There is only one body in the world that can stop psychotic dictators from getting the bomb, and it ain't the UN.
I see supprisingly little difference between "psychotic dictators" of countries like Iran having nuclear weapons and the psychotic dictator currently running the US having nuclear weapons.
I'm sorry, but the whole attitude of the US of "noone can have nukes except us because we're the only stable nation" is downright arrogant and plain wrong. Especially after your current president decided to ignore the other nations and go ahead and invade Iraq. (And yes, I know Bush came to the UK and got the support of his puppet in charge here, and no there's no way in hell I'll be voting for Blare. At least he was actually elected though).
If you want nations with less millitary force to stop developing nuclear weapons, it would be a good idea to lose yours too and stop bullying them just because you can.
Ok, removing all the nukes might be a bad idea - why don't we put them in the collective hands of the UN instead of under the control of a single nation?
The US's current attitude is like running around a city with an Uzi, threatening people and then complaining when those people decide they need to go buy their own guns to defend themselves.
Ya, let's provoke a nation that is under the leadership of a crazy guy who probably wouldn't bat an eye at killing all this citizens by launching a nuke...
Yeah, bad idea......at a bunch of US carriers
Wuh? Oh, you weren't referring to dubbya as the crazy guy? Sorry, I misunderstood:)
I wonder how many votes this gained him vs. votes lost...
the people who sell stuff by spam (generally) don't suffer much of a negative effect - some people buy from them, everyone else ignores it. the same can't be said of a politician because it seems likely that whilest he will gain some votes through this campaign, he will also lose a lot more from the people he pissed off.
Which is my point! Why use crappy tools on a machine when you can use better tools?
I don't consider vim crappy... I do consider Pico, Joe, Windows Notepad, etc crappy though (for what I need) - none of them are feature-rich enough for me to comfortably use
People focus on the low-level stuff like keyboard vrs. mouse whereas the real productivity gains are made from higher considerations like what system tools should be available to overcome "missing" stuff.
True, and this is one of the big reasons I _hate_ windows - it has no useful commandline tools bundled with it as standard. If linux came without tcpdump, grep, sed, bash, etc an aweful lot of people would complain and find it difficult to do their jobs.
And like it or not, many of us find commandline tools much faster than GUIs. For example, it's faster for me to type 'grep -r "something"/somewhere' than go to Start, find, files, then click through directories until I find the one I want to search, and then enter something to search for (I don't know if that's exactly where it is - I haven't used Windows in many years). This especially applies when you're searching for a complex regex (I do this frequently) whcih windows' crap commands won't support at all.
However, given the choice between two equally feature-rich text editors, one GUI based and one terminal based, I'll choose the terminal based one every time because (to me) there are real gains in not having to reach for the mouse every 5 minutes. Not everyone will agree - some people won't want to remember what commands to enter and want everything in a clickable format, but _for me_ I find it much faster to type the commands that are engrained in my fingers than click through menus to get to the command.
And how many people run flash card UNIX systems? That's simply irrelevant to the discussion
How is it irrelevent? You were making broad sweeping claims that *noone* should want to use vi for any reason - These reasons are very relevent *to me* although trueth be told I've been using vi exclusively as my text editor long before I started working on these "challenged" systems as you call them.
As for crippled systems, I view any system that gets in my way as crippled
Any system that gets in the way of the *end user* could be considered crippled - remember that a lot of people you're including in your arguement are not the true end-users of the system. Given the choice between using vi or increasing the production cost of a system which you're only very occasionally going to need vi on (and the customer will never need to at all), which are you going to choose?
In the same way, I consider pico crippled - it gets in my way by not having the features I want. Yes, I can work around it by using external tools to do the same job, but not having that stuff build directly into my editor means I spend that much more time getting frustrated.
Meanwhile my boss struggles with vi
If anyone still struggles with vi after a significant amount of time using it they obviously have no business using it in the first place and should settle for less powerful, more luserfriendly editors. But please accept that there are those of us who know how to use vi and find them much more capable, much easier and much faster to use than the alternatives.
Yes, I'll be the first to admit that I don't know how to do everything that vi is capable of, but I know how to do everything that _I_ need.
It's amazing how many people want to continue to use crappy tools like vi for spurious reasons like "it's the only one you're guaranteed to find on UNIX"
It is a valid reason - if you're a unix admin you need to be familiar with vi.
Personally my own reasons for using vim include: - I use it all day for work on boxes which have no other editor installed so I know my way around it. - It is a _very_ powerful editor and I do use a lot of the powerful features - Syntax highlighting (yes, I know other editors do this) - Very fast - No farting around with a mouse - you do everything through very quick keyboard commands - very easy to use once you know your way around it (it may be hell for a beginner but once you know how to use it I have yet to find an editor that's as easy and fast to use).
Pico also does a wonderful job of mangling config files if you forget to turn off word-wraping.
(why would I be searching for it in the first place - I don't want to work on crippled systems that don't have better editors)
Define "better". If you mean "easier for the layperson to use" then yes, there are "better" editors. If you mean one with a GUI then you're not always guaranteed to be using a machine with X installed (most servers don't) and I also argue that GUI based editors which constantly rely on you grabbing the mouse make work slow. And of course if you are always using systems that have lots of disk space you can install lots of editors and pick and choose - I'm usually working on systems that are running off small compact flash cards so this is certainly not an option (I don't consider these systems "crippled" - they have what they need on them). In any case, just because you don't "want" to be using a crippled system doesn't mean you're not going to find yourself working on one - or are you going to refuse to work on it and turn down your paycheque?
"you need it if your system crashes" (bullshit - this is why you carry a boot CD.)
Assuming you have a CD drive in the machine you're working on (and no, you can't assume you always do)
MSN uses about 3 times the bandwidth as Jabber when idle (in my experience). When you're paying for GPRS bandwidth this is significant when considering if you want to leave it running all the time
There is no advantage to using one IM service over another, so why anybody switch?
Rubbish. I _hate_ MSN since it assumes that everyone only uses one machine at a time. It can't support multiple logins so I have to remember to log in when I move workstations and I can't use auto-relogin since then the clients war with eachother, repeatedly kicking eachother off. Not using auto-relogin means that I have to remember to manually log back in after the MSN servers (frequently) go down.
The big reason why people won't change is because the networks don't interoperate so if all my friends are on MSN I'm forced to use MSN to talk to them.
And I use Explorer because there are websites that don't render properly under anything else.
I'm waiting for the time when web designers can't be bothered to work around IE's brokenness and you start seeing "this website won't work in IE - please use another browser".
On a mroe serious note, I really wish that browsers validated code as standard and gave you a warning on the status bar if it didn't validate. This would have some significant advantages: 1. Web developers can easilly see if they broke some code on their page without having to go and specifically run it through a validator. 2. If you just paid a web developer a lot of money to build you a website and your browser gives you a "this monkey can't write XHTML to save his life" warning when you preview the site, you're probably not going to pay that designer - this is a good thing coz it encourages professional web designers to actually write valid code. I don't know if it's just me, but has anyone else noticed how it's usually the professionally designed sites that only work in IE or are horrible to use or are written entirely in Flash? I guess if you're bothering to write your own website you're going to care enough to spend time to make it work rather than just get it done quickly so you can get paid...
A bit off topic, can you reccommend any websites where I can learn how to do CSS properly? I'll admit I usually use lots of nested tables for things.... where can I learn how to do this with CSS:)
I have been redesigning my website recently to use XHTML1.1 and completely separated styles. I would say that everyone's comments of "never use tables for layout" are a bit premature for 2 reasons:
1. CSS2 is not really capable enough - CSS2.1 solves some of the problems but is not well enough supported yet (once firefox supports display:inline-block then a lot of problems will be solved... but that's been in bugzilla for 5 years now so I'm not holding my breath). I think CSS3 will be very worthwhile when browsers start supporting it. 2. IE's brokenness really doesn't cope well with some of the stuff you should be able to do. e.g. if I have 2 div tags with the first set to float:left the second div should appear next to it. Unforuntately any tables in that div get pushed down below the bottom of the first div by IE (works perfectly in all other browsers though:)
Having said that, I have successfully done what I set out to do (the new site isn't online yet though - it still has some work to do) and I don't use things like tables to control layout, etc. Completely separating the style out from the markup makes things much cleaner and means it more or less outright works with Elinks, lynx, etc.
The IE inconsistencies havent' caused me big problems because I have taken the attitude that so long as my site is usable in IE it doesn't matter too much if it doesn't look quite right - I haven't gone a long way out of my way to work around IE's bugs. Obviously if you're writing a corporate website it does (unfortunately) need to look really good in IE too - mine is my personal site, I don't make money off it so can happilly take the "screw 'em" attitude to IE users.:)
My advice is to think about what sort of data you're presenting whiel you write the markup rather than what you want it to look like. i.e. if you're creating a menu you might want to put it in a table... but it's not really tabular data - it's a list of options so why not stick it in an unordered list (ul) instead. You can still use CSS to turn that list into a table-like menu. If you do that then looking at the markup itself and ignoring the style completely should leave you with a page that still makes sense.
Reference the W3 site frequently (for both the XHTML and CSS specs) and validate frequently - if you have invalid XHTML or CSS you will likely see "weirdness" and more cross-browser inconsistencies. Making sure your code is valid can save you a lot of debugging trying to work out what's causing a problem.
And of course, when you want to do something and can't work out how to do it, hit google - you will usually find (nearly) what you're looking for.
There are no safe browsers (yet?), just ones that haven't been picked on much.
There are safeER browsers though. By your arguement, why give up smoking? yeah it'll reduce the risk of lung cancer but you still might get lung cancer anyway so it's not worth it.
Whilest I agree that Mozilla and Opera haven't been picked on as much as IE, I also believe they have less security holes and when a security hole is found it gets fixed quickly instead of Microsoft's aparant strategy if waiting until the bug is exploited months later before (slowly) reacting.
Microsoft (being a corporation) has a profit motive behind working on MSIE. Thus once they have achieved market dominance there is little interest in improving the program further.
I honestly don't understand what MS has to gain by including a browser for free that they have paid good money to develop over including a browser for free that someone else has developed (or multiple 3rd party browsers).
It's not like IE will only work with IIS so by securing market share on the client side they will secure market share on the server side too.
No browser can be considered completely safe. Security is a process, not a product. However, if you figure that the reporters have badly misrepresented the knowledge that Mozilla developers had regarding the shell and UI spoofing issues, it is fairly obvious that it is *safer* than IE.
No software involved in accessing the big bad internet in any way can be considered completely safe. Security is always a balance between security and usability and training (don't forget the training bit - if you try to provide security without considering training then you may as well be making a car safer by tieing the brake peddle to the floor - well look on the bright side, the user doesn't have to be trained to sue the brakes anymore, the car is doing that automatically for them:)
I have certainly been unimpressed by the media when it comes to reporting security problems. When CERT started telling people to stop using IE the media reiterated that but didn't provide any prominent advice on what to use instead - most people probably don't know that there is anything other than IE... and ofcourse "that tharr intarweb" is installed on everyone's computers by those friendly people at microsoft isn't it?:)
The media have shown again and again that they rarely do anything other than a cursory investigation or republishing rumours for computing stories. When the shell exploit in Mozilla was announced, much of the media behaved in the same way as many people here on slashdot who hadn't RTFA or read bugzilla properly. Lots of people were whinging that the bug had been known about for 2 years and should've been fixed then but failed to see that: 1. the specific shell problem hadn't been identified - it was simply known that something like that could be done. 2. the problem wasn't really with mozilla, the problem was with the OS providing a protocol handler that should never have been presented. 3. until the specific problem had been identified nothing could be done to work around the bug in the OS without severely crippling legitimate protocol handlers. 4. Once the specific problem had been identified it was fixed within a day 5. Microsoft had claimed to have fixed the bug in the OS *months* earlier 6. I saw lots of people on microsoft's side saying "well it must be a bug in Mozilla - no MS products are affected by this" which was completely incorrect - a number of MS products were later found to be affected by exactly the same OS bug. I saw none of the above points mentioned by the mainstream media whcih was very disapointing.
I also don't believe that the UI spoofing problem is anything especially new - people have done that in IE for years. I for one would not have been affected by it since I don't allow javascript to remove the toolbars on my browser (I find it annoying when Javascript does that).
I am fairly sure that ActiveX security is SO broken that IE is not only unsafe but irreparably so.
I agree entirely... But of course all websites are so well designed that they're still usable without the various scripting engines turned on in the browser, right? right?:)
Imagine the nightmares web page designers would have to go through if they had to support two completely different non-standards-compliant browsers.
They already have to cope with more than 2 completely different non-complient browsers:
IE 6
IE 5.x (which behaves in a completely different broken way to IE6)
Mac IE (which in many ways is less broken than IE6, but the brokenness is again completely different to the PC versions of IE)
Opera (Ok, it's much better than IE, but it's still got lots of breakages (e.g. the box model, etc.) compared to Gecko - anyone who claims Opera is the 2nd coming has obviously never done web development)
However, I do agree with you entirely that even if Gecko browsers get 95% of the market there is no excuse for it to lose it's complience (although the browser writers should probably work with the W3 and get cool new features standardised). I am even very dubious of the -moz-* CSS extensions, even though the spec allows for them.
I do my best to make my website work properly in Firefox, Opera, Safari, ELinks and Lynx - I make sure it's usable in IE too. But I certainly don't go too far out of my way to make it look really nice in IE - fixing breakages in IE almost always involves big compromises when it comes to complient browsers and I don't want to make those compromises. Of course my website is a personal (informational) site and I don't make money off it - if it was a commerce site I would obviously have to be less inclined to say "fsck 'em" to IE users.
(After a lot of hard thinking I finally added some javascript to my site that asks IE users if they'd like to upgrade to Firefox in the hope it might educate people - judging by my webalizer stats it hasn't put any people off looking at my site but it's too early to say if it has influenced the browsers being used to visit).
Believe it or not, the whole world doesn't hinge on the US - it may stop development by companies in the US but it won't stop the rest of the world. Once the rest of the world have VoIP the US will _have_ to catch up or be left out in the cold
The _only_ time you need to go via a 3rd-party VoIP provider is when you're gatewaying to the PSTN. Calls made purely over the internet don't need to go via "VoIP providers", they can be made as end-to-end calls in the same way as you SSH into a machine. You don't even need to pay a provider to route your VoIP calls since the ENUM system lets you translate normal PSTN numbers into VoIP URIs. So unless you're gatewaying to the PSTN I don't see how these laws are enforcable - you can't regulate end users like that. And if your call is ending up on the PSTN it's tappable there anyway.
IMHO eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) the PSTN will die out in favor or a purely VoIP system. We will nolonger have those hard to remember phone numbers, it will all be tied in with DNS the same as the rest of the internet, so we won't even need PSTN to URI translation systems. i.e. at the moment you can phone IAX2/pabx.nexusuk.org/slashdot and you will get through to the speaking clock running on my VoIP server.
So basically what I'm saying is that VoIP wiretapping regulations seem to be pointless. They can't prevent individuals from encrypting their own traffic when making direct connections to eachother anymore than they can prevent people from using SSH or HTTPS. And the only time 3rd party VoIP providers (who can be regulated) are even needed is when gatewaying to the PSTN, which can be tapped anyway.
I've been using broadband for decades... My old 1200bps modem used broadband modulation.
Will people please _stop_ using technical terms like "broadband" to describe something completely unrelated just because the marketting droids thought it would be a good idea?
It really took the piss when the courts ruled that it is illegal for NTL to use the term "broadband" to sell their 128kbps cablemodem services (which use broadband modulation) because 128kbps isn't fast enough. Broadband has _nothing_ to do with the data rate you get and everything to do with the technology behind it... I'm just waiting for someone to market ethernet connections as "broadband" to see if they get sued into oblivion for claiming that ethernet is broadband (it isn't, it's baseband).
Why should I be *forced* to see some ad when I don't have to.
Umm, because it's paying for the site you're using? Would you prefer to enter your credit card number for every site?
Whilest I agree with blocking ads that are specifically designed to be annoying, blocking unobtrusive targetted ads such as Google's seems exceptionally shortsighted.
i'd rather have an independant channel that can produce and broadcast non mainstream programmes
So would I - unfortunately that isn't the BBC... Or do you consider football, reality TV and soap operas to be non-mainstream? I would have much less of a problem forking out 120 quid a year if the beeb _did_ stick to their charter of broadcasting non-mainstream stuff. The Sky Digital package I'm on costs me 216 quid a year (ontop of the beeb's licence) and I get *way* more than double the amount of non-mainstream stuff off that than I ever do off the beeb. (Not to mention the mainstream stuff I do watch).
And don't talk to me about how the BBC has to charge that much to fund their extra digital channels: the digital channels are more full of crap than the terrestrial ones (I think I have watched BBC Three _once_ since it was launched), and not everyone can get them (yes, believe it or not there are some locations in the UK where you can't get either satellite or DVB-T)
It's actually typical for a public company. Just imagine that someone sues Google because he was indeed using Google Zeitgeist for some scientific research, unaware that it was just for fun.
So put a big fat disclaimer on the top of the site. Like it or not, the browser stats are useful and Google is probably the most unbiassed site on the internet to get such stats off. Infact I wish they would publish the browser stats in a more useful format (e.g. bigger graph, updated on a weekly or daily basis, etc). There are also various things they can do to reduce the problem of people spoofing their UA string such as checking for really stupid things like MSIE running under Linux.
Which brings me to an unrelated point: I *really* hate what the UA string has become. There is absolutely no reason for web developers to ever be checking the UA string on the server side - if you need different markup for different browsers then you're going wrong and making maintenance of the site more difficult. It *IS* possible to make a site that works on all modern browsers even if doing so does cause you a headache. And so there's no reason for a browser to ever fake it's UA string - all browsers should be reporting what they are instead of pretending to be something different - having all browsers claiming they're IE is a problem for anyone who is actually interested in those statistics (which all web developers should be).
Slashdot Mirror
I missed the live webcast since I was at work - they only have small clips up now. Anyone know if there is a full copy of the live webcast somewhere?
There is only one body in the world that can stop psychotic dictators from getting the bomb, and it ain't the UN.
I see supprisingly little difference between "psychotic dictators" of countries like Iran having nuclear weapons and the psychotic dictator currently running the US having nuclear weapons.
I'm sorry, but the whole attitude of the US of "noone can have nukes except us because we're the only stable nation" is downright arrogant and plain wrong. Especially after your current president decided to ignore the other nations and go ahead and invade Iraq. (And yes, I know Bush came to the UK and got the support of his puppet in charge here, and no there's no way in hell I'll be voting for Blare. At least he was actually elected though).
If you want nations with less millitary force to stop developing nuclear weapons, it would be a good idea to lose yours too and stop bullying them just because you can.
Ok, removing all the nukes might be a bad idea - why don't we put them in the collective hands of the UN instead of under the control of a single nation?
The US's current attitude is like running around a city with an Uzi, threatening people and then complaining when those people decide they need to go buy their own guns to defend themselves.
Ya, let's provoke a nation that is under the leadership of a crazy guy who probably wouldn't bat an eye at killing all this citizens by launching a nuke...
...at a bunch of US carriers
:)
Yeah, bad idea...
Wuh? Oh, you weren't referring to dubbya as the crazy guy? Sorry, I misunderstood
Actually, thats likely to be quite a problem - we all know how hot drives get these days.
I wonder how many votes this gained him vs. votes lost...
the people who sell stuff by spam (generally) don't suffer much of a negative effect - some people buy from them, everyone else ignores it. the same can't be said of a politician because it seems likely that whilest he will gain some votes through this campaign, he will also lose a lot more from the people he pissed off.
I'm sure it would've been smarter to just outlaw VoIP and cellphones :)
Chips have been using ceramic casings for a long long time. Of course flip-chips (such as Athlons) don't have casings at all.
Which is my point! Why use crappy tools on a machine when you can use better tools?
/somewhere' than go to Start, find, files, then click through directories until I find the one I want to search, and then enter something to search for (I don't know if that's exactly where it is - I haven't used Windows in many years). This especially applies when you're searching for a complex regex (I do this frequently) whcih windows' crap commands won't support at all.
I don't consider vim crappy... I do consider Pico, Joe, Windows Notepad, etc crappy though (for what I need) - none of them are feature-rich enough for me to comfortably use
People focus on the low-level stuff like keyboard vrs. mouse whereas the real productivity gains are made from higher considerations like what system tools should be available to overcome "missing" stuff.
True, and this is one of the big reasons I _hate_ windows - it has no useful commandline tools bundled with it as standard. If linux came without tcpdump, grep, sed, bash, etc an aweful lot of people would complain and find it difficult to do their jobs.
And like it or not, many of us find commandline tools much faster than GUIs. For example, it's faster for me to type 'grep -r "something"
However, given the choice between two equally feature-rich text editors, one GUI based and one terminal based, I'll choose the terminal based one every time because (to me) there are real gains in not having to reach for the mouse every 5 minutes. Not everyone will agree - some people won't want to remember what commands to enter and want everything in a clickable format, but _for me_ I find it much faster to type the commands that are engrained in my fingers than click through menus to get to the command.
And how many people run flash card UNIX systems? That's simply irrelevant to the discussion
How is it irrelevent? You were making broad sweeping claims that *noone* should want to use vi for any reason - These reasons are very relevent *to me* although trueth be told I've been using vi exclusively as my text editor long before I started working on these "challenged" systems as you call them.
As for crippled systems, I view any system that gets in my way as crippled
Any system that gets in the way of the *end user* could be considered crippled - remember that a lot of people you're including in your arguement are not the true end-users of the system. Given the choice between using vi or increasing the production cost of a system which you're only very occasionally going to need vi on (and the customer will never need to at all), which are you going to choose?
In the same way, I consider pico crippled - it gets in my way by not having the features I want. Yes, I can work around it by using external tools to do the same job, but not having that stuff build directly into my editor means I spend that much more time getting frustrated.
Meanwhile my boss struggles with vi
If anyone still struggles with vi after a significant amount of time using it they obviously have no business using it in the first place and should settle for less powerful, more luserfriendly editors. But please accept that there are those of us who know how to use vi and find them much more capable, much easier and much faster to use than the alternatives.
Yes, I'll be the first to admit that I don't know how to do everything that vi is capable of, but I know how to do everything that _I_ need.
It's amazing how many people want to continue to use crappy tools like vi for spurious reasons like "it's the only one you're guaranteed to find on UNIX"
It is a valid reason - if you're a unix admin you need to be familiar with vi.
Personally my own reasons for using vim include:
- I use it all day for work on boxes which have no other editor installed so I know my way around it.
- It is a _very_ powerful editor and I do use a lot of the powerful features
- Syntax highlighting (yes, I know other editors do this)
- Very fast
- No farting around with a mouse - you do everything through very quick keyboard commands
- very easy to use once you know your way around it (it may be hell for a beginner but once you know how to use it I have yet to find an editor that's as easy and fast to use).
Pico also does a wonderful job of mangling config files if you forget to turn off word-wraping.
(why would I be searching for it in the first place - I don't want to work on crippled systems that don't have better editors)
Define "better". If you mean "easier for the layperson to use" then yes, there are "better" editors. If you mean one with a GUI then you're not always guaranteed to be using a machine with X installed (most servers don't) and I also argue that GUI based editors which constantly rely on you grabbing the mouse make work slow. And of course if you are always using systems that have lots of disk space you can install lots of editors and pick and choose - I'm usually working on systems that are running off small compact flash cards so this is certainly not an option (I don't consider these systems "crippled" - they have what they need on them). In any case, just because you don't "want" to be using a crippled system doesn't mean you're not going to find yourself working on one - or are you going to refuse to work on it and turn down your paycheque?
"you need it if your system crashes" (bullshit - this is why you carry a boot CD.)
Assuming you have a CD drive in the machine you're working on (and no, you can't assume you always do)
- Lightwait protocol (especially when idle)
MSN uses about 3 times the bandwidth as Jabber when idle (in my experience). When you're paying for GPRS bandwidth this is significant when considering if you want to leave it running all the time
There is no advantage to using one IM service over another, so why anybody switch?
Rubbish. I _hate_ MSN since it assumes that everyone only uses one machine at a time. It can't support multiple logins so I have to remember to log in when I move workstations and I can't use auto-relogin since then the clients war with eachother, repeatedly kicking eachother off. Not using auto-relogin means that I have to remember to manually log back in after the MSN servers (frequently) go down.
The big reason why people won't change is because the networks don't interoperate so if all my friends are on MSN I'm forced to use MSN to talk to them.
The congregation says Firewhat?
;)
FireSomething of course
And I use Explorer because there are websites that don't render properly under anything else.
I'm waiting for the time when web designers can't be bothered to work around IE's brokenness and you start seeing "this website won't work in IE - please use another browser".
On a mroe serious note, I really wish that browsers validated code as standard and gave you a warning on the status bar if it didn't validate. This would have some significant advantages:
1. Web developers can easilly see if they broke some code on their page without having to go and specifically run it through a validator.
2. If you just paid a web developer a lot of money to build you a website and your browser gives you a "this monkey can't write XHTML to save his life" warning when you preview the site, you're probably not going to pay that designer - this is a good thing coz it encourages professional web designers to actually write valid code. I don't know if it's just me, but has anyone else noticed how it's usually the professionally designed sites that only work in IE or are horrible to use or are written entirely in Flash? I guess if you're bothering to write your own website you're going to care enough to spend time to make it work rather than just get it done quickly so you can get paid...
A bit off topic, can you reccommend any websites where I can learn how to do CSS properly? I'll admit I usually use lots of nested tables for things.... where can I learn how to do this with CSS :)
:)
:)
I have been redesigning my website recently to use XHTML1.1 and completely separated styles. I would say that everyone's comments of "never use tables for layout" are a bit premature for 2 reasons:
1. CSS2 is not really capable enough - CSS2.1 solves some of the problems but is not well enough supported yet (once firefox supports display:inline-block then a lot of problems will be solved... but that's been in bugzilla for 5 years now so I'm not holding my breath). I think CSS3 will be very worthwhile when browsers start supporting it.
2. IE's brokenness really doesn't cope well with some of the stuff you should be able to do. e.g. if I have 2 div tags with the first set to float:left the second div should appear next to it. Unforuntately any tables in that div get pushed down below the bottom of the first div by IE (works perfectly in all other browsers though
Having said that, I have successfully done what I set out to do (the new site isn't online yet though - it still has some work to do) and I don't use things like tables to control layout, etc. Completely separating the style out from the markup makes things much cleaner and means it more or less outright works with Elinks, lynx, etc.
The IE inconsistencies havent' caused me big problems because I have taken the attitude that so long as my site is usable in IE it doesn't matter too much if it doesn't look quite right - I haven't gone a long way out of my way to work around IE's bugs. Obviously if you're writing a corporate website it does (unfortunately) need to look really good in IE too - mine is my personal site, I don't make money off it so can happilly take the "screw 'em" attitude to IE users.
My advice is to think about what sort of data you're presenting whiel you write the markup rather than what you want it to look like. i.e. if you're creating a menu you might want to put it in a table... but it's not really tabular data - it's a list of options so why not stick it in an unordered list (ul) instead. You can still use CSS to turn that list into a table-like menu. If you do that then looking at the markup itself and ignoring the style completely should leave you with a page that still makes sense.
Reference the W3 site frequently (for both the XHTML and CSS specs) and validate frequently - if you have invalid XHTML or CSS you will likely see "weirdness" and more cross-browser inconsistencies. Making sure your code is valid can save you a lot of debugging trying to work out what's causing a problem.
And of course, when you want to do something and can't work out how to do it, hit google - you will usually find (nearly) what you're looking for.
There are no safe browsers (yet?), just ones that haven't been picked on much.
There are safeER browsers though. By your arguement, why give up smoking? yeah it'll reduce the risk of lung cancer but you still might get lung cancer anyway so it's not worth it.
Whilest I agree that Mozilla and Opera haven't been picked on as much as IE, I also believe they have less security holes and when a security hole is found it gets fixed quickly instead of Microsoft's aparant strategy if waiting until the bug is exploited months later before (slowly) reacting.
Microsoft (being a corporation) has a profit motive behind working on MSIE. Thus once they have achieved market dominance there is little interest in improving the program further.
I honestly don't understand what MS has to gain by including a browser for free that they have paid good money to develop over including a browser for free that someone else has developed (or multiple 3rd party browsers).
It's not like IE will only work with IIS so by securing market share on the client side they will secure market share on the server side too.
No browser can be considered completely safe. Security is a process, not a product. However, if you figure that the reporters have badly misrepresented the knowledge that Mozilla developers had regarding the shell and UI spoofing issues, it is fairly obvious that it is *safer* than IE.
:)
:)
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No software involved in accessing the big bad internet in any way can be considered completely safe. Security is always a balance between security and usability and training (don't forget the training bit - if you try to provide security without considering training then you may as well be making a car safer by tieing the brake peddle to the floor - well look on the bright side, the user doesn't have to be trained to sue the brakes anymore, the car is doing that automatically for them
I have certainly been unimpressed by the media when it comes to reporting security problems. When CERT started telling people to stop using IE the media reiterated that but didn't provide any prominent advice on what to use instead - most people probably don't know that there is anything other than IE... and ofcourse "that tharr intarweb" is installed on everyone's computers by those friendly people at microsoft isn't it?
The media have shown again and again that they rarely do anything other than a cursory investigation or republishing rumours for computing stories. When the shell exploit in Mozilla was announced, much of the media behaved in the same way as many people here on slashdot who hadn't RTFA or read bugzilla properly. Lots of people were whinging that the bug had been known about for 2 years and should've been fixed then but failed to see that:
1. the specific shell problem hadn't been identified - it was simply known that something like that could be done.
2. the problem wasn't really with mozilla, the problem was with the OS providing a protocol handler that should never have been presented.
3. until the specific problem had been identified nothing could be done to work around the bug in the OS without severely crippling legitimate protocol handlers.
4. Once the specific problem had been identified it was fixed within a day
5. Microsoft had claimed to have fixed the bug in the OS *months* earlier
6. I saw lots of people on microsoft's side saying "well it must be a bug in Mozilla - no MS products are affected by this" which was completely incorrect - a number of MS products were later found to be affected by exactly the same OS bug.
I saw none of the above points mentioned by the mainstream media whcih was very disapointing.
I also don't believe that the UI spoofing problem is anything especially new - people have done that in IE for years. I for one would not have been affected by it since I don't allow javascript to remove the toolbars on my browser (I find it annoying when Javascript does that).
I am fairly sure that ActiveX security is SO broken that IE is not only unsafe but irreparably so.
I agree entirely... But of course all websites are so well designed that they're still usable without the various scripting engines turned on in the browser, right? right?
They already have to cope with more than 2 completely different non-complient browsers:
However, I do agree with you entirely that even if Gecko browsers get 95% of the market there is no excuse for it to lose it's complience (although the browser writers should probably work with the W3 and get cool new features standardised). I am even very dubious of the -moz-* CSS extensions, even though the spec allows for them.
I do my best to make my website work properly in Firefox, Opera, Safari, ELinks and Lynx - I make sure it's usable in IE too. But I certainly don't go too far out of my way to make it look really nice in IE - fixing breakages in IE almost always involves big compromises when it comes to complient browsers and I don't want to make those compromises. Of course my website is a personal (informational) site and I don't make money off it - if it was a commerce site I would obviously have to be less inclined to say "fsck 'em" to IE users.
(After a lot of hard thinking I finally added some javascript to my site that asks IE users if they'd like to upgrade to Firefox in the hope it might educate people - judging by my webalizer stats it hasn't put any people off looking at my site but it's too early to say if it has influenced the browsers being used to visit).
So basically what I'm saying is that VoIP wiretapping regulations seem to be pointless. They can't prevent individuals from encrypting their own traffic when making direct connections to eachother anymore than they can prevent people from using SSH or HTTPS. And the only time 3rd party VoIP providers (who can be regulated) are even needed is when gatewaying to the PSTN, which can be tapped anyway.
communicators - hell mobile phones are far better than communicators
:)
I hate to think what interstellar roaming charges are like though
One of the reasons you have to calibrate your own monitor's picture rotation is because it is affected by the local geomagnetic field.
I've been using broadband for decades... My old 1200bps modem used broadband modulation.
Will people please _stop_ using technical terms like "broadband" to describe something completely unrelated just because the marketting droids thought it would be a good idea?
It really took the piss when the courts ruled that it is illegal for NTL to use the term "broadband" to sell their 128kbps cablemodem services (which use broadband modulation) because 128kbps isn't fast enough. Broadband has _nothing_ to do with the data rate you get and everything to do with the technology behind it... I'm just waiting for someone to market ethernet connections as "broadband" to see if they get sued into oblivion for claiming that ethernet is broadband (it isn't, it's baseband).
Why should I be *forced* to see some ad when I don't have to.
Umm, because it's paying for the site you're using? Would you prefer to enter your credit card number for every site?
Whilest I agree with blocking ads that are specifically designed to be annoying, blocking unobtrusive targetted ads such as Google's seems exceptionally shortsighted.
i'd rather have an independant channel that can produce and broadcast non mainstream programmes
So would I - unfortunately that isn't the BBC... Or do you consider football, reality TV and soap operas to be non-mainstream? I would have much less of a problem forking out 120 quid a year if the beeb _did_ stick to their charter of broadcasting non-mainstream stuff. The Sky Digital package I'm on costs me 216 quid a year (ontop of the beeb's licence) and I get *way* more than double the amount of non-mainstream stuff off that than I ever do off the beeb. (Not to mention the mainstream stuff I do watch).
And don't talk to me about how the BBC has to charge that much to fund their extra digital channels: the digital channels are more full of crap than the terrestrial ones (I think I have watched BBC Three _once_ since it was launched), and not everyone can get them (yes, believe it or not there are some locations in the UK where you can't get either satellite or DVB-T)
It's actually typical for a public company. Just imagine that someone sues Google because he was indeed using Google Zeitgeist for some scientific research, unaware that it was just for fun.
So put a big fat disclaimer on the top of the site. Like it or not, the browser stats are useful and Google is probably the most unbiassed site on the internet to get such stats off. Infact I wish they would publish the browser stats in a more useful format (e.g. bigger graph, updated on a weekly or daily basis, etc). There are also various things they can do to reduce the problem of people spoofing their UA string such as checking for really stupid things like MSIE running under Linux.
Which brings me to an unrelated point: I *really* hate what the UA string has become. There is absolutely no reason for web developers to ever be checking the UA string on the server side - if you need different markup for different browsers then you're going wrong and making maintenance of the site more difficult. It *IS* possible to make a site that works on all modern browsers even if doing so does cause you a headache. And so there's no reason for a browser to ever fake it's UA string - all browsers should be reporting what they are instead of pretending to be something different - having all browsers claiming they're IE is a problem for anyone who is actually interested in those statistics (which all web developers should be).