Until Gekko can play as fast and loose with HTML as the IE rendering engine...
HTML is a standard, playing fast and loose with a standard is a bad thing, not a good thing, ask anyone who builds bridges for a living. So the fact that Gecko fails to render non-standards compliant HTML is a good thing. The only problem I have with Gecko is how slow it is compared to the old Navigator 4.x engine...
What if my cousin (US citizen) requested that I (EU citizen) buy this and FedEx it to him? Would I risk being prosecuted in the US for trafficking illegal software next time I visit him?
The simple answer is that no one knows, there are a whole bunch of opinions on the matter, even lawyers who specialise in this sort of area seem to disagree. Alan Cox even stopped distributing details of the security fixes to the kernel to US Citizens, and resigned from the USENIX ALS committee, citing that "...it has become apparent that it is not safe for non US software engineers to visit the United States".
I was recently offered a job in the States and the DCMA, amougst otehr things, was certainly a factor that I weighed up when I turned it down.
I tend to agree, and the specs are more or less what I want in a PDA with integrated phone. I got excited enough about it to start digging in my wallet for my credit card, then I checked and found that none of the UK networks support it. How very annoying...
But we should stop and consider what the average Internet user is looking for from the web.
Why? Surely if we know what we're doing, and consider this to be a bad move, its our duty (again) to be the poor shmuck that has to stand up and tell people that the emporer has no clothes.
An all Flash web would fundamentally change the nature of the net, lots of things we take for granted now would change radically: search engine access, cross-platform accesibility, proprietary vs. open protocols. My personal is that its a fairly horrifying concept.
I think Macromedia's initiative has a good chance at success.
I'd like to do a flat rate, but we have a tiny percentage of users that load thousands of pages a week.
But my guess would be that the tiny percentage are the people that are actually posting real content (as opposed to crud which is immediately modded down as trolling). Isn't it a bad idea to change the people providing the content more than the rest who are just sponging off them?
Never having counted my page views I haven't a clue which category I fall into, I'll wait for the ads and see how horrendous I find them, and then I might pay, so long as I don't have to use PayPal.
Alright, I'll give. Perhaps I'm part of the problem... but what was significant about September '91? I've also seen September alluded to a few other times in this context. I didn't start using the 'net until 1994-ish, so I guess that makes me a newbie but I'd like to know...
See the Jargon File entry for an explanation of the Sept'93 reference, but for me the death knell was sounded in Sept'91 when JANET started talking about JIPS, which was TCP/IP over the then entirely X.28 UK academic network.
Again, I don't think you're the majority, by any means...But because you're pissed, we should block a continent?
I'm not asking you to block a continent. A bunch of people are pissed off, and are doing something about it. You're free to accept mail from Asia if you want, but the people that get bucket loads of spam from Asia have had enough and are going to black hole them until they've learned manners. Why is this a problem?
This is the internet showing its true colours, if you don't want mail from Asia, you don't have to accept it...
In the 1994 days, when the net boomed, lots of people got onlne and there was a chaos of newsgroup/email spamming. These people have largely learned. Then MS internet users got online in 1995. Same thing. Then AOL users. Each one of them will learn...
Actually it's still September '91 as far as I'm concerned, and if you don't know what that means, you're part of the problem...
If I remember correctly alot of us did exactly the same thing to mail, and usenet posts, originating from AOL back when if first gave its users full internet access. We blocked it, entirely, eventually the news filtered through that they'd more or less learned manners and we unblocked them. Although I still know of a couple of small academic sites that block all incoming mail from AOL and MSN. Go figure...
This isn't new, people have been doing it since we first started hooking all the various networks together in the first place. Admittedly I can't remember it ever happening to an entire continent before. Personally I think its a reasonable idea...
I get nowhere near enough spam in my inbox to interfere with legitimate mail (although I don't doubt there are exceptions that do....) and I don't even use a filter!
Ever heard of small number statistics? Just because its not a problem for you, doesn't mean its not a problem for everyone else. Either you don't have much of an online presence on USENET, or the web, or you've been extremely lucky. I get a couple of hundred spam mails a week, ninety nine percent of these are automagically junked by my custom filters. The remaining one percent is still an pain in the backside...
I can't find any drivers written to support the machine's TurboChannel bus.
Having had a couple of TurboChannel machines kicking around a few of years I went through the same cycle. Linux doesn't support TurboChannel at all, but some versions of BSD do, from the Linux/Alpha FAQ
Linux/Alpha is unlikely to support the TURBOchannel-based Alpha systems in the near (or any) future (this is the DEC 3000 series of workstations). The reason for this is two-fold:
first, these machines have an I/O system that is very different from PCI-based machines and therefore do not look anything like PCs (e.g., pretty much all drivers would have to be
written from scratch). Second, with the advent of PCI, the TURBOchannel is pretty much dead technology (for better or worse) and it just isn't all that much fun to develop software
for dead technology (on the other hand, it may soon be possible to buy such systems cheaply, which would make them more interesting to Linux users, I suppose).
If you have such a machine and want to run a free OS, look for the BSD's. At least one of them supports the 3000 series.
A number of written that the sky is fallen because Microsft is allowing smart tags. Of course, if you read the article smart tags are only implemented in the latest version of thier browser - where new features that some people like and others don't have always been.
Agreed, no big deal. I'm still using Netscape 4.7, it just gracefully fails to render most of the modern junk that I don't want to see anyway.
Probably the best solution is a two-tiered pricing scheme in which light users pay a lower monthly fee but are guaranteed a speed of, say, 768kbps down and in which heavy users (say, over 2 gigs a month) pay a much higher fee.
2Gb per month is heavy usage? I push more data than this in a day, admittedly I've got a T3 running straight into a 100Mb/s LAN, but none the less if "working from home" is ever to be practical for me I'd need the same sort of bandwidth. I don't really regard any of the current broadband offerings to be really that, especially since most of them can't guarantee quality of service.
One thing that comes to mind is a story by Richard Feynman where he was having a hard time coming up with a new idea to research, so he stopped trying to come up with a new idea. He saw someone throw a frisbee and that it wobbled a certain way. He decided to analyze the factors that influence the way that frisbee wobbles based on rotation and other variables. This indirectly led to some more significant discoveries by Feynman...
I'm fairly sure it was a spinning dinner plate during a food fight in the Cal Tech cafeteria, rather than a frisbee, which kicked off the train of thought that lead his work on electron spin. If my memory is correct Feynman talks about the incident in his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!.
The internet existed for years as a network of trusted participants, exposed to attack, but somehow it never was inconvenienced much by such things.
...and back then the proportion of people on the network that knew what they were doing, and would therefore have been able to do serious damage, was alot higher. These days the vast majority of so-called hackers are just script kiddies. They're annoying, but do not pose a serious threat.
A whole second program complete with it's own shuttles which made space runs to plant military satellites in orbit. There's a lot of very expensive & very powerful junk up there which uses classified technologies far in advance of what John Q. Private Sector is allowed to sell in his hard drives.
Err, no? Pure paranoia...It would be impossible to conceal a re-entry from the major powers, or even from the academic portions of deep space tracking network, and being an academic I can tell you exactly how long that sort of secret would last...
On the other hand you are (sort of) right, when we were putting together the Hubble the guys working on spy satellites for the US Military were sitting down the other end of the table from the NASA guys, but weren't allowed to tell the astronomers that the "two big solar panels" design was a really bad idea. They'd stopped using them for spy satellites several years back.
Why? Because they found that large panels made for an unstable platform, the panels flexed due to impulse from the solar wind, and the "seeing" was therefore degraded.
Here's an interesting paper on the same subject...
...and if you still believe in habitable zones, like most of the astronomical community, there are some interesting papers talking about habitable zones in the systems with known extra-solar planets. For instance...
Europa does have very likely evidence of a liquid ocean, but the article then uses that to 'assume' of living creatures there (bac). How can there be?
While I would be the first to argue that we have no proof of life, the martian meteorites not withstanding, Europa is probably our "best bet" to find it inside our own solar system.
For instance have a look at these papers from the AAS DPS meeting,
I guess I'm going to get modded down for this, but don't get me wrong, I'd love to find a good justification for the manned space program. However, the current scientific program, and the ISS, isn't it...
...you can have experiments that are easily monitored, altered, and corrected. It's probably cheaper to have an astronaut do the work than to design (and pay for the lift of) the mechanics to do so.
Unfortunately there are very few experiments that we've been able to think of that really require an astronaut, most could be done cheaper without the human interferance.
...by having experiments inside the permanent structure of the station, you don't need to reproduce the wheel every time you send up an experiment (shielding for radiation and dust, airtight containment, temperature control, etc etc). The station provides all that.
But you do have to shield ever (delicate) experiment against the humans and the gunk that they produce. That costs.
A lot of this could be done with the shuttle...
The shuttle was, and is, a dead end, and alot of the community argued against it. We should have stuck with disposables until we figured out how to build something that really was SSTO. Unfortunately we still haven't managed it...
Indeed, I work at a British university, and just graduated from another. The last mile problem doesn't exist for us...now has a 100Mbps link, of which about 5% is used.
You've on a JANET spur then, the main JANET backbone is up to 1GB/s...
Your quoted numbers include a huge portion of Russia, which does not have all these services you speak of, as well as the former Yugoslavia and much of eastern Europe.
Actually having roamned over most of Eastern Europe and parts of Russian with my Orange GSM tri-band, I can quite catagorically state that you are wrong, at least for GSM.
...use a telnet based BBS (located in the UK) - called Monochrome...
Wow! Mono is still going? God that takes me back a few years, its got to seven or eight years
since I last logged in...wonder if my account is still active!?
Slashdot Mirror
Until Gekko can play as fast and loose with HTML as the IE rendering engine...
HTML is a standard, playing fast and loose with a standard is a bad thing, not a good thing, ask anyone who builds bridges for a living. So the fact that Gecko fails to render non-standards compliant HTML is a good thing. The only problem I have with Gecko is how slow it is compared to the old Navigator 4.x engine...
Al.What if my cousin (US citizen) requested that I (EU citizen) buy this and FedEx it to him? Would I risk being prosecuted in the US for trafficking illegal software next time I visit him?
The simple answer is that no one knows, there are a whole bunch of opinions on the matter, even lawyers who specialise in this sort of area seem to disagree. Alan Cox even stopped distributing details of the security fixes to the kernel to US Citizens, and resigned from the USENIX ALS committee, citing that "...it has become apparent that it is not safe for non US software engineers to visit the United States".
I was recently offered a job in the States and the DCMA, amougst otehr things, was certainly a factor that I weighed up when I turned it down.
Al.I tend to agree, and the specs are more or less what I want in a PDA with integrated phone. I got excited enough about it to start digging in my wallet for my credit card, then I checked and found that none of the UK networks support it. How very annoying...
Al.But we should stop and consider what the average Internet user is looking for from the web.
Why? Surely if we know what we're doing, and consider this to be a bad move, its our duty (again) to be the poor shmuck that has to stand up and tell people that the emporer has no clothes.
An all Flash web would fundamentally change the nature of the net, lots of things we take for granted now would change radically: search engine access, cross-platform accesibility, proprietary vs. open protocols. My personal is that its a fairly horrifying concept.
I think Macromedia's initiative has a good chance at success.
Depressingly, I tend to agree.
Al.I'd like to do a flat rate, but we have a tiny percentage of users that load thousands of pages a week.
But my guess would be that the tiny percentage are the people that are actually posting real content (as opposed to crud which is immediately modded down as trolling). Isn't it a bad idea to change the people providing the content more than the rest who are just sponging off them?
Never having counted my page views I haven't a clue which category I fall into, I'll wait for the ads and see how horrendous I find them, and then I might pay, so long as I don't have to use PayPal.
Al.However, I do not like doing business with PayPal. Please, ditch PayPal and give me an alternative!
Ditto. I'd probably be willing to sign up for an ad free slashdot, but not if you're using PayPal.
Al.Alright, I'll give. Perhaps I'm part of the problem... but what was significant about September '91? I've also seen September alluded to a few other times in this context. I didn't start using the 'net until 1994-ish, so I guess that makes me a newbie but I'd like to know...
See the Jargon File entry for an explanation of the Sept'93 reference, but for me the death knell was sounded in Sept'91 when JANET started talking about JIPS, which was TCP/IP over the then entirely X.28 UK academic network.
Al.Actually, its September '93...
Nope, I'll hold out for September '91. AOL was just the final straw, it'd all being going down hill for a long time before that...
Al.Again, I don't think you're the majority, by any means...But because you're pissed, we should block a continent?
I'm not asking you to block a continent. A bunch of people are pissed off, and are doing something about it. You're free to accept mail from Asia if you want, but the people that get bucket loads of spam from Asia have had enough and are going to black hole them until they've learned manners. Why is this a problem?
This is the internet showing its true colours, if you don't want mail from Asia, you don't have to accept it...
Al.In the 1994 days, when the net boomed, lots of people got onlne and there was a chaos of newsgroup/email spamming. These people have largely learned. Then MS internet users got online in 1995. Same thing. Then AOL users. Each one of them will learn...
Actually it's still September '91 as far as I'm concerned, and if you don't know what that means, you're part of the problem...
If I remember correctly alot of us did exactly the same thing to mail, and usenet posts, originating from AOL back when if first gave its users full internet access. We blocked it, entirely, eventually the news filtered through that they'd more or less learned manners and we unblocked them. Although I still know of a couple of small academic sites that block all incoming mail from AOL and MSN. Go figure...
This isn't new, people have been doing it since we first started hooking all the various networks together in the first place. Admittedly I can't remember it ever happening to an entire continent before. Personally I think its a reasonable idea...
Al.I get nowhere near enough spam in my inbox to interfere with legitimate mail (although I don't doubt there are exceptions that do....) and I don't even use a filter!
Ever heard of small number statistics? Just because its not a problem for you, doesn't mean its not a problem for everyone else. Either you don't have much of an online presence on USENET, or the web, or you've been extremely lucky. I get a couple of hundred spam mails a week, ninety nine percent of these are automagically junked by my custom filters. The remaining one percent is still an pain in the backside...
Al.I can't find any drivers written to support the machine's TurboChannel bus.
Having had a couple of TurboChannel machines kicking around a few of years I went through the same cycle. Linux doesn't support TurboChannel at all, but some versions of BSD do, from the Linux/Alpha FAQ
Al.A number of written that the sky is fallen because Microsft is allowing smart tags. Of course, if you read the article smart tags are only implemented in the latest version of thier browser - where new features that some people like and others don't have always been.
Agreed, no big deal. I'm still using Netscape 4.7, it just gracefully fails to render most of the modern junk that I don't want to see anyway.
Al.Probably the best solution is a two-tiered pricing scheme in which light users pay a lower monthly fee but are guaranteed a speed of, say, 768kbps down and in which heavy users (say, over 2 gigs a month) pay a much higher fee.
2Gb per month is heavy usage? I push more data than this in a day, admittedly I've got a T3 running straight into a 100Mb/s LAN, but none the less if "working from home" is ever to be practical for me I'd need the same sort of bandwidth. I don't really regard any of the current broadband offerings to be really that, especially since most of them can't guarantee quality of service.
Al.One thing that comes to mind is a story by Richard Feynman where he was having a hard time coming up with a new idea to research, so he stopped trying to come up with a new idea. He saw someone throw a frisbee and that it wobbled a certain way. He decided to analyze the factors that influence the way that frisbee wobbles based on rotation and other variables. This indirectly led to some more significant discoveries by Feynman...
I'm fairly sure it was a spinning dinner plate during a food fight in the Cal Tech cafeteria, rather than a frisbee, which kicked off the train of thought that lead his work on electron spin. If my memory is correct Feynman talks about the incident in his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! .
Al.The internet existed for years as a network of trusted participants, exposed to attack, but somehow it never was inconvenienced much by such things.
...and back then the proportion of people on the network that knew what they were doing, and would therefore have been able to do serious damage, was alot higher. These days the vast majority of so-called hackers are just script kiddies. They're annoying, but do not pose a serious threat.
Al.If you have to know crypto-analysis in order to get into college, where are you supposed to learn crypto-analysis?
A book?
Al.A whole second program complete with it's own shuttles which made space runs to plant military satellites in orbit. There's a lot of very expensive & very powerful junk up there which uses classified technologies far in advance of what John Q. Private Sector is allowed to sell in his hard drives.
Err, no? Pure paranoia...It would be impossible to conceal a re-entry from the major powers, or even from the academic portions of deep space tracking network, and being an academic I can tell you exactly how long that sort of secret would last...
On the other hand you are (sort of) right, when we were putting together the Hubble the guys working on spy satellites for the US Military were sitting down the other end of the table from the NASA guys, but weren't allowed to tell the astronomers that the "two big solar panels" design was a really bad idea. They'd stopped using them for spy satellites several years back.
Why? Because they found that large panels made for an unstable platform, the panels flexed due to impulse from the solar wind, and the "seeing" was therefore degraded.
Ho hum...
Al.Here's an interesting paper on the same subject...
...and if you still believe in habitable zones, like most of the astronomical community, there are some interesting papers talking about habitable zones in the systems with known extra-solar planets. For instance...
- Can terrestrial planets exist in the habitable zones of known exoplanetary systems?
- The stability of the orbits of terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of known exoplanetary systems
Al.Europa does have very likely evidence of a liquid ocean, but the article then uses that to 'assume' of living creatures there (bac). How can there be?
While I would be the first to argue that we have no proof of life, the martian meteorites not withstanding, Europa is probably our "best bet" to find it inside our own solar system.
For instance have a look at these papers from the AAS DPS meeting,
or even
- Europa's Habitability follows from Classical Dynamical Astronomy
Al....but one possibility is that (s)he had forgotten to model downforce.
That would be my guess as well...
Al.I guess I'm going to get modded down for this, but don't get me wrong, I'd love to find a good justification for the manned space program. However, the current scientific program, and the ISS, isn't it...
...you can have experiments that are easily monitored, altered, and corrected. It's probably cheaper to have an astronaut do the work than to design (and pay for the lift of) the mechanics to do so.
Unfortunately there are very few experiments that we've been able to think of that really require an astronaut, most could be done cheaper without the human interferance.
...by having experiments inside the permanent structure of the station, you don't need to reproduce the wheel every time you send up an experiment (shielding for radiation and dust, airtight containment, temperature control, etc etc). The station provides all that.
But you do have to shield ever (delicate) experiment against the humans and the gunk that they produce. That costs.
A lot of this could be done with the shuttle...
The shuttle was, and is, a dead end, and alot of the community argued against it. We should have stuck with disposables until we figured out how to build something that really was SSTO. Unfortunately we still haven't managed it...
Al.Indeed, I work at a British university, and just graduated from another. The last mile problem doesn't exist for us...now has a 100Mbps link, of which about 5% is used.
You've on a JANET spur then, the main JANET backbone is up to 1GB/s...
Al.Your quoted numbers include a huge portion of Russia, which does not have all these services you speak of, as well as the former Yugoslavia and much of eastern Europe.
Actually having roamned over most of Eastern Europe and parts of Russian with my Orange GSM tri-band, I can quite catagorically state that you are wrong, at least for GSM.
Al.Wow! Mono is still going? God that takes me back a few years, its got to seven or eight years since I last logged in...wonder if my account is still active!?
Al.