Posts by Carcass

Oscars can Sacha Baron Cohen Avatar skit

Typical Slop Print Journalism

New York concludes: "So in case you’re ranking celebrity senses of humor at home, you can now safely put Cameron below Eminem."

Eminem was in on the joke, see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1189987/MTV-Movie-Awards-Eminem-Sacha-Baron-Cohens-bare-prank.html

And Bruno was funny for about the first 10 minutes, until you realized that it was same joke (act like an ass, make people uncomfortable and try and get a reaction from them) over and over and over again.

SourceForge bars 5 nations from open source downloads

Pointless

That is all.

Mozilla buries heels on un-YouTube open video

Just "type" attribute the damn tag

The HTML <script> tag has a "type" attribute that tells you what language the script is (or more specifically, it's MIME type). Either your browser runs the script it or it doesn't. There is no reason why the <video> tag can't have a similar mechanism. If a video tag calls for H.264 and your browser doesn't support non-free formats, it won't play, and you can get a plug-in or different browser. If a video tag calls for Ogg and your browser is made by a company that won't support anything other than H.264; again, you can get a different browser.

Eventually, the market will decide, as it did in the case of Javascript vs. VBScript, that one format is preferred, and go with it. The market can figure this one out too.

Mine is the one with the browser that can be enhanced via add-in or plug-in.

Microsoft will issue emergency IE patch on Thursday

Yes, Designed

The library in question mshtml.dll (Trident) is the engine that is used by a bunch of apps that render HTML content (via shdocview.dll), not just Internet Explorer. It's not 100% certain that the file will be locked, but it is highly likely.

A shared HTML rendering library is not such a terrible idea, it's just that the implementation is horrible. Unfortunately, developers use it because it's easy to implement and it has zero cost, not because it's good or high quality. The nature of the vulnerability, a reference counting problem, is going to be very, very difficult to fix properly. This will not be the last update you see for this issue.

Israelis develop Nazi-doodlebug sonic deathwave cannon

Real Life Usage

In Paso Robles, Napa and Sonoma in California, vineyards use these as a bird deterrent. Given the acreage involved, it's a lot more effective than having migrant labor running around trying to scare birds (followed closely by Republicans trying to scare the migrants).

Exploit code for potent IE zero-day bug goes wild

DEP Breaks Most Remaining Reasons to Use IE

The only reason to use IE in a corporate environment are legacy ActiveX controls. Unfortunately, DEP "breaks" many of those and a bunch of add-in's as well. Unfortunately, DEP is an "all or nothing" setting, you cannot selectively disable it for "trusted" or internal sites.

I've been trying to push for Firefox at our company, and implement IE Tabs when we have no choice but to use IE. Since Firefox configuration can't be managed through GPO's, it has been a difficult sell to the guys that manage the workstations and AD.

The quality and security of the computing experience seems to be nosediving as we plummet headlong into the "browser is the OS" mentality.

Mine's the one with the application installation CD, that I can install and not worry about whatever goddam browser or plug-in revision I have. Bring back statically linked executables. You can keep all of your frameworks, dynamic libraries, shared objects, JVM's, Silverlight/Flash and 50 other ways to waste my time guessing whether my app will work or not. Get off my lawn.

Sh*t the bed, it's Comment of the Week

Remember Compute Magazine?

My first box was a Commodore 64. There was this magazine called Compute - they had a Commodore version that came with programming listings in not only BASIC but machine code - you could type in pages upon pages of hex codes on the gawdawful C64 keyboard. Only to have it often fail. The tears would be a combo of the failure of said application to run as well as pain lingering in my once-functional fingers.

Danm, though, I miss those days... (except for "EasyScript", which was anything but)