That would make sense on laptops and other small devices, but not so much if you're sitting 2-3 ft away from 2-3 large screens. Which is not uncommon for programmers and designers these days.
Right now, from where I'm sitting, I can't touch my desktop monitor without leaning forward uncomfortably. Even if large touchscreens become cheaper over the next few years, my arms aren't going to get any longer, and my field of vision isn't going to get any wider (larger monitor = sit further away). In this situation, touch isn't simply imperfect, it's physiologically impossible. It'll be even more impossible if your "screen" is a 50" plasma TV on the opposite wall.
The other practical problem I see: fingerprints. I never touch my laptop screen because I'm looking at it all day and even at full brightness you can see previous fingerprints.
Haha, you're right. I have dry skin, so I make heavy use of hand cream... which doesn't play nicely with touchscreens at all. The smudges are especially annoying on glossy screens.
Completely agreed. The method described in the article requires commenters to use HTML tags and even know how to balance them. In addition, it is supposed to detect code blocks automagically, which would be prone to errors. (How do you know whether a block of text is English or Python?)
Markdown is terse, easy to write, and readable even when rendered in plain text. There's a reason why so many web sites, from Reddit to Github to Stack Exchange, uses Markdown exclusively.
As for the alternatives: Wikitext ''seriously'' '''overloads''' the '''''apostrophe''''', often needs to be supplemented with <u>HTML</u> anyway, and contains [[wiki-specific syntax]] which is not relevant in most blog-commenting situations. BBCode is just a bastardized subset of HTML. It's popular in old-fashioned forum software, but I see no reason to use it in new applications.
There's Textile, but its handling of blockquotes and code samples is much less convenient than Markdown. Github's wiki used to use Textile, and it sucked.
I use a desktop at home and a small laptop on the go, and everything I need is always on both computers. Files, bookmarks, browsing history, you name it. I can just log into either computer and keep working. The advent of cloud-based synchronization tools makes it very easy for people to juggle 2 or more computers. So instead of fighting over the "Desktop of laptop?" question, one can get both and not suffer any inconvenience.
After all, what would the average North American middle-class family do if they needed a vehicle that was both large enough for the kids' hockey games and fuel-efficient enough for the dad's long commute? They wouldn't settle for one mid-sized car; they'd buy a minivan and a Prius.
The proportion of people who are "always on the go" is rather small.
> some of them can be overcome: external peripherals for ergonomics, larger screens, and extra storage.
Once you've attached an external monitor, external keyboard and mouse, and an external hard drive to a laptop, you're using the laptop exactly as you would a desktop tower: something you only need to touch if you want to insert a piece of removable media.
In that case, you might as well fork out a few more dollars and put a real desktop tower in that space. Sync everything and enjoy the extra speed.
>the 8 char password has much less entropy: 95^8 ~= 6.63E15 //
Most of the word usage is going to be limited though too. testyourvocab.com put the average at 27k I think. We're looking for words one can remember easily so the word pool is going to be a lot lower - 15000^4 ~= 5E16 FWIW.
Some Koreans do this: they just type up some Korean words. Since most password fields only accept ASCII symbols, the password gets entered as a nonsensical string of alphabets. For example, the Korean word '비밀번호' (meaning 'password'), when typed on a standard Korean keyboard, becomes 'qlalfqjsgh'.
Rails is a framework. PHP is a language. If you use a framework with PHP, it's just as easy to avoid XSS. Likewise, if you use vanilla Ruby without any framework...
daeken is arguing, based on quite a bit of experience, that PHP applications (even those written with frameworks) tend to have more security vulnerabilities than Rails apps. I happen to agree with him.
One very illustrative example: arbitrary code execution. I've lost count of the number of arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities I've found in PHP applications. In contrast, I recall very vividly the last arbitrary code execution vulnerability I found in a Python application: I uploaded a PHP script to the server, which was also running mod_php. ;-)
The problem here is simple: most web servers that run PHP are configured with a rule that says "If a file ends in .php, execute it as PHP." This is useful for new users: it allows them to run and execute separate PHP scripts very easily. But it's also a potential security vulnerability if an attacker can upload a PHP file to your server.
If you're using a framework, you typically have a fixed number of scripts that should be executable and you can configure your web server appropriately. However, that requires a VPS or dedicated server.
Edit: If you're interested in an actual language-level difference between PHP and Ruby/Python that affects security, PHP scripts accepted null bytes as part of filesystem paths until recently (PHP 5.3.4, which added protection against it, was released at the end of 2010).
I'm not disputing any of that. I just get annoyed when people compare languages with frameworks. Ruby and Python have many advantages compared to PHP, but out-of-the-box XSS prevention is not one of them.
Rails is a DSL based on Ruby to build web applications that has hooks into a rich library that helps with that. PHP is a language designed to build web applications (although it can be abused to write any type of application)
Most LiveCDs don't mount hard drives unless you specifically tell it to do so, for example, by clicking on the drive icon. Perhaps this distro disables even that capability, so you can't leave any trace on the machine even if someone got you to run the latest Firefox exploit.
This distribution has stripped hard disk support from the kernel. It is intended as a relatively more secure browsing platform (with support for DoD two-factor authentication for email access, etc.). I provide it to my parents for browsing the web, and my tech support calls from home are gone.
correct. I played with this for a while and couldn't find a way to mount. You're booted in as a non-root user and don't know the root password. There's all sorts of stuff you can't do with this. I this may be primarily being developed as a counter-intel tool.
So, when you copy somebody else's work (e.g. a song) for personal enjoyment, it's an outrageous crime; but when you copy a student's essay for profit, it's fair use. You're right, it's not at all surprising.
It's copyright infringement by you, the person who made and sent a copy, not by me who just received it. If you look at the lawsuits, they're all convicted because they uploaded, not because they downloaded.
Has anyone ever been convicted for just downloading MP3s?
Besides, there's obviously a difference between receiving a random essay from a person who claims to own the rights (that's obviously in their TOS), and asking to download an MP3 of some band. In the latter case, the downloader obviously knows the copy is illegal and it can be argued that (s)he's abetting the infringer.
Just wait until people start talking about IE 26, Firefox 34, Chrome 42, etc. Now that even the Linux kernel is jumping onto the inflated-version-numbers bandwagon, it won't be long.
Right now, from where I'm sitting, I can't touch my desktop monitor without leaning forward uncomfortably. Even if large touchscreens become cheaper over the next few years, my arms aren't going to get any longer, and my field of vision isn't going to get any wider (larger monitor = sit further away). In this situation, touch isn't simply imperfect, it's physiologically impossible. It'll be even more impossible if your "screen" is a 50" plasma TV on the opposite wall.
So it seems that @jonpaul does have a point.