Yeah, I'm not too concerned with the folks that turn Javascript off on purpose. They know what they're in for, and they'll get a lot of pure web awfulness everywhere they go, so they're used to it. I work for state government though, and I have to provide "equivalent facilitation" for persons with disabilities, which means that everything works in a screen reader or text-mode only browser with keyboard input.
So if I want to show of my hard-earned 1337 4j4}{ h4}{0R 5k1LLz, I've gotta have the plain-jane version too.
Well, sure - it's an escalation, there's no doubt about that... but I'm game anyway, and I bet a lot of other people are too. Here's the thing:
Blue users are generally security-conscious. They probably use various antivirus technologies already, and can spot social-engineering techniques a mile away. Most ISPs and webmail providers provide automatic virus scanning anyway, and some ISPs provide a free copy of AV software. So there would be many Blue users who would be confident of weathering a storm of virus-infected email.
So, why not ask them? It's an active community with a lot of communication channels. Why not explain the risks to Blue users and require a new opt-in for the continued fight? Some would drop out, sure, but many (most?) would stay on. They joined to be proactive against the black hats. Why would they quit when it starts getting good?
Which brings me to another point: the website is down. Completely down. The DNS resolves, but the server is off. This is not an appropriate way to go out. Sure, shut down the reporting service if that's your decision, but to bring down your homepage on short notice does a disservice to the loyalty of the Blue community. Where's the opportunity for discussion, for disseminating information? Even just a "<p>We're closing our doors. Thanks for all the fish.</p>" would be better than this.
I don't know. I don't agree with how this is being handled; it seems unprofessional and defeatist. And basically just disappointing.
I'd been thinking about joining before the attacks happened. When they did, I joined as soon as I could. I thought, "This must really work." The community was patting itself on the back for survivng the attacks. They were bringing stuff back online and reporting their progress in a little box on their website.
This makes no fscking sense. One minute they're bulletproof antispam gods, the only ones with a winning solution, and the next they've shut down the entire website for good, and I have to read about it in the Post?
I thought it was pretty much over. Didn't they set up a new firewall, or get a different host, or something?
"It's clear to us that [quitting] would be the only thing to prevent a full-scale cyber-war that we just don't have the authority to start," Reshef said. "Our users never signed up for this kind of thing."
Sorry, but that's exactly what I signed on for. So,
I wonder how difficult it will be to write degradable applications with this toolkit. The demo applications I played with do nothing at all with javascript disabled... they're just a script tag in a body tag, so they make no attempt to render the application using plain HTML. I know they're just demos, but it won't save any time if you have to develop the non-js version separately... which is a problem particularly for those of us who have to develop to accessibility standards.
Also, this is coming right on the heels of the buzz about Oracle's AJAX Framework... and of course there's the Eclipse AJAX Toolkit Framework, which uses Dojo, Zimbra, and OpenRico (which in turn uses prototype)... others have mentioned Yahoo!'s toolkit and Atlas, as well, not to mention Rails... My point is that there are suddenly a ton of frameworks that all have slightly different approaches to the whole AJAX idea. Some are higher-level, some lower; some target a specific server backend; some offer UI libraries... Any or all of these might merge or die off or be made irrelevant at any time. It's almost harder to develop AJAXy applications now than back when you had to write your own HTTP request code... sure, you can knock one out in ten minutes now, but you spend the time you saved choosing the toolset beforehand.
I think I'll wait a bit... we've put the scorpions in the box and shaken it, so let's see who survives.
Nice how it's dead while the show's off the air, then builds to a peak at the end of each season.
Plus, apparently they love them some Idol in the South Pacific...
Re:Steep learning curve...?
on
Vim 7 Released
·
· Score: 1
Don't bother me with these troublesome "facts" about how "psychologists" would plot this graph. If what you say were true, my joke wouldn't work at all... or at least, it'd be about Ruby on Rails instead of vi;)
Steep learning curve...?
on
Vim 7 Released
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I tried to figure out exactly how steep vi's learning curve is, and I got a DivideByZeroException...:(
Yeah, or maybe not. Chances are that members of the St. Cloud community know exactly how much this project costs, having been informed by local media. And they're using it - which means they find the service valuable, despite the 'hiccups' and the use of their tax dollars.
As for the capital, it's being allocated to provide a public service. Not a traditional one, or even arguably a necessary one, but as I said, it's a service that the taxpayers find valuable. The service benefits everyone - efficient businesses, inefficient businesses... whoever. The playing field is just as level as it always was, unless you happen to be an efficient business with six-inch steel walls and no signal.
Sorry, but the private model isn't any better - it's hard to imagine a more inefficient business than a national communications corporation. This program is an investment - by saving these people money on their Internet rates, they'll have more money to put into *local* businesses.
I don't have numbers to support this (I doubt anybody does at this stage), but there's a potential general economic benefit to providing this service - for instance, supporting small businesses by providing their connectivity, being able to negotiate prices with ISPs as a block instead of individually, or encouraging folks to raise their level of technological competence, making them a more effective workforce. Maybe more?
I hope there's at least a chance that this pays for itself... that's probably the only way we'll ever see it adopted on a larger scale.
... because you'll have a choice. You can either watch low-res, grainy video with commercials over an Internet connection, or grab a torrent and watch full-quality video with no commercials right off your hard drive. When you can wake up Monday morning and find an hours-old HR-HDTV copy of the Sopranos with 5.1 audio sitting on your desktop, that you can watch whenever you want, you get spoiled.
Sounds kinda like Relatable's TRM fingerprints, which are used by MusicBrainz and in the Neuros audio player.
IIRC, the fingerprints don't have any actual content in them, but instead describe the characteristics of the audio. So it's plausible, at least, that they can't listen in on your conversations, but could still uniquely identify what you're listening to.
You can have many of these fine features with Google as well, using Firefox extensions such as GooglePreview, CustomizeGoogle, and LookAhead. You can even jump over and search ask.com (and many others) with one extra click, if you wanna.
I worked out a way to do this recently using Javascript, without changing the href attribute or adding any other attributes to the link. All that is needed is to add two Javascript references in the page head.
The script adds a click event handler to each link found on the page. When the link is clicked, an AJAX-style request is sent to the server, with the URL and link text. Meanwhile the user goes on to the link destination. You can also limit the event handlers to a particular HTML element by class or ID attribute.
Yes, it could be used for nefarious purposes... but from a site administration standpoint, it is useful to see which links are being clicked. It goes beyond just server logs... you can see which areas of your page are most visible or draw the user's attention, for instance.
I posted some of my code for this last month. (This is a link to my site, which has no commercial purpose and does not employ tracking of any kind, including the technique described above.)
Just be sure that you don't have a pacemaker, braces, plates, pins, screws or other assorted metal items embedded in your body. Don't wear glasses, jewelry of any kind, anything with a zipper, or metal eyelets, buttons, or rivets. Don't carry your keys, a pocketknife, a USB key, or any writing implements. For that matter, the use of nearly all office supplies is prohibited, including staplers, hole punches, binder clips, hanging files, and push pins. Be sure not to use any silverware or cookware nearby, and you can't use any tools - no screwdrivers, pliers, or hammers. Motorized electric tools are out as well.
Oh, and be sure not to use any metal at all when you build it.
Thanks to their Ajax prowess, Google can set themselves up as the provider of any kind of software you can think of... with two exceptions. You need an operating system and a browser to be a Google consumer. Why not go ahead and take care of one of those? They're just increasing the amount of the stack that they control.
I'm on a team that manages a very large website for a state government agency. We are, as of recently, facing new statewide standards for IT accessibility. What we are finding out is that developing accessible applications and content actually goes hand-in-hand with other development best practices. For example, it's far easier to develop a site template that uses CSS for all aspects of presentation than it is to maintain alternative text-only content for screen readers (which is a requirement of the accessibility standards).
At least on the web side, if you already follow good development practices, maintain W3C compliance, etc., then adding accessibility to the mix isn't that much of a stretch. We've got some legacy applications left over that are going to be hell to bring into compliance because these practices weren't followed - the HTML's all mixed in with the logic.
We've got a lot of work ahead, but we don't consider it a hardship - our site will be easier to maintain in the long run, because accessibility standards just happen to encourage a highly maintainable site design.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.speex.org/
It's like Ogg for speech instead of music. I use it for audiobooks and such, but I can't take it with me yet.
Yeah, but you'd buy it. C'mon, you know you would.
If I wish really, really hard, it'll all work out. You know, idealism.
Seriously, though, I'd plunk down, oh, say $500 for this and never look back.
K, then I won't buy anything. Love, 6 billion humans.
Hardware manufacturers! I'll make this easy for you. Here's what I want:
I don't care about video. I mean seriously, it's a 2.5 inch screen. And I want to pay $200. So you have your assignment now.
Go.
/* libAnonCoward.php */
function Redirect($location) {
header("Location: $location");
die;
}
function MapPath($file) {
return realpath($file);
}
Yeah, I'm not too concerned with the folks that turn Javascript off on purpose. They know what they're in for, and they'll get a lot of pure web awfulness everywhere they go, so they're used to it. I work for state government though, and I have to provide "equivalent facilitation" for persons with disabilities, which means that everything works in a screen reader or text-mode only browser with keyboard input.
So if I want to show of my hard-earned 1337 4j4}{ h4}{0R 5k1LLz, I've gotta have the plain-jane version too.
Hadn't heard of that one yet. And I realized later that I had forgotten Echo, so things just keep getting better and better.
Well, sure - it's an escalation, there's no doubt about that... but I'm game anyway, and I bet a lot of other people are too. Here's the thing:
Blue users are generally security-conscious. They probably use various antivirus technologies already, and can spot social-engineering techniques a mile away. Most ISPs and webmail providers provide automatic virus scanning anyway, and some ISPs provide a free copy of AV software. So there would be many Blue users who would be confident of weathering a storm of virus-infected email.
So, why not ask them? It's an active community with a lot of communication channels. Why not explain the risks to Blue users and require a new opt-in for the continued fight? Some would drop out, sure, but many (most?) would stay on. They joined to be proactive against the black hats. Why would they quit when it starts getting good?
Which brings me to another point: the website is down. Completely down. The DNS resolves, but the server is off. This is not an appropriate way to go out. Sure, shut down the reporting service if that's your decision, but to bring down your homepage on short notice does a disservice to the loyalty of the Blue community. Where's the opportunity for discussion, for disseminating information? Even just a "<p>We're closing our doors. Thanks for all the fish.</p>" would be better than this.
I don't know. I don't agree with how this is being handled; it seems unprofessional and defeatist. And basically just disappointing.
I'd been thinking about joining before the attacks happened. When they did, I joined as soon as I could. I thought, "This must really work." The community was patting itself on the back for survivng the attacks. They were bringing stuff back online and reporting their progress in a little box on their website.
This makes no fscking sense. One minute they're bulletproof antispam gods, the only ones with a winning solution, and the next they've shut down the entire website for good, and I have to read about it in the Post?
I thought it was pretty much over. Didn't they set up a new firewall, or get a different host, or something? Sorry, but that's exactly what I signed on for. So,
What the hell?
I wonder how difficult it will be to write degradable applications with this toolkit. The demo applications I played with do nothing at all with javascript disabled... they're just a script tag in a body tag, so they make no attempt to render the application using plain HTML. I know they're just demos, but it won't save any time if you have to develop the non-js version separately... which is a problem particularly for those of us who have to develop to accessibility standards.
Also, this is coming right on the heels of the buzz about Oracle's AJAX Framework... and of course there's the Eclipse AJAX Toolkit Framework, which uses Dojo, Zimbra, and OpenRico (which in turn uses prototype)... others have mentioned Yahoo!'s toolkit and Atlas, as well, not to mention Rails... My point is that there are suddenly a ton of frameworks that all have slightly different approaches to the whole AJAX idea. Some are higher-level, some lower; some target a specific server backend; some offer UI libraries... Any or all of these might merge or die off or be made irrelevant at any time. It's almost harder to develop AJAXy applications now than back when you had to write your own HTTP request code... sure, you can knock one out in ten minutes now, but you spend the time you saved choosing the toolset beforehand.
I think I'll wait a bit... we've put the scorpions in the box and shaken it, so let's see who survives.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=american+idol&ctab= 0&date=all&geo=all
Nice how it's dead while the show's off the air, then builds to a peak at the end of each season.
Plus, apparently they love them some Idol in the South Pacific...
Don't bother me with these troublesome "facts" about how "psychologists" would plot this graph. If what you say were true, my joke wouldn't work at all... or at least, it'd be about Ruby on Rails instead of vi ;)
I tried to figure out exactly how steep vi's learning curve is, and I got a DivideByZeroException... :(
Yeah, or maybe not. Chances are that members of the St. Cloud community know exactly how much this project costs, having been informed by local media. And they're using it - which means they find the service valuable, despite the 'hiccups' and the use of their tax dollars.
As for the capital, it's being allocated to provide a public service. Not a traditional one, or even arguably a necessary one, but as I said, it's a service that the taxpayers find valuable. The service benefits everyone - efficient businesses, inefficient businesses... whoever. The playing field is just as level as it always was, unless you happen to be an efficient business with six-inch steel walls and no signal.
Sorry, but the private model isn't any better - it's hard to imagine a more inefficient business than a national communications corporation. This program is an investment - by saving these people money on their Internet rates, they'll have more money to put into *local* businesses.
I don't have numbers to support this (I doubt anybody does at this stage), but there's a potential general economic benefit to providing this service - for instance, supporting small businesses by providing their connectivity, being able to negotiate prices with ISPs as a block instead of individually, or encouraging folks to raise their level of technological competence, making them a more effective workforce. Maybe more?
I hope there's at least a chance that this pays for itself... that's probably the only way we'll ever see it adopted on a larger scale.
... because you'll have a choice. You can either watch low-res, grainy video with commercials over an Internet connection, or grab a torrent and watch full-quality video with no commercials right off your hard drive. When you can wake up Monday morning and find an hours-old HR-HDTV copy of the Sopranos with 5.1 audio sitting on your desktop, that you can watch whenever you want, you get spoiled.
Sounds kinda like Relatable's TRM fingerprints, which are used by MusicBrainz and in the Neuros audio player.
IIRC, the fingerprints don't have any actual content in them, but instead describe the characteristics of the audio. So it's plausible, at least, that they can't listen in on your conversations, but could still uniquely identify what you're listening to.
I'm just recompiling my kernel without support for ELF binaries. Just a quick reboot, and I'
You can have many of these fine features with Google as well, using Firefox extensions such as GooglePreview, CustomizeGoogle, and LookAhead. You can even jump over and search ask.com (and many others) with one extra click, if you wanna.
Just saying.
Although efforts are underway to port Evolution to Windows, it doesn't run yet. IIRC, it can be compiled, but it's far from usable...
Stay tuned though; Tor Lillqvist's pretty unstoppable.
I worked out a way to do this recently using Javascript, without changing the href attribute or adding any other attributes to the link. All that is needed is to add two Javascript references in the page head.
The script adds a click event handler to each link found on the page. When the link is clicked, an AJAX-style request is sent to the server, with the URL and link text. Meanwhile the user goes on to the link destination. You can also limit the event handlers to a particular HTML element by class or ID attribute.
Yes, it could be used for nefarious purposes... but from a site administration standpoint, it is useful to see which links are being clicked. It goes beyond just server logs... you can see which areas of your page are most visible or draw the user's attention, for instance.
I posted some of my code for this last month. (This is a link to my site, which has no commercial purpose and does not employ tracking of any kind, including the technique described above.)
Just be sure that you don't have a pacemaker, braces, plates, pins, screws or other assorted metal items embedded in your body. Don't wear glasses, jewelry of any kind, anything with a zipper, or metal eyelets, buttons, or rivets. Don't carry your keys, a pocketknife, a USB key, or any writing implements. For that matter, the use of nearly all office supplies is prohibited, including staplers, hole punches, binder clips, hanging files, and push pins. Be sure not to use any silverware or cookware nearby, and you can't use any tools - no screwdrivers, pliers, or hammers. Motorized electric tools are out as well.
Oh, and be sure not to use any metal at all when you build it.
Otherwise, enjoy your travels!
Thanks to their Ajax prowess, Google can set themselves up as the provider of any kind of software you can think of... with two exceptions. You need an operating system and a browser to be a Google consumer. Why not go ahead and take care of one of those? They're just increasing the amount of the stack that they control.
Makes sense, right?
I'm on a team that manages a very large website for a state government agency. We are, as of recently, facing new statewide standards for IT accessibility. What we are finding out is that developing accessible applications and content actually goes hand-in-hand with other development best practices. For example, it's far easier to develop a site template that uses CSS for all aspects of presentation than it is to maintain alternative text-only content for screen readers (which is a requirement of the accessibility standards).
At least on the web side, if you already follow good development practices, maintain W3C compliance, etc., then adding accessibility to the mix isn't that much of a stretch. We've got some legacy applications left over that are going to be hell to bring into compliance because these practices weren't followed - the HTML's all mixed in with the logic.
We've got a lot of work ahead, but we don't consider it a hardship - our site will be easier to maintain in the long run, because accessibility standards just happen to encourage a highly maintainable site design.