Apparently some people are confused as to who owns what.
Saul Zaentz owns the film/tv (most non-print, iirc) rights to all of Tolkien's works.
New Line has a license to produce films based on LOTR, which they have exercised.
MGM has a license to produce film(s) based on The Hobbit, which they have not exercised.
Both Jackson and New Line tried to buy MGM's license multiple times in the last decade. MGM wouldn't sell for any reasonable price.
With the expiration of MGM's license drawing nigh, they realized that they finally had to do something in order to profit from it. What's the simplest thing to do? Go to New Line and offer a partnership that puts Jackson in the mix.
What MGM didn't count on is the accounting suit Jackson has against New Line regarding profits from FotR, a suit that New Line is stonewalling, but apparently tried to settle as a condition of Hobbit production, which Jackson didn't like. Everyone involved knows that any Hobbit film is dependent on Jackson's involvement for maximum profitability.
And now MGM's license is about to expire. MGM has to be pissed at New Line for allowing this to happen. Jackson is probably annoyed at New Line for trying to drag his lawsuit into it. New Line is probably salivating at the prospect of finally getting the Hobbit license for themselves, to do with as they wish. They just have to hope Jackson doesn't get it, if he wants it.
If Jackson does get the Hobbit license, wouldn't it just be a kick in the balls if he had MGM distribute it?
First, kids are constantly inundated with an increasingly materialistic, impulsive culture. The "three R's" can't get you a PS3 on launch date, and if someone like Paris Hilton can get famous, what's the point? Being bored at school doesn't pay anything, but being bored in a menial job at least gets you a meager paycheck.
Second is that kids think that high school isn't teaching them anything, certainly not much that they can perceive as useful in the "real world". If critical thinking was part of any curriculum, they'd realize that they are penalizing themselves in the long run for a short term gain.
Then there's the parents who passively contribute to the phenomenon by not taking an interest.
As much as I'd like to see an atheist (or an agnostic) in the oval office, I'd prefer it wasn't the poster boy for corporatism. Cheney is bad enough where he is.
Anyway, with the rise of the "religious right", this is highly unlikely. Factor in the increasing polarization of politics, 75 or more years of inertia of the current issues, and the fact that politicians foster their own kind, and the chance becomes almost nil.
The only way an atheist could even have a hope of prevailing in a dirty election process is if the candidate was so well known, respected, and liked by the populace that their religious views became a non-issue.
Kind of like Schwarzenegger, but with talent. For anything. Norman Lear suggested Richard Dreyfuss for president while the both of them were on Real Time with Bill Maher the other night. After listening to Dreyfuss' comments throughout the show, he seems a better choice than any of the clowns either party could drudge up.
Obviously you've never used Blender, which utilizes about half of the available [key], ctrl-[key], alt-[key], and shift-[key] keystroke combinations, especially the ones that have any sensible mnemonic meaning. G doesn't make sense when you want to Move something, until you associate Grab to the key, which arguably makes more sense than V, which Photoshop uses. Many of Blender's keystrokes even have different functionality based on context.
There is a keystroke map for Blender, but its innate information overload makes it less usable than those for simpler software like Photoshop.
In fact, Blender has a reputation for being somewhat hard to learn, mostly based on its tendency to promote the use of keystrokes over wading through a maze of menus. The number of keystrokes required to graduate from noob to novice as a blender user is about half as many keystrokes as there are in all of Photoshop.
Given the nature of 3d modeling applications, I can't imagine that 3DS Max, Maya, Lightwave, Rhino, or any of the others are much different in this regard. It's not about laziness so much as it is about the complexity of the tool.
Any application where the UI is hotkey driven (or has lots of semi-decipherable icons) can benefit from an Optimus.
Personally, I want one just for Blender. Lots of other graphics apps could benefit from this (Photoshop, even), and certainly there are some video people out there that would like to plug one of these into their Avid systems.
Sadly, the extra 10 side keys could have been put to good use in a Blender key layout.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a second...
If Microsoft started suing folks using its technology then its technology would become much less popular virtually overnight.
How could MS be more effective than the (MP|RI)AA with this tactic? MS would be uproariously stupid to sue individuals (especially 12 year old girls), but what about the small businesses out there?
Oh, shit. What if MS wasn't going after RH or IBM... What if their target was the massive server hosting companies that couldn't operate without a free OS? RackShack and the like better watch their asses.
MS insisting that the startup sound be tolerable after 1000 times hearing it alludes to the fact that they know how unstable and badly architected Windows (including Vista) is. There's got to be an internal memo regarding how often in a given time period the average user would hear the startup sound.
And no, this is not a direct correlation to Gnome/KDE startup sounds, which would only be played when Gnome/KDE or X is started, not the entire OS. OSX, iirc, embeds the Mac startup sound in the harware, so it plays long before the desktop reaches memory.
As for the sound itself, the four notes immediately struck me as a blatant attempt at brand strengthening. What made previous versions of the startup sound tolerable was that they were simply amorphous tones, there was no identifiable structure (notes) in them. This version obviously throws that out the window in favor of branding, and won't be tolerable after more than a few plays.
More evidence that Vista is what Redmond wants and what Hollywood will tolerate, rather than what users want.
A lot of the comments here claim that Dvorak doesn't "get it".
Consider for a moment something demonstrably true: Microsoft doesn't "get it".
Given infinite time, a thousand Dvoraks with typewriters will eventualy concoct a valid reason why anything happens. That says nothing about the faulty and overly verbose logic constructed to support it.
Microsoft still doesn't "get" open source. They're trying every angle they can conceive of within their narrow, myopic view.
Microsoft could fork the language, but they couldn't call it "Java".
True... MS would have to call it something else... like... say... J++? Or maybe J#?
If the MS-Novell deal turns out to be the catastrophe that everyone thinks it is (based on MS' track record of how it treats its "partners"), then this is a really smart move for Sun. SuSe and Gnome get tainted, Mono becomes a dirty disease, what's left to fill in the void? Java: the reason why.NET and Mono exist in the first place.
Apparently those of you who dismiss this issue have never experienced a screen reader for themselves.
Firstly, the experience is much more focused than reading a web page. Reading involves more than one word, even more than one line, simultaneously. The brain constructs context based on the words before and after the word your eyes are focused on. Screen readers aren't capable of this. The only way to hear an entire page is to let the reader speak it from beginning to end. There's no skipping the navigation, the reader doesn't know where that is.
Now, for the next issue of comprehension: tone, tempo, volume, and inflection of voice. Screen readers are incapable of constructing context, and therefore are incapable of assigning naturalistic vocal changes to text that they "speak". Monotonous, droning voices are harder to understand because there are no clues to tell the listener when a sentence ends, what is a question, or anything else. Not everything on a page is a sentence, either... listening to deeply nested table content is nightmarish.
This is where CSS and semamtics come in. (Yes, there is CSS for audio... what do you think the voice-family IE hack is based on?). CSS can control many aspects of a voice, and many of these aspects can be mapped to visual aspects of text, but not all. Semantics constructs the context of a piece of text for the screen reader. Screen readers don't care about font size, but they can construct context based on what tags are used. This is why
The first can clearly be indentified as a header (h1 tag), while the second is just really big, heavy text.
Now, if a blind person's screen reader can distill all this extra info out of a well structured document, so can a search engine, an RSS reader, XSL transforms, or any other piece of software. This is what the Semantic Web is all about.
The ADA became law on July 26 1990, a couple of months before TBL started non-conceptual work on the WWW in October 1990. The physical argument is moot, as servers physically exist... the means to access and interact with them is the paradigm shift.
If online stores are public places, then the entirety of the internet is a public place, barring sites or parts of sites that specifically deny access and provide no public means to acquire that access. Drawing a line based on one specific functionality is absurd.
Yes, this would mean that every site out there would have to be ADA compliant. That would mean developers would finally have to learn what accessibility, usability, semantics, and web standards are. It would be a welcomed blow to Flash, because Flash cannot be made accessible.
As for cost or return on this investment... well, all those companies (and government agencies) who built their sites without giving the first thought to accessibility deserve the agony of hiring competent designers and developers (who know more than just how to make a site pretty) this time around, heeding their advice, and avoiding the same potential exposure to litigation for which the case against Target has now set a precedent.
Hard core gamers (the early adopters, so they can drool over DX10) aren't going to be happy with mucking around with MS support every time they slot in the latest video card, or whatever other hardware triggers this bullshit.
Eventually the gamers will rise up en masse and switch to another OS rather than deal with this crap, at some point Windows won't be worth it anymore no matter how cool DX10 might be. The game studios should prepare for this now.
For that matter, software vendors in general should prepare for this now.
I think most professionals are probably coding in XHTML, whether by hand or by GUI program.
No, they aren't. A lot of "professionals" don't even know the difference. The WYSIWYGs are still internally designed to spew table layouts, and no matter which one you use, to use CSS layout you have to set up the layout CSS by hand. This won't change.
When all the major browsers have competitive standards support (IE7 56%, everything else 90%+), then maybe the standards will matter more. The so called "Web 2.0" is a realization that the standards published in 1998 to 2001 are actually well implemented in some browsers (Gecko, Opera, KHTML).
Read the rest of the comments in this thread for proof that your statement is false. Lots of people claiming "XHTML doesn't matter" or "XHTML is hard" or "HTML works fine" or "screw you, I'm still using tag <foo>". These people perpetuate the problem.
HTML is dead. It's been superceded by XHTML for years now.
HTML was a good idea with some rough edges. It took XHTML to smooth some of them out. Specs that are less vague, more complete, and leave less to interpretation will fix more problems in the future.
XHTML is simpler than HTML (contrary to popular belief) because the syntax and structure is more consistent than HTML. You don't have to wonder whether you need a closing a tag: all tags get closed. All attributes get quoted. All tag names and attributes are lower case. It's really not that hard; if you don't want to do it because you can't read it anymore (you capitalization whore), that's what syntax highlighting is for. You just have to put forth a tiny bit of effort to make turn these rules into instinct.
There are two reasons why the transition to XHTML hasn't happened:
Browsers and WYSIWYGs allow incredibly sloppy markup
Therefore, developers don't see any need to move up
As long as browsers try to interpret messy markup, few people are going to care. It's the "good enough" attitude. "Quirks mode" is the big bad here. Browsers and visual authoring tools need to tell users that the page they are looking at is non-conformant and warn that it may not behave correctly. No other softare on the planet is as forgiving of the data it handles as web browesers.
If GCC still compiled C code when curly braces, paretheses, and quote marks are omitted at random, how much shittier would all the C code in the world be?
At least the W3C is doing something about the quagmire, but working in parallel is just a waste of time. Let HTML be, it's old and busted. XHTML is the new hotness. The W3C can spew out all the Recommendations (the flimsient of terms) it wants, but no one is going to care unless there's some enforcement at the other end of the line.
One thing the W3C needs to do is get off the semantic web high horse; it's putting the cart before the horse. They need to evangelize correctness, and the semantic web (plus other aspects) will follow naturally.
So, all you so called "developers" and "designers", keep on churning out your HTML 4.01 Transitional pages (or let Dreamweaver do it for you) with bloated table layouts. You'll keep contributing to the problem.
Obviously, intraoperability would be "operability within a single platform".
What he's actually talking about is how standards compliance would affect Windows as a whole. Help files, Office, Outlook, a lot of things depend on MS' 8 year old (or more) decision to merely pay lip service to web standards and/or pervert them for their own internal uses.
MS doesn't care one bit about other platforms. They don't even consider the existence of other platforms most of the time. That's their business. Closed source, closed minded.
But to dismiss developers' demands in favor of not having to fix their platform? That's not caring about developers, customers, or anyone other than themselves. MS has the same attitude about lots of topics, including security. All their past design choices are coming back to haunt them.
Fact: IE7 still sucks at web standards, and MS doesn't care. They're even whispering to people that it doesn't (among the roar of UI catch up). They just had to whip up the token effort that is IE7 so people would get distracted from Firefox. People are fed up with IE, especially web developers. The best, most secure browsing experience? Certainly not with IE, and maybe not even on Windows.
IE7's CSS (and other standards) support hasn't changed since RC1. They've said this.
For a complete report on IE7's support, see WebDevout.com. For those thjo lazy (or embarrassed) to click the link, here's a summary of CSS 2.1 support:
Firefox: 100%
Opera 9: 86%
IE6: 43%
IE7: 43%
In the grand scheme of things, what they did to improve IE7's CSS support is statistically insignificant. They basically took all the IE7 bug pages on the net and cherry picked what they felt like fixing.
Make no mistake: IE7 is little more than a marketing effort attempting to stave off the rise of other demonstrably better browsers. The few fixes they did put in are going to cause even more problems for developers who decide to support it (I'm not) because of how, which, and in what context the bugs are fixed.
Virii, worms, and malware all exist because MS makes famously insecure products. Symantec and McAfee exist because virii, worms, and malware exist.
Symantec and McAfee need to at least acknowledge that their business models are based on design flaws, poor implemetation, and bad coding practices within MS. They should thank Bill and crew for the ability to complain when a fraction of these inadequacies are fixed after many years.
I'm not defending MS and their monopolistic procatices, but this isn't simply another Netscape crushing. Netscape was a user space product. This is about fundamental flaws at the core of the Windows OS: about as faw away from user space as you can get. That these flaws permeate into the userspace is beside the fact.
Symantec and McAfee (and many others) have spent the past decade or more cleaning up after MS in terms of security. Now they want to bitch when their lazy benefactor decides to take some responsibility? But, the issue isn't the mere taking of the responsibility, it's more about the monopolizing of that responsibility. No one has any reason to believe that MS' anti-crapware will be more effective than any third party solution. MS allowed security to become a third party market, now they want to be that market.
MS is wrong for closing out vendors from providing a complete third party security solution. However, MS is more wrong for not writing secure products in the first place, and certainly for not understanding what comprises an operating system.
Web Browser: critical OS component.
Security: third party solutions are OK until we get around to it.
Windows security vendors only have something to worry about if MS actually produces a secure operating system. I don't believe they think this is possible, which is why they haven't broadened their product lines. Until hell freezes over, Symantec and McAfee should all but shut up and enjoy what MS has given them.
The first response by anyone critical of the Bush administration and their rampant croneyism should be "They're going to let us see how much Halliburton is raking in?". Unfortunately, this will never happen.
Firstly, this massive undertaking won't be implemented until well after Bush is out of office.
Secondly, even if another Republican gets elected in '08, there's no way anything even remotely resembling military spending or "national security" would be itemized in a meaningful manner, if it appears at all.
When (if) this thing does go online, it likely won't include any data from fiscal years prior to its release. Unless a year's budget is posted after that year ends.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently some people are confused as to who owns what.
Both Jackson and New Line tried to buy MGM's license multiple times in the last decade. MGM wouldn't sell for any reasonable price.
With the expiration of MGM's license drawing nigh, they realized that they finally had to do something in order to profit from it. What's the simplest thing to do? Go to New Line and offer a partnership that puts Jackson in the mix.
What MGM didn't count on is the accounting suit Jackson has against New Line regarding profits from FotR, a suit that New Line is stonewalling, but apparently tried to settle as a condition of Hobbit production, which Jackson didn't like. Everyone involved knows that any Hobbit film is dependent on Jackson's involvement for maximum profitability.
And now MGM's license is about to expire. MGM has to be pissed at New Line for allowing this to happen. Jackson is probably annoyed at New Line for trying to drag his lawsuit into it. New Line is probably salivating at the prospect of finally getting the Hobbit license for themselves, to do with as they wish. They just have to hope Jackson doesn't get it, if he wants it.
If Jackson does get the Hobbit license, wouldn't it just be a kick in the balls if he had MGM distribute it?
First, kids are constantly inundated with an increasingly materialistic, impulsive culture. The "three R's" can't get you a PS3 on launch date, and if someone like Paris Hilton can get famous, what's the point? Being bored at school doesn't pay anything, but being bored in a menial job at least gets you a meager paycheck.
Second is that kids think that high school isn't teaching them anything, certainly not much that they can perceive as useful in the "real world". If critical thinking was part of any curriculum, they'd realize that they are penalizing themselves in the long run for a short term gain.
Then there's the parents who passively contribute to the phenomenon by not taking an interest.
As much as I'd like to see an atheist (or an agnostic) in the oval office, I'd prefer it wasn't the poster boy for corporatism. Cheney is bad enough where he is.
Anyway, with the rise of the "religious right", this is highly unlikely. Factor in the increasing polarization of politics, 75 or more years of inertia of the current issues, and the fact that politicians foster their own kind, and the chance becomes almost nil.
The only way an atheist could even have a hope of prevailing in a dirty election process is if the candidate was so well known, respected, and liked by the populace that their religious views became a non-issue.
Kind of like Schwarzenegger, but with talent. For anything. Norman Lear suggested Richard Dreyfuss for president while the both of them were on Real Time with Bill Maher the other night. After listening to Dreyfuss' comments throughout the show, he seems a better choice than any of the clowns either party could drudge up.
Obviously you've never used Blender, which utilizes about half of the available [key], ctrl-[key], alt-[key], and shift-[key] keystroke combinations, especially the ones that have any sensible mnemonic meaning. G doesn't make sense when you want to Move something, until you associate Grab to the key, which arguably makes more sense than V, which Photoshop uses. Many of Blender's keystrokes even have different functionality based on context.
There is a keystroke map for Blender, but its innate information overload makes it less usable than those for simpler software like Photoshop.
In fact, Blender has a reputation for being somewhat hard to learn, mostly based on its tendency to promote the use of keystrokes over wading through a maze of menus. The number of keystrokes required to graduate from noob to novice as a blender user is about half as many keystrokes as there are in all of Photoshop.
Given the nature of 3d modeling applications, I can't imagine that 3DS Max, Maya, Lightwave, Rhino, or any of the others are much different in this regard. It's not about laziness so much as it is about the complexity of the tool.
Any application where the UI is hotkey driven (or has lots of semi-decipherable icons) can benefit from an Optimus.
Personally, I want one just for Blender. Lots of other graphics apps could benefit from this (Photoshop, even), and certainly there are some video people out there that would like to plug one of these into their Avid systems.
Sadly, the extra 10 side keys could have been put to good use in a Blender key layout.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a second...
How could MS be more effective than the (MP|RI)AA with this tactic? MS would be uproariously stupid to sue individuals (especially 12 year old girls), but what about the small businesses out there?
Oh, shit. What if MS wasn't going after RH or IBM... What if their target was the massive server hosting companies that couldn't operate without a free OS? RackShack and the like better watch their asses.
(pun possibly intended)
MS insisting that the startup sound be tolerable after 1000 times hearing it alludes to the fact that they know how unstable and badly architected Windows (including Vista) is. There's got to be an internal memo regarding how often in a given time period the average user would hear the startup sound.
And no, this is not a direct correlation to Gnome/KDE startup sounds, which would only be played when Gnome/KDE or X is started, not the entire OS. OSX, iirc, embeds the Mac startup sound in the harware, so it plays long before the desktop reaches memory.
As for the sound itself, the four notes immediately struck me as a blatant attempt at brand strengthening. What made previous versions of the startup sound tolerable was that they were simply amorphous tones, there was no identifiable structure (notes) in them. This version obviously throws that out the window in favor of branding, and won't be tolerable after more than a few plays.
More evidence that Vista is what Redmond wants and what Hollywood will tolerate, rather than what users want.
Of course Rummy knew what weapons Iraq had... he gave those weapons to Iraq.
The real menace within the DOD is Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of all of the USA's global imperialist schemes since at least the Carter years.
Unfortunately, last year someone decided he was of better use as president of the World Bank than Deputy Secretary of Defense.
A lot of the comments here claim that Dvorak doesn't "get it".
Consider for a moment something demonstrably true: Microsoft doesn't "get it".
Given infinite time, a thousand Dvoraks with typewriters will eventualy concoct a valid reason why anything happens. That says nothing about the faulty and overly verbose logic constructed to support it.
Microsoft still doesn't "get" open source. They're trying every angle they can conceive of within their narrow, myopic view.
That's all Dvorak had to say.
True... MS would have to call it something else... like... say... J++? Or maybe J#?
If the MS-Novell deal turns out to be the catastrophe that everyone thinks it is (based on MS' track record of how it treats its "partners"), then this is a really smart move for Sun. SuSe and Gnome get tainted, Mono becomes a dirty disease, what's left to fill in the void? Java: the reason why .NET and Mono exist in the first place.
It's about much more than alt tags.
Apparently those of you who dismiss this issue have never experienced a screen reader for themselves.
Firstly, the experience is much more focused than reading a web page. Reading involves more than one word, even more than one line, simultaneously. The brain constructs context based on the words before and after the word your eyes are focused on. Screen readers aren't capable of this. The only way to hear an entire page is to let the reader speak it from beginning to end. There's no skipping the navigation, the reader doesn't know where that is.
Now, for the next issue of comprehension: tone, tempo, volume, and inflection of voice. Screen readers are incapable of constructing context, and therefore are incapable of assigning naturalistic vocal changes to text that they "speak". Monotonous, droning voices are harder to understand because there are no clues to tell the listener when a sentence ends, what is a question, or anything else. Not everything on a page is a sentence, either... listening to deeply nested table content is nightmarish.
This is where CSS and semamtics come in. (Yes, there is CSS for audio... what do you think the voice-family IE hack is based on?). CSS can control many aspects of a voice, and many of these aspects can be mapped to visual aspects of text, but not all. Semantics constructs the context of a piece of text for the screen reader. Screen readers don't care about font size, but they can construct context based on what tags are used. This is why
Is more effective in non-visual mediums than
The first can clearly be indentified as a header (h1 tag), while the second is just really big, heavy text.
Now, if a blind person's screen reader can distill all this extra info out of a well structured document, so can a search engine, an RSS reader, XSL transforms, or any other piece of software. This is what the Semantic Web is all about.
They were sued over the method(s) used to present and access the content. That would be, in at least one respect, the design.
Design goes far beyond graphics, colors, and fonts.
The ADA became law on July 26 1990, a couple of months before TBL started non-conceptual work on the WWW in October 1990. The physical argument is moot, as servers physically exist... the means to access and interact with them is the paradigm shift.
If online stores are public places, then the entirety of the internet is a public place, barring sites or parts of sites that specifically deny access and provide no public means to acquire that access. Drawing a line based on one specific functionality is absurd.
Yes, this would mean that every site out there would have to be ADA compliant. That would mean developers would finally have to learn what accessibility, usability, semantics, and web standards are. It would be a welcomed blow to Flash, because Flash cannot be made accessible.
As for cost or return on this investment... well, all those companies (and government agencies) who built their sites without giving the first thought to accessibility deserve the agony of hiring competent designers and developers (who know more than just how to make a site pretty) this time around, heeding their advice, and avoiding the same potential exposure to litigation for which the case against Target has now set a precedent.
No you don't. You'd pull the patch out after a week of getting inundated with messages.
Hard core gamers (the early adopters, so they can drool over DX10) aren't going to be happy with mucking around with MS support every time they slot in the latest video card, or whatever other hardware triggers this bullshit.
Eventually the gamers will rise up en masse and switch to another OS rather than deal with this crap, at some point Windows won't be worth it anymore no matter how cool DX10 might be. The game studios should prepare for this now.
For that matter, software vendors in general should prepare for this now.
XHTML and CSS encourage the separation of content and presentation. HTML embraces, no, relies on, embedded presentation.
SGML "lies in the ditch" because it is so broad and abstract that it has no practical application, and was never intended to.
News flash, genius: HTML, XML, and XHTML are all subsets of SGML.
No, they aren't. A lot of "professionals" don't even know the difference. The WYSIWYGs are still internally designed to spew table layouts, and no matter which one you use, to use CSS layout you have to set up the layout CSS by hand. This won't change.
When all the major browsers have competitive standards support (IE7 56%, everything else 90%+), then maybe the standards will matter more. The so called "Web 2.0" is a realization that the standards published in 1998 to 2001 are actually well implemented in some browsers (Gecko, Opera, KHTML).
Read the rest of the comments in this thread for proof that your statement is false. Lots of people claiming "XHTML doesn't matter" or "XHTML is hard" or "HTML works fine" or "screw you, I'm still using tag <foo>". These people perpetuate the problem.
HTML is dead. It's been superceded by XHTML for years now.
HTML was a good idea with some rough edges. It took XHTML to smooth some of them out. Specs that are less vague, more complete, and leave less to interpretation will fix more problems in the future.
XHTML is simpler than HTML (contrary to popular belief) because the syntax and structure is more consistent than HTML. You don't have to wonder whether you need a closing a tag: all tags get closed. All attributes get quoted. All tag names and attributes are lower case. It's really not that hard; if you don't want to do it because you can't read it anymore (you capitalization whore), that's what syntax highlighting is for. You just have to put forth a tiny bit of effort to make turn these rules into instinct.
There are two reasons why the transition to XHTML hasn't happened:
As long as browsers try to interpret messy markup, few people are going to care. It's the "good enough" attitude. "Quirks mode" is the big bad here. Browsers and visual authoring tools need to tell users that the page they are looking at is non-conformant and warn that it may not behave correctly. No other softare on the planet is as forgiving of the data it handles as web browesers.
If GCC still compiled C code when curly braces, paretheses, and quote marks are omitted at random, how much shittier would all the C code in the world be?
At least the W3C is doing something about the quagmire, but working in parallel is just a waste of time. Let HTML be, it's old and busted. XHTML is the new hotness. The W3C can spew out all the Recommendations (the flimsient of terms) it wants, but no one is going to care unless there's some enforcement at the other end of the line.
One thing the W3C needs to do is get off the semantic web high horse; it's putting the cart before the horse. They need to evangelize correctness, and the semantic web (plus other aspects) will follow naturally.
So, all you so called "developers" and "designers", keep on churning out your HTML 4.01 Transitional pages (or let Dreamweaver do it for you) with bloated table layouts. You'll keep contributing to the problem.
This guy is full of shit. The foulest, most vile stinking kind of shit. A corporate marketing droid shoveled it into him.
When answering a question about IE's lousy standards support (#9), he uses interoperability as a defense. What the fuck.
Let's play with word prefixes for a moment.
Lots of people have heard of interoperability. Most people understand it to mean "operability between or among platforms.
Obviously, intraoperability would be "operability within a single platform".
What he's actually talking about is how standards compliance would affect Windows as a whole. Help files, Office, Outlook, a lot of things depend on MS' 8 year old (or more) decision to merely pay lip service to web standards and/or pervert them for their own internal uses.
MS doesn't care one bit about other platforms. They don't even consider the existence of other platforms most of the time. That's their business. Closed source, closed minded.
But to dismiss developers' demands in favor of not having to fix their platform? That's not caring about developers, customers, or anyone other than themselves. MS has the same attitude about lots of topics, including security. All their past design choices are coming back to haunt them.
Fact: IE7 still sucks at web standards, and MS doesn't care. They're even whispering to people that it doesn't (among the roar of UI catch up). They just had to whip up the token effort that is IE7 so people would get distracted from Firefox. People are fed up with IE, especially web developers. The best, most secure browsing experience? Certainly not with IE, and maybe not even on Windows.
IE7's CSS (and other standards) support hasn't changed since RC1. They've said this.
For a complete report on IE7's support, see WebDevout.com. For those thjo lazy (or embarrassed) to click the link, here's a summary of CSS 2.1 support:
In the grand scheme of things, what they did to improve IE7's CSS support is statistically insignificant. They basically took all the IE7 bug pages on the net and cherry picked what they felt like fixing.
Make no mistake: IE7 is little more than a marketing effort attempting to stave off the rise of other demonstrably better browsers. The few fixes they did put in are going to cause even more problems for developers who decide to support it (I'm not) because of how, which, and in what context the bugs are fixed.
Why not? People used to say that Service Pack 6 for NT4 was RedHat.
Virii, worms, and malware all exist because MS makes famously insecure products. Symantec and McAfee exist because virii, worms, and malware exist.
Symantec and McAfee need to at least acknowledge that their business models are based on design flaws, poor implemetation, and bad coding practices within MS. They should thank Bill and crew for the ability to complain when a fraction of these inadequacies are fixed after many years.
I'm not defending MS and their monopolistic procatices, but this isn't simply another Netscape crushing. Netscape was a user space product. This is about fundamental flaws at the core of the Windows OS: about as faw away from user space as you can get. That these flaws permeate into the userspace is beside the fact.
Symantec and McAfee (and many others) have spent the past decade or more cleaning up after MS in terms of security. Now they want to bitch when their lazy benefactor decides to take some responsibility? But, the issue isn't the mere taking of the responsibility, it's more about the monopolizing of that responsibility. No one has any reason to believe that MS' anti-crapware will be more effective than any third party solution. MS allowed security to become a third party market, now they want to be that market.
MS is wrong for closing out vendors from providing a complete third party security solution. However, MS is more wrong for not writing secure products in the first place, and certainly for not understanding what comprises an operating system.
Windows security vendors only have something to worry about if MS actually produces a secure operating system. I don't believe they think this is possible, which is why they haven't broadened their product lines. Until hell freezes over, Symantec and McAfee should all but shut up and enjoy what MS has given them.
The first response by anyone critical of the Bush administration and their rampant croneyism should be "They're going to let us see how much Halliburton is raking in?". Unfortunately, this will never happen.
Firstly, this massive undertaking won't be implemented until well after Bush is out of office.
Secondly, even if another Republican gets elected in '08, there's no way anything even remotely resembling military spending or "national security" would be itemized in a meaningful manner, if it appears at all.
When (if) this thing does go online, it likely won't include any data from fiscal years prior to its release. Unless a year's budget is posted after that year ends.
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