All of the people who cared about what they were doing got laid off from my last place -- and while there's contracting work out there, full-time employment is VERY thin on the ground. Certainly, since last year, the average time out of work has been 6 months and up -- for GOOD, strong developers. You know, C, C++, assembly, the whole kit and kaboodle.
Time to go to school again while the economy rights itself.
Turn that statement around: if those sales people weren't doing cold calls, all your work would amount to nothing more than bits and bytes on a server. No one would pay for it and, oops, now you have no job.
Hmmm... one place I worked at, the sales team were paid bonuses according to how many units they could sell into the distribution channel.
They were not docked when those items got returned because they didn't sell-through.
Which result do you think is likely?
1. The sales team will say "Hang on a minute guys... pay us based on Sell-In, we'll cripple our budgets and cannabalize our sales if we flood the channels, and that could topple the whole pinada?"
2. The sales team will stuff the channels and not give a flying fuck, because they're getting their bonuses.
I'll give you a clue: The correct answer is an even number.
So from what I've seen, sales people don't have to deal with even HALF the consequences that developers do. We have to think about the results of every line of code we write -- while all of the sales people I've seen are solely looking at the bottom line -- namely theirs and not exercising any intelligence or big-picture thinking at all.
Maybe I'm an oddball, but if I see potential business problems, as an employee, it's my job to alert people to them. If it's not in my field... so what?
[This all changed eventually... but it's freaking scary how long this went on]
Don't bother! Management is for schmucks. I've seen very few 'higher-uppers' that were worth their weight in shit! They talk and spew forth more crap than i care to stand near. Look at all those enron fuckers and their 'brilliant management techniques'! Sheesh! True, some programmers might act immature or act like baby's or whatever, but most of us have never been responsible for a company's collapse! It always happens on the top! And my group spends most of the time, because we actually do most of the real work mopping up after dumshits and their grandiose 'visions' of what a web product can be. Ugh!
Hear hear.
In the last two years I've seen more people laid off than I ever want to see happen again. At least 25 of those people were good friends.
It was never their fault.
As a team, we have a track record of:
1. Always giving management what they ask for, and a little more if possible.
2. Predicting management's to's and fro's.
3. ALWAYS shipping products on time and under budget. (Over 30 product in the last two years).
Yet who gets laid off?
Is it the management staff? No.
But eventually, they did all get screwed. Bad decision after bad decision after bad decision, and finally, someone wakes up and prunes the tree closer to the top.
Unfortunately, by that point, they'd done enough damage that it screwed us over for the next two years. We're 1 year into that screw-up period, and budgets were killed.
I got laid off in the last batch. A legacy of crappy shitty management has left me and a lot of my good friends -- people who I would hire in a heartbeat if I had the capital to start my own company (I'm working on it, but it's slow going) -- in the lurch.
Funny how people that high up in the organisation - the ones who make the BIG mistakes - tend to get a year's worth of severance pay at their over inflated salaries.
I know about XP - it won't help you when the people handling requirements don't know what they want.
That's where social engineering comes into play; you tell them what you want to make, and what the risks are. You tell them what it will cost. And how much it'll save them down the line. Then they work with you to work out what they think they need.
Phrasing everything in terms of "Will you be willing to slip the project to get this feature in? It'll slip us by X months" helps as well. That's design change control.
- Listen to us, not to the consultants
- Decide on the plan, stand back, and let us implement
- Act as a filter for the politics
Number 2 on your list isn't ever going to happen -- things change too much for that. That's why it's called Life. Because it's a changey kind of thing. Death is where it doesn't change much (for the participant) any more.
Not only have I done this, I actually happen to have the drive (Connor 120mb), but havn't you guys ever cut down a motherboard to fit a case?
It's kinda nifty. Drop the thing under an arm saw (Is that the name? I'm a computer guy, not woodworking), and slice the side off. Sparks galore. Had to do that to get a 286 board to fit in a 486 case.
You guys need to try some new things, and stop taking people at their word, because some 'publication' says that's not supposed to happen
And the motherboard worked after you did that?
You're either incredibly lucky, or I'm incredibly gullible.
You can't just slice off a chunk of motherboard. Things stop working. You know all those little lines on the board? They transmit *signals* between different components on the board. Cut through one of them, and unless you're incredibly incredibly massively lucky you can kiss the board goodbye.
The funny things is the journalists get all indignant when you point this out to them and ask them to throw in the security holes for IIS, IE, OE, Office, SQL Server, etc.
I've seen more Linux users get indignant when you count a sendmail bug as a Linux bug than the other way round.
"Linux is just the kernel!" they shout.
Really? Well, I guess Windows is just the kernel too.
It is a copyright violation. It isn't stealing. HUGE difference
The only difference appears to be that Thou Shalt Not Steal was supposedly etched in stone thousands of years ago and brought down from a mountain by a man with a beard. They're both illegal. And they're both morally and ethically wrong.
Someone else wrote:
If you wouldn't buy a product for the selling price then you don't deserve to use it.
AC wrote:
So if I won't buy a hamburger from Mickey Ds, I forfeit my right to ever cook a hamburger on my grill?
Talk about bait and switch. You're talking about something completely different.
If you won't buy a hamburger from McDonalds, you do not forfeit the right to ever cook a hamburger on your own grill. You forfeit the right to eat the McDonalds hamburger. You can always make your own -- which will take a lot more time and effort on your part. And probably (on the whole) will cost more to you because of economies of scale. But hey, who's counting?
No, I mean like a VCR. You know, something that costs less than $500, sits in your entertainment system. Has no keyboard. Just put it in and go. *Not* a computer.
Spending $2k on an iMac just to burn DVDs is not something that Joe Schmoe is going to do in a hurry.
The problem is that DVHS offers advantages only to people with HDTV. But right now that is a very small minority. DVD offered not only far superior picture quality to VHS, but also better sound and random access. DVHS loses that all important ability of random access and has for the regular viewer no advantage over DVD.
Except for, presumably, being writable on a standard consumer-level system rather than requiring an MPEG-2 encoder and DVD burner?
That will be where its value comes in -- as a way of consumers making their own recordings in digital format.
Could you please point us in the direction of information which will show that IE does in fact have better support for PNG alpha transparency than this test would indicate?
No, I can't -- thanks for the link and the correction. I guess they support basic on/off transparency (gif style), but not full alpha values.
There is nothing to ensure that the different versions actually are the same message though. You could quite easily have a text email with some HTML intended to work as malware...
The same applies to the To: From: and any other fields you might pass to the app; unfortunately, security, traceability, authentication and integrity aren't really features of the SMTP spec.
*Sigh*... sometimes irony goes completely over peoples' heads...
What I meant was, the original poster was complaining about how people sent him Word files, you suggested MIME as a remedy, and I just wanted to point out that that would be like saying "I hate banner ads" - "So use ADSL", i.e. the difference between content and carrier.
Irony's great, provided it's in context.
The original poster was complaining about malformed emails that used RTF and HTML instead of just plain text.
Read the post again:
How many Outlook badly formated HTML/word/rtf e-mail's must we put up with before we scream enough!
That's not a Word document he's talking about. Not an attachment. We're talking embedded content here.
It's one thing to break the "global web experience" by writing bad mark-up that breaks all but one browser, it's another thing to throw in comments* that a poorly-written piece of software can't handle.
It is my understanding that email headers preceded by an "X-" are to be ignored by clients that don't know how to interpret them.
Correct! And that's what Outlook & Outlook Express do.
The thing is, Moffit writes headers that abuse those headers -- and the X-* headers in question are only used by Outlook & Outlook Express (stuff like X-Message-Flag: Comment).
The only problematic bug is that OE & Outlook appear to auto-decode uuencoded files. So if you malform your uuencoded data, then you'll screw up someone's mail.
Well, presumably my friends have an older version of Pine then, because they're definitely having trouble with HTML mail -- and looking at the raw message source, they definitely are getting the plaintext fallback content.
Hmmm, I didn't realize that Word was part of MIME...
That's what multipart/alternative is for -- read the spec. RFC 2046. You can write your email in Word, Illustrator, PDF or even TeX if you like, provided that your mail editor supports multipart/alternative correctly. It's polite to provide multiple representations -- eg. plain text, HTML, and El Weirdo File Format in the same message -- for downlevel clients. And it's all fully spelled out in the spec.
Outlook does this; it provides both an HTML or RTF content entity, and a plaintext one. Compliant readers that don't support HTML should only display the plaintext content entity.
Word = RTF or HTML depending on the version, when used for email.
So Blue Mountain should have quietly gone out of buisness because of Microsoft's incompentence? Microsoft was asked to remove Blue Mountain from the mail filter. Microsoft said they weren't going to fix it. Only then did Blue Mountain sue them. If Microsoft wanted a junk mail filter, they should have been willing to take responsiblity of taking care of it and removing stuff from the filter than shouldn't have been there.
Why does it make your internet experiance so much shitter? Are you too stupid to set up your own mail filter? Read the manual, and if Outlook Express won't let you do it, well, you chose the mail program.
No, Blue Mountain should have worked with Microsoft to fix the problem instead of suing them -- it's in the court record; Microsoft offered to help, Blue Mountain declined.
As for making my internet experience, it's the whole shitload of spam that I get. No, I'm not too stupid to set up my own mail filter; and in fact, I have done. However, there's a limit to what you can do without writing some kind of markov-chain based algorithm to weed out the spam. At the moment, I've got it set up to only keep emails that are CC'd or sent to my address directly (getting rid of 75% of the spam that doesn't have a real email address for me in its headers), and I pull mailing lists back out into their own folders to rescue them from my junkmail folder. However, anything more complex than that is too difficult to do without writing something that scans every post for specific sentences, keywords and content.
I like having things like that written for me. If I wanted to write something like that, I'd do it, and sell the results. But frankly, life is too short, and I have too many other projects to work on already.
As a result, 25% of my spam (the stuff that actually gets sent to my email address, instead of just being SMTP MAIL TO'd my mailbox with the headers being unrelated) can't be filtered out by my set of 30 rules. I'm more than a little pissed that instead of working to resolve the problem, they sued instead. I'm even more pissed that the judge ruled in their favor; that was blatantly wrong.
Not just transparency, in my experience; PNG in general. I was testing a site in Mozilla and IE6. Everything was fine in Mozilla, but IE6 was color-shifting my PNGs a little, in effect darkening them. They didn't match my HTML-specified backgrounds anymore. It looked horrible. I switched to GIFs and it looked fine in both. I really wanted to use PNG because they were significantly smaller files in my case, but I also don't want to have IE6 users bugging me about supposedly bad pages.
1. Check your PNG gamma settings.
2. Are you running Windows in 16-bit color mode? If so, you'll hit this problem.
Yea, right. Lamo. And Microsoft was trashing the messages in Outlook Express, by default, because they knew that every Outlook Express user regarded Blue Mountain as spam. It was a wonderful new "feature" right?
Spam or not, my mail shouldn't go to the trash unless I say so. Your mail ->/dev/null
It didn't go into the trash. It went into a "Possible Junk Mail" folder, which you could choose to rescue it from.
Blue Mountain basically singlehandedly killed any hope of consumers getting any form of automatic junk-mail killing without hand-crafting it *themselves*. Thanks Blue Mountain! You made my internet experience so much shittier.
So is that why IE6 renders PNG transparency so poorly? They're trying to outdo inferior browsers?
No, it's QuickTime that renders PNG transparency poorly; IE6's support works perfectly fine. If you install QuickTime, it takes over rendering of PNG images (without asking you beforehand), and causes the problems you're seeing.
Another poster wrote:
Nutscrape 4 supports so little of the CSS spec that the feature is practically useless.
Enigma2175 wrote:
And this is sharp contrast to IE 4? If you are going to compare the browsers, at least compare current browsers, don't compare the current IE to the 2 year old Netscape.
I'd have thought that comparing non-beta releases would have been a pre-requisite, as that's what most people will be running. And regardless of the Netscape 6 preview release (because it's a BETA), Netscape 4.7 is the last version of Netscape that Netscape Communications Corp. actually released.
There's nothing else from Netscape that they can compare it to. Maybe when Mozilla is finally released, then you can make a comparison with anything else. But until then, sorry, but it ain't production code.
Hmm? Pine has featured MIME compliance for years. I use it as my primary mailer and I can sling attachments with the best of 'em.
Attachments are not the sole reason for MIME. MIME is a standard for denoting and handling content encoding and multi-format content in heterogeneous environments.
Take a look at RFC 2046 and read the section on multipart/alternative segments.
The problem with PINE isn't in its ability to push around attachments. It's that (from reports from friends who use it on a daily basis), it appears to be unable to handle multipart/alternative entities in any kind of intelligent (or standards-compliant) fashion. So you get garbage when you read an HTML-encoded email, even if it provides an alternate, plain-text encoded message entity for downlevel clients.
Don't you see the problem? Look at all the overhead that's tacked on because some marketing bozo wants his email to look 'pretty'. IMHO, MIME is ok for adding attachments for images, data files, sounds, etc. Sending two copies of the same message, one in plain text and the other with tons of markup seems a bit ridiculous to me. Do you send all the other recipients of an email that's been forwarded a dozen times when you forward the letter on to someone else?
Maybe there should be a required netiquette section for any class on how to use a computer.
Maybe there should be a required netiquette section on MIME compliancy for mail readers.
Two copies of the message, one in plain text and the other with markup makes perfect sense to me -- because, frankly, color and formatting can help a LOT when it comes to getting your point across.
Heck, even the original VT52 terminal creators recognized this -- no color, but the ability to do certain kinds of markup (underline, bold, inverse).
However, nice dodge. Whether it's efficient or not isn't the point.
If we're looking into efficiency, why isn't all email dictionary encoded and then huffman encoded before being transferred over SMTP? Why are all the headers text fields rather than simple binary fields?
The answer is twofold; for redundancy (including backwards and forwards compatibility), and human readability.
This is why the same text is sent twice in the message; once for obsolete / down-level clients, and once for clients that can handle HTML.
If efficiency were a concern, email gateways wouldn't be limited to 7-bit character sets, so don't even try to get on that high horse.
Regardless; HTML and text are supported in the same email through the MIME standard, which specifically allows this behavior. If your mail reader can't cut it, then tough crap -- get with the standards program, or get out of the game.
Slashdot Mirror
All of the people who cared about what they were doing got laid off from my last place -- and while there's contracting work out there, full-time employment is VERY thin on the ground. Certainly, since last year, the average time out of work has been 6 months and up -- for GOOD, strong developers. You know, C, C++, assembly, the whole kit and kaboodle.
Time to go to school again while the economy rights itself.
Turn that statement around: if those sales people weren't doing cold calls, all your work would amount to nothing more than bits and bytes on a server. No one would pay for it and, oops, now you have no job.
Hmmm... one place I worked at, the sales team were paid bonuses according to how many units they could sell into the distribution channel.
They were not docked when those items got returned because they didn't sell-through.
Which result do you think is likely?
1. The sales team will say "Hang on a minute guys... pay us based on Sell-In, we'll cripple our budgets and cannabalize our sales if we flood the channels, and that could topple the whole pinada?"
2. The sales team will stuff the channels and not give a flying fuck, because they're getting their bonuses.
I'll give you a clue: The correct answer is an even number.
So from what I've seen, sales people don't have to deal with even HALF the consequences that developers do. We have to think about the results of every line of code we write -- while all of the sales people I've seen are solely looking at the bottom line -- namely theirs and not exercising any intelligence or big-picture thinking at all.
Maybe I'm an oddball, but if I see potential business problems, as an employee, it's my job to alert people to them. If it's not in my field... so what?
[This all changed eventually... but it's freaking scary how long this went on]
Simon
Don't bother! Management is for schmucks. I've seen very few 'higher-uppers' that were worth their weight in shit! They talk and spew forth more crap than i care to stand near. Look at all those enron fuckers and their 'brilliant management techniques'! Sheesh! True, some programmers might act immature or act like baby's or whatever, but most of us have never been responsible for a company's collapse! It always happens on the top! And my group spends most of the time, because we actually do most of the real work mopping up after dumshits and their grandiose 'visions' of what a web product can be. Ugh!
Hear hear.
In the last two years I've seen more people laid off than I ever want to see happen again. At least 25 of those people were good friends.
It was never their fault.
As a team, we have a track record of:
1. Always giving management what they ask for, and a little more if possible.
2. Predicting management's to's and fro's.
3. ALWAYS shipping products on time and under budget. (Over 30 product in the last two years).
Yet who gets laid off?
Is it the management staff? No.
But eventually, they did all get screwed. Bad decision after bad decision after bad decision, and finally, someone wakes up and prunes the tree closer to the top.
Unfortunately, by that point, they'd done enough damage that it screwed us over for the next two years. We're 1 year into that screw-up period, and budgets were killed.
I got laid off in the last batch. A legacy of crappy shitty management has left me and a lot of my good friends -- people who I would hire in a heartbeat if I had the capital to start my own company (I'm working on it, but it's slow going) -- in the lurch.
Funny how people that high up in the organisation - the ones who make the BIG mistakes - tend to get a year's worth of severance pay at their over inflated salaries.
Fuck 'em.
Si
I know about XP - it won't help you when the people handling requirements don't know what they want.
That's where social engineering comes into play; you tell them what you want to make, and what the risks are. You tell them what it will cost. And how much it'll save them down the line. Then they work with you to work out what they think they need.
Phrasing everything in terms of "Will you be willing to slip the project to get this feature in? It'll slip us by X months" helps as well. That's design change control.
Si
- Listen to us, not to the consultants
- Decide on the plan, stand back, and let us implement
- Act as a filter for the politics
Number 2 on your list isn't ever going to happen -- things change too much for that. That's why it's called Life. Because it's a changey kind of thing. Death is where it doesn't change much (for the participant) any more.
Simon
Not only have I done this, I actually happen to have the drive (Connor 120mb), but havn't you guys ever cut down a motherboard to fit a case?
It's kinda nifty. Drop the thing under an arm saw (Is that the name? I'm a computer guy, not woodworking), and slice the side off. Sparks galore. Had to do that to get a 286 board to fit in a 486 case.
You guys need to try some new things, and stop taking people at their word, because some 'publication' says that's not supposed to happen
And the motherboard worked after you did that?
You're either incredibly lucky, or I'm incredibly gullible.
You can't just slice off a chunk of motherboard. Things stop working. You know all those little lines on the board? They transmit *signals* between different components on the board. Cut through one of them, and unless you're incredibly incredibly massively lucky you can kiss the board goodbye.
Sheesh.
Si
The funny things is the journalists get all indignant when you point this out to them and ask them to throw in the security holes for IIS, IE, OE, Office, SQL Server, etc.
I've seen more Linux users get indignant when you count a sendmail bug as a Linux bug than the other way round.
"Linux is just the kernel!" they shout.
Really? Well, I guess Windows is just the kernel too.
Simon
It is a copyright violation. It isn't stealing. HUGE difference
The only difference appears to be that Thou Shalt Not Steal was supposedly etched in stone thousands of years ago and brought down from a mountain by a man with a beard. They're both illegal. And they're both morally and ethically wrong.
Someone else wrote:
If you wouldn't buy a product for the selling price then you don't deserve to use it.
AC wrote:
So if I won't buy a hamburger from Mickey Ds, I forfeit my right to ever cook a hamburger on my grill?
Talk about bait and switch. You're talking about something completely different.
If you won't buy a hamburger from McDonalds, you do not forfeit the right to ever cook a hamburger on your own grill. You forfeit the right to eat the McDonalds hamburger. You can always make your own -- which will take a lot more time and effort on your part. And probably (on the whole) will cost more to you because of economies of scale. But hey, who's counting?
Simon
In a truly free market, corporations would not need government grants of monopoly to protect their ideas.
No, they'd just use Vinnie and his buddies and send them round to break your legs when you didn't pay to use their stuff.
If you want a truly free market, please, remove all laws. ALL of them. Including the ones that make stealing, killing, extortion, etc bad.
Simon
You mean like this [apple.com]?
No, I mean like a VCR. You know, something that costs less than $500, sits in your entertainment system. Has no keyboard. Just put it in and go. *Not* a computer.
Spending $2k on an iMac just to burn DVDs is not something that Joe Schmoe is going to do in a hurry.
The problem is that DVHS offers advantages only to people with HDTV. But right now that is a very small minority. DVD offered not only far superior picture quality to VHS, but also better sound and random access. DVHS loses that all important ability of random access and has for the regular viewer no advantage over DVD.
Except for, presumably, being writable on a standard consumer-level system rather than requiring an MPEG-2 encoder and DVD burner?
That will be where its value comes in -- as a way of consumers making their own recordings in digital format.
Si
Could you please point us in the direction of information which will show that IE does in fact have better support for PNG alpha transparency than this test would indicate?
;-)
No, I can't -- thanks for the link and the correction. I guess they support basic on/off transparency (gif style), but not full alpha values.
QuickTime's PNG support still sucks though
Si
There is nothing to ensure that the different versions actually are the same message though. You could quite easily have a text email with some HTML intended to work as malware...
The same applies to the To: From: and any other fields you might pass to the app; unfortunately, security, traceability, authentication and integrity aren't really features of the SMTP spec.
Si
*Sigh*... sometimes irony goes completely over peoples' heads...
What I meant was, the original poster was complaining about how people sent him Word files, you suggested MIME as a remedy, and I just wanted to point out that that would be like saying "I hate banner ads" - "So use ADSL", i.e. the difference between content and carrier.
Irony's great, provided it's in context.
The original poster was complaining about malformed emails that used RTF and HTML instead of just plain text.
Read the post again:
How many Outlook badly formated HTML/word/rtf e-mail's must we put up with before we scream enough!
That's not a Word document he's talking about. Not an attachment. We're talking embedded content here.
Si
It's one thing to break the "global web experience" by writing bad mark-up that breaks all but one browser, it's another thing to throw in comments* that a poorly-written piece of software can't handle.
It is my understanding that email headers preceded by an "X-" are to be ignored by clients that don't know how to interpret them.
Correct! And that's what Outlook & Outlook Express do .
The thing is, Moffit writes headers that abuse those headers -- and the X-* headers in question are only used by Outlook & Outlook Express (stuff like X-Message-Flag: Comment).
The only problematic bug is that OE & Outlook appear to auto-decode uuencoded files. So if you malform your uuencoded data, then you'll screw up someone's mail.
Si
Well, presumably my friends have an older version of Pine then, because they're definitely having trouble with HTML mail -- and looking at the raw message source, they definitely are getting the plaintext fallback content.
Hmmm, I didn't realize that Word was part of MIME...
That's what multipart/alternative is for -- read the spec. RFC 2046. You can write your email in Word, Illustrator, PDF or even TeX if you like, provided that your mail editor supports multipart/alternative correctly. It's polite to provide multiple representations -- eg. plain text, HTML, and El Weirdo File Format in the same message -- for downlevel clients. And it's all fully spelled out in the spec.
Outlook does this; it provides both an HTML or RTF content entity, and a plaintext one. Compliant readers that don't support HTML should only display the plaintext content entity.
Word = RTF or HTML depending on the version, when used for email.
Simon
So Blue Mountain should have quietly gone out of buisness because of Microsoft's incompentence? Microsoft was asked to remove Blue Mountain from the mail filter. Microsoft said they weren't going to fix it. Only then did Blue Mountain sue them. If Microsoft wanted a junk mail filter, they should have been willing to take responsiblity of taking care of it and removing stuff from the filter than shouldn't have been there.
Why does it make your internet experiance so much shitter? Are you too stupid to set up your own mail filter? Read the manual, and if Outlook Express won't let you do it, well, you chose the mail program.
No, Blue Mountain should have worked with Microsoft to fix the problem instead of suing them -- it's in the court record; Microsoft offered to help, Blue Mountain declined.
As for making my internet experience, it's the whole shitload of spam that I get. No, I'm not too stupid to set up my own mail filter; and in fact, I have done. However, there's a limit to what you can do without writing some kind of markov-chain based algorithm to weed out the spam. At the moment, I've got it set up to only keep emails that are CC'd or sent to my address directly (getting rid of 75% of the spam that doesn't have a real email address for me in its headers), and I pull mailing lists back out into their own folders to rescue them from my junkmail folder. However, anything more complex than that is too difficult to do without writing something that scans every post for specific sentences, keywords and content.
I like having things like that written for me. If I wanted to write something like that, I'd do it, and sell the results. But frankly, life is too short, and I have too many other projects to work on already.
As a result, 25% of my spam (the stuff that actually gets sent to my email address, instead of just being SMTP MAIL TO'd my mailbox with the headers being unrelated) can't be filtered out by my set of 30 rules. I'm more than a little pissed that instead of working to resolve the problem, they sued instead. I'm even more pissed that the judge ruled in their favor; that was blatantly wrong.
Simon
Not just transparency, in my experience; PNG in general. I was testing a site in Mozilla and IE6. Everything was fine in Mozilla, but IE6 was color-shifting my PNGs a little, in effect darkening them. They didn't match my HTML-specified backgrounds anymore. It looked horrible. I switched to GIFs and it looked fine in both. I really wanted to use PNG because they were significantly smaller files in my case, but I also don't want to have IE6 users bugging me about supposedly bad pages.
1. Check your PNG gamma settings.
2. Are you running Windows in 16-bit color mode? If so, you'll hit this problem.
Simon
Yea, right. Lamo. And Microsoft was trashing the messages in Outlook Express, by default, because they knew that every Outlook Express user regarded Blue Mountain as spam. It was a wonderful new "feature" right?
/dev/null
Spam or not, my mail shouldn't go to the trash unless I say so. Your mail ->
It didn't go into the trash. It went into a "Possible Junk Mail" folder, which you could choose to rescue it from.
Blue Mountain basically singlehandedly killed any hope of consumers getting any form of automatic junk-mail killing without hand-crafting it *themselves*. Thanks Blue Mountain! You made my internet experience so much shittier.
So is that why IE6 renders PNG transparency so poorly? They're trying to outdo inferior browsers?
No, it's QuickTime that renders PNG transparency poorly; IE6's support works perfectly fine. If you install QuickTime, it takes over rendering of PNG images (without asking you beforehand), and causes the problems you're seeing.
Simon
Another poster wrote:
Nutscrape 4 supports so little of the CSS spec that the feature is practically useless.
Enigma2175 wrote:
And this is sharp contrast to IE 4? If you are going to compare the browsers, at least compare current browsers, don't compare the current IE to the 2 year old Netscape.
I'd have thought that comparing non-beta releases would have been a pre-requisite, as that's what most people will be running. And regardless of the Netscape 6 preview release (because it's a BETA), Netscape 4.7 is the last version of Netscape that Netscape Communications Corp. actually released.
There's nothing else from Netscape that they can compare it to. Maybe when Mozilla is finally released, then you can make a comparison with anything else. But until then, sorry, but it ain't production code.
Simon
Hmm? Pine has featured MIME compliance for years. I use it as my primary mailer and I can sling attachments with the best of 'em.
Attachments are not the sole reason for MIME. MIME is a standard for denoting and handling content encoding and multi-format content in heterogeneous environments.
Take a look at RFC 2046 and read the section on multipart/alternative segments.
The problem with PINE isn't in its ability to push around attachments. It's that (from reports from friends who use it on a daily basis), it appears to be unable to handle multipart/alternative entities in any kind of intelligent (or standards-compliant) fashion. So you get garbage when you read an HTML-encoded email, even if it provides an alternate, plain-text encoded message entity for downlevel clients.
Simon
Don't you see the problem? Look at all the overhead that's tacked on because some marketing bozo wants his email to look 'pretty'. IMHO, MIME is ok for adding attachments for images, data files, sounds, etc. Sending two copies of the same message, one in plain text and the other with tons of markup seems a bit ridiculous to me. Do you send all the other recipients of an email that's been forwarded a dozen times when you forward the letter on to someone else?
Maybe there should be a required netiquette section for any class on how to use a computer.
Maybe there should be a required netiquette section on MIME compliancy for mail readers.
Two copies of the message, one in plain text and the other with markup makes perfect sense to me -- because, frankly, color and formatting can help a LOT when it comes to getting your point across.
Heck, even the original VT52 terminal creators recognized this -- no color, but the ability to do certain kinds of markup (underline, bold, inverse).
However, nice dodge. Whether it's efficient or not isn't the point.
If we're looking into efficiency, why isn't all email dictionary encoded and then huffman encoded before being transferred over SMTP? Why are all the headers text fields rather than simple binary fields?
The answer is twofold; for redundancy (including backwards and forwards compatibility), and human readability.
This is why the same text is sent twice in the message; once for obsolete / down-level clients, and once for clients that can handle HTML.
If efficiency were a concern, email gateways wouldn't be limited to 7-bit character sets, so don't even try to get on that high horse.
Regardless; HTML and text are supported in the same email through the MIME standard, which specifically allows this behavior. If your mail reader can't cut it, then tough crap -- get with the standards program, or get out of the game.
Simon