There was a cool episode of Modern Marvels on the History Channel that was about waste annd dumps. They covered computer recycling. They started off melting them down to get a few cents worth of gold off. Then they realized prying the chips off and reselling them had 1000x the value. OTOH, looking at my Mac Mini's motherboard, I see no pryable chips.:-(
"Lets ignore the people downloading things for a moment and concentrate on the uploaders (the real problem)."
Um, with no demand, there would be no supply. Or at least, the supply would become irrelevant. If a tree falls in the forest...
The filesharing "problem" exists because the demand is there. Period. Same thing with the drug problem, the slave trade, child pornography... Nature abhors a vucuum.
I won't argue "profitable" but I would guess that "MSN... is one of the top ten destinations on the web" because that is IE's default homepage. At my company, I set all browser's home pages to be an Intranet site I run. By both counting the hits and walking around the floor I can tell you that most people don't change their home page, no matter how *ahem* ugly or useless it may be. Looking at my stats, I can tell you that I literally get thousands times more hits on the front page than the whole rest of the site combined. People launch their browsers, wait for the page to load, and type in the address they *really* want to be at.
>"The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player." >No, that's what you say it says. What it says is >About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod >note the "who have" in that sentence?
Jesus holy christ. This is the last time I am going to rely to this. Posted below, on three separate lines, are three consecutive sentences from TFA. Draw your own conclusions. The math might be off, everything else might be wrong, but THIS IS WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS. Watch closely. Yes, he says "who have" in the first sentence, but he says "80 percent" twice and the one I'm referring to is the second instance of that. It's kind of tricky, but try to keep up. The part I'm referring to is between a bunch of !!!s. Ready? Here it comes.
1) "About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. 2) "It's pretty staggering." 3) !!!The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player!!! -- that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft's corporate campus.
>Well, it also asumes that 100% of all Microsoft employees have a music player, which I seriously doubt.
No, it doesn't. God, how many times do we have to do this? The article may not be perfectly written, but here's what it says.
"The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player."
and
" 'About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod,' said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. 'It's pretty staggering.' "
Yes, it says that, and it ALSO says 80% of ALL EMPLOYEES own MP3 players as well. Read it again, carefully. (Sorry for the caps, too lazy for (em) tags.)
""About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. "It's pretty staggering." The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player"
Maybe it was written by a 14-year-old girl. Ever hear them talk? "There's this magazine? In Australia? That compared a bunch of distros? and wrote about it?"
Robert Scoble--one of the people mentioned in the article--has already written about it. "Personally there's no way that 80% of our employees own an MP3 player. I don't know what world that source is living in, but it's not the one I live in... the story is a non-starter. I know a lot of Apple employees who play Halo 2 too. Is that a story?"
Ed Bott has some good comments too: "Now read the story. Read it carefully.... Note that the entire thingis based on an interview with one "high-level [Microsoft] manager who asked to remain anonymous." From this one source, we are able to calculate with confidence that 16,000 employees at Microsoft's Redmond campus own iPods... taking an offhand remark from an unknown source (who may or may not have a hidden agenda and who may or may not know what he's talking about) and extrapolating it to the entire campus is just silly... One thing they teach you in Journalism 101 is that when you have a single anonymous source, you don't have a story. That's still true."
The methods he describes on the linked page are all for determining words in CAPTCHAs. I've seen some where it just said "type in these letters" (i.e., random letters, not words) which would in general cause his counter-CAPTCHA algo to puke, and in particular make it fail more if it insisted on supplying words when the CAPTCHAs all specifically aren't.
"Federal and state officials, meanwhile, have bemoaned a lack of knowledge of U.S. civics and history among young people. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, has even pushed through a mandate that schools must teach about the Constitution on September 17, the date it was signed in 1787."
$ cal 9 2005
---September 2005---
S. M. Tu W. Th F. S. -- -- -- -- 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 --
"Looks like we'll have to wait a little longer for the PowerBook G5."
But, but... but what about the clear.gif? THERE WAS A CLEAR.GIF, DAMMIT!!! From an AD AGENCY! Doesn't that mean ANYTHING?!?!? Arrgh!
I had it backwards... and I like my idea better
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
·
· Score: 1
The first time I skimmed the summary, I thought it was the other way around--I thought he put a whole Mini into a PC, like those tiny PPC boxes that came out a few years ago that fit into a CD-ROM bay. That'd be cool, and actually handy. Maybe put a KVM inside too and run all the cables out the back. Bonus points if you could make the (15v?) Mac run off the PC's power supply.
"Thats odd as one of the points Sir Tim Berners-Lee was making with all the British papers who were asking him how rich he would be if he had patented "his" idea..."
W: Do you wish you'd started the Web as a business?
TBL: If I'd started "Web Inc." it would have been just another proprietary system. You wouldn't have had this universality. For something like the Web to exist, it has to be based on public, nonproprietary standards.
"lots" is a relative term. In sheer numbers, yeah, 100,000 people just like you could be considered "lots." But compared to several million iPod sales, 100,000 is not even noticed.
It's an old joke that Apple is MS's R & D division--that MS copies everything from Apple. So if Apple is doing well (i.e., will still be in business in the near future), then MS doesn't have to invest in R & D because Apple will be around to do it for them.
Rather than pad lines to avoid the lameness filter I'm posting this with newlines but as HTML. To see a nice list, view the source.
Mgm Class Action Settlement
Eligible Dvd List:
10 To Midnight ---
1969 ---
1984 ---
24 Hour Party People ---
3 Strikes ---
8 Heads In A Duffel Bag ---
Abominable Dr. Phibes, The ---
Across 110th Street ---
Alice ---
Alice's Restaurant ---
All Dogs Go To Heaven ---
All Dogs Go To Heaven 2 ---
All Or Nothing ---
Alphabet City ---
Amazing Grace ---
American Buffalo ---
American Ninja ---
American Ninja 2 & 3 ---
Amityville Horror, The ---
Amos & Andrew ---
Angel Levine, The ---
Angel Unchained/Cycle Savages ---
Angels And Insects ---
Annie Hall ---
Another Woman ---
Assassination ---
At First Sight ---
At First Sight/Kill Me Again ---
At The Earth's Core ---
Attic, The/Crawl Space ---
Audrey Rose ---
Autumn In New York ---
Avanti! ---
Aviator, The ---
Babette's Feast ---
Baby Boom ---
Back To School ---
Bad Influence ---
Bagdad Café ---
Bananas ---
Bar Girls ---
Barbershop ---
Basic Training ---
Basket, The ---
Beat Street ---
Believers, The ---
Benny And Joon ---
Bent ---
Best Seller ---
Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey ---
Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure ---
Billion Dollar Hobo, The ---
Biodome ---
Birdcage, The ---
Birdman Of Alcatraz ---
Black Caesar ---
Black Mama, White Mama ---
Black Robe ---
Black Stallion 1 & 2, The ---
Black Stallion Returns, The ---
Black Stallion, The ---
Blue Sky ---
Blue Steel ---
Body Of Evidence ---
Born Romantic ---
Bound For Glory ---
Boxcar Bertha ---
Boxing Helena ---
Breaker! Breaker! ---
Breakheart Pass ---
Breakin' ---
Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo ---
Breaking In ---
Breathless ---
Breathless/Red Corner ---
Breeders ---
Bride Wore Black, The ---
Bright Lights, Big City ---
Broadway Danny Rose ---
Bucktown ---
Bull Durham ---
Business Of Strangers ---
Cadillac Man ---
Camille Claudel ---
Candyman 2: Farewell To The Flesh ---
Carrie - 25th Anniversary ---
Carrington ---
Catch The Heat ---
Caveman ---
Charles Bronson ---
Chato's Land ---
Cheech And Chong Corsican Bros ---
Cherry 2000 ---
Children's Hour ---
Child's Play ---
Chocolate ---
Choose Me ---
Christina's House ---
City Of Industry ---
City Slickers ---
Class ---
Class/Youngblood ---
Clean Slate ---
Coca Cola Kid, The ---
Code Of Silence ---
Coffy ---
Colors ---
Coming Home ---
Company Business ---
Cooley High ---
Cornbread, Earl, And Me ---
Cotton Club ---
Cotton Comes To Harlem ---
Couch Trip ---
Count Yorga, Vampire ---
Courage Mountain ---
Cq ---
Crime And Punishment In Suburbia ---
Crimes And Misdemeanors ---
Crybanshee/Murdersruemorgue ---
Cuba ---
Cutters Way ---
Cutting Edge, The ---
Cyborg ---
Dark Half, The ---
De Sade ---
Dead Man Walking ---
Dead Of Winter ---
Death Warrant ---
Decameron, The ---
Defiant Ones ---
Delirious ---
Delta Force ---
Delta Force Ii ---
Deranged/Motel Hell ---
Desert Hearts ---
Desperate Hours ---
Desperately Seeking Susan ---
Diggstown ---
Dillinger ---
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels ---
Dirty Work ---
Disturbing Behavior ---
Dogs Of War, The ---
Doll's House ---
Dominick And Eugene ---
Donovan's Brain ---
Double Impact ---
Dr. No ---
Dr. Phibes Rises Again ---
Duel At Diablo ---
Dunwich Horror, The ---
Easy Money ---
Eat, Drink, Man, Woman ---
Echo Park ---
Eddie And The Cruisers ---
Edge Of Sanity ---
Eight Men Out ---
Electra ---
Elmer Gantry ---
Empire Of The Ants ---
End, The ---
Entertainer, The ---
Equus ---
Europa Europa ---
Eve Of Destruction ---
Everything You Always Wanted ---
Extreme Adventures Of Super Dave ---
Extremities ---
Eye For An Eye ---
Eye Of The Needle ---
Falcon And The Snowman, The ---
Fatal Beauty ---
Fatal Instinct ---
Favor, The ---
Fellini's Roma ---
Fires Within ---
First Power, The ---
Fish Called Wanda, A ---
Five On The Black Hand Side ---
Flam
My wife used to do that, but many clerks still didn't care. And now that people are used to not signinng receipts when they make purchases online, a lot of places don't even ask to see IDs under a certain amount. You can use a credit card at a McD's drive through without ID or an autograph, and charge up to $100 at Target.
"Wireless carriers will not earn $12B because better options exist."
Note: you can't lose what you don't yet have.
Interesting fact: you are not entitled to a profit. If your business model sucks, or if your product is too costly, it will fail. See also: airphones. Remember them? All gone now, because using cell phones (which everyone already has) before and after the flight is good enough.
Um, there's only one key to memorize: control. Control-click = right-click everywhere in OS X, period. And personally, I don't mind it, because it hitting-right-click requires odd hand contortions when your index finger just went to the lower-left corner of the trackpad.
Flat-panel iMac (2002), Gateway Profile (1998?), Compaq Presario 3020/3060 (1997), 20th Anniversary Mac (1997), laptops in general... how long have you been waiting for this?
Or, better yet, just get a "Pimp my ride"-style swing-down flat panel and mount it under a cabinet, and put the CPU on a high shelf you don't use anyway. bam! no counter space at all. Or mount the LCD on the wall.
"If you've ever tried to read through the W3C recommendations, you'll find them pretty dry and occasionally confusing. You can understand how browsers don't conform completely all the time."
Furthermore, there are no hard-and-fast rules on how to handle bad code. Or even problematic code that is technically OK. (Not to mention contradictions that are possible within the spec.) For example: if I have a line with 1,000 capital Ws, it should be shown as one line. This is completely valide code. So, sould the browser assume the whole page iw that wide and run all the text way out there? Just text below the Ws? All text on the page? What if it's in a TD or DIV? etc etc etc. It is impossible to make rules that cover every possible combination of odd-but-valid code, let alone handle errors nicely.
And defaults: remember how img tags with no border specified used to get a border of 1 or 2 *if* they were links? I think at least one relatively recent browser still does that--it still jumps out at me every so often when I make a page quickly, forget my 'border="0"'. and test.
There are a lot of decisions that are left to the browser to make--the ones I see most are blank lines above and below tables, lists, forms, etc etc etc. Oh, and tables--if I don't specify cellpadding, cellspacing, and border, what should they be? 0, 1, 2, more?
Remember, the point of a browser isn't to achieve some holy level of perfection. The point of a browser is to render, as well as possible, every page on the Internet, many of which were generated 10 years ago or more, often with bad tools that didn't even know there *were* standards (or at least behaved that way.) That's a *lot* of old code to account for.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a cool episode of Modern Marvels on the History Channel that was about waste annd dumps. They covered computer recycling. They started off melting them down to get a few cents worth of gold off. Then they realized prying the chips off and reselling them had 1000x the value. OTOH, looking at my Mac Mini's motherboard, I see no pryable chips. :-(
"Lets ignore the people downloading things for a moment and concentrate on the uploaders (the real problem)."
Um, with no demand, there would be no supply. Or at least, the supply would become irrelevant. If a tree falls in the forest...
The filesharing "problem" exists because the demand is there. Period. Same thing with the drug problem, the slave trade, child pornography... Nature abhors a vucuum.
I won't argue "profitable" but I would guess that "MSN... is one of the top ten destinations on the web" because that is IE's default homepage. At my company, I set all browser's home pages to be an Intranet site I run. By both counting the hits and walking around the floor I can tell you that most people don't change their home page, no matter how *ahem* ugly or useless it may be. Looking at my stats, I can tell you that I literally get thousands times more hits on the front page than the whole rest of the site combined. People launch their browsers, wait for the page to load, and type in the address they *really* want to be at.
>"The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player."
>No, that's what you say it says. What it says is
>About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod
>note the "who have" in that sentence?
Jesus holy christ. This is the last time I am going to rely to this. Posted below, on three separate lines, are three consecutive sentences from TFA. Draw your own conclusions. The math might be off, everything else might be wrong, but THIS IS WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS. Watch closely. Yes, he says "who have" in the first sentence, but he says "80 percent" twice and the one I'm referring to is the second instance of that. It's kind of tricky, but try to keep up. The part I'm referring to is between a bunch of !!!s. Ready? Here it comes.
1) "About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous.
2) "It's pretty staggering."
3) !!!The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player!!! -- that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft's corporate campus.
And from Tom Lehrer: "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down." :-)
>Well, it also asumes that 100% of all Microsoft employees have a music player, which I seriously doubt.
No, it doesn't. God, how many times do we have to do this? The article may not be perfectly written, but here's what it says.
"The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player."
and
" 'About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod,' said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. 'It's pretty staggering.' "
Got it?
Yes, it says that, and it ALSO says 80% of ALL EMPLOYEES own MP3 players as well. Read it again, carefully. (Sorry for the caps, too lazy for (em) tags.)
""About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. "It's pretty staggering." The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player"
Maybe it was written by a 14-year-old girl. Ever hear them talk? "There's this magazine? In Australia? That compared a bunch of distros? and wrote about it?"
Robert Scoble--one of the people mentioned in the article--has already written about it. "Personally there's no way that 80% of our employees own an MP3 player. I don't know what world that source is living in, but it's not the one I live in... the story is a non-starter. I know a lot of Apple employees who play Halo 2 too. Is that a story?"
Ed Bott has some good comments too: "Now read the story. Read it carefully.... Note that the entire thingis based on an interview with one "high-level [Microsoft] manager who asked to remain anonymous." From this one source, we are able to calculate with confidence that 16,000 employees at Microsoft's Redmond campus own iPods... taking an offhand remark from an unknown source (who may or may not have a hidden agenda and who may or may not know what he's talking about) and extrapolating it to the entire campus is just silly...
One thing they teach you in Journalism 101 is that when you have a single anonymous source, you don't have a story. That's still true."
The methods he describes on the linked page are all for determining words in CAPTCHAs. I've seen some where it just said "type in these letters" (i.e., random letters, not words) which would in general cause his counter-CAPTCHA algo to puke, and in particular make it fail more if it insisted on supplying words when the CAPTCHAs all specifically aren't.
"Looks like we'll have to wait a little longer for the PowerBook G5."
.gif? THERE WAS A CLEAR .GIF, DAMMIT!!! From an AD AGENCY! Doesn't that mean ANYTHING?!?!? Arrgh!
But, but... but what about the clear
The first time I skimmed the summary, I thought it was the other way around--I thought he put a whole Mini into a PC, like those tiny PPC boxes that came out a few years ago that fit into a CD-ROM bay. That'd be cool, and actually handy. Maybe put a KVM inside too and run all the cables out the back. Bonus points if you could make the (15v?) Mac run off the PC's power supply.
"Thats odd as one of the points Sir Tim Berners-Lee was making with all the British papers who were asking him how rich he would be if he had patented "his" idea..."
Furthermore, from one of my favorite wired articles ever, comes one of the best quotes ever...
W: Do you wish you'd started the Web as a business?
TBL: If I'd started "Web Inc." it would have been just another proprietary system. You wouldn't have had this universality. For something like the Web to exist, it has to be based on public, nonproprietary standards.
"lots" is a relative term. In sheer numbers, yeah, 100,000 people just like you could be considered "lots." But compared to several million iPod sales, 100,000 is not even noticed.
It's an old joke that Apple is MS's R & D division--that MS copies everything from Apple. So if Apple is doing well (i.e., will still be in business in the near future), then MS doesn't have to invest in R & D because Apple will be around to do it for them.
The e in Ututo stands for Desktop (in Spanish).
That should be:
"The e in Ututo stands for Desktop... in Japan!"
Rather than pad lines to avoid the lameness filter I'm posting this with newlines but as HTML. To see a nice list, view the source.
Mgm Class Action Settlement Eligible Dvd List: 10 To Midnight --- 1969 --- 1984 --- 24 Hour Party People --- 3 Strikes --- 8 Heads In A Duffel Bag --- Abominable Dr. Phibes, The --- Across 110th Street --- Alice --- Alice's Restaurant --- All Dogs Go To Heaven --- All Dogs Go To Heaven 2 --- All Or Nothing --- Alphabet City --- Amazing Grace --- American Buffalo --- American Ninja --- American Ninja 2 & 3 --- Amityville Horror, The --- Amos & Andrew --- Angel Levine, The --- Angel Unchained/Cycle Savages --- Angels And Insects --- Annie Hall --- Another Woman --- Assassination --- At First Sight --- At First Sight/Kill Me Again --- At The Earth's Core --- Attic, The/Crawl Space --- Audrey Rose --- Autumn In New York --- Avanti! --- Aviator, The --- Babette's Feast --- Baby Boom --- Back To School --- Bad Influence --- Bagdad Café --- Bananas --- Bar Girls --- Barbershop --- Basic Training --- Basket, The --- Beat Street --- Believers, The --- Benny And Joon --- Bent --- Best Seller --- Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey --- Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure --- Billion Dollar Hobo, The --- Biodome --- Birdcage, The --- Birdman Of Alcatraz --- Black Caesar --- Black Mama, White Mama --- Black Robe --- Black Stallion 1 & 2, The --- Black Stallion Returns, The --- Black Stallion, The --- Blue Sky --- Blue Steel --- Body Of Evidence --- Born Romantic --- Bound For Glory --- Boxcar Bertha --- Boxing Helena --- Breaker! Breaker! --- Breakheart Pass --- Breakin' --- Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo --- Breaking In --- Breathless --- Breathless/Red Corner --- Breeders --- Bride Wore Black, The --- Bright Lights, Big City --- Broadway Danny Rose --- Bucktown --- Bull Durham --- Business Of Strangers --- Cadillac Man --- Camille Claudel --- Candyman 2: Farewell To The Flesh --- Carrie - 25th Anniversary --- Carrington --- Catch The Heat --- Caveman --- Charles Bronson --- Chato's Land --- Cheech And Chong Corsican Bros --- Cherry 2000 --- Children's Hour --- Child's Play --- Chocolate --- Choose Me --- Christina's House --- City Of Industry --- City Slickers --- Class --- Class/Youngblood --- Clean Slate --- Coca Cola Kid, The --- Code Of Silence --- Coffy --- Colors --- Coming Home --- Company Business --- Cooley High --- Cornbread, Earl, And Me --- Cotton Club --- Cotton Comes To Harlem --- Couch Trip --- Count Yorga, Vampire --- Courage Mountain --- Cq --- Crime And Punishment In Suburbia --- Crimes And Misdemeanors --- Crybanshee/Murdersruemorgue --- Cuba --- Cutters Way --- Cutting Edge, The --- Cyborg --- Dark Half, The --- De Sade --- Dead Man Walking --- Dead Of Winter --- Death Warrant --- Decameron, The --- Defiant Ones --- Delirious --- Delta Force --- Delta Force Ii --- Deranged/Motel Hell --- Desert Hearts --- Desperate Hours --- Desperately Seeking Susan --- Diggstown --- Dillinger --- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels --- Dirty Work --- Disturbing Behavior --- Dogs Of War, The --- Doll's House --- Dominick And Eugene --- Donovan's Brain --- Double Impact --- Dr. No --- Dr. Phibes Rises Again --- Duel At Diablo --- Dunwich Horror, The --- Easy Money --- Eat, Drink, Man, Woman --- Echo Park --- Eddie And The Cruisers --- Edge Of Sanity --- Eight Men Out --- Electra --- Elmer Gantry --- Empire Of The Ants --- End, The --- Entertainer, The --- Equus --- Europa Europa --- Eve Of Destruction --- Everything You Always Wanted --- Extreme Adventures Of Super Dave --- Extremities --- Eye For An Eye --- Eye Of The Needle --- Falcon And The Snowman, The --- Fatal Beauty --- Fatal Instinct --- Favor, The --- Fellini's Roma --- Fires Within --- First Power, The --- Fish Called Wanda, A --- Five On The Black Hand Side --- Flam
Shouldn't be a problem. Apple is doing quite well these days, so MS can afford to trim a little here. :-)
My wife used to do that, but many clerks still didn't care. And now that people are used to not signinng receipts when they make purchases online, a lot of places don't even ask to see IDs under a certain amount. You can use a credit card at a McD's drive through without ID or an autograph, and charge up to $100 at Target.
"Wireless carriers will not earn $12B because better options exist."
Note: you can't lose what you don't yet have.
Interesting fact: you are not entitled to a profit. If your business model sucks, or if your product is too costly, it will fail. See also: airphones. Remember them? All gone now, because using cell phones (which everyone already has) before and after the flight is good enough.
Um, there's only one key to memorize: control. Control-click = right-click everywhere in OS X, period. And personally, I don't mind it, because it hitting-right-click requires odd hand contortions when your index finger just went to the lower-left corner of the trackpad.
Flat-panel iMac (2002), Gateway Profile (1998?), Compaq Presario 3020/3060 (1997), 20th Anniversary Mac (1997), laptops in general... how long have you been waiting for this?
Or, better yet, just get a "Pimp my ride"-style swing-down flat panel and mount it under a cabinet, and put the CPU on a high shelf you don't use anyway. bam! no counter space at all. Or mount the LCD on the wall.
I'm still waiting for my 104-button-mouse and 1-key keyboard.
(I wish I could claim I invented that line.)
"If you've ever tried to read through the W3C recommendations, you'll find them pretty dry and occasionally confusing. You can understand how browsers don't conform completely all the time."
Furthermore, there are no hard-and-fast rules on how to handle bad code. Or even problematic code that is technically OK. (Not to mention contradictions that are possible within the spec.) For example: if I have a line with 1,000 capital Ws, it should be shown as one line. This is completely valide code. So, sould the browser assume the whole page iw that wide and run all the text way out there? Just text below the Ws? All text on the page? What if it's in a TD or DIV? etc etc etc. It is impossible to make rules that cover every possible combination of odd-but-valid code, let alone handle errors nicely.
And defaults: remember how img tags with no border specified used to get a border of 1 or 2 *if* they were links? I think at least one relatively recent browser still does that--it still jumps out at me every so often when I make a page quickly, forget my 'border="0"'. and test.
There are a lot of decisions that are left to the browser to make--the ones I see most are blank lines above and below tables, lists, forms, etc etc etc. Oh, and tables--if I don't specify cellpadding, cellspacing, and border, what should they be? 0, 1, 2, more?
Remember, the point of a browser isn't to achieve some holy level of perfection. The point of a browser is to render, as well as possible, every page on the Internet, many of which were generated 10 years ago or more, often with bad tools that didn't even know there *were* standards (or at least behaved that way.) That's a *lot* of old code to account for.