As far as I can tell, the medical condition is of no relevance to the case other than that pointing it out makes the RIAA (or at least their lawyers) look like heartless bloodsuckers.
I've had two relatives affected by MS. It's a poorly understood condition, and its affects can vary from person to person. At a most basic level, the condition is localized nerve damage, although the mechanism, to the best of my knowledge, is still unknown. The effects are a loss of feeling and/or motor control in some part (or several parts) of the body, usually limbs, and there is no cure. I imagine it is quite possible for the condition to prevent computer use, although that doesn't sound like the case here.
A better definition of Web 2.0: A trademark created by O'Reilly Associates so that they could create a corresponding new conference to charge money for.
It goes right along with AJAX, which is a term made up by consultants so that they could charge more money to do the same work they've been doing for the past five years, by giving it a buzzwordy name.
You missed my point. I understand that price fluctuates with supply and demand, and that typically a decrease in supply will cause the price to increase and vice versa. By limiting the supply, Sony has... limited the supply, which indeed raised the price, as one would expect.
But as I remember it, supply and demand are independent variables, and either can change without the other. If they were intentionally limiting the supply, Sony wouldn't affect the demand itself, just the price point where the two intersect. I would expect that the initial demand for the PS3 would have been (roughly) the same whether Sony had 80,000 available at launch or 8,000,000.
OTOH, if there were anything more stupid than chicken, it would be called a "plant", it would breathe carbon dioxide, and it would think George Bush was a terrific President.
No, there is at least one animal dumber than a chicken, and at least here in the states we are all getting ready to celebrate it's stupidity by making it the main course of next Thursday's dinner.
(And for the record, gravity or not, front load washers are the greatest advance in laundry since running water. They can clean twice the clothes with a quarter of the water (or less) and half the detergent. The water level never actually gets above the seal anyway- that just keeps it from splashing out.)
Rather than comparing PS3/XBox360 launches to the PS2/Dreamcast launches, they should have compared them to the Xbox/PS2 launches.
Microsoft released the more advanced (and substantially more expensive to manufacture) Xbox a year after the PS2. By that time the PS2 had already sold millions of units and was a well established platform with dozens of top selling games. In comparison, the majority of the initial XBox titles were unimpressive. Most people who bought an Xbox early on bought it for one or two games and spent most of their time and money on the PS2 they had already bought, or on their PC. Microsoft had to practically give the things away to stay competitive with the PS2, and they were bleeding money the whole time. It wasn't until almost two years after launch that the game lineup for the Xbox was on par with the PS2, which by the way, is about how long it was before Microsoft had a single profitable quarter selling the Xbox.
Sounds a little more familiar, doesn't it? Sure, the Xbox was (eventually) a wild success in terms of units sold, but can Sony really afford that kind of success?
they are "ugly" to most people that want the cookie cutter that looks like the other 15 homes in the new subdivision.
Do you really think that most people actually prefer that? You've obviously never looked at how far out of their way most builders go to try and hide the fact that every building in a new development has the same floorplan. (Never mind the fact that half the time the minor differences that they do manage to come up with can actually make the similarity more glaringly obvious) "Cookie Cutter" has its negative connotations for a reason.
They require more land than the typical suburbian/urban lot offers.
Total BS. Generally speaking, a smaller house will nearly always be more efficient than a larger house of similar base construction. In fact, I would guess that one of the biggest limiting factors in the efficiency of new houses is the 'bigger is better' attitude that most people seem to have towards home buying. When the very first thing listed on any real estate listing is the square footage of the house, builders tend to maximize that at the expense of everything else.
Actually paying for low-e glass + correct design + insulation is expensive! They would rather have cherry cabinets, stone fireplaces with a plasma TV above it than energy efficiency.
True, but this is more of an issue for renovating existing houses than building a new one. For new buildings, you can do a lot to make the building more efficient that will add very little extra to the overall cost of the building. And many times a small increased cost in one area can be offset in other areas. For example, a more efficient building will have a smaller heating and cooling load which will cut down on the cost of the HVAC system, which can be both an immediate and a long term savings. The catch is that you have to have efficiency as a goal from the beginning of the planning process instead of something that's tacked on at the end, and few developers care to do that, because they don't see the benefit to them.
building from real materials is also insane expensive. I live in a all brick and Stone home now that is from the 1950's It's beautiful and would cost nearly $1,000,000 to build today. The stonework is real the brickwork is real my walls are 2X6 and then have the stonework on the outside giving me 10-12 inch thick walls, new mansions dont have real stone anymore, they have the faux or created stuff that is in reality only an inch or two thick even for their fireplace stonework (I have real marble and limestone) so building the home to have real thermal capabilities is not possible except for the rich.
I'm really having a very hard time even figuring out what this has to do with the rest of your post. It's unfortunate, yes, but it has nothing to do with building efficient houses.
efficient designs are hard to get approved by the association... Any home that looks different is considered ugly.
You know, building technology has advanced since the 1970's. Yes, domes are incredibly efficient, and yes, we've discovered that most people would prefer to live in a house that looks like a house, big surprise. But that's irrelevant. With a little bit of forethought it's easily possible to build an efficient house that would not look out of place in any suburban neighborhood. My wife and I have done a lot to make our house more efficient since we moved into it, and not one of the changes that we've made or even planned to make would require us to even ask for HOA approval.
As your punishment, you should write some kind of data-mining algorithm that starts from the point you disabled threading and try to construct intelligent threads based on the subject and the body of comments...
That's a pretty tall order, considering most of the time we can't even do that when threading is enabled. Reminds me of a quote I saw once:
That job is like trying to make a cow out of 800 pounds of hamburger meat and white glue.
I'm going to avoid taking one side or the other here, and only point out that there are literally dozens of local factors that are probably more likely than global warming to cause changes in snowfall on that scale. For example, growth of nearby cities (cities create a 'heat island' that can change temperatures by several degrees, and more importantly, divert wind patterns), development of farm or forest land, or draining or filling of nearby reservoirs, just off the top of my head.
You can't make any determinations about global warming based of any particular region. After all, many of the currently accepted theories about global warming show most of Europe cooling several degrees as average global temperature rises, due to changing ocean currents.
GS: It did seem like there were a number of mis-statements, and this may be a media misperception, but did you have to work to rein people in and make sure they're on message?
Even the Sony guy didn't claim that (and note the spelling error is the web site's not mine)
Which spelling error? Unless you think they are talking about turning all of the marketing people into royalty, I don't see anything out of place there.
Yeah, I agree with you. While I think that Bruce is right about the difference between real and perceived risks, the 'would you remember the date' statement is a little out of place. If two planes had been hit by lightning and fell out of the sky, and everyone took to calling it 'The 9/11 Storm', I'm sure we'd remember the date just as clearly. Likewise, if everyone referred to the incident that actually happened as the 'World Trade Center Attack' rather than as '9/11' or 'September 11th', I think you'd be surprised how few people remember the date even five years later. How many people remember the dates of the first World Trade Center bombing, or the Oklahoma city bombing?
Earlier somebody posted a list of some of the major events of the last century. (Hindenburg, Pearl Harbor, JFK assassination, man on the moon, Challenger disaster). While I can remember the ones that I was alive for (admittedly not many of them) quite vividly, the only event I knew the actual date for was Pearl Harbor, and even that one I had to double check on Wikipedia.
Agreed. As another example, a few years back 3 people were killed when one of the window washing platforms fell off of the John Hancock building in high winds and landed on a car stopped at an intersection below. This was a true accident. No adverse driving conditions, no other drivers to avoid, nothing that the best driver in the world could have seen coming and avoided.
What are the odds of a random car being crushed by a falling window washing platform? I have no idea. One in a trillion maybe. But it still happened. And I'm sure that there are thousands of other examples out there of similar accidents. There may be a lot that you can do to reduce your likely hood of dying in a car accident, but I don't think anyone can claim that they are a good enough driver to reduce the risk by two orders of magnitude.
I remember too, but only because it was the day after Christmas. If it hadn't been on a major holiday would you still remember? Do you remember the date of the earthquake that happened in Pakistan last year?
How many people do you know have ever been to America, or know any Americans?
George Bush does not equal the United States, you know. Or Congress for that matter. There are a lot of Americans with a lot of different viewpoints, and it's not all as bad as people from other countries make it out to be.
Agreed, we don't have a meaningful national policy on CO2 emissions yet, and that does frustrate a lot of us. But that doesn't mean nothing is being done about it.
"Blatant" election fraud is mostly a conspiracy theory. I'm not denying that fraud exists, because I know the system is not perfect. But while I agree that there is a lot that should be done to improve it but if there is blatant fraud out there, it is on a much smaller scale than most people like to believe. More importantly, it is a significantly smaller problem than it was in our not-so-distant past, (Chicago city politics of the early to mid 1900's are a famous example.)
The retarded monkey comment almost doesn't merit a response, but I will say that about as many people voted against him as for him, and not even all of those still support him. Not only that, but it is still important to note that he took office in an orderly transition of power from the opposing party, and in two more years, he will leave office and transition power to another leader (whether of the same party or the opposition, it is too early to tell) in an orderly fashion. (Note: that is of course speculation about the future and no one really knows what the future will bring, so if it doesn't come to pass you are all more than allowed to laugh at us when the time comes, but not until then)
Regarding poverty, racism, xenophobia, etc. I will be the first to admit that we have problems on all of those fronts. But there was a very famous leader once who said "Let him without fault throw the first stone." I notice you don't say where you're from. Would you be willing to offer your country as an example of the way things should be? I'm not saying that I assume the U.S. is better than wherever you are from, because I know there are a lot of countries who handle some or all of the above better then we do, but there are also many that do not. I would point out however, that while we do have our share of problems with racism, in most parts of the country people of many different races all live together in the same neighborhoods in relative peace, which is more than can be said of many of the other countries I've been to. (Unfortunately, I believe that this has gotten worse in recent years rather than better)
Anyway, my real point about all of this is, how much to you (and your friends) actually really know about America? I know when I was younger I 'learned' a lot about how terrible things were in other countries, and how I should be happy/proud to be an American. Now that I am older, and actually know a lot of people who lived in or traveled to those countries at the time, I have found that most of the popular perceptions in America at the time where exaggerations or even outright false. I don't think that I was ever deliberately lied to about other countries, I just think that many people too easily fall prey to 'conventional wisdom'. If enough people start believing something, suddenly it must be the truth. I would ask that you be careful that you are not falling prey to the same conventional wisdom.
(Of course, since you bring it up, I have to admit that, more than any other reason, except perhaps for his attempts to 'reinterpret' the Geneva Conventions, I dislike Bush for the serious and lasting damage that he has done to our international reputation. While I don't agree with much that he's done as President, I probably could have conceded that he's done at least a halfway decent job (especially considering the clowns that he had running against him) were it not for those two things.)
The point is not that WGA can't be worked around. The point is that if IE7 does enforce WGA there aren't going to be nearly as many people silently upgraded to the "latest and greatest" without any action on their own part.
People who a) know how to work around WGA, and b) actually want IE7, have probably already downloaded and installed it manually, and people without WGA who don't meet both of those conditions won't be affected by this release.
As much as I was looking forward to the IE7 release, it turns out to just be more of the same stuff we learned to expect from IE6. Except, instead of dealing with the bizarre behaviors that we have spent six years learning, now we get all new bizarre behaviors. My favorite so far:
IE7's feed handler starts with a mime sniff. It looks at the first 512 bytes of the XML and if it has a element, it then does believe it to be a feed. Since in your case this isn't an RSS or Atom feed, you get the error text.
You have two options.
1) You can turn off the feed view in IE (buried in Advanced options, IIRC). 2) You can add a large comment to the top of the XML to push the element out of the first 512 bytes. This may be difficult for you if you don't own the webservice in question.
The quote in question comes from the leader of the "Vista RSS platform, IE UX, and IE setup teams."
Personally, this is about the behavior that I would expect if I asked a second year college student on a summer internship to write the feed detection logic, and even then, if I was on the team I would have thrown it away and had someone else rewrite it. To see the RSS team lead not only acknowledge without a hint of embarrassment this as an intentional design decision, and on top of that to suggest with a straight face that stuffing your XML documents with unnecessary comments is a valid solution absolutely blows my mind.
Microsoft has learned absolutely nothing from 6 years of experience with Internet Explorer 6. Sure, they fixed a lot of long standing bugs, but they also completely ignored a lot of bugs that were not only known, but documented on their own site. For example, http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/re ference/properties/name_2.asp
The NAME attribute cannot be set at run time on elements dynamically created with the createElement method. To create an element with a name attribute, include the attribute and value when using the createElement method.
The following example shows how to set the NAME attribute on a dynamically created A element.
var oAnchor = document.createElement("<A NAME='AnchorName'></A>");
Syndicating a feed and visiting a web page are totally different, the XSL is there specifically to reformat the content as HTML for browsers (or feed readers with layout and XSLT engines).
Here is where I agree with you. Yes, they are two different things. And despite the fact that it is a web browser, Firefox 2.0 also now has a more complete concept of feeds that it did before. In this case, the developers have decided that they are not displaying a 'web page', they are displaying an 'rss feed', just as a dedicated feed reader would. Quite obviously you don't agree with this decision, but many others do, and it is far from being 'obviously wrong'.
And yes, comparing this to a web browser ignoring style sheets is apples and oranges. A web page is a web page. An RSS feed is not a web page, but it can be displayed as one if the author has written a stylesheet to do so. For an application to display an RSS feed as a feed (which it is) rather than as a web page with the providers preferred formatting is different than for an application to display a web page as a web page with different formatting.
And despite the fact that they are different, neither one is clearly wrong.
So is this a question about where to find programmers or a thinly disguised job posting? Not that, I'm complaining really. Aside from the April Fools gag where they spent the whole day advertising pointless gadgets on Thinkgeek, Slashdot IMO does surprisingly little self promotion.
Has the tech market improved so much that working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent?
Anyway, to answer the question, yes. I mean, no. Yes, working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent. No, I don't think it really has that much to do with the state of the tech market. When the tech market was bad, it was a prominent website that was drawing employees, it was having a job, any job. And we've all seen our fair share of examples of what can (and does) happen to any website. Certainly, all other things being equal, yes, I'd take a job working on a higher profile website, but when I say "all other things being equal", I really mean "all other things". A prominent website won't compete with better projects, better location, better pay, better stability, better benefits, better management, better coworkers, better lighting, or a better stocked kitchen.
For that matter, if I was looking for a job working on a prominent website, it help to be prominent outside the geek crowd. If I told my friends or relatives that I worked on Google or Yahoo or even Ebay, they would know what I was talking about, and might even be impressed. If I told just about anyone that I know that I worked on SourceForge, I'd get a blank stare in return. So even among the crowd where working on a prominent website would be a draw, SourceForge probably doesn't have the drawing power that your hoping for, because you're up against a lot bigger names.
I think they know they Democrats will get in next time, and they're going to hand them a mountain of debt, which they'll try and sort out, causing a serious cooling of the economy. Then four years later, back will come the Republicans, saying "remember how good you had it under us?"
See, I find this ironic, because this is exactly what I figured the Democrats were thinking near the end of Bill Clinton's second term. Although I disliked Al Gore more than I disliked GW (at least at the time- with 6 years of hindsight now, I don't think I would have voted for either of them), there was a part of me that wished he would win just so that the Democrats couldn't blame the impending recession on the Republicans. (Or at least they wouldn't be quite so smug anymore about the economy under Clinton, which he had next to nothing to do with.)
don't bother unless you're also prepared to argue that all websites should be displayed with the default html stylesheet!
Apples and oranges IMO, but since you bring it up, I'll take the bait.
Replace 'should' with 'may' and you would be 100% correct, and that is a more accurate comparison. What Firefox is doing is obviously not what some people would prefer, but it is not obviously wrong either, just as Lynx is not 'obviously wrong' to display a web page without stylesheets. For that matter, it is possible even in Firefox and several other modern browsers to disable stylesheets on a web page and view them with the default html stylesheet. This is not 'wrong'- it is completely acceptable, and is in fact the whole reason that we started using CSS- it allows one to remove the formatting information without losing content.
Likewise, the reason that the formatting data on BBC is in an XSLT stylesheet and not in the RSS feed itself is just that. It is visual formatting information that is unrelated to the content, and may be used or ignored as the user agent sees fit without affecting the content itself. Are standalone feed readers (or better yet, web based ones such as Google's) 'obviously wrong' if they don't display the RSS feed with the BBCs stylesheet rather than loading it into their own interface? It's exactly the same thing, they just happen to have a more fully featured interface than Firefox does.
Speaking of session restore, is there a way to disable it, or at least make it a little smarter?
I find it mildly annoying that if I shut down my laptop (Ubuntu) without closing Firefox first, the next time I run it, it complains about exiting unexpectedly and offers to restore my session. No, it wasn't unexpected, no I don't want you to restore what I was doing, if I did I wouldn't have shut down in the first place, and dangit just give me a new window already...
Congratulations on successfully coming up with ten answers that were all sufficiently wordy to print yet completely devoid of content. Granted, Slashdot may not be the best environment for gathering intelligent questions for a MSFT project manager, but at least some of those were pretty good questions, and it seems like he could have come up with a lot better answers than this even if he was obligated to toe the company line.
I haven't seen an interview this inane since Blizzard's marketing department intercepted our questions for the World of Warcraft developers.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can tell, the medical condition is of no relevance to the case other than that pointing it out makes the RIAA (or at least their lawyers) look like heartless bloodsuckers.
I've had two relatives affected by MS. It's a poorly understood condition, and its affects can vary from person to person. At a most basic level, the condition is localized nerve damage, although the mechanism, to the best of my knowledge, is still unknown. The effects are a loss of feeling and/or motor control in some part (or several parts) of the body, usually limbs, and there is no cure. I imagine it is quite possible for the condition to prevent computer use, although that doesn't sound like the case here.
A better definition of Web 2.0:
A trademark created by O'Reilly Associates so that they could create a corresponding new conference to charge money for.
It goes right along with AJAX, which is a term made up by consultants so that they could charge more money to do the same work they've been doing for the past five years, by giving it a buzzwordy name.
You missed my point. I understand that price fluctuates with supply and demand, and that typically a decrease in supply will cause the price to increase and vice versa. By limiting the supply, Sony has... limited the supply, which indeed raised the price, as one would expect.
But as I remember it, supply and demand are independent variables, and either can change without the other. If they were intentionally limiting the supply, Sony wouldn't affect the demand itself, just the price point where the two intersect. I would expect that the initial demand for the PS3 would have been (roughly) the same whether Sony had 80,000 available at launch or 8,000,000.
No, there is at least one animal dumber than a chicken, and at least here in the states we are all getting ready to celebrate it's stupidity by making it the main course of next Thursday's dinner.
(And for the record, gravity or not, front load washers are the greatest advance in laundry since running water. They can clean twice the clothes with a quarter of the water (or less) and half the detergent. The water level never actually gets above the seal anyway- that just keeps it from splashing out.)
I see somebody fell asleep in the freshman economics course.
Fewer units = lower supply.
Rather than comparing PS3/XBox360 launches to the PS2/Dreamcast launches, they should have compared them to the Xbox/PS2 launches.
Microsoft released the more advanced (and substantially more expensive to manufacture) Xbox a year after the PS2. By that time the PS2 had already sold millions of units and was a well established platform with dozens of top selling games. In comparison, the majority of the initial XBox titles were unimpressive. Most people who bought an Xbox early on bought it for one or two games and spent most of their time and money on the PS2 they had already bought, or on their PC. Microsoft had to practically give the things away to stay competitive with the PS2, and they were bleeding money the whole time. It wasn't until almost two years after launch that the game lineup for the Xbox was on par with the PS2, which by the way, is about how long it was before Microsoft had a single profitable quarter selling the Xbox.
Sounds a little more familiar, doesn't it? Sure, the Xbox was (eventually) a wild success in terms of units sold, but can Sony really afford that kind of success?
Do you really think that most people actually prefer that? You've obviously never looked at how far out of their way most builders go to try and hide the fact that every building in a new development has the same floorplan. (Never mind the fact that half the time the minor differences that they do manage to come up with can actually make the similarity more glaringly obvious) "Cookie Cutter" has its negative connotations for a reason.
Total BS. Generally speaking, a smaller house will nearly always be more efficient
than a larger house of similar base construction. In fact, I would guess that one of the biggest limiting factors in the efficiency of new houses is the 'bigger is better' attitude that most people seem to have towards home buying. When the very first thing listed on any real estate listing is the square footage of the house, builders tend to maximize that at the expense of everything else.
True, but this is more of an issue for renovating existing houses than building a new one. For new buildings, you can do a lot to make the building more efficient that will add very little extra to the overall cost of the building. And many times a small increased cost in one area can be offset in other areas. For example, a more efficient building will have a smaller heating and cooling load which will cut down on the cost of the HVAC system, which can be both an immediate and a long term savings. The catch is that you have to have efficiency as a goal from the beginning of the planning process instead of something that's tacked on at the end, and few developers care to do that, because they don't see the benefit to them.
I'm really having a very hard time even figuring out what this has to do with the rest of your post. It's unfortunate, yes, but it has nothing to do with building efficient houses.
You know, building technology has advanced since the 1970's. Yes, domes are incredibly efficient, and yes, we've discovered that most people would prefer to live in a house that looks like a house, big surprise. But that's irrelevant. With a little bit of forethought it's easily possible to build an efficient house that would not look out of place in any suburban neighborhood. My wife and I have done a lot to make our house more efficient since we moved into it, and not one of the changes that we've made or even planned to make would require us to even ask for HOA approval.
That's a pretty tall order, considering most of the time we can't even do that when threading is enabled. Reminds me of a quote I saw once:
100 days.
This is Congress after all. 100 hours is probably barely enough time for them all to get their coffee and find their new seats.
I'm going to avoid taking one side or the other here, and only point out that there are literally dozens of local factors that are probably more likely than global warming to cause changes in snowfall on that scale. For example, growth of nearby cities (cities create a 'heat island' that can change temperatures by several degrees, and more importantly, divert wind patterns), development of farm or forest land, or draining or filling of nearby reservoirs, just off the top of my head.
You can't make any determinations about global warming based of any particular region. After all, many of the currently accepted theories about global warming show most of Europe cooling several degrees as average global temperature rises, due to changing ocean currents.
Which spelling error? Unless you think they are talking about turning all of the marketing people into royalty, I don't see anything out of place there.
That's because you lost it in your .sig
Yeah, I agree with you. While I think that Bruce is right about the difference between real and perceived risks, the 'would you remember the date' statement is a little out of place. If two planes had been hit by lightning and fell out of the sky, and everyone took to calling it 'The 9/11 Storm', I'm sure we'd remember the date just as clearly. Likewise, if everyone referred to the incident that actually happened as the 'World Trade Center Attack' rather than as '9/11' or 'September 11th', I think you'd be surprised how few people remember the date even five years later. How many people remember the dates of the first World Trade Center bombing, or the Oklahoma city bombing?
Earlier somebody posted a list of some of the major events of the last century. (Hindenburg, Pearl Harbor, JFK assassination, man on the moon, Challenger disaster). While I can remember the ones that I was alive for (admittedly not many of them) quite vividly, the only event I knew the actual date for was Pearl Harbor, and even that one I had to double check on Wikipedia.
Agreed. As another example, a few years back 3 people were killed when one of the window washing platforms fell off of the John Hancock building in high winds and landed on a car stopped at an intersection below. This was a true accident. No adverse driving conditions, no other drivers to avoid, nothing that the best driver in the world could have seen coming and avoided.
What are the odds of a random car being crushed by a falling window washing platform? I have no idea. One in a trillion maybe. But it still happened. And I'm sure that there are thousands of other examples out there of similar accidents. There may be a lot that you can do to reduce your likely hood of dying in a car accident, but I don't think anyone can claim that they are a good enough driver to reduce the risk by two orders of magnitude.
I remember too, but only because it was the day after Christmas. If it hadn't been on a major holiday would you still remember? Do you remember the date of the earthquake that happened in Pakistan last year?
How many people do you know have ever been to America, or know any Americans?
George Bush does not equal the United States, you know. Or Congress for that matter. There are a lot of Americans with a lot of different viewpoints, and it's not all as bad as people from other countries make it out to be.
Agreed, we don't have a meaningful national policy on CO2 emissions yet, and that does frustrate a lot of us. But that doesn't mean nothing is being done about it.
"Blatant" election fraud is mostly a conspiracy theory. I'm not denying that fraud exists, because I know the system is not perfect. But while I agree that there is a lot that should be done to improve it but if there is blatant fraud out there, it is on a much smaller scale than most people like to believe. More importantly, it is a significantly smaller problem than it was in our not-so-distant past, (Chicago city politics of the early to mid 1900's are a famous example.)
The retarded monkey comment almost doesn't merit a response, but I will say that about as many people voted against him as for him, and not even all of those still support him. Not only that, but it is still important to note that he took office in an orderly transition of power from the opposing party, and in two more years, he will leave office and transition power to another leader (whether of the same party or the opposition, it is too early to tell) in an orderly fashion. (Note: that is of course speculation about the future and no one really knows what the future will bring, so if it doesn't come to pass you are all more than allowed to laugh at us when the time comes, but not until then)
Regarding poverty, racism, xenophobia, etc. I will be the first to admit that we have problems on all of those fronts. But there was a very famous leader once who said "Let him without fault throw the first stone." I notice you don't say where you're from. Would you be willing to offer your country as an example of the way things should be? I'm not saying that I assume the U.S. is better than wherever you are from, because I know there are a lot of countries who handle some or all of the above better then we do, but there are also many that do not. I would point out however, that while we do have our share of problems with racism, in most parts of the country people of many different races all live together in the same neighborhoods in relative peace, which is more than can be said of many of the other countries I've been to. (Unfortunately, I believe that this has gotten worse in recent years rather than better)
Anyway, my real point about all of this is, how much to you (and your friends) actually really know about America? I know when I was younger I 'learned' a lot about how terrible things were in other countries, and how I should be happy/proud to be an American. Now that I am older, and actually know a lot of people who lived in or traveled to those countries at the time, I have found that most of the popular perceptions in America at the time where exaggerations or even outright false. I don't think that I was ever deliberately lied to about other countries, I just think that many people too easily fall prey to 'conventional wisdom'. If enough people start believing something, suddenly it must be the truth. I would ask that you be careful that you are not falling prey to the same conventional wisdom.
(Of course, since you bring it up, I have to admit that, more than any other reason, except perhaps for his attempts to 'reinterpret' the Geneva Conventions, I dislike Bush for the serious and lasting damage that he has done to our international reputation. While I don't agree with much that he's done as President, I probably could have conceded that he's done at least a halfway decent job (especially considering the clowns that he had running against him) were it not for those two things.)
The point is not that WGA can't be worked around. The point is that if IE7 does enforce WGA there aren't going to be nearly as many people silently upgraded to the "latest and greatest" without any action on their own part.
People who a) know how to work around WGA, and b) actually want IE7, have probably already downloaded and installed it manually, and people without WGA who don't meet both of those conditions won't be affected by this release.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=243
The quote in question comes from the leader of the "Vista RSS platform, IE UX, and IE setup teams."
Personally, this is about the behavior that I would expect if I asked a second year college student on a summer internship to write the feed detection logic, and even then, if I was on the team I would have thrown it away and had someone else rewrite it. To see the RSS team lead not only acknowledge without a hint of embarrassment this as an intentional design decision, and on top of that to suggest with a straight face that stuffing your XML documents with unnecessary comments is a valid solution absolutely blows my mind.
Microsoft has learned absolutely nothing from 6 years of experience with Internet Explorer 6. Sure, they fixed a lot of long standing bugs, but they also completely ignored a lot of bugs that were not only known, but documented on their own site. For example, http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/r
I thought it said auto dealers. Here I got all excited only to find out that it doesn't even apply to me, because I only have a cell phone...
Here is where I agree with you. Yes, they are two different things. And despite the fact that it is a web browser, Firefox 2.0 also now has a more complete concept of feeds that it did before. In this case, the developers have decided that they are not displaying a 'web page', they are displaying an 'rss feed', just as a dedicated feed reader would. Quite obviously you don't agree with this decision, but many others do, and it is far from being 'obviously wrong'.
And yes, comparing this to a web browser ignoring style sheets is apples and oranges. A web page is a web page. An RSS feed is not a web page, but it can be displayed as one if the author has written a stylesheet to do so. For an application to display an RSS feed as a feed (which it is) rather than as a web page with the providers preferred formatting is different than for an application to display a web page as a web page with different formatting.
And despite the fact that they are different, neither one is clearly wrong.
Anyway, to answer the question, yes. I mean, no. Yes, working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent. No, I don't think it really has that much to do with the state of the tech market. When the tech market was bad, it was a prominent website that was drawing employees, it was having a job, any job. And we've all seen our fair share of examples of what can (and does) happen to any website. Certainly, all other things being equal, yes, I'd take a job working on a higher profile website, but when I say "all other things being equal", I really mean "all other things". A prominent website won't compete with better projects, better location, better pay, better stability, better benefits, better management, better coworkers, better lighting, or a better stocked kitchen.
For that matter, if I was looking for a job working on a prominent website, it help to be prominent outside the geek crowd. If I told my friends or relatives that I worked on Google or Yahoo or even Ebay, they would know what I was talking about, and might even be impressed. If I told just about anyone that I know that I worked on SourceForge, I'd get a blank stare in return. So even among the crowd where working on a prominent website would be a draw, SourceForge probably doesn't have the drawing power that your hoping for, because you're up against a lot bigger names.
See, I find this ironic, because this is exactly what I figured the Democrats were thinking near the end of Bill Clinton's second term. Although I disliked Al Gore more than I disliked GW (at least at the time- with 6 years of hindsight now, I don't think I would have voted for either of them), there was a part of me that wished he would win just so that the Democrats couldn't blame the impending recession on the Republicans. (Or at least they wouldn't be quite so smug anymore about the economy under Clinton, which he had next to nothing to do with.)
Apples and oranges IMO, but since you bring it up, I'll take the bait.
Replace 'should' with 'may' and you would be 100% correct, and that is a more accurate comparison. What Firefox is doing is obviously not what some people would prefer, but it is not obviously wrong either, just as Lynx is not 'obviously wrong' to display a web page without stylesheets. For that matter, it is possible even in Firefox and several other modern browsers to disable stylesheets on a web page and view them with the default html stylesheet. This is not 'wrong'- it is completely acceptable, and is in fact the whole reason that we started using CSS- it allows one to remove the formatting information without losing content.
Likewise, the reason that the formatting data on BBC is in an XSLT stylesheet and not in the RSS feed itself is just that. It is visual formatting information that is unrelated to the content, and may be used or ignored as the user agent sees fit without affecting the content itself. Are standalone feed readers (or better yet, web based ones such as Google's) 'obviously wrong' if they don't display the RSS feed with the BBCs stylesheet rather than loading it into their own interface? It's exactly the same thing, they just happen to have a more fully featured interface than Firefox does.
Speaking of session restore, is there a way to disable it, or at least make it a little smarter?
I find it mildly annoying that if I shut down my laptop (Ubuntu) without closing Firefox first, the next time I run it, it complains about exiting unexpectedly and offers to restore my session. No, it wasn't unexpected, no I don't want you to restore what I was doing, if I did I wouldn't have shut down in the first place, and dangit just give me a new window already...
Congratulations on successfully coming up with ten answers that were all sufficiently wordy to print yet completely devoid of content. Granted, Slashdot may not be the best environment for gathering intelligent questions for a MSFT project manager, but at least some of those were pretty good questions, and it seems like he could have come up with a lot better answers than this even if he was obligated to toe the company line.
I haven't seen an interview this inane since Blizzard's marketing department intercepted our questions for the World of Warcraft developers.