So, what you're saying is that it's more likely that they're lying to the SEC, and comitting federal offenses by falsifying their accounts and auditors statements? If you are, then I'm sure the SEC and the FBI would love to hear more about your theories. If you aren't, then you better believe that Microsoft have upwards of 40 billion USD cash or cash equivalents.
They're not, however if they do make an offer of 50 cents of a 5 dollar meal.
Then it's not charity, and not a genuine offer, but an insult when it's given to someone they can clearly see can't afford it. In such a case offering to give 50 cents, or even 5 cents would be more meaningful than a discount the person can't afford to take advantage off.
If they aren't prepared to give a meaningful offer that showns respect, then they could have just said "No, we can't offer you anything".
Bill Gates generally donates SHARES to his foundation. This has several advantages for him: First of all, it allow him to reduce his tax bill substantially, as donations to a charity in the US is tax deductible. If he were to sell similar amounts of shares he would instead incur more tax, and worse, the share price of Microsoft would plummet if he kept on disposing of that large amounts of shares (Bill Gates has for years been slowly disposing of his Microsoft shares in order to diversify, and the pace has been slow exactly in order to prevent it from adversely affecting Microsoft in the stock market).
Donating shares is a great tax planning tool if you're otherwise unable to dispose of the shares that quickly without damaging the stock price, or if the shares aren't very liquid and selling a large volume of them would be impossible (the latter doesn't apply in this case, as the volume of transactions in Microsoft shares high enough)
I'm not saying his charity is bad. What I'm saying is that it's not nearly as generous as it might look - Gates gets quite a few personal advantages out of these donations.
The point isn't preventing people from downloading images - they can do that just by visiting his site. The point is to prevent "hotlinking" - referring to an image on someone elses site without permission. Often it's done out of stupidity, but some people go to greats lengths to reduce their bandwidth bills (and increase yours) that way.
As for someones right to see where you come from, yes, you're right. Which is why it is up to you whether or not you use a client that allow you to turn the referrer header off or fake it. But on the other hand, it is up to the webmaster of the site you're trying to visit whether he'll then decide to prevent you from accessing his site.
I've been doing web oriented software development for 7+ years, so yeah, I've read the standards. And you're right, you might have to go with HTML 2.0, which was released in '95, in order to get forms. Though all browsers I used as far back as '94 already supported forms. In addition you'd of course need SSL, which browsers that old didn't support.
But in any case, my point was that apart for SSL there's no good reason for an online bank to require HTML features that wasn't already standarized 7 years ago, and readily available in practically all browsers 8 years ago. In fact, the two online banks I use regularly both require only that feature set, and provide all the functionality I need and want from an online bank.
That doesn't mean they need to restrict themselves to only the tags standarized then, and they don't need to stop using stylesheets etc., as older browsers will gracefully disregard tags they don't understand. The pages might look ugly on older browsers, but they will work.
This also saves cost for the banks: They don't have to develop different versions of the pages for PDA's and cellphones etc., just use another HTML template, as the pages themselves doesn't require any functionality that is difficult to support on such platforms. And they don't have to change their system each time a new browser or browser version is launched.
There's simply no good reason to require more browser features - an online banking site is there to provide a fixed set of functionality in a user friendly manner, not to act as a showcase for some designers (lack of) javascript skills.
It's tragicomic that banks, who have so long stuck with incredibly simple (but functional) interfaces for their ATMs exactly because of a focus on functionality and usability and low maintenance costs over glitzy look, often go so over board with their websites that they even shut out customers based on browser versions.
No, by enumerating the software, the bank increases it's liability in the case that the user looses money while using the software they've enumerated. Liability they could have avoided by saying "it's your responsibility to ensure the software you use is safe", and restrict themselves to recommending the alternatives they prefer. Instead they are actively preventing users from using possibly significantly superior products, which would be a likely basis for a lawsuit if the banks choice turns out to be insecure or possible to abuse.
Or, as in the case of me most of the Linux users I know: Highly paid software developers, development managers, etc.
Anyway, you'd be surprised to know that most banks see colleged kids as some of their most valuable customers, as hooking a colleged kid now means they are likely to get a customer that will stay with the bank for years, will get a high paid job, will get a mortgage, credit cards, personal loans and more.
Banks have been known to go to quite some excesses to get college kids to move to their bank, including special graduate loans, high credit limits, preferable interest rates and more.
And you're right, business is about profit, not market share, which is exactly why it's important for a business such as a bank to deal with non-IE browsers:
Their cost is essentially the same - they merely need to give their tech team the right guidelines, unless their tech team consists of people who should never have done software development in the first place. The development time should be the same or LESS. The maintenance costs will DROP, as they don't have to change their site every time there's a new version of IE with different quirks.
And their potential market is then 5% larger.
All their other fixed costs stays the same, and for a bank the fixed costs are incredibly high. Adding 5% to their potential market share could easily add 10-15% to their bottom line.
Who is to blame is 1000s of people using IE run some nice little separate spyware application that they installed because it has some useful functionality, but that intercept all IE traffic?
Just as in your example, it would be whoever wrote the offending software, neither the bank nor the customer.
My experience is that designing to standards, as opposed to piling on features and then spending tons of time debugging and testing that it works in IE, actually save time, and reduce cost. I've managed development teams for the last 3 years, and worked primarily on internet technologies and web applications for the last 7, and not once have we seen any need to compromise on cross browser compatibility to save cost, because we focus on usability, standards and customer satisfaction instead of what's considered cool this week.
Most of the time, developers targetting a specific browser do so because they don't know what they're doing, and spent a lot of time hacking together something that barely works.
Long term, this has even more profound cost issues than the added time during initial development: If you design to standards today, your system keeps working. If you design to what quirks works in IE today, your site breaks and needs costly maintenance work the next time Microsoft decide to change some behavior, or whenever the something new and "better" comes out the door.
This is what faces people who designed to features in the 4.0 browsers now. Often you'll face expensive maintenance cycles long after the original designers and developers have left the company.
I don't think they should give a shit whether or not a web application runs in ANY browser - they should give a shit whether or not their web application is conservative in the feature set it users, and follows standards. If they do, then it likely will work in Lynx, as my current online bank, Barclays do (no, I don't usually use Lynx, but I tested it a bit earlier because their site is very clean, and I was curious, and it worked flawlessly).
It is that important - which this story demonstrates clearly. As it is, people that for various reasons can't run IE, or would prefer to run something else, face reduce choice in banks. We face reduced choice many other places as well. And for what reason? Because these banks and other companies prefer to lose customers instead of hiring competent technical staff that consider usability and customer satisfaction important.
It is that important because if we don't vote with our money and switch to companies that does value our business, and are vocal about why we're doing it, in a few years time we won't be able to choose to use other browsers, because too many services we depend on will only work with IE.
Even at 95%, that means that any company making their site IE only reject 5% of their potential customers - That may seem little, but considering the competition in most industries, saying no to 5% of your potential customer base because you can't be bothered thinking about standards is more than enough to make you a loser long term, as there will always be competitors that don't say no to our business as long as they know we're there.
This is a ridiculous argument. The bank has no way (or right) to control how the user secures his or hers machine, so why do they care about the browser? The user can have "HackMeProxy 1.0" installed, that intercept all IP traffic and post it to Usenet for what the bank knows, and it might be what the user wants.
Face it, the bank has NO WAY of ensuring security by dictating browser type.
And if they do care about the browser, all logic would dictate that they shouldn't support IE, given the security track record IE has.
Fact is, this is entirely laziness and incompetence from the banks technical departments.
In the end though, the incompetent banks will lose out - I've already cancelled one bank account due to a ridiculously bad online bank (a 1.5MB java applet that required write access to your hard disk to write an encrypted profile that you needed to move around to any machine you wanted to access their bank from, which in itself made it useless to me, as the reason I use online banking is to be able to do my banking from anywhere I please - add to that that the applet had severe problems on anything but Windows...). While my account on it's own only accounted for a few hundred dollars a year in lost revenue for them, I'm sure I'm not the first and won't be the last they lose.
Your second argument is bullshit. What client software the bank let their customers use is in no way related to what they use to run their banking platform on. There's no reason why the bank can't continue to use whatever software they prefer, and still create a website that works well with Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, IE, Lynx and whatever anyone throws at it from the same code base, if they just get a clue and require their development and design teams to design for simplicity and standards compliance instead of throwing in useless "features" that doesn't do anything for usability of the site and instantly cause compatibility problems.
Thats just bullshit. My experience with various online banks is that the ones that are the most usable also work flawlessly across browsers. Why? Because they don't try to make their sites use all kind of fancy crap that just slow down and complicate things. When I log on to my online bank, I want to do one of checking my balance, looking at statements, or paying bills. Why would you need to use anything beyond basic HTML for that? Perhaps there are a few functions you want to use basic Javascript for, fine, but nothing that can't be trivially done so that it'll work even in Netscape 4, and nothing that should prevent the site from working with Javascript off.
I currently use Barclays (UK), and their site demonstrate my point well. It works. It's reasonably fast (and when it isn't, it's because their system is overloaded, not because they're trying to push hundreds of kb's of crap to my browser), and it works flawlessly even with Lynx (thought their pages look like crap, since they don't use empty alt tags to hide all their pixel gifs...
Can you explain to me exactly which advanced functionality your bank need to use to make their site work that hasn't been there since HTML 1.0?
Uhm.. The articles are inconsistent. The newest article says Lawrence Livermore labs will use it for nuclear weapons simulations. However Blue Gene isn't one machine, it's a research program that is supposed to include multiple machines, so both might be true.
The point of XML is not for it to be human readable, but to allow easy automatic processing of various kinds.
With XML Schema and DTD's, you can validate various aspects of the data without writing a custome validator.
With XPath and XPointer you can refer to parts of an XML document without needing to understand what the document contains.
With XSL you can translate all or parts of the document from one format to the other without your application needing to know the structure, and without needing to understand more of the format than the parts you are extracting.
With SAX and the DOM you can programmatically traverse and extract information from an XML file without having to write a custom parser.
With CSS an editor or viewer for instance can use a standard mechanism of applying styles to elements without hardcoding the style attributes for elements anywhere.
With XML namespaces, you can intersperse data in various formats in the same file, and the components handling each of the vocabularies need not know anything about the other components - an example would be embedding SVG in HTML: The HTML renderer doesn't need to understand any of the SVG tags, only that it should delegate contents with other namespaces to another component. And the SVG renderer couldn't care less about the HTML.
And this doesn't even touch on the benefits of all the various interchange formats that have been specified on top of these base technologies.
The importance of XML is that it opens up the doors for building interchangable components that operate on data without needing any hardcoded
application specific knowledge of the data.
Most of the time, you still have to write some code to tie it all together, but you don't have to build your own parsers, your own document object model, your own styling system, your own way of handling contained data of other types, your own way of transforming data between formats, etc.
For me as a software developer XML delivered years ago. I use XML technologies daily, and it saves me work.
The report you mention is a poll of citizens of the countries. Based on that I think it's no wonder that some countries ranking high on press freedom will also rank high. There's two good reasons for ranking high on a poll about corruption:
Actual high levels of corruptions, and a press that is free to be extremely critical of the government, making people aware of every little thing going on.
Similarly, in a country without reasonable freedom of the press, it will be much harder for people to know about corruption, and in some of the countries people might be more worried about talking about it.
To take your examples, Germany and France, of discrepancies between the reports, at least France have almost institutionalized criticism of the government - the press freely have been accusing president Chirac of corruption and various other illegal activities, for instance. At the same time France has a very bureaucratic government, which in many areas are very elitist.
The reason for this is perhaps that France has a very diverse political arena, where there are parties ranging from the PCF (french communist party) on the extreme left to Front Nationale (nationalists, anti-immigration etc.) on the extreme right that all have sufficient popular support that they would have no problems getting sufficient attention to any censorship of their media to win the public over, and the range of parties is large enough that everyone will have someone supporting them - if the right tried to censor the communists, for instance, the socialist party would see it as an attack on them as well, since the support of the communists is important for them in order to win seats during the election. Siliarly, the right wing parties are dependant on eachothers support to counter the left.
And all of them want their newspapers and media to be able to keep on criticizing the others...
The end result is that the press can pretty much write what it wants, because there will always be enough politicians that gain from what they write that they can count on support if someone tries to censor them.
The US haven't declared war since WWII. Vietnam was officially a "police operation" for years, and the US never declared war against any of the parties.
Ehm.. Have you ever read any papers from outside Norway? Newsflash: Media everywhere contains loads of meaningless information about celebrities and tons of factual errors.
They're NOT both government departments. The BBC is a Corporation under Royal Charter. It may seem like a subtle difference, but it means that the BBC for the most part is run like any other company with the exception that it's board is appointed by the Crown, and it's main form of revenue is the license fee.
Particularly under the Royal Charter BBC has an agreement that guarantee them editorial independence, which means that if they use the Tardis in a way that the Metropolitan Police doesn't like they don't have any recourse through government channels - they can choose to try to negotitate with the BBC, or they can sue. Presumably it's a situation like that the Met doesn't like.
The point was that if you have binutils installed, you already have gas, and practically anyone using a Linux box for development will have bintuils installed, so why bother with nasm?
This isn't about changing existing files, but about changing software that is in production use on mainframes. And it isn't IBM, but IBMs mainframe customers and anyone dealing with their mainframe using customers that would get the work.
And if you read the XML 1.1 spec you'll see that all of the characters you've listed above except for 0x2029 are interpreted by XML 1.0 as the end of a logical line.
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So, what you're saying is that it's more likely that they're lying to the SEC, and comitting federal offenses by falsifying their accounts and auditors statements? If you are, then I'm sure the SEC and the FBI would love to hear more about your theories. If you aren't, then you better believe that Microsoft have upwards of 40 billion USD cash or cash equivalents.
Then it's not charity, and not a genuine offer, but an insult when it's given to someone they can clearly see can't afford it. In such a case offering to give 50 cents, or even 5 cents would be more meaningful than a discount the person can't afford to take advantage off.
If they aren't prepared to give a meaningful offer that showns respect, then they could have just said "No, we can't offer you anything".
Donating shares is a great tax planning tool if you're otherwise unable to dispose of the shares that quickly without damaging the stock price, or if the shares aren't very liquid and selling a large volume of them would be impossible (the latter doesn't apply in this case, as the volume of transactions in Microsoft shares high enough)
I'm not saying his charity is bad. What I'm saying is that it's not nearly as generous as it might look - Gates gets quite a few personal advantages out of these donations.
As for someones right to see where you come from, yes, you're right. Which is why it is up to you whether or not you use a client that allow you to turn the referrer header off or fake it. But on the other hand, it is up to the webmaster of the site you're trying to visit whether he'll then decide to prevent you from accessing his site.
But in any case, my point was that apart for SSL there's no good reason for an online bank to require HTML features that wasn't already standarized 7 years ago, and readily available in practically all browsers 8 years ago. In fact, the two online banks I use regularly both require only that feature set, and provide all the functionality I need and want from an online bank.
That doesn't mean they need to restrict themselves to only the tags standarized then, and they don't need to stop using stylesheets etc., as older browsers will gracefully disregard tags they don't understand. The pages might look ugly on older browsers, but they will work.
This also saves cost for the banks: They don't have to develop different versions of the pages for PDA's and cellphones etc., just use another HTML template, as the pages themselves doesn't require any functionality that is difficult to support on such platforms. And they don't have to change their system each time a new browser or browser version is launched.
There's simply no good reason to require more browser features - an online banking site is there to provide a fixed set of functionality in a user friendly manner, not to act as a showcase for some designers (lack of) javascript skills.
It's tragicomic that banks, who have so long stuck with incredibly simple (but functional) interfaces for their ATMs exactly because of a focus on functionality and usability and low maintenance costs over glitzy look, often go so over board with their websites that they even shut out customers based on browser versions.
No, by enumerating the software, the bank increases it's liability in the case that the user looses money while using the software they've enumerated. Liability they could have avoided by saying "it's your responsibility to ensure the software you use is safe", and restrict themselves to recommending the alternatives they prefer. Instead they are actively preventing users from using possibly significantly superior products, which would be a likely basis for a lawsuit if the banks choice turns out to be insecure or possible to abuse.
Anyway, you'd be surprised to know that most banks see colleged kids as some of their most valuable customers, as hooking a colleged kid now means they are likely to get a customer that will stay with the bank for years, will get a high paid job, will get a mortgage, credit cards, personal loans and more.
Banks have been known to go to quite some excesses to get college kids to move to their bank, including special graduate loans, high credit limits, preferable interest rates and more.
And you're right, business is about profit, not market share, which is exactly why it's important for a business such as a bank to deal with non-IE browsers:
Their cost is essentially the same - they merely need to give their tech team the right guidelines, unless their tech team consists of people who should never have done software development in the first place. The development time should be the same or LESS. The maintenance costs will DROP, as they don't have to change their site every time there's a new version of IE with different quirks.
And their potential market is then 5% larger.
All their other fixed costs stays the same, and for a bank the fixed costs are incredibly high. Adding 5% to their potential market share could easily add 10-15% to their bottom line.
Just as in your example, it would be whoever wrote the offending software, neither the bank nor the customer.
Most of the time, developers targetting a specific browser do so because they don't know what they're doing, and spent a lot of time hacking together something that barely works.
Long term, this has even more profound cost issues than the added time during initial development: If you design to standards today, your system keeps working. If you design to what quirks works in IE today, your site breaks and needs costly maintenance work the next time Microsoft decide to change some behavior, or whenever the something new and "better" comes out the door.
This is what faces people who designed to features in the 4.0 browsers now. Often you'll face expensive maintenance cycles long after the original designers and developers have left the company.
I don't think they should give a shit whether or not a web application runs in ANY browser - they should give a shit whether or not their web application is conservative in the feature set it users, and follows standards. If they do, then it likely will work in Lynx, as my current online bank, Barclays do (no, I don't usually use Lynx, but I tested it a bit earlier because their site is very clean, and I was curious, and it worked flawlessly).
It is that important because if we don't vote with our money and switch to companies that does value our business, and are vocal about why we're doing it, in a few years time we won't be able to choose to use other browsers, because too many services we depend on will only work with IE.
Even at 95%, that means that any company making their site IE only reject 5% of their potential customers - That may seem little, but considering the competition in most industries, saying no to 5% of your potential customer base because you can't be bothered thinking about standards is more than enough to make you a loser long term, as there will always be competitors that don't say no to our business as long as they know we're there.
And if they do care about the browser, all logic would dictate that they shouldn't support IE, given the security track record IE has.
Fact is, this is entirely laziness and incompetence from the banks technical departments.
In the end though, the incompetent banks will lose out - I've already cancelled one bank account due to a ridiculously bad online bank (a 1.5MB java applet that required write access to your hard disk to write an encrypted profile that you needed to move around to any machine you wanted to access their bank from, which in itself made it useless to me, as the reason I use online banking is to be able to do my banking from anywhere I please - add to that that the applet had severe problems on anything but Windows...). While my account on it's own only accounted for a few hundred dollars a year in lost revenue for them, I'm sure I'm not the first and won't be the last they lose.
Your second argument is bullshit. What client software the bank let their customers use is in no way related to what they use to run their banking platform on. There's no reason why the bank can't continue to use whatever software they prefer, and still create a website that works well with Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, IE, Lynx and whatever anyone throws at it from the same code base, if they just get a clue and require their development and design teams to design for simplicity and standards compliance instead of throwing in useless "features" that doesn't do anything for usability of the site and instantly cause compatibility problems.
I currently use Barclays (UK), and their site demonstrate my point well. It works. It's reasonably fast (and when it isn't, it's because their system is overloaded, not because they're trying to push hundreds of kb's of crap to my browser), and it works flawlessly even with Lynx (thought their pages look like crap, since they don't use empty alt tags to hide all their pixel gifs...
Can you explain to me exactly which advanced functionality your bank need to use to make their site work that hasn't been there since HTML 1.0?
Uhm.. The articles are inconsistent. The newest article says Lawrence Livermore labs will use it for nuclear weapons simulations. However Blue Gene isn't one machine, it's a research program that is supposed to include multiple machines, so both might be true.
With XML Schema and DTD's, you can validate various aspects of the data without writing a custome validator.
With XPath and XPointer you can refer to parts of an XML document without needing to understand what the document contains.
With XSL you can translate all or parts of the document from one format to the other without your application needing to know the structure, and without needing to understand more of the format than the parts you are extracting.
With SAX and the DOM you can programmatically traverse and extract information from an XML file without having to write a custom parser.
With CSS an editor or viewer for instance can use a standard mechanism of applying styles to elements without hardcoding the style attributes for elements anywhere.
With XML namespaces, you can intersperse data in various formats in the same file, and the components handling each of the vocabularies need not know anything about the other components - an example would be embedding SVG in HTML: The HTML renderer doesn't need to understand any of the SVG tags, only that it should delegate contents with other namespaces to another component. And the SVG renderer couldn't care less about the HTML.
And this doesn't even touch on the benefits of all the various interchange formats that have been specified on top of these base technologies.
The importance of XML is that it opens up the doors for building interchangable components that operate on data without needing any hardcoded application specific knowledge of the data.
Most of the time, you still have to write some code to tie it all together, but you don't have to build your own parsers, your own document object model, your own styling system, your own way of handling contained data of other types, your own way of transforming data between formats, etc.
For me as a software developer XML delivered years ago. I use XML technologies daily, and it saves me work.
Similarly, in a country without reasonable freedom of the press, it will be much harder for people to know about corruption, and in some of the countries people might be more worried about talking about it.
To take your examples, Germany and France, of discrepancies between the reports, at least France have almost institutionalized criticism of the government - the press freely have been accusing president Chirac of corruption and various other illegal activities, for instance. At the same time France has a very bureaucratic government, which in many areas are very elitist.
The reason for this is perhaps that France has a very diverse political arena, where there are parties ranging from the PCF (french communist party) on the extreme left to Front Nationale (nationalists, anti-immigration etc.) on the extreme right that all have sufficient popular support that they would have no problems getting sufficient attention to any censorship of their media to win the public over, and the range of parties is large enough that everyone will have someone supporting them - if the right tried to censor the communists, for instance, the socialist party would see it as an attack on them as well, since the support of the communists is important for them in order to win seats during the election. Siliarly, the right wing parties are dependant on eachothers support to counter the left.
And all of them want their newspapers and media to be able to keep on criticizing the others...
The end result is that the press can pretty much write what it wants, because there will always be enough politicians that gain from what they write that they can count on support if someone tries to censor them.
The US haven't declared war since WWII. Vietnam was officially a "police operation" for years, and the US never declared war against any of the parties.
Ehm.. Have you ever read any papers from outside Norway? Newsflash: Media everywhere contains loads of meaningless information about celebrities and tons of factual errors.
Particularly under the Royal Charter BBC has an agreement that guarantee them editorial independence, which means that if they use the Tardis in a way that the Metropolitan Police doesn't like they don't have any recourse through government channels - they can choose to try to negotitate with the BBC, or they can sue. Presumably it's a situation like that the Met doesn't like.
Of course if you're running bash or another shell with tab expansion, all you really need is to type a character or two and press tab twice.
The point was that if you have binutils installed, you already have gas, and practically anyone using a Linux box for development will have bintuils installed, so why bother with nasm?
No, I didn't. I specifically wrote that Unicode define 0x85 as a newline character, not the newline character.
This isn't about changing existing files, but about changing software that is in production use on mainframes. And it isn't IBM, but IBMs mainframe customers and anyone dealing with their mainframe using customers that would get the work.
And if you read the XML 1.1 spec you'll see that all of the characters you've listed above except for 0x2029 are interpreted by XML 1.0 as the end of a logical line.