The government's tax made up about 30% of the total charge. Like I said, the total charge was half the price of the goods thanks to the "processing fee" that the postal service charges.
The big 4 labels ALL decided to pull the plug at the same time?
The way I understood things, there were never any plugs to pull. They didn't have the agreements in place that they claimed at launch. The claim of future iPod support when they'd based the whole system off WMA DRM should have tipped people off that perhaps there was less to Qtrax than met the eye.
The postal service does do that sometimes, at least for international post. When your item is just above the customs limit for duty, as my wife's birthday present from her parents was last year, you can end up paying half the value of the goods again in tax, duty and extortionate "processing fees".
Some iPods may have a media accelerator in them with hardware support for WMA that is not used by the software. This has no bearing on whether all iPods are perfectly capable of decoding WMA in software.
I'm not sure about it being a more fancy restaurant than that. Having worked in a cheaper Japanese restaurant, its more likely that all that was made fresh in the restaurant was miso soup, rice, and stock for the udon, soba etc. The pizza was likely bought in prepared and frozen, defrosted and toasted on demand (the restaurant where I worked didn't do pizza, but there were many other things on the menu that worked like that). That is the real reason why they can't offer variation. In a more expensive restaurant, or a speciality pizza restaurant where the pizza is made fresh, of course they'll bend to your requirements.
Getting WMA to play on the iPod would require a very sophisticated firmware change, and only the classic iPods are known to have WMA capable hardware. The Touch/iPhone likely only has hardware support for H.264.
H.264 is a video codec. WMA is an audio codec, which requires much less processor power to decode. I suspect that all iPods have plenty of processor power to do a software decode of WMA files, even with DRM thrown into the mix. Media acceleration is a recent thing for Windows Mobile PDAs (which all support WMA), and mostly is only required for the more heavily compressed video codecs.
I wish that was the default. I normally only use the cache when a server with interesting looking results is not responding. It's annoying when some script, css or image on the page stops the cache version from loading as well.
It was a poor analogy anyway. The equivalent would be Linus Torvolds deciding to release an "updated" version of the GPL v2.0 after RMS's death, citing the fact that Bill Gates had influenced Eben Moglen to insert subversive clauses into the original behind RMS's back.
People code their web pages to IE6, because that's what the vast majority of the userbase has.
IE6 has somewhere between 30% and 40% of the userbase. That's not a vast majority, and by the time IE8 comes out, it will have shrunken into insignificance.
If IE8 renders the page differently than IE6/7, even if it does so in a more standards compliant way, it is still going to make their pages appear incorrect, and they have no one on staff with the knowledge or ability to fix it.
Their pages appear incorrect for over half of webusers already, as no browser has more than 50% share if you split IE7 and IE6 (which is fair, since they already render significantly differently). Even if they managed to render consistently between IE6 and IE7, those browsers only account for 75% of the web browsing population, so if they haven't heard from the other 25% by now, then their site probably doesn't break too badly in a more standards compliant browser, and they have nothing to fear from IE8.
Well, if standards compliance is going to break web apps, then why not just implement the new tag as a compatibility mode flag to activate the IE6/7 quirks mode instead of doing it the other way around? App devs can just add that meta tag to their web apps, and the rest of the world can code to a standard that doesn't involve MS.
Yes, it really stinks that MS are trying to make the default behaviour for the web an undocumented render_like_IE6 mode. This is much worse than the backwards compatibility crap in the OOXML spec.
That's not true. Microsoft are using doctype switching, but rendering it differently than what they know they should according to that doctype. They then have this meta tag to override the incorrect rendering and render it properly.
If they did the same as every other browser, and tried their best to render every page according to its doctype, then developers would fix their pages, and the web would look the same on all modern browsers. By employing this hack, they give web developers a path to avoid updating their pages and as a bonus those pages will continue to display as designed with IE6. Of course those pages will never display properly on the competitions' browsers, a bonus from Microsoft's point of view. I see another EU antitrust investigation coming.
currently (after nearly 3 years) IE7 has barely overtaken IE6.
IE7 wasn't even publicly announced 3 years ago. It is a little over a year (October 2006) since it was released, and some markets still haven't had it pushed over Windows Update yet (Japan is due to have it pushed in about 3 weeks).
There's nothing here for WebKit to obey. If they see a strict DOCTYPE, they just do as they do today and render it strictly. If the page has a META tag specifying that the page is designed for IE8, then hopefully it'll be pretty close to what the page designer expects, since IE8 is supposed to be following the standards, just like WebKit does. If the page doesn't have that tag, then either IE8 will render it incorrectly, or the page is broken just like the few broken "designed for IE6" pages you see today.
1. Japan is very far ahead of us as far as cell-phone technology is concerned. They've had fully-functional video phones for at least a year or two, for example (as in, you can communicate via real-time video).
I'm in the UK, and my first video phone just wore out after two and a half years. Not that I ever used the gimmicky video-phone on it, but they'd been around for a while already before I got mine.
Would you consider a COBOL application that only ran on IBM System/38 hardware for your financial system? This isn't about a browser fetish, its about selecting software that is already obsolete for a new deployment. And given the speed at which Microsoft drops support for old products, and the rate of vulnerabilities being discovered, chosing an obsolete Microsoft platform is very foolish indeed.
Who made the purchasing decision? They should be sacked for purchasing a piece of software that relies on an already outdated OS component. If you were stuck with it from before, that's understandable, but you'd have had two years to pressure the supplier to update their software, and really should have been looking for alternatives by now.
Microsoft isn't giving people enough time to catch up with the latest version.
How long do you need? IE7 was released in August 2005 so Web developers could start testing and fixing their apps well ahead of the October 2006 release.
The funny thing is that I've had quite a number of pages that worked fine in IE6, worked fine in firefox (and others), but totally bombed in IE7.
These pages are probably detecting that you are using IE, and enabling ugly IE6 hacks (or more likely the sites are "designed for IE6", and only enable the standards compliance hacks when they detect Mozilla/Firefox and perhaps Safari and Opera. Nothing is perfect, but IE7 is miles better than IE6 when it comes to standards compliance and rendering CSS properly.
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The government's tax made up about 30% of the total charge. Like I said, the total charge was half the price of the goods thanks to the "processing fee" that the postal service charges.
The way I understood things, there were never any plugs to pull. They didn't have the agreements in place that they claimed at launch. The claim of future iPod support when they'd based the whole system off WMA DRM should have tipped people off that perhaps there was less to Qtrax than met the eye.
These guys are from England, who gives a shit?
The postal service does do that sometimes, at least for international post. When your item is just above the customs limit for duty, as my wife's birthday present from her parents was last year, you can end up paying half the value of the goods again in tax, duty and extortionate "processing fees".
Some iPods may have a media accelerator in them with hardware support for WMA that is not used by the software. This has no bearing on whether all iPods are perfectly capable of decoding WMA in software.
I'm not sure about it being a more fancy restaurant than that. Having worked in a cheaper Japanese restaurant, its more likely that all that was made fresh in the restaurant was miso soup, rice, and stock for the udon, soba etc. The pizza was likely bought in prepared and frozen, defrosted and toasted on demand (the restaurant where I worked didn't do pizza, but there were many other things on the menu that worked like that). That is the real reason why they can't offer variation. In a more expensive restaurant, or a speciality pizza restaurant where the pizza is made fresh, of course they'll bend to your requirements.
Doesn't the iPod require a specific option to be set to do this? Does the iPhone have the same option hidden deep within its configuration menu?
H.264 is a video codec. WMA is an audio codec, which requires much less processor power to decode. I suspect that all iPods have plenty of processor power to do a software decode of WMA files, even with DRM thrown into the mix. Media acceleration is a recent thing for Windows Mobile PDAs (which all support WMA), and mostly is only required for the more heavily compressed video codecs.
I wish that was the default. I normally only use the cache when a server with interesting looking results is not responding. It's annoying when some script, css or image on the page stops the cache version from loading as well.
If they pass through the original certificate, how do they decrypt the communications?
Jesus Christ as a prophet is Islam. Christians consider him to be the son of god.
It was a poor analogy anyway. The equivalent would be Linus Torvolds deciding to release an "updated" version of the GPL v2.0 after RMS's death, citing the fact that Bill Gates had influenced Eben Moglen to insert subversive clauses into the original behind RMS's back.
IE6 has somewhere between 30% and 40% of the userbase. That's not a vast majority, and by the time IE8 comes out, it will have shrunken into insignificance.
No, its worse. At least in OOXML you have to explicitly request the undocumented broken behaviour.
Their pages appear incorrect for over half of webusers already, as no browser has more than 50% share if you split IE7 and IE6 (which is fair, since they already render significantly differently). Even if they managed to render consistently between IE6 and IE7, those browsers only account for 75% of the web browsing population, so if they haven't heard from the other 25% by now, then their site probably doesn't break too badly in a more standards compliant browser, and they have nothing to fear from IE8.
Yes, it really stinks that MS are trying to make the default behaviour for the web an undocumented render_like_IE6 mode. This is much worse than the backwards compatibility crap in the OOXML spec.
That's not true. Microsoft are using doctype switching, but rendering it differently than what they know they should according to that doctype. They then have this meta tag to override the incorrect rendering and render it properly.
If they did the same as every other browser, and tried their best to render every page according to its doctype, then developers would fix their pages, and the web would look the same on all modern browsers. By employing this hack, they give web developers a path to avoid updating their pages and as a bonus those pages will continue to display as designed with IE6. Of course those pages will never display properly on the competitions' browsers, a bonus from Microsoft's point of view. I see another EU antitrust investigation coming.
IE7 wasn't even publicly announced 3 years ago. It is a little over a year (October 2006) since it was released, and some markets still haven't had it pushed over Windows Update yet (Japan is due to have it pushed in about 3 weeks).
There's nothing here for WebKit to obey. If they see a strict DOCTYPE, they just do as they do today and render it strictly. If the page has a META tag specifying that the page is designed for IE8, then hopefully it'll be pretty close to what the page designer expects, since IE8 is supposed to be following the standards, just like WebKit does. If the page doesn't have that tag, then either IE8 will render it incorrectly, or the page is broken just like the few broken "designed for IE6" pages you see today.
I'm in the UK, and my first video phone just wore out after two and a half years. Not that I ever used the gimmicky video-phone on it, but they'd been around for a while already before I got mine.
If you mean the fact that Microsoft still owns a substantial part of the code for OS/2, then you are probably right.
Would you consider a COBOL application that only ran on IBM System/38 hardware for your financial system? This isn't about a browser fetish, its about selecting software that is already obsolete for a new deployment. And given the speed at which Microsoft drops support for old products, and the rate of vulnerabilities being discovered, chosing an obsolete Microsoft platform is very foolish indeed.
Who made the purchasing decision? They should be sacked for purchasing a piece of software that relies on an already outdated OS component. If you were stuck with it from before, that's understandable, but you'd have had two years to pressure the supplier to update their software, and really should have been looking for alternatives by now.
How long do you need? IE7 was released in August 2005 so Web developers could start testing and fixing their apps well ahead of the October 2006 release.
These pages are probably detecting that you are using IE, and enabling ugly IE6 hacks (or more likely the sites are "designed for IE6", and only enable the standards compliance hacks when they detect Mozilla/Firefox and perhaps Safari and Opera. Nothing is perfect, but IE7 is miles better than IE6 when it comes to standards compliance and rendering CSS properly.