Specifically (from that document the parent post linked to):
Proper Use of the LEGO Trademark on a Web Site
If the LEGO trademark is used at all, it should always be used as an adjective, not as a noun. For example, say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGO BRICKS". Never say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGOs".Also, the trademark should appear in the same typeface as the surrounding text and should not be isolated or set apart from the surrounding text. In other words, the trademarks should not be emphasized or highlighted. Finally, the LEGO trademark should always appear with a ® symbol each time it is used.
Moz and W2K renders it as it was told to, which includes the fact that the guy has forced the window size so that it requires a scrollbar to display the last couple of pixels (more or less, depending on your font size)
I have to agree. I've been seriously trying to use openoffice over the last few weeks, and several times it has really #$%$#ed me off because of buggy features, to the point where I nearly gave up and went to use excel or word instead.
I found that when making a chart in the spreadsheet package that the undo list was very unreliable. If I made a few changes, then undid more than 1 or 2 of them, it would not go back to anything like what I had originally. Even if I reapplied (redo) the changes, ie, undo/undo/undo/redo/redo/redo, I didn't end up with what I started with.
Secondly, Mozilla is perhaps one of the biggest open source projects. A quick trip to bugzilla.mozilla.org will show bugs that have been waiting to be fixed for serveral *YEARS* now. Reading the comments on some of them, it's clear that there are some very strong egos involved. In several cases, where a large group of people want "x" changed, it simply doesn't happen because the developer doesn't believe in that same change. That's a very closed minded attitude for an open source project.
You can rant and rave about microsoft's shortcomings, but by and large, if you try and do something with their products, it will either work, or the app will crash. What doesn't often happen is that the function "sorta" works.
The fundamental problem is that Telecom NZ is a private company, and as such, is *required* to return a profit to its shareholders.
On one hand, people scream and moan about outrageous DSL pricing structures, but on the other, those people who have invested in the company absolutely love what it is doing to the value of that investment.
In addition, TCNZ is one of, if not the biggest, companies in the country. The government is quite understandably scared to step in and do anything, because of the economic ramifications of playing with the source of such a large part of their tax income stream.
I don't know if this is true of Telstra as well, but I suspect it is.
After just receiving yet another spam email from a former [insert poor country here] official asking for my personal help in moving their large sum of money, the first thing I thought of upon reading this article was that it's gotta be a scam.
Hello - I'm a [poor student] who has created a wonderful piece of free software used for [searching for files] and the [monolithic faceless corporation that everyone already hates] has just sued me, but in an out-of-court-settlement, we agreed to me transferring them my life savings of [believable amount]. Now I'm a [poor student] with no money, and I'm asking for [suckers] to help me out here and send in donations.
It smells strongly of that website a while back who cried foul when his webpage got slashdotted and he received the bill from his ISP for the incoming traffic.
blah blah blah.. change "Telstra" for "Telecom NZ", and you've got the New Zealand version.
It's funny, cause over here, Telstra (who bought Clear a few years ago and became TelstraClear) are the "saviours", and Telecom NZ are the incumbant monolithic faceless telecomms corporation who again happen to own all the infrastructure, and in Aussie, it's the same deal, but the other way around.
The keyboard itself doesn't get programmed.. however the keyboard driver can usually be configured to remap things. It has a table that coverts scancodes into ascii codes in any case, so changing things is just a matter of changing values in that table.
You're not the only person in the world that knows those keys. I can't remember the last time I used the close/maximise/minimise icons on the window.. I do everything with the keyboard
maximise - alt-space,x maximise - alt-space,n close - alt-f4
In addition, most applications allow you to move between sub windows opened within the current window with ctrl-f6, and to close them individually with ctrl-f4.
I just downloaded their protocol definitions and took a look - they differentiate kazaa and generic http by looking for the "user-agent: kazaa" line in the header.
HTTP is a layer 7 protocol.. and both IE and Kazza make HTTP requests to a host to retrieve a file, so on that basis, at layer 7, Kazaa, IE, Mozilla and a bunch of other apps all look the same in that they're all HTTP clients.
Having said that, I you could check for X-Kazaa-* tags in the header and differentiate them that way.. except X- tags shouldn't be treated as a reliable identifier because they are, by definition, not a standard...
Or you could go by the fact that browsing on a port other than 80 or 443 probably isn't going to be "normal" web browsing traffic.
It really depends on how much effort they put into analysing the packet/datagram/data.
Bonfire K has been vacant for 12201 days
<snip to get round the lameness filter>
Fort Awesome K has been vacant for 12201 days
Fort Awesome Minor has been vacant for 12201 days
Fort Awesome Major has been vacant for 12201 days
Uh.. they've been vacant for ~ 33 years ? I knew I shouldn't have been lining up waiting for the other toilets to free up!
In the vast majority of cases, it's simply not economic to release bug-free code.
1. Any programmer knows that 90% of the code is written in the first 90% of the time, and the other 10% of the code is written in the other 90% of the time. (no typo). That is to say, it takes a lot more time, effort, and hence money, to move a project from "working well" to "working perfectly".
2. Many software companies these days make very little profit on the 1.0 release of their software, and make huge amounts of money through ongoing support charges. Microsoft is a classic example of this type of company.
3. If you release a piece of software that works really well, does everything the users want, and never crashes or causes trouble, then you may as well pack up shop and go out of business quietly. The unfortunate truth is that nobody is going to buy version 2 if they can do everything they want with version 1, and they're not getting constantly frustrated by crashes. The only carrot you have in this situation is to think up some really great ideas for version 2 in order to encourage people to upgrade - In fact, some of those ideas may have been deliberately left out of version 1 just so that they could be added later. Version 3 is more difficult still, and version 5 is right out. By comparison - how many versions of office are we up to now ?
A notable except to this business model is the games writers. Companies like valve and id software consistantly produce very near to bug-free code that works well and generally impresses the masses.
In all the years since half-life was released, there have been relatively few patches and fixes, and many of those were to prevent ingenious new methods of cheating, or to add support for hardware that didn't exist when the game was first released. The unreal engine had a similar history.
People buy new games because they crave the excitement or challange of exploring and interacting with it. That's not something that could really be said about excel or word, so those sorts of products have to rely on the "draw out the profit over many releases" strategy described above.
Another (big) factor is people's expectations - most people expect that word will crash from time to time, and given microsoft's past history, they have little reason to expect that to change. On the other hand, gamers have an expectation that the latest game from id software will be as solid as a rock, and that the few problems that do crop up after the release will be fixed quickly.
If a games company didn't spend that "other" 90% on the last 10% of development, and released something that crashed as often as explorer, their reputation would be mud within days, and people would stop buying their games.
And lastly, choice.
People have a choice as to which games they want to buy. It's a competitive market out there, with many people having little disposible income to spend on games. On the other hand, despite what linux advocates (I can't believe I'm saying this on slashdot) say, most people use MS apps and operating systems because they don't have a choice - say due to corporate rules.
You might think that it is the end user that gets the sharp end of the stick here, but the people that really get screwed are the dedicated and talented programmers, who are working for companies that don't care too much if they release code before it has been fully tested.
It will be interesting to see if this works with nokia's bluetooth phones. My experience with them, and a number of google hits suggests that nokia bluetooth only talks reliably to nokia bluetooth
One thing that's always irritated me with linux is how difficult it can be to REMOVE an application. By default, most things tend to install their executables into/usr/local/bin or even/usr/bin or/bin - the problem here is that we end up with one directory with potentionally hundreds of unrelated binaries in it.
This is all well and good for the things that come with the OS - like cat and top and diff etc, but when I install another app with./configure/make/make install, and then realise I forgot to specifically set the --prefix on configure, it's already too late. I've come across very very few Makefiles that have an uninstall target, and thus let me uninstall them.
The obvious reply to this is to say 'use the package manager!', and this would be fine if everything I installed came as a package (and if the package manager in slackware was nice.)
I guess it comes down to the individual distros to make their own package managers (rpm etc) to deal with this problem.
In windows, apps love to install to \program files\company\app name\, (some of the more badly behaved ones also like to install dlls into system32 etc), and installshield, or MSI, or whatever, create an uninstall script at the time of installation.
I think this is one of the bigger stumbling blocks that linux needs to overcome to gain wider acceptance - if joe public can't install a new app, try it, and then if they don't like it, remove it *cleanly and easily*, then they're never going to use a linux system.
I think that the autogenerated Makefile that most tgz files use should always contain an uninstall target, and that it is regarded as being just as important as the install target.
Their HTML says that the table should be 67% of the page width, and their TD tag does not a NOWRAP specified.
Each TD includes two images, which should (to make the page work) be next to each other horizontally.
Mozilla, correctly, wraps the TD data when the window is too small to fit the table into 67% of that width, and places the smaller (right hand) image on the next 'line', making their page look pretty awful.
If you resize your browser window to about 1000 pixels across, it displays as the developers intended.
Apparently IE ignores the 67%, or assumes there is a NOWRAP in the TD tag. Either way, IE is doing it wrong. It just happens to hide the mistake the cmedia people have in their HTML.
If they don't wait their TD data to wrap, then they should tell the browser that with the nowrap tag.
They also shouldn't do something dumb like have a single table centred on the page with a maximum width of 67%.. because that forces the browser to waste 16% either side of it. (Unless you're using IE)
Well.. duh.. but seriously, it's wild out there.
on
WLANs As Spam Conduit
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The finding doesn't surpise me much. As far as I'm concerned, a wireless lan should be considered at least as dangerous as your internet connection, and should be firewalled appropriately.
What makes them more dangerous is that it's like having your users sit in your DMZ.. their laptops with wireless cards can be wide open and they don't have a clue. I guess it's just like when those users use a dialup modem account without a firewall, but because they're often connected to the corporate network via a vpn etc, they believe they are somehow more secure.
They might well have a ipsec or mppe vpn active, but that doesn't usually stop windows from listening on ports 137/138/445.
And how many windows users do you really think are going to run a 'personal' firewall and/or understand what they've got themselves into by going wireless.
"Unscrupulous resellers and/or distributors may purchase less expensive processors that are rated at lower clock frequencies and then remark those processor at higher clock frequencies, a procedure known as over-clocking".
The article claims that they're doing this to prevent unscrupulous resellers etc from claiming a chip is faster than what intel claim. This would only work if you're buying a complete system (or at least a preinstalled chip and motherboard), and that you never look at your chip, or know what to check in the BIOS or motherboard jumpers.
I really wonder how common this sort of thing is. Certainly the biggest occurance of overclocked chips would be the geek end-user that wants to push the last little bit of performance out of their chip, and they know what they're doing and expect instability if they push it too far.
It seems to me that intel are in fact targetting that group of people, and trying to make them purchase faster-tested 'boxed' chips so that intel can make more money off them.
The reality is that if Intel did produce chips with a clock verification circuit, then the gamers / overclockers would just move to AMD (and hope that they never do the same thing).
Slashdot Mirror
Specifically (from that document the parent post linked to):
Proper Use of the LEGO Trademark on a Web Site
If the LEGO trademark is used at all, it should always be used as an adjective, not as a noun. For example, say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGO BRICKS". Never say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGOs".Also, the trademark should appear in the same typeface as the surrounding text and should not be isolated or set apart from the surrounding text. In other words, the trademarks should not be emphasized or highlighted. Finally, the LEGO trademark should always appear with a ® symbol each time it is used.
Moz and W2K renders it as it was told to, which includes the fact that the guy has forced the window size so that it requires a scrollbar to display the last couple of pixels (more or less, depending on your font size)
I have to agree. I've been seriously trying to use openoffice over the last few weeks, and several times it has really #$%$#ed me off because of buggy features, to the point where I nearly gave up and went to use excel or word instead.
I found that when making a chart in the spreadsheet package that the undo list was very unreliable. If I made a few changes, then undid more than 1 or 2 of them, it would not go back to anything like what I had originally. Even if I reapplied (redo) the changes, ie, undo/undo/undo/redo/redo/redo, I didn't end up with what I started with.
Secondly, Mozilla is perhaps one of the biggest open source projects. A quick trip to bugzilla.mozilla.org will show bugs that have been waiting to be fixed for serveral *YEARS* now. Reading the comments on some of them, it's clear that there are some very strong egos involved. In several cases, where a large group of people want "x" changed, it simply doesn't happen because the developer doesn't believe in that same change. That's a very closed minded attitude for an open source project.
You can rant and rave about microsoft's shortcomings, but by and large, if you try and do something with their products, it will either work, or the app will crash. What doesn't often happen is that the function "sorta" works.
since when did the government ever listen to the people ?
and for that matter, since when did the people ever agree on anything.. heh.
The fundamental problem is that Telecom NZ is a private company, and as such, is *required* to return a profit to its shareholders.
On one hand, people scream and moan about outrageous DSL pricing structures, but on the other, those people who have invested in the company absolutely love what it is doing to the value of that investment.
In addition, TCNZ is one of, if not the biggest, companies in the country. The government is quite understandably scared to step in and do anything, because of the economic ramifications of playing with the source of such a large part of their tax income stream.
I don't know if this is true of Telstra as well, but I suspect it is.
After just receiving yet another spam email from a former [insert poor country here] official asking for my personal help in moving their large sum of money, the first thing I thought of upon reading this article was that it's gotta be a scam.
Hello - I'm a [poor student] who has created a wonderful piece of free software used for [searching for files] and the [monolithic faceless corporation that everyone already hates] has just sued me, but in an out-of-court-settlement, we agreed to me transferring them my life savings of [believable amount]. Now I'm a [poor student] with no money, and I'm asking for [suckers] to help me out here and send in donations.
It smells strongly of that website a while back who cried foul when his webpage got slashdotted and he received the bill from his ISP for the incoming traffic.
Just a thought, if nothing else.
blah blah blah.. change "Telstra" for "Telecom NZ", and you've got the New Zealand version.
It's funny, cause over here, Telstra (who bought Clear a few years ago and became TelstraClear) are the "saviours", and Telecom NZ are the incumbant monolithic faceless telecomms corporation who again happen to own all the infrastructure, and in Aussie, it's the same deal, but the other way around.
The keyboard itself doesn't get programmed.. however the keyboard driver can usually be configured to remap things. It has a table that coverts scancodes into ascii codes in any case, so changing things is just a matter of changing values in that table.
You're not the only person in the world that knows those keys. I can't remember the last time I used the close/maximise/minimise icons on the window.. I do everything with the keyboard
maximise - alt-space,x
maximise - alt-space,n
close - alt-f4
In addition, most applications allow you to move between sub windows opened within the current window with ctrl-f6, and to close them individually with ctrl-f4.
I just downloaded their protocol definitions and took a look - they differentiate kazaa and generic http by looking for the "user-agent: kazaa" line in the header.
so there you go.
HTTP is a layer 7 protocol.. and both IE and Kazza make HTTP requests to a host to retrieve a file, so on that basis, at layer 7, Kazaa, IE, Mozilla and a bunch of other apps all look the same in that they're all HTTP clients.
Having said that, I you could check for X-Kazaa-* tags in the header and differentiate them that way.. except X- tags shouldn't be treated as a reliable identifier because they are, by definition, not a standard...
Or you could go by the fact that browsing on a port other than 80 or 443 probably isn't going to be "normal" web browsing traffic.
It really depends on how much effort they put into analysing the packet/datagram/data.
But Kazaa uses HTTP, so to the shaper, it would presumably look identical to your web browsing traffic.
I've never been fooled by the gui lookalikes, because, quite simply, they don't look like my gui.
I've never particularly liked the standard windows colour scheme, so one of the first things I do after installing is change it.
Consequently, a picture of a grey button looks very out of place on my desktop.
Bonfire K has been vacant for 12201 days <snip to get round the lameness filter>
Fort Awesome K has been vacant for 12201 days
Fort Awesome Minor has been vacant for 12201 days
Fort Awesome Major has been vacant for 12201 days Uh.. they've been vacant for ~ 33 years ? I knew I shouldn't have been lining up waiting for the other toilets to free up!
In the vast majority of cases, it's simply not economic to release bug-free code.
1. Any programmer knows that 90% of the code is written in the first 90% of the time, and the other 10% of the code is written in the other 90% of the time. (no typo). That is to say, it takes a lot more time, effort, and hence money, to move a project from "working well" to "working perfectly".
2. Many software companies these days make very little profit on the 1.0 release of their software, and make huge amounts of money through ongoing support charges. Microsoft is a classic example of this type of company.
3. If you release a piece of software that works really well, does everything the users want, and never crashes or causes trouble, then you may as well pack up shop and go out of business quietly. The unfortunate truth is that nobody is going to buy version 2 if they can do everything they want with version 1, and they're not getting constantly frustrated by crashes. The only carrot you have in this situation is to think up some really great ideas for version 2 in order to encourage people to upgrade - In fact, some of those ideas may have been deliberately left out of version 1 just so that they could be added later. Version 3 is more difficult still, and version 5 is right out. By comparison - how many versions of office are we up to now ?
A notable except to this business model is the games writers. Companies like valve and id software consistantly produce very near to bug-free code that works well and generally impresses the masses.
In all the years since half-life was released, there have been relatively few patches and fixes, and many of those were to prevent ingenious new methods of cheating, or to add support for hardware that didn't exist when the game was first released. The unreal engine had a similar history.
People buy new games because they crave the excitement or challange of exploring and interacting with it. That's not something that could really be said about excel or word, so those sorts of products have to rely on the "draw out the profit over many releases" strategy described above.
Another (big) factor is people's expectations - most people expect that word will crash from time to time, and given microsoft's past history, they have little reason to expect that to change. On the other hand, gamers have an expectation that the latest game from id software will be as solid as a rock, and that the few problems that do crop up after the release will be fixed quickly.
If a games company didn't spend that "other" 90% on the last 10% of development, and released something that crashed as often as explorer, their reputation would be mud within days, and people would stop buying their games.
And lastly, choice.
People have a choice as to which games they want to buy. It's a competitive market out there, with many people having little disposible income to spend on games. On the other hand, despite what linux advocates (I can't believe I'm saying this on slashdot) say, most people use MS apps and operating systems because they don't have a choice - say due to corporate rules.
You might think that it is the end user that gets the sharp end of the stick here, but the people that really get screwed are the dedicated and talented programmers, who are working for companies that don't care too much if they release code before it has been fully tested.
It will be interesting to see if this works with nokia's bluetooth phones. My experience with them, and a number of google hits suggests that nokia bluetooth only talks reliably to nokia bluetooth
No nvidia or SiS chipset support yet
ooh.. neat :)
For anyone else that wanted the URL:
http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/stow.html
One thing that's always irritated me with linux is how difficult it can be to REMOVE an application. By default, most things tend to install their executables into /usr/local/bin or even /usr/bin or /bin - the problem here is that we end up with one directory with potentionally hundreds of unrelated binaries in it.
./configure/make/make install, and then realise I forgot to specifically set the --prefix on configure, it's already too late. I've come across very very few Makefiles that have an uninstall target, and thus let me uninstall them.
This is all well and good for the things that come with the OS - like cat and top and diff etc, but when I install another app with
The obvious reply to this is to say 'use the package manager!', and this would be fine if everything I installed came as a package (and if the package manager in slackware was nice.)
I guess it comes down to the individual distros to make their own package managers (rpm etc) to deal with this problem.
In windows, apps love to install to \program files\company\app name\, (some of the more badly behaved ones also like to install dlls into system32 etc), and installshield, or MSI, or whatever, create an uninstall script at the time of installation.
I think this is one of the bigger stumbling blocks that linux needs to overcome to gain wider acceptance - if joe public can't install a new app, try it, and then if they don't like it, remove it *cleanly and easily*, then they're never going to use a linux system.
I think that the autogenerated Makefile that most tgz files use should always contain an uninstall target, and that it is regarded as being just as important as the install target.
Their HTML says that the table should be 67% of the page width, and their TD tag does not a NOWRAP specified.
.. because that forces the browser to waste 16% either side of it. (Unless you're using IE)
Each TD includes two images, which should (to make the page work) be next to each other horizontally.
Mozilla, correctly, wraps the TD data when the window is too small to fit the table into 67% of that width, and places the smaller (right hand) image on the next 'line', making their page look pretty awful.
If you resize your browser window to about 1000 pixels across, it displays as the developers intended.
Apparently IE ignores the 67%, or assumes there is a NOWRAP in the TD tag. Either way, IE is doing it wrong. It just happens to hide the mistake the cmedia people have in their HTML.
If they don't wait their TD data to wrap, then they should tell the browser that with the nowrap tag.
They also shouldn't do something dumb like have a single table centred on the page with a maximum width of 67%
pig => ham => spiced ham => spam
The finding doesn't surpise me much. As far as I'm concerned, a wireless lan should be considered at least as dangerous as your internet connection, and should be firewalled appropriately. What makes them more dangerous is that it's like having your users sit in your DMZ.. their laptops with wireless cards can be wide open and they don't have a clue. I guess it's just like when those users use a dialup modem account without a firewall, but because they're often connected to the corporate network via a vpn etc, they believe they are somehow more secure. They might well have a ipsec or mppe vpn active, but that doesn't usually stop windows from listening on ports 137/138/445. And how many windows users do you really think are going to run a 'personal' firewall and/or understand what they've got themselves into by going wireless.
The article claims that they're doing this to prevent unscrupulous resellers etc from claiming a chip is faster than what intel claim. This would only work if you're buying a complete system (or at least a preinstalled chip and motherboard), and that you never look at your chip, or know what to check in the BIOS or motherboard jumpers.
I really wonder how common this sort of thing is. Certainly the biggest occurance of overclocked chips would be the geek end-user that wants to push the last little bit of performance out of their chip, and they know what they're doing and expect instability if they push it too far.
It seems to me that intel are in fact targetting that group of people, and trying to make them purchase faster-tested 'boxed' chips so that intel can make more money off them.
The reality is that if Intel did produce chips with a clock verification circuit, then the gamers / overclockers would just move to AMD (and hope that they never do the same thing).
hahaha. I'll have to keep a copy of that mov somewhere handy.
there's a bunch of javascript in the main page to check that you're running IE. You don't even get a login box to type in if the check fails.