I've seen *exactly* this method in action - at the Computer History Museum, with the audience being composed almost entirely of kids under the age of ten. It worked brilliantly.
Um, no, you're thinking of Netscape. MSIE versions 3 to 6 were more compliant with W3C standards than the equivalent Netscape releases.
Javascript
Javascript became a standard (i.e. ECMAscript) with Microsoft's involvement. Before then, it was a proprietary language created by Netscape. (This is not to apportion any kind of blame to Netscape for Javascript - just the opposite, it's a great language design and Netscape deserve(d) kudos for creating it. But if you claim that somehow there was a standard which MS broke, you're not looking at the history properly.)
It's typical that this thread devolves into a fight about which language gives you cleaner and more understandable syntax, or whether it's just down to "elegant code" as if that's the main problem here. Want to make your code maintainable and understandable? Here's the big secret you've been overlooking:
Comments.
The sad fact is, the vast majority of open source code may as well not be open, given the impenetrability of it all - mostly written by losers who have convinced themselves that they write "self-documenting code" (*cough* bullshit). There is no such thing as self-documenting code; even if you use Literal Programming techniques (which not nearly enough people do, and which help a great deal) you still need to put actual line comments in.
The last time I dove into Mozilla code was to try and fix a long-standing complaint I had with (what was then) Mail & News. I was dealing with a JS file, not even their horrific C++ (which has been described as "not so much C++ as a whole new language that a C++ compiler happens to be able to deal with". After grappling for an hour with a huge and totally uncommented file, I gave up and never went back. It's a shame, as I'd love to be able to contribute.
End-users who choose to stick with a non-standards-compliant browser cause extra work for web developers.
I'd hereby like to apologise to all those web developers for whom I'm causing extra work. But I'm not going to change my browser, because I like Firefox, and want to keep using it. I hear the same from Opera users about their choice.
However, if you do know of any web browsers which comply fully with all web standards, I'd really like to know, because I've never heard of one.
Yes, Gnutella's architecture makes it a better sharing system than pure BitTorrent, for the simple reason that BT creates torrents for a single file, whereas Gnutella servents have been maintaining download meshes (the name of "torrrents" in Gnutella-speak) for many files at once.
But BT's been able to do that pretty much from day one. You can get a torrent that's a folder full of files. (No, I don't mean a zipped folder) You can choose to only download selected files.
All Excel added was running with a native Windows UI.
On the contrary: Excel was the first spreadsheet program to take spreadsheets out of the financial planning domain and make them useful to everyone. People had been using spreadsheets for all kinds of other things before, but only Microsoft actually noticed this and gave people the tools for it (in Excel 5.0). Lotus, at the time, was working in the opposite direction with Improv, which was really good at financial planning but not so great at the rest. Joel Spolsky explains more here.
I wrote a blog post about this a while back: the basic spreadsheet model and its tools are incredibly useful for a whole bunch of different jobs, and Excel was the first software to really make use of this. The spreadsheet structure has become as fundamental and useful for data as the text file, the document object model or the relational database. The reasons for Excel's market dominance may have more to do with the marketing and positioning of MS Office in general, but both recognising the use of spreadsheets as a fundamental datatype and assisting it with easy tools is why it's revolutionary.
There should be no web browser that's integrated into the OS. There are many reasons for this, but I'll name one: security. Browsing the web is an inherently insecure operation. Why would you (for any technical reason) integrate that function into the core of your OS?
I've bolded the sentence above because it makes absolutely no sense to me. If it's inherently insecure, why are you doing it at all? And where do you get the idea that it's inherently insecure, anyway? Because it's taking untrusted data from an external source? So does a TCP/IP stack. Hell, so does a keyboard driver.
"Try dumping the left join and using simple queries" is the first thing I suggest to my junior developers when they have gone and done the competent thing and ended up with a web app query that takes a full minute to return a result.
Y'see, I'd rather that my developers not get punished for "doing the competent thing", and get to spend their time developing new features rather than having to hand-optimise existing ones. As the other reply suggests, if an RDBMS can't properly analyse a complex query and return results faster than doing it with multiple simple queries being dumped over the network, then that RDBMS is screwed. Maybe it's just tuned badly or maybe it's terminally brain-dead, but there's definitely something wrong there.
FFTW is the 'Fastest Fourier Transform in the West', a cute name for the work of a number of graduate students who use several techniques to turn the FFT from 'Numerical Recipes in C' into a freaking speed daemon.... but not as fast as djbfft, right? (I'm asking rather than telling, as I have very little FFT experience and am intrigued to know)
The thing to bear in mind is that your sample set is probably taken from common English usage. The soft-hyphen bug was brought to my attention by a web developer friend who works for Nature Publishing, which publishes a large number of scientific journals online. As a result, he habitually has to deal with much longer words than you usually get when working in English. If you look at the comments on my blog entry and in the Bugzilla bug, those who need the bug fixed for their day to day work are dealing with languages that often have 20-30 letter words. And while "web content" may not care if it's justified, the layout designers who are working with it often do. (If you get one really short line in the middle of a paragraph, it just looks shit.)
So rather than just acknowledge the unsurprising truth, you choose to judge browsers by their release date instead of by the actual date now, in the real world.
Yes, but you're avoiding the point of why I'm doing that, which is not to talk about which is the better browser for use right now (Firefox, for god's sake), but to address the original bullshit idea that Microsoft browser releases have always been wilfully standards-breaking and much buggier than their counterparts.
I'll say it again: there is no browser that implements all actively-recommended web standards correctly. What's more, I don't think there ever has been (at least, not after HTML 2). But we put up with this because we don't actually care about using the latest standards - at least not until there's some decent support for them. Most web designers didn't really care about the rendering deficiencies in IE6 until at least two years later because that's when other browsers that could render those standards properly had enough market share to be worth developing for. So the problem is not that IE6 is more buggy than all the other browsers, it's that the standards it doesn't support are now in much greater demand. If Apple stopped working on Safari right now, exactly the same issue would result, and I don't hear people currently screaming that Safari is hugely buggy.
And, I've just realised, the problem isn't even that MS stopped developing IE6. If they'd come out with IE7 in 2004 you can be sure that today IE6 would still have 20% market share (i.e. large enough to still need coverage in the vast majority of projects), despite MS's continual efforts to get all its users to use Windows Update regularly.
I dispute this, on the grounds that it hasn't been fixed. The code is, after all, open source, and there are a large number of talented programmers who speak Germanic languages. If it were as big of a deal as you suggest, and as much easier than the "much harder problems that have been flattened with ease," why hasn't anyone stepped up and fixed it?
Have you looked at the Gecko source code recently? Clue 1.
The whole point of open source is that people focus their efforts on the bugs that matter to them. If no one addresses a bug, that means that there wasn't anyone who found it important enough to fix.
The people who are affected by this bug are German web designers. They code HTML and CSS, not C++. And even if they could code C++, they'd still need to spend a good month or so ploughing through tons of badly-commented code (as I once did when trying to fix a bug in MailNews, and soon just gave up). And the chances are they can't just take a month off work to learn Gecko's workings in order to fix one bug.
The people who could fix it are the few coders out there who've been living and breathing Gecko for years. They could probably do it in a couple of days, though I have no real proof of that other than knowing it took Dave Hyatt less than a day to fix in WebCore. Gecko could be architected in such a way that makes it much harder. But the reason it hasn't been fixed is not that "nobody cares" - take a look at the Bugzilla comments if you don't believe me.
It looks like you are saying that IE is more standards compliant than anything else, but you are not.
Well, no, it only looks like that if you don't pay attention. What I'm saying is that IE was more standards compliant than anything else, as evidenced by the bolded bit:
Every web browser released by Microsoft from IE3 onwards has been more standards-compliant than any Netscape browser released around the same time.
The mainstream Microsoft browser is a five and a half year old piece of shit because Microsoft wasted all of their time on Active Desktop, DRM and other lock in garbage instead of real standards, speed, stability or security. For a minute, it looked like you were saying the opposite because you have some ancient hatred of Netscape or something.
UUUHHNNN! MICROSOFT BAD! NETSCAPE GOOD! BASH MICROSOFT, BASH!!!
Aside from the bizarre idea that Bill Gates said "Hey guys, let's spend the next five years creating shitty stuff that everyone hates to the exclusion of everything else," you might want to realise that sometimes big companies do both bad things and good things, irrelevant of whether they are Microsoft or Netscape.
The whole reason for my initial comment, in case you missed it, was to dispute the idea that Microsoft was somehow the bad standards-breaking browser maker in the midst of a bunch of angels, which is demonstrably bullshit. But hey, we're criticising Microsoft here, and they're always evil, right? So don't let facts get in the way or anything, please...
No, you're missing the point. Firefox 1.5 is way more standards-compliant than IE6 is, I'm not denying that. What I'm saying is:
Complaining that a browser released in 2001 - and that's had almost no standards-related bug fixes since then - is much worse than a browser that's been through constant maintenance since then is not exactly surprising, irrelevant of the fact that it's from Microsoft
The point about the soft-hyphen bug is that standards-compliance problems in the favoured browsers are often overlooked by their fans, even though they can cause just as much pain to web developers. Soft-hyphen support doesn't seem like a big deal if you're working in English, but to Germans it's a very big deal indeed. This bug has gone unfixed for five years, And the weird thing is that much much harder problems related to CSS rendering have been flattened with ease.
AFAIK, there is not a single web browser in existence that correctly deals with all recommended web standards. (No, Acid2 doesn't nearly test them all.) This is firstly because there are new standards being created all the time, and secondly because creating a browser that manages it all correctly is rocket-science-level, mental-breakdown-triggering hard. Lambasting Microsoft for not updating their browser is one thing, but for ever having bugs in it at all? Let the browser that is without rendering deficiencies cast the first stone.
Back in 1995, Netscape had managed to completely derail the W3C's efforts with HTML 3.0, and we all had to settle for the hugely-cut-down 3.2. Internet Explorer was the first major commercial browser effort to break away from the whole damaging tag-inventing arms race, take a good look at what the W3C was proposing and actually make a point of following it. And for that, the web standards effort should give it at least a small vote of thanks.
Microsoft has yet to release a browser that comes close to supporting standards
This is often shouted and an easy way to bash MS. It's also completely wrong.
Every web browser released by Microsoft from IE3 onwards has been more standards-compliant than any Netscape browser released around the same time. IE3 was the first major browser (outside of W3C testbeds) with CSS support. IE4 brought CSS-P support, while NS4 introduced the totally non-standard LAYER tag, then made a bad stab at implementing CSS-P under sufferance. IE5/Mac was easily the most standards-compliant browser on the Mac for years. The Mozilla project had been going for a while when IE6 came out, and Mozilla might be considered the better browser of the two if you rate standards compliance several miles above stability and speed.
The reason IE6 is bashed so hard by designers these days is not that IE6 was a particularly bad release. It's that it's bad by today's standards, and nothing's been done to fix it. This is a different issue, and one that the IE7 team has been loudly busting a gut to address. (There is also the utterly shameful issue of IE6's many security problems, which is a different argument, but it's one of the main reasons I've been using Mozilla-based browsers since 1.0)
I've been on the lookout for a mobile data card in the UK ever since using a Verizon EVDO card in the US; it saved our arses at ETech when the network went down on the last day, and we had to demo our web service.
Up until now all the pricing for mobile data's been around 70 quid/month for 200MB, which is far enough from flat rate to make me worried about using it repeatedly. However, this is 20 quid for 2 gig, and that's fantastic. 20 quid is more than worthwhile insurance if I have to give even one demo a month - the fact that I can setup and get going with no futzing with local networks is a major boon.
When I bought it they said I could use it for anything. I may pop over the road at lunchtime and give the T-Mobsters a grilling about these restrictions. Mind you, I really can't see how they'll enforce this; so many people have their IM client set to start automatically on boot and sign-on on network connection that it's going to be a major pain, and T-Mob deserve all the problems they get if they think they can enforce it.
I'm seriously considering organising my books by colour when we move into our new flat shortly. It's not hard to work out where any book is (and I'm used to having a rough idea of where any book is despite not organising them in any particular way in the past) and it can lookfantastic.
Creating the licences is pointless if nobody uses them. You have to get out there and show people how and why. CC's rapidly accelerating acceptance is evidence that they're doing a decent job of it.
Re:Retro Computing
on
IT Crowd On-line
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· Score: 4, Informative
Well spotted! That particular machine (along with a load of other junk^H^H^H^Hvaluable retrocomputing paraphernalia you'll see scattered around the set) belongs to my father-in-law. Talkback raided a few different people's collections for the set - watch out for more, as I think they're changing stuff around to some degree every week.
Whenever I see that on a website, right there I think to myself, "This is an annoying, and/or low quality website with suspect information on it."
The essential and consistently-excellent Urban Legends Reference Pages site is the notable exception to this rule. (Okay, it has plenty of suspect information on it, but at least it's marked as such.) It's a shame they have those pop-ups; thankfully, FF1.5 now blocks the fastclick.net that always seemed to get past FF1.0.
BTW among the "losers" in the basement is someone named Jen. So it seems there is a token geek grrl down there with the guys.... except, as becomes apparent early on, she's not a geek. She's been put there to manage them. (And this is where a big chunk of the comedy comes from. You'll have to trust me on this one.)
Yes, they had consultants. I was one of them.
on
'The IT Crowd' UK Sit-com
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I first got a mail from Graham Linehan back in August of last year (he'd been given my details by Cory Doctorow - okay, not much more namedropping, I promise) and I jumped at the chance to help out - Father Ted and Big Train are two of my favourite-ever TV comedies.
He sent the scripts and I eventually sent a couple of notes back with a couple of minor corrections, but I really didn't need to do much at all; the humour in the show comes from really good character comedy, and the IT aspect is (quite rightly, IMHO) just a sideline thing. Roy and Moss bear slightly more resemblance to real-world sysadmins than Ted and Dougal do to real-world priests, but only slightly. As with Ted, the joy is in exggerating the silliness of the situations.
It was in building the set that the fun really started, and I need to get Sean to participate in the thread here as I recommended him for the job of gathering as much fun techie crap as possible as well as looking after the on-set PCs. Having visited the set once, I can tell you he did a fantastic job. There are so many wonderful little references and rare bits of kit lurking in the messes (British geeks in particular are in for a treat). Plus, thanks to Danny, there are EFF stickers everywhere.
Make sure to tape/TiVo/torrent it - it's a great show, fun and silly, with lots of easter-egg treats for geeks.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen *exactly* this method in action - at the Computer History Museum, with the audience being composed almost entirely of kids under the age of ten. It worked brilliantly.
HTML
Um, no, you're thinking of Netscape. MSIE versions 3 to 6 were more compliant with W3C standards than the equivalent Netscape releases.
Javascript
Javascript became a standard (i.e. ECMAscript) with Microsoft's involvement. Before then, it was a proprietary language created by Netscape. (This is not to apportion any kind of blame to Netscape for Javascript - just the opposite, it's a great language design and Netscape deserve(d) kudos for creating it. But if you claim that somehow there was a standard which MS broke, you're not looking at the history properly.)
It's typical that this thread devolves into a fight about which language gives you cleaner and more understandable syntax, or whether it's just down to "elegant code" as if that's the main problem here. Want to make your code maintainable and understandable? Here's the big secret you've been overlooking:
Comments.
The sad fact is, the vast majority of open source code may as well not be open, given the impenetrability of it all - mostly written by losers who have convinced themselves that they write "self-documenting code" (*cough* bullshit). There is no such thing as self-documenting code; even if you use Literal Programming techniques (which not nearly enough people do, and which help a great deal) you still need to put actual line comments in.
The last time I dove into Mozilla code was to try and fix a long-standing complaint I had with (what was then) Mail & News. I was dealing with a JS file, not even their horrific C++ (which has been described as "not so much C++ as a whole new language that a C++ compiler happens to be able to deal with". After grappling for an hour with a huge and totally uncommented file, I gave up and never went back. It's a shame, as I'd love to be able to contribute.
"Most fans of the MythBusters would agree that the two hosts of the show, Adam and Jamie, are 'diametrically opposed in every aspect of their lives'.
One's a clean-cut professional cop who plays it by the rules. The other's a wild rookie who'll use every trick in the book to get to the truth!
End-users who choose to stick with a non-standards-compliant browser cause extra work for web developers.
I'd hereby like to apologise to all those web developers for whom I'm causing extra work. But I'm not going to change my browser, because I like Firefox, and want to keep using it. I hear the same from Opera users about their choice.
However, if you do know of any web browsers which comply fully with all web standards, I'd really like to know, because I've never heard of one.
Yes, Gnutella's architecture makes it a better sharing system than pure BitTorrent, for the simple reason that BT creates torrents for a single file, whereas Gnutella servents have been maintaining download meshes (the name of "torrrents" in Gnutella-speak) for many files at once.
But BT's been able to do that pretty much from day one. You can get a torrent that's a folder full of files. (No, I don't mean a zipped folder) You can choose to only download selected files.
No. Elsewhere in this thread: Why Excel is revolutionary
All Excel added was running with a native Windows UI.
On the contrary: Excel was the first spreadsheet program to take spreadsheets out of the financial planning domain and make them useful to everyone. People had been using spreadsheets for all kinds of other things before, but only Microsoft actually noticed this and gave people the tools for it (in Excel 5.0). Lotus, at the time, was working in the opposite direction with Improv, which was really good at financial planning but not so great at the rest. Joel Spolsky explains more here.
I wrote a blog post about this a while back: the basic spreadsheet model and its tools are incredibly useful for a whole bunch of different jobs, and Excel was the first software to really make use of this. The spreadsheet structure has become as fundamental and useful for data as the text file, the document object model or the relational database. The reasons for Excel's market dominance may have more to do with the marketing and positioning of MS Office in general, but both recognising the use of spreadsheets as a fundamental datatype and assisting it with easy tools is why it's revolutionary.
There should be no web browser that's integrated into the OS. There are many reasons for this, but I'll name one: security. Browsing the web is an inherently insecure operation. Why would you (for any technical reason) integrate that function into the core of your OS?
I've bolded the sentence above because it makes absolutely no sense to me. If it's inherently insecure, why are you doing it at all? And where do you get the idea that it's inherently insecure, anyway? Because it's taking untrusted data from an external source? So does a TCP/IP stack. Hell, so does a keyboard driver.
"Try dumping the left join and using simple queries" is the first thing I suggest to my junior developers when they have gone and done the competent thing and ended up with a web app query that takes a full minute to return a result.
Y'see, I'd rather that my developers not get punished for "doing the competent thing", and get to spend their time developing new features rather than having to hand-optimise existing ones. As the other reply suggests, if an RDBMS can't properly analyse a complex query and return results faster than doing it with multiple simple queries being dumped over the network, then that RDBMS is screwed. Maybe it's just tuned badly or maybe it's terminally brain-dead, but there's definitely something wrong there.
FFTW is the 'Fastest Fourier Transform in the West', a cute name for the work of a number of graduate students who use several techniques to turn the FFT from 'Numerical Recipes in C' into a freaking speed daemon. ... but not as fast as djbfft, right? (I'm asking rather than telling, as I have very little FFT experience and am intrigued to know)
The thing to bear in mind is that your sample set is probably taken from common English usage. The soft-hyphen bug was brought to my attention by a web developer friend who works for Nature Publishing, which publishes a large number of scientific journals online. As a result, he habitually has to deal with much longer words than you usually get when working in English. If you look at the comments on my blog entry and in the Bugzilla bug, those who need the bug fixed for their day to day work are dealing with languages that often have 20-30 letter words. And while "web content" may not care if it's justified, the layout designers who are working with it often do. (If you get one really short line in the middle of a paragraph, it just looks shit.)
So rather than just acknowledge the unsurprising truth, you choose to judge browsers by their release date instead of by the actual date now, in the real world.
Yes, but you're avoiding the point of why I'm doing that, which is not to talk about which is the better browser for use right now (Firefox, for god's sake), but to address the original bullshit idea that Microsoft browser releases have always been wilfully standards-breaking and much buggier than their counterparts.
I'll say it again: there is no browser that implements all actively-recommended web standards correctly. What's more, I don't think there ever has been (at least, not after HTML 2). But we put up with this because we don't actually care about using the latest standards - at least not until there's some decent support for them. Most web designers didn't really care about the rendering deficiencies in IE6 until at least two years later because that's when other browsers that could render those standards properly had enough market share to be worth developing for. So the problem is not that IE6 is more buggy than all the other browsers, it's that the standards it doesn't support are now in much greater demand. If Apple stopped working on Safari right now, exactly the same issue would result, and I don't hear people currently screaming that Safari is hugely buggy.
And, I've just realised, the problem isn't even that MS stopped developing IE6. If they'd come out with IE7 in 2004 you can be sure that today IE6 would still have 20% market share (i.e. large enough to still need coverage in the vast majority of projects), despite MS's continual efforts to get all its users to use Windows Update regularly.
I dispute this, on the grounds that it hasn't been fixed. The code is, after all, open source, and there are a large number of talented programmers who speak Germanic languages. If it were as big of a deal as you suggest, and as much easier than the "much harder problems that have been flattened with ease," why hasn't anyone stepped up and fixed it?
Have you looked at the Gecko source code recently? Clue 1.
The whole point of open source is that people focus their efforts on the bugs that matter to them. If no one addresses a bug, that means that there wasn't anyone who found it important enough to fix.
The people who are affected by this bug are German web designers. They code HTML and CSS, not C++. And even if they could code C++, they'd still need to spend a good month or so ploughing through tons of badly-commented code (as I once did when trying to fix a bug in MailNews, and soon just gave up). And the chances are they can't just take a month off work to learn Gecko's workings in order to fix one bug.
The people who could fix it are the few coders out there who've been living and breathing Gecko for years. They could probably do it in a couple of days, though I have no real proof of that other than knowing it took Dave Hyatt less than a day to fix in WebCore. Gecko could be architected in such a way that makes it much harder. But the reason it hasn't been fixed is not that "nobody cares" - take a look at the Bugzilla comments if you don't believe me.
It looks like you are saying that IE is more standards compliant than anything else, but you are not.
Well, no, it only looks like that if you don't pay attention. What I'm saying is that IE was more standards compliant than anything else, as evidenced by the bolded bit:
Every web browser released by Microsoft from IE3 onwards has been more standards-compliant than any Netscape browser released around the same time.
The mainstream Microsoft browser is a five and a half year old piece of shit because Microsoft wasted all of their time on Active Desktop, DRM and other lock in garbage instead of real standards, speed, stability or security. For a minute, it looked like you were saying the opposite because you have some ancient hatred of Netscape or something.
UUUHHNNN! MICROSOFT BAD! NETSCAPE GOOD! BASH MICROSOFT, BASH!!!
Aside from the bizarre idea that Bill Gates said "Hey guys, let's spend the next five years creating shitty stuff that everyone hates to the exclusion of everything else," you might want to realise that sometimes big companies do both bad things and good things, irrelevant of whether they are Microsoft or Netscape.
The whole reason for my initial comment, in case you missed it, was to dispute the idea that Microsoft was somehow the bad standards-breaking browser maker in the midst of a bunch of angels, which is demonstrably bullshit. But hey, we're criticising Microsoft here, and they're always evil, right? So don't let facts get in the way or anything, please...
AFAIK, there is not a single web browser in existence that correctly deals with all recommended web standards. (No, Acid2 doesn't nearly test them all.) This is firstly because there are new standards being created all the time, and secondly because creating a browser that manages it all correctly is rocket-science-level, mental-breakdown-triggering hard. Lambasting Microsoft for not updating their browser is one thing, but for ever having bugs in it at all? Let the browser that is without rendering deficiencies cast the first stone.
Back in 1995, Netscape had managed to completely derail the W3C's efforts with HTML 3.0, and we all had to settle for the hugely-cut-down 3.2. Internet Explorer was the first major commercial browser effort to break away from the whole damaging tag-inventing arms race, take a good look at what the W3C was proposing and actually make a point of following it. And for that, the web standards effort should give it at least a small vote of thanks.
Microsoft has yet to release a browser that comes close to supporting standards
This is often shouted and an easy way to bash MS. It's also completely wrong.
Every web browser released by Microsoft from IE3 onwards has been more standards-compliant than any Netscape browser released around the same time. IE3 was the first major browser (outside of W3C testbeds) with CSS support. IE4 brought CSS-P support, while NS4 introduced the totally non-standard LAYER tag, then made a bad stab at implementing CSS-P under sufferance. IE5/Mac was easily the most standards-compliant browser on the Mac for years. The Mozilla project had been going for a while when IE6 came out, and Mozilla might be considered the better browser of the two if you rate standards compliance several miles above stability and speed.
The reason IE6 is bashed so hard by designers these days is not that IE6 was a particularly bad release. It's that it's bad by today's standards, and nothing's been done to fix it. This is a different issue, and one that the IE7 team has been loudly busting a gut to address. (There is also the utterly shameful issue of IE6's many security problems, which is a different argument, but it's one of the main reasons I've been using Mozilla-based browsers since 1.0)
And if you're still not convinced of anything other than Firefox's total superiority over IE in all standards-related matters, how about we dig up an issue of HTML4 compliance which IE's had right for years, and Mozilla/Firefox never has.
I've been on the lookout for a mobile data card in the UK ever since using a Verizon EVDO card in the US; it saved our arses at ETech when the network went down on the last day, and we had to demo our web service.
Up until now all the pricing for mobile data's been around 70 quid/month for 200MB, which is far enough from flat rate to make me worried about using it repeatedly. However, this is 20 quid for 2 gig, and that's fantastic. 20 quid is more than worthwhile insurance if I have to give even one demo a month - the fact that I can setup and get going with no futzing with local networks is a major boon.
When I bought it they said I could use it for anything. I may pop over the road at lunchtime and give the T-Mobsters a grilling about these restrictions. Mind you, I really can't see how they'll enforce this; so many people have their IM client set to start automatically on boot and sign-on on network connection that it's going to be a major pain, and T-Mob deserve all the problems they get if they think they can enforce it.
Good point, I hadn't considered that.
I may ask Rod (owner of the first bookshelf in the photos) how he's getting on with his arrangement.
I'm seriously considering organising my books by colour when we move into our new flat shortly. It's not hard to work out where any book is (and I'm used to having a rough idea of where any book is despite not organising them in any particular way in the past) and it can look fantastic.
Then again, I've never seen how Creative Commons amounts to the "social movement" that people make it out to be.
The fact that you've heard of CC at all shows that it's having some effect as a movement.
What the CC movement is ultimately about is showing people that there's more to protecting your work than simply slapping a big © symbol on it. What if you demand attribution, but don't care about duplication? Copyright is not a binary thing. CC firstly educates that there are different options for different uses. It shows that if people start using CC, there's much more usable content out there for people to share and build on. And by creating and sharing the licences and making them easy to apply, it removes the largest stumbling block in the way of people who want to share their stuff while still exerting some control.
Creating the licences is pointless if nobody uses them. You have to get out there and show people how and why. CC's rapidly accelerating acceptance is evidence that they're doing a decent job of it.
Well spotted! That particular machine (along with a load of other junk^H^H^H^Hvaluable retrocomputing paraphernalia you'll see scattered around the set) belongs to my father-in-law. Talkback raided a few different people's collections for the set - watch out for more, as I think they're changing stuff around to some degree every week.
Whenever I see that on a website, right there I think to myself, "This is an annoying, and/or low quality website with suspect information on it."
The essential and consistently-excellent Urban Legends Reference Pages site is the notable exception to this rule. (Okay, it has plenty of suspect information on it, but at least it's marked as such.) It's a shame they have those pop-ups; thankfully, FF1.5 now blocks the fastclick.net that always seemed to get past FF1.0.
BTW among the "losers" in the basement is someone named Jen. So it seems there is a token geek grrl down there with the guys. ... except, as becomes apparent early on, she's not a geek. She's been put there to manage them. (And this is where a big chunk of the comedy comes from. You'll have to trust me on this one.)
As I explain down here.
(Karma whore? Me? But of course.)
I first got a mail from Graham Linehan back in August of last year (he'd been given my details by Cory Doctorow - okay, not much more namedropping, I promise) and I jumped at the chance to help out - Father Ted and Big Train are two of my favourite-ever TV comedies.
He sent the scripts and I eventually sent a couple of notes back with a couple of minor corrections, but I really didn't need to do much at all; the humour in the show comes from really good character comedy, and the IT aspect is (quite rightly, IMHO) just a sideline thing. Roy and Moss bear slightly more resemblance to real-world sysadmins than Ted and Dougal do to real-world priests, but only slightly. As with Ted, the joy is in exggerating the silliness of the situations.
It was in building the set that the fun really started, and I need to get Sean to participate in the thread here as I recommended him for the job of gathering as much fun techie crap as possible as well as looking after the on-set PCs. Having visited the set once, I can tell you he did a fantastic job. There are so many wonderful little references and rare bits of kit lurking in the messes (British geeks in particular are in for a treat). Plus, thanks to Danny, there are EFF stickers everywhere.
Make sure to tape/TiVo/torrent it - it's a great show, fun and silly, with lots of easter-egg treats for geeks.