A lot of those laws, however, are only 'dumb' to the people who make the site. For example, they list as 'dumb' a law that states 'Citizens may not relieve themselves or spit on the street.' I don't really think that making it illegal to relieve oneself in public is dumb, do you?
They also list the French language laws in Quebec, which state that signs must be in French, or, if bilingual, the French must be larger. French, however, is the official language of Quebec, and thus this law makes as much sense as one requiring that signs be in English anywhere else in Canada or the US.
They also say it's dumb that you can't work on your car in the street (Kanata, ON) or wash your car in the street (Montreal, QC), even though doing so could obstruct traffic or cause a danger to yourself or others.
Then they list the illegality of clear or non-dark sodas to contain caffiene - or rather, to have caffiene added to them. I read an article a few years back about the FDA reconsidering their stance on this issue (allowing it), because of possible health risks.
Then there are the laws in China about only having one child (or paying a fine) - for the world's most populous country, a country that has enough trouble supporting the population it has already, this law makes perfect sense.
That being said, there are some pretty amusing ones on that site ('It is illegal for a woman to be topless in public except as a clerk in a tropical fish store,' Liverpool, UK).
Mediocre code that does the job the way it's supposed to, or 'pretty' code that screws it up? Safari, remember, has been made to pass the Acid2 test. How is konqueror doing with that? Is it even on their agenda?
I'll take code that works as it should over code that looks as it should any day of the week.
Ah, but the problem is not that. The problem is that Safari automatically *opens* these widgets, which in turn installs and runs them. Thus, just visiting a page can install and run a widget on your system, which can, in turn, download other software and run that too. Pretty big freaking hole.
I think what he's getting at is that software perfection is an unattainable goal - software will always be imperfect, as will everything else.
What he means is that they should stop worrying about philosophical arguments and just write a good browser that does things well. I mean, writing 'perfect' code is nice and all, but apparantly, it doesn't really matter. Compare Konqueror's rendering with Safari's - Safari has recently been coded to pass the Acid2 test. How is Konqueror doing in that respect?
So what if the code is ugly? It can be cleaned up later. What good is pretty, well-written code that doesn't do what it's supposed to do properly? What's the point in having a beautifully architectured system that doesn't do the job? It's better than having an ugly one that doesn't do the job, but if you're going to write a web browser, write one that follows standards. Safari has done this with admittedly ugly code in spots. Konqueror has failed to do this, but has done so with nice code.
In the end, it comes down to the right tool for the job, and if you're a web developer trying to use the full features and expected behaviour of CSS and HTML, Konqueror is not that tool, and Safari is (or will be, once those patches are folded into release). Should the Konqueror developers be chastizing Apple for writing bad code? No, it does the job and their code doesn't, so they have no grounds for complaint other than purely philosophical.
Some more related info, for those who are interested.
I used to work for Leo, but I got out before things went from bad to worse. Other coworkers and friends, as well as my roommate, weren't so lucky.
Aside from the flash designers that he was paying under the table and the animal pornography and child pornography that he's gotten into distributing (the story didn't mention that though, I guess it's unrelated), he was just a really shady character. He was good friends with Alan Ralsky (who, at one point, both had and used my roommate's cellphone number several times), and he was all for doing whatever he could to make money. Truly, to those who believe in the capitalist ideal, he was an icon for all.
Leo is a Russia-born American citizen; the address in Mass. is his mother's address, but Leo has relocated to Russia (the article says he might be, but I can confirm this). Aside from the big screw-ups that the article mentions, he's also done such wonderful things as trying to dock people's pay so their salaries match other employees, and he fired me because the secretary, with whom he was having an affair, told him that I'd said I was going to quit (which I didn't).
I don't feel so bad now that I 'worked' for him for a few months, fudged my hours upwards by around 50-70%, and then went on vacation after I'd made a few grand off of him. Oh well.
A -- potentially better -- option is to have something like an "approved" widget download area. Say, apple's servers, where you know widgets hosted there have been given the thumbs up.
Actually, this isn't far wrong. I guess some people get so frustrated and angry when they get dinged by the 419 scams that they go to Nigeria looking for these people... Except these people make so much money that they can essentially control entire towns and hire a small army with the money they got.
So yeah. I'm willing to bet that in Russia, soviet or not, you'd just get your ass kicked.
Well, I'd like to abandon syslog in favour of logging to an SQL database for everything (a central sysloggable database would be nice, a standard API and what have you). Text logs are nice, but given the choice, I'd rather put everything into MySQL. It's searchable, it's archivable, it's a lot faster to process than plaintext. A hundred megs of logs takes forever to process with perl, but if it's in the database, you can make a lot of queries live.
SELECT SUM(transfersize)/1024 FROM logs.apache WHERE vhost = "files.darien.ca" AND date > "2005-05-01 00:00:00" AND date "2005-06-01 00:00:00"
Now I have the amount of bandwidth (in kilobytes) that was served from my files site in the month of May. Doing this with raw logs is absurdly slow in comparison, and only gets moreso as time goes on. If you want to archive them in compressed format, you can do 'mysqldump --where="date..." --database logs' and such.
For that matter, unless you are on an unusual architecture (like PPC or Sparc - unlikely), Flash works fine in Linux. Install the plugin, and maybe install that flash blocker that lets you click to enable it, and poof, problem solved.
That people are lazy and are taught that getting something now is more important than working for it, and that instant gratification is to be encouraged and exploited.
A better way to fool Oracle is to run it with --help (I think) and it will ignore the host OS checks. I don't know *why*, as there is actually a documented command-line flag that is supposed to do this, but it seems as though pretty much anything will do.
KTHML is a platform-dependant mess. There's no illusion of platform independance, as KHTML was written for KDE and only for KDE. They had a ball of code that was KDE's rendering engine.
Apple took that code, worked on it, made it unarguably better. They changed the KDE dependance to OS X dependance, and gave the ball of code that is now WebKit.
The KHTML team gave a chunk of code to the world, and that's great. Apple took it, made it better, and gave it back, and now they're some evil empire.
Isn't this what the GPL is about? Why should they have to submit patchsets? Why should they have to submit changelogs? Why should they have to go to any lengths at all to make the KDE developers happy, when the whole mess wouldn't matter if the code was abstracted properly in the first place. That didn't happen though, because KDE is all about interdependancies, just like OS X is.
Cry me a river people, because the KDE team is getting no better than they gave - a ball of code. Apple may not be making it easier, but that's not their job, is it?
If you like Spotlight (and a lot of people do), I would strongly advise you to check out QuickSilver. It performs a different but similar task, and is extremely useful.
I find that Spotlight is fantastic when I want to get an overview of things - for example, if I want to type in the name of my latest project and get all the correspondance, documents, and (commented) address book entries about it. I can hit Ctrl-Space, type in "Project Gopher" for example and hit 'All Results' and bring up a window where I can organize and sort through things, arrange data, and such.
QuickSilver, however, serves a different purpose. QS seems to be for finding one thing and doing something with it. For example, I can tap Ctrl, type in "Jake Baked" (or whoever), and as I'm typing, it will (after I've typed enough) show me that it found Jake's address book card. Then I hit Enter and it brings up a new Mail message to him.
That sounds a little complex, so an example: to send a message to Johnathan Boyt, I do "John" and that's it. If I had other Johnathans in my address book I could type 'Boyt' instead, or if I knew other Boyts as well, I could type 'jobo' or 'johnb' or whatever.
Similarly, if I want to launch an application, I can do likewise. I decided to try Automator today, so I just had to do "aut" and that was it - and keep in mind, this is tapping Control, not holding it.
Quicksilver is a lot faster than Spotlight (which is saying a lot, as Spotlight isn't the least bit sluggish), so it's excellent for when you just want to do one thing with one other thing. Spotlight is great when you want to find something in, or do something with, your data as a whole. They work fantastically well together, and when you realize what it is that they each do best, your life will get so much easier.
extracting Longhorn as we speak <wrmachine> lame <psaux> your mom <wrmachine> see, i don't install beta anything unless i'm beta testing a game <wrmachine> nor do i install software i don't intend to use <psaux> I'm installing it in Virtual PC <psaux> I want to see what's done right and what's done wrong, so that I can give the verbal smackdown to people who are all bitching about things they don't know what they're talking about <wrmachine> ya i figured it'd be on a virtual pc, but still <wrmachine> laaaame <wrmachine> my mom made banana bread <psaux> does your mom want to help me test my longhorn? <psaux> it's stable and fast, and it can stay up for months without a problem <wrmachine> i bet it'll crash as soon as i boot it
The worst is that web designers used specific parsing bugs in IE5 to trick it into rendering things the way it's supposed to. IE6 then went ahead and fixed the parsing bugs (so the trick doesn't work) without fixing exactly what it was that the trick was needed for in the first place.
The latest trend is to use Javascript to set the styles, which (imho) is a much better idea - never rely on bugs to implement features.
More like fork the code if the developers don't switch to GPL2.
Keep in mind, the standard preamble for GPL'ed code is 'Version 2 of this license, or, at your option, any later version', so any 2.0 code can be changed to 3.0 code (meaning forks could be made that could not be used commercially).
Of course, companies that use 2.0 code wouldn't choose to follow the 3.0 license and screw themselves, but they could.
Javascript could access this, then send that information to a form via a GET request (URLencoded) to a script via a 1x1 pixel iframe hidden on the page, or even a display: hidden; iframe for that matter.
I don't think this is necessarily a huge problem - it's a critical bug, but until we see some major code execution or phishing, it probably won't be as big of a deal as it could be.
The question is, can they find out how big of a memory chunk they can read before they start reading? If so, they could grab god knows how many megs and start uploading it somewhere (somehow - that's too big for a GET query) and just dump it, but if they read too much and try to read what Firefox can't access, it should (emphasis 'should') get killed by Windows instead of failing silently.
Sorry mate, but I have seen to many examples of customers being fucked over by vendors of strategic software and you can go and tell the PR department of { Oracle | Microsoft | IBM } that they are just dead wrong and for an "analyst" it's bad form to just reprint their spew.
Another example of how important a letter can be - the difference between observation and causation.:)
To add to this, personal use in Canada also covers e.g. my ripping of someone else's CDs. For example, I can borrow the parent poster's original CDs, rip them all to MP3, and then give them back, and as long as it's for personal use (i.e. I can't give or lend my copy to someone else) then it's well within the boundaries of personal use, and is thus legal (per the Copyright Act).
There have been female Time Lords, but the Doctor is a guy. The last thing we need is a gender-bending regeneration to lose all the former fans due to fanservice.
Unless, of course, you mean have a DIFFERENT Doctor, who is female, in which case you could do the whole Highlander-the-series protege-dies-then-comes-back-to-life revelation, 'Rose, you're actually a Time Lord that was left on this planet as a baby etc. etc', perhaps the love child of the doctor and Rose's mother, and we could turn it into a space opera with Daleks.
Actually, this is starting to sound weird enough that it just might work. After all, they only have two Doctors left anyway. Personally, I'm hoping that when they get to their last Doctor, they make a feature film, hugely dramatic, the Doctor sacrifices himself and dies his final time to save the universe. Then at the end, the companion lays dying with the secondary character(s) around, then suddenly, we see the regeneration effect, and s/he changes into a new form.
'Rose..? Is that you?' 'Yes... But please, call me... Doctor.'
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of those laws, however, are only 'dumb' to the people who make the site. For example, they list as 'dumb' a law that states 'Citizens may not relieve themselves or spit on the street.' I don't really think that making it illegal to relieve oneself in public is dumb, do you?
They also list the French language laws in Quebec, which state that signs must be in French, or, if bilingual, the French must be larger. French, however, is the official language of Quebec, and thus this law makes as much sense as one requiring that signs be in English anywhere else in Canada or the US.
They also say it's dumb that you can't work on your car in the street (Kanata, ON) or wash your car in the street (Montreal, QC), even though doing so could obstruct traffic or cause a danger to yourself or others.
Then they list the illegality of clear or non-dark sodas to contain caffiene - or rather, to have caffiene added to them. I read an article a few years back about the FDA reconsidering their stance on this issue (allowing it), because of possible health risks.
Then there are the laws in China about only having one child (or paying a fine) - for the world's most populous country, a country that has enough trouble supporting the population it has already, this law makes perfect sense.
That being said, there are some pretty amusing ones on that site ('It is illegal for a woman to be topless in public except as a clerk in a tropical fish store,' Liverpool, UK).
Mediocre code that does the job the way it's supposed to, or 'pretty' code that screws it up? Safari, remember, has been made to pass the Acid2 test. How is konqueror doing with that? Is it even on their agenda?
I'll take code that works as it should over code that looks as it should any day of the week.
Ah, but the problem is not that. The problem is that Safari automatically *opens* these widgets, which in turn installs and runs them. Thus, just visiting a page can install and run a widget on your system, which can, in turn, download other software and run that too. Pretty big freaking hole.
I think what he's getting at is that software perfection is an unattainable goal - software will always be imperfect, as will everything else.
What he means is that they should stop worrying about philosophical arguments and just write a good browser that does things well. I mean, writing 'perfect' code is nice and all, but apparantly, it doesn't really matter. Compare Konqueror's rendering with Safari's - Safari has recently been coded to pass the Acid2 test. How is Konqueror doing in that respect?
So what if the code is ugly? It can be cleaned up later. What good is pretty, well-written code that doesn't do what it's supposed to do properly? What's the point in having a beautifully architectured system that doesn't do the job? It's better than having an ugly one that doesn't do the job, but if you're going to write a web browser, write one that follows standards. Safari has done this with admittedly ugly code in spots. Konqueror has failed to do this, but has done so with nice code.
In the end, it comes down to the right tool for the job, and if you're a web developer trying to use the full features and expected behaviour of CSS and HTML, Konqueror is not that tool, and Safari is (or will be, once those patches are folded into release). Should the Konqueror developers be chastizing Apple for writing bad code? No, it does the job and their code doesn't, so they have no grounds for complaint other than purely philosophical.
Some more related info, for those who are interested.
I used to work for Leo, but I got out before things went from bad to worse. Other coworkers and friends, as well as my roommate, weren't so lucky.
Aside from the flash designers that he was paying under the table and the animal pornography and child pornography that he's gotten into distributing (the story didn't mention that though, I guess it's unrelated), he was just a really shady character. He was good friends with Alan Ralsky (who, at one point, both had and used my roommate's cellphone number several times), and he was all for doing whatever he could to make money. Truly, to those who believe in the capitalist ideal, he was an icon for all.
Leo is a Russia-born American citizen; the address in Mass. is his mother's address, but Leo has relocated to Russia (the article says he might be, but I can confirm this). Aside from the big screw-ups that the article mentions, he's also done such wonderful things as trying to dock people's pay so their salaries match other employees, and he fired me because the secretary, with whom he was having an affair, told him that I'd said I was going to quit (which I didn't).
I don't feel so bad now that I 'worked' for him for a few months, fudged my hours upwards by around 50-70%, and then went on vacation after I'd made a few grand off of him. Oh well.
A -- potentially better -- option is to have something like an "approved" widget download area. Say, apple's servers, where you know widgets hosted there have been given the thumbs up.
Ask and ye shall recieve - Mac OS X Downloads - Dashboard
Actually, this isn't far wrong. I guess some people get so frustrated and angry when they get dinged by the 419 scams that they go to Nigeria looking for these people... Except these people make so much money that they can essentially control entire towns and hire a small army with the money they got.
So yeah. I'm willing to bet that in Russia, soviet or not, you'd just get your ass kicked.
Well, I'd like to abandon syslog in favour of logging to an SQL database for everything (a central sysloggable database would be nice, a standard API and what have you). Text logs are nice, but given the choice, I'd rather put everything into MySQL. It's searchable, it's archivable, it's a lot faster to process than plaintext. A hundred megs of logs takes forever to process with perl, but if it's in the database, you can make a lot of queries live.
..." --database logs' and such.
SELECT SUM(transfersize)/1024 FROM logs.apache WHERE vhost = "files.darien.ca" AND date > "2005-05-01 00:00:00" AND date "2005-06-01 00:00:00"
Now I have the amount of bandwidth (in kilobytes) that was served from my files site in the month of May. Doing this with raw logs is absurdly slow in comparison, and only gets moreso as time goes on. If you want to archive them in compressed format, you can do 'mysqldump --where="date
So my recommendation for logging: support mysql!
For that matter, unless you are on an unusual architecture (like PPC or Sparc - unlikely), Flash works fine in Linux. Install the plugin, and maybe install that flash blocker that lets you click to enable it, and poof, problem solved.
This isn't even a problem, it's just laziness.
That people are lazy and are taught that getting something now is more important than working for it, and that instant gratification is to be encouraged and exploited.
A better way to fool Oracle is to run it with --help (I think) and it will ignore the host OS checks. I don't know *why*, as there is actually a documented command-line flag that is supposed to do this, but it seems as though pretty much anything will do.
KTHML is a platform-dependant mess. There's no illusion of platform independance, as KHTML was written for KDE and only for KDE. They had a ball of code that was KDE's rendering engine.
Apple took that code, worked on it, made it unarguably better. They changed the KDE dependance to OS X dependance, and gave the ball of code that is now WebKit.
The KHTML team gave a chunk of code to the world, and that's great. Apple took it, made it better, and gave it back, and now they're some evil empire.
Isn't this what the GPL is about? Why should they have to submit patchsets? Why should they have to submit changelogs? Why should they have to go to any lengths at all to make the KDE developers happy, when the whole mess wouldn't matter if the code was abstracted properly in the first place. That didn't happen though, because KDE is all about interdependancies, just like OS X is.
Cry me a river people, because the KDE team is getting no better than they gave - a ball of code. Apple may not be making it easier, but that's not their job, is it?
If you like Spotlight (and a lot of people do), I would strongly advise you to check out QuickSilver. It performs a different but similar task, and is extremely useful.
I find that Spotlight is fantastic when I want to get an overview of things - for example, if I want to type in the name of my latest project and get all the correspondance, documents, and (commented) address book entries about it. I can hit Ctrl-Space, type in "Project Gopher" for example and hit 'All Results' and bring up a window where I can organize and sort through things, arrange data, and such.
QuickSilver, however, serves a different purpose. QS seems to be for finding one thing and doing something with it. For example, I can tap Ctrl, type in "Jake Baked" (or whoever), and as I'm typing, it will (after I've typed enough) show me that it found Jake's address book card. Then I hit Enter and it brings up a new Mail message to him.
That sounds a little complex, so an example: to send a message to Johnathan Boyt, I do "John" and that's it. If I had other Johnathans in my address book I could type 'Boyt' instead, or if I knew other Boyts as well, I could type 'jobo' or 'johnb' or whatever.
Similarly, if I want to launch an application, I can do likewise. I decided to try Automator today, so I just had to do "aut" and that was it - and keep in mind, this is tapping Control, not holding it.
Quicksilver is a lot faster than Spotlight (which is saying a lot, as Spotlight isn't the least bit sluggish), so it's excellent for when you just want to do one thing with one other thing. Spotlight is great when you want to find something in, or do something with, your data as a whole. They work fantastically well together, and when you realize what it is that they each do best, your life will get so much easier.
Don't forget about those other lucky people that have had it for a few days now...
extracting Longhorn as we speak
<wrmachine> lame
<psaux> your mom
<wrmachine> see, i don't install beta anything unless i'm beta testing a game
<wrmachine> nor do i install software i don't intend to use
<psaux> I'm installing it in Virtual PC
<psaux> I want to see what's done right and what's done wrong, so that I can give the verbal smackdown to people who are all bitching about things they don't know what they're talking about
<wrmachine> ya i figured it'd be on a virtual pc, but still
<wrmachine> laaaame
<wrmachine> my mom made banana bread
<psaux> does your mom want to help me test my longhorn?
<psaux> it's stable and fast, and it can stay up for months without a problem
<wrmachine> i bet it'll crash as soon as i boot it
Oh, I almost forgot to close my /sarcasm tag.
Oh! A sarcasm tag! That's really useful.
The worst is that web designers used specific parsing bugs in IE5 to trick it into rendering things the way it's supposed to. IE6 then went ahead and fixed the parsing bugs (so the trick doesn't work) without fixing exactly what it was that the trick was needed for in the first place.
The latest trend is to use Javascript to set the styles, which (imho) is a much better idea - never rely on bugs to implement features.
...or is a feature that will be in the next release of OS X (slated soon?).
Six days (April 29, 2005).
Actually, it's probably more like hard links - where one file on disk can be two files in the filesystem at the same time. Very handy.
Q. How do you know if a Microsoft editor has changed their post?
A. There's white-out over the ink.
More like fork the code if the developers don't switch to GPL2.
Keep in mind, the standard preamble for GPL'ed code is 'Version 2 of this license, or, at your option, any later version', so any 2.0 code can be changed to 3.0 code (meaning forks could be made that could not be used commercially).
Of course, companies that use 2.0 code wouldn't choose to follow the 3.0 license and screw themselves, but they could.
Javascript could access this, then send that information to a form via a GET request (URLencoded) to a script via a 1x1 pixel iframe hidden on the page, or even a display: hidden; iframe for that matter.
I don't think this is necessarily a huge problem - it's a critical bug, but until we see some major code execution or phishing, it probably won't be as big of a deal as it could be.
The question is, can they find out how big of a memory chunk they can read before they start reading? If so, they could grab god knows how many megs and start uploading it somewhere (somehow - that's too big for a GET query) and just dump it, but if they read too much and try to read what Firefox can't access, it should (emphasis 'should') get killed by Windows instead of failing silently.
Not to be offtopic or anything, but...
:)
Sorry mate, but I have seen to many examples of customers being fucked over by vendors of strategic software and you can go and tell the PR department of { Oracle | Microsoft | IBM } that they are just dead wrong and for an "analyst" it's bad form to just reprint their spew.
Another example of how important a letter can be - the difference between observation and causation.
To add to this, personal use in Canada also covers e.g. my ripping of someone else's CDs. For example, I can borrow the parent poster's original CDs, rip them all to MP3, and then give them back, and as long as it's for personal use (i.e. I can't give or lend my copy to someone else) then it's well within the boundaries of personal use, and is thus legal (per the Copyright Act).
There have been female Time Lords, but the Doctor is a guy. The last thing we need is a gender-bending regeneration to lose all the former fans due to fanservice.
Unless, of course, you mean have a DIFFERENT Doctor, who is female, in which case you could do the whole Highlander-the-series protege-dies-then-comes-back-to-life revelation, 'Rose, you're actually a Time Lord that was left on this planet as a baby etc. etc', perhaps the love child of the doctor and Rose's mother, and we could turn it into a space opera with Daleks.
Actually, this is starting to sound weird enough that it just might work. After all, they only have two Doctors left anyway. Personally, I'm hoping that when they get to their last Doctor, they make a feature film, hugely dramatic, the Doctor sacrifices himself and dies his final time to save the universe. Then at the end, the companion lays dying with the secondary character(s) around, then suddenly, we see the regeneration effect, and s/he changes into a new form.
'Rose..? Is that you?'
'Yes... But please, call me... Doctor.'
*Cue badass Dr Who theme*