If MS really wanted to pretend to be "more compatible", they could always implement even one of the Linux filesystems on their own. The code is out there, people are even attempting to port it by themselves. Hell, Linux already has an HFS implementation, so what's stopping MS from doing one, really?
Same to Apple, really. You support FAT, but you don't support ext2? Or any of the other ones I've thrown up there in the subject line? Really, Linux is currently the most compatible OS on the market -- even though it isn't "on the market", really.
MS has always abused their market share to be able to implement things however the hell they want, and claim everyone else is incompatible for not using their "standard". Every time someone else implements their own version of it, they are made to look less compatible. Take OpenDocument. If I sent an ODT to someone who didn't already know what it is, they'd automatically assume I was sending some weird, non-standard format. They'd continue to think that once I explained it, even though the truth is, ODT is a standard, and DOC is not. They'd be confused as hell if I sent a DOC back to them and said "I can't read this non-standard format."
So of course everyone has to reverse-engineer and re-implement MS "standards", as well as come up with their own, since the MS ones suck so much -- FAT? In 2006? -- so of course, when you've spent more work reverse-engineering a shitty solution than coming up with your own brilliant one, you have a right, nay, a responsibility to stand up and be proud and say "We're more compatible."
Anyone who wonders why we dare to create real standards that aren't the broken MS Way may kindly go fuck themselves.
a whole bunch of totally different tasks -- launching applications, monitoring running tasks, etc.
All I use the Dock for is launching apps or switching to a running app. When your apps don't suck down 100% of CPU while idle, the distinction becomes less meaningful, but if you really want to know, running apps have a little black arrow under them.
You have Finder windows that flip from brushed metal to Aqua when you merely show/hide the toolbar
Why does this matter? Seriously? I didn't even notice it until you pointed it out -- why yes, the title bar looks different. Big surprise -- the whole window looks different, because you hid a bunch of stuff. I'd just assumed the brushed metal disappeared.
why can't I drag a document from the Recent Items list to open it in a non-default application?
Good point. I've never, ever run into this.
Why can't I assign an icon to a folder by dragging it into the Get Info window?
Well, we're comparing this to Windows, and AFAIK, you can't do this with Windows, either. More relevant question: How do I assign an icon to a folder? More relevant still: When have I ever wanted to make things even more inconsistent by assigning an icon to a folder? "application" files are bad enough, when you're digging around in the Unix end...
Why can't I drag a document from the Dock to the Desktop?
Acutally, why can't I drag a document from the Dock to anywhere? Actually, as far as I know, a document on the Dock behaves exactly like an Application on the Dock -- it's only there so you can launch it. You cannot drag it from the Dock to anywhere, because it's not really on the Dock, it's somewhere else.
Like iTunes, with its "streamlined" interface that just leaves average users upset because they can't understand why there isn't a "stop" button.
Average users are used to their iPods, on which there isn't a "stop" button either, and it never bothered anyone. Or maybe there is? Anyway, I only ever see people hitting "pause", so this makes sense.
Why the hell can't I play videos fullscreen in the built-in media player?
I make it a point to avoid QuickTime like the Plague. VLC and mplayer are only a download away. I think even Flip4Mac might be free.
And the confusing interface that makes no distinction between the fundamental system menus and an individual application's menus.
Here's the distinction: On the far left, there's an Apple menu. That's the system. On the right, there are various other menus -- mostly Spotlight, the current time, your user, etc. Those are the system. Everything else -- everything on the left that's not part of the Apple menu -- is the application.
Maybe it's hard to tell the difference, but there is a huge usability advantage, and I do notice it when using a trackpad -- you don't have to aim as much that first time. Just run your mouse up as far as it'll go, you only have to aim left and right to find what you're looking for, because your cursor is sliding along the top of the screen. On Windows and Linux, for no good reason, you have to aim both horizontally and vertically.
Of course, it's nothing like some stranger things -- on Linux, I saw a window manager that put the whole menu up there. That is, once you hit "File", say, the whole File menu would be across the bar on the top, along with a way to go up to the parent menu. Maybe harder to learn, but ultimately could be more usable.
And I believe this hasn't changed since OS 9.
I still haven't managed to teach one aging Mac fanatic friend the difference between closing a document window and closing an application.
Which begs the question: Isn't it possible to just link to that source on the library's homepage, so it can be cached across various AJAX pages? Slow computers would become more of a problem than slow connections, then, as you have to parse the entire JS file and store it somewhere.
Seriously, pick something else that actually deserves your hate -- like Flash.
It appears you missed the point of the original posters remarks.
Ok, I give up. What was the point of the original poster's remarks? In what way does this:
To make THAT leap, that the electronic equates that of the PHYSICAL, is an all or nothing proposition.
Equal this:
Where is the line now, where was it before such a thing like this occurred, and where is that BLURRED LINE heading???
You see how I could be confused. I thought "all or nothing" meant "all or nothing", not, ya know, gradual change that might stop somewhere or change direction.
The rest of your comments really aren't worth responding to, although I should apologize for turning it nasty in the first place.
I don't understand your question. What about real stuff indeed? Maybe you don't see the value of food, or medical treatment, for example, but most people do.
That's my point exactly. Are all of these explicitly covered under an economy? It seems to me that many things we consider valuable, and can sue for damages lost, are really only valuable in that they can be exchanged for currency. An obvious one would be gold.
Thus, if gamers decide to give their toy money value, all they need to do is show that it can be easily exchanged for real money.
To make THAT leap, that the electronic equates that of the PHYSICAL, is an all or nothing proposition.
Where does your paycheck go? Do you store it in your mattress, in pure cash or gold? Or do you store it the way normal people do, as an electronic number on an electronic computer accessible via some sort of inter-bank network?
The lines are being blurred, but not all of them. Murder or rape in-game is still not a crime, because murder will never be as final as RL murder (and we know we have life after death), and you can always logout if you're being raped (which is possible in some games). But money is where I'd draw the line now -- it takes real work to earn, and it can be converted to and from real money, which isn't so real anyway -- see above.
The day certain online behavior is deemed criminal by laws that exist in the PHYSICAL WORLD, and this might have already occurred I don't know, is the day the police state no longer becomes a phrase to fear, book theme, or mental abstract, but a real living force.
You know, there are plenty of reasons to be afraid of a police state, and the direction we're heading. Precrime, wiretapping, doublethink, newspeak, nanny-nation, and many other things.
Those of us who realize this now look much worse because of idiots like you. You do realize that it's illegal to crack into a server and steal data, right? Or to deface a website, or launch a virus/worm, or buy drugs... Does this make sense to you? Or is the damage not real enough for you, because it's all in computers, never mind the hundreds of thousands of real dollars it can cost to counter these problems?
If you have not already received a Darwin award, I, too, "weap" for the future.
Here's the trouble: A skilled gamer who does something like this can, if punished in the game, easily set up a new account. The whole point of law enforcement is to prevent crime. One way to do that is to have something be a suitable deterrant, and in-game law is that for some players. But for someone who already has a main account on which to roleplay (if they even care about that), and buys other accounts to cheat and scam with, in-game law won't stop them at all.
The other way to prevent crime is to take known criminals, who are likely to commit the same crimes again, and remove them from that opportunity -- or remove them from society altogether. Banning would be sufficient, if it worked, but as I said, if you have fifteen different accounts under fake names, who cares if one gets banned? And if the in-game currency can be sold for real-world money, you can easily afford those accounts and any fake IDs necessary.
Thus, the most effective way to stop scams like this is to bring it into the real world.
Now, I would much rather see in-game crime be punished in-game, to allow people the choice of playing as a criminal, and to generally make in-game life more interesting. I would rather see the real-life punishment limited to things like actual cheating -- as in, exploiting bugs. But I can see why people might want this particular kind of punishment to cross into the real world.
This is simply another aspect of the question that philsophers have been struggling with for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Are the things that you have earned on an internet game your "property", per se?
Waitaminit. You're telling me the Internet's been around for hundreds, nay, thousands of years?
Two-year-olds attempt murder all the time by hitting each other as hard as they can. But since they can't kill, I don't think it really counts. After all, if you really wanted to banish them from ever playing quake again, you could try a different approach, like 0wning their computer and corrupting Quake, and preventing them from reinstalling. Or calling id and reporting them as a pirate.
Or are you saying pillow fights are also attempted murder?
Anyway, it's irrelevant -- we can agree that in-game murder is very different from RL murder. We can't say the same about game currency, especially when it can be exchanged for real currency.
When you bought your Monopoly game, it came in a box. The game probably takes only a couple hours to play, max. The real paper money has little or no value. When someone steals a quarter, do you call the cops? $1? $5? Probably not.
However, money in an MMO often takes effort to earn. So does Monopoly money, but that's easy come, easy go -- gone at the end of the game, in fact. MMO money can involve a huge amount of investment of real time, and it's persistant and digital.
In other words, just like any other currency.
Or is it not "real" theft when someone steals money from your bank account? That's all it is, numbers in a machine. It's all about the value we assign to it as a culture, and I'd say, except for a few assholes, most gamers assign quite a lot of value to in-game money -- just look at how much it trades for in real money. Real money is the same way -- except for the few assholes pulling these same cons in reality, most of us have some respect for the value of these green slips of paper and numbers in our bank.
There's a real reason for lowercase. If you're designing a webpage from scratch, XHTML (even transitional) can help a lot -- validation is like a unit test for your webpage. But it insists that it all be lowercase, because that's now the standard, and XML is case-sensitive.
Anyway, thank God for HTML Tidy -- no more doing that by hand, even if you still think it makes your filesize smaller.
It would be OpenAL, because it'll generally go straight to ALSA (more efficient), but it should be possible to send through stuff like jackd, esd, or even oss. But I don't know which is better for capture -- that's all about playback.
And by "tweaking", I mean tweaking on Google's part. You have to tweak it to any OS. What you're suggesting, and I'm suspecting isn't necessary, is a similar amount of tweaking per-distro to get it working. I believe ut2004 worked similarly well out of the box and did audio capture. If you installed Festival, it did text to speech.
Personally, I avoid messing with my IE, and I only use it for testing, kind of the way I used to use my Firefox (before I discovered the developer extensions). And I make a point never to work with IE-only pages. I develop on Firefox for Firefox, and apply the IE bug suite later, if I'm being paid to.
I may install it at some point, but I'll probably go to something like Dojo first, so I let someone else worry about browser issues.
Re:WPA-supporting devices all but mandatory
on
Crypto Snake Oil
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· Score: 1
OK, I admit it -- I have other reasons I didn't get a DS. Mostly because I have a gaming desktop and no need for a portable. But thanks for the link.
Main point -- don't complain to Slashdot, complain to people who can actually do something about it -- and then rally Slashdot to help you complain.
Well, I said flamewars, but there you go. Another year, and we're in some stupid war. We're no longer united because it's good, we're united against something.
And please, do remember Afghanistan. Absolutely brilliant move, amazing it worked, but brilliant too -- most people can't tell the difference between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Even if you agree with the War against Afghanistan, it was wholly redirected to Iraq, and no one seems to remember these days.
It's frustrating how we, as a species, can only seem to unite through tragedy, and not for very long. We get over it, and we look for someone to blame.
Maybe I just don't see anyone who doesn't care, maybe they've all hit -1 by now, but all I hear are people saying RIP and making jokes. Personally, I find the "crikeys" to be in good taste. He probably would've liked that.
But enjoy it now, because in another few hours, this will all be forgotten in yet another flamewar.
At my last job, I had to do a LOT of this. Basically, I had to duplicate someone's web site look'n'feel, given nothing more than a URL, and put our (dynamic) content in the middle of it. Then, they could link to our page, and we'd essentially have one page of their site under our control.
First thing: Crack open the source. I would try not to clean it up if I didn't have to. If I didn't like it, that means I had to -- MS FrontPage and all of its DAMN CAPS ON EVERY TAG meant I'd run it through HTML Tidy.
Second thing: Fix the URLs. Since it was on our server, I had to make everything into absolute URLs. Rather than write a general-purpose script for this, I just wrote semi-generic regex search-and-replace in Vim. Replace href="/ with href="http://example.com/. Replace href="../ with href="http://example.com/foo/. And so on, and also with src.
Now the real challenge: Fix the structure of the document. Some don't need much. Some need major surgery -- fixed table widths, images set to those exactly, fixed heights, all kinds of other stuff in a layout... The worst were the ones where their main textual content was split up arbitrarily, to create things like columns.
Or worse, Adobe GoLive. I simply refused to work with it -- absolutely everything on the page, no matter how small or meaningless the distinction -- list items, everything -- was wrapped in its own div and positioned absolutely with separate CSS. The structure of the code did not match the structure of the visual document at all. And the menu (something I'd always have to customize) was generated entirely from some difficult-to-read JavaScript -- I wish I'd known about the web developer's "view generated source"...
Two main things to remember here: Dom Inspector and the Web Developer Toolbar. Dom Inspector to find where what you're looking for lives in the code, and the Web Developer extension (for Firefox) to edit the CSS and see changes reflected in realtime, as well as way, way more stuff than I could possibly mention here, including "view generated source".
Sometimes I couldn't fix their layout, and I'd have to make a brand new document and paste their content into a brand new layout. Sometimes it worked, often it didn't. So keep that in mind -- I know others have said it, but sometimes it makes sense to just throw the whole thing out. But yours looks like it could work with some simple search/replace in Vim -- look for href=, src=, and in CSS, url('...
I'd paste an example, but slashdot seems to think PHP code is "junk characters".
It is.
PHP was designed for about what you're describing, when there were better technologies out there to do the same thing. It really looks like it was just supposed to be a bunch of PHP tags you'd mix in with your HTML tags, so you didn't have to think too much like a programmer, and could think more like a web coder.
This is a bad idea in the first place -- if you want to do dynamic stuff, learn to program. Worse, for some inexplicable reason, PHP has been adapted to much more general things.
At my current job, I'm developing a Wordpress plugin. Wordpress is written in PHP. I try to offload as much of the logic to a ruby script and into the MySQL database, because PHP is so ugly and difficult to work with. Much more so than Perl, with none of the upside.
And Wordpress seems to be a really decent, well-designed app. Imagine having to deal with some idiot's homebrew PHP... *shudder*
Anyway, why even bring up PHP here? Unless OP ends up redoing the entire site, what they're really looking for is tidy.
Ah, but is it out of the box? Did you have to do no tweaking at all?
Yes. I typed "emerge googleearth" as root, and then "googleearth" as my normal account. It does not use Wine, it is a native Linux port.
To be fair, I had to set up my nvidia drivers first. That was "emerge nvidia-drivers" and changing one line of Xorg.conf, and I had already done this long ago to get games and movies working.
If they use native drivers, the diversity of GNU/Linux setups is going to prevent widespread use, IMHO.
ALSA wouldn't do it?
Doom 3 and Quake 4 use ALSA natively, I think. I know ut2004, last I checked, used OpenAL, which can be configured to use SDL or ALSA directly as a backend, probably even ESD if you don't have a lot of channels -- on my system, it defaults to ALSA with two speakers, and is trivial to configure for surround.
I know Linux has a reputation for requiring massive tweaking to get anything working, but this is 2006, and most things just work. And I'm on a 64-bit Gentoo, for crying out loud -- it should logically take me the most tweaking of anyone to get it working. There are still things I tweak a lot, like gigabit networking, but they aren't things your average desktop user is going to run into, and for the most part, it seems like Windows would need just as much tweaking.
I'm not sure if this is really true, but I strongly suspect that while most of these would get a guy fired, I'm trying to imagine how you'd fire a female for being misogynistic.
Let's not forget, Google has already told the Government to go fsck itself at least once when asked for data. How would the government legally go about obtaining this (fairly useless) data?
Slashdot Mirror
If MS really wanted to pretend to be "more compatible", they could always implement even one of the Linux filesystems on their own. The code is out there, people are even attempting to port it by themselves. Hell, Linux already has an HFS implementation, so what's stopping MS from doing one, really?
Same to Apple, really. You support FAT, but you don't support ext2? Or any of the other ones I've thrown up there in the subject line? Really, Linux is currently the most compatible OS on the market -- even though it isn't "on the market", really.
MS has always abused their market share to be able to implement things however the hell they want, and claim everyone else is incompatible for not using their "standard". Every time someone else implements their own version of it, they are made to look less compatible. Take OpenDocument. If I sent an ODT to someone who didn't already know what it is, they'd automatically assume I was sending some weird, non-standard format. They'd continue to think that once I explained it, even though the truth is, ODT is a standard, and DOC is not. They'd be confused as hell if I sent a DOC back to them and said "I can't read this non-standard format."
So of course everyone has to reverse-engineer and re-implement MS "standards", as well as come up with their own, since the MS ones suck so much -- FAT? In 2006? -- so of course, when you've spent more work reverse-engineering a shitty solution than coming up with your own brilliant one, you have a right, nay, a responsibility to stand up and be proud and say "We're more compatible."
Anyone who wonders why we dare to create real standards that aren't the broken MS Way may kindly go fuck themselves.
All I use the Dock for is launching apps or switching to a running app. When your apps don't suck down 100% of CPU while idle, the distinction becomes less meaningful, but if you really want to know, running apps have a little black arrow under them.
Why does this matter? Seriously? I didn't even notice it until you pointed it out -- why yes, the title bar looks different. Big surprise -- the whole window looks different, because you hid a bunch of stuff. I'd just assumed the brushed metal disappeared.
Good point. I've never, ever run into this.
Well, we're comparing this to Windows, and AFAIK, you can't do this with Windows, either. More relevant question: How do I assign an icon to a folder? More relevant still: When have I ever wanted to make things even more inconsistent by assigning an icon to a folder? "application" files are bad enough, when you're digging around in the Unix end...
Acutally, why can't I drag a document from the Dock to anywhere? Actually, as far as I know, a document on the Dock behaves exactly like an Application on the Dock -- it's only there so you can launch it. You cannot drag it from the Dock to anywhere, because it's not really on the Dock, it's somewhere else.
Average users are used to their iPods, on which there isn't a "stop" button either, and it never bothered anyone. Or maybe there is? Anyway, I only ever see people hitting "pause", so this makes sense.
I make it a point to avoid QuickTime like the Plague. VLC and mplayer are only a download away. I think even Flip4Mac might be free.
Here's the distinction: On the far left, there's an Apple menu. That's the system. On the right, there are various other menus -- mostly Spotlight, the current time, your user, etc. Those are the system. Everything else -- everything on the left that's not part of the Apple menu -- is the application.
Maybe it's hard to tell the difference, but there is a huge usability advantage, and I do notice it when using a trackpad -- you don't have to aim as much that first time. Just run your mouse up as far as it'll go, you only have to aim left and right to find what you're looking for, because your cursor is sliding along the top of the screen. On Windows and Linux, for no good reason, you have to aim both horizontally and vertically.
Of course, it's nothing like some stranger things -- on Linux, I saw a window manager that put the whole menu up there. That is, once you hit "File", say, the whole File menu would be across the bar on the top, along with a way to go up to the parent menu. Maybe harder to learn, but ultimately could be more usable.
And I believe this hasn't changed since OS 9.
Why would they need to know the difference?
Which begs the question: Isn't it possible to just link to that source on the library's homepage, so it can be cached across various AJAX pages? Slow computers would become more of a problem than slow connections, then, as you have to parse the entire JS file and store it somewhere.
Seriously, pick something else that actually deserves your hate -- like Flash.
Ok, I give up. What was the point of the original poster's remarks? In what way does this:
Equal this:
You see how I could be confused. I thought "all or nothing" meant "all or nothing", not, ya know, gradual change that might stop somewhere or change direction.
The rest of your comments really aren't worth responding to, although I should apologize for turning it nasty in the first place.
That's my point exactly. Are all of these explicitly covered under an economy? It seems to me that many things we consider valuable, and can sue for damages lost, are really only valuable in that they can be exchanged for currency. An obvious one would be gold.
Thus, if gamers decide to give their toy money value, all they need to do is show that it can be easily exchanged for real money.
Or am I missing something obvious?
What about real stuff, then?
Game money has value because enough people inside the game give it enough value to spend real money on it.
First truly insightful post I've seen in this discussion. Finally, some sanity.
Where does your paycheck go? Do you store it in your mattress, in pure cash or gold? Or do you store it the way normal people do, as an electronic number on an electronic computer accessible via some sort of inter-bank network?
The lines are being blurred, but not all of them. Murder or rape in-game is still not a crime, because murder will never be as final as RL murder (and we know we have life after death), and you can always logout if you're being raped (which is possible in some games). But money is where I'd draw the line now -- it takes real work to earn, and it can be converted to and from real money, which isn't so real anyway -- see above.
You know, there are plenty of reasons to be afraid of a police state, and the direction we're heading. Precrime, wiretapping, doublethink, newspeak, nanny-nation, and many other things.
Those of us who realize this now look much worse because of idiots like you. You do realize that it's illegal to crack into a server and steal data, right? Or to deface a website, or launch a virus/worm, or buy drugs... Does this make sense to you? Or is the damage not real enough for you, because it's all in computers, never mind the hundreds of thousands of real dollars it can cost to counter these problems?
If you have not already received a Darwin award, I, too, "weap" for the future.
Here's the trouble: A skilled gamer who does something like this can, if punished in the game, easily set up a new account. The whole point of law enforcement is to prevent crime. One way to do that is to have something be a suitable deterrant, and in-game law is that for some players. But for someone who already has a main account on which to roleplay (if they even care about that), and buys other accounts to cheat and scam with, in-game law won't stop them at all.
The other way to prevent crime is to take known criminals, who are likely to commit the same crimes again, and remove them from that opportunity -- or remove them from society altogether. Banning would be sufficient, if it worked, but as I said, if you have fifteen different accounts under fake names, who cares if one gets banned? And if the in-game currency can be sold for real-world money, you can easily afford those accounts and any fake IDs necessary.
Thus, the most effective way to stop scams like this is to bring it into the real world.
Now, I would much rather see in-game crime be punished in-game, to allow people the choice of playing as a criminal, and to generally make in-game life more interesting. I would rather see the real-life punishment limited to things like actual cheating -- as in, exploiting bugs. But I can see why people might want this particular kind of punishment to cross into the real world.
Waitaminit. You're telling me the Internet's been around for hundreds, nay, thousands of years?
Two-year-olds attempt murder all the time by hitting each other as hard as they can. But since they can't kill, I don't think it really counts. After all, if you really wanted to banish them from ever playing quake again, you could try a different approach, like 0wning their computer and corrupting Quake, and preventing them from reinstalling. Or calling id and reporting them as a pirate.
Or are you saying pillow fights are also attempted murder?
Anyway, it's irrelevant -- we can agree that in-game murder is very different from RL murder. We can't say the same about game currency, especially when it can be exchanged for real currency.
No, it is not the same.
When you bought your Monopoly game, it came in a box. The game probably takes only a couple hours to play, max. The real paper money has little or no value. When someone steals a quarter, do you call the cops? $1? $5? Probably not.
However, money in an MMO often takes effort to earn. So does Monopoly money, but that's easy come, easy go -- gone at the end of the game, in fact. MMO money can involve a huge amount of investment of real time, and it's persistant and digital.
In other words, just like any other currency.
Or is it not "real" theft when someone steals money from your bank account? That's all it is, numbers in a machine. It's all about the value we assign to it as a culture, and I'd say, except for a few assholes, most gamers assign quite a lot of value to in-game money -- just look at how much it trades for in real money. Real money is the same way -- except for the few assholes pulling these same cons in reality, most of us have some respect for the value of these green slips of paper and numbers in our bank.
There's a real reason for lowercase. If you're designing a webpage from scratch, XHTML (even transitional) can help a lot -- validation is like a unit test for your webpage. But it insists that it all be lowercase, because that's now the standard, and XML is case-sensitive.
Anyway, thank God for HTML Tidy -- no more doing that by hand, even if you still think it makes your filesize smaller.
It would be OpenAL, because it'll generally go straight to ALSA (more efficient), but it should be possible to send through stuff like jackd, esd, or even oss. But I don't know which is better for capture -- that's all about playback.
And by "tweaking", I mean tweaking on Google's part. You have to tweak it to any OS. What you're suggesting, and I'm suspecting isn't necessary, is a similar amount of tweaking per-distro to get it working. I believe ut2004 worked similarly well out of the box and did audio capture. If you installed Festival, it did text to speech.
Personally, I avoid messing with my IE, and I only use it for testing, kind of the way I used to use my Firefox (before I discovered the developer extensions). And I make a point never to work with IE-only pages. I develop on Firefox for Firefox, and apply the IE bug suite later, if I'm being paid to.
I may install it at some point, but I'll probably go to something like Dojo first, so I let someone else worry about browser issues.
OK, I admit it -- I have other reasons I didn't get a DS. Mostly because I have a gaming desktop and no need for a portable. But thanks for the link.
Main point -- don't complain to Slashdot, complain to people who can actually do something about it -- and then rally Slashdot to help you complain.
Well, I said flamewars, but there you go. Another year, and we're in some stupid war. We're no longer united because it's good, we're united against something.
And please, do remember Afghanistan. Absolutely brilliant move, amazing it worked, but brilliant too -- most people can't tell the difference between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Even if you agree with the War against Afghanistan, it was wholly redirected to Iraq, and no one seems to remember these days.
There seem to be less and less people taking this seriously, but:
Google has a motto of "Don't be evil." Other search engines don't.
Google did not release data. Other search engines did.
Coincidence?
It's frustrating how we, as a species, can only seem to unite through tragedy, and not for very long. We get over it, and we look for someone to blame.
Maybe I just don't see anyone who doesn't care, maybe they've all hit -1 by now, but all I hear are people saying RIP and making jokes. Personally, I find the "crikeys" to be in good taste. He probably would've liked that.
But enjoy it now, because in another few hours, this will all be forgotten in yet another flamewar.
And maybe that's as it should be, but it's sad.
RIP, Steve. You will be remembered.
At my last job, I had to do a LOT of this. Basically, I had to duplicate someone's web site look'n'feel, given nothing more than a URL, and put our (dynamic) content in the middle of it. Then, they could link to our page, and we'd essentially have one page of their site under our control.
First thing: Crack open the source. I would try not to clean it up if I didn't have to. If I didn't like it, that means I had to -- MS FrontPage and all of its DAMN CAPS ON EVERY TAG meant I'd run it through HTML Tidy.
Second thing: Fix the URLs. Since it was on our server, I had to make everything into absolute URLs. Rather than write a general-purpose script for this, I just wrote semi-generic regex search-and-replace in Vim. Replace href="/ with href="http://example.com/. Replace href="../ with href="http://example.com/foo/. And so on, and also with src.
Now the real challenge: Fix the structure of the document. Some don't need much. Some need major surgery -- fixed table widths, images set to those exactly, fixed heights, all kinds of other stuff in a layout... The worst were the ones where their main textual content was split up arbitrarily, to create things like columns.
Or worse, Adobe GoLive. I simply refused to work with it -- absolutely everything on the page, no matter how small or meaningless the distinction -- list items, everything -- was wrapped in its own div and positioned absolutely with separate CSS. The structure of the code did not match the structure of the visual document at all. And the menu (something I'd always have to customize) was generated entirely from some difficult-to-read JavaScript -- I wish I'd known about the web developer's "view generated source"...
Two main things to remember here: Dom Inspector and the Web Developer Toolbar. Dom Inspector to find where what you're looking for lives in the code, and the Web Developer extension (for Firefox) to edit the CSS and see changes reflected in realtime, as well as way, way more stuff than I could possibly mention here, including "view generated source".
Sometimes I couldn't fix their layout, and I'd have to make a brand new document and paste their content into a brand new layout. Sometimes it worked, often it didn't. So keep that in mind -- I know others have said it, but sometimes it makes sense to just throw the whole thing out. But yours looks like it could work with some simple search/replace in Vim -- look for href=, src=, and in CSS, url('...
It is.
PHP was designed for about what you're describing, when there were better technologies out there to do the same thing. It really looks like it was just supposed to be a bunch of PHP tags you'd mix in with your HTML tags, so you didn't have to think too much like a programmer, and could think more like a web coder.
This is a bad idea in the first place -- if you want to do dynamic stuff, learn to program. Worse, for some inexplicable reason, PHP has been adapted to much more general things.
At my current job, I'm developing a Wordpress plugin. Wordpress is written in PHP. I try to offload as much of the logic to a ruby script and into the MySQL database, because PHP is so ugly and difficult to work with. Much more so than Perl, with none of the upside.
And Wordpress seems to be a really decent, well-designed app. Imagine having to deal with some idiot's homebrew PHP... *shudder*
Anyway, why even bring up PHP here? Unless OP ends up redoing the entire site, what they're really looking for is tidy.
Yes. I typed "emerge googleearth" as root, and then "googleearth" as my normal account. It does not use Wine, it is a native Linux port.
To be fair, I had to set up my nvidia drivers first. That was "emerge nvidia-drivers" and changing one line of Xorg.conf, and I had already done this long ago to get games and movies working.
ALSA wouldn't do it?
Doom 3 and Quake 4 use ALSA natively, I think. I know ut2004, last I checked, used OpenAL, which can be configured to use SDL or ALSA directly as a backend, probably even ESD if you don't have a lot of channels -- on my system, it defaults to ALSA with two speakers, and is trivial to configure for surround.
I know Linux has a reputation for requiring massive tweaking to get anything working, but this is 2006, and most things just work. And I'm on a 64-bit Gentoo, for crying out loud -- it should logically take me the most tweaking of anyone to get it working. There are still things I tweak a lot, like gigabit networking, but they aren't things your average desktop user is going to run into, and for the most part, it seems like Windows would need just as much tweaking.
I'm not sure if this is really true, but I strongly suspect that while most of these would get a guy fired, I'm trying to imagine how you'd fire a female for being misogynistic.
We'll just be able to block it more easily. Simply run all Google-related apps as a user who's not in the audio group.
I doubt they'll have porting issues at all, by the way. Google Earth works flawlessly for me.
Let's not forget, Google has already told the Government to go fsck itself at least once when asked for data. How would the government legally go about obtaining this (fairly useless) data?