That assumes the browser can render the content properly based on the CSS. Even Mozilla which is probably the best, most standards compliant browser still has bugs and quirks that could trip up sites, and other browsers are far, far worse.
Throw javascript and the DOM into the mix and it's not hard at all to see why some sites prefer to feed different content to different browsers.
The number of non-Win32 / non-IE browsers. I was lazy and didn't look up the figures but I would say that's a very reasonable guess. The true figure may be higher, but it serves the point.
Running Linux is great, but Motorola phone have had a long history of being the most fiddly, battery sapping, unfriendly bastards to operate for a long while. Who cares what OS is running underneath if the software subjects you to hellish reams of menus and extra buttons when competing phones from Nokia or whoever just seem to work with a few clicks?
I say this as someone who was actually contracting for Motorola, when a rant came down from management demanding that everyone use Motorola phones. I wonder if anyone was actually brave enough to actually tell him why none of the workforce were using their phones...
Anyway, I hope the situation has changed and management has gotten a clue. No one will eat a cake that looks like a giant dog turd even if it is made of delicious marzipan. The same goes for running Linux in a phone.
AOL is not just another shareware client bundling the IE control. They pay to see the source, they pay for premium content, they have tens of millions of customers ready to clog up expensive call centres if it doesn't work properly. This costs hundreds of millions and even then they still can't change the source if they want to add a feature or fix a bug that is affecting their customers. Neither can they influence the direction of future development, and using IE ties them to the Windows platform, and the MS development cycle. To cap it all, Microsoft is a competitor via MSN, so money they pay is helping funding content and development of their rival!
In short they are hostage to Microsoft and paying them money for the privilege. It is clearly in their interest to dump it as soon as humanly possible. Now they could do that right now, but I expect they are concerned about their user 'experience' and determining the best way to make the break. Still, it is possible to see from the fact that Gecko has made its way into Compuserve and AOL for OS X and a few other places that they're chipping away at the block. Hopefully such efforts although peripheral to the main AOL client will begin to have an affect on the web landscape.
Well banking is perhaps a seperate issue, but any e-store that feels it is not worth gaining 5-10% customers simply by fixing their damned pages is either:
Making too much money to care, so clearly they can't offering that much value to begin with.
Being run so badly that 5-10% potential profits is slipping through their fingers. They could go under any minute!
Either way, there are plenty of other stores to choose from.
I do feel your pain however about banks. My own bank steadfastly refuses to update their site to work on anything but IE and only on the PC you first registered thanks to some file it deposits there. Frankly it's a ludicrous situation especially as the service is called "Anytime". Apparantly to them Anytime, means "any time you're in front of the one machine running IE (including Java) which you registered on, but go to hell if you're a Mac or Linux user, or a Mozilla / Opera / Safari user, or sat in an Internet cafe or at another machine desperately trying to transfer funds from your own account".
Well in this matter AOL are being pretty honest. AOL sells content - news, films, magazines etc. and frankly they don't care how you get it as long as you can get it. Therefore standards as far they are concerned is a Good Thing since they can deliver their content in a way that reaches as many people as possible - Windows, Mac, Linux, settop boxes, phones, wherever.
What they don't want is Microsoft or anyone else controlling the delivery format for obvious reasons - it's as good an idea as allowing a mental patient to shave your privates with a razor.
They do already - parking meters, plus wheel clamping for illegal parking. I suppose however that some drivers have no intention of stopping for that long, being as they are on their way to drop someone off at work, pick them up, collect a package etc., or foolishly thinking that cutting through central London is a great way to beat traffic on the M25 or wherever.
London is so well furnished with public transport that there is precious little reason to enter unless you're a resident, mad or lazy. Hopefully the charge will discourage people in the last two categories.
Who says I'm arguing? I'm just pointing out the reality of the situation from Microsoft's point of view. They live in a world where lock-in is part of their business model - software is everything and they use proprietary protocols to keep people using MS products. Throw that away and with no hardware or anything else to distinguish themselves from anyone else and they have nothing.
Encryption consists of two things - the key and the algorithm. Unless NASA was monumentally stupid, the key would be unique for each shuttle and each mission and the 'obscurity' (or not) of the algorithm wouldn't make a difference to the strength of the encryption.
As Columbia's key has been revoked - permenantly - it really doesn't matter if that part comes out now unless they were carrying out top secret work on the last mission. I suppose someone who recorded the last flight might glean something if they had the key, but it certainly shouldn't help them for any other mission or shuttle. Maybe NASA really were dumb enough to reuse the key each time, but if so then might already be broken for all they know. Reusing a key when so much of the data sent from one flight to the next is identical or similar is really dumb and is how the likes of enigma was broken using kribs.
As for the algorithm, I can understand that military types believe security through obscurity is another protection against the code being broken, but if it were up to scratch to begin with (as it should if it were to withstand any kind of crypto attack) it shouldn't make a difference here or there if someone got ahold of the hardware or know the algorithm. At worst, the enemy might be able to broadcast garble to confuse genuine transmissions, but if the algorithm is secure I doubt they could do much more.
So no, I wouldn't give you my private keys since I reuse them over and over but but you can have my public PGP key if you like:
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com
Come now, switching a few security keys is hardly going to break the bank. Chances are, the Columbia key was unique anyway (i.e. not shared with the other shuttles), so what does it matter?
So the key is useless - well so is Columbia seeing as its lying in bits across a good part of the US.
Camille Paglia is so far up her own arse that its a wonder she can speak at all. If she applied her feminist lesbian deconstructionive intellect to a tin of baked beans it would come out as a 10,000 word essay railing against phallic imagery and male oppression.
Any system that requires the encryption system to be secret can't be that much good. I can understand why they want to find it, but worst case is they switch over to another system of which the US must have dozens of suitable candidates.
Itemise all the things that would be required to make Solaris or Linux a drop-in replacement for NT and protocols would be top of the list.
I can well imagine that if all the various protocols implemented by MS were fully documented that Sun or others could very well sell a box that mimiced an NT to such a degree that people would be able to migrate away from it completely.
Ding dong, is any one home? You can spray insecticide all you like and all will happen is the mosquitos will become resistant to it and you're back to square one. The only way to effectively rid mosquitos from an area is through education and public works initiatives - the little buggers breed in standing water so draining nearby swamps helps, as does effective drainage schemes and prosecuting people who have uncovered standing water on their properties.
I agree, however I believe the situation of registration/cd keys has come about because online games are often sold with 30 days worth of free 'credit'. In other words, buy the game, tap the number in and play for a month with no further obligation. Obviously you can't have an unlimited number of people being able to use the same number or you'd never get any money.
So validation plays an important role here to prevent lamers swapping the serial nr to get 30 days playing time for free. What is unacceptable is requiring validation to get any functionality whatsoever. If validation fails the worst scenario should be that you can still play but you don't get 30 days free and have to pay.
The situation is muddied by 'expansion packs' but perhaps online games should sell them on CD with a key and release them 'into the wild'. If you buy the CD, the key allows access to the expansion, otherwise you download from wherever for your expansion and pay the N dollars required to enable it.
Re:Buyer Beware
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is no different from any other online game these days. Every online title such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Neverwinter Nights, Dark Age of Camelot will require you to enter a CD key, or serial number and if you don't have one or its been used before you can fuck off. Now when online play is free this makes sense, but not so much when you're paying 15.99 or whatever per month.
Personally I believe subscription games should be given away at cashiers desks, magazine front covers, available for download etc. Hand them out like toffee to hook as many people as possible. Requiring people to put up money upfront and a monthly sub is a surefire way to put them off.
Who actually pays attention to the ratings on Amazon, at least as far as DVD & games reviews go? As soon as the new title is logged in their system and way before anyone could possibly have a clue what the final product would be like, it is receiving rave reviews. Look at the assholes who rate EQ expansions months before they appear and did likewise with Lord of the Rings Special Edition DVD set. It makes a total joke of the system.
Amazon should allow reviews but clearly mark them as opinion and when the product finally comes up for sale, wipe the pre-release reviews and start over. As it is, reviews in these sections are next to useless.
Of course, in this case perhaps they were accurate... The Sims was a boring, boring game and its unfathomable why anyone would have derived any enjoyment from its predictable and reptitive nature. On online version might appeal from a IRC/chat point of view, but otherwise its the same old crap.
Someone is releasing a music player that in combination with a GBA is much more expensive than an off-the-shelf MP3 player, uses a proprietary format, has copy protection, has a diabolical reflective screen and is as easy to stick in your pocket as a very large lumpy thing.
It's destined to join the Gameboy camera in the worse than fucking useless pantheon of add-ons for the Gameboy.
CDE has stunk as a UI for at least five years and possibly longer. I got given an account in a big corporate back in 1997 or so and I was appalled with it even back then. What the hell is so complicated about a glorified clock, calendar and icon bar that it has hardly changed in all that time?
Frankly it's a wonder that Sun et al in Unix land weren't obliterated by Microsoft for sticking with that piece of shit.
GNOME should give a welcome boost to commercial *nixes, though knowing Sun they'll probably ship a default GNOME desktop which exactly mimics CDE thereby negating any point in changing at all.
Screw the icons, how about a complete display SVG engine akin to Display Postscript / Aqua?
If this lib as fast as it claims (at rendering though I doubt parsing), then why not? Windows and other elements in the display would break-down into SVG commands that would be rendered as required. Perhaps it would prove a very efficient way of presenting a remote desktop too rather than sending down bitmaps like VNC does at present.
Now consider you need the memory in a hurry and buy from a camera shop. The gulf would widen considerably. I have not personally seen a memory stick card being sold over the counter for less than one and a half the price of any other format. Now consider you want 256Mb memory for your new 6 megapixel camera. Oops you can't with memory stick.
Certainly there is a market if you're already locked into Sony and I'm sure someone will be sticks for sometime to come. But if you're free of Sony then there is absolutely no reason to go with the format. On the one hand you have ubquitous compact flash and sd/mmc format used by every other manufacturer and on the other you have expensive, limiter memory stick. I can't thing of a compelling reason that anyone would want to lock themselves into the format; Sony cameras aren't that good.
Sorry but you're deluding yourself. No major manufacturer except for Sony endorses memory stick. You might find the odd device here or there but the market and consumers have overwhelmingly favoured compact flash and the emergent SD/MMC format. Smartmedia is an also-ran too, though I kind of liked it except for the easly uncertainty over voltage and future expandibility.
And yes, the memory stick format is much more expensive, not to mention has various confusing variations (e.g. magic gate) and is still proprietary. It offers absolutely zero advantage of any of its more open counterparts and plenty of disadvantages, not least because it and card readers are considerably more expensive, and harder to come by than other formats. You cannot deny it because that's the plain truth. You might find prices on Amazon.com come close to CF or SD/MMC but I can walk into any camera shop and be offered compact flash cards by 3 or 4 manufactures where I'd be lucky if could find 2 for memory stick. The prices would certainly reflect that.
In fact you can't even get memory sticks over 128Mb unless you count the vapour memory stick pro, while compact flash is already up to gigabytes, including harddrives as well as other peripherals such as 802.11b devices which fit the format. Frankly I don't care what format I stick in my camera, but I can tell you that it would not - short of some massive and unlikely groundswell of support - be for the memory stick format. Sony tried to capture the market and failed miserably.
What is more, their persistence in sticking with memory stick format means consumers like me who consider ubiquity and cheapness of media as an influencing factor will buy their cameras and laptops etc from someone else. I wonder how many extra memory sticks Sony will have to sell because I bought my digital camera from someone else. I wonder how many digital cameras sales total they've lost for the same reasons. Sooner or later some beancounter in Sony is going to realise that very fact and they'll dump it.
I'm not fanatic about memory cards, but I do care (and I'm not alone) when I see proprietary crap being foisted onto me or other consumers. And memory stick is most surely that.
Because memory sticks are ludicrously expensive compared to other formats and proprietary. Except for Sony hardly anything uses a memory stick and it wouldn't surprise me if even Sony unceremoniously dumped the format. They have already lost the battle. It would not surprise me if digital camera users were actually buying other brands on this point alone (I know I did), so Sony is going to wake up sooner or later.
Besides, any reason for preferring them for size has long gone since MMC/SD appeared, and both CF and MMC/SD are considerably cheaper, ubiquitous and come in bigger capacities too.
Slashdot Mirror
Throw javascript and the DOM into the mix and it's not hard at all to see why some sites prefer to feed different content to different browsers.
The number of non-Win32 / non-IE browsers. I was lazy and didn't look up the figures but I would say that's a very reasonable guess. The true figure may be higher, but it serves the point.
I say this as someone who was actually contracting for Motorola, when a rant came down from management demanding that everyone use Motorola phones. I wonder if anyone was actually brave enough to actually tell him why none of the workforce were using their phones...
Anyway, I hope the situation has changed and management has gotten a clue. No one will eat a cake that looks like a giant dog turd even if it is made of delicious marzipan. The same goes for running Linux in a phone.
In short they are hostage to Microsoft and paying them money for the privilege. It is clearly in their interest to dump it as soon as humanly possible. Now they could do that right now, but I expect they are concerned about their user 'experience' and determining the best way to make the break. Still, it is possible to see from the fact that Gecko has made its way into Compuserve and AOL for OS X and a few other places that they're chipping away at the block. Hopefully such efforts although peripheral to the main AOL client will begin to have an affect on the web landscape.
Either way, there are plenty of other stores to choose from.
I do feel your pain however about banks. My own bank steadfastly refuses to update their site to work on anything but IE and only on the PC you first registered thanks to some file it deposits there. Frankly it's a ludicrous situation especially as the service is called "Anytime". Apparantly to them Anytime, means "any time you're in front of the one machine running IE (including Java) which you registered on, but go to hell if you're a Mac or Linux user, or a Mozilla / Opera / Safari user, or sat in an Internet cafe or at another machine desperately trying to transfer funds from your own account".
What they don't want is Microsoft or anyone else controlling the delivery format for obvious reasons - it's as good an idea as allowing a mental patient to shave your privates with a razor.
London is so well furnished with public transport that there is precious little reason to enter unless you're a resident, mad or lazy. Hopefully the charge will discourage people in the last two categories.
Who says I'm arguing? I'm just pointing out the reality of the situation from Microsoft's point of view. They live in a world where lock-in is part of their business model - software is everything and they use proprietary protocols to keep people using MS products. Throw that away and with no hardware or anything else to distinguish themselves from anyone else and they have nothing.
As Columbia's key has been revoked - permenantly - it really doesn't matter if that part comes out now unless they were carrying out top secret work on the last mission. I suppose someone who recorded the last flight might glean something if they had the key, but it certainly shouldn't help them for any other mission or shuttle. Maybe NASA really were dumb enough to reuse the key each time, but if so then might already be broken for all they know. Reusing a key when so much of the data sent from one flight to the next is identical or similar is really dumb and is how the likes of enigma was broken using kribs.
As for the algorithm, I can understand that military types believe security through obscurity is another protection against the code being broken, but if it were up to scratch to begin with (as it should if it were to withstand any kind of crypto attack) it shouldn't make a difference here or there if someone got ahold of the hardware or know the algorithm. At worst, the enemy might be able to broadcast garble to confuse genuine transmissions, but if the algorithm is secure I doubt they could do much more.
So no, I wouldn't give you my private keys since I reuse them over and over but but you can have my public PGP key if you like:
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com
mQGiBDTCbwMRBADkoMjI9eyXRWbYC8kONZdFUSNjX4h0oT8
Z/S9WJlzrizrKECp5rYGG15x/Uiz0+f1w
1+lxRGG4V0OBmmT8Alou0T3xKIUpwrU5x
0BARh1oEN3So2H8fSzm1BKkD/1BlZN2QL
0o7i7RZUG/gqGNC4Ymr8AnqaX5uReiXON
dsNds4StysWEClZnRoVi8mGX+kmOJdUJN
29h2BADT2qfUxyWdbOwuiOZG0ttpqs+rb
nsV7JnoeDxqh6msXQT9ToCueJFAx1SFDN
3DhGBWXlGnjxtZjHtC+3nZuipxXsokrAW
eHltQHlhaG9vLmNvbT6JAEoEEBECAAsFA
AJjt/OYpg8eV1Xw0HXoCS8bCFqRcAJ9Om
eW0gPGRyeHltQG5ldHNjYXBlLm5ldD6JA
GwFPfS44IEOxAKDIyfncJ7EzxjBcYI/r+
SR/6mt+5Ag0ENMJvAxAIAPZCV7cIfwgXc
VqMU6Y9AVfPQB8bLQ6mUrfdMZIZJ+AyDv
klnN/biudE/F/Ha8g8VHMGHOfMlm/xX5u
9Ij9WE5J280gtJ3kkQc2azNsOA1FHQ98i
ONM0/XwXV0OjHRhs3jMhLLUq/zzhsSlAG
0ApQmwJG0wg9ZqRdQZ+cfL2JSyIZJrqro
lR1AhmF/YexWet+j0fGwTpBGjI64bJIQY
yOcyuct6DTwphpiYz3jIV3Om2LziCRHPT
zQFB2R+ASGXpdAl5HvXlAQZpe4Ngg6/GR
CQFYZ9bibxHABLRqXCOWlHDGDiunfXKyI
4A/8zh8S1HRXXEKKaWrzsH7gO8QAfZE7l
vb2RPFyJAD8DBRg0wm8D9RsBT30uOCARA
JQCg007UeCxLSdrjkdXRwfspC+7X++A=
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
So the key is useless - well so is Columbia seeing as its lying in bits across a good part of the US.
Camille Paglia is so far up her own arse that its a wonder she can speak at all. If she applied her feminist lesbian deconstructionive intellect to a tin of baked beans it would come out as a 10,000 word essay railing against phallic imagery and male oppression.
Any system that requires the encryption system to be secret can't be that much good. I can understand why they want to find it, but worst case is they switch over to another system of which the US must have dozens of suitable candidates.
I can well imagine that if all the various protocols implemented by MS were fully documented that Sun or others could very well sell a box that mimiced an NT to such a degree that people would be able to migrate away from it completely.
That's what Microsoft is afraid of.
Ding dong, is any one home? You can spray insecticide all you like and all will happen is the mosquitos will become resistant to it and you're back to square one. The only way to effectively rid mosquitos from an area is through education and public works initiatives - the little buggers breed in standing water so draining nearby swamps helps, as does effective drainage schemes and prosecuting people who have uncovered standing water on their properties.
Blaxploitium
Exactly, hence me qualifying the remark with "Now when online play is free..."
So validation plays an important role here to prevent lamers swapping the serial nr to get 30 days playing time for free. What is unacceptable is requiring validation to get any functionality whatsoever. If validation fails the worst scenario should be that you can still play but you don't get 30 days free and have to pay.
The situation is muddied by 'expansion packs' but perhaps online games should sell them on CD with a key and release them 'into the wild'. If you buy the CD, the key allows access to the expansion, otherwise you download from wherever for your expansion and pay the N dollars required to enable it.
Personally I believe subscription games should be given away at cashiers desks, magazine front covers, available for download etc. Hand them out like toffee to hook as many people as possible. Requiring people to put up money upfront and a monthly sub is a surefire way to put them off.
Amazon should allow reviews but clearly mark them as opinion and when the product finally comes up for sale, wipe the pre-release reviews and start over. As it is, reviews in these sections are next to useless.
Of course, in this case perhaps they were accurate... The Sims was a boring, boring game and its unfathomable why anyone would have derived any enjoyment from its predictable and reptitive nature. On online version might appeal from a IRC/chat point of view, but otherwise its the same old crap.
It's destined to join the Gameboy camera in the worse than fucking useless pantheon of add-ons for the Gameboy.
Frankly it's a wonder that Sun et al in Unix land weren't obliterated by Microsoft for sticking with that piece of shit.
GNOME should give a welcome boost to commercial *nixes, though knowing Sun they'll probably ship a default GNOME desktop which exactly mimics CDE thereby negating any point in changing at all.
If this lib as fast as it claims (at rendering though I doubt parsing), then why not? Windows and other elements in the display would break-down into SVG commands that would be rendered as required. Perhaps it would prove a very efficient way of presenting a remote desktop too rather than sending down bitmaps like VNC does at present.
Certainly there is a market if you're already locked into Sony and I'm sure someone will be sticks for sometime to come. But if you're free of Sony then there is absolutely no reason to go with the format. On the one hand you have ubquitous compact flash and sd/mmc format used by every other manufacturer and on the other you have expensive, limiter memory stick. I can't thing of a compelling reason that anyone would want to lock themselves into the format; Sony cameras aren't that good.
And yes, the memory stick format is much more expensive, not to mention has various confusing variations (e.g. magic gate) and is still proprietary. It offers absolutely zero advantage of any of its more open counterparts and plenty of disadvantages, not least because it and card readers are considerably more expensive, and harder to come by than other formats. You cannot deny it because that's the plain truth. You might find prices on Amazon.com come close to CF or SD/MMC but I can walk into any camera shop and be offered compact flash cards by 3 or 4 manufactures where I'd be lucky if could find 2 for memory stick. The prices would certainly reflect that.
In fact you can't even get memory sticks over 128Mb unless you count the vapour memory stick pro, while compact flash is already up to gigabytes, including harddrives as well as other peripherals such as 802.11b devices which fit the format. Frankly I don't care what format I stick in my camera, but I can tell you that it would not - short of some massive and unlikely groundswell of support - be for the memory stick format. Sony tried to capture the market and failed miserably.
What is more, their persistence in sticking with memory stick format means consumers like me who consider ubiquity and cheapness of media as an influencing factor will buy their cameras and laptops etc from someone else. I wonder how many extra memory sticks Sony will have to sell because I bought my digital camera from someone else. I wonder how many digital cameras sales total they've lost for the same reasons. Sooner or later some beancounter in Sony is going to realise that very fact and they'll dump it.
I'm not fanatic about memory cards, but I do care (and I'm not alone) when I see proprietary crap being foisted onto me or other consumers. And memory stick is most surely that.
Besides, any reason for preferring them for size has long gone since MMC/SD appeared, and both CF and MMC/SD are considerably cheaper, ubiquitous and come in bigger capacities too.