> Screem is my idea of a decent editor, it's free, and it doesn't > work in windows.
Emacs is so much more than merely "a decent editor", and it's free, and it works just fine in Windows.
Indeed, it arguably works, or at least integrates with the system, better under Windows than under X11. (Among other things, X11's separate notions of current selection and actual clipboard introduces ambiguity as to which item should be associated with the top item in the Emacs kill ring. Under Windows there's just the one clipboard, so it's obviously that. The rest of the kill ring isn't supported, but at least the top item is well integrated with the system's copy-and-paste; whereas, on X11, it's not really. This is one of the most annoying things about the X Window System for me, although I still prefer *nix systems to Windows for other reasons.)
The only really annoying thing about Emacs on Windows is that it isn't included with the OS out of the box, but this is also true on e.g. FreeBSD. (No, having the ability to install it from the ports collection is *not* an improvement over having the ability to easily download and install a pre-compiled version.) And, I take it, Screem is not included in the base install of most OSes, either, though of course some distributions may include it as an optional package (as they do also with Emacs).
However, with all that said, I don't terribly want to do my web development on Windows, either. I keep a separate Windows system around for just such things as testing the website in IE, and yes, it's annoying that I have to do this.
# > IE7 requires WGA to run - so that applications like Wine # > are unable to run it.
# (excerpt from answer) # I think the core of your question is about giving away # Windows licenses for free.
> What? Who is asking for Windows licenses? That has nothing > at all to do with the question.
It does, sort of, but you have to understand something about how Microsoft thinks. (Actually, there are two things to understand here that have relevance for the question.)
First, in Microsoft's worldview, Internet Explorer is a component of Windows. It has been since circa 1998. The two are distinguishable, so that you can say "This is IE" or "This is Windows" and mean something a little bit different, but the two are nonetheless inextricably linked, in the same way that the human body and mind are linked. You can't do anything to one of them without having an impact on the other, and to totally separate them would be death. To Microsoft, IE is a part of Windows.
Given that mindset, allowing people (e.g., web developers) to run a Windows component without purchasing a Windows license is tantamount to giving away free Windows licenses (or, at least, Windows component licenses, but IE is not a separately licensed component, unlike, say, SQL Server).
The second thing to understand is the implication this has for how Microsoft views Wine, if Wine allows people to run Windows components (such as IE or probably even little things like calc.exe) without purchasing a Windows license. The details there are left as an exercise to the reader.
With FreeBSD, my upgrade is free. All I have to do when I want to upgrade to a new version of something is portsnap fetch, then portsnap upgrade, then portupgrade -r -R packagename. Then, when other random applications and/or my desktop environment break because of some library that was upgraded that isn't binary compatible with previous versions, all I have to do is run pkgdb -F a few times, manually fix all the stale dependencies, then portupgrade -a -f -k and check in on my computer every few hours for the next several weeks to answer the little "Do you want to enable such-and-such component" prompts. Sure, my CPU is maxed out the whole time so I can't actually _use_ my computer until the process is completed, but that's a small price to pay for having the latest version of Inkscape, or whatever...
(Sorry, I'm not usually this sarcastic. But the FreeBSD Gnome team recently decided to change the install prefix on half the ports in the tree, so my computer is a mess at the moment and I'm just a little grumpy.)
> 95% of the answers given here are going to be smartasses telling > you to install Ubuntu.
Actually, I was going to say OpenBSD. Because that way in order to screw them up the students have to actually *learn* something, which is the whole point of having them in the school in the first place (them being the computers or the students; either is true). But this answer is only halfway serious.
If you're really got to have a locked-down Windows lab environment, then you need to invest in Terminal Server and diskless thin clients, but this costs money and will probably not happen in the middle of a school year. (Even if you can pull out the hard drives on the existing workstations and tell the BIOS to boot from the network, evading the need to buy new thin clients, you've still got to have a beefy server plus licenses.) Over the long term it's much more sustainable -- both in terms of administration and budget -- but the up-front cost is too steep for a middle-of-the-year upgrade, at least for most schools.
You can probably limp through the year on Ghost and whatnot, but by the end of the year you'll be ready to move to a better solution.
> Microsoft will operate 64-bit versions of Windows Vista as a tabernacle, > with the kernel as the holy of holies, where only its own high priests > of security may venture.
And that only once a year, and not without blood, which he offers for himself and for the sins the people have committed in ignorance?
Or perhaps we are stretching the metaphor too far. Perhaps after all computer security is not very much like a temple sacrifice religion, but more like a military installation. Yes, there may be authorization checks at the entrances, but the security of the area within is protected from unauthorized entry due to practical concerns. Granted, not everyone agrees with all of the practical concerns or the level of security involved, but nonetheless I don't think it's fair to imply that the protection of the inner sanctum is purely religious.
Dude, you really should check out this thing called gopher. It's way more pure than the web. Unfortunately a lot of internet service provides no longer provide a gopher client in their connection kit for some reason, so you may have to download one from an ftp site.
> What time is "afternoon" exactly? Is it 12:01 PM - 3:00PM. It sounds very vague.
It's between noon and evening. I've never heard anyone refer to any time before 5pm as "evening", so presumably afternoon runs at least until then. Also bear in mind that a lot of the Mozilla people are on Pacific time, so their afternoon can run well into the east coast's evening and Europe's night.
> It doesn't matter how much better you are than IE, you have to give people a real, tangible > reason to switch and then you have to make it so exceedingly easy that there is next to no > effort involved. That second part is more important than the first. I like many others here > can come up with many "tanglible" reasons for people to switch, I still can't get them to > download it or install it.
Repeat after me: End users do not install software. End users do not install software. End users do not install software.
At least, they don't install software on purpose, if they realize that's what they're doing. (The _do_ click links on web pages, so if clicking a link hijacks the browser and automatically installs software on the computer, then that's another matter.)
End users rely on *other* people to do that "technical stuff" for them. If you want them to use Firefox, this is what you do: the next time they ask you to fix their computer (e.g., because they accidentally got Active Desktop turned on and it hid all their icons), you install Firefox _for_ them, as part of the process of fixing their computer, set it as the default web browser, remove the IE icon from the desktop, and put the Firefox shortcut right where the IE icon used to be. Plus you fix whatever their immediate problem was, and if you have time also install Ad-Aware or Spybot or somesuch, and run a scan. And you make sure any relevant service packs are installed, if they weren't already, and that automatic security updates are turned on. Then you say, "I fixed [whatever], and I upgraded your web browser, and I ran a scan for adware, and your security updates are turned on, so you should be all set for a while."
Think of it as a full-service computer maintenance job.
Of course, there's a limit to how many end users you'll be willing to support with this level of service (I do immediate family plus a handful of good friends, plus people who are sufficiently desparate to physically bring their computer to my house), but IMO it's better to _fully_ support a few users than to spread yourself too thin and not do the job properly for anyone.
Close buttons on every tab was tried out before in the suite (circa 0.9.6 IIRC), and it was proven then to be a wretched idea as far as I'm concerned. It's still a wretched idea, for power users. The main thing it does is reduce the effective amount of space on the tab that can be used to label the tab with the page title, thereby impeding user's ability to keep straight which tab is which. But, that's from a poweruser perspective, wherein there are sometimes enough tabs open that the amount of space on each tab can become a concern.
Probably the reason for changing the default now is because Firefox is getting picked up by a lot of end users these days, and end users never open enough pages at once that the amount of space on the tabs could ever be a concern. For them, the ability to close a tab more easily with the mouse is more important. So from that perspective I think I agree with putting them on there by default.
However, there's no excuse for not putting an option in the preferences. End users will never see it anyhow (they don't look at preferences, EVER), and power users could then easily turn the close buttons off to regain that extra space for the tabs' titles, since we commonly close tabs via Ctrl-W anyhow.
Designing an application to suit both end users and power users is a bit of an art form at times, but the key thing is to set up the defaults for the end users and give the power users the option to change things to suit themselves better. This works because power users *like* having options; whereas, end users ignore them entirely.
> You'll still have to cater for IE6 or a loong time
I'm not planning on it. Once IE7 hits the automatic updates for fully-patched-up users, I'm giving it a month or two and then dropping IE6 support. I'm not going to deliberately *break* IE6, but I'm not going to cater to it either. Win98 users can get Firefox or Opera, and people who refuse to install service packs can go lick a sidewalk.
I already broke down and started using PNG transparency a year or so ago, and IE6 users can just *see* a funny background color behind the images. The alpha channel is the only way to solve certain layout problems, and I was no longer willing to do without it. By the first of the year I'm not going to be willing to hack around the CSS deficiencies in IE6, either. IE7 is better. It's not perfect, but it's better. So my IE testing will focus on version 7.
I imagine I'm not alone. A lot of web developers are utterly fed up with IE6. The upgrade to IE7 is so compelling to web developers that it will *become* compelling to the users, because without it there are going to be a lot of websites that don't display properly. Ordinarily very few web developers in the past several years (except the crazed and rabid lunatic fringe, of course) have wanted to be first-movers on requiring users to upgrade their browsers, but this one is compelling, and additionally it is going out via automatic update, so most users are going to be left without any very good excuse for refusing it. Even the usual laziness excuse won't cut it on this one; all you've gotta do is leave automatic updates turned on and Bob is your uncle. Webmasters aren't going to have a lot of sympathy for users who refuse.
We've finally reached the point, at long last, where most browsers have at least minimal support for letting the user choose between alternate stylesheets supplied by a website. However, Internet Explorer, including version 7, still completely fails to understand alternate stylesheets. In the absense of any UI for choosing, a reasonable behavior is to just select the first choice and use it, but IE instead chooses to try to apply *all* of the choices at once. This gets really weird with several alternate stylesheets and results in the need for hacks like adding a special last choice stylesheet that systematically undoes most of the styling done in the other choices.
Can we expect a future version of IE to correct this? How soon?
I'm familiar with that, but it only *sometimes* works, and it's hard to pin down _when_ it's going to work, and in any event it's not an _other_ way to solve the layout problems I was talking about: it's a way to use (on IE6) the _same_ way to solve them that is used on every other browser, specifically, it's a way to use the alpha channel and have it actually work -- well, _sometimes_ actually work -- on IE6.
> Actually, it's sooner than expected: it'll hit automatic updates on November 1. > Though it sounds like they're only targeting IE7 beta users at first, then > adding systems with IE6 "after a few weeks."
Ah. When it's hitting automatic update for IE6 users is what I meant to ask. From a web developer's perspective, having IE7 beta users auto-updated to the formal IE7 release is less of an issue, because it doesn't much change the relative usage numbers for IE6 versus IE7. I mean, yes, obviously you want the beta users to get the update to the final release, but not for the same kinds of reasons that you want IE6 users to upgrade. It doesn't have an impact over whether we can finally start using the alpha channel in our images and child selectors in our stylesheets, for instance.
For some types of information, I go straight to Wikipedia, yes. For instance, the other day I got tired of seeing the word "bracken" in fantasy books and only knowing that it's a type of undergrowth, so I looked it up in Wikipedia. ("Oh, those. I always just called them big ferns.") It's a great one-stop-shop for that sort of thing. It's also fantastic for geography, especially historical geography of the sort you can't easily find on mapping services (e.g., if you want to know exactly where Phrygia was).
On the other hand, if I just want to find a certain website (e.g., let's say I want to try out the Flock web browser, or I can't remember the URI for Improv Everywhere), I would use Google for that. If I am getting a particular error message and want to know the cause of it (e.g., when I was trying to do a portupgrade a while back and couldn't get Gnome to recompile properly), I use Google. If I want to see what sorts of things people are saying about a certain topic, I use Google.
And there are other things I go to other sources for. If I want to know what spices to put in borsch, I would head straight for rec.food.recipes on Google groups. If I want a module that implements a certain file format or protocol, search.cpan.org will tell me what I want to know. If I want to get an acronym expanded, I use dictionary.com.
> Unfortunately there are plenty of people who can't install *anything* > because IT locks the machine down
One supposes in that case that it's IT's responsibility to install the updates from Microsoft. You probably want to give them a couple of months or so for testing after the update comes out (large IT departments are crazy about testing everything before deploying it, go figure), but after that...
> Still, the sooner IE6 disappears, the easier things will be.
Indeed. I'd already gone ahead months ago and started using the alpha channel, and IE6 users can just *see* a funny-looking background color behind the images, because there isn't any other way to solve certain design problems. I'm looking forward to feeling free to use child and sibling selectors. (Any word on how soon IE7 is hitting automatic updates? Not until at least Patch Tuesday, I assume... and then you give IT departments a couple of months to test... Guess I better hold off till the end of the year or so.)
On the other hand, I've already discovered one new (probably CSS related, but I can't prove that) layout bug in IE7 that does not occur in IE6, and which causes parts of the page to be blanked out. I spent a couple of hours at work figuring out what was going on and how to work around it and had to alter the page layout (on IE7) in order to resolve this.
You don't need journalling if you turn off write cacheing. (You can still use read cacheing.) Indeed, without write cacheing there wouldn't be much point to journalling. If turning off write caching kills your performance, then your application is doing too much writing for Flash RAM to be a reasonable storage medium. So, you don't need a journalled filesystem.
> I'll use [software that is current now] for the rest of my life.
Planning to die in the next few years, are you? I don't think you'll want to be saddled indefinitely with the state of the art of 2006. If you wanted to live your life that way, you could always download Navigator 4.08 and have a go at browsing the web with that 2006. Firefox 2.0 will seem just as antequated in another eight years.
> Most of us code to a set of standards so that all our code can work well > in ALL browsers not just IE.
I code to standards first, but then I also have to make whatever adjustments are necessary to get IE to display the page. (I don't go so far as to make IE display the page exactly the way it's intended to look, as that would take *forever*, but I try to reach the point where the page is usable in IE and looks almost reasonable.)
I had to spend two hours at work yesterday fixing the legacy-browser stylesheet to work around a new CSS bug in IE7 so that it doesn't blank out large areas in our website. The solution I ended up going with causes the page layout in IE to be different from that in every other browser (unless the user of the other browser deliberately selects the "Legacy" stylesheet from the bottom of the list of alternate stylesheets; IE uses it automatically because it doesn't grok alternate stylesheets, so it just applies them all).
This rule, if indeed it is a rule, must have more exceptions than most. I've known a lot of skinny people that couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.
Then there's me: I'm not sure what I weigh with any great precision, but I've surely got to be over 200 lbs at the least, and my vocabulary routinely frightens people. Apparently I use "too many big words". I get complaints to this effect at least a couple of times a day, from people of all ages. Granted, "too many" is relative (certainly, *I* don't think I use too many big words), as is the size of the words in question (again, *I* don't think the words I use are all that large), and I live in the middle of a three-county-wide educationally depressed area, but nonetheless, plenty of the people who whine that they can't understand me and implore me to avoid the use of so much vocabulary are clearly much skinnier than I am.
In summary, my anecdotal evidence calls into question the universality of the study's conclusion.
It doesn't matter _what_ the job is...
on
IT and Divorce?
·
· Score: 1
Any job, in any field, can cause marital problems that can lead to divorce, but the problem is independent of any particular profession. The problem comes from a difference of understanding between you, your spouse, and your boss about how much priority your job takes over other stuff. In some cases the differences between your spouse and your boss may be irreconcilable, in which case you have no choice but to pick sides. If you do what your boss wants in such an instance, your family life will suffer, make no mistake.
> Is this accurate? Don't the glue records get published through ICANN, and couldn't > they remove them?
Unless I am mistaken, no.
ICANN is responsible for the *root* domain servers, i.e., the ones that tell you which (other) domain servers have authority for various *top-level* domains. So if the court wanted the.org TLD to be delisted, ICANN would be the outfit to contact.
However, the individual domains _within_ each TLD are the responsibility of certain key registries who run the authoritative servers for those domains. For instance, the.com registry was run, last I recall, by Network Solutions. (That may have changed, because I haven't paid attention recently, but whether.com is still run by netsol is not really germaine to the discussion.) Assuming that that is still the case, then the root domain servers, over which ICANN has charge, will basically say that for.com you consult the nameserver over at Network Solutions, and for.uk you consult the nameserver of some UK outfit that runs that one, and so on.
To get a specific site's domain delisted, you'd have to go to the people who hold the domain the next level up, i.e., the people who run the nameserver that authoritatively lists the domain you're trying to get delisted. You can't go to ICANN and say, "please delist galion.lib.oh.us", for instance -- you'd have to go to whoever currently runs the nameserver with authority for the lib.oh.us domain (which was OARNET last I knew). If ICANN were to act, they'd be delisting the whole TLD (.us in the library's case, or.org in the case of Spamhaus), and that would be a much more weighty thing to do. However big a deal you think it would be to delist Spamhaus, take that up a couple of orders of magnitude and you start to get an idea how big a deal it would be for ICANN to delist a TLD.
From a webmaster's perspective, the big win with IE7 is the alpha channel.
However, that's a pretty big deal given that approximately eight out of every ten webmasters have been dying to get it for the last six years or so. Improved CSS support would be nice, but the alpha channel is much *more* important.
I imagine that about a day and a half after IE7 is officially released, rather a lot of websites will start telling IE6 users to upgrade. As a web developer, I'll be *VERY* pleased if it's pushed out as a critical update.
Improved CSS support? That'd be real nice, but I'll take what I can get.
> > If it still breaks, well... then the browser is marginal and broken, who cares? > None important, just the customer and the visitors.
Actually, in context, he was talking about browsers that aren't on the radar, presumably because they don't have a significant showing in the access logs. Hence, the browser is marginal. And he says he tests for W3C compliance, hence if the browser can't display the page it's "broken" in some way (although it's more likely to just be out of date, I suspect).
It's good to test on a variety of browsers and platforms, but fundamentally it's impossible to test on _every_ browser in existence. (Do *you* test on NetPositive, Arachne, Oregano, and QNX Voyager? These are important niche browsers, each very significant for its respective platform.) That's why testing for standards compliance is important: if your site adheres to standards, then it should display reasonably in any browser that supports the standards. (I say "should" because no browser's standards support is entirely complete, but you do what you can and hope for the best.)
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> Screem is my idea of a decent editor, it's free, and it doesn't
> work in windows.
Emacs is so much more than merely "a decent editor", and it's free, and it works just fine in Windows.
Indeed, it arguably works, or at least integrates with the system, better under Windows than under X11. (Among other things, X11's separate notions of current selection and actual clipboard introduces ambiguity as to which item should be associated with the top item in the Emacs kill ring. Under Windows there's just the one clipboard, so it's obviously that. The rest of the kill ring isn't supported, but at least the top item is well integrated with the system's copy-and-paste; whereas, on X11, it's not really. This is one of the most annoying things about the X Window System for me, although I still prefer *nix systems to Windows for other reasons.)
The only really annoying thing about Emacs on Windows is that it isn't included with the OS out of the box, but this is also true on e.g. FreeBSD. (No, having the ability to install it from the ports collection is *not* an improvement over having the ability to easily download and install a pre-compiled version.) And, I take it, Screem is not included in the base install of most OSes, either, though of course some distributions may include it as an optional package (as they do also with Emacs).
However, with all that said, I don't terribly want to do my web development on Windows, either. I keep a separate Windows system around for just such things as testing the website in IE, and yes, it's annoying that I have to do this.
# > IE7 requires WGA to run - so that applications like Wine
# > are unable to run it.
# (excerpt from answer)
# I think the core of your question is about giving away
# Windows licenses for free.
> What? Who is asking for Windows licenses? That has nothing
> at all to do with the question.
It does, sort of, but you have to understand something about how Microsoft thinks. (Actually, there are two things to understand here that have relevance for the question.)
First, in Microsoft's worldview, Internet Explorer is a component of Windows. It has been since circa 1998. The two are distinguishable, so that you can say "This is IE" or "This is Windows" and mean something a little bit different, but the two are nonetheless inextricably linked, in the same way that the human body and mind are linked. You can't do anything to one of them without having an impact on the other, and to totally separate them would be death. To Microsoft, IE is a part of Windows.
Given that mindset, allowing people (e.g., web developers) to run a Windows component without purchasing a Windows license is tantamount to giving away free Windows licenses (or, at least, Windows component licenses, but IE is not a separately licensed component, unlike, say, SQL Server).
The second thing to understand is the implication this has for how Microsoft views Wine, if Wine allows people to run Windows components (such as IE or probably even little things like calc.exe) without purchasing a Windows license. The details there are left as an exercise to the reader.
> Maybe someone will hack an election to make it very obviously hacked
Write-in candidates, anyone?
With FreeBSD, my upgrade is free. All I have to do when I want to upgrade to a new version of something is portsnap fetch, then portsnap upgrade, then portupgrade -r -R packagename. Then, when other random applications and/or my desktop environment break because of some library that was upgraded that isn't binary compatible with previous versions, all I have to do is run pkgdb -F a few times, manually fix all the stale dependencies, then portupgrade -a -f -k and check in on my computer every few hours for the next several weeks to answer the little "Do you want to enable such-and-such component" prompts. Sure, my CPU is maxed out the whole time so I can't actually _use_ my computer until the process is completed, but that's a small price to pay for having the latest version of Inkscape, or whatever...
(Sorry, I'm not usually this sarcastic. But the FreeBSD Gnome team recently decided to change the install prefix on half the ports in the tree, so my computer is a mess at the moment and I'm just a little grumpy.)
> 95% of the answers given here are going to be smartasses telling
> you to install Ubuntu.
Actually, I was going to say OpenBSD. Because that way in order to screw them up the students have to actually *learn* something, which is the whole point of having them in the school in the first place (them being the computers or the students; either is true). But this answer is only halfway serious.
If you're really got to have a locked-down Windows lab environment, then you need to invest in Terminal Server and diskless thin clients, but this costs money and will probably not happen in the middle of a school year. (Even if you can pull out the hard drives on the existing workstations and tell the BIOS to boot from the network, evading the need to buy new thin clients, you've still got to have a beefy server plus licenses.) Over the long term it's much more sustainable -- both in terms of administration and budget -- but the up-front cost is too steep for a middle-of-the-year upgrade, at least for most schools.
You can probably limp through the year on Ghost and whatnot, but by the end of the year you'll be ready to move to a better solution.
> Microsoft will operate 64-bit versions of Windows Vista as a tabernacle,
> with the kernel as the holy of holies, where only its own high priests
> of security may venture.
And that only once a year, and not without blood, which he offers for himself and for the sins the people have committed in ignorance?
Or perhaps we are stretching the metaphor too far. Perhaps after all computer security is not very much like a temple sacrifice religion, but more like a military installation. Yes, there may be authorization checks at the entrances, but the security of the area within is protected from unauthorized entry due to practical concerns. Granted, not everyone agrees with all of the practical concerns or the level of security involved, but nonetheless I don't think it's fair to imply that the protection of the inner sanctum is purely religious.
Dude, you really should check out this thing called gopher. It's way more pure than the web. Unfortunately a lot of internet service provides no longer provide a gopher client in their connection kit for some reason, so you may have to download one from an ftp site.
> What time is "afternoon" exactly? Is it 12:01 PM - 3:00PM. It sounds very vague.
It's between noon and evening. I've never heard anyone refer to any time before 5pm as "evening", so presumably afternoon runs at least until then. Also bear in mind that a lot of the Mozilla people are on Pacific time, so their afternoon can run well into the east coast's evening and Europe's night.
> It doesn't matter how much better you are than IE, you have to give people a real, tangible
> reason to switch and then you have to make it so exceedingly easy that there is next to no
> effort involved. That second part is more important than the first. I like many others here
> can come up with many "tanglible" reasons for people to switch, I still can't get them to
> download it or install it.
Repeat after me: End users do not install software. End users do not install software. End users do not install software.
At least, they don't install software on purpose, if they realize that's what they're doing. (The _do_ click links on web pages, so if clicking a link hijacks the browser and automatically installs software on the computer, then that's another matter.)
End users rely on *other* people to do that "technical stuff" for them. If you want them to use Firefox, this is what you do: the next time they ask you to fix their computer (e.g., because they accidentally got Active Desktop turned on and it hid all their icons), you install Firefox _for_ them, as part of the process of fixing their computer, set it as the default web browser, remove the IE icon from the desktop, and put the Firefox shortcut right where the IE icon used to be. Plus you fix whatever their immediate problem was, and if you have time also install Ad-Aware or Spybot or somesuch, and run a scan. And you make sure any relevant service packs are installed, if they weren't already, and that automatic security updates are turned on. Then you say, "I fixed [whatever], and I upgraded your web browser, and I ran a scan for adware, and your security updates are turned on, so you should be all set for a while."
Think of it as a full-service computer maintenance job.
Of course, there's a limit to how many end users you'll be willing to support with this level of service (I do immediate family plus a handful of good friends, plus people who are sufficiently desparate to physically bring their computer to my house), but IMO it's better to _fully_ support a few users than to spread yourself too thin and not do the job properly for anyone.
Close buttons on every tab was tried out before in the suite (circa 0.9.6 IIRC), and it was proven then to be a wretched idea as far as I'm concerned. It's still a wretched idea, for power users. The main thing it does is reduce the effective amount of space on the tab that can be used to label the tab with the page title, thereby impeding user's ability to keep straight which tab is which. But, that's from a poweruser perspective, wherein there are sometimes enough tabs open that the amount of space on each tab can become a concern.
Probably the reason for changing the default now is because Firefox is getting picked up by a lot of end users these days, and end users never open enough pages at once that the amount of space on the tabs could ever be a concern. For them, the ability to close a tab more easily with the mouse is more important. So from that perspective I think I agree with putting them on there by default.
However, there's no excuse for not putting an option in the preferences. End users will never see it anyhow (they don't look at preferences, EVER), and power users could then easily turn the close buttons off to regain that extra space for the tabs' titles, since we commonly close tabs via Ctrl-W anyhow.
Designing an application to suit both end users and power users is a bit of an art form at times, but the key thing is to set up the defaults for the end users and give the power users the option to change things to suit themselves better. This works because power users *like* having options; whereas, end users ignore them entirely.
> You'll still have to cater for IE6 or a loong time
I'm not planning on it. Once IE7 hits the automatic updates for fully-patched-up users, I'm giving it a month or two and then dropping IE6 support. I'm not going to deliberately *break* IE6, but I'm not going to cater to it either. Win98 users can get Firefox or Opera, and people who refuse to install service packs can go lick a sidewalk.
I already broke down and started using PNG transparency a year or so ago, and IE6 users can just *see* a funny background color behind the images. The alpha channel is the only way to solve certain layout problems, and I was no longer willing to do without it. By the first of the year I'm not going to be willing to hack around the CSS deficiencies in IE6, either. IE7 is better. It's not perfect, but it's better. So my IE testing will focus on version 7.
I imagine I'm not alone. A lot of web developers are utterly fed up with IE6. The upgrade to IE7 is so compelling to web developers that it will *become* compelling to the users, because without it there are going to be a lot of websites that don't display properly. Ordinarily very few web developers in the past several years (except the crazed and rabid lunatic fringe, of course) have wanted to be first-movers on requiring users to upgrade their browsers, but this one is compelling, and additionally it is going out via automatic update, so most users are going to be left without any very good excuse for refusing it. Even the usual laziness excuse won't cut it on this one; all you've gotta do is leave automatic updates turned on and Bob is your uncle. Webmasters aren't going to have a lot of sympathy for users who refuse.
We've finally reached the point, at long last, where most browsers have at least minimal support for letting the user choose between alternate stylesheets supplied by a website. However, Internet Explorer, including version 7, still completely fails to understand alternate stylesheets. In the absense of any UI for choosing, a reasonable behavior is to just select the first choice and use it, but IE instead chooses to try to apply *all* of the choices at once. This gets really weird with several alternate stylesheets and results in the need for hacks like adding a special last choice stylesheet that systematically undoes most of the styling done in the other choices.
Can we expect a future version of IE to correct this? How soon?
I'm familiar with that, but it only *sometimes* works, and it's hard to pin down _when_ it's going to work, and in any event it's not an _other_ way to solve the layout problems I was talking about: it's a way to use (on IE6) the _same_ way to solve them that is used on every other browser, specifically, it's a way to use the alpha channel and have it actually work -- well, _sometimes_ actually work -- on IE6.
> Actually, it's sooner than expected: it'll hit automatic updates on November 1.
> Though it sounds like they're only targeting IE7 beta users at first, then
> adding systems with IE6 "after a few weeks."
Ah. When it's hitting automatic update for IE6 users is what I meant to ask. From a web developer's perspective, having IE7 beta users auto-updated to the formal IE7 release is less of an issue, because it doesn't much change the relative usage numbers for IE6 versus IE7. I mean, yes, obviously you want the beta users to get the update to the final release, but not for the same kinds of reasons that you want IE6 users to upgrade. It doesn't have an impact over whether we can finally start using the alpha channel in our images and child selectors in our stylesheets, for instance.
For some types of information, I go straight to Wikipedia, yes. For instance, the other day I got tired of seeing the word "bracken" in fantasy books and only knowing that it's a type of undergrowth, so I looked it up in Wikipedia. ("Oh, those. I always just called them big ferns.") It's a great one-stop-shop for that sort of thing. It's also fantastic for geography, especially historical geography of the sort you can't easily find on mapping services (e.g., if you want to know exactly where Phrygia was).
On the other hand, if I just want to find a certain website (e.g., let's say I want to try out the Flock web browser, or I can't remember the URI for Improv Everywhere), I would use Google for that. If I am getting a particular error message and want to know the cause of it (e.g., when I was trying to do a portupgrade a while back and couldn't get Gnome to recompile properly), I use Google. If I want to see what sorts of things people are saying about a certain topic, I use Google.
And there are other things I go to other sources for. If I want to know what spices to put in borsch, I would head straight for rec.food.recipes on Google groups. If I want a module that implements a certain file format or protocol, search.cpan.org will tell me what I want to know. If I want to get an acronym expanded, I use dictionary.com.
So basically it depends on what I want to know.
> Unfortunately there are plenty of people who can't install *anything*
> because IT locks the machine down
One supposes in that case that it's IT's responsibility to install the updates from Microsoft. You probably want to give them a couple of months or so for testing after the update comes out (large IT departments are crazy about testing everything before deploying it, go figure), but after that...
> Still, the sooner IE6 disappears, the easier things will be.
Indeed. I'd already gone ahead months ago and started using the alpha channel, and IE6 users can just *see* a funny-looking background color behind the images, because there isn't any other way to solve certain design problems. I'm looking forward to feeling free to use child and sibling selectors. (Any word on how soon IE7 is hitting automatic updates? Not until at least Patch Tuesday, I assume... and then you give IT departments a couple of months to test... Guess I better hold off till the end of the year or so.)
On the other hand, I've already discovered one new (probably CSS related, but I can't prove that) layout bug in IE7 that does not occur in IE6, and which causes parts of the page to be blanked out. I spent a couple of hours at work figuring out what was going on and how to work around it and had to alter the page layout (on IE7) in order to resolve this.
You don't need journalling if you turn off write cacheing. (You can still use read cacheing.) Indeed, without write cacheing there wouldn't be much point to journalling. If turning off write caching kills your performance, then your application is doing too much writing for Flash RAM to be a reasonable storage medium. So, you don't need a journalled filesystem.
> I'll use [software that is current now] for the rest of my life.
Planning to die in the next few years, are you? I don't think you'll want to be saddled indefinitely with the state of the art of 2006. If you wanted to live your life that way, you could always download Navigator 4.08 and have a go at browsing the web with that 2006. Firefox 2.0 will seem just as antequated in another eight years.
> Most of us code to a set of standards so that all our code can work well
> in ALL browsers not just IE.
I code to standards first, but then I also have to make whatever adjustments are necessary to get IE to display the page. (I don't go so far as to make IE display the page exactly the way it's intended to look, as that would take *forever*, but I try to reach the point where the page is usable in IE and looks almost reasonable.)
I had to spend two hours at work yesterday fixing the legacy-browser stylesheet to work around a new CSS bug in IE7 so that it doesn't blank out large areas in our website. The solution I ended up going with causes the page layout in IE to be different from that in every other browser (unless the user of the other browser deliberately selects the "Legacy" stylesheet from the bottom of the list of alternate stylesheets; IE uses it automatically because it doesn't grok alternate stylesheets, so it just applies them all).
This rule, if indeed it is a rule, must have more exceptions than most. I've known a lot of skinny people that couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.
Then there's me: I'm not sure what I weigh with any great precision, but I've surely got to be over 200 lbs at the least, and my vocabulary routinely frightens people. Apparently I use "too many big words". I get complaints to this effect at least a couple of times a day, from people of all ages. Granted, "too many" is relative (certainly, *I* don't think I use too many big words), as is the size of the words in question (again, *I* don't think the words I use are all that large), and I live in the middle of a three-county-wide educationally depressed area, but nonetheless, plenty of the people who whine that they can't understand me and implore me to avoid the use of so much vocabulary are clearly much skinnier than I am.
In summary, my anecdotal evidence calls into question the universality of the study's conclusion.
Any job, in any field, can cause marital problems that can lead to divorce, but the problem is independent of any particular profession. The problem comes from a difference of understanding between you, your spouse, and your boss about how much priority your job takes over other stuff. In some cases the differences between your spouse and your boss may be irreconcilable, in which case you have no choice but to pick sides. If you do what your boss wants in such an instance, your family life will suffer, make no mistake.
Does anyone else remember when if you wanted to be sure something would remain available for a few weeks, you just posted it to usenet?
> Is this accurate? Don't the glue records get published through ICANN, and couldn't
.org TLD to be delisted, ICANN would be the outfit to contact.
.com registry was run, last I recall, by Network Solutions. (That may have changed, because I haven't paid attention recently, but whether .com is still run by netsol is not really germaine to the discussion.) Assuming that that is still the case, then the root domain servers, over which ICANN has charge, will basically say that for .com you consult the nameserver over at Network Solutions, and for .uk you consult the nameserver of some UK outfit that runs that one, and so on.
.org in the case of Spamhaus), and that would be a much more weighty thing to do. However big a deal you think it would be to delist Spamhaus, take that up a couple of orders of magnitude and you start to get an idea how big a deal it would be for ICANN to delist a TLD.
> they remove them?
Unless I am mistaken, no.
ICANN is responsible for the *root* domain servers, i.e., the ones that tell you which (other) domain servers have authority for various *top-level* domains. So if the court wanted the
However, the individual domains _within_ each TLD are the responsibility of certain key registries who run the authoritative servers for those domains. For instance, the
To get a specific site's domain delisted, you'd have to go to the people who hold the domain the next level up, i.e., the people who run the nameserver that authoritatively lists the domain you're trying to get delisted. You can't go to ICANN and say, "please delist galion.lib.oh.us", for instance -- you'd have to go to whoever currently runs the nameserver with authority for the lib.oh.us domain (which was OARNET last I knew). If ICANN were to act, they'd be delisting the whole TLD (.us in the library's case, or
> IE7 = tabs + new UI
From a webmaster's perspective, the big win with IE7 is the alpha channel.
However, that's a pretty big deal given that approximately eight out of every ten webmasters have been dying to get it for the last six years or so. Improved CSS support would be nice, but the alpha channel is much *more* important.
I imagine that about a day and a half after IE7 is officially released, rather a lot of websites will start telling IE6 users to upgrade. As a web developer, I'll be *VERY* pleased if it's pushed out as a critical update.
Improved CSS support? That'd be real nice, but I'll take what I can get.
> > If it still breaks, well... then the browser is marginal and broken, who cares?
> None important, just the customer and the visitors.
Actually, in context, he was talking about browsers that aren't on the radar, presumably because they don't have a significant showing in the access logs. Hence, the browser is marginal. And he says he tests for W3C compliance, hence if the browser can't display the page it's "broken" in some way (although it's more likely to just be out of date, I suspect).
It's good to test on a variety of browsers and platforms, but fundamentally it's impossible to test on _every_ browser in existence. (Do *you* test on NetPositive, Arachne, Oregano, and QNX Voyager? These are important niche browsers, each very significant for its respective platform.) That's why testing for standards compliance is important: if your site adheres to standards, then it should display reasonably in any browser that supports the standards. (I say "should" because no browser's standards support is entirely complete, but you do what you can and hope for the best.)