Genesis may very well be 100% accurate and true-- if so, that simply means that science cannot describe the origin of man or the universe, not that Genesis is science.... I'm not against Genesis being taught in school either, as long as it's in Social Studies, Comparative Religion, or even Literary Studies. It's simply not science. I agree, Genesis is not science - but you can use it as a hypothesis, and once you do, then you can start doing science. For example, the Bible gives a rough idea how long ago Creation occurred (there are genealogies listed that we can extrapolate from). If you start with the hypothesis that the earth is 6,000 years old, then you can look for evidence that supports your hypothesis. Now we're getting into the realm of science.
Maybe, but those retailers wouldn't have anything to push if the source didn't create it. True, but as long as some of the major studios are releasing BluRay movies, if WalMart exclusively carries BluRay, many consumers will buy a BluRay disc from WalMart rather than going elsewhere to find a movie that WalMart doesn't sell.
more complicated apostrophe use (possessives ending in s always send me to a style guide) Just because Americans rarely follow our own rules doesn't mean we don't have them. Possessives ending in "s" get the apostrophe at the end. The big exception is "its" which is possessive with no apostrophe (as opposed to "it's" which is always a contraction).
I'd say WalMart, Blockbuster and Netflix were more influential than the studios. Most people don't care what format the studios are releasing in, they care what format their retail store of choice is selling.
I'm a Christian, I believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, and I believe Creation Science really is science. Intelligent Design is not. Intelligent Design is the philosophy that certain things are too complex to have come about naturally and therefore they must have been supernaturally designed. Just because I happen to believe that they were supernaturally designed doesn't make the philosophy of ID any more scientific.
IE 89 is being touted one way or another like a current released product, which it isn't. Seems like vaporware to me. Not any more than Firefox 3, which isn't a currently released product either (although FF3 is much closer to release than IE8). Come to think of it, when we were talking about IE7 before it was released, it wasn't vaporware either.
Seriously, nobody's saying IE8 will be out the door tomorrow or next month. It's a work in progress, and it's being treated like a work in progress. If the company says it will ship "any day now" and we know it won't really, that's vaporware. This isn't vaporware. I have every confidence that IE8 will ship within a reasonable timeframe.
Yes, but the new way is just as idiotic: Every single existing web page that is who knows how old and currently IE6- and/or IE7-compatible will have to be updated with a meta tag telling IE8 that it should not render them in IE8 mode. This is only true if 1) those old pages are currently rendering in standards mode (really old stuff designed for Netscape 4 will still render in Quirks mode and will therefore not be affected by this) and 2) the improved standards compliance of IE8's rendering engine actually breaks your site. Chances are, if your web site looks OK in Firefox, Opera and Safari, it will also look OK in IE8. On the other hand, if you actually meant for your page to look like this, IE8 will cause a problem for you.
Note that this situation is slightly different from the problems people experienced when upgrading from IE6 to IE7. If your site looks correct in IE7 but is broken in IE8, all you have to do is add a simple META tag. Yes, it's more obnoxious in the short term than if IE7 compatibility were the default, but I really don't expect most sites to have a problem with it.
I really don't see people bothering and going and updating hundreds of thousands of existing web pages/sites. IE8 will break more web sites than it will 'fix'. No matter what Microsoft does, they just make things worse. People have already had to update hundreds of thousands of existing web pages to get them to work in IE7. If they had any sense, they didn't just hack them to work exclusively in IE7; they updated the code to be standards-compliant so it renders correctly in IE7 and Firefox and Opera and Safari. IE8 getting even better standards support shouldn't break much.
I understand your point, and it's well taken, but you are introducing a tautology. Standards compliance is absolute, by _definition_. I take your point as well, but I want to interject that this entirely depends on what the standards are. Can you build a word processor that is 100% compliant with Microsoft's OOXML standard? Not really, in any meaningful sense, because the standard is incomplete and refers to behavior that isn't described as part of the standard (that's a large part of what all the OOXML vs ODF fuss was about). Can you build an IRC client that is completely standards-compliant? No, because the RFCs that describe how IRC works are incomplete, inconsistent, contain errors, and aren't strictly adhered to by any popular implementation.
In the case of HTML/XHTML and CSS, there's been quite a bit more effort invested into making sure the standards are properly documented and are internally consistent, but these standards are constantly evolving. Is it enough to support HTML 4.01 and CSS 2, or must you support HTML 5 and CSS 3? Do de-facto standards count? Remember that XMLHttpRequest (the basis of AJAX) is mostly a de-facto standard; the W3C has published a working draft of a specification for it.
Standards compliance isn't always as cut-and-dry as you make it sound.
Skip DST entirely. No clock changes at all. You want more daylight? Get up earlier. Need more time to work? Work summer hours.
It's MUCH easier than having to change your clocks all the time. And it seems that it's much less wasteful, too. Because somewhere, somebody is making money on this, and they would stand to lose quite a bit if we all adopted Arizona's model. The question is, who is that somebody? Bruce Perens above said it's the charcoal briquette manufacturers; I've heard it's WalMart and other retailers (selling charcoal briquettes, but also other picnic/outdoor/camping gear). It's pretty obvious that the official reason (saving energy, which is why the DST change was attached to an energy bill) is a load of crap.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the required computer updates cost $2 billion for IT.
What Microsoft HAS proven (repeatedly) is that it considers compliance with standards to be a relative term. So do all other browser makers. The various standards involved are non-trivial to implement, and as another poster commented, nobody has implemented all of them.
Just because a browser passes Acid2 doesn't mean it's "standards-compliant". It means it complies with the specific parts of the standards that Acid2 tests for, which is only a few things that most browsers (at the time Acid2 was created) got wrong.
Perhaps Opera's complaint to the EU or the EU's record antitrust fine had something to do with Redmond's about-face. Or perhaps Microsoft simply realized that their previous plan was flawed, and they've decided to do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do. Or maybe it occurred to them that encouraging everyone to move to standard code will make development of future versions of IE much easier, so it's in their own interests to do so.
Let's start with the installer. I realize the vast majority of users will never see it, but for those of us who do, Vista's installer is like a breath of fresh air compared to XP. Actually, it's very similar to Mac OS X and most "modern" Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.). First of all, you boot off the DVD into a full GUI, the command prompt is called "command prompt" instead of "recovery console" and doesn't require the Administrator password of the previously installed system before letting you use it, and because it's a GUI with a command prompt, you can actually run simple GUI apps off the hard drive - nothing complex obviously, but something like Notepad works fine. Editing a file on the hard drive while booted from an XP install CD is non-trivial.
If you need to load a third-party driver (e.g. for a RAID controller) during installation, with XP you have to press F6 at precisely the right moment, then insert a floppy disk (yes, a floppy disk) containing the driver into the A: drive. Vista gives you a button to click, and lets you browse for the correct driver using a standard (i.e. familiar) "open file" dialog box; of course you can load the driver from a CD, or a USB flash drive, or whatever.
Oh, and in case you're trying to fix an existing installation that can't boot for some reason, there's a button to fix common startup problems automatically. It doesn't work in every case, but if your problem happens to be one of the ones it can fix, it's nice.
Moving on...
Ever try to copy a whole bunch of files, only to have the copy fail halfway through because of some temporary problem that's easily fixable? For example, say you're copying files over a wireless network and the network goes down because your 2.4GHz cordless phone rang, or you're copying from a Linux box running Samba and one of the files has incorrect permissions for some reason and you can't read it. On XP, the whole operation fails, and there's no good way to resume. You could delete everything and start over, but that takes too much time; depending on how the files are organized you may be able to figure out which files and folders have copied successfully and skip those when you start copying again, but it's a huge pain in the ass. On Vista, once you've fixed the problem, all you have to do is click the Try Again button, and everything is fine.
You know those old games from the Windows 95 era that stored their saved game files in the same location as the application itself, instead of doing the sensible thing and putting them in the current user's profile directory? It made sense at the time because most Win95 machines didn't even have the multiple user capability enabled and everyone had write access to C:\Program Files anyway. Well, on a modern multi-user system, that doesn't work. If you're running as an Administrator user on XP, with access to C:\Program Files, you'll probably be OK, as long as you don't care if any other users on the system have access to the same saved game files, but Slashdotters know that running as Administrator all the time is bad, right? Well, Vista creates sort of a virtual filesystem, so that when you run an old game that tries to write to C:\Program Files, it really writes to a special path inside your profile directory. The game works perfectly because it thinks it has write access to the entire hard drive just like it did on Win95, but you don't need Administrator privileges to run it, and it works properly in a multi-user environment.
Connecting to a wireless network is less of a pain in the ass. Instead of making you enter a 26-character WEP key twice while typing blind, on Vista you only have to type it once and you get the option to display the characters while you're typing so you can check for errors. It still hides it with bullets by default, but since most of the time the person looking over your shoulder as you enter a WEP key is the person who gave you the WEP key in the
Your lack of interest in Vista explains your lack of knowledge about Vista; it's not "less of an OS" than XP. It does have some problems, the most glaring of which will hopefully be fixed in SP1; the larger issue is third-party compatibility which is comparable to the problems Windows 2000 had when it first came out.
Vista doesn't piss me off the way XP always did. They've fixed a lot of little things. The problem is that XP is good enough for most people, and there are enough compatibility problems, plus the performance issues, that people have gotten the idea that Vista is a turd - either because they tried it and experienced compatibility or performance problems, or because they've been warned by other people not to try it. There's nothing Microsoft can do now to make these people want to try Vista again (unless the existence of SP1 is enough), but the next version of Windows will be released in 2010 or so. Under the hood it will be almost the same as Vista, but on the surface it will look as different from Vista as XP does from 2000, so people will eat it up.
In the improbable case that this would ever happen to me, I would demand that the offending peace of luggage is removed from the first class area (either put elsewhere or put in the cargo area). Yes, and as soon as the horde of coach-class passengers has gotten out of the way, I'm sure a flight attendant would be happy to move it for you, causing an additional delay.
The first few rows are first class seats; they get on first because they've paid a hell of a lot more money. They have more space available, so no trouble stowing their luggage, and they're also frequent fliers so they know what the hell they're doing. They sit down and get out of everyone else's way before coach class passengers are allowed to begin boarding (except for passengers with small children, etc.).
Agreed. If airlines enforced that rule (if it doesn't fit in the little box, you're not allowed to carry it on - with exceptions for unusually-shaped items that most people don't normally travel with) carry-on space would not be a problem.
All software is a form of math, one technique can have completely different looking math but produces the same results such as the prior example. You can not patent math because you didn't invent anything, you just discovered the formula which was already there. I respectfully disagree. While the 3D shading example you cite is certainly math, Amazon's One-Click patent is certainly not. In that case, anyone "skilled in the art" could easily come up with several implementations; the concept of the solution is obvious when the problem is described, and it's not any particular implementation that's patented, but rather the concept of keeping the user's billing information on file so they can buy something by clicking a single button instead of having to enter or confirm their billing information for each purchase.
Anyone who wants to allow online customers to easily buy things without confirming their billing information is completely unable to do so, even though the solution is obvious in general and several implementations of the solution are obvious, unless they license the patent from Amazon (like Apple chose to do for the iTunes Store).
Or let's say you want to let users zoom in on a picture using a touch-screen interface. There are only so many ways you could possibly do that, but grabbing with two fingers and pulling apart to stretch the image is patented by Apple now. The implementation would be pretty tricky to get right, but that's not patented, that's just a trade secret.
If you run a blaring loudspeaker van through a residential neighborhood at 4AM it doesn't matter I didn't realize spam interrupted a process that is biologically necessary to live... Oh, it doesn't? Wow.... then your analogy sucks balls! Fine, forget about it being 4AM. It's still illegal at 4PM. The content of the message doesn't matter; you're not allowed to deliver your message to me in that way. If someone tried to do that in my neighborhood, I'd call the police, and if it wasn't illegal, I'd go down to City Hall and find out what we could do to fix that.
The right to communicate without going to jail or receiving fines for doing so is very much a free speech issue. You're still free to say whatever you want to say, as long as I'm free not to listen to you. Spam doesn't give me that freedom, because spam invades my inbox and there's nothing I can do to avoid getting more of it.
(Yes, of course I run spam filtering software, but it can't block everything. I shouldn't have to use special software to help me not listen to what you have to say. Spam doesn't give me the option to simply choose not to see it anymore - those unsubscribe links are fake.)
Under Mac OS X you can remove every mention of WebKit and all that will happen is a couple of programs won't work until you re-install them with their embedded versions of WebKit. Since WebKit is included as part of the operating system, applications should not embed their own versions of it, unless they have a very good reason to. If your app embeds an older version of WebKit, then your app won't be able to take advantage of the security, stability, and performance improvements in the next version of WebKit, unless you put together a new version of your app that embeds the new version of WebKit and all your users download the update from you.
Obviously, if Apple somehow changes WebKit in a way that breaks compatibility with your application, then you'll have a problem, but Apple is aware of their responsibility to application developers, and this scenario is quite unlikely.
Simple-SSL is only $35 for two years. Unfortunately at that price it looks like they can't afford to keep their DNS servers online, so the site appears to be down at the moment, but I've had good luck with them in the past. It's a valid cert, no chained root crap, works in all modern browsers (not in Netscape 4 or IE5 or possibly a few other things), works for HTTPS and POP3S/IMAPS and SMTP with TLS.
For testing purposes, you can also try FreeSSL which is only valid for one month. Interestingly, you won't find this mentioned on their site but although it works fine for HTTPS (same browser support as above), it is not valid for e-mail.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say WalMart, Blockbuster and Netflix were more influential than the studios. Most people don't care what format the studios are releasing in, they care what format their retail store of choice is selling.
I'm a Christian, I believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, and I believe Creation Science really is science. Intelligent Design is not. Intelligent Design is the philosophy that certain things are too complex to have come about naturally and therefore they must have been supernaturally designed. Just because I happen to believe that they were supernaturally designed doesn't make the philosophy of ID any more scientific.
Seriously, nobody's saying IE8 will be out the door tomorrow or next month. It's a work in progress, and it's being treated like a work in progress. If the company says it will ship "any day now" and we know it won't really, that's vaporware. This isn't vaporware. I have every confidence that IE8 will ship within a reasonable timeframe.
Note that this situation is slightly different from the problems people experienced when upgrading from IE6 to IE7. If your site looks correct in IE7 but is broken in IE8, all you have to do is add a simple META tag. Yes, it's more obnoxious in the short term than if IE7 compatibility were the default, but I really don't expect most sites to have a problem with it. I really don't see people bothering and going and updating hundreds of thousands of existing web pages/sites. IE8 will break more web sites than it will 'fix'. No matter what Microsoft does, they just make things worse. People have already had to update hundreds of thousands of existing web pages to get them to work in IE7. If they had any sense, they didn't just hack them to work exclusively in IE7; they updated the code to be standards-compliant so it renders correctly in IE7 and Firefox and Opera and Safari. IE8 getting even better standards support shouldn't break much.
In the case of HTML/XHTML and CSS, there's been quite a bit more effort invested into making sure the standards are properly documented and are internally consistent, but these standards are constantly evolving. Is it enough to support HTML 4.01 and CSS 2, or must you support HTML 5 and CSS 3? Do de-facto standards count? Remember that XMLHttpRequest (the basis of AJAX) is mostly a de-facto standard; the W3C has published a working draft of a specification for it.
Standards compliance isn't always as cut-and-dry as you make it sound.
It's MUCH easier than having to change your clocks all the time. And it seems that it's much less wasteful, too. Because somewhere, somebody is making money on this, and they would stand to lose quite a bit if we all adopted Arizona's model. The question is, who is that somebody? Bruce Perens above said it's the charcoal briquette manufacturers; I've heard it's WalMart and other retailers (selling charcoal briquettes, but also other picnic/outdoor/camping gear). It's pretty obvious that the official reason (saving energy, which is why the DST change was attached to an energy bill) is a load of crap.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the required computer updates cost $2 billion for IT.
The other end was extended to include Halloween for safety reasons; kids can go Trick-Or-Treating in daylight.
Just because a browser passes Acid2 doesn't mean it's "standards-compliant". It means it complies with the specific parts of the standards that Acid2 tests for, which is only a few things that most browsers (at the time Acid2 was created) got wrong.
I haven't seen a single thing "fixed".
Let's start with the installer. I realize the vast majority of users will never see it, but for those of us who do, Vista's installer is like a breath of fresh air compared to XP. Actually, it's very similar to Mac OS X and most "modern" Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.). First of all, you boot off the DVD into a full GUI, the command prompt is called "command prompt" instead of "recovery console" and doesn't require the Administrator password of the previously installed system before letting you use it, and because it's a GUI with a command prompt, you can actually run simple GUI apps off the hard drive - nothing complex obviously, but something like Notepad works fine. Editing a file on the hard drive while booted from an XP install CD is non-trivial.
If you need to load a third-party driver (e.g. for a RAID controller) during installation, with XP you have to press F6 at precisely the right moment, then insert a floppy disk (yes, a floppy disk) containing the driver into the A: drive. Vista gives you a button to click, and lets you browse for the correct driver using a standard (i.e. familiar) "open file" dialog box; of course you can load the driver from a CD, or a USB flash drive, or whatever.
Oh, and in case you're trying to fix an existing installation that can't boot for some reason, there's a button to fix common startup problems automatically. It doesn't work in every case, but if your problem happens to be one of the ones it can fix, it's nice.
Moving on...
Ever try to copy a whole bunch of files, only to have the copy fail halfway through because of some temporary problem that's easily fixable? For example, say you're copying files over a wireless network and the network goes down because your 2.4GHz cordless phone rang, or you're copying from a Linux box running Samba and one of the files has incorrect permissions for some reason and you can't read it. On XP, the whole operation fails, and there's no good way to resume. You could delete everything and start over, but that takes too much time; depending on how the files are organized you may be able to figure out which files and folders have copied successfully and skip those when you start copying again, but it's a huge pain in the ass. On Vista, once you've fixed the problem, all you have to do is click the Try Again button, and everything is fine.
You know those old games from the Windows 95 era that stored their saved game files in the same location as the application itself, instead of doing the sensible thing and putting them in the current user's profile directory? It made sense at the time because most Win95 machines didn't even have the multiple user capability enabled and everyone had write access to C:\Program Files anyway. Well, on a modern multi-user system, that doesn't work. If you're running as an Administrator user on XP, with access to C:\Program Files, you'll probably be OK, as long as you don't care if any other users on the system have access to the same saved game files, but Slashdotters know that running as Administrator all the time is bad, right? Well, Vista creates sort of a virtual filesystem, so that when you run an old game that tries to write to C:\Program Files, it really writes to a special path inside your profile directory. The game works perfectly because it thinks it has write access to the entire hard drive just like it did on Win95, but you don't need Administrator privileges to run it, and it works properly in a multi-user environment.
Connecting to a wireless network is less of a pain in the ass. Instead of making you enter a 26-character WEP key twice while typing blind, on Vista you only have to type it once and you get the option to display the characters while you're typing so you can check for errors. It still hides it with bullets by default, but since most of the time the person looking over your shoulder as you enter a WEP key is the person who gave you the WEP key in the
Your lack of interest in Vista explains your lack of knowledge about Vista; it's not "less of an OS" than XP. It does have some problems, the most glaring of which will hopefully be fixed in SP1; the larger issue is third-party compatibility which is comparable to the problems Windows 2000 had when it first came out.
Vista doesn't piss me off the way XP always did. They've fixed a lot of little things. The problem is that XP is good enough for most people, and there are enough compatibility problems, plus the performance issues, that people have gotten the idea that Vista is a turd - either because they tried it and experienced compatibility or performance problems, or because they've been warned by other people not to try it. There's nothing Microsoft can do now to make these people want to try Vista again (unless the existence of SP1 is enough), but the next version of Windows will be released in 2010 or so. Under the hood it will be almost the same as Vista, but on the surface it will look as different from Vista as XP does from 2000, so people will eat it up.
Life goes on.
The first few rows are first class seats; they get on first because they've paid a hell of a lot more money. They have more space available, so no trouble stowing their luggage, and they're also frequent fliers so they know what the hell they're doing. They sit down and get out of everyone else's way before coach class passengers are allowed to begin boarding (except for passengers with small children, etc.).
Agreed. If airlines enforced that rule (if it doesn't fit in the little box, you're not allowed to carry it on - with exceptions for unusually-shaped items that most people don't normally travel with) carry-on space would not be a problem.
So, is Akamai infringing on your patent? If not, what are they doing differently that your patent doesn't cover?
Anyone who wants to allow online customers to easily buy things without confirming their billing information is completely unable to do so, even though the solution is obvious in general and several implementations of the solution are obvious, unless they license the patent from Amazon (like Apple chose to do for the iTunes Store).
Or let's say you want to let users zoom in on a picture using a touch-screen interface. There are only so many ways you could possibly do that, but grabbing with two fingers and pulling apart to stretch the image is patented by Apple now. The implementation would be pretty tricky to get right, but that's not patented, that's just a trade secret.
(Yes, of course I run spam filtering software, but it can't block everything. I shouldn't have to use special software to help me not listen to what you have to say. Spam doesn't give me the option to simply choose not to see it anymore - those unsubscribe links are fake.)
Obviously, if Apple somehow changes WebKit in a way that breaks compatibility with your application, then you'll have a problem, but Apple is aware of their responsibility to application developers, and this scenario is quite unlikely.
Simple-SSL is only $35 for two years. Unfortunately at that price it looks like they can't afford to keep their DNS servers online, so the site appears to be down at the moment, but I've had good luck with them in the past. It's a valid cert, no chained root crap, works in all modern browsers (not in Netscape 4 or IE5 or possibly a few other things), works for HTTPS and POP3S/IMAPS and SMTP with TLS.
For testing purposes, you can also try FreeSSL which is only valid for one month. Interestingly, you won't find this mentioned on their site but although it works fine for HTTPS (same browser support as above), it is not valid for e-mail.