Far from freeing the US market from SIM locking and carrier lock-in, Apple is trying to export the evil of the US cellular market to Europe.
By "evil" do you mean: "doesn't conform to what I want". But surely you must mean something else, because calling something "evil" just because "you don't like it" would be childish and petulant.
Introducing a business model that takes away existing freedoms (from a consumer perspective) is evil, in Google's self-defined sense. Whether I like it or not doesn't enter into the discussion. Don't Americans like freedoms?
I say this as a new iPhone owner (posting with it in fact) knowing full well not only what I was getting into, but also that things won't be improving in either Canada or the US anytime soon. I do hope the anti-consumer model doesn't get exported to the rest of the world.
IMHO, we haven't begun to see fucked yet, with the ignorance that MTV likes to portray as the Real World. Let's hope there are still some out there who still see the morality of the world today AND are bright enough to see that we have more than ONE political party out there.
And then they won't bother with elections because unlike American Idol, you only get one vote, and you can't cast it from a cell phone:-)
He was right, though - the iPod IS lame. It didn't really bring any exciting new features to the market - it just threw together existing technology in a cutesy package and marketed it as a fashion accessory. I've owned several different MP3 players (currently a Sansa e280 with Rockbox) but I've never had any reason to purchase an iPod.
Typical consumers with disposable cash (or at least high credit card limits) like cutesy and flashy. News at 11.
For what it's worth I *did* get a first-generation iPod, for reasons which included these "existing technologies" that, curiously, no other mp3 player was using:
- Firewire transfer. Few seem to remember that mp3 players at the time were limited to USB1.1 "Full" speed of 12 Mbps. Filling a 5 GB drive with that would take an hour, Firewire 400 could do it in less than 2 minutes.
- Scroll wheel. May have existed before in other electronics, but not in an mp3 player. Made navigating lengthy songlists easy.
- doubled as a portable FW hard drive. Perfect to keep encrypted backups with me at all times
The iPod was also the first portable player to use 1.8" hard drives, rather than the 2.5" in other HDD players, making it "half the size and weight of all other jukebox players on the market then" and "solved the weight/dimension/capacity problem that faced all previous players" according to this retrospective on digital audio players.
The tradeoff of having an integrated battery was that it got up to 10 hours playback on a single charge, too (which weren't exaggerated; when mine was new I timed it at about 9 hours and 40 minutes).
So was the first iPod lame in "exciting new features" as you say? Maybe. OTOH, geeks are supposed to be less shallow than surface features, and look at the engineering side of things, too.
Canadian App store users, try this: search for "redskins" As in the Washington Redskins NFL team.
In each of the resulting 7 or so apps, each of their descriptions has Redskins censored, i.e. "R*****ns."
(Non-Canadians can verify this by downloading either Pandora Box or AppMiner apps, which download app lists for each country separately, and setting them to use Canadian currency)
Native American sensibilities is one thing, but censoring the name of a recognized sports team is pretty damn ridiculous. This raises a question: what was the process for getting it censored, and who demanded it be censored?
If she can answer my questions well, she'll get a job. If she can't, she won't.
She can't, she ain't getting a job, and she is SUEING the university for it.
Really?
Reminds me of the tongue-in-cheek story about how, upon receiving a rejection letter from a company, the applicant sent them back a letter regretfully rejecting their rejection, and that he'd therefore be starting employment with them the following week.
Odd how that story doesn't seem so funny now, with lawyers and a litigious society making it close to reality. We're maybe one step away from from that -- "Today, sue school for not finding me a job. Tomorrow, sue company itself for rejecting me and hurting my self-esteem!"
Let's cut straight to the chase: I get the impression that Americans are rabid individualists. [...] They believe that an individual relying completely on themselves is responsible for their own well being. Socialized health care on the other hand understands that humanity has a dignity and if you are unjustly disadvantaged then you can still get treatment according to fairness with everyone else.
What I find ironic is that for all their rabid individualism, Americans are far more likely to be religious and (in theory) ultimately put their well being and faith not in themselves but in God. I attended a service recently and the minister even said relying only on yourself was a form of idolatry.
Our Canadian system isn't anywhere near ideal, but like our federal election system, I'll take ours over the US system any day of the week.
Honest question - my experience Apple UIs are that they are abysmal (Quicktime, Itunes), so I am curious to know if OS X is different - what objective examples can you give of the UI being better than all other operating systems?
I agree wholeheartedly that Apple UIs suck--on Windows. I'm a Mac guy going back over two decades, but Windows IT/tech is one of the hats I wear at work, and I was swearing up a storm at Apple when I tried using Quicktime Player and iTunes (and Safari) on Windows.
Why? Because it looked wrong. It didn't behave like a Windows app, and the font rendering also looked screwy (maybe Apple's approach to screen fonts isn't quite compatible with Windows ClearType).
For the most part, iTunes and Quicktime Player look and behave great on Macs.
I doubt there are many "objective" examples of one UI element being better, since even design philosophy is subjective. Best example I can think of: persistent menu bar, or one for each window? There are good arguments for both.
So, I won't bother listing things here...
As others have pointed out, a comparable Wintel machine is in the same price range.
How many Macs are in the common sub-£500 price range?
The argument is not that there's many comparable Macs in the sub-$1000 USD range (there are two lines, the Mini and Macbook), but that compared to most Macs, an equivalently-spec'ed PC is about the same price.
I don't care much for this argument though--while true (at least when comparing US prices), it presupposes people want all the extra options built in, or want to pay for features they'll never use. OTOH, this means Mac users are typically slightly ahead in new technologies that become mainstream--ethernet and USB were standard on all Macs a few years before being shipped with the majority of new PCs (and for f sake, why did the new HP and Lenovo PCs we got last year *still* ship with PS2 keyboards!? Get with the 21st century already!)
but re-install the OS every six months.
And when I used a Mac, I reinstalled the OS every six months, honest.
How long ago was that? I hope you're not talking about pre-OSX (~2001), that would be the equivalent of comparing against Windows 95/98/ME.
Using a Mac is not just a neutral experience. It is pleasurable.
Dude, it's a computer.
That's like saying to a Ferrari owner that it's just a car. Not that Macs are equivalent to Ferraris, but there is a similar effect that causes an emotional attachment in many people. I set up an iMac for a friend's mother a few years back, and she instantly bonded to it. Ten years ago this could be explained away as rooting for the underdog, but this doesn't explain the attachment felt by new users.
My honest advice would be to visit an Apple store (or local equivalent), and sit down for at least half an hour to try it out. Why half an hour, if it doesn't grab you right away? For the same reason you probably at least half an hour test-driving a new car: to give something familiar (but not quite the same) a fair shake.
Sometimes I wonder if it's worth the effort. Eliminating the interstate charges helps save everyone a couple pennies, but then the citizens turn-around and have to pay the EU ministers and bureaucrats ~$100,000 a year salaries for their labor during that negotiation.
Huh? You said it yourself: "~$100,000 a year salaries." Those bureaucrats aren't on a contract basis, they will be paid even if they do nothing but sit on their asses all day doing nothing.
There's circumvention, and then there's misrepresenting yourself to trick someone into thinking you're someone else.
Analogy time: telephone caller ID and names. Many telemarketers make sure to use caller ID blocking, so the receiver doesn't know who's calling. At best, they'll pick up anyway; at worst they'll ignore it.
There are some shadier organizations that will actually send a false ID and name though. Anyone with a PBX can change the name being sent, spoofing the number is probably only slightly more difficult. The goal of course is to trick the other end into accepting what they think is a legitimate call, and making them believe you're someone they trust is half the battle.
The internet has its own term for this: phishing.
Palm may be circumventing restrictions, but they're abusing the USB standard for Vendor ID to do so.
Palm should be slapped down hard for trying to corrupt a system based around some limited honour and trust. Do you really want future USB specs updated so the vendor ID has to be digitally signed?
And promptly discovered the problem. While they had a huge database of images to use, they realized that all their 'friendly' craft had pictures taken during the day, while in flight. All their 'hostile' craft however were pictures that had been taken at night during spy runs or from over head satalite shots.
[...] I heard the same one except with tanks.
Wait, they imaged tanks while they were in flight...?
No, we need to get rid of the notion of political parties entirely. Canada hasn't gotten as bad as the US yet, where there are effectively only two parties, but we're headed there.
What I'd like to see (but will never, ever happen:-( ) is a system with more focused representatives, e.g. in your example one that decriminalizes marijuana, another that promotes environment, another on IP issues... in addition to more "mainstream" interests, e.g. economy, international affairs, etc.
In an election, you'd get to vote for up to five candidates, according to what's most important to you. If I don't support the marijuana agenda, I don't vote for their candidate. Here's a twist: you can vote *against* an issue, but it costs you one of your votes.
The five "issues" candidates with the greatest votes would collectively form the representatives for your local riding. In this fashion, local interests are not only better represented, but they'd actually have time and resources to pursue their stated agendas.
When voting to pass bills, the collective votes for your riding count as a single vote (rather than each representative's vote weighted equally).
I could get into this more; I haven't addressed issues with an even more bloated government, or hypothetical checks and balances to limit damage by lobbyists and special interests, etc... but it's a nice day out, and since this will never happen it's all academic anyway. The idea, though, is to de-centralize power away from political parties, to ensure people's interests are better represented.
Slashdot's advantages over traditional media is not just because of the comments and mods, but also that mod points
1) are more than simple agree/disagree flags, they also indicate why the mod chose the mod they did 2) are lost if the moderator subsequently comments in the same story 3) aren't always available to a given reader, and are a limited resource
That last is key. In Canada, CBC's online news discussions are superior to CTV's site (where only select stories can be commented on, and all comments are weighted the same), but it's still just a giant popularity contest that uses agree/disagree flags. Trolls routinely hit disagree on a comment just to be asses, whereas if their "opinions" were limited in quantity and timeframe, their damage would be negligible.
Granted Slashdot has problems with collective moderator biases as well, but it's far and away a much better system of balancing the good and bad aspects of public participation.
Michigan weather does do nasty things to roads, but I've been in plenty of other states (and even Canada) with similar weather and the local governments have zero problem keeping roads properly maintained. For being the automotive capital of the world, Michigan has always been completely bass-ackwards when it comes to cars and roads. One of the main reasons I'm looking to move out soon.
I've only heard of the legendary poor condition of Michigan roads--from a friend who lived in part of Quebec where potholes are already horrendous.
I figured the massive potholes in Michigan are left there deliberately to a) wear down regular cars faster so residents have to buy new cars sooner than should be necessary, and/or b) drive up sales of expensive trucks and SUVs.
1) Apple culture heavily weighted towards having latest shiny object
2) AT&T contract requires 2 year ownership or pay $200 penalty
3) Apple maintains 1 year design cycle
4) Profit!!
And if you thought that was bad, Rogers in Canada forces a three year contract. And unlike the US, there aren't any other GSM carriers that Apple could threaten to switch to.
This classic Dilbert strip was fall-down funny when it came out in 1995, yet 14 years later you literally do shake a handheld computer to reset (undo) something.
Hold on, are you talking about consumer internet? Because that's what I assumed the GP was talking about, and I'm paying about $50+tax/month for 10 Mbps (1.2 MB/s) with 60 GB transfer.
You're right about cellphone and dataplan rates sucking ass though. Add to that a *3 year* contract, that was enough to make me pass on the latest and greatest smartphones.
Call BS all you want, I just visited bing.com for the very first time, typed "linux" into the search field, and verified for myself that GP is correct.
The suggestions I got, in order, were:
* linux * linux windows * linux microsoft * linux vista * linux commands * linux download * linux software * linux distros
It knows I'm coming from Canada, so if you're getting different results where you are, maybe geography plays a role?
Thats why you don't do it in that order. IE 6 then make it work on everything else.
Absolute, unadulterated nonsense. That attitude held back the web for the better part of a decade, as the lazy developers blamed the emerging standard browsers for being a pain to code/test for and just didn't bother coding/testing for them.
Now that IE market share is dropping fast (Net Applications claims 66%, a 10% drop in just one year), and they can no longer ignore the other browsers (or, they're just trying to code a nifty new feature like, oh I don't know, using translucent PNGs!), they're finally figuring out what the better developers have known for years: the blame lies mostly with Internet Explorer and Microsoft.
Doing it any other way, just leads to heartbreak and frustration.
At least here you're correct. But only because they never bothered making it work on anything else in the first place.
They'll be getting that heartbreak and frustration, with interest, once they try updating their code for standard browsers. Hell, I hope they had/have fun just updating for IE 7 and 8, since Microsoft forced those updates on many consumers.
On top of that even if it did work better than the alternatives you'd still have serious issues since it doesn't lower carbon emissions.
Perhaps I'm not understanding how carbon emissions are calculated, but doesn't "burning" corn as fuel essentially release no more carbon than what it took in as it grew? I thought the issue was more releasing carbon that's been trapped for millions of years, i.e. fossil fuels.
This is a good question, and you are probably right, but the security model in OSX is a lot more clear, so it would be easier to teach users, "If you have to type in your password, something bad might happen!"
And this is different from UAC excatly how? Every time my wife (who basically use only web browser) downloads some weird looking nice_smileys_for_MSN_mssngr_now_with_virus.msi from internet and tries to install it UAC prompts her for administrator password and saves the day. I haven't told her the password of course.
For one, OS X prompts you only if it needs admin rights to do something, rather than prompting every time Vista thinks the user is doing something dangerous within their permission space.
The supposed advantage to this aspect of UAC is that the user becomes more aware of potentially hazardous actions they themselves do. The downside is that they'll almost always ignore the warning text and click Continue.
OSX does have (non-admin) prompts for opening downloaded apps for the first time, but this still falls within the GP's claim that "the security model in OSX is a lot more clear."
in which [McMaster] likened the site "to a hotel or motel owner that knows prostitution is going on on their premises and fails to do anything about it especially after having been told."
Yet McMaster and (most) other politicians have been whoring themselves to corporate and special interest lobbyists since time immemorial. Not only do the "owners" of the house know this, everyone knows this, and there's actual public demand for this to stop.
I'd mod you up if I hadn't commented already. We use Flash in our online courses for exactly this reason.
Maybe this can be duplicated using SVG and Javascript, but if you thought HTML/CSS/Javascript compatibility between browsers was a pain to code and test for...
If your goal is to use no Javascript whatsoever on your page but still validate, Option #2 (quantity/buy are in the same column) is your best (only?) option. You probably have to set the nowrap attribute for that TD element, too.
To avoid the extra linebreak in IE (v7 anyway) without a DIV, give the form a style with margin:0 (can be defined in your CSS file, e.g. form {margin:0;} ).
Also, once I put the whole form inside a single TD element, <form><input type="hidden"... > validated just fine under HTML 4.01 Transitional. Under XHTML Transitional you have to make input tags self-closing, e.g. <input type="hidden".../>
The following validates fine at http://validator.w3.org/check (had to mash a few lines together for space):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/><title>title</title> <style type="text/css">td {border:1px solid silver;} form {margin:0;}</style> </head> <body><table><tr><td>blah</td><td>Valid HTML for Invalid Developers</td><td>A. Nonymous</td><td>This valuable tome will teach... etc</td> <td style="money">$36.52</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">
<form action="cart.php">
<input type="hidden" name="productid" value="133239"/>
<input name="quantity"/>
<input type="submit" name="buy" value="Buy Now!"/>
</form> </td></tr></table></body></html>
However, my preference would be a variation of your Option #3 which doesn't need Javascript. The form encloses the table, but without a "Buy now" button on each row. Instead, there'd be a single "Update cart" button somewhere, which negates the need for a hidden productID input for each row, too (it's combined with the quantity, e.g. <input name="quantity_133239"/> ).
Slashdot Mirror
Far from freeing the US market from SIM locking and carrier lock-in, Apple is trying to export the evil of the US cellular market to Europe.
By "evil" do you mean: "doesn't conform to what I want". But surely you must mean something else, because calling something "evil" just because "you don't like it" would be childish and petulant.
Introducing a business model that takes away existing freedoms (from a consumer perspective) is evil, in Google's self-defined sense. Whether I like it or not doesn't enter into the discussion. Don't Americans like freedoms?
I say this as a new iPhone owner (posting with it in fact) knowing full well not only what I was getting into, but also that things won't be improving in either Canada or the US anytime soon. I do hope the anti-consumer model doesn't get exported to the rest of the world.
IMHO, we haven't begun to see fucked yet, with the ignorance that MTV likes to portray as the Real World. Let's hope there are still some out there who still see the morality of the world today AND are bright enough to see that we have more than ONE political party out there.
And then they won't bother with elections because unlike American Idol, you only get one vote, and you can't cast it from a cell phone :-)
He was right, though - the iPod IS lame. It didn't really bring any exciting new features to the market - it just threw together existing technology in a cutesy package and marketed it as a fashion accessory. I've owned several different MP3 players (currently a Sansa e280 with Rockbox) but I've never had any reason to purchase an iPod.
Typical consumers with disposable cash (or at least high credit card limits) like cutesy and flashy. News at 11.
For what it's worth I *did* get a first-generation iPod, for reasons which included these "existing technologies" that, curiously, no other mp3 player was using:
- Firewire transfer. Few seem to remember that mp3 players at the time were limited to USB1.1 "Full" speed of 12 Mbps. Filling a 5 GB drive with that would take an hour, Firewire 400 could do it in less than 2 minutes.
- Scroll wheel. May have existed before in other electronics, but not in an mp3 player. Made navigating lengthy songlists easy.
- doubled as a portable FW hard drive. Perfect to keep encrypted backups with me at all times
The iPod was also the first portable player to use 1.8" hard drives, rather than the 2.5" in other HDD players, making it "half the size and weight of all other jukebox players on the market then" and "solved the weight/dimension/capacity problem that faced all previous players" according to this retrospective on digital audio players.
The tradeoff of having an integrated battery was that it got up to 10 hours playback on a single charge, too (which weren't exaggerated; when mine was new I timed it at about 9 hours and 40 minutes).
So was the first iPod lame in "exciting new features" as you say? Maybe. OTOH, geeks are supposed to be less shallow than surface features, and look at the engineering side of things, too.
Canadian App store users, try this: search for "redskins" As in the Washington Redskins NFL team.
In each of the resulting 7 or so apps, each of their descriptions has Redskins censored, i.e. "R*****ns."
(Non-Canadians can verify this by downloading either Pandora Box or AppMiner apps, which download app lists for each country separately, and setting them to use Canadian currency)
Native American sensibilities is one thing, but censoring the name of a recognized sports team is pretty damn ridiculous. This raises a question: what was the process for getting it censored, and who demanded it be censored?
If she can answer my questions well, she'll get a job. If she can't, she won't.
She can't, she ain't getting a job, and she is SUEING the university for it.
Really?
Reminds me of the tongue-in-cheek story about how, upon receiving a rejection letter from a company, the applicant sent them back a letter regretfully rejecting their rejection, and that he'd therefore be starting employment with them the following week.
Odd how that story doesn't seem so funny now, with lawyers and a litigious society making it close to reality. We're maybe one step away from from that -- "Today, sue school for not finding me a job. Tomorrow, sue company itself for rejecting me and hurting my self-esteem!"
Let's cut straight to the chase: I get the impression that Americans are rabid individualists. [...] They believe that an individual relying completely on themselves is responsible for their own well being. Socialized health care on the other hand understands that humanity has a dignity and if you are unjustly disadvantaged then you can still get treatment according to fairness with everyone else.
What I find ironic is that for all their rabid individualism, Americans are far more likely to be religious and (in theory) ultimately put their well being and faith not in themselves but in God. I attended a service recently and the minister even said relying only on yourself was a form of idolatry.
Our Canadian system isn't anywhere near ideal, but like our federal election system, I'll take ours over the US system any day of the week.
Honest question - my experience Apple UIs are that they are abysmal (Quicktime, Itunes), so I am curious to know if OS X is different - what objective examples can you give of the UI being better than all other operating systems?
I agree wholeheartedly that Apple UIs suck--on Windows. I'm a Mac guy going back over two decades, but Windows IT/tech is one of the hats I wear at work, and I was swearing up a storm at Apple when I tried using Quicktime Player and iTunes (and Safari) on Windows.
Why? Because it looked wrong. It didn't behave like a Windows app, and the font rendering also looked screwy (maybe Apple's approach to screen fonts isn't quite compatible with Windows ClearType).
For the most part, iTunes and Quicktime Player look and behave great on Macs.
I doubt there are many "objective" examples of one UI element being better, since even design philosophy is subjective. Best example I can think of: persistent menu bar, or one for each window? There are good arguments for both.
So, I won't bother listing things here...
As others have pointed out, a comparable Wintel machine is in the same price range.
How many Macs are in the common sub-£500 price range?
The argument is not that there's many comparable Macs in the sub-$1000 USD range (there are two lines, the Mini and Macbook), but that compared to most Macs, an equivalently-spec'ed PC is about the same price.
I don't care much for this argument though--while true (at least when comparing US prices), it presupposes people want all the extra options built in, or want to pay for features they'll never use. OTOH, this means Mac users are typically slightly ahead in new technologies that become mainstream--ethernet and USB were standard on all Macs a few years before being shipped with the majority of new PCs (and for f sake, why did the new HP and Lenovo PCs we got last year *still* ship with PS2 keyboards!? Get with the 21st century already!)
but re-install the OS every six months.
And when I used a Mac, I reinstalled the OS every six months, honest.
How long ago was that? I hope you're not talking about pre-OSX (~2001), that would be the equivalent of comparing against Windows 95/98/ME.
Using a Mac is not just a neutral experience. It is pleasurable.
Dude, it's a computer.
That's like saying to a Ferrari owner that it's just a car. Not that Macs are equivalent to Ferraris, but there is a similar effect that causes an emotional attachment in many people. I set up an iMac for a friend's mother a few years back, and she instantly bonded to it. Ten years ago this could be explained away as rooting for the underdog, but this doesn't explain the attachment felt by new users.
My honest advice would be to visit an Apple store (or local equivalent), and sit down for at least half an hour to try it out. Why half an hour, if it doesn't grab you right away? For the same reason you probably at least half an hour test-driving a new car: to give something familiar (but not quite the same) a fair shake.
Not to mention, if they're left-handed they may have changed the mouse settings so left- and right-clicks are reversed.
Sometimes I wonder if it's worth the effort. Eliminating the interstate charges helps save everyone a couple pennies, but then the citizens turn-around and have to pay the EU ministers and bureaucrats ~$100,000 a year salaries for their labor during that negotiation.
Huh? You said it yourself: "~$100,000 a year salaries." Those bureaucrats aren't on a contract basis, they will be paid even if they do nothing but sit on their asses all day doing nothing.
There's circumvention, and then there's misrepresenting yourself to trick someone into thinking you're someone else.
Analogy time: telephone caller ID and names. Many telemarketers make sure to use caller ID blocking, so the receiver doesn't know who's calling. At best, they'll pick up anyway; at worst they'll ignore it.
There are some shadier organizations that will actually send a false ID and name though. Anyone with a PBX can change the name being sent, spoofing the number is probably only slightly more difficult. The goal of course is to trick the other end into accepting what they think is a legitimate call, and making them believe you're someone they trust is half the battle.
The internet has its own term for this: phishing.
Palm may be circumventing restrictions, but they're abusing the USB standard for Vendor ID to do so.
Palm should be slapped down hard for trying to corrupt a system based around some limited honour and trust. Do you really want future USB specs updated so the vendor ID has to be digitally signed?
And promptly discovered the problem. While they had a huge database of images to use, they realized that all their 'friendly' craft had pictures taken during the day, while in flight. All their 'hostile' craft however were pictures that had been taken at night during spy runs or from over head satalite shots.
[...]
I heard the same one except with tanks.
Wait, they imaged tanks while they were in flight...?
No, we need to get rid of the notion of political parties entirely. Canada hasn't gotten as bad as the US yet, where there are effectively only two parties, but we're headed there.
What I'd like to see (but will never, ever happen :-( ) is a system with more focused representatives, e.g. in your example one that decriminalizes marijuana, another that promotes environment, another on IP issues... in addition to more "mainstream" interests, e.g. economy, international affairs, etc.
In an election, you'd get to vote for up to five candidates, according to what's most important to you. If I don't support the marijuana agenda, I don't vote for their candidate. Here's a twist: you can vote *against* an issue, but it costs you one of your votes.
The five "issues" candidates with the greatest votes would collectively form the representatives for your local riding. In this fashion, local interests are not only better represented, but they'd actually have time and resources to pursue their stated agendas.
When voting to pass bills, the collective votes for your riding count as a single vote (rather than each representative's vote weighted equally).
I could get into this more; I haven't addressed issues with an even more bloated government, or hypothetical checks and balances to limit damage by lobbyists and special interests, etc... but it's a nice day out, and since this will never happen it's all academic anyway. The idea, though, is to de-centralize power away from political parties, to ensure people's interests are better represented.
Slashdot's advantages over traditional media is not just because of the comments and mods, but also that mod points
1) are more than simple agree/disagree flags, they also indicate why the mod chose the mod they did
2) are lost if the moderator subsequently comments in the same story
3) aren't always available to a given reader, and are a limited resource
That last is key. In Canada, CBC's online news discussions are superior to CTV's site (where only select stories can be commented on, and all comments are weighted the same), but it's still just a giant popularity contest that uses agree/disagree flags. Trolls routinely hit disagree on a comment just to be asses, whereas if their "opinions" were limited in quantity and timeframe, their damage would be negligible.
Granted Slashdot has problems with collective moderator biases as well, but it's far and away a much better system of balancing the good and bad aspects of public participation.
Michigan weather does do nasty things to roads, but I've been in plenty of other states (and even Canada) with similar weather and the local governments have zero problem keeping roads properly maintained. For being the automotive capital of the world, Michigan has always been completely bass-ackwards when it comes to cars and roads. One of the main reasons I'm looking to move out soon.
I've only heard of the legendary poor condition of Michigan roads--from a friend who lived in part of Quebec where potholes are already horrendous.
I figured the massive potholes in Michigan are left there deliberately to a) wear down regular cars faster so residents have to buy new cars sooner than should be necessary, and/or b) drive up sales of expensive trucks and SUVs.
And yet Canadians travel overseas at a far greater rate.
I'd guess that's mostly because they have no place that's really warm.
You'd be wrong. Vancouver broke temperature records a couple of weeks ago, 30 Celsius and above. They don't usually hit that until July/August.
Ottawa and Montreal will often reach the mid-30s Celsius, almost 100 F, during the summer months. It's humid as all hell when that happens.
Okay, so we don't have anywhere that's always warm all year round, but even Florida gets chilly in January.
This is genius.
1) Apple culture heavily weighted towards having latest shiny object
2) AT&T contract requires 2 year ownership or pay $200 penalty
3) Apple maintains 1 year design cycle
4) Profit!!
And if you thought that was bad, Rogers in Canada forces a three year contract. And unlike the US, there aren't any other GSM carriers that Apple could threaten to switch to.
This classic Dilbert strip was fall-down funny when it came out in 1995, yet 14 years later you literally do shake a handheld computer to reset (undo) something.
Hold on, are you talking about consumer internet? Because that's what I assumed the GP was talking about, and I'm paying about $50+tax/month for 10 Mbps (1.2 MB/s) with 60 GB transfer.
You're right about cellphone and dataplan rates sucking ass though. Add to that a *3 year* contract, that was enough to make me pass on the latest and greatest smartphones.
Call BS all you want, I just visited bing.com for the very first time, typed "linux" into the search field, and verified for myself that GP is correct.
The suggestions I got, in order, were:
* linux
* linux windows
* linux microsoft
* linux vista
* linux commands
* linux download
* linux software
* linux distros
It knows I'm coming from Canada, so if you're getting different results where you are, maybe geography plays a role?
Thats why you don't do it in that order. IE 6 then make it work on everything else.
Absolute, unadulterated nonsense. That attitude held back the web for the better part of a decade, as the lazy developers blamed the emerging standard browsers for being a pain to code/test for and just didn't bother coding/testing for them.
Now that IE market share is dropping fast (Net Applications claims 66%, a 10% drop in just one year), and they can no longer ignore the other browsers (or, they're just trying to code a nifty new feature like, oh I don't know, using translucent PNGs!), they're finally figuring out what the better developers have known for years: the blame lies mostly with Internet Explorer and Microsoft.
Doing it any other way, just leads to heartbreak and frustration.
At least here you're correct. But only because they never bothered making it work on anything else in the first place.
They'll be getting that heartbreak and frustration, with interest, once they try updating their code for standard browsers. Hell, I hope they had/have fun just updating for IE 7 and 8, since Microsoft forced those updates on many consumers.
On top of that even if it did work better than the alternatives you'd still have serious issues since it doesn't lower carbon emissions.
Perhaps I'm not understanding how carbon emissions are calculated, but doesn't "burning" corn as fuel essentially release no more carbon than what it took in as it grew? I thought the issue was more releasing carbon that's been trapped for millions of years, i.e. fossil fuels.
And this is different from UAC excatly how? Every time my wife (who basically use only web browser) downloads some weird looking nice_smileys_for_MSN_mssngr_now_with_virus.msi from internet and tries to install it UAC prompts her for administrator password and saves the day. I haven't told her the password of course.
For one, OS X prompts you only if it needs admin rights to do something, rather than prompting every time Vista thinks the user is doing something dangerous within their permission space.
The supposed advantage to this aspect of UAC is that the user becomes more aware of potentially hazardous actions they themselves do. The downside is that they'll almost always ignore the warning text and click Continue.
OSX does have (non-admin) prompts for opening downloaded apps for the first time, but this still falls within the GP's claim that "the security model in OSX is a lot more clear."
in which [McMaster] likened the site "to a hotel or motel owner that knows prostitution is going on on their premises and fails to do anything about it especially after having been told."
Yet McMaster and (most) other politicians have been whoring themselves to corporate and special interest lobbyists since time immemorial. Not only do the "owners" of the house know this, everyone knows this, and there's actual public demand for this to stop.
When will McMaster do something about that?
I'd mod you up if I hadn't commented already. We use Flash in our online courses for exactly this reason.
Maybe this can be duplicated using SVG and Javascript, but if you thought HTML/CSS/Javascript compatibility between browsers was a pain to code and test for...
If your goal is to use no Javascript whatsoever on your page but still validate, Option #2 (quantity/buy are in the same column) is your best (only?) option. You probably have to set the nowrap attribute for that TD element, too.
... > validated just fine under HTML 4.01 Transitional. Under XHTML Transitional you have to make input tags self-closing, e.g. <input type="hidden" ... />
/><title>title</title> /> />
To avoid the extra linebreak in IE (v7 anyway) without a DIV, give the form a style with margin:0 (can be defined in your CSS file, e.g. form {margin:0;} ).
Also, once I put the whole form inside a single TD element, <form><input type="hidden"
The following validates fine at http://validator.w3.org/check (had to mash a few lines together for space):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"
<style type="text/css">td {border:1px solid silver;} form {margin:0;}</style>
</head>
<body><table><tr><td>blah</td><td>Valid HTML for Invalid Developers</td><td>A. Nonymous</td><td>This valuable tome will teach... etc</td>
<td style="money">$36.52</td>
<td nowrap="nowrap">
<form action="cart.php">
<input type="hidden" name="productid" value="133239"
<input name="quantity"
<input type="submit" name="buy" value="Buy Now!"/>
</form>
</td></tr></table></body></html>
However, my preference would be a variation of your Option #3 which doesn't need Javascript. The form encloses the table, but without a "Buy now" button on each row. Instead, there'd be a single "Update cart" button somewhere, which negates the need for a hidden productID input for each row, too (it's combined with the quantity, e.g. <input name="quantity_133239"/> ).