How many percent of users running IE 6 as a primary browser are doing so on pre-XP operating systems, such as Windows 2000 Professional, which do not have IE 7?
Probably not very big. I know one shouldn't extrapolate too far from one site's statistics, but I see more hits from Vista machines (7.8%) than from Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows 98 and Windows 95 combined (4.1%). That still represents a huge number of actual machines, but it's nowhere near enough to account for IE6's 37% share of the same data.
they've fixed also the bugs that made it possible to work around the bugs that they have NOT fixed yet!:-/
On the plus side, conditional comments help with that. They make it much easier to target a section of HTML or a stylesheet link to only IE6, or only IE7, or only IE up through 7, etc. And since they're intended functionality, not bugs, they're less likely to stop working in the future.
Possibly the part about, "If IE7 provides more security, then it should be available only for genuine editions. Why incentivise piracy?"
Consider that computer security flaws affect everyone, not just the vulnerable system. An owned box will pump out viruses or spam, clog traffic, can be used as a stepping-stone to launch attacks, etc. The suggestion that pirated systems shouldn't get security fixes has proved...controversial here in the past.
IE7 was added to the automatic update channel about a month after the installer became available. It started automatically, then required user intervention: it brought up a dialog box asking if you wanted to install IE7. If you said yes, it would run the WGA validation, then download the rest of the files and install.
They even released a tool you could run that would tell Automatic Updates to skip IE7, if you had an environment you wanted to keep on IE6 and not have to uncheck the item every time.
The most common case for WinXP users with auto-update turned on, leaving their computers running, would be to turn on the monitor sometime last November and see "Do you want to install IE7?" on the screen.
If you want to get technical, no browser is truly "standards compliant" in the sense that it supports everything. I'll be the first to say that IE7 is far behind Opera, Firefox and Safari in implementation, but it's also considerably better than IE6. Not in terms of overall numbers, but there are a few critical features implemented (first among them alpha PNG), and bugs fixed.
In my experience, I can usually build a layout for Gecko/Webkit/Opera, tweak it a little bit for IE7, and tweak it a bunch for IE6.
"Natural monopoly" refers to a type of industry that is believed to be more efficient when controlled by a single company (which is, of course debatable), not necessarily one that is currently dominated by just one company.
Industries that involve physical infrastructure, like utilities, are commonly cited. You could have two companies each running their own water delivery pipes and their own sewer system through a city, but it would cost the city's population a lot less to pick one and avoid the duplication.
Also worth noting: Third-party DSL generally means that the local phone company allows a DSL provider to hook up their network to the local phone lines. It may be different in your area, but it's possible that your DSL provider contracts with Bellsouth/AT&T for access to that phone line that runs to your house.
"Hey, what's this about owing you my first-born child?"
"Oh, that's standard contract language. Don't worry about it. We won't exercise it, we just make sure we have the option to."
"Oh, okay, then."
5 years later....
"We've come for Billy."
"What do you mean?"
"We have a contract saying you'd give us your firstborn as an apprentice. You signed it."
"But you said you'd never use that clause!"
"New management. I don't know what you're complaining about. You signed it without duress, and initialed the clause indicating you'd read and understood it."
"Mommy?"
"Sorry, honey, you have to go away with the nice Sith Lord. I'll text you every day, I promise."
If all they want to do is assert their right to shut down exploitative sites & users, wouldn't clauses A (violation of Acceptable Use Policy) and B (violation of law/regulation/tariff/etc.) be enough, without clause C (make AT&T look bad)?
Well, I'm not going to drop the iTunes Music store entirely, but I'm certainly going to start looking at the Amazon MP3 store first, and using iTunes as a secondary source. Anything I pick up from Amazon, I'll be able to use anywhere without going through the lossy burn-to-CD-and-re-rip method.
Yeah, DRMed tracks on iTunes allow the most common use cases (assuming you stick with the Apple music stack), but if I ever run up against the edges -- something goes wrong with the authorization, for instance, or if I end up replacing my iPod with another brand of music player -- it'll be less trouble to transfer the plain MP3s around.
I picked it up a few years back as a dual package with Soulbringer on one of those 2-for-$20 re-releases. I started with Soulbringer, got stuck after a while, and never got around to installing Planescape.
It sounds like I should dig out those CDs and give it a try.
They do. MOST of them don't, in accordance with Sturgeon's law, but the good ones do. Tolkien's work, or Mervyn Peake's, John Wyndham, HG Wells... Just not the crap.
Well, mostly. There's still a gap between the 90% that's crap and the 1% that's celebrated. The literary world only celebrates the great science fiction and fantasy, and tends to lump the merely good stuff in with the crap. Even then, half the time it tries to pretend that the books aren't really science-fiction, in order to avoid removing the "always crap" clause from their personal definition of sci-fi.
OK, strike that theory (on the amz being an archive). I bought a couple of albums last night, and the.amz file is clearly the equivalent of a playlist file: it gets opened by the downloader, which then retrieves each track one at a time, with pause & resume capability. (This was nice, because I was also trying to troubleshoot some issues on the Windows box which required a restart. Yeah, big surprise there.)
The integration with the iTunes application is nice. Sure, it's convenient that the downloader automatically adds tracks to your library as you download them. More importantly, Amazon provides all the metadata that iTunes expects, down to track numbers and album art, and some flag such that iTunes recognizes it as a "purchased track."
However even if we accept marginal quality and size improvements these are overwhelmingly outweighed by the universal nature of MP3 files. Every digital player supports MP3. Portables, cars, home stereos, etc. There is no vendor lock.
As much as I like the iTunes store for pricing and convenience, you've hit the proverbial nail on the head. This is the first service I can recall seeing with:
No DRM encumbrance, and therefore no artificial limits and no subscription worries
Universal compatibility (as you point out, even DRM-free AAC will only play on devices that have implemented it, but everyone's implemented MP3 playback)
Significant selection of stuff from major labels.
There've been plenty of services that had one, or even two of these factors. Add in backing from an undisputed giant* of e-commerce, and I'd say this has some serious potential.
I'm going to have to do some shopping tonight and put my money where my mouth is. Vote with my wallet, and all that.
(*Not that they haven't stumbled from time to time. I mean, they had huge plans for the A9 search engine, and ended up scaling it back massively.)
It seems to me that if the only issue is whether tracks are licensed for individual sale or not, they could probably solve that by offering the album as, say, a ZIP archive containing the album tracks. If a track is only available on an album, and not individually, then you only put it in the ZIP.
Heck, for all we know, maybe an.amz fileis just a zip archive, just with a different extension so that it'll open with the Amazon Downloader and automatically extract itself.
There have been a few fiascos with WordPress doing semi-evil things like SEO-hidden-linking every copy of wordpress back to his pay-per-ad site(s).
After a few arguments and releases later he finally removed it.
Um... not exactly. What you're probably thinking of is the time when he had keyword-spam "content" on hidden areas of wordpress.org. All WP blogs had, by default, a link back to wordpress.org, and that site (not anyone's own blog) had the hidden links to the spam.
Someone called him on it while he was on vacation, there was a huge controversy, Google de-listed them, and WordPress.org scrambled to take the links down from their site. When he got home, he pulled everything down and issued a public apology.
There are other ways to solve this without having to send the URL to Google. Another approach would be to maintain a list of BAD URLS on the client. This is more expensive since it requires a potentially large list of bad URLS to be stored locally.
Ah, you mean like the way it already works in Firefox 2. And, as far as I can tell, the way it will still work in Firefox 3, unless you turn on the real-time checking option (which is already present in Fx 2).
If you use Firefox 2, take a look in your profile directory for a file named something like urlclassifier2.sqlite. That's the local database of known bad URLs, which it periodically updates. It seems to be about 9.5 MB right now.
Nowhere does the summary (or your quote of it) claim that the article said it was. It' says 867+ or G5
When it was originally posted, the summary said AppleInsider was anticipating that they'd drop all G4 support. That's why there are about 20 comments -- including this quote from the article -- correcting it. (And why it's tagged with "badsummary")
I'm glad the editors fixed the summary, but it would have been nice if they'd made some note to that effect, instead of confusing even more people.
The article is specifically about 800MHz and slower G4s being excluded:
Instead, Leopard will now require Macs with "an Intel processor or a PowerPC G4 (867 MHz or faster) or G5 processor." Other system requirements include a DVD drive, built-in FireWire, at least 512MB of RAM (additional recommended), and at least 9GB of hard disk space.
Though seemingly mild, the 67MHz increase will exclude a handful of Mac system, namely the 800MHz PowerBook G4 (Titanium), 800MHz PowerMac G4 (Quicksilver), 800MHz iMac G4, 800MHz iBook G4, and 800MHz eMac.
Nowhere does the article claim that Leopard will be G5 & Intel only.
No matter how many times I restart Opera, I still find it unnecessarily ugly.
Well, you see, these days we have these things called themes or skins. If you don't like the way an app looks, you can often make it look like something else.
--Dude, where've you been? I haven't been able to reach you for days!
--I was in the hospital with (whispers) *Linux*. They wouldn't let me get online. They were afraid I'd install it on the computer. They even found it on my cellphone.
--Man, that's harsh!
--You're telling me! At least they put me in a room with Windows.
After this lead-in, in which open source seems to be regarded as some kind of communicable disease
Sir, you appear to be confusing "open source" with "open sores." I realize they sound similar, and English spelling isn't entirely logical, but this one ends with an "S" sound, not a "Z."
As an independent voter, I might have considered voting for McCain in the Republican primary (assuming my Democrat pick was projected to win), but his vote against this bill dampens my interest in that plan.
I rather liked McCain back in 2000, but over the past few years he's been drifting further and further right, and seriously courting the fundamentalist base. Maybe we're seeing his true colors, maybe he's changed his views, or maybe he's compromised his principles for political gain. Whatever the reason, he's long since lost my interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the turnover rate.
Probably not very big. I know one shouldn't extrapolate too far from one site's statistics, but I see more hits from Vista machines (7.8%) than from Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows 98 and Windows 95 combined (4.1%). That still represents a huge number of actual machines, but it's nowhere near enough to account for IE6's 37% share of the same data.
On the plus side, conditional comments help with that. They make it much easier to target a section of HTML or a stylesheet link to only IE6, or only IE7, or only IE up through 7, etc. And since they're intended functionality, not bugs, they're less likely to stop working in the future.
Possibly the part about, "If IE7 provides more security, then it should be available only for genuine editions. Why incentivise piracy?"
Consider that computer security flaws affect everyone, not just the vulnerable system. An owned box will pump out viruses or spam, clog traffic, can be used as a stepping-stone to launch attacks, etc. The suggestion that pirated systems shouldn't get security fixes has proved...controversial here in the past.
IE7 was added to the automatic update channel about a month after the installer became available. It started automatically, then required user intervention: it brought up a dialog box asking if you wanted to install IE7. If you said yes, it would run the WGA validation, then download the rest of the files and install.
They even released a tool you could run that would tell Automatic Updates to skip IE7, if you had an environment you wanted to keep on IE6 and not have to uncheck the item every time.
The most common case for WinXP users with auto-update turned on, leaving their computers running, would be to turn on the monitor sometime last November and see "Do you want to install IE7?" on the screen.
If you want to get technical, no browser is truly "standards compliant" in the sense that it supports everything. I'll be the first to say that IE7 is far behind Opera, Firefox and Safari in implementation, but it's also considerably better than IE6. Not in terms of overall numbers, but there are a few critical features implemented (first among them alpha PNG), and bugs fixed.
In my experience, I can usually build a layout for Gecko/Webkit/Opera, tweak it a little bit for IE7, and tweak it a bunch for IE6.
"Natural monopoly" refers to a type of industry that is believed to be more efficient when controlled by a single company (which is, of course debatable), not necessarily one that is currently dominated by just one company.
Industries that involve physical infrastructure, like utilities, are commonly cited. You could have two companies each running their own water delivery pipes and their own sewer system through a city, but it would cost the city's population a lot less to pick one and avoid the duplication.
Also worth noting: Third-party DSL generally means that the local phone company allows a DSL provider to hook up their network to the local phone lines. It may be different in your area, but it's possible that your DSL provider contracts with Bellsouth/AT&T for access to that phone line that runs to your house.
"Hey, what's this about owing you my first-born child?"
"Oh, that's standard contract language. Don't worry about it. We won't exercise it, we just make sure we have the option to."
"Oh, okay, then."
5 years later....
"We've come for Billy."
"What do you mean?"
"We have a contract saying you'd give us your firstborn as an apprentice. You signed it."
"But you said you'd never use that clause!"
"New management. I don't know what you're complaining about. You signed it without duress, and initialed the clause indicating you'd read and understood it."
"Mommy?"
"Sorry, honey, you have to go away with the nice Sith Lord. I'll text you every day, I promise."
If all they want to do is assert their right to shut down exploitative sites & users, wouldn't clauses A (violation of Acceptable Use Policy) and B (violation of law/regulation/tariff/etc.) be enough, without clause C (make AT&T look bad)?
Well, I'm not going to drop the iTunes Music store entirely, but I'm certainly going to start looking at the Amazon MP3 store first, and using iTunes as a secondary source. Anything I pick up from Amazon, I'll be able to use anywhere without going through the lossy burn-to-CD-and-re-rip method.
Yeah, DRMed tracks on iTunes allow the most common use cases (assuming you stick with the Apple music stack), but if I ever run up against the edges -- something goes wrong with the authorization, for instance, or if I end up replacing my iPod with another brand of music player -- it'll be less trouble to transfer the plain MP3s around.
I picked it up a few years back as a dual package with Soulbringer on one of those 2-for-$20 re-releases. I started with Soulbringer, got stuck after a while, and never got around to installing Planescape.
It sounds like I should dig out those CDs and give it a try.
Well, mostly. There's still a gap between the 90% that's crap and the 1% that's celebrated. The literary world only celebrates the great science fiction and fantasy, and tends to lump the merely good stuff in with the crap. Even then, half the time it tries to pretend that the books aren't really science-fiction, in order to avoid removing the "always crap" clause from their personal definition of sci-fi.
OK, strike that theory (on the amz being an archive). I bought a couple of albums last night, and the .amz file is clearly the equivalent of a playlist file: it gets opened by the downloader, which then retrieves each track one at a time, with pause & resume capability. (This was nice, because I was also trying to troubleshoot some issues on the Windows box which required a restart. Yeah, big surprise there.)
The integration with the iTunes application is nice. Sure, it's convenient that the downloader automatically adds tracks to your library as you download them. More importantly, Amazon provides all the metadata that iTunes expects, down to track numbers and album art, and some flag such that iTunes recognizes it as a "purchased track."
As much as I like the iTunes store for pricing and convenience, you've hit the proverbial nail on the head. This is the first service I can recall seeing with:
There've been plenty of services that had one, or even two of these factors. Add in backing from an undisputed giant* of e-commerce, and I'd say this has some serious potential.
I'm going to have to do some shopping tonight and put my money where my mouth is. Vote with my wallet, and all that.
(*Not that they haven't stumbled from time to time. I mean, they had huge plans for the A9 search engine, and ended up scaling it back massively.)
As they say, never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck driving down the highway, full of recorded media.
It seems to me that if the only issue is whether tracks are licensed for individual sale or not, they could probably solve that by offering the album as, say, a ZIP archive containing the album tracks. If a track is only available on an album, and not individually, then you only put it in the ZIP.
.amz file is just a zip archive, just with a different extension so that it'll open with the Amazon Downloader and automatically extract itself.
Heck, for all we know, maybe an
Um... not exactly. What you're probably thinking of is the time when he had keyword-spam "content" on hidden areas of wordpress.org. All WP blogs had, by default, a link back to wordpress.org, and that site (not anyone's own blog) had the hidden links to the spam.
Someone called him on it while he was on vacation, there was a huge controversy, Google de-listed them, and WordPress.org scrambled to take the links down from their site. When he got home, he pulled everything down and issued a public apology.
Ah, you mean like the way it already works in Firefox 2. And, as far as I can tell, the way it will still work in Firefox 3, unless you turn on the real-time checking option (which is already present in Fx 2).
If you use Firefox 2, take a look in your profile directory for a file named something like urlclassifier2.sqlite. That's the local database of known bad URLs, which it periodically updates. It seems to be about 9.5 MB right now.
The article is about as informative as one of those "Your computer is broadcasting an IP Address!" banners.
For the record:
When it was originally posted, the summary said AppleInsider was anticipating that they'd drop all G4 support. That's why there are about 20 comments -- including this quote from the article -- correcting it. (And why it's tagged with "badsummary")
I'm glad the editors fixed the summary, but it would have been nice if they'd made some note to that effect, instead of confusing even more people.
The article is specifically about 800MHz and slower G4s being excluded:
Nowhere does the article claim that Leopard will be G5 & Intel only.
Well, you see, these days we have these things called themes or skins. If you don't like the way an app looks, you can often make it look like something else.
--Dude, where've you been? I haven't been able to reach you for days!
--I was in the hospital with (whispers) *Linux*. They wouldn't let me get online. They were afraid I'd install it on the computer. They even found it on my cellphone.
--Man, that's harsh!
--You're telling me! At least they put me in a room with Windows.
Sir, you appear to be confusing "open source" with "open sores." I realize they sound similar, and English spelling isn't entirely logical, but this one ends with an "S" sound, not a "Z."
I rather liked McCain back in 2000, but over the past few years he's been drifting further and further right, and seriously courting the fundamentalist base. Maybe we're seeing his true colors, maybe he's changed his views, or maybe he's compromised his principles for political gain. Whatever the reason, he's long since lost my interest.