Maybe you already know this, but the main character in Pirates of the Caribbean (played by Johnny Depp) says "Savvy?" all the time. He uses it to mean "you understand?", or "got it?", or "OK?". He also says it with a bit of a drawl, or something--it's more interesting to hear than someone dryly saying "savvy?".
Ian
Re:hope they finally got rid of some annoyances ..
on
GNOME 2.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
but come on gnome, you're soon gonna be 3.x
Says who? They could easily go 2.10, 2.12,..., 2.98, 2.100, etc. I'm not advocating it, but it's not like 3.0 is neccessarily right around the corner.
I'm not very knowledgeable in this department, but don't all hash algorithms have collisions? There's a hell of a lot of 128-bit numbers, but there are a lot more 256-bit numbers than 128-bit numbers, so hashing two arbitrary 256-bit files could result in the same hash value. And a 256-bit file is pretty freaking small, so hashing any two arbitrary files could, potentially, result in a collision, no?
Mostly 'cause Java and Flash both require a plug-in download, and may or may not require filesystem permissions to install. Sydney provides similar functionality with zero install.
Sydney is an all-Javascript/CSS/DOM project intended to create applications that run in your browser but look like desktop apps. It's already in use in a real project, but I'm not sure how much I can say about it, what with it being proprietary and all.... Anyway, Sydney is (to be) released under the LGPL. (The "to be" part is 'cause I'm just finishing up exams, and I haven't figured out the file release tools on SourceForge yet. Everything's in CVS, though.) It provides a fairly rich class hierarchy of widgets, including normal stuff like buttons, labels, and checkboxes, plus some more complex stuff like trees and tables. It runs in both Mozilla and IE, and it's intended to be cross-browser, so now that it's open source, it may start to work in $YOUR_FAVOURITE_NON_TTY_BROWSER. Let me know what you think.
Since we're already well OT, how would you pronounce virii? When I read it and the writer means "more than one virus", I usually "hear" viri in my head (two syllables: vie-rye), but if virii is the plural of virius, then I suppose virii would sound like radii: veer-ree-eye, no?
Although I agree with the general sentiment of your post, did you notice that you responded to someone with a 4-digit ID? Of course, you posted AC, so there's no way of knowing how long you've been around, but MadMan2 has been here for longer than 99% of Slashdot.
I'm neither a lawyer, nor an American... But I think the answer would/might depend on the similarity between (x,y,z) and (a,b,c). Without having RTFA, the comments suggest that the patent covers updating software through a menu-driven system, or somesuch. There's plenty of ways to update software, but even if I use a different menuing library to implement my updater, I'm infringing on this patent because of the menu "procedure"--I can't avoid it just because I use a unique menuing algorithm....
You're right, there's no universially usable UI. However, there are some interfaces out there (I can't think of any off the top of my head) that are universially unusable (or nearly). I am learning UI design by doing it, and one thing I've learned is that it's easy to slip into an inside-out design mode that leads to absolutly awful UIs. What I mean is that it's easy to think of the application in terms of the work it has to do, and then design the interface from that perspective, rather than thinking about what the user wants to do, implement the UI that way, and then figure out how to coax the application into doing what the user wants. Of course, a usability study is probably necessary to really fine-tune a UI to make it really intuitive, but before you spend time observing real users, it's worth the effort to do a thought experiment and pretend to observe users. It sounds wacky when I "say it out loud" like that, but it really works.
To make an offtopic Gentoo-plug, the portage system checks MD5 sums of the downloaded source and won't continue with the install if the MD5 doesn't match up.
Can anyone tell me why this MD5 thing is considered secure, though? I realise it sounds good, and I was told once that a compromised source mirror was discovered by a Gentoo user whose MD5s didn't match, but if you can manage to hack into a server and upload some tainted source files, what's to stop you from uploading some tainted MD5/gpg signatures, too?
I don't have WINE installed on my system, or the time to install and configure it, but since WINE re-implements the Windows API, wouldn't it have the function that Mozilla/IE/Word call to execute shell: URLs? Has anybody tested this vulnerability in WINE? Does anybody care what the results are?
AFAIK Canadians pay a tax of sorts to the local recording industry on the purchase of every medium capable of recording music (hard drive, CD-RWs, etc.). It's a certain number of cents per megabyte, or something. I think someone told me once that the medium has to be empty to be subject to the tax, though, so selling iPods with a song on them would exempt them from the tax. Not sure if that's true....
Recently, I have seen quite a few posts to Slashdot claiming that the poster has to keep IE for a few key sites that are only supported in IE. Can you list (some of) yours? I run a Linux distro, and have no IE, so all my browsing has to work in Firefox, or I don't see it, but I haven't run into a site that isn't supported by Firefox in a longer time than I can remember. Perhaps I just limit myself to too little of the web.
One nitpick though. Regardless of whether or not you agree with RMS on the whole GNU/Linux thing, Linus doesn't even have to enter the debate most of the time because, AFAIK, he rarely bothers himself with the GNU part of GNU/Linux--he is, after all, the Benevolent Dictator For Life of the kernel, not the associated operating system. In other words, when Linus says "Linux" you can usually be sure that he's actually referring to the kernel, which RMS himself would (or should, if he's consistent, and I'd have to say he's consistent) refer to as Linux, not GNU/Linux. The reason for this ramble is that I wouldn't have put Linus in your chart, because he doesn't seem (to me) to talk about GNU/Linux very often, by any name.
Yeah, that helped a lot. Thanks for the pleasant, polite answer.
Now, I have another question. Has the RIAA ever satisfied these "new", more strict requirements in any of their 3000+ lawsuits? What I mean is, now that they have to go to court and convince a judge that some crime has actually occurred behind a given IP address, rather than just getting a rubber stamp, have they successfully extracted a real person's identity from the associated ISP and then sued that person? Or do these John Doe lawsuits die in the courts before anybody figures out who John Doe actually is?
Maybe this has been answered before, but nothing in the 3+ modded questions even alludes to it.
What the hell is the point in filing 482 John Doe lawsuits? Or 3000+ for that matter?
I mean, ignoring the usual debate over whether or not they should be filing any lawsuits, and just assuming they're in the right, why the hell are they doing it this way? Isn't there precendent to say that the RIAA can't force ISPs to reveal the name of the person behind a given IP address? How do you extract money from a 32-bit number? How do you instill fear in a 32-bit number? Am I missing something?
Yeah, supporting Netscape 4.7 would probably make me murderous, too. JavaScript as a language is actually really nice. It's object-oriented, but the type system is very flexible (they're aren't really any classes, per se, they're all "prototypes"), functions are objects, so you can pass them around, and closures are possible, which gives you lots of power. I agree that differences between browser implementations can cause some grief, but we've been able to abstract away most of those differences, so there isn't a single line of code in the entire code base that makes any reference to the browser string. Of course, this means that if you try to use the latest version of Konqueror that I tried, things just blow up, because we assume your browser can handle our app, and that version of Konq can't, but we're developing for a captive audience, and we can almost dictate browser versions, so that's been a bit of a saving grace. One nice thing is that all the developers work on GNU/Linux, so it has to work in Moz for us to be able to develop, but the users all use IE, so it has to work there for us to sell it. This dichotomy (did I use that right?) has dictated that our framework must be cross-browser. If our code was littered with
if(isIE) { // do this } else if(isMozilla) { //do this } else { // blow up }
I think we would have instigated a mass suicide a long time ago, but since we have almost no code like that, and since all such code is hidden in the equivalent of "library code", making new screens, or new functionality is pretty straight forward. I find the productivity to be pretty high, and the library has only been in development since August of 2003. Of course, I'm biased since I was one of the pilot developers, but the opinions of my coworkers seem to at least align with mine, even if they're not quite as enthusiastic.
The XmlHttpRequest object is poorly named. Really you're just making an HTTP request, and if the response happens to be XML, there are convenience functions for getting a fully-parsed DOM view of the document. If the response is anything else (plain text, JavaScript, Perl, HTML, etc.) you can do what you want with it, including calling eval() on it from a JavaScript script. You can do synchronous (blocking) or asynchronous (non-blocking) calls to your web server, and either be notified of completion by a callback for non-blocking calls, or just treat it like a function call for blocking calls. It's quite handy, and we have a project at work that makes extensive use of this technique. We have a "thick" or "rich" client application that runs in the web browser. Our client looks like a native application--it has table widgets, with clickable headers that resort the columns, it has a tree widget that looks like the tree in Windows Explorer, it supports drag-and-drop and custom context-menus, and if you open our application in a chrome-free browser window, it's almost possible to forget it's not native (the speed is usually what gives it away, the GUI is a little sluggish...). It works equally well in Mozilla, Firefox, IE 5.5+, and Netscape 7.1+ on Windows 9x, 2000, XP, and many flavours of GNU/Linux (tested on Gentoo and Redhat 7.3, and 8.0 using GNOME, KDE, and some kind of *Box wm). Well, "equally well" is a bit of a stretch. IE's implementation of the DOM is dog slow, so some things run a bit faster in the Gecko-based browsers, but all functionality is equally available in all the configurations listed above. We've managed to stay standards-compliant for the most part, and have abstracted away the quirks in IE, so as soon as Konqueror, Opera and $YOUR_FAVOURITE_BROWSER fully support JavaScript 1.5, DOM 2.0, and CSS 2.0, our app will work in your browser, too. (I don't know which parts these browsers are missing, so maybe our app already works there.)
The only remaining hurdle is to convince management that it should be open-sourced so that other people can use it, too. If you can't wait, you might want to check out SourceForge. There are some other widget kits available for building browser-based apps. We chose not to go with them because, at the time, they were too Alpha-ish, and we disagreed with some design decisions. Our decision not to use those projects has not been revisited for a while though, now that we are rather comitted to our in-house implementation, so things may have improved significantly since the last time I had a look.
Also, if you're going to actually build any significant JavaScript apps (we have more than 40k loc that turns out to be more than 1 meg of JavaScript to download), I highly recommend JSDoc. The main developer, Gabriel, has been very responsive and helpful, and the documentation that his scripts produce is excellent. Especially considering he builds JSDoc in his spare time, I can't compliment his work enough. Now that our codebase is too large for me to keep it all in my head, the API has saved a lot of my time.
I should have been more specific when I called bullshit. I completely agree with what you've just said, and with the second half of your original post. Sorry for the confusion and the resulting unintended flamage on my part.
I'm gonna hafta call bullshit. I was raised in the Peel Board, which is one of the biggest boards of education in Ontario. I'm pretty sure the board used whatever the hell was in the rummage pile the day they went shopping for software. I've used Claris Works, Microsoft Works, Microsoft Office, WordPerfect, and a whole pile of other crap, depending on the year. Probably the Ontario Ministry has hit the next crest in its upgrade cycle and StarOffice was the cheapest, with the most features, or something. The last thing on anyone's mind was what students are most likely to be comfortable with.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you already know this, but the main character in Pirates of the Caribbean (played by Johnny Depp) says "Savvy?" all the time. He uses it to mean "you understand?", or "got it?", or "OK?". He also says it with a bit of a drawl, or something--it's more interesting to hear than someone dryly saying "savvy?".
Ian
Says who? They could easily go 2.10, 2.12, ..., 2.98, 2.100, etc. I'm not advocating it, but it's not like 3.0 is neccessarily right around the corner.
Ian
I'm not very knowledgeable in this department, but don't all hash algorithms have collisions? There's a hell of a lot of 128-bit numbers, but there are a lot more 256-bit numbers than 128-bit numbers, so hashing two arbitrary 256-bit files could result in the same hash value. And a 256-bit file is pretty freaking small, so hashing any two arbitrary files could, potentially, result in a collision, no?
Ian
Probably. I usually use the Preview button, and didn't this time since it was such a "simple post"....
Ian
Normally I'm not a spelling Nazi, but your typo is funny: they'd have neither the patience, nor the patiens! =P
Mostly 'cause Java and Flash both require a plug-in download, and may or may not require filesystem permissions to install. Sydney provides similar functionality with zero install.
Ian
Plug warning: I'm the project admin
Go check out the Sydney project. There's an example at http://sydney.sourceforge.net/sydney_example.html.
Sydney is an all-Javascript/CSS/DOM project intended to create applications that run in your browser but look like desktop apps. It's already in use in a real project, but I'm not sure how much I can say about it, what with it being proprietary and all.... Anyway, Sydney is (to be) released under the LGPL. (The "to be" part is 'cause I'm just finishing up exams, and I haven't figured out the file release tools on SourceForge yet. Everything's in CVS, though.) It provides a fairly rich class hierarchy of widgets, including normal stuff like buttons, labels, and checkboxes, plus some more complex stuff like trees and tables. It runs in both Mozilla and IE, and it's intended to be cross-browser, so now that it's open source, it may start to work in $YOUR_FAVOURITE_NON_TTY_BROWSER. Let me know what you think.
Ian
Since we're already well OT, how would you pronounce virii? When I read it and the writer means "more than one virus", I usually "hear" viri in my head (two syllables: vie-rye), but if virii is the plural of virius, then I suppose virii would sound like radii: veer-ree-eye, no?
Ian
Although I agree with the general sentiment of your post, did you notice that you responded to someone with a 4-digit ID? Of course, you posted AC, so there's no way of knowing how long you've been around, but MadMan2 has been here for longer than 99% of Slashdot.
Ian
I'm neither a lawyer, nor an American... But I think the answer would/might depend on the similarity between (x,y,z) and (a,b,c). Without having RTFA, the comments suggest that the patent covers updating software through a menu-driven system, or somesuch. There's plenty of ways to update software, but even if I use a different menuing library to implement my updater, I'm infringing on this patent because of the menu "procedure"--I can't avoid it just because I use a unique menuing algorithm....
You're right, there's no universially usable UI. However, there are some interfaces out there (I can't think of any off the top of my head) that are universially unusable (or nearly). I am learning UI design by doing it, and one thing I've learned is that it's easy to slip into an inside-out design mode that leads to absolutly awful UIs. What I mean is that it's easy to think of the application in terms of the work it has to do, and then design the interface from that perspective, rather than thinking about what the user wants to do, implement the UI that way, and then figure out how to coax the application into doing what the user wants. Of course, a usability study is probably necessary to really fine-tune a UI to make it really intuitive, but before you spend time observing real users, it's worth the effort to do a thought experiment and pretend to observe users. It sounds wacky when I "say it out loud" like that, but it really works.
Ian
How'd you put the accented characters in your post? I've tried before, but /. strips out the &...; entities.
To make an offtopic Gentoo-plug, the portage system checks MD5 sums of the downloaded source and won't continue with the install if the MD5 doesn't match up.
Can anyone tell me why this MD5 thing is considered secure, though? I realise it sounds good, and I was told once that a compromised source mirror was discovered by a Gentoo user whose MD5s didn't match, but if you can manage to hack into a server and upload some tainted source files, what's to stop you from uploading some tainted MD5/gpg signatures, too?
Ian
I don't have WINE installed on my system, or the time to install and configure it, but since WINE re-implements the Windows API, wouldn't it have the function that Mozilla/IE/Word call to execute shell: URLs? Has anybody tested this vulnerability in WINE? Does anybody care what the results are?
Ian
AFAIK Canadians pay a tax of sorts to the local recording industry on the purchase of every medium capable of recording music (hard drive, CD-RWs, etc.). It's a certain number of cents per megabyte, or something. I think someone told me once that the medium has to be empty to be subject to the tax, though, so selling iPods with a song on them would exempt them from the tax. Not sure if that's true....
Ian
Recently, I have seen quite a few posts to Slashdot claiming that the poster has to keep IE for a few key sites that are only supported in IE. Can you list (some of) yours? I run a Linux distro, and have no IE, so all my browsing has to work in Firefox, or I don't see it, but I haven't run into a site that isn't supported by Firefox in a longer time than I can remember. Perhaps I just limit myself to too little of the web.
Ian
This is hilarious.
One nitpick though. Regardless of whether or not you agree with RMS on the whole GNU/Linux thing, Linus doesn't even have to enter the debate most of the time because, AFAIK, he rarely bothers himself with the GNU part of GNU/Linux--he is, after all, the Benevolent Dictator For Life of the kernel, not the associated operating system. In other words, when Linus says "Linux" you can usually be sure that he's actually referring to the kernel, which RMS himself would (or should, if he's consistent, and I'd have to say he's consistent) refer to as Linux, not GNU/Linux. The reason for this ramble is that I wouldn't have put Linus in your chart, because he doesn't seem (to me) to talk about GNU/Linux very often, by any name.
Ian
Yeah, that helped a lot. Thanks for the pleasant, polite answer.
Now, I have another question. Has the RIAA ever satisfied these "new", more strict requirements in any of their 3000+ lawsuits? What I mean is, now that they have to go to court and convince a judge that some crime has actually occurred behind a given IP address, rather than just getting a rubber stamp, have they successfully extracted a real person's identity from the associated ISP and then sued that person? Or do these John Doe lawsuits die in the courts before anybody figures out who John Doe actually is?
Slightly Less Clueless
Maybe this has been answered before, but nothing in the 3+ modded questions even alludes to it.
What the hell is the point in filing 482 John Doe lawsuits? Or 3000+ for that matter?
I mean, ignoring the usual debate over whether or not they should be filing any lawsuits, and just assuming they're in the right, why the hell are they doing it this way? Isn't there precendent to say that the RIAA can't force ISPs to reveal the name of the person behind a given IP address? How do you extract money from a 32-bit number? How do you instill fear in a 32-bit number? Am I missing something?
Clueless
Yeah, supporting Netscape 4.7 would probably make me murderous, too. JavaScript as a language is actually really nice. It's object-oriented, but the type system is very flexible (they're aren't really any classes, per se, they're all "prototypes"), functions are objects, so you can pass them around, and closures are possible, which gives you lots of power. I agree that differences between browser implementations can cause some grief, but we've been able to abstract away most of those differences, so there isn't a single line of code in the entire code base that makes any reference to the browser string. Of course, this means that if you try to use the latest version of Konqueror that I tried, things just blow up, because we assume your browser can handle our app, and that version of Konq can't, but we're developing for a captive audience, and we can almost dictate browser versions, so that's been a bit of a saving grace. One nice thing is that all the developers work on GNU/Linux, so it has to work in Moz for us to be able to develop, but the users all use IE, so it has to work there for us to sell it. This dichotomy (did I use that right?) has dictated that our framework must be cross-browser. If our code was littered with
I think we would have instigated a mass suicide a long time ago, but since we have almost no code like that, and since all such code is hidden in the equivalent of "library code", making new screens, or new functionality is pretty straight forward. I find the productivity to be pretty high, and the library has only been in development since August of 2003. Of course, I'm biased since I was one of the pilot developers, but the opinions of my coworkers seem to at least align with mine, even if they're not quite as enthusiastic.Ian
It's not exactly sockets, but you can do an awful lot with the XmlHttpRequest object. Microsoft did it first, I think, and Mozilla has a complete clone. Check out the XulPlanet documentation, the Mozilla documentation, the Microsoft documentation or this tutorial called Using the XML HTTP Request Object
The XmlHttpRequest object is poorly named. Really you're just making an HTTP request, and if the response happens to be XML, there are convenience functions for getting a fully-parsed DOM view of the document. If the response is anything else (plain text, JavaScript, Perl, HTML, etc.) you can do what you want with it, including calling eval() on it from a JavaScript script. You can do synchronous (blocking) or asynchronous (non-blocking) calls to your web server, and either be notified of completion by a callback for non-blocking calls, or just treat it like a function call for blocking calls. It's quite handy, and we have a project at work that makes extensive use of this technique. We have a "thick" or "rich" client application that runs in the web browser. Our client looks like a native application--it has table widgets, with clickable headers that resort the columns, it has a tree widget that looks like the tree in Windows Explorer, it supports drag-and-drop and custom context-menus, and if you open our application in a chrome-free browser window, it's almost possible to forget it's not native (the speed is usually what gives it away, the GUI is a little sluggish...). It works equally well in Mozilla, Firefox, IE 5.5+, and Netscape 7.1+ on Windows 9x, 2000, XP, and many flavours of GNU/Linux (tested on Gentoo and Redhat 7.3, and 8.0 using GNOME, KDE, and some kind of *Box wm). Well, "equally well" is a bit of a stretch. IE's implementation of the DOM is dog slow, so some things run a bit faster in the Gecko-based browsers, but all functionality is equally available in all the configurations listed above. We've managed to stay standards-compliant for the most part, and have abstracted away the quirks in IE, so as soon as Konqueror, Opera and $YOUR_FAVOURITE_BROWSER fully support JavaScript 1.5, DOM 2.0, and CSS 2.0, our app will work in your browser, too. (I don't know which parts these browsers are missing, so maybe our app already works there.)
The only remaining hurdle is to convince management that it should be open-sourced so that other people can use it, too. If you can't wait, you might want to check out SourceForge. There are some other widget kits available for building browser-based apps. We chose not to go with them because, at the time, they were too Alpha-ish, and we disagreed with some design decisions. Our decision not to use those projects has not been revisited for a while though, now that we are rather comitted to our in-house implementation, so things may have improved significantly since the last time I had a look.
Also, if you're going to actually build any significant JavaScript apps (we have more than 40k loc that turns out to be more than 1 meg of JavaScript to download), I highly recommend JSDoc. The main developer, Gabriel, has been very responsive and helpful, and the documentation that his scripts produce is excellent. Especially considering he builds JSDoc in his spare time, I can't compliment his work enough. Now that our codebase is too large for me to keep it all in my head, the API has saved a lot of my time.
Ian
I should have been more specific when I called bullshit. I completely agree with what you've just said, and with the second half of your original post. Sorry for the confusion and the resulting unintended flamage on my part.
Ian
I'm gonna hafta call bullshit. I was raised in the Peel Board, which is one of the biggest boards of education in Ontario. I'm pretty sure the board used whatever the hell was in the rummage pile the day they went shopping for software. I've used Claris Works, Microsoft Works, Microsoft Office, WordPerfect, and a whole pile of other crap, depending on the year. Probably the Ontario Ministry has hit the next crest in its upgrade cycle and StarOffice was the cheapest, with the most features, or something. The last thing on anyone's mind was what students are most likely to be comfortable with.
Ian