"If you actually read the article, you would see that they do know about Mozilla, Firefox etc because they will be writing stuff to allow these browsers at a later date...This is just 'in the first instance'."
"Yes officer, I'd like you to know that I will be considering your request for my driving license at a later date."
In many official situations, not offering something which you're legally obliged to provide is a bad idea. In this case, government websites, and standards-compliant HTML.
"Any other professional is expected to show, you know, *professionalism* in their field."
Now if only builders had to deal with clients like that... "and the house has to have light shows like las vegas, and we don't care if 15% of people can't fit through the door... now redesign it with a different sort of flashing light... and replace the brick with papier mache, oh you have to work overtime to keep it upright during the storms...
I'm not a professional webdesigner, but I think they're allowed to start acting like professionals when they started getting treated as such...
"if the ad contains movement of any sort - animated GIFs, Flash etc. - I will always AdBlock it."
Rather than waiting until such adverts appear, some of the things to do when installing a new browser include: * Install FlashBlock * In about:config, set image animation mode = none * In "web features", disallow javascript from changing images * Install AdBlock and the "Remove this page-element permanently" extension to filter out anything annoying that gets through the normal filters
I really don't understand how people can concentrate on a page when there's flashing banner adverts, animated hammers, or whatever competing for your attention. I've watched some internet-explorer users browse the web recently, and I couldn't even read the text they showed me, with that amount of distraction around the edges of the page.
Now, if only I can find an extension to remove the "width=120px" attributes that newspapers put around the entire article...
"Stealing is not exclusively defined as depriving someone else of something that belongs to them."
OK, quote some laws then, because that opinion looks a lot like bullshit to me.
For example, the Theft Act 1968: "A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and 'thief' and 'steal' shall be construed accordingly."
"Well, yeah, I suppose that "Unixen" would make sense if UNIX was a word with some sort of secret Anglo-Saxon heritage. However, it isn't the case."
So, let's get this straight:
You're expecting people who think that 32767 is a round number, 31337 is a word, that the naming conventions for konfabulator, kerobos, zope and *NIX make sense, to follow the rules of anglo-saxon pluralisation that they were told in high-school?
"Avila clearly intended to operate a business from his website because he used the.com domain suffix, the "commercial level domain," rather than.net.'"
Wouldn't the ".net" domain indicate that he planned to start an internet service provider?
He's not an ISP, and he's not a school, and he's not an organisation, and he's not the government, and he's not a country. ".com" it is then...
At least, I'm pretty sure it's a mathematical formula, which is better than (if in arizona and not in towns x, y, or z, and after 1933 and not between 1977 and 1980, and if between 1am on the third sunday after easter and before 11pm on the last sunday in October if that doesn't fall on the 31st, then...) which is what the timezone calculation ends up like
And the Mac Mini is cheaper than many 'cappucino-sized' barebones PCs, nevermind silenced ones with wireless keyboards, capable of playing networked music, video, CDs, DVDs, etc
In fact, it's small enough that you could probably find space to install it by displacing a single boxed-set of DVDs...
"Of course stuff that is hardcoded with the old DST dates is going to have trouble"
Gadgets with clocks are more trouble than they're worth -- most don't account for daylight-savings at all, which means they're just extra things to go around fixing twice per year when the clocks change.
Some things can't help it (timers, alarms, videos) but if it's a choice between fiddling around every 6 months (hold down the mode and set buttons for 4.3 seconds and press A to change to DST...) and buying something with a radio time receiver, it's not really comparable...
Coding some simple algorithm for DST isn't much better than making people do it themselves, because it changes so often, and it's only valid for one place. (e.g. you couldn't use it in America, because it would have to know which town and state you're in to know when DST starts, and even those change far too frequently...)
Really, if a gadget can't get its time from some reliable central source (NTP servers, radio clocks, GPS, mobile phone networks, teletext...) then it shouldn't bother even displaying a clock.
"Daylight savings time is an idiotic solution to a non-existent problem."
And while every other aspect of the gregorian calendar can be described in just a few lines of code, the daylight-savings time requires a 450KB database just to find out which timezone you're in, with entries like "during the second world war, London experimented with double daylight-savings time..." (admittedly most of that 450K is comments)
"That array was carried on an airplane, to be "sure" it was safe. It had more damage than any other piece of hardware, even the ones that UPS drop-kicked. I'm amazed by some of the damage I've seen. I haven't figured out how they bent some of the metal, since the boxes looked fine, and they were well packed."
Are you sure you don't want to work for UPS? I'm sure some companies pay for better reviews than "was drop-kicked"
(yes, I'd agree with you for every parcel carrier I've used!)
"The spam system I use is the challenge/response type"
Good luck buying anything from a shop which emails you once to say "can we check your address?"
I was looking at the greylist system, until I realised how many false-positives it would generate. Even today, when I auto-delete about 99.8% of my email, I still have to fish-out internet shops and add them to the relevant whitelists...
Maybe I should allocate one To: address for all the shops, rather than a different one for each shop (which tells me who leaked the address... But even then, I suspect greylists wouldn't work.
So if I delete any email with HTML tags, am I a biased polititian?
(I don't mind being biased, just interested to know)
Secondly, since US political parties are, I believe, "licensed to spam", surely that means I delete them on principle anyway (as legalised spammers) regardless of the validity of their viewpoint (if any)
i.e. if a group are given legal dispensation to spam, I'll do what I can to delete anything they send, simply because they might be spammers.
(works for terrorists, may as well work for politicians...)
I actually still remember the FBI searching entire postcodes because they knew where a particular letter was posted (this was the anthrax scare a few years ago, b.t.w.)
While I'm sure you could say "just post it in a city", I'm just noting that some things we think are anonymous, don't stay that way if there's enough police interest.
(Not to mention, I wouldn't post anything anonymous in a city, having seen the number of CCTV cameras on every corner...)
Mixmaster is a good idea though, and I still use it. I do wonder how it will cope in a few years though, when 40% of its users are FBI honeypots and the other 59% are spammers...
"Actually, I would think "World Class" would mean the terminal would scream at you if you had an issue: "HEY, YOUR HARD DRIVE IS FUCKED!"
I actually managed to derive that information from watching a friend's Windows PC boot... was right as well, but people always assume it's a software problem.
"If I have a brick and mortar store and an unsatisfied customer enters my store and begins passing out fliers and berating my business with a megaphone, INSIDE MY STORE, do you think that's acceptable?"
If you've built up a business on the basis that customers can get recommendations from each other within your store, then yes!
If you don't like that idea, then you might be better suited with a website that didn't have any community aspect to it. But lots of e-commerce websites find it quite good for business to allow discussions, advice, and user-rating of products.
"if patents were reserved to things that were truely innovative it wouldn't necessarily be that bad of a thing"
There was a quite interesting proposal that 10 patents per subject per year could be awarded at a public ceremony (similar to Nobel prizes) -- something like that would be the level of change required.
If it's an indication of how far removed patents are from "innovation", they're universally associated with 'business', and the expectation that any sufficiently large and technical company can generate patents about as easily as they can produce new versions of the software.
What was the most recent invention that you'd put in encyclopedias and history books? I'm guessing it wouldn't be "Multi-processor Digital Video Recorder" or "CD ejection mechanism"...
"and i'm pretty sure most linux installers run straight over anything else that is in the mbr too"
Don't know whether this is boot-sector or MBR, but I've installed Knoppix, Mepis, Mandrake, Ububtu, Vector, and Suse, and they've all installed a boot-loader that lists your Windows partition as one of the options if you're dual-booting.
Most of those systems also ask you during installation which OS you want to boot by default.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you actually read the article, you would see that they do know about Mozilla, Firefox etc because they will be writing stuff to allow these browsers at a later date...This is just 'in the first instance'."
"Yes officer, I'd like you to know that I will be considering your request for my driving license at a later date."
In many official situations, not offering something which you're legally obliged to provide is a bad idea. In this case, government websites, and standards-compliant HTML.
"Any other professional is expected to show, you know, *professionalism* in their field."
Now if only builders had to deal with clients like that... "and the house has to have light shows like las vegas, and we don't care if 15% of people can't fit through the door... now redesign it with a different sort of flashing light... and replace the brick with papier mache, oh you have to work overtime to keep it upright during the storms...
I'm not a professional webdesigner, but I think they're allowed to start acting like professionals when they started getting treated as such...
"ID does such a good job of making Linux releases - what will it take for you to do the same?"
That's "free as in £15 per month", and you have to edit XFree86config4 yourself if you want OpenGL to work...
"Why should I care what browser other people are using?"
So you can laugh when they run screaming around the office "Help, help, our computers are being eaten by a virus!"
Mark Driver also has a good article on online advertising
"if the ad contains movement of any sort - animated GIFs, Flash etc. - I will always AdBlock it."
Rather than waiting until such adverts appear, some of the things to do when installing a new browser include:
* Install FlashBlock
* In about:config, set image animation mode = none
* In "web features", disallow javascript from changing images
* Install AdBlock and the "Remove this page-element permanently" extension to filter out anything annoying that gets through the normal filters
I really don't understand how people can concentrate on a page when there's flashing banner adverts, animated hammers, or whatever competing for your attention. I've watched some internet-explorer users browse the web recently, and I couldn't even read the text they showed me, with that amount of distraction around the edges of the page.
Now, if only I can find an extension to remove the "width=120px" attributes that newspapers put around the entire article...
"Stealing is not exclusively defined as depriving someone else of something that belongs to them."
OK, quote some laws then, because that opinion looks a lot like bullshit to me.
For example, the Theft Act 1968:
"A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and 'thief' and 'steal' shall be construed accordingly."
High-End Aluminum PC Cases Make A Comeback
Suits make a corporate comeback
"Apple should take note of this surge of interest and really consider selling the OS only. I know I'd line up to buy one."
So why not buy a Mac? It's not like it costs any more than Windows (especially if it saves you time solving problems with it)
"Well, yeah, I suppose that "Unixen" would make sense if UNIX was a word with some sort of secret Anglo-Saxon heritage. However, it isn't the case."
So, let's get this straight:
You're expecting people who think that 32767 is a round number, 31337 is a word, that the naming conventions for konfabulator, kerobos, zope and *NIX make sense, to follow the rules of anglo-saxon pluralisation that they were told in high-school?
"Avila clearly intended to operate a business from his website because he used the .com domain suffix, the "commercial level domain," rather than .net.'"
Wouldn't the ".net" domain indicate that he planned to start an internet service provider?
He's not an ISP, and he's not a school, and he's not an organisation, and he's not the government, and he's not a country. ".com" it is then...
"try calculating the ISO week number"
Isn't that just floor(((day of year) - 3) / 7)?
At least, I'm pretty sure it's a mathematical formula, which is better than (if in arizona and not in towns x, y, or z, and after 1933 and not between 1977 and 1980, and if between 1am on the third sunday after easter and before 11pm on the last sunday in October if that doesn't fall on the 31st, then...) which is what the timezone calculation ends up like
And the Mac Mini is cheaper than many 'cappucino-sized' barebones PCs, nevermind silenced ones with wireless keyboards, capable of playing networked music, video, CDs, DVDs, etc
In fact, it's small enough that you could probably find space to install it by displacing a single boxed-set of DVDs...
"Of course stuff that is hardcoded with the old DST dates is going to have trouble"
Gadgets with clocks are more trouble than they're worth -- most don't account for daylight-savings at all, which means they're just extra things to go around fixing twice per year when the clocks change.
Some things can't help it (timers, alarms, videos) but if it's a choice between fiddling around every 6 months (hold down the mode and set buttons for 4.3 seconds and press A to change to DST...) and buying something with a radio time receiver, it's not really comparable...
Coding some simple algorithm for DST isn't much better than making people do it themselves, because it changes so often, and it's only valid for one place. (e.g. you couldn't use it in America, because it would have to know which town and state you're in to know when DST starts, and even those change far too frequently...)
Really, if a gadget can't get its time from some reliable central source (NTP servers, radio clocks, GPS, mobile phone networks, teletext...) then it shouldn't bother even displaying a clock.
"Daylight savings time is an idiotic solution to a non-existent problem."
And while every other aspect of the gregorian calendar can be described in just a few lines of code, the daylight-savings time requires a 450KB database just to find out which timezone you're in, with entries like "during the second world war, London experimented with double daylight-savings time..." (admittedly most of that 450K is comments)
"That array was carried on an airplane, to be "sure" it was safe. It had more damage than any other piece of hardware, even the ones that UPS drop-kicked. I'm amazed by some of the damage I've seen. I haven't figured out how they bent some of the metal, since the boxes looked fine, and they were well packed."
Are you sure you don't want to work for UPS? I'm sure some companies pay for better reviews than "was drop-kicked"
(yes, I'd agree with you for every parcel carrier I've used!)
"The spam system I use is the challenge/response type"
Good luck buying anything from a shop which emails you once to say "can we check your address?"
I was looking at the greylist system, until I realised how many false-positives it would generate. Even today, when I auto-delete about 99.8% of my email, I still have to fish-out internet shops and add them to the relevant whitelists...
Maybe I should allocate one To: address for all the shops, rather than a different one for each shop (which tells me who leaked the address... But even then, I suspect greylists wouldn't work.
So if I delete any email with HTML tags, am I a biased polititian?
(I don't mind being biased, just interested to know)
Secondly, since US political parties are, I believe, "licensed to spam", surely that means I delete them on principle anyway (as legalised spammers) regardless of the validity of their viewpoint (if any)
i.e. if a group are given legal dispensation to spam, I'll do what I can to delete anything they send, simply because they might be spammers.
(works for terrorists, may as well work for politicians...)
"How 'bout a country that had 13 of it's citizens drive planes into two of our office buildings?"
How about a country that had 2 of its citizens drop bombs into our television stations and newspaper offices?
terrorist (n) Somebody with a bomb, but without an airforce
* Anonymous letter via snail mail
I actually still remember the FBI searching entire postcodes because they knew where a particular letter was posted (this was the anthrax scare a few years ago, b.t.w.)
While I'm sure you could say "just post it in a city", I'm just noting that some things we think are anonymous, don't stay that way if there's enough police interest.
(Not to mention, I wouldn't post anything anonymous in a city, having seen the number of CCTV cameras on every corner...)
Mixmaster is a good idea though, and I still use it. I do wonder how it will cope in a few years though, when 40% of its users are FBI honeypots and the other 59% are spammers...
"Actually, I would think "World Class" would mean the terminal would scream at you if you had an issue: "HEY, YOUR HARD DRIVE IS FUCKED!"
I actually managed to derive that information from watching a friend's Windows PC boot... was right as well, but people always assume it's a software problem.
"If I have a brick and mortar store and an unsatisfied customer enters my store and begins passing out fliers and berating my business with a megaphone, INSIDE MY STORE, do you think that's acceptable?"
If you've built up a business on the basis that customers can get recommendations from each other within your store, then yes!
If you don't like that idea, then you might be better suited with a website that didn't have any community aspect to it. But lots of e-commerce websites find it quite good for business to allow discussions, advice, and user-rating of products.
"if patents were reserved to things that were truely innovative it wouldn't necessarily be that bad of a thing"
There was a quite interesting proposal that 10 patents per subject per year could be awarded at a public ceremony (similar to Nobel prizes) -- something like that would be the level of change required.
If it's an indication of how far removed patents are from "innovation", they're universally associated with 'business', and the expectation that any sufficiently large and technical company can generate patents about as easily as they can produce new versions of the software.
What was the most recent invention that you'd put in encyclopedias and history books? I'm guessing it wouldn't be "Multi-processor Digital Video Recorder" or "CD ejection mechanism"...
"and i'm pretty sure most linux installers run straight over anything else that is in the mbr too"
Don't know whether this is boot-sector or MBR, but I've installed Knoppix, Mepis, Mandrake, Ububtu, Vector, and Suse, and they've all installed a boot-loader that lists your Windows partition as one of the options if you're dual-booting.
Most of those systems also ask you during installation which OS you want to boot by default.
I think I left out a whole lot more than that (keep thinking: laptops, email, notebooks...)...
Managers?