I reported a compliance bug with a web page whereby the authors used some proprietory tags which are not W3C compliant. I filed the bug under Mozilla too but the official reply was: "It's not a bug, we're following the standard and not accepting propr. tags". Unfortunately, rather than acknowledging their mistake and fixing it (heck I pointed out the line numbers, offered patches and gave them a URL showing these problem tags and a solution on how to fix them) here's their reply:
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Thank you for your e-mail. In reply to your queries both Mygo and go mobile's website are designed for IE5 and upwards and this is Company policy.
We are aware that not everyone uses IE. However, IE offers certain features which other browsers do not. Using these, we are able to use a greater array of features which allow us to design better interfaces. 84.3 per cent of the internet population uses Internet Explorer. More than 98 percent of the hits on go mobile's website originate from IE.
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I mailed them again telling them it's nonsense (browsers reporting themselves as being IE etc) and that there are alternatives to make it work for both but surprise surprise! no reply. Bugzilla contains a number of other websites suffering from this condition (inc. Microsoft, no surprises here).
Therefore Mozilla follow standards so page X won't work and page X authors follow market so they won't fix it. What does BBC recommend I do in this case?
Suggestion: Get Sun/OO to set up a few servers and buy a copy of Word. Yes that's right, buy a copy of Word. Then write a couple of macros in word or use OLE so that anyone can submit a word document over the web (securly of course) and have it mailed back in a format OpenOffice/Sun/etc understands.
There, 100% compatibility problem solved and should be trivial to implement
I was tempted to try out subscribing to D. Telkom T-Online's "special offer". It went like this:
Option 1: Take ISDN phone at half price if you pay full price for DSL
Option 2: Take DSL at half price and pay full price for ISDN phone
Option 3: Pay full price for DSL
Option 4: Pay full price for ISDN phone
and hey since it's half price save 70 euros on the DSL modem...right....
NOT...when you look at the prices you realise that the ISDN phone and the DSL modem cost just about the same!
Reminds me of what my university group did in reply to a government proposal several years ago. They barred access to the canteen and wrote this on a board outside:
To go to the canteen you have these options:
Go from the back door
Go from the door next to the poet's statue
Go from the door next to the ATM machine
and yes all three options referred to the same door!
Yes, MS employees really do sit around figuring out how to keep Wordperfect from crashing.
Like Lotus 1-2-3? Back then they sat around till they figured out how it would always crash because surprise surprise, they were pushing their own app...
I remember a DOS editor which saved every single character one typed in real-time and it was fast enough even in those days. The name escapes me but I believe it was written by Borland (don't quote me on this though!)
Step 5: Re-connect cable, enjoy most expensive offer at the cheapest one
Step n: If they call you, just say: "Yes I removed it for a while because I was painting the room/on holiday/blah. Sorry didn't know"
It's a stupid protocol with no feedback, they just send the codes and ASSUME the receiver has processed the filtering requests. I wonder why they don't keep sending the codes every x days...
that Aerosmith's "just push play" is listed on the "known corrupt cd's" list on fat chuck's?
Why is it ironic? I pushed play in Winamp with the mp3 selected and it worked just fine.
This is why Itanium changes all that because the processor is explicitly told what it can execute in parallel and what not. So you could have this:
if (a=z) b=c+d; else b=f+g
and this would come something like:
cmp.eq p1,p2=r1,r2
(p1) add b=c+d
(p2) add b=f+g
In this case you can have multiple cpu's or multiple cores inside one cpu executing all statements at once (yes, ALL at once) and then when it gets the compare result it knows which result to keep (compare sets p1 to true and p2 to false or vice versa depending on the result).
This is much more fine grained so will give much better performance rather than fooling the OS that it's 2 processors and expect the programmer to think of ways to use "both". Hyperthreading IMHO is just a way to get back at AMD to dampen their marketing department, a sort-of "me-too" if you will.
Rubbish. AMD is the same ageing thing pushed further. There are dozens of things which Intel corrected with Itanium:
Registers: 128 general registers, 128 floating point (no more register juggling crap)
Register rotation
Branch Hints to improve prefetching and stuff
Prediction is mega cool. When you have a branch in C saying something like:
if (a) { b=c+d; }
if (e) {h=i-j;}
this is transformed to
cmp.ne p1,p2=a,r0
cmp.ne p3,p4=e,r0
(p1)add b=c,d
(p3)sub h=i,j
When the compares execute p1 gets set to true and p2 to false (or vice versa). Then when it encounters the statements (p1) and (p3) it checks whether to execute them or not.
Notice the difference yet?
In Itanium, the processor can theoretically execute all those instructions at once, no branches to flush pipelines and so on. Adding more processors should become much easier too and get a much more fine-grained execution. Try doing that with the "superior AMD". The dependencies in Itanium code are explicitly programmed so the processors knowswhat it can execute in parallel. In contrast, old x86 processors have to try and analyse code in real time - a very complex time-consuming task and in no way as accurate.
Most people speak negatively about the Itanium because they've read reports that it's slow. That's true for Itanium 1 but Itanium 2 is much much better and Intel has already confirmed that it has 5 more currently in development. There's a learning curve and this I suspect is the major blocking factor since people are scared to suddenly find that they have to relearn many things.
The other major reason for the slow uptake is that it takes a lot of work to create decent compilers since a lot of work has shifted from the hardware to the software side.
So please give it some time and have a good look at it's potential rather than requoting some crap out of a dumb witted reviewer. x86 has no future for scaleability without major juggling on the programmer's part. With Itanium, performance scaleability is assured.
Kids remember that there was a time when having a colour monitor was a rarity and the resolution sucked and people stuck to monochrome. How many people do you know who still use a mono monitor today?
In some years time no one will be buying a CRT monitor anymore. However CRT monitors don't burn up or go out of use at the same rate as other components so my guess is that the transition to CRT won't be as fast.
Sony does this repeatedly too and the Playstation chip guys just keep playing catch up. Sony has also sued some mod-chip makers.
Frankly I don't understand why this should be a problem. I think Microsoft has to be seen that they're doing something to encourage game companies to develop for it. At the same time, suppose i buy this Xbox and being a hacker I try a hand at loading linux on it. Fine, now I've got an Xbox game console + Linux computer. If I can hack it's DVD region checks I'll be happier and if I'm happier I'll tell my friends who'll also buy other X-Boxes.
At a certain point, you get out of the geek circle who want to do stuff like run linux and these people start buying games. This will make game companies sit up and take notice and pretty soon...bang.... the fierce war between sony and MS becomes more cutthroat!
And for the average person, you see more spoofing where files were named the same thing, but it wasn't an actual Eminem song, or it was just a couple seconds of it. And the file quality isn't consistent, the directories sometimes are wrong, you get viruses.
viruses? in an mp3? Quick someone tell McAfee to update their jpeg virus scanner!
I made an experiment and found out that they're right about the hammer. The gui in MS-Word now really rocks!
In fact it took 1.205 secs to write "Hello World" as a heading with my Pentium and it took an incredible 1.215secs to click select Heading1 and type "Hello World" with the Hammer.
The time savings is a whopping 8% or 0.01secs!!
Yeah i'll definitely buy the hammer -- after all if i have 100 headings in my document i'll finish early and can spend an extra second at the beach!
[snip] The engine can be used to build C&C, WC2, SC and AOE-like real-time strategy (RTS) games. It successfully runs under Linux, BSD, BeOS, MacOS/X, MacOS/ Darwin and MS Windows. Souce code and binaries are available from
...just setting the junk filter to move everything to the junk folder. Then when I apply for the usual BS forms which send you an email for verification I select their addresses and say they're not junk
works in reverse now, we have to tell the bleedin system unless I tell you everything is junk rather than the other way round as it should be:-(
Slashdot Mirror
---
Thank you for your e-mail. In reply to your queries both Mygo and go mobile's website are designed for IE5 and upwards and this is Company policy.
We are aware that not everyone uses IE. However, IE offers certain features which other browsers do not. Using these, we are able to use a greater array of features which allow us to design better interfaces. 84.3 per cent of the internet population uses Internet Explorer. More than 98 percent of the hits on go mobile's website originate from IE.
---
I mailed them again telling them it's nonsense (browsers reporting themselves as being IE etc) and that there are alternatives to make it work for both but surprise surprise! no reply. Bugzilla contains a number of other websites suffering from this condition (inc. Microsoft, no surprises here).
Therefore Mozilla follow standards so page X won't work and page X authors follow market so they won't fix it. What does BBC recommend I do in this case?
There, 100% compatibility problem solved and should be trivial to implement
Option 1: Take ISDN phone at half price if you pay full price for DSL
Option 2: Take DSL at half price and pay full price for ISDN phone
Option 3: Pay full price for DSL
Option 4: Pay full price for ISDN phone
and hey since it's half price save 70 euros on the DSL modem...right....
NOT...when you look at the prices you realise that the ISDN phone and the DSL modem cost just about the same!
Reminds me of what my university group did in reply to a government proposal several years ago. They barred access to the canteen and wrote this on a board outside:
To go to the canteen you have these options:
Go from the back door
Go from the door next to the poet's statue
Go from the door next to the ATM machine
and yes all three options referred to the same door!
Lies, damn lies and special offers
Like Lotus 1-2-3? Back then they sat around till they figured out how it would always crash because surprise surprise, they were pushing their own app...
Step 2: Disconnect cable wire
Step 3: Call them, ask for cheapest offer
Step 4: Leave disconnected for around 2 weeks
Step 5: Re-connect cable, enjoy most expensive offer at the cheapest one
Step n: If they call you, just say: "Yes I removed it for a while because I was painting the room/on holiday/blah. Sorry didn't know"
It's a stupid protocol with no feedback, they just send the codes and ASSUME the receiver has processed the filtering requests. I wonder why they don't keep sending the codes every x days...
that Aerosmith's "just push play" is listed on the "known corrupt cd's" list on fat chuck's? Why is it ironic? I pushed play in Winamp with the mp3 selected and it worked just fine.
The little green men! Won't no one care and take action to protect those poor little green men!
if (a=z) b=c+d; else b=f+g
and this would come something like:
cmp.eq p1,p2=r1,r2
(p1) add b=c+d
(p2) add b=f+g
In this case you can have multiple cpu's or multiple cores inside one cpu executing all statements at once (yes, ALL at once) and then when it gets the compare result it knows which result to keep (compare sets p1 to true and p2 to false or vice versa depending on the result).
This is much more fine grained so will give much better performance rather than fooling the OS that it's 2 processors and expect the programmer to think of ways to use "both". Hyperthreading IMHO is just a way to get back at AMD to dampen their marketing department, a sort-of "me-too" if you will.
"Case dismissed!"
Registers: 128 general registers, 128 floating point (no more register juggling crap)
Register rotation
Branch Hints to improve prefetching and stuff
Prediction is mega cool. When you have a branch in C saying something like:
if (a) { b=c+d; }
if (e) {h=i-j;}
this is transformed to
cmp.ne p1,p2=a,r0
cmp.ne p3,p4=e,r0
(p1)add b=c,d
(p3)sub h=i,j
When the compares execute p1 gets set to true and p2 to false (or vice versa). Then when it encounters the statements (p1) and (p3) it checks whether to execute them or not.
Notice the difference yet?
In Itanium, the processor can theoretically execute all those instructions at once, no branches to flush pipelines and so on. Adding more processors should become much easier too and get a much more fine-grained execution. Try doing that with the "superior AMD". The dependencies in Itanium code are explicitly programmed so the processors knowswhat it can execute in parallel. In contrast, old x86 processors have to try and analyse code in real time - a very complex time-consuming task and in no way as accurate.
Most people speak negatively about the Itanium because they've read reports that it's slow. That's true for Itanium 1 but Itanium 2 is much much better and Intel has already confirmed that it has 5 more currently in development. There's a learning curve and this I suspect is the major blocking factor since people are scared to suddenly find that they have to relearn many things.
The other major reason for the slow uptake is that it takes a lot of work to create decent compilers since a lot of work has shifted from the hardware to the software side.
So please give it some time and have a good look at it's potential rather than requoting some crap out of a dumb witted reviewer. x86 has no future for scaleability without major juggling on the programmer's part. With Itanium, performance scaleability is assured.
In some years time no one will be buying a CRT monitor anymore. However CRT monitors don't burn up or go out of use at the same rate as other components so my guess is that the transition to CRT won't be as fast.
Anything you sell us for $40 we resell for $100 elsewhere
Does this mean MS will supply SP4 without saying what it contains within?
I think my tagline sums up pretty much what DMCA et al are saying
Frankly I don't understand why this should be a problem. I think Microsoft has to be seen that they're doing something to encourage game companies to develop for it. At the same time, suppose i buy this Xbox and being a hacker I try a hand at loading linux on it. Fine, now I've got an Xbox game console + Linux computer. If I can hack it's DVD region checks I'll be happier and if I'm happier I'll tell my friends who'll also buy other X-Boxes.
At a certain point, you get out of the geek circle who want to do stuff like run linux and these people start buying games. This will make game companies sit up and take notice and pretty soon...bang.... the fierce war between sony and MS becomes more cutthroat!
It's true! Sometimes you even wake up hearing what women are thinking...
pots calling the kettles black....
Titles like:
"The pleasure and the greed",
"Mistake",
"Undersold",
"Knee deep (in what I ask...?)",
"No fault"
and best of all
"All our days are numbered"! :-)
Nope, I hadn't. Tks for the update! Unlikely to occur though ;-)
viruses? in an mp3? Quick someone tell McAfee to update their jpeg virus scanner!
You may find this useful for "Real computer users". Kindly forward this information as appropriate:
ironic Pronunciation Key (-rnk) also ironical (-rn-kl) adj.
Characterized by or constituting irony. Given to the use of irony. See Synonyms at sarcastic.
Poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended: madness, an ironic fate for such a clear thinker.
You'll also find this defintion useful:
twit Pronunciation Key (twt)
tr.v. twitted, twitting, twits
To taunt, ridicule, or tease, especially for embarrassing mistakes or faults. See Synonyms at ridicule.
n.
The act or an instance of twitting.
A reproach, gibe, or taunt.
Slang. A foolishly annoying person.
oh and don't bother commenting on the fact that I switched timings ;-)
In fact it took 1.205 secs to write "Hello World" as a heading with my Pentium and it took an incredible 1.215secs to click select Heading1 and type "Hello World" with the Hammer. The time savings is a whopping 8% or 0.01secs!!
Yeah i'll definitely buy the hammer -- after all if i have 100 headings in my document i'll finish early and can spend an extra second at the beach!
Souce code? Yum yum!
...just setting the junk filter to move everything to the junk folder. Then when I apply for the usual BS forms which send you an email for verification I select their addresses and say they're not junk works in reverse now, we have to tell the bleedin system unless I tell you everything is junk rather than the other way round as it should be :-(