I wasn't saying that CSS2 is not a flawed specification. I was pointing out that the second sentence was wrong - the one that said CSS 2.1 will totally replace CSS 2. CSS 2.1 is CSS 2. It's like arguing that KDE 3.5 will totally replace KDE - not quite right, is it?
No CSS specification has been ratified as a standard to my knowledge. If you want a standardised stylesheet language, use ISO/IEC 10179:1996 (DSSSL).
it's also a no-brainer that it's asking for a trademark infringement suit
I wouldn't have said so - Microsoft shouldn't have a trademark on "windows". It's like if Microsoft trademarked the word "server" today, marketed a product called "Microsoft Server", and then, in twenty years time, sued everybody else who uses the word "server" or something that resembles it. Sounds completely bizarre, but it's essentially what Microsoft did with the word "windows".
Also, IIRC, Microsoft didn't/couldn't trademark "windows" in some places, which is why they sued Lindows in more than one country.
Clearly "Windows Vista" is not the same as "Vista" the software company.
That will be Microsoft's position right up until such time as Windows Vista is large enough to be the dominant name in the industry, and then they'll just turn around and sue him for infringing on their Windows Vista trademark.
Right now, the name can be changed without Microsoft caring too much. If it gets to release time, there is no way in hell Microsoft will change the name. They'll just throw lawyers at him until he gives in. If it doesn't work in the USA, they'll harass him in other countries.
Right now, he's got a clear advantage. If he makes every move to completely stop their use of the mark 'Vista' (as opposed to licensing it to them or something), then they'll probably change the name sharpish. But if he shows any sign of weakness, they'll just steamroller him into submission.
Part of the reasons MS's product releases take so long and are so complex is their obligation to be backwardly compatible with all previous versions. And they've done a great job of it.
In some cases yes, in some cases no. The Internet Explorer developers don't do a very good job of it. There are plenty of ways in which Internet Explorer 6 broke backwards compatibility with previous versions. Internet Explorer 5.x did the same thing. Remember "channels" that Internet Explorer 4 supported? They were a precursor to RSS that Microsoft dropped once the "push" buzzword fell out of favour. Java too was supported by Microsoft then dropped.
With Linux and OS X/OS 9, you can test in multiple versions of browsers because they aren't tied to the operating system. Multiple Internet Explorers on one version of Windows is an unstable hack and it isn't a hack that you can rely on to work in the future. Internet Explorer's behaviour already varies depending on what service packs you have installed, this just makes testing even more of a pain in the neck.
The license agreement is worthless. You don't see it until you have already bought the copy of Windows XP. You can't retroactively change the terms of a sale after the sale has already occurred. When you walk into a shop and buy a copy of Windows XP, that's a sale. You have bought a copy of Windows XP. Whatever is inside the box is your property, and if you choose to rip up the license "agreement", you can. If I sell you a box of chocolates, and you open it up and there's a bit of paper that says "PS: you owe me ten pink elephants", that doesn't mean you owe me ten pink elephants. It just means you own a box of chocolates and a piece of paper with some words on it. When you buy a copy of Windows XP, and find a license agreement inside, all it means is that you own a copy of Windows XP and a piece of paper with some words on it.
If you actually "Owned" your copy of XP, why couldn't you pick it apart with a debugger and publish whatever you find?
That depends on your definition of "what you find". If "what you find" is, say, an image embedded in some binary file, then copyright law would prevent you from publishing it. No need for a license agreement. If "what you find" is, say, a secret API, you could publish the fact that there's a secret API in there.
It obviously requires an identity layer? News to me. As a card-carrying member of the tinfoil hat brigade, I prefer anonimity.
Then why are you posting as Atlantis-Rising and not as Anonymous Coward?
Identity and anonymity are not mutually exclusive. Slashdot has identified you as Atlantis-Rising. They need to identify you in order to provide you with your karma bonus, your custom homepage, and so on.
So long as an identity system is not required to link an identity to a particular real-world person, or with other identities shared by that particular person, it can support anonymity just fine.
The backwards compatibility is under the assumption that the people using XML do sensible things.
In RSS before the most recent change, certain element types can contain normal text (e.g. <foo>x < y is a formula</foo>) and HTML that is doubly encoded (e.g. <foo>x &lt; y is a <em>formula</em></foo>).
As far as the rules of XML go, that's all just text. It's the RSS specification that says what the text means. The RSS specification hides the markup from normal XML rules by encoding it instead of using namespaces.
So basically, if a feed reader sees < in the text, it has no way of knowing whether it's meant to be an actual less-than sign in normal text, or if it's meant to be part of the markup in HTML.
Then the RSS board went and changed the "frozen" RSS 2.0 specification to say that it's always doubly-encoded HTML. That's great, except this "frozen" specification has suddenly changed in such a way as to make previously valid feeds (e.g. the Reuters feeds) invalid. And they refused to admit that it was an incompatible change, and refused to change the version number. Their reasoning for not changing the version number? Because the spec is frozen! Gotta love the logic on that one, huh? So now it is possible to author a feed that is simultaneously valid RSS 2.0 and invalid RSS 2.0 - depending on what version of RSS 2.0 you are talking about.
And people wonder why Atom and proper standardisation is needed.
If the improvements in IE 7.0 are restricted to Longhorn only
How is it possible that you could respond to a story entitled "Internet Explorer 7 To Be XP Only", that states that Internet Explorer 7 will run on Windows XP... and understand that to mean that Internet Explorer 7 won't run on Windows XP?
Microsoft hold the trademark "Windows XP". They hold the copyright to the code they ship. They do not own all copies of Windows XP. Trademarks are not property. Copyright is not property. When you buy something, you own it. When you buy a copy of Windows you own that copy. It is your property.
It never occured to me that the fact that some Apache directives are enclosed in markup tags makes it XML.
It doesn't make it XML. It makes it like XML. That's part of the point I was making. The marked up structure without the benefits.
To me, they are conceptually similar to braces for code blocks.
Yes, they denote where a particular logical structure begins and ends. Just like XML - the logical structure you are delimiting with tags is called an element.
Spaces in file names have never been an issue for me, since one can use an escape character
Which escape character? Okay, so you've chosen an escape character. Now how do you use filenames with that escape character in?
Sure, you can figure out ways of getting around it, the value in XML is that somebody has already figured out decent rules, that everybody who has worked with any form of XML already understands.
I'm just surprised that my perspective is entirely different from yours. Perhaps the fact that I was introduced to httpd almost a decade ago, and have accepted the config file format as such, explains a lot about why some of those "corner cases" still exist. I'm more than happy to shrug my shoulders and say, "well, that's the way it always was."
Well I've been dealing with Apache config files for years as well, although not quite as long as you. But I guess I don't accept "that's the way it always was" as a valid reason for avoiding XML. Config file syntax is something that isn't solved well by Apache, as this presentation points out. To improve it, you need to look at alternatives. XML is a very good alternative, especially as the most common objection to XML for config files (tag phobia) doesn't apply, since the Apache config syntax already uses tags, albeit in a non-standard way.
It's not like this in music CD's, but why do we have to include product descriptions on the front of a game package?
Because despite his blather about the "feel" of the game, you can actually get at least some sense of what a game is like from words and pictures. Beyond saying if an album's "blues" or "pop" or whatever, there's very little to impart about music without writing a full review, and even then there's little chance of you knowing what it's really like until you listen to it.
Or do you REALLY CARE that much if there happens to be a "www" in the location bar?
It's got nothing to do with the location bar. http://example.com/foo.html and http://www.example.com/foo.html are completely different resources as far as HTTP is concerned, and they are cached separately. This drives down cache hits, wasting bandwidth and increasing server load.
I get spam after spam from a few companies that swear they aren't spammers. I email them from a throwaway account complaining, but refuse to tell them my real email address, because that only makes it more valuable to spammers.
Don't get me wrong, I -know- they screen-scraped my email address from websites, usenet, whatever, because I tag my email address wherever I go (I have my own domain).
The way I see it, their list is tainted with people who don't want to be on it. Disclosing my email address, even if they are completely ethical, will only solve my problem. They'll continue spamming everyone else whose email address they have.
So I do my best to explain the issues to somebody higher up than the average grunt, and if I don't get through, I block them from my mail servers completely, for all users.
One example of these idiots are the people behind ScribeStudio, who insist that they aren't spamming, even though they are emailing me on an address that I only use in a single newsgroup that has nothing to do with their company or product.
what are acceptable and ethical ways to promote targeted offers to email users?
As many people have said, double opt-in is the only way to go, along with an unsubscribe link that actually works.
But you need to handle your existing list. Emailing them and telling them that they can unsubscribe is not good enough. All spammers say that. You need to email them and say "if you wish to continue to receive our mailings, click here".
The first thing your boss will say is "but hardly anybody will do that!" That is exactly the point of doing it. If "hardly anybody will do that", then that means that the majority of people on your list don't want to be on it and you are spamming them.
They also 'published a second notice indicating that it would do the things it had earlier said it wouldn't do.' A TSA spokesman said the info will be destroyed when the test is over.
And when the test is over, what stops them from publishing a third notice indicating that they won't destroy it after all?
If this sort of thing happened in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office would be all over them.
In response basically every flaw is downloayed, denied, blamed on me, or declared to be "a better way of doing things".
In fairness, that is often a correct response. Too many people come over from other operating systems demanding that it work exactly like they are used to, no matter how broken that is. For example, a Windows 98 user that wants to log in as root all the time. It's a really bad idea, but try pointing that out, and you get accused of being elitist snobs.
I've no idea if this is (not|partly|completely) the case with you, but you might want to bear it in mind before accusing people of being zealots. It might just be that, although it's been working for you in the past, your methods have big downsides and the way the Linux software is built avoids them.
Because I like plain text config files just the way they are.
The Apache config isn't plain text. It's an ad-hoc format that is similar to XML but doesn't have as many of the benefits.
There's no such thing as a "plain text" config file format, only ad-hoc formats. You still have to have a custom parser, you still have to figure out the syntax, you still have the corner cases (e.g. spaces in filenames). XML solves all that.
People always consider their slides "the presentation".
Have you ever thought that there might be regional differences in what people consider "the presentation"? A presentation, to me, and everybody I have worked with, and everybody I went to school/college/university with, is when you stand up and say stuff in front of a bunch of people. The slides? They call them "the slides".
If you equate the slides with the presentation, then you must give really crap presentations. Think about it: if the slides say everything that is needed, what are you for? Why not just hand out leaflets instead?
"Puttomg a presentation online" consists of...
It doesn't matter what "putting a presentation online" consists of, because nowhere in the summary did anybody say that a presentation was put online. Like the previous poster, you are misrepresenting the summary. It said:
Today's the last day of ApacheCon Europe; There was a hilarious presentation...
ApacheCon Europe is a conference. Where get-up-and-talk presentations occur. This sentence is talking about once such event. It's not talking about a presentation in the form of a computer file.
It offers a link, which I presumed to represent the presentation in some way. The slides alone do not represent the presentation, because the presentation is mainly somebody standing up on stage talking, using the slides as a focal point. A transcript could represent the presentation. A video could represent the presentation. In some cases, an audio feed could represent the presentation. The slides don't, because they don't include anything the person said.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't saying that CSS2 is not a flawed specification. I was pointing out that the second sentence was wrong - the one that said CSS 2.1 will totally replace CSS 2. CSS 2.1 is CSS 2. It's like arguing that KDE 3.5 will totally replace KDE - not quite right, is it?
No CSS specification has been ratified as a standard to my knowledge. If you want a standardised stylesheet language, use ISO/IEC 10179:1996 (DSSSL).
it's also a no-brainer that it's asking for a trademark infringement suit
I wouldn't have said so - Microsoft shouldn't have a trademark on "windows". It's like if Microsoft trademarked the word "server" today, marketed a product called "Microsoft Server", and then, in twenty years time, sued everybody else who uses the word "server" or something that resembles it. Sounds completely bizarre, but it's essentially what Microsoft did with the word "windows".
Also, IIRC, Microsoft didn't/couldn't trademark "windows" in some places, which is why they sued Lindows in more than one country.
when someone with this kind of nickname posts about microsoft, its bound not to sound objective or credible.
All the poster did was summarise a story published by the Seattle Times. How much objectivity or credibility do you need for that?
Clearly "Windows Vista" is not the same as "Vista" the software company.
That will be Microsoft's position right up until such time as Windows Vista is large enough to be the dominant name in the industry, and then they'll just turn around and sue him for infringing on their Windows Vista trademark.
Right now, the name can be changed without Microsoft caring too much. If it gets to release time, there is no way in hell Microsoft will change the name. They'll just throw lawyers at him until he gives in. If it doesn't work in the USA, they'll harass him in other countries.
Right now, he's got a clear advantage. If he makes every move to completely stop their use of the mark 'Vista' (as opposed to licensing it to them or something), then they'll probably change the name sharpish. But if he shows any sign of weakness, they'll just steamroller him into submission.
Part of the reasons MS's product releases take so long and are so complex is their obligation to be backwardly compatible with all previous versions. And they've done a great job of it.
In some cases yes, in some cases no. The Internet Explorer developers don't do a very good job of it. There are plenty of ways in which Internet Explorer 6 broke backwards compatibility with previous versions. Internet Explorer 5.x did the same thing. Remember "channels" that Internet Explorer 4 supported? They were a precursor to RSS that Microsoft dropped once the "push" buzzword fell out of favour. Java too was supported by Microsoft then dropped.
With Linux and OS X/OS 9, you can test in multiple versions of browsers because they aren't tied to the operating system. Multiple Internet Explorers on one version of Windows is an unstable hack and it isn't a hack that you can rely on to work in the future. Internet Explorer's behaviour already varies depending on what service packs you have installed, this just makes testing even more of a pain in the neck.
Go read the license agreement
The license agreement is worthless. You don't see it until you have already bought the copy of Windows XP. You can't retroactively change the terms of a sale after the sale has already occurred. When you walk into a shop and buy a copy of Windows XP, that's a sale. You have bought a copy of Windows XP. Whatever is inside the box is your property, and if you choose to rip up the license "agreement", you can. If I sell you a box of chocolates, and you open it up and there's a bit of paper that says "PS: you owe me ten pink elephants", that doesn't mean you owe me ten pink elephants. It just means you own a box of chocolates and a piece of paper with some words on it. When you buy a copy of Windows XP, and find a license agreement inside, all it means is that you own a copy of Windows XP and a piece of paper with some words on it.
If you actually "Owned" your copy of XP, why couldn't you pick it apart with a debugger and publish whatever you find?
That depends on your definition of "what you find". If "what you find" is, say, an image embedded in some binary file, then copyright law would prevent you from publishing it. No need for a license agreement. If "what you find" is, say, a secret API, you could publish the fact that there's a secret API in there.
Actually, rule zero is really that there is no global identity management system.
I thought the first rule of identity is you do not talk about the global identity system.
It obviously requires an identity layer? News to me. As a card-carrying member of the tinfoil hat brigade, I prefer anonimity.
Then why are you posting as Atlantis-Rising and not as Anonymous Coward?
Identity and anonymity are not mutually exclusive. Slashdot has identified you as Atlantis-Rising. They need to identify you in order to provide you with your karma bonus, your custom homepage, and so on.
So long as an identity system is not required to link an identity to a particular real-world person, or with other identities shared by that particular person, it can support anonymity just fine.
The backwards compatibility is under the assumption that the people using XML do sensible things.
In RSS before the most recent change, certain element types can contain normal text (e.g. <foo>x < y is a formula</foo>) and HTML that is doubly encoded (e.g. <foo>x &lt; y is a <em>formula</em></foo>).
As far as the rules of XML go, that's all just text. It's the RSS specification that says what the text means. The RSS specification hides the markup from normal XML rules by encoding it instead of using namespaces.
So basically, if a feed reader sees < in the text, it has no way of knowing whether it's meant to be an actual less-than sign in normal text, or if it's meant to be part of the markup in HTML.
Then the RSS board went and changed the "frozen" RSS 2.0 specification to say that it's always doubly-encoded HTML. That's great, except this "frozen" specification has suddenly changed in such a way as to make previously valid feeds (e.g. the Reuters feeds) invalid. And they refused to admit that it was an incompatible change, and refused to change the version number. Their reasoning for not changing the version number? Because the spec is frozen! Gotta love the logic on that one, huh? So now it is possible to author a feed that is simultaneously valid RSS 2.0 and invalid RSS 2.0 - depending on what version of RSS 2.0 you are talking about.
And people wonder why Atom and proper standardisation is needed.
If the improvements in IE 7.0 are restricted to Longhorn only
How is it possible that you could respond to a story entitled "Internet Explorer 7 To Be XP Only", that states that Internet Explorer 7 will run on Windows XP... and understand that to mean that Internet Explorer 7 won't run on Windows XP?
CSS2 *IS* a flawed standard. That's why CSS 2.1 will totally replace it once it's finalized.
What you mean is "CSS 2.0 is a flawed specification".
Please see CSS2.1 is CSS2. In short, "CSS 2.1" is short for "CSS 2, Revision 1".
Microsoft own Windows XP
Microsoft hold the trademark "Windows XP". They hold the copyright to the code they ship. They do not own all copies of Windows XP. Trademarks are not property. Copyright is not property. When you buy something, you own it. When you buy a copy of Windows you own that copy. It is your property.
It never occured to me that the fact that some Apache directives are enclosed in markup tags makes it XML.
It doesn't make it XML. It makes it like XML. That's part of the point I was making. The marked up structure without the benefits.
To me, they are conceptually similar to braces for code blocks.
Yes, they denote where a particular logical structure begins and ends. Just like XML - the logical structure you are delimiting with tags is called an element.
Spaces in file names have never been an issue for me, since one can use an escape character
Which escape character? Okay, so you've chosen an escape character. Now how do you use filenames with that escape character in?
Sure, you can figure out ways of getting around it, the value in XML is that somebody has already figured out decent rules, that everybody who has worked with any form of XML already understands.
I'm just surprised that my perspective is entirely different from yours. Perhaps the fact that I was introduced to httpd almost a decade ago, and have accepted the config file format as such, explains a lot about why some of those "corner cases" still exist. I'm more than happy to shrug my shoulders and say, "well, that's the way it always was."
Well I've been dealing with Apache config files for years as well, although not quite as long as you. But I guess I don't accept "that's the way it always was" as a valid reason for avoiding XML. Config file syntax is something that isn't solved well by Apache, as this presentation points out. To improve it, you need to look at alternatives. XML is a very good alternative, especially as the most common objection to XML for config files (tag phobia) doesn't apply, since the Apache config syntax already uses tags, albeit in a non-standard way.
Also: data sources in XML format.
It's not like this in music CD's, but why do we have to include product descriptions on the front of a game package?
Because despite his blather about the "feel" of the game, you can actually get at least some sense of what a game is like from words and pictures. Beyond saying if an album's "blues" or "pop" or whatever, there's very little to impart about music without writing a full review, and even then there's little chance of you knowing what it's really like until you listen to it.
Or do you REALLY CARE that much if there happens to be a "www" in the location bar?
It's got nothing to do with the location bar. http://example.com/foo.html and http://www.example.com/foo.html are completely different resources as far as HTTP is concerned, and they are cached separately. This drives down cache hits, wasting bandwidth and increasing server load.
I get spam after spam from a few companies that swear they aren't spammers. I email them from a throwaway account complaining, but refuse to tell them my real email address, because that only makes it more valuable to spammers.
Don't get me wrong, I -know- they screen-scraped my email address from websites, usenet, whatever, because I tag my email address wherever I go (I have my own domain).
The way I see it, their list is tainted with people who don't want to be on it. Disclosing my email address, even if they are completely ethical, will only solve my problem. They'll continue spamming everyone else whose email address they have.
So I do my best to explain the issues to somebody higher up than the average grunt, and if I don't get through, I block them from my mail servers completely, for all users.
One example of these idiots are the people behind ScribeStudio, who insist that they aren't spamming, even though they are emailing me on an address that I only use in a single newsgroup that has nothing to do with their company or product.
what are acceptable and ethical ways to promote targeted offers to email users?
As many people have said, double opt-in is the only way to go, along with an unsubscribe link that actually works.
But you need to handle your existing list. Emailing them and telling them that they can unsubscribe is not good enough. All spammers say that. You need to email them and say "if you wish to continue to receive our mailings, click here".
The first thing your boss will say is "but hardly anybody will do that!" That is exactly the point of doing it. If "hardly anybody will do that", then that means that the majority of people on your list don't want to be on it and you are spamming them.
They also 'published a second notice indicating that it would do the things it had earlier said it wouldn't do.' A TSA spokesman said the info will be destroyed when the test is over.
And when the test is over, what stops them from publishing a third notice indicating that they won't destroy it after all?
If this sort of thing happened in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office would be all over them.
In response basically every flaw is downloayed, denied, blamed on me, or declared to be "a better way of doing things".
In fairness, that is often a correct response. Too many people come over from other operating systems demanding that it work exactly like they are used to, no matter how broken that is. For example, a Windows 98 user that wants to log in as root all the time. It's a really bad idea, but try pointing that out, and you get accused of being elitist snobs.
I've no idea if this is (not|partly|completely) the case with you, but you might want to bear it in mind before accusing people of being zealots. It might just be that, although it's been working for you in the past, your methods have big downsides and the way the Linux software is built avoids them.
Because I like plain text config files just the way they are.
The Apache config isn't plain text. It's an ad-hoc format that is similar to XML but doesn't have as many of the benefits.
There's no such thing as a "plain text" config file format, only ad-hoc formats. You still have to have a custom parser, you still have to figure out the syntax, you still have the corner cases (e.g. spaces in filenames). XML solves all that.
People always consider their slides "the presentation".
Have you ever thought that there might be regional differences in what people consider "the presentation"? A presentation, to me, and everybody I have worked with, and everybody I went to school/college/university with, is when you stand up and say stuff in front of a bunch of people. The slides? They call them "the slides".
If you equate the slides with the presentation, then you must give really crap presentations. Think about it: if the slides say everything that is needed, what are you for? Why not just hand out leaflets instead?
"Puttomg a presentation online" consists of...
It doesn't matter what "putting a presentation online" consists of, because nowhere in the summary did anybody say that a presentation was put online. Like the previous poster, you are misrepresenting the summary. It said:
Today's the last day of ApacheCon Europe; There was a hilarious presentation...
ApacheCon Europe is a conference. Where get-up-and-talk presentations occur. This sentence is talking about once such event. It's not talking about a presentation in the form of a computer file.
It offers a link, which I presumed to represent the presentation in some way. The slides alone do not represent the presentation, because the presentation is mainly somebody standing up on stage talking, using the slides as a focal point. A transcript could represent the presentation. A video could represent the presentation. In some cases, an audio feed could represent the presentation. The slides don't, because they don't include anything the person said.
I got caught up in the hype myself to a certain extent. I started to believe I didn't need the computer for games.
Yeah, me too. I thought that if I stared at the CD and concentrated really hard, that I could play the game purely with the power of my mind.
Damn hype.
he wants to be a girl, he's already 3/4 of the way there. lol
Grow up.
let's hope these hollywood hacks don't fuck up moore like league of extraordinary gentlemen
Fucking it up in the style of League of Gentlemen would be interesting though.