Since the pay cut is just a way to postpone payments until the budget is passed, the system system needs to issue back pay after the crisis. It's entirely plausible that issuing back pay is more complicated than implementing the pay cut.
It seems that California has a similar budget crisis every single year. Back in 1992 they issued IOUs.
I find it surprising that a building dating from 1800 would be designed in such a way that it would require artificial lighting. Surely, given the technology of the day, it would have been more convenient to install windows than to light candles and oil lamps whenever Congress was in session?
They also use the bible and their personal interpretation of it to justify their own wanton greed and the destruction of the innocent. George Bush, for example, claims to be a Christian. Hasn't he heard "thou shalt not kill?"
That depends on whether your interpretation (translation) of the commandment is "Thou shalt not kill" or "Thou shalt not murder". Capital punishment is not murder.
While I generally support the democrats I do think they're being fairly stupid or opportunistic about this windfall profit tax. Tax em, fine. That money should be 100% allocated to funding expansion of public transportation systems in the top 20 metro areas in the US. Not the damn general fund where it will just be sucked up by Bush's war machine.
Spending on public transportation is just going to be wasted on defending against imaginary threats.
If you have a laptop from the Give-1-Get-1 program, you can easily obtain a developer key from the OLPC website that lets you bypass the security restrictions. You can then install any operating system you want on the machine.
This format war was fought through movie studios, but interestingly most consumers don't really care what discs their movies come on. Whether on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the movies play essentially the same way. Hell, DVDs are good enough for movies -- the resolution is good enough, and the run-time of a DVD is longer than the length of time that you can sit still on your butt.
On the other hand, DVDs will soon become obsolete as a data storage medium. Remember when an entire OS came on a CD-ROM, and you could back up your hard drive onto a couple of DVD+-R? Now operating systems come on DVDs, and only sane backup medium for most consumers is another hard disk. For that, I'm glad that the higher-capacity Blu-Ray standard won, and hopefully Blu-Ray burners will be cheap enough by the time the need arises.
I wouldn't be surprised if Blu-Ray movies never replace DVDs, but Blu-Ray burners become standard on computers.
At one point, there was speculation that the DDOS was a grassroots effort rather than the work of an individual. "Flash mob" would be an appropriate term for that.
The problem: Historically, IE versions have had bugs that have cause rendering issues. This is further compounded by the fact that because of IE's wide adoption, companies have designed their internal applications around these bugs. When such companies are inevitably forced to upgrade, they are also forced to spend time and money to correct their applications that no longer work because IE has fixed the bugs that the company's application relied upon.
The companies with IE-specific internal applications aren't going to roll out IE 8 anyway. Hell, we know that they are still clinging to IE 6 because of compatibility concerns. Just fix IE 8 the way it should be fixed, and given enough time, those companies will realize that the world has moved on without them. Microsoft's only responsibility is to ensure that:
Users who don't want to upgrade to IE 8 don't have to
Dual-mode (W3C and IE) websites can continue to use existing IE-detection mechanisms (conditional comments, User-Agent sniffing, JavaScript sniffing)
Personally think its great because I will spend 2 minutes of development time in order to support IE8.
It's not just 2 minutes of development time. It's development time for developers everywhere to serve a stupid flag forevermore in the future (or until Microsoft drops the legacy mode support from IE xand the number of users still clinging to IE x-1 has dwindled to a negligible number) (which is practically forever).
Microsoft claims that the X-UA-Compatible flag is necessary on standards-compatible content to avoid breaking IE-specific content. I call BS.
For years, Microsoft has been telling everyone to put version-specific IE hacks in conditional comments, in case IE's behavior improves in future versions. Now that they are finally fixing IE, they spring this X-UA-Compatible "solution" on us, punishing those who have been producing standards-compliant content and rewarding the zombies who have been writing IE-specific code. If your site is standards-compliant, you have to do the extra work to tag it as such, and keep that crufty tag around for the foreseeable future!
If you sat down today and wrote a new standards-compliant browser, it would work just fine with almost all the content and web applications out there. Apple did this recently with Safari. Microsoft claims to have done this with IE 8. Safari didn't need any X-UA-Compatible flag. Why should IE 8 need one?
The only reason IE 8 would need the X-UA-Compatible flag is simply because it is IE 8. If their new browser identified itself as, say, "Microsoft Trident VI" instead, things would just work. Microsoft could still call it "Internet Explorer 8" for marketing purposes, but web developers would know that "MS Trident VI" means IE 8, just as "WebKit 4xx" means Safari 2 (or similar browsers) and Gecko means Firefox (or similar browsers).
Dear Microsoft, here's a sane solution for you:
Ditch the X-UA-Compatible flag; it's a stupid idea.
Continue supporting HTML conditional comments as you have been doing.
Fix the layout engine and the CSS parser at the same time, so that any existing IE-specific CSS hacks become irrelevant.
Add support for CSS conditional comments, to give web designers an escape route. Let's face it, CSS hacks are a reality, so we might as well have a tool to do it cleanly.
Send this as the User-Agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Microsoft Trident VI; Windows NT x.y;...; Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0;...). Any server-side code doing browser sniffing, not seeing the "MSIE" string, should send a standards-compliant response. User-Agent strings have never really been logical anyway -- IE started this mess years ago by sending the "Mozilla" string, and Opera continued the trend by optionally sending the "MSIE" string -- so additional games in this area wouldn't do any more harm to the Web.
In JScript, navigator.appName should return 'Microsoft Trident', and navigator.userAgent should return the string above. Client-side scripts doing explicit browser sniffing, not seeing the "MSIE" string, would suppress their legacy IE hacks.
In JScript, document.all should evaluate to false (although expressions involving document.all can still behave as in older versions of IE). This approach worked for Mozilla, and it will work for Microsoft too.
As you see, it is possible to fix IE in a backward compatible way without introducing a X-UA-Compatible flag. The chances of Microsoft taking these steps is almost nil, since it places IE 8 on an even playing field with other standards-compliant browsers. That's why they are proposing X-UA-Compatible -- they can claim to support web standards while knowing that web developers will find it easier to muddle along than to use their stupid flag.
There are actually two versions of Mac OS X. The full release, called Mac OS X Server, is $499. Granted, the feature set of plain Mac OS X is already similar to that of Vista Ultimate.
There should be no "momentum" in an election. The fact that there is illustrates that a significant number of voters "follow the leader". This is not to say that people are _completely_ sheepish, but rather when faced with a decision, a significant part of that decision is what other people are doing.
There is a component of strategy to "following the leader". A rational voter would take into consideration the latest information before voting. If you were playing rock-paper-scissors, and were offered the opportunity to go second, you would be stupid to stick to your first choice. Voting is no different. One could logically switch to a second-choice candidate with "momentum" instead of voting for what appears to be a doomed first-choice candidate. Making such a compromise would let you have some influence over the outcome, instead of throwing away your vote. It's not ideal, but that's how the game works.
Even more impressive is the Campanile movie, where an entire 3D model of the UC Berkeley campus and a fly-by shot was generated from just 15 still pictures. This was done a whole decade ago, for SIGGRAPH 97.
A few months ago, my dad needed to replace an ancient PC at home, and asked me for a recommendation. I recommended that he get a Mac, telling him that Macs today are drastically different from Macs of the '90s, and that he should go to an Apple Store to play around with one. He called me from the Apple Store, and I walked him through a few things he would need for his work, such as how to run SSH from the Terminal. He was convinced that getting a Mac would be a good idea.
A few minutes later, he called me again, asking if there was any particular reason he should buy the Mac from the Apple Store. I told him that prices for Macs were more or less the same everywhere, so he could buy one from wherever he wanted. He explained that the Apple Store had a restocking charge for returns, so he would get his Mac from Fry's instead.
The next day, he went to Fry's, and while he was there he somehow changed his mind and got a Media Center PC with Vista instead.
I would call this a victory, considering that all of the DMCA-like provisions that had been proposed have been stripped out in the end.
Here's the originally proposed diff, in French and German, against the existing Swiss Copyright Law of 1992.
Some of the notable changes would have been:
Reverse engineering is allowed only for creating interoperable software (Article 21)
Outlawing circumvention of copy protection (Article 70a), even for the purpose of sharing the content with friends/family (Article 19, Paragraph 4)
Legitimately acquired software can be translated, bugfixed, or adapted (Article 13a)
Extending length of software copyright from 50 years after the last author's death to 70 years (Article 29)
Compare that with the enacted diff, in French and German. None of the provisions above remains. Some of the notable features of the new law are:
Provision for using orphaned works (Article 22b)
Explicit allowance for transitory copies (Article 24a)
Allowance for making works accessible to disabled persons (Article 24c)
From my cursory reading of the law, I would say that it's all upside and no downside for content consumers.
If you realize that you have accidentally dialed 911, the correct thing to do is to stay on the line and tell the operator that you dialed it by mistake. Then nothing happens.
It happened to me once, in an office where I had to dial 9 to get an outside line. Trying to call long-distance to L.A. (9-1-310-xxx-xxxx), my finger slipped and missed the 3.
It's not the same as in Texas. In British Columbia, you pay for vehicle registration and liability insurance at the same time, to the same entity (the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, a quasi-government company similar in status to the post office). ICBC also runs the driver licensing offices. If you want your registration to last for a year, then you pay for a year of insurance up front. The system is set up so that there is no enforcement problem. The downside is that ICBC has a monopoly on third-party liability insurance for automobiles.
Google seriously dropped the ball and showed huge negligence and ignorance when entering local market unprepared - for example, their engine did not even search for different wordforms and Russian of course has an ultra-developed word endings system. So - at first - Google was 99% useless.
Surprising, considering that Sergey Brin is Russian.
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Since the pay cut is just a way to postpone payments until the budget is passed, the system system needs to issue back pay after the crisis. It's entirely plausible that issuing back pay is more complicated than implementing the pay cut.
It seems that California has a similar budget crisis every single year. Back in 1992 they issued IOUs.
I find it surprising that a building dating from 1800 would be designed in such a way that it would require artificial lighting. Surely, given the technology of the day, it would have been more convenient to install windows than to light candles and oil lamps whenever Congress was in session?
They're still busy developing a patch for the ARDAgent root exploit.
They also use the bible and their personal interpretation of it to justify their own wanton greed and the destruction of the innocent. George Bush, for example, claims to be a Christian. Hasn't he heard "thou shalt not kill?"
That depends on whether your interpretation (translation) of the commandment is "Thou shalt not kill" or "Thou shalt not murder". Capital punishment is not murder.
Spending on public transportation is just going to be wasted on defending against imaginary threats.
If you have a laptop from the Give-1-Get-1 program, you can easily obtain a developer key from the OLPC website that lets you bypass the security restrictions. You can then install any operating system you want on the machine.
Actually, all tea needs to be baked or roasted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea#Processing_and_classification
Oscar the Cat kills you just by lying next to you!
PHP and Windows? They each suck enough on their own.
This format war was fought through movie studios, but interestingly most consumers don't really care what discs their movies come on. Whether on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the movies play essentially the same way. Hell, DVDs are good enough for movies -- the resolution is good enough, and the run-time of a DVD is longer than the length of time that you can sit still on your butt.
On the other hand, DVDs will soon become obsolete as a data storage medium. Remember when an entire OS came on a CD-ROM, and you could back up your hard drive onto a couple of DVD+-R? Now operating systems come on DVDs, and only sane backup medium for most consumers is another hard disk. For that, I'm glad that the higher-capacity Blu-Ray standard won, and hopefully Blu-Ray burners will be cheap enough by the time the need arises.
I wouldn't be surprised if Blu-Ray movies never replace DVDs, but Blu-Ray burners become standard on computers.
That's nothing compared to the time he desoldered the BIOS chip from his Thinkpad.
"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
-- Gen. George Patton
At one point, there was speculation that the DDOS was a grassroots effort rather than the work of an individual. "Flash mob" would be an appropriate term for that.
The companies with IE-specific internal applications aren't going to roll out IE 8 anyway. Hell, we know that they are still clinging to IE 6 because of compatibility concerns. Just fix IE 8 the way it should be fixed, and given enough time, those companies will realize that the world has moved on without them. Microsoft's only responsibility is to ensure that:
- Users who don't want to upgrade to IE 8 don't have to
- Dual-mode (W3C and IE) websites can continue to use existing IE-detection mechanisms (conditional comments, User-Agent sniffing, JavaScript sniffing)
Personally think its great because I will spend 2 minutes of development time in order to support IE8.It's not just 2 minutes of development time. It's development time for developers everywhere to serve a stupid flag forevermore in the future (or until Microsoft drops the legacy mode support from IE x and the number of users still clinging to IE x-1 has dwindled to a negligible number) (which is practically forever).
Microsoft claims that the X-UA-Compatible flag is necessary on standards-compatible content to avoid breaking IE-specific content. I call BS.
For years, Microsoft has been telling everyone to put version-specific IE hacks in conditional comments, in case IE's behavior improves in future versions. Now that they are finally fixing IE, they spring this X-UA-Compatible "solution" on us, punishing those who have been producing standards-compliant content and rewarding the zombies who have been writing IE-specific code. If your site is standards-compliant, you have to do the extra work to tag it as such, and keep that crufty tag around for the foreseeable future!
If you sat down today and wrote a new standards-compliant browser, it would work just fine with almost all the content and web applications out there. Apple did this recently with Safari. Microsoft claims to have done this with IE 8. Safari didn't need any X-UA-Compatible flag. Why should IE 8 need one?
The only reason IE 8 would need the X-UA-Compatible flag is simply because it is IE 8. If their new browser identified itself as, say, "Microsoft Trident VI" instead, things would just work. Microsoft could still call it "Internet Explorer 8" for marketing purposes, but web developers would know that "MS Trident VI" means IE 8, just as "WebKit 4xx" means Safari 2 (or similar browsers) and Gecko means Firefox (or similar browsers).
Dear Microsoft, here's a sane solution for you:
As you see, it is possible to fix IE in a backward compatible way without introducing a X-UA-Compatible flag. The chances of Microsoft taking these steps is almost nil, since it places IE 8 on an even playing field with other standards-compliant browsers. That's why they are proposing X-UA-Compatible -- they can claim to support web standards while knowing that web developers will find it easier to muddle along than to use their stupid flag.
There are actually two versions of Mac OS X. The full release, called Mac OS X Server, is $499. Granted, the feature set of plain Mac OS X is already similar to that of Vista Ultimate.
There is a component of strategy to "following the leader". A rational voter would take into consideration the latest information before voting. If you were playing rock-paper-scissors, and were offered the opportunity to go second, you would be stupid to stick to your first choice. Voting is no different. One could logically switch to a second-choice candidate with "momentum" instead of voting for what appears to be a doomed first-choice candidate. Making such a compromise would let you have some influence over the outcome, instead of throwing away your vote. It's not ideal, but that's how the game works.
Even more impressive is the Campanile movie, where an entire 3D model of the UC Berkeley campus and a fly-by shot was generated from just 15 still pictures. This was done a whole decade ago, for SIGGRAPH 97.
A few months ago, my dad needed to replace an ancient PC at home, and asked me for a recommendation. I recommended that he get a Mac, telling him that Macs today are drastically different from Macs of the '90s, and that he should go to an Apple Store to play around with one. He called me from the Apple Store, and I walked him through a few things he would need for his work, such as how to run SSH from the Terminal. He was convinced that getting a Mac would be a good idea.
A few minutes later, he called me again, asking if there was any particular reason he should buy the Mac from the Apple Store. I told him that prices for Macs were more or less the same everywhere, so he could buy one from wherever he wanted. He explained that the Apple Store had a restocking charge for returns, so he would get his Mac from Fry's instead.
The next day, he went to Fry's, and while he was there he somehow changed his mind and got a Media Center PC with Vista instead.
Plugging ports and shaping traffic is the worst thing they could possibly do. Instead of having normal conversations, everybody will be shouting...
I would call this a victory, considering that all of the DMCA-like provisions that had been proposed have been stripped out in the end.
Here's the originally proposed diff, in French and German, against the existing Swiss Copyright Law of 1992. Some of the notable changes would have been:
Compare that with the enacted diff, in French and German. None of the provisions above remains. Some of the notable features of the new law are:
From my cursory reading of the law, I would say that it's all upside and no downside for content consumers.
If you realize that you have accidentally dialed 911, the correct thing to do is to stay on the line and tell the operator that you dialed it by mistake. Then nothing happens.
It happened to me once, in an office where I had to dial 9 to get an outside line. Trying to call long-distance to L.A. (9-1-310-xxx-xxxx), my finger slipped and missed the 3.
Now how are you going to get rescued when your car dies in the middle of nowhere?
It's not the same as in Texas. In British Columbia, you pay for vehicle registration and liability insurance at the same time, to the same entity (the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, a quasi-government company similar in status to the post office). ICBC also runs the driver licensing offices. If you want your registration to last for a year, then you pay for a year of insurance up front. The system is set up so that there is no enforcement problem. The downside is that ICBC has a monopoly on third-party liability insurance for automobiles.
Surprising, considering that Sergey Brin is Russian.