To make your analogy accurate, you would have to include the fact that people came along afterwards and wrote additional things on the leaflets she put on lampposts, and they are suing her for those statements as well.
Actually, that might be changing in the immediate future. Check out the slides to go with this talk, in particular, page 10 where there's a timeline including:
2007.11: $500 -> $1000; qmail placed into public domain.
With all due respect, that's just a bunch of hand-waving that is so vague it's impossible to extract anything relevant to my comment. Of course there are multiple potential interfaces to perform the same thing. That's always true, obvious to everybody, and isn't relevant to the fact that the DOM defines just one canonical interface.
Nope. The reason why I don't notice anything is because the contrast between the text and the background is so low that the text is invisible unless I crank up the gamma on my monitor, and even when I do so, the text is unreadable because it's absolutely tiny. They've actually hard-coded a 9px font size in there. Ridiculous.
What's more, they specify the OS X font Lucida Grande, which has a large x-height, followed by Arial, which has a normal x-height, meaning that if you don't have Lucida Grande installed (e.g. Linux users), the text appears smaller than if you do have Lucida Grande installed (e.g. OS X users). Where do some designers get the idea that this style text is in any way a good idea?
Do you have a reference for this? As I understand it, the specification was written in a generic way precisely so different languages could implement the exact same interface. If you are referring to this text from the DOM 1 specification:
Vendors can support the DOM as an interface to their proprietary data structures and APIs, and content authors can write to the standard DOM interfaces rather than product-specific APIs, thus increasing interoperability on the Web.
...and this:
The DOM specifies interfaces which may be used to manage XML or HTML documents. It is important to realize that these interfaces are an abstraction - much like "abstract base classes" in C++, they are a means of specifying a way to access and manipulate an application's internal representation of a document. Interfaces do not imply a particular concrete implementation. Each DOM application is free to maintain documents in any convenient representation, as long as the interfaces shown in this specification are supported.
...then what this means is that it shouldn't matter how Microsoft or Mozilla decide to implement their rendering engines, web developers should be able to write to a single, portable interface without worrying about how any one browser implements things. If you look further, it certainly seems like the W3C were aiming for a canonical interface:
As a W3C specification, one important objective for the Document Object Model is to provide a standard programming interface that can be used in a wide variety of environments and applications. The DOM is designed to be used with any programming language.
You're confusing two different things here; JavaScript and the DOM. The DOM isn't part of the JavaScript language, it's merely a series of host objects following an interface defined by the W3C. While you can debate the merits of the two different interfaces all you like, it doesn't mean that using one instead of the other means you don't know JavaScript.
If somebody can't "methodically code a program", then they are going to have just as much difficulty with jQuery as they are with the DOM. jQuery can't be used as a substitute for programming knowledge. At worst, you could say that people would copy and paste from the jQuery examples, but the same has been true for JavaScript in general for the past decade, so jQuery is no different in this respect.
Re:what is jquery?
on
Learning jQuery
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· Score: 1, Informative
No, it's not Yet Another Language. It's a JavaScript library, and it's quite easy to have 5+ years experience with JavaScript.
Re:what is jquery?
on
Learning jQuery
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· Score: 2, Informative
Mootools is simply faster, smaller, and more modular (read: well written) than the competition.
Faster, smaller and more modular? Firstly, if you are worrying about the speed at which your JavaScript executes, you are almost certainly either prematurely optimising or using way too much JavaScript. Only a minority of developers need to worry about that, even assuming older clients. Having said that, the release notes for jQuery 1.1.3 have some interesting notes regarding the benchmark you refer to:
We're over 800% faster than we were in jQuery 1.1.2.
We're the fastest framework in the most popular browser, Internet Explorer 6.
We're the only framework that doesn't give incorrect results.
As for smaller, well jQuery is 26kb after packing, and the link you provide says that mootools is 34kb after packing, so I don't see how your link backs you up there.
As for more modular and well written, in what sense do you mean this? I skimmed over the website, and was struck at how mootools' site itself abuses JavaScript (major annoyance: don't use <div> s and JavaScript to badly emulate links when a real <a> element would do). I find it hard to believe that a project that makes basic mistakes like that would be well written, but if you would care to go into detail perhaps I might change my mind.
After 20 pages of long debunks it would become apparent that people had wasted part of their lives arguing with another bored rogue who didn't believe any of the crap they were posting. Not only were they playing a joke on their fellow rogues but they were making fun of people that came to their forums to complain. In a similar manner I wonder if any of these emails or posts on slashdot are from bored people expressing fake opinions that are the oppossite of their real ones, just for the amusement of seeing the responses.
On behalf of everybody at Dell, I'd like to congratulate you on the purchase of your first computer, and I offer you a hearty welcome to the Internet. These people are called "trolls" and it is in fact perfectly legal to kill them with fire.
I suppose if the site hosted torrents, that would fall under "an article specifically designed or adapted for making copies of that work, knowing or having reason to believe that it is to be used to make infringing copies.".
Alternatively, if the site merely hosted links, it might be classified as "permitting use of premises for infringing performance", but that's a bit of a stretch.
IMHO, people will also pay good money for websites that work. Ah but there's the rub. WORK. For a sign, 'work' means that you get twice as many customers walking into your business. It probably means the same for a website.
Sadly, it does not. A person who knows nothing about sign-making can easily look at a sign and see whether it "works" or not. A person who knows nothing about web design can't look at a website and judge whether it "works" or not. Chances are they are using Internet Explorer. Does it fail in all other browsers? I wouldn't consider a website like that "working", but why would a person who isn't a web designer think to check in other browsers? Is it valid? Why would a non-professional know what validity is? What's the uptime like? Could a non-professional judge something like that? Is it accessible? Usable?
The real problem with the web design industry is that the people paying for websites can't usually judge ahead of time whether a person is a professional putting out high-quality work, or if they are a kid who is good at drawing pretty pictures. They only find out once the website goes live and they start getting complaints — and the usual response to that is to commission the unprofessional screw-up to do more paid work to fix it, when it shouldn't have been broken in the first place.
Yes, that's definitely the sense he meant it in. I thought my irony was obvious, but I guess not.
The problem with mislabelling everything remotely related to the web as a "tag" is that it dilutes the meaning of the term to be practically useless. How is somebody who refers to everything as a "tag" supposed to distinguish between the title attribute and the <title> element type? More importantly, how is a newbie supposed to figure out in what sense it is meant when they are told to use "appropriate title tags"? This kind of stupid laziness only makes it more difficult for people to learn how to do things right and keeps people at the "copy code, bash it until it works or ask for help" stage.
Thanks, but I'm not a newbie and I think you are confused. <title> tags are used to delimit a <title> element. A <title> element can only appear as a child of a <head> element. It's got nothing to do with the <h1> element type and I'm not confusing the <head> and <h1> element types.
One thing I've been keeping an eye on is WPHP. It's only alpha-quality at the moment, but it's basically a WSGI application (WSGI is the standard Python web application interface) with a FastCGI backend that runs PHP. With something like this, you can mix and match PHP and Python — for example, you could write an authentication handler in Python and link it to a legacy PHP application.
What do you need a sound daemon for an office package for?
That should be optional. Same with the network discovery crap.
Blame your distribution. They are optional. Whoever packaged it for your distribution decided that they should be required. I have KOffice installed, and I haven't got all of those packages installed.
A lot of those packages are simply the individual applications and their supporting data. Once you ignore those, the required supporting packages are simply:
kdelibs-data, kdelibs4c2a, libarts1c2a - the KDE libraries and sound daemon.
libavahi-qt3-1 - support library for Rendevous/Bonjour/whatever it's called these days that makes network service autodiscovery work.
libopenexr2c2a - support library for the EXR image format.
libpoppler1, libpoppler1-glib, libpoppler1-qt - support library for PDFs.
libruby1.8 - support library for scripting.
libwv2-1c2 - support library for Word document format.
The rest of the packages are optional. Furthermore, if you only want a couple of the applications, e.g. KWord, you can install them individually. And of course, on a KDE desktop, you'll already have much of this installed anyway. Considering the size of things like OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, I'd say that's not too bad.
One thing the headline, summary and article itself don't make clear is that this guy had half a kilo of potassium nitrate, 250g of calcium chloride, videos of beheadings and he had recently visited Pakistan. More information article. There's a lot more to this story than "kid reads forbidden book and gets arrested". It sounds more like "this guy looks like he was planning on blowing people up".
Re:Evolution Fails Critical Test w/GPG Signatures
on
Thunderbird in Crisis?
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· Score: 1
Instead of them being inline as they are in Kmail, OE and Outlook, Evolution attaches them as a seperate file. This defeats the entire purpose of digitally signing an email. It's impossible to prove the email was modified or who it was signed by as the attachment could go to anything.
Just because it's in a separate file it doesn't mean that the signature is meaningless. The signature doesn't simply say "yeah, whatever's the first part of this email is fine", you know. Do you really believe that detached signatures were a) invented, b) standardised, and c) implemented in multiple mail clients without anybody realising that the signatures need to correspond to the data they are signing?
I merely used the term your to indicate that you have them. You created them is completely irrelevant.
Here's what you said:
And a working solution would have to remove the incentive behind spam. Your filters do nothing to remove the incentive.
The relevance is that "my" filters are not just mine, but are used by a hell of a lot of people, drastically reducing the efficiency of spammers.
Honestly, even if you have hundreds of customers, thats only a small drop in the bucket compared to how many people the spammers hit every day. And how do you know that none of your customers have any other email addresses? Are you sure none of them have hotmail/yahoo/gmail addresses that may be seeing spam there?
All three of those providers have draconian spam filters. And why does it matter what proportion of total email users I serve? Just because I haven't solved the problem for everybody everywhere does not mean that I've not solved a problem. A few months ago, spamd stopped processing mail, resulting in the majority of spam filtering being disabled for my clients. I had a client on the phone within a matter of hours complaining that their mail was swamped. Are you still "baffled" at people using spam filters? How would you explain that such filters are "futile" to people like him?
The spammers know those people are out there, and will happily work around common filters to get to them. Hence the filters are compounding the problem because they only cause the spammers to get more creative.
Sorry, you still aren't making sense. Spammers having to work harder is a bad thing? And they are happily working around filters?
Have you ever tracked the bandwidth that a domain consumes just in the process of taking in and rejecting spam?
Yes. The bandwidth problem and the user-hassling problem are two different problems with a single root cause. Just because an approach only tackles one of those problems, it doesn't mean that it's useless.
The disagreement here is that you're willing to work on only one. I want a solution that does both.
Please re-read my comments. I've not said anything even close to that. You said that you were baffled at the people using filters and that their efforts were futile. I replied saying that my efforts in filtering have been very effective. I never said that stopping the spammers from sending in the first place was a bad thing. I'd love for that to happen, but in the meantime, email is useless for a great many people unless they use filters.
A filter really doesn't make it worse for spammers, even if it does make it better for users.
And making it better for users is "futile"? Making it better for users "baffles" you?
I want a proactive solution to spam.
We all do. But calling filtering pointless is just stupid.
I think the biggest downside to the GPLv3 is for those who simply want to protect the four freedoms, and don't feel like a general-purpose software license is the right place for combating anything else that they disagree with (e.g. software patents, DRM, etc). I'm much more on the BSD-camp side of letting people do whatever the hell they want with the code that I write. I don't care what you do with the derivative works, as long as you give others the freedom to do whatever they want too.
So why don't you use the usual trick of specifying GPLv2 or later? That way you don't force anybody into agreeing with the further restrictions of GPLv3 that they don't agree with, but you aren't needlessly incompatible with those people who do choose to use GPLv3.
Slashdot Mirror
To make your analogy accurate, you would have to include the fact that people came along afterwards and wrote additional things on the leaflets she put on lampposts, and they are suing her for those statements as well.
Actually, that might be changing in the immediate future. Check out the slides to go with this talk, in particular, page 10 where there's a timeline including:
With all due respect, that's just a bunch of hand-waving that is so vague it's impossible to extract anything relevant to my comment. Of course there are multiple potential interfaces to perform the same thing. That's always true, obvious to everybody, and isn't relevant to the fact that the DOM defines just one canonical interface.
I'm pretty sure it already knows.
Nope. The reason why I don't notice anything is because the contrast between the text and the background is so low that the text is invisible unless I crank up the gamma on my monitor, and even when I do so, the text is unreadable because it's absolutely tiny. They've actually hard-coded a 9px font size in there. Ridiculous.
What's more, they specify the OS X font Lucida Grande, which has a large x-height, followed by Arial, which has a normal x-height, meaning that if you don't have Lucida Grande installed (e.g. Linux users), the text appears smaller than if you do have Lucida Grande installed (e.g. OS X users). Where do some designers get the idea that this style text is in any way a good idea?
Do you have a reference for this? As I understand it, the specification was written in a generic way precisely so different languages could implement the exact same interface. If you are referring to this text from the DOM 1 specification:
You're confusing two different things here; JavaScript and the DOM. The DOM isn't part of the JavaScript language, it's merely a series of host objects following an interface defined by the W3C. While you can debate the merits of the two different interfaces all you like, it doesn't mean that using one instead of the other means you don't know JavaScript.
If somebody can't "methodically code a program", then they are going to have just as much difficulty with jQuery as they are with the DOM. jQuery can't be used as a substitute for programming knowledge. At worst, you could say that people would copy and paste from the jQuery examples, but the same has been true for JavaScript in general for the past decade, so jQuery is no different in this respect.
No, it's not Yet Another Language. It's a JavaScript library, and it's quite easy to have 5+ years experience with JavaScript.
Faster, smaller and more modular? Firstly, if you are worrying about the speed at which your JavaScript executes, you are almost certainly either prematurely optimising or using way too much JavaScript. Only a minority of developers need to worry about that, even assuming older clients. Having said that, the release notes for jQuery 1.1.3 have some interesting notes regarding the benchmark you refer to:
As for smaller, well jQuery is 26kb after packing, and the link you provide says that mootools is 34kb after packing, so I don't see how your link backs you up there.
As for more modular and well written, in what sense do you mean this? I skimmed over the website, and was struck at how mootools' site itself abuses JavaScript (major annoyance: don't use <div> s and JavaScript to badly emulate links when a real <a> element would do). I find it hard to believe that a project that makes basic mistakes like that would be well written, but if you would care to go into detail perhaps I might change my mind.
On behalf of everybody at Dell, I'd like to congratulate you on the purchase of your first computer, and I offer you a hearty welcome to the Internet. These people are called "trolls" and it is in fact perfectly legal to kill them with fire.
It's hard to say; the article doesn't give enough detail. The relevant UK law is, I believe, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
I suppose if the site hosted torrents, that would fall under "an article specifically designed or adapted for making copies of that work, knowing or having reason to believe that it is to be used to make infringing copies.".
Alternatively, if the site merely hosted links, it might be classified as "permitting use of premises for infringing performance", but that's a bit of a stretch.
Please point your blame in a different direction. CSS 2.0 had perfectly good support for this, but no browser vendors implemented it, so it was taken out of CSS 2.1.
Sadly, it does not. A person who knows nothing about sign-making can easily look at a sign and see whether it "works" or not. A person who knows nothing about web design can't look at a website and judge whether it "works" or not. Chances are they are using Internet Explorer. Does it fail in all other browsers? I wouldn't consider a website like that "working", but why would a person who isn't a web designer think to check in other browsers? Is it valid? Why would a non-professional know what validity is? What's the uptime like? Could a non-professional judge something like that? Is it accessible? Usable?
The real problem with the web design industry is that the people paying for websites can't usually judge ahead of time whether a person is a professional putting out high-quality work, or if they are a kid who is good at drawing pretty pictures. They only find out once the website goes live and they start getting complaints — and the usual response to that is to commission the unprofessional screw-up to do more paid work to fix it, when it shouldn't have been broken in the first place.
I think you'll find that two are required — one to open the element and one to close it :).
Yes, that's definitely the sense he meant it in. I thought my irony was obvious, but I guess not.
The problem with mislabelling everything remotely related to the web as a "tag" is that it dilutes the meaning of the term to be practically useless. How is somebody who refers to everything as a "tag" supposed to distinguish between the title attribute and the <title> element type? More importantly, how is a newbie supposed to figure out in what sense it is meant when they are told to use "appropriate title tags"? This kind of stupid laziness only makes it more difficult for people to learn how to do things right and keeps people at the "copy code, bash it until it works or ask for help" stage.
Thanks, but I'm not a newbie and I think you are confused. <title> tags are used to delimit a <title> element. A <title> element can only appear as a child of a <head> element. It's got nothing to do with the <h1> element type and I'm not confusing the <head> and <h1> element types.
alt is an attribute, and you certainly don't want title tags anywhere but in your <head> element.
One thing I've been keeping an eye on is WPHP. It's only alpha-quality at the moment, but it's basically a WSGI application (WSGI is the standard Python web application interface) with a FastCGI backend that runs PHP. With something like this, you can mix and match PHP and Python — for example, you could write an authentication handler in Python and link it to a legacy PHP application.
Blame your distribution. They are optional. Whoever packaged it for your distribution decided that they should be required. I have KOffice installed, and I haven't got all of those packages installed.
A lot of those packages are simply the individual applications and their supporting data. Once you ignore those, the required supporting packages are simply:
The rest of the packages are optional. Furthermore, if you only want a couple of the applications, e.g. KWord, you can install them individually. And of course, on a KDE desktop, you'll already have much of this installed anyway. Considering the size of things like OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, I'd say that's not too bad.
One thing the headline, summary and article itself don't make clear is that this guy had half a kilo of potassium nitrate, 250g of calcium chloride, videos of beheadings and he had recently visited Pakistan. More information article. There's a lot more to this story than "kid reads forbidden book and gets arrested". It sounds more like "this guy looks like he was planning on blowing people up".
Just because it's in a separate file it doesn't mean that the signature is meaningless. The signature doesn't simply say "yeah, whatever's the first part of this email is fine", you know. Do you really believe that detached signatures were a) invented, b) standardised, and c) implemented in multiple mail clients without anybody realising that the signatures need to correspond to the data they are signing?
Yes. Summary: When somebody accesses the Internet through your connection, they pay for it, and you get half.
Here's what you said:
The relevance is that "my" filters are not just mine, but are used by a hell of a lot of people, drastically reducing the efficiency of spammers.
All three of those providers have draconian spam filters. And why does it matter what proportion of total email users I serve? Just because I haven't solved the problem for everybody everywhere does not mean that I've not solved a problem. A few months ago, spamd stopped processing mail, resulting in the majority of spam filtering being disabled for my clients. I had a client on the phone within a matter of hours complaining that their mail was swamped. Are you still "baffled" at people using spam filters? How would you explain that such filters are "futile" to people like him?
Sorry, you still aren't making sense. Spammers having to work harder is a bad thing? And they are happily working around filters?
Yes. The bandwidth problem and the user-hassling problem are two different problems with a single root cause. Just because an approach only tackles one of those problems, it doesn't mean that it's useless.
Please re-read my comments. I've not said anything even close to that. You said that you were baffled at the people using filters and that their efforts were futile. I replied saying that my efforts in filtering have been very effective. I never said that stopping the spammers from sending in the first place was a bad thing. I'd love for that to happen, but in the meantime, email is useless for a great many people unless they use filters.
And making it better for users is "futile"? Making it better for users "baffles" you?
We all do. But calling filtering pointless is just stupid.
So why don't you use the usual trick of specifying GPLv2 or later? That way you don't force anybody into agreeing with the further restrictions of GPLv3 that they don't agree with, but you aren't needlessly incompatible with those people who do choose to use GPLv3.