Yeah, I don't get it either. A long time ago I worked on a web app that supported IE3, IE4 and Netscape. All the layout was done with tables. Validation was done both on the server and in JavaScript. We sniffed the browser and turned off JS if the browser was not whitelisted. The site would still work - it just needed to round trip to the server if a form contained an invalid date for example. On a browser with decent JS support you could skip that step and reduce the server load a bit.
IE3 was very quirky, IE4 wasn't too bad and Netscape got most stuff right even though it was a bit old. But the corporate desktops we were aiming at demanded IE3 compatibility so we made sure that we didn't need much sophistication on the client.
Why it's "OMG totally impossible" to support IE6 is frankly beyond me.
> (they removed the RRoD in favor of a green dot.)
I think you mean they finally solved the RROD problem. That means the vacation freeze is off, no more overtime and a party on Friday.
The green dot has different symptoms and you'll have to open a new bug report. Oh, your account is locked out? Well file a bug report on that then. I'm off to Thailand for four weeks.
Firefox needs to stop setting meaningless metrics to call itself the fastest browser. I can make a side-by-side performance video too. It will show IE, Chrome, Opera and anything else scroll through and interact with the most CPU hogging sites on the net, while FF is chugging trying to scroll a.txt file.
I find Firefox sluggish too - particularly recent versions compared to recent versions of Opera. IE used to be fast but almost as bloated as Firefox.
Why do Americans say "Indian giving" for this sort of behaviour? Didn't the Europeans take the whole country away from the indigenous population, signing and then breaking many treaties in the process?
Surely it should be called "European treaty breaking"?
It's not about homebrew it's about piracy. Games consoles are sold at a loss and the manufacturers make money out of selling games. If people can run arbitrary code on them they can also run pirated games and that means the manufacturers make a loss.
When I clicked this I got a popup ad with a big spinning wheel and a sign saying loading. It had a close box too. So I click the close box and it collapses to a small box on the side of the page that says "Stop waiting for the network. Get a better network. Juniper systems".
Genius!
Even more interestingly, if I refresh the page I don't see the same ad. In fact most of the time I don't see any ad at all. If I follow the link from slashdot however, I do get ads. So it's like they know they should only hit you the first time you visit the site, not on a refresh.
If I clone the tab in Opera I can get the ad again, and it's as I thought - the spinner is actually the ad, nothing is loading. The text says "Still waiting for automation, still waiting for simplicity..." and then it collapses whether or not you click the close box.
And you can see they have a bunch of spinning wheels and progress bars as adverts.
HP could learn a lot from this sort of advertising. Now on to the article. What they are doing would actually be sort of OK if they got the advertisers to pay for the ink rather than the people that get spammed. Only sort of though, it's a seriously flawed idea.
Absolutely. When I want to cut out the noise I use my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones. I also like to relax with a soothing Ritalin 20mg, now available over the counter in your local pharmacy.
Back in the days of Athlon64 vs Pentium 4 and Itanium AMD were ahead. Still since Core2 I'd say Intel are doing better. That being said Larrabee seems to be dead and I still think the idea has legs. Hopefully AMD will be to Larrabee what AMD64 was to IA64 - i.e. a more pragmatic version of the idea that ends up working better.
no shit sherlock. but then again, if *anything* in the past would have been different, *anything* could be reality right now. let's say, Columbus never liked boats or something - we might all be waving swiss cheese right now. who knows? it's a silly "argument" in any case, but to reply to my statement of "fuck empire" with something like that is just idiotic.
Not really. Thinking in terms of empires and national power may seem outdated to Germans who now live in a post nationalist world, but the only reason Germans have that luxury is because the US stopped the Nazis and deterred the Communists.
As Robert Kagan pithily put it "Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order"
Americans who came of age during the Cold War have always thought of Europe almost exclusively in Achesonian terms — as the essential bulwark of freedom in the struggle against Soviet tyranny. But Americans of Roosevelt’s era had a different view. In the late 1930s the common conviction of Americans was that “the European system was basically rotten, that war was endemic on that continent, and the Europeans had only themselves to blame for their plight.” By the early 1940s Europe appeared to be nothing more than the overheated incubator of world wars that cost America dearly. During World War II Americans like Roosevelt, looking backward rather than forward, believed no greater service could be performed than to take Europe out of the global strategic picture once and for all. “After Germany is disarmed,” FDR pointedly asked, “what is the reason for France having a big military establishment?” Charles DeGaulle found such questions “disquieting for Europe and for France.” Even though the United States pursued Acheson’s vision during the Cold War, there was always a part of American policy that reflected Roosevelt’s vision, too. Eisenhower undermining Britain and France at Suez was only the most blatant of many American efforts to cut Europe down to size and reduce its already weakened global influence.
But the more important American contribution to Europe’s current world-apart status stemmed not from anti-European but from pro-European impulses. It was a commitment to Europe, not hostility to Europe, that led the United States in the immediate postwar years to keep troops on the continent and to create NATO. The presence of American forces as a security guarantee in Europe was, as it was intended to be, the critical ingredient to begin the process of European integration.
Europe’s evolution to its present state occurred under the mantle of the U.S. security guarantee and could not have occurred without it. Not only did the United States for almost half a century supply a shield against such external threats as the Soviet Union and such internal threats as may have been posed by ethnic conflict in places like the Balkans. More important, the United States was the key to the solution of the German problem and perhaps still is. Germany’s Fischer, in the Humboldt University speech, noted two “historic decisions” that made the new Europe possible: “the usa’s decision to stay in Europe” and “France’s and Germany’s commitment to the principle of integration, beginning with economic links.” But of course the latter could never have occurred without the former. France’s willingness to risk the reintegration of Germany into Europe — and France was, to say the least, highly dubious — depended on the promise of continued American involvement in Europe as a guarantee against any resurgence of German militarism. Nor were postwar Germans unaware that their own future in Europe depended on the calming prese
E.g. I've got a test image PNG image generated by Vista's Snipping Tool which is a screenshot with few colours. It is 25.4KB.
Serif Photoplus 6.0 has an image optimizer which is like Photoshop's but not quite as good. On the other hand Serif Photoplus is Free Software and Photoshop isn't.
Now I run my test image through the optimizer. It can save it as a PNG file at 23.2KB or a 256 colour GIF at 15.6KB. However with GIF I can reduce the bit depth further, e.g. to 16 (8 is clearly too few for this image). Then it's 12.0KB. With PNG I don't have that option. IIRC this was true with Photoshop too, at least the last time I used it.
So in this case I get the following
PNG from Snipping tool 25.4KB PNG from Serif Photoplus's optimizer 23.2KB GIF from Serif Photoplus's optimizer 15.6KB (default settings, 256 colours) GIF from Serif Photoplus's optimizer 12.0KB (manually tuned 16 colours)
Now if I load the original PNG into IrfanView, drop the bit depth to 16 and write a PNG file with PNGOUT I get 7.0KB. Deflate is after all better than LZW.
Still with Photoplus GIF still produces the smallest files. Of course if it allowed you to specify palette size with PNG that would change. But the fact is that right now it doesn't.
Even better the tool should have a "Auto size Palette" option that automatically creates a palette just big enough to contain all the colours in the original image for both PNG or GIF. You'd allow the user to override the calculated size.
The patents on GIF have expired. It's not just as free as PNG. Plus it supports animation. Also a lot of software - notably Photoshop - tends to produce smaller GIFs than PNGs for most images because the GIF generation code is more optimized.
Bawww! I wrote a rabid post cheerleading Team Freedom and got modded down. The hive has rejected me! Now I'll have to face the terror of individuality.
Hey kiddo Microsoft, Fox News and Big Oil want cheerleaders too. And unlike Team Freedom they actually pay them. Plus they don't have any of that awkward peer moderation.
My point is that people like you are cowards. You're scared of the Islamists and you're scared of having to fight them. You try to obfuscate the situation - make it seem more complex than it really is - to avoid having to take a stand and condemn the fact that they are prepared to use intimidation and murder to suppress any criticism of them and to enforce their medieval value system on the world.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno if it counts as a superhero movie but I liked Kick Ass.
Yeah, I don't get it either. A long time ago I worked on a web app that supported IE3, IE4 and Netscape. All the layout was done with tables. Validation was done both on the server and in JavaScript. We sniffed the browser and turned off JS if the browser was not whitelisted. The site would still work - it just needed to round trip to the server if a form contained an invalid date for example. On a browser with decent JS support you could skip that step and reduce the server load a bit.
IE3 was very quirky, IE4 wasn't too bad and Netscape got most stuff right even though it was a bit old. But the corporate desktops we were aiming at demanded IE3 compatibility so we made sure that we didn't need much sophistication on the client.
Why it's "OMG totally impossible" to support IE6 is frankly beyond me.
> (they removed the RRoD in favor of a green dot.)
I think you mean they finally solved the RROD problem. That means the vacation freeze is off, no more overtime and a party on Friday.
The green dot has different symptoms and you'll have to open a new bug report. Oh, your account is locked out? Well file a bug report on that then. I'm off to Thailand for four weeks.
Firefox needs to stop setting meaningless metrics to call itself the fastest browser. I can make a side-by-side performance video too. It will show IE, Chrome, Opera and anything else scroll through and interact with the most CPU hogging sites on the net, while FF is chugging trying to scroll a .txt file.
I find Firefox sluggish too - particularly recent versions compared to recent versions of Opera. IE used to be fast but almost as bloated as Firefox.
Sony did a bit of Indian-giving Nintendo did not.
Why do Americans say "Indian giving" for this sort of behaviour? Didn't the Europeans take the whole country away from the indigenous population, signing and then breaking many treaties in the process?
Surely it should be called "European treaty breaking"?
It's not about homebrew it's about piracy. Games consoles are sold at a loss and the manufacturers make money out of selling games. If people can run arbitrary code on them they can also run pirated games and that means the manufacturers make a loss.
Flash 9 and later uses byte code that is JITted to native code. Performance should be pretty decent.
When I clicked this I got a popup ad with a big spinning wheel and a sign saying loading. It had a close box too. So I click the close box and it collapses to a small box on the side of the page that says "Stop waiting for the network. Get a better network. Juniper systems".
Genius!
Even more interestingly, if I refresh the page I don't see the same ad. In fact most of the time I don't see any ad at all. If I follow the link from slashdot however, I do get ads. So it's like they know they should only hit you the first time you visit the site, not on a refresh.
If I clone the tab in Opera I can get the ad again, and it's as I thought - the spinner is actually the ad, nothing is loading. The text says "Still waiting for automation, still waiting for simplicity..." and then it collapses whether or not you click the close box.
The ad goes here
http://www.thenewnetworkishere.com/us/en/?WT.mc_id=WT_US_GE_028&CAMPAIGN_NAME=WT_US_GE_AdvAllRichMedia
And you can see they have a bunch of spinning wheels and progress bars as adverts.
HP could learn a lot from this sort of advertising. Now on to the article. What they are doing would actually be sort of OK if they got the advertisers to pay for the ink rather than the people that get spammed. Only sort of though, it's a seriously flawed idea.
Absolutely. When I want to cut out the noise I use my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones. I also like to relax with a soothing Ritalin 20mg, now available over the counter in your local pharmacy.
Oy vey!
If Reddit upvotes decide who will be World President it's time to hide my menorahs, dreidels and yarmulkes.
I thought of this dog pleasing song by the Circle Jerks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bqByfEU3TU&feature=related
Back in the days of Athlon64 vs Pentium 4 and Itanium AMD were ahead. Still since Core2 I'd say Intel are doing better. That being said Larrabee seems to be dead and I still think the idea has legs. Hopefully AMD will be to Larrabee what AMD64 was to IA64 - i.e. a more pragmatic version of the idea that ends up working better.
The issue with the cartoonists is happening in our countries, not theirs.
no shit sherlock. but then again, if *anything* in the past would have been different, *anything* could be reality right now. let's say, Columbus never liked boats or something - we might all be waving swiss cheese right now. who knows? it's a silly "argument" in any case, but to reply to my statement of "fuck empire" with something like that is just idiotic.
Not really. Thinking in terms of empires and national power may seem outdated to Germans who now live in a post nationalist world, but the only reason Germans have that luxury is because the US stopped the Nazis and deterred the Communists.
As Robert Kagan pithily put it "Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order"
http://www.newamericancentury.org/kagan-20020520.htm
Americans who came of age during the Cold War have always thought of Europe almost exclusively in Achesonian terms — as the essential bulwark of freedom in the struggle against Soviet tyranny. But Americans of Roosevelt’s era had a different view. In the late 1930s the common conviction of Americans was that “the European system was basically rotten, that war was endemic on that continent, and the Europeans had only themselves to blame for their plight.” By the early 1940s Europe appeared to be nothing more than the overheated incubator of world wars that cost America dearly. During World War II Americans like Roosevelt, looking backward rather than forward, believed no greater service could be performed than to take Europe out of the global strategic picture once and for all. “After Germany is disarmed,” FDR pointedly asked, “what is the reason for France having a big military establishment?” Charles DeGaulle found such questions “disquieting for Europe and for France.” Even though the United States pursued Acheson’s vision during the Cold War, there was always a part of American policy that reflected Roosevelt’s vision, too. Eisenhower undermining Britain and France at Suez was only the most blatant of many American efforts to cut Europe down to size and reduce its already weakened global influence.
But the more important American contribution to Europe’s current world-apart status stemmed not from anti-European but from pro-European impulses. It was a commitment to Europe, not hostility to Europe, that led the United States in the immediate postwar years to keep troops on the continent and to create NATO. The presence of American forces as a security guarantee in Europe was, as it was intended to be, the critical ingredient to begin the process of European integration.
Europe’s evolution to its present state occurred under the mantle of the U.S. security guarantee and could not have occurred without it. Not only did the United States for almost half a century supply a shield against such external threats as the Soviet Union and such internal threats as may have been posed by ethnic conflict in places like the Balkans. More important, the United States was the key to the solution of the German problem and perhaps still is. Germany’s Fischer, in the Humboldt University speech, noted two “historic decisions” that made the new Europe possible: “the usa’s decision to stay in Europe” and “France’s and Germany’s commitment to the principle of integration, beginning with economic links.” But of course the latter could never have occurred without the former. France’s willingness to risk the reintegration of Germany into Europe — and France was, to say the least, highly dubious — depended on the promise of continued American involvement in Europe as a guarantee against any resurgence of German militarism. Nor were postwar Germans unaware that their own future in Europe depended on the calming prese
Careful! He's German - this sort of humour might give him an aneurysm.
No wait! You haven't learned how do do Hello World in Enterprise Java Beans, or MFC yet.
Most people would rather stick pins in their eyes than use GIMP though.
APNG (.png) supports animation in any non-IE web browser.
APNG was also voted down as a standard - MNG is the official way to do animation but no one supports it.
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=3.0.6.32.20070420132821.012dd8e8%40mail.comcast.net
A properly optimized PNG file will often be half the size of a gif, and supports 24bit colour too...
Part of the problem with PNG is that a lot of applications will generate 24bit PNGs for images that would be smaller if they used a palette.
In both cases PNG's official feature set often works against it.
Well there are very optimized GIF encoders.
E.g. I've got a test image PNG image generated by Vista's Snipping Tool which is a screenshot with few colours. It is 25.4KB.
Serif Photoplus 6.0 has an image optimizer which is like Photoshop's but not quite as good. On the other hand Serif Photoplus is Free Software and Photoshop isn't.
Now I run my test image through the optimizer. It can save it as a PNG file at 23.2KB or a 256 colour GIF at 15.6KB. However with GIF I can reduce the bit depth further, e.g. to 16 (8 is clearly too few for this image). Then it's 12.0KB. With PNG I don't have that option. IIRC this was true with Photoshop too, at least the last time I used it.
So in this case I get the following
PNG from Snipping tool 25.4KB
PNG from Serif Photoplus's optimizer 23.2KB
GIF from Serif Photoplus's optimizer 15.6KB (default settings, 256 colours)
GIF from Serif Photoplus's optimizer 12.0KB (manually tuned 16 colours)
Now if I load the original PNG into IrfanView, drop the bit depth to 16 and write a PNG file with PNGOUT I get 7.0KB. Deflate is after all better than LZW.
Still with Photoplus GIF still produces the smallest files. Of course if it allowed you to specify palette size with PNG that would change. But the fact is that right now it doesn't.
Even better the tool should have a "Auto size Palette" option that automatically creates a palette just big enough to contain all the colours in the original image for both PNG or GIF. You'd allow the user to override the calculated size.
The patents on GIF have expired. It's not just as free as PNG. Plus it supports animation. Also a lot of software - notably Photoshop - tends to produce smaller GIFs than PNGs for most images because the GIF generation code is more optimized.
H.264 is also supported by Flash.
Bawww! I wrote a rabid post cheerleading Team Freedom and got modded down. The hive has rejected me! Now I'll have to face the terror of individuality.
Hey kiddo Microsoft, Fox News and Big Oil want cheerleaders too. And unlike Team Freedom they actually pay them. Plus they don't have any of that awkward peer moderation.
Your faith in your friends is your greatest weakness, young Jedi
Soon you will witness the power of this fully armed and operational patent pool.
I will give half of the mod points I receive for this post to starving people in the third world.
My point is that people like you are cowards. You're scared of the Islamists and you're scared of having to fight them. You try to obfuscate the situation - make it seem more complex than it really is - to avoid having to take a stand and condemn the fact that they are prepared to use intimidation and murder to suppress any criticism of them and to enforce their medieval value system on the world.