No no no, that's not it. Microsoft, wise multi billion dollar company that they are, forgot to pay their $35 fee to renew the hotmail.com domain name, thus disabling the service all at once on Christmas Eve, 1999. A guy named Michael Chaney realized what was going on, paid the fee, and went about his business. Microsoft sent him an unsolicited check for $500, but he refused it -- putting the check they sent him up for sale on eBay and promising to give whatever proceeds from the auction (and matching up to $2000) to a charity of the winning bidder's choice.
The links about it are still available online -- Slashdot played it's role in events.
Not that anyone's gonna see a post coming in so late, but I just got a chance to read the article this morning and it had a glaring hole in it that the reporter inexplicably glossed over. To wit, these researchers were looking at how it seems to them that e.g. here in North America, animals started becoming extinct at the same time that humans migrated to the continent, some 12,500 years ago. Well, if that were true, then they might be on to something. But it's not true.
A lot of research over the last 10 or 20 years has indicated that humans have been here for at least twice that long, with verified evidence of human presence dated to 20k or 3k years ago, and with some tentative evidence of humans being here as long as 50k years ago. I grant that this settlement wouldn't have been all at once, and maybe there was an increased wave of migration during the timeframe in question, but the fact remains that these researchers picked an (out of favor) date of human settlement and then massaged their research to fit that timeframe.
That's bad science, and the reporter was negligent not to call them on it, either directly or by bringing in an anthropologist that would have raised the point. It's this sort of sloppy research and sloppy reporting that allows pseudo science to flourish. There may have been an interesting fragment of new knowledge at the heart of this research, but I (as a science nerd)am no closer to understanding it now than I was before, and the average non-technically literate reader could well be even more confused now.
This is terrible.
Re:stars in jars make your life miserable
on
Star In A Jar
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· Score: 2
The attached photo, while dramatic (IMHO) could benefit from some fill flash on the right. The strong sidelighting causes a sharply defined cutoff from full light to shadow, and lack of shadow detail probably prevents this photo from being a Photo of the Week candidate.
So, does anyone have any workable ideas on how to get some fill flash on the right side of the frame? I'm only getting one more shot at this. As you might imagine, travel expenses are horrendous. I'd really like to make sure this shot works next time.
One of the funniest things I'd seen on the web in a loooong time. Check out the comments, they're very helpful.
In a case like this, you need a good lighting source. Even a 2400 W strobe won't do. I suggest renting a star from you local photography dealer.
A really large reflector. Just make sure you get it out of the view of the image because you will only get one shot at it. Start saving your money; maybe your grandchildren's too.
Duh! Take two steps to the right and position the sunlight on the face at a right angle. And use a tripod next time, we need to be sharp!
It apparently took that long to get the original published paper translated from German.
I'm guessing they spent so much on research that there was no budget left for translation services from anyone other than Babelfish. That of course meant that it would take a couple of years to sort things out....:)
They may not care for this kind of "corporate" news site, but they don't seem to have a problem accepting their ad dollars. Gotta love the way Slashdot puts the smack down with one hand while happily accepting the greenbacks with the other. You're just so much better than these other guys, riiiiiiight.
Corporate may not be so bad anyway. Who knows, maybe Slashdot could go [even more] corporate and it would pay for some spell / fact checkers. Ok that's asking too much, this is an "amateur" site. Riiiight. *wink wink*
Gee, in hindsight, this topic couldn't possibly have been an invitation to an all out flamewar over which language has the most fervent True Believers... Java! Python! C++! Assembler! Nothing like a/. shouting match.....
It's real; students can compile and write real, significant programs in Java and know that businesses use Java extensively for significant applications. (Not the case with Pascal or Python.)
You say that as if it's a good thing, but it isn't. At least not necessarily. Turn the point around: which curriculum would lead to the highest attrition rate [in a college setting, not high school necessarily]: a commercially viable language like Java, or an academic one like Python? If you're not concerned about students ditching school after a semester, then by all means go with Java. If however you're a cynical greedy bastard that wants four years of tuition money out of them, then make sure they understand the academic stuff well, and let them figure out the commercially viable languages on their own when they graduate.
Also, as for the "it looks familiar" point, that again could be seen as a strike against it. Teaching something relatively exotic like Python (or way exotic like Lisp), and then coming back later to teach a language from the C family (C++, Java, even Perl) could help the students see what elements are similar among vastly different languages, and thus help them to understand what common things are going on at a low level in any language.
What a shatteringly bad idea. The single biggest problem for the average CS department isn't that the students don't understand what they're doing, but that the attrition rate is so high. Students take a couple of semesters using a commercially viable language, get the idea, and quit to get one of thise glamorous high paying stock option drenched dotcom jobs that they keep hearing about. Admittedly, that siren isn't singing quite so seductively these days, but that doesn't change the underlying problem there.
In order to cut down the attrition rate, you cannot scare off the incoming students. No way. If the first thing they get in Programming 101 is a solid smack upside the brain, a lot of them are going to just walk away. The dotcoms may not be hiring as much as they were before, but braving the job market is still going to be more appealing for the average student than having to put up with assembly language.
They're gonna get the low level stuff before long; at this point they need to get a grasp of the big picture. As interesting as your suggestion is -- and I would agree that it's a very unusual way to approach the subject -- my advice would be to do almost completely the opposite. Use a language that shields the students from a lot of the underlying complexity, so they can focus on broader concepts that would usually come later in a software engineering class.
Use Python.
It's still a bit exotic, so the incentive to ditch school for a job using it is less pressing (though that would change fast if a lot of people started learning it, of course). It enforces clean syntax & frees coders up to focus on higher level problems through the use of -- get out your buzzword bingo cards -- object oriented libraries. It's scripted, so the students won't have as much arcana to deal with right away, and better still it comes with a command line interpreter, so students can test expressions to see what happens when various language constructs are executed, with instant feedback if anything is going wrong.
As the students move through the curriculum, they can revisit earlier projects by rewriting libraries in a low level language like C (or assembler, if your sadistic impulse can't be denied any longer...:). This can be a bridge to understanding how a big project develops, especially among multiple programmers: the obvious thing to do would be for the first classes to use object libraries written by the second classes, which in turn are writing to specs prepared by the later software engineering classes. Etc.
I really think it could be the foundation (with the later addition of C, C++, &/or Java) to a good, comprehensive CS curriculum.
...and upon about 30 seconds of research on SecurityFocus (which should have been done first here, doh!), it seems that case insensitivity might not be an issue on Windows after all:
"Tested against Apache 1.3.20 on Windows 98 SE (has case insensitive fs) appears not to be vulnerable."
The posts on SecurityFocus don't illuminate how the Win32 version of Apache gets around the problem, but I'm sure some enterprising soul could find the saving code in the source somewhere...
Yeah, I've been wondering about that one too. I'd never heard it discussed before this, but it does seem like it would be a hole to be fixed on any case-insensitive filesystem, including both Windows FAT32 and NTFS, in addition to Mac HFS.
I was thinking mod_speling might be a ready solution to this issue, but it might not work in the way I was hoping. This bug seems to come up during the parsing of access control settings (early in the request phase), whereas I think mod_speling comes in later, during the mapping of URLs to permitted filesystem points. I think. Nonetheless, even if it can't fix the problem out of the box, I think mod_speling could perhaps be adapted to this purpose if someone knew what they were doing. I'd take a shot myself, but my understanding of Apache's architecture is too weak to be of much value here, I think. Oh well.
This is just growing pains -- old school Mac used a case-insensitive filesystem, newschool Mac has to preserve support for both old HFS and new UFS. (Other Unix tools are hitting the same problem whenever case [in-]sensitivity comes up -- the MacPerl people for example are working through it at the moment, too...)
This is a problem that Apple saw coming, and handled, sorta, with a custom mod_whatever that tried to address the problem. Why they didn't release it (either as source or, if necessary, as a binary) with OSX client is a big question, and an unfortunate decision on their part, but at least it already exists. Maybe this negative publicity will get them to release it &/or fold it into the next update to the operating system.
Really though, if you're using OSX for the new &/or Unixy stuff, then you need to run it on a UFS partition so that things like this won't bite you in the ass. If you need support for OS9/Classic, then either it or the Unix stuff needs to go onto a different partition. If not, you'll constantly be hitting these sorts of problems...
As the Attrition rant notes, petty vandalism has been going on pretty constantly for a while now. The tone of it has changed, slightly, now that the vandals are making the news, but what you're seeing now really isn't significantly different, in volume or content, than it has been for a while now.
To the extent that the reporter talks about the increase in Chinese attacks during the timeframe in question, the reporter is wrong. There was no such increase. There were $foohundred attacks then. There were also $foohundred attacks the month before, and there were $foohundred attacks the month after. Big deal.
Not all vapid propaganda has to come from big brother...
Maybe they had just seen Cleopatra. I just watched it last night, and they blamed the burning of Alexandria's library on Julius Caesar's troops. That didn't seem correct to me, but I really couldn't remember & had no way of looking it up at the time, so I'd forgotten it until just now. If you're correct though, and it was destroyed some three or four hundred years later, then the [very famous] movie is spreading incorrect information, and that could be where the reporter got it. *shrug*
Now I'm taking it as a challenge to write my perl using vi.
FWIW, I've way too recently started playing around with adapting vi. I work on an NT laptop, an OSX iMac, and various Linux servers all day long. All of them are running vim &/or gvim. They all share the same.gvimrc intialization script. They all do a nice job (not perfect, but nice) with syntax highlighting & coloring. It's not point & drool-y like VB is, but it's nice. Poke around vim.org to learn more. Now that I'm used to it, I've set it as my default for all editing on Windows, and have just about given up on Pico (finally!) on the Linux boxes. It's like taking off the training wheels...:)
Really? I can't remember now, but for year's I've been remembering the line as if it were spoken in the Inigo's voice. Hrm... here we go, IMDB to the rescue:
[Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up]
Vizzini: HE DIDN'T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
In any case, I'm gonna be quoting that movie to myself all weekend now. Too bad I don't have a copy of it.
Prince Mundie: Surrender!
Slashdot: You mean you wish to surrender to me? Very well, I accept.
And, in all honesty, i think you've missed my point. I am different from the people I criticize
We're just going in circles at this point, but I still stand by my argument, citing the "walks like a duck, talks like a duck" principle. You say that you're somehow better than people who are doing the exact same thing you're doing; I say that simply being aware of what's going on without making any changes to your behavior doesn't make you different, and being condescending about it actually makes you (or me, or anyone) worse.
It's like saying "well, I'm not a vegetarian, but a lot of my friends are and I like veggie food, so I might as well be one." Well, no. You either are or you aren't, and such a person isn't. Or saying (uh oh, here comes Godwin to ruin the fun...:) "I'm not actually a Nazi, I just work at the camp because the money is good" doesn't make such a person better than the people that work there for, well, whatever other reasons.
Sorry.
I mean, certainly you have to consider the fact that i earn a living using a non-M$ OS and, also, spend 99% of my free time using a non-M$ OS putting up.
Sure. And I also consider the fact that, because you paid for that Windows license, it really doesn't matter whether you use it constantly or 1% of the time. They got their money from you, end of story. Granted, short of building a system from raw components, it is a pain in the ass to get a PC without paying for that license along with it, but it would be a different matter if that license had never been used. That's not the case here. You are using it, however infrequently. You paid the money and are now using the product, just like millions of others.
So again, put up or shut up. If you're gonna be a vegetarian, stop sneaking the McBurgers. If you're gonna be a Linux purist, stop playing the damn Windows video games. You can't just say you want to be one, you have to actually follow through with your convictions here.
The examples i have been giving all along pretty much prove that that is not the case at all. People can switch to other operating systems easily and quickly. They simply don't, for whatever reason.
Well again we're just going in circles here (not that that isn't fun sometimes), but once again you make & then refute your point. You say that people can switch at any time, and this is plainly true. But then you say people don't "for whatever reason", as if people's reasons were just some trivial thing to be swept under the carpet. This clearly isn't the case. A lot of people clearly have reasons to stick with Windows that are much more important to them than the reasons to switch.
In your case, your reason is a game, which you don't play often but still you play often enough to dual boot. Whatever, same difference. In my case, the reason is that I have NT software that I have to be able to run at work from time to time, and it's not worth spending 15 minutes round trip from a running *nix login to a running NT login & back. In my parents' case, it's that they've just started to get the hang of using Windows and are not about to try again with some much more arcane system just because their son thinks it's cool -- especially when that would mean having to switch away from AOL. At my company, it's because we write software that emulates Windows software for test purposes, so we have to be able to both experiment with the originals & deploy our simulations on Windows for others. Etc.
Clearly, everyone has some reason or another, and almost all of them are stronger than mere ideology or variety. Ignorance really doesn't come into play -- some are aware of the alternatives, some aren't, but mere ignorance usually isn't the barrier. Even if everyone were informed about the glories of *nix, the vast majority wouldn't switch to it -- certainly not overnight, anyway.
WILL YOU PEOPLE PLEASE STOP USING THE WORD INNOVATE?!?!
Every time Ballmer opens his damn mouth, every other word seems to be "innovate". The more he says it, the less I believe it. If he was so busy innovating, where does he find the time to draw attention to it so much?
It reminds me of so many things, none flattering.
It reminds me of the movie "Princess Bride", in which the Spaniard quizzically points out the the Sicilian "you keep using that word -- I don't think it means what you think it means...".
It also reminds me of the movie "What About Bob", in which Bill Murray tries babie steps therapy: "Baby steps gettin' out of the chair, baby steps walking across the room, baby steps opening up the door, baby steps walkin' through the door, baby steps closin' the door..." ad nauseam.
Closer to home, it reminds me of Philip Morris' recent PR campaign, in which they make sure that the audience knows how many millions they're spending on public service campaigns. What they don't mention in those ads is that they're spending about ten times more money on the ad campaign than on the actual charitable services that they claim to put so much emphasis on. What's more important to them? Actually helping out, or giving the appearance of helping out, such that they might throw off some of the lawsuits against them? I know I'm suspicious.
And so it is with Microsoft's "innovation" campaign. It just seems like you're more "laterally" innovative than anything else. You embrace open source, kinda, but in a way that carefully distances you from the whole "open" part of the equation, thus defeating the whole point.
For a huge, powerful company, there are a lot of ways to go about things, as you well know. For the/. crowd, true innovation could nicely start with really & honestly opening up your source code, but I doubt you'll ever relinquish that much control over what you have worked so hard for, and I won't begrudge you for that. And I do realize that there's a marketing role to be played, and that the perception of being an innovator can be just as useful -- and much cheaper -- than actually being one. Maybe there is something to be said for putting all your efforts into such "lateral" innovations -- getting people to think you're pushing the frontiers, and giving the public enough (profitable!) little shiny chrome frills and vaporware for the claim to be at least plausible, while not actually providing anything that is truly, fundamentally new.
But could I suggest trying to meet halfway here? Is it not the case that Microsoft earns more from support contracts than actual product licenses? (I don't know, this is just my impression, but I'd be interested in more concrete information). Do you *really* think people can be talked into going to a subscription model, benefits be damned, if it's going to mean having to pay a software bill every month? I think there's a lot to be said for it (I like Windows Update, Mac OSX's Software Update, and Debian's apt-get features, and these are all embryonic versions of the same idea), but I also think that people will strongly resist the idea of having to pay a recurring fee for something that they were allowed to use outright & in perpetuity in the past.
If you're going to plow ahead with this "innovation", can we at least ask for someting in return? I think I could actually deal with having to subscribe to a.NET system that allowed me to look at & modify the code I was receiving. Allowing others to share & modify it as well would be even better -- that's why they call it open & free software -- but if you at least agreed to publicize what it is that you're trying to get people to do, you might encounter a bit less resistance than you're begging for now. As it is, you're just singling out this particular demographic of clued up, tech savvy devlopers and saying we want nothing to do with your or your freaky hippie ways. The resulting "yeah well fuck you too" should come as little surprise. Maybe a truce can be reached? I'd be happy to see it, but the ball is in your court...
You're carefully avoiding my point. It doesn't matter if it's one game or a million of them; if there is something that you want to use & it's only available on Windows, then you are no different than the people you criticize.
Note that it has nothing to do with it being "too hard" or anything else. You seem to be not at all intimidated by the difficulties of using Linux on a day to day basis, and yet still you're booting into That Other OS. Clearly, there is an issue preventing even your full fledged adoption of Linux, and at least in this case, it ain't the difficulty of using it. So I repeat: everyone has their reasons...
First off, my car analogy was more (as i stated in another response to one of the replies) along the lines of being a force for change.
...and my public utilities analogy was meant to point out that unless you're some sort of fanatic, this sort of change may be possible but it really isn't feasible. Just like it's possible to spend all day breathing through scuba gear if you're really that worried about pollution, but unless you're nuts it really isn't feasible.
they stick to the status quo (i.e. Windows) because they don't know any better or, at least, they are too blind to see the vicious cycle
Nah, you're insulting people again. It isn't that people don't know that Windows sucks, it's that they either [a] don't care, or [b] know, but aren't able to change their position at this point. There's actually a category [c], of people who know and *are* able to do something about it, but that 2% of users has already switched to Linux, and we're talking about the other 98% here.
If you buy into the idea that M$ is the standard and therefore go out and buy M$ products, then you have just made M$ the standard. And as microsoft actually veers from the standard (read: Kerberos, Java, etc.) people feel they have no choice but to follow because...well...(throw up your hands)....Microsoft is the standard
What you're acknoledging here is that de facto standards are more important than de jure ones. On paper, drugs are (or were, until recently) illegal in the Netherlands, and yet in practice they were mostly tolerated, so the de facto standard prevailed. On paper (specifically, the constitution), you can reside in the US for five years and then become a US citizen; in practice, the INS raises so many hoops for people to jump through that people can live here for decades without gaining their citizenship. On paper, you can run any operating system on your computer that you like, but in practice you have to run Windows if you want to be able to work with anyone else. Like I say, it isn't worth it to make yourself a pariah.
"Hey! There are other operating systems out there. Maybe one fits you better, have you tried any of them?"
Yeah, now that you mention it, I really like BeOS. It should be the best operating system for media type work, which would be useful to me as a web developer. And yet I've got it installed on my laptop at work, and it isn't able to use my network card, so there goes any kind of web work. It can't run the software that my colleagues need me to keep an eye on, so that cripples them & me. And because every other BeOS user out there is hitting problems like this, the user base is dwindling, the developers are abandoning it for bigger names like Windows, Mac, and Linux, and the company behind it seems to be dying. All this in spite of the fact that, on paper, this is the best OS that I have been able to find. Once again, a de facto standard ("anything but BeOS") is trumping a de jure one ("go ahead & use BeOS").
It is *not* the fact that people are lemmings. Stop saying that, stop thinking that. It's that, given a choice between putting up with Windows' familiar quirks and taking on an entirely new & alien system, most people simply can't be bothered with the alternatives. It's a big deal to the Slashdot crowd. It isn't a big deal to anyone else. If you're still hell bent on your car analogy, you might as well compare it to a gas engine against a diesel or electric one: from the average user's point of view, the gas/windows one seems to perform better (despite some flaws) while the other one is harder to find fuel for and is overall just a pain in the ass for regular commuting.
BTW - the only reason i have windows installed on my system is because of Counter-Strike and Flash. I just got done with a 5 hour gaming session and haven't booted into linux yet.
Well, there you go. Everyone has their reasons. Yours happens to be games. For other people, it might be Office. Whatever. Despite your passion, you yourself are doing what these "lemmings" of yours do: putting up with whatever flaws you see in Windows because it happens to provide something you want that no other operating system currently provides. If you *really* want to convince people that it's possible to totally abandon Windows -- and I would accept that it is possible, if your work & leisure roles allow you to get away with it -- then you can't speak out of both sides of your mouth like this. Practice what you preach, or cut people some slack.
This whole thing reminds me of why i stopped using winders in the first place (as i type this from W2k:(
That one line both summarizes & refutes your point. Yeah, it would be nice if we could live in a purely Windows free world. I like the idea of putting "I don't do Windows" on my resume. But we don't live in a Windows free world, and most of us, including you it seems, don't have the flexibility to put that quip on our resumes.
Your car analogy only works on the assumption that if all cars can work the same way & drive on the same roads, then any car can be used in place of any other car. But you know well that software doesn't work that way. It has nothing to do with being a lemming, so stop making pointless insults about average folks.
Walk into any place that sells computers, and damn near all of them are going to have Windows installed. Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to switch to something else, especially when leaving Windows on there means being able to run the same applications and documents that most other people are using. Being a pariah isn't that rewarding to most people, so advocating it is an uphill battle.
Rather than comparing operating systems to cars, it's better to compare them to something like public utilities. It's something that is always there in the background and, aside from a certain geeky demographic, people generally don't spend much time thinking about it. If the utility or the OS company makes a change we don't like, there isn't much that can be done about it. Sure, you could switch your computer to Linux and you could put solar panels on your roof & a windmill in the backyard, but really these sorts of measures aren't feasible for the majority.
I'd love to turn my building into a gleaming solar powered home of the future, but there are a lot of obstacles in the way: I would have to figure out where to get equipment and how to set it up, and I'd probably have to get used to spending my spare time on maintaining it unless I can pay someone else to do so (not likely, I think). Further, I live in a condo, so I'd have to convince eight other families that it's a good idea, and get them all to switch with me. Maybe we'd all be happier afterwards, but I can't see persuading that many people to change, when just sending out a check to the electric company every month is so much easier in the short term.
Same deal here. Skipping from present hell to a future utopia would be nice, but it's much more complicated than just telling people to abandon the present. Most of us can't simply do that, and advocating such things really isn't as constructive as you seem to think it is.
I've never actually tried to use the facility, but Apache allows you to set environment variables more or less on the fly. Assuming that you're running Apache, look up the documentation on SetEnv. If you've got a copy of O'Reilly's Apache guide, the reference material starts on page 90. The syntax is one of:
SetEnv variable value
SetEnvIf attribute regex envar[=value] [..]
How you actually get the character encoding into this new variable is the proverbial exercise left to the reader, but I'm pretty confident that it could be done. In the worst case scenario, you'd have to write a new module for Apache, but it's possible that something like this already exists. Surely this isn't a rare problem when getting into I18N issues....
Oh sure, but let's deal with the here & now. IE *is* dominent, overwhelmingly so, and really there isn't any viable alternative on the horizon. As much as people talk about Mozilla here, that's all it is -- talk, here, on Slashdot, where we're weird-o geeks that give a shit about such trivial things.
The rest of the world could care less.
I fully expect that there might well be some other dominant browser in five or ten years (if we're even using a tool that could be recognized as a browser by then...), and in my wildest dreams it might even running on something other than a Microsoft operating system.
Sure, that could happen.
But the future is the child of the present, and what we will have then will be an outgrowth of what is around today. Whatever that future browser is going to be, it'll either have to reject everything currently existing (not likely), or it'll have to draw on today's standards, both de jure (from the W3C) and de facto (IE compatibility). I feel secure that by sticking to today's de jure & de facto standards, which do *not* include Netscape, then whatever comes I'll be able to handle it, as will the web pages that I've been making.
Well, bringing up your point about the homeless would just be meeting one reductio ad absurdam with another, which I'd rather not do. As it happens though, I'm just talking about realpolitik here: I also run some of those "other" operating systems (Yet Another BeOS User going down with the ship...:( ), but I also realize that as a web developer, it only makes sense to devote 99% of my attention to that 99% of the browser market.
Yes, there is virtue in developing for the lowest common denominator. For a long time, I was only happy when my pages looked good on Lynx, even though I knew Lynx traffic was never more than a couple percent of total web users, because if a page looks good there then it should look okay anywhere. But increasingly, I'm treating Netscape as that lowest common denominator platform, because it's handling of great stuff like stylesheets is so crude that I have to keep everything as simple as possible in order for it to work there. Frankly, Lynx has kept evolving, and it's no longer as necessary to dumb things down for it, but Netscape/Mozilla has only grown uglier and I really can't be bothered with it.
Someone else pointed out, and I agree, that more often than not the Solaris, HP, &c boxes are used as servers, accessed remotely via other machines that very often are running something much less esoteric, such as (gasp!) Windows or Macintosh. Both of those systems are capable of running a much better browser than Netscape. Counting such proxy users, my guess is that usage of Windows or Macintosh goes even higher than the 95 or 99 percent share they have to begin with.
With that in mind, I really think that anyone using anything else is just being difficult. Please don't misunderstand me -- I'm looking forward to the brave GNU world as much as the rest of the/. audience is. But if you're rejecting use of IE just as some sort of political maneuver, you're just being difficult and I, as a web developer, really can't be bothered to cater to you. I *like* Linux and its cousins. My main work computer is NT, but I spend all day working on Linux machines via SSH, and I run FreeBSD at home. But I realize that I am the anomaly, and that most users -- the people I want to see my web pages -- are using more typical arrangements.
I'm going to cater to those average users, rather than expect them to meet my esoteric prefernces. Most of them are going to be using IE, and rightly so -- it's just flat out better software than the alternatives. It's easier than Netscape to develop for (hey how about that, software that obeys K&R's "be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you send") and has better support for new technologies like CSS & XML. Unlike Mozilla, IE isn't a bloated mess that crashes all the time. My understanding is that it was developed by a small team of coders, and you can tell -- it feels much more cohesive than Mozilla, and the tight interfacing with the rest of the operating system is no coincidence. Evil monopolistic overtones aside, I *like* that the component services IE provides, like the html rendering engine, can be used all over the system. It makes things much easier & more efficient to work with, and will probably make big "loose coupling / tight cohesion" efforts like.NET, if not easy to pull off, then at least *possible*. I can't see any way that a big monolithic monster like Mozilla can compete.
IE is just so much better in so many ways that advocating Netscape against it is like trying to make a case for the telegraph against a modern cell phone.
If that makes any sense, I realize I'm rambling. Sorry.
Psst! Hey! Guess what? Apparently no one told you, but Netscape has long since become irrelevant. Roughly 89% of users are still running some version of IE, while only 7% are using Netscape. The same source tells us that well over 90% of people are using some version of windows, with only 1% running Macintosh, and all others combined don't even merit a mention.
Looking at another site, I find roughly similar numbers -- an 80/10/5 split on IE/Netscape/AOL(that is, IE again) usage, and a 95/4/1 split on Win/Mac/Other usage. I know there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, but I think these numbers are pretty valid -- look anywhere and you'll find roughly similar figures.
I hate to break it to you, but the list of platforms you describe is basically irrelevant. So Netscape has cornered the dark back alley of the internet. Big deal, they can have it. The browser war, as you seem not to understand, was (past tense) a fight over which software would become the de facto standard access point to the web for the average user, and the result of that war has been settled & done with.
Having better cross-platform support is a trump card if & only if the other platforms are statistically significant, but they aren't -- just ask anyone that was hoping to see something come of the BeOS. Netscape is finished, IE is in control of the web now. There are fringe browsers out there that might help keep IE honest (Opera, Lynx, W3M, Omniweb, Mozilla, and Netscape), but the're nothing more than fringe players, and for most purposes insignificant.
Netscape was alright back in the day, but let's not treat this dead horse too badly, ok?
Slashdot Mirror
The links about it are still available online -- Slashdot played it's role in events.
A lot of research over the last 10 or 20 years has indicated that humans have been here for at least twice that long, with verified evidence of human presence dated to 20k or 3k years ago, and with some tentative evidence of humans being here as long as 50k years ago. I grant that this settlement wouldn't have been all at once, and maybe there was an increased wave of migration during the timeframe in question, but the fact remains that these researchers picked an (out of favor) date of human settlement and then massaged their research to fit that timeframe.
That's bad science, and the reporter was negligent not to call them on it, either directly or by bringing in an anthropologist that would have raised the point. It's this sort of sloppy research and sloppy reporting that allows pseudo science to flourish. There may have been an interesting fragment of new knowledge at the heart of this research, but I (as a science nerd)am no closer to understanding it now than I was before, and the average non-technically literate reader could well be even more confused now.
This is terrible.
One of the funniest things I'd seen on the web in a loooong time. Check out the comments, they're very helpful.
Etc... :)
I'm guessing they spent so much on research that there was no budget left for translation services from anyone other than Babelfish. That of course meant that it would take a couple of years to sort things out.... :)
(Do not leave there is no (oidvay) cabal.)
They may not care for this kind of "corporate" news site, but they don't seem to have a problem accepting their ad dollars. Gotta love the way Slashdot puts the smack down with one hand while happily accepting the greenbacks with the other. You're just so much better than these other guys, riiiiiiight.
Corporate may not be so bad anyway. Who knows, maybe Slashdot could go [even more] corporate and it would pay for some spell / fact checkers. Ok that's asking too much, this is an "amateur" site. Riiiight. *wink wink*
Gee, in hindsight, this topic couldn't possibly have been an invitation to an all out flamewar over which language has the most fervent True Believers... Java! Python! C++! Assembler! Nothing like a /. shouting match.....
You say that as if it's a good thing, but it isn't. At least not necessarily. Turn the point around: which curriculum would lead to the highest attrition rate [in a college setting, not high school necessarily]: a commercially viable language like Java, or an academic one like Python? If you're not concerned about students ditching school after a semester, then by all means go with Java. If however you're a cynical greedy bastard that wants four years of tuition money out of them, then make sure they understand the academic stuff well, and let them figure out the commercially viable languages on their own when they graduate.
Also, as for the "it looks familiar" point, that again could be seen as a strike against it. Teaching something relatively exotic like Python (or way exotic like Lisp), and then coming back later to teach a language from the C family (C++, Java, even Perl) could help the students see what elements are similar among vastly different languages, and thus help them to understand what common things are going on at a low level in any language.
In order to cut down the attrition rate, you cannot scare off the incoming students. No way. If the first thing they get in Programming 101 is a solid smack upside the brain, a lot of them are going to just walk away. The dotcoms may not be hiring as much as they were before, but braving the job market is still going to be more appealing for the average student than having to put up with assembly language.
They're gonna get the low level stuff before long; at this point they need to get a grasp of the big picture. As interesting as your suggestion is -- and I would agree that it's a very unusual way to approach the subject -- my advice would be to do almost completely the opposite. Use a language that shields the students from a lot of the underlying complexity, so they can focus on broader concepts that would usually come later in a software engineering class.
Use Python.
It's still a bit exotic, so the incentive to ditch school for a job using it is less pressing (though that would change fast if a lot of people started learning it, of course). It enforces clean syntax & frees coders up to focus on higher level problems through the use of -- get out your buzzword bingo cards -- object oriented libraries. It's scripted, so the students won't have as much arcana to deal with right away, and better still it comes with a command line interpreter, so students can test expressions to see what happens when various language constructs are executed, with instant feedback if anything is going wrong.
As the students move through the curriculum, they can revisit earlier projects by rewriting libraries in a low level language like C (or assembler, if your sadistic impulse can't be denied any longer... :). This can be a bridge to understanding how a big project develops, especially among multiple programmers: the obvious thing to do would be for the first classes to use object libraries written by the second classes, which in turn are writing to specs prepared by the later software engineering classes. Etc.
I really think it could be the foundation (with the later addition of C, C++, &/or Java) to a good, comprehensive CS curriculum.
The posts on SecurityFocus don't illuminate how the Win32 version of Apache gets around the problem, but I'm sure some enterprising soul could find the saving code in the source somewhere...
I was thinking mod_speling might be a ready solution to this issue, but it might not work in the way I was hoping. This bug seems to come up during the parsing of access control settings (early in the request phase), whereas I think mod_speling comes in later, during the mapping of URLs to permitted filesystem points. I think. Nonetheless, even if it can't fix the problem out of the box, I think mod_speling could perhaps be adapted to this purpose if someone knew what they were doing. I'd take a shot myself, but my understanding of Apache's architecture is too weak to be of much value here, I think. Oh well.
This is a problem that Apple saw coming, and handled, sorta, with a custom mod_whatever that tried to address the problem. Why they didn't release it (either as source or, if necessary, as a binary) with OSX client is a big question, and an unfortunate decision on their part, but at least it already exists. Maybe this negative publicity will get them to release it &/or fold it into the next update to the operating system.
Really though, if you're using OSX for the new &/or Unixy stuff, then you need to run it on a UFS partition so that things like this won't bite you in the ass. If you need support for OS9/Classic, then either it or the Unix stuff needs to go onto a different partition. If not, you'll constantly be hitting these sorts of problems...
As the Attrition rant notes, petty vandalism has been going on pretty constantly for a while now. The tone of it has changed, slightly, now that the vandals are making the news, but what you're seeing now really isn't significantly different, in volume or content, than it has been for a while now.
To the extent that the reporter talks about the increase in Chinese attacks during the timeframe in question, the reporter is wrong. There was no such increase. There were $foohundred attacks then. There were also $foohundred attacks the month before, and there were $foohundred attacks the month after. Big deal.
Not all vapid propaganda has to come from big brother...
Maybe they had just seen Cleopatra. I just watched it last night, and they blamed the burning of Alexandria's library on Julius Caesar's troops. That didn't seem correct to me, but I really couldn't remember & had no way of looking it up at the time, so I'd forgotten it until just now. If you're correct though, and it was destroyed some three or four hundred years later, then the [very famous] movie is spreading incorrect information, and that could be where the reporter got it. *shrug*
FWIW, I've way too recently started playing around with adapting vi. I work on an NT laptop, an OSX iMac, and various Linux servers all day long. All of them are running vim &/or gvim. They all share the same .gvimrc intialization script. They all do a nice job (not perfect, but nice) with syntax highlighting & coloring. It's not point & drool-y like VB is, but it's nice. Poke around vim.org to learn more. Now that I'm used to it, I've set it as my default for all editing on Windows, and have just about given up on Pico (finally!) on the Linux boxes. It's like taking off the training wheels... :)
In any case, I'm gonna be quoting that movie to myself all weekend now. Too bad I don't have a copy of it.
Heh heh heh...
We're just going in circles at this point, but I still stand by my argument, citing the "walks like a duck, talks like a duck" principle. You say that you're somehow better than people who are doing the exact same thing you're doing; I say that simply being aware of what's going on without making any changes to your behavior doesn't make you different, and being condescending about it actually makes you (or me, or anyone) worse.
It's like saying "well, I'm not a vegetarian, but a lot of my friends are and I like veggie food, so I might as well be one." Well, no. You either are or you aren't, and such a person isn't. Or saying (uh oh, here comes Godwin to ruin the fun... :) "I'm not actually a Nazi, I just work at the camp because the money is good" doesn't make such a person better than the people that work there for, well, whatever other reasons.
Sorry.
Sure. And I also consider the fact that, because you paid for that Windows license, it really doesn't matter whether you use it constantly or 1% of the time. They got their money from you, end of story. Granted, short of building a system from raw components, it is a pain in the ass to get a PC without paying for that license along with it, but it would be a different matter if that license had never been used. That's not the case here. You are using it, however infrequently. You paid the money and are now using the product, just like millions of others.So again, put up or shut up. If you're gonna be a vegetarian, stop sneaking the McBurgers. If you're gonna be a Linux purist, stop playing the damn Windows video games. You can't just say you want to be one, you have to actually follow through with your convictions here.
Well again we're just going in circles here (not that that isn't fun sometimes), but once again you make & then refute your point. You say that people can switch at any time, and this is plainly true. But then you say people don't "for whatever reason", as if people's reasons were just some trivial thing to be swept under the carpet. This clearly isn't the case. A lot of people clearly have reasons to stick with Windows that are much more important to them than the reasons to switch.In your case, your reason is a game, which you don't play often but still you play often enough to dual boot. Whatever, same difference. In my case, the reason is that I have NT software that I have to be able to run at work from time to time, and it's not worth spending 15 minutes round trip from a running *nix login to a running NT login & back. In my parents' case, it's that they've just started to get the hang of using Windows and are not about to try again with some much more arcane system just because their son thinks it's cool -- especially when that would mean having to switch away from AOL. At my company, it's because we write software that emulates Windows software for test purposes, so we have to be able to both experiment with the originals & deploy our simulations on Windows for others. Etc.
Clearly, everyone has some reason or another, and almost all of them are stronger than mere ideology or variety. Ignorance really doesn't come into play -- some are aware of the alternatives, some aren't, but mere ignorance usually isn't the barrier. Even if everyone were informed about the glories of *nix, the vast majority wouldn't switch to it -- certainly not overnight, anyway.
Every time Ballmer opens his damn mouth, every other word seems to be "innovate". The more he says it, the less I believe it. If he was so busy innovating, where does he find the time to draw attention to it so much?
It reminds me of so many things, none flattering.
And so it is with Microsoft's "innovation" campaign. It just seems like you're more "laterally" innovative than anything else. You embrace open source, kinda, but in a way that carefully distances you from the whole "open" part of the equation, thus defeating the whole point.
For a huge, powerful company, there are a lot of ways to go about things, as you well know. For the /. crowd, true innovation could nicely start with really & honestly opening up your source code, but I doubt you'll ever relinquish that much control over what you have worked so hard for, and I won't begrudge you for that. And I do realize that there's a marketing role to be played, and that the perception of being an innovator can be just as useful -- and much cheaper -- than actually being one. Maybe there is something to be said for putting all your efforts into such "lateral" innovations -- getting people to think you're pushing the frontiers, and giving the public enough (profitable!) little shiny chrome frills and vaporware for the claim to be at least plausible, while not actually providing anything that is truly, fundamentally new.
But could I suggest trying to meet halfway here? Is it not the case that Microsoft earns more from support contracts than actual product licenses? (I don't know, this is just my impression, but I'd be interested in more concrete information). Do you *really* think people can be talked into going to a subscription model, benefits be damned, if it's going to mean having to pay a software bill every month? I think there's a lot to be said for it (I like Windows Update, Mac OSX's Software Update, and Debian's apt-get features, and these are all embryonic versions of the same idea), but I also think that people will strongly resist the idea of having to pay a recurring fee for something that they were allowed to use outright & in perpetuity in the past.
If you're going to plow ahead with this "innovation", can we at least ask for someting in return? I think I could actually deal with having to subscribe to a .NET system that allowed me to look at & modify the code I was receiving. Allowing others to share & modify it as well would be even better -- that's why they call it open & free software -- but if you at least agreed to publicize what it is that you're trying to get people to do, you might encounter a bit less resistance than you're begging for now. As it is, you're just singling out this particular demographic of clued up, tech savvy devlopers and saying we want nothing to do with your or your freaky hippie ways. The resulting "yeah well fuck you too" should come as little surprise. Maybe a truce can be reached? I'd be happy to see it, but the ball is in your court...
You're carefully avoiding my point. It doesn't matter if it's one game or a million of them; if there is something that you want to use & it's only available on Windows, then you are no different than the people you criticize.
Note that it has nothing to do with it being "too hard" or anything else. You seem to be not at all intimidated by the difficulties of using Linux on a day to day basis, and yet still you're booting into That Other OS. Clearly, there is an issue preventing even your full fledged adoption of Linux, and at least in this case, it ain't the difficulty of using it. So I repeat: everyone has their reasons...
My advice to you is simple. Put up, or shut up.
:)
...and my public utilities analogy was meant to point out that unless you're some sort of fanatic, this sort of change may be possible but it really isn't feasible. Just like it's possible to spend all day breathing through scuba gear if you're really that worried about pollution, but unless you're nuts it really isn't feasible.
Nah, you're insulting people again. It isn't that people don't know that Windows sucks, it's that they either [a] don't care, or [b] know, but aren't able to change their position at this point. There's actually a category [c], of people who know and *are* able to do something about it, but that 2% of users has already switched to Linux, and we're talking about the other 98% here.
What you're acknoledging here is that de facto standards are more important than de jure ones. On paper, drugs are (or were, until recently) illegal in the Netherlands, and yet in practice they were mostly tolerated, so the de facto standard prevailed. On paper (specifically, the constitution), you can reside in the US for five years and then become a US citizen; in practice, the INS raises so many hoops for people to jump through that people can live here for decades without gaining their citizenship. On paper, you can run any operating system on your computer that you like, but in practice you have to run Windows if you want to be able to work with anyone else. Like I say, it isn't worth it to make yourself a pariah.
Yeah, now that you mention it, I really like BeOS. It should be the best operating system for media type work, which would be useful to me as a web developer. And yet I've got it installed on my laptop at work, and it isn't able to use my network card, so there goes any kind of web work. It can't run the software that my colleagues need me to keep an eye on, so that cripples them & me. And because every other BeOS user out there is hitting problems like this, the user base is dwindling, the developers are abandoning it for bigger names like Windows, Mac, and Linux, and the company behind it seems to be dying. All this in spite of the fact that, on paper, this is the best OS that I have been able to find. Once again, a de facto standard ("anything but BeOS") is trumping a de jure one ("go ahead & use BeOS").
It is *not* the fact that people are lemmings. Stop saying that, stop thinking that. It's that, given a choice between putting up with Windows' familiar quirks and taking on an entirely new & alien system, most people simply can't be bothered with the alternatives. It's a big deal to the Slashdot crowd. It isn't a big deal to anyone else. If you're still hell bent on your car analogy, you might as well compare it to a gas engine against a diesel or electric one: from the average user's point of view, the gas/windows one seems to perform better (despite some flaws) while the other one is harder to find fuel for and is overall just a pain in the ass for regular commuting.
Well, there you go. Everyone has their reasons. Yours happens to be games. For other people, it might be Office. Whatever. Despite your passion, you yourself are doing what these "lemmings" of yours do: putting up with whatever flaws you see in Windows because it happens to provide something you want that no other operating system currently provides. If you *really* want to convince people that it's possible to totally abandon Windows -- and I would accept that it is possible, if your work & leisure roles allow you to get away with it -- then you can't speak out of both sides of your mouth like this. Practice what you preach, or cut people some slack.
That one line both summarizes & refutes your point. Yeah, it would be nice if we could live in a purely Windows free world. I like the idea of putting "I don't do Windows" on my resume. But we don't live in a Windows free world, and most of us, including you it seems, don't have the flexibility to put that quip on our resumes.
Your car analogy only works on the assumption that if all cars can work the same way & drive on the same roads, then any car can be used in place of any other car. But you know well that software doesn't work that way. It has nothing to do with being a lemming, so stop making pointless insults about average folks.
Walk into any place that sells computers, and damn near all of them are going to have Windows installed. Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to switch to something else, especially when leaving Windows on there means being able to run the same applications and documents that most other people are using. Being a pariah isn't that rewarding to most people, so advocating it is an uphill battle.
Rather than comparing operating systems to cars, it's better to compare them to something like public utilities. It's something that is always there in the background and, aside from a certain geeky demographic, people generally don't spend much time thinking about it. If the utility or the OS company makes a change we don't like, there isn't much that can be done about it. Sure, you could switch your computer to Linux and you could put solar panels on your roof & a windmill in the backyard, but really these sorts of measures aren't feasible for the majority.
I'd love to turn my building into a gleaming solar powered home of the future, but there are a lot of obstacles in the way: I would have to figure out where to get equipment and how to set it up, and I'd probably have to get used to spending my spare time on maintaining it unless I can pay someone else to do so (not likely, I think). Further, I live in a condo, so I'd have to convince eight other families that it's a good idea, and get them all to switch with me. Maybe we'd all be happier afterwards, but I can't see persuading that many people to change, when just sending out a check to the electric company every month is so much easier in the short term.
Same deal here. Skipping from present hell to a future utopia would be nice, but it's much more complicated than just telling people to abandon the present. Most of us can't simply do that, and advocating such things really isn't as constructive as you seem to think it is.
How you actually get the character encoding into this new variable is the proverbial exercise left to the reader, but I'm pretty confident that it could be done. In the worst case scenario, you'd have to write a new module for Apache, but it's possible that something like this already exists. Surely this isn't a rare problem when getting into I18N issues....
The rest of the world could care less.
I fully expect that there might well be some other dominant browser in five or ten years (if we're even using a tool that could be recognized as a browser by then...), and in my wildest dreams it might even running on something other than a Microsoft operating system.
Sure, that could happen.
But the future is the child of the present, and what we will have then will be an outgrowth of what is around today. Whatever that future browser is going to be, it'll either have to reject everything currently existing (not likely), or it'll have to draw on today's standards, both de jure (from the W3C) and de facto (IE compatibility). I feel secure that by sticking to today's de jure & de facto standards, which do *not* include Netscape, then whatever comes I'll be able to handle it, as will the web pages that I've been making.
Yes, there is virtue in developing for the lowest common denominator. For a long time, I was only happy when my pages looked good on Lynx, even though I knew Lynx traffic was never more than a couple percent of total web users, because if a page looks good there then it should look okay anywhere. But increasingly, I'm treating Netscape as that lowest common denominator platform, because it's handling of great stuff like stylesheets is so crude that I have to keep everything as simple as possible in order for it to work there. Frankly, Lynx has kept evolving, and it's no longer as necessary to dumb things down for it, but Netscape/Mozilla has only grown uglier and I really can't be bothered with it.
Someone else pointed out, and I agree, that more often than not the Solaris, HP, &c boxes are used as servers, accessed remotely via other machines that very often are running something much less esoteric, such as (gasp!) Windows or Macintosh. Both of those systems are capable of running a much better browser than Netscape. Counting such proxy users, my guess is that usage of Windows or Macintosh goes even higher than the 95 or 99 percent share they have to begin with.
With that in mind, I really think that anyone using anything else is just being difficult. Please don't misunderstand me -- I'm looking forward to the brave GNU world as much as the rest of the /. audience is. But if you're rejecting use of IE just as some sort of political maneuver, you're just being difficult and I, as a web developer, really can't be bothered to cater to you. I *like* Linux and its cousins. My main work computer is NT, but I spend all day working on Linux machines via SSH, and I run FreeBSD at home. But I realize that I am the anomaly, and that most users -- the people I want to see my web pages -- are using more typical arrangements.
I'm going to cater to those average users, rather than expect them to meet my esoteric prefernces. Most of them are going to be using IE, and rightly so -- it's just flat out better software than the alternatives. It's easier than Netscape to develop for (hey how about that, software that obeys K&R's "be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you send") and has better support for new technologies like CSS & XML. Unlike Mozilla, IE isn't a bloated mess that crashes all the time. My understanding is that it was developed by a small team of coders, and you can tell -- it feels much more cohesive than Mozilla, and the tight interfacing with the rest of the operating system is no coincidence. Evil monopolistic overtones aside, I *like* that the component services IE provides, like the html rendering engine, can be used all over the system. It makes things much easier & more efficient to work with, and will probably make big "loose coupling / tight cohesion" efforts like .NET, if not easy to pull off, then at least *possible*. I can't see any way that a big monolithic monster like Mozilla can compete.
IE is just so much better in so many ways that advocating Netscape against it is like trying to make a case for the telegraph against a modern cell phone.
If that makes any sense, I realize I'm rambling. Sorry.
Looking at another site, I find roughly similar numbers -- an 80/10/5 split on IE/Netscape/AOL(that is, IE again) usage, and a 95/4/1 split on Win/Mac/Other usage. I know there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, but I think these numbers are pretty valid -- look anywhere and you'll find roughly similar figures.
I hate to break it to you, but the list of platforms you describe is basically irrelevant. So Netscape has cornered the dark back alley of the internet. Big deal, they can have it. The browser war, as you seem not to understand, was (past tense) a fight over which software would become the de facto standard access point to the web for the average user, and the result of that war has been settled & done with.
Having better cross-platform support is a trump card if & only if the other platforms are statistically significant, but they aren't -- just ask anyone that was hoping to see something come of the BeOS. Netscape is finished, IE is in control of the web now. There are fringe browsers out there that might help keep IE honest (Opera, Lynx, W3M, Omniweb, Mozilla, and Netscape), but the're nothing more than fringe players, and for most purposes insignificant.
Netscape was alright back in the day, but let's not treat this dead horse too badly, ok?