It is remarkable that we deal with organizations throughout the world from Ontario, but it's so very important that we match the US for 3 weeks of the year. Of course we'll only match one timezone, and actually by ignoring this DST extension we could have benefitted from matching another timezone (CDT) for those weeks. We could have called it "MidWest Monster Mash!"
Anyways, many people don't even understand how DST affects them, or what this change will mean. Wouldn't you know it - I put up an entry explaining it!
Getting a product to market with a new technology can advance the adoption of a standard.
This is true not only for standards that spend years wallowing through standards boards - someone releases an implementation, and it lights a fire under their asses to get something out the door - but also by creating de facto standards that advance the state of the art. Most of the innovations didn't come from large and wide standards bodies, but rather by a couple of people who did something that was adopted and spread. To bring up an evil example, AJAX is founded on a completely proprietary piece of COM functionality accessible via scripting in Internet Explorer. Pretty soon it became a part of the standard.
This is not a troll, but ever since Opera went free-as-in-beer, my Firefox icon gets used about as frequently as my IE link does (I have the IE 7 beta as well, but it's just laughable in comparison).
Of course to me the primary benefits of Firefox were standards compliance, features, cross-platform capabilities, and free-as-in-beer. I get all of those advantages, along with improved speed and a few more feaures (e.g. native SVG, something that is coming to a stable Firefox release any-year-now), in Opera. Of course I do miss some of the Firefox plug-ins, which is why I jump over to it on occasion.
Am I alone in feeling this way? I suspect that the freeing of Opera has had more of an impact on Firefox than anything Microsoft is doing.
"I'm seeing Intel dual-core processors appearing in < $700 PCs. From that angle Intel absolutely devastates AMD, as somehow their dual-cores are far less expensive."
It's clearly benefited Slashdot. The story quality and lack of dupes proves it.
Slashdot editors may be paid, but in no other sense of the word are they professionals (well, technically they are...but you know what I mean). The drivel that is selected for posting here, and the blatant errors and oversights. It really boggles the mind. A random selection mechanism would work just as good.
Anyways, an very intriguing article by Nicholas Carr caught my eye the other day - The amorality of Web 2.0. Agree with it or not (in particular the section The Cult of the Amateur), it's thought provoking and worth a read.
Errr...is a very quick hacker. Sorta rushed in the hopes of trying to save people from becoming sexual assault victims at the hands of the evil goatse believers.
Either someone is very a quick hacker, or this was a pre-planned exploit, but the article redirects to goatse. Now lets watch Slashdot's finest (the so-called editors) take a couple of hours to correct this.
Wow. Someone managed to get a goatse link in a submission (I can't imagine that they worked that quickly on the hacking the destination or XSS to get it in there). Amazing.
The only people that think Apple is renowned for extraordinary quality are those that close their eyes intentionally to the flaws in Apple products.
You do realize, don't you, that there are actual real-world metrics of vendor quality? Those metrics consistently put Apple in a pretty hefty lead. Apple's quality isn't any more imaginary than Honda or Toyota's are (though just like those, there are the self-proclaimed realists who ignore actual proof and help set the record straight for us fools), and it's a part of their corporate strategy.
No one is going to care because it's a pretty dumb story (as is typically front-paged by the genius editors at Slashdot these days). Millions of items are recalled pretty much daily. The fact that this had to do "with computers" is a pretty weak foundation for it appearing on Slashdot. Of course as an actual information source Slashdot is on par with PC Magazine these days.
People might pay heed if it's Apple only because Apple is renowned for extraordinary quality - in fact that's one of the reasons Apple can charge a premium in relatively commodity market. It still is pretty dumb to see posts about scratches on an MP3 player though.
It would have been nice if the article offered up more ideas about approaches to attenuate the exposure and risk of the fungi.
Pillows have long been identified as an irritant for people with respiratory problems, which is why you can already buy plenty of asthma specific pillow cases (which usually include a non-porous liner to make it less hospitable for things like dust mites, and of course spores), and of course you should change your bedding frequently.
Strange that these "measure things that have always been there, but a number sounds scary" type of fear mongering news get any attention at all. There was some idiotic British show that recently made the rounds in my area that they advertised with a radio campaign that included a sound snippet of one of the hosts saying "we found three different types of bacteria in this room!". Oh no! Three types!
Oh, wait, there are hundreds, thousands, or millions of types of bacteria all over the place, and they're a completely normal part of this enormous biosphere that we live in.
Cross-site scripting is a family of vulnerabilities that share these attributes: a) a web-site that takes and displays text (e.g. Slashdot allows you to post comments) and b) a web browser that processes javascript in webpages.
Is that just a classic script injection attack?
I always thought a cross site scripting attack was actually a method for script from one site to use content from another site. e.g. I embed a full-size IFRAME in my site, or I launch a new window, that loads the real PayPal, and from my site I monitor the form controls on the PayPal page, or alternatelly I embed some of another site's script into my site.
Of course browsers should prohibit this sort of cross-site scripting, but there have been cases where the controls have been circumvented.
This is about as far as I made it into your drivel, however no - my reply was actually just an in-kind to your unnecessarily hostile response. I call the dickheads where I see them, and you sir, are one of them.
Often? Care to cite some numbers in support of your claim?
Care to cite some numbers that disproves it, dickhead?
You have just contradicted yourself. If their is a kernel of truth in the indictments, then they have criminal liability
Only in the world of tinfoil-helmeted simpletons - those who see the world as a nothing but opposites - did I contract myself. Every reasonable sized company on the planet - being a collection of imperfect humans after all - has employees who have transgressed both the law and morality. (OMG! I used logic and a knowledge of human instinct to provide an unproven observation!) Maybe an email between low-level employees in a manner that is inconsistent with regulations. In no way is that comparable to CEOs getting together and setting collusion strategies. You see, there are an amazing number of grays in this place we call reality.
So we should just quit prosecuting criminal cases against corporations?
Good to see that you totally missed the point. What I actually said was that out-of-court settlements - something that is terribly vulnerable to fishing expeditions and extortion - shouldn't be allowed. If they have a case then it should go before a judge and tried.
Because often there isn't guilt. If you really buy into the Spitzer-following belief that big companies are evil and governments are clean, then I have a bridge to sell you. In many ways a lot of these settlements are the end result of extortion - maybe there is a kernel of truth to them, but the companies settle because they can't compete with the endless resource (and law setting) ability of government.
If the government really has a case, it should be proven in court. Settlements out of court are a travesty, and are far too open to abuse.
I always wonder how much these fines really hurt mega-corps.
$300 million is a lot of money to anyone - even a mega-corp.
Nonetheless, a better question would be the motivation and impartiality of governments. It seems that the US government is busy fining every "foreign" company in every way it can (usually bullying for multi-million, or BILLION, dollar settlements), adding the proceeds to the general slush fund (it seldom makes its way to consumers), and the European governments are busy taxing - sorry fining - American companies to the tune of hundreds of millions as well.
Oh I sort of missed the core point there - the MSXML team oddly decided to include not only all of the processing functionality, but also HTTP objects (I seem to recall that they didn't use the Internet Explorer HTTP dlls either, so there was some issue configuring proxies and the like). That opened the door to a lot of great functionality, encouraged on by the fact that Microsoft started distributed msxml with other products and technologies.
I always thought it had one or more activex controls lurking around -- because of its other-browser incompatibility.
It depends on how you define ActiveX (pendantically speaking, COM objects are not necessarily ActiveX). XMLHTTP was a part of MSXML (which was not a "part of the browser", nor was it a part of Exchange, or Outlook, as is commonly claimed. MSXML was a isolated COM in-proc XML parsing library, built by another Microsoft team, that you could instantiate to open, parse, create, transform, validate, and save XML documents) - a COM library and object that they attributed it as safe for scripting, so it was accessible by browser JavaScript. Outlook, and many internal web applications, made use of this excellent little component. Among other web applications I made one - a timesheet applications - where all changes (time additions, comments, approvals, deletes) happened locally, and it would call back, using xmlhttp, in the background, changing, retransforming and displaying the local XML if it got a success back from the server. Worked brilliantly.
The rest of the world with which Massachusetts gov communicates is using MS Office documents.
http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2005/10/05.html#a97 People barely communicate at all with Office documents anymore. I remember an era, not to long ago, when people would actually type emails in Word documents and attach it to emails, simply saying "look in the attached document" (even for company wide memos). Thankfully that sort of ignorance is mostly a thing of the past.
The most likely product to replace MS Office in Massachusetts gov will be OO.org or *Office
It'll almost certainly be Office. The likelihood of Microsoft supporting Open Document, either directly or via a plug-in, is closing in on 100%. Please feel free to reference this reply in the future if I'm wrong. The simple reality is that there is little new ground in the world of document layout, so it's time to lay down the hammer and agree on a universal format (and if they think up a new blink element they can submit it to the committee). This is similar to if Microsoft insisted that everyone support MS:TCP/IP for networking - you can play, but only on Microsoft's terms.
How many gov employees, do you wager, are just going to save everything as *.doc because its 'easier'?
Office 12 already defaults to Office XML..doc is legacy, and the whole point is that a change, whether to Office XML or Open Document, is happening anyways, so might as well go with one that is truly the grounds for innovation (e.g. I can develop software, including evil proprietary closed source commercial software, to process OpenDoc files without making any agreements of cedes to Microsoft).
Man my submission was a world better than the one they went with. I included details on Microsoft's speculated venture with AOL, and other good links. Slashdot editors stink.
For example, reporting or commentary on politics, religion, Tara Reid's breasts is all news. Reposting an article from the Times is not.
So is Slashdot news? Basically you take original content (sometimes two paragraph blog entries that hilariously get reported as "articles"), have someone random person mishmash and portray it out of context, and then report it on Slashdot. News for Nerds!
Of course most blog "journalists" are really nothing more than unassociated OpEds (usually with a terrible bias) - It isn't "news" to give your opinion on something, yet that's what most so-called blog journalists are doing. They aren't out there digging up facts or presenting new information, but instead they're regurgitating and reassembling second or third-hand facts. Sort of like that sentence just did to the one before.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to be a typical Canada/US relation.
It is remarkable that we deal with organizations throughout the world from Ontario, but it's so very important that we match the US for 3 weeks of the year. Of course we'll only match one timezone, and actually by ignoring this DST extension we could have benefitted from matching another timezone (CDT) for those weeks. We could have called it "MidWest Monster Mash!"
Anyways, many people don't even understand how DST affects them, or what this change will mean. Wouldn't you know it - I put up an entry explaining it!
Getting a product to market with a new technology can advance the adoption of a standard.
This is true not only for standards that spend years wallowing through standards boards - someone releases an implementation, and it lights a fire under their asses to get something out the door - but also by creating de facto standards that advance the state of the art. Most of the innovations didn't come from large and wide standards bodies, but rather by a couple of people who did something that was adopted and spread. To bring up an evil example, AJAX is founded on a completely proprietary piece of COM functionality accessible via scripting in Internet Explorer. Pretty soon it became a part of the standard.
Coincidentally I wrote about this yesterday.
This is not a troll, but ever since Opera went free-as-in-beer, my Firefox icon gets used about as frequently as my IE link does (I have the IE 7 beta as well, but it's just laughable in comparison).
Of course to me the primary benefits of Firefox were standards compliance, features, cross-platform capabilities, and free-as-in-beer. I get all of those advantages, along with improved speed and a few more feaures (e.g. native SVG, something that is coming to a stable Firefox release any-year-now), in Opera. Of course I do miss some of the Firefox plug-ins, which is why I jump over to it on occasion.
Am I alone in feeling this way? I suspect that the freeing of Opera has had more of an impact on Firefox than anything Microsoft is doing.
They may use such licenses to release code to thier client and partner companies but that remains to be seen.
They have been doing so for years.
Geez, I didn't preview so I suffer.
"I'm seeing Intel dual-core processors appearing in < $700 PCs. From that angle Intel absolutely devastates AMD, as somehow their dual-cores are far less expensive."
We all know AMD's dual core lineup trashes intel.
I'm seeing Intel dual-core processors appearing in devastates AMD, as somehow their dual-cores are far less expensive.
I've yet to see a mainstream PC with a dual-core AMD on the other hand.
It's a trap!
Indeed, they're going to catch him at Lustums, put him in Lail, where he'll be Lodomized. It's too bad, too, giving that he could have worked on Livx.
It's clearly benefited Slashdot. The story quality and lack of dupes proves it.
Slashdot editors may be paid, but in no other sense of the word are they professionals (well, technically they are...but you know what I mean). The drivel that is selected for posting here, and the blatant errors and oversights. It really boggles the mind. A random selection mechanism would work just as good.
Anyways, an very intriguing article by Nicholas Carr caught my eye the other day - The amorality of Web 2.0. Agree with it or not (in particular the section The Cult of the Amateur), it's thought provoking and worth a read.
Errr...is a very quick hacker. Sorta rushed in the hopes of trying to save people from becoming sexual assault victims at the hands of the evil goatse believers.
Either someone is very a quick hacker, or this was a pre-planned exploit, but the article redirects to goatse. Now lets watch Slashdot's finest (the so-called editors) take a couple of hours to correct this.
Wow. Someone managed to get a goatse link in a submission (I can't imagine that they worked that quickly on the hacking the destination or XSS to get it in there). Amazing.
This confirms it - Slashdot really is dead.
The only people that think Apple is renowned for extraordinary quality are those that close their eyes intentionally to the flaws in Apple products.
You do realize, don't you, that there are actual real-world metrics of vendor quality? Those metrics consistently put Apple in a pretty hefty lead. Apple's quality isn't any more imaginary than Honda or Toyota's are (though just like those, there are the self-proclaimed realists who ignore actual proof and help set the record straight for us fools), and it's a part of their corporate strategy.
see how no one is going to care about this
No one is going to care because it's a pretty dumb story (as is typically front-paged by the genius editors at Slashdot these days). Millions of items are recalled pretty much daily. The fact that this had to do "with computers" is a pretty weak foundation for it appearing on Slashdot. Of course as an actual information source Slashdot is on par with PC Magazine these days.
People might pay heed if it's Apple only because Apple is renowned for extraordinary quality - in fact that's one of the reasons Apple can charge a premium in relatively commodity market. It still is pretty dumb to see posts about scratches on an MP3 player though.
It would have been nice if the article offered up more ideas about approaches to attenuate the exposure and risk of the fungi.
Pillows have long been identified as an irritant for people with respiratory problems, which is why you can already buy plenty of asthma specific pillow cases (which usually include a non-porous liner to make it less hospitable for things like dust mites, and of course spores), and of course you should change your bedding frequently.
Strange that these "measure things that have always been there, but a number sounds scary" type of fear mongering news get any attention at all. There was some idiotic British show that recently made the rounds in my area that they advertised with a radio campaign that included a sound snippet of one of the hosts saying "we found three different types of bacteria in this room!". Oh no! Three types!
Oh, wait, there are hundreds, thousands, or millions of types of bacteria all over the place, and they're a completely normal part of this enormous biosphere that we live in.
Cross-site scripting is a family of vulnerabilities that share these attributes: a) a web-site that takes and displays text (e.g. Slashdot allows you to post comments) and b) a web browser that processes javascript in webpages.
Is that just a classic script injection attack?
I always thought a cross site scripting attack was actually a method for script from one site to use content from another site. e.g. I embed a full-size IFRAME in my site, or I launch a new window, that loads the real PayPal, and from my site I monitor the form controls on the PayPal page, or alternatelly I embed some of another site's script into my site.
Of course browsers should prohibit this sort of cross-site scripting, but there have been cases where the controls have been circumvented.
Ooooh! I hit a nerve!
This is about as far as I made it into your drivel, however no - my reply was actually just an in-kind to your unnecessarily hostile response. I call the dickheads where I see them, and you sir, are one of them.
Often? Care to cite some numbers in support of your claim?
Care to cite some numbers that disproves it, dickhead?
You have just contradicted yourself. If their is a kernel of truth in the indictments, then they have criminal liability
Only in the world of tinfoil-helmeted simpletons - those who see the world as a nothing but opposites - did I contract myself. Every reasonable sized company on the planet - being a collection of imperfect humans after all - has employees who have transgressed both the law and morality. (OMG! I used logic and a knowledge of human instinct to provide an unproven observation!) Maybe an email between low-level employees in a manner that is inconsistent with regulations. In no way is that comparable to CEOs getting together and setting collusion strategies. You see, there are an amazing number of grays in this place we call reality.
So we should just quit prosecuting criminal cases against corporations?
Good to see that you totally missed the point. What I actually said was that out-of-court settlements - something that is terribly vulnerable to fishing expeditions and extortion - shouldn't be allowed. If they have a case then it should go before a judge and tried.
And they do so without admitting guilt.
Because often there isn't guilt. If you really buy into the Spitzer-following belief that big companies are evil and governments are clean, then I have a bridge to sell you. In many ways a lot of these settlements are the end result of extortion - maybe there is a kernel of truth to them, but the companies settle because they can't compete with the endless resource (and law setting) ability of government.
If the government really has a case, it should be proven in court. Settlements out of court are a travesty, and are far too open to abuse.
I always wonder how much these fines really hurt mega-corps.
$300 million is a lot of money to anyone - even a mega-corp.
Nonetheless, a better question would be the motivation and impartiality of governments. It seems that the US government is busy fining every "foreign" company in every way it can (usually bullying for multi-million, or BILLION, dollar settlements), adding the proceeds to the general slush fund (it seldom makes its way to consumers), and the European governments are busy taxing - sorry fining - American companies to the tune of hundreds of millions as well.
Welcome to the world of "free trade".
Oh I sort of missed the core point there - the MSXML team oddly decided to include not only all of the processing functionality, but also HTTP objects (I seem to recall that they didn't use the Internet Explorer HTTP dlls either, so there was some issue configuring proxies and the like). That opened the door to a lot of great functionality, encouraged on by the fact that Microsoft started distributed msxml with other products and technologies.
I always thought it had one or more activex controls lurking around -- because of its other-browser incompatibility.
It depends on how you define ActiveX (pendantically speaking, COM objects are not necessarily ActiveX). XMLHTTP was a part of MSXML (which was not a "part of the browser", nor was it a part of Exchange, or Outlook, as is commonly claimed. MSXML was a isolated COM in-proc XML parsing library, built by another Microsoft team, that you could instantiate to open, parse, create, transform, validate, and save XML documents) - a COM library and object that they attributed it as safe for scripting, so it was accessible by browser JavaScript. Outlook, and many internal web applications, made use of this excellent little component. Among other web applications I made one - a timesheet applications - where all changes (time additions, comments, approvals, deletes) happened locally, and it would call back, using xmlhttp, in the background, changing, retransforming and displaying the local XML if it got a success back from the server. Worked brilliantly.
http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2005/10/07.html#a102
The rest of the world with which Massachusetts gov communicates is using MS Office documents.
.doc is legacy, and the whole point is that a change, whether to Office XML or Open Document, is happening anyways, so might as well go with one that is truly the grounds for innovation (e.g. I can develop software, including evil proprietary closed source commercial software, to process OpenDoc files without making any agreements of cedes to Microsoft).
http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2005/10/05.html#a97 People barely communicate at all with Office documents anymore. I remember an era, not to long ago, when people would actually type emails in Word documents and attach it to emails, simply saying "look in the attached document" (even for company wide memos). Thankfully that sort of ignorance is mostly a thing of the past.
The most likely product to replace MS Office in Massachusetts gov will be OO.org or *Office
It'll almost certainly be Office. The likelihood of Microsoft supporting Open Document, either directly or via a plug-in, is closing in on 100%. Please feel free to reference this reply in the future if I'm wrong. The simple reality is that there is little new ground in the world of document layout, so it's time to lay down the hammer and agree on a universal format (and if they think up a new blink element they can submit it to the committee). This is similar to if Microsoft insisted that everyone support MS:TCP/IP for networking - you can play, but only on Microsoft's terms.
How many gov employees, do you wager, are just going to save everything as *.doc because its 'easier'?
Office 12 already defaults to Office XML.
Man my submission was a world better than the one they went with. I included details on Microsoft's speculated venture with AOL, and other good links. Slashdot editors stink.
For example, reporting or commentary on politics, religion, Tara Reid's breasts is all news. Reposting an article from the Times is not.
So is Slashdot news? Basically you take original content (sometimes two paragraph blog entries that hilariously get reported as "articles"), have someone random person mishmash and portray it out of context, and then report it on Slashdot. News for Nerds!
Of course most blog "journalists" are really nothing more than unassociated OpEds (usually with a terrible bias) - It isn't "news" to give your opinion on something, yet that's what most so-called blog journalists are doing. They aren't out there digging up facts or presenting new information, but instead they're regurgitating and reassembling second or third-hand facts. Sort of like that sentence just did to the one before.
Right Idea...Wrong Browser
True, but I heard the Opera people weren't keep on getting involved with the deal.