Most of the Linux vs. Windows discussion with respect to Netbooks tends to ignore how crummy the default Linux distros have been so far. The Eee PC as an example, it's distro is slow, ugly, and probably burned a lot of Asus' resources creating and maintaining it. More important, every non-system-management app could be implemented as an HTML5 application.
Savvy users would install their own distros, but they aren't the target audience for Chrome OS. The target audience is people wanting a simple internet machine, and the benefit for the rest of us is one more person independent of Microsoft.
The problem remains that - despite your rights - they still have the power to prevent you from boarding a flight. As in my case, you can call your lawyer, talk to them like cops, make them work for their fake show of security, but at the end of all that they can still deny you your seat.
Moreover there's nothing for them to learn. They know that what they're doing is shady. They know that it has very little impact on terrorism, drug trafficking, and other illegal activities. They know that the vast majority of people going through screening are perfectly innocent, and they pull people aside for additional screening with zero basis for suspicion. Hence the term "security theatre" and the term "airport security" as a pejorative in contrast to real security.
You'll have a bigger impact donating to appropriate lobby groups, writing your congressman, and avoiding flying altogether. The last is rarely optional, though.
The challenge would be motivating enough people to do so: By the time you're at TSA screening you have so much committed to the hassle-filled process of air travel that giving up your seat on the plane by exercising your rights becomes a hard sell.
Even if successful in convincing people to take a stand, I suspect they'd just find an alternative means of terrifying and hassling people but with less obvious rights trampling. For example, the carry-on fluid restrictions, or the laptop surrender rules.
The worst the TSA will ever do to you is call the actual police. The second worst is attempt to confiscate your belongings. The third - and the one most innocent travelers are most wary of - is they'll prevent you from boarding your flight.
For people falling into that third scenario you aren't arguing just against being detained. You don't want to wait for a lawyer, and you don't want to escalate the issue to them calling the police over. You're trying to get through TSA screening as quickly as possible so you can make your flight.
I've flown on average once a month for the past six years, and have been detained in a back room half a dozen times myself. The first time it happened I treated it like a police encounter ("No sir, I'm not aware," "am I being detained, or am I free to go?" "I don't have anything to say without my lawyer present."). I ended up missing my flight, missing a job interview, wasting a few hours in a security checkpoint waiting room, and getting nothing back in return - even with my lawyer's involvement.
Since then I've just played nice. I'm more interested in getting to my destination than being a martyr. It's one of those "You'd be right, but you'd still lose" scenarios.
A small deposit almost always negates the need for a credit check already.
I moved to the US four years ago and thanks to a fubar with INS I wasn't able to get a SSN for three months. Each time I signed a new contract the respective company would insist on a SSN until I identified that I was a Canadian, didn't have one yet, and didn't have a US credit history. In every case I was given the option of paying a deposit equal to approximately 1-2 months worth of service on top of any initial charges, normally refunded after 12 months of service.
I managed to rent an apartment, sign up for home phone, internet, cable, cell and utility accounts, along with securing bank and Visa accounts, with no pieces of ID and a wad of cash.
Why not "novice," then, instead of "idiot?" Most of the same meaning, none of the insulting connotation or room for confusion.
Say what you will about self-censorship, but the wrong person finding out you called them an "idiot" - regardless of how you define the term - can really ruin a job. Meanwhile you can almost guarantee that you can use "novice" right to the subject's face without any confusion or offense.
Pretty much. I'm an H-1B in the process of moving back to Canada after four years spent in the US working for a fairly reputable tech company.
For those unfamiliar with H-1Bs, the biggest problem is a lack of grace period. You're expected to leave the country literally the day you're no longer employed, which is rough in the case of a sudden layoff.
In practice there's a 30 day unofficial grace period, but given the job market and typical turnaround time of a salary H-1B professional role, and need for visa sponsorship, you're basically out of luck. And if you're like me you spend any of that time in the US wondering when INS/DHS are going to beat down your door.
The other option - apart from leaving the country - is filing for a visa transfer (e.g. to a B-2). But the estimated processing time is about three months. Apparently they give you a break if you can prove you mailed out your transfer in a timely fashion... but it can also cause problems when you attempt to transfer back to a work visa.
In my case I left ASAP, leaving my entire apartment and its contents behind, paying my lease and bills remotely, and praying I can get a B-2 at the border when I hop down to package up my stuff.
H-1Bs are honestly designed to prevent skilled workers from finding new employment in the US.
(Disclaimer: Clearly IANAL - most of this comes second hand from my former immigration lawyer)
I've been outside of Canadian politics for a while now, so I can't comment on on Joe Volpe or how internet saavy he or his people are.. However, seems you've just discovered that the domain is owned by... Mike Hunt... Mike Hunt... say it out loud.
I mean, there's always the chance that the person registering the domain had a very unfortunate name. On the other hand this lends credibility to another poster's claim that perhaps the domain was nixed thanks to inaccurate contact info.
They weren't running ON Gamecube hardware. They were running IN Gamecube shells. The summary is more true to fact than the subject.
From TFA:
Nintendo confirmed that they did indeed use GameCube housing, but that the "guts" or internal architecture was certainly from the Wii. "The Wii hardware we exhibited at E3 2006 was made specifically for the E3 show and is not the final mass-production version. Some of this hardware was cased in Nintendo GameCube housing," the company explained.
Heaven FORBID that they need to go back to the drawing board on HCI (Human Computer Interaction) because there is now a lot more capability that was just added to the HCI interface.
You make this out to be some trivial process. It isn't. One of the first things taught in any HCI program is that it's an obscenely expensive and time consuming process, even when working with existing and well-known technology and paradigms. It's also the first thing you'll encounter doing HCI work in the real world, as you'll typically find yourself grossly under-funded, under-staffed, and treated in a similar fashion to tech writers: Your usability research and their documentation are afterthoughts.
Mind you, in this case that doesn't even seem to be the complaint. I'd go so far as to label Takahashi's criticism as a response to the repeated suggestion from various Nintendo reps that they're pursuing innovation over graphic power, then putting so much emphasis into the controller. From anyone else I'd be more skeptical, but Takahashi managed to produce one of the most original, simple, and fun games of this past generation. Katamari is an example to his point of innovation not being dependent on control scheme.
Another voice of agreement for lack of mod points.
For anecdote's sake, this is similar to what caused my grandfather's decades-old business to go down the toilet. When his business partner died, enough control was left in the hands of the former-partner's family to effectively castrate the company. Their collective interest was in killing off the company so they could sell off its assets, and eventually they managed to do exactly that.
It really sucks to have to think in terms of looting the dead, but occasionally it's a simple matter of being prudent. And it's not just a concern with businesses: Everyone wants a piece of you when you die.
And these cases reflect the current situation how? Kerberos came out of MIT (and damn if Microsoft's extension didn't come with an RFC specifically declaring their modifications as non-standard), and CSS from academics who would subsequently join the W3C. Microsoft had majority involvement in neither, and as with all corporations, they're more likely to respect their own standards (which they cna distort from the very beginning in defining it, rather than down the road) than to respect standards put forth by others. They also weren't bedded entirely in existing standards, either, as with this SSE proposal, and as with SOAP.
I don't doubt the abundance of other examples of Microsoft outlining a specifications than violating them, but there are certain restraints that limit the damage they can do in this case, and it's most similar other standards that have been hurt more by complexity than any nefarious distortion on Microsoft's part. If Microsoft were interested solely in locking down a standard in this case, why attempt a standard at all? From the evil point of view it makes sense to simply throw the XML into the wild without clear specification, leaving it more open to the introduction of backward compability and proprietary extension.
In fact, I'd say it's extremely foolish to think they'll do anything other than subvert the standard in a way that's designed to most benefit them.
"Anything but subvert" seems a bit harsh. Every day I work with at least one standard that Microsoft took a role in the development of. One with the apparent intent of specifically avoiding lock-in in several respects. The (arguably) best implementations isn't Microsoft's own, and in most cases they communicate with each other quite happily. And, similar to this latest proposal, it's based upon existing standards which might help in curbing abuse.
Just as re-enforcement of what you're saying, the ESA's latest "Essential Facts" (Warning: PDF). It's consistent with their papers from past years indicating that the vast majority of gaming purchases (~95%) are made by individuals over the age of 18, and individuals 18 and under make up roughly a third of all game players.
There's still a lot of money to be made tapping into minors, but this all rides on the purse strings of their parents. And parents are probably more swayed by which consoles are getting a nod on the morning news and in papers and magazines than the likes of SpikeTV's event. Which leaves me wondering why nobody's bothered to capitalize on this with parent-targeted gaming publications...
Re:What's Perl being used for today?
on
Perl Best Practices
·
· Score: 2, Informative
CPAN? Though let me know if it's not exactly what you had in mind.
One of the reasons we're able to write quick throw-away scripts for virtually all purposes in Perl is that we have a massive Perl codebase to draw from. CPAN is often cited as one of Perl's greatest strengths, particularly against the likes of Ruby, Python, and even PHP. Not that their communities aren't moving in this direction, but the fact that each has projects whose mission statement is essentially "Be like CPAN for [insert language here]" should be an indicator of what remains desirable with Perl, and how we might characterize it as a big-name project.
And if there's one place where you'd want to maintain best practices...
The state of Internet "crime fighting" as a whole is pretty atrocious. You'd think that with fraud and identity theft alone huge issues impacting millions the government would be investing more resources.
I took a computer forensics course about a year ago. We were lucky enough to have law enforcement officials from numerous sources in to talk with us about the current state of their business. The real motivator for all of them seemed to be limited to child porn, and even in this task they all made it sound as if they were grossly understaffed. And the hiring process for such jobs is hardly ideal; they'd all worked grunt jobs for years, stuff like ticketing cars, walking a beat, or even participating as peacekeepers (for the RCMP; Canadian slant, but they claimed it's the same south of the border).
I honestly think most governments assume that the private sector will step up to carry the burden, and that's a huge shame.
Don't get me wrong, there aren't lots of big problems, but why bother dealing with them at all if you don't have to?
Because as previously suggested there are certain additional benefits to working with XHTML. The grass isn't very green on either side of the fence, but forgive my optimism in opting to move forward, rather than back.
Personally, as someone who's been in a similar position of having to convert a large number of user-submitted documents for posting, I've found converting to XHTML with numeric entities invaluable in the past; first Tidy cleans the document, then I can post-process with an XML parser.
This isn't true. XHTML is fundamentally incompatible with HTML as its empty element syntax means something different due to SHORTTAG NET being used in HTML. Granted, this particular issue doesn't cause problems often, but that doesn't change the fact that they are fundamentally incompatible.
Fair enough, but again, the instances where this becomes an issue are relatively rare. Personally I'd leave the choice of accepting rare instances of incompatibility for rare beneficial applications up to the user.
This isn't about doctype switching or tables. It's about things like not being able to use a character encoding other than UTF-8 or UTF-16 because the defaults and constraints of XML and Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 recommendation prevent you from using anything else. Unicode is usually the best choice when dealing with Western languages, but still has quite severe compatibility issues when dealing with Asian languages among others.
You can specify other character encoding in the XML declaration and meta content type (C.9). Though admittedly this isn't something that Tidy itself takes into consideration.
Using a less-compatible format to boost your ego? Doesn't sound very smart to me.
Forgive my ignorance, but I'm wasn't aware that compatibility issues were so severe?
Fundamentally an XHTML document is well-formed HTML document. Sending with application/xhtml+xml as a mime type has its issues, but that isn't an issue if the file's saved with anything other than a.xhtml extension or someone goes out of their way to send as xhtml+xml.
Having a doctype throws some browsers into strict mode as opposed to quirks mode, but if anything this yields greater consistency between modern browsers. If that's a problem, just drop the doctype. This isn't even an XHTML-specific issue though.
Most of the content coming out of Word shouldn't see much damage either way. The most complex things you'll encounter will be tables for which HTML vs. XHTML shouldn't even be an issue.
If you think that Microsoft is most concerned with the U.S. market, you are sadly mistaken. Capturing the US market and not capturing the Asian market would be a complete failure.
Oh, I'm not forgetting other regions. Some of the challenges Microsoft faces in other regions may simply be insurmountable. In the meantime, there's no rule that states they need to be first in every market. Certainly one of their goals, but America is a big market and where their brand strength is greatest. If Microsoft fails in the console business it will be for not being able to capitalize on this, not for lack of strength in other markets.
And the lack of HD-DVD will negatively impact very few users - please recall that few world-wide households have HDTV - less than 1%! And about zero percent have HD-DVD discs.
HD-DVD != HDTV. It's a higher capacity format, and while the specification does include higher resolutions for HD-DVD video, the higher capacity (and perhaps bandwidth) is more relevant to gaming. The problem is it would create two classes of Xbox 360s, meaning older consoles would need to be physically upgraded to play new content on HD-DVDs.
Where HDTV is concerned, at last check roughly 10% of households in America have HDTVs. These are individuals willing to spend more money on their entertainment technology and willing early adopters; this is exactly a company selling gaming devices would be targeting.
However, the copyright holder needs to contact the source in question to have material removed. And, as far as I can tell, can only file an injunction. Reading C-60 myself, it reads as if it's making an exception specifically for search engines such that it isn't illegal copyright violation until such an injunction is filed.
Makes sense that, if you ask a search engine to remove your content, they would comply. Just like most comply with robots.txt and whatnot.
Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.
Emphasis mine.
Don't assume that violence won't put a game there. Rumors persist regarding game ratings being based both on degree and amount of content. While I don't agree about getting all up in arms about this issue, the sex minigame could simply have been a rather explicit last straw. The violence in the game didn't simply disappear or cease to be a factor when the sex game was unlocked.
That makes no sense; the article says "The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing,". Obviously, the licensing refers to the format. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense for it to refer to products based on the format because products are generally not licensed "royalty free".
My bad in phrasing, though my greater point still stands: I don't see where licensing is relevant, at least not until we've established that the license itself is specifically non-open. If I'm reading you right, you seem you seem to be suggesting that such a license acts against a given format being open, but even in the open source world formats and applications fall under licenses and are subject to licensing.
I'm not sure what your expectations are for "open" given your criticism of WiX? "Something that's more generally useful in open source form"? They have the project up on SourceForge under the CPL, and the format itself is relatively transparent.
However, a format is not "open" if it is "available for licensing". "Available for licensing" implies that the creator of the format retains some control, and that is not acceptable, no matter who the company is that created the format.
My understanding is that products based around Metro will be available for licensing, not the format itself. Heck, based on the articles, it seems that it's Global Graphics developing the licensed products, rather than Microsoft itself.
Being developed under one company does have the downside of having them control the format. Butchering the format with time or making it intentionally arcane for their own benefit would defeat the purpose of such a format, though, and shouldn't become an issue if the format is properly defined and versioned to begin with.
Meanwhile, WiX has yet to be undermined in such a manner.
Slashdot Mirror
The target for Chrome OS seems to be Netbooks.
Most of the Linux vs. Windows discussion with respect to Netbooks tends to ignore how crummy the default Linux distros have been so far. The Eee PC as an example, it's distro is slow, ugly, and probably burned a lot of Asus' resources creating and maintaining it. More important, every non-system-management app could be implemented as an HTML5 application.
Savvy users would install their own distros, but they aren't the target audience for Chrome OS. The target audience is people wanting a simple internet machine, and the benefit for the rest of us is one more person independent of Microsoft.
The problem remains that - despite your rights - they still have the power to prevent you from boarding a flight. As in my case, you can call your lawyer, talk to them like cops, make them work for their fake show of security, but at the end of all that they can still deny you your seat.
Moreover there's nothing for them to learn. They know that what they're doing is shady. They know that it has very little impact on terrorism, drug trafficking, and other illegal activities. They know that the vast majority of people going through screening are perfectly innocent, and they pull people aside for additional screening with zero basis for suspicion. Hence the term "security theatre" and the term "airport security" as a pejorative in contrast to real security.
You'll have a bigger impact donating to appropriate lobby groups, writing your congressman, and avoiding flying altogether. The last is rarely optional, though.
The challenge would be motivating enough people to do so: By the time you're at TSA screening you have so much committed to the hassle-filled process of air travel that giving up your seat on the plane by exercising your rights becomes a hard sell.
Even if successful in convincing people to take a stand, I suspect they'd just find an alternative means of terrifying and hassling people but with less obvious rights trampling. For example, the carry-on fluid restrictions, or the laptop surrender rules.
He was detained by the TSA, not the police.
The worst the TSA will ever do to you is call the actual police. The second worst is attempt to confiscate your belongings. The third - and the one most innocent travelers are most wary of - is they'll prevent you from boarding your flight.
For people falling into that third scenario you aren't arguing just against being detained. You don't want to wait for a lawyer, and you don't want to escalate the issue to them calling the police over. You're trying to get through TSA screening as quickly as possible so you can make your flight.
I've flown on average once a month for the past six years, and have been detained in a back room half a dozen times myself. The first time it happened I treated it like a police encounter ("No sir, I'm not aware," "am I being detained, or am I free to go?" "I don't have anything to say without my lawyer present."). I ended up missing my flight, missing a job interview, wasting a few hours in a security checkpoint waiting room, and getting nothing back in return - even with my lawyer's involvement.
Since then I've just played nice. I'm more interested in getting to my destination than being a martyr. It's one of those "You'd be right, but you'd still lose" scenarios.
A small deposit almost always negates the need for a credit check already.
I moved to the US four years ago and thanks to a fubar with INS I wasn't able to get a SSN for three months. Each time I signed a new contract the respective company would insist on a SSN until I identified that I was a Canadian, didn't have one yet, and didn't have a US credit history. In every case I was given the option of paying a deposit equal to approximately 1-2 months worth of service on top of any initial charges, normally refunded after 12 months of service.
I managed to rent an apartment, sign up for home phone, internet, cable, cell and utility accounts, along with securing bank and Visa accounts, with no pieces of ID and a wad of cash.
Why not "novice," then, instead of "idiot?" Most of the same meaning, none of the insulting connotation or room for confusion.
Say what you will about self-censorship, but the wrong person finding out you called them an "idiot" - regardless of how you define the term - can really ruin a job. Meanwhile you can almost guarantee that you can use "novice" right to the subject's face without any confusion or offense.
Pretty much. I'm an H-1B in the process of moving back to Canada after four years spent in the US working for a fairly reputable tech company.
For those unfamiliar with H-1Bs, the biggest problem is a lack of grace period. You're expected to leave the country literally the day you're no longer employed, which is rough in the case of a sudden layoff.
In practice there's a 30 day unofficial grace period, but given the job market and typical turnaround time of a salary H-1B professional role, and need for visa sponsorship, you're basically out of luck. And if you're like me you spend any of that time in the US wondering when INS/DHS are going to beat down your door.
The other option - apart from leaving the country - is filing for a visa transfer (e.g. to a B-2). But the estimated processing time is about three months. Apparently they give you a break if you can prove you mailed out your transfer in a timely fashion... but it can also cause problems when you attempt to transfer back to a work visa.
In my case I left ASAP, leaving my entire apartment and its contents behind, paying my lease and bills remotely, and praying I can get a B-2 at the border when I hop down to package up my stuff.
H-1Bs are honestly designed to prevent skilled workers from finding new employment in the US.
(Disclaimer: Clearly IANAL - most of this comes second hand from my former immigration lawyer)
I've been outside of Canadian politics for a while now, so I can't comment on on Joe Volpe or how internet saavy he or his people are.. However, seems you've just discovered that the domain is owned by... Mike Hunt... Mike Hunt... say it out loud.
I mean, there's always the chance that the person registering the domain had a very unfortunate name. On the other hand this lends credibility to another poster's claim that perhaps the domain was nixed thanks to inaccurate contact info.
They weren't running ON Gamecube hardware. They were running IN Gamecube shells. The summary is more true to fact than the subject.
From TFA:
Nintendo confirmed that they did indeed use GameCube housing, but that the "guts" or internal architecture was certainly from the Wii. "The Wii hardware we exhibited at E3 2006 was made specifically for the E3 show and is not the final mass-production version. Some of this hardware was cased in Nintendo GameCube housing," the company explained.
Heaven FORBID that they need to go back to the drawing board on HCI (Human Computer Interaction) because there is now a lot more capability that was just added to the HCI interface.
You make this out to be some trivial process. It isn't. One of the first things taught in any HCI program is that it's an obscenely expensive and time consuming process, even when working with existing and well-known technology and paradigms. It's also the first thing you'll encounter doing HCI work in the real world, as you'll typically find yourself grossly under-funded, under-staffed, and treated in a similar fashion to tech writers: Your usability research and their documentation are afterthoughts.
Mind you, in this case that doesn't even seem to be the complaint. I'd go so far as to label Takahashi's criticism as a response to the repeated suggestion from various Nintendo reps that they're pursuing innovation over graphic power, then putting so much emphasis into the controller. From anyone else I'd be more skeptical, but Takahashi managed to produce one of the most original, simple, and fun games of this past generation. Katamari is an example to his point of innovation not being dependent on control scheme.
Another voice of agreement for lack of mod points.
For anecdote's sake, this is similar to what caused my grandfather's decades-old business to go down the toilet. When his business partner died, enough control was left in the hands of the former-partner's family to effectively castrate the company. Their collective interest was in killing off the company so they could sell off its assets, and eventually they managed to do exactly that.
It really sucks to have to think in terms of looting the dead, but occasionally it's a simple matter of being prudent. And it's not just a concern with businesses: Everyone wants a piece of you when you die.
Like kerberos? Like CSS?
And these cases reflect the current situation how? Kerberos came out of MIT (and damn if Microsoft's extension didn't come with an RFC specifically declaring their modifications as non-standard), and CSS from academics who would subsequently join the W3C. Microsoft had majority involvement in neither, and as with all corporations, they're more likely to respect their own standards (which they cna distort from the very beginning in defining it, rather than down the road) than to respect standards put forth by others. They also weren't bedded entirely in existing standards, either, as with this SSE proposal, and as with SOAP.
I don't doubt the abundance of other examples of Microsoft outlining a specifications than violating them, but there are certain restraints that limit the damage they can do in this case, and it's most similar other standards that have been hurt more by complexity than any nefarious distortion on Microsoft's part. If Microsoft were interested solely in locking down a standard in this case, why attempt a standard at all? From the evil point of view it makes sense to simply throw the XML into the wild without clear specification, leaving it more open to the introduction of backward compability and proprietary extension.
In fact, I'd say it's extremely foolish to think they'll do anything other than subvert the standard in a way that's designed to most benefit them.
"Anything but subvert" seems a bit harsh. Every day I work with at least one standard that Microsoft took a role in the development of. One with the apparent intent of specifically avoiding lock-in in several respects. The (arguably) best implementations isn't Microsoft's own, and in most cases they communicate with each other quite happily. And, similar to this latest proposal, it's based upon existing standards which might help in curbing abuse.
Just as re-enforcement of what you're saying, the ESA's latest "Essential Facts" (Warning: PDF). It's consistent with their papers from past years indicating that the vast majority of gaming purchases (~95%) are made by individuals over the age of 18, and individuals 18 and under make up roughly a third of all game players.
There's still a lot of money to be made tapping into minors, but this all rides on the purse strings of their parents. And parents are probably more swayed by which consoles are getting a nod on the morning news and in papers and magazines than the likes of SpikeTV's event. Which leaves me wondering why nobody's bothered to capitalize on this with parent-targeted gaming publications...
CPAN? Though let me know if it's not exactly what you had in mind.
One of the reasons we're able to write quick throw-away scripts for virtually all purposes in Perl is that we have a massive Perl codebase to draw from. CPAN is often cited as one of Perl's greatest strengths, particularly against the likes of Ruby, Python, and even PHP. Not that their communities aren't moving in this direction, but the fact that each has projects whose mission statement is essentially "Be like CPAN for [insert language here]" should be an indicator of what remains desirable with Perl, and how we might characterize it as a big-name project.
And if there's one place where you'd want to maintain best practices...
The state of Internet "crime fighting" as a whole is pretty atrocious. You'd think that with fraud and identity theft alone huge issues impacting millions the government would be investing more resources.
I took a computer forensics course about a year ago. We were lucky enough to have law enforcement officials from numerous sources in to talk with us about the current state of their business. The real motivator for all of them seemed to be limited to child porn, and even in this task they all made it sound as if they were grossly understaffed. And the hiring process for such jobs is hardly ideal; they'd all worked grunt jobs for years, stuff like ticketing cars, walking a beat, or even participating as peacekeepers (for the RCMP; Canadian slant, but they claimed it's the same south of the border).
I honestly think most governments assume that the private sector will step up to carry the burden, and that's a huge shame.
Don't get me wrong, there aren't lots of big problems, but why bother dealing with them at all if you don't have to?
Because as previously suggested there are certain additional benefits to working with XHTML. The grass isn't very green on either side of the fence, but forgive my optimism in opting to move forward, rather than back.
Personally, as someone who's been in a similar position of having to convert a large number of user-submitted documents for posting, I've found converting to XHTML with numeric entities invaluable in the past; first Tidy cleans the document, then I can post-process with an XML parser.
This isn't true. XHTML is fundamentally incompatible with HTML as its empty element syntax means something different due to SHORTTAG NET being used in HTML. Granted, this particular issue doesn't cause problems often, but that doesn't change the fact that they are fundamentally incompatible.
Fair enough, but again, the instances where this becomes an issue are relatively rare. Personally I'd leave the choice of accepting rare instances of incompatibility for rare beneficial applications up to the user.
This isn't about doctype switching or tables. It's about things like not being able to use a character encoding other than UTF-8 or UTF-16 because the defaults and constraints of XML and Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 recommendation prevent you from using anything else. Unicode is usually the best choice when dealing with Western languages, but still has quite severe compatibility issues when dealing with Asian languages among others.
You can specify other character encoding in the XML declaration and meta content type (C.9). Though admittedly this isn't something that Tidy itself takes into consideration.
Using a less-compatible format to boost your ego? Doesn't sound very smart to me.
Forgive my ignorance, but I'm wasn't aware that compatibility issues were so severe?
Fundamentally an XHTML document is well-formed HTML document. Sending with application/xhtml+xml as a mime type has its issues, but that isn't an issue if the file's saved with anything other than a .xhtml extension or someone goes out of their way to send as xhtml+xml.
Having a doctype throws some browsers into strict mode as opposed to quirks mode, but if anything this yields greater consistency between modern browsers. If that's a problem, just drop the doctype. This isn't even an XHTML-specific issue though.
Most of the content coming out of Word shouldn't see much damage either way. The most complex things you'll encounter will be tables for which HTML vs. XHTML shouldn't even be an issue.
If you think that Microsoft is most concerned with the U.S. market, you are sadly mistaken. Capturing the US market and not capturing the Asian market would be a complete failure.
Oh, I'm not forgetting other regions. Some of the challenges Microsoft faces in other regions may simply be insurmountable. In the meantime, there's no rule that states they need to be first in every market. Certainly one of their goals, but America is a big market and where their brand strength is greatest. If Microsoft fails in the console business it will be for not being able to capitalize on this, not for lack of strength in other markets.
And the lack of HD-DVD will negatively impact very few users - please recall that few world-wide households have HDTV - less than 1%! And about zero percent have HD-DVD discs.
HD-DVD != HDTV. It's a higher capacity format, and while the specification does include higher resolutions for HD-DVD video, the higher capacity (and perhaps bandwidth) is more relevant to gaming. The problem is it would create two classes of Xbox 360s, meaning older consoles would need to be physically upgraded to play new content on HD-DVDs.
Where HDTV is concerned, at last check roughly 10% of households in America have HDTVs. These are individuals willing to spend more money on their entertainment technology and willing early adopters; this is exactly a company selling gaming devices would be targeting.
Practice what your signature preaches. ;)
I mean, I know you're not submitting an actual story, but this is still Slashdot, and VGCats' pages aren't light on the bandwidth.
IANAL.
However, the copyright holder needs to contact the source in question to have material removed. And, as far as I can tell, can only file an injunction. Reading C-60 myself, it reads as if it's making an exception specifically for search engines such that it isn't illegal copyright violation until such an injunction is filed.
Makes sense that, if you ask a search engine to remove your content, they would comply. Just like most comply with robots.txt and whatnot.
No amount of violence will put a game there... but a single tit (or any other form of nudity) will force the game there.
From ESRB's ratings and descriptors guide:
Emphasis mine.
Don't assume that violence won't put a game there. Rumors persist regarding game ratings being based both on degree and amount of content. While I don't agree about getting all up in arms about this issue, the sex minigame could simply have been a rather explicit last straw. The violence in the game didn't simply disappear or cease to be a factor when the sex game was unlocked.
That makes no sense; the article says "The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing,". Obviously, the licensing refers to the format. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense for it to refer to products based on the format because products are generally not licensed "royalty free".
My bad in phrasing, though my greater point still stands: I don't see where licensing is relevant, at least not until we've established that the license itself is specifically non-open. If I'm reading you right, you seem you seem to be suggesting that such a license acts against a given format being open, but even in the open source world formats and applications fall under licenses and are subject to licensing.
I'm not sure what your expectations are for "open" given your criticism of WiX? "Something that's more generally useful in open source form"? They have the project up on SourceForge under the CPL, and the format itself is relatively transparent.
However, a format is not "open" if it is "available for licensing". "Available for licensing" implies that the creator of the format retains some control, and that is not acceptable, no matter who the company is that created the format.
My understanding is that products based around Metro will be available for licensing, not the format itself. Heck, based on the articles, it seems that it's Global Graphics developing the licensed products, rather than Microsoft itself.
Being developed under one company does have the downside of having them control the format. Butchering the format with time or making it intentionally arcane for their own benefit would defeat the purpose of such a format, though, and shouldn't become an issue if the format is properly defined and versioned to begin with.
Meanwhile, WiX has yet to be undermined in such a manner.