In general, natural disasters are net positive for the economy, as the temporary loss of economic activity is offset by the future rebuilding and enhanced productivity.
Isn't this just an example of the broken window fallacy? I mean, sure there are jobs created, but you've lost the value of what needs to be rebuilt.
People bitch and moan about a Microsoft software program that is designed to stop piracy...
...except that, if you were to read TFA, you would see that this is not a pirated version of Windows. Do you really want to start a program where you randomly accuse your customers of being software pirates, even when they are not? How will that help "stop piracy" when the real pirates are using corporate keys to begin with (and are immune from WGA) and the real customers are being falsely flagged?
They're different socket types made by different manufacturers -- some of them are ultra proprietary (my lamps for my lawn and garden can only use bulbs from the manufacturer), some of them are fairly standardized (the 60watt table lamp bulbs) and some are standardized but more rare (the bulbs we use in our halogen downlights over the kitchen counter).
But we're talking in analogies here, when the concrete issue is this: the Internet is not proprietary. Even if you can find examples of bulbs that run only in proprietary products (i.e. Xmas lights) then chances are that the bulbs were designed exclusively for that product, and the product for those bulbs. Are you suggesting that the Internet should have specific web pages designed for specific browsers, even if it means that Consumer Joe has to switch browsers/operating systems several times a day just to buy his products at SiteX, SiteY and SiteZ?
What I attempted to illustrate (perhaps unclearly) was that by having more "standards" that are incompatible with each other, you're limited to the applications to which they apply. By saying that we should have two dozen "standards" for displaying a web page, you are suggesting that each user is responsible for either installing those two dozen browsers/plugins/extensions and remembering when to use each one, or that each browser developer is responsible for ensureing taht all two dozen implementations work correctly. How would this not be easier with one clear document?
If we had 20 standards of web layout rendering, we'd likely see many more competitors trying to beat one another in the easiest to use/cheapest/most capable for whatever need the user and creator has.
And while they are trying to "beat one another", users are subjected to an uncountable number of "this page cannot be displayed properly without installing ProductX" messages and browser crap-outs. That's unacceptable, in my books.
If you want to compete, compete based on your browser's merits, not on how well it implements your super-duper bonus extended features. Especially when they're something trivial, like displaying a page nicely on my screen.
When I have to use screws to fix my deck, each screw tends to have its own screwhead for the driver -- competitive forces that allow us to have variety for our screws. Each light bulb definitely does not have the same socket -- look at halogen and LED and fluourescent and incandescent and PAR 64s and all that. Even in my own home I have 4 different bulb sockets I use all the time -- competitive forces that allow me to use the most efficient design for what I need done.
Yes, but you are talking about a "standard" of 3 or 4 things -- call them "attributes" if you like. For screws, let's enumerate them as headtype={robertson,philips,flathead,torx} and for bulbs let's do the same as basetype={edison,miniature,LEDstyle,etc}. It's still a screw in a screw-hole, and a bulb in a socket.
I liken this to the attributes of a CSS tag, such as textalign:{center,left,right,justify}. The fewer there are, the less confusion. By developing any-old-style willy-nilly, who are you burdening now? BrowserCompanyX modifies their CSS handling such that it makes all body text smaller than the headings. People start to compensate by boosting their heading sizes. Now when BrowserY and BrowserZ look at the page, they look pretty bad because the headings are HUGE. How is this a fault of CSS, which clearly spells out standard (yet modifiable!) rules regarding headers and text?
Don't you feel lucky that you only "need" a half dozen screwdrivers to assemble a piece of furniture? Can you imagine what it would be like if you were responsible for having every type of screwdriver available, because some designer chose 78 different screw styles?
That's all.
Re:Standard versus Proprietary?
on
Dvorak Rants on CSS
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· Score: 2, Insightful
no one wants to really follow anyone else's standards.
Lots of people want to follow other standards. It allows for their product to be interoperable with existing (read: not their own) products. The ones that usually oppose said interoperability are trying to preserve a monopoly on their format.
competitive standards rather than an all-in-one standard.
Ahh, yes. The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
The problem with this approach is that it's a mess. Can you imagine if all of the nails used to build your house required a different hammer? Each light bulb had a different sized socket? Each automobile required a different sequence to start the engine? There's a reason why things are standardized. In this case, a standardized display format for websites should make it easier for everyone involved... if implemented properly.
Firefox also does not comply with the standards at all -- why?
Don't you think "at all" is a bit facetious? Fx is actually pretty good at implementing CSS, especially compared to, say, IE. Box model, anyone?
I think I have more faith in PDFs rendering properly on ANY platform than CSS or HTML.
Different purposes. I shudder to think of a PDF-based Internet.
Re:Standard versus Proprietary?
on
Dvorak Rants on CSS
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm in the process of starting our CSS layout from scratch for all of our blogs (I hired one graphic designer and have 2 more volunteers). We've spent 40 hours in the last week testing a few ideas on a variety of browsers and they're a mess.
The troubles you are experiencing are not CSS problems, per se, but rather piss-poor browser implementations of CSS. If browsers followed the specs, you'd probably eliminate 99% of the issues right off the bat.
The TH part of THin and THey started life as two different letters with different sounds
Indeed, I'm neither disputing that they were different letters, nor that they shouldn't be. I'm just wondering why the h's in Franklin's alphabet all look so similar, at least to my eyes. It's possible to make them different, yet more distinct. Repeating my earlier example, if we were to reform modern English by making a new letter to replace the t and the h in "th", wouldn't it make sense to make it identifiable as such by depicting the sound as an h with a cross through the stem, or similar?
Of course, you can also make a completely different symbol, but at least make sure you don't already have too many similar symbols in your alphabet. Take, for example, the thorn. It looks kind of like a P, but since there's only one P-like letter in our modern alphabet -- to me, q looks different enough, as does B -- I wouldn't find it nearly as confusing as having four slightly different h's. It's as bad as those algebra books that say "consider vector v, originating at point v in vector-space V." Bah!
except every other imported ODF word will be reversed because of a mismatch between ODF and MSopenXML.
Well sure, but right now if I send an ODF document to my buddy who only uses MS Office, he can't even open it. There's no filter to import ODF at all. I guess he could open it as a plain text file in the case of simple XML-based ODF files (then manually remove all excess codes and whatnot) but what to do when it's a ZIPped JAR with several content/formatting files? At least with this "converter" there's a fleeting chance he can get to the content, even if the tables are a little misaligned. Otherwise I need to send him the file as a DOC, or as a RTF, or some other intermediate file, defeating the whole purpose of ODF.
Of course it's not perfect, but it's a good step. Not everybody will jump ship from MS Office, so there has to be some method to establish and maintain compatibility with them.
One of the problems I see with Franklin's alphabet is that there are a number of letters that, to me, look way too similar. Take a look at 'h' (as in "Hi") vs. 'longer serif h' (as in "THin") vs. 'longer serif but straighter h' (as in THey) vs. 'curly h' (as in "SHare"). I understand that all of these combinations involve the letter 'h', but they'd be awfully hard to discern, especially in my sloppy handwriting. Couldn't he have made a few other shapes instead, or at least made them somewhat relate to the other letters they are joined with -- e.g. for "THey" maybe make an 'h'-type shape with a cross through it, as you would a 't'?
ODF plugin for MS Office would hinder acceptance of alternative office suites
Meh, so what? If this plugin truly enables us alternative-office-suite-users to have better compatibility with those who cling to MS Office, so be it. At least they'll be able to view/edit our documents with less headaches.
I'm more concerned about the file format (ODF) than the suite itself (OO.o, Abiword, etc.)
I don't know the maximum I am willing to pay, because I don't know the "value" of an item. Why don't I know the value of the item? Because I don't know what other people are willing to pay for it.
Well, unless you're buying the item to resell it later (to someone who obviously isn't bidding on eBay), the "value" is simply the value of the item to you. I might value a hard to find CD at $50. If somebody else wants to drop down $500 on it, that doesn't make its "value" to me jump up, only its value if it were to be resold in the market.
I can't choose a bid ahead of time that will guarantee that I win the auctino yet still guarantee that I pay something I can afford.
Here's a simple tip: don't place "maximum" bids you can't afford.
I chould choose, $20, $80, or $200 as a max bid for something. But at any of those price points, I'd be willing to pay $21, $81, or $201, because it represents such a trivial incremental addition to the price.
Well, I think you've just found your "maximum bid" strategy right there, wouldn't you say?
That's strange, although I have heard others echo similar comments. I can't verify this at all, since my XP computer at work is set to "notify me only" and it does just that -- a popup windows appears saying "new updates are available, please click here to start downloading". If I do nothing and reboot, the same keeps happening until I finally choose to install.
I guess this thread is to what you are referring, or something similar. Again, I have never seen this firsthand.
I kinda get the image of a kid hitting his brother with a chair, then running away hiding behind mom and asking for forgiveness before the retaliation comes. Then he repeats it.
I could be wrong, but I thought that you could still use the Automatic Updates feature without WGA validation, and that only launching Windows Update would prompt you to verify your legit copy of Windows.
It is hard to focus on just the story summaries...
Woah there! When did all of us Slashdotters start reading the summaries before launching into flame-fueled post-fests based on inaccurate or incindiary headlines?
I didn't think any excryption was perfect. So what happens if they do encrypt the disk and the drive gets stolen.
Let me get this straight. There are two scenarios: leaving the disk unencrypted, and encrypting it. Under scenario 1, if the laptop is stolen, the thieves have free access to all the info on the hard drive. Under scenario 2, the thieves have potential access to all of the info on the hard drive, but only if they break the encryption.
Are you arguing that scenario 2 is no better than scenario 1?
If they don't report it and the encrytion is broken what recourse do those people with compromised information/identities have?
I'd say that has more to do with the company's actions (not reporting the theft) than the encryption itself. Under scenario 2, the company should still be liable, but they can come back and say "hey, at least we tried to put some basic security measures in place."
Slashdot Mirror
I always liked this one:
"Hey Billy. Come and help your uncle Jack off the horse."
Does this imply that any porn star named Barbie has to change her name (again) before starting up a web site?
Isn't this just an example of the broken window fallacy? I mean, sure there are jobs created, but you've lost the value of what needs to be rebuilt.
Just curious.
...except that, if you were to read TFA, you would see that this is not a pirated version of Windows. Do you really want to start a program where you randomly accuse your customers of being software pirates, even when they are not? How will that help "stop piracy" when the real pirates are using corporate keys to begin with (and are immune from WGA) and the real customers are being falsely flagged?
But I guess you just wanted to whine about Apple.
But we're talking in analogies here, when the concrete issue is this: the Internet is not proprietary. Even if you can find examples of bulbs that run only in proprietary products (i.e. Xmas lights) then chances are that the bulbs were designed exclusively for that product, and the product for those bulbs. Are you suggesting that the Internet should have specific web pages designed for specific browsers, even if it means that Consumer Joe has to switch browsers/operating systems several times a day just to buy his products at SiteX, SiteY and SiteZ?
What I attempted to illustrate (perhaps unclearly) was that by having more "standards" that are incompatible with each other, you're limited to the applications to which they apply. By saying that we should have two dozen "standards" for displaying a web page, you are suggesting that each user is responsible for either installing those two dozen browsers/plugins/extensions and remembering when to use each one, or that each browser developer is responsible for ensureing taht all two dozen implementations work correctly. How would this not be easier with one clear document?
And while they are trying to "beat one another", users are subjected to an uncountable number of "this page cannot be displayed properly without installing ProductX" messages and browser crap-outs. That's unacceptable, in my books.
If you want to compete, compete based on your browser's merits, not on how well it implements your super-duper bonus extended features. Especially when they're something trivial, like displaying a page nicely on my screen.
Yes, but you are talking about a "standard" of 3 or 4 things -- call them "attributes" if you like. For screws, let's enumerate them as headtype={robertson,philips,flathead,torx} and for bulbs let's do the same as basetype={edison,miniature,LEDstyle,etc}. It's still a screw in a screw-hole, and a bulb in a socket.
I liken this to the attributes of a CSS tag, such as textalign:{center,left,right,justify}. The fewer there are, the less confusion. By developing any-old-style willy-nilly, who are you burdening now? BrowserCompanyX modifies their CSS handling such that it makes all body text smaller than the headings. People start to compensate by boosting their heading sizes. Now when BrowserY and BrowserZ look at the page, they look pretty bad because the headings are HUGE. How is this a fault of CSS, which clearly spells out standard (yet modifiable!) rules regarding headers and text?
Don't you feel lucky that you only "need" a half dozen screwdrivers to assemble a piece of furniture? Can you imagine what it would be like if you were responsible for having every type of screwdriver available, because some designer chose 78 different screw styles?
That's all.
Lots of people want to follow other standards. It allows for their product to be interoperable with existing (read: not their own) products. The ones that usually oppose said interoperability are trying to preserve a monopoly on their format.
Ahh, yes. The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
The problem with this approach is that it's a mess. Can you imagine if all of the nails used to build your house required a different hammer? Each light bulb had a different sized socket? Each automobile required a different sequence to start the engine? There's a reason why things are standardized. In this case, a standardized display format for websites should make it easier for everyone involved... if implemented properly.
Don't you think "at all" is a bit facetious? Fx is actually pretty good at implementing CSS, especially compared to, say, IE. Box model, anyone?
Different purposes. I shudder to think of a PDF-based Internet.
The troubles you are experiencing are not CSS problems, per se, but rather piss-poor browser implementations of CSS. If browsers followed the specs, you'd probably eliminate 99% of the issues right off the bat.
Indeed, I'm neither disputing that they were different letters, nor that they shouldn't be. I'm just wondering why the h's in Franklin's alphabet all look so similar, at least to my eyes. It's possible to make them different, yet more distinct. Repeating my earlier example, if we were to reform modern English by making a new letter to replace the t and the h in "th", wouldn't it make sense to make it identifiable as such by depicting the sound as an h with a cross through the stem, or similar?
Of course, you can also make a completely different symbol, but at least make sure you don't already have too many similar symbols in your alphabet. Take, for example, the thorn. It looks kind of like a P, but since there's only one P-like letter in our modern alphabet -- to me, q looks different enough, as does B -- I wouldn't find it nearly as confusing as having four slightly different h's. It's as bad as those algebra books that say "consider vector v, originating at point v in vector-space V." Bah!
Well sure, but right now if I send an ODF document to my buddy who only uses MS Office, he can't even open it. There's no filter to import ODF at all. I guess he could open it as a plain text file in the case of simple XML-based ODF files (then manually remove all excess codes and whatnot) but what to do when it's a ZIPped JAR with several content/formatting files? At least with this "converter" there's a fleeting chance he can get to the content, even if the tables are a little misaligned. Otherwise I need to send him the file as a DOC, or as a RTF, or some other intermediate file, defeating the whole purpose of ODF.
Of course it's not perfect, but it's a good step. Not everybody will jump ship from MS Office, so there has to be some method to establish and maintain compatibility with them.
One of the problems I see with Franklin's alphabet is that there are a number of letters that, to me, look way too similar. Take a look at 'h' (as in "Hi") vs. 'longer serif h' (as in "THin") vs. 'longer serif but straighter h' (as in THey) vs. 'curly h' (as in "SHare"). I understand that all of these combinations involve the letter 'h', but they'd be awfully hard to discern, especially in my sloppy handwriting. Couldn't he have made a few other shapes instead, or at least made them somewhat relate to the other letters they are joined with -- e.g. for "THey" maybe make an 'h'-type shape with a cross through it, as you would a 't'?
Meh, so what? If this plugin truly enables us alternative-office-suite-users to have better compatibility with those who cling to MS Office, so be it. At least they'll be able to view/edit our documents with less headaches.
I'm more concerned about the file format (ODF) than the suite itself (OO.o, Abiword, etc.)
Here's another: those w/o a credit card can still use change.
Well, unless you're buying the item to resell it later (to someone who obviously isn't bidding on eBay), the "value" is simply the value of the item to you. I might value a hard to find CD at $50. If somebody else wants to drop down $500 on it, that doesn't make its "value" to me jump up, only its value if it were to be resold in the market.
Here's a simple tip: don't place "maximum" bids you can't afford.
Well, I think you've just found your "maximum bid" strategy right there, wouldn't you say?
Well, of course. How would anyone download Firefox without a web browser?
That's strange, although I have heard others echo similar comments. I can't verify this at all, since my XP computer at work is set to "notify me only" and it does just that -- a popup windows appears saying "new updates are available, please click here to start downloading". If I do nothing and reboot, the same keeps happening until I finally choose to install.
I guess this thread is to what you are referring, or something similar. Again, I have never seen this firsthand.
There, I corrected it for you.
I could be wrong, but I thought that you could still use the Automatic Updates feature without WGA validation, and that only launching Windows Update would prompt you to verify your legit copy of Windows.
Isn't that the $130 laptop? Or did they manage to bring the cost back down?
Woah there! When did all of us Slashdotters start reading the summaries before launching into flame-fueled post-fests based on inaccurate or incindiary headlines?
Well gee, maybe I should take a look at that <em> tag.
/slaps forehead
Wouldn't that make it difficult when many of us emphasize points using italics?
Well, ok, not anymore at least.
This is handy! I've been looking for an easy way to find cracks for Firefox and OpenOffice, so I can use the "pro" features.
I didn't think any excryption was perfect. So what happens if they do encrypt the disk and the drive gets stolen.
Let me get this straight. There are two scenarios: leaving the disk unencrypted, and encrypting it. Under scenario 1, if the laptop is stolen, the thieves have free access to all the info on the hard drive. Under scenario 2, the thieves have potential access to all of the info on the hard drive, but only if they break the encryption.
Are you arguing that scenario 2 is no better than scenario 1?
If they don't report it and the encrytion is broken what recourse do those people with compromised information/identities have?
I'd say that has more to do with the company's actions (not reporting the theft) than the encryption itself. Under scenario 2, the company should still be liable, but they can come back and say "hey, at least we tried to put some basic security measures in place."