Benchmarks are usually pretty unreliable and fudgeable anyway, but I think these TCO studies are the pits. I certainly don't believe them...
Ahh, but you've missed the point slightly: PHBs love statistics to "prove" things.
Most geeks already know the score, but TCO benchmarks aren't aimed at us, they're aimed at the PHBs. We can bang on about "freedom" as much as we like, but until someone has "proved" it will cost less, the PHBs won't give a damn!
I have, from personal experience, found out that IE is the most CSS compliant of all browsers available.
Sheesh... I'm wondering if you've ever even made your first website, let alone done any CSS? Let me tell you - I do freelance web development pretty much up to the cutting edge of what is possible, and you sir, are absolutely talking out of your ass.
Not only does IE not implement the following parts of CSS:
position: fixed
min-width
max-width
child selectors
adjacent selectors
attribute selectors
generated content
:hover on things other than anchors
... and probably a few more that I've forgotten, it has the following thrown in for good measure as well...
no support for PNG alpha transparency
"the peekaboo bug"
"the three-pixel text jog bug"
countless other layout bugs that have average web developers tearing their hair out for weeks
If we didn't have to mess around getting around Internet Exploder's bugs and unsupported features, website front-end development time would be slashed to something like 50% of what we currently have to spend on it. Not to mention that we'd be able to use a whole bunch of advanced CSS stuff that IE can't even begin to dream about handling.
IE's CSS support is so bad, I'm surprised Microsoft can even claim it's a standard's compliant browser, because IT F#CKING ISN'T!!!
If it does get to the point where some or all online ads are shown to be ineffective, the advertisers will have to think of a better way of getting their message across.
Popups didn't work and with the advent of popup blockers, advertisers have been forced to find a less annoying method of advertising. Now people are blocking Flash ads, Javascript ads, any kind of ad that comes across as too intrusive, the advertisers will be forced to think again about what kind of advertising is considered acceptable to the average web surfer.
Almost the only adverts I don't object to are Google's text-only adverts, because they are unintrusive and just let you get on with browsing. You can scan over them quickly without getting a headache from the 2-frame epileptic-fit causing animated insanity of CasinoOnNet et al.
If sites can't support themselves without the ad revenue, then I say "big deal, get over it". Perhaps we'll return to the state where sites will actually have to provide something of quality for their visitors and support themselves by other means.
I'm a musician with a site set up to promote my MP3s and have been paying for it myself for years. People need to stop expecting to run a website for free, and realise that if you're serious about your online presence, you need to pay for it yourself. Either that, or make it saleable enough that people will want to pay for it - perhaps by subscription, or perhaps by running it as a company with shareholders, depending on the size of the operation.
If you can't do it, someone else will, so ultimately as web surfers, we aren't going to lose out - we're going to end up with better competition online that forces sites to try and be better than each other in terms of value, user experience and possibly a sprinkling of low-key advertising. Either that, or we simply find a better site to go to.
Whatever, the outcome can only be positive, because the less ads there are online, the less crappy ad-supported sites there will be.
I'm more than happy to pay for my own online exposure, as should any serious website owner. If a site gets so big that I can no longer afford to pay for it's bandwidth consumption myself, then I'll be in a position to generate money from it by alternative means.
The only problem here is that some marketroids will be required to rethink their flawed business model - boo f#cking hoo for them!
... because that involves actually creating a law that has real balls, and enforcing it.
The chickenshit laws they are coining at the moment have no effect on spammers whatsoever, yet still enable politicians to be seen to be doing something about the problem.
Politics in this day and age is nothing to do with what you're actually doing, just what you are seen to be doing. The current anti-spam laws are nothing more than populist spin campaigns to win votes from the uninformed masses.
Cellphone courtesy is easy, as is courtesy in general, but you miss the point. The point is that sadly, a lot of people are total assholes in all aspects of their lives, so why would they make any exceptions for their cellphone?
Yeah, I guess I'm an isolationist too. Nothing wrong with doing business and being friendly with other countries, but telling them how to run their own affairs is most definitely bullshit and always seems to end in tears.
The trouble with trying to beat the shit out of terrorists is that they're hard to find and very dispersed throughout the general population of a country, whereas their targets (us) are not only easy to find, but far less specific. As in, if they carry out an attack, it doesn't matter quite where it is or who it's on - it's the attack that is the aim.
If we're trying to stamp out the terrorists, we have to target specific individuals without accidentally killing other people in the process. Much harder work for us.
What, you mean back during the Crusades while we were pillaging their countries in the name of "delivering the holy places from Mohammedan tyranny"? (OK, I guess that's only 900 years or so...)
Now it's the government, back then it was the church - the bullshit was still the same.
It's quite frightning to those of us who don't have our heads up our asses how people like you can so completely ignore the problem, so let me spell it out for you: the problem is that they want us to stop fucking around with their countries and telling them how to live their lives. Doesn't seem like too much to ask, does it - or do you have a better suggestion?
The concern I raised in my original post was purely for the quality of life for the child, as in "perhaps they've saved her for now, but if this only serves to prolong her suffering, was it the right thing to do, for her?"
But what of the hundreds of thousands of people dying worldwide because of starvation? No medical science needed, just some food and water so that they don't starve to death. How many of them could potentially be brilliant scientists, leaders, who knows...? They're dead, just because they had no food.
Do you think it's right that medical science can save those who can afford it, but those who are otherwise healthy, but just happen to live in poverty deserve to die?
Good luck to this girl - I really hope she makes it and has a great life ahead of her. Just don't forget that while we're spending millions saving the life of one baby, thousands of people are dying for the cost of just some bread and water.
No. It isn't. If we as a society can not protect and do what is right for the weakest amongst us, then are we truely a civilized society?
It's all very well to come out with quotes like that, but the fact is that if this child had been born in a less affluent part of the world, she would have died, no question about it.
Worldwide we should be doing a lot more to help people less fortunate than ourselves. The money spent on saving the life of one baby who may just die in a few years anyway could have been used to help a much greater number of people.
I'm not saying that the two are mutually exclusive (they aren't) but eight other babies could have been saved with the same number of organs, or with the same amount of money a starving village could have been fed for a month.
Is it fair that if you're born with a whole load of problems but your parents have the money, we can fix you up, whereas if you're born with nothing wrong with you but your parents can't even afford to feed you, you should die?
We should protect and do what is right for the weakest among us, but defying the laws of evolution is pretty far outside of that.
I know this will sound harsh, but if your child is born with so many problems that they would die without eight organ replacements, one has to wonder what their long-term chances of survival realistically are.
I know we can work wonders with organ transplants these days, but how much is too much? What are this child's chances of having a reasonable quality of life after being born with so many potentially fatal problems?
It's sad to see your loved ones die, but I can't help wondering if the parents did the right thing under these circumstances.
No doubt my feelings on this would be much stronger if it was my own child in question, but it would seem we as a species very often let our emotions get in the way of rational thought, and I'm just not sure these parents made the right decision for their child.
This is most definitely a difficult issue - I could well be wrong, but I'm throwing my initial thoughts into the pot to see what others think.
Your right to hack off your daughter's clit ended in downtown Manhattan.
Your right to impose your values on someone else's culture ends at your country's border, whether you like it or not. I can't say I agree with the fundamentalist Islamist way of life, but I respect their right to live that way if that's what they want. We don't need to make enemies of them by giving them more reasons to hate us.
Then you go on to quote some rather irrelevant lines from a film, ending in:
Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.
Remind me what is already going on with the US - people are dying because of this ridiculous war, and your freedoms are being taken away on an almost daily basis. Your ignorant attitude and blatant denial of the problem is the cause of this, so you can expect more death and less freedom until you stop being fooled and do something about it.
The only thing I've confused your preference for is the preference for believing whatever propaganda you are spoon fed, instead of the preference for actually thinking about things for yourself.
If "the terrorists" hate non-Islamic people already, then why give them yet more ammunition for their cause? Why legitimise their reasons to hate us?
Attempting to kill them by starting wars in their part of the world only increases their credibility and furthers the objective of "the terrorists", because we become (in the eyes of many Muslims) the things they have already said we are. (Evil murdering imperialists, who want to destroy their way of life.)
The only path is to show them that we aren't evil imperialists bent on destroying their world, and the way to do that is NOT to exchange blows for blows. If we do what the terrorists have told their people we will do (invade their countries and kill their people), then we just play into their hands.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, and this policy of trying to crush "terrorists" is an insane and fucking dangerous one.
At the end of the day, Islamic nations just want the same thing as everyone else in the world does - to be able to live their lives as they wish, without having someone else's ideals imposed on them.
"Terrorists" only hate non-Islamic people because "we" (as in, our governments) have given them cause to. It is our duty to dissent against the way our governments are behaving, because it is they who are directly responsible for causing this terrorism by their sheer ignorance and blatant interference in the way other people live their lives. Until that changes, there will never be an end to the "terrorists".
I'm not anti-American. I'm anti the actions of the American government under the banner of "the war against terror", because it is utter bullshit.
The only correct reaction to terrorism is no reaction at all. Give them an inch, and they'll take a mile. By reacting to terrorist attacks in such a knee-jerk frenzy of panic, we have already lost the war against terror, because it has taken the grip on society that the terrorists wanted it to take.
Bin Laden and co are insane maniacs who must be stopped, but you can't wipe out terrorists by killing them - it simply doesn't work like that. You have to address the reason they are terrorists in the first place, whether it's an insane reason or not, otherwise the terrorists will never go away.
Large-scale sponsorship of their enemies (eg. Israel) is hardly a good idea.
"Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty." - Benjamin Franklin
My personal opinion on the matter is that you can't fight a war against terrorism without looking at what the root causes of that terrorism are. The fact is, that at the moment the west is seemingly willing to just overlook what the causes of terrorism are, and are trying to just blow the terrorists to smithereens.
When will people learn that labelling people "terrorists" and killing them just creates new "terrorists" at an exponential rate? As far as these "terrorists" are concerned, America and the UK are "terrorists" too.
Clever tracking software or not, "terrorists" are not going to go away until we start looking at why they are "terrorists" in the first place.
Just because a government chooses to carry out military activities, doesn't make them any less terroristic or any more legitimate.
Perhaps those doubting the terrorism carried out by the US and allies in Iraq should check this page for help in visualising the numbers.
If this constitutes a "slick" website, then I'm Jeffry Zeldman!
No doctype, all upper case tags, badly aliased transparent gifs, font tags, a fucking hit counter, flashing animated gif menu bullets... not to mention that it looks like shit anyway!
Slashdot Mirror
Benchmarks are usually pretty unreliable and fudgeable anyway, but I think these TCO studies are the pits. I certainly don't believe them...
Ahh, but you've missed the point slightly: PHBs love statistics to "prove" things.
Most geeks already know the score, but TCO benchmarks aren't aimed at us, they're aimed at the PHBs. We can bang on about "freedom" as much as we like, but until someone has "proved" it will cost less, the PHBs won't give a damn!
I have, from personal experience, found out that IE is the most CSS compliant of all browsers available.
Sheesh... I'm wondering if you've ever even made your first website, let alone done any CSS? Let me tell you - I do freelance web development pretty much up to the cutting edge of what is possible, and you sir, are absolutely talking out of your ass.
Not only does IE not implement the following parts of CSS:
... and probably a few more that I've forgotten, it has the following thrown in for good measure as well...
If we didn't have to mess around getting around Internet Exploder's bugs and unsupported features, website front-end development time would be slashed to something like 50% of what we currently have to spend on it. Not to mention that we'd be able to use a whole bunch of advanced CSS stuff that IE can't even begin to dream about handling.
IE's CSS support is so bad, I'm surprised Microsoft can even claim it's a standard's compliant browser, because IT F#CKING ISN'T!!!
They already started doing this on AListApart a while back.
Can't happen a moment too soon!
... the number of The GIMP? :-S
If it does get to the point where some or all online ads are shown to be ineffective, the advertisers will have to think of a better way of getting their message across.
Popups didn't work and with the advent of popup blockers, advertisers have been forced to find a less annoying method of advertising. Now people are blocking Flash ads, Javascript ads, any kind of ad that comes across as too intrusive, the advertisers will be forced to think again about what kind of advertising is considered acceptable to the average web surfer.
Almost the only adverts I don't object to are Google's text-only adverts, because they are unintrusive and just let you get on with browsing. You can scan over them quickly without getting a headache from the 2-frame epileptic-fit causing animated insanity of CasinoOnNet et al.
If sites can't support themselves without the ad revenue, then I say "big deal, get over it". Perhaps we'll return to the state where sites will actually have to provide something of quality for their visitors and support themselves by other means.
I'm a musician with a site set up to promote my MP3s and have been paying for it myself for years. People need to stop expecting to run a website for free, and realise that if you're serious about your online presence, you need to pay for it yourself. Either that, or make it saleable enough that people will want to pay for it - perhaps by subscription, or perhaps by running it as a company with shareholders, depending on the size of the operation.
If you can't do it, someone else will, so ultimately as web surfers, we aren't going to lose out - we're going to end up with better competition online that forces sites to try and be better than each other in terms of value, user experience and possibly a sprinkling of low-key advertising. Either that, or we simply find a better site to go to.
Whatever, the outcome can only be positive, because the less ads there are online, the less crappy ad-supported sites there will be.
I'm more than happy to pay for my own online exposure, as should any serious website owner. If a site gets so big that I can no longer afford to pay for it's bandwidth consumption myself, then I'll be in a position to generate money from it by alternative means.
The only problem here is that some marketroids will be required to rethink their flawed business model - boo f#cking hoo for them!
... because that involves actually creating a law that has real balls, and enforcing it.
The chickenshit laws they are coining at the moment have no effect on spammers whatsoever, yet still enable politicians to be seen to be doing something about the problem.
Politics in this day and age is nothing to do with what you're actually doing, just what you are seen to be doing. The current anti-spam laws are nothing more than populist spin campaigns to win votes from the uninformed masses.
Where are those mod points when I need them?
Cellphone courtesy is easy, as is courtesy in general, but you miss the point. The point is that sadly, a lot of people are total assholes in all aspects of their lives, so why would they make any exceptions for their cellphone?
Easy! Get a good browser and dump that piece of junk Internet Exploder!
...and their management team needs to face criminal charges and do the jail time if found guilty.
Surely everyone is forgetting the most important thing: just relaxing and being yourself.
Yeah, I guess I'm an isolationist too. Nothing wrong with doing business and being friendly with other countries, but telling them how to run their own affairs is most definitely bullshit and always seems to end in tears.
The trouble with trying to beat the shit out of terrorists is that they're hard to find and very dispersed throughout the general population of a country, whereas their targets (us) are not only easy to find, but far less specific. As in, if they carry out an attack, it doesn't matter quite where it is or who it's on - it's the attack that is the aim.
If we're trying to stamp out the terrorists, we have to target specific individuals without accidentally killing other people in the process. Much harder work for us.
Gah... religion!
Pah! This has nothing to do with Bush! It's those damn terrists with their nucular weapons asterites of mass destructionism!
What, you mean back during the Crusades while we were pillaging their countries in the name of "delivering the holy places from Mohammedan tyranny"? (OK, I guess that's only 900 years or so...)
Now it's the government, back then it was the church - the bullshit was still the same.
It's quite frightning to those of us who don't have our heads up our asses how people like you can so completely ignore the problem, so let me spell it out for you: the problem is that they want us to stop fucking around with their countries and telling them how to live their lives. Doesn't seem like too much to ask, does it - or do you have a better suggestion?
WHAT!!!??? Do you seriously expect us to believe that politicians are just the tainted pawns of large wealthy corporations?
AFAIK both the UK and France have nuclear weapons.
Surely you mean nucular weapons?
Perhaps if you'd actually read my original posting, you'd notice that not once do I mention money or people being a burden on society.
If you're going to counter an argument, at least counter the argument that was made!
The concern I raised in my original post was purely for the quality of life for the child, as in "perhaps they've saved her for now, but if this only serves to prolong her suffering, was it the right thing to do, for her?"
But what of the hundreds of thousands of people dying worldwide because of starvation? No medical science needed, just some food and water so that they don't starve to death. How many of them could potentially be brilliant scientists, leaders, who knows...? They're dead, just because they had no food.
Do you think it's right that medical science can save those who can afford it, but those who are otherwise healthy, but just happen to live in poverty deserve to die?
Good luck to this girl - I really hope she makes it and has a great life ahead of her. Just don't forget that while we're spending millions saving the life of one baby, thousands of people are dying for the cost of just some bread and water.
No. It isn't. If we as a society can not protect and do what is right for the weakest amongst us, then are we truely a civilized society?
It's all very well to come out with quotes like that, but the fact is that if this child had been born in a less affluent part of the world, she would have died, no question about it.
Worldwide we should be doing a lot more to help people less fortunate than ourselves. The money spent on saving the life of one baby who may just die in a few years anyway could have been used to help a much greater number of people.
I'm not saying that the two are mutually exclusive (they aren't) but eight other babies could have been saved with the same number of organs, or with the same amount of money a starving village could have been fed for a month.
Is it fair that if you're born with a whole load of problems but your parents have the money, we can fix you up, whereas if you're born with nothing wrong with you but your parents can't even afford to feed you, you should die?
We should protect and do what is right for the weakest among us, but defying the laws of evolution is pretty far outside of that.
I know this will sound harsh, but if your child is born with so many problems that they would die without eight organ replacements, one has to wonder what their long-term chances of survival realistically are.
I know we can work wonders with organ transplants these days, but how much is too much? What are this child's chances of having a reasonable quality of life after being born with so many potentially fatal problems?
It's sad to see your loved ones die, but I can't help wondering if the parents did the right thing under these circumstances.
No doubt my feelings on this would be much stronger if it was my own child in question, but it would seem we as a species very often let our emotions get in the way of rational thought, and I'm just not sure these parents made the right decision for their child.
This is most definitely a difficult issue - I could well be wrong, but I'm throwing my initial thoughts into the pot to see what others think.
Your right to swing your fist ends in my face.
Your right to hack off your daughter's clit ended in downtown Manhattan.
Your right to impose your values on someone else's culture ends at your country's border, whether you like it or not. I can't say I agree with the fundamentalist Islamist way of life, but I respect their right to live that way if that's what they want. We don't need to make enemies of them by giving them more reasons to hate us.
Then you go on to quote some rather irrelevant lines from a film, ending in:
Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.
Remind me what is already going on with the US - people are dying because of this ridiculous war, and your freedoms are being taken away on an almost daily basis. Your ignorant attitude and blatant denial of the problem is the cause of this, so you can expect more death and less freedom until you stop being fooled and do something about it.
The only thing I've confused your preference for is the preference for believing whatever propaganda you are spoon fed, instead of the preference for actually thinking about things for yourself.
No, you never, ever "just gotta kill".
If "the terrorists" hate non-Islamic people already, then why give them yet more ammunition for their cause? Why legitimise their reasons to hate us?
Attempting to kill them by starting wars in their part of the world only increases their credibility and furthers the objective of "the terrorists", because we become (in the eyes of many Muslims) the things they have already said we are. (Evil murdering imperialists, who want to destroy their way of life.)
The only path is to show them that we aren't evil imperialists bent on destroying their world, and the way to do that is NOT to exchange blows for blows. If we do what the terrorists have told their people we will do (invade their countries and kill their people), then we just play into their hands.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, and this policy of trying to crush "terrorists" is an insane and fucking dangerous one.
At the end of the day, Islamic nations just want the same thing as everyone else in the world does - to be able to live their lives as they wish, without having someone else's ideals imposed on them.
"Terrorists" only hate non-Islamic people because "we" (as in, our governments) have given them cause to. It is our duty to dissent against the way our governments are behaving, because it is they who are directly responsible for causing this terrorism by their sheer ignorance and blatant interference in the way other people live their lives. Until that changes, there will never be an end to the "terrorists".
I'm not anti-American. I'm anti the actions of the American government under the banner of "the war against terror", because it is utter bullshit.
The only correct reaction to terrorism is no reaction at all. Give them an inch, and they'll take a mile. By reacting to terrorist attacks in such a knee-jerk frenzy of panic, we have already lost the war against terror, because it has taken the grip on society that the terrorists wanted it to take.
I'm not saying terrorism is right - it's clearly not. But the fact of the matter is that that you're about ten times more likely to get murdered by a fellow American than you are by a terrorist inside America, and you have to keep things in perspective.
Bin Laden and co are insane maniacs who must be stopped, but you can't wipe out terrorists by killing them - it simply doesn't work like that. You have to address the reason they are terrorists in the first place, whether it's an insane reason or not, otherwise the terrorists will never go away.
Large-scale sponsorship of their enemies (eg. Israel) is hardly a good idea.
Obligatory quote:
"Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty." - Benjamin Franklin
My personal opinion on the matter is that you can't fight a war against terrorism without looking at what the root causes of that terrorism are. The fact is, that at the moment the west is seemingly willing to just overlook what the causes of terrorism are, and are trying to just blow the terrorists to smithereens.
When will people learn that labelling people "terrorists" and killing them just creates new "terrorists" at an exponential rate? As far as these "terrorists" are concerned, America and the UK are "terrorists" too.
Clever tracking software or not, "terrorists" are not going to go away until we start looking at why they are "terrorists" in the first place.
Just because a government chooses to carry out military activities, doesn't make them any less terroristic or any more legitimate.
Perhaps those doubting the terrorism carried out by the US and allies in Iraq should check this page for help in visualising the numbers.
If this constitutes a "slick" website, then I'm Jeffry Zeldman!
No doctype, all upper case tags, badly aliased transparent gifs, font tags, a fucking hit counter, flashing animated gif menu bullets... not to mention that it looks like shit anyway!