What is it with people having some sort of fetish for putting EVERYTHING into the frigging browser?
This problem starts, believe it or not, with certain Web designers. Some people out there will not be able to sleep at night if you and me actually control the way their pages are displayed or their Web-sites used. The Flash obsession, for example, starts with the desire to prevent you from saving videos, and it continues with an absolute necessity of making you watch ads. Me and you understand that it would be elementary to have a browser plugin that detects Web-links to video files/streams and starts an external player. The truth is, clicking on a link to a video is so easy, no one needs a plugin for that. A program like VLC is far superior to any browser gizmo with respect to controlling the video playback. On a phone form-factor, playing back inside the browser window is simply INSANE. Indeed, linking is the simplest solution, and the one with the least overhead, and also the one that was working as far back as there were video players and Web browsers, and, of course, the one still implemented on everyfriggingWeb-sitenotdoneby dicks.
I am afraid that HTML5 is not going to change the landscape. People who have a monopoly on serving bits (or just desire it) will persist in using proprietary software and secret protocols. HTML5 will be worse than useless to them for the reason stated above. IMHO, Mozilla and W3C are mostly wasting everyone's time with the video tag. Other tags, such as the ones for Web-forms, seem far more useful. And all of this superfluous BS distracts people from converting over to XHTML, which would actually improve Web documents' quality and compatibility.
Yeah that was kind of my point: if we need to drag in Java, then processing a byte stream in simple loop is actually easier and faster. I don't think the author described a good RE application; he was probably thinking of a different problem.
How about the problem from TFA: "replace every third character in a 100,000-line file, except when it's followed by the numeral 4". Since TFA does not qualify anything else, we have to assume that the file is a binary file with 999999 new line characters, and line lengths can be as low as zero.
Do you really think that taking desktop apps and shoving the on a phone will make for a good user experience?
Yes. When I run LibreOffice on my phone, 800x480 screen, I find it quite usable. Which means that UI—in this case, the default LO UI designed for a big screen and a mouse—is not a problem. Hiding the menu and leaving a single toolbar will produce an office suite that is a pleasure to use on a small screen, as long as you have a real keyboard. I know why Word would be suboptimal: the ribbon would take half of the screen while keeping 75% of its buttons hidden. But it's hard for me to take your baseless criticism seriously while actually using LO on a phone. And if your phone does not have a real keyboard or does not respond to a stylus, I am sorry, you've been had.
"the last 10% is 90% of the work"
Not in this case. The audio works, it's just glitchy in certain configurations, nothing a hardware testing department cannot solve. X may be monstrous in principle and a resource hog, but it manages to work on phones made in 2009, and Wayland already has a demo implementation and support from Canonical and Intel, among others. It really is a few kinks, and they only really matter if you want to play Angry Birds. And again, I don't give a shit about games. They are ruled by the same principles as fashion. The bulk of them will forever remain proprietary, with deep trench lines dividing the market. That granted, I refuse to accept a rod up my ass (even if it belongs to Steve Jobs, that sexy devil) when all I want is a very compact computer with wireless Internet.
Cell-phone form factor can run full-blown GNU/Linux today. N900 was doing it in 2009. There are no more legitimate, hardware-related excuses for OS fragmentation: it exists solely because it pays to lock your customer into a proprietary platform. (This strategy pays off because a lot of otherwise smart people go stupid when they enter a store, and the reason for the latter is ads, but that's besides the point.) Don't be confused by Android being open-source: every Android-based phone on the market today is a proprietary platform. If official kernel security updates can brick your phone just because you dared to gain root, it's a proprietary platform. If your phone cannot work without proprietary drivers in the kernel, it's a proprietary platform.
If cell-phone makers wanted to express good will towards their customers, they would throw some cash at improving Linux graphics and sound and released a lean, feature-full, and completely free cell-phone OS. We already have Wayland and Pulse Audio. Sans a few kinks, Linux is ready to go as an entertainment platform. They could still lock it up and sell it to idiots, and the idiots would still buy the locked-up versions (it's 2011 and people still buy Windows and OS X to fill spreadsheets, case closed). This would be cheaper for everyone, there would be no fragmentation outside of gaming, and everyone would have the productivity apps like PDF reader, ODT editor, Web browser. All these apps are already written. They are free, stable, and they were running for years in GNU/Linux and *BSD.
I am disappointed in Nokia. I really, really like N900 but now I feel like I voted with my wallet and got bitch-slapped. I am seriously thinking about getting a tiny laptop with no Windows tax, a USB 3g (4g if later) adapter with open-source Linux drivers provided by manufacturer (yes, there are a bunch of them on the market), and ditching this whole cell-phone mess. And if you ever need to contact me, be it emergency, work, or leisure, write me a frigging email or join my XMPP server.
This is certainly true if you are concerned with the well-being of all main-street guys, in all the countries involved, but probably has exceptions if you disregard all but the winners.
True, but vulnerabilities can and will be patched, as long as the drivers are free. Autorun, on the other hand, is a feature for stupid, by the stupid, and there's no patch against stupidity.
God said, "the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh" [JPS]. That's pretty narrow, and he could still flood most of us, or destroy all flesh some other way.
Even young Earthers agree to certain climate change events (global floods of Noah).
This is funny. A perfect example of a global and disastrous climate change, caused by humans
persisting in their errors. It is funny that many of the same people who read Bible the most manage
to learn from it the least.
The point is to advertise YouTube, and therefore Adobe. HTML5 my ass. Wouldn't it be cool if someone actually started a torrent with a Theora or WebM space video with sub-half-inch pixels? I couldn't even finish watching this one, it's a mess. You would think that a university could afford 20 kbps uplink for a month, and PhDs in engineering could figure out how to seed a torrent, but no. It has to be the shittiest quality imaginable, piped through Flash.
Yeah, it may be hard to find a retailer, but my point is, it's on the market, and it works with TMobile and AT&T.
Then why aren't there more notable Free games?
I was only talking about utility software, excluding pure entertainment (which, afaik, even RMS does not think has to be Free). And I definitely agree: art is primarily what makes games great, and art creation is not that much cheaper in the Free world—in fact, it costs exactly the same if it is original and not derived from other Free art. But I hope we will have more Free games in the future, as the Public Domain is now slowly recovering from nearly a century of not getting any new art. Artists are the ones who need to realize that the copyright law is unfair and that they must copyleft and monetize their art in ways that avoid intellectual monopoly and censorship.
It's not as bad as you say. There's just no demand. You can buy Nokia N900 today, and have a Debian-based GNU/Linux box in your pants that's also a superb, easy to use phone. It will cost you mere $600 (not that much worse compared to other phones when you reject the contract) for a lot of computing power, 30 GiB of SSD, and a huge screen. And since it doesn't come with a contract, you can start saving $40 per month with practically unlimited 3G (@ TMobile). You can run python even before rooting, and if you are really into it, you can install the freaking toolchain on the phone and compile your favorite C?? programs. I love it. But hey, you know what? No one else gives a shit. I am coming to realize that, by and large, people have no idea what the hell computers do and why running proprietary software is, frankly, insane. Sure, everyone has their own moral precepts, but people are actually so dim, they seem to be OK with being charged arm and leg for a bag which allegedly contains a cat. It is abundantly clear by now that Free software costs less to develop, is more reliable, and actually does what users want, and nothing else, but, again, no one gives a shit, because Stallman looks like a villain from a Brothers Grimm story, while Steve Jobs is the sexiest man ever to put on a black turtleneck, and even though he sells you overpriced pieces of turd, he is smart enough to use a VERY shiny wrapper.
You are talking out of your ass. Apple sneaked in a kill-switch into the iphone and admitted it after the fact back in 2008. They are freaking patenting it. If you don't think they sell it to you backdoored, you are just being insanely naive. But hey, that's how Apple makes money: their niche is stupid people.
They would hate to pull the plug, since this is how they make money. In fact, pretty much every businesses out there would also hate them, as a lot of commerce is done over Internet, and turning it off would be extremely disruptive. This power is only useful to censors and dictators, and will be hated by everyone else. The bill they need to pass should read the opposite: Internet access should be an inalienable right, and the government must make sure that every human being on USA soil has free unrestricted access all the time. I am surprised that the Fed is not already moving this way. They could spend as much money there as they do in DHS, and unlike in DHS, that money would actually buy useful things like infrastructure.
Great Firewall is a joke. Anyone who wants to, uses proxies. I set up Apache+https+CGIProxy on my residential connection while my friend was touring in China, and I just left it up. It is undetectable (sans the fact that an https connection is established), impossible to filter, and completely transparent to a client. Piece of cake.
I know next to nothing about the reality of K12, but from what you say, it sounds like the blame can be put everywhere. All of you, Americans, should first of all secure federal funding so that you can provide the same basic level of education to every American. I don't care if "it can't be done", it was done in other developed countries, and until voters and the administration come together on this one, you will continue shafting the poor, in defiance of the declaration of human rights. With the funding secured regardless of students' performance, your schools can actually start failing students who refuse to learn. And when a school or a district starts sucking for reasons other that students being lazy (as substantiated by unbiased auditors), you don't cut its funding: you shaft the educators responsible, be they teachers, principles, or board members. We can all benefit from recognizing that assigning blame is easy, but gets us nowhere. Instead we should simply model K12 after systems that seem to be more humane and more effective.
Slashdot Mirror
What is it with people having some sort of fetish for putting EVERYTHING into the frigging browser?
This problem starts, believe it or not, with certain Web designers. Some people out there will not be able to sleep at night if you and me actually control the way their pages are displayed or their Web-sites used. The Flash obsession, for example, starts with the desire to prevent you from saving videos, and it continues with an absolute necessity of making you watch ads. Me and you understand that it would be elementary to have a browser plugin that detects Web-links to video files/streams and starts an external player. The truth is, clicking on a link to a video is so easy, no one needs a plugin for that. A program like VLC is far superior to any browser gizmo with respect to controlling the video playback. On a phone form-factor, playing back inside the browser window is simply INSANE. Indeed, linking is the simplest solution, and the one with the least overhead, and also the one that was working as far back as there were video players and Web browsers, and, of course, the one still implemented on every frigging Web-site not done by dicks.
I am afraid that HTML5 is not going to change the landscape. People who have a monopoly on serving bits (or just desire it) will persist in using proprietary software and secret protocols. HTML5 will be worse than useless to them for the reason stated above. IMHO, Mozilla and W3C are mostly wasting everyone's time with the video tag. Other tags, such as the ones for Web-forms, seem far more useful. And all of this superfluous BS distracts people from converting over to XHTML, which would actually improve Web documents' quality and compatibility.
Yeah that was kind of my point: if we need to drag in Java, then processing a byte stream in simple loop is actually easier and faster. I don't think the author described a good RE application; he was probably thinking of a different problem.
How about the problem from TFA: "replace every third character in a 100,000-line file, except when it's followed by the numeral 4". Since TFA does not qualify anything else, we have to assume that the file is a binary file with 999999 new line characters, and line lengths can be as low as zero.
Do you really think that taking desktop apps and shoving the on a phone will make for a good user experience?
Yes. When I run LibreOffice on my phone, 800x480 screen, I find it quite usable. Which means that UI—in this case, the default LO UI designed for a big screen and a mouse—is not a problem. Hiding the menu and leaving a single toolbar will produce an office suite that is a pleasure to use on a small screen, as long as you have a real keyboard. I know why Word would be suboptimal: the ribbon would take half of the screen while keeping 75% of its buttons hidden. But it's hard for me to take your baseless criticism seriously while actually using LO on a phone. And if your phone does not have a real keyboard or does not respond to a stylus, I am sorry, you've been had.
"the last 10% is 90% of the work"
Not in this case. The audio works, it's just glitchy in certain configurations, nothing a hardware testing department cannot solve. X may be monstrous in principle and a resource hog, but it manages to work on phones made in 2009, and Wayland already has a demo implementation and support from Canonical and Intel, among others. It really is a few kinks, and they only really matter if you want to play Angry Birds. And again, I don't give a shit about games. They are ruled by the same principles as fashion. The bulk of them will forever remain proprietary, with deep trench lines dividing the market. That granted, I refuse to accept a rod up my ass (even if it belongs to Steve Jobs, that sexy devil) when all I want is a very compact computer with wireless Internet.
Cell-phone form factor can run full-blown GNU/Linux today. N900 was doing it in 2009. There are no more legitimate, hardware-related excuses for OS fragmentation: it exists solely because it pays to lock your customer into a proprietary platform. (This strategy pays off because a lot of otherwise smart people go stupid when they enter a store, and the reason for the latter is ads, but that's besides the point.) Don't be confused by Android being open-source: every Android-based phone on the market today is a proprietary platform. If official kernel security updates can brick your phone just because you dared to gain root, it's a proprietary platform. If your phone cannot work without proprietary drivers in the kernel, it's a proprietary platform.
If cell-phone makers wanted to express good will towards their customers, they would throw some cash at improving Linux graphics and sound and released a lean, feature-full, and completely free cell-phone OS. We already have Wayland and Pulse Audio. Sans a few kinks, Linux is ready to go as an entertainment platform. They could still lock it up and sell it to idiots, and the idiots would still buy the locked-up versions (it's 2011 and people still buy Windows and OS X to fill spreadsheets, case closed). This would be cheaper for everyone, there would be no fragmentation outside of gaming, and everyone would have the productivity apps like PDF reader, ODT editor, Web browser. All these apps are already written. They are free, stable, and they were running for years in GNU/Linux and *BSD.
I am disappointed in Nokia. I really, really like N900 but now I feel like I voted with my wallet and got bitch-slapped. I am seriously thinking about getting a tiny laptop with no Windows tax, a USB 3g (4g if later) adapter with open-source Linux drivers provided by manufacturer (yes, there are a bunch of them on the market), and ditching this whole cell-phone mess. And if you ever need to contact me, be it emergency, work, or leisure, write me a frigging email or join my XMPP server.
I agree. Burning paper is way more satisfying than telling a computer to forget.
Papyrus? Lucky you. My neighborhood cafe won't allow anything but runes on clay.
This is certainly true if you are concerned with the well-being of all main-street guys, in all the countries involved, but probably has exceptions if you disregard all but the winners.
Italics are bugged, can be fixed via Stylish.
True, but vulnerabilities can and will be patched, as long as the drivers are free. Autorun, on the other hand, is a feature for stupid, by the stupid, and there's no patch against stupidity.
God said, "the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh" [JPS]. That's pretty narrow, and he could still flood most of us, or destroy all flesh some other way.
Even young Earthers agree to certain climate change events (global floods of Noah).
This is funny. A perfect example of a global and disastrous climate change, caused by humans persisting in their errors. It is funny that many of the same people who read Bible the most manage to learn from it the least.
Also, WTH can't I use <i> for italic?
You can. You just can't see it without a Stylish hack like
i {font-style: italic !important;}
because /. is FUBAR.
The point is to advertise YouTube, and therefore Adobe. HTML5 my ass. Wouldn't it be cool if someone actually started a torrent with a Theora or WebM space video with sub-half-inch pixels? I couldn't even finish watching this one, it's a mess. You would think that a university could afford 20 kbps uplink for a month, and PhDs in engineering could figure out how to seed a torrent, but no. It has to be the shittiest quality imaginable, piped through Flash.
Yeah, it may be hard to find a retailer, but my point is, it's on the market, and it works with TMobile and AT&T.
Then why aren't there more notable Free games?
I was only talking about utility software, excluding pure entertainment (which, afaik, even RMS does not think has to be Free). And I definitely agree: art is primarily what makes games great, and art creation is not that much cheaper in the Free world—in fact, it costs exactly the same if it is original and not derived from other Free art. But I hope we will have more Free games in the future, as the Public Domain is now slowly recovering from nearly a century of not getting any new art. Artists are the ones who need to realize that the copyright law is unfair and that they must copyleft and monetize their art in ways that avoid intellectual monopoly and censorship.
It's not as bad as you say. There's just no demand. You can buy Nokia N900 today, and have a Debian-based GNU/Linux box in your pants that's also a superb, easy to use phone. It will cost you mere $600 (not that much worse compared to other phones when you reject the contract) for a lot of computing power, 30 GiB of SSD, and a huge screen. And since it doesn't come with a contract, you can start saving $40 per month with practically unlimited 3G (@ TMobile). You can run python even before rooting, and if you are really into it, you can install the freaking toolchain on the phone and compile your favorite C?? programs. I love it. But hey, you know what? No one else gives a shit. I am coming to realize that, by and large, people have no idea what the hell computers do and why running proprietary software is, frankly, insane. Sure, everyone has their own moral precepts, but people are actually so dim, they seem to be OK with being charged arm and leg for a bag which allegedly contains a cat. It is abundantly clear by now that Free software costs less to develop, is more reliable, and actually does what users want, and nothing else, but, again, no one gives a shit, because Stallman looks like a villain from a Brothers Grimm story, while Steve Jobs is the sexiest man ever to put on a black turtleneck, and even though he sells you overpriced pieces of turd, he is smart enough to use a VERY shiny wrapper.
The answer is they have not done either of these.
You are talking out of your ass. Apple sneaked in a kill-switch into the iphone and admitted it after the fact back in 2008. They are freaking patenting it. If you don't think they sell it to you backdoored, you are just being insanely naive. But hey, that's how Apple makes money: their niche is stupid people.
I believe bots are people too :)
How do you know there are two of us and not one, hiding behind two IDs?
"=" is a binary operator.
They would hate to pull the plug, since this is how they make money. In fact, pretty much every businesses out there would also hate them, as a lot of commerce is done over Internet, and turning it off would be extremely disruptive. This power is only useful to censors and dictators, and will be hated by everyone else. The bill they need to pass should read the opposite: Internet access should be an inalienable right, and the government must make sure that every human being on USA soil has free unrestricted access all the time. I am surprised that the Fed is not already moving this way. They could spend as much money there as they do in DHS, and unlike in DHS, that money would actually buy useful things like infrastructure.
Great Firewall is a joke. Anyone who wants to, uses proxies. I set up Apache+https+CGIProxy on my residential connection while my friend was touring in China, and I just left it up. It is undetectable (sans the fact that an https connection is established), impossible to filter, and completely transparent to a client. Piece of cake.
Very nice. I actually made a mistake: Black should be black. It works, but it's not kosher.
And after much cursing, I managed to kill the box on the left:
div.col_1 { display: none !important; }
section#firehose { margin-left: 0 !important; }
section#comments { margin-left: 1.5em !important; }
Nah. Now people will waste even more time trying to fix the bugs with Stylish hacks like these:
One-liner contrast:
#comments .oneline {background: #F5F5F5 !important;}
.oneline p {color: Black !important;}
.commentBody {color: Black !important;}
#comments
.oneline
Highlighting friends:
span.friend {
border-style: groove;
border-width: 2px;
background-color: #32CD32;
}
span.friend > a:link {
color: black !important;
margin-left: 1em !important;
margin-right: 1em !important;
}
I know next to nothing about the reality of K12, but from what you say, it sounds like the blame can be put everywhere. All of you, Americans, should first of all secure federal funding so that you can provide the same basic level of education to every American. I don't care if "it can't be done", it was done in other developed countries, and until voters and the administration come together on this one, you will continue shafting the poor, in defiance of the declaration of human rights. With the funding secured regardless of students' performance, your schools can actually start failing students who refuse to learn. And when a school or a district starts sucking for reasons other that students being lazy (as substantiated by unbiased auditors), you don't cut its funding: you shaft the educators responsible, be they teachers, principles, or board members. We can all benefit from recognizing that assigning blame is easy, but gets us nowhere. Instead we should simply model K12 after systems that seem to be more humane and more effective.