If you want to be able to disable the Genuine Windows Advantage Add-on for IE (accessible via Tools|Manage Add-ons... in IE), you might be surprised (or not) to see that Microsoft will not let you do so.
Don't worry just yet, we're still in the good times. I mean, you can at least SEE it's there, and you can't turn it off.
In Vista, it'll be a part of the core OS and completely invisible. And we all know we're getting Vista sooner or later (if we depend on Windows software).
When I read this, I thought, this has GOT to be a joke:
Oh, and it also checks for updates, so Microsoft can presumably execute arbitrary code on any machine with it installed, merely by making that code part of a WGA update.
Where did WGA come from? Auto Updates. What does Auto Updates do? Downloads executable code and makes it a part of your Windows OS.
"Shocking facts" like those really put Slashdot editors low in my eyes.
Amaya's an experimental testbed intended to fit as many different technologies into one browser as possible. I think expecting it to be as polished as a commercial web browser is a little much, don't you think?
I don't follow your logic. It's a testbed, therefore it's ok it's broken and can't render properly written and implemented HTML/CSS pages. Is this what you mean?
If this is what W3C tests its standards on, then thank god for WHATWG.
What makes you say that it's dead? The CVS shows activity as recent as two days ago and the last release was less than two months ago.
It's an open source project, I can myself go, change a comment, and update the CVS and register "activity". But W3C officially abandoned Amaya in 2003, and this was all over the Internet media.
It's still hosted at W3C, but they are no longer working on it. They said they are instead refocusing on their recommendations and standards.
HTML has been deprecated for six years. XHTML finally got rid of HTML's quirky syntax and bad semantics.
That's funny. Because XHTML is a carbon copy of HTML 4.01 as a dialect of XML. All that got "cleaner" is that XHTML uses a subset of SGML (XML), where HTML is a SGML dialect.
The semantics of both are totally the same. You've been brainwashed.
XHTML2 has some competition, however, in the form of HTML5. While I can understand frustration at the glacial speed of the W3C at producing new documents, WHATWG seeks to damage most of the progress made since HTML 4.01.
W3C says "do as I say". They can't even implement what they recommend properly. They tried, with Amaya, and the project is now dead (not to mention it was always one buggy and slow piece of software).
WHATWG catters to the needs of the web developers and web users TODAY. They are formed by browser makers and web developers who have feet firmly planted on the ground as to what constitutes a semantic and functional web we can actually use.
W3C unwillingness to cooperate brought us the table hacks, and now the CSS hacks. We, web devs, always have to use "hacks" of some sort, not just because of bad browser implementation, but because if plain defunctional standards..
Then come zealots who claim W3C can't be wrong, refuse to join a discussion and declare WHATWG is a bunch of terrorists who want to blow up the internet.
Good thing is, while zealots are pretty vocal, the rest of the practical folks are quietly working on making a better Internet with WHAWG.
The canvas element and SVG bring new ways of displaying graphical stuff to be interacted with
The canvas element was invented by Safari and incorporated in WHATWG's HTML5. I though they work hard on wrecking the Internet?
the table layout trolls and Dreamweaver monkeys will be two tech generations behind
The current generation of Dreamweaver produces strict XHTML with CSS based layouts. I bet ranting at fukll power didn't leave you time to see how the world around you adapts to changes.
You are the face of CSS zealots in this thread, my man.
I use CSS for layouts on a daily basis, but just about anything you said here is wrong.
Tables are not bloat, a three cell table is not larger as HTML code than the outer set of 4-5 divs required to fake it qith faux columns, not to say the added weight of the extra images required for faux columns which is not the case with tables (especially if you want simply solid color columns).
About tables being "primitive", I guess you're too sophisticated to expand your way too narrow view on web design, so I'll not try.
You can't tell me it's not funny as hell that you rant how IE doesn't support the display:table/table-row/table-cell, what you're essentially saying is that you NEED the layout tools a table provides, but you want to hack other elements to behave as tables, or it won't be l33t enough.
CSS is vastly better than what was before: nested tables full of font tags
You've apprently not seen what some people do when they try to push CSS do the same what "nested tables" do: "nested divs and 3000px wide images".
Equal height columns are easy: height: 100%;. Too bad IE can't get this right unless you declare the height of the parent element. Hate the implementation, not the specification.
You don't even know CSS, do you. It's IE which doesn't require (in quirks mode) that parent height is set. But with proper DOCTYPE it does require it. Just like Firefox and Opera also do.
But your parent element has to have known height per spec, and that height can't stretch to its content as content amount changes, hence CSS can't do equal size columns, unless you hard-code the height in the element or parent elements.
Oh, you mean the same way ActiveX, Java, and Flash have done it for years?
Yes, in exactly that way:D
I'm not arguing it's not been done before. I'm personally making my money with JS and Flash coding, among other things. But it also has to be noted that WinFX has the advantage if being preinstalled with Windows Vista, which is very important given how huge it is.
Flash also came with Windows 2000 and XP and I hope Microsoft cheats itself into delivering Flash 8 with Vista as well, but it's not guaranteed. Even if doesn't god bless Flash is a pretty small download (Flash 9 will be 1MB or less still).
Adobe knows WinFX and Vista are their enemy that can kill Flash, up to the community to wake up and realize it too (actually a lot of people already realize it).
We are geeks... I mean, check out what is "news" to the rest of the world. A dumb blond wrecking her car...
I find this especially ironic. People care about Paris Hilton's car crash not because car crashes are particularly rare, but because Paris Hilton is really popular.
And you're reasoning that Google ordering items by popularity is very important, not because ordering by popularity is particularly rare, but because Google is really popular.
But you can always find comfort in the idea that we're "the geeks" and "the rest of the world" is just plain dumb and undeserving attention.
You know, maybe it's not Google who hypes this up. Maybe they just posted it in a blog and the community took it up.
Every single little thing Google does, no matter how trivial, is reported to take down Microsoft and take over the world.
But COME ON, is this really worth an article on Slashdot:
[we] rank them based on how popular they are
Shit they better patent it before someone else figures it out! It's only literally every site with plenty of items that can be sorted based on popularity.
Yes,.NET targets rich client apps and browser apps. However, to use the web you use a web browser, not a rich client. The only way that they could break compatibility and force you to download the.NET runtime is to convert IE into a rich client platform. Could they do that? Yes they could. Are they giving any indication that they are going to do that in the near future? Not at all.
Yea "not at all", they've only allowed.NET appplications to run in Internet Explorer 7 right off the web (in sandboxed mode, like applets and Flash), and you "only" can intermix it with existing HTML pages and you can "only" communicate from.NET to JScript that operates within HTML and back.
Please, educate yourself before trolling utter rubbish like the one in your comment. Some people might believe it.
That's ironic...
You don't need to download.NET 3.0 to run.NET 3.0 browser apps in the same way that you don't need to download PHP, Python, Ruby or Perl to your computer to use Slashdot or Digg or Google, etc.
That's where you're wrong. While.NET is a great technology on the server side where it can send HTML to the browsers, it does act as a client too, especially in Vista, where it has a new rich graphical UI framework (Avalon) and is basically the equivalent of Java's applets. The graphical UI of older.NET apps is called WinForms..NET apps can run in the browser or as standalone exe files.
Reporters are not supposed to troll, they are supposed to at least believe what they say is correct (even if it's not).
When John Dvorak writes his typical troll stories, potentially millions of people not familiar with the phenomenon John Dvorak take the article at face value and form opinion of people and products that affect their purchase choice and they also share the misinformation with other people.
Tell a lie enough times, and it stops being a lie in people's minds.
So are "Mac zealots" to be mocked about reacting strongly to lies spread in the media, or should the liears not exist in first place?
It's not so funny that media use misinformation just to drive ad impressions up. That's really low of them.
I mean see how much better Netscape 8 is compared to Firefox 1.5.
And seriously, it does make sense to align it with their.NET brand since after killing the "cool code names" (Avalon, Indigo) and turning then into indecypherable abbreviations (WPF, WCF, WTF and so on), people got confused, and slap WinFX on top of all that.
Of course.NET also is not a great way to describe it since it's an OS programming framework, not just network related, but what the hell..
Like an MRI [wikipedia.org], for instance? I'm guessing it's ok.
Yup, but this is what X-Ray inventors also guessed when they shot themselves under X-Ray scaners for hours and hours of self-made moving skeleton movies, and later died by cancer.
If around the meteor there's oddly a huge amount of worms that morph for days into two-head lizards, dragons and blue monkeys, get the hell outta there.
in the forms of very trace amounts of magnetite in brain tissue.
Two questions:
1. If I put a supermagnet right next to my head, am I piersing microscopic holes through my brain? There should be some effect even with trace amounts, I suppose, even if not that drastic.
2. Where did this magnetite come from? I think my mother's diet didn't include magnetite, nor did mine. I suppose the organism will have to metabolise in a truly peculiar way to start with organic proteins and end with magnetite as well:D
Starting your post in the subject is... really annoying.
Have you ever stopped an wonder why the heck do comments have subject at all.
For a standalone article it makes sense as you see what the news and discussion will be is about, but do you really announce the subject of your reply out loud every time you want to respond to something in a real conversation?
Thus people just have to either repeat the beginning of their post in the subject, or just start there and continue in he body, lest "cat got their tongue".
Slashdot Mirror
In any case, I think that alcohol is more dangerous than the brain damage that you may induce with microscopic holes through your skull.
Yup, thing is, a lot of things damage our brain, even most of the food we eat. I guess living is dying, no way to separate them.
it is not (yet) a police state
Funny, apparently we're talking some other USA here.
I don't use auto updates, so at least in theory, Microsoft can't do such a thing to me at present.
However, if I install this, I have no choice (leaving hacking it aside) but to give Microsoft that capability.
You can't install it without using auto updates (or Windows updates), therefore...
If you want to be able to disable the Genuine Windows Advantage Add-on for IE (accessible via Tools|Manage Add-ons... in IE), you might be surprised (or not) to see that Microsoft will not let you do so.
Don't worry just yet, we're still in the good times. I mean, you can at least SEE it's there, and you can't turn it off.
In Vista, it'll be a part of the core OS and completely invisible. And we all know we're getting Vista sooner or later (if we depend on Windows software).
When I read this, I thought, this has GOT to be a joke:
Oh, and it also checks for updates, so Microsoft can presumably execute arbitrary code on any machine with it installed, merely by making that code part of a WGA update.
Where did WGA come from? Auto Updates. What does Auto Updates do? Downloads executable code and makes it a part of your Windows OS.
"Shocking facts" like those really put Slashdot editors low in my eyes.
Amaya's an experimental testbed intended to fit as many different technologies into one browser as possible. I think expecting it to be as polished as a commercial web browser is a little much, don't you think?
I don't follow your logic. It's a testbed, therefore it's ok it's broken and can't render properly written and implemented HTML/CSS pages. Is this what you mean?
If this is what W3C tests its standards on, then thank god for WHATWG.
What makes you say that it's dead? The CVS shows activity as recent as two days ago and the last release was less than two months ago.
It's an open source project, I can myself go, change a comment, and update the CVS and register "activity". But W3C officially abandoned Amaya in 2003, and this was all over the Internet media.
It's still hosted at W3C, but they are no longer working on it. They said they are instead refocusing on their recommendations and standards.
HTML has been deprecated for six years. XHTML finally got rid of HTML's quirky syntax and bad semantics.
That's funny. Because XHTML is a carbon copy of HTML 4.01 as a dialect of XML. All that got "cleaner" is that XHTML uses a subset of SGML (XML), where HTML is a SGML dialect.
The semantics of both are totally the same. You've been brainwashed.
XHTML2 has some competition, however, in the form of HTML5. While I can understand frustration at the glacial speed of the W3C at producing new documents, WHATWG seeks to damage most of the progress made since HTML 4.01.
W3C says "do as I say". They can't even implement what they recommend properly. They tried, with Amaya, and the project is now dead (not to mention it was always one buggy and slow piece of software).
WHATWG catters to the needs of the web developers and web users TODAY. They are formed by browser makers and web developers who have feet firmly planted on the ground as to what constitutes a semantic and functional web we can actually use.
W3C unwillingness to cooperate brought us the table hacks, and now the CSS hacks. We, web devs, always have to use "hacks" of some sort, not just because of bad browser implementation, but because if plain defunctional standards..
Then come zealots who claim W3C can't be wrong, refuse to join a discussion and declare WHATWG is a bunch of terrorists who want to blow up the internet.
Good thing is, while zealots are pretty vocal, the rest of the practical folks are quietly working on making a better Internet with WHAWG.
The canvas element and SVG bring new ways of displaying graphical stuff to be interacted with
The canvas element was invented by Safari and incorporated in WHATWG's HTML5. I though they work hard on wrecking the Internet?
the table layout trolls and Dreamweaver monkeys will be two tech generations behind
The current generation of Dreamweaver produces strict XHTML with CSS based layouts. I bet ranting at fukll power didn't leave you time to see how the world around you adapts to changes.
You are the face of CSS zealots in this thread, my man.
I use CSS for layouts on a daily basis, but just about anything you said here is wrong.
Tables are not bloat, a three cell table is not larger as HTML code than the outer set of 4-5 divs required to fake it qith faux columns, not to say the added weight of the extra images required for faux columns which is not the case with tables (especially if you want simply solid color columns).
About tables being "primitive", I guess you're too sophisticated to expand your way too narrow view on web design, so I'll not try.
You can't tell me it's not funny as hell that you rant how IE doesn't support the display:table/table-row/table-cell, what you're essentially saying is that you NEED the layout tools a table provides, but you want to hack other elements to behave as tables, or it won't be l33t enough.
CSS is vastly better than what was before: nested tables full of font tags
You've apprently not seen what some people do when they try to push CSS do the same what "nested tables" do: "nested divs and 3000px wide images".
Equal height columns are easy: height: 100%;. Too bad IE can't get this right unless you declare the height of the parent element. Hate the implementation, not the specification.
You don't even know CSS, do you. It's IE which doesn't require (in quirks mode) that parent height is set. But with proper DOCTYPE it does require it. Just like Firefox and Opera also do.
But your parent element has to have known height per spec, and that height can't stretch to its content as content amount changes, hence CSS can't do equal size columns, unless you hard-code the height in the element or parent elements.
Pretty simple. Like all CSS zealots.
Its not ironic. All popular people are popular simply because they are popular.
This is not the thing I'm saying is ironic. Read the whole post.
Does anyone else find it humorous that it was through this article that I learned that Paris Hilton was in a car crash?
Maybe no since I, and most of us here did too.
Oh, you mean the same way ActiveX, Java, and Flash have done it for years?
:D
Yes, in exactly that way
I'm not arguing it's not been done before. I'm personally making my money with JS and Flash coding, among other things.
But it also has to be noted that WinFX has the advantage if being preinstalled with Windows Vista, which is very important given how huge it is.
Flash also came with Windows 2000 and XP and I hope Microsoft cheats itself into delivering Flash 8 with Vista as well, but it's not guaranteed. Even if doesn't god bless Flash is a pretty small download (Flash 9 will be 1MB or less still).
Adobe knows WinFX and Vista are their enemy that can kill Flash, up to the community to wake up and realize it too (actually a lot of people already realize it).
.. and check out the upcoming artices on Slashdot in the next few days:
How Google Makes Thumbnails: by scaling the images down
How Google Displays Links: by using the anchor tag
How Google News Finds News: by scanning news sites
How Does Google Make You Feel Lucky: by showing you the first match
We are geeks... I mean, check out what is "news" to the rest of the world. A dumb blond wrecking her car...
I find this especially ironic. People care about Paris Hilton's car crash not because car crashes are particularly rare, but because Paris Hilton is really popular.
And you're reasoning that Google ordering items by popularity is very important, not because ordering by popularity is particularly rare, but because Google is really popular.
But you can always find comfort in the idea that we're "the geeks" and "the rest of the world" is just plain dumb and undeserving attention.
You know, maybe it's not Google who hypes this up. Maybe they just posted it in a blog and the community took it up.
Every single little thing Google does, no matter how trivial, is reported to take down Microsoft and take over the world.
But COME ON, is this really worth an article on Slashdot:
[we] rank them based on how popular they are
Shit they better patent it before someone else figures it out!
It's only literally every site with plenty of items that can be sorted based on popularity.
Yes, .NET targets rich client apps and browser apps. However, to use the web you use a web browser, not a rich client. The only way that they could break compatibility and force you to download the .NET runtime is to convert IE into a rich client platform. Could they do that? Yes they could. Are they giving any indication that they are going to do that in the near future? Not at all.
.NET appplications to run in Internet Explorer 7 right off the web (in sandboxed mode, like applets and Flash), and you "only" can intermix it with existing HTML pages and you can "only" communicate from .NET to JScript that operates within HTML and back.
Yea "not at all", they've only allowed
Please, educate yourself before trolling utter rubbish like the one in your comment. Some people might believe it.
.NET 3.0 to run .NET 3.0 browser apps in the same way that you don't need to download PHP, Python, Ruby or Perl to your computer to use Slashdot or Digg or Google, etc.
.NET is a great technology on the server side where it can send HTML to the browsers, it does act as a client too, especially in Vista, where it has a new rich graphical UI framework (Avalon) and is basically the equivalent of Java's applets. The graphical UI of older .NET apps is called WinForms. .NET apps can run in the browser or as standalone exe files.
That's ironic...
You don't need to download
That's where you're wrong. While
Reporters are not supposed to troll, they are supposed to at least believe what they say is correct (even if it's not).
When John Dvorak writes his typical troll stories, potentially millions of people not familiar with the phenomenon John Dvorak take the article at face value and form opinion of people and products that affect their purchase choice and they also share the misinformation with other people.
Tell a lie enough times, and it stops being a lie in people's minds.
So are "Mac zealots" to be mocked about reacting strongly to lies spread in the media, or should the liears not exist in first place?
It's not so funny that media use misinformation just to drive ad impressions up. That's really low of them.
I mean see how much better Netscape 8 is compared to Firefox 1.5.
.NET brand since after killing the "cool code names" (Avalon, Indigo) and turning then into indecypherable abbreviations (WPF, WCF, WTF and so on), people got confused, and slap WinFX on top of all that.
.NET also is not a great way to describe it since it's an OS programming framework, not just network related, but what the hell..
And seriously, it does make sense to align it with their
Of course
That would actually, then, be four-and-a-quarter million dollars rather than a paltry 4K.
:(
There go my plans for acquiring 3D Realms for $4k
Like an MRI [wikipedia.org], for instance? I'm guessing it's ok.
Yup, but this is what X-Ray inventors also guessed when they shot themselves under X-Ray scaners for hours and hours of self-made moving skeleton movies, and later died by cancer.
If around the meteor there's oddly a huge amount of worms that morph for days into two-head lizards, dragons and blue monkeys, get the hell outta there.
in the forms of very trace amounts of magnetite in brain tissue.
:D
Two questions:
1. If I put a supermagnet right next to my head, am I piersing microscopic holes through my brain? There should be some effect even with trace amounts, I suppose, even if not that drastic.
2. Where did this magnetite come from? I think my mother's diet didn't include magnetite, nor did mine. I suppose the organism will have to metabolise in a truly peculiar way to start with organic proteins and end with magnetite as well
Starting your post in the subject is ... really annoying.
Have you ever stopped an wonder why the heck do comments have subject at all.
For a standalone article it makes sense as you see what the news and discussion will be is about, but do you really announce the subject of your reply out loud every time you want to respond to something in a real conversation?
Thus people just have to either repeat the beginning of their post in the subject, or just start there and continue in he body, lest "cat got their tongue".
I think you mean a full-blown desktop. You can have a full-blown OS taking much less space.
:)
To be honest I kinda meant a full-blown Windows OS...
It helps because I'll pay extra to see the Victoria Secret Show and you'll get sidelined cheepskate!
I've some tullips to sell you, $1000 the piece.