Someone mod the parent up "Informative"; the link in the article was definitely not right.
And now having run the test in IE and Firefox, I can honestly say that while they both failed it, Firefox looked a hell of a lot more like the test image than IE did. I think he was right -- standards don't mean much to monopolists.
Indeed, the CSS formatting model allows more control horizontally than vertically. This is due to (typically) having a known width, but an unknown height. As such, the height is harder to deal with.
However, CSS2 fixed positioning allows you to place content relative to the viewport (which is CSS-speak for window) instead of the document. For example, by setting position: fixed; bottom: 0 on an element, it will stick to the bottom. This works in Opera, Safari and Mozilla-based browsers. IE6 doesn't support it, however. It remains to be seen if IE7 will support it.
That's an interesting point, given the profusion of video monitor sizes and their associated resolutions (800X600, 1024X768, etc.), and the variety of browsers and the explosion of toolbars now available. How do you define "height" in a browser? There's certainly a fixed viewing area based on all the above factors, but it's so varied from user to user that it makes it hard to come up with a good idea of how big something should be on the page. You can use relative sizes, but that only works if the content is scalable; fixed sizes are good for a range of resolutions, but as resolution increases it tends to make things become squashed vertically.
It's the bane of web development -- how scalable do you make your content? Do you care that much about old browsers and how things render? How many people out there are realistically still using IE4 and Netscape 4?
That's the best advice you'll get. You pay them to provide you with mobile phone service and in return they promise to provide that service. The onus is on them; if someone is illegally using your phone number and wracking up hundreds or thousands of dollars in calls you did not make, they have a vested interest in determining if this is true and putting a stop to it. The easiest way for them to do that is freeze yor account and issue you a new phone number. I have T-Mobile and managed to lose my phone in France; I called them immediately and they were able to freeze my account that instant, preventing anyone from making calls and I was able to get a replacement as soon as I got back.
Try calling again -- keep calling until you get someone to listen. Try to cut right to the heart of the matter -- tell them you think someone is making calls using your number. A CSR should be able to pull up your current calling records and verify what you're terlling them easily enough.
As an aside, why is it possible for calls from the same number to be going on simultaneously? Wouldn't there be something to prevent that, unless you were using a three-way calling option?
Mein Deutsch is a bit rusty, but I recall "über" as meaning "over, above, beyond" or something to that effect. That would seem to indicate that an 'über-geek' is "beyond a geek." What is there past geekdom?
As an aside, I wonder if Slashdot has an umlaut limit?
As the CIO Council and Office of Management and Budget help map out the June 2008 transition to IP Version 6, perhaps the biggest challenge is that they're entering unfamiliar territory.
In the newest additions to the IPv6 Transition Guidance, the council's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee has provided a list of best practices and transition elements that agencies should use as they work to meet the deadline.
So the government has a year-and-a-half to meet this deadline? Forgive the cynicism, but given that they have a loose set of guidelines and so many systems that would need conversion, I think they're being a tad optimistic. Kudos for trying this, but I won't be surprised when it takes until 2010.
Two points: 1) not only über-geeks are doing PC-to-PC calling. 2) Lots of über-geeks actually use IE.
Two counterpoints: 1) If people are using Firefox predominantly, they they are liable to not care that Windows Live Messenger has this function as they probably are not in the habit of using MS products and 2) über-geek is a hackneyed phrase that no self-respecting geek would use let alone be labelled as
We're seeing this more now (think Sun and SGI) -- companies that are underperforming making changes at the top in the hopes of generating new intitiatives and pumping up the stock price. It remains to be seen if all the bloodletting will lead to any marked improvement in the short term -- new execs have to deal with things as they are and try to untangle the mess left on their desk before they can move forward.
You would think that people would have learned after the first time around. Apparently not.
You're giving people too much credit; as has been noted in this forum many times, the average computer user is not exactly bright and doesn't read Slashdot, so they would have no idea that this is a problem. People just assume that if something appears to work a certain way, it in fact works that way.
What sort of IP Reform is needed in a New Jersey town? This platform is inheritly national.
But that's just it - all politics is local. If you have an agenda, you can't afford to make it your sole purpose if you want to play in the political realm. You have to have a broad platform to attract voters on a general level, and your personal agenda is just one plank in that platform. As you gain strength, that plank can come more and more to the fore until once you reach the national level, its the flag you fly.
So we can expect to see reformed copyright and IP laws in the US around 2032?
Well, there are two options:
Complain about how the system is corrupt, there's nothing we can do, big money will always win, youth won't vote, etc., thereby maintianing the status quo and ensuring there's no reform
Try, and give it a chance to work
Of ocurse it will take time, and maybe other things will happen in the interim to bring about the change faster, but I can guarantee nothing will happen unless some effort is made. It seems the Pirate Party is willing to make the effort. I personally am going to think about joining up, as soon as I can find an eye patch...
Better to trial and fail then not try at all, I'd say. At least if you actively work to avoid them, eventually you will at least hurt them financially - which can eventually (hopefully?) lead to someone else with bigger pockets that we can trust finally buying out the backbone.
It's not so easy in more rural areas, but I suspect this will give Vonage a hefty boost if enough people get disenfranchised by AT&T over this to make the switch. That's assuming that Vonage can avoid more lawsuits.
With the election system of the US, it's always 2 parties with nobody having thet slightest chance to muscle in, at best in local elections (which, frankly, have no impact on copyright laws).
But that's the best place to start, locally. Some small town, say here in NJ. A Pirate Party candidate runs, solicits donations via Internet, runs a clean campaign and overwhelms some lowlife local mayor by making him/her look out of touch with the modern world. If elected, that candidiate becomes a news item; next up - city council elections! You just work your way through, starting at the grass roots level, shoe-horning your way into every nook and cranny of local politics until you have a large enough power base to build state organizations. It's only a couple more jumps until you're in the national spotlight. The whole thing hinges, however, on getting youth to vote, because they would probably identify more strongly from the start with a Pirate Party candidate.
As an aside, the name is fine; after all there used to be "Whigs" and "Tories"; how lame are those?
What I prefer to newsletters is user-requested content, where you can say "Send me an email when you write a new blog post/article/whatever about $SUBJECT". I'm not usually interested in everything a site has to offer, but if they're willing to pick out the things I would be interested in, I'm much more likely to want to see it
I agree. I'm not a big fan of blogs, but there are occasionally ones that contain useful information and come across with some thought-provoking ideas. I like this idea of the customizeable email alert; I get these already from my bank and credit card company, and from CNN, why not a blog? When you think about it, it's similar to doing a search on a topic and following the links, except that instead of getting a lot of irrelevant crap, you get a more focused set of data. THe only caveat would be to make sure that if it's keyword based, there's some kind of threshhold that says, "alert me is $SUBJECT comes up, but only if it's talked about at length." Someone might mention a keyword once in a blog, but that shouldn't be good enough to trigger an alert -- it should only get sent out if there's enough about that subject to make it worth reading.
Perhaps we need to find a new name for them other than "laptop." I'm certainly not putting my HP on my lap without a sheet of Space Shuttle tiles between me and it.
People who think like you make endless wars the smart choice for the Feds.
I see. So because I advocate reforming the current system, removing the bozos currently in office, and electing people who might have a brain in my head, it's my fault. Well, that's sound, logical thinking for you! Try reading the whole thred; try reading more of my posts. I can't defend the country by myself, unless someone's going to hand me the nuke button; I rely on the Federal Government for that, and they are supposed to listen to the American people and do what we say. What we're seeing right now is a government feeling the need to disregard its bosses and pursue its own agenda as far as fighting terrorists goes. What I have said and will continue to say is that we need to take the system back and put people in place who will do the right thing for a change! I don't want a war anymore than anyone else, but I also need a government that will try to protect me to the best of its ability from all threats. I just don't agree with the current government's tactics, but then I think Clinton was a putz for not bombing Bin Laden into the Stone Age back when he had a chance.
It's always nice to see how a person can take a statement out of context, mangle it, and use it to make themselves feel better than someone else... just another example of politics-in-action, but on the Slashdot scale.
As a card-carrying member of the Sarcasm Society of America, I admire your sarcasm. I just felt a point needed to be made; I've actually been trying to make it all day. Every issue on the Internet now seems to be political, more than economic or social; wish it weren't so. Politics should have no sway over the Web.
I don't think it's a question of "hating" America, but more the system that we seem to be developing. It's obvious that money talks -- you don't need Pink Floyd to point that out. Corporations will naturally hold more sway than people (unless those people are Bill Gates or Warren Buffet), although collections of people can certainly bring to bear greater resources (hence special interests).
In the end, our government should not be about who has the money to have their voice heard, but what is in the national interest. The whole net neutrality debate is over what everyone thinks is best, but both sides, rather than having open and honest debate, are simply lining up their resources and preparing for a fight.
I've said it many times: the American people have the capacity and capability to make their voice heard, if they choose to. Vote. Write you Congressman. Write the President. If you are getting no satisfaction from them, find new people who you trust more. The only reason money in Washington, D.C. ever becomes an issue is because eventually, if you are there long enough, the power you wield will bring you suitors and they will court you ruthlessly, to get you to see things their way. That's the way of it, and even the best man will crack under it eventually, given a moment of weakness.
Forget the argument that telcos need to be guaranteed a return on investment or they won't upgrade our bandwidth. No one guarantees Intel a return before they spend billions in R&D on their next Pentium chip to beat their competitors at AMD. No one guarantees Cisco a return on their investment before they deploy their next router to beat Juniper. In real, competitive markets, the market provides access to capital.
So the telcos take our money, give us lousy service, and complain long and hard about how they're not making enough money, though last I checked they all seemed to be financially solvent.
The telcos, like an industry, are afraid of change. But they are going to have to change -- or the Internet will pass them by. Forget DSL; they need to start laying fiber as fast as it can be made. Because if they don't, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN will, and pretty soon people will wonder "what ever happened to the phone company?"
But the last mile is the killer part. I highly doubt google is going to become an ISP.
Why not? It would certainly give them a revenue stream independent of advertising and then they'd be able to take the fight right to the telcos, perhaps even undercutting them in areas. Link that up with providing VoIP service, and they would have an advantage over the telcos. I suspect people would drop Verizon, et. al. like a box of roaches for Google, since Google is becoming a ubiquitous name for the Internet.
All those things are nice, but they aren't really revolutionary technology. We're talking making JavaScript work right or being able to use the browser on things other than a computer, which is really nothing new.
I'm talking about the browser as window, mirror, control center, television, etc. Right now everyone is trying to modify current or graft new functionality onto current browsers, which would be fine if they were still mainly dealing with static content, but as the Web becomes more and more dynamic, there's a plethora of data that needs to be tamed and made to follow simple rules. Instead of simply refining or expanding JavaScript, which users and developers have a love/hate relationship with, how about replacing it with a scripting language that ties it directly to the DOM, gives no one any wiggle room (to avoid IE's laziness), and prevents content in the browser from getting "out of the box." Even that is still narrowly focused thinking -- it's one of those times I see something in my head but can't articulate it fully. I'm just thinking of an adjustable, customizable interface that would serve to keep data secure inside its environment while allowing maximum flexibility in design and layout. Perhaps the current crop of browsers are capable of this; I don't know.
The problem is that there's no real, new, revolutionary development in browsers. They're all following each other's leads and copying each other's successes, not looking beyong the narrow confines of their little war for market share.
With applications migrating from static desktop to web driven versions and web sites creating useful functionality, the web browser has to evolve. Even the word "browser" is really not fitting anymore, since they do so much more than serve up static content. They are becoming control interfaces, transaction screens, and data transfer mechanisms; the browser is going to have to become "heftier" (do not read as larger) to deal not just with interacting with these new applications, but to provide a new layer of security.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone mod the parent up "Informative"; the link in the article was definitely not right.
And now having run the test in IE and Firefox, I can honestly say that while they both failed it, Firefox looked a hell of a lot more like the test image than IE did. I think he was right -- standards don't mean much to monopolists.
Indeed, the CSS formatting model allows more control horizontally than vertically. This is due to (typically) having a known width, but an unknown height. As such, the height is harder to deal with.
However, CSS2 fixed positioning allows you to place content relative to the viewport (which is CSS-speak for window) instead of the document. For example, by setting position: fixed; bottom: 0 on an element, it will stick to the bottom. This works in Opera, Safari and Mozilla-based browsers. IE6 doesn't support it, however. It remains to be seen if IE7 will support it.
That's an interesting point, given the profusion of video monitor sizes and their associated resolutions (800X600, 1024X768, etc.), and the variety of browsers and the explosion of toolbars now available. How do you define "height" in a browser? There's certainly a fixed viewing area based on all the above factors, but it's so varied from user to user that it makes it hard to come up with a good idea of how big something should be on the page. You can use relative sizes, but that only works if the content is scalable; fixed sizes are good for a range of resolutions, but as resolution increases it tends to make things become squashed vertically.
It's the bane of web development -- how scalable do you make your content? Do you care that much about old browsers and how things render? How many people out there are realistically still using IE4 and Netscape 4?
Here's some advice: Don't take that shit.
That's the best advice you'll get. You pay them to provide you with mobile phone service and in return they promise to provide that service. The onus is on them; if someone is illegally using your phone number and wracking up hundreds or thousands of dollars in calls you did not make, they have a vested interest in determining if this is true and putting a stop to it. The easiest way for them to do that is freeze yor account and issue you a new phone number. I have T-Mobile and managed to lose my phone in France; I called them immediately and they were able to freeze my account that instant, preventing anyone from making calls and I was able to get a replacement as soon as I got back.
Try calling again -- keep calling until you get someone to listen. Try to cut right to the heart of the matter -- tell them you think someone is making calls using your number. A CSR should be able to pull up your current calling records and verify what you're terlling them easily enough.
As an aside, why is it possible for calls from the same number to be going on simultaneously? Wouldn't there be something to prevent that, unless you were using a three-way calling option?
Mein Deutsch is a bit rusty, but I recall "über" as meaning "over, above, beyond" or something to that effect. That would seem to indicate that an 'über-geek' is "beyond a geek." What is there past geekdom?
As an aside, I wonder if Slashdot has an umlaut limit?
As the CIO Council and Office of Management and Budget help map out the June 2008 transition to IP Version 6, perhaps the biggest challenge is that they're entering unfamiliar territory.
In the newest additions to the IPv6 Transition Guidance, the council's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee has provided a list of best practices and transition elements that agencies should use as they work to meet the deadline.
So the government has a year-and-a-half to meet this deadline? Forgive the cynicism, but given that they have a loose set of guidelines and so many systems that would need conversion, I think they're being a tad optimistic. Kudos for trying this, but I won't be surprised when it takes until 2010.
Two points: 1) not only über-geeks are doing PC-to-PC calling. 2) Lots of über-geeks actually use IE.
Two counterpoints: 1) If people are using Firefox predominantly, they they are liable to not care that Windows Live Messenger has this function as they probably are not in the habit of using MS products and 2) über-geek is a hackneyed phrase that no self-respecting geek would use let alone be labelled as
More on the shakeup.
We're seeing this more now (think Sun and SGI) -- companies that are underperforming making changes at the top in the hopes of generating new intitiatives and pumping up the stock price. It remains to be seen if all the bloodletting will lead to any marked improvement in the short term -- new execs have to deal with things as they are and try to untangle the mess left on their desk before they can move forward.
You would think that people would have learned after the first time around. Apparently not.
You're giving people too much credit; as has been noted in this forum many times, the average computer user is not exactly bright and doesn't read Slashdot, so they would have no idea that this is a problem. People just assume that if something appears to work a certain way, it in fact works that way.
Mercer Cty... Washington Twp to be precise... close to the seat of power in Trenton, from which great despair flows.
I don't remember this from Schoolhouse Rock.
What sort of IP Reform is needed in a New Jersey town? This platform is inheritly national.
But that's just it - all politics is local. If you have an agenda, you can't afford to make it your sole purpose if you want to play in the political realm. You have to have a broad platform to attract voters on a general level, and your personal agenda is just one plank in that platform. As you gain strength, that plank can come more and more to the fore until once you reach the national level, its the flag you fly.
So we can expect to see reformed copyright and IP laws in the US around 2032?
Well, there are two options:
Of ocurse it will take time, and maybe other things will happen in the interim to bring about the change faster, but I can guarantee nothing will happen unless some effort is made. It seems the Pirate Party is willing to make the effort. I personally am going to think about joining up, as soon as I can find an eye patch...
Better to trial and fail then not try at all, I'd say. At least if you actively work to avoid them, eventually you will at least hurt them financially - which can eventually (hopefully?) lead to someone else with bigger pockets that we can trust finally buying out the backbone.
It's not so easy in more rural areas, but I suspect this will give Vonage a hefty boost if enough people get disenfranchised by AT&T over this to make the switch. That's assuming that Vonage can avoid more lawsuits.
With the election system of the US, it's always 2 parties with nobody having thet slightest chance to muscle in, at best in local elections (which, frankly, have no impact on copyright laws).
But that's the best place to start, locally. Some small town, say here in NJ. A Pirate Party candidate runs, solicits donations via Internet, runs a clean campaign and overwhelms some lowlife local mayor by making him/her look out of touch with the modern world. If elected, that candidiate becomes a news item; next up - city council elections! You just work your way through, starting at the grass roots level, shoe-horning your way into every nook and cranny of local politics until you have a large enough power base to build state organizations. It's only a couple more jumps until you're in the national spotlight. The whole thing hinges, however, on getting youth to vote, because they would probably identify more strongly from the start with a Pirate Party candidate.
As an aside, the name is fine; after all there used to be "Whigs" and "Tories"; how lame are those?
...this happens more often than Dell admits.
What I prefer to newsletters is user-requested content, where you can say "Send me an email when you write a new blog post/article/whatever about $SUBJECT". I'm not usually interested in everything a site has to offer, but if they're willing to pick out the things I would be interested in, I'm much more likely to want to see it
I agree. I'm not a big fan of blogs, but there are occasionally ones that contain useful information and come across with some thought-provoking ideas. I like this idea of the customizeable email alert; I get these already from my bank and credit card company, and from CNN, why not a blog? When you think about it, it's similar to doing a search on a topic and following the links, except that instead of getting a lot of irrelevant crap, you get a more focused set of data. THe only caveat would be to make sure that if it's keyword based, there's some kind of threshhold that says, "alert me is $SUBJECT comes up, but only if it's talked about at length." Someone might mention a keyword once in a blog, but that shouldn't be good enough to trigger an alert -- it should only get sent out if there's enough about that subject to make it worth reading.
Perhaps we need to find a new name for them other than "laptop." I'm certainly not putting my HP on my lap without a sheet of Space Shuttle tiles between me and it.
People who think like you make endless wars the smart choice for the Feds.
I see. So because I advocate reforming the current system, removing the bozos currently in office, and electing people who might have a brain in my head, it's my fault. Well, that's sound, logical thinking for you! Try reading the whole thred; try reading more of my posts. I can't defend the country by myself, unless someone's going to hand me the nuke button; I rely on the Federal Government for that, and they are supposed to listen to the American people and do what we say. What we're seeing right now is a government feeling the need to disregard its bosses and pursue its own agenda as far as fighting terrorists goes. What I have said and will continue to say is that we need to take the system back and put people in place who will do the right thing for a change! I don't want a war anymore than anyone else, but I also need a government that will try to protect me to the best of its ability from all threats. I just don't agree with the current government's tactics, but then I think Clinton was a putz for not bombing Bin Laden into the Stone Age back when he had a chance.
It's always nice to see how a person can take a statement out of context, mangle it, and use it to make themselves feel better than someone else... just another example of politics-in-action, but on the Slashdot scale.
As a card-carrying member of the Sarcasm Society of America, I admire your sarcasm. I just felt a point needed to be made; I've actually been trying to make it all day. Every issue on the Internet now seems to be political, more than economic or social; wish it weren't so. Politics should have no sway over the Web.
I don't think it's a question of "hating" America, but more the system that we seem to be developing. It's obvious that money talks -- you don't need Pink Floyd to point that out. Corporations will naturally hold more sway than people (unless those people are Bill Gates or Warren Buffet), although collections of people can certainly bring to bear greater resources (hence special interests).
In the end, our government should not be about who has the money to have their voice heard, but what is in the national interest. The whole net neutrality debate is over what everyone thinks is best, but both sides, rather than having open and honest debate, are simply lining up their resources and preparing for a fight.
I've said it many times: the American people have the capacity and capability to make their voice heard, if they choose to. Vote. Write you Congressman. Write the President. If you are getting no satisfaction from them, find new people who you trust more. The only reason money in Washington, D.C. ever becomes an issue is because eventually, if you are there long enough, the power you wield will bring you suitors and they will court you ruthlessly, to get you to see things their way. That's the way of it, and even the best man will crack under it eventually, given a moment of weakness.
Forget the argument that telcos need to be guaranteed a return on investment or they won't upgrade our bandwidth. No one guarantees Intel a return before they spend billions in R&D on their next Pentium chip to beat their competitors at AMD. No one guarantees Cisco a return on their investment before they deploy their next router to beat Juniper. In real, competitive markets, the market provides access to capital.
So the telcos take our money, give us lousy service, and complain long and hard about how they're not making enough money, though last I checked they all seemed to be financially solvent.
The telcos, like an industry, are afraid of change. But they are going to have to change -- or the Internet will pass them by. Forget DSL; they need to start laying fiber as fast as it can be made. Because if they don't, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN will, and pretty soon people will wonder "what ever happened to the phone company?"
But the last mile is the killer part. I highly doubt google is going to become an ISP.
Why not? It would certainly give them a revenue stream independent of advertising and then they'd be able to take the fight right to the telcos, perhaps even undercutting them in areas. Link that up with providing VoIP service, and they would have an advantage over the telcos. I suspect people would drop Verizon, et. al. like a box of roaches for Google, since Google is becoming a ubiquitous name for the Internet.
All those things are nice, but they aren't really revolutionary technology. We're talking making JavaScript work right or being able to use the browser on things other than a computer, which is really nothing new.
I'm talking about the browser as window, mirror, control center, television, etc. Right now everyone is trying to modify current or graft new functionality onto current browsers, which would be fine if they were still mainly dealing with static content, but as the Web becomes more and more dynamic, there's a plethora of data that needs to be tamed and made to follow simple rules. Instead of simply refining or expanding JavaScript, which users and developers have a love/hate relationship with, how about replacing it with a scripting language that ties it directly to the DOM, gives no one any wiggle room (to avoid IE's laziness), and prevents content in the browser from getting "out of the box." Even that is still narrowly focused thinking -- it's one of those times I see something in my head but can't articulate it fully. I'm just thinking of an adjustable, customizable interface that would serve to keep data secure inside its environment while allowing maximum flexibility in design and layout. Perhaps the current crop of browsers are capable of this; I don't know.
The problem is that there's no real, new, revolutionary development in browsers. They're all following each other's leads and copying each other's successes, not looking beyong the narrow confines of their little war for market share.
With applications migrating from static desktop to web driven versions and web sites creating useful functionality, the web browser has to evolve. Even the word "browser" is really not fitting anymore, since they do so much more than serve up static content. They are becoming control interfaces, transaction screens, and data transfer mechanisms; the browser is going to have to become "heftier" (do not read as larger) to deal not just with interacting with these new applications, but to provide a new layer of security.