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User: dmgxmichael

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  1. Will they even get an appeal on SCO Preps Appeals Against Novell and IBM · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't care how slick the lawyer is, SCO had a summary judgment against them. Provided the judge in the case dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's those things are damn near impossible to successfully appeal. I'd put the odds against successful appeal at 20 to 1. More likely than not the appeals court will simply say, 'No' and that will be the final whimper of SCO.

  2. Re:Invade! on Titan's Organics Surpass Oil Reserves on Earth · · Score: 1

    Drill it? but Uranus is a gas giant.

  3. In other news... on 6% of Web Users Generate 50% of Ad Clicks · · Score: 1

    0.00666% of all users are responsible for ordering viagra, funding the Nigerian Embassy and in general keeping spam afloat. Remember, if he hunts long enough even a blind squirrel can find his nuts.

  4. Re:Regulators? on Yahoo Bid shows Microsoft on the Ropes · · Score: 1

    Teddy Roosevelt was Republican in name only. He never got along with the party bosses - the only reason he ended up president is the bosses didn't want him to run against them so they offered him the VP spot after the Spanish American war. Their plans got burned when McKinley got shot.

    Nixon signed a Democratic Congress' act into law at the point of a political gun - the EPA was founded in response 3 mile Island and Love Canal. To veto the bill would have been political suicide and Nixon knew it.

    The Republicans are the party of big business. They always have been and prided themselves in as much, then they try to hide that fact when big business enrages the public through greed as they have done under the Bush administration.

  5. Re:Regulators? on Yahoo Bid shows Microsoft on the Ropes · · Score: 1

    I don't see why not - They let Ma Bell reassemble herself, let Adobe buy Macromedia, and so on. Republican administrations do not enforce corporate laws well, and have never been known to enforce anti-monopoly laws. So as long as this deal is done while Bush is in office it will go through.

  6. Re:I'll tell you what's amazing on IE8 May Not Pass the Acid2 Test After All · · Score: 1

    When your clients are paying 5 to 6 figures per site you do what they say. They say make it work in IE and you make it work in IE, standards be damned. I'm happy you can afford to ignore the browser with the largest market share, I can't even though I wish I could.

  7. I'll tell you what's amazing on IE8 May Not Pass the Acid2 Test After All · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All of this whining about Microsoft's approach to standards implementation on IE 8 sounds like it is coming from a bunch of academic eggheads who've not held a job in web development in their lives. I, like most web developers that have a job have been using user_agent sniffs for some time to make sure that IE 6's wonky non-standard approach is accounted for. I suspect that many have done the same as I - look for "MSIE" in the string, make the adjustments for MS's buggy implementation, and call it a day. So if Microsoft suddenly goes compliant every one of those pages will break. The only reason I didn't face a mass break on IE 7 is IE 7 goes to quirks mode when the doctype is missing (and it's missing on most all my legacy pages. My newer pages have them and I had to fix 12 of them for IE 7's changes).

    Microsoft doesn't follow standards. I don't know about some of you nerds but I've got some 300 sites that have code that will break if MS decides to follow the standard. I don't personally like the idea of going in and rewriting the drive code for those pages again. Yes, it would have been better if Microsoft had followed the standard in the first place but they didn't and as far as I can tell this is about the only way out of the problem they've created for them.

    Now I know that in the fantasy world of some the moment a new version of IE comes out the pages written to the bad standard MS foisted on us dissappear - but that isn't the case. Hell, there are pages out there still written for Netscape 4. Microsoft has the unenviable position of striking a balance between the needs of the development community - one standard to rule them all - and the clients of those developers - "I don't give a damn what you have to do to make it work, just make it work."

    I don't know about the rest of you, but if my old clients started coming to me because their pages look like crap in the newest IE the words, "but it's Microsoft's fault - tech blah blah blah blah" they'll won't accept the explanation - because for most of them the explanation involves technical details they don't give a damn about and they pay us to handle for them because we're supposed to be the professionals. At the end of the day the majority of the world doesn't give a flying rat's hindquarters about standards - they simply want the web to work.

    Microsoft does a lot of asinine crap that they fully deserve to be taken to task for - but this isn't one instance of it. Breaking pages to make way for the "future" would only further the drive of folks to other browsers.

    All of that said, Microsoft has a cleaner solution available to them - change IE 8's http_user_agent string so completely that browser sniffing software will (presumably) feed them the standards compliant page. Personally that's what I do - if you're using IE, Firefox, Safari or Opera I'll adjust for your browser bugs - if not you'd better be able to handle CSS 2.1 strict cause that's what you're gonna get.

  8. Re:Moon landing 1969 on Design of Next-Gen NASA Rocket Showing Flaws · · Score: 1

    All projects have three elements - time, quality, money. Pick two. Quality must be top notch for NASA as human lives are at stake so you can do it in a hurry and spend about 25 times as much money as NASA has available now, or you can do it slowly and stay within the shoestring budget NASA is shackled to these days. It's not the tech, its the money. If NASA had maintained its peak level of funding from 1969 I have no doubts we would be sending manned missions to the outer planets by now as Arthur C. Clark had predicted. But without the money the progress won't come.