Posts from — February 2003

'Help, Help! I'm Not Being Repressed!'. Plastic::Politics::Protest: Civil disobedience is so difficult when the pigs don't play along. [Plastic: Most Recent]

Oh, you will be, you wi-lll-lll be, in my best yoda voice. the best repression isn't visible, it isn enculturation, combined with peer effects….

Bush orders guidelines for cyber-war. Bush orders guidelines for cyber-war Is it my old age that makes me wonder what else might be in this secret directive as regards computers and the Net?
“First set of rules for attacking enemy computers studied.”
Perhaps you support the president or you are the enemy (recall: you are with us or against us)…. [MetaFilter]

but who is he ordering in the end…., whose interests will be put forth here?

Why Users Hate IT Products and Developers [Slashdot]

hate is such a strong word, i doubt anyone really hates this, though they do definitely despise it. I think it has quite a bit to do with 'the condition of their labor' which envelops these technologies.

IBM research papers on communities, learning and more.

Trying to find a paper on-line gives you a lot of other interesting things. So, I came accross public papers of IBM Watson Research Center.

Nifty collection, hope people find them useful.

Terry Jones: I'm losing patience with my neighbours, Mr Bush. Terry Jones writes in the Observer that he's “going to give the whole street two weeks – no, 10 days – to come out in the open and hand over all aliens and interplanetary hijackers, galactic outlaws and interstellar terrorist masterminds, and if they don't hand them over nicely and say 'Thank you', I'm going to bomb the entire street to kingdom come.” I'm really excited by George Bush's latest reason for bombing Iraq: he's running out of patience. And so am I! For some time now I've been really pissed off with Mr Johnson, who lives a couple of doors down the street. Well, him and Mr Patel, who runs the health food shop. They both give me queer looks, and I'm sure Mr… [Monkey X - Hairy Thoughts]

Now if we could just get the people on the 1000-2000 block of pennsylvania avenue to take the same sort of approach to their neighbors…. well, one of them already has, look at that….

Market Competition, Microsoft Style.

Microsoft's home page tells the computers of people using the Opera browser and only the computers of people using the Opera browser to move the left margin of the page 30 pixels off the left end of the screen.

The natural inference is that Microsoft is doing this in the hope of convincing everyone who uses Opera and visits the Microsoft home page that the Opera browser is broken, and that they should use Internet Explorer instead.

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The Register: Opera Software has accused Microsoft of deliberately engineering the MSN home page in order to make it look as if the Opera browser has a serious flaw in it. And the Norwegian company has published the results of an investigation which it says proves this.

Although Opera is convinced it has been deliberately targeted, it seems at least possible that the problem could be put down to some strangely coincidental finger trouble. But if that's the case, Opera has explained how simple it would be to fix it, and one therefore presumes Microsoft will give the matter its immediate attention.

Opera's techies downloaded the page using wget, in three different formats, identifying as Opera 7, MSIE and Netscape 7.01. The files sent to each browser are different, which is not necessarily suspicious, and the one sent to Opera7 has less content and is bigger than the one sent to IE. But that is not necessarily suspicious either.

Where it does get suspicious is when you look at the style sheets MSN sends to the browsers. The culprit, says Opera, is a 30 pixel value set on the margin property in the Opera style sheet. This instructs Opera to move list elements 30 pixels to the left of the parent, which means content moves off the side of its container, which means it looks like Opera is broken.

Opera tried to test whether or not this was deliberate by changing identification to the non-existent browser Oprah. This returns the IE style sheet, which works perfectly well in Opera. In Opera's view MSN is therefore looking specifically for “Opera” in the User-Agent string and sending it a broken style sheet. That, of course, could still be a mistake, as it's perfectly logical to send IE as the default if the browser can't be identified. But as there was no need for MSN to design an Opera-specific style sheet in the first place, one wonders…

[Semi-Daily Journal]