Incidentally, I don't see any support for such tricks as using tables to lay out a page
But I don't see them specifically ruled out either, any more than in HTML 4.01. Sure, W3C don't want people using them, but there's nothing much they can do about that.
Will this force people to recode their layouts with CSS (which they probably should do anyway)
Yeah, I know it's very worthy and everything, but have you ever tried converting a table layout to CSS? It ain't fun.
First, of course, browser support is terrible; Netscape tends to break if you have the temerity to put a positioned element inside another positioned element, and it messes the whole page up if you try to mix CSS-P with tables to achieve some kind of graceful degradation on
But that's not what's wrong with the standard, obv. What's wrong is the total lack of flexibility in positioning. Normally with positioning you want to say things like "this element is to go 3 ems to the left of that element", or "this element should line up horizontally with that element and vertically with the other element". But CSS gives you only two choices: specify an absolute page position, or move the element a bit in some direction; you can't mix the two horizontally and vertically, and the latter option is usually useless anyway since it leaves an element-shaped hole in the parent.
This could nearly be half-workable, since you can achieve more complex effects by putting elements inside other elements. But Netscape 4 breaks so very, very badly if you try that the page often becomes completely unreadable.
So what you end up doing is either making every element absolutely-positioned to the page pixel, which is okay for the kind of fixed-layout fixed-width page which idiots write, but otherwise useless, or you end up writing a complete page-layout engine in several KB of JavaScript at the top of the page, slowing everyone down. And of course writing layout JavaScript that works with IE4+, Netscape 4 and the W3C DOM is a Sisyphean task. Oh, and of course people with JavaScript turned off are screwed.
To summarise: CSS is not up to producing interesting, dynamic-page-size layouts, and browser-supported CSS is not up to anything at all.
To summarise the summary: Style. Is a problem.
To summarise the summary of the summary: Aaaarrrrrghhh.
They used to, back in the days of HTML 2.0->4.0. I think it's a bit different these days, since the CSS/DOM people have built quite a big bunch of standard which is way beyond what most browsers support, and the browser writers are playing catch-up. Of course Microsoft are adding all sorts of weird extended style-sheet stuff, but I've never seen any of it actually used, probably because no-one really understands it.
people are way too lazy to actually follow standards.
Sometimes. I think in more cases, they just don't really know standards are even there to be followed. I think most content on the web is hacked up by people who've learnt HTML from reading other people's HTML, or from a woefully inaccurate "HTML for Tossers" book. Or they're using FrontPage, God help 'em.
Ten years from now, there will still be messy "optimized for Netscape"
You're right, of course.:-(
browser writers will still fudge the standard, and people will still check their HTML on the only browser they have before putting it on the web.
But ten years from now, we'll fantasise that politicians were honest, prices reasonable, Netscape implemented standards and JavaScript ever worked.:-)
The usless people incluced hair dressers, telephone sanitizers, etc.
Which was rather unfair, of course. Hairdressers do a necessary job, after all, and we all know what happened without the telephone sanitisers.
I'd define the useless third as that breed of hangers-on whose only work is self-promotion. They join groups ending in 'AA' whose only goals are to promote their own existence at the expense of everyone else. They have their companies fight each other. They sue. They are the lawyers. They are the politicians who are in it for the power, not because they believe in any particular vision of the future.
Stick 'em on Ark Fleet Ship B and back to Golgafrincham with them!
My guess is that they have put a layer in the CD that gives read errors.
Ngh. You could be right.
SPDIF should work but thats slower then hell.
I don't know - if I liked a CD enough to buy it, I think I could stand to listen to it through once whilst ripping it.
PS. Kinda sucks if you have a $1000 CD transport and the CD are Fed when you get them...
Quite. Once again, a copy protection system inconveniences the legitimate customer whilst failing to prevent the pirate from copying the material. Why do they do this stuff? Do they get some kind of control-freak sexual kick from it, or something?
It is interesting that "newer" CD players can deal with these mangled discs at all. Have manufacturers been trying to sneak protection into a new CD non-standard standard or is it just luck that they work at all?
Of course as a copy-protection method this is utterly hopeless -
c't Labs are currently testing whether the copy protection also prevents playing CDs through the SP/DIF digital output. It is possible that the product could fail to qualify for the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" label due to non-conformace to the Red Book standard. When consulted by c't, BMG admitted to being aware of difficulties with the scheme. Until these are cleared up, no further protected CDs will be released
- even if somehow the digital interconnects are disabled - which would seem to implicate player manufacturers in the protection scheme - it will still always be possible to save any sound a device can play back at us.
The music industry wants us to keep paying for the same music again and again, on new formats, or as old media wear out (yeah - I've got CDs that won't play properly any more already, but that's no problem once they're MP3d), or simply through making us rent all music. But since CDs the cat is already way out of the bag, and clumsy attempts like this - and DVD-Audio - to stuff it back in just won't work any more.
Oh quick, more news coming in...
Useless Third sues Rest of World
California, 25 January - A group of lawyers today issued writs against society in an attempt to preserve the livelihoods of their clients.
Moschops Ankleduster, attorney for the useless third of the population commented, "My clients feel that it is unfair to deny the vital importance of the Useless sector - those jobs that are neither productive nor creative."
"Industry bodies and bureaucracies must be permitted to make great sums of money from the work of the artists who create the products and the workers who physically create them", he continued, "and we will fight for the rights of all those upstanding citizens - ourselves included - who contribute absolutely nothing to the world".
Asked whether existing modes of distribution were still viable in a rapidly-changing information-based society, Ankleduster commented, "Fuck off".
if a design-team is competent, they will create an interface that is best-suited to their target audience, *not* to other programmers and people who are used to dealing with shoddy applications.
Doesn't seem like there are that many competent design-teams about, tho, does it?:-(
I think the important thing is that the internal design should follow the interface design, not the other way around. I always start with the user interface, what sorts of objects and models I'd want to interact with as a user. This often suggests much of the implementation. You could call it outside-in programming, or something; design top-down, then implement bottom-up. Of course, for me, designing how things should work is a lot more fun than actually making them work, so I guess less than 50% of my pet projects actually ever get implemented.
A lot of programs, alas, seem to have started their design with a few simple internal classes, and layered as many UI elements over them as are needed to make the software usable at all, ending up with horribly counter-intuitive interfaces. (I've been guilty of this in rushed projects too, natch.) Then you end up having to add crud like Wizards to perform common operations because the normal interface makes them too hard. Yuck poo smell. And bum as well.
As it happens, I did used to write much of my stuff in assembler. Wouldn't say that exactly made me perfect, but hey. I used to be able to understand my programs at the time, as well. My habit of labelling subroutines.thing_thing_kludge or.john_prescotts_face doesn't make it entirely fun maintaining the code now...
(Of course, ARM assembler doesn't count anyway, since it is far too easy to be classed a proper assembly language.)
How do you know they don't just reboot reality while you sleep, huh? HUH?!
Right. That'd be Dark City, then.
How many related films can we namecheck in one/. thread, then? The Matrix, good though it was, was mainly a collection of rehashed ideas from other sf films and literature, after all.
Alanis Morrisette doesn't know what Irony is either: "Rain on your wedding day" is not ironic.
Nah, nah, nah, you've got it all wrong, mate.
That none of the allegedly ironic examples given in the song are actually ironic is deliberate. It's ironic that the song, called Ironic, is not ironic, thus making the song ironic. Thus the non-ironic song is thus very ironic, which is itself doubly ironic, or meta-ironic... er... or something.
Therefore Alanis is not a silly moo at all, but in fact very clever. Unless she really is dumb and is just being ironic about it all.
Just pointing out the daftness of the Reno quote - this still has nothing to do with on-line privacy. Which is an issue, just not one that could be resolved by LawNet as described in the article.
Jurisdiction. If a cracker in Michigan breaks into a firm's corporate servers in California, and steals a Delaware man's credit card number, all 3 states have claims on jurisdiction. Coordinating the investigation and (eventual) prosecution through one federal office makes plenty of sense.
It certainly does. But no more than in any other, non-e-commercy case, I'd have thought. But then I am British and don't 'get' how US state law works.
Of course in this case the cracker was not so much in Michigan as in Russia. So unless the 'international agents' mentioned were in fact hitmen there's probably not that much LawNet can do about it.:-)
Reno said LawNet would also need to focus on privacy issues, protecting consumers from invasions like the CD Universe extortion case.
How is this a privacy issue? Consumers gave their CC#s to CD Universe to obtain services from them. Maybe a retailer that sent you CDs for free is indeed a great idea, but it's probably not much of a viable business plan.
The only problem with CD Universe is that they were cracked.
That they were then blackmailed is no great issue since there are already perfectly adequate non-Internet-related anti-blackmail laws.
According to The Register the crack was caused by a hole in NetVerify. Personally it seems to me that credit card processor connection software like ICVerify's actually does very little for what it costs and it would be a Really Good Thing if it could be replaced by free software, for security reasons as well as lowering the cost of entry to e-commerce.
Anyway, haven't we already got pretty good information exchange on the computer security front without LawNet's help? If law enforcement isn't currently reading the likes of CERT advisories, that's it's own stupid fault IMHO.
Look, if anybody's going to kick MSFT around, it's going to be this 8-headed monster. Take a pill, already.
Ah. The enemy of my enemy, right?
Or is Netscape evil, too, now?
Oh yes, have been for ages. They invented "decommoditising net standards", after all.
As one of the legion who spend 10% of work time authoring web content, and the other 90% trying to work around Netscape bugs, I'm sure I speak for many others in saying Netscape are very evil indeed, oh yes.:-(
So, roll up, roll up, for the fight of the multinationals! Netscape-Sun-AOL-Time-Warner vs IE-Microsoft-MSN-News-International, coming soon to a world near you!
So who controls that power and for whom does it work? Us.
The first difference is that in a conventional democracy, we are voting for a national government which will affect ourselves (the body of voters in an election) and not, to any large degree, the body of people not entitled to vote - that is, the inhabitants of the rest of the world. Unless our government chooses to go to war, or something.
However, a group of shareholders is voting on the actions of a company which can affect the non-voting rest of the world, and is very likely to vote in the financial interest of the company over the general well-being of everyone. Whilst national democracy is clearly flawed in practice, it was at least designed to produce the best possible outcome for the greatest number. The company-with-shareholders model is designed only to make money for the company and screw everyone else. Even if the directors want to play nice, they are still at the mercy of the shareholders.
The second major difference is that of block voting. Even those fortunate enough to own shares in a company are likely to have little power since many more shares will be owned by the banks and pension plans you mention. Many times in the UK we have seen shareholder revolts over environmental concerns, directors' pay and so on, come to naught simply because the balance of power is held by a few large businesses.
Instead of watching in horror as these organizations do things we can't stand, why don't we hack these things, figure out how they work, and see what we can do? That's the sort of article I'd like to see, anyway.
Seconded. But however much an 'alternative' economy can be realised, based around low-control, the internet, free software and freedom of digital information, there are still things the transnats can do to get in the way. Patents is the obvious one, which has rightly received a great deal of attention here. By patenting enough obvious and necessary computing ideas and coercing national governments into recognising the patents, they can prevent software outside their sphere of influence being distributed. Lawyers can be used to frighten individuals and ISPs into effective censorship. Encryption outlawed. The whole YRO gamut.
Me, I'd like to be optimistic, but it's doesn't suit me.:-)
On a purely historical note, however, the ARM series was, at its inception, more than comparable with the x86 processors of the day; that'd would've been about 1987, I guess.
ARM Ltd was spun off to develop the processor and aimed at the embedded market in particular, resulting in the less spectacular mid-range chips such as the ARM6 core; as you note, it took Digital's involvement in the StrongARM project to make another high-end processor.
Of course, no ARM ever ran the x86 instruction set, which is where (we think) this may differ...
it isn't quite hard to quess that transmeta's projects have something to do with processors.
Well, yes, we'd kind of known that for some time.:-)
The new-news hidden in this article (apart from the codename itself) is that Crusoe is to be aimed at low-power devices like laptops, which is quite a different market to the mega-workstation many people here wanted it to be (perhaps due to dislike for Intel).
'Course, low-electrical-power doesn't mean low-computing-power. Look at the ARM series, for one. Or c't could be wrong, though they usually aren't. Guess we'll just have to wait and see - to use a phrase already worn out in Transmeta discussion...
This virus won't, because it's written that way. However, avoiding this virus is not an issue because it has never occurred in the wild, and judging by the AV companies' reports, probably never will.
WinNT running IE5 is susceptible to this problem and there is no reason a new email or web page designed to do so could not exploit this.
Am I wrong?
I hope so because I'm using NT4IE5 right here at work.
and your security settings can't be on high.
Ah yes, I'll just change th... oh. I can't. Admin has disabled the Internet Options menu entry, and the Control Panel version crashes. Marvellous. Hooray for Pok^H^H^H MS.
(Local apps also not suited to all tasks shock, horror!)
ASPs are a good idea, but they won't kill off local applications completely.
I should hope not! There are some things that ASPs are suited to providing and some they are definitely not.
I'm currently working on a web application that performs certain processor-hungry data-processing on large data-sets. It's not a very interactive task: you just tell it to go do a job and it comes back when it's done. This is clearly suited to being done by an ASP, and does not require much of the browser user. (Yes, it works with Lynx and everything.) Batch-style tasks are a good candidate for ASP.
But when I followed the link to GIFWorks I experienced a mixture of awe (that Andover had managed to get it to work so well) and horror (at the sheer amount of hack effort that must lie behind it, at both the browser and especially the server end).
Interactive content creation/editing software is not a good candidate for running through an ASP! Text editors, graphics editors, sound sequencers... all these things benefit from instant-effect interaction. Which means either using DHTML - with the usability hit you (and Jakob Nielsen) mention, and grievous server-side implementation worries (probably leading to more bugs) - or some sort of applet that shifts the majority of the processing over to the client anyway.
Information management tasks can be good candidates for ASP. Especially where communication of the information is inherent to the service. I suppose webmail is an example of this, though personally I still see it as a bit of a hack and it's definitely less usable than a good mailer.
One reason why web interfaces can be useful, though, is simply that many employees are stuck behind firewalls or NATs that only allow the likes of port 80 through. And probably aren't allowed to install their own software anyway. Leaving HTTP the only escape route.
OK, now ask yourself if you would entrust the spreadsheet with all the juicy details of your Top Secret business plan to MSExcel.com.
And, as others have noted, it's a question of ownership. Software vendors can already virtually own your data by hiding it in their proprietary formats. Now they can technically - and, I guess, even legally own your data.
Anyway. Last in this series of random unedited thoughts: I personally would expect more popular web services to be built by single organisations who have come up with a cool idea than a few distinct ASP firms as the article implies.
ISTM it's all talk of "warfare" and "targetting" and "computers" and "websites" and "guidelines" and all sorts of crap, but nothing actually interesting about how or what might be done.
Indeed. And the quote in the Reuters article doesn't exactly inspire confidence that "One Senior Military Officer" (TM) has much of a clue either:
"We went through the drill of figuring out how we would do some of these cyber things if we were to do them."
These Cyber Things. Ah, yes, right. Good old US Army. They'll save us from the commies and their deadly website cracks. Or something.
Good luck to Sinclair, I say. Given that we've already got working stuff in Europe, goodness knows why the US needs another standard at all. I'd like to have a telly I can use anywhere in the world.
Putting smart quotes in web pages in indeed a heinous act.
Problem is, they do actually look quite nice, so if you ask people to remove them they probably won't. And the ‘ and ’ entities aren't very well supported either.
The solution is to keep pages smart-quote-free and change the sexless quotes to smart ones on the fly at the browser end. You can also have the browser display " - " using an em-dash, "fi" and "fl" using ligatures, and so on. There is already one web browser that does this, but it's, er, a bit obscure.
You can detect whether a quote mark should be open or closed using my Patented Smart Quote Algorithm[*]. If the previous character was a space, open quote, open bracket or start-of-input, use an open quote, else use a closed one. It ain't perfect (words with an apostrophe at the start come out wrong; they don't happen very often), but it looks pretty good.
[*] I didn't really patent it. Obviously. The sad thing is, I probably could.:-(
Well, the page seems to be back up, at least, though the main image doesn't work for me.
From the other pics it looks like it's just three more normal-sized panels stuck together with special TFT glue. "Segmented", as they call it, meaning you get whopping great black strips down your picture, chiz chiz.
Which isn't bad, I suppose, but for the price I had expected more.
And how you're going to drive it I don't know; the resolution is far too big to stick through a regular DFP/DVI connector. Do you need a graphics card with three digital outputs? Does such a beast exist?
Erm. So probably doesn't work under Linux... but imagine a Beowulf cluster... ect ect.
I have often thought the universe is one big memory storage device, and that the moment you know all information about something you will need just as much space as the universe to store it.
Okay, so who's got a good compression system for reality itself?
Run-length encoding looks pretty good for the vast emptyness of space, to me.:-)
Or alternatively, are weird quantum effects the result of reality itself being stored using lossy compression?
I hadn't really thought that killing a cell would be terrifically difficult since we can already do it by so many non-genetic means, but with hindsight a reliable "suicide-gene" probably isn't that easy to isolate since normally it would not be terribly conducive to survival, and that.
...it could attack the wrong cells...
Yes... this problem still seems to be, er, left as an exercise to the reader, alas.
Hmm. 'Scuse me if I'm missing something, but from this article (having not read the whole paper), how does this help fight cancerous cells whilst leaving healthly cells intact? Sounds like vpr just kills more or less everything in its way.
Which would leave patients without cancer, yes, but also possibly without vital organs, brains, hearts, you know, that kind of thing.
This might be considered a Bad Thing. From the patient's point of view. If the patient still had eyes, anyway.
I suppose it would cut down the cost of caring for cancer patients, though, eh readers?
Slashdot Mirror
But I don't see them specifically ruled out either, any more than in HTML 4.01. Sure, W3C don't want people using them, but there's nothing much they can do about that.
Yeah, I know it's very worthy and everything, but have you ever tried converting a table layout to CSS? It ain't fun.
First, of course, browser support is terrible; Netscape tends to break if you have the temerity to put a positioned element inside another positioned element, and it messes the whole page up if you try to mix CSS-P with tables to achieve some kind of graceful degradation on
But that's not what's wrong with the standard, obv. What's wrong is the total lack of flexibility in positioning. Normally with positioning you want to say things like "this element is to go 3 ems to the left of that element", or "this element should line up horizontally with that element and vertically with the other element". But CSS gives you only two choices: specify an absolute page position, or move the element a bit in some direction; you can't mix the two horizontally and vertically, and the latter option is usually useless anyway since it leaves an element-shaped hole in the parent.
This could nearly be half-workable, since you can achieve more complex effects by putting elements inside other elements. But Netscape 4 breaks so very, very badly if you try that the page often becomes completely unreadable.
So what you end up doing is either making every element absolutely-positioned to the page pixel, which is okay for the kind of fixed-layout fixed-width page which idiots write, but otherwise useless, or you end up writing a complete page-layout engine in several KB of JavaScript at the top of the page, slowing everyone down. And of course writing layout JavaScript that works with IE4+, Netscape 4 and the W3C DOM is a Sisyphean task. Oh, and of course people with JavaScript turned off are screwed.
To summarise: CSS is not up to producing interesting, dynamic-page-size layouts, and browser-supported CSS is not up to anything at all.
To summarise the summary: Style. Is a problem.
To summarise the summary of the summary: Aaaarrrrrghhh.
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They used to, back in the days of HTML 2.0->4.0. I think it's a bit different these days, since the CSS/DOM people have built quite a big bunch of standard which is way beyond what most browsers support, and the browser writers are playing catch-up. Of course Microsoft are adding all sorts of weird extended style-sheet stuff, but I've never seen any of it actually used, probably because no-one really understands it.
Sometimes. I think in more cases, they just don't really know standards are even there to be followed. I think most content on the web is hacked up by people who've learnt HTML from reading other people's HTML, or from a woefully inaccurate "HTML for Tossers" book. Or they're using FrontPage, God help 'em.
You're right, of course. :-(
But ten years from now, we'll fantasise that politicians were honest, prices reasonable, Netscape implemented standards and JavaScript ever worked. :-)
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Yep, that was the reference I was after.
Which was rather unfair, of course. Hairdressers do a necessary job, after all, and we all know what happened without the telephone sanitisers.
I'd define the useless third as that breed of hangers-on whose only work is self-promotion. They join groups ending in 'AA' whose only goals are to promote their own existence at the expense of everyone else. They have their companies fight each other. They sue. They are the lawyers. They are the politicians who are in it for the power, not because they believe in any particular vision of the future.
Stick 'em on Ark Fleet Ship B and back to Golgafrincham with them!
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Ngh. You could be right.
I don't know - if I liked a CD enough to buy it, I think I could stand to listen to it through once whilst ripping it.
Quite. Once again, a copy protection system inconveniences the legitimate customer whilst failing to prevent the pirate from copying the material. Why do they do this stuff? Do they get some kind of control-freak sexual kick from it, or something?
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It is interesting that "newer" CD players can deal with these mangled discs at all. Have manufacturers been trying to sneak protection into a new CD non-standard standard or is it just luck that they work at all?
Technical details very lacking at Sonopress - http://www.sonopress.de/sononews /15-99/protect.htm is about all there is.
Of course as a copy-protection method this is utterly hopeless -
- even if somehow the digital interconnects are disabled - which would seem to implicate player manufacturers in the protection scheme - it will still always be possible to save any sound a device can play back at us.
The music industry wants us to keep paying for the same music again and again, on new formats, or as old media wear out (yeah - I've got CDs that won't play properly any more already, but that's no problem once they're MP3d), or simply through making us rent all music. But since CDs the cat is already way out of the bag, and clumsy attempts like this - and DVD-Audio - to stuff it back in just won't work any more.
Oh quick, more news coming in...
Useless Third sues Rest of World
California, 25 January - A group of lawyers today issued writs against society in an attempt to preserve the livelihoods of their clients.
Moschops Ankleduster, attorney for the useless third of the population commented, "My clients feel that it is unfair to deny the vital importance of the Useless sector - those jobs that are neither productive nor creative."
"Industry bodies and bureaucracies must be permitted to make great sums of money from the work of the artists who create the products and the workers who physically create them", he continued, "and we will fight for the rights of all those upstanding citizens - ourselves included - who contribute absolutely nothing to the world".
Asked whether existing modes of distribution were still viable in a rapidly-changing information-based society, Ankleduster commented, "Fuck off".
Douglas Adams was unavailable for comment.
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Doesn't seem like there are that many competent design-teams about, tho, does it? :-(
I think the important thing is that the internal design should follow the interface design, not the other way around. I always start with the user interface, what sorts of objects and models I'd want to interact with as a user. This often suggests much of the implementation. You could call it outside-in programming, or something; design top-down, then implement bottom-up. Of course, for me, designing how things should work is a lot more fun than actually making them work, so I guess less than 50% of my pet projects actually ever get implemented.
A lot of programs, alas, seem to have started their design with a few simple internal classes, and layered as many UI elements over them as are needed to make the software usable at all, ending up with horribly counter-intuitive interfaces. (I've been guilty of this in rushed projects too, natch.) Then you end up having to add crud like Wizards to perform common operations because the normal interface makes them too hard. Yuck poo smell. And bum as well.
As it happens, I did used to write much of my stuff in assembler. Wouldn't say that exactly made me perfect, but hey. I used to be able to understand my programs at the time, as well. My habit of labelling subroutines .thing_thing_kludge or .john_prescotts_face doesn't make it entirely fun maintaining the code now...
(Of course, ARM assembler doesn't count anyway, since it is far too easy to be classed a proper assembly language.)
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Right. That'd be Dark City, then.
How many related films can we namecheck in one /. thread, then? The Matrix, good though it was, was mainly a collection of rehashed ideas from other sf films and literature, after all.
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Nah, nah, nah, you've got it all wrong, mate.
That none of the allegedly ironic examples given in the song are actually ironic is deliberate. It's ironic that the song, called Ironic, is not ironic, thus making the song ironic. Thus the non-ironic song is thus very ironic, which is itself doubly ironic, or meta-ironic... er... or something.
Therefore Alanis is not a silly moo at all, but in fact very clever. Unless she really is dumb and is just being ironic about it all.
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Just pointing out the daftness of the Reno quote - this still has nothing to do with on-line privacy. Which is an issue, just not one that could be resolved by LawNet as described in the article.
It certainly does. But no more than in any other, non-e-commercy case, I'd have thought. But then I am British and don't 'get' how US state law works.
Of course in this case the cracker was not so much in Michigan as in Russia. So unless the 'international agents' mentioned were in fact hitmen there's probably not that much LawNet can do about it. :-)
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How is this a privacy issue? Consumers gave their CC#s to CD Universe to obtain services from them. Maybe a retailer that sent you CDs for free is indeed a great idea, but it's probably not much of a viable business plan.
The only problem with CD Universe is that they were cracked.
That they were then blackmailed is no great issue since there are already perfectly adequate non-Internet-related anti-blackmail laws.
According to The Register the crack was caused by a hole in NetVerify. Personally it seems to me that credit card processor connection software like ICVerify's actually does very little for what it costs and it would be a Really Good Thing if it could be replaced by free software, for security reasons as well as lowering the cost of entry to e-commerce.
Anyway, haven't we already got pretty good information exchange on the computer security front without LawNet's help? If law enforcement isn't currently reading the likes of CERT advisories, that's it's own stupid fault IMHO.
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Ah. The enemy of my enemy, right?
Oh yes, have been for ages. They invented "decommoditising net standards", after all.
As one of the legion who spend 10% of work time authoring web content, and the other 90% trying to work around Netscape bugs, I'm sure I speak for many others in saying Netscape are very evil indeed, oh yes. :-(
So, roll up, roll up, for the fight of the multinationals! Netscape-Sun-AOL-Time-Warner vs IE-Microsoft-MSN-News-International, coming soon to a world near you!
On pay-per-view, natch.
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The first difference is that in a conventional democracy, we are voting for a national government which will affect ourselves (the body of voters in an election) and not, to any large degree, the body of people not entitled to vote - that is, the inhabitants of the rest of the world. Unless our government chooses to go to war, or something.
However, a group of shareholders is voting on the actions of a company which can affect the non-voting rest of the world, and is very likely to vote in the financial interest of the company over the general well-being of everyone. Whilst national democracy is clearly flawed in practice, it was at least designed to produce the best possible outcome for the greatest number. The company-with-shareholders model is designed only to make money for the company and screw everyone else. Even if the directors want to play nice, they are still at the mercy of the shareholders.
The second major difference is that of block voting. Even those fortunate enough to own shares in a company are likely to have little power since many more shares will be owned by the banks and pension plans you mention. Many times in the UK we have seen shareholder revolts over environmental concerns, directors' pay and so on, come to naught simply because the balance of power is held by a few large businesses.
Seconded. But however much an 'alternative' economy can be realised, based around low-control, the internet, free software and freedom of digital information, there are still things the transnats can do to get in the way. Patents is the obvious one, which has rightly received a great deal of attention here. By patenting enough obvious and necessary computing ideas and coercing national governments into recognising the patents, they can prevent software outside their sphere of influence being distributed. Lawyers can be used to frighten individuals and ISPs into effective censorship. Encryption outlawed. The whole YRO gamut.
Me, I'd like to be optimistic, but it's doesn't suit me. :-)
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Indeed. Your point is well-taken.
On a purely historical note, however, the ARM series was, at its inception, more than comparable with the x86 processors of the day; that'd would've been about 1987, I guess.
ARM Ltd was spun off to develop the processor and aimed at the embedded market in particular, resulting in the less spectacular mid-range chips such as the ARM6 core; as you note, it took Digital's involvement in the StrongARM project to make another high-end processor.
Of course, no ARM ever ran the x86 instruction set, which is where (we think) this may differ...
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Well, yes, we'd kind of known that for some time. :-)
The new-news hidden in this article (apart from the codename itself) is that Crusoe is to be aimed at low-power devices like laptops, which is quite a different market to the mega-workstation many people here wanted it to be (perhaps due to dislike for Intel).
'Course, low-electrical-power doesn't mean low-computing-power. Look at the ARM series, for one. Or c't could be wrong, though they usually aren't. Guess we'll just have to wait and see - to use a phrase already worn out in Transmeta discussion...
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This virus won't, because it's written that way. However, avoiding this virus is not an issue because it has never occurred in the wild, and judging by the AV companies' reports, probably never will.
But, according to MS's patch at:
http://support.micro soft.com/support/kb/articles/q240/3/08.asp,
WinNT running IE5 is susceptible to this problem and there is no reason a new email or web page designed to do so could not exploit this.
Am I wrong?
I hope so because I'm using NT4IE5 right here at work.
Ah yes, I'll just change th... oh. I can't. Admin has disabled the Internet Options menu entry, and the Control Panel version crashes. Marvellous. Hooray for Pok^H^H^H MS.
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(Local apps also not suited to all tasks shock, horror!)
I should hope not! There are some things that ASPs are suited to providing and some they are definitely not.
I'm currently working on a web application that performs certain processor-hungry data-processing on large data-sets. It's not a very interactive task: you just tell it to go do a job and it comes back when it's done. This is clearly suited to being done by an ASP, and does not require much of the browser user. (Yes, it works with Lynx and everything.) Batch-style tasks are a good candidate for ASP.
But when I followed the link to GIFWorks I experienced a mixture of awe (that Andover had managed to get it to work so well) and horror (at the sheer amount of hack effort that must lie behind it, at both the browser and especially the server end).
Interactive content creation/editing software is not a good candidate for running through an ASP! Text editors, graphics editors, sound sequencers... all these things benefit from instant-effect interaction. Which means either using DHTML - with the usability hit you (and Jakob Nielsen) mention, and grievous server-side implementation worries (probably leading to more bugs) - or some sort of applet that shifts the majority of the processing over to the client anyway.
Information management tasks can be good candidates for ASP. Especially where communication of the information is inherent to the service. I suppose webmail is an example of this, though personally I still see it as a bit of a hack and it's definitely less usable than a good mailer.
One reason why web interfaces can be useful, though, is simply that many employees are stuck behind firewalls or NATs that only allow the likes of port 80 through. And probably aren't allowed to install their own software anyway. Leaving HTTP the only escape route.
And, as others have noted, it's a question of ownership. Software vendors can already virtually own your data by hiding it in their proprietary formats. Now they can technically - and, I guess, even legally own your data.
Anyway. Last in this series of random unedited thoughts: I personally would expect more popular web services to be built by single organisations who have come up with a cool idea than a few distinct ASP firms as the article implies.
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Indeed. And the quote in the Reuters article doesn't exactly inspire confidence that "One Senior Military Officer" (TM) has much of a clue either:
These Cyber Things. Ah, yes, right. Good old US Army. They'll save us from the commies and their deadly website cracks. Or something.
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Indeed, and they're pretty impressive. But I'd also like to recommend bringing a set of earplugs along. As electricity can be quite loud.
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NYT link didn't work for me - try http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/bin/fastweb ?getdoc+site+site+79513+1+wAAA+DTV. Curse these dumb CGIs!
Good luck to Sinclair, I say. Given that we've already got working stuff in Europe, goodness knows why the US needs another standard at all. I'd like to have a telly I can use anywhere in the world.
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Putting smart quotes in web pages in indeed a heinous act.
Problem is, they do actually look quite nice, so if you ask people to remove them they probably won't. And the ‘ and ’ entities aren't very well supported either.
The solution is to keep pages smart-quote-free and change the sexless quotes to smart ones on the fly at the browser end. You can also have the browser display " - " using an em-dash, "fi" and "fl" using ligatures, and so on. There is already one web browser that does this, but it's, er, a bit obscure.
You can detect whether a quote mark should be open or closed using my Patented Smart Quote Algorithm[*]. If the previous character was a space, open quote, open bracket or start-of-input, use an open quote, else use a closed one. It ain't perfect (words with an apostrophe at the start come out wrong; they don't happen very often), but it looks pretty good.
[*] I didn't really patent it. Obviously. The sad thing is, I probably could. :-(
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Well, the page seems to be back up, at least, though the main image doesn't work for me.
From the other pics it looks like it's just three more normal-sized panels stuck together with special TFT glue. "Segmented", as they call it, meaning you get whopping great black strips down your picture, chiz chiz.
Which isn't bad, I suppose, but for the price I had expected more.
And how you're going to drive it I don't know; the resolution is far too big to stick through a regular DFP/DVI connector. Do you need a graphics card with three digital outputs? Does such a beast exist?
Erm. So probably doesn't work under Linux... but imagine a Beowulf cluster... ect ect.
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Okay, so who's got a good compression system for reality itself?
Run-length encoding looks pretty good for the vast emptyness of space, to me. :-)
Or alternatively, are weird quantum effects the result of reality itself being stored using lossy compression?
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Ah! I knew /. moderation was missing a few terms.
Score this (+1 Revolting).
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Useful link. Thanks!
I hadn't really thought that killing a cell would be terrifically difficult since we can already do it by so many non-genetic means, but with hindsight a reliable "suicide-gene" probably isn't that easy to isolate since normally it would not be terribly conducive to survival, and that.
Yes... this problem still seems to be, er, left as an exercise to the reader, alas.
Anyway. Hooray for Science!
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Hmm. 'Scuse me if I'm missing something, but from this article (having not read the whole paper), how does this help fight cancerous cells whilst leaving healthly cells intact? Sounds like vpr just kills more or less everything in its way.
Which would leave patients without cancer, yes, but also possibly without vital organs, brains, hearts, you know, that kind of thing.
This might be considered a Bad Thing. From the patient's point of view. If the patient still had eyes, anyway.
I suppose it would cut down the cost of caring for cancer patients, though, eh readers?
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