Well, of course there's a mac virus now - virus writers have been comfortably writing to the intel platform for years, and now with the processor switch, all the viruses will be very easy to port over:)
Hmmm... I don't know if grandparent meant Dune 2 or not (which was an amazing game in its own right for the time), but I think the original Dune is greatly undervalued.
It managed to combine elements of strategy, adventure and a financial sim in a package that was amazingly well produced for its time: the animated full-screen portraits, the first person flying and worm riding sequences and the wonderful AdLib soundtrack still evoke warm memories.
I would also say that it has aged a lot better than Dune 2, which doesn't stack up very well gameplay-wise to today's RTS games.
These guys (wheresgeorge) have a pretty ingenious business model... They sell stamps which allow you to mark bills thus greatly increasing the chances that somebody else will enter it into the system.
Firstly, I want to mention that physician's offices and hospitals are two wildly different targets, since office-based practices generally revolve around a single doctor while hospitals are huge multi-ward affairs.
Both J2EE and.Net pretty much require you to run on a dedicated server, which carries a significant monthly cost. You may have diffuculty getting a private practicioner (with no IT staff) to commit to this. While with PHP, you can easily talk them into a shared hosting plan, and a DSL account for the office to manage things quickly (the two combined will probably run under $100 per month, and you can even make some money on referring the doctor to a webhost)
At a low low price of $200, Apple's main goal for the flash player will be to make its slightly bigger and slightly more expensive players (the mini at $250 and the full size at $300) seem like very well priced bargains.
Opera's User Agent string roughly translated says this:
"I am Netscape 4" "I am IE 6" "I am IE 5.5" "I am Opera".
Yes, it really says all these things.
A genuine IE User Agent String says:
"I am Netscape 4" "I am IE 6"
The ONLY way to tell genuine IE6 is to look for a browser that claims to be IE6, but DOES NOT claim to be one of the other browsers that are known to PRETEND to be IE6.
Opera is a known browser that pretends to be IE6. There assume there are also some more browsers X, Y and Z that are known to do the same thing. In that case, the only way to detect genuine IE6 would be to say
You are IE6 if you say "I am IE 6", unless you also say "I am Opera" or "I am X" or "I am Y" or "I am Z".
By changing "Opera" to "Oprah", the browser now says:
"I am Netscape 4" "I am IE 6" "I am IE 5.5" "I am Oprah".
Since "Oprah" is not a browser known to pretend to be IE6, MSN assumes that it is the genuine thing, and shows it the IE6 specific CSS file.
I'm not saying that the generic CSS wasn't bad. While there is a chance that they tested it to work against some arcane browser, that chance is pretty slim. However, Opera at the time used their "Oprah" test to "prove" that they are being specifically targeted by MSN, and that a nonexistant browser got "valid" css while they did not.
My point is that MSN probably sent ALL 3RD TIER BROWSERS the bad CSS, not just Opera. Changing "Opera" to "Oprah" had the same effect as changing the UA to a strictly MSIE 6 string.
Actually after reading the article again, I realized that there was no ill intention against Opera per se on MSN's part.
If you look at the names of their css files, it becomes clear that they categorize browsers as IE for windows (presumably there is also a mac version), Netscape 6/7/Mozilla, and everything else.
The "everything else" stylesheet was arguably broken, but it was by no means targeted at Opera alone. In the article, the Opera people "prove" that it is by changing their UA string from containging Opera to Oprah. However, this proves nothing.
Assuming you are implementing a browser detection script based on the UA string, the way you used to find a Netscape browser is by looking for strings that contain "Mozilla" but do not contain "MSIE". This is because Internet Explorer has "Mozilla" in it's UA string.
The same is true of detecting explorer today. Most browsers today have "MSIE" somwhere in their UA string. Opera has not 1 but 2 instances of "MSIE" - it pretends to be explorer 5.5 and 6 simultaneously! Assuming Microsoft said we want to send the IE6 stylesheet only to Explorer, but not browsers PRETENDING to be explorer, they would have had to look for "MSIE" and specifically exclude other browsers known to pretend to be IE6. Opera is one of them, but there may be more.
Their proof is meaningless specifically because there is no "Oprah" browser - this means that any detection mechanism that they encountered treated "Oprah" UA as IE6. I cannot think of any other MSIE-pretenders off the top of my head, but if there are known ones out there, I am sure MSN would have sent these browsers the "generic" stylesheet as well.
Any chance Apple is just building a defensive portfolio to keep the trolls at arm's length?
Quit kidding yourself. Apple *IS* a patent troll - they use any legal means they can think of to preserve market share. Whether or not this is a fair practice is debatable, but it isn't any different from Amazon slamming BN with 1-Click.
Of course, if it were Microsoft, I'd be all outraged and stuff.
If I were you, I would be outraged reguardless. By getting one of the first interface patents, Apple has just made it easier for all sorts of frivolous patent awards to happen. Patents as originally concieved were intended to protect concrete mechanisms and technologies, not ideas, algorithm and UI concepts.
This one is a case in point of the trend of patenting things that were not meant to be patented. How can this do anything but lower the standard of software we use every day?
These people are trying to serve ads to people actively trying to block them. Oh yeah, that's brilliant.
Your sarcasm is misplaced. It is brilliant. Who is more likely to pay attention to your ad, someone who sees (and reflexively closes) 100s of them every day, or someone who hasn't seen an ad in such a format for a few months? What they're doing is tryin gto reach a market no longer being tapped.
(Of course I do not speak of the ethical implications of this)
No, this is not the case at all. I'm not sure about you, but I never miss the close box on a window, and have a hard time seeing somebody miss it 5% of the time.
The fact that good reputable companies are still willing to pour money into these ads demonstrates that the ROI is good. Unfortunately for the entire industry, there are also BAD advertisers, ones who spawn dozens of windows, or take advantage of IE flaws to install spyware, etc. These bring down the whole industry.
Most sites using popups show one ad per visitor per day, and advertise legitimate products. Would you not agree to subject yourself to a measely daily popup so that your favorite site could remain free and operational?
... For those who have not disabled javascript
this just might be the nail that gets them to disable it.
As a webmaster, let me assure you that the percentage of the web audience who have disabled javascript (or in fact knows how to do so), is so insignificant that it's not worth talking about.
Again, it's not people who run mozilla or paid $29.99 for an IE blocker that this measure is targeting. These people hadly make up 10% of the web users... The reason ad companies are scrambling now to circumvent blockers is because the two largest toolbars now provide them, and soon so will the most popular web browser.
I think that this crop of blocker circumventors is not targeted at the users who said they don't want popups, but rather at people who installed a google/yahoo toolbar in their browser, and for whom popup disappearance is a side-effect.
The truth is, popup ads have about 10-20 times as high a clickthrough rate as regular banners do (even flash banners) - so the companies will keep paying for them. Where there is a will and a lot of money, there is a way.
If popups become ignored (as you propose, as opposed to being simply blocked) on a significantly large scale (doubt it will happen though), ad companies will not even attempt to show popups, but jump straight to DIV layer ads, so you're not really going to ever solve this problem permanently.
However, consider that Mozilla has had blocking for a couple of years now, and the ad industry didn't really do anything about it. It's not until Yahoo and Google (and soon MS) got in on the action that they started to get worried and started coming up with circumvention techniques. The truth is that Mozilla is currently not a big enough market for the companies to worry about. In fact, most current implementations of floating DIV ads leave mozilla users alone.
Don't expect this privilege to continue if our little underdog of a browser earns any significant market share.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, of course there's a mac virus now - virus writers have been comfortably writing to the intel platform for years, and now with the processor switch, all the viruses will be very easy to port over :)
While I'm not sure I agree about their replayability, I agree with you that this was the adventure games' golden age.
For my money, Day of the Tentacle is the pinnacle of the genre.
Hmmm... I don't know if grandparent meant Dune 2 or not (which was an amazing game in its own right for the time), but I think the original Dune is greatly undervalued. It managed to combine elements of strategy, adventure and a financial sim in a package that was amazingly well produced for its time: the animated full-screen portraits, the first person flying and worm riding sequences and the wonderful AdLib soundtrack still evoke warm memories. I would also say that it has aged a lot better than Dune 2, which doesn't stack up very well gameplay-wise to today's RTS games.
These guys (wheresgeorge) have a pretty ingenious business model... They sell stamps which allow you to mark bills thus greatly increasing the chances that somebody else will enter it into the system.
One more reason for europeans to feel snooty supperiority over their vaunted consolidated cell phone system :)
Hamster computing, here we come!
"Apples deemed so last century as the industry rushes to adopt the wider use of oranges"
Both J2EE and .Net pretty much require you to run on a dedicated server, which carries a significant monthly cost. You may have diffuculty getting a private practicioner (with no IT staff) to commit to this. While with PHP, you can easily talk them into a shared hosting plan, and a DSL account for the office to manage things quickly (the two combined will probably run under $100 per month, and you can even make some money on referring the doctor to a webhost)
The LAPD has also promised a speedy patch to adress the widespread camera control issues in the first release.
How about yelling: "You'll never get away with this!" while slowly being lowered into liquid hot magma?
Can somebody ban the BLINK tag please? And pages full of CENTERed text?
"I am Netscape 4" "I am IE 6" "I am IE 5.5" "I am Opera".
Yes, it really says all these things.
A genuine IE User Agent String says:
"I am Netscape 4" "I am IE 6"
The ONLY way to tell genuine IE6 is to look for a browser that claims to be IE6, but DOES NOT claim to be one of the other browsers that are known to PRETEND to be IE6.
Opera is a known browser that pretends to be IE6. There assume there are also some more browsers X, Y and Z that are known to do the same thing. In that case, the only way to detect genuine IE6 would be to say
You are IE6 if you say "I am IE 6", unless you also say "I am Opera" or "I am X" or "I am Y" or "I am Z".
By changing "Opera" to "Oprah", the browser now says:
"I am Netscape 4" "I am IE 6" "I am IE 5.5" "I am Oprah".
Since "Oprah" is not a browser known to pretend to be IE6, MSN assumes that it is the genuine thing, and shows it the IE6 specific CSS file.
I hope that clears it up for you.
My point is that MSN probably sent ALL 3RD TIER BROWSERS the bad CSS, not just Opera. Changing "Opera" to "Oprah" had the same effect as changing the UA to a strictly MSIE 6 string.
If you look at the names of their css files, it becomes clear that they categorize browsers as IE for windows (presumably there is also a mac version), Netscape 6/7/Mozilla, and everything else.
The "everything else" stylesheet was arguably broken, but it was by no means targeted at Opera alone. In the article, the Opera people "prove" that it is by changing their UA string from containging Opera to Oprah. However, this proves nothing.
Assuming you are implementing a browser detection script based on the UA string, the way you used to find a Netscape browser is by looking for strings that contain "Mozilla" but do not contain "MSIE". This is because Internet Explorer has "Mozilla" in it's UA string.
The same is true of detecting explorer today. Most browsers today have "MSIE" somwhere in their UA string. Opera has not 1 but 2 instances of "MSIE" - it pretends to be explorer 5.5 and 6 simultaneously! Assuming Microsoft said we want to send the IE6 stylesheet only to Explorer, but not browsers PRETENDING to be explorer, they would have had to look for "MSIE" and specifically exclude other browsers known to pretend to be IE6. Opera is one of them, but there may be more.
Their proof is meaningless specifically because there is no "Oprah" browser - this means that any detection mechanism that they encountered treated "Oprah" UA as IE6. I cannot think of any other MSIE-pretenders off the top of my head, but if there are known ones out there, I am sure MSN would have sent these browsers the "generic" stylesheet as well.
Quit kidding yourself. Apple *IS* a patent troll - they use any legal means they can think of to preserve market share. Whether or not this is a fair practice is debatable, but it isn't any different from Amazon slamming BN with 1-Click.
Of course, if it were Microsoft, I'd be all outraged and stuff.
If I were you, I would be outraged reguardless. By getting one of the first interface patents, Apple has just made it easier for all sorts of frivolous patent awards to happen. Patents as originally concieved were intended to protect concrete mechanisms and technologies, not ideas, algorithm and UI concepts.
This one is a case in point of the trend of patenting things that were not meant to be patented. How can this do anything but lower the standard of software we use every day?
Your sarcasm is misplaced. It is brilliant. Who is more likely to pay attention to your ad, someone who sees (and reflexively closes) 100s of them every day, or someone who hasn't seen an ad in such a format for a few months? What they're doing is tryin gto reach a market no longer being tapped.
(Of course I do not speak of the ethical implications of this)
The fact that good reputable companies are still willing to pour money into these ads demonstrates that the ROI is good. Unfortunately for the entire industry, there are also BAD advertisers, ones who spawn dozens of windows, or take advantage of IE flaws to install spyware, etc. These bring down the whole industry.
Most sites using popups show one ad per visitor per day, and advertise legitimate products. Would you not agree to subject yourself to a measely daily popup so that your favorite site could remain free and operational?
As a webmaster, let me assure you that the percentage of the web audience who have disabled javascript (or in fact knows how to do so), is so insignificant that it's not worth talking about.
Again, it's not people who run mozilla or paid $29.99 for an IE blocker that this measure is targeting. These people hadly make up 10% of the web users... The reason ad companies are scrambling now to circumvent blockers is because the two largest toolbars now provide them, and soon so will the most popular web browser.
The truth is, popup ads have about 10-20 times as high a clickthrough rate as regular banners do (even flash banners) - so the companies will keep paying for them. Where there is a will and a lot of money, there is a way.
If popups become ignored (as you propose, as opposed to being simply blocked) on a significantly large scale (doubt it will happen though), ad companies will not even attempt to show popups, but jump straight to DIV layer ads, so you're not really going to ever solve this problem permanently.
However, consider that Mozilla has had blocking for a couple of years now, and the ad industry didn't really do anything about it. It's not until Yahoo and Google (and soon MS) got in on the action that they started to get worried and started coming up with circumvention techniques. The truth is that Mozilla is currently not a big enough market for the companies to worry about. In fact, most current implementations of floating DIV ads leave mozilla users alone.
Don't expect this privilege to continue if our little underdog of a browser earns any significant market share.
Geez....
I personally blame the Japanese
Go Apple!
If you lisence Amazon's 1-Click patent, do they give you an SDK to help understand this advanced and innovative technology?