I'm a web developer too, have been since the NS4 days, etc.
My question: How do you manage to keep yourself (and you team) motivated when you know you are working on the worse web browser on the market? When you sit down and reflect on your work, put things in perspective, and see how insanely more advanced the Opera, Gecko, WebKit rendering engines are, how do you feel exactly? These question interest me, on a human level. It baffles me that people would want to get out of bed in the morning and go to work on such a poor product.
For us web developers, things are simple: spend 40% of the time building a page from scratch so it works in "A list" browsers, and then spend the resting 60% of the time debugging it for IE6. For us, your product is not only a source of emotional frustration, it's the source of a direct, unavoidable loss of money. This is not an exagerated statement (if anything, the 40/60% division is conservative).
I hate MySpace as much as the average slashdotter, but last week I discovered a new band called "No Bra", they only have released a couple of 12' (that's vinyl), no albums, no CDs, no MP3s. You can't download the songs they put on their MySpace page (yeah, I tried the various hacks to get them).
So I would have been happy to buy their stuff, and way more than.99c a track too.
A designer from work was beta testing one this summer. I had to troubleshoot the thing because it takes for granted that your wireless network is wide open (but it isn't too bad: the bunny has his MAC address stuck to his rear end).
I didn't have much fun with email and weather notification, but sending audio clips to the thing had its moments. They have a fast selection of stuff on the site, and also pre-recordered female voices with a super cutsy accent saying super custy stuff about love, relationships, etc, it seems like the French interpretation of what Japanese schoolgirls find "kawaï".
What really got on my nerve is that under the oozing fabricated cuteness, they charge you for every audio clip you send to the bunny. You get 10 or 15 free ones to start off with, but after that you have to pay. Basically, all the bunny does is poll a server and download highly compressed audio clips and other data, and play and display them. Paying for simply using the damn thing seems like a ripoff to me (you have to buy the object first). So the mix of pseudo cuteness and greedy commercial behaviour didn't work for me.
I was on the verge of setting up a proxy to analyse the traffic, and possibly create a free gateway as a webservice (blabla), but I guess they probably encrypt the traffic, and it wasn't worth the effort.
In one word : yawn. Then again, I'm certainly not their target.
But the real issue is always the same : trust management. You want to be able to grant as much trust as possible to trustworthy (non-spamming) strangers, while revoking all trust to others.
So why do we always want to build trust management systems on top of other systems, and not design a stand-alone one, that can be used by a wide range of media (email, usenet, blogs, etc) ?
Note: identifying "personas" does not mean identifying "real people", so there are no privacy issues in such a system.
The Bass-Station is a mobile, visually loud, and funky 1980s Boom Box. Imbedded within its shell is a modern computer and wireless networking components. By creating a locally accessible wireless network, people of an intimate community can use the Bass- Station as a hub through which they can freely and democratically exchange information. By actively observing the exchanges of a small community, you can learn things about that community that you couldn't by talking to any one of its members. The Bass-Station is also a shared stereo that makes its presence fun and entertaining.
It's the same functionality, but with a real design concept behind it
American forces parachuted small probes the long of the Ho-Chi-Ming trail during the Vietnam War. The probes contained very sensitive microphones, and a radio emitter. The purpose was to monitor the passage of the (noisy) Viet Cong trucks, send the information back to command, and launch an air strike over that portion of the trail.
Unfortunatly it didn't seem to work very well : the Viet Cong gathered the probes, and hacked them into traditional radio transmiters, and used them as a communication device.
This time, the probes are more sophisticated, but the idea is the same.
I'm all for the idea, and as a matter of fact, I suggested it a couple of months ago.
If individual spam victims start repetitively downloading the spammers website, this could bring the spammer to change the way he sends spam from the current big bang technique to a small continuous trickle technique. The spammer would send a single spam over several weeks, in stead of a few hours. He would parallelize the process.
I see two possible counter-attacks to this :
content-based blacklisting (like Vilpul Razor, etc), i.e a central database of links that are currently being used in spam.
high aggressivity from the victims : if everyone loads the URI 50, 100, or 300 times, then the "trickle method" would probably fail. You should of course change the HTTP User Agent string for each request, and randomize the timing to stop any filtering on the web server.
There are adapters from Orange Micro, TDK, MSI, and Brainboxes (to name a few) that make the Bluetooth headsets described in the article usable with your Mac.
Providing live feedback without interrupting the person who is talking is quite interesting.
You need to be able to handle pretty heavy multi-tasking / parallel thinking though.
Heckle Bot is an IRC bot that transmits feedback to the speaker of a conference for example. Heckling the person that is speaking. This can sometimes backfire and work in both ways.
David Beckemeyer built a LCD output display called UcHeckle (easy to read while speaking) for the heckle bot, that retransmits the comments of the audience.
Evolt.org is a community driven site, no participants are paid. The hosting fees are paid by members.
Peter-Paul Koch is considered to be one of the few real guru web developers out there, so all those who seem to think he doesn't know what he's talking about are totally mistaken.
His article is not about the technical value of Firebird vs. KHTML or whatever, it's about PR and marketing. Something we (web developpers and browser developpers) tend to forget about.
Thanks ppk, I think it's spot on, and very amusing too:)
The current browsers have reached a certain maturity doing one thing : parsing and displaying HTML.
The thing Marc Andreessen does not say is that all the innovation is not around HTML anymore. It's RSS, Echo (well, soon:), two way communications in Blogs (Trackback, Pingback, Referrer lists, etc), FOAF, GeoURL, etc.
For the moment, all these higher level ideas are being integrated into web pages, because the browsers aren't using them (except for RSS readers).
Today's browsers are the user interface to HTML. We still have to invent the user interface for these technologies. They are the next layer of the web.
The spacial desktop metaphor (WIMP, etc.) is actually very good for people who have never touched a computer, because it uses concepts that they already know : moving physical objects around, associating them, etc.
The current state of the art system GUIs are a lot worse in that respect, because they are a lot more abstract : the file managers of XP and OSX for example are based on the "browser" concept, that is not spacial at all. It's more efficient for most, but probably more difficult for beginners.
In your Future Vision white paper, last modified in January 2001, you outline several very interesting ideas about metadata.
Several developements have taken place since : the extensible attributes of BeFS has been burried with BeOS, the database-like metadata of Longhorn (aka Yukon) may actually be a separate layer from the filesystem altogether, and Apple is also moving all metadata out of the filesystem to XML files shared between applications (see iLife package).
My question : What is your current take on the metadata debate ? Do you still think the filesystem is the right place to handle metadata ? Any predictions ?
New Distributed Computing Project : DDoS spammers
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Or more accuratly, DDoS the spammers clients.
I have been looking at the source of my spam lately, and, although the email addresses are always forged, the body of the messages nearly always point to some website.
What we should do is have a way to automatize the slashdotting of these sites. The resource cost for every recepient is very small, but is very high for the target web site. If the site is run directly by the spammer, then that's great (he get's to pay the bandwidth bill). If it is run by the spammer's client, then that's even better. If it is hosted on a free non-commercial facility, it will wake them up and will make them find a way to make their users accountable.
So how to do this in a very user-friendly and convenient way ?
Make a distributed-computing application, very light-weight, that runs on every platform. You should be able to set the maximum bandwidth you want to use (the default could be very low, like 5kbps), when it should start and stop, etc.The app will go and fetch a list of URLs of images or HTML pages on the target servers, and start downloading them to/dev/null. The app should have a funny user interface, that let's you know when a target host becomes unavailable (victory ! another one bites the dust !), etc. The downloadable list of target hosts should be maintained by a trusted source (it could be GPG signed for example), maybe mailed to you though a MixMaster remailer to avoid spammer suing the originator.
This could make all the Spam issue a lot more fun !
Other 3D UIs: references and links.
on
Opencroquet
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This is the kind of stuff that is regularly discussed on Nooface (a Slash site BTW).
Ripped straight off the side bar :
Will 3D user interfaces ever take
off? With ever-growing 3D processing capabilities available on standard
PC hardware, it seems only natural to pursue UI directions that take
advantage of this awesome power. Moreover, the generation of users now
emerging has had access to video games for as long as they could
remember. As the line between video games and PCs becomes blurrier, the
time may have come to think about how to apply 3D visualization
techniques for more day-to-day computing tasks.
Here are links to some of the 3DUIs that are available today:
- FSN
(pronounced "fusion") produces a cyberspace rendering of a file system.
This was the original 3D file system navigator shown in Jurassic Park ("Hey, this is UNIX. I know this!").
[Screenshot] | [Download] (IRIX)
- FSV is modelled after
FSN, but runs on Linux. FSV lays out files and directories in 3D,
geometrically representing the file system hierarchy to allow visual
overview and analysis.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Xcruise
lets you fly through a filesystem in 3D as if it were interplanetary
space. Directories are represented as galaxies, files are represented
as planets (whose mass is determined by the file size), and symbolic
links are represented as wormholes.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- TDFSB is a 3D filesystem browser for Linux. Take a walk through your filesystem!
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Visual File System
is a 3D file system visualizer for Windows. The tool scans a drive
selected by the user, and then models the contents of the drive in 3D,
based on the directories that are selected in a tree browser on the
side of the display.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- 3Dtop
is an extension for Windows that represents desktop icons in 3D, letting
you to fly around your desktop. You can create coloured spotlights,
background and floor textures, "paintings" (bitmaps), clocks, and
"flags" that represent shortcuts.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- ROOMS
turns a Windows desktop into a 3D world. You can see the world either
through a first person perspective or with a map view, and you can
populate the world with sounds, animated images, and 3D icons.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- CubicEye organizes windows into
a navigable cube. Cubes can be arranged by thematic or functional
subject matter, and can be explored either individually or collectively
as part of a more comprehensive structure of multiple cubes
representing various areas of interest.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- Vizible WorldViewer
distributes windows across the exterior and interior surfaces of
spheres, providing the means to visualize and navigate large numbers of
web pages and data sources simultaneously.
[Screenshot]
The problem with using HTTP for large file downloads is that, in most cases, it's cheaper ressource-wise to span multiple FTP simultaneous connections than HTTP connections. Of course, this only becomes a real problem if you have more than a few hundred virtual hosts on a single box. So save your httpd processes, and use FTP for large files.
Sure, some formatting is missing, but it's relatively minor for the majority of books in question. And given the existance of this unformatted text it's alot easier to create formatted text than from scratch, so you even get a benefit there.
P.G. is a worldwide project, not only north american. I'm living in France at the moment, and have a pile of old books that contain ancient french, latin and ancien greek. Transcribing the caracters to ASCII would be absurd. It would be a huge loss of information.
Secondly, you seem to say that basic formatting, like those described in the document guidelines are good enough.That brings up two problems: Because this is digital media, you do not want to use formatting, you want to use semantic markup : the reader could be blind, of deaf, of using a PDA etc. Formatting is static, semantic markup can be reinterpreted again and again to suit best the reader. This is where the W3C is going. The idea is not to make some alphabet soup that can be used to create formatted text. The idea is to provide books that are directly usable and readable. The document guidelines only specify one level of chapter heading for exemple. Why ?
I was getting all excited about contributing to this project, but the current guidelines are just too weak. Using unicode encoded xml documents with a specific DTD (or Schema) seems to be a good solution, but I'm no specialist.
This is a cut and paste job. The properly formatted original may be this one, but I'm pretty shure I have read the "It rivals SmallTalk" idiotic comment earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the interesting read. Quite unusual for Slashdot :)
Not after G. W. Bush was reelected by the American people.
I'm a web developer too, have been since the NS4 days, etc.
My question: How do you manage to keep yourself (and you team) motivated when you know you are working on the worse web browser on the market? When you sit down and reflect on your work, put things in perspective, and see how insanely more advanced the Opera, Gecko, WebKit rendering engines are, how do you feel exactly? These question interest me, on a human level. It baffles me that people would want to get out of bed in the morning and go to work on such a poor product.
For us web developers, things are simple: spend 40% of the time building a page from scratch so it works in "A list" browsers, and then spend the resting 60% of the time debugging it for IE6. For us, your product is not only a source of emotional frustration, it's the source of a direct, unavoidable loss of money. This is not an exagerated statement (if anything, the 40/60% division is conservative).
I hate MySpace as much as the average slashdotter, but last week I discovered a new band called "No Bra", they only have released a couple of 12' (that's vinyl), no albums, no CDs, no MP3s. You can't download the songs they put on their MySpace page (yeah, I tried the various hacks to get them).
.99c a track too.
So I would have been happy to buy their stuff, and way more than
A designer from work was beta testing one this summer. I had to troubleshoot the thing because it takes for granted that your wireless network is wide open (but it isn't too bad: the bunny has his MAC address stuck to his rear end).
I didn't have much fun with email and weather notification, but sending audio clips to the thing had its moments. They have a fast selection of stuff on the site, and also pre-recordered female voices with a super cutsy accent saying super custy stuff about love, relationships, etc, it seems like the French interpretation of what Japanese schoolgirls find "kawaï".
What really got on my nerve is that under the oozing fabricated cuteness, they charge you for every audio clip you send to the bunny. You get 10 or 15 free ones to start off with, but after that you have to pay. Basically, all the bunny does is poll a server and download highly compressed audio clips and other data, and play and display them. Paying for simply using the damn thing seems like a ripoff to me (you have to buy the object first). So the mix of pseudo cuteness and greedy commercial behaviour didn't work for me.
I was on the verge of setting up a proxy to analyse the traffic, and possibly create a free gateway as a webservice (blabla), but I guess they probably encrypt the traffic, and it wasn't worth the effort.
In one word : yawn. Then again, I'm certainly not their target.
The title of the news is misleading : this JS component only corrects some CSS 2 selectors that IE doesn't natively support.
So it doesn't really make IS standards compliant, it just extends some functionnality. It doesn't, for example, correct the box model of IE5.
So I'm afraid it doesn't spare us of using CSS hacks to filter out IE.
Fine !
Call it Atom.
The right tool for the job : FormFucker !
Just like spam on other media (email, usenet, web forums, etc), you can apply quick and dirty fixes :
But the real issue is always the same : trust management. You want to be able to grant as much trust as possible to trustworthy (non-spamming) strangers, while revoking all trust to others.
So why do we always want to build trust management systems on top of other systems, and not design a stand-alone one, that can be used by a wide range of media (email, usenet, blogs, etc) ?
Note: identifying "personas" does not mean identifying "real people", so there are no privacy issues in such a system.
It's the same functionality, but with a real design concept behind it
Unfortunatly it didn't seem to work very well : the Viet Cong gathered the probes, and hacked them into traditional radio transmiters, and used them as a communication device.
This time, the probes are more sophisticated, but the idea is the same.
I'm all for the idea, and as a matter of fact, I suggested it a couple of months ago.
If individual spam victims start repetitively downloading the spammers website, this could bring the spammer to change the way he sends spam from the current big bang technique to a small continuous trickle technique. The spammer would send a single spam over several weeks, in stead of a few hours. He would parallelize the process.
I see two possible counter-attacks to this :
Feel the rage !
There are adapters from Orange Micro, TDK, MSI, and Brainboxes (to name a few) that make the Bluetooth headsets described in the article usable with your Mac.
You need to be able to handle pretty heavy multi-tasking / parallel thinking though.
Heckle Bot is an IRC bot that transmits feedback to the speaker of a conference for example. Heckling the person that is speaking. This can sometimes backfire and work in both ways.
David Beckemeyer built a LCD output display called UcHeckle (easy to read while speaking) for the heckle bot, that retransmits the comments of the audience.
Peter-Paul Koch is considered to be one of the few real guru web developers out there, so all those who seem to think he doesn't know what he's talking about are totally mistaken.
His article is not about the technical value of Firebird vs. KHTML or whatever, it's about PR and marketing. Something we (web developpers and browser developpers) tend to forget about.
Thanks ppk, I think it's spot on, and very amusing too :)
The thing Marc Andreessen does not say is that all the innovation is not around HTML anymore. It's RSS, Echo (well, soon :), two way communications in Blogs (Trackback, Pingback, Referrer lists, etc), FOAF, GeoURL, etc.
For the moment, all these higher level ideas are being integrated into web pages, because the browsers aren't using them (except for RSS readers).
Today's browsers are the user interface to HTML. We still have to invent the user interface for these technologies. They are the next layer of the web.
The current state of the art system GUIs are a lot worse in that respect, because they are a lot more abstract : the file managers of XP and OSX for example are based on the "browser" concept, that is not spacial at all. It's more efficient for most, but probably more difficult for beginners.
In your Future Vision white paper, last modified in January 2001, you outline several very interesting ideas about metadata.
Several developements have taken place since : the extensible attributes of BeFS has been burried with BeOS, the database-like metadata of Longhorn (aka Yukon) may actually be a separate layer from the filesystem altogether, and Apple is also moving all metadata out of the filesystem to XML files shared between applications (see iLife package).
My question : What is your current take on the metadata debate ? Do you still think the filesystem is the right place to handle metadata ? Any predictions ?
I have been looking at the source of my spam lately, and, although the email addresses are always forged, the body of the messages nearly always point to some website.
What we should do is have a way to automatize the slashdotting of these sites. The resource cost for every recepient is very small, but is very high for the target web site. If the site is run directly by the spammer, then that's great (he get's to pay the bandwidth bill). If it is run by the spammer's client, then that's even better. If it is hosted on a free non-commercial facility, it will wake them up and will make them find a way to make their users accountable.
So how to do this in a very user-friendly and convenient way ? /dev/null. The app should have a funny user interface, that let's you know when a target host becomes unavailable (victory ! another one bites the dust !), etc. The downloadable list of target hosts should be maintained by a trusted source (it could be GPG signed for example), maybe mailed to you though a MixMaster remailer to avoid spammer suing the originator.
Make a distributed-computing application, very light-weight, that runs on every platform. You should be able to set the maximum bandwidth you want to use (the default could be very low, like 5kbps), when it should start and stop, etc.The app will go and fetch a list of URLs of images or HTML pages on the target servers, and start downloading them to
This could make all the Spam issue a lot more fun !
See for yourself and please mod down this stupidity.
Ripped straight off the side bar :
Will 3D user interfaces ever take off? With ever-growing 3D processing capabilities available on standard PC hardware, it seems only natural to pursue UI directions that take advantage of this awesome power. Moreover, the generation of users now emerging has had access to video games for as long as they could remember. As the line between video games and PCs becomes blurrier, the time may have come to think about how to apply 3D visualization techniques for more day-to-day computing tasks.
Here are links to some of the 3DUIs that are available today:
- FSN (pronounced "fusion") produces a cyberspace rendering of a file system. This was the original 3D file system navigator shown in Jurassic Park ("Hey, this is UNIX. I know this!").
[Screenshot] | [Download] (IRIX)
- FSV is modelled after FSN, but runs on Linux. FSV lays out files and directories in 3D, geometrically representing the file system hierarchy to allow visual overview and analysis.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Xcruise lets you fly through a filesystem in 3D as if it were interplanetary space. Directories are represented as galaxies, files are represented as planets (whose mass is determined by the file size), and symbolic links are represented as wormholes.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- TDFSB is a 3D filesystem browser for Linux. Take a walk through your filesystem!
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Visual File System is a 3D file system visualizer for Windows. The tool scans a drive selected by the user, and then models the contents of the drive in 3D, based on the directories that are selected in a tree browser on the side of the display.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- 3Dtop is an extension for Windows that represents desktop icons in 3D, letting you to fly around your desktop. You can create coloured spotlights, background and floor textures, "paintings" (bitmaps), clocks, and "flags" that represent shortcuts.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- ROOMS turns a Windows desktop into a 3D world. You can see the world either through a first person perspective or with a map view, and you can populate the world with sounds, animated images, and 3D icons.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- CubicEye organizes windows into a navigable cube. Cubes can be arranged by thematic or functional subject matter, and can be explored either individually or collectively as part of a more comprehensive structure of multiple cubes representing various areas of interest.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- Vizible WorldViewer distributes windows across the exterior and interior surfaces of spheres, providing the means to visualize and navigate large numbers of web pages and data sources simultaneously.
[Screenshot]
They haven't yet updated the counter for this paper, so that makes it 23 times in 7 years.
http://www.macobserver.com/appledeathknell
The problem with using HTTP for large file downloads is that, in most cases, it's cheaper ressource-wise to span multiple FTP simultaneous connections than HTTP connections. Of course, this only becomes a real problem if you have more than a few hundred virtual hosts on a single box. So save your httpd processes, and use FTP for large files.
P.G. is a worldwide project, not only north american. I'm living in France at the moment, and have a pile of old books that contain ancient french, latin and ancien greek. Transcribing the caracters to ASCII would be absurd. It would be a huge loss of information.
Secondly, you seem to say that basic formatting, like those described in the document guidelines are good enough.That brings up two problems :
Because this is digital media, you do not want to use formatting, you want to use semantic markup : the reader could be blind, of deaf, of using a PDA etc. Formatting is static, semantic markup can be reinterpreted again and again to suit best the reader. This is where the W3C is going.
The idea is not to make some alphabet soup that can be used to create formatted text. The idea is to provide books that are directly usable and readable. The document guidelines only specify one level of chapter heading for exemple. Why ?
I was getting all excited about contributing to this project, but the current guidelines are just too weak. Using unicode encoded xml documents with a specific DTD (or Schema) seems to be a good solution, but I'm no specialist.
Cheers