Are you sure it is free now? I'm running couple of X terminals home. One of them is more than 10 years old and never need hardware upgrade. But if I count all the money I spent upgrading my home computer last 10 years, it would probably cost more than $50/month. And countless hours administering the system. How much your work-hour cost?
The most common reason for a top of the line system is gamaing - that's something that cannot be done on a remote server (there's just not going to be enough bandwidth to shift all the video data between a remote server and your monitor). I don't play much in the way of games (the odd game of BZ Flag and thats about it), so I'm quite happy with having a system that's not top of the range.
I bought a P200 in 1997 and that served me well until 2002. Yeah, ok it got a few upgrades on the way - hard drive, CD burner, modem, monitor, etc. The only one of those upgrades that wouldn't have been applicable if I was using a remote server to run all my code is the hard drive. I'd still have got a CD burner (so I can keep a personal backup of the data, coz I wouldn't trust a remote service with the only copy, and to burn music CDs). I'd still have got a new monitor - using a remote server won't stop me wanting a decent quality display. I bought a new modem coz the old one died - it wasn't a big deal coz I just lost my internet connection for a while, but if I was using a remote server for everything that would've keft me computer-less until I bought a new one.
In 2002 I got a new machine - Athlon XP 2100+. Again, that's had some upgrades, but nothing that I wouldn't buy if I was using a remote server to do everything: scanner, printer, new mouse, DSL router, etc. I fully expect that machine to last me until at least 2007.
Hell, I still use my old P166 laptop - it needs a bit more memory really, but it's still fine for browsing the web and running a few Eterms.
My Athlon cost me 300ukp (no monitor, etc - I reused my existing monitor) - assuming a life of 5 years that's only 5ukp a month, and I for one prefer to have complete control over my system - in short, I know how clueless some of the techies at these companies are (hey, I've done tech support for them) and I wouldn't trust them to run my systems.
Remember, most upgrades are either stuff like printers, scanners, etc. which people need locally whatever they're doing, or games related stuff, which would have to be local for bandwidth and latency reasons anyway.
And countless hours administering the system. How much your work-hour cost?
Yes, fair enough, the time I spend adminning my systems does add up, but most of that time is coz I want to either set things up exactly as I want (something I can't do if I'm relying on someone else to do it for me), or because I'm doing something new, cool and bleeding edge (something I'd probably have to pay someone a lot of money to do if I weren't doing it myself).
I'm also not sure how you stop clueless lusers doing stuff like installing spyware - either you prevent them from installing anything (which would make it terribly restrictive) or you have to live with the fact that users will install dubious stuff.
People want computers to be appliances which they don't have to maintain, like a toaster, but they also want to be able to take their toaster and install a coffee maker, microwave and washing machine in it at will. I don't believe it's possible to have an appliance computer thats flexible enough for most users to use as their desktop machine. Although it's easy enough to do - stick the OS on a read only device along with any programs you want and make the storage device for the user's data non-executable - there's almost nothing they can do to break it then... but I wouldn't want to use that kind of system.
A computer is more like a car - it needs maintaining by someone who knows what they're doing. I maintain my own computer. I take my car to the garage and get a professional to maintain
You seem to be promoting the idea that all computers should come pre-installed with an operating system... well we know which is the market dominent OS, so I guess you're promoting the idea that everyone should be forced to have windows pre-installed (with the accompanying expense) even if they don't want it?
Having a computer and operating system sold as sererate components makes as much sense as having the auto industry be in the practice of advertising and selling cars routinely without steering wheels.
I see no problem with that business model. What's better? Selling cars that have very basic steering wheels which cannot be bolted on, so they fall off while you're doing 70mph down the motorway, or selling cars with no steering wheel and then giving you the choice to pay 200ukp for the crappy one, or you can install a free one which doesn't fall off and comes with built in autopilot?
Similarly, you might say that selling a car without a stereo is a stupid idea, but personally, I ripped the stereo out of every car I've bought and put in one that *I* want instead of what the manufacturer thought I wanted - I'd prefer not to have to have bought it in the first place.
The idea that I'm going to pay the richest man in the world $100 for something that was deliberately left of the computer is absurd and insane
Noone's forcing you to - some of us haven't used any products from the richest man in the world for many years and TBH, I'm better for it.
XHTML is supposed to be refused if malformed; HTML prior to 4.0 is supposed to be best-guessed.
This reenforces my belief that XHTML is the way forward since it reduces the code complexity of the browser:
XHTML: Try to parse - fail - give up HTML: Try to parse - fail - Try to reconstruct - hit bug - crash
XHTML is also good because it removes the fuzzy area of what to do if the code is crap - with HTML, a web developer will write a page, won't bother to validate it and just check it works in IE. Since different browsers have different methods of fixing broken code, the results of this page are not platform independent. With XHTML, if the developer writes broken code it just plain won't work. The management who pay the web developer probably don't know anything about standards compliance and if it works in IE the developer gets paid, but if it just sits there with a parse error the developer will either have to fix it or not get paid (Good Thing).
That said, IMHO there is something to be said for a couple of additions to the XHTML spec:
1. a button on the "parse error" page which tells the browser to render it as tag soup - that way the end user can try to view the page anyway even if it's broken (whilest still being informed that it really is broken code). 2. an automatic feedback system in which the browser will post details of the parse error back to the server. Otherwise the developer may never know there's a problem (especially important with dynamically generated markup which may not be easilly validated).
Similarly, it would be really nice, IMHO, if browsers made it clear (by placing a big X on the status bar or something) when they are viewing broken *HTML* code since this would indicate to the user why the page might not look quite right and would be an indication to the management not to pay the web designer they hired since he is obviously lacking in the ability to do his job.
Because of their memory effect, NiMH are the most inconvenient batteries to use.
NiMH have very little 'memory effect' - NiCd's are the offenders there. However, all batteries need to be treated correctly - I keep my batteries in sets and don't mix the batteries within those sets, that way I never end up mixing fully charged batteries with semi-charged, etc (which really does kill batteries).
NiMH cell capacities are now on-par with Alkalines, the only downside of NiMH cells is that they do discharge over time.
Whilest Li-ion's have a higher energy density, they are also not compatable with alkaline batteries, and when I'm on holiday and stuck with a dead battery I'd prefer to have the option to buy some alkalines from the shop rather than do without my camera.
(I have a HP Photosmart 850 and am _very_ happy with it)
I have Asterisk set up at home with an X100P FXO card, but even with the echo cancellation there is still a very distracting echo that I haven't been able to get rid of (you hear the first fraction of a second of everything you say).
Saddamn Hussein murdered hundreds of thousands of his own Kurdish countrymen
Why is that the US's business? I agree it is the _world's_ business but it's not specifically the US's so why should the US be allowed to go bomb the crap out of it because it doesn't agree with what it sees unless the rest of the world agrees with the US? I see very little difference between that and bombing people because they have a different religion to you.
Iran, North Korea, and anyone else thinking about sticking their chin out better think very hard about it in the future.
Great, so by bombing Iraq you have proved once and for all that to be safe from the US you _need_ WMDs. Excellent work.
I will not have any pity upon you when those Islamic Facists slice your childrens' throats, your wifes throat, and then your throat.
I don't think there is any danger of that until they invade the place where I live - of course a country has a right to defend their country if it is attacked, but this isn't what happened - the US bombed the crap out of a country that wasn't attacking them.
Iraq has never used WMDs (the US have). And in what way is invading another sovereign state not an abuse? (still talking about the US here). Please note that I am *not* saying that the current holders of WMDs should or should not have them, I am asking why it's ok for a nation like the US, who has abused it's military position, to have WMDs but not ok for anyone else? Seems quite hypocrytical to me.
Please explain what the point is in having the UN if a single rogue nation (the US) can ignore the consensus of all the other members of the UN and blow the crap out of another country? Especially since in the end it turned out that there were no grounds for war.
I'd also love to know why it's ok for the US to hold WMDs (especially given the US's record regarding wars) but it's not ok for another nation to hold them?
Sorry, that's crap - the 2 are completely unrelated. And the protests weren't really about the price of oil, they were about the sheer quantity of tax the UK government places on fuel (very little of which goes back into maintaining the roads which are in a terrible state of repair). The government flatly refused to reduce the tax, but by the next election everyone seemed to have forgotten about it.
Besides, the public have repeatedly been told that the war was "not about oil" (ok, I don't believe that at all since before the war started it was about "weapons of mass destruction" and after that was debunked the public were told that it was about getting rid of Saddam).
The big problem with strictly enforcing the law is that sometimes it's actually safer to break the law. Example - single carriageway road, 60mph limit. I want to overtake someone who's doing 50mph - do I crawl past them at 60mph (thereby staying on the wrong side of the road for ages) or do I judge that it's safer to get past them as quickly as possible at 70 or 80mph and then slow down to 60 again? IMHO it's safer to briefly ignore the speed limit and spend as little time on the wrong side of the road as possible.
The UN, and everybody else (save Britain) were screaming that there was no evidence, and that going to war is wrong.
Actually, here in the UK a huge chunk of the British public protested about the war and the government plain ignored public opinion (not for the first time in this government's history either (can you say "fuel protests"?)... unfortunately, come election time the voters seem to forget about this stuff).
That was exactly my point - ATM because the world is governed by Windows (which is x86-only), most people are forced into using x86 hardware even if they're not using Windows because non-x86 hardware is not especially mainstream, so it's expensive. If the world revolved around open source software then IMHO we would have much more choice because a wider range of hardware would be supported, bringing down the price of alternative architectures. So you could choose what was best for you.
...are provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied......Blizzard warrants up to and including ninety (90) days from the date of your purchase of the Program that the media containing the Program shall be free from defects in material and workmanship
Is the second clause in that quote even valid? It appears to be excluded by the first clause (the product is provided without any warranty, even if a warranty is expressly indicated).
Additionally, a large market of open-source software would take some of the focus off x86 processors. We all know that x86 is an aging architecture, and it's a pain for the chip manufacturers to keep the backward compatability. With open source software, pretty much all the userspace software, and a large chunk of the kernel can be quickly recompiled for new architectures and you can ditch the backward compatability. This would make CPU design simpler, cheaper, and more efficient.
Look at the PDA industry - they aren't goverened by a single big software company only supporting one architecture, if a PDA manufacturer sees a better architecture then they usually have no significant problems with dropping their current one in favor of it without worrying about hardware compatability. I'm sure that if the desktop computer industry was able to pick and choose their architectures we would be in a much better position.
It's also worth noting that different CPU architectures suit different problems, and having the choice allows you to pick the best hardware for the job.
With the Mac OS now a layer on top of Unix, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple eventually gives up reserving its software for its own hardware and begins to sell Mac OS as a GUI and software bundle on top of Linux, essentially a commercial counterpart to Gnome or KDE.
I think they would be completely missing their target market if they did that. People who buy Macs are getting them because they "Just Work". One of the big reasons why they "Just Work" is because Apple has complete control over the hardware they're using, they can test the software on exactly what the end-user will be using it on and make sure it all works. Furthermore, they can test upgrades on hardware identical to what the end-users are using.
Whilest it's possible that they may eventually ditch BSD in favor of Linux if it looks like Linux will be beneficial for them, I doubt they will ever start shipping it as a stand-alone piece of software rather than a soft/hardware combo.
os x has, by far, been the most stable OS i have had to use in the workplace.
Does that include Linux? I use Linux exclusively at both home and work and I would struggle to make any stability comparisons amoungst any OSes that stay up for such long periods of time. In my (limited) experience, OS X and Linux seem to be on par with eachother when it comes to stability. Obviously OS X is easier for the average user to use, so that where it wins.
I'm a big fan of *nix based OSes and I think Apple have made a good call with moving to a BSD-based platform. I agree that Microsoft seem to be overlooking Apple if they think they'll be gone in 10 years - it has seemed to me recently that OS X is rapidly gaining popular support.
There's something quite Darwinian going on here. Of course you're going to lose your warranty if you rip apart your laptop, duh! Or are you one of the people who needs labels on the mains power sockets telling you that if you stick a fork in each hole and hang onto them you might get a shock?
Actually, IMHO making the browser refuse to render a badly formed page (as is the case with XHTML) is a Good Thing, although there is a good arguement for the browsers to have a button on the "parse error" page to switch them into tag-soup mode and render it anyway.
The reason it is a Good Thing is quite simple - the behaviour for how to handle complient markup is well defined and so you (should) get (mostly) identical results on all browsers. The behaviour for fixing broken code is not defined (and would probably be quite difficult to define), so broken code probably renders very differently on different browsers. The problem comes when someone writes broken code and only tests it in one browser and decides it's ok - it probably doesn't work in other browsers at all. Whereas complient code should at least be readable, even if browser bugs prevent it from looking quite right.
Additionally, making it obvious that a web developer has no clue what he's doing is also a good idea - if you're a (non-techy) manager and employ a web developer to build a site for you, you probably just look in IE and say "yep, looks fine, here's your pay cheque", even though the markup is complete rubbish and it may not work in other browsers at all. If you're a non-techy manager and the web designer presents you with a site that causes your browser to say "this designer is a complete chimp" then you probably won't pay them.
Internet explorer is the dominant browser......and it doesn't support CSS fully.
This is the *big* problem why IE is really bad - it's not that it's not standards complient, it's that it has got such a huge chunk of the market that you have to support it on commercial sites, and the fact that MS don't care. I think (hope?) that most of the other browsers would continue to get bugfixes and innovations, even if they had 100% of the market. This is one reason why MS shouldn't be allowed to bundle such broken software with the OS, because it totally holds back innovation on the whole web.
On the other hand, if you run a site as a hobby instead of making money off it, then why pander to the IE users? I made the decision with my website that as long as it was readable in IE it didn't have to look particularly nice - working around the bugs in a browser that has had no significant development in 10 years is a waste of my time and restricts what new features I can use. I pop up a big warning to IE users when they first visit the site, explaining why they shouldn't use IE and with luck it'll encourage people to migrate to browsers that are still being developed. If more non-commercial sites did this then it might help push IE out of the market whilest not restricting content from the IE users. Obviously it's not an option for commercial sites since they stand to lose a lot of money.
Having said that, since I instituted this policy, the amount of traffic on my site has not changed, and the percentage of hits from IE has gone down, so I consoder that to be a good sign of people migrating away from IE because of the warning I give them.
The problem is that only browsers based on Mozilla code (Camino, Firefox, Netscape, etc.) have support for these standards.
Wrong - most of the non-IE browsers support the modern standards and they're not all Gecko-based. i.e. Opera is pretty standards complient (slightly more buggy than Firefox in my experience, but still not bad), Safari and the Gecko browsers are about on-par with eachother IMHO (yeah ok, they both have some bugs - what software doesn't. Moderately annoyingly they have different bugs which can sometimes cause it to be difficult to make something work perfectly in both, but generally they're quite minor).
But do not think writing a web site in CSS will solve all your browser compatibility problems.
It solves most of them... especially if you remove IE from the equation.
In the mean time, stick with a combination of CSS AND minimal tables.
I recently redid my website in XHTML 1.1 and made sure I used the correct tags for the data I wanted to present (not the layout). i.e. only use tables for tabular data, menus are lists, etc. It resulted in far neater code and (importantly, IMHO) it presents very readable results in lynx and elinks, which should help provide much more accessible results to people with disabilities. I believe that it is more important to cator for people who are restricted by their disabilities than cator for people who are simply too stubborn to use a reasonable browser.
Since it is my personal site (i.e. not at all commercial - I maintain it purely as a hobby), I decided that as long as it's readable in IE then it doesn't have to look especially nice. Working around all the bugs in IE and making it look perfect would be a complete PITA, but then it always is, nomatter what type of markup you use. Ignoring IE for the most part makes it easier, neater and might encourage people to switch to a real browser.
Serve your pages with a content type of application/xml+xhtml and the browser will check it's well formed. Of course it won't work at all in crappy IE, but you can use content negotiation to work around that.
And with the deal announced a day or two ago re: "Virgin Galactic" you can bet Paul Allen has seen a nice return on his investment. Or at least, the odds of such a return have improved dramatically.
Was he looking for a return? If I had bucket loads of cash (like more than I could hope to spend in my lifetime) then I'd definately be thinking about funding something like this even with no possible return. Purely coz it's cool and something I'm interested in.
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Are you sure it is free now? I'm running couple of X terminals home. One of them is more than 10 years old and never need hardware upgrade. But if I count all the money I spent upgrading my home computer last 10 years, it would probably cost more than $50/month. And countless hours administering the system. How much your work-hour cost?
The most common reason for a top of the line system is gamaing - that's something that cannot be done on a remote server (there's just not going to be enough bandwidth to shift all the video data between a remote server and your monitor). I don't play much in the way of games (the odd game of BZ Flag and thats about it), so I'm quite happy with having a system that's not top of the range.
I bought a P200 in 1997 and that served me well until 2002. Yeah, ok it got a few upgrades on the way - hard drive, CD burner, modem, monitor, etc. The only one of those upgrades that wouldn't have been applicable if I was using a remote server to run all my code is the hard drive. I'd still have got a CD burner (so I can keep a personal backup of the data, coz I wouldn't trust a remote service with the only copy, and to burn music CDs). I'd still have got a new monitor - using a remote server won't stop me wanting a decent quality display. I bought a new modem coz the old one died - it wasn't a big deal coz I just lost my internet connection for a while, but if I was using a remote server for everything that would've keft me computer-less until I bought a new one.
In 2002 I got a new machine - Athlon XP 2100+. Again, that's had some upgrades, but nothing that I wouldn't buy if I was using a remote server to do everything: scanner, printer, new mouse, DSL router, etc. I fully expect that machine to last me until at least 2007.
Hell, I still use my old P166 laptop - it needs a bit more memory really, but it's still fine for browsing the web and running a few Eterms.
My Athlon cost me 300ukp (no monitor, etc - I reused my existing monitor) - assuming a life of 5 years that's only 5ukp a month, and I for one prefer to have complete control over my system - in short, I know how clueless some of the techies at these companies are (hey, I've done tech support for them) and I wouldn't trust them to run my systems.
Remember, most upgrades are either stuff like printers, scanners, etc. which people need locally whatever they're doing, or games related stuff, which would have to be local for bandwidth and latency reasons anyway.
And countless hours administering the system. How much your work-hour cost?
Yes, fair enough, the time I spend adminning my systems does add up, but most of that time is coz I want to either set things up exactly as I want (something I can't do if I'm relying on someone else to do it for me), or because I'm doing something new, cool and bleeding edge (something I'd probably have to pay someone a lot of money to do if I weren't doing it myself).
I'm also not sure how you stop clueless lusers doing stuff like installing spyware - either you prevent them from installing anything (which would make it terribly restrictive) or you have to live with the fact that users will install dubious stuff.
People want computers to be appliances which they don't have to maintain, like a toaster, but they also want to be able to take their toaster and install a coffee maker, microwave and washing machine in it at will. I don't believe it's possible to have an appliance computer thats flexible enough for most users to use as their desktop machine. Although it's easy enough to do - stick the OS on a read only device along with any programs you want and make the storage device for the user's data non-executable - there's almost nothing they can do to break it then... but I wouldn't want to use that kind of system.
A computer is more like a car - it needs maintaining by someone who knows what they're doing. I maintain my own computer. I take my car to the garage and get a professional to maintain
You seem to be promoting the idea that all computers should come pre-installed with an operating system... well we know which is the market dominent OS, so I guess you're promoting the idea that everyone should be forced to have windows pre-installed (with the accompanying expense) even if they don't want it?
Having a computer and operating system sold as sererate components makes as much sense as having the auto industry be in the practice of advertising and selling cars routinely without steering wheels.
I see no problem with that business model. What's better? Selling cars that have very basic steering wheels which cannot be bolted on, so they fall off while you're doing 70mph down the motorway, or selling cars with no steering wheel and then giving you the choice to pay 200ukp for the crappy one, or you can install a free one which doesn't fall off and comes with built in autopilot?
Similarly, you might say that selling a car without a stereo is a stupid idea, but personally, I ripped the stereo out of every car I've bought and put in one that *I* want instead of what the manufacturer thought I wanted - I'd prefer not to have to have bought it in the first place.
The idea that I'm going to pay the richest man in the world $100 for something that was deliberately left of the computer is absurd and insane
Noone's forcing you to - some of us haven't used any products from the richest man in the world for many years and TBH, I'm better for it.
XHTML is supposed to be refused if malformed; HTML prior to 4.0 is supposed to be best-guessed.
This reenforces my belief that XHTML is the way forward since it reduces the code complexity of the browser:
XHTML: Try to parse - fail - give up
HTML: Try to parse - fail - Try to reconstruct - hit bug - crash
XHTML is also good because it removes the fuzzy area of what to do if the code is crap - with HTML, a web developer will write a page, won't bother to validate it and just check it works in IE. Since different browsers have different methods of fixing broken code, the results of this page are not platform independent. With XHTML, if the developer writes broken code it just plain won't work. The management who pay the web developer probably don't know anything about standards compliance and if it works in IE the developer gets paid, but if it just sits there with a parse error the developer will either have to fix it or not get paid (Good Thing).
That said, IMHO there is something to be said for a couple of additions to the XHTML spec:
1. a button on the "parse error" page which tells the browser to render it as tag soup - that way the end user can try to view the page anyway even if it's broken (whilest still being informed that it really is broken code).
2. an automatic feedback system in which the browser will post details of the parse error back to the server. Otherwise the developer may never know there's a problem (especially important with dynamically generated markup which may not be easilly validated).
Similarly, it would be really nice, IMHO, if browsers made it clear (by placing a big X on the status bar or something) when they are viewing broken *HTML* code since this would indicate to the user why the page might not look quite right and would be an indication to the management not to pay the web designer they hired since he is obviously lacking in the ability to do his job.
Because of their memory effect, NiMH are the most inconvenient batteries to use.
NiMH have very little 'memory effect' - NiCd's are the offenders there. However, all batteries need to be treated correctly - I keep my batteries in sets and don't mix the batteries within those sets, that way I never end up mixing fully charged batteries with semi-charged, etc (which really does kill batteries).
NiMH cell capacities are now on-par with Alkalines, the only downside of NiMH cells is that they do discharge over time.
Whilest Li-ion's have a higher energy density, they are also not compatable with alkaline batteries, and when I'm on holiday and stuck with a dead battery I'd prefer to have the option to buy some alkalines from the shop rather than do without my camera.
(I have a HP Photosmart 850 and am _very_ happy with it)
I have Asterisk set up at home with an X100P FXO card, but even with the echo cancellation there is still a very distracting echo that I haven't been able to get rid of (you hear the first fraction of a second of everything you say).
Because they're making a complete mess of it?
Saddamn Hussein murdered hundreds of thousands of his own Kurdish countrymen
Why is that the US's business? I agree it is the _world's_ business but it's not specifically the US's so why should the US be allowed to go bomb the crap out of it because it doesn't agree with what it sees unless the rest of the world agrees with the US? I see very little difference between that and bombing people because they have a different religion to you.
Iran, North Korea, and anyone else thinking about sticking their chin out better think very hard about it in the future.
Great, so by bombing Iraq you have proved once and for all that to be safe from the US you _need_ WMDs. Excellent work.
I will not have any pity upon you when those Islamic Facists slice your childrens' throats, your wifes throat, and then your throat.
I don't think there is any danger of that until they invade the place where I live - of course a country has a right to defend their country if it is attacked, but this isn't what happened - the US bombed the crap out of a country that wasn't attacking them.
Iraq has never used WMDs (the US have). And in what way is invading another sovereign state not an abuse? (still talking about the US here). Please note that I am *not* saying that the current holders of WMDs should or should not have them, I am asking why it's ok for a nation like the US, who has abused it's military position, to have WMDs but not ok for anyone else? Seems quite hypocrytical to me.
Its completely legal here in the UK so long as the central white line is not solid (it's usually dotted).
Please explain what the point is in having the UN if a single rogue nation (the US) can ignore the consensus of all the other members of the UN and blow the crap out of another country? Especially since in the end it turned out that there were no grounds for war.
I'd also love to know why it's ok for the US to hold WMDs (especially given the US's record regarding wars) but it's not ok for another nation to hold them?
Sorry, that's crap - the 2 are completely unrelated. And the protests weren't really about the price of oil, they were about the sheer quantity of tax the UK government places on fuel (very little of which goes back into maintaining the roads which are in a terrible state of repair). The government flatly refused to reduce the tax, but by the next election everyone seemed to have forgotten about it.
Besides, the public have repeatedly been told that the war was "not about oil" (ok, I don't believe that at all since before the war started it was about "weapons of mass destruction" and after that was debunked the public were told that it was about getting rid of Saddam).
The big problem with strictly enforcing the law is that sometimes it's actually safer to break the law. Example - single carriageway road, 60mph limit. I want to overtake someone who's doing 50mph - do I crawl past them at 60mph (thereby staying on the wrong side of the road for ages) or do I judge that it's safer to get past them as quickly as possible at 70 or 80mph and then slow down to 60 again? IMHO it's safer to briefly ignore the speed limit and spend as little time on the wrong side of the road as possible.
The UN, and everybody else (save Britain) were screaming that there was no evidence, and that going to war is wrong.
Actually, here in the UK a huge chunk of the British public protested about the war and the government plain ignored public opinion (not for the first time in this government's history either (can you say "fuel protests"?)... unfortunately, come election time the voters seem to forget about this stuff).
Besides, isn't choice good?
That was exactly my point - ATM because the world is governed by Windows (which is x86-only), most people are forced into using x86 hardware even if they're not using Windows because non-x86 hardware is not especially mainstream, so it's expensive. If the world revolved around open source software then IMHO we would have much more choice because a wider range of hardware would be supported, bringing down the price of alternative architectures. So you could choose what was best for you.
...are provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied... ...Blizzard warrants up to and including ninety (90) days from the date of your purchase of the Program that the media containing the Program shall be free from defects in material and workmanship
Is the second clause in that quote even valid? It appears to be excluded by the first clause (the product is provided without any warranty, even if a warranty is expressly indicated).
Additionally, a large market of open-source software would take some of the focus off x86 processors. We all know that x86 is an aging architecture, and it's a pain for the chip manufacturers to keep the backward compatability. With open source software, pretty much all the userspace software, and a large chunk of the kernel can be quickly recompiled for new architectures and you can ditch the backward compatability. This would make CPU design simpler, cheaper, and more efficient.
Look at the PDA industry - they aren't goverened by a single big software company only supporting one architecture, if a PDA manufacturer sees a better architecture then they usually have no significant problems with dropping their current one in favor of it without worrying about hardware compatability. I'm sure that if the desktop computer industry was able to pick and choose their architectures we would be in a much better position.
It's also worth noting that different CPU architectures suit different problems, and having the choice allows you to pick the best hardware for the job.
With the Mac OS now a layer on top of Unix, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple eventually gives up reserving its software for its own hardware and begins to sell Mac OS as a GUI and software bundle on top of Linux, essentially a commercial counterpart to Gnome or KDE.
I think they would be completely missing their target market if they did that. People who buy Macs are getting them because they "Just Work". One of the big reasons why they "Just Work" is because Apple has complete control over the hardware they're using, they can test the software on exactly what the end-user will be using it on and make sure it all works. Furthermore, they can test upgrades on hardware identical to what the end-users are using.
Whilest it's possible that they may eventually ditch BSD in favor of Linux if it looks like Linux will be beneficial for them, I doubt they will ever start shipping it as a stand-alone piece of software rather than a soft/hardware combo.
os x has, by far, been the most stable OS i have had to use in the workplace.
Does that include Linux? I use Linux exclusively at both home and work and I would struggle to make any stability comparisons amoungst any OSes that stay up for such long periods of time. In my (limited) experience, OS X and Linux seem to be on par with eachother when it comes to stability. Obviously OS X is easier for the average user to use, so that where it wins.
I'm a big fan of *nix based OSes and I think Apple have made a good call with moving to a BSD-based platform. I agree that Microsoft seem to be overlooking Apple if they think they'll be gone in 10 years - it has seemed to me recently that OS X is rapidly gaining popular support.
When it has been installed in your house for about 16 years, it will overclock with no intervention on your part...
Doesn't that usually lead to a melt down?
There's something quite Darwinian going on here. Of course you're going to lose your warranty if you rip apart your laptop, duh! Or are you one of the people who needs labels on the mains power sockets telling you that if you stick a fork in each hole and hang onto them you might get a shock?
Actually, IMHO making the browser refuse to render a badly formed page (as is the case with XHTML) is a Good Thing, although there is a good arguement for the browsers to have a button on the "parse error" page to switch them into tag-soup mode and render it anyway.
The reason it is a Good Thing is quite simple - the behaviour for how to handle complient markup is well defined and so you (should) get (mostly) identical results on all browsers. The behaviour for fixing broken code is not defined (and would probably be quite difficult to define), so broken code probably renders very differently on different browsers. The problem comes when someone writes broken code and only tests it in one browser and decides it's ok - it probably doesn't work in other browsers at all. Whereas complient code should at least be readable, even if browser bugs prevent it from looking quite right.
Additionally, making it obvious that a web developer has no clue what he's doing is also a good idea - if you're a (non-techy) manager and employ a web developer to build a site for you, you probably just look in IE and say "yep, looks fine, here's your pay cheque", even though the markup is complete rubbish and it may not work in other browsers at all. If you're a non-techy manager and the web designer presents you with a site that causes your browser to say "this designer is a complete chimp" then you probably won't pay them.
Internet explorer is the dominant browser... ...and it doesn't support CSS fully.
This is the *big* problem why IE is really bad - it's not that it's not standards complient, it's that it has got such a huge chunk of the market that you have to support it on commercial sites, and the fact that MS don't care. I think (hope?) that most of the other browsers would continue to get bugfixes and innovations, even if they had 100% of the market. This is one reason why MS shouldn't be allowed to bundle such broken software with the OS, because it totally holds back innovation on the whole web.
On the other hand, if you run a site as a hobby instead of making money off it, then why pander to the IE users? I made the decision with my website that as long as it was readable in IE it didn't have to look particularly nice - working around the bugs in a browser that has had no significant development in 10 years is a waste of my time and restricts what new features I can use. I pop up a big warning to IE users when they first visit the site, explaining why they shouldn't use IE and with luck it'll encourage people to migrate to browsers that are still being developed. If more non-commercial sites did this then it might help push IE out of the market whilest not restricting content from the IE users. Obviously it's not an option for commercial sites since they stand to lose a lot of money.
Having said that, since I instituted this policy, the amount of traffic on my site has not changed, and the percentage of hits from IE has gone down, so I consoder that to be a good sign of people migrating away from IE because of the warning I give them.
The problem is that only browsers based on Mozilla code (Camino, Firefox, Netscape, etc.) have support for these standards.
Wrong - most of the non-IE browsers support the modern standards and they're not all Gecko-based. i.e. Opera is pretty standards complient (slightly more buggy than Firefox in my experience, but still not bad), Safari and the Gecko browsers are about on-par with eachother IMHO (yeah ok, they both have some bugs - what software doesn't. Moderately annoyingly they have different bugs which can sometimes cause it to be difficult to make something work perfectly in both, but generally they're quite minor).
But do not think writing a web site in CSS will solve all your browser compatibility problems.
It solves most of them... especially if you remove IE from the equation.
In the mean time, stick with a combination of CSS AND minimal tables.
I recently redid my website in XHTML 1.1 and made sure I used the correct tags for the data I wanted to present (not the layout). i.e. only use tables for tabular data, menus are lists, etc. It resulted in far neater code and (importantly, IMHO) it presents very readable results in lynx and elinks, which should help provide much more accessible results to people with disabilities. I believe that it is more important to cator for people who are restricted by their disabilities than cator for people who are simply too stubborn to use a reasonable browser.
Since it is my personal site (i.e. not at all commercial - I maintain it purely as a hobby), I decided that as long as it's readable in IE then it doesn't have to look especially nice. Working around all the bugs in IE and making it look perfect would be a complete PITA, but then it always is, nomatter what type of markup you use. Ignoring IE for the most part makes it easier, neater and might encourage people to switch to a real browser.
Serve your pages with a content type of application/xml+xhtml and the browser will check it's well formed. Of course it won't work at all in crappy IE, but you can use content negotiation to work around that.
And with the deal announced a day or two ago re: "Virgin Galactic" you can bet Paul Allen has seen a nice return on his investment. Or at least, the odds of such a return have improved dramatically.
Was he looking for a return? If I had bucket loads of cash (like more than I could hope to spend in my lifetime) then I'd definately be thinking about funding something like this even with no possible return. Purely coz it's cool and something I'm interested in.