Are D&D 3.x and MMO games (calling them RPG's is like calling Windows secure). And now that they have been combined, everything else in the universe will suck less, according to the First Law of Suckage Dynamics.
This is yet further proof. When there are no more comics/cartoons/TV shows/books to license, tinseltown will collapse under its own gluttonous weight.
While I hope the live action Transformers is cool (read: not suck), I seriously hate Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheiner. All they can direct is a series of improbably explosions linked together by flat dialogue.
Email phishing is a small part of the problem that Microsoft has spent the last 15 years creating: the average user is totally ignorant of how to use a computer.
Windows goes out of its way to protect itself from the user, and its architecture is so full of holes that it then exposes that user to spam, viruses, phishing, identity theft, etc. Knowledge is power, and Joe User has no power over their computer, because Microsoft forgoes useful documentation, overwhelming users with the perceived need for functionality (email, documents, media) instead of teaching users how to use that functionality responsibly. Microsoft maintains the power by keeping users in the dark.
If p2p authors can be held accountable for how their software is used, then MS should be held responsible for allowing virii to be assembled via drag-n-drop in Visual Studio.
XAML is to XUL what J++ (or c#) is to Java: Microsoft "innovation". They see a promising technology, reimplement (badly, if not ass-backwards) it to suit their purposes, call it new, and the PHB's are none the wiser.
Since it's against MS's interests to be cross platform, and XAML/Avalon is Longhorn/XP+SP3 (IE7) only, users/corporations have no choice but to choose the original technology, or pay for another ride on the upgrade-go-round.
Applications are already being built in XUL, go check out MozDev, or ActiveState's Komodo, or Nvu. At least one web-based application plans to have an available XUL interface (see my sig).
Standards support improvements? Half-assed
on
IE7 Details Emerge
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
MS is doing as little as it can for its users. XP+SP2 and 2k3 only? Come on, they're just creating another excuse to keep the upgrade carousel turning.
It surprises me that they're going to improve PNG and CSS support at all. But being MS, we know there's going to be a catch.
PNG: Something sinister, I dunno what (perhaps like positioning a 32 bit image over another one will result in trans levels showing up as colors), with alpha transparency will be done just wrong enough to make it a hassle.
CSS: I would be surprised again (floored, even) if they fixed the box model. I think what they are calling "improved CSS support" can more accurately be called "improved DOM and event model support", like supporting:hover on elements other than links. They can't fix too much, because MS is famously afraid of breaking backwards compatibility. Any CSS support they fix will be little things that amount to a big list.
Call me a pessimist, but look at their track record. I don't see anyone at MS advocating putting a time warp in IE to bring its users (victims) from the 2001 web to the 2005 web in one fell swoop.
Today's kids have measureably less creative skills than in the past, because corporate america is doing an ever better job of shrink wrapping imagination.
Back in the day, there were Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, Legos, and many other toys that had an inherent creative context. Legos are still around, but the most popular kits now have some kind of licensing tie-in.
In fact, the most popular toys for most of the last 20 years have been licensed. In the last few years, witness the Pokemon and Spongebob crazes.
Video games are most directly damaging to a child's imagination, because now the child doesn't have to imagine anything. Their mind's eye is transplanted onto a screen. Not to mention that video games today have increasingly less replay value, having become more like interactive scripts and requiring less and less problem solving. If the hero dies, go back to the last save point and try again. Video games have been sacrificing game play for more visual, aural, and physical believability.
Today's kids have computers to think for them, tomorrow's kids will have computers to imagine for them.
I'm left handed, and use my mouse with my left hand, even going so far as to reverse the buttons (which is easier than making a hand cursor showing an obscene gesture).
I can use other people's computers reasonably well, but anyone who tries to use mine invariably pulls the mouse to the right side of the keyboard, then gives up after 10 seconds of making the context menu appear wherever they click.
...to destroy the Netscape brand, becasue they don't have the will to escape from Microsoft's nutgrip on them. First they ignored that they even owned Netscape (7 year option deal to use IE), then they try to turn it into a low cost ISP, now they are wasting time and effort on a hybrid browser. This browser is doomed to fail for a number of reasons:
Not only do web developers have to detect what browser is loading their page, we now have to detect what rendering engine it's using
The UA string is worthless
Usability is horrible.
I looked at the screenshot, and it seems that whoever designed this theme made every effort to make it cluttered, unnecessarily move things around (what other Windows app has the main menubar aligned to the right?), design icons whose meanings are difficult if not impossible to discern, and pick a color palette that is garish and unsettling.
Netscape is dead. Microsoft killed it, the (Bush) DOJ prevented it from getting a proper burial, and AOL is raping the corpse.
IE7 (and please, let's call it what it really is: XP SP3) will be mostly security bondo like SP2 was. IE developers have been known to claim that adding tabs is difficult, to the point of recommending people use Maxthon or whatever the rebranded crap is called. If they manage to hand out any interface candy, I'll be shocked.
Is the "average user" running XP SP2? Debatable at best.
I don't remember Windows installing Flash, Real Player, Java, and Quicktime automagically. What special non-monopolistic version Windows of do you have?
Apple has developed x86 versions of all their OS's since System 7. They just never release them. If they did release OSX for x86, Redmond would explode in frustration.
The reason it is successful is that there are a lot of uneducated Americans that like to think they are right.
And all but one of the hosts on Fox News are sensationalism spewing idiots (the TV equivalent of a Troll) who are consistenly rude and belligerent to their guests and insert tripe editorial comments between the lines of the teleprompter text. The one exception is Neil Cavuto.
One other overlooked factor in Fox News' success is that every female correspondent/host (with the obvious exception of Greta van Susteren) is totally hot. I'd nail Jane Skinner in a heartbeat)
Nothing in the press release or IE blog post mentions improved standards support. Mixed in with the "Yay, IE7!" bandwagon blog comments are those from actual web developers still asking for better CSS and PNG support.
Which we won't get. IE7 will be (spurious) security fixes, and the large version increase (6.0 to 7.0) would imply more sweeping changes than SP2 to the Windows security model. That may be, and considering the track record of SP2, also implies more software breaking.
IE7 might include some candy that the average user can comprehend (like tabbed browsing or RSS feeds), but I'd give even odds on that. What we definitely won't see is a fixed CSS box model (or any standards improvements), and native alpha support for PNG. They've made such a mess for themselves out of the rendering engine that they can't fix it without a ground-up rewrite.
MS has no reason to allow people to stay on XP or 2k instead of upgrading to Longhorn in now() + 2 years. IE7 has two purposes:
to show people that they care about security (while skirting around the fact that their security sucks now)
to attempt to take some momentum away from Firefox
By not addressing standards at all with this release, the press has no reason to make an issue of it. Mainstream press isn't capable of making the link between standards support and interoperability anyway.
Didn't Marc Andreesen claim 10 years ago that Netscape would make Windows irrelevant? I don't remember the exact quote.
Well, its not playing out exactly like that. Web based apps are making the OS irrelevant, and Google is leading the way, opening the doors that MS has tried to keep shut for the past decade. Sure, web technology has matured a lot since 1995, and will continue to do so, regardless of IE, MS Word, J#,.NET, and all the other wheels that MS reinvents when they see potential in an open technology.
Practically, I can see where the horned devil might make certain religious people uncomfortable.
And the reason why they feel this way is because they are completely ignorant of the history of their own religion. Symbols like this were used by the Church to instill fear in pagans in order to get them to convert to Christianity, as well as for other social/political/ecomonic gains.
I think that for most of the 20th century, English, and most languages in the industrialized world, was largely static, dominated by the written word which was dominated by proper grammar. Since WWII, popular culture and faster communications have increasingly exposed us to local vernaculars, mostly through radio and television. The written word lagged behind in its cultural evolution.
Thanks to the internet (initially email, BBS's and IRC, but more widely known on the Web), we now have a hybrid of the spoken and written word: the "typed word". This form of language evolves at the same rate as the spoken word, and injects its own vernacular as a side effect of the medium: acromyn and abbreviation "words" (rofl, how r u), along with common misspellings (pwned), and mixing letters with numbers or punctuation (133t, n00b). All of these serve at least one purpose, whether as a form of super shorthand, insult, the appearance of being "cool", or are merely the result of laziness on the part of the author. Most typed-word terms don't transfer well when spoken.
One of my hobbies is studying (European) languages and how they are related. Sometimes I worry about the damage the typed word is causing to the spoken and written word (and any proper linguist should at least be interested in the phenomenon). Luckily, most typed word expressions aren't pronounceable, and the ones that are sound absurd, because they are removed from their original context when spoken, and everyone recognizes gibberish when they hear it. How the typed word affects the written word remains to be seen. Yes both are typed now, but only the written word has a chance of going through an editorial process. I think it will take a very long time for the formal lexicon and rules of grammar to embrace, however reluctantly if ever, the typed vernacular.
A STANDARD is what a majority of the people agree to use
Wrong... what you are describing is at best a de facto standard, such as IE, and not everyone agrees to use IE even if they use Windows. From disctionary.com, definition 2a:
An acknowledged measure of comparison for quantitative or qualitative value; a criterion.
Everyone acknowledges that the various W3C Standards exist... not everyone (namely MS, and to a lesser extent Macromedia, Adobe, and others) chooses to implement them correctly or completely. The organizations that publish standards (W3C, ISO, ECMA) do so to promote interoperability.
XAML and XUL serve the same purpose. XUL is based on open technology and standards, while XAML is not (excepting XML). XAML, imo, is MS's attempt to rewrite XUL to suit their own monopolistic goals (and they'll no doubt call it innovation)..NET is MS's attempt at a Windows-only rewrite of Java (and everything that has sprung from Java in the past 10 years).
Web based applications are the next step, and HTML is not capable of providing the breadth of UI elements and system integration that exist in desktop apps. XUL and XAML both provide this. If XUL becomes the favored tool, XAML will have similar market penetration and usage as ActiveX (mostly business apps), while XUL rules the web. If XAML ends up favored (hindered by the momentum of OSS/Linux/Firefox, and that XAML will only run on winXP or newer), then MS will have managed to expand their monopoly grip beyond the Windows Desktop.
Now given that MS has $60B in cash available and hasn't bothered to fix the standards implementations in IE since 2001 (IE6 broke as much as it fixed) much less plug the security sieve that is the Win32 API, how much chance is there that they will suddenly miraculously support all the standards that developers have been asking them to for the last 10 years? Little to none, I think. And the reason they get away with not supporting standards is precisely because they are a monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Asstyrants.
Oh, you obviously missed the DMCA and the Patriot Act. The latter was passed by Congress without a single Senator or Representative having read it.
Are D&D 3.x and MMO games (calling them RPG's is like calling Windows secure). And now that they have been combined, everything else in the universe will suck less, according to the First Law of Suckage Dynamics.
This is yet further proof. When there are no more comics/cartoons/TV shows/books to license, tinseltown will collapse under its own gluttonous weight.
While I hope the live action Transformers is cool (read: not suck), I seriously hate Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheiner. All they can direct is a series of improbably explosions linked together by flat dialogue.
Email phishing is a small part of the problem that Microsoft has spent the last 15 years creating: the average user is totally ignorant of how to use a computer.
Windows goes out of its way to protect itself from the user, and its architecture is so full of holes that it then exposes that user to spam, viruses, phishing, identity theft, etc. Knowledge is power, and Joe User has no power over their computer, because Microsoft forgoes useful documentation, overwhelming users with the perceived need for functionality (email, documents, media) instead of teaching users how to use that functionality responsibly. Microsoft maintains the power by keeping users in the dark.
If p2p authors can be held accountable for how their software is used, then MS should be held responsible for allowing virii to be assembled via drag-n-drop in Visual Studio.
I could recite Denis Leary's No Cure For Cancer verbatim from beginning to end?
Disclaimer: That was nearly a decade ago, I may or may not have a life now
XAML is to XUL what J++ (or c#) is to Java: Microsoft "innovation". They see a promising technology, reimplement (badly, if not ass-backwards) it to suit their purposes, call it new, and the PHB's are none the wiser.
Since it's against MS's interests to be cross platform, and XAML/Avalon is Longhorn/XP+SP3 (IE7) only, users/corporations have no choice but to choose the original technology, or pay for another ride on the upgrade-go-round.
Applications are already being built in XUL, go check out MozDev, or ActiveState's Komodo, or Nvu. At least one web-based application plans to have an available XUL interface (see my sig).
MS is doing as little as it can for its users. XP+SP2 and 2k3 only? Come on, they're just creating another excuse to keep the upgrade carousel turning.
It surprises me that they're going to improve PNG and CSS support at all. But being MS, we know there's going to be a catch.
Call me a pessimist, but look at their track record. I don't see anyone at MS advocating putting a time warp in IE to bring its users (victims) from the 2001 web to the 2005 web in one fell swoop.
The W administration deflated the antitrust case; if Gore had been appointed President, MS would have been broken up.
Today's kids have measureably less creative skills than in the past, because corporate america is doing an ever better job of shrink wrapping imagination.
Back in the day, there were Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, Legos, and many other toys that had an inherent creative context. Legos are still around, but the most popular kits now have some kind of licensing tie-in.
In fact, the most popular toys for most of the last 20 years have been licensed. In the last few years, witness the Pokemon and Spongebob crazes.
Video games are most directly damaging to a child's imagination, because now the child doesn't have to imagine anything. Their mind's eye is transplanted onto a screen. Not to mention that video games today have increasingly less replay value, having become more like interactive scripts and requiring less and less problem solving. If the hero dies, go back to the last save point and try again. Video games have been sacrificing game play for more visual, aural, and physical believability.
Today's kids have computers to think for them, tomorrow's kids will have computers to imagine for them.I'm left handed, and use my mouse with my left hand, even going so far as to reverse the buttons (which is easier than making a hand cursor showing an obscene gesture).
I can use other people's computers reasonably well, but anyone who tries to use mine invariably pulls the mouse to the right side of the keyboard, then gives up after 10 seconds of making the context menu appear wherever they click.
...to destroy the Netscape brand, becasue they don't have the will to escape from Microsoft's nutgrip on them. First they ignored that they even owned Netscape (7 year option deal to use IE), then they try to turn it into a low cost ISP, now they are wasting time and effort on a hybrid browser. This browser is doomed to fail for a number of reasons:
I looked at the screenshot, and it seems that whoever designed this theme made every effort to make it cluttered, unnecessarily move things around (what other Windows app has the main menubar aligned to the right?), design icons whose meanings are difficult if not impossible to discern, and pick a color palette that is garish and unsettling.
Netscape is dead. Microsoft killed it, the (Bush) DOJ prevented it from getting a proper burial, and AOL is raping the corpse.
IE7 (and please, let's call it what it really is: XP SP3) will be mostly security bondo like SP2 was. IE developers have been known to claim that adding tabs is difficult, to the point of recommending people use Maxthon or whatever the rebranded crap is called. If they manage to hand out any interface candy, I'll be shocked.
Is the "average user" running XP SP2? Debatable at best.
I don't remember Windows installing Flash, Real Player, Java, and Quicktime automagically. What special non-monopolistic version Windows of do you have?
Apple has developed x86 versions of all their OS's since System 7. They just never release them. If they did release OSX for x86, Redmond would explode in frustration.
So when do we get XPCOM bindings for PHP?
Smarty might be "slick", but it has a real weakness in not being XML based, like this templating engine.
And all but one of the hosts on Fox News are sensationalism spewing idiots (the TV equivalent of a Troll) who are consistenly rude and belligerent to their guests and insert tripe editorial comments between the lines of the teleprompter text. The one exception is Neil Cavuto.
One other overlooked factor in Fox News' success is that every female correspondent/host (with the obvious exception of Greta van Susteren) is totally hot. I'd nail Jane Skinner in a heartbeat)
I rarely watched B5, so maybe I missed the Tolkien references.
However, the original Star Trek races were pretty much a direct rip-off of Tolkien:
Sadly, Roddenberry didn't manage to get Hobbits in space.
Nothing in the press release or IE blog post mentions improved standards support. Mixed in with the "Yay, IE7!" bandwagon blog comments are those from actual web developers still asking for better CSS and PNG support.
Which we won't get. IE7 will be (spurious) security fixes, and the large version increase (6.0 to 7.0) would imply more sweeping changes than SP2 to the Windows security model. That may be, and considering the track record of SP2, also implies more software breaking.
IE7 might include some candy that the average user can comprehend (like tabbed browsing or RSS feeds), but I'd give even odds on that. What we definitely won't see is a fixed CSS box model (or any standards improvements), and native alpha support for PNG. They've made such a mess for themselves out of the rendering engine that they can't fix it without a ground-up rewrite.
MS has no reason to allow people to stay on XP or 2k instead of upgrading to Longhorn in now() + 2 years. IE7 has two purposes:
By not addressing standards at all with this release, the press has no reason to make an issue of it. Mainstream press isn't capable of making the link between standards support and interoperability anyway.
IE is better at handling broken code, kind of like the blind leading the blind.
Didn't Marc Andreesen claim 10 years ago that Netscape would make Windows irrelevant? I don't remember the exact quote.
Well, its not playing out exactly like that. Web based apps are making the OS irrelevant, and Google is leading the way, opening the doors that MS has tried to keep shut for the past decade. Sure, web technology has matured a lot since 1995, and will continue to do so, regardless of IE, MS Word, J#, .NET, and all the other wheels that MS reinvents when they see potential in an open technology.
And the reason why they feel this way is because they are completely ignorant of the history of their own religion. Symbols like this were used by the Church to instill fear in pagans in order to get them to convert to Christianity, as well as for other social/political/ecomonic gains.
This is an attempt to make Longhorn appear more imminent than it actually is.
I'm convinced Longhorn will be released when now() + 2 years == now()
However, this doesn't mean we can sit on our laurels and wait for OSS to find it's own way onto the desktop.
I think that for most of the 20th century, English, and most languages in the industrialized world, was largely static, dominated by the written word which was dominated by proper grammar. Since WWII, popular culture and faster communications have increasingly exposed us to local vernaculars, mostly through radio and television. The written word lagged behind in its cultural evolution.
Thanks to the internet (initially email, BBS's and IRC, but more widely known on the Web), we now have a hybrid of the spoken and written word: the "typed word". This form of language evolves at the same rate as the spoken word, and injects its own vernacular as a side effect of the medium: acromyn and abbreviation "words" (rofl, how r u), along with common misspellings (pwned), and mixing letters with numbers or punctuation (133t, n00b). All of these serve at least one purpose, whether as a form of super shorthand, insult, the appearance of being "cool", or are merely the result of laziness on the part of the author. Most typed-word terms don't transfer well when spoken.
One of my hobbies is studying (European) languages and how they are related. Sometimes I worry about the damage the typed word is causing to the spoken and written word (and any proper linguist should at least be interested in the phenomenon). Luckily, most typed word expressions aren't pronounceable, and the ones that are sound absurd, because they are removed from their original context when spoken, and everyone recognizes gibberish when they hear it. How the typed word affects the written word remains to be seen. Yes both are typed now, but only the written word has a chance of going through an editorial process. I think it will take a very long time for the formal lexicon and rules of grammar to embrace, however reluctantly if ever, the typed vernacular.
Wrong... what you are describing is at best a de facto standard, such as IE, and not everyone agrees to use IE even if they use Windows. From disctionary.com, definition 2a:
Everyone acknowledges that the various W3C Standards exist... not everyone (namely MS, and to a lesser extent Macromedia, Adobe, and others) chooses to implement them correctly or completely. The organizations that publish standards (W3C, ISO, ECMA) do so to promote interoperability.
XAML and XUL serve the same purpose. XUL is based on open technology and standards, while XAML is not (excepting XML). XAML, imo, is MS's attempt to rewrite XUL to suit their own monopolistic goals (and they'll no doubt call it innovation). .NET is MS's attempt at a Windows-only rewrite of Java (and everything that has sprung from Java in the past 10 years).
Web based applications are the next step, and HTML is not capable of providing the breadth of UI elements and system integration that exist in desktop apps. XUL and XAML both provide this. If XUL becomes the favored tool, XAML will have similar market penetration and usage as ActiveX (mostly business apps), while XUL rules the web. If XAML ends up favored (hindered by the momentum of OSS/Linux/Firefox, and that XAML will only run on winXP or newer), then MS will have managed to expand their monopoly grip beyond the Windows Desktop.
Now given that MS has $60B in cash available and hasn't bothered to fix the standards implementations in IE since 2001 (IE6 broke as much as it fixed) much less plug the security sieve that is the Win32 API, how much chance is there that they will suddenly miraculously support all the standards that developers have been asking them to for the last 10 years? Little to none, I think. And the reason they get away with not supporting standards is precisely because they are a monopoly.