The builders of Stonehenge would not have been impressed. The outside of the real thing's ring and the lintels are actually smoothly curved into a proper circle instead of having those ugly corners jutting out. Not to mention the central "horseshoe" of stones, several of which would require specialised equipment to move about a field today.
This thing may have all sorts of unlikely stellar alignments in it, but that too is almost certainly nothing like the original, which has a few solar alignments.
Certainly Stonehenge is impressive, I find it far more impressive that a 5000 year old tomb with clock function still works even today.
Of course, Stonehenge has been upgraded several times. The hightly visible stones of the final version are quite new, as you say, but the original dates back even further than Newgrange. The oldest dates from the site are in the region of 10000 years old. Although, those parts don't seem to tell the time or anything like that.
While a 5000 tomb with a Solstice marker is impressive, a site which was in actual use by people and maintained and updated for coming on to 8000 years is fairly stunning too.
I have a dual boot 400Mhz machine and Firefox is unusable in Windows and Linux. It takes about a second for dropdowns on forms to appear even if they have only a few entries. Everything else is about the same scale. Opera flies along and IE's many problems are not speed related.
or hadn't these morons noticed it just finished paying a huge dividend in the middle of a depression?
While I agree that MS is in no danger, paying out savings as dividends during a depression is often a sign of desperation to keep the stock up, so in itself that's not a reason to dismiss the claims.
Why is/. refusing to run articles covering the elections in Iraq?
Because absolutely nothing of any note or import occured? Do you need/. to tell yo that the carefully vetted and selected pro-US candidate won? What's newsworthy in that?
What's the deal, is there something in the drinking water around here?
No. YOU are anoying people by making assertions which are totally moronic and then acting as if everyone else is a fool for not accepting them. IE is broken but you say it's not. The bugs are well documented, MS staff have written about them MS itself said, years ago, that they would be fixed. But you want us all to believe that they don't exist because one of them can be delt with by reference to a system call outside of and completely unrelated to anything to do with writing web pages. And that a file format the whole world is using is "obscure".
And have the brass neck to ask why you are getting insults? I don't think you are trolling, but that actually leaves an even less flattering alternative open.
Sigh. Again with the loaded questions. This isn't an issue of "industry standards." It's an issue of adding additional support for a seldom-used file format.
Wrong on both counts. Three counts if you include the bit about loaded questions; it is not a loaded question to ask if a seven year old bug has not been fixed because of apathy or incompetance - it really has to be one or the other. Anyway, it is an industry standard and it is often used, particularly behind the scenes to pass graphics between developers in a lossless fashion. Once the graphics are ready, of course, we than have to find ways of displaying them on IE, which is broken.
The support is already there, you just want them to add more support.
No it's not. There is a way of forcing IE to display the graphic by embedding a raw system call in your page, but that's not a reasonable way of doing business.
If you want to make the case that Microsoft needs to go back and implement a fairly obscure feature that's already implemented in a different way, great.
It's not obscure except to people like you who think that the "industry" is defined as "Microsoft", and it's not implimented. It is implimented in IE for the Mac; the windows version does not display PNGs correctly.
I just don't think this interview is the right platform for trying to do that.
Someone is going to talk to us about why MS is superior to all the alternatives. Asking why MS can't fix old bugs that they admit to getting lots of complaints about is addressing that very assertion and it perfectly on-topic. I remind you again that this guy's job is all about "competition" and this is a question about why MS is so much poorer than the competition in one of its core products - the browser. I can only assume that you are afraid of the truth: that MS really does not give a toss about CSS or PNG, any more that it ever has about HTML or any other interopertability standard or protocol.
Microsoft has stated several times now that they do not plan on making any kind of substantive update to IE until Longhorn (with security being an exception).
Ignoring the fact that they left these problems over two full releases, fixing two minor bugs is not what I'd call "substantive updates".
fairly recent standards compliance.
We're talking about 7 and 8 YEAR old bugs here, not recent stuff.
I should say that no stand-up comics should ever be employed if people who write about their lives online shouldn't be employed
That was basically what you did say.
My original point was not this, but to suggest that employing people who are spending work time observing their co-workers and watching for things to plonk on their blog instead of concentrating on their work, and in addition are part of that entire movement of people who fill Google up with their rubbish, making actual use of the Web harder for everyone, may not be a good idea. I may have stuck a thick layer of scorn over it, but that was my semi-serious point.
Your argument makes no sense, and I'm apparently unable to show you that.
I think you just missed the argument under the hyperbole.
I don't guess it would do any good if I just asked you please not to participate in this thread, huh?
I take it you've not bothered your bum to read any of this guy's output, so there's little point in discussing it.
He's here to tell us that Linux and OS X suck donkey wab and anyone that says otherwise is an idiot. Read his stuff: that's what he ALWAYS says.
Here's an opportunity for dialogue
MS has turned down hundreds of opportunities for dialogue over the years. I didn't make them, and I don't see why I have the responsibility to keep on extending the hand after all this time.
If they sent anyone else apart from Balmer I'd see your point, but this bloke is not here for dialogue.
Astounding! He's actually claiming that after seven (now eight) years, that they simply can't get it to work! That it's too hard!? That seems...unlikely, even given MS's general level of programming talent.
In what way is "they don't care" not a reasonable paraphrasing of your comment that displaying a standard image format or rendering standard stylesheets with their web browser is "not a priority for the IE development team"? That's like saying that working headlights aren't a priority for Ford's car design section!
What do you really think is going to be accomplished by turning this interview into a hate-fest?
Hello? Have you seen who is being interviewed? The man in charge of FUD? Negativity is his job description. He's doing this for the same reason his boss has been lying about Linux security and interopertablity all month: to get the message accross and squash the competition. My question is about why they don't try to fight the competition with quality products instead of bullshit rhetoric. That's a perfectly good question to put to some one that persists in paying for TCO studies that pit MS against RH and then blithly say that it proves that Linux is more expensive. I'm running many Linux servers and desktops and I'm not using Red Hat. RH is not Linux; the TCO studies are not about Linux, they're about Red Hat. Why does he keep on lying about them? Why can't his company just produce a decent product that works? Why do we have to have all these security holes and why do they have to keep telling us that Linux is just as bad when everyone knows it's not? Why don't they compete on quality? Competition is his job; it's a fair question. Except, of course, I know he'll lie through his teeth if he's asked it.
Martin Taylor is looking for a platform to spread FUD. Why are you so keen to let him do it?
It's hard to put a lot of languages into one course; I think 3 high-level and an assembler language is as much as I would want to pack into a degree. The important part is to take them from different families, rather than get hung up on the simple size of the language count.
I extended that to include people who have friends and people who are funny at drinks after work.
In English, we call that "an analogy". An analogy depends on there being shared characteristics between the two concepts. You were making a connection between bloggers being fired for engaging in something that you (I assume, as a member of the mutual-masturbation club that is the blogosphere) see as a social characteristic (writing down pointless accounts of their boring lives) and something which normal people see as a social characteristic (having friends). I refuted your analogy by way of an insulting dismissal of the connection. I could just as easily have said "Bloggers aren't funny" to achieve the same effect.
Reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, is it?
Because those two features are simply not a priority for the IE development team.
In other words: they don't care.
I'd be very disappointed if such an obvious and shallow question made the cut, displacing what might be a more interesting question.
Yet, it strikes at the very heart of why so many people despise MS: they don't give a damn about working with other people, even those with no commercial axe to grind, not even with their own users. Why?
On the PNG issue, use AlphaImageLoader. Works like a charm.
As a workaround, it's pretty good and I use it but it fails in some cases where CSS is included from other links, to say nothing of how tiresome it can be in situations where images are read dynamically without knowing their exact dimensions (eg: I did a site where images were uploaded and fitted into a 150x150 box. I did not know in advance if they would be portrait or landscape, but I didn't need to know until IE was reading the page).
Regardless, it's obviously nonsense to need such cruft just to display a standard image format, particularly one as useful as PNG24.
Not loaded in the normal sense: after all this time it can only be one or the other. IE has been patched to bejesus for security reasons, so it's not like they couldn't put these into one of those fixes. SO, they must either not care or can't get it to work for some odd internal reason.
If Microsoft is so much better why does IE still not support semi-transparent PNGs or CSS fixed positioning while every other browser has done both for literally years? Is it because you don't care or because you can't actually get it to work?
Slashdot Mirror
TWW
This thing may have all sorts of unlikely stellar alignments in it, but that too is almost certainly nothing like the original, which has a few solar alignments.
3/10. Must try harder.
TWW
Of course, Stonehenge has been upgraded several times. The hightly visible stones of the final version are quite new, as you say, but the original dates back even further than Newgrange. The oldest dates from the site are in the region of 10000 years old. Although, those parts don't seem to tell the time or anything like that.
While a 5000 tomb with a Solstice marker is impressive, a site which was in actual use by people and maintained and updated for coming on to 8000 years is fairly stunning too.
TWW
So instead we ask you to force people to go to the wrong page and then click down to the one they want, thereby er... costing us more bandwidth. Um.
TWW
I have a dual boot 400Mhz machine and Firefox is unusable in Windows and Linux. It takes about a second for dropdowns on forms to appear even if they have only a few entries. Everything else is about the same scale. Opera flies along and IE's many problems are not speed related.
TWW
While I agree that MS is in no danger, paying out savings as dividends during a depression is often a sign of desperation to keep the stock up, so in itself that's not a reason to dismiss the claims.
It's still wishful thinking, though.
TWW
Or a Christian who carries a gun.
TWW
Because absolutely nothing of any note or import occured? Do you need /. to tell yo that the carefully vetted and selected pro-US candidate won? What's newsworthy in that?
TWW
I've not seen it happen in coming on a year of Gentoo/nvidia use. Which version of the driver have you emerged?
TWW
No. YOU are anoying people by making assertions which are totally moronic and then acting as if everyone else is a fool for not accepting them. IE is broken but you say it's not. The bugs are well documented, MS staff have written about them MS itself said, years ago, that they would be fixed. But you want us all to believe that they don't exist because one of them can be delt with by reference to a system call outside of and completely unrelated to anything to do with writing web pages. And that a file format the whole world is using is "obscure".
And have the brass neck to ask why you are getting insults? I don't think you are trolling, but that actually leaves an even less flattering alternative open.
TWW
Wrong on both counts. Three counts if you include the bit about loaded questions; it is not a loaded question to ask if a seven year old bug has not been fixed because of apathy or incompetance - it really has to be one or the other. Anyway, it is an industry standard and it is often used, particularly behind the scenes to pass graphics between developers in a lossless fashion. Once the graphics are ready, of course, we than have to find ways of displaying them on IE, which is broken.
The support is already there, you just want them to add more support.
No it's not. There is a way of forcing IE to display the graphic by embedding a raw system call in your page, but that's not a reasonable way of doing business.
If you want to make the case that Microsoft needs to go back and implement a fairly obscure feature that's already implemented in a different way, great.
It's not obscure except to people like you who think that the "industry" is defined as "Microsoft", and it's not implimented. It is implimented in IE for the Mac; the windows version does not display PNGs correctly.
I just don't think this interview is the right platform for trying to do that.
Someone is going to talk to us about why MS is superior to all the alternatives. Asking why MS can't fix old bugs that they admit to getting lots of complaints about is addressing that very assertion and it perfectly on-topic. I remind you again that this guy's job is all about "competition" and this is a question about why MS is so much poorer than the competition in one of its core products - the browser. I can only assume that you are afraid of the truth: that MS really does not give a toss about CSS or PNG, any more that it ever has about HTML or any other interopertability standard or protocol.
TWW
Ignoring the fact that they left these problems over two full releases, fixing two minor bugs is not what I'd call "substantive updates".
fairly recent standards compliance.
We're talking about 7 and 8 YEAR old bugs here, not recent stuff.
TWW
That was basically what you did say.
My original point was not this, but to suggest that employing people who are spending work time observing their co-workers and watching for things to plonk on their blog instead of concentrating on their work, and in addition are part of that entire movement of people who fill Google up with their rubbish, making actual use of the Web harder for everyone, may not be a good idea. I may have stuck a thick layer of scorn over it, but that was my semi-serious point.
Your argument makes no sense, and I'm apparently unable to show you that.
I think you just missed the argument under the hyperbole.
TWW
I take it you've not bothered your bum to read any of this guy's output, so there's little point in discussing it.
He's here to tell us that Linux and OS X suck donkey wab and anyone that says otherwise is an idiot. Read his stuff: that's what he ALWAYS says.
Here's an opportunity for dialogue
MS has turned down hundreds of opportunities for dialogue over the years. I didn't make them, and I don't see why I have the responsibility to keep on extending the hand after all this time.
If they sent anyone else apart from Balmer I'd see your point, but this bloke is not here for dialogue.
Let me guess American?
Nope. Let me guess...astroturf?
TWW
TWW
In what way is "they don't care" not a reasonable paraphrasing of your comment that displaying a standard image format or rendering standard stylesheets with their web browser is "not a priority for the IE development team"? That's like saying that working headlights aren't a priority for Ford's car design section!
What do you really think is going to be accomplished by turning this interview into a hate-fest?
Hello? Have you seen who is being interviewed? The man in charge of FUD? Negativity is his job description. He's doing this for the same reason his boss has been lying about Linux security and interopertablity all month: to get the message accross and squash the competition. My question is about why they don't try to fight the competition with quality products instead of bullshit rhetoric. That's a perfectly good question to put to some one that persists in paying for TCO studies that pit MS against RH and then blithly say that it proves that Linux is more expensive. I'm running many Linux servers and desktops and I'm not using Red Hat. RH is not Linux; the TCO studies are not about Linux, they're about Red Hat. Why does he keep on lying about them? Why can't his company just produce a decent product that works? Why do we have to have all these security holes and why do they have to keep telling us that Linux is just as bad when everyone knows it's not? Why don't they compete on quality? Competition is his job; it's a fair question. Except, of course, I know he'll lie through his teeth if he's asked it.
Martin Taylor is looking for a platform to spread FUD. Why are you so keen to let him do it?
TWW
It's hard to put a lot of languages into one course; I think 3 high-level and an assembler language is as much as I would want to pack into a degree. The important part is to take them from different families, rather than get hung up on the simple size of the language count.
TWW
In English, we call that "an analogy". An analogy depends on there being shared characteristics between the two concepts. You were making a connection between bloggers being fired for engaging in something that you (I assume, as a member of the mutual-masturbation club that is the blogosphere) see as a social characteristic (writing down pointless accounts of their boring lives) and something which normal people see as a social characteristic (having friends). I refuted your analogy by way of an insulting dismissal of the connection. I could just as easily have said "Bloggers aren't funny" to achieve the same effect.
Reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, is it?
Yes, it is, actually. Do you have a strong suit?
TWW
In other words: they don't care.
I'd be very disappointed if such an obvious and shallow question made the cut, displacing what might be a more interesting question.
Yet, it strikes at the very heart of why so many people despise MS: they don't give a damn about working with other people, even those with no commercial axe to grind, not even with their own users. Why?
On the PNG issue, use AlphaImageLoader. Works like a charm.
As a workaround, it's pretty good and I use it but it fails in some cases where CSS is included from other links, to say nothing of how tiresome it can be in situations where images are read dynamically without knowing their exact dimensions (eg: I did a site where images were uploaded and fitted into a 150x150 box. I did not know in advance if they would be portrait or landscape, but I didn't need to know until IE was reading the page).
Regardless, it's obviously nonsense to need such cruft just to display a standard image format, particularly one as useful as PNG24.
TWW
Which is?
TWW
That wasn't trolling: that was insulting. There's a (slight) difference.
TWW
Not loaded in the normal sense: after all this time it can only be one or the other. IE has been patched to bejesus for security reasons, so it's not like they couldn't put these into one of those fixes. SO, they must either not care or can't get it to work for some odd internal reason.
TWW
TWW
TWW
Do bloggers have friends? No. So it's not the same thing at all.
TWW