As long as clients ask for shiny spinning mouseover widgets and marquee scrollers on their crappy company homepages, and as long as us designers need their money, standards will continue to be meaningless.
It's a myth that animation etc is non-standard. Sure, there are non-standard ways of doing things like that, but there are standard ways too. It's rare to find something that simply can't be done with compliant code.
Internet Explorer 7, which hasn't even been released yet, will not support large sections of the CSS 2 specification, published by the W3C in 1998. If you think the W3C are behind everybody else, then I believe you are only looking at the bits and pieces of their specifications that are actually implemented by the browser developers. With that twisted reasoning, it's logically impossible for them to be ahead.
Just getting people to recognize the CSS standard is a headache, and things like rounded corners are still a long way off.
Rounded corners are in CSS 3. Browsers haven't finished implementing CSS 2 yet. What's the point in the W3C racing even further ahead when the lack of browser support means it won't make any difference for years to come?
The CSS 3 spec is taking how long?
CSS 3 is a group of specifications, not a single specification, and some of them are ready to be implemented. So the answer to your question "How long?" is "Already there."
I figure you get Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera to the table, you'd have some pretty interesting standards developed that the browsers might stick to.
That's a perfectly reasonable belief. One that, unfortunately, does not correspond to reality. All the major browser developers have been members of the W3C. Microsoft helped write the CSS specifications. Just because an organisation has been involved in designing something, it doesn't mean they are going to support it.
Perhaps if you are comparing this to crimes where people get sent to jail, yes. But nobody is going to jail here, the comparison isn't appropriate. For instance, you don't have to get somebody convicted to get a restraining order against them either, but nobody complains about their civil rights being infringed there, do they? Think of ASBOs as restraining orders on behalf of the community. They aren't great, but they aren't the catastrophe you immediately assume.
The more abstract a language is, the better a compiler can understand what you are doing. If you write out twenty instructions to do something in a low-level language, it's a lot of work to figure out that what matters isn't that the instructions get executed, but the end result. If you write out one instruction in a high-level language that does the same thing, the compiler can decide how best to get that result without trying to figure out if it's okay to throw away the code you've written. Optimisation is easier and safer.
Furthermore, the bottleneck is often in the programmer's brain rather than the code. If programmers could write code ten times faster, that executes a tenth as quickly, that would actually be a beneficial trade-off for many (most?) organisations. High-level languages help with programmer productivity. I know that it's considered a mark of programmer ability to write the most efficient code possible, but it's a mark of software engineer ability to get the programming done faster while still meeting performance constraints.
Funny you should ask that. I can't remember whether it was lyrics.ch or another popular lyrics site, but when the record companies shut them down, they nicked their domain name, and set up an "equivalent" service. What this actually was was a Java applet that would connect to the server, download encrypted lyrics, display a couple of lines at a time and scroll slowly. You couldn't even scroll back up or copy & paste.
I think they must have had some sort of agreement to keep the service running in exchange for the domain name, but wanted to make it as big of a fuck-up as possible for anybody who actually wanted to use it. When did simply displaying plain text become such an arduous task?
There's no way Gracenote would make a deal like this unless they had an agreement that the record companies would bludgeon Gracenote's competition to death with copyright. It's no problem for the record companies and it makes what they are licensing to Gracenote so much more valuable.
It will probably be easier than going after people who share MP3s - lyrics sites are generally ad-supported, with the ad providers like Google mentioning copyright problems in their terms & conditions, so there's no need for lawyers, just complain to the advertisers and "cut off their air supply".
This won't be the first time this has happened, either. Anybody remember lyrics.ch? Raided by the police for telling people the words to songs! Does it get any more ridiculous?
your conversation could arguably considered copyrighted information (as it's being recorded)
Is it being recorded though, or just transmitted? Something is only copyrighted once it gets fixed into a medium. So if you are recording to disk and then transmitting, that would be protected by copyright. But the user would hold the copyright, not Skype, so Skype couldn't use the DMCA against anybody.
I thought that maybe Skype could include a copyrighted logo or something at the beginning of each transmission, but Nintendo tried to do exactly this, and the court ruled that the copying for protocol purposes wasn't infringement. But the law has gotten far more protective over copyright lately, so who knows? Skype might be able to ward off competitors with just the possibility of a successful lawsuit.
The problem of "I have a load of data that I need to be able to store and then restore into an easily manipulatable structure in memory."
Parsing is one of the most well-understood areas of computer science.
Just because it's a well-understood area, it doesn't mean data magically leaps out of files into data structures, does it? There's still a problem of actually implementing it.
It is the lack of semantics that makes XML little better than plain text
I assume by "plain text", you mean "ad-hoc format I cooked up on the fly"? You can't parse plain text unless you've solved the NLP problem - and that isn't "a well understood area of computer science", and proving very difficult for PhDs, let alone run-of-the-mill graduates.
XML is better than ad-hoc formats because you don't have to write a parser yourself - the problem is solved for you by a glut of libraries for all kinds of different systems. Furthermore, there's all kinds of different software that can manipulate XML in various useful ways. Why do work you don't need to? Just because something does [x] + [y] and not [x] + [y] + [z], it doesn't mean that it doing [x] and [y] isn't useful.
Don't be smart around stupid people - they'll come and beat you up for it.
I agree that socialisation in school is crappy. But to play devil's advocate, would you really prefer it if your kid didn't learn that other people might resent his intelligence, so when he starts work he thinks that everybody is stupid and he's clueless about why people get pissed off with him?
I was significantly smarter than my peers all through school, and at first I didn't actually realise that other people had difficulty understanding the things the teachers were saying, I took it for granted that everybody else was as smart as I was. If I hadn't had school to get me used to it and teach me how to handle this situation gracefully, I'd have had a massive shock when the time came to get a job, and I'd probably form much lower opinions of other people.
Look at it from the opposite direction - schools might teach "don't be smart around stupid people", but they also teach "don't look down on people who aren't as smart as you".
Due to Theo and Co's knee jerk (hello Theo) attitude to non-OpenBSD OSes there is no way to make ssh public key authentication plug cleanly in the OS authentication chain. The reason is that ssh continues to be developed from the perspective "PAM sucks, we here do not do that". That is a purely political OpenBSD position which belongs to the realm of OpenBSD and should have nothing to do with OpenSSH. If OpenSSH is to really support linux without "OpenBSD is better TM)" being involved it will have to support PAM properly, natively, all the way and for all authentication methods including public keys. This is the way of the land.
If this is so important, how come nobody has forked OpenSSH? Debian could do it. Any of the distributions could do it. You are essentially complaining that OpenBSD developers are developing OpenSSH for OpenBSD instead of the way you want them to do it. They aren't under any obligation to make dodgy (in their opinion) security decisions to please you - that would be making politicial decisions.
Remember when XML was going to revolutionize communication between computers by structuring everything consistently?
No. I do remember how a lot of clueless PHB-types ran around telling everybody that though. XML solves the parsing problem, not the semantics problem. It's languages built on top of XML that handle semantics.
XML was never meant to solve the problem you are talking about. Parsing markup into a tree is a totally different concept to figuring out what the stuff in the tree means. The only people who ever thought XML had something to do with what you say were totally clueless about XML.
So now why is this "vevent" class special, and who decided it would be "vevent" and not "scheduledevent" or "calendarevent" or "microsoftcalendarhassomethingforyoutodotoday"?
It's special because it appears in the hCalendar specification. The people who wrote the specification decided it would be "vevent". They intend to submit it to a standards body.
I suggest you try a simple experiment: Open up a firefox window and start Gmail, leave the window open for several days and monitor how much memory is used each day.
That's not a good test because the JavaScript is constantly running and the page is never reloaded. That means it could easily be a leak in Google's JavaScript causing the results you see - it's not as if a browser can magically decide that a script doesn't need an object any more if it's still hanging onto it.
That's not to say I don't think that Firefox has memory problems, but if you're going to do something like that, at least reload the page periodically.
Why are computer file names and conventions and protocols so messed up?
People do the simplest thing that can possibly work, figuring they'll fix it later. Then later comes along, and either they can't fix it without breaking loads of other code, or their manager gives them a bollocking for even considering working on something that the company won't make any money out of.
I think the biggest problem I had one day was when I was trying to remove a file in Linux who's first character was -
That is what the -- option is for. It signifies that there will be no further options, so anything following it that starts with '-' will be interpreted as a filename. rm -- -funny-named-file will do the trick.
What we really need is a DNS system that can return multiple IP addresses and a code to indicate how to use them (ie, randomly select one or use the first unless it fails then fallback to the next one).
The SRV RR allows administrators to use several servers for a single domain, to move services from host to host with little fuss, and to designate some hosts as primary servers for a service and others as backups.
It doesn't require any DNS infrastructure changes, but clients need to support it. For example, Firefox and Mozilla don't support it.
Wikipedia's Achilles' heel is the perception that Wikipedia is not a "good" source of information, and that it is a less "definitive," or "authoritative" source than others.
No college student should quote the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a scientific paper, but they quote the Wikipedia. Every blogger links routinely to wikipedia articles, because it is so easy.
The college student is screwing up. The blogger is not. The former is attempting to cite a source to back them up, but bloggers just link so that you can obtain more information. Wikipedia is perfectly suitable to give a brief overview of a subject.
Wikipedia contents are the first result on Google, MSN and every other search engine.
So? There's no reasonable expectation that a search engine is going to give you an authorative source for a subject anywhere in their search results, let alone as the first result.
professors frown on (and sometimes penalize) the use of wikipedia
Either your professors are idiots or you've misinterpreted them. There's nothing wrong with using Wikipedia. There is, however, a lot wrong with citing Wikipedia or not checking your facts with primary sources.
It's worth pointing out that the person publishing those benchmarks is an Opera employee. Not that I think they are fabricated, but it's always good to know potential biases.
Slashdot Mirror
You're way off on that one. List, by date, of W3C technical reports.
It's a myth that animation etc is non-standard. Sure, there are non-standard ways of doing things like that, but there are standard ways too. It's rare to find something that simply can't be done with compliant code.
Internet Explorer 7, which hasn't even been released yet, will not support large sections of the CSS 2 specification, published by the W3C in 1998. If you think the W3C are behind everybody else, then I believe you are only looking at the bits and pieces of their specifications that are actually implemented by the browser developers. With that twisted reasoning, it's logically impossible for them to be ahead.
Rounded corners are in CSS 3. Browsers haven't finished implementing CSS 2 yet. What's the point in the W3C racing even further ahead when the lack of browser support means it won't make any difference for years to come?
CSS 3 is a group of specifications, not a single specification, and some of them are ready to be implemented. So the answer to your question "How long?" is "Already there."
That's a perfectly reasonable belief. One that, unfortunately, does not correspond to reality. All the major browser developers have been members of the W3C. Microsoft helped write the CSS specifications. Just because an organisation has been involved in designing something, it doesn't mean they are going to support it.
Perhaps if you are comparing this to crimes where people get sent to jail, yes. But nobody is going to jail here, the comparison isn't appropriate. For instance, you don't have to get somebody convicted to get a restraining order against them either, but nobody complains about their civil rights being infringed there, do they? Think of ASBOs as restraining orders on behalf of the community. They aren't great, but they aren't the catastrophe you immediately assume.
The more abstract a language is, the better a compiler can understand what you are doing. If you write out twenty instructions to do something in a low-level language, it's a lot of work to figure out that what matters isn't that the instructions get executed, but the end result. If you write out one instruction in a high-level language that does the same thing, the compiler can decide how best to get that result without trying to figure out if it's okay to throw away the code you've written. Optimisation is easier and safer.
Furthermore, the bottleneck is often in the programmer's brain rather than the code. If programmers could write code ten times faster, that executes a tenth as quickly, that would actually be a beneficial trade-off for many (most?) organisations. High-level languages help with programmer productivity. I know that it's considered a mark of programmer ability to write the most efficient code possible, but it's a mark of software engineer ability to get the programming done faster while still meeting performance constraints.
Funny you should ask that. I can't remember whether it was lyrics.ch or another popular lyrics site, but when the record companies shut them down, they nicked their domain name, and set up an "equivalent" service. What this actually was was a Java applet that would connect to the server, download encrypted lyrics, display a couple of lines at a time and scroll slowly. You couldn't even scroll back up or copy & paste.
I think they must have had some sort of agreement to keep the service running in exchange for the domain name, but wanted to make it as big of a fuck-up as possible for anybody who actually wanted to use it. When did simply displaying plain text become such an arduous task?
There's no way Gracenote would make a deal like this unless they had an agreement that the record companies would bludgeon Gracenote's competition to death with copyright. It's no problem for the record companies and it makes what they are licensing to Gracenote so much more valuable.
It will probably be easier than going after people who share MP3s - lyrics sites are generally ad-supported, with the ad providers like Google mentioning copyright problems in their terms & conditions, so there's no need for lawyers, just complain to the advertisers and "cut off their air supply".
This won't be the first time this has happened, either. Anybody remember lyrics.ch? Raided by the police for telling people the words to songs! Does it get any more ridiculous?
Is it being recorded though, or just transmitted? Something is only copyrighted once it gets fixed into a medium. So if you are recording to disk and then transmitting, that would be protected by copyright. But the user would hold the copyright, not Skype, so Skype couldn't use the DMCA against anybody.
I thought that maybe Skype could include a copyrighted logo or something at the beginning of each transmission, but Nintendo tried to do exactly this, and the court ruled that the copying for protocol purposes wasn't infringement. But the law has gotten far more protective over copyright lately, so who knows? Skype might be able to ward off competitors with just the possibility of a successful lawsuit.
The problem of "I have a load of data that I need to be able to store and then restore into an easily manipulatable structure in memory."
Just because it's a well-understood area, it doesn't mean data magically leaps out of files into data structures, does it? There's still a problem of actually implementing it.
I assume by "plain text", you mean "ad-hoc format I cooked up on the fly"? You can't parse plain text unless you've solved the NLP problem - and that isn't "a well understood area of computer science", and proving very difficult for PhDs, let alone run-of-the-mill graduates.
XML is better than ad-hoc formats because you don't have to write a parser yourself - the problem is solved for you by a glut of libraries for all kinds of different systems. Furthermore, there's all kinds of different software that can manipulate XML in various useful ways. Why do work you don't need to? Just because something does [x] + [y] and not [x] + [y] + [z], it doesn't mean that it doing [x] and [y] isn't useful.
I agree that socialisation in school is crappy. But to play devil's advocate, would you really prefer it if your kid didn't learn that other people might resent his intelligence, so when he starts work he thinks that everybody is stupid and he's clueless about why people get pissed off with him?
I was significantly smarter than my peers all through school, and at first I didn't actually realise that other people had difficulty understanding the things the teachers were saying, I took it for granted that everybody else was as smart as I was. If I hadn't had school to get me used to it and teach me how to handle this situation gracefully, I'd have had a massive shock when the time came to get a job, and I'd probably form much lower opinions of other people.
Look at it from the opposite direction - schools might teach "don't be smart around stupid people", but they also teach "don't look down on people who aren't as smart as you".
Clearly we need some type of action film made about zombie dogs vs. zombie pigs with hapless humans caught in the crossfire. On a plane.
If this is so important, how come nobody has forked OpenSSH? Debian could do it. Any of the distributions could do it. You are essentially complaining that OpenBSD developers are developing OpenSSH for OpenBSD instead of the way you want them to do it. They aren't under any obligation to make dodgy (in their opinion) security decisions to please you - that would be making politicial decisions.
Nah, they just need a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on crab meat.
No. I do remember how a lot of clueless PHB-types ran around telling everybody that though. XML solves the parsing problem, not the semantics problem. It's languages built on top of XML that handle semantics.
XML was never meant to solve the problem you are talking about. Parsing markup into a tree is a totally different concept to figuring out what the stuff in the tree means. The only people who ever thought XML had something to do with what you say were totally clueless about XML.
It's special because it appears in the hCalendar specification. The people who wrote the specification decided it would be "vevent". They intend to submit it to a standards body.
That's not a good test because the JavaScript is constantly running and the page is never reloaded. That means it could easily be a leak in Google's JavaScript causing the results you see - it's not as if a browser can magically decide that a script doesn't need an object any more if it's still hanging onto it.
That's not to say I don't think that Firefox has memory problems, but if you're going to do something like that, at least reload the page periodically.
Reminds me of this guy. Hey, maybe we have another Einstein in the making... or maybe not.
People do the simplest thing that can possibly work, figuring they'll fix it later. Then later comes along, and either they can't fix it without breaking loads of other code, or their manager gives them a bollocking for even considering working on something that the company won't make any money out of.
That is what the -- option is for. It signifies that there will be no further options, so anything following it that starts with '-' will be interpreted as a filename. rm -- -funny-named-file will do the trick.
RFC 2782. I quote:
It doesn't require any DNS infrastructure changes, but clients need to support it. For example, Firefox and Mozilla don't support it.
Also, I forgot to mention Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check.
The college student is screwing up. The blogger is not. The former is attempting to cite a source to back them up, but bloggers just link so that you can obtain more information. Wikipedia is perfectly suitable to give a brief overview of a subject.
So? There's no reasonable expectation that a search engine is going to give you an authorative source for a subject anywhere in their search results, let alone as the first result.
That is what Template:Fact is for. If you see an article that claims something that isn't backed up by a citation to an authorative source, hit it with that, and "[citation needed]" appears, and the article is listed in the "Articles with unsourced statements" category. You can read more about this at Wikipedia:Citing sources.
Either your professors are idiots or you've misinterpreted them. There's nothing wrong with using Wikipedia. There is, however, a lot wrong with citing Wikipedia or not checking your facts with primary sources.
It's worth pointing out that the person publishing those benchmarks is an Opera employee. Not that I think they are fabricated, but it's always good to know potential biases.