"Nobody had 17" monitors back then; nobody had that kind of resolution."
I think you're thinking about the wrong kinds of monitors, as I have my HP 98751A 19" Sony Triniton monitor which does 1024x768x60hz from 1988 here.. and it works just fine. Thats a high resolution, and a huge tube. The thing weights about 35kg, or 77lbs. It's way bigger than the piddling monitor PCs had back in the late 1980s, which might be what you meant.
The processor on the NeXT Cube is much more powerful than the processor in the HP 300 which mates with the monitor, though. But then I also have a Personal DECstation 5000/25 which has a 25Mhz R3000 processor which would likely edge it out (especially with its whopping 40mb of ram):-) ---
Because G is small. The equation for measuring the gravitation force between two objects is the same as the equation for measuring the electromagnetic force between two objects, except for the constant.
If you want to figure out why gravity is weak, figure out why G is small. There are a lot of "magic numbers" used in physics that were measured through experimentation, but which have no explanation. As a programmer, I find the situation intollerable:-) I'd like to know why G constant is the way it is.. what does it stand for? The number of angels who can dance of the head of a pin? The number of massless spin 2 bosons which can fit into a 3x3 room which has a 2.5 people in it?
Once we know where the magic numbers come from, we'll have a better chance of understand how things work on the lowest (i.e.: quantum) levels where they likely originate. ---
The only problem with Tom's hardware review, is that their server implements referrer filtering.
Basically, if you're like me, and use a proxy which blanks the referrer, you get that hammer image for every gif, and get the front page of every story. Not fun. ---
I checked into VPND somewhat recently to see if it'd be a nice way to link a few LANs which have faily powerful (min 200Mhz) firewalls which could be used to tunnel traffic.
I looked at the source code, as I had to port the program to OpenBSD. My first thought was that the person who wrote the code must've been some ASM programmer who took a 5-hour course in C. The entire body of main is the entire source file. Functional programming? What's that? The code is one big blob function. You can see blocks which are similar and could probably be handled by a separate function, but aren't.
My friend's first comment on waving him over to see the code was, "and you wanted to run that on your server?"
The code looks a lot like procmail's code, and is (IMO) a complete tear down and rewrite. I'm sure a lot can be salvaged from vpnd, but I find it hard to believe that the person who wrote code looking like that also did the strictest possible checking on all input/output code for security problems.
I agree, currently the Linux kernel isn't very "easy" for people who love the DirectX install routine for being so quick and painless (too bad there's no uninstall routine[!]).
ESR is working on making the Linux Kernel config scripts smarter with his CML2.
I'd personally love to have the equivalent of apsfilter for video and sound cards -- just run SETUP, answer some questions, and all is done for you.
But everything takes time. Linux has had to get to the point where people asked, "hey, can I just slap my new soundcard drivers on this thing?" before the quesition could be answered. ---
I'm sorry if my post seemed that way, but the user seemed uninformed that the nuts and bolts even existed.
As for putting them together, I'd certainly be willing to help setup an easy LKM install system for people such as the original poster.
Quake 3 for Linux was somewhat easy to install becuase it used a version of a sharchive. It wouldn't be too hard to make a shar that extracts to a tmp dir, checks that the proper major (and minimum required minor) kernel version exists, that a compiler exists, and then compiles, etc. The file which insmods the kernel file at boot would have to be SysV (it's just easier to modify automagically compared to BSD-style, and Slackware supports SysV stuff out of the box anyway:)), but that's the only potential snag I can think of.
If you want my help, my contact information is at the bottom of my webpage. ---
1) Linux drivers are not at all like Windows drivers. We have loadable modules, not VxDs. You could setup a system let people download a Makefile + source + shell script to auto compile, copy to/lib/modules/{kernel}, and insmod/add to/etc/rc.d structure very easily. Which would address your point.
2) I fail to see why you are saying this. DRI does this now. Linux 2.4.x-pre supports your USB devices now (and will be released RSN:)). The only missing glue is the input API. Perasonally, I wouldn't mind it if SDL became standard. It works on almost everything now.
3) I'm not sure what you're aiming at. Putting game binaries in/usr/local/bin or/usr/local/games with the data files in/usr/local/games/lib/{game name} is an accepted standard.
Btw: OpenDoc is Corba, and is alive and well in Gnome, etc. Please keep your facts straight. ---
Mozilla does not handle the title attribute of the anchor tag in any appreciable way. All of the links on my homepage have a title="" attribute meant to give an additional description for people with accesibility browsers (who wants to hear "ach-tee-tee-pee-colon.." every time their browser selects a link?). The Alertbox (a web usability column I read) also uses these tags to make the browsing experience easier.
I'm sure I could find more tags that Mozilla fails to support/implement properly, but I don't have a "test suite" handy.. although I'm assuming someone will write one soon (I might event take a stab at it). ---
It's standards compliant HTML. It should render similarly in any browser which supports the standard.
Saying that a table in a table is a bit of a kludge is true, but claiming I'm abusing HTML is dead wrong. If you want to see abuse of HTML, go look at the homepages which lack head tags, a dtd, have tags missmashed, have invalid entities, etc, etc. ---
I fail to see why I should "unfix" my page when it follows the standards to the letter. I refuse to write poorly constructed HTML which will work only with some browsers. The webstandards people have even said that IE fails with proper HTML. (More information about frustration with working about browser implementations here) ---
No. I wish I could use CSS properly for all my format output specification. But as you can see, browsers are so horribly lacking in support for this (a standard from 1996!), that I must resort to kludges. ---
"This attribute specifies the desired width of the entire table and is intended for visual user agents. When the value is a percentage value, the value is relative to the user agent's available horizontal space. In the absence of any width specification, table width is determined by the user agent. "
So IE and Gecko's engines seem to assume for the nested inner table that 100% means the maximum width allocateable, because they fail to limit the region available to the inner table from the outer table (which is set to 99% of the user window).
This, despite the fact that the W3C people provide a page about calculation of column width for tables. Including how to handle margins with table widths (which Mozilla gets wrong, and is targetted to be fixed in "future"). ---
As the AC above said, nested tables with width="100%" somehow makes the 100% bigger the size of the window (which is so wrong, it's not even funny because the top level table is set to be 99% the width of the window). That's what IE does AFAIK (I can't test it here as there's no IE I can safely install/remove without it integrating itself into my 98Lite setup I use for gaming).
Opera mishandles the nested tables such that the inner table doesn't fill the outer table, even though the inside table's width is "100%."
Mozilla's engine does the same thing IE does. I submitted it as a bug, and it is a conflict between the table code and CSS.. which doesn't suprise me.
iCab and Netscape 4.7x seem to handle it fine, though. ---
that some of the developer effort goes into making Gecko properly render completely standards compliant HTML (such as my homepage) which is sadly misrendered by Opera 3.6x and Mozilla M16, even though Netscape 4.7x renders it just fine.
The gecko module may let you have a nice browser, but if it can't handle nice, standards compliant HTML, then it needs to be fixed. There are a lot of warts in the interpretation code (especially related to CSS1 and tables) that come out when you try to do serious browsing with the Gecko component because the Netscape/Mozilla crew are busy also working on a UI, a skin component, a ported GTK+ widget set, etc, etc, etc... ---
"... and in awe of Carmack probably somewhere between Doom and Quake. He writes some amazingly fast graphics stuff."
I always liked his work because of the stability. In Doom, if you go walking through and around things, the engine doesn't crash. You can even have monsters spill into the great void outside of the defined map, and spend hours running around nothing with only the HoM effect to keep you company..
Compare this with Duke3D which would crash so hard when you left the map (or sometimes, though holes in the map around doors), that after the first two versions, 3DRealms made it so that you dieded if you crossed a map boundtry (to stop the game from getting to where it could crash). ---
If the internet was totally inaccessable for you, would you change OSes?
This was why I switched from OS/2 to Win98 back in 1998. Microsoft's monopoly powers do extend much further than other companies, but I wanted to ensure I presented a balanced view since the power of having market share tends to corrupt. ---
Bullshit. The modern gas engine is 40% efficient. This is light years ahead of the 15% efficient cars of the 1950s, but far worse than the hybrid cars which use batteries and a small gasoline enginer for eletricity generation which are 90% efficient.
You might was well just throw every second dollar you pay for gasoline right onto a fire, because all that energy is lost as heat in today's current engines. The hybrids don't have this problem as much because the eletric motors that move the wheels don't produce nearly as much waste heat as 4 cylinders. ---
Browsers are just horrible. Why? No one implements the standards properly. And once a company manages to get a lead in their market share, they ignore the fact that their browsers are broken by design, and add features that the marketting department orders.
The Day the Browser Died by Jeffery Zeldman illustrates quite nicely how this happened with Netscape v4, which fails to support CSS very well at all (IIRC, it turns CSS into some sort of Javascript style page stuff).
People have never had much choice when it came to web browsers. In the early days, it was Netscape or Mosaic, and Netscape was the clear leader. Because of this, people didn't care that Netscape was horribly broken, and wrote HTML which was broken by design (such as elements without terminating semicolons). Then Netscape would release an updated version which fixed the behaviour, and a lot of the web would just "not work"..
Enter IE. IE came along as a half-baked licencing of the Spyglass Mosaic source. Think Mosaic v1, but in 1996 when it had to compete against Netscape v2. It didn't get any better until IE v4 in 1998. But IE 4 (and 5, and 5.5) also have gaping holes in their support for common, well known standards.
So what's a web designer to do? Because the two main choices (ignore Opera, 99.99% of people will not use shareware when all other browsers are freeware) are both so poor, the web designer is stuck using the lowest common denominator standards, using horrible kludges to work around the broken feature sets of the browsers used to render their work. Worse, once one of the two browsers gains more than a certain percentage of market share, a lot of web designers will go ahead and write broken HTML using the features of the most common browser out of exasperation (not to mention all the "web programming" programs targetted at absolute newbies, such as Front Page, which produce highly non-portable HTML).
Microsoft (and some other FUDsters that remain) like to talk about Linux and fragmentation of standards in the Unix camp, yet they go ahead and do EXACTLY the same thing in their own little places. The balkanization of the web is well on its way to happening, thanks to the standards-incompliant browsers out there.
You think it's bad having to spend 799$ on MS Word to be able to read the macro viruses that most companies use for documentation systems? Wait until one company (in this case, Microsoft, but Netscape was just as bad when it had its large percentage of market share) has control of web standards. How much will a good browser which supports the latest MS-HTML feature cost in 2003?
Dr. Jakob Nielsen did some research into browser usage patterns that could present a way to avoid the problems of incompatible HTML. It's simple: get a browser with standards support available before Jan. 2001. If you can get it into that window, people will start using your browser.
Mozilla looks like it can make it, if they get some help from people in making sure that they have good standards compliance out of the gate. Right now, Mozilla has some notable problems with CSS 1 (such as conflicts between CSS margining, paragraph indentation, and HTML 4.0 tables) and other parts of its rendering engine interacting badly.
Web designers want to use standards in their daily business. It lets them be free to write sites that work the best possible way. If you give them clients using standards compliance browsers, they will make standards compliant websites.
If the free software programmers help get the gecko engine working properly, and provide a nice wrapper to it (such as the Galeon Gnome wrapper for Gecko), people will switch to it. Provide stability, provide standards compliance, and give it away free. People will download it (especially since gecko+wrapper should be a lot smaller than Mozilla itself, which has so many other things people might not need, like YetAnotherMailClient). The only catch is that you also need to have a Windows version, or you can bank on MS being able to force people into using IE 6.0.
We have a headstart on MS because Gecko is here today with the source open to people who can help fix it and get it out the door. Don't let this opprotunity go to waste. We can beat the marketters at their own game.
A "flattened" namespace is just what the doctor ordered. Yes, the DNS system should be hierarchical, but no human is anal-compulsive enough to think that way, let alone follow the rules (why do you think we're in this mess in the first place?). Look at General Motors with their "gmcanada.com" site (why not gm.ca? Because they didn't know about TLDs). It's easier to change how you represent things on the backend than it is to go and teach all the billions of people not currently using the internet how to use it as they start using it.
When you want to ls a dir, do you type/bin/ls every time? No. You have a nice path statement to provide a level of flat namespace to you. Similarly,.com acts like the "commercial bin" for the internet, and allows people to "microsoft" or "yahoo" along. Forcing humans to use hierarchies when they don't think in them leads to problems with people who can't think that way. Plus, retyping all the Department of Redundancy, Redunancy Department locational information should be automated in the first place (we use computers because they lessen workload, not increase it)!
The best solution would be to have the hierarchy imposed, but to have a nice equivalent to the path statement to make it easier for humans to use. Or a nice way of translating between human requests for information, and the "real" location of things.
Humans always think in terms of relativity and relations, not hierarchy. That's why we have $HOME:-) ---
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you there. The US Republican party is incredibly right-wing, and the US Democarat party is 'just' right wing. The Ralf Nader party (the "Green" party) is the closest thing to a liberal party the United States has.
What you term moderate liberal, I term conservative. What you term conservative, I term ultra conservative. This is because I live in Canada, a country with more than 2 parties. I have a different perspective (as do most people in countries with a non-dual-party system);-) ---
Trusting data from a client will never, ever work. If you give someone a magic black box which will encrypt all data between the two parties, people can still feed the box invalid data if that want to rig an election.
When you make things digital, you remove a lot of boundries (such as the cost of replication, etc), and make it much easier to "lie" about certain things. You have to be able to have a high level of "trust" for the client's data by making it hard to spoof the credentials.
A better solution would be to have a 128-bit SSL server for each district with a list of the people who live their, and have the user present some credentials to verify their identity.
The voting is encrypted via SSL. The authentication system reads in the credentials, and presents the user with the poll page if they validate. The poll sheet would only record the vote, and pass a value back to the authentication process (which would then disable further authentication until reset for the next election).
The authentication credentials could be three pieces of data, one of which is easy to obtain (the person's name), the second a bit harder (their social security number), and the third requiring interception of mail (a mailed out password). This would make it very hard to rig an election, as you'd have to compile a list of a lot of names, social security numbers, and passwords from intercepted mail. Certainly you could do it if you had enough money (bribing the postal service, etc), but it would likely be noticed, negating the gain.
You don't have to make riging an election impossible, just hard enough that no one will try:-) ---
"I hesitate to point it out, but no Russian space engineers have yet to completely fsck up a simple metric conversion function"
If anything, the chances are that this will happen as the United States is the only country in the world (besides a couple in S. America) which still uses the archaic Imperal system.. the Russians must thunk down to the US level of measurement to make their components interoperable, thus opening the possibility of a metric conversion problem.
If the US had converted to Metric with Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, NASA would've directly saved a few hundred million on their probes, not to mention other benefits (mainly in the sciences). ---
Slashdot Mirror
is taking so long, look no further than here.
/. crew have nicely saturated our server with hits, and actually made the Dual PPro 180 w/ 256mb of ram swap (I've never seen it do that before).
;-P
12:09pm up 1 day, 18:21, 1 user, load average: 13.08, 13.59, 13.66
The
You wouldn't believe how long ssh takes to login when the load is 15.
Thanks for not censoring this story by DDoSing the competition or anything, Michael
---
"Nobody had 17" monitors back then; nobody had that kind of resolution."
:-)
I think you're thinking about the wrong kinds of monitors, as I have my HP 98751A 19" Sony Triniton monitor which does 1024x768x60hz from 1988 here.. and it works just fine. Thats a high resolution, and a huge tube. The thing weights about 35kg, or 77lbs. It's way bigger than the piddling monitor PCs had back in the late 1980s, which might be what you meant.
The processor on the NeXT Cube is much more powerful than the processor in the HP 300 which mates with the monitor, though. But then I also have a Personal DECstation 5000/25 which has a 25Mhz R3000 processor which would likely edge it out (especially with its whopping 40mb of ram)
---
Because G is small.
:-) I'd like to know why G constant is the way it is.. what does it stand for? The number of angels who can dance of the head of a pin? The number of massless spin 2 bosons which can fit into a 3x3 room which has a 2.5 people in it?
The equation for measuring the gravitation force between two objects is the same as the equation for measuring the electromagnetic force between two objects, except for the constant.
If you want to figure out why gravity is weak, figure out why G is small. There are a lot of "magic numbers" used in physics that were measured through experimentation, but which have no explanation. As a programmer, I find the situation intollerable
Once we know where the magic numbers come from, we'll have a better chance of understand how things work on the lowest (i.e.: quantum) levels where they likely originate.
---
The only problem with Tom's hardware review, is that their server implements referrer filtering.
Basically, if you're like me, and use a proxy which blanks the referrer, you get that hammer image for every gif, and get the front page of every story. Not fun.
---
I checked into VPND somewhat recently to see if it'd be a nice way to link a few LANs which have faily powerful (min 200Mhz) firewalls which could be used to tunnel traffic.
I looked at the source code, as I had to port the program to OpenBSD. My first thought was that the person who wrote the code must've been some ASM programmer who took a 5-hour course in C. The entire body of main is the entire source file. Functional programming? What's that? The code is one big blob function. You can see blocks which are similar and could probably be handled by a separate function, but aren't.
My friend's first comment on waving him over to see the code was, "and you wanted to run that on your server?"
The code looks a lot like procmail's code, and is (IMO) a complete tear down and rewrite. I'm sure a lot can be salvaged from vpnd, but I find it hard to believe that the person who wrote code looking like that also did the strictest possible checking on all input/output code for security problems.
You might want to read the VPN section of the Linux Admin Security Guide for a listing of alternatives.
---
I agree, currently the Linux kernel isn't very "easy" for people who love the DirectX install routine for being so quick and painless (too bad there's no uninstall routine[!]).
ESR is working on making the Linux Kernel config scripts smarter with his CML2.
I'd personally love to have the equivalent of apsfilter for video and sound cards -- just run SETUP, answer some questions, and all is done for you.
But everything takes time. Linux has had to get to the point where people asked, "hey, can I just slap my new soundcard drivers on this thing?" before the quesition could be answered.
---
I'm sorry if my post seemed that way, but the user seemed uninformed that the nuts and bolts even existed.
:)), but that's the only potential snag I can think of.
As for putting them together, I'd certainly be willing to help setup an easy LKM install system for people such as the original poster.
Quake 3 for Linux was somewhat easy to install becuase it used a version of a sharchive. It wouldn't be too hard to make a shar that extracts to a tmp dir, checks that the proper major (and minimum required minor) kernel version exists, that a compiler exists, and then compiles, etc.
The file which insmods the kernel file at boot would have to be SysV (it's just easier to modify automagically compared to BSD-style, and Slackware supports SysV stuff out of the box anyway
If you want my help, my contact information is at the bottom of my webpage.
---
1) Linux drivers are not at all like Windows drivers. We have loadable modules, not VxDs. You could setup a system let people download a Makefile + source + shell script to auto compile, copy to /lib/modules/{kernel}, and insmod/add to /etc/rc.d structure very easily. Which would address your point.
:)). The only missing glue is the input API. Perasonally, I wouldn't mind it if SDL became standard. It works on almost everything now.
/usr/local/bin or /usr/local/games with the data files in /usr/local/games/lib/{game name} is an accepted standard.
2) I fail to see why you are saying this. DRI does this now. Linux 2.4.x-pre supports your USB devices now (and will be released RSN
3) I'm not sure what you're aiming at. Putting game binaries in
Btw: OpenDoc is Corba, and is alive and well in Gnome, etc. Please keep your facts straight.
---
Seems like Gamespy has a bad case of a certian disorder.
---
Mozilla does not handle the title attribute of the anchor tag in any appreciable way. All of the links on my homepage have a title="" attribute meant to give an additional description for people with accesibility browsers (who wants to hear "ach-tee-tee-pee-colon .." every time their browser selects a link?). The Alertbox (a web usability column I read) also uses these tags to make the browsing experience easier.
I'm sure I could find more tags that Mozilla fails to support/implement properly, but I don't have a "test suite" handy.. although I'm assuming someone will write one soon (I might event take a stab at it).
---
It's standards compliant HTML. It should render similarly in any browser which supports the standard.
Saying that a table in a table is a bit of a kludge is true, but claiming I'm abusing HTML is dead wrong. If you want to see abuse of HTML, go look at the homepages which lack head tags, a dtd, have tags missmashed, have invalid entities, etc, etc.
---
I fail to see why I should "unfix" my page when it follows the standards to the letter. I refuse to write poorly constructed HTML which will work only with some browsers. The webstandards people have even said that IE fails with proper HTML. (More information about frustration with working about browser implementations here)
---
No. I wish I could use CSS properly for all my format output specification. But as you can see, browsers are so horribly lacking in support for this (a standard from 1996!), that I must resort to kludges.
---
I'd tell the iCab people to change their program, as it seems to have some erroneus ideas about table width elements.
.html#Length)
(From http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/dtd
[!ENTITY % Length "CDATA" -- nn for pixels or nn% for percentage length --]
(From http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html)
"This attribute specifies the desired width of the entire table and is intended for visual user agents. When the value is a percentage value, the value is relative to the user agent's available horizontal space. In the absence of any width specification, table width is determined by the user agent. "
(See also HTML 4.x types defintion for length which also lists pixels or percentage.)
So IE and Gecko's engines seem to assume for the nested inner table that 100% means the maximum width allocateable, because they fail to limit the region available to the inner table from the outer table (which is set to 99% of the user window).
This, despite the fact that the W3C people provide a page about calculation of column width for tables. Including how to handle margins with table widths (which Mozilla gets wrong, and is targetted to be fixed in "future").
---
As the AC above said, nested tables with width="100%" somehow makes the 100% bigger the size of the window (which is so wrong, it's not even funny because the top level table is set to be 99% the width of the window). That's what IE does AFAIK (I can't test it here as there's no IE I can safely install/remove without it integrating itself into my 98Lite setup I use for gaming).
Opera mishandles the nested tables such that the inner table doesn't fill the outer table, even though the inside table's width is "100%."
Mozilla's engine does the same thing IE does. I submitted it as a bug, and it is a conflict between the table code and CSS.. which doesn't suprise me.
iCab and Netscape 4.7x seem to handle it fine, though.
---
that some of the developer effort goes into making Gecko properly render completely standards compliant HTML (such as my homepage) which is sadly misrendered by Opera 3.6x and Mozilla M16, even though Netscape 4.7x renders it just fine.
The gecko module may let you have a nice browser, but if it can't handle nice, standards compliant HTML, then it needs to be fixed. There are a lot of warts in the interpretation code (especially related to CSS1 and tables) that come out when you try to do serious browsing with the Gecko component because the Netscape/Mozilla crew are busy also working on a UI, a skin component, a ported GTK+ widget set, etc, etc, etc...
---
"... and in awe of Carmack probably somewhere between Doom and Quake. He writes some amazingly fast graphics stuff."
I always liked his work because of the stability. In Doom, if you go walking through and around things, the engine doesn't crash. You can even have monsters spill into the great void outside of the defined map, and spend hours running around nothing with only the HoM effect to keep you company..
Compare this with Duke3D which would crash so hard when you left the map (or sometimes, though holes in the map around doors), that after the first two versions, 3DRealms made it so that you dieded if you crossed a map boundtry (to stop the game from getting to where it could crash).
---
If the internet was totally inaccessable for you, would you change OSes?
This was why I switched from OS/2 to Win98 back in 1998. Microsoft's monopoly powers do extend much further than other companies, but I wanted to ensure I presented a balanced view since the power of having market share tends to corrupt.
---
These numbers are direct from my physics prof.
---
"Plus the modern gas engine is very efficient,"
Bullshit. The modern gas engine is 40% efficient. This is light years ahead of the 15% efficient cars of the 1950s, but far worse than the hybrid cars which use batteries and a small gasoline enginer for eletricity generation which are 90% efficient.
You might was well just throw every second dollar you pay for gasoline right onto a fire, because all that energy is lost as heat in today's current engines. The hybrids don't have this problem as much because the eletric motors that move the wheels don't produce nearly as much waste heat as 4 cylinders.
---
Browsers are just horrible. Why? No one implements the standards properly. And once a company manages to get a lead in their market share, they ignore the fact that their browsers are broken by design, and add features that the marketting department orders.
..
The Day the Browser Died by Jeffery Zeldman illustrates quite nicely how this happened with Netscape v4, which fails to support CSS very well at all (IIRC, it turns CSS into some sort of Javascript style page stuff).
People have never had much choice when it came to web browsers. In the early days, it was Netscape or Mosaic, and Netscape was the clear leader. Because of this, people didn't care that Netscape was horribly broken, and wrote HTML which was broken by design (such as elements without terminating semicolons). Then Netscape would release an updated version which fixed the behaviour, and a lot of the web would just "not work"
Enter IE. IE came along as a half-baked licencing of the Spyglass Mosaic source. Think Mosaic v1, but in 1996 when it had to compete against Netscape v2. It didn't get any better until IE v4 in 1998. But IE 4 (and 5, and 5.5) also have gaping holes in their support for common, well known standards.
So what's a web designer to do? Because the two main choices (ignore Opera, 99.99% of people will not use shareware when all other browsers are freeware) are both so poor, the web designer is stuck using the lowest common denominator standards, using horrible kludges to work around the broken feature sets of the browsers used to render their work. Worse, once one of the two browsers gains more than a certain percentage of market share, a lot of web designers will go ahead and write broken HTML using the features of the most common browser out of exasperation (not to mention all the "web programming" programs targetted at absolute newbies, such as Front Page, which produce highly non-portable HTML).
Microsoft (and some other FUDsters that remain) like to talk about Linux and fragmentation of standards in the Unix camp, yet they go ahead and do EXACTLY the same thing in their own little places. The balkanization of the web is well on its way to happening, thanks to the standards-incompliant browsers out there.
You think it's bad having to spend 799$ on MS Word to be able to read the macro viruses that most companies use for documentation systems? Wait until one company (in this case, Microsoft, but Netscape was just as bad when it had its large percentage of market share) has control of web standards. How much will a good browser which supports the latest MS-HTML feature cost in 2003?
Dr. Jakob Nielsen did some research into browser usage patterns that could present a way to avoid the problems of incompatible HTML. It's simple: get a browser with standards support available before Jan. 2001. If you can get it into that window, people will start using your browser.
Mozilla looks like it can make it, if they get some help from people in making sure that they have good standards compliance out of the gate. Right now, Mozilla has some notable problems with CSS 1 (such as conflicts between CSS margining, paragraph indentation, and HTML 4.0 tables) and other parts of its rendering engine interacting badly.
Web designers want to use standards in their daily business. It lets them be free to write sites that work the best possible way. If you give them clients using standards compliance browsers, they will make standards compliant websites.
If the free software programmers help get the gecko engine working properly, and provide a nice wrapper to it (such as the Galeon Gnome wrapper for Gecko), people will switch to it. Provide stability, provide standards compliance, and give it away free. People will download it (especially since gecko+wrapper should be a lot smaller than Mozilla itself, which has so many other things people might not need, like YetAnotherMailClient). The only catch is that you also need to have a Windows version, or you can bank on MS being able to force people into using IE 6.0.
We have a headstart on MS because Gecko is here today with the source open to people who can help fix it and get it out the door. Don't let this opprotunity go to waste. We can beat the marketters at their own game.
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A "flattened" namespace is just what the doctor ordered. Yes, the DNS system should be hierarchical, but no human is anal-compulsive
/bin/ls every time? No. You have a nice path statement to provide a level of flat namespace to you. Similarly, .com acts like the "commercial bin" for the internet, and allows people to "microsoft" or "yahoo" along. Forcing humans to use hierarchies when they don't think in them leads to problems with people who can't think that way. Plus, retyping all the Department of Redundancy, Redunancy Department locational information should be automated in the first place (we use computers because they lessen workload, not increase it)!
:-)
enough to think that way, let alone follow the rules (why do you think we're in this mess in the first place?). Look at General Motors with their "gmcanada.com" site (why not gm.ca? Because they didn't know about TLDs). It's easier to change how you represent things on the backend than it is to go and teach all the billions of people not currently using the internet how to use it as they start using it.
When you want to ls a dir, do you type
The best solution would be to have the hierarchy imposed, but to have a nice equivalent to the path statement to make it easier for humans to use. Or a nice way of translating between human requests for information, and the "real" location of things.
Humans always think in terms of relativity and relations, not hierarchy. That's why we have $HOME
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"Clinton and Gore are both moderate liberals."
;-)
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you there. The US Republican party is incredibly right-wing, and the US Democarat party is 'just' right wing. The Ralf Nader party (the "Green" party) is the closest thing to a liberal party the United States has.
What you term moderate liberal, I term conservative. What you term conservative, I term ultra conservative. This is because I live in Canada, a country with more than 2 parties. I have a different perspective (as do most people in countries with a non-dual-party system)
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How long is it before the GPS data is spoofed?
:-)
Trusting data from a client will never, ever work. If you give someone a magic black box which will encrypt all data between the two parties, people can still feed the box invalid data if that want to rig an election.
When you make things digital, you remove a lot of boundries (such as the cost of replication, etc), and make it much easier to "lie" about certain things. You have to be able to have a high level of "trust" for the client's data by making it hard to spoof the credentials.
A better solution would be to have a 128-bit SSL server for each district with a list of the people who live their, and have the user present some credentials to verify their identity.
The voting is encrypted via SSL. The authentication system reads in the credentials, and presents the user with the poll page if they validate. The poll sheet would only record the vote, and pass a value back to the authentication process (which would then disable further authentication until reset for the next election).
The authentication credentials could be three pieces of data, one of which is easy to obtain (the person's name), the second a bit harder (their social security number), and the third requiring interception of mail (a mailed out password). This would make it very hard to rig an election, as you'd have to compile a list of a lot of names, social security numbers, and passwords from intercepted mail. Certainly you could do it if you had enough money (bribing the postal service, etc), but it would likely be noticed, negating the gain.
You don't have to make riging an election impossible, just hard enough that no one will try
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"I hesitate to point it out, but no Russian space engineers have yet to completely fsck up a simple metric conversion function"
If anything, the chances are that this will happen as the United States is the only country in the world (besides a couple in S. America) which still uses the archaic Imperal system.. the Russians must thunk down to the US level of measurement to make their components interoperable, thus opening the possibility of a metric conversion problem.
If the US had converted to Metric with Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, NASA would've directly saved a few hundred million on their probes, not to mention other benefits (mainly in the sciences).
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