Someone give me one good reason why I should EVER enable IDN?
I can understand that many languages have more than just plain ASCII in them and that users want to be able to use them. What I don't understand is how people who developed the IDN didn't think of this beforehand. "We'll use full Unicode for domain names. People will be able to register domains that look like others. People will use this trick to do wrong." Is it such a big leap of thought that it couldn't have been foreseen? Especially given today's Internet, a cesspool of mischief?
I was going to argue that the only safe thing to do would be to use wget and interpret the web pages in your head. But the last guy who took that advice got 'sploited anyways. He's in the hospital with his brain stuck in an infinite loop.
It could be worse. You could receive a link to goatse.cx. Which would:
Or better yet, assuming you keep all rights to the code, program something that takes another area of expertise and create a program to make someone elses life easier.
In other words, ask for ideas from people who work in less-technical fields. See where the power of computing can help people's task, people who aren't technical enough to write their own programs. Economics is always a rich source of ideas.
...or Google is starting to make GDS into some kind of browser alternative? Which would make sense to some extent, I guess, in order to Web-enable your desktop via a central point without depending on various browsers' and various websites' particular quirks.
I wonder if this will affect adoption of browsers such as Firefox, which already have the potential to offer similar features on their own. I mean, if you're going to keep the browser open most of the time you're at the computer (you know you do!), isn't the browser the ultimate web connection?
I guess what I'm driving at is, what do they hope to achieve by picking on browsers, which are one of the most unquestionable pieces of software around?
If only FireFox would support the mouse-wheel inside multi-line text boxes (like the one I'm typing text into right now).
Works fine on the Linux port.
If only the drop-down list box for FireFox's address bar made ANY sense what-so-ever. In IE6, the most recently used URL is at the top, and unused URLs fall to the bottom and then off the list. I have never figured out what "logic" FireFox uses in that list. It's annoying to the point of uselessness.
Logic is "most often visited", with even more priority given to URL's chosen from the bar (as opposed to links or bookmarks).
If IE used another engine, then we could finally stop writing multiple CSS hacks and fretting over lack of PNG support to make up for Trident's next-to-worthless implementation of both.
Which reminds me: in the articles I've read regarding IE7, so far haven't see a clear statement regarding the freakin' PNG support. They had better not leave THAT out. Say it ain't so.
Lemme say this again: IE7 will make or break Microsoft's stand in the new browser war. I believe they know this. They had better get it right the first try.
My personal opinion is that too much of Firefox is implemented in JS. Probably half of that JS could be easily reimplemented as native code for a substantial speed bonus. I'd like to see that browser.
What, and lose the XUL base? No way, Jose. I'd rather pray for a better and faster XUL engine. Let us all not forget that Firefox is a XUL and Gecko implementation. XUL and Gecko are too cool for words IMHO and some of the greatest things to come out of the whole Mozilla project. Let's not put the cart before the horses here. If people don't like this particular implementation of XUL that is Firefox, tough. Go build a browser from scratch. But don't go arround suggesting that Firefox should drop the very things that make up its core. I mean, drop XUL and you lose the extensions and the whole modularity. Reimplement that as what? And what's next, drop Gecko? Venkman? Anything else?
Good thing Bill Gates doesn't run Adobe... Otherwise he'd be releasing a press statement proclaiming how dangerous open software is.
Actually, I was just thinking of Adobe and Corel when I saw this piece of news. It's become obvious, to me at least, that eventually the open source model will produce worthy competition even in those fields that had always been lacking. You know, games, graphics editing, video editing and so on.
Given that most people aren't professionals, they can probably move from their [coughpiratedcough] copy of Illustrator to Inkscape and not miss much.
Of course, professionals will still keep buying the big thing, at least for another while. So you can say that the likes of Adobe and Corel won't miss much. But I have to wonder anyway if they'll take this lying down.
Even so, his idea is still valid. Why treat the symptoms instead of the cause? Rather then leaving smog alone and making buildings look pretty, let's cut down on the smog itself. This discovery is just a way to hide the garbage under the carpet.
How wide-focus is this? Would police be able to use this on the street without frying everyone?
Probably not and they probably don't care. Think of the usual riot control weapons: water cannons, tear gas, wide-spread rubber bullets. The point IS to affect as many rioters as possible quickly.
Could some sort of protection be made against this? (Portable Faraday cage, maybe?) If not, what's to prevent one of these falling into the black market and eventually being used on Police?
Frankly, I don't see what use bad guys would have for non-lethal mass weapons. They'd use good old firearms, Molotov cockteils and bombs.
[...]If people can't peacefully protest (or even riot), dissent is just forced underground, causing it to be made manifest more anonymously, more unexpectedly, and likely more distructively. Instead of more protests or riots, we have more things like...say...roadside bombs.
I've already seen similary confused takes in other comments here. The quote "peacefully protest (or even riot)" alone is self-contradicting and misguided.
It seems that people forget that there's a pretty definite line between a group of protesters and a maddened mob. You need the group to be very inflamed and you need a catalyst before you get a riot.
The dynamics of protesters over rioters are usually very different too, with the main difference being this: you can no longer reason with or control a mob. You need to inflict pain quickly and en-masse to turn the mob into reasoning individuals, you need to do it quickly and in a wide area, and the humane thing to do is to try not to kill the subjects in the process.
Finally, all the fright that such weapons as the ray-gun will be used by the government against peaceful protesters are rather badly placed IMHO. If a government at some point decides to shut people up by violence in the open, what methods are used won't do much of a difference.
The only beef I have with this story is that they're using Iraq as tests grounds. WTF, go test it on your own people you assholes, see if you get away with that. Oh, but in Iraq is so much easier to find mobs and riots to practice on, isn't it? Serves them right for being testy these days.
I'm curious as to how it got past the QA team that 1.0.5 broke a bunch of extensions. Downloading say, the 10 most popular extensions and testing them is too dificult and time consuming?
It wasn't THAT obvious. I have about 20 extensions installed and the only annoyance I noticed was middle-click-open-in-new-tab not working once in a while, apparently at random. Friends of mine who have (far) fewer extensions never noticed anything was wrong with 1.0.5.
Plus, I suspect a dev might not have many extensions installed, because they could viciate the behaviour of the vanilla application. I also imagine it's enough work on FF itself to worry about 3rd party extensions which may not be written properly in the first place.
I was commenting on the slew of decent, if not actually good extensions that have been lost in the dust bin of 0.8 - 1.0PR obsolescence.
And it will happen with 1.1 very soon, again. I shudder to think about it. Perhaps we'll catch a break, but I'm not an optimist. Actually, I might not upgrade to 1.1 right away, so I avoid annoying myself silly finding out how many of my favorite extensions break.
PS: Too many times it takes more than a quick edit of the RDF, so don't mention it.
I just installed Deer Park Alpha 2. Slashdot renders correctly and the whole thing seems faster and neater.
Which is good to hear, but it also crashes every once in a while. Which I find unacceptable at work and annoying at home. Kudos to DP, but I'll wait for the stable 1.1 release.
What is wrong with ff is that it is setup in such a way that extensions can have it hang. People should be 'screaming at the devs' about this.
Every plugin system has this problem. You either give the plugins access to the inner workings, or you don't. If it crashes and burns, tough. The extension dev should've tested more, or the extension was written for an older FF and can't cope with the new one. Really, the current system is pretty good given the circumstances.
It happened to me several times. I did a bulk update, either extensions or FF, only to find out on restart that it froze in various weird postures with the interface botched up or with chrome errors. I then had to track down the offending extension and decide what I want to do about it (downgrade, uninstall, live with it, etc.).
The one thing I love about BG is that the spaceships are physically accurate. They have thrusters all over the ships in different directions to subtly change course and they conserve momentum. When an enemy is behind them they just use the thrusters to flip around and shoot backwards.
Say, that's very clever... Umm... until you start thinking they should've better put some lasers all over the ships pointing in different directions... Then you realise you're talking about TV shows and commercial movies, which like to take miss Physics and miss Common Sense out back in the bushes, screw their brains out and leave them crying in shame in the woods, until a bear stumbles over them, horribly mauls them both and finally pisses all over their corpses (from different directions).
Why did the industry fail so horribly in coming up with a cheap and easy floppy replacement? Perhaps there's just far less need for it now that so many PCs are connected via the internet or local LAN.
I blame acute competition. There's always been competition, yet 20 years ago the rise of the PC gave birth to some industry-wide solutions such as the floppy.
Sadly, I fear we're not going to get the same scale of shared compatibility ever again. These days it's a dog eat dog world and the best one particular format can do is be one of the two or three competitive (and often incompatible) top dogs.
Many truly nice alternatives were killed due to this process. People ask about CD's with built-in protective casing, about cheap solid state media, about DVD's with real time read-write access. Yes, they're out there, in the form of wet smudges under the foot of the competition.
The DVD +R vs -R wars were just the preamble and we should consider ourselves lucky that we got off as easy as we did (although there were a couple of really crazy years back then). From now on, units with dual (or triple) format support are going to be the norm, that's just no other way to do this.
OK, that covers the format issues. As for why media isn't cheaper, faster and larger already... come on, what planet are you living on? With the likes of **AA and the showbiz bigshots breathing down everybody's neck, who the hell is going to produce and sell you that fabled 1-TB-at-100-MB/s-for-pennies media? Just shut up and use the Internet while you still have it. Or use a floppy disk, your choice.
If this is any indication, BBC is taking the concept of Internet broadcasting *very* seriously.
I'm not very suprised about this. Great Britain is after all the country that managed a 40% switch to digital TV in only 3 years and are used as a classical example by now. Plus, the European Union intends to do a full switchover to digital for all media by 2012 and God forbid the Brits would be left behind.:)
1) People entering the scene are getting dumber. While this could be said in general for the current generation (brainwashed by MTV, the whole No Logo thing etc. etc.), they are also being dumbed down by the computers/OSes they're using.
[...]
2) Like the article says, the learning curve is much higher for beginners. Before you can do something cool you have to learn a lot, essentially catching up with all the security progress that's been had these past couple of decades. It's not like the "good ol days" when you could just dial up/ connect to some system and use some arcane bug that's 2 years old to login.
These reasons have always been there, in spirit if not in form. The dumb people never amount to anything more than script kiddies. And the beginners always have to learn a lot if they want to amount to anything.
It takes a special mix of curiosity, technical enclination and perseverence to make a hacker, regardless if he's hacking his dad's car engine or game protection.
So I'd argue that the reasons you listed lead to there being fewer hackers, not lower quality hackers.
It has symbolic, religions, and sexual themes which are simply out of reach for most kids. Not that I wouldn't let kids watch the show, as I don't particularly find those concepts scary (I bought the 1st DVD for my little brother of 13 a few years back). But for many younger kids, they just wouldn't get large portions of the show.
And it's a shame too, because as a "kid" you miss out, really, watching NGE like this. I watched it when I was 14 and it was "cool" but it left a lot of blur in my mind. I watched it again and again in later years in order to fully appreciate it. NGE is a complex enough show to make even adults watch it at least twice. I think it's a waste on children, frankly.
On the other hand, it definitely leaves an impression which may attract that kid to anime in the future. I suspect that for many "westerners" the likes of NGE, Gundam Wing or Dragon Ball were basically the wake-up call towards anime.
even Mark Twain claims to have seen one more than six feet long and weighing 250 pounds in the Mississippi River. (How he managed to weigh it is not recorded ^_-).
Pound measures mass, not weight. An experienced river traveller can probably infer the mass correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone give me one good reason why I should EVER enable IDN?
I can understand that many languages have more than just plain ASCII in them and that users want to be able to use them. What I don't understand is how people who developed the IDN didn't think of this beforehand. "We'll use full Unicode for domain names. People will be able to register domains that look like others. People will use this trick to do wrong." Is it such a big leap of thought that it couldn't have been foreseen? Especially given today's Internet, a cesspool of mischief?I was going to argue that the only safe thing to do would be to use wget and interpret the web pages in your head. But the last guy who took that advice got 'sploited anyways. He's in the hospital with his brain stuck in an infinite loop.
It could be worse. You could receive a link to goatse.cx. Which would:Or better yet, assuming you keep all rights to the code, program something that takes another area of expertise and create a program to make someone elses life easier.
In other words, ask for ideas from people who work in less-technical fields. See where the power of computing can help people's task, people who aren't technical enough to write their own programs. Economics is always a rich source of ideas.
There are no laws preventing the dealer from counting, either. Why kick you out when they can use the same tactics against you and still make money.
...or Google is starting to make GDS into some kind of browser alternative? Which would make sense to some extent, I guess, in order to Web-enable your desktop via a central point without depending on various browsers' and various websites' particular quirks.
I wonder if this will affect adoption of browsers such as Firefox, which already have the potential to offer similar features on their own. I mean, if you're going to keep the browser open most of the time you're at the computer (you know you do!), isn't the browser the ultimate web connection?
I guess what I'm driving at is, what do they hope to achieve by picking on browsers, which are one of the most unquestionable pieces of software around?
If only FireFox would support the mouse-wheel inside multi-line text boxes (like the one I'm typing text into right now).
Works fine on the Linux port.
If only the drop-down list box for FireFox's address bar made ANY sense what-so-ever. In IE6, the most recently used URL is at the top, and unused URLs fall to the bottom and then off the list. I have never figured out what "logic" FireFox uses in that list. It's annoying to the point of uselessness.
Logic is "most often visited", with even more priority given to URL's chosen from the bar (as opposed to links or bookmarks).
Has anyone tried to run IE 7 with WINE on Linux?
Why, did IE6 work so well with WINE and it's time to move on?
If IE used another engine, then we could finally stop writing multiple CSS hacks and fretting over lack of PNG support to make up for Trident's next-to-worthless implementation of both.
Which reminds me: in the articles I've read regarding IE7, so far haven't see a clear statement regarding the freakin' PNG support. They had better not leave THAT out. Say it ain't so.
Lemme say this again: IE7 will make or break Microsoft's stand in the new browser war. I believe they know this. They had better get it right the first try.
My personal opinion is that too much of Firefox is implemented in JS. Probably half of that JS could be easily reimplemented as native code for a substantial speed bonus. I'd like to see that browser.
What, and lose the XUL base? No way, Jose. I'd rather pray for a better and faster XUL engine. Let us all not forget that Firefox is a XUL and Gecko implementation. XUL and Gecko are too cool for words IMHO and some of the greatest things to come out of the whole Mozilla project. Let's not put the cart before the horses here. If people don't like this particular implementation of XUL that is Firefox, tough. Go build a browser from scratch. But don't go arround suggesting that Firefox should drop the very things that make up its core. I mean, drop XUL and you lose the extensions and the whole modularity. Reimplement that as what? And what's next, drop Gecko? Venkman? Anything else?
Good thing Bill Gates doesn't run Adobe... Otherwise he'd be releasing a press statement proclaiming how dangerous open software is.
Actually, I was just thinking of Adobe and Corel when I saw this piece of news. It's become obvious, to me at least, that eventually the open source model will produce worthy competition even in those fields that had always been lacking. You know, games, graphics editing, video editing and so on.
Given that most people aren't professionals, they can probably move from their [coughpiratedcough] copy of Illustrator to Inkscape and not miss much.
Of course, professionals will still keep buying the big thing, at least for another while. So you can say that the likes of Adobe and Corel won't miss much. But I have to wonder anyway if they'll take this lying down.
Even so, his idea is still valid. Why treat the symptoms instead of the cause? Rather then leaving smog alone and making buildings look pretty, let's cut down on the smog itself. This discovery is just a way to hide the garbage under the carpet.
How wide-focus is this? Would police be able to use this on the street without frying everyone?
Probably not and they probably don't care. Think of the usual riot control weapons: water cannons, tear gas, wide-spread rubber bullets. The point IS to affect as many rioters as possible quickly.
Could some sort of protection be made against this? (Portable Faraday cage, maybe?) If not, what's to prevent one of these falling into the black market and eventually being used on Police?
Frankly, I don't see what use bad guys would have for non-lethal mass weapons. They'd use good old firearms, Molotov cockteils and bombs.
[...]If people can't peacefully protest (or even riot), dissent is just forced underground, causing it to be made manifest more anonymously, more unexpectedly, and likely more distructively. Instead of more protests or riots, we have more things like...say...roadside bombs.
I've already seen similary confused takes in other comments here. The quote "peacefully protest (or even riot)" alone is self-contradicting and misguided.
It seems that people forget that there's a pretty definite line between a group of protesters and a maddened mob. You need the group to be very inflamed and you need a catalyst before you get a riot.
The dynamics of protesters over rioters are usually very different too, with the main difference being this: you can no longer reason with or control a mob. You need to inflict pain quickly and en-masse to turn the mob into reasoning individuals, you need to do it quickly and in a wide area, and the humane thing to do is to try not to kill the subjects in the process.
Finally, all the fright that such weapons as the ray-gun will be used by the government against peaceful protesters are rather badly placed IMHO. If a government at some point decides to shut people up by violence in the open, what methods are used won't do much of a difference.
The only beef I have with this story is that they're using Iraq as tests grounds. WTF, go test it on your own people you assholes, see if you get away with that. Oh, but in Iraq is so much easier to find mobs and riots to practice on, isn't it? Serves them right for being testy these days.
I'm curious as to how it got past the QA team that 1.0.5 broke a bunch of extensions. Downloading say, the 10 most popular extensions and testing them is too dificult and time consuming?
It wasn't THAT obvious. I have about 20 extensions installed and the only annoyance I noticed was middle-click-open-in-new-tab not working once in a while, apparently at random. Friends of mine who have (far) fewer extensions never noticed anything was wrong with 1.0.5.
Plus, I suspect a dev might not have many extensions installed, because they could viciate the behaviour of the vanilla application. I also imagine it's enough work on FF itself to worry about 3rd party extensions which may not be written properly in the first place.
I was commenting on the slew of decent, if not actually good extensions that have been lost in the dust bin of 0.8 - 1.0PR obsolescence. And it will happen with 1.1 very soon, again. I shudder to think about it. Perhaps we'll catch a break, but I'm not an optimist. Actually, I might not upgrade to 1.1 right away, so I avoid annoying myself silly finding out how many of my favorite extensions break. PS: Too many times it takes more than a quick edit of the RDF, so don't mention it.
I just installed Deer Park Alpha 2. Slashdot renders correctly and the whole thing seems faster and neater.
Which is good to hear, but it also crashes every once in a while. Which I find unacceptable at work and annoying at home. Kudos to DP, but I'll wait for the stable 1.1 release.
What is wrong with ff is that it is setup in such a way that extensions can have it hang. People should be 'screaming at the devs' about this.
Every plugin system has this problem. You either give the plugins access to the inner workings, or you don't. If it crashes and burns, tough. The extension dev should've tested more, or the extension was written for an older FF and can't cope with the new one. Really, the current system is pretty good given the circumstances.
It happened to me several times. I did a bulk update, either extensions or FF, only to find out on restart that it froze in various weird postures with the interface botched up or with chrome errors. I then had to track down the offending extension and decide what I want to do about it (downgrade, uninstall, live with it, etc.).
[...]anyone out there think MS would be capable of an iPod equivalent for movies? :D
Which is... sad, really. I mean, if not MS with all their money and resources, then who?
Otherwise, swing by your local office depot and ask for "cotton paper"[...]
And remember to wear huge sunglasses and a fake beard when you do that, to cover your tracks. And talk in a low, husky voice.The one thing I love about BG is that the spaceships are physically accurate. They have thrusters all over the ships in different directions to subtly change course and they conserve momentum. When an enemy is behind them they just use the thrusters to flip around and shoot backwards.
Say, that's very clever... Umm... until you start thinking they should've better put some lasers all over the ships pointing in different directions... Then you realise you're talking about TV shows and commercial movies, which like to take miss Physics and miss Common Sense out back in the bushes, screw their brains out and leave them crying in shame in the woods, until a bear stumbles over them, horribly mauls them both and finally pisses all over their corpses (from different directions).
Why did the industry fail so horribly in coming up with a cheap and easy floppy replacement? Perhaps there's just far less need for it now that so many PCs are connected via the internet or local LAN.
I blame acute competition. There's always been competition, yet 20 years ago the rise of the PC gave birth to some industry-wide solutions such as the floppy.
Sadly, I fear we're not going to get the same scale of shared compatibility ever again. These days it's a dog eat dog world and the best one particular format can do is be one of the two or three competitive (and often incompatible) top dogs.
Many truly nice alternatives were killed due to this process. People ask about CD's with built-in protective casing, about cheap solid state media, about DVD's with real time read-write access. Yes, they're out there, in the form of wet smudges under the foot of the competition.
The DVD +R vs -R wars were just the preamble and we should consider ourselves lucky that we got off as easy as we did (although there were a couple of really crazy years back then). From now on, units with dual (or triple) format support are going to be the norm, that's just no other way to do this.
OK, that covers the format issues. As for why media isn't cheaper, faster and larger already... come on, what planet are you living on? With the likes of **AA and the showbiz bigshots breathing down everybody's neck, who the hell is going to produce and sell you that fabled 1-TB-at-100-MB/s-for-pennies media? Just shut up and use the Internet while you still have it. Or use a floppy disk, your choice.
If this is any indication, BBC is taking the concept of Internet broadcasting *very* seriously. I'm not very suprised about this. Great Britain is after all the country that managed a 40% switch to digital TV in only 3 years and are used as a classical example by now. Plus, the European Union intends to do a full switchover to digital for all media by 2012 and God forbid the Brits would be left behind. :)
1) People entering the scene are getting dumber. While this could be said in general for the current generation (brainwashed by MTV, the whole No Logo thing etc. etc.), they are also being dumbed down by the computers/OSes they're using.
[...]2) Like the article says, the learning curve is much higher for beginners. Before you can do something cool you have to learn a lot, essentially catching up with all the security progress that's been had these past couple of decades. It's not like the "good ol days" when you could just dial up/ connect to some system and use some arcane bug that's 2 years old to login.
These reasons have always been there, in spirit if not in form. The dumb people never amount to anything more than script kiddies. And the beginners always have to learn a lot if they want to amount to anything.
It takes a special mix of curiosity, technical enclination and perseverence to make a hacker, regardless if he's hacking his dad's car engine or game protection.
So I'd argue that the reasons you listed lead to there being fewer hackers, not lower quality hackers.
Of course I'd return my copy for a signed bookplate in a heartbeat.
I'd try to trade mine for sex first, and if that didn't pan out, I'd take the bookplate.
Before doing that, I'd think about what kind of girls are into Harry Potter if I were you...It has symbolic, religions, and sexual themes which are simply out of reach for most kids. Not that I wouldn't let kids watch the show, as I don't particularly find those concepts scary (I bought the 1st DVD for my little brother of 13 a few years back). But for many younger kids, they just wouldn't get large portions of the show.
And it's a shame too, because as a "kid" you miss out, really, watching NGE like this. I watched it when I was 14 and it was "cool" but it left a lot of blur in my mind. I watched it again and again in later years in order to fully appreciate it. NGE is a complex enough show to make even adults watch it at least twice. I think it's a waste on children, frankly.
On the other hand, it definitely leaves an impression which may attract that kid to anime in the future. I suspect that for many "westerners" the likes of NGE, Gundam Wing or Dragon Ball were basically the wake-up call towards anime.
even Mark Twain claims to have seen one more than six feet long and weighing 250 pounds in the Mississippi River. (How he managed to weigh it is not recorded ^_-).
Pound measures mass, not weight. An experienced river traveller can probably infer the mass correctly.