Bill Gates says he's frustrated by capitalism's shortcomings, but what he's identifying as capitalism isn't. There isn't a single truly capitalism economy anywhere on the planet. As for the notion that businesses should be directed to immolate themselves to benefit the collective... well, his so-called "creative capitalism" is altruism by force. Socialism. That's what he's advocating. I'm so fucking angry right now, I could spit. Ayn Rand, call your office. Friends of Global Progress, here we come.
Bill Gates, go to hell. And take the guilt trip you're trying to spread right along with you.
Yes, I do. But being able to do so still doesn't do anyone a bit of good when developing applications in which the style of elements needs to change often, and may have different initial states upon a page load. Unless you want to resend the style sheet with every request, too, which kind of defeats the supposedly bandwidth-saving utility of CSS in the first place.
Uh, no you won't get people doing that, because they're removing the style= attribute. (See a previous reply of mine to learn exactly how stupid I think that particular move is.)
Specifying class is _not_ an acceptable substitute for specifying a unique style to individual elements.
If I have 100 separate elements that all require separate styling, I now have to create a CSS that defines them all _and_ every possible style state they may happen to be in during the life of the application. Frankly, that's stupid.
For instance, if I have a single element that could be some combination of red or green, bold or italic, floated left or floated right, and 12 or 22 point text, I would have to draft 2^4 different styles that this element could be. If I want to do a simple dhtml color fade from black to white across all 256 greyscale shades, I'd need to draft 2^8 different styles to accomplish it. If I want this fade to happen in conjunction with the element being bold or italic, floated left or floated right, that's 2^10 styles I need to draft. Now multiply that by all the unique elements I may have in my application. Now imaging if I'm creating these elements on the fly dynamically. One, your style-sheet would be absolutely nuts and probably be about half a megabyte in size. Yeah, that's efficient.
This by itself nearly renders in-browser dhtml applications (ajax or no) non-complaint and broken.
Somebody really needs to wrench the HTML spec out of the hands of the W3C and place it into the hands of somebody who spends a little time on other side of the ivory towers.
It's a really nice paper and all, but it avoids one particular point:
(And I'm assuming here, I just speed-skimmed through it.)
In what _objective_ universe does the _virtual_ universe reside? It can't be virtual turtles all the way down. So even if we happen to sit in a virtual universe, there's got to be an objective universe at the bottom of the pile.
Also, who says that our laws of information processing would hold true outside of our virtual universe? After all, they're based only on information processing within the realm of the universe in which we live.
*shrug* Me, I just hope that if this is a virtual universe, it is Strongly Typed.
"Maximum Compatibility" can and will occur regardless of whether or not the media types are "patent-free".
"Maximum Compatibility" will likely happen because of the marketplace -- people will demand certain features in their browsers, and if they can't get them from one, they'll move to another.
"Patent-free" can only happen in-spite of the marketplace, by imposing it, which is exactly the fast one people tried to pull here. Never mind that there's no good reason to impose it, just hippie-crunch-bar commun/social/altru-ist political sentiment injection (because god forbid innovators be "allowed" to profit from their efforts). "Patent-free" imposition will, in time, hurt more than it helps because that's all that self-sacrifice at gunpoint ever does.
With respect to HTML, which is a language for describing how to mark up hypertext, it doesn't make sense for the HTML spec to specify _anything_ outside of HTML, such as what formats may/should/must/etc be embedded inside of it. (And no, it shouldn't specify GIF or JPEG or PNG, for images, either.)
The object tag can handle video well enough. Hell, the object tag could handle images, too, and greatly simply things. (Then, the img, video and audio tags could _all_ be merely suggestive markup around object tags.)
As far as the "proprietary" and "self-serving" corporations go, look, if everyone and their brother switches to Ogg tomorrow, they'll play ball because it's in their interest to do so.
I doubt they will, as things like flv and flash video players have become the defacto standard, in part because flash is more or less ubiquitous and because the embedding of video inside of your own player gives you the ability to decide how the content is ultimately going to look inside of the browser to a greater level of certainty than you would by relying on the browser to server up your content. The "audio" and "video" tags will take us back to the days of writing in certain HTML for certain browsers because one draws it one way and one draws it another. That doesn't sound like progress to me. (It's more likely that developers will ignore the audio and video tags altogether and continue using Flash or whatever next great thing comes down the pike [which, btw, HTML5's tags won't be able to account for and will lag behind, whereas the object tag handles all of those nicely.] to display video.)
No, it doesn't make perfect sense. What makes better sense is the way that the object tag allows third party flash video players to be happily embedded into an HTML document currently -- the object tag frees folks up to be innovative and do things in the browser (like display audio and video) that the spec doesn't/can't account for and is better off NOT accounting for on its own; nobody needs a bloated spec to do anything and everything.
Many sites that host video now use flv embedded in a flash-based player, which is embedded using the object tag. It would seem most people are content with hoping that Flash is available on their platform, and in most cases, it is. Except my Blackberry phone, which kind of annoys me. The nice thing about embedding video this way (and I don't think it's likely to change) is that your player can be independently specified/styled to match the experience that is your web site, and people aren't bitching about how "my web browser's video player sucks!"
Were I making the decision, the audio and video tags would be purely "suggestive" markup with little or no attributes used around object (and possibly a href) tags to suggest to the browser that what's contained in the child object is video or audio. You can use the object tag to attempt to embed your content any way (and in any format) you like, and the browser still knows that it's supposed to try to display it as video, audio, or something else. To me, that would seem a more useful, flexible and reasonable solution without injecting politics into the spec, as folks seemed to be trying to do with Ogg, or forcing browser makers to all build their own embedded (and likely to be hated) video and audio players.
Forgive my ignorance, I've not been following the topic at all, but why would one even consider it a good thing to have specific support for one format -- free-as-in-beer-speech-whathaveyou -- embedded in HTML in the first place? Aside from the usual not very good hippie-mountain-crunch commun/social/altru-istic reasons, especially when there is likely to be an encoding-agnostic means to attempt to embed objects into HTML? (I'm assuming here, because I can't imagine something like the OBJECT tag going away any time soon, right?)
Vachss wrote about just this situation, way back in 2000 in his novel, Dead and Gone:
Lune tapped a few keys, pointed an immaculate fingernail at his computer screen. "You know what that is?" he asked me, as what looked like a string of auction bids popped into focus.
"A bunch of dope dealers talking in code?"
"No. It's the IRS."
"Huh? I don't get it."
"It's a pattern," he said, spinning on his chair to face me. "You know all this talk about America's 'underground cash economy'?"
"It's not just talk."
"Exactly! It's authenticated fact. And that's where the real money is. Not in cocaine cartels or topless clubs; it's in flea markets, garage sales, all the 'hobbyist' stuff that's being trafficked back and forth every second."
"Flea markets? How much could--?"
"You have to watch the patterns," he said, reciting his mantra.
He turned back to the screen, beckoning me to look over his shoulder. "Look! Here's one, right there on the screen. He's selling a signed copy of a first-edition book by--Martha Grimes. See it?"
"Sure. The highest bidder is--forty-five bucks so far, right?"
"Right. And what this guy--I mean the seller, okay?--what he did was, he bought maybe twenty copies of that book when it was remaindered. You know, you've seen the tables where they sell them in bookstores, haven't you?"
"Yeah," I said, knowing that everybody pays, and that the currency I needed to pay Lune's tolls was patience.
"First, you have to understand that all books get remaindered. It doesn't matter if they sell a million copies, there's always some left over. Well, the publisher isn't going to throw them away, so they sell them, in bulk, very cheaply. A book you spent twenty-five dollars on when it was new, a couple of years later, you'll see it for a dollar ninety-eight."
"Yeah--?"
"Now the guy has all these books, so he waits until this Martha Grimes is doing a book-signing someplace. Then he ambushes her, gets her to sign as many copies as he can get away with. Some writers will just do it, some will limit the number of copies. But this--merchant, his story is always what a huge fan he is and how he's going to give the books away to all his friends as Christmas gifts or for their birthdays or something. See?"
"I--guess so. But --" "Look at the pattern, Burke. Come on. This guy buys a book for, say, less than two dollars. He gets it signed. Then he sells it for forty-five dollars on this Internet auction site. Do you think, for one single solitary second, that he declares that profit as income?"
"Of course not."
"Good. Now multiply by--oh, ten million transactions per year."
"Are you serious?"
Not a brilliant question to ask Lune. "Come closer," he said, pulling back from the screen so I could do it. "Take a look as I scroll through for you. See how every single seller and every single buyer has to provide information just to participate? Their e-mail, a credit card, a street address--a ton of authentic data. What you see here is the clearest, cleanest audit trail that any IRS agent could ever dream of."
Anyone with a soldering iron and a little time on their hands would likely be able to bypass this. You've got to have a battery somewhere, and you've got to have leads to that battery.
Yeah, it means cracking open the device, but if you've stolen it, there's a good chance you're not going to care all that much about some pry marking on the case.
Why thank ya. (And if you wouldn't mind actually _giving_ me a +1, that'd be great, because someone already modded me -1/Overrated. *grin*)
But just a clarification, Atlas Shrugged really wasn't Rand's nightmare. Just the opposite: it was more ideal vision of _real_ moral humanity and the rather _big_ difference between them and a bunch of cannibals. Rand wrote more to praise the roses than to damn the weeds. No doubt the world her antagonists chose rightly to abandon and watch destroy itself _was_ a nightmare world indeed, but frankly, Rand didn't write the novel as a warning to people who choose to live in such a world -- her effort would have been wasted. Rand chose instead to hold productive individuals up as examples of what real men (average men, _not_ heroes) really were: a means to their own ends, and not the means of others.
Bonus points to you for realizing that a goodly number of folks still think it's moral and just to make everybody else live in their nightmare. It's hard to ingest a news article or editorial these days without some aspect of the dying world of Atlas Shrugged leaping out at you from the content.
Google, c'mon. Nobody likes a billion-dollar cry-baby. Take Paris Hilton, for example. (Mom!!!?!)
It appears to me that Google is really stretching the definition of its "don't be evil" mission by playing the "pull" card and trying to get an already over-reaching government to bitchslap Microsoft on their behalf. Ayn Rand, call your office.
Google, if you've given up on trying to make it on your ability and have decided instead to play the looter's game, please issue a press release to that effect so that I can be properly and officially disappointed in you, and switch my IE and Mozilla over to MS Live search just for spite.
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates says he's frustrated by capitalism's shortcomings, but what he's identifying as capitalism isn't. There isn't a single truly capitalism economy anywhere on the planet. As for the notion that businesses should be directed to immolate themselves to benefit the collective... well, his so-called "creative capitalism" is altruism by force. Socialism. That's what he's advocating. I'm so fucking angry right now, I could spit. Ayn Rand, call your office. Friends of Global Progress, here we come.
Bill Gates, go to hell. And take the guilt trip you're trying to spread right along with you.
Yes, I do. But being able to do so still doesn't do anyone a bit of good when developing applications in which the style of elements needs to change often, and may have different initial states upon a page load. Unless you want to resend the style sheet with every request, too, which kind of defeats the supposedly bandwidth-saving utility of CSS in the first place.
Uh, no you won't get people doing that, because they're removing the style= attribute. (See a previous reply of mine to learn exactly how stupid I think that particular move is.)
Specifying class is _not_ an acceptable substitute for specifying a unique style to individual elements.
If I have 100 separate elements that all require separate styling, I now have to create a CSS that defines them all _and_ every possible style state they may happen to be in during the life of the application. Frankly, that's stupid.
For instance, if I have a single element that could be some combination of red or green, bold or italic, floated left or floated right, and 12 or 22 point text, I would have to draft 2^4 different styles that this element could be. If I want to do a simple dhtml color fade from black to white across all 256 greyscale shades, I'd need to draft 2^8 different styles to accomplish it. If I want this fade to happen in conjunction with the element being bold or italic, floated left or floated right, that's 2^10 styles I need to draft. Now multiply that by all the unique elements I may have in my application. Now imaging if I'm creating these elements on the fly dynamically. One, your style-sheet would be absolutely nuts and probably be about half a megabyte in size. Yeah, that's efficient.
Fuck. Ing. Rid. I. Cul. Ous.
Don't keep your head down.
No more style attributes on any element.
*blink*
Idiocy. Abso-fucking-lute idiocy.
This by itself nearly renders in-browser dhtml applications (ajax or no) non-complaint and broken.
Somebody really needs to wrench the HTML spec out of the hands of the W3C and place it into the hands of somebody who spends a little time on other side of the ivory towers.
Black, then Gold, then clear sailing through to the end zone!
...at the '01 or '02 White House Press Corp dinner, at which he was speaking. He had suggested that airport security ask two questions:
1. "Are you going to blow up the plane?"
2. "Really?"
It's a really nice paper and all, but it avoids one particular point:
(And I'm assuming here, I just speed-skimmed through it.)
In what _objective_ universe does the _virtual_ universe reside? It can't be virtual turtles all the way down. So even if we happen to sit in a virtual universe, there's got to be an objective universe at the bottom of the pile.
Also, who says that our laws of information processing would hold true outside of our virtual universe? After all, they're based only on information processing within the realm of the universe in which we live.
*shrug* Me, I just hope that if this is a virtual universe, it is Strongly Typed.
A liberal is just a conservative who hasn't been mugged?
"Maximum Compatibility" can and will occur regardless of whether or not the media types are "patent-free".
"Maximum Compatibility" will likely happen because of the marketplace -- people will demand certain features in their browsers, and if they can't get them from one, they'll move to another.
"Patent-free" can only happen in-spite of the marketplace, by imposing it, which is exactly the fast one people tried to pull here. Never mind that there's no good reason to impose it, just hippie-crunch-bar commun/social/altru-ist political sentiment injection (because god forbid innovators be "allowed" to profit from their efforts). "Patent-free" imposition will, in time, hurt more than it helps because that's all that self-sacrifice at gunpoint ever does.
With respect to HTML, which is a language for describing how to mark up hypertext, it doesn't make sense for the HTML spec to specify _anything_ outside of HTML, such as what formats may/should/must/etc be embedded inside of it. (And no, it shouldn't specify GIF or JPEG or PNG, for images, either.)
The object tag can handle video well enough. Hell, the object tag could handle images, too, and greatly simply things. (Then, the img, video and audio tags could _all_ be merely suggestive markup around object tags.)
As far as the "proprietary" and "self-serving" corporations go, look, if everyone and their brother switches to Ogg tomorrow, they'll play ball because it's in their interest to do so.
I doubt they will, as things like flv and flash video players have become the defacto standard, in part because flash is more or less ubiquitous and because the embedding of video inside of your own player gives you the ability to decide how the content is ultimately going to look inside of the browser to a greater level of certainty than you would by relying on the browser to server up your content. The "audio" and "video" tags will take us back to the days of writing in certain HTML for certain browsers because one draws it one way and one draws it another. That doesn't sound like progress to me. (It's more likely that developers will ignore the audio and video tags altogether and continue using Flash or whatever next great thing comes down the pike [which, btw, HTML5's tags won't be able to account for and will lag behind, whereas the object tag handles all of those nicely.] to display video.)
No, it doesn't make perfect sense. What makes better sense is the way that the object tag allows third party flash video players to be happily embedded into an HTML document currently -- the object tag frees folks up to be innovative and do things in the browser (like display audio and video) that the spec doesn't/can't account for and is better off NOT accounting for on its own; nobody needs a bloated spec to do anything and everything.
Many sites that host video now use flv embedded in a flash-based player, which is embedded using the object tag. It would seem most people are content with hoping that Flash is available on their platform, and in most cases, it is. Except my Blackberry phone, which kind of annoys me. The nice thing about embedding video this way (and I don't think it's likely to change) is that your player can be independently specified/styled to match the experience that is your web site, and people aren't bitching about how "my web browser's video player sucks!"
Were I making the decision, the audio and video tags would be purely "suggestive" markup with little or no attributes used around object (and possibly a href) tags to suggest to the browser that what's contained in the child object is video or audio. You can use the object tag to attempt to embed your content any way (and in any format) you like, and the browser still knows that it's supposed to try to display it as video, audio, or something else. To me, that would seem a more useful, flexible and reasonable solution without injecting politics into the spec, as folks seemed to be trying to do with Ogg, or forcing browser makers to all build their own embedded (and likely to be hated) video and audio players.
Forgive my ignorance, I've not been following the topic at all, but why would one even consider it a good thing to have specific support for one format -- free-as-in-beer-speech-whathaveyou -- embedded in HTML in the first place? Aside from the usual not very good hippie-mountain-crunch commun/social/altru-istic reasons, especially when there is likely to be an encoding-agnostic means to attempt to embed objects into HTML? (I'm assuming here, because I can't imagine something like the OBJECT tag going away any time soon, right?)
...is the possibility that our existence may indeed be based on a Lie.
*chuckle*
Automobile Magazine had a write-up a few months back of a previous roadtrip of Roy's, attempting to beat a package overnight from New York to Miami:
http://www.automobilemag.com/features/great_drives/0703_fedex_jet_vs_2007_bentley_continental_gtc/index1.html
It's a funny read, the author has a hilarious writing style.
Is the Pentagon forgetting something?
Like, um, oh, I don't know, the fact that China already has satellite-busting technology?
Yeah, that's it, let's give _any_ U.S. Military operation a massively single point of failure.
Military Intelligence really _is_ an oxymoron.
Vachss wrote about just this situation, way back in 2000 in his novel, Dead and Gone:
Lune tapped a few keys, pointed an immaculate fingernail at his computer screen. "You know what that is?" he asked me, as what looked like a string of auction bids popped into focus.
"A bunch of dope dealers talking in code?"
"No. It's the IRS."
"Huh? I don't get it."
"It's a pattern," he said, spinning on his chair to face me. "You know all this talk about America's 'underground cash economy'?"
"It's not just talk."
"Exactly! It's authenticated fact. And that's where the real money is. Not in cocaine cartels or topless clubs; it's in flea markets, garage sales, all the 'hobbyist' stuff that's being trafficked back and forth every second."
"Flea markets? How much could--?"
"You have to watch the patterns," he said, reciting his mantra.
He turned back to the screen, beckoning me to look over his shoulder. "Look! Here's one, right there on the screen. He's selling a signed copy of a first-edition book by--Martha Grimes. See it?"
"Sure. The highest bidder is--forty-five bucks so far, right?"
"Right. And what this guy--I mean the seller, okay?--what he did was, he bought maybe twenty copies of that book when it was remaindered. You know, you've seen the tables where they sell them in bookstores, haven't you?"
"Yeah," I said, knowing that everybody pays, and that the currency I needed to pay Lune's tolls was patience.
"First, you have to understand that all books get remaindered. It doesn't matter if they sell a million copies, there's always some left over. Well, the publisher isn't going to throw them away, so they sell them, in bulk, very cheaply. A book you spent twenty-five dollars on when it was new, a couple of years later, you'll see it for a dollar ninety-eight."
"Yeah--?"
"Now the guy has all these books, so he waits until this Martha Grimes is doing a book-signing someplace. Then he ambushes her, gets her to sign as many copies as he can get away with. Some writers will just do it, some will limit the number of copies. But this--merchant, his story is always what a huge fan he is and how he's going to give the books away to all his friends as Christmas gifts or for their birthdays or something. See?"
"I--guess so. But --"
"Look at the pattern, Burke. Come on. This guy buys a book for, say, less than two dollars. He gets it signed. Then he sells it for forty-five dollars on this Internet auction site. Do you think, for one single solitary second, that he declares that profit as income?"
"Of course not."
"Good. Now multiply by--oh, ten million transactions per year."
"Are you serious?"
Not a brilliant question to ask Lune. "Come closer," he said, pulling back from the screen so I could do it. "Take a look as I scroll through for you. See how every single seller and every single buyer has to provide information just to participate? Their e-mail, a credit card, a street address--a ton of authentic data. What you see here is the clearest, cleanest audit trail that any IRS agent could ever dream of."
"Damn!"
http://www.vachss.com/updates/040605.html
Vachss is a rather undersung fortune teller.
...this Pope is the Antichrist.
Thank heavens I'm an athiest.
In related news, Walter Williams wrote a great editorial on El Hefe's condemnation of people trying their damnedest to keep what they fucking earn.
Anyone with a soldering iron and a little time on their hands would likely be able to bypass this. You've got to have a battery somewhere, and you've got to have leads to that battery.
Yeah, it means cracking open the device, but if you've stolen it, there's a good chance you're not going to care all that much about some pry marking on the case.
Why thank ya. (And if you wouldn't mind actually _giving_ me a +1, that'd be great, because someone already modded me -1/Overrated. *grin*)
But just a clarification, Atlas Shrugged really wasn't Rand's nightmare. Just the opposite: it was more ideal vision of _real_ moral humanity and the rather _big_ difference between them and a bunch of cannibals. Rand wrote more to praise the roses than to damn the weeds. No doubt the world her antagonists chose rightly to abandon and watch destroy itself _was_ a nightmare world indeed, but frankly, Rand didn't write the novel as a warning to people who choose to live in such a world -- her effort would have been wasted. Rand chose instead to hold productive individuals up as examples of what real men (average men, _not_ heroes) really were: a means to their own ends, and not the means of others.
Bonus points to you for realizing that a goodly number of folks still think it's moral and just to make everybody else live in their nightmare. It's hard to ingest a news article or editorial these days without some aspect of the dying world of Atlas Shrugged leaping out at you from the content.
Google, c'mon. Nobody likes a billion-dollar cry-baby. Take Paris Hilton, for example. (Mom!!!?!)
It appears to me that Google is really stretching the definition of its "don't be evil" mission by playing the "pull" card and trying to get an already over-reaching government to bitchslap Microsoft on their behalf. Ayn Rand, call your office.
Google, if you've given up on trying to make it on your ability and have decided instead to play the looter's game, please issue a press release to that effect so that I can be properly and officially disappointed in you, and switch my IE and Mozilla over to MS Live search just for spite.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/0 7/1925250
;)
In about 100 million years, intelligent design _will_ be considered science.
It's only utter bullshit for the _first_ generation.
I wonder.... in a million years, will these little fuckers come to the conclusion that intelligent design was a crock of shit?
*ponders*