs, ints, floats, etc. are still going to act like they are being passed by value--because they are. The object pointers you pass around only feel like they are being passed by reference because you think of them as objects instead of pointers.
I haven't and wouldn't want to try to remove safari to see if Apple allows it so easily.
I'll save you the trouble: yes. You'll still have the WebKit framework, since that's an integral part of several other bundled apps and a whole bunch of 3rd-party apps, but Safari itself is trivial to remove.
Mac OS X x86 looks less impressive in the application-based test using iTunes (version 4.8). Windows XP is clearly faster here, taking 20.7 seconds for the MP3 transformation test compared to 61 seconds for the Apple operating system. [...] iTunes on Mac OS X x86's slower speed in this test is actually due to the Rosetta emulation environment, under which this PowerPC application (among others) runs.
[...]
Application performance clearly lags behind, though, and still needs to improve.
I'm looking forward to their next well-researched, hard-hitting review, where they run iTunes on a G5, then iTunes for Windows under VirtualPC on the same machine, then conclude that Windows application performance clearly lags behind.
Did you know that squaring something is exactly equivalent to taking the absolute value of it? I have two cases as proof:
1^2 = 1 = abs(1)
(-1)^2 = 1 = abs(1)
There you have it! Conclusive proof!
Seriously, while those examples may be interesting, picking any two examples really doesn't tell you anything about the overall balance of the impact of the patent system on our technological development.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish this were funny, but it's not. Many, many sites (including lots of big name sites--Yahoo anyone?) look for "Firefox" and the Firefox version they want, rather than the Gecko version that has been available in the UA since before Firefox was called Firefox, and if your browser isn't called Firefox (and isn't Netscape, IE, or Safari), tough luck.
It really sucks for anyone trying to use (or build) a Gecko-based browser that's not Firefox.
> Firefox 2.0.0.10 fails the test
> Camino 1.0.3 crashes when starting the test
> Safari 2.0.4 doesn't even get started.
Those aren't the current versions of any of those browsers--not even close in the case of Camino and Safari--so that's not a terribly interesting test list.
And don't you think that a 60% greater chance of disease due to vitamin D deficiency would be a strong evolutionary pressure? Strong enough to act over relatively short time periods on the evolutionary scale perhaps?
Why would it? How many people die of cancer before they reach childbearing age?
Or you could follow the published bugzilla etiquette and not make pointless arguments in a bug that is WONTFIXed. You are ignored when you do because making the same arguments over and over again doesn't add anything to the discussion.
In this case, unless you have a technical solution for the fact that the option currently doesn't work as it was described, there's nothing useful you can add to that bug.
9. Storage Space: With Vista taking as much as 10 Gbytes of hard drive space, big and fast hard drives will be a must.
Hardly relevant, any hard drive sold within the last few years will allow > 100GB.
Yes, everyone knows that every laptop sold in the last few years had a >100GB, wicked-fast drive in it.
The simple fact is that if you want the mainstream world to join your movement they need to be able to make money at it.
What makes you think that mainstream acceptance is what people who are part of the FOSS "movement" want? I've done open source software development, and I couldn't care much less about whether it goes "mainstream". I like the software more than the other options out there, so I got personal satisfaction out of working on it. As an added bonus, I knew that other people were benefiting as well. End of story.
The idea that if others benefit from something you do as a hobby for fun, you suddenly need to start charging money for it and/or "win", is not one that everyone subscribes to.
You are missing the point. The issue isn't people who want to go to aaa.cm accidently typing aab.cm, it's people wanting to go to aaa.com and forgetting the 'o'.
I don't think anyone has suggested that they not be allowed to read the kids blog.
No one except, you know, the post I was replying to in the first place.
Read first, flame second.
That's not what I said. Try reading my entire comment. What I'm saying is absurd is the idea that the administration at the school shouldn't be allowed to *read* the sign.
however I think blogs will eventually have to be considered as something between public and private.
That doesn't make any sense. If you want a private blog, you use a system that has accounts and access controls. If you want something between private and public, you use an alias that's not linked to your name in any way, and don't post identifiable things. If you post things under your name on publicly accessible sites, for the express purpose of making that content available to the rest of the world, you cannot possibly have any expectation of privacy. Something you broadcast globaly, indiscriminantly, is by definition not private. Saying that people shouldn't be able to "search" public blogs without legal cause is like saying that if you stand on the street and shout that you are selling drugs, and a police officer overhears you, that constitutes an illegal search.
Not acting on personal speech is completely different, and there are already various protections relating to speech. The idea of people saying things that, e.g., their employer may disagree with (but that their employer can't legally take action against them for) is not new to blogs.
Even Safari, which passes the Acid test, still doesn't allow web developers to replace the goofy Aqua buttons on a site with standard ones.
The CSS spec specificially exempts form controls from having to follow style, so I'm not sure what that has to do with "standard valid CSS handling". It's also silly to say that it can't replace the Aqua buttons with "standard" ones--those buttons are standard, both in the browser and in the entire OS. What you really mean is that it doesn't allow you to replace them with goofy custom non-standard ones. Whether the fact that it will be possible in a future version of the browser is a good thing or not depends on whether you trust web developers not to completely sacrifice usability for making their site purdy (which is a hard thing to trust in once you use the internet for any length of time...).
The linked post was written by Dave Hyatt. He's been a Safari developer since the beginning of the Safari project, before which he worked on Mozilla, Chimera, Camino, Firefox, etc. The idea that he doesn't know that browsers control rendering is absurd.
What you seem to be missing is that rendering is a cooperative effort, where the developer of the page does have some input into the rendering process. This post is describing two things: first, some best practices for looking good when your page is scaled by the browser (e.g., use SVG where possible), and second, ways the standards could help things look good.
The idea of being able to tailor your page when you know something about the rendering is not new to CSS. Take printing for example: you could just as well say that printing is something the browser decides how to do, so it's irrelevant to site developers--but it's not; developers can use a different style sheet to tailor the page in order to give the user a better experience of the site in print form.
The entire world of web development is a combination of browser design and web design; trying to solve every problem in just one place or the other ignores the reality of the web, and leads to suboptimal solutions. "Just render the page as you would then blow everything up by a factor of x" would be a browser-only solution, but it would give uglier results than the cooperative approach being proposed here.
it looks like this only affects CSS and not pictures/spacers some developers use
It sounds like you didn't read the article. It's talking about scaling up the entire page--text, images, CSS offsets, etc. The point is that scaling up text and positioning offsets is pretty easy, but scaling up images just gives you images that look like they have been scaled up. This isn't about making scaled-up websites work, it's about making them look better (in terms of image quality) than they would using a simple "just take everything and blow it up by a factor of two" scaling system.
As an example, imagine you have an 800x600 source image, and you scale it to 400x300 in photoshop for 400x300 display on your website. When someone comes along with their browser view in 2x scale mode, which do you think would make the site look better: a scaled up 400x300 image shown at 800x600 pixels, or swapping in the 800x600 original? From a layout perspective it doesn't matter, but from an image-quality perspective it's important.
Graphics could likewise be scaled.
Yes, they can--but scaled graphics will never look as good as higher-resolution source graphics. The entire point of what he's talking about is enabling web developers to have pages with images that look fantastic when scaled up, rather than looking like a page with small images that have been automatically scaled by the OS/browser.
You mean a new mouse to replace the two-button-with-scroll-wheel mouse that ships with every single Intel iMac?
It's pretty hard to argue that between two formats, the one with only about 1/4 of the market is the de facto standard.
As with the classic MacOS, there's also an emulator involved, so the newer architecture can run (most) binaries compiled on the older architecture.
Rosetta is not an emulator, and it bears essentially no resemblance to Classic from either a technology or user-experience perspective.
Of course it does. It doesn't invalidate his opinions (again, I never said it did), but it certainly has some bearing on why he might hold those opinions.
Huh? The reason someone holds an opinion and the accuracy of a statement are completely separate concepts; I fail to see how you think your statement refutes the point you are replying to. Here's a little illustration:
Statements a) and b) are accurate. Statements c) and d) are inaccurate. The paranthetical comments have, as has been previously said, absolutely no bearing on the accuracy of the statements. Only if you had no way to determine the color of the sky for yourself would it be interesting to know whether my message was funded by Convince People the Sky is Green Coalition.
Bias can change motivation for saying something, but it cannot possibly change the fabric of reality to make something more or less true. The reason people use source criticism is because some statements are not independently verifiable or refutable (some historical documentation, for example) so understanding motivations for something having been written help people guess how accurate the statement might be. If you can verify the accuracy of a statement yourself, there's no need for source criticism and guessing.
The quotes in the article are easily verifiable (or refutable), which leaves only what is clearly opinion. So in this case, unless someone is a sheep who is totally unable to decide if they agree or disagree with an opion based on merit, and simply blindly adopt the opinions of other who come from a blessed source and discard all others, there's no need to consider the source while reading the piece.
It is a precedent. Imagine for example giving the police the right to arrest anybody they deem necessary and trust them to make correct judgement every time because they are good guys after all - I mean they are not just going to start arresting people at random, right ? If there is a power to be abused, it probably will be, sooner or later ...
Because a search engine in an open and competitive market determining how best to return results to its users is just like a police state.
Where's my option to choose a different police force if I don't like the one that wants to arrest me?
The scientific framework of ideas is well-established and the theories are interdependent. This is why we can readily reject challenges like "Intelligent Design".
I'm not a proponent of ID, but if you want to argue against something it's best to understand it--and your argument has nothing to do with ID. While ID my be embraced by some literalist creationists as a way to slip in the side door, ID itself has no contradiction with things like the fossil record or carbon-dating results. At the core, evolution says "we evolved over time, through a combination of pure random chance and natural selection", whereas ID says "maybe it wasn't all random chance".
The more crackpot end is where people try to prove ID, when it clearly isn't provable scientifically. But keep in mind that we also can't prove that what is attributable to random chance is truly random, and isn't actually at least sometimes influenced by some outside force with motivations that we don't understand.
In short, it's perfectly possible to believe in a higher power guiding the development of life at some level without the slightest contraction with accepted scientififc observations. Lots of religious people do; you just don't hear about them because they aren't raising a big stink or proposing crackpot 'science' to try to make others accept that view.
In Objective-C, everything is again passed by reference (as opposed to by value).
That's not technically correct. Everything in Objective-C is passed by value (unless you explicitly pass by reference) just like in regular C. It's just that the values you pass are mostly pointers. BOOLs, ints, floats, etc. are still going to act like they are being passed by value--because they are. The object pointers you pass around only feel like they are being passed by reference because you think of them as objects instead of pointers.
I haven't and wouldn't want to try to remove safari to see if Apple allows it so easily.
I'll save you the trouble: yes. You'll still have the WebKit framework, since that's an integral part of several other bundled apps and a whole bunch of 3rd-party apps, but Safari itself is trivial to remove.
My personal favorite:
Mac OS X x86 looks less impressive in the application-based test using iTunes (version 4.8). Windows XP is clearly faster here, taking 20.7 seconds for the MP3 transformation test compared to 61 seconds for the Apple operating system. [...] iTunes on Mac OS X x86's slower speed in this test is actually due to the Rosetta emulation environment, under which this PowerPC application (among others) runs.
[...]
Application performance clearly lags behind, though, and still needs to improve.
I'm looking forward to their next well-researched, hard-hitting review, where they run iTunes on a G5, then iTunes for Windows under VirtualPC on the same machine, then conclude that Windows application performance clearly lags behind.
A classical misuse of a syllogism is not a very effective rebuttal point.
I will admit that the two cases are not enough to pass judgement [...]
Sounds like I made my point pretty clearly. I would consider that effective.
And I have two cases as proof.
Did you know that squaring something is exactly equivalent to taking the absolute value of it? I have two cases as proof:
There you have it! Conclusive proof!
Seriously, while those examples may be interesting, picking any two examples really doesn't tell you anything about the overall balance of the impact of the patent system on our technological development.