If someone has a client that can't render a standard page, then that's their problem and we should have left them to it - eventually they would have complained to the relevant person and their browser would become closer to the standard.
Not every client can get their browser changed. Not every client is willing to lift a finger to improve their standard either, and can happily move on to a competitor who's more than willing to accommodate them.
If you have CSS, in this day and age, that does detection of the user-agent, then that's your problem
Tell that to clients who want a particular design. They don't care about standards, they care that the pages look correct across all browsers, including legacy versions of IE dating back to 7 (or, even in some cases, 6), and on mobile devices. They're not going to say "oh, IE 7 doesn't support [standard]? Okay, you can cut that piece out then. ^^" They're going to not appreciate that your pages don't look right, and they won't care why.
Personally, I use Opera - have done for nearly a decade now. If it doesn't work in Opera, I move on and go somewhere else.
Yeah, filtering one's web traffic based on user-agent string is stupid. I think it was a poor attempt to say "we only have to design for one web site!" by "forcing" users to use "correct" browsers. That being said, I've not seen this practice used for some time (maybe because I use Chrome? I've not seen it at work either...)
And as others have said, the fancy stuff usually is mandated by people over the site designers' heads, either for the client, or because Mister Boss Man wants it, or for some other reason. Yes, in a perfect world, we'd only use HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc that we knew worked 100% of the time across any medium that can display a web page, but that just isn't how the world turns.
I tried to set mine up, and now Apple is saying I need to wait 3 days before the process can be completred. I'm in no hurry, but this feels kind of arbitrary, when other popular services (Google, Blizzard, et al) can set this form of authentication up instantly.
That's how I feel too. And that's why I cringe whenever I think about how drug companies can advertise their medicines on TV, saying "talk to your doctor about DrugXYZ." That is, "bug your doctor about our product instead of letting them decide what's best for you."
To when web sites tried to disable right-clicking to "hide" their source code. I was in middle school and knew that was baloney...
Actually, this reminds me of web sites hosting lyrics, too, that either attempt to disable right-click or insert their website in tiny text between words of lyrics.
Reading the article tells me that this sort of "fee" doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. I've never been to the web site in question, but if I ever needed to and wished to copy some text, nothing prevents me from doing so (heck, I'm running NotScript now, so I'd get no pop-up anyway)...
Serious question. With the advent of this official government petition forum, online petitions have been all the rage lately. Topics have ranged from legitimate causes (the one discussed in the article) to silly or facetious ones (building a Death Star). I know it's far too early to tell for the recent petitions, as it takes a while for things to happen in the government scene, but what electronic petitions have actually gotten stuff going?
I guess SlashDot didn't have enough room in their article title bar for a seven letter word. Perfectly reasonable explanation as to why they omitted the word "violent," right?
Mine doesn't allow 3rd party services, but that was just a potential example. We have an internal network that everyone has access to (it's divided up so you don't have access to ~every~ folder, but you can still setup easy sharing between any number of individuals). For your scenario, why not use a network? Open it up just like a folder on your computer, drop the file(s) there, done and done.
This is an idea I had just now, could be completely useless, impossible to get users to adapt to, and would just shift the problem from one domain to another, but here goes anyway: How about we do away with e-mail attachments? Adapt a policy that forbids any e-mail attachments from being downloaded, period (sorry, people who feel the need to include a fancy e-mail signature image, guess you'll just to have to use boring text). Obligate employees, etc. to retrieve files from another source outside of e-mail. With the advent of technologies like DropBox, SkyDrive, etc. (or, heck, network shares), sharing files is dead simple, and doesn't require having to "send" files to anyone anymore. Instead, they get a link to said file(s) to download, from a trusted source (internal network, corporate web site, and so on).
While this wouldn't prevent "your Facebook account has been hacked! Click here and give us your info to fix, because we're totally Facebook" style spam/malware, it would shut and lock the door to any malicious e-mail that relies on viewing/downloading an e-mail attachment instantly.
Is it possible to setup a group policy to disable e-mail attachment downloading in, say, Outlook? I'm sure Company Policy could state "never never download e-mail attachments, period," but I'm guessing that would get ignored once co-worker X just has to see those new pretty kitty pictures.
Most of those websites look crippled until the last of these dozen services finally loads 3 minutes later.
I know, right? Browsing the web with NotScript (Chrome extension) is a real eye-opener. Some sites simply load as a blank white screen until you whitelist scripts to run! It's especially good when you first open a site, it has three sources for scripts, then when you enable one, suddenly 15 more appear in the list. It's great being able to disable most of the junk people toss on sites from the get-go, but sometimes it's irritating to have to dig through the long chain of scripts just to make a web site functional. Eventually I just give up and go with "run all temporarily."
I hope we get to a point where web sites can't just include arbitrary scripts to run from third party sites, but then we might have issues of people hosting the cruddy stuff from their own host, making filtering harder. A catch-22, for sure.
Must have at least one lowercase letter, capital letter, punctuation, number? Uh...
Max length of 12 characters. Wat?
Some password requirements are perfectly acceptable, even encouraged. There exist plenty, however, that just make one scratch one's head. Why would a maximum length any lower than several hundred characters ever be necessary? More egregious limitations include requiring an insanely complex number of symbol/letter/number combinations (easy for AI, hard for humans, as XKCD eloquently points out) and, of course, passwords restricted to numbers only. Sadly financial institutions seem to be fond of this one, possibly under the mentality that a PIN is just as good as a password, and customers won't forget that!
Having a phone while driving my car is probably the biggest advantage. I barely use my prepaid cellphone, but the ability to call people when not at home, work, etc, having a consistent number to reach me, etc, are all good reasons. You can have a cellphone without spending hours a day on it, texting and talking away.
I have a prepaid cell phone using T-Mobile. While it's true that the minutes expire after a year, if you put any amount of additional minutes on it (i.e. even $5 worth, for example), the timer is reset for all of your existing minutes. Additionally, after putting a certain amount of money into it over time (I forget the precise amount - been a few years), the cost is about 10 cents a minute. It's probably not the best deal, but considering I only have to put ~$50/year into my phone for talk and text (and the phone itself was only $30 off the shelf), I consider it a bargain.
Which is why Chrome's Click to Play also puts a puzzle piece in your address bar, which you can click to run all plugins on a page once or all the time for a given domain. Does Firefox do something similar? There are lots of cases where there's no clickable space to enable a third party plugin.
I won't contest your first two points, even though I personally don't mind either of them, myself. However, while your third point was a concern I had initially, I very quickly found that Windows lets you configure the taskbar to behave like the old one did (i.e. have it only on one monitor). This requires no external utilities or hacks: right-click the taskbar and select Properties, then uncheck "Show taskbar on all displays."
Also, credit where credit is due, Windows 8 improved multi-monitor support. Desktop backgrounds can now be set on a per-screen basis, and also supports a single, panoramic image across multiple monitors (something that required custom software in previous versions of windows). The metro start screen, hated as it is, can be quickly moved between screeens with Windows Key + PgUp/PgDn, and it remembers the last screen it was on. I use three monitors myself.
Admittedly, it is a generalization. I do think it applies, however, after a mass shooting. Gun control is brought up. If it took place in a school, the "should teachers carry guns" / "should we have officers in schools" debates arise. There are a couple incidents of either would-be copycats being caught or innocents looking like they're doing something vaguely like what just happened are punished. But I digress. The point I wanted to stress is that people are wound up right now, and it'll fade as time goes on.
Irrational behavior tends to be expected when fear and their ilk are involved. I did not mean to conflate "expected" with "acceptable." It's just something that's bound to happen after events such as these.
Kneejerk reactions are to be expected after a tragedy. Every school is going to be gone over with a fine tooth comb for a while, taking drastic actions over the smallest of incidents. I haven't read the article, so I don't know if there is more to this story than "kid draws pictures of guns and gets punished for it." If there is, then there's little to discuss. If there isn't, then it's, of course, an extreme overreaction.
In light of recent events, schools seem to be adopting zero tolerance policies. My old high school (I attended in 2002-2006) had such a policy against the word "kill." If you said that heinous word, even in jest, you'd get punished. Of course, students didn't take such a threat seriously, and I can't recall any incidents where action was taken (my graduating class was
The student in this case didn't exactly make the best of decisions: With tensions high, it would probably be better to not be drawing guns or give any potential "danger indicators" to school officials, etc. I don't know if the kid's school announced either changes in policy or the like, but I'm not sure they'd necessarily have to.
Going on the assumption that all the kid did was draw the guns, is this wrong? Of course. Will it be ironed out over the next week or two? Probably. Is this the Sign of Things to Come (as I'm reading in some comments here)? Doubtful. If this sort of draconian enforcement takes place six months from now, maybe I'll consider starting to worry, but for now, it's nothing but kneejerk reactions and trigger-happy (pardon the pun) folk.
For your Secret Questions, I just put the questions and their respective garbage answers in KeePass as well! My bank also does the "unrecognized device? Answer security questions" thing. I just pretend I have four usernames and four passwords in that regard. This way you can keep the garbage answers (really just password strings now).
"By the time Windows 9 comes along, touch screens on the desktop should be fairly commonplace..."
Are touch screen devices really becoming that common for desktop PC environments? Honest question. I know I won't be spending any more money on monitors in the next few years if I can avoid it, personally.
Slashdot Mirror
Some cursory googling did not reveal any link between Evidon and Rapleaf. Got some sources to share?
If someone has a client that can't render a standard page, then that's their problem and we should have left them to it - eventually they would have complained to the relevant person and their browser would become closer to the standard.
Not every client can get their browser changed. Not every client is willing to lift a finger to improve their standard either, and can happily move on to a competitor who's more than willing to accommodate them.
If you have CSS, in this day and age, that does detection of the user-agent, then that's your problem
Tell that to clients who want a particular design. They don't care about standards, they care that the pages look correct across all browsers, including legacy versions of IE dating back to 7 (or, even in some cases, 6), and on mobile devices. They're not going to say "oh, IE 7 doesn't support [standard]? Okay, you can cut that piece out then. ^^" They're going to not appreciate that your pages don't look right, and they won't care why.
Personally, I use Opera - have done for nearly a decade now. If it doesn't work in Opera, I move on and go somewhere else.
Yeah, filtering one's web traffic based on user-agent string is stupid. I think it was a poor attempt to say "we only have to design for one web site!" by "forcing" users to use "correct" browsers. That being said, I've not seen this practice used for some time (maybe because I use Chrome? I've not seen it at work either...)
And as others have said, the fancy stuff usually is mandated by people over the site designers' heads, either for the client, or because Mister Boss Man wants it, or for some other reason. Yes, in a perfect world, we'd only use HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc that we knew worked 100% of the time across any medium that can display a web page, but that just isn't how the world turns.
Hmm, while that does make sense, I'm afraid I did none of those things. Ah well, better to err on the side of caution.
I tried to set mine up, and now Apple is saying I need to wait 3 days before the process can be completred. I'm in no hurry, but this feels kind of arbitrary, when other popular services (Google, Blizzard, et al) can set this form of authentication up instantly.
That's how I feel too. And that's why I cringe whenever I think about how drug companies can advertise their medicines on TV, saying "talk to your doctor about DrugXYZ." That is, "bug your doctor about our product instead of letting them decide what's best for you."
To when web sites tried to disable right-clicking to "hide" their source code. I was in middle school and knew that was baloney...
Actually, this reminds me of web sites hosting lyrics, too, that either attempt to disable right-click or insert their website in tiny text between words of lyrics.
Reading the article tells me that this sort of "fee" doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. I've never been to the web site in question, but if I ever needed to and wished to copy some text, nothing prevents me from doing so (heck, I'm running NotScript now, so I'd get no pop-up anyway)...
What about the Internet as a whole? I think that needs to become a utility before a company does...
Serious question. With the advent of this official government petition forum, online petitions have been all the rage lately. Topics have ranged from legitimate causes (the one discussed in the article) to silly or facetious ones (building a Death Star). I know it's far too early to tell for the recent petitions, as it takes a while for things to happen in the government scene, but what electronic petitions have actually gotten stuff going?
I guess SlashDot didn't have enough room in their article title bar for a seven letter word. Perfectly reasonable explanation as to why they omitted the word "violent," right?
Number of programs/apps I can run on a Surface Pro outside of the official app store: Lots (i.e. however many Windows 7 can.
Number of programs/apps I can run on an iDevice outside of the official app store: 0
You're not obligated to use the app store at all, and you're not obligated to use the Metro interface any more time than you spend in a start menu.
Mine doesn't allow 3rd party services, but that was just a potential example. We have an internal network that everyone has access to (it's divided up so you don't have access to ~every~ folder, but you can still setup easy sharing between any number of individuals). For your scenario, why not use a network? Open it up just like a folder on your computer, drop the file(s) there, done and done.
So you'd settle for Windows 6.1 over Windows 6.2?
I know people hate Metro on their desktops, but is there a reason it's so despised on what is its intended device use: a touch screen device?
Outside of Metro, what's different between 8 and 7 (especially in tablet form)?
This is an idea I had just now, could be completely useless, impossible to get users to adapt to, and would just shift the problem from one domain to another, but here goes anyway: How about we do away with e-mail attachments? Adapt a policy that forbids any e-mail attachments from being downloaded, period (sorry, people who feel the need to include a fancy e-mail signature image, guess you'll just to have to use boring text). Obligate employees, etc. to retrieve files from another source outside of e-mail. With the advent of technologies like DropBox, SkyDrive, etc. (or, heck, network shares), sharing files is dead simple, and doesn't require having to "send" files to anyone anymore. Instead, they get a link to said file(s) to download, from a trusted source (internal network, corporate web site, and so on).
While this wouldn't prevent "your Facebook account has been hacked! Click here and give us your info to fix, because we're totally Facebook" style spam/malware, it would shut and lock the door to any malicious e-mail that relies on viewing/downloading an e-mail attachment instantly.
Is it possible to setup a group policy to disable e-mail attachment downloading in, say, Outlook? I'm sure Company Policy could state "never never download e-mail attachments, period," but I'm guessing that would get ignored once co-worker X just has to see those new pretty kitty pictures.
Most of those websites look crippled until the last of these dozen services finally loads 3 minutes later.
I know, right? Browsing the web with NotScript (Chrome extension) is a real eye-opener. Some sites simply load as a blank white screen until you whitelist scripts to run! It's especially good when you first open a site, it has three sources for scripts, then when you enable one, suddenly 15 more appear in the list. It's great being able to disable most of the junk people toss on sites from the get-go, but sometimes it's irritating to have to dig through the long chain of scripts just to make a web site functional. Eventually I just give up and go with "run all temporarily."
I hope we get to a point where web sites can't just include arbitrary scripts to run from third party sites, but then we might have issues of people hosting the cruddy stuff from their own host, making filtering harder. A catch-22, for sure.
Some password requirements are perfectly acceptable, even encouraged. There exist plenty, however, that just make one scratch one's head. Why would a maximum length any lower than several hundred characters ever be necessary? More egregious limitations include requiring an insanely complex number of symbol/letter/number combinations (easy for AI, hard for humans, as XKCD eloquently points out) and, of course, passwords restricted to numbers only. Sadly financial institutions seem to be fond of this one, possibly under the mentality that a PIN is just as good as a password, and customers won't forget that!
Having a phone while driving my car is probably the biggest advantage. I barely use my prepaid cellphone, but the ability to call people when not at home, work, etc, having a consistent number to reach me, etc, are all good reasons. You can have a cellphone without spending hours a day on it, texting and talking away.
I have a prepaid cell phone using T-Mobile. While it's true that the minutes expire after a year, if you put any amount of additional minutes on it (i.e. even $5 worth, for example), the timer is reset for all of your existing minutes. Additionally, after putting a certain amount of money into it over time (I forget the precise amount - been a few years), the cost is about 10 cents a minute. It's probably not the best deal, but considering I only have to put ~$50/year into my phone for talk and text (and the phone itself was only $30 off the shelf), I consider it a bargain.
Which is why Chrome's Click to Play also puts a puzzle piece in your address bar, which you can click to run all plugins on a page once or all the time for a given domain. Does Firefox do something similar? There are lots of cases where there's no clickable space to enable a third party plugin.
I won't contest your first two points, even though I personally don't mind either of them, myself. However, while your third point was a concern I had initially, I very quickly found that Windows lets you configure the taskbar to behave like the old one did (i.e. have it only on one monitor). This requires no external utilities or hacks: right-click the taskbar and select Properties, then uncheck "Show taskbar on all displays."
Also, credit where credit is due, Windows 8 improved multi-monitor support. Desktop backgrounds can now be set on a per-screen basis, and also supports a single, panoramic image across multiple monitors (something that required custom software in previous versions of windows). The metro start screen, hated as it is, can be quickly moved between screeens with Windows Key + PgUp/PgDn, and it remembers the last screen it was on. I use three monitors myself.
Admittedly, it is a generalization. I do think it applies, however, after a mass shooting. Gun control is brought up. If it took place in a school, the "should teachers carry guns" / "should we have officers in schools" debates arise. There are a couple incidents of either would-be copycats being caught or innocents looking like they're doing something vaguely like what just happened are punished. But I digress. The point I wanted to stress is that people are wound up right now, and it'll fade as time goes on.
Irrational behavior tends to be expected when fear and their ilk are involved. I did not mean to conflate "expected" with "acceptable." It's just something that's bound to happen after events such as these.
Kneejerk reactions are to be expected after a tragedy. Every school is going to be gone over with a fine tooth comb for a while, taking drastic actions over the smallest of incidents. I haven't read the article, so I don't know if there is more to this story than "kid draws pictures of guns and gets punished for it." If there is, then there's little to discuss. If there isn't, then it's, of course, an extreme overreaction.
In light of recent events, schools seem to be adopting zero tolerance policies. My old high school (I attended in 2002-2006) had such a policy against the word "kill." If you said that heinous word, even in jest, you'd get punished. Of course, students didn't take such a threat seriously, and I can't recall any incidents where action was taken (my graduating class was
The student in this case didn't exactly make the best of decisions: With tensions high, it would probably be better to not be drawing guns or give any potential "danger indicators" to school officials, etc. I don't know if the kid's school announced either changes in policy or the like, but I'm not sure they'd necessarily have to.
Going on the assumption that all the kid did was draw the guns, is this wrong? Of course. Will it be ironed out over the next week or two? Probably. Is this the Sign of Things to Come (as I'm reading in some comments here)? Doubtful. If this sort of draconian enforcement takes place six months from now, maybe I'll consider starting to worry, but for now, it's nothing but kneejerk reactions and trigger-happy (pardon the pun) folk.
For your Secret Questions, I just put the questions and their respective garbage answers in KeePass as well! My bank also does the "unrecognized device? Answer security questions" thing. I just pretend I have four usernames and four passwords in that regard. This way you can keep the garbage answers (really just password strings now).
Are touch screen devices really becoming that common for desktop PC environments? Honest question. I know I won't be spending any more money on monitors in the next few years if I can avoid it, personally.
Zerglings and Banelings are defending their colonies!