> I installed Google Desktop a while back. It's great for searching IMAP mail.
No it's not - it barely supports it. It can't even index mail that was already in your inbox before you installed it! I find it pretty useless. It's only indexed about 200 of my 9000 emails and there's nothing you can do to get it to index the rest (certainly not if you're using Thunderbird, but apparently it behaves better with Outlook Express). It only really works if you tell Thunderbird to make every single folder available offline (say goodbye to free RAM though because your Thunderbird will now munch RAM like cheese).
Why they can't add a simple plugin to index the mail while it's still ON THE SERVER I really don't know. This would make it really useful. It does this for Gmail but it can't seem to do it for IMAP.
As an aside, most people seem to assume Google Desktop is the best desktop search tool just because it has Google in the title, but pretty much every OTHER desktop search tool is better than Google's tool in my opinion and in most of the group-reviews that I've read. I recommend you try Copernic or even Windows Desktop Search. Both blow away Google Desktop Search in terms of features, useability and reliability.
> The Washington Post is reporting that Virgina has a proposed law
No, it doesn't say that at all. RTFA editors. It clearly says Virginia.
I can't work out if both the submittor and the editors are blind, or if that's supposed to be some extremely non-funny joke. How can you make the same typo twice? I guess I've missed something.
If you shine a 2000lm light through an LCD, 1-2% of the light goes through the BLACK areas. Assuming your eye somehow PERFECTLY adapts so you can see NOTHING in the room other than the image itself, the black levels are STILL crap. Even in a cinema the contrast ratio is still pretty bad. You can easily see light in the black areas very easily. You're obviously not very observant.
> I'm having a hard time seeing why anyone who wants a > big display would ever purchase anything other than a projector.
Because most people also use their TVs in the DAY or with lights on and projectors are absolutely crap in the daytime. The contrast ratio falls to next to nothing if there's any light in the room whatsoever.
The darkest black a projector can display is the black that you see when you look at a WHITE wall. Look at a nearby white wall NOW and decide for yourself if that's an acceptable BLACK level. If LCDs or Plasmas had a black level that bad, NOBODY would buy them and we'd all still be using CRT screens. The ONLY advantage of a projector is it's picture size, but the vast majority of people aren't prepared to cope with all the drawbacks just to get a bigger (washed out) picture.
Also, projectors are very difficult to site in the average living room. They need to go at the opposite end of the room to all your AV kit and preferably high up on a wall or ceiling. You either have to move all your AV kit to the back of the room and fire your remote controls backwards, or run a signal cable the whole distance of your living room to feed the projector.
They're great if all you want is a big picture in cinema-like blackout conditions, but they're hardly practical for the average family who needs to install it in a room with windows.
I had this idea for a secure keyboard. You could make a keyboard (or adapter dongle) which is capable of encrypting each character you type with a public key (PGP style). Once you browse to a secure site that supports it, a browser plugin would send your keyboard the public key and the keyboard would then encrypt everything you type using that key and the browser will send the result directly back to the website. You'd have to use a protocol that lets you detect a man in the middle attack (and I'm sure they must exist).
There's probably some massive flaw with this idea that I haven't thought of?:)
Looking at the picture in the article, it looks like they're planning to put 100 millions CDs in orbit to reflect the light. If so, I think I have enough AOL CDs in my drawer for the mission to go ahead right now.
The human eye and cognition is MORE sensitive to moving objects than still ones. That's why lights on emergency vehicles are made to flash or rotate rather than just being static - despite the fact that this means you see the lights for less time overall. This boomerang like plane wizzing around in the sky will be far more likely to catch your attention than a conventional plane moving very slowly across your field of view. This is quite apparent from the demo videos.
They are trying to make the plane blur in the sky so you can't see it, but the demo model spins FAR FAR too slowly for this effect to work. To make it truely blur so you can't see it, it would have to spin at several thousand RPM, which would make controlling it and taking pictures from it, totally impossible. It would also use up far too much power if it span this fast to be able to fly for any useful length of time.
A better approach would surely be to make a UAV which can fly higher and thus is smaller and slower in your field of view. Even if you do see it, you might not be able to tell what it is and you will stand little chance of shooting it down without expensive weaponry. Keeping it slow and quiet is probably more important than trying to blur it.
> To my knowledge most text-image CAPTCHAs don't defeat sophisticated OCR
Yes but 99.9% of people are NOT going to shell out hundreds of dollars for "sophisticated" OCR package just for their e-mail client or mail server. They'll use a cheap or free one like GOCR. The only people that might use expensive OCR packages are ASPs like messagelabs.com or BrightMail.
I don't know if you actually USED any free/cheap OCR software recently but a couple I've used are easily defeated by non standard fonts and lightly patterned backgrounds. For example, you can't usually OCR something that's been faxed, or uses brush script as it's font or has a speckled background. One of the ones I used couldn't even cope with COLOR images FFS (even if they were color scans of B/W documents! It's not exactly CAPTCHA busting technology if a speckled or colored background can completely thwarte it.
I've received that exact spam 5 times today already.:(
In general, I'm finding SpamAssassin becoming ever less effective at removing spam from my mailbox. I get approximately 200 spams a day and at least 20 or so end up in my inbox rather than my spam folder. I've even considered signing up to a spam filtering service, but I can't find one that's any good AND supports IMAP accounts.
I really hope they finish this OCR plugin soon as I think this will be the only solution.
However I predict that about a week after it's released, all spammers will obfuscate text in the same way that CAPTCHA tests do. You don't have to distort letters very much before OCR completely stops working. Most of the open-source ones don't even work if you have a lightly patterned background image - so at the very least, some kind of pre-filtering would need to take place.
I think the research should concentrate on analysing the blocks of text that's always immediately below the image to fool Bayesian filters. More often than not, the words do not form sentences, or the sentences are taken from different sources and therefore have unrealistic topic variances. There must be a way of automatically deducing that a paragraph which appears to be about vegetable growing AND photocopier servicing is probably just SPAM text.
In the meantime, is it possible to get SpamAssassin to give a high score to messages which contain a single EMBEDDED image and a big paragraph of text at the bottom? Or in fact ANY other SpamAssassin rules or add-ons which significantly increase the effectiveness for messages like this?
> locks have never been enough to keep thieves out.
I think most high security prisons would disagree with you. Usually thieves only get out because of human error. A decent house with double glazing and decent locks is WAY less likely to get broken into than a less secure house. That's why your insurance is much cheaper if you have both of those. OK it's not 100%, but a secure house with an alarm is a pretty unattractive target.
> What is generally enough to keep thieves out is a) basic human morality, and b) the law.
Except thieves don't give a shit about either of those things so it isn't "generally enough to keep thieves out" at all.
Who cares? The CSS in the Acid 2 test is irrelevent to the vast majority of web developers - but for some reason, loads of slashdot readers who aren't full time web-devs and know very little about real-world website developement seem to think that passing Acid 2 is in some way important. Not even FireFox 1.5 supports it.
> Just buy a network storage device with a RAID and keep it maintained
Yeah and when someone steals it? Or if it burns or gets wet? It's only designed to prevent against disk failures in (semi)critical systems. It's no use at all for long term backup of data
> One solution to the noise problem is to get a non-CRT television set (plasma, LCD, DLP, etc.).
Not necessarily. My LCD TV in my bedroom makes way more high pitched noise at far greater volume than my normal CRT ever did. It depends which one you buy. I eventually realised it was just the power supply so I installed that in the loft/roofspace and wall-mounted the TV. Problem solved.
> "Lack of new exciting software"? Try xgl/compiz!
It's a f***ing window manager. If you think a window manager is exciting then you're a bit of a loser - even by Slashdot geek standards. Do you really think that 99.9% of people think that a window manager is exciting new software?
If you people with the mod points (yes you) also think window managers are exiting, then please mod me down and I'll shut up and find a new website to read over my lunch hour.
We seem to be going backwards. About 10 years ago, I had a vesa local bus HDD controller which took SIMMS to use as cache. You could shove up to 32mb on it and it would remain powered even when the system was shut down. This meant you could load DOS and even Windows 3.11 entirely from the disk cache after rebooting. As far as I'm aware, there are no SATA controllers which can take DIMMS or similar to use as a large cache. PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong.
Why doesn't this exist today? I think it was a really good idea. The closest thing I've found is Gigabyte's iRam, but this isn't really the same thing - as it's purely a RAM drive and doesn't persist to hard disk.
I think that slow booting is the one of the biggest annoyances of computers and the primary reason many people never turn off their machines in an office environment (hiberating on XP rarely works reliably in my experience - usually due to driver issues not reinitialising the hardware properly rather than there being any problem with XP itself).
If people's machines booted to the desktop in under 10 seconds, far more people would turn them off at the end of the day and worldwide power consumption would be significantly reduced.
Here in the UK, it's already the equivalent of $7 per US gallon (97p/litre) or more. You guys don't know how good you've got it.
Mind you, the average "yank tank" probably uses more than double the fuel of the average European car. I think our average engine size is still under 1.6 litres in the UK.
> The average European engine size is somewhere around 2l
I seriously doubt it's even as high as that. Most cars in Europe are around 1.4 or 1.6 litre. 2.0 litres is only common on largish exec cars like BMWs. A lot of people drive compact city cars which are typically 1.0 or less (eg Daewoo Matiz, Smart Car).
One thing I've noticed that if you drive a really heavy American car such as a Ford Taurus, it performs REALLY badly with an engine close to double the size and twice the fuel consumption of a similar sized European car such as a Ford Mondeo (OK, it's a little smaller, but not a huge amount). Why don't they engineer their cars to be as light as a European or Japanese built car? Then they wouldn't NEED such ridiculous engine sizes.
The 3 litre V6 Taurus I drove was MUCH slower than my 2 litre Ford Focus and handled incredibly badly while turning or stopping (I nearly hit a toll booth barrier the first time I drove a US car, because I didn't realise I needed to give 2 weeks notice in writing for it to stop).
Thankfully in most parts of the US, the yanks seem to take things much more slowly and seem a lot more chilled while driving, so the poor braking performance and handling isn't as much of a problem as it would be if you drove around in Europe. Besides, the roads are mostly wide, straight and long and I only saw about 2 roundabouts in 2000 miles of driving around the west, compared with the several hundred you'd encounter if you did the same mileage in the UK for example.
I'm a web developer and the main reason I don't use CSS exclusively isn't because of poor browser support or rendering bugs, but CSS itself.
CSS is really really annoying. Sometimes you just need to use tables because even with a good standards compliant browser like Safari, it's just not possible to do what you want with CSS.
Things which use to be REALLY easy with tables in quirks mode (like a 3 column layout, 100% high with a header and footer) are almost impossible to implement using CSS. There are a multitude of websites giving example or template layouts in CSS. Some of these show 100 odd lines of CSS with loads of exceptions for each browser. The same thing can often be achieved with a single table in about 8 lines of code.
I mean just look at the CSS for slashdot - there are pages and pages of it and loads of browser exceptions. It had none of this complexity when it was a basic tables based site. They've just used CSS whereever possible for the sake of it.
The box model is really really annoying. If I tell something to be 200px wide, then it should be 200px wide all the time. However in most standards compliant browsers, it will be wider than 200px because it adds the margins and borders to the outside of it's own width. That makes it very difficult to work with as you have to subtract all those dimensions from the width you're giving it and need to alter about a million dimensions everytime you want to make something a bit wider.
>> As far as the rendering looking the same as IE 6, I would say you're probably full of crap.
> Try it yourself. Just write up a XHTML definition and a few CSS2 styles.
I've tried it and it seems to work OK for me. Why not post a URL of the page that you're having problems with?
In my experience, the vast majority of people moaning about how IE7 is very broken and behaves just like IE6 simply don't understand DOCTYPES and are trying to get the browser to be standard's compliant in QUIRKS mode (it's called that for a good reason).
If there's a bug - report it using the bug reporting tool instead of moaning about it on slashdot. It's beta remember.
I wouldn't even consider XP to be bloatware. What is in XP that shouldn't be there? I think I've used pretty much all the features in XP. If they get used - they are not bloat.
Bloat is including a whole lot of crap that nobody will use. Bloat is things like hundreds of mb of source code in a distribution intended for normal users. Bloat is installing 8 different text editors and 4 different web browsers just to give you a choice (instead of giving you ONE, which you can then use to download the one you really want).
As far as I've seen so far, Windows XP and below have never been bloated in any way (I have NOT looked at Vista so I allow for that being different - but I bet the final release is smaller than the beta). It does not have lots of programs or features of significant size that the vast majority of people will not use. It's fairly slim, fast, and boots way faster than most other operating systems I've used (especially Linux - which seems to take about a minute to boot on my machine compared to the 15 seconds for XP).
> Where can I get one of these 3.2GB CDs of which you speak?
Eh?
You can't. But so far all of MS's operating systems have fitted on a normal 640mb CD. (no idea about Vista because I haven't tried it - and you can't go on the beta as it includes loads of extra crap that won't be in the final release).
I've always wondered... Where do you actually find metals? It's not like I keep digging up bits of iron or copper whenever I'm out in the garden - yet there seems to be a near limitless supply of iron and copper. Are they located in specific countries? I know the UK has a large steel industry so we must have a fair bit of iron somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell are you talking about? It runs Linux you idiot (ever heard of that?).
> Clearly, not only is the virus "on the hard drive", but it actually gets executed.
Says WHO? Now you're just making stuff up.
> I installed Google Desktop a while back. It's great for searching IMAP mail.
No it's not - it barely supports it. It can't even index mail that was already in your inbox before you installed it! I find it pretty useless. It's only indexed about 200 of my 9000 emails and there's nothing you can do to get it to index the rest (certainly not if you're using Thunderbird, but apparently it behaves better with Outlook Express). It only really works if you tell Thunderbird to make every single folder available offline (say goodbye to free RAM though because your Thunderbird will now munch RAM like cheese).
Why they can't add a simple plugin to index the mail while it's still ON THE SERVER I really don't know. This would make it really useful. It does this for Gmail but it can't seem to do it for IMAP.
As an aside, most people seem to assume Google Desktop is the best desktop search tool just because it has Google in the title, but pretty much every OTHER desktop search tool is better than Google's tool in my opinion and in most of the group-reviews that I've read. I recommend you try Copernic or even Windows Desktop Search. Both blow away Google Desktop Search in terms of features, useability and reliability.
> The Washington Post is reporting that Virgina has a proposed law
No, it doesn't say that at all. RTFA editors. It clearly says Virginia.
I can't work out if both the submittor and the editors are blind, or if that's supposed to be some extremely non-funny joke. How can you make the same typo twice? I guess I've missed something.
If you shine a 2000lm light through an LCD, 1-2% of the light goes through the BLACK areas. Assuming your eye somehow PERFECTLY adapts so you can see NOTHING in the room other than the image itself, the black levels are STILL crap. Even in a cinema the contrast ratio is still pretty bad. You can easily see light in the black areas very easily. You're obviously not very observant.
> I'm having a hard time seeing why anyone who wants a
> big display would ever purchase anything other than a projector.
Because most people also use their TVs in the DAY or with lights on and projectors are absolutely crap in the daytime. The contrast ratio falls to next to nothing if there's any light in the room whatsoever.
The darkest black a projector can display is the black that you see when you look at a WHITE wall. Look at a nearby white wall NOW and decide for yourself if that's an acceptable BLACK level. If LCDs or Plasmas had a black level that bad, NOBODY would buy them and we'd all still be using CRT screens. The ONLY advantage of a projector is it's picture size, but the vast majority of people aren't prepared to cope with all the drawbacks just to get a bigger (washed out) picture.
Also, projectors are very difficult to site in the average living room. They need to go at the opposite end of the room to all your AV kit and preferably high up on a wall or ceiling. You either have to move all your AV kit to the back of the room and fire your remote controls backwards, or run a signal cable the whole distance of your living room to feed the projector.
They're great if all you want is a big picture in cinema-like blackout conditions, but they're hardly practical for the average family who needs to install it in a room with windows.
I had this idea for a secure keyboard. You could make a keyboard (or adapter dongle) which is capable of encrypting each character you type with a public key (PGP style). Once you browse to a secure site that supports it, a browser plugin would send your keyboard the public key and the keyboard would then encrypt everything you type using that key and the browser will send the result directly back to the website. You'd have to use a protocol that lets you detect a man in the middle attack (and I'm sure they must exist).
:)
There's probably some massive flaw with this idea that I haven't thought of?
Looking at the picture in the article, it looks like they're planning to put 100 millions CDs in orbit to reflect the light.
If so, I think I have enough AOL CDs in my drawer for the mission to go ahead right now.
I don't see how this is going to work.
The human eye and cognition is MORE sensitive to moving objects than still ones. That's why lights on emergency vehicles are made to flash or rotate rather than just being static - despite the fact that this means you see the lights for less time overall. This boomerang like plane wizzing around in the sky will be far more likely to catch your attention than a conventional plane moving very slowly across your field of view. This is quite apparent from the demo videos.
They are trying to make the plane blur in the sky so you can't see it, but the demo model spins FAR FAR too slowly for this effect to work. To make it truely blur so you can't see it, it would have to spin at several thousand RPM, which would make controlling it and taking pictures from it, totally impossible. It would also use up far too much power if it span this fast to be able to fly for any useful length of time.
A better approach would surely be to make a UAV which can fly higher and thus is smaller and slower in your field of view. Even if you do see it, you might not be able to tell what it is and you will stand little chance of shooting it down without expensive weaponry. Keeping it slow and quiet is probably more important than trying to blur it.
SpamArrest.com is what you're looking for then. It does pretty much exactly that. Unfortunatly it's not free.
> To my knowledge most text-image CAPTCHAs don't defeat sophisticated OCR
Yes but 99.9% of people are NOT going to shell out hundreds of dollars for "sophisticated" OCR package just for their e-mail client or mail server. They'll use a cheap or free one like GOCR. The only people that might use expensive OCR packages are ASPs like messagelabs.com or BrightMail.
I don't know if you actually USED any free/cheap OCR software recently but a couple I've used are easily defeated by non standard fonts and lightly patterned backgrounds. For example, you can't usually OCR something that's been faxed, or uses brush script as it's font or has a speckled background. One of the ones I used couldn't even cope with COLOR images FFS (even if they were color scans of B/W documents! It's not exactly CAPTCHA busting technology if a speckled or colored background can completely thwarte it.
I've received that exact spam 5 times today already. :(
In general, I'm finding SpamAssassin becoming ever less effective at removing spam from my mailbox. I get approximately 200 spams a day and at least 20 or so end up in my inbox rather than my spam folder. I've even considered signing up to a spam filtering service, but I can't find one that's any good AND supports IMAP accounts.
I really hope they finish this OCR plugin soon as I think this will be the only solution.
However I predict that about a week after it's released, all spammers will obfuscate text in the same way that CAPTCHA tests do. You don't have to distort letters very much before OCR completely stops working. Most of the open-source ones don't even work if you have a lightly patterned background image - so at the very least, some kind of pre-filtering would need to take place.
I think the research should concentrate on analysing the blocks of text that's always immediately below the image to fool Bayesian filters. More often than not, the words do not form sentences, or the sentences are taken from different sources and therefore have unrealistic topic variances. There must be a way of automatically deducing that a paragraph which appears to be about vegetable growing AND photocopier servicing is probably just SPAM text.
In the meantime, is it possible to get SpamAssassin to give a high score to messages which contain a single EMBEDDED image and a big paragraph of text at the bottom? Or in fact ANY other SpamAssassin rules or add-ons which significantly increase the effectiveness for messages like this?
> locks have never been enough to keep thieves out.
I think most high security prisons would disagree with you. Usually thieves only get out because of human error.
A decent house with double glazing and decent locks is WAY less likely to get broken into than a less secure house. That's why your insurance is much cheaper if you have both of those. OK it's not 100%, but a secure house with an alarm is a pretty unattractive target.
> What is generally enough to keep thieves out is a) basic human morality, and b) the law.
Except thieves don't give a shit about either of those things so it isn't "generally enough to keep thieves out" at all.
Who cares? The CSS in the Acid 2 test is irrelevent to the vast majority of web developers - but for some reason, loads of slashdot readers who aren't full time web-devs and know very little about real-world website developement seem to think that passing Acid 2 is in some way important. Not even FireFox 1.5 supports it.
> Just buy a network storage device with a RAID and keep it maintained
Yeah and when someone steals it? Or if it burns or gets wet? It's only designed to prevent against disk failures in (semi)critical systems. It's no use at all for long term backup of data
> One solution to the noise problem is to get a non-CRT television set (plasma, LCD, DLP, etc.).
Not necessarily. My LCD TV in my bedroom makes way more high pitched noise at far greater volume than my normal CRT ever did. It depends which one you buy. I eventually realised it was just the power supply so I installed that in the loft/roofspace and wall-mounted the TV. Problem solved.
> "Lack of new exciting software"? Try xgl/compiz!
It's a f***ing window manager. If you think a window manager is exciting then you're a bit of a loser - even by Slashdot geek standards. Do you really think that 99.9% of people think that a window manager is exciting new software?
If you people with the mod points (yes you) also think window managers are exiting, then please mod me down and I'll shut up and find a new website to read over my lunch hour.
We seem to be going backwards. About 10 years ago, I had a vesa local bus HDD controller which took SIMMS to use as cache. You could shove up to 32mb on it and it would remain powered even when the system was shut down. This meant you could load DOS and even Windows 3.11 entirely from the disk cache after rebooting. As far as I'm aware, there are no SATA controllers which can take DIMMS or similar to use as a large cache. PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong.
Why doesn't this exist today? I think it was a really good idea. The closest thing I've found is Gigabyte's iRam, but this isn't really the same thing - as it's purely a RAM drive and doesn't persist to hard disk.
I think that slow booting is the one of the biggest annoyances of computers and the primary reason many people never turn off their machines in an office environment (hiberating on XP rarely works reliably in my experience - usually due to driver issues not reinitialising the hardware properly rather than there being any problem with XP itself).
If people's machines booted to the desktop in under 10 seconds, far more people would turn them off at the end of the day and worldwide power consumption would be significantly reduced.
$5/gal gas? Wow that's cheap!
Here in the UK, it's already the equivalent of $7 per US gallon (97p/litre) or more. You guys don't know how good you've got it.
Mind you, the average "yank tank" probably uses more than double the fuel of the average European car. I think our average engine size is still under 1.6 litres in the UK.
> The average European engine size is somewhere around 2l
I seriously doubt it's even as high as that. Most cars in Europe are around 1.4 or 1.6 litre. 2.0 litres is only common on largish exec cars like BMWs. A lot of people drive compact city cars which are typically 1.0 or less (eg Daewoo Matiz, Smart Car).
One thing I've noticed that if you drive a really heavy American car such as a Ford Taurus, it performs REALLY badly with an engine close to double the size and twice the fuel consumption of a similar sized European car such as a Ford Mondeo (OK, it's a little smaller, but not a huge amount). Why don't they engineer their cars to be as light as a European or Japanese built car? Then they wouldn't NEED such ridiculous engine sizes.
The 3 litre V6 Taurus I drove was MUCH slower than my 2 litre Ford Focus and handled incredibly badly while turning or stopping (I nearly hit a toll booth barrier the first time I drove a US car, because I didn't realise I needed to give 2 weeks notice in writing for it to stop).
Thankfully in most parts of the US, the yanks seem to take things much more slowly and seem a lot more chilled while driving, so the poor braking performance and handling isn't as much of a problem as it would be if you drove around in Europe. Besides, the roads are mostly wide, straight and long and I only saw about 2 roundabouts in 2000 miles of driving around the west, compared with the several hundred you'd encounter if you did the same mileage in the UK for example.
I'm a web developer and the main reason I don't use CSS exclusively isn't because of poor browser support or rendering bugs, but CSS itself.
CSS is really really annoying. Sometimes you just need to use tables because even with a good standards compliant browser like Safari, it's just not possible to do what you want with CSS.
Things which use to be REALLY easy with tables in quirks mode (like a 3 column layout, 100% high with a header and footer) are almost impossible to implement using CSS. There are a multitude of websites giving example or template layouts in CSS. Some of these show 100 odd lines of CSS with loads of exceptions for each browser. The same thing can often be achieved with a single table in about 8 lines of code.
I mean just look at the CSS for slashdot - there are pages and pages of it and loads of browser exceptions. It had none of this complexity when it was a basic tables based site. They've just used CSS whereever possible for the sake of it.
The box model is really really annoying. If I tell something to be 200px wide, then it should be 200px wide all the time. However in most standards compliant browsers, it will be wider than 200px because it adds the margins and borders to the outside of it's own width. That makes it very difficult to work with as you have to subtract all those dimensions from the width you're giving it and need to alter about a million dimensions everytime you want to make something a bit wider.
CSS has a long way to go in my opinion.
>> As far as the rendering looking the same as IE 6, I would say you're probably full of crap.
> Try it yourself. Just write up a XHTML definition and a few CSS2 styles.
I've tried it and it seems to work OK for me. Why not post a URL of the page that you're having problems with?
In my experience, the vast majority of people moaning about how IE7 is very broken and behaves just like IE6 simply don't understand DOCTYPES and are trying to get the browser to be standard's compliant in QUIRKS mode (it's called that for a good reason).
If there's a bug - report it using the bug reporting tool instead of moaning about it on slashdot. It's beta remember.
Er, he in NO WAY created the Internet.
I wouldn't even consider XP to be bloatware. What is in XP that shouldn't be there? I think I've used pretty much all the features in XP. If they get used - they are not bloat.
Bloat is including a whole lot of crap that nobody will use.
Bloat is things like hundreds of mb of source code in a distribution intended for normal users.
Bloat is installing 8 different text editors and 4 different web browsers just to give you a choice (instead of giving you ONE, which you can then use to download the one you really want).
As far as I've seen so far, Windows XP and below have never been bloated in any way (I have NOT looked at Vista so I allow for that being different - but I bet the final release is smaller than the beta). It does not have lots of programs or features of significant size that the vast majority of people will not use. It's fairly slim, fast, and boots way faster than most other operating systems I've used (especially Linux - which seems to take about a minute to boot on my machine compared to the 15 seconds for XP).
> Where can I get one of these 3.2GB CDs of which you speak?
Eh?
You can't. But so far all of MS's operating systems have fitted on a normal 640mb CD. (no idea about Vista because I haven't tried it - and you can't go on the beta as it includes loads of extra crap that won't be in the final release).
I've always wondered... Where do you actually find metals? It's not like I keep digging up bits of iron or copper whenever I'm out in the garden - yet there seems to be a near limitless supply of iron and copper. Are they located in specific countries? I know the UK has a large steel industry so we must have a fair bit of iron somewhere.