Right, because there's a clear, present, and completely unavoidable requirement that non-x86 users cannot use iPlayer. Oh, woe, if only there were media formats unencumbered by the legacy of the 4004....
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
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HTML V5 and XHTML V2
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It's easy to write something in a CDATA section (and I think a comment, but I don't have time to test this now) that looks like a tag but isn't a tag. If you blindly encode the angle braces, you'll end up displaying them incorrectly -- which may be fine, but you may also encode away the ending tag of the CDATA section.
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
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HTML V5 and XHTML V2
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Why does a website comment system want to be allowing HTML any more complicated than the list of allowed tags here on Slashdot?
I'm not suggesting that a comment system should allow them. A malicious user could submit invalid input containing comments or CDATA sections which would confuse every regex-based system I've seen. If the filter doesn't handle them properly, it could let malicious data through unmunged.
In this case, they refuse to run Flash because running a proprietary application would be "below them."
If I lived in the UK and paid for a television license, you'd better believe I'd be up in arms about the Flash-based system not working on Linux/PPC.
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
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HTML V5 and XHTML V2
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It seems to me that we don't care about the parse tree at all - we just want to be sure that the output of the filter doesn't contain any potentially dangerous tags.
Recognizing potentially dangerous tags is more difficult than it seems, though. Our commenting system at work can't handle valid HTML in some cases, as it believes that newlines are not appropriate whitespace within tags. (The specification is clear that newlines are allowable whitespace within tags.) Furthermore, adding a CDATA or PCDATA section -- or in some cases, simple HTML comments -- can break almost every HTML-parsing regex I've ever seen.
There's no substitute for tokenizing and parsing with a stateful state machine.
Regexes are completely the wrong tool for handling HTML.
That was my point at well; I just wasn't as clear about it as I could have been. I've never seen an unbreakable HTML-parsing regular expression.
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
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HTML V5 and XHTML V2
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· Score: 2, Interesting
How can you not do it with a regex (or two)?
In the past eight years or so, I haven't seen a single regex which can parse HTML correctly and completely. The closest variant failed when it encountered CDATA sections.
Much as Microsoft churns out a lot of junk, whenever I read their developer blogs, I'm always impressed by the amount of thought that goes into their design.
If only the quality of the results reflected the amount of thought....
I'm having trouble remembering the last time I saw a lead Microsoft developer....
... develop his or her project entirely in public, with all of the disagreements and drama available for the whole world to see.
As it is now the Mac offers the easiest method for computer users to install software. Linspire's Click N Run, CNR, may change that seeing as how all it requires, other than net access, is to click to install programs.
I'm getting confused as to whether you mean proprietary software or software in general. If you mean proprietary software, then you certainly have the point. If you mean software in general, I can't see how the Mac possibly wins.
Upthread I mentioned that Ubuntu's Synaptic offers click and install, and it's installed by default. Not so for Version Tracker, Fink, or MacPorts (per my experience). I believe that distributions such as Fedora, Suse, and Mandrake also offer graphical installers as part of their default packages, but I haven't installed software on any of those in a graphical fashion in a couple of years.
I was helping a friend debug a problem a couple of weeks ago and logged into her machine and thought "Hey, I don't have ccache or Valgrind." Fortunately I had sudo access.
I'm sure it's not too much bother to remember ccache.samba.org or valgrind.org, but I didn't even have to remember that much.
But there are certain huge advantages to being able to buy something online, download it, and install it, without worrying about breakage. This is the main reason so many of us abandoned Linux as a desktop and moved to OS X.
The only piece of proprietary software I've ever purchased for Mac OS X in fact didn't "just work". I could never get it working, and that's just one of the reasons I abandoned Mac OS X.
Far better than the BSD ports system, as found in MacPorts?
I stopped using Mac OS X at 10.2. Is MacPorts part of Leopard now?
If you're talking commercial software, then it's a click on the installer, and you drag the app bundle into Applications.
How did that installer get on your system such that the installation is only a click and a drag? Magic pixies?
I want to install Bip on a server running Ubuntu. The only thing I need to do is to type sudo aptitude install bip and hit enter to confirm. There's a nice point and click interface if you want that too.
Just for kicks, I decided to upgrade all of the software installed on that machine too. That's two commands.
All of these commands are present on every fresh Ubuntu installation, for example, and none of them require the presence of magic pixies to define away other parts of the software installation process to make it look more simple than it is. It really is this simple, as long as the software is in the repository.
What in Linux "just works" like the Unified Mac Experience?
I don't believe in the Unified Mac Experience (except for connecting to video projectors), but installing software from a Linux distribution package repository is far better.
These "tedious" reminders don't make the series longer, only the book in your hand, which costs you the same as the thinner abridged volume you are requesting.
That's rather interesting logic. "Sure, it's useless and repetitive and makes individual books longer, but it doesn't make the series longer."
i appologise if you're not the original poster, forgot to check
I'm not. I'm just complaining that RJ has needed better editing since at least book four.
The best example is near the end of Nine Princes.... Zelazny describes one character's hours-long fight up a staircase full of enemies in a couple of paragraphs, and then several pages in a subsequent scene describing a very short fencing match, and you don't notice unless you're looking for it because the scope of each description is so contextually right.
Of course thats just me.... But the trick with reading WoT is knowing when to read a page a minute and when to read a paragraph a minute.
I'm a professional editor. I delete useless words, sentences, and paragraphs. With better editing, no one would have needed a trick to read WoT.
The series has some interesting ideas, the overall story is solid, and despite some clunky pastiche (did someone mention Dune?), there's some good stuff in there. Stronger editorial direction and polishing could have brought that out.
You missed the three books where Hansel doesn't appear at all and Gretel camps outside the witch's house complaining about the weather for three days. One book, one day.
So you don't classify this a character development?
The first time each separate character thought that, perhaps. When I noticed that separate characters did and thought the same things, I appreciated the irony. When it happened multiple times per book in multiple books, I decided that it was as much characterization as the catchphrases of Steve Urkel, and that I had better things to do with my time than to read another several hundred pages while wondering When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?.
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Built for static languages, controlled by Microsoft. Those properties make them less than universally useful.
Right, because there's a clear, present, and completely unavoidable requirement that non-x86 users cannot use iPlayer. Oh, woe, if only there were media formats unencumbered by the legacy of the 4004....
It's easy to write something in a CDATA section (and I think a comment, but I don't have time to test this now) that looks like a tag but isn't a tag. If you blindly encode the angle braces, you'll end up displaying them incorrectly -- which may be fine, but you may also encode away the ending tag of the CDATA section.
I'm not suggesting that a comment system should allow them. A malicious user could submit invalid input containing comments or CDATA sections which would confuse every regex-based system I've seen. If the filter doesn't handle them properly, it could let malicious data through unmunged.
If I lived in the UK and paid for a television license, you'd better believe I'd be up in arms about the Flash-based system not working on Linux/PPC.
Recognizing potentially dangerous tags is more difficult than it seems, though. Our commenting system at work can't handle valid HTML in some cases, as it believes that newlines are not appropriate whitespace within tags. (The specification is clear that newlines are allowable whitespace within tags.) Furthermore, adding a CDATA or PCDATA section -- or in some cases, simple HTML comments -- can break almost every HTML-parsing regex I've ever seen.
There's no substitute for tokenizing and parsing with a stateful state machine.
That was my point at well; I just wasn't as clear about it as I could have been. I've never seen an unbreakable HTML-parsing regular expression.
In the past eight years or so, I haven't seen a single regex which can parse HTML correctly and completely. The closest variant failed when it encountered CDATA sections.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, tell those who do not to.
If only the quality of the results reflected the amount of thought....
... develop his or her project entirely in public, with all of the disagreements and drama available for the whole world to see.
I'm getting confused as to whether you mean proprietary software or software in general. If you mean proprietary software, then you certainly have the point. If you mean software in general, I can't see how the Mac possibly wins.
Upthread I mentioned that Ubuntu's Synaptic offers click and install, and it's installed by default. Not so for Version Tracker, Fink, or MacPorts (per my experience). I believe that distributions such as Fedora, Suse, and Mandrake also offer graphical installers as part of their default packages, but I haven't installed software on any of those in a graphical fashion in a couple of years.
I was helping a friend debug a problem a couple of weeks ago and logged into her machine and thought "Hey, I don't have ccache or Valgrind." Fortunately I had sudo access.
I'm sure it's not too much bother to remember ccache.samba.org or valgrind.org, but I didn't even have to remember that much.
The date of the interview was 8 December, and Brandon mentioned that he would likely see it on 10 December. It's possible.
The only piece of proprietary software I've ever purchased for Mac OS X in fact didn't "just work". I could never get it working, and that's just one of the reasons I abandoned Mac OS X.
I stopped using Mac OS X at 10.2. Is MacPorts part of Leopard now?
How did that installer get on your system such that the installation is only a click and a drag? Magic pixies?
I want to install Bip on a server running Ubuntu. The only thing I need to do is to type sudo aptitude install bip and hit enter to confirm. There's a nice point and click interface if you want that too.
Just for kicks, I decided to upgrade all of the software installed on that machine too. That's two commands.
All of these commands are present on every fresh Ubuntu installation, for example, and none of them require the presence of magic pixies to define away other parts of the software installation process to make it look more simple than it is. It really is this simple, as long as the software is in the repository.
I don't believe in the Unified Mac Experience (except for connecting to video projectors), but installing software from a Linux distribution package repository is far better.
Anyone who's been around for a while should recognize sending at least the first C&D as a requirement of maintaining a trademark.
That's rather interesting logic. "Sure, it's useless and repetitive and makes individual books longer, but it doesn't make the series longer."
I'm not. I'm just complaining that RJ has needed better editing since at least book four.
The best example is near the end of Nine Princes.... Zelazny describes one character's hours-long fight up a staircase full of enemies in a couple of paragraphs, and then several pages in a subsequent scene describing a very short fencing match, and you don't notice unless you're looking for it because the scope of each description is so contextually right.
You might like the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series by Tad Williams. He doesn't pull a lot of punches, and there's some good writing.
It worked because Ivan didn't spend the whole day whining!
I'm a professional editor. I delete useless words, sentences, and paragraphs. With better editing, no one would have needed a trick to read WoT.
The series has some interesting ideas, the overall story is solid, and despite some clunky pastiche (did someone mention Dune?), there's some good stuff in there. Stronger editorial direction and polishing could have brought that out.
You missed the three books where Hansel doesn't appear at all and Gretel camps outside the witch's house complaining about the weather for three days. One book, one day.
Maybe so, but I expected something to happen to them eventually.
The first time each separate character thought that, perhaps. When I noticed that separate characters did and thought the same things, I appreciated the irony. When it happened multiple times per book in multiple books, I decided that it was as much characterization as the catchphrases of Steve Urkel, and that I had better things to do with my time than to read another several hundred pages while wondering When are they going to get to the fireworks factory? .