I think there may well be a strong case for defamation against RBL publishers, because of that very fact - they are publishers, and they therefore are subject to libel laws. Libellous statements are published false statements likely to have a negative effect on a person's standing, or causing them financial loss. An incorrect RBL entry sounds a good candidate for a libel suit to me...
To use your restaurant analogy: Any RBL is a publisher of reviews, reviews which some people use to determine which netblocks they are willing to accept SMTP traffic from, in the same way that people use restaurant reviews to determine which restaurant to attend. And publishing _inaccurate_ reviews of restaurants (saying the steak is tough and the service surly when neither is true, or that a particular IP address is originating spam when this is not the case) would be considered libel in most sane legal systems.
To clarify - reviews saying 'I didn't enjoy the steak', or other such subjective opinions, are not going to be considered libel because the statements in question are most probably true (or at least hard to disprove) - which is why negative reviews of perfectly good things can be published, of course. But publishing a review of a restaurant that says 'The steak was greasy, rancid, and possibly made from horsemeat' when a restaurant sources its steak from a reputable organic beef farm is a different matter. Of course, if the statement is true and the reviewer can prove it, it's also legal to publish it.
In fact, what RBLs do is more akin to a food critic posting a review along the lines of 'the food in some of the restaurants on main street sucks - and in spite of repeatedly informing the property developers who own all the buildings on main street of this, they have refused to do anything to prevent those restaurants from selling appalling food. As a result, we recommend nobody go to any of the restaurants on main street'
Notice that the critic in question _doesn't_ include the crucial piece of information indicating which restaurant or restaurants are responsible for the crappy food. Posting a review of this nature could be considered pretty defamatory towards any restaurants on Main Street who do serve good food. This is exactly what happens when a netblock is listed by an RBL. Some of the IP addresses in that netblock may well be being used for spamming. Some of them may well not be. Anyone whose IP address is in the listed range might well have a case for suing the RBL for publishing a false and defamatory statement about them - namely, that their IP address should be considered a likely source of spam.
You can, indeed, block email from any IP address you choose, just as you can choose whether to attend a particular restaurant. That's your right. But you can't publish defamatory comments about anybody you choose. People have the right to conduct their lives and businesses without the threat of people publishing lies about them that have a detrimental effect on their standing or their economic fortunes - something which I think RBLs come perilously close to doing. The only thing that might keep them immune to such an attack is most probably the legal system's haziness over what constitutes 'publishing' if the publication only takes place electronically, and the 'readers' of the publication are not conscious, opinion-forming people, but dumb computer programs. Would be an interesting case.
You must be watching a different show than the one we got over here in the UK. I mean, yeah, the one we saw had a certain level of war-on-terror allegory to it, but I must have missed the part where everything done by the civilian leadership or military command was portrayed as incontrovertably good. I thought that if there were parallels to be drawn, it was that things are complex, and people make mistakes, and not everything you do has the consequences you expect... Oh, yes, and war is bad.
In fact, by the end of the series, you're starting to get the idea that the Cylons - even though they may have started a huge war, and nuked a few planets, might not be an entire race of complete badguys after all. Maybe they're a little more complex than that.
The religious allegory would likely make most of the US Christian right livid: monotheistic robots who believe in a forgiving single God are the ones who attacked and wiped out a largely lapsed, but fundamentally polytheistic pagan culture. There's a message that I doubt would sit well at a Republican convention - leastways, not with the roles you assume fit your comfortable post 9/11 allegory story.
Don't be so quick to judge. This is a smart show, I'm glad to see it renewed. I'm not entirely comfortable with the story it's telling, but I don't feel the need to be comfortable all the time.
Coke is so far beyond a brand it's weird - but that has its downsides, too.
Go up to a bar that sells Pepsi, and order a Coke. Bartender reaction: 'Pepsi okay?'. Before you've said 'yeah, whatever', or 'no, goddamn it', they're pouring it anyway. In other words, there's an implicit assumption that if you order Coke, you probably mean cola. Y'know. Generic brown fizzy sugar water.
Try the inverse experiment. Go up to a bar that sells Coke, and order a Pepsi. It melts the bartender's mind. Nobody explicitly orders Pepsi. If you do, you must really want Pepsi. Coke will certainly not do! So they have to apologise, and offer you Coke as a token of goodwill.
In other words, even if Coke's marketing succeeds - even if they really do manage to persuade someone to go out and think 'you know what, I really want a Coke!', then that person may find that if they go up to a bar to order one, they end up with Pepsi anyway. The inverse is not going to happen.
See why owners of trademarks like Google fight against their names becoming generic terms...
EA already bought Criterion, last year. The reason being, Criterion make a bit of software called RenderWare, that is used by a whole host of games developers as a base library for building their products. EA bought them in order to bring RenderWare into their operation, although RenderWare is still licensed to non-EA-published developers. So far as I'm aware, there's been no layoffs, and the staff are happy with their EA compensation packages.
I think, actually, ampersand is a contraction of 'and per se and', although I can't find a really solid cite for that right now.
Incidentally, I'd always thought 'ampersat' was an official typographical term for '@', derived from a similar 'at per se at' contraction, but it looks, from brief research, like that may not be the case, and ampersat is simply a modern coinage...
In fact, a 1 in 455 chance of humanity being wiped out in each successive 100 year block gives us a 454 in 455 chance of surviving that 100 year block.
Our odds of surviving 200 years is the odds of us surviving the first block (454 in 455) times the odds of us surviving the second (another 454 in 455) - about 99.5%
In other words, the odds of us surviving 100n years is (454/455) ^ n. The odds of us making it through the next millennium, then, is (454/455) ^ 10; that equates to about 44 in 45, or a one in 45 chance of our species being wiped out before we see the next millennium bug.
The odds at 10000 years (n=100) diminish to about one in five that we'll all have been wiped out - that is, four in five that we're still here.
Around the 30 000 year mark, the chances we're wiped out are pretty much even. That would mean we'd tend to expect mass extinction events about once every 60000 years, on average. you could consider that as a kind of indicator as to the validity of the original statistic.
Beyond that point, it becomes easier to quote the odds we're still here than that we're not.
After 100 000 years, we get down to about a one in ten chance of still existing. In other words, out of all the possible ways the next 100 millennia could go, only one in ten of them finish with us still existing.
In other words, the number predicts survival is unlikely, but it's not impossible, and the odds keep dropping, but they don't reach zero.
Whether the 1 in 455 number is right or not is open to question, of course, but just because we've been around more than 45500 years is no reason to dismiss it completely.
Remember - making life easier for your vendor has a direct and positive effect on your bottom line - it makes their product cheaper.
Sure, lock them out. You have a problem with their software, call their tech support, and when they ask for access, tell them to go fish... but then don't bitch about the callout charge to get an engineer out to your site.
You know, it's funny... Our customers are notorious for demanding that we can diagnose and fix all problems that occur on the boxes that support our applications. To protect our systems from attacks allowed in by well-meaning but less-than-perfectly-competent customers, we have set up a quarantined network for each customer.
> I know a person who speaks and writes English, and they use "they" in the singular.
Is they a friend of yours? They has an interesting way of speaking...
Of course, you're right, in many cases, you can use 'they' or 'them' as a singular. But there are still circumstances where I'd balk at it, not just those above. It's a complex little beast, this. I'm not at all sure how I'd resolve the two sentences I started this post with, if you'd introduced a singular 'them' into conversation. Possibly referring to them as 'this person', or - horror of horrors - 'he or she'...
Episodes four and five, the last two to show in the UK, really have Battlestar getting into its stride. You should have given it a week longer. Edward James Olmos is shaping up like one of the finest actors to turn up in a sci fi show since Patrick Stewart...
"if FireFox wants to be better than IE, it needs to at least render the pages the way they were intended."
The trouble is... there's no way to know what was intended with some pages. Most of the web consists of HTML that doesn't follow w3c standards, because if you followed standards, your page wouldn't look right in IE. So, diligent web designers have coded in all sorts of hacks that make their pages deviate from the standard, but work in IE. In other words 'do what was intended' means 'do whatever IE does'. That's not really a recipe for being better than IE, is it?
In order to get round this problem, browsers have two different rendering paths - quirks mode and standards mode (IE and Mozilla both do this). Quirks mode is where the browser pretends it's never heard of web standards, and tries to do the right thing, with whatever the website sends it. Standards mode - triggered by finding a suitable DOCTYPE declaration at the top of a page - switches the browser's 'pedant' circuits in, and it tries to religiously do what the perfect browser should do with all input.
But most sites are rendered in quirks mode, which, as the name implies, means that they are subject to the quirks of each individual browser. Only a very silly web designer would want that. So the lesson is, design your sites to web standards, use DOCTYPE declarations, and you'll get the benefit of your site being rendered much more consistently in any modern browser - even IE. But it'll look better in Mozilla.
(Unless you use the IE7 extensions on your site, that is, in which case it'll look pretty much the same...)
The number of times 'but this renders differently in IE and Mozilla!' problems can be solved just by sticking a doctype declaration at the top to force standards mode in both browsers is really quite remarkable...
Actually, thinking about the physical packaging of the media, one thing I've been wondering since DVDs came along is - why the hell do all new media have to follow the exact same 12cm form factor of CDs?
It seems crazy, to me, that we have all these 12cm discs with identically sized holes in the centre, that could contain completely different kinds of data.
If I pick up a shiny 12cm disc, what should I play it on? my TV? My Hi Fi? Or maybe it's a data disc and only makes sense to my computer. In the future, I won't be able to tell by glancing at it whether a disc will be readable in my blue-laser DVD player, because it may be a UV disc.
Admittedly, my DVD player can play CDs, and I only need one optical drive on my PC - these are advantages, yes. And we're probably stuck with the 13cm shiny disc format for the forseeable future now. But shouldn't somebody have realised, back when DVDs were created, that maybe there ought to be a standard way of telling them apart from CDs?
And don't even think about getting me started on packaging design. I mean, it maybe makes sense to put movie DVDs into packages the smae height as VHS tapes, because people may have an existing investment in VHS storage in their living rooms. But in god's name, why would you package DVD-ROMs in the same sized boxes as VHS tapes? In an environment where people have storage space for CD-ROM-sized boxes, introduce a stupid, oversized box.
What sort of box are they going to use for blue DVDs? And what can we do to stop them?
Some day, fossil fuels aren't going to be a major energy supplier at all. So, you're asking, can anyone see a day when wind power is a more important energy source than fossil fuel, well the answer is yes.
As for nuclear - well that depends, doesn't it. Those fossil-burning plants will have to be replaced with some sort of power provision at some point. If it turns out that it's easier to persuade voters to permit building of windfarms than nuclear plants, then wind farms will be what gets built. So, you never know... it may well be that the naive view is the one that says that fossil fuels will always be a dominant energy source.
It may seem a bit rich to have to tell somebody who's actually posting a link to RTFA, but... I don't recall any of Mother Earth Mother Board being about laying cable in the Pacific; the cable in question makes its way down the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, across the Indian ocean, and up through the China Seas to the Sea of Japan - which, I guess, are fringe-pacific, but hardly open ocean territory...
Great article, but... I think you should maybe re-read...
Yes, and before anaesthetic doctors got by performing amputations using a bottle of rum and a rag in the patient's mouth. Has anaesthetic saved lives, or encouraged a lazy attitude towards diagnosis? I guess time will tell...
Are you seriously arguing that it is better for doctors to rely on hazy memories of lectures they slept through several years earlier, supplemented with occasional runs down to the hospital library to look through the card index and find that the book they need has been checked out by someone else? We're not talking about doctors sticking a list of the patient's symptoms into google and hoping the first page back is right - we're talking about access to indexed medical journals, pharmaceutical databases, and email consultation with peers and consultants. Communication and information are NEVER detrimental to doing a good job...
Well, obviously when you search for pages from slashdot that don't include the string 'qqqqqqqq', you'll be excluding certain pages on slashdot. Like this one.
Yeah, printer quality certainly is declining. That's why I still use my old 7-pin dot matrix. If you can stand the racket it makes when it's printing, you can get a black and white image that, if you squint, is almost as good as a 1980s newsprint photograph!
You can keep your fancy inkjets with their photographic quality output that cost less than a fifth of what I paid for my dot matrix back in 1990... those things are just so flimsy (why, when they're printing, you can hardly hear any noise from them at all).
Indeed, languages do evolve. This is an important, natural process, as human experience changes over time and we need new ways to express our thoughts and ideas about the world. But this has traditionally been a constructive kind of evolution - a process of creating new terms for new phenomena, or co-opting existing terms to do the job. This is all good.
But when we conflate the meanings of two distinct, established terms and use them interchangeably where there used to be a distinction, then we actively reduce the ability of the language to help us communicate our thoughts with clarity and precision. The migration in meaning of a word like 'ironic' to be interchangeable with another such as 'unfortunate' is sad, because it means that humanity's capacity to express the concept to which it originally referred is diminished. If there is no distinction in meaning between the words 'ensure' and 'insure', then the language is poorer for it, because it has lost the ability to reliably refer to two different concepts.
But notice I don't say that one usage is 'correct' and another 'wrong'. In language there is only 'common' usage, not 'correct' and 'incorrect'. If, as you say, millions of people use e.g. and i.e. as synonyms for 'such as', then millions of people are, indeed, by their own terms 'right'. But at the same time, those millions of people are going to have trouble communicating with the millions of us who don't agree with them. Which presents us with a problem.
This is why people like me get upset when we see vocabulary so casually narrowed. We know that these two words mean two different things, but we also know that the fact that others are no longer aware of the distinction means that even if we use the words distinctly (note that I don't say 'correctly'), they may not be understood the way we intend, and they simply lose their distinct meaning. For example, if the world has decided that e.g. and i.e. are synonyms, then I can no longer use them at all, because some other people have been too lazy to notice the (quite clear) distinction between them, and used the wrong word. In other words, the English language just lost two shorthand ways of expressing a pair of common, useful concepts. So forgive people like me for occasionally trying to draw a line in the sand and say, "you shall not take that word." The version of the language that I speak is richer than that that you speak. I want to continue to enjoy that richness. And you're spoiling it. (not specifically 'you - slothman', a more general, rhetorical 'you - the people who do this sort of thing', by the way)
Irony has nothing to do with unexpectedness, incidentally, and everything to do with tangential coincidences contributing often grim humour to otherwise unfortunate circumstances, but then I wouldn't expect that to be of concern to you. A sad loss to the language, this word, because an ability to perceive irony is intrinsic to being able to find humour in misfortune and loss, and while an inability to express the feeling of irony correctly with a single word doesn't preclude you from experiencing it, I tend to think that being able to categorise a set of circumstances in your brain as 'ironic' is an important part of coping with difficult times. A sense of irony can keep you sane. God knows it's the only thing we British have left...
... I do not think it means what you think it means.
i.e. is an abbreviation for the Latin id est, "that is". It's a synonym for "in other words", "that is to say", or (sort of) "specifically". It does NOT mean "for example", or "such as". For those expressions, you're looking for the Latin abbreviation e.g. - exempli gratia, which means "for example".
Saying this virus "searches your machine for email domains, i.e. yahoo.com", you're actually saying that it "searches for email domains, in other words yahoo.com". This implies that yahoo.com is the only email domain it searches for (or that you are an idiot, and honestly believe that 'email domains' is synonymous with 'yahoo.com'), which makes it seem like a rather pointless search, to say the least.
I.e./e.g. confusion seems to be increasingly common, which surprises me, because it doesn't seem to me that their meanings are at all similar. It seems rather like confusing the phrases 'In spite of which' and 'since Thursday'. Since Thursday, people still seem to do it.
If you really can't remember whether you mean i.e. or e.g., then just write out 'for example' or 'in other words' in full... it doesn't take that much longer.
And I've had co-workers who 'took their time' coding, crashed deadlines, and cost tens of thousands in lost sales and delivery penalties because they lacked the flexibility to find faster ways to solve problems. It's easy to whine that managers only care about turnaround time, not about quality, but the fact is, what most managers want is fast turnaround _and_ good code - which is, admittedly, hard, but then that's why people who are good at this sort of thing make a lot of money. What, you thought IT jobs were paid 25% more than equivalent grade non-technical jobs because they like programmers' dress sense?
Fact is, programmers always like to say 'I don't have enough time'. The author of the Pragmatic Programmer, whose name escapes me right now, suggests you turn that round into 'I have too much to do'. I suggest you turn it into 'I need to find a way to get the same effect by doing less things'. That doesn't mean leaving out features or testing or code reviews - it means finding innovative ways to generate more good code in less time. There are fundamental routes to this, such as adopting better tools. Obviously, having highly developed technical skills helps because you need to know your platform and your tools inside out to be able to create the kind of solutions that you need. There are working practices that can help, like XP claims to. But mainly I find it's an attitude thing. If the company needs something done in three days, and the first approach you think of will take you six, then you'd better reject your first thought, and find a way that'll get it done in three days. That's what they're paying you to do, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there may well be a strong case for defamation against RBL publishers, because of that very fact - they are publishers, and they therefore are subject to libel laws. Libellous statements are published false statements likely to have a negative effect on a person's standing, or causing them financial loss. An incorrect RBL entry sounds a good candidate for a libel suit to me...
To use your restaurant analogy: Any RBL is a publisher of reviews, reviews which some people use to determine which netblocks they are willing to accept SMTP traffic from, in the same way that people use restaurant reviews to determine which restaurant to attend. And publishing _inaccurate_ reviews of restaurants (saying the steak is tough and the service surly when neither is true, or that a particular IP address is originating spam when this is not the case) would be considered libel in most sane legal systems.
To clarify - reviews saying 'I didn't enjoy the steak', or other such subjective opinions, are not going to be considered libel because the statements in question are most probably true (or at least hard to disprove) - which is why negative reviews of perfectly good things can be published, of course. But publishing a review of a restaurant that says 'The steak was greasy, rancid, and possibly made from horsemeat' when a restaurant sources its steak from a reputable organic beef farm is a different matter. Of course, if the statement is true and the reviewer can prove it, it's also legal to publish it.
In fact, what RBLs do is more akin to a food critic posting a review along the lines of 'the food in some of the restaurants on main street sucks - and in spite of repeatedly informing the property developers who own all the buildings on main street of this, they have refused to do anything to prevent those restaurants from selling appalling food. As a result, we recommend nobody go to any of the restaurants on main street'
Notice that the critic in question _doesn't_ include the crucial piece of information indicating which restaurant or restaurants are responsible for the crappy food. Posting a review of this nature could be considered pretty defamatory towards any restaurants on Main Street who do serve good food. This is exactly what happens when a netblock is listed by an RBL. Some of the IP addresses in that netblock may well be being used for spamming. Some of them may well not be. Anyone whose IP address is in the listed range might well have a case for suing the RBL for publishing a false and defamatory statement about them - namely, that their IP address should be considered a likely source of spam.
You can, indeed, block email from any IP address you choose, just as you can choose whether to attend a particular restaurant. That's your right. But you can't publish defamatory comments about anybody you choose. People have the right to conduct their lives and businesses without the threat of people publishing lies about them that have a detrimental effect on their standing or their economic fortunes - something which I think RBLs come perilously close to doing. The only thing that might keep them immune to such an attack is most probably the legal system's haziness over what constitutes 'publishing' if the publication only takes place electronically, and the 'readers' of the publication are not conscious, opinion-forming people, but dumb computer programs. Would be an interesting case.
You must be watching a different show than the one we got over here in the UK. I mean, yeah, the one we saw had a certain level of war-on-terror allegory to it, but I must have missed the part where everything done by the civilian leadership or military command was portrayed as incontrovertably good. I thought that if there were parallels to be drawn, it was that things are complex, and people make mistakes, and not everything you do has the consequences you expect... Oh, yes, and war is bad.
In fact, by the end of the series, you're starting to get the idea that the Cylons - even though they may have started a huge war, and nuked a few planets, might not be an entire race of complete badguys after all. Maybe they're a little more complex than that.
The religious allegory would likely make most of the US Christian right livid: monotheistic robots who believe in a forgiving single God are the ones who attacked and wiped out a largely lapsed, but fundamentally polytheistic pagan culture. There's a message that I doubt would sit well at a Republican convention - leastways, not with the roles you assume fit your comfortable post 9/11 allegory story.
Don't be so quick to judge. This is a smart show, I'm glad to see it renewed. I'm not entirely comfortable with the story it's telling, but I don't feel the need to be comfortable all the time.
Coke is so far beyond a brand it's weird - but that has its downsides, too.
Go up to a bar that sells Pepsi, and order a Coke. Bartender reaction: 'Pepsi okay?'. Before you've said 'yeah, whatever', or 'no, goddamn it', they're pouring it anyway. In other words, there's an implicit assumption that if you order Coke, you probably mean cola. Y'know. Generic brown fizzy sugar water.
Try the inverse experiment. Go up to a bar that sells Coke, and order a Pepsi. It melts the bartender's mind. Nobody explicitly orders Pepsi. If you do, you must really want Pepsi. Coke will certainly not do! So they have to apologise, and offer you Coke as a token of goodwill.
In other words, even if Coke's marketing succeeds - even if they really do manage to persuade someone to go out and think 'you know what, I really want a Coke!', then that person may find that if they go up to a bar to order one, they end up with Pepsi anyway. The inverse is not going to happen.
See why owners of trademarks like Google fight against their names becoming generic terms...
EA already bought Criterion, last year. The reason being, Criterion make a bit of software called RenderWare, that is used by a whole host of games developers as a base library for building their products. EA bought them in order to bring RenderWare into their operation, although RenderWare is still licensed to non-EA-published developers. So far as I'm aware, there's been no layoffs, and the staff are happy with their EA compensation packages.
I think, actually, ampersand is a contraction of 'and per se and', although I can't find a really solid cite for that right now.
Incidentally, I'd always thought 'ampersat' was an official typographical term for '@', derived from a similar 'at per se at' contraction, but it looks, from brief research, like that may not be the case, and ampersat is simply a modern coinage...
Not quite how it works.
In fact, a 1 in 455 chance of humanity being wiped out in each successive 100 year block gives us a 454 in 455 chance of surviving that 100 year block.
Our odds of surviving 200 years is the odds of us surviving the first block (454 in 455) times the odds of us surviving the second (another 454 in 455) - about 99.5%
In other words, the odds of us surviving 100n years is (454/455) ^ n. The odds of us making it through the next millennium, then, is (454/455) ^ 10; that equates to about 44 in 45, or a one in 45 chance of our species being wiped out before we see the next millennium bug.
The odds at 10000 years (n=100) diminish to about one in five that we'll all have been wiped out - that is, four in five that we're still here.
Around the 30 000 year mark, the chances we're wiped out are pretty much even. That would mean we'd tend to expect mass extinction events about once every 60000 years, on average. you could consider that as a kind of indicator as to the validity of the original statistic.
Beyond that point, it becomes easier to quote the odds we're still here than that we're not.
After 100 000 years, we get down to about a one in ten chance of still existing. In other words, out of all the possible ways the next 100 millennia could go, only one in ten of them finish with us still existing.
In other words, the number predicts survival is unlikely, but it's not impossible, and the odds keep dropping, but they don't reach zero.
Whether the 1 in 455 number is right or not is open to question, of course, but just because we've been around more than 45500 years is no reason to dismiss it completely.
Remember - making life easier for your vendor has a direct and positive effect on your bottom line - it makes their product cheaper.
Sure, lock them out. You have a problem with their software, call their tech support, and when they ask for access, tell them to go fish... but then don't bitch about the callout charge to get an engineer out to your site.
Your call.
You know, it's funny... Our customers are notorious for demanding that we can diagnose and fix all problems that occur on the boxes that support our applications. To protect our systems from attacks allowed in by well-meaning but less-than-perfectly-competent customers, we have set up a quarantined network for each customer.
:)
I'm still looking for better customers
> I know a person who speaks and writes English, and they use "they" in the singular.
Is they a friend of yours? They has an interesting way of speaking...
Of course, you're right, in many cases, you can use 'they' or 'them' as a singular. But there are still circumstances where I'd balk at it, not just those above. It's a complex little beast, this. I'm not at all sure how I'd resolve the two sentences I started this post with, if you'd introduced a singular 'them' into conversation. Possibly referring to them as 'this person', or - horror of horrors - 'he or she'...
Ah, English. Language of a thousand exceptions.
Your timing is terrible...
Episodes four and five, the last two to show in the UK, really have Battlestar getting into its stride. You should have given it a week longer. Edward James Olmos is shaping up like one of the finest actors to turn up in a sci fi show since Patrick Stewart...
"if FireFox wants to be better than IE, it needs to at least render the pages the way they were intended."
The trouble is... there's no way to know what was intended with some pages. Most of the web consists of HTML that doesn't follow w3c standards, because if you followed standards, your page wouldn't look right in IE. So, diligent web designers have coded in all sorts of hacks that make their pages deviate from the standard, but work in IE. In other words 'do what was intended' means 'do whatever IE does'. That's not really a recipe for being better than IE, is it?
In order to get round this problem, browsers have two different rendering paths - quirks mode and standards mode (IE and Mozilla both do this). Quirks mode is where the browser pretends it's never heard of web standards, and tries to do the right thing, with whatever the website sends it. Standards mode - triggered by finding a suitable DOCTYPE declaration at the top of a page - switches the browser's 'pedant' circuits in, and it tries to religiously do what the perfect browser should do with all input.
But most sites are rendered in quirks mode, which, as the name implies, means that they are subject to the quirks of each individual browser. Only a very silly web designer would want that. So the lesson is, design your sites to web standards, use DOCTYPE declarations, and you'll get the benefit of your site being rendered much more consistently in any modern browser - even IE. But it'll look better in Mozilla.
(Unless you use the IE7 extensions on your site, that is, in which case it'll look pretty much the same...)
The number of times 'but this renders differently in IE and Mozilla!' problems can be solved just by sticking a doctype declaration at the top to force standards mode in both browsers is really quite remarkable...
Actually, thinking about the physical packaging of the media, one thing I've been wondering since DVDs came along is - why the hell do all new media have to follow the exact same 12cm form factor of CDs?
It seems crazy, to me, that we have all these 12cm discs with identically sized holes in the centre, that could contain completely different kinds of data.
If I pick up a shiny 12cm disc, what should I play it on? my TV? My Hi Fi? Or maybe it's a data disc and only makes sense to my computer. In the future, I won't be able to tell by glancing at it whether a disc will be readable in my blue-laser DVD player, because it may be a UV disc.
Admittedly, my DVD player can play CDs, and I only need one optical drive on my PC - these are advantages, yes. And we're probably stuck with the 13cm shiny disc format for the forseeable future now. But shouldn't somebody have realised, back when DVDs were created, that maybe there ought to be a standard way of telling them apart from CDs?
And don't even think about getting me started on packaging design. I mean, it maybe makes sense to put movie DVDs into packages the smae height as VHS tapes, because people may have an existing investment in VHS storage in their living rooms. But in god's name, why would you package DVD-ROMs in the same sized boxes as VHS tapes? In an environment where people have storage space for CD-ROM-sized boxes, introduce a stupid, oversized box.
What sort of box are they going to use for blue DVDs? And what can we do to stop them?
Some day, fossil fuels aren't going to be a major energy supplier at all. So, you're asking, can anyone see a day when wind power is a more important energy source than fossil fuel, well the answer is yes.
As for nuclear - well that depends, doesn't it. Those fossil-burning plants will have to be replaced with some sort of power provision at some point. If it turns out that it's easier to persuade voters to permit building of windfarms than nuclear plants, then wind farms will be what gets built. So, you never know... it may well be that the naive view is the one that says that fossil fuels will always be a dominant energy source.
draw-dropping???
Even if you mean 'drawer-dropping', I worry about anybody who finds electronic good exciting enough to make them drop their drawers...
I hope you meant 'jaw-dropping'. And let this be a lesson to not confine your vocabulary-acquisition to television and film.
It may seem a bit rich to have to tell somebody who's actually posting a link to RTFA, but... I don't recall any of Mother Earth Mother Board being about laying cable in the Pacific; the cable in question makes its way down the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, across the Indian ocean, and up through the China Seas to the Sea of Japan - which, I guess, are fringe-pacific, but hardly open ocean territory...
Great article, but... I think you should maybe re-read...
Yes, and before anaesthetic doctors got by performing amputations using a bottle of rum and a rag in the patient's mouth. Has anaesthetic saved lives, or encouraged a lazy attitude towards diagnosis? I guess time will tell...
Are you seriously arguing that it is better for doctors to rely on hazy memories of lectures they slept through several years earlier, supplemented with occasional runs down to the hospital library to look through the card index and find that the book they need has been checked out by someone else? We're not talking about doctors sticking a list of the patient's symptoms into google and hoping the first page back is right - we're talking about access to indexed medical journals, pharmaceutical databases, and email consultation with peers and consultants. Communication and information are NEVER detrimental to doing a good job...
> yes, but tell me how many pages on slashdot contain a string 'qqqqqqqq'. Only a few, I suppose.
But increasing with every reply to this thread...
Well, obviously when you search for pages from slashdot that don't include the string 'qqqqqqqq', you'll be excluding certain pages on slashdot. Like this one.
Yeah, printer quality certainly is declining. That's why I still use my old 7-pin dot matrix. If you can stand the racket it makes when it's printing, you can get a black and white image that, if you squint, is almost as good as a 1980s newsprint photograph!
You can keep your fancy inkjets with their photographic quality output that cost less than a fifth of what I paid for my dot matrix back in 1990... those things are just so flimsy (why, when they're printing, you can hardly hear any noise from them at all).
Indeed, languages do evolve. This is an important, natural process, as human experience changes over time and we need new ways to express our thoughts and ideas about the world. But this has traditionally been a constructive kind of evolution - a process of creating new terms for new phenomena, or co-opting existing terms to do the job. This is all good.
But when we conflate the meanings of two distinct, established terms and use them interchangeably where there used to be a distinction, then we actively reduce the ability of the language to help us communicate our thoughts with clarity and precision. The migration in meaning of a word like 'ironic' to be interchangeable with another such as 'unfortunate' is sad, because it means that humanity's capacity to express the concept to which it originally referred is diminished. If there is no distinction in meaning between the words 'ensure' and 'insure', then the language is poorer for it, because it has lost the ability to reliably refer to two different concepts.
But notice I don't say that one usage is 'correct' and another 'wrong'. In language there is only 'common' usage, not 'correct' and 'incorrect'. If, as you say, millions of people use e.g. and i.e. as synonyms for 'such as', then millions of people are, indeed, by their own terms 'right'. But at the same time, those millions of people are going to have trouble communicating with the millions of us who don't agree with them. Which presents us with a problem.
This is why people like me get upset when we see vocabulary so casually narrowed. We know that these two words mean two different things, but we also know that the fact that others are no longer aware of the distinction means that even if we use the words distinctly (note that I don't say 'correctly'), they may not be understood the way we intend, and they simply lose their distinct meaning. For example, if the world has decided that e.g. and i.e. are synonyms, then I can no longer use them at all, because some other people have been too lazy to notice the (quite clear) distinction between them, and used the wrong word. In other words, the English language just lost two shorthand ways of expressing a pair of common, useful concepts. So forgive people like me for occasionally trying to draw a line in the sand and say, "you shall not take that word." The version of the language that I speak is richer than that that you speak. I want to continue to enjoy that richness. And you're spoiling it. (not specifically 'you - slothman', a more general, rhetorical 'you - the people who do this sort of thing', by the way)
Irony has nothing to do with unexpectedness, incidentally, and everything to do with tangential coincidences contributing often grim humour to otherwise unfortunate circumstances, but then I wouldn't expect that to be of concern to you. A sad loss to the language, this word, because an ability to perceive irony is intrinsic to being able to find humour in misfortune and loss, and while an inability to express the feeling of irony correctly with a single word doesn't preclude you from experiencing it, I tend to think that being able to categorise a set of circumstances in your brain as 'ironic' is an important part of coping with difficult times. A sense of irony can keep you sane. God knows it's the only thing we British have left...
Here's the cached version.
... I do not think it means what you think it means.
i.e. is an abbreviation for the Latin id est, "that is". It's a synonym for "in other words", "that is to say", or (sort of) "specifically". It does NOT mean "for example", or "such as". For those expressions, you're looking for the Latin abbreviation e.g. - exempli gratia, which means "for example".
Saying this virus "searches your machine for email domains, i.e. yahoo.com", you're actually saying that it "searches for email domains, in other words yahoo.com". This implies that yahoo.com is the only email domain it searches for (or that you are an idiot, and honestly believe that 'email domains' is synonymous with 'yahoo.com'), which makes it seem like a rather pointless search, to say the least.
I.e./e.g. confusion seems to be increasingly common, which surprises me, because it doesn't seem to me that their meanings are at all similar. It seems rather like confusing the phrases 'In spite of which' and 'since Thursday'. Since Thursday, people still seem to do it.
If you really can't remember whether you mean i.e. or e.g., then just write out 'for example' or 'in other words' in full... it doesn't take that much longer.
And I've had co-workers who 'took their time' coding, crashed deadlines, and cost tens of thousands in lost sales and delivery penalties because they lacked the flexibility to find faster ways to solve problems. It's easy to whine that managers only care about turnaround time, not about quality, but the fact is, what most managers want is fast turnaround _and_ good code - which is, admittedly, hard, but then that's why people who are good at this sort of thing make a lot of money. What, you thought IT jobs were paid 25% more than equivalent grade non-technical jobs because they like programmers' dress sense?
Fact is, programmers always like to say 'I don't have enough time'. The author of the Pragmatic Programmer, whose name escapes me right now, suggests you turn that round into 'I have too much to do'. I suggest you turn it into 'I need to find a way to get the same effect by doing less things'. That doesn't mean leaving out features or testing or code reviews - it means finding innovative ways to generate more good code in less time. There are fundamental routes to this, such as adopting better tools. Obviously, having highly developed technical skills helps because you need to know your platform and your tools inside out to be able to create the kind of solutions that you need. There are working practices that can help, like XP claims to. But mainly I find it's an attitude thing. If the company needs something done in three days, and the first approach you think of will take you six, then you'd better reject your first thought, and find a way that'll get it done in three days. That's what they're paying you to do, after all.
Cool - I bet he wouldn't have known that if you hadn't pointed it out to him...
Hopefully, not for long. If there's too much energy leaking out of the top, then it's not been designed right.