Well, there are many mechanisms to choose from, some of which are already implemented on Wikipedia. There are many commercial and political interests in the biggest and most popular online encyclopedia, so this search venture is not that very different in that sense.
The real answer, I guess, is that you can't control it for all cases, but you can be sure that the most popular terms will have enough eyes on them to be safe from it.
Yes, for instance the "Passion of the Jew" episode was aired very shortly after the Passion of the Christ movie was released in theaters, and its controversy as being allegedly anti-semitic and unnecessarily graphic was very, very fresh in people's minds.
Their response time allows them to be very brilliant with excellent timing.
Well, the post claims that it would take 3+ hours to execute the statement. It didn't say anything about how long it would take to put those changes in the production site. I mean, I would assume that the site was running on a mirror database while the reconstruction happened. Doing the switch is not so trivial in a website as big as Slashdot...
18 hours is a pretty good response time, considering that this is not a banking site or anything of the sort.
What are your plans for pushing version 2 to the current group of 1.* users? Do you have a strict policy of not pushing major version changes through automatic updates, or is it something that will be done eventually?
Either way, do you have any plans for those users who don't posses automatic update capabilities (pre-1.5)?
Even though I know those sites actually exist, I spend most of my life browsing the web (part of my job, in fact) with Firefox, and I almost never encounter Firefox-specific problems. Any respectable website (except Marlboro maybe) follows basic standards well enough these days. Even horribly random sites such as MySpace or hi5 work on Firefox just fine.
I downloaded IE7, but mostly out of curiosity, and because, again, my job is heavily Internet-related. I only use it when I need to download an XPI from certain websites that don't have a direct download link:).
Re:oMG ROFL SKATES!!
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Black humour does have it's place, and I did expect there to be a lot here, but when the entire top half of this page is filled with these comments modded "+5 funny", something about it is just a bit disheartening, quite frankly.
I believe they/we do this because it's so much easier to come up with a joke than a serious comment, even for such a great guy as he apparently was (just read it off wikipedia). Furthermore, I think it's healthy to have a good laugh, even in sad occasions such as this.
When installing alpha or beta versions of Firefox it's usually better to have multiple profiles. This is absolutely necessary for a developer, but I think it's recommendable for advanced users who like to take early peeks. You can copy your old profile folder into the new one and you'll have an instant migration of saved data:-).
As I side note, I use Firefox 2.0 beta 1 with my main, everyday profile, and I haven't had a single problem.
I would go with something like "Netcraft confirms it: Google is dead".
On a more serious note, I agree with you. I'm sure Microsoft had a very fresh and innovative approach to HR back in the day, and surely there were a few dozen articles discussing just that. Round and round we go...
I think web browsers and office suites can be a lot more mainstream than operating systems, if only because of the abysmal difference of installation and adaptation difficulties. Actually, it's pretty obvious.
Up next: how easy it is to install Ubuntu (well, it is).
Here's a question for you: Why does everyone assume that evolution is a good thing?
We exist because of evolution.
The world around us exists because of evolution.
Evolution helps living beings endure their surroundings more effectively.
Just to name a few. I'm sorry to say this, but you having fish is absolutely meaningless in the grand scheme of the survival of this planet's biology. As a matter of fact, the survival of our whole species is relatively unimportant.
But that's what people give MS shit for, finding and fixing security holes.
Uhh... no. People give MS shit for finding and not fixing security holes. Since we're talking about browsers, I give you IE6, which hasn't received a serious overhaul in over half a decade and has proved to be an extremely insecure application.
Microsoft has a history of leaving known (as in having exploits in the wild) security flaws unpatched. Some argue they do this because hackers can then reverse-engineer patches and create exploits of the bugs, but that logic is a bit dubious to me. If your software has security problems, they should be addressed. Period. And this is exactly what Mozilla does.
About your last point, that's one of the key improvements in version 1.5. Updates are downloaded and installed automatically. Users will be up to date unless they specifically set it otherwise. Users of previous versions still have to upgrade manually, but I think in time most will.
People should be as free as possible to do whatever they want, so long as it doesn't cause direct harm to somebody else's interests.
Who decides when harm is being done? You? Me? No, there's usually some regulatory system that deals with this, and, ideally, it's properly tuned to ensure the well being of the majority. This is exactly what I mean about having a compromise. If you know that some product is going to be mostly used in a way that will cause harm to others (drugs and weapons come to mind) then it is only sensible to restrict the usage of such products. Do you think everybody should have access to rocket launchers or industrial-strength chemicals? I'm sure there's plenty of reasonable uses for those.
All I'm saying is that this map tool may be one of those products that do more harm than good.
Similar, but malice and stupidity are quite different. I'll add to this that there's a compromise that needs to be done between need and safety. I don't think we can really do without hammers, but we can do without this cellphone traffic thing. And there's a greater danger of people being killed by a vehicle driven by an irresponsible driver than being hit in the head by a deranged carpenter.
So hammer developers need to come up with hammers that can't be used to whack the crap out of my thumbnail?
All within reason. You're referring to the accidental misuse of a rarely used household item. Furthermore, this accidental use causes harm to the user and nobody else.
In this case we're talking about intentional misuse (people are well aware of the dangers) of an almost ubiquitous device while handling a very dangerous (and also ubiquitous) piece of equipment. It's a public hazard, and has and will take many lives. If this map feature is designed to be used while driving I say it's irresponsible as hell.
I agree with you, partly. Users are definitely responsible for misusing the tools they are given, but tool developers have the responsibility of creating tools that don't facilitate potentially damaging uses, or do so in the smallest way possible. We already know people are stupid, so we should develop tools under that assumption.
Actually, there already exists such an organization: the WHATWG. It was created by browser developers including Opera, Mozilla and the makers of Safari. They have released several specifications, some of which have already been implemented into the browsers. For instance, the canvas element, and SessionStorage, which is included in the upcoming Firefox 2.
Quite frankly I prefer the idea of a single standards organization, in this case the W3C. It's more sensible to find ways to make this organization more flexible and open than to start having competing standards and the unavoidable incompatibilities. But sometimes there is no alternative than radical change. I hope it doesn't come down to this.
It is. Taco has mentioned it in a couple of posts. And yes, it seems to go greatly against Slashdot's apparent mindset. But you have to take into account that most people do their Slashdotting at work, where they rarely get to choose.
I use Windows XP, but that's entirely my choice, just like Firefox;).
Opera gets mentioned every once in a while and always gets placed under the general software topic.
First of all, I would have to say Opera gets placed under the general software topic because it only gets mentioned every once in a while, so that's really just one reason. And not to flame, but I think Mozilla does deserve a category of their own for its current market precence, and because they produce a lot more than Firefox.
I like Opera a lot, and I think it has contributed greatly to browser history, but its market share is too small. Granted, perhaps it's due to the User Agent switcher. Perhaps these reasons are enough to make Opera undeserving of a category of its own. I'm sure the editors have some "objective" criteria for creating categories. I wouldn't say they're biased.
People will start sending you ODF when us geeks (you) start sending them ODF.
Exactly, it's a 2-way channel. People won't send you ODF if they don't use OOo or an equivalent, or they think you don't. I have lots of friends/coworkers which probably use OpenOffice, but I don't know for sure, so I usually go with a more "universal" format. I'll pick PDF if there's no need for editing.
I do ask some people if they use OOo, and yes, I have sent ODF files to coworkers I know use OOo.
Want to convince people? The free PDF converter is a very good selling point.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there are many mechanisms to choose from, some of which are already implemented on Wikipedia. There are many commercial and political interests in the biggest and most popular online encyclopedia, so this search venture is not that very different in that sense.
The real answer, I guess, is that you can't control it for all cases, but you can be sure that the most popular terms will have enough eyes on them to be safe from it.
Damn you, I had!!
Ugh.
Yes, for instance the "Passion of the Jew" episode was aired very shortly after the Passion of the Christ movie was released in theaters, and its controversy as being allegedly anti-semitic and unnecessarily graphic was very, very fresh in people's minds.
Their response time allows them to be very brilliant with excellent timing.
Well, the post claims that it would take 3+ hours to execute the statement. It didn't say anything about how long it would take to put those changes in the production site. I mean, I would assume that the site was running on a mirror database while the reconstruction happened. Doing the switch is not so trivial in a website as big as Slashdot...
18 hours is a pretty good response time, considering that this is not a banking site or anything of the sort.
And yes, I know you were just being funny. :P
What are your plans for pushing version 2 to the current group of 1.* users? Do you have a strict policy of not pushing major version changes through automatic updates, or is it something that will be done eventually?
Either way, do you have any plans for those users who don't posses automatic update capabilities (pre-1.5)?
I don't mean to troll here, but how about spelling Firefox right when you send the questions?
Jeez...
Even though I know those sites actually exist, I spend most of my life browsing the web (part of my job, in fact) with Firefox, and I almost never encounter Firefox-specific problems. Any respectable website (except Marlboro maybe) follows basic standards well enough these days. Even horribly random sites such as MySpace or hi5 work on Firefox just fine.
I downloaded IE7, but mostly out of curiosity, and because, again, my job is heavily Internet-related. I only use it when I need to download an XPI from certain websites that don't have a direct download link :).
American indeed...
P.S. USA is alright.
I believe they/we do this because it's so much easier to come up with a joke than a serious comment, even for such a great guy as he apparently was (just read it off wikipedia). Furthermore, I think it's healthy to have a good laugh, even in sad occasions such as this.
When installing alpha or beta versions of Firefox it's usually better to have multiple profiles. This is absolutely necessary for a developer, but I think it's recommendable for advanced users who like to take early peeks. You can copy your old profile folder into the new one and you'll have an instant migration of saved data :-).
As I side note, I use Firefox 2.0 beta 1 with my main, everyday profile, and I haven't had a single problem.
On a more serious note, I agree with you. I'm sure Microsoft had a very fresh and innovative approach to HR back in the day, and surely there were a few dozen articles discussing just that. Round and round we go...
I think web browsers and office suites can be a lot more mainstream than operating systems, if only because of the abysmal difference of installation and adaptation difficulties. Actually, it's pretty obvious.
Up next: how easy it is to install Ubuntu (well, it is).
You keep using that word...
Just to name a few. I'm sorry to say this, but you having fish is absolutely meaningless in the grand scheme of the survival of this planet's biology. As a matter of fact, the survival of our whole species is relatively unimportant.
Uhh... no. People give MS shit for finding and not fixing security holes. Since we're talking about browsers, I give you IE6, which hasn't received a serious overhaul in over half a decade and has proved to be an extremely insecure application.
Microsoft has a history of leaving known (as in having exploits in the wild) security flaws unpatched. Some argue they do this because hackers can then reverse-engineer patches and create exploits of the bugs, but that logic is a bit dubious to me. If your software has security problems, they should be addressed. Period. And this is exactly what Mozilla does.
About your last point, that's one of the key improvements in version 1.5. Updates are downloaded and installed automatically. Users will be up to date unless they specifically set it otherwise. Users of previous versions still have to upgrade manually, but I think in time most will.
Who decides when harm is being done? You? Me? No, there's usually some regulatory system that deals with this, and, ideally, it's properly tuned to ensure the well being of the majority. This is exactly what I mean about having a compromise. If you know that some product is going to be mostly used in a way that will cause harm to others (drugs and weapons come to mind) then it is only sensible to restrict the usage of such products. Do you think everybody should have access to rocket launchers or industrial-strength chemicals? I'm sure there's plenty of reasonable uses for those.
All I'm saying is that this map tool may be one of those products that do more harm than good.
Similar, but malice and stupidity are quite different. I'll add to this that there's a compromise that needs to be done between need and safety. I don't think we can really do without hammers, but we can do without this cellphone traffic thing. And there's a greater danger of people being killed by a vehicle driven by an irresponsible driver than being hit in the head by a deranged carpenter.
All within reason. You're referring to the accidental misuse of a rarely used household item. Furthermore, this accidental use causes harm to the user and nobody else.
In this case we're talking about intentional misuse (people are well aware of the dangers) of an almost ubiquitous device while handling a very dangerous (and also ubiquitous) piece of equipment. It's a public hazard, and has and will take many lives. If this map feature is designed to be used while driving I say it's irresponsible as hell.
I agree with you, partly. Users are definitely responsible for misusing the tools they are given, but tool developers have the responsibility of creating tools that don't facilitate potentially damaging uses, or do so in the smallest way possible. We already know people are stupid, so we should develop tools under that assumption.
Actually, there already exists such an organization: the WHATWG. It was created by browser developers including Opera, Mozilla and the makers of Safari. They have released several specifications, some of which have already been implemented into the browsers. For instance, the canvas element, and SessionStorage, which is included in the upcoming Firefox 2.
Quite frankly I prefer the idea of a single standards organization, in this case the W3C. It's more sensible to find ways to make this organization more flexible and open than to start having competing standards and the unavoidable incompatibilities. But sometimes there is no alternative than radical change. I hope it doesn't come down to this.
Costa Rica. May be hard to find in the map, but that's probably a good thing.
Isn't this the case for any kind of advertisement? Logarithmic growth, anyone?
It is. Taco has mentioned it in a couple of posts. And yes, it seems to go greatly against Slashdot's apparent mindset. But you have to take into account that most people do their Slashdotting at work, where they rarely get to choose.
I use Windows XP, but that's entirely my choice, just like Firefox ;).
First of all, I would have to say Opera gets placed under the general software topic because it only gets mentioned every once in a while, so that's really just one reason. And not to flame, but I think Mozilla does deserve a category of their own for its current market precence, and because they produce a lot more than Firefox.
I like Opera a lot, and I think it has contributed greatly to browser history, but its market share is too small. Granted, perhaps it's due to the User Agent switcher. Perhaps these reasons are enough to make Opera undeserving of a category of its own. I'm sure the editors have some "objective" criteria for creating categories. I wouldn't say they're biased.
Exactly, it's a 2-way channel. People won't send you ODF if they don't use OOo or an equivalent, or they think you don't. I have lots of friends/coworkers which probably use OpenOffice, but I don't know for sure, so I usually go with a more "universal" format. I'll pick PDF if there's no need for editing.
I do ask some people if they use OOo, and yes, I have sent ODF files to coworkers I know use OOo.
Want to convince people? The free PDF converter is a very good selling point.