What other browser does significantly better overall at standards compliance than Firefox?
Well, since the link you provide is largely question marks for the Webkit based browsers, that's hard to say. Also, the comparison you link to is missing a lot of standards where Firefox is a bit behind. These include:
Javascript - Safari, Opera, and Konquerer all have at least some support for Javascript DOM 3, which Firefox lacks in the released versions so far.
image formats - Konquerer supports MNG, Tiff, and PDF. Safari supports JPEG 2000, Tiff, and PDF. I know of no standard image formats Firefox supports not supported by both of those (yet).
XHTML 1.1 lists Firefox at 63% and question marks for Safari and Konquerer, but wikipedia currently lists both of those as having "full support" and Firefox as "partial."
Web Forms 2.0 - Opera supports, Firefox doesn't
Voice XML - Opera supports, Firefox doesn't
WML - Opera supports, Firefox doesn't
That is not to say Firefox is necessarily behind other browser for standards compliance in general. No one with a clue would cite the Acid tests as proof of anything in that regard, but it does indicate that the link you provide is not particularly strong evidence one way or another. The whole question is probably too vague to be answered. There are a lot of Web standards and what really matters is which ones are most universally supported and what functionality cannot be used because of lacking support in one browser or another.
In summary, I reject your assertion, not because I'm convinced you're wrong, but because you haven't provided enough evidence to support it and there is significant contradictory evidence (cited above).
I wonder if they're serious. Will they really be standards compliant enough so that I don't have to hack around IE8's deficiencies? Will this still be true for IE9? It's possible. Will this include SVG and XHTML and CSS3? What about XUL and HTML 5?
If all of the above work in the next couple of version of IE, do you know what that would indicate to me? That would indicate that Microsoft is betting on Silverlight to lock in users in the next 5 years... because they've pretty much convinced me they will never compete based upon features and the merits of their software, rather than trying to make it as hard as possible for users to switch to anything else.
For anyone interested in complaining to the member companies about this... here is a link to their membership list.
Some members are no surprise and don't care if their customers hate them (RIAA, MPAA). Others are more likely to respond to bad press (Apple, Microsoft, Vivendi). Other sponsors are directly responsible, such as the government agencies (many in the USA and Canada) and the states of North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Send a letter or e-mail, maybe this crap will not happen again, at least not in academia where it is so easily detected.
Personally I think the best solution is to always enter an incorrect user name and password first (or even none). If it's accepted it's a phishing site, if not it's genuine.
I use the same machine for most tasks and it manages all my passwords for me. If I have to type anything, well it probably is a phishing attempt.
The user has to tell the different from bad sites and the real site.
Yeah, and on my old truck I had to shift gears by hand using a double clutch and putting it in 4WD mean climbing out and locking the wheels by hand. That doesn't mean users don't want something easier and better.
If a girl called you saying they are from your bank asking for the numbers on your Bank card would you give it to her?
No, but I never get calls from my bank. I do get regular e-mail messages from various Web services. I do enjoy having my cell phone tell me the identity of callers automatically, without my having to get out a little black book and check before answering. Given that my computer is even more of a general purpose device than my phone, I'd like it to manage the same functionality.
Don't get me wrong, it isn't a deal breaker right now and prematurely releasing technologies that are not ready for mainstream use might do more harm than good (I'm looking at you IE 7). Still, better identity verification for Web sites sounds useful to me, and essential for my mother and father and nieces.
Why is double checking the URL not a good solution for most people?
First, because as more and more services become dependent upon URLs there are fewer and fewer URLs that don't have some feature that might indicate they are really a phishing attempt. Also, as the Web becomes more international more characters that look the same or very similar are introduced. More and more legitimate e-mail messages, even automated ones, reference Web sites. Am I going to look at every single e-mail I get from Netflix to make sure the URL that pops up really is NetFlix? Maybe, or maybe I won't sometime and if the tab that loads does not have a warning, maybe I'll mistake it for Netflix. Maybe I will look, but maybe I won't notice it is netf1ix.com instead of netflix.com. Everyone makes a mistake now and again and most people are nowhere near as security conscious as I am.
Can you honestly say there is no way you would ever make that mistake? Can you honestly say there is no way your grandmother or 8 year-old nephew could not make that mistake? Technology to automatically verify the identity of a Web server is useful for everyone and I believe there is a real demand. If that demand is ignored, people will go elsewhere, maybe to IE7 where they feel safer, or maybe to Opera. Web browser developers ignoring that demand will probably lose out. If you don't want to use it, don't worry. I'm sure Firefox will let you turn it off, and if it won't, will you can always fork it.
Are they blind?
Some of them are, certainly. I know it takes my friend a lot longer to listen to a page via an audio interface or even read it using his braille board. By default, I don't even think it reads the URL and if it did it would be a huge annoyance for him.
Oh did you mean that as a rhetorical question? Too bad, it is a real concern.
If you want a car analogy, "If I can't be relied on to observe traffic around me while driving, then I should not be driving, regardless of how necessary society says driving is."
By that logic, we should all be observant enough to check our coolant levels before driving too. After all, once in a great while it is too low and the engine will overheat. Why bother to put a heat sensor and warning light on the dash? What are you, blind or something? If you can't check your engine coolant periodically you should just walk everywhere.
What does that have to do with being OSS or not? Safari has an extension model just like IE, and neither are open source. Prior to IE7, several third-party extensions added anti-phishing support for IE (MSN, Google, etc), and as far as I can tell there's nothing in Safari's extension model that would prevent others from doing the same there as well. OSS vs. non-OSS doesn't even come into play here.
Well put and there actually is such a plug-in for Safari that comes with the 1password password and identity management software. (Although it is not a whitelist/blacklist setup, but instead relies more upon the fact that it is really obvious a page is not genuine when you can't automatically log in using your 1password identity.)
See almost anything by Devinder Sharma, but particularly "Africa's Tragedy; Famine as Commerce."
...or, just do a Google search for "africa agriculture dumping."
I believe that bad local politics (to say nothing of war) is a large reason for African poverty. Despotism in Zimbabwe, genocide in Sudan, war in Kenya...
There are a great many contributing factors. If local governments did not exorbitantly tax the people and especially farmers as a way to confiscate and resell land, such a scheme would not work. If there were reasonable tariffs on imported food, this would not be an issue. It is awfully hard to run a campaign, however, with the stated policy of taxing imported food distributed by charities. It is especially difficult when the charities are associated with organized religion that has huge influence within the country. It is even harder when your opposition is backed by donations from said charities as well as big business and wealthy foreign powers.
There is plenty of blame to go around for the poverty and hardship in the third world... from rampant, violent colonialism and exploitation in the past to present day exploitation by both unscrupulous native politicians and foreign corporate interests. You are quite correct in pointing out the role of local politics and and war, although you might want to look closely at who has funded the wars and provided the arms. Regardless, providing necessities to people in such poverty will almost always lead to a a growing dependance upon that charity... which we all know is not sustainable in the long run. Human nature will always provide those looking to take advantage of charity by, using it to redirect resources that would otherwise be sustaining those people to profit a small minority.
Look, if you're not checking what's in the URL of your browser, or are in the habit of clicking on links in email blindly, you get the phishing you deserve.
On this I must disagree. Right now the best solution probably is double checking URLs, but that is realistically not a good solution for the majority of people. Apple (and every other browser developer) should be working on a a URL whitelist/greylist/blacklist detection and warning technology. I'm not sure, however, that they should rush to deploy such technology. It might be better to wait until it is reliable enough to provide real benefit without providing a false sense of security. Right not IE has such a technology, but reviews show it to be of little, practical use. I know Apple is working on such technology and depending upon how effective it seems to be, it might be best that they have not rolled it out for Safari yet. I do think there s a real demand for this type of technology and developers should be trying to fill that need.
snark: And Safari users are advised to stop using PayPal.
Well... I might say all security minded users might be well advised to stop using Paypal. We have Google Checkout now who would want to use Paypal?
...blindness prevention (there are some common ways to become blind in underdeveloped countries).
Heh. I was just reading the other day that preventable kinds of blindness cause nearly four times the rate of blindness or serious reduction of vision in the USA as in Canada. At least when it comes to providing preventative medicine, the USA counts as one of those underdeveloped countries.
Here's an idea--instead of giving African kids laptops and teaching them C, why don't you focus on some more basic stuff? God knows roads, medicine, sanitation, water, better farming techniques, industrial techniques, etc. are nowhere near as geek-tastic as getting these kids to write code, but which do you think will be more useful?
In many places they have water and they used to have farms. Then the US (and other countries) dumped produce on their market below the true cost (subsidized) such that local farmers could not compete. So the local farmers were undercut, couldn't pay their taxes and are now unemployed and homeless. It isn't that they don't know how to farm. It is that they can't make enough money farming to get by. They might be able to compete despite the unfair price of imported food if they could use modern practices, but they don't have the industrial infrastructure needed to make the heavy equipment and fertilizers and irrigation systems and they don't have the capital to buy it. The money needed to fund such a project would be way, way, way more than what is spent on the OLPC project.
Truthfully, there really isn't a better industry than intellectual property creation for high returns on low initial investment. This doesn't necessarily mean programming (in Python not C, since that is what ships with OLPC). Heck, people in some parts of the world could probably make a living with a XO laptop just by solving captchas. Then there is writing, video and audio creation, etc.
The point of the OLPC project is not to just supply what is most needed today, but rather to augment the charity food, water, shelter, and medical care with the tools of education (for any subject) and with the cheapest possible way for them to create a sustainable industry that will allow their society to stop relying on charity and start building again.
P.S. did you know Remote Area Medical, a charity that provides medical care primarily to Africa and east Asia has recently had to start working in the United States because so many Americans cannot get or afford basic medical care? Maybe the US should stop teaching computer science and focus on teaching medicine to more people?
If you're really confused about why replacing the company name "Apple" with the company name "Microsoft" changes the situation both practically and legally... read this post I put in this thread all the way through.
I'll second the recommendations for "The Design of Everyday Things" and "Tog's First Principles of Interaction Design" as I've found both to be solid and helpful for avoiding some of the biggest pitfalls. I bought a copy of the former and put it in my previous company's engineering library and it has been read by almost everyone by now. I also would like to echo try_anything's recommendation that you look at the style guide for your particular target plaform(s) unless you are coding an interface for something proprietary (like a phone or kiosk) or a Web interface.
More generally, Books are fine for getting some basic principals down and for avoiding some of the most common mistakes. They'll get you maybe 70% of the way, which is still better than some mainstream offerings. Beyond that, hire a UI consultant to do real evaluation and to perform real usability testing. Seriously, testing is the only way to really have a good UI. There are simply too many variables with people and some of the things testing finds are things you would never, ever, ever have thought of if fresh eyes had not repeatedly had problems with it. I mean who knew that icon looked just like a symbol that appears on lots of feminine hygiene products I've never seen and thus confuses half of all users? I can't stress testing enough and it really helps to have someone who really knows how to to usability testing right with a reasonable budget.
I'll bet Apple is still experimenting with the new API and the only reason its not published is because they can't tell if its fully effective or not.
Nope. Apple (or more specifically Apple's Webkit team) are using a hack. It isn't documented because no one who can't guarantee Webkit is updated at the same time as OS X should be using it (and that means just Apple). Basically Apple put in new code that optimizes things. They put in a published API for applications that want to use it. The problem is, every application that calls Webkit also would want to use it, but in order to do so all those apps would need to be updated individually by their respective developers and all of them would have to learn about the new feature. So Apple used a hack one time so that all applications that use Webkit also use this optimization. In order to do that they had to make a second way to do it, but not one they would want anyone else using in the long term. So they told everyone else to use the public API, but one guy did not understand it and just looked to see how Webkit did it instead and then posted about the "secret" API that Apple was using and soon found out that it was "secret" because it was likely to go away as soon as Apple decided enough apps that call Webkit had been upgraded. So he realized his error, but by that point some other person with even less understanding had posted his blog to Slashdot with a really, obnoxiously misleading title. He then updated his blog so anyone who RTFA would figure out what was really up.
That whole claim of a non-programatic way of setting a flag is bullshit. He has no need.
It is true he does not need to use anything but the public API, however, he mistakenly thought the public API applied to all cocoa apps or none, not on a per application basis. So he thought he needed to use the internal, unpublished way Webkit does. In a way, that might even be better since it means other applications that embed Gecko (like Camino) would also gain the optimization even if the developer did not know about the flag... and pretty much anything embedding Gecko would want this. That is the same reason Apple used the hack for Webkit, so developers that just call Webkit, would not have to update their apps to get this optimization.
Everyone screws up. Vladimir admitted his mistake and has even tried to help correct the misunderstanding of people on Slashdot who did not read or understand his post, but just read the inflammatory title of this article and started gibbering about things with no real understanding of what they were talking about. Personally, I prefer to work with humans who can screw up and admit it, rather than arrogant jerks who screw up and try to conceal that fact and fool as many people as possible into thinking it was someone else's fault somehow.
There is nothing about "we use unstable internal libraries to make sure that our browser tops in benchmarks".
Is it too much to ask that you RTFA, or at least one of the dozens of postings from the original blogger? Safari does not use an undocumented, internal API. Webkit does use an internal API so that all applications that use it will get better performance than Applications that don't set a parameter that is in a documented API. A default system library using an internal API is not exactly uncommon. The person who wrote the original comment made a mistake and thought that he had to set a parameter globally for all cocoa applications, instead of setting it for just Firefox. So now he knows and isn't using the internal API because it is not needed to gain the same benefit.
Wasn't there a similar situation where MS crippled Netscape so people would be more likely to use Internet Explorer?
Yes the DoJ ruled Microsoft guilty of criminal antitrust abuse in that regard. The difference being MS was legally determined to have a monopoly on desktop operating systems, and the only thing Apple is close to having a monopoly on is portable, digital music players. So for Apple, this is annoying third party developers, while for MS it was criminal. I guess that means Apple won't have to donate to election campaigns in order to get a free pass on breaking the law.
I think it should either be ok for all players to have internal APIs or not ok for all players.
You seem to failing to understand why antitrust abuse is "bad" and hence illegal. You say it should be okay for all players or not okay for all players. In this, you fail to understand antitrust law, so I will try to enlighten you.
First, an analogy: It is legal to fire a gun. Bob goes to the target range and practices his marksmanship in hopes of getting on the olympic team. Barry goes to the mall with a shotgun and starts murdering people wearing hats. Should it always be illegal or not illegal to fire a gun? It is the exact same action, just in different circumstances. Is Barry's action illegal because he is different person, or is it illegal because it is a different situation with different results? Hopefully this shows you logically, why you can't ignore the surrounding circumstance as to what is happening....on to the specifics...
Tying two products from different markets together is generally a legal business strategy. You can sell product A in market A and product B in market B or sell product A and B together in the hopes of attracting buyers who want both products. This is like shooting a gun at the shooting range... all well and good. The problem comes when a market is monopolized. That is to say, when a company has so much influence in one market, that many consumers have no other choice for their needs. If pretty much everyone in market A has to buy from you, what happens when you stop selling product A, but only offer a tied together bundle of product A and product B? In general what happens is regardless of how good your product B is, you sell it anyway, because you are forcing buyers to buy it because they need product A... even if they don't want product B at all. This is like shooting people at the mall.
In the first scenario the free market continued to operate because even though you were tying your two products, consumers could just select different suppliers if they have a better offering. In the second scenario the free market is undermined. No matter how crappy your product B is, people still have to pay for it, even if they just throw it away and buy a different one from another vendor. In order for you to undermine the market B, however, you have to have monopoly influence in that market A. The laws that ban this behavior are called antitrust laws, because they were first used to stop large business trusts that were undermining the free market and ruining the economy.
I think it should either be ok for all players to have internal APIs or not ok for all players. I mean, if we say that right now it's ok for Apple to do this because they are not a monopoly, what happens if they do become one?
When Apple becomes a monopoly, then they are banned from tying that monopoly to any product they offer in a different, existing market. For example, Apple does not have a monopoly on desktop operating systems. They don't have a monopoly on any given type of software (like Web browsers). Thus, if they give their Web browser advantages that people who don't also produce Mac OS X don't get, they are not undermining free trade or breaking the law.
On the other hand, Apple has close to 70% of the portable, digital music player market. Right now they are being investigated by the EU to see if their influence in this market is sufficient to qualify as monopoly influence. If the courts decide it is, then they will be banned from tying anything to that monopoly product (iPod) which vendors in other markets cannot do. This means if they support FairPlay DRM, they must either let other music sellers use FairPlay or they must support the DRM of the other music seller. If they bundle a copy of iTunes with every iPod, they must also bundle a copy of any other music playing software other vendors want to offer. If they have protocols for putting music on iPods, they must publish those protocols so that others can
Nazi imagery is not banned - it can be used for art and historical education. All the law says is you can't get a Nazi flag and march up and down the street waving it at people.
From the BBC article about the proposed (later defeated) EU-wide ban on Nazi symbology:
"Germany has banned the use of Nazi insignia."
France, for example, bars the sale of Nazi-related memorabilia.
I think that qualifies as censorship, to the extend that several Web stores and auction sites have been ordered to remove such items from sales when the person viewing the Web site store is in their country.
It's pretty easy for Americans to not realise the devastation that occured in Germany, and how it's still affecting Germany to this day.
A whole lot of Americans were over there and we probably have as many violent war movies about the era as anyone. As for me, personally, I don't think it likely to ever forget the one and only time my grandfather spoke about his experiences. He was one of the soldiers that found the ovens. In fact, he rarely spoke at all after the war and I suspect his experiences there and the 40% casualty rate in his platoon probably left him mentally scarred for the remainder of his life.
They're not targetting it because it's easy, but because the last time no-one did, millions of people died.
When no one stood up to christian slavers, acting with the consent and sometimes directly commission of the catholic church, millions of people died and millions more were enslaved as were their progeny for generations. All, this because catholic administrators ruled that africans and islanders were hereditarily cannibals and hence had no souls; thus enslaving them was godly work.
I'd say the practical risk of death by Christians claiming to be acting for their faith is much higher than that of death by Neo-Nazis. Yet, no EU country bans the sale of Catholic paraphernalia do they? There is always some subset of society that wishes to censor things they disapprove of. In my own country "Harry Potter" novels are among the most commonly banned books in local jurisdictions (at the behest of people who call themselves "christians"). In other places, books critical of Islam or books about homosexuality or books critical of he current political regime. There are no shortage of people who are ready and willing to try to decide what other people should be able to see and hear and do and enforce it at gunpoint if necessary.
And so I say again, Nazi imagery is censored not because people feel guilty about what happened or because Nazis are a greater real threat that other groups not because their past crimes are greater than any other. Rather, they are censored because there were so few people (and more importantly politicians) willing to stand up and defend the right of free expression in that regard at the danger of being labelled a "Nazi" or "Nazi sympathizer."
In my opinion the principal is too important for any exceptions for some individual group to be singled out to have their rights curtailed. After all, did not the Nazis themselves start out by removing human rights for a subset of people who were known to be evil and who had committed evil deeds in the past? After all, they killed the son of the one true god didn't they? Surely you would not stand up and defend the rights of such evil people? It would be political suicide and might get you killed. And sadly, there were probably a lot of people in what became Nazi Germany who did not stand up and defend the basic human rights of a group they were not part of and whose very existence was heretical.
As I've said before, I don't approve of Nazis. I don't approve of Neo-Nazis. But if it comes right down to it, I will help them fight for their right to free expression, because that right belongs to all mankind, not all mankind except those who want to draw a symbol that has been used in the past by people who did great evil (whether it is a cross a swastika or a star of david).
If secular government had power in Europe at the time they would have rightly done just that. However, they were not and the inquisition is hundreds of years in the past now.
The world wars have been over for a long time too. Most of the people who were alive during them are now dead.
The entire cultural basis on which it operated has changed.
I disagree. There are still numerous christian extremist groups responsible for murder. Jews, homosexuals, atheists, etc. have all been killed in the past year by intolerant christians. (And lets not look at religious motivations for recent wars.) What about Islam? In the name of Islam a lot of people have been killed lately. Should the EU ban Islamic imagery?
The danger of the neonazi groups is that they are modeled on existing cultures and so must be dealt with until nothing remains for them to operate and cause such immense damage again.
That will never be true. Someone could always come along, read an old book about Nazis and decide to emulate them. There have been people throughout history that have done just that, including a cult heavily laden with imagery of Charlemagne, two years ago. All your arguments look to me like someone trying to justify a decision and differentiate it from other cultures based upon an already determined belief.
Face it, Nazi paraphernalia is banned not because the danger posed by swastikas, but because it is still so unpopular and so an easy target for censorship. I'd say the real world threat posed by either christian or islamic extremist groups is greater, but they are not censored because they are more popular cultures, not because they are any less dangerous.
We assume things about gravity based on our theories thereof and tried to get rockets to the moon and succeeded.
You miss the point entirely. You said in your original post, "The facts of it are that we have an extremely limited knowledge of the process of evolution." I simply pointed out that we also have a very limited understanding of the process of gravity. We know both phenomenon exist and can predict how they will act given certain stimulus, but knowing exactly how the process of natural selection affects genetic material and heredity. Likewise while we know how to predict the result of forces well enough to get a rocket to the moon, that doesn't mean we fully understand the process by which matter is attracted to other matter.
I challenge you to come up with similar tests of evolutionary theory.
There have been thousands of such experiments, where certain stimuli is applied to organisms to stress them and true to prediction the organisms develop characteristics that minimize the affects of that stimuli. Do a search for "fruit fly experiments" if you actually want to see an enormous body of work.
Go back and read the article on the Higgs Boson -- many (most?) particle physicists doubt Einsteins theory of Special Relativity and try to experiment to prove their own theories instead.
There is a difference between spacial relativity and the theory of gravity. The former is one attempt to explain the process of the latter. Just as their are many theories that try to explain exactly what genetic material combinations encode real information which is hereditary in the next generation and in later generations.
Until Einstein, nobody seriously challenged what we believed about gravity for many years.
Ahh, but Einstein did not try to recreate all of Newtons experiments, nor did he prove that matter is not attracted to matter. Einstein instead looked at refining the understanding of how matter attracts matter and behaviors that we could not predict (such as very high speeds).
The more you understand about anything, the more you should be coming to grips with how little humanity knows about that subject.
Sure there is always more to learn. But I don't think it is useful at this point to try to disprove theories that form the entire basis of large fields of scientific study and which have been successfully used as predictors for many, many years. I'd say the theory of gravity and the theory of evolution both fall into this category. It is useful to refine our understanding of either... but I also don't expect metallurgists to have problems with their alloys flying off the planet on their own anytime soon, nor do I expect that we will discover that environmental stresses that cause reproductive selection will not lead to evolutionary changes.
It is not a matter of personal disapproval with the neonazis. It is a recorded danger.
I didn't realize that catholic paraphernalia was also banned in Europe, as it must be since the Inquisition is a recorded danger that executed people of other faiths, especially jews.
I realize my reply is somewhat flippant, but you must understand that many, many groups are responsible for terrible crimes throughout history. I don't approve of Nazis, nor Neo-Nazis. On the other hand I do believe that free expression is a basic human right and I don't see that painting a swastika implicitly removes the rights of another person to the degree it needs to be banned. I believe that bans on such things are simply people allowing their fear to override their principals. I understand that others have a different opinion and can understand it. I just place a higher value on personal freedom. Then again, perhaps some day in the not so distant future christian symbols will be banned to prevent christians from harming others.
Maybe by "has run" you mean "once upon a time an obscure beta of this ran un Unix";)
Actually by "has run" he means "before Adobe bought the company that made it and then killed everything but the Windows version." FrameMaker started out as a SunOS app and the second supported platform was Mac OS.
People who doubt evolution make better scientists than those who believe it because its well accepted.
I'm not sure I can agree with this. The truth is, no person can experimentally determine everything they need to know in order to advance science. The body of previous work is simply too great and we do stand on the shoulders of giants in order to see any further. Skepticism is certainly useful when applied to a given process, but the idea that literally thousands and thousands of scientists have been fabricating their results and such a fundamental theory as evolution is wrong, well it is possible, but I think a rational person would see such a belief as closer to clinical paranoia than healthy skepticism.
The facts of it are that we have an extremely limited knowledge of the process of evolution. The scientific community is pretty good with the effects as observed, but not the process, although there are some good sub-theories about that.
This is, of course, a judgement call. How much knowledge we have is relative. For example, when comparing the theory of evolution and the theory of gravity, which process do we understand better? Maybe it is just because my girlfriend is a biochemist, but I'd have to say evolution. We're pretty sure gravity exists and we can describe very accurately how it will affect things in the physical world, but do we really understand why there is gravity and how it functions? Well sort of, probably. But does that mean doubting the theory of gravity is productive and makes one a better scientist?
Actually one of my favorite quotes on this subject I found on/. during a previous discussion of evolution. Biologists had observed some phenomenon and a person commented "doesn't this provide more support for the theory of evolution?" to which the response was "yes, in much the same way when metallurgists mix two elements into a new alloy and it doesn't go whizzing up into the air and into space that provides more support for the theory of gravity."
Sooo many people oppose the theory of evolution because they don't know what it is. I'm willing to wager that at least 99% of these people are of Judeo-Christian-Islamic faith.
You're giving these people too much credit. It is true most people don't know what the theory of evolution is. It is also true that while a lot of people claim to be of a given Judeo-christian-islamic faith, most of those people don't know what the doctrine of their church is and have not read the central religious works of their faith, or even the history of their own religion.
Really the situation is that most people are ignorant in many ways and don't know what the theory of evolution is or how it relates to the religion with which they identify. They just react badly when confronted with their own ignorance and rather than learning they get angry and try to stop others from learning and making them look even more ignorant by comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since the link you provide is largely question marks for the Webkit based browsers, that's hard to say. Also, the comparison you link to is missing a lot of standards where Firefox is a bit behind. These include:
That is not to say Firefox is necessarily behind other browser for standards compliance in general. No one with a clue would cite the Acid tests as proof of anything in that regard, but it does indicate that the link you provide is not particularly strong evidence one way or another. The whole question is probably too vague to be answered. There are a lot of Web standards and what really matters is which ones are most universally supported and what functionality cannot be used because of lacking support in one browser or another.
In summary, I reject your assertion, not because I'm convinced you're wrong, but because you haven't provided enough evidence to support it and there is significant contradictory evidence (cited above).
I wonder if they're serious. Will they really be standards compliant enough so that I don't have to hack around IE8's deficiencies? Will this still be true for IE9? It's possible. Will this include SVG and XHTML and CSS3? What about XUL and HTML 5?
If all of the above work in the next couple of version of IE, do you know what that would indicate to me? That would indicate that Microsoft is betting on Silverlight to lock in users in the next 5 years... because they've pretty much convinced me they will never compete based upon features and the merits of their software, rather than trying to make it as hard as possible for users to switch to anything else.
For anyone interested in complaining to the member companies about this... here is a link to their membership list.
Some members are no surprise and don't care if their customers hate them (RIAA, MPAA). Others are more likely to respond to bad press (Apple, Microsoft, Vivendi). Other sponsors are directly responsible, such as the government agencies (many in the USA and Canada) and the states of North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Send a letter or e-mail, maybe this crap will not happen again, at least not in academia where it is so easily detected.
I use the same machine for most tasks and it manages all my passwords for me. If I have to type anything, well it probably is a phishing attempt.
Yeah, and on my old truck I had to shift gears by hand using a double clutch and putting it in 4WD mean climbing out and locking the wheels by hand. That doesn't mean users don't want something easier and better.
If a girl called you saying they are from your bank asking for the numbers on your Bank card would you give it to her?No, but I never get calls from my bank. I do get regular e-mail messages from various Web services. I do enjoy having my cell phone tell me the identity of callers automatically, without my having to get out a little black book and check before answering. Given that my computer is even more of a general purpose device than my phone, I'd like it to manage the same functionality.
Don't get me wrong, it isn't a deal breaker right now and prematurely releasing technologies that are not ready for mainstream use might do more harm than good (I'm looking at you IE 7). Still, better identity verification for Web sites sounds useful to me, and essential for my mother and father and nieces.
First, because as more and more services become dependent upon URLs there are fewer and fewer URLs that don't have some feature that might indicate they are really a phishing attempt. Also, as the Web becomes more international more characters that look the same or very similar are introduced. More and more legitimate e-mail messages, even automated ones, reference Web sites. Am I going to look at every single e-mail I get from Netflix to make sure the URL that pops up really is NetFlix? Maybe, or maybe I won't sometime and if the tab that loads does not have a warning, maybe I'll mistake it for Netflix. Maybe I will look, but maybe I won't notice it is netf1ix.com instead of netflix.com. Everyone makes a mistake now and again and most people are nowhere near as security conscious as I am.
Can you honestly say there is no way you would ever make that mistake? Can you honestly say there is no way your grandmother or 8 year-old nephew could not make that mistake? Technology to automatically verify the identity of a Web server is useful for everyone and I believe there is a real demand. If that demand is ignored, people will go elsewhere, maybe to IE7 where they feel safer, or maybe to Opera. Web browser developers ignoring that demand will probably lose out. If you don't want to use it, don't worry. I'm sure Firefox will let you turn it off, and if it won't, will you can always fork it.
Are they blind?Some of them are, certainly. I know it takes my friend a lot longer to listen to a page via an audio interface or even read it using his braille board. By default, I don't even think it reads the URL and if it did it would be a huge annoyance for him.
Oh did you mean that as a rhetorical question? Too bad, it is a real concern.
If you want a car analogy, "If I can't be relied on to observe traffic around me while driving, then I should not be driving, regardless of how necessary society says driving is."By that logic, we should all be observant enough to check our coolant levels before driving too. After all, once in a great while it is too low and the engine will overheat. Why bother to put a heat sensor and warning light on the dash? What are you, blind or something? If you can't check your engine coolant periodically you should just walk everywhere.
Well put and there actually is such a plug-in for Safari that comes with the 1password password and identity management software. (Although it is not a whitelist/blacklist setup, but instead relies more upon the fact that it is really obvious a page is not genuine when you can't automatically log in using your 1password identity.)
Sure.
Here's a Google Scholar link to one book on the subject:Smaller, C. 2005. Planting the Rights Seed: A Human Rights Perspective on Agricultural Trade and the WTO. Backgrounder No. 1, THREAD Series, IATP: Minneapolis , MN .
See almost anything by Devinder Sharma, but particularly "Africa's Tragedy; Famine as Commerce."
...or, just do a Google search for "africa agriculture dumping."
I believe that bad local politics (to say nothing of war) is a large reason for African poverty. Despotism in Zimbabwe, genocide in Sudan, war in Kenya...There are a great many contributing factors. If local governments did not exorbitantly tax the people and especially farmers as a way to confiscate and resell land, such a scheme would not work. If there were reasonable tariffs on imported food, this would not be an issue. It is awfully hard to run a campaign, however, with the stated policy of taxing imported food distributed by charities. It is especially difficult when the charities are associated with organized religion that has huge influence within the country. It is even harder when your opposition is backed by donations from said charities as well as big business and wealthy foreign powers.
There is plenty of blame to go around for the poverty and hardship in the third world... from rampant, violent colonialism and exploitation in the past to present day exploitation by both unscrupulous native politicians and foreign corporate interests. You are quite correct in pointing out the role of local politics and and war, although you might want to look closely at who has funded the wars and provided the arms. Regardless, providing necessities to people in such poverty will almost always lead to a a growing dependance upon that charity... which we all know is not sustainable in the long run. Human nature will always provide those looking to take advantage of charity by, using it to redirect resources that would otherwise be sustaining those people to profit a small minority.
On this I must disagree. Right now the best solution probably is double checking URLs, but that is realistically not a good solution for the majority of people. Apple (and every other browser developer) should be working on a a URL whitelist/greylist/blacklist detection and warning technology. I'm not sure, however, that they should rush to deploy such technology. It might be better to wait until it is reliable enough to provide real benefit without providing a false sense of security. Right not IE has such a technology, but reviews show it to be of little, practical use. I know Apple is working on such technology and depending upon how effective it seems to be, it might be best that they have not rolled it out for Safari yet. I do think there s a real demand for this type of technology and developers should be trying to fill that need.
snark: And Safari users are advised to stop using PayPal.Well... I might say all security minded users might be well advised to stop using Paypal. We have Google Checkout now who would want to use Paypal?
...blindness prevention (there are some common ways to become blind in underdeveloped countries).Heh. I was just reading the other day that preventable kinds of blindness cause nearly four times the rate of blindness or serious reduction of vision in the USA as in Canada. At least when it comes to providing preventative medicine, the USA counts as one of those underdeveloped countries.
In many places they have water and they used to have farms. Then the US (and other countries) dumped produce on their market below the true cost (subsidized) such that local farmers could not compete. So the local farmers were undercut, couldn't pay their taxes and are now unemployed and homeless. It isn't that they don't know how to farm. It is that they can't make enough money farming to get by. They might be able to compete despite the unfair price of imported food if they could use modern practices, but they don't have the industrial infrastructure needed to make the heavy equipment and fertilizers and irrigation systems and they don't have the capital to buy it. The money needed to fund such a project would be way, way, way more than what is spent on the OLPC project.
Truthfully, there really isn't a better industry than intellectual property creation for high returns on low initial investment. This doesn't necessarily mean programming (in Python not C, since that is what ships with OLPC). Heck, people in some parts of the world could probably make a living with a XO laptop just by solving captchas. Then there is writing, video and audio creation, etc.
The point of the OLPC project is not to just supply what is most needed today, but rather to augment the charity food, water, shelter, and medical care with the tools of education (for any subject) and with the cheapest possible way for them to create a sustainable industry that will allow their society to stop relying on charity and start building again.
P.S. did you know Remote Area Medical, a charity that provides medical care primarily to Africa and east Asia has recently had to start working in the United States because so many Americans cannot get or afford basic medical care? Maybe the US should stop teaching computer science and focus on teaching medicine to more people?
If you're really confused about why replacing the company name "Apple" with the company name "Microsoft" changes the situation both practically and legally... read this post I put in this thread all the way through.
I'll second the recommendations for "The Design of Everyday Things" and "Tog's First Principles of Interaction Design" as I've found both to be solid and helpful for avoiding some of the biggest pitfalls. I bought a copy of the former and put it in my previous company's engineering library and it has been read by almost everyone by now. I also would like to echo try_anything's recommendation that you look at the style guide for your particular target plaform(s) unless you are coding an interface for something proprietary (like a phone or kiosk) or a Web interface.
More generally, Books are fine for getting some basic principals down and for avoiding some of the most common mistakes. They'll get you maybe 70% of the way, which is still better than some mainstream offerings. Beyond that, hire a UI consultant to do real evaluation and to perform real usability testing. Seriously, testing is the only way to really have a good UI. There are simply too many variables with people and some of the things testing finds are things you would never, ever, ever have thought of if fresh eyes had not repeatedly had problems with it. I mean who knew that icon looked just like a symbol that appears on lots of feminine hygiene products I've never seen and thus confuses half of all users? I can't stress testing enough and it really helps to have someone who really knows how to to usability testing right with a reasonable budget.
Nope. Apple (or more specifically Apple's Webkit team) are using a hack. It isn't documented because no one who can't guarantee Webkit is updated at the same time as OS X should be using it (and that means just Apple). Basically Apple put in new code that optimizes things. They put in a published API for applications that want to use it. The problem is, every application that calls Webkit also would want to use it, but in order to do so all those apps would need to be updated individually by their respective developers and all of them would have to learn about the new feature. So Apple used a hack one time so that all applications that use Webkit also use this optimization. In order to do that they had to make a second way to do it, but not one they would want anyone else using in the long term. So they told everyone else to use the public API, but one guy did not understand it and just looked to see how Webkit did it instead and then posted about the "secret" API that Apple was using and soon found out that it was "secret" because it was likely to go away as soon as Apple decided enough apps that call Webkit had been upgraded. So he realized his error, but by that point some other person with even less understanding had posted his blog to Slashdot with a really, obnoxiously misleading title. He then updated his blog so anyone who RTFA would figure out what was really up.
It is true he does not need to use anything but the public API, however, he mistakenly thought the public API applied to all cocoa apps or none, not on a per application basis. So he thought he needed to use the internal, unpublished way Webkit does. In a way, that might even be better since it means other applications that embed Gecko (like Camino) would also gain the optimization even if the developer did not know about the flag... and pretty much anything embedding Gecko would want this. That is the same reason Apple used the hack for Webkit, so developers that just call Webkit, would not have to update their apps to get this optimization.
Everyone screws up. Vladimir admitted his mistake and has even tried to help correct the misunderstanding of people on Slashdot who did not read or understand his post, but just read the inflammatory title of this article and started gibbering about things with no real understanding of what they were talking about. Personally, I prefer to work with humans who can screw up and admit it, rather than arrogant jerks who screw up and try to conceal that fact and fool as many people as possible into thinking it was someone else's fault somehow.
Is it too much to ask that you RTFA, or at least one of the dozens of postings from the original blogger? Safari does not use an undocumented, internal API. Webkit does use an internal API so that all applications that use it will get better performance than Applications that don't set a parameter that is in a documented API. A default system library using an internal API is not exactly uncommon. The person who wrote the original comment made a mistake and thought that he had to set a parameter globally for all cocoa applications, instead of setting it for just Firefox. So now he knows and isn't using the internal API because it is not needed to gain the same benefit.
Yes the DoJ ruled Microsoft guilty of criminal antitrust abuse in that regard. The difference being MS was legally determined to have a monopoly on desktop operating systems, and the only thing Apple is close to having a monopoly on is portable, digital music players. So for Apple, this is annoying third party developers, while for MS it was criminal. I guess that means Apple won't have to donate to election campaigns in order to get a free pass on breaking the law.
I think it should either be ok for all players to have internal APIs or not ok for all players.
You seem to failing to understand why antitrust abuse is "bad" and hence illegal. You say it should be okay for all players or not okay for all players. In this, you fail to understand antitrust law, so I will try to enlighten you.
First, an analogy: It is legal to fire a gun. Bob goes to the target range and practices his marksmanship in hopes of getting on the olympic team. Barry goes to the mall with a shotgun and starts murdering people wearing hats. Should it always be illegal or not illegal to fire a gun? It is the exact same action, just in different circumstances. Is Barry's action illegal because he is different person, or is it illegal because it is a different situation with different results? Hopefully this shows you logically, why you can't ignore the surrounding circumstance as to what is happening. ...on to the specifics...
Tying two products from different markets together is generally a legal business strategy. You can sell product A in market A and product B in market B or sell product A and B together in the hopes of attracting buyers who want both products. This is like shooting a gun at the shooting range... all well and good. The problem comes when a market is monopolized. That is to say, when a company has so much influence in one market, that many consumers have no other choice for their needs. If pretty much everyone in market A has to buy from you, what happens when you stop selling product A, but only offer a tied together bundle of product A and product B? In general what happens is regardless of how good your product B is, you sell it anyway, because you are forcing buyers to buy it because they need product A... even if they don't want product B at all. This is like shooting people at the mall.
In the first scenario the free market continued to operate because even though you were tying your two products, consumers could just select different suppliers if they have a better offering. In the second scenario the free market is undermined. No matter how crappy your product B is, people still have to pay for it, even if they just throw it away and buy a different one from another vendor. In order for you to undermine the market B, however, you have to have monopoly influence in that market A. The laws that ban this behavior are called antitrust laws, because they were first used to stop large business trusts that were undermining the free market and ruining the economy.
I think it should either be ok for all players to have internal APIs or not ok for all players. I mean, if we say that right now it's ok for Apple to do this because they are not a monopoly, what happens if they do become one?
When Apple becomes a monopoly, then they are banned from tying that monopoly to any product they offer in a different, existing market. For example, Apple does not have a monopoly on desktop operating systems. They don't have a monopoly on any given type of software (like Web browsers). Thus, if they give their Web browser advantages that people who don't also produce Mac OS X don't get, they are not undermining free trade or breaking the law.
On the other hand, Apple has close to 70% of the portable, digital music player market. Right now they are being investigated by the EU to see if their influence in this market is sufficient to qualify as monopoly influence. If the courts decide it is, then they will be banned from tying anything to that monopoly product (iPod) which vendors in other markets cannot do. This means if they support FairPlay DRM, they must either let other music sellers use FairPlay or they must support the DRM of the other music seller. If they bundle a copy of iTunes with every iPod, they must also bundle a copy of any other music playing software other vendors want to offer. If they have protocols for putting music on iPods, they must publish those protocols so that others can
From the BBC article about the proposed (later defeated) EU-wide ban on Nazi symbology:
"Germany has banned the use of Nazi insignia." France, for example, bars the sale of Nazi-related memorabilia.I think that qualifies as censorship, to the extend that several Web stores and auction sites have been ordered to remove such items from sales when the person viewing the Web site store is in their country.
It's pretty easy for Americans to not realise the devastation that occured in Germany, and how it's still affecting Germany to this day.A whole lot of Americans were over there and we probably have as many violent war movies about the era as anyone. As for me, personally, I don't think it likely to ever forget the one and only time my grandfather spoke about his experiences. He was one of the soldiers that found the ovens. In fact, he rarely spoke at all after the war and I suspect his experiences there and the 40% casualty rate in his platoon probably left him mentally scarred for the remainder of his life.
They're not targetting it because it's easy, but because the last time no-one did, millions of people died.When no one stood up to christian slavers, acting with the consent and sometimes directly commission of the catholic church, millions of people died and millions more were enslaved as were their progeny for generations. All, this because catholic administrators ruled that africans and islanders were hereditarily cannibals and hence had no souls; thus enslaving them was godly work.
I'd say the practical risk of death by Christians claiming to be acting for their faith is much higher than that of death by Neo-Nazis. Yet, no EU country bans the sale of Catholic paraphernalia do they? There is always some subset of society that wishes to censor things they disapprove of. In my own country "Harry Potter" novels are among the most commonly banned books in local jurisdictions (at the behest of people who call themselves "christians"). In other places, books critical of Islam or books about homosexuality or books critical of he current political regime. There are no shortage of people who are ready and willing to try to decide what other people should be able to see and hear and do and enforce it at gunpoint if necessary.
And so I say again, Nazi imagery is censored not because people feel guilty about what happened or because Nazis are a greater real threat that other groups not because their past crimes are greater than any other. Rather, they are censored because there were so few people (and more importantly politicians) willing to stand up and defend the right of free expression in that regard at the danger of being labelled a "Nazi" or "Nazi sympathizer."
In my opinion the principal is too important for any exceptions for some individual group to be singled out to have their rights curtailed. After all, did not the Nazis themselves start out by removing human rights for a subset of people who were known to be evil and who had committed evil deeds in the past? After all, they killed the son of the one true god didn't they? Surely you would not stand up and defend the rights of such evil people? It would be political suicide and might get you killed. And sadly, there were probably a lot of people in what became Nazi Germany who did not stand up and defend the basic human rights of a group they were not part of and whose very existence was heretical.
As I've said before, I don't approve of Nazis. I don't approve of Neo-Nazis. But if it comes right down to it, I will help them fight for their right to free expression, because that right belongs to all mankind, not all mankind except those who want to draw a symbol that has been used in the past by people who did great evil (whether it is a cross a swastika or a star of david).
The world wars have been over for a long time too. Most of the people who were alive during them are now dead.
The entire cultural basis on which it operated has changed.I disagree. There are still numerous christian extremist groups responsible for murder. Jews, homosexuals, atheists, etc. have all been killed in the past year by intolerant christians. (And lets not look at religious motivations for recent wars.) What about Islam? In the name of Islam a lot of people have been killed lately. Should the EU ban Islamic imagery?
The danger of the neonazi groups is that they are modeled on existing cultures and so must be dealt with until nothing remains for them to operate and cause such immense damage again.That will never be true. Someone could always come along, read an old book about Nazis and decide to emulate them. There have been people throughout history that have done just that, including a cult heavily laden with imagery of Charlemagne, two years ago. All your arguments look to me like someone trying to justify a decision and differentiate it from other cultures based upon an already determined belief.
Face it, Nazi paraphernalia is banned not because the danger posed by swastikas, but because it is still so unpopular and so an easy target for censorship. I'd say the real world threat posed by either christian or islamic extremist groups is greater, but they are not censored because they are more popular cultures, not because they are any less dangerous.
You miss the point entirely. You said in your original post, "The facts of it are that we have an extremely limited knowledge of the process of evolution." I simply pointed out that we also have a very limited understanding of the process of gravity. We know both phenomenon exist and can predict how they will act given certain stimulus, but knowing exactly how the process of natural selection affects genetic material and heredity. Likewise while we know how to predict the result of forces well enough to get a rocket to the moon, that doesn't mean we fully understand the process by which matter is attracted to other matter.
I challenge you to come up with similar tests of evolutionary theory.There have been thousands of such experiments, where certain stimuli is applied to organisms to stress them and true to prediction the organisms develop characteristics that minimize the affects of that stimuli. Do a search for "fruit fly experiments" if you actually want to see an enormous body of work.
Go back and read the article on the Higgs Boson -- many (most?) particle physicists doubt Einsteins theory of Special Relativity and try to experiment to prove their own theories instead.There is a difference between spacial relativity and the theory of gravity. The former is one attempt to explain the process of the latter. Just as their are many theories that try to explain exactly what genetic material combinations encode real information which is hereditary in the next generation and in later generations.
Until Einstein, nobody seriously challenged what we believed about gravity for many years.Ahh, but Einstein did not try to recreate all of Newtons experiments, nor did he prove that matter is not attracted to matter. Einstein instead looked at refining the understanding of how matter attracts matter and behaviors that we could not predict (such as very high speeds).
The more you understand about anything, the more you should be coming to grips with how little humanity knows about that subject.Sure there is always more to learn. But I don't think it is useful at this point to try to disprove theories that form the entire basis of large fields of scientific study and which have been successfully used as predictors for many, many years. I'd say the theory of gravity and the theory of evolution both fall into this category. It is useful to refine our understanding of either... but I also don't expect metallurgists to have problems with their alloys flying off the planet on their own anytime soon, nor do I expect that we will discover that environmental stresses that cause reproductive selection will not lead to evolutionary changes.
I didn't realize that catholic paraphernalia was also banned in Europe, as it must be since the Inquisition is a recorded danger that executed people of other faiths, especially jews.
I realize my reply is somewhat flippant, but you must understand that many, many groups are responsible for terrible crimes throughout history. I don't approve of Nazis, nor Neo-Nazis. On the other hand I do believe that free expression is a basic human right and I don't see that painting a swastika implicitly removes the rights of another person to the degree it needs to be banned. I believe that bans on such things are simply people allowing their fear to override their principals. I understand that others have a different opinion and can understand it. I just place a higher value on personal freedom. Then again, perhaps some day in the not so distant future christian symbols will be banned to prevent christians from harming others.
Actually by "has run" he means "before Adobe bought the company that made it and then killed everything but the Windows version." FrameMaker started out as a SunOS app and the second supported platform was Mac OS.
I'm not sure I can agree with this. The truth is, no person can experimentally determine everything they need to know in order to advance science. The body of previous work is simply too great and we do stand on the shoulders of giants in order to see any further. Skepticism is certainly useful when applied to a given process, but the idea that literally thousands and thousands of scientists have been fabricating their results and such a fundamental theory as evolution is wrong, well it is possible, but I think a rational person would see such a belief as closer to clinical paranoia than healthy skepticism.
The facts of it are that we have an extremely limited knowledge of the process of evolution. The scientific community is pretty good with the effects as observed, but not the process, although there are some good sub-theories about that.This is, of course, a judgement call. How much knowledge we have is relative. For example, when comparing the theory of evolution and the theory of gravity, which process do we understand better? Maybe it is just because my girlfriend is a biochemist, but I'd have to say evolution. We're pretty sure gravity exists and we can describe very accurately how it will affect things in the physical world, but do we really understand why there is gravity and how it functions? Well sort of, probably. But does that mean doubting the theory of gravity is productive and makes one a better scientist?
Actually one of my favorite quotes on this subject I found on /. during a previous discussion of evolution. Biologists had observed some phenomenon and a person commented "doesn't this provide more support for the theory of evolution?" to which the response was "yes, in much the same way when metallurgists mix two elements into a new alloy and it doesn't go whizzing up into the air and into space that provides more support for the theory of gravity."
You're giving these people too much credit. It is true most people don't know what the theory of evolution is. It is also true that while a lot of people claim to be of a given Judeo-christian-islamic faith, most of those people don't know what the doctrine of their church is and have not read the central religious works of their faith, or even the history of their own religion.
Really the situation is that most people are ignorant in many ways and don't know what the theory of evolution is or how it relates to the religion with which they identify. They just react badly when confronted with their own ignorance and rather than learning they get angry and try to stop others from learning and making them look even more ignorant by comparison.