"Again, save your bitches about the result -- I know it's ugly as fuck, but working with tables in MS products (1) has changed over releases and (2) IMO is easier than the competition [for simple operations - more complex operations shouldn't be done visually anyway]."
Seriously, I can't really comment on tables in MS because I totally chickened out from 4.23 layouts and tabulate my data in Excel with OLE. I found the table handling to start 'bizarre' and descend into 'surreal' with stops at 'fairly random behaviour' and 'making decisions for me'.
My word skills aren't exactly the best in the world, so I'll accept that YMMV.
"that coding for standards can save boku bucks in the here and now, in terms of bandwidth costs and in the costs of designing and maintaining sites."
The main argument of Jeff's book is that of bandwidth...and it depends what you're paying for bandwidth and the number of visitors, but that's what sold me on CSS a couple of years ago.
Trouble is that margin of bandwidth savings can be swallowed by a single JPG.
"If people start coding for the standards-complient browsers instead of IE, people might realize what they're missing out on."
Customers and money, you mean?
The sad thing is that standards-compliant doesn't pay the rent, and there are a large number of us trying to create standards compliant while trying to earn a living. It's a difficult balance to trade off, and after _two_ years of struggling and quietly putting in CSS whereever possible, my boss starts asking about it.
Hoo-bloody-ray.
There's a chasm yawning between commercial reality and a dream of standards compliance that some of us have been trying to bridge, but the real benefits will only come when;
Governments start to _demand_ standards compliance.
Other devices start to reach critical mass in the electronics market.
Until that point, there will be no compelling reason for the vast quantity of designers to do anything but design for IE, especially under todays squeezed budgets. All 'we' can do is try our best to convert the PHBs slowly and steadily by telling them the upsides. And there's no bloody way you'll get a user that doesn't patch their OS to change browser.
I'm glad you got a funny out of it, because it wasn't accurate;
"Word is king, innovation slows to a trickle. The Word you use today is like the Word you used half-a-decade ago."
Thank Eris that's the case. For one thing I use about 10% of Word's features, and I'm mainly going back to text for documentation because you can't beat it for cross-platform support.
Word 6, BTW, can be found called 'Wordpad' without a bunch of the cruft.
"The Visual IDEs are king, innovation slows to a trickle."
Althogh I'm giggling when I say this...'.NET'? It's a significant change from VS6.0
"Monopolies traditionally stagnate as often as they can get away with."
Now this is actually true, but it's one of the bigger problems endemic to business; resting on your laurels is one of the sure ways to spend a significant amount of time checking spreadsheets to see which poor saps collect their cards.
"The Browser Wars are certainly not over yet...they are just being postponed for a little while.:P"
They're over. All the major browser manufacturers got around a table to discuss the problems they had with compliance and started to comply with the _standards_ laid down by the w3C, but didn't _fully_ comply in all cases.
Microsoft's announcement that they'd stop developing IE6 came as a bit of a kick in the teeth for people that were looking forward to table-less CSS because it's still bugged.
You may recall that the original 'browser wars' had more to do with people wibbling off into the sunset with proprietory extensions to the then mythical HTML 3.0 standard (It was never really formalised) than trying to garner a market share at the time.
"Maybe said developers will start coding more standards-compliant webpages."
Actually, I do. The main problem is that the customer throws a fit if the page doesn't display 'correctly' in a browser with the largest market share, which means you end up compromising the stylesheets and markup to please them, usually squeezing your budgets because you're competing with 'HTML 4.01 transitionals'.
So please don't blame developers; we've been badgering MS on regular occasions to fix their browser to match the recommendations that they helped to write in the first place.
"How many times does this need to be pointed out?"
Many, many more.:oP
"It was Gabe's e-mail that was hacked. The machine containing that source wasn't on the net."
Then at first glances he was 'storing' a third of the source code in his webmail folders?
How about the recent reports that there's a leaked version of the entire game doing the rounds? You'd need access to the source tree to do that, surely?
Accepted, although I believe part of my incredulity is still this problem of people having a fairly lax approach towards security, particularly in high profile companies.
"And how is this different than the developers of OpenBSD, Apache, Samba and other developers?"
They're open source, and it's not considered the end of the world if you see theirs.
Valve's implementations of engines, physics, etc would be the selling points 'behind the scenes' so to speak. That is if the leaked source is usable and not around simply for bragging rights.
I think 2003/2004 will be remembered as the years that the gaming industry went 'dirty' though....
Doom 3 and Half Life 2 do seem to be going head to head at the moment...hmm.
"Well, before you start blasting Valve, why don't you actually read up on the hack? It was a buffer overflow in the Outlook preview pane that allowed the hacker to install custom versions of RemoteAnywhere."
Alledgedly.
And when was that exploit patched in Outlook Express?
I think it's perfectly justifiable to have a giggle at Valve because that's the kind of schoolboy error that companies are not supposed to fall victim to, especially software companies.
"A shame. Still, a custom written trojan made against Valve to target their system and get the code/data of the game isn't something you see everyday."
I've read the accounts and I still can't see the point behind a 'custom' written trojan if they'd managed to install several keyloggers on machines. Not to piddle on Valve's bonfire, but something stinks to high heaven if they don't patch Outlook Express, run heuristic checking and/or have sufficient nous to make sure that they don't connect production servers to the internet.
While I feel a certain amount of sympathy, the whole thing has the feel of an April fools gag.
In short, I can't really believe that this happened in the way described.
"They probably probed Valve to check what exploits would or wouldn't work"
Unless they're really competent, there's a backtrace to follow, but it comes back to the same thing; why was the development server connected to the internet? I know that most game companies run a VPN between offices, but open internet access? Gabe was using Webmail? WTF?
"What if it turns out that some independent organization hasn't *done* the hard numbers on replying ? What if it can't be proven via a study that replying with an unsubscribe doesn't put you on yet another list ?"
One of the things I've been considering for a while is that this is one of those problems that almost steps into the world of quantum electrodynamics simply because the act of observation can change the outcome.
The point is that you'll never see a definitive answer on the subject, but a rough analogy of my argument was that while you won't die everytime you run across a road without looking, it's better to look rather than 'play the percentages'.
Minor point that got exploded by Rogerborg petulantly demanding peer reviewed papers only.;)
"You put Microsoft Secure Computing before your night of passion with Christine Aguilera? Your priorities are whacked, man!"
It's sorted into the likelyhood of it happening, mon frere, rather than in my desire of it happening. That's a completely separate list that I would produce, but it was subpoenaed by the courts over some 'injunction' or another.
Kylie has absolutely no sense of humour, despite her elfin perfection.
"A dissident is someone who disagree with someone you disagree with and a terrorist is someone disagreeing with you. In the same way, a freedomfighter is someone fighting an oppresive regime you don't like, while a rebel is someone fighting an oppresive regime you do like."
Funny thing is that the world governments tend to try and tell people that this is an objective decision when it's entirely subjective and tends to depend on who's paying for the ideological dissemination of information.
"It's funny to see how hysterical people are about child porn, and how "underground" it is portrayed in the media. But yet relatively public networks such as edonkey has lots of the "pre-teen" material. It's not like it would take a heroic detective skills to raid some of the houses of people who are distributing it..."
Of course, there is the complete lack of advertising standards on peer-to-peer networks meaning that occasionally the 'teen miss takes on hockey team' is actually a geriatric donkey-frightener taking a double-ender without her teeth in.
Personally I think the discovery of that on my hard drive would be more socially damaging.
You could say the same about anything the W3c outputs, but yes, sendmail is a standard. Like ASCII it may not be the best standard, but it's a standard. You can use anything you wish, which is the beauty of the whole enchilada, but unless you have a seriously large number of machines to administer, you mind want to consider scaling a change to another MTA from ol' sendmail.
"Sendmail, promiscuous relay for all"
Exchange is as bad if you don't set up authentication. Hell, any SMTP server is as bad if you don't set up *some* form of authentication, but I guess that mentioning that would have stopped your anti-sendmail troll.
"indecipherable rules file"
Assuming everyone else is as incompetent as yourself is a dangerous trap to fall into.
Fine. Here, have some candy and stop annoying the adults.
The problem is that spreading this kind of FUD is fine because it keep everyone from punting their email address around with gay abandon. All of a sudden the average joe user thinks, 'Hey, my email address has value to someone.'
The more important thing to ask is if anyone honours the unsubscribe links. I know that all of the lists I've written (double opt in, etc) and the lists I'm subscribed to do, but unsolicited email is coming from a value-added list that someone's bought or spidered. I'll be buggered if I *ask* to be removed from a list that I didn't even know I belonged to without solid assurances that it would get back to the root source.
"I challenge anyone here to cite any quantative evidence"
I run several emails accounts; one is ultimately public and receives around forty spams a day...another goes out to friends and people who know that the 'forward' button is a dangerous tool. The second receives No spam.
I know it's anecdotal, but FFS, go give it a try for yourself.
"If everyone quit whining and installed one of these tools, nobody would get spam, and the spammers would be out of business."
Deary, deary.
You obviously aren't seeing the sharp end of the wedge and the people trying desperately to increase both the false positive rate and therefore the value of these tools. It is like an arms race, and anyone who has even approached the subject knows that arms races have no end. Better to simply slap a lawsuit on trading entities that use spam as a sales vector and drive the spammers out of business by cutting their food supply.
"It seems like the ultimate in arrogant bad judgment for a TLD registrar to thumb their nose at the agency that MADE them a TLD registrar."
You mean in the similar way that the authority that made them a TLD registrar closed it's doors and started electing people to it's own board under some very strange circumstances? Hmm. A pattern may be emerging.
"ICANN has already called on VeriSign to suspend Site Finder pending a review of the system, but VeriSign rejected that request."
The functional equivalent of shouting 'Stop! Or I'll shout stop again!'.
At the moment it's down to people firewalling and patching their BIND installs to do the job that the increasing meeting's bound and lethargic ICANN is supposed to, and I quote, 'In addition, ICANN coordinates the stable operation of the Internet's root server system.'
Slashdot Mirror
"Again, save your bitches about the result -- I know it's ugly as fuck, but working with tables in MS products (1) has changed over releases and (2) IMO is easier than the competition [for simple operations - more complex operations shouldn't be done visually anyway]."
Seriously, I can't really comment on tables in MS because I totally chickened out from 4.23 layouts and tabulate my data in Excel with OLE. I found the table handling to start 'bizarre' and descend into 'surreal' with stops at 'fairly random behaviour' and 'making decisions for me'.
My word skills aren't exactly the best in the world, so I'll accept that YMMV.
"I was ordered to remove the CSS and replace it with the mess of inline font tags and other such nonsense."
Name and shame, bro. That betrays the idiocy that sometimes infects management from time to time.
"that coding for standards can save boku bucks in the here and now, in terms of bandwidth costs and in the costs of designing and maintaining sites."
The main argument of Jeff's book is that of bandwidth...and it depends what you're paying for bandwidth and the number of visitors, but that's what sold me on CSS a couple of years ago.
Trouble is that margin of bandwidth savings can be swallowed by a single JPG.
Customers and money, you mean?
The sad thing is that standards-compliant doesn't pay the rent, and there are a large number of us trying to create standards compliant while trying to earn a living. It's a difficult balance to trade off, and after _two_ years of struggling and quietly putting in CSS whereever possible, my boss starts asking about it.
Hoo-bloody-ray.
There's a chasm yawning between commercial reality and a dream of standards compliance that some of us have been trying to bridge, but the real benefits will only come when;
- Governments start to _demand_ standards compliance.
- Other devices start to reach critical mass in the electronics market.
Until that point, there will be no compelling reason for the vast quantity of designers to do anything but design for IE, especially under todays squeezed budgets. All 'we' can do is try our best to convert the PHBs slowly and steadily by telling them the upsides. And there's no bloody way you'll get a user that doesn't patch their OS to change browser.I'm glad you got a funny out of it, because it wasn't accurate;
"Word is king, innovation slows to a trickle. The Word you use today is like the Word you used half-a-decade ago."
Thank Eris that's the case. For one thing I use about 10% of Word's features, and I'm mainly going back to text for documentation because you can't beat it for cross-platform support.
Word 6, BTW, can be found called 'Wordpad' without a bunch of the cruft.
"The Visual IDEs are king, innovation slows to a trickle."
Althogh I'm giggling when I say this...'.NET'? It's a significant change from VS6.0
"Monopolies traditionally stagnate as often as they can get away with."
Now this is actually true, but it's one of the bigger problems endemic to business; resting on your laurels is one of the sure ways to spend a significant amount of time checking spreadsheets to see which poor saps collect their cards.
"The Browser Wars are certainly not over yet...they are just being postponed for a little while. :P"
They're over. All the major browser manufacturers got around a table to discuss the problems they had with compliance and started to comply with the _standards_ laid down by the w3C, but didn't _fully_ comply in all cases.
Microsoft's announcement that they'd stop developing IE6 came as a bit of a kick in the teeth for people that were looking forward to table-less CSS because it's still bugged.
You may recall that the original 'browser wars' had more to do with people wibbling off into the sunset with proprietory extensions to the then mythical HTML 3.0 standard (It was never really formalised) than trying to garner a market share at the time.
"Maybe said developers will start coding more standards-compliant webpages."
Actually, I do. The main problem is that the customer throws a fit if the page doesn't display 'correctly' in a browser with the largest market share, which means you end up compromising the stylesheets and markup to please them, usually squeezing your budgets because you're competing with 'HTML 4.01 transitionals'.
So please don't blame developers; we've been badgering MS on regular occasions to fix their browser to match the recommendations that they helped to write in the first place.
"How many times does this need to be pointed out?"
:oP
Many, many more.
"It was Gabe's e-mail that was hacked. The machine containing that source wasn't on the net."
Then at first glances he was 'storing' a third of the source code in his webmail folders?
How about the recent reports that there's a leaked version of the entire game doing the rounds? You'd need access to the source tree to do that, surely?
"That's what happened according to Gabe himself."
Accepted, although I believe part of my incredulity is still this problem of people having a fairly lax approach towards security, particularly in high profile companies.
"Get on kazaa, note that REAL source is available."
Is that the one with 'REAL' after it rather than the fifteen other trojans, four 'is fake' text files and the one proclaiming that it's also a 'teen'?
"Having a KVM would only be acceptable if the login script set your desktop background to a bright orange/red bitmap and a one-minute screensaver."
A variation on the same idea is something I use for Putty sessions; local servers use orange on purple.
Try forgetting which server you're on for that colour combination...
"And how is this different than the developers of OpenBSD, Apache, Samba and other developers?"
They're open source, and it's not considered the end of the world if you see theirs.
Valve's implementations of engines, physics, etc would be the selling points 'behind the scenes' so to speak. That is if the leaked source is usable and not around simply for bragging rights.
I think 2003/2004 will be remembered as the years that the gaming industry went 'dirty' though....
Doom 3 and Half Life 2 do seem to be going head to head at the moment...hmm.
"Well, before you start blasting Valve, why don't you actually read up on the hack? It was a buffer overflow in the Outlook preview pane that allowed the hacker to install custom versions of RemoteAnywhere."
Alledgedly.
And when was that exploit patched in Outlook Express?
I think it's perfectly justifiable to have a giggle at Valve because that's the kind of schoolboy error that companies are not supposed to fall victim to, especially software companies.
"A shame. Still, a custom written trojan made against Valve to target their system and get the code/data of the game isn't something you see everyday."
I've read the accounts and I still can't see the point behind a 'custom' written trojan if they'd managed to install several keyloggers on machines. Not to piddle on Valve's bonfire, but something stinks to high heaven if they don't patch Outlook Express, run heuristic checking and/or have sufficient nous to make sure that they don't connect production servers to the internet.
While I feel a certain amount of sympathy, the whole thing has the feel of an April fools gag.
In short, I can't really believe that this happened in the way described.
"They probably probed Valve to check what exploits would or wouldn't work"
Unless they're really competent, there's a backtrace to follow, but it comes back to the same thing; why was the development server connected to the internet? I know that most game companies run a VPN between offices, but open internet access? Gabe was using Webmail? WTF?
"I'm not interested in your unrelated anecdotes. I too have an account that receives no spam, but what relevance does this have?"
You're absolutely right, I had no right to offer an opinion in your thread.
Perhaps it would be safer if you gave me your email address, then I could run submissions by you in the future?
G'wan?
"What if it turns out that some independent organization hasn't *done* the hard numbers on replying ? What if it can't be proven via a study that replying with an unsubscribe doesn't put you on yet another list ?"
;)
One of the things I've been considering for a while is that this is one of those problems that almost steps into the world of quantum electrodynamics simply because the act of observation can change the outcome.
The point is that you'll never see a definitive answer on the subject, but a rough analogy of my argument was that while you won't die everytime you run across a road without looking, it's better to look rather than 'play the percentages'.
Minor point that got exploded by Rogerborg petulantly demanding peer reviewed papers only.
"You put Microsoft Secure Computing before your night of passion with Christine Aguilera? Your priorities are whacked, man!"
It's sorted into the likelyhood of it happening, mon frere, rather than in my desire of it happening. That's a completely separate list that I would produce, but it was subpoenaed by the courts over some 'injunction' or another.
Kylie has absolutely no sense of humour, despite her elfin perfection.
"A dissident is someone who disagree with someone you disagree with and a terrorist is someone disagreeing with you. In the same way, a freedomfighter is someone fighting an oppresive regime you don't like, while a rebel is someone fighting an oppresive regime you do like."
Funny thing is that the world governments tend to try and tell people that this is an objective decision when it's entirely subjective and tends to depend on who's paying for the ideological dissemination of information.
eg 'Sandinistas' - 'Freedom Fighters'; 'Al Queda' - 'Terrorists'
"It's funny to see how hysterical people are about child porn, and how "underground" it is portrayed in the media. But yet relatively public networks such as edonkey has lots of the "pre-teen" material. It's not like it would take a heroic detective skills to raid some of the houses of people who are distributing it..."
Of course, there is the complete lack of advertising standards on peer-to-peer networks meaning that occasionally the 'teen miss takes on hockey team' is actually a geriatric donkey-frightener taking a double-ender without her teeth in.
Personally I think the discovery of that on my hard drive would be more socially damaging.
"So then we must develop spam tools that do not subject themselves to high false positive training =)"
I'll pencil it in for after over-unity power generation, Microsoft secure computing and my night of passion with Christine Aguilera.
"Are they even relevant except for inertia?"
You could say the same about anything the W3c outputs, but yes, sendmail is a standard. Like ASCII it may not be the best standard, but it's a standard. You can use anything you wish, which is the beauty of the whole enchilada, but unless you have a seriously large number of machines to administer, you mind want to consider scaling a change to another MTA from ol' sendmail.
"Sendmail, promiscuous relay for all"
Exchange is as bad if you don't set up authentication. Hell, any SMTP server is as bad if you don't set up *some* form of authentication, but I guess that mentioning that would have stopped your anti-sendmail troll.
"indecipherable rules file"
Assuming everyone else is as incompetent as yourself is a dangerous trap to fall into.
"I'm calling bullshit on both of them."
Fine. Here, have some candy and stop annoying the adults.
The problem is that spreading this kind of FUD is fine because it keep everyone from punting their email address around with gay abandon. All of a sudden the average joe user thinks, 'Hey, my email address has value to someone.'
The more important thing to ask is if anyone honours the unsubscribe links. I know that all of the lists I've written (double opt in, etc) and the lists I'm subscribed to do, but unsolicited email is coming from a value-added list that someone's bought or spidered. I'll be buggered if I *ask* to be removed from a list that I didn't even know I belonged to without solid assurances that it would get back to the root source.
"I challenge anyone here to cite any quantative evidence"
I run several emails accounts; one is ultimately public and receives around forty spams a day...another goes out to friends and people who know that the 'forward' button is a dangerous tool. The second receives No spam.
I know it's anecdotal, but FFS, go give it a try for yourself.
"If everyone quit whining and installed one of these tools, nobody would get spam, and the spammers would be out of business."
Deary, deary.
You obviously aren't seeing the sharp end of the wedge and the people trying desperately to increase both the false positive rate and therefore the value of these tools. It is like an arms race, and anyone who has even approached the subject knows that arms races have no end. Better to simply slap a lawsuit on trading entities that use spam as a sales vector and drive the spammers out of business by cutting their food supply.
Regarding the study.
Register followup
The study itself (pdf)
"It seems like the ultimate in arrogant bad judgment for a TLD registrar to thumb their nose at the agency that MADE them a TLD registrar."
You mean in the similar way that the authority that made them a TLD registrar closed it's doors and started electing people to it's own board under some very strange circumstances? Hmm. A pattern may be emerging.
"ICANN has already called on VeriSign to suspend Site Finder pending a review of the system, but VeriSign rejected that request."
The functional equivalent of shouting 'Stop! Or I'll shout stop again!'.
At the moment it's down to people firewalling and patching their BIND installs to do the job that the increasing meeting's bound and lethargic ICANN is supposed to, and I quote, 'In addition, ICANN coordinates the stable operation of the Internet's root server system.'