I think Mozilla is wrong for not supporting ActiveX.
Nobody should be enabling ActiveX when browsing the internet. It's just a gigantic security hole. If Microsoft cared a shit for the people who buy their software (and pay their salaries), they'd stop using ActiveX on their website and patch IE to disable it permanently.
But, of course, promoting ActiveX is just part of the plan to reinforce the Windows monopoly, since an ActiveX control is basically just a Win32 executable and hence only runnable on Windows. If Microsoft has to con its customers into exposing their PCs to crooks to reinforce its monopoly, then it will con its customers into exposing their PCs to crooks.
But there's no good reason for you or anyone else to help them.
You can browse the site with Mozilla, however, ActiveX is required for full functionality so IE is required to use the store.
/. gets it wrong again.
ActiveX depends on Windows, not IE. There are ActiveX plugins for Mozilla running on Windows. On the other hand, IE on Mac can't use ActiveX plugins.
Of course, any reasonably knowledgeable user will have disabled ActiveX even if running IE on Windows. The ActiveX mechanism is one of the biggest security holes in Windows, and that's saying a lot.
When Frank Capra was making movies, when D.W. Griffith was making movies, it was all about the story. Today, we have technological changes, and you can do all sorts of digital wizardry, but digital morphing is not a story.
Special effects and explosions and big-name stars aren't a story either. A common attitude in Hollywood seems to be, that most of the moviegoing public are too stupid to follow a complex story anyway, so there's little point in having a good one.
Valenti is an idiot. He almost single-handedly killed the entertainment industry with his crusade against VCRs (a technology that actually saved the industry). I cannot figure out why the industry even pays him lip service because he is a moron.
Moderators: the parent post should not have been modded up to 5. Calling someone "an idiot" and "a moron" because you disagree with him does not count as insight. It counts as self-description.
I don't like Valenti or what he stands for, but he is obviously a fairly clever man. Had he really been an idiot, he wouldn't have done so much damage.
Binary storage for 3D data makes a lot more sense since it is more compact and easier to parse
A binary format for X3D is being defined. X3D supports multiple file encodings describing the same abstract model.
But nowadays everything has got to be XML, even if it does not make any sense at all
The XML encoding enables smooth integration with web services and cross-platform inter-application file and data transfer. An excellent idea, surely. See the X3D FAQ for more details.
I mean, a royalty-bearing, pseudo-open universal 3D format from Intel and Microsoft? Sorry, guys. That trick doesn't work anymore.
Unfortunately, with Microsoft's money and monopoly of the desktop, that trick might work. In fact it probably will work, unless some of us put together good ideas and good software using the open standard X3D before the bad guys get their bandwagon rolling.
One key assumption many have is that economics is a zero-sum game. Lower costs supposedly means more profit to executives, but no increase in jobs.
You are right that economics is not a zero-sum game. Outsourcing will result in more total wealth in the US economy. But what you overlook is that this is not always a good thing. Here's how it works:
Start with a CEO getting $1 million/year. He figures out how to outsource the jobs of 20 engineers, each getting $100k a year, to India where their replacements will get $10k/year each, saving $1.8million. This enables him to boost his own salary to $2 million/year, and distribute $0.8 million to the stockholders as dividends.
All this extra wealth for the bosses enables them to hire more gardeners, maids, etc and to dine more often at upscale restaurants which provide super service by having lots of flunkeys. The fired engineers eventually get some of these jobs, at $20k/year.
Now let's see how an economist would view the change. Total incomes in the US at the beginning were: CEO $1M, engineers 20 times $100k, total $3million. Total incomes in the US at the end were: CEO $2M, extra dividends to stockholders $0.8M, ex-engineers 20 times $20k, total $3.2 million. A gain of $200,000! You think that's great? I think it stinks.
its very amusing how these politicans make "backdoors" for themselves in law.
After you've been watching it for another 20 years, it'll probably stop amusing you.
I'm more familiar with the US. Where Congress "gave" us Social Security, for example... but exempted themselves from it. They don't pay Social Security taxes like the rest of us, and they have a real pension system, that gives them all great pensions that are more than 90% of the voters earn while working.
The pols in many countries rip off the people to some degree. Maybe term limits are part of the answer. But it's a real problem.
The sooner the linux acpi project stops bitching that its MS and/or the BIOS vendors fault that ACPI doesnt work correctly the better. As has ben posted, ACPI works fine under XP
Recent BIOS implementations work under XP. Some older ones don't, because the manufacturers only tested them against older Windows. Some of the current implementations, that are tweaked for XP, might stop working when Longhorn comes out.
This is a mess. In the long run, the only way to get something that works reliably is for the BIOS manufacturers to implement the standard, not to cobble together something that seems to work with the flavor du jour of Windows. The Linux APCI project is absolutely right to bitch about BIOS vendors who haven't implemented the standard properly. The most effective thing for the Linux community to do, is to publish a list of which vendors implement the standard, so that when we buy machines, we can choose ones in which ACPI is done right.
Think IE, and how many sites are custom crafted to it.
There are sites that are custom crafted to some version of IE, but actually there are not many, and they are not "leadership" sites. The sites that people look to for examples of what to do are all sites that are written to the standards, not to Microsoft's current bugs. I'm thinking of sites like A List Apart.
How would YOU do it, if not by using the name as the first level check?
I wouldn't do it at all. The whole concept of depriving people of the right to travel just because they are vaguely "suspected" of something stinks.
If the government wants to penalize somebody in such a major way, it should have to:
Tell that person what he/she is accused of
Give the person an opportunity to confront his/her accusers in court and rebut the evidence
Have a judge or jury consider the evidence in public
Most of us thought we had that right. Too many people seem willing to give it up, in return for an illusory feeling of "security". The chance of your being injured by a terrorist in the next year is considerably less than the chance of your being injured by a non-terrorist driving an automobile. There are risks in life, get used to it. Giving up essential liberties, which took centuries of struggle and sacrifice to get, just to possibly reduce some already-tiny risk, is irresponsible, short-sighted, and extremely stupid.
People won't be so computer-illiterate in about ten years when computers will be as common as any other appliance
Boy, you haven't been around long, have you? Still in high school, right?
10 years ago, the average computer user understood at least 5 times as much about what was going on in his/her computer as today's user.
If appliances being common led to people understanding them, then every American over 17 would be able would be able to diagnose and fix a fuel-pump airlock in his/her automobile. From observation, however, I'd say that over half of them don't even know how to check the oil level.
Java is one of the very, very few programming languages ever created which brought no new ideas to programming. It's more or less a subset of C++, with a garbage-collector (as popularized by Lisp in the 1960s). The original intent was to compile it to a compact interpretable form somewhat like BCPL's ocode (circa 1970).
Apple produces a product (hardware and software) that is of a quality higher than many people are willing to pay for.
You have a strange notion of "quality" that is different from mine. For me, "quality" has nothing to do with how "cool" or "stylish" the product looks. It has to do mainly with how reliable the product is. There are lots of PC manufacturers who built PCs to last. Apple never needed to, because every major new release of their OS seems to obsolete any Apple hardware more than 4 years old. In software, Linux is top for reliability. There are Compaq PCs running Linux which have been running continously (without even a reboot) since before Apple's latest OS even existed.
The Apple II was a real workhorse in its day. Every Apple since has been, basically, a yuppy toy. Style, cool, yeah man. But if you want to get work done as cost-effectively as possible, you shop in a market where there's commodity hardware and competition. It's no accident that Apple's main success has been in sectors where "appearance is everything" - advertising, marketing, graphic design etc.
I think I'm glad I'm changing courses at school, from a tech job route, to Commercial Pilot.
I think you're making a smart move, despite all the negative replies to your comment. The job of flying passengers from Chicago to LA cannot easily be outsourced to India. Right now, the air tranportation industry is having some temporary problems, but it will recover as it always has in the past. Whereas software development, or circuit design, will never recover because there will never be any reason to bring those jobs back from India/China/Vietnam etc.
You're dreaming. According to the article, $67,000 in California or NYC. You think that's a high-paying salary? If you work 2000 hours in a year, it's about $33/hour. A very junior lawyer from a second-rate school might start at a similar rate, but lawyer salaries go up with experience much faster than IT salaries.
And if you can find a plumber who'd be content with $33/hour, let me know, I've got work for him/her. I'll pay travel expenses on top.
In these days of outsourcing to Asia, an education in Computer Science probably has the worst return on investment of any work-related degree.
What about the apps than finally figured out how to use fonts that don't suck under Gnome? What about the apps that finally figured out how to use fonts that don't suck under KDE? (that's two, largely non-overlapping, sets of apps BTW.) What will their text look like under Enlightenment?
Will it look as good as all text looks under Windows?
Today, AFAIK, there is no Linux environment under which all apps generate text which looks as good as Windows text, all the time. I know it's a lot more fun to play about with "new ideas" in environments, than to fix environments or apps that somebody else has developed. But until Linux gets rid of the complete garbage that often masquerades as text output (and anything short of Windows quality should be regarded as garbage), promoting alternative environments is just a distraction and a nuisance that makes it harder to get the real problems solved.
of course hardware manufacturers don't like to release the details of the hardware.
There's no "of course" about it. Ten years ago, almost all hardware manufacturers released details of hardware routinely. Back in 1994, I was programming video boards (S3 based, and Targa) using hardware specs provided by the manufacturer. Their reasoning was that providing programming specs resulted in more software being written for their boards, which would result in more sales. Makes sense, doesn't it?
What has changed is that now Microsoft is a powerful monopoly with a strong interest in preventing other operating systems from supporting as wide a variety of hardware as Windows. It concludes restrictive agreements (whose terms are usually secret) with hardware manufacturers. That's a big part of the reason why it is less common today than 10 years ago for hardware manufacturers to release specs.
What happened to programming a website/webpage with the old W3C standards and just being done with it?
You have a point, but you overstate it (and probably some grumpy moderator will mod you down for that...)
Some of the post-HTML standards are really beneficial. For example, the separation of document structure from presentation style (using CSS) is good, because it simplifies website maintenance and will allow programs to make sense of web pages. We're not there yet, but there's progress toward some really useful goals.
But the addition of a bunch of features just for eye candy ("very, very, very cool stuff" as the article referred to by the story puts it) is a giant leap backwards. It's just like flashing popups. The kids and the salespeople yell "wow! cool" for about 3 weeks and then suddenly they're no longer cool.
When I use the web, I want information. Stuff that looks like a video game in attract mode is just a timewasting distraction. Unfortunately, much of the advocacy for change is coming from graphic artists, not from real users.
Apple, Adobe, Macromedia, Opera, and Sun are definitely interested in causing Microsoft to become financially insolvent.
Which planet do you live on? Microsoft has approximately $55 billion in the bank. Do you have any idea at all what that number means? For example, after subtracting a $400 million fine from the European Union, MS would still have... $55 billion in the bank (to the same precision).
Apple, Adobe, Macromedia, Opera, and Sun are interested in not being caused to become financially insolvent by Microsoft. Some of them won't make it. IMHO Sun will be the first to die, but all of them are in danger. They are definitely not the slightest danger to Microsoft.
we're also seeking ideas that will make Firefox 2.0 blow every other browser out of the water.
You mean more new features.
Forget new features, just fix the bugs. There are bugs (some inherited from Mozilla) that make Firefox unusable on some Linux systems. If you want ideas for what to work on, go to Mozilla's bug list.
This would be about 1000 times more useful than putting in yet more code bloat which will introduce yet more bugs. Of course, it won't gratify your ego as much. It's a question of what your goal is - accomplish something useful for the community, or pump up your ego.
But do we really? The Debian folks have excluded key parts of mplayer from their distro (they include a crippled subset that is arguably useless) because of licensing concerns.
Now, this could just be a couple of people at the Debian project being anal-retentive; I don't pretend to fully understand the issues, and I don't know whether Debian's position makes sense or not. But at the least, there is some kind of question mark hanging over the mplayer copyrights and license.
While specialized code developed to work exclusively in Internet Explorer might be convenient, it may be harmful to the users who view your site.
Generally speaking, one should always ask nicely. But I think you're overdoing it here. These sites are exposing their customers to risk. Under the circumstances I think one is justified in being a little more direct. Perhaps replace this by:
As a user of your web site, I object most strongly to your faulty web-site design, which compels your users to expose themselves to security problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody should be enabling ActiveX when browsing the internet. It's just a gigantic security hole. If Microsoft cared a shit for the people who buy their software (and pay their salaries), they'd stop using ActiveX on their website and patch IE to disable it permanently.
But, of course, promoting ActiveX is just part of the plan to reinforce the Windows monopoly, since an ActiveX control is basically just a Win32 executable and hence only runnable on Windows. If Microsoft has to con its customers into exposing their PCs to crooks to reinforce its monopoly, then it will con its customers into exposing their PCs to crooks.
But there's no good reason for you or anyone else to help them.
/. gets it wrong again.
ActiveX depends on Windows, not IE. There are ActiveX plugins for Mozilla running on Windows. On the other hand, IE on Mac can't use ActiveX plugins.
Of course, any reasonably knowledgeable user will have disabled ActiveX even if running IE on Windows. The ActiveX mechanism is one of the biggest security holes in Windows, and that's saying a lot.
When Frank Capra was making movies, when D.W. Griffith was making movies, it was all about the story. Today, we have technological changes, and you can do all sorts of digital wizardry, but digital morphing is not a story.
Special effects and explosions and big-name stars aren't a story either. A common attitude in Hollywood seems to be, that most of the moviegoing public are too stupid to follow a complex story anyway, so there's little point in having a good one.
Moderators: the parent post should not have been modded up to 5. Calling someone "an idiot" and "a moron" because you disagree with him does not count as insight. It counts as self-description.
I don't like Valenti or what he stands for, but he is obviously a fairly clever man. Had he really been an idiot, he wouldn't have done so much damage.
A binary format for X3D is being defined. X3D supports multiple file encodings describing the same abstract model.
But nowadays everything has got to be XML, even if it does not make any sense at all
The XML encoding enables smooth integration with web services and cross-platform inter-application file and data transfer. An excellent idea, surely. See the X3D FAQ for more details.
Unfortunately, with Microsoft's money and monopoly of the desktop, that trick might work. In fact it probably will work, unless some of us put together good ideas and good software using the open standard X3D before the bad guys get their bandwagon rolling.
You are right that economics is not a zero-sum game. Outsourcing will result in more total wealth in the US economy. But what you overlook is that this is not always a good thing. Here's how it works:
Start with a CEO getting $1 million/year. He figures out how to outsource the jobs of 20 engineers, each getting $100k a year, to India where their replacements will get $10k/year each, saving $1.8million. This enables him to boost his own salary to $2 million/year, and distribute $0.8 million to the stockholders as dividends.
All this extra wealth for the bosses enables them to hire more gardeners, maids, etc and to dine more often at upscale restaurants which provide super service by having lots of flunkeys. The fired engineers eventually get some of these jobs, at $20k/year.
Now let's see how an economist would view the change. Total incomes in the US at the beginning were: CEO $1M, engineers 20 times $100k, total $3million.
Total incomes in the US at the end were: CEO $2M, extra dividends to stockholders $0.8M, ex-engineers 20 times $20k, total $3.2 million. A gain of $200,000! You think that's great? I think it stinks.
After you've been watching it for another 20 years, it'll probably stop amusing you.
I'm more familiar with the US. Where Congress "gave" us Social Security, for example ... but exempted themselves from it. They don't pay Social Security taxes like the rest of us, and they have a real pension system, that gives them all great pensions that are more than 90% of the voters earn while working.
The pols in many countries rip off the people to some degree. Maybe term limits are part of the answer. But it's a real problem.
Recent BIOS implementations work under XP. Some older ones don't, because the manufacturers only tested them against older Windows. Some of the current implementations, that are tweaked for XP, might stop working when Longhorn comes out.
This is a mess. In the long run, the only way to get something that works reliably is for the BIOS manufacturers to implement the standard, not to cobble together something that seems to work with the flavor du jour of Windows. The Linux APCI project is absolutely right to bitch about BIOS vendors who haven't implemented the standard properly. The most effective thing for the Linux community to do, is to publish a list of which vendors implement the standard, so that when we buy machines, we can choose ones in which ACPI is done right.
Have you ever seen a Microsoft ad that was not misleading? I haven't.
There are sites that are custom crafted to some version of IE, but actually there are not many, and they are not "leadership" sites. The sites that people look to for examples of what to do are all sites that are written to the standards, not to Microsoft's current bugs. I'm thinking of sites like A List Apart.
I wouldn't do it at all. The whole concept of depriving people of the right to travel just because they are vaguely "suspected" of something stinks.
If the government wants to penalize somebody in such a major way, it should have to:
- Tell that person what he/she is accused of
- Give the person an opportunity to confront his/her accusers in court and rebut the evidence
- Have a judge or jury consider the evidence in public
Most of us thought we had that right. Too many people seem willing to give it up, in return for an illusory feeling of "security". The chance of your being injured by a terrorist in the next year is considerably less than the chance of your being injured by a non-terrorist driving an automobile. There are risks in life, get used to it. Giving up essential liberties, which took centuries of struggle and sacrifice to get, just to possibly reduce some already-tiny risk, is irresponsible, short-sighted, and extremely stupid.Boy, you haven't been around long, have you? Still in high school, right?
10 years ago, the average computer user understood at least 5 times as much about what was going on in his/her computer as today's user.
If appliances being common led to people understanding them, then every American over 17 would be able would be able to diagnose and fix a fuel-pump airlock in his/her automobile. From observation, however, I'd say that over half of them don't even know how to check the oil level.
Java is one of the very, very few programming languages ever created which brought no new ideas to programming. It's more or less a subset of C++, with a garbage-collector (as popularized by Lisp in the 1960s). The original intent was to compile it to a compact interpretable form somewhat like BCPL's ocode (circa 1970).
Google for Postgresql support and you'll find lots of support, including but not limited to:
You have a strange notion of "quality" that is different from mine. For me, "quality" has nothing to do with how "cool" or "stylish" the product looks. It has to do mainly with how reliable the product is. There are lots of PC manufacturers who built PCs to last. Apple never needed to, because every major new release of their OS seems to obsolete any Apple hardware more than 4 years old. In software, Linux is top for reliability. There are Compaq PCs running Linux which have been running continously (without even a reboot) since before Apple's latest OS even existed.
The Apple II was a real workhorse in its day. Every Apple since has been, basically, a yuppy toy. Style, cool, yeah man. But if you want to get work done as cost-effectively as possible, you shop in a market where there's commodity hardware and competition. It's no accident that Apple's main success has been in sectors where "appearance is everything" - advertising, marketing, graphic design etc.
I think you're making a smart move, despite all the negative replies to your comment. The job of flying passengers from Chicago to LA cannot easily be outsourced to India. Right now, the air tranportation industry is having some temporary problems, but it will recover as it always has in the past. Whereas software development, or circuit design, will never recover because there will never be any reason to bring those jobs back from India/China/Vietnam etc.
You're dreaming. According to the article, $67,000 in California or NYC. You think that's a high-paying salary? If you work 2000 hours in a year, it's about $33/hour. A very junior lawyer from a second-rate school might start at a similar rate, but lawyer salaries go up with experience much faster than IT salaries.
And if you can find a plumber who'd be content with $33/hour, let me know, I've got work for him/her. I'll pay travel expenses on top.
In these days of outsourcing to Asia, an education in Computer Science probably has the worst return on investment of any work-related degree.
What about the apps than finally figured out how to use fonts that don't suck under Gnome? What about the apps that finally figured out how to use fonts that don't suck under KDE? (that's two, largely non-overlapping, sets of apps BTW.) What will their text look like under Enlightenment?
Will it look as good as all text looks under Windows?
Today, AFAIK, there is no Linux environment under which all apps generate text which looks as good as Windows text, all the time. I know it's a lot more fun to play about with "new ideas" in environments, than to fix environments or apps that somebody else has developed. But until Linux gets rid of the complete garbage that often masquerades as text output (and anything short of Windows quality should be regarded as garbage), promoting alternative environments is just a distraction and a nuisance that makes it harder to get the real problems solved.
There's no "of course" about it. Ten years ago, almost all hardware manufacturers released details of hardware routinely. Back in 1994, I was programming video boards (S3 based, and Targa) using hardware specs provided by the manufacturer. Their reasoning was that providing programming specs resulted in more software being written for their boards, which would result in more sales. Makes sense, doesn't it?
What has changed is that now Microsoft is a powerful monopoly with a strong interest in preventing other operating systems from supporting as wide a variety of hardware as Windows. It concludes restrictive agreements (whose terms are usually secret) with hardware manufacturers. That's a big part of the reason why it is less common today than 10 years ago for hardware manufacturers to release specs.
You have a point, but you overstate it (and probably some grumpy moderator will mod you down for that...)
Some of the post-HTML standards are really beneficial. For example, the separation of document structure from presentation style (using CSS) is good, because it simplifies website maintenance and will allow programs to make sense of web pages. We're not there yet, but there's progress toward some really useful goals.
But the addition of a bunch of features just for eye candy ("very, very, very cool stuff" as the article referred to by the story puts it) is a giant leap backwards. It's just like flashing popups. The kids and the salespeople yell "wow! cool" for about 3 weeks and then suddenly they're no longer cool.
When I use the web, I want information. Stuff that looks like a video game in attract mode is just a timewasting distraction. Unfortunately, much of the advocacy for change is coming from graphic artists, not from real users.
Which planet do you live on? Microsoft has approximately $55 billion in the bank. Do you have any idea at all what that number means? For example, after subtracting a $400 million fine from the European Union, MS would still have ... $55 billion in the bank (to the same precision).
Apple, Adobe, Macromedia, Opera, and Sun are interested in not being caused to become financially insolvent by Microsoft. Some of them won't make it. IMHO Sun will be the first to die, but all of them are in danger. They are definitely not the slightest danger to Microsoft.
You mean more new features.
Forget new features, just fix the bugs. There are bugs (some inherited from Mozilla) that make Firefox unusable on some Linux systems. If you want ideas for what to work on, go to Mozilla's bug list.
This would be about 1000 times more useful than putting in yet more code bloat which will introduce yet more bugs. Of course, it won't gratify your ego as much. It's a question of what your goal is - accomplish something useful for the community, or pump up your ego.
But do we really? The Debian folks have excluded key parts of mplayer from their distro (they include a crippled subset that is arguably useless) because of licensing concerns.
Now, this could just be a couple of people at the Debian project being anal-retentive; I don't pretend to fully understand the issues, and I don't know whether Debian's position makes sense or not. But at the least, there is some kind of question mark hanging over the mplayer copyrights and license.
Generally speaking, one should always ask nicely. But I think you're overdoing it here. These sites are exposing their customers to risk. Under the circumstances I think one is justified in being a little more direct. Perhaps replace this by:
As a user of your web site, I object most strongly to your faulty web-site design, which compels your users to expose themselves to security problems.