For styling (i.e. fonts, colors, background images, borders) CSS is OK. For layout - it's unusable in all but the simplest layouts. If you think otherwise, you haven't developed a webapp that needs to be localized into 8 languages. No, fixed width and positioning won't work in German with its mile-long words. And they may not work in Japanese because fons are larger. One thing that could save the day is combined dimensions. If I want the sidebar to be, say, 20em, there must be something that would tell the body to be 100% - borders, padding and margins - sidebar width, so that when webapp is localized into German and width of the sidebar is 25em I'd just need to change the width of the sidebar. Right now one has to resort to javascript which is fucked up.
Microsoft needs to replace SteveB with this dude. Hierarchies of management have grown to enormous depths at MSFT. No wonder folks on top have no idea when Vista will ship - it's a broken telephone game. And folks on the bottom can't make any decisions since they have no authority. And technical details get lost one level above the grunts who work in the trenches. So by the time anything reaches a VP (Microsoft currently has something like 120 VPs!), it's screwed up several times. And VP doesn't know shit about tech, he makes decisions which benefit him career wise.
Bravo, Intel. I think it's time to buy Intel stock.
Yeah, and I want NO ADS on cable TV that I'm paying for. If every US resident chips in five bucks, that'd be $1.5B. I bet that's enough money to pass a legislation against ads on cable and satellite.
Anyway, this is more of a theoretical discussion to me, since I have neither cable nor satellite.
Dell releases coupons with staggering discounts, those coupons go to "deal" sites. "Smart mob" of buyers with coupon codes floods Dell's website and gets their 30-40% off. Regular Joes continue to buy at twice of what they could have paid.
No chairs will be thrown over this departure. The dude was a bullshit master. And not just that, but he was managing other bullshit masters, which kind of means he didn't have much time to spout bullshit outside MSFT. There are millions of bullshit masters in the US, especially if you pay them Gundotra's salary. Chairs will be thrown if senior engineering staff (of Bosworth and Lucovsky level) departs. Those folks are harder to replace and Google should start targeting them instead if they want to piss off Ballmer.
Installed it yesterday on my old Dell laptop. Turns out it breaks slashdot layout, sidebars to be exact. WTF? I thought it was supposed to have better support for CSS, not worse!
I bought a Mac mini a few months ago and experienced wireless issues. I took it to the store and had it back in three days with wireless seeing some access points in the vicinity that I wasn't even previously aware of.
But you should see the GIGANTIC thread about this issue in Apple forums. Folks try everything except for the right thing - take it to the store and have it repaired or replaced. Some folks have been posting into that thread for MONTHS.
I want Bill to apply his "evil" skills here as well. With such a monumental pile of money, they could buy the entire US government from President down and make them do something useful for the world for a change. Think about it, instead of spending $500B on Iraq, Gates/Buffet $50-70B could buy the government and spend this money on curing cancer and AIDS.
How about upgrading B1-B first? Russians have Tu-160 long range supersonic bomber that's better than B1-B, and has a longer range that even this "far in the future" contraption.
Compared to B1-B, Tu-160 can: 1. Carry more weapons (payload of 40 metric tons, compared to 34 tons) 2. Fly faster (Mach 2.05 compared to Mach 1.25) 3. Carry nucular weapons, including short range nuclear cruise missiles
And it's also "stealth".
There are only a few aircraft currently in service in the Russian army, but you don't need that many of them, and they're making more.
Because back in the day, they were tasked with defeating Netscape at any cost as quickly as possible. No one cared about Engineering Excellence (MSFT term) or security and the codebase has been a nightmare since then. It's hard to fix bugs in it, it's hard to make it support new standards, it's hard to just even understand it, not to mention fix bugs and ask features without breaking much in terms of backwards compat. So in IE7 they're "reaping some low hanging fruit" (another MSFT term) and slapping a new UI on it.
One badly needed standard is CSS-like localization language, with fallback sequences etc. I want to be able to include a list of strings into my page and specify that if there's no, say, Spanish string, English must be used.
E.g. create a tag, add "loc" attribute to input tags and create *.loc files with loc strings. Include them into the page like you include CSS today, have browser choose depending on locale. Substitute the strings on page render. Allow people to select different localization on the fly like they select custom stylesheets today. Allow them to create custom localizations, too.
I simply fail to see why localization has to happen on the server.
But how about mining in Arctica/Antarctica first? There's tons of oil and other natural resources under the ice. I can't believe it's cheaper to mine on the Moon than in Arctica/Antarctica.
Microsoft, proficient at shooting themselves in the foot. When Vista comes out and people write another 10000 viruses for it, this claim will backfire in a big way and further hurt Microsoft reputation (or what remains of it).
Steve Vai said the same thing a couple of years ag
on
How iTunes Hurts Weird Al
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
For instance, If you go to Itunes and download a song for $.99, Apple retains about $.34 and the label receives about $.65. Labels then calculate a royalty base price to apply to the artists deal points. Following are some of the deductions:
a. A packaging fee (container cost) of up to, and sometimes more than, 25%. That's 25% of retail which is $.99 equaling about $.25 (by the way, there is no packaging on a digital download).
b. A 15% deduction for free goods. That's an additional $.15 or so. (There is usually no free goods with digital downloads unless someone is ripping it from the net.
That leaves a royalty base price of close to $.60 per track that the artists royalty is calculated against. If an artist receives 15 points in their deal (and remember, that's a very good deal) then he is entitled to aprox. $.09 a track. This is then cut in half because of the "new technology clause" that is incorporated into most deals. The artists royalty is then calced out at $.04-.05 a download and from that, 100% of it is withheld by the label to go towards recoupment of any advances to make the record, advances in general, tour support, radio promotion and other things in some cases. Most managers and producers are paid from record one and are paid regardless of the expenses, leaving the artists with even more of a recoupment burden before they start to see any income.
IOW, freakin' artist needs to be extremely lucky to see ANY of the money, ever, despite the fact that it's his work being sold. OTOH he may be able repay his debt to the label - this is something they won't be able to do if their stuff is sold through allofmp3.com.
Think about it, AMDs official plan for world domination is two fold -
1. Multicore processors (and Moore's law) 2. Highly specialized co-processors - hardware solutions are at times orders of magnitude more efficient than software for the same problem.
ATI is a company that knows just about everything there is to know about one kind of highly specialized vectorized processors - GPUs. Their expertise could no doubt be expanded to things like array processing, audio/video encoding in real time, matrix calculations, etc. etc. Plus, they make pretty decent chipsets. Plus, they've cornered off the console GPU market almost entirely.
What I would also like to see is a "blend" between FPGAs and regular processors that would enable long running apps to reconfigure parts of the system as they see fit. If I load a multitrack audio editor, I'd like my computer to have hardware acceleration for effects, such as filtering, distortion, reverberation. If I want to run a router, why not reconfigure parts of my hardware to do routing-specific tasks on a hardware level? Etc. You get my drift.
Scoble was an embarrassment to a lot of folks at Microsoft. Contrary to popular belief, a relative minority "drinks the coolaid" there. Scoble was freakin' SOAKED in cool-aid. He was also blogging about blogging most of the time and sometimes engaged in "I make less money than I could" rhetoric. Good riddance. Let's hope they hire someone less embarrassing to fill his place.
Even Microsoft cringes at the possibility of shutting off 10-15% of the users from using their services (they do it anyway, for cost reasons, in some cases). What I'm saying is that if something doesn't come "in the box" with Windows, online services are not going to be enthusiastic about it because chances are this stuff is not on the client's computer. Look at.NET Framework, for example. Did you know it's possible to write great, secure applets in it with practically unlimited functionality? Microsoft even writes such applets for internal use. Why don't we see such applets outside Microsoft? For three reasons: 1..NET Framework does not come with Windows 2..NET Framework is not a "critical" update at Windows Update 3. Those pesky remaining 15% of users running on platforms other than windows and/or browsers other than IE (but this wouldn't be much of an issue to at least Microsoft itself if it wasn't for #1 and #2)
It controls 90% of the client OS market and 85% of the browser market, that's what. Any initiative is not going anywhere if it's not supported by Microsoft. OTOH, the remaining 15% of the browser market guarantee that any non-cross platform initiative is not going anywhere either. It's a tough balance of powers and it's unfortunate that Microsoft has a monopoly. There won't be any common standard until the ridiculousness of all this XML/AJAX/HTML/CSS2 crap becomes blindingly obvious to everybody. And that ain't happening right now.
It's not like I'm against web. Web is a fine publishing medium. It's just that browser is a piss poor platform for apps, and all this AJAX stuff isn't really making things any easier.
It's a horrible, overcomplicated kludge that creates more problems than it solves. The sole reason why it exists, is because there's no single, widely adopted standard that would enable rich, extensible UI on the client and seamless interop with the server. There are two reasons why there's no such standard:
1. Microsoft doesn't want the web to enable something that will threaten its monopoly in OS and Office software. 2. Existing (and upcoming) standards are broken for two reasons: a). Microsoft XAML (which could solve the problem beautifully) is not cross-platform, and XUL doesn't truly solve the problems - it still needs binary extensions to do anything meaningful and they aren't cross platform either.
Quite frankly, for something like Flickr, I wouldn't mind running a client app as long as there's an easy, reliable way of updating it (like what's implemented in Firefox - binary diffs). That app, however, must run on three platforms in order to work for me, because I use Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
For styling (i.e. fonts, colors, background images, borders) CSS is OK. For layout - it's unusable in all but the simplest layouts. If you think otherwise, you haven't developed a webapp that needs to be localized into 8 languages. No, fixed width and positioning won't work in German with its mile-long words. And they may not work in Japanese because fons are larger. One thing that could save the day is combined dimensions. If I want the sidebar to be, say, 20em, there must be something that would tell the body to be 100% - borders, padding and margins - sidebar width, so that when webapp is localized into German and width of the sidebar is 25em I'd just need to change the width of the sidebar. Right now one has to resort to javascript which is fucked up.
Microsoft needs to replace SteveB with this dude. Hierarchies of management have grown to enormous depths at MSFT. No wonder folks on top have no idea when Vista will ship - it's a broken telephone game. And folks on the bottom can't make any decisions since they have no authority. And technical details get lost one level above the grunts who work in the trenches. So by the time anything reaches a VP (Microsoft currently has something like 120 VPs!), it's screwed up several times. And VP doesn't know shit about tech, he makes decisions which benefit him career wise.
Bravo, Intel. I think it's time to buy Intel stock.
...oops, it's not readable anymore.
Yeah, and I want NO ADS on cable TV that I'm paying for. If every US resident chips in five bucks, that'd be $1.5B. I bet that's enough money to pass a legislation against ads on cable and satellite.
Anyway, this is more of a theoretical discussion to me, since I have neither cable nor satellite.
Dell releases coupons with staggering discounts, those coupons go to "deal" sites. "Smart mob" of buyers with coupon codes floods Dell's website and gets their 30-40% off. Regular Joes continue to buy at twice of what they could have paid.
No chairs will be thrown over this departure. The dude was a bullshit master. And not just that, but he was managing other bullshit masters, which kind of means he didn't have much time to spout bullshit outside MSFT. There are millions of bullshit masters in the US, especially if you pay them Gundotra's salary. Chairs will be thrown if senior engineering staff (of Bosworth and Lucovsky level) departs. Those folks are harder to replace and Google should start targeting them instead if they want to piss off Ballmer.
Installed it yesterday on my old Dell laptop. Turns out it breaks slashdot layout, sidebars to be exact. WTF? I thought it was supposed to have better support for CSS, not worse!
I bought a Mac mini a few months ago and experienced wireless issues. I took it to the store and had it back in three days with wireless seeing some access points in the vicinity that I wasn't even previously aware of.
But you should see the GIGANTIC thread about this issue in Apple forums. Folks try everything except for the right thing - take it to the store and have it repaired or replaced. Some folks have been posting into that thread for MONTHS.
I want Bill to apply his "evil" skills here as well. With such a monumental pile of money, they could buy the entire US government from President down and make them do something useful for the world for a change. Think about it, instead of spending $500B on Iraq, Gates/Buffet $50-70B could buy the government and spend this money on curing cancer and AIDS.
How about upgrading B1-B first? Russians have Tu-160 long range supersonic bomber that's better than B1-B, and has a longer range that even this "far in the future" contraption.
Compared to B1-B, Tu-160 can:
1. Carry more weapons (payload of 40 metric tons, compared to 34 tons)
2. Fly faster (Mach 2.05 compared to Mach 1.25)
3. Carry nucular weapons, including short range nuclear cruise missiles
And it's also "stealth".
There are only a few aircraft currently in service in the Russian army, but you don't need that many of them, and they're making more.
Because back in the day, they were tasked with defeating Netscape at any cost as quickly as possible. No one cared about Engineering Excellence (MSFT term) or security and the codebase has been a nightmare since then. It's hard to fix bugs in it, it's hard to make it support new standards, it's hard to just even understand it, not to mention fix bugs and ask features without breaking much in terms of backwards compat. So in IE7 they're "reaping some low hanging fruit" (another MSFT term) and slapping a new UI on it.
Create a tag, that is.
One badly needed standard is CSS-like localization language, with fallback sequences etc. I want to be able to include a list of strings into my page and specify that if there's no, say, Spanish string, English must be used.
E.g. create a tag, add "loc" attribute to input tags and create *.loc files with loc strings. Include them into the page like you include CSS today, have browser choose depending on locale. Substitute the strings on page render. Allow people to select different localization on the fly like they select custom stylesheets today. Allow them to create custom localizations, too.
I simply fail to see why localization has to happen on the server.
But how about mining in Arctica/Antarctica first? There's tons of oil and other natural resources under the ice. I can't believe it's cheaper to mine on the Moon than in Arctica/Antarctica.
Now that they're beginning to charge content providers, broadband should cost zero dollars. That's "net neutrality" for you, telcos.
Why only games? Let's do the same thing for violence shown daily on TV. In the news, in the movies, everywhere.
Seriously, though. I don't see why games were singled out.
He has his own label, Favored Nations, which gives the artists 50% of the earnings.
Microsoft, proficient at shooting themselves in the foot. When Vista comes out and people write another 10000 viruses for it, this claim will backfire in a big way and further hurt Microsoft reputation (or what remains of it).
Steve Vai said the same thing a couple of years ago: http://www.vai.com/AllAboutSteve/postcard_040220.h tml
Here's an excerpt about iTunes in particular:
For instance, If you go to Itunes and download a song for $.99, Apple retains about $.34 and the label receives about $.65. Labels then calculate a royalty base price to apply to the artists deal points. Following are some of the deductions:
a. A packaging fee (container cost) of up to, and sometimes more than, 25%. That's 25% of retail which is $.99 equaling about $.25 (by the way, there is no packaging on a digital download).
b. A 15% deduction for free goods. That's an additional $.15 or so. (There is usually no free goods with digital downloads unless someone is ripping it from the net.
That leaves a royalty base price of close to $.60 per track that the artists royalty is calculated against. If an artist receives 15 points in their deal (and remember, that's a very good deal) then he is entitled to aprox. $.09 a track. This is then cut in half because of the "new technology clause" that is incorporated into most deals. The artists royalty is then calced out at $.04-.05 a download and from that, 100% of it is withheld by the label to go towards recoupment of any advances to make the record, advances in general, tour support, radio promotion and other things in some cases. Most managers and producers are paid from record one and are paid regardless of the expenses, leaving the artists with even more of a recoupment burden before they start to see any income.
IOW, freakin' artist needs to be extremely lucky to see ANY of the money, ever, despite the fact that it's his work being sold. OTOH he may be able repay his debt to the label - this is something they won't be able to do if their stuff is sold through allofmp3.com.
Think about it, AMDs official plan for world domination is two fold -
1. Multicore processors (and Moore's law)
2. Highly specialized co-processors - hardware solutions are at times orders of magnitude more efficient than software for the same problem.
ATI is a company that knows just about everything there is to know about one kind of highly specialized vectorized processors - GPUs. Their expertise could no doubt be expanded to things like array processing, audio/video encoding in real time, matrix calculations, etc. etc. Plus, they make pretty decent chipsets. Plus, they've cornered off the console GPU market almost entirely.
What I would also like to see is a "blend" between FPGAs and regular processors that would enable long running apps to reconfigure parts of the system as they see fit. If I load a multitrack audio editor, I'd like my computer to have hardware acceleration for effects, such as filtering, distortion, reverberation. If I want to run a router, why not reconfigure parts of my hardware to do routing-specific tasks on a hardware level? Etc. You get my drift.
Scoble was an embarrassment to a lot of folks at Microsoft. Contrary to popular belief, a relative minority "drinks the coolaid" there. Scoble was freakin' SOAKED in cool-aid. He was also blogging about blogging most of the time and sometimes engaged in "I make less money than I could" rhetoric. Good riddance. Let's hope they hire someone less embarrassing to fill his place.
>> If you want any extra features you often have to buy them
Like, for example, what?
>> everything is managed through the clicky interface from hell
Bullshit. You can manage everything from script or even by editing metabase (which is an XML file) or web.config or machine.config by hand.
>> ISAPI hurts my brain
Yeah, it hurt Microsoft developers' brain, too. So now you can do just about anything from ASP.NET which doesn't hurt.
Even Microsoft cringes at the possibility of shutting off 10-15% of the users from using their services (they do it anyway, for cost reasons, in some cases). What I'm saying is that if something doesn't come "in the box" with Windows, online services are not going to be enthusiastic about it because chances are this stuff is not on the client's computer. Look at .NET Framework, for example. Did you know it's possible to write great, secure applets in it with practically unlimited functionality? Microsoft even writes such applets for internal use. Why don't we see such applets outside Microsoft? For three reasons: .NET Framework does not come with Windows .NET Framework is not a "critical" update at Windows Update
1.
2.
3. Those pesky remaining 15% of users running on platforms other than windows and/or browsers other than IE (but this wouldn't be much of an issue to at least Microsoft itself if it wasn't for #1 and #2)
It controls 90% of the client OS market and 85% of the browser market, that's what. Any initiative is not going anywhere if it's not supported by Microsoft. OTOH, the remaining 15% of the browser market guarantee that any non-cross platform initiative is not going anywhere either. It's a tough balance of powers and it's unfortunate that Microsoft has a monopoly. There won't be any common standard until the ridiculousness of all this XML/AJAX/HTML/CSS2 crap becomes blindingly obvious to everybody. And that ain't happening right now.
It's not like I'm against web. Web is a fine publishing medium. It's just that browser is a piss poor platform for apps, and all this AJAX stuff isn't really making things any easier.
It's a horrible, overcomplicated kludge that creates more problems than it solves. The sole reason why it exists, is because there's no single, widely adopted standard that would enable rich, extensible UI on the client and seamless interop with the server. There are two reasons why there's no such standard:
1. Microsoft doesn't want the web to enable something that will threaten its monopoly in OS and Office software.
2. Existing (and upcoming) standards are broken for two reasons: a). Microsoft XAML (which could solve the problem beautifully) is not cross-platform, and XUL doesn't truly solve the problems - it still needs binary extensions to do anything meaningful and they aren't cross platform either.
Quite frankly, for something like Flickr, I wouldn't mind running a client app as long as there's an easy, reliable way of updating it (like what's implemented in Firefox - binary diffs). That app, however, must run on three platforms in order to work for me, because I use Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.