It breaks workflows, not browsers. The conformance rules are so ad hoc that they have to be hand-coded into XML processing streams. Might not be a problem for your hobbyist PHP coder, but for the serious maintainer... well, we've all been there before, right?
Have you even tried to read section 9 of the proposal? It's a nightmare. The problem with the spec as it stands is that it contains 10% original material and 90% post facto justification for existing browser behavior.
My personal gripe is with the haphazard way of handling DOCTYPEs (9.1.1). Granted, no browser handles DOCTYPEs correctly, but that doesn't justify the requirement of the "useless" element, and "about:legacy-compat" is just sad, an afterthought when somebody explained to Hickson that the DOCTYPE actually has meaning outside of the world of Netscape-begotten browsers. If you're not going to use it, lose it. So it'll break ancient browsers. If you are using a significant chunk of the new features that HTML 5 offers to justify its use, then ancient browsers are going to break anyway.
Gah, I just glanced at the preliminary spec again to look up section numbers. Compare the parsing rules for "raw" HTML 5 (9) to that of the XML version (10). How many browser vendors are going to implement that algorithm completely and correctly? Apple, that's who; and only because they are a major driving force of the WHAT-WG. Hell, the error recovery operations (9.2.8) are non-normative, which is a fancy way of saying "we're afraid that if we commit to something vendors won't like us."
Yes, I know: I should hurt before I holler. But let's face it: it's wag the dog, redux. The acknowledgement section alone pretty much admits this. Developers aren't going to reference this document at all; they're going to see what WebKit does with their docs and take that as gospel. And since error checking is "soft," bad behavior will proliferate, become entrenched, and all other browsers will be forced to follow the WebKit interpretation. It's justification for cargo cult coding, but this time WebKit will dominate instead of MSIE. Just because it is open source does not make it right.
The problem with the HTML5 "spec" is that it is so much penis-programming: purposely breaking existing tools and workflows so that everyone will be forced to rewrite everything from scratch. The parsing model is so ad-hoc that it is sure to create another code-for-the-browser generation of web developers.
Actually, what Apple offers in retail is an upgrade, and is labeled as such. That it allows you to do a full wipe of the system without checking for a previous installation is a kindness on their part; should this Psystar case go south for them, expect more draconian restrictions. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple required you to bring in your Mac to an authorized repair center for an upgrade, especially since the majority of their (non-technical) customers never bother upgrading and wouldn't be inconvenienced. Any loss from retail would be easily balanced by protected hardware sales.
Try selling white boxes and bundling in copies of a Vista upgrade pack instead of the OEM package, and see how long it is before Microsoft is banging on your door. Actually, Microsoft wouldn't care unless you flaunted it, just like Psystar did; then they would be forced to act.
I took the argument to the extreme just to show the inherent flaw in your reasoning. I forgot that a fundamental trait of Slashdot is the inability to detect sarcasm. I'll use emoticons next time.
You're trying to redefine a one-time lease as transfer-of-ownership, even though the leaser explicitly states otherwise. One party said that the transfer is a lease, but you want to claim it is a sale. The only thing you can do is refuse to take part in the transaction.
Do you do the same at Hertz? "Oh, this wasn't a rental agreement. You sold me that car for $55."
If you're hung up on the concept of physical loss, then what about time? Would you like it if you came into work one day (assuming you're not sucking off the government's teat) to find that your employer has decided not to pay you for the last four weeks of work? It's not like you physically lost something; you didn't sell a concrete entity to your employer.
I would bet dollars to donuts you would have a lawyer on the line before you left the building, because you would (justifiably) feel robbed.
My objection wasn't to the sale-versus-lease issue; my objection to the original poster was that he felt that he had the "right" to break the law because the government was corrupt. If someone hurts you, then you go after the people that hurt you, not a third party.
My (purposely ridiculous) response was that if you believe that being taken advantage of gives you free reign, then by the same logic you won't mind if I commit a crime against you. The choice of burglary was poor in the light of the question of ownership; I should have said "...and we'll drop by and rape you" instead. After all, once the injuries heal, the original poster hasn't suffered a physical loss...
I've always enjoyed the hypocrisy of this mentality: Peter is robbing me, so I'm morally right in robbing Paul.
If you don't like the terms of a product, then don't buy the product. That's all you're morally allowed to do. Disagreement with an organization's policies does not give you any rights to ignore responsibility.
Those that feel differently are kindly instructed to post their home addresses; my friends and I will drop by shortly to loot your homes.
There's more sense in that comment than most people realize, and it's why the eternal argument will never be settled: everyone has different valuations for their time. Carl Howe covered this awhile back; he is usually pro-Apple, but this article is well-balanced: http://hardware.seekingalpha.com/article/30109.
That's wishful thinking from a lot of UNIX hacks hoping to pop open a bourne shell on their phone and hack away. "OS X" and "MacOS X" are two different beasts: the former is the kernel (Xnu) and application libraries (CoreFoundation; Cocoa); the latter is a superset that can be installed on a Macintosh. I'd be surprised if there are any of the aforementioned userland tools on the phone; they are unnecessary for applications to run.
Remember, the damn thing needs space to store music and videos. The designers won't fill up its internal memory with text processing utilities on the off chance that some future application needs 'grep.'
Not only will the stockholders revolt, but they would lose most of their executive talent. Corporate executives for the most part are not relaxed, patient types: they want immediate results. They want action. They want excitement. The first billion is never enough. Nor is the second.
The past history of Microsoft shows this behavior is endemic within the upper eschelons of the company. If the balance books turned even the slightest bit red, you can be sure the company would switch into full panic mode. The problem with panic mode is that companies take dangerous risks during those times... Billions could disappear overnight.
Last I heard, IE 5 was the last version of IE made for the Mac, because future browser enhancements required the "sophistication" of Longhorn. Whether this decision was the result of or the cause of Safari is an exercise left to the reader.
It's funny in a way... CSS requirements for Safari made Apple radically improve system-wide typography services in Panther (drop shadows, et cetera).
With the loss of Avalon as a direct feature of Longhorn, one has to wonder what "manditory" features in the next generation of Internet Explorer cannot still be provided under MacOS X.
Icons in MacOS X are 128x128 rasters, with smaller versions at 48x48, 32x32 and 16x16. The display manager picks the most appropriate size and uses bicubic interpolation to scale it down. IconComposer (in/Developer/Applications/) can show all four sizes.
You can see this if you find a file with an icon that is different for each size. As you scale it down, it changes abruptly when it hits a transition point. You can see this effect if you scale down the icon for Adobe Reader (the stylized "A" suddenly gets larger relative to the rest of the icon). MacDict X is a more extreme example, with completely different icons for all three sizes.
As far as I know, the only desktop system to use pure vector icons was the old Magic Desktop on IRIX boxes, and the shapes were limited to filled polygons.
Slashdot Mirror
It breaks workflows, not browsers. The conformance rules are so ad hoc that they have to be hand-coded into XML processing streams. Might not be a problem for your hobbyist PHP coder, but for the serious maintainer... well, we've all been there before, right?
Have you even tried to read section 9 of the proposal? It's a nightmare. The problem with the spec as it stands is that it contains 10% original material and 90% post facto justification for existing browser behavior.
My personal gripe is with the haphazard way of handling DOCTYPEs (9.1.1). Granted, no browser handles DOCTYPEs correctly, but that doesn't justify the requirement of the "useless" element, and "about:legacy-compat" is just sad, an afterthought when somebody explained to Hickson that the DOCTYPE actually has meaning outside of the world of Netscape-begotten browsers. If you're not going to use it, lose it. So it'll break ancient browsers. If you are using a significant chunk of the new features that HTML 5 offers to justify its use, then ancient browsers are going to break anyway.
Gah, I just glanced at the preliminary spec again to look up section numbers. Compare the parsing rules for "raw" HTML 5 (9) to that of the XML version (10). How many browser vendors are going to implement that algorithm completely and correctly? Apple, that's who; and only because they are a major driving force of the WHAT-WG. Hell, the error recovery operations (9.2.8) are non-normative, which is a fancy way of saying "we're afraid that if we commit to something vendors won't like us."
Yes, I know: I should hurt before I holler. But let's face it: it's wag the dog, redux. The acknowledgement section alone pretty much admits this. Developers aren't going to reference this document at all; they're going to see what WebKit does with their docs and take that as gospel. And since error checking is "soft," bad behavior will proliferate, become entrenched, and all other browsers will be forced to follow the WebKit interpretation. It's justification for cargo cult coding, but this time WebKit will dominate instead of MSIE. Just because it is open source does not make it right.
Amen, brother.
The problem with the HTML5 "spec" is that it is so much penis-programming: purposely breaking existing tools and workflows so that everyone will be forced to rewrite everything from scratch. The parsing model is so ad-hoc that it is sure to create another code-for-the-browser generation of web developers.
Actually, what Apple offers in retail is an upgrade, and is labeled as such. That it allows you to do a full wipe of the system without checking for a previous installation is a kindness on their part; should this Psystar case go south for them, expect more draconian restrictions. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple required you to bring in your Mac to an authorized repair center for an upgrade, especially since the majority of their (non-technical) customers never bother upgrading and wouldn't be inconvenienced. Any loss from retail would be easily balanced by protected hardware sales.
Try selling white boxes and bundling in copies of a Vista upgrade pack instead of the OEM package, and see how long it is before Microsoft is banging on your door. Actually, Microsoft wouldn't care unless you flaunted it, just like Psystar did; then they would be forced to act.
I took the argument to the extreme just to show the inherent flaw in your reasoning. I forgot that a fundamental trait of Slashdot is the inability to detect sarcasm. I'll use emoticons next time.
You're trying to redefine a one-time lease as transfer-of-ownership, even though the leaser explicitly states otherwise. One party said that the transfer is a lease, but you want to claim it is a sale. The only thing you can do is refuse to take part in the transaction.
Do you do the same at Hertz? "Oh, this wasn't a rental agreement. You sold me that car for $55."
If you're hung up on the concept of physical loss, then what about time? Would you like it if you came into work one day (assuming you're not sucking off the government's teat) to find that your employer has decided not to pay you for the last four weeks of work? It's not like you physically lost something; you didn't sell a concrete entity to your employer.
I would bet dollars to donuts you would have a lawyer on the line before you left the building, because you would (justifiably) feel robbed.
My objection wasn't to the sale-versus-lease issue; my objection to the original poster was that he felt that he had the "right" to break the law because the government was corrupt. If someone hurts you, then you go after the people that hurt you, not a third party.
My (purposely ridiculous) response was that if you believe that being taken advantage of gives you free reign, then by the same logic you won't mind if I commit a crime against you. The choice of burglary was poor in the light of the question of ownership; I should have said "...and we'll drop by and rape you" instead. After all, once the injuries heal, the original poster hasn't suffered a physical loss...
I've always enjoyed the hypocrisy of this mentality: Peter is robbing me, so I'm morally right in robbing Paul.
If you don't like the terms of a product, then don't buy the product. That's all you're morally allowed to do. Disagreement with an organization's policies does not give you any rights to ignore responsibility.
Those that feel differently are kindly instructed to post their home addresses; my friends and I will drop by shortly to loot your homes.
There's more sense in that comment than most people realize, and it's why the eternal argument will never be settled: everyone has different valuations for their time. Carl Howe covered this awhile back; he is usually pro-Apple, but this article is well-balanced: http://hardware.seekingalpha.com/article/30109.
That's wishful thinking from a lot of UNIX hacks hoping to pop open a bourne shell on their phone and hack away. "OS X" and "MacOS X" are two different beasts: the former is the kernel (Xnu) and application libraries (CoreFoundation; Cocoa); the latter is a superset that can be installed on a Macintosh. I'd be surprised if there are any of the aforementioned userland tools on the phone; they are unnecessary for applications to run.
Remember, the damn thing needs space to store music and videos. The designers won't fill up its internal memory with text processing utilities on the off chance that some future application needs 'grep.'
Microsoft sold all of its shares in Apple years ago (at a tidy profit, too). "Microsoft (still) owns Apple" is an urban legend that will not die.
Hey, the quote's from Rob Enderle. I'm willing to believe anything he says; he's so objective.
Not only will the stockholders revolt, but they would lose most of their executive talent. Corporate executives for the most part are not relaxed, patient types: they want immediate results. They want action. They want excitement. The first billion is never enough. Nor is the second.
The past history of Microsoft shows this behavior is endemic within the upper eschelons of the company. If the balance books turned even the slightest bit red, you can be sure the company would switch into full panic mode. The problem with panic mode is that companies take dangerous risks during those times... Billions could disappear overnight.
Last I heard, IE 5 was the last version of IE made for the Mac, because future browser enhancements required the "sophistication" of Longhorn. Whether this decision was the result of or the cause of Safari is an exercise left to the reader.
It's funny in a way... CSS requirements for Safari made Apple radically improve system-wide typography services in Panther (drop shadows, et cetera).
With the loss of Avalon as a direct feature of Longhorn, one has to wonder what "manditory" features in the next generation of Internet Explorer cannot still be provided under MacOS X.
They can call their Windows Media player the "wmp-e."
If Microsoft were the only company to implement this protocol, it would be more effective than they ever dreamed:
Microsoft should be congratulated, not censured, for coming up with such a scheme to help edge detection of spam.
Not true.
Icons in MacOS X are 128x128 rasters, with smaller versions at 48x48, 32x32 and 16x16. The display manager picks the most appropriate size and uses bicubic interpolation to scale it down. IconComposer (in /Developer/Applications/) can show all four sizes.
You can see this if you find a file with an icon that is different for each size. As you scale it down, it changes abruptly when it hits a transition point. You can see this effect if you scale down the icon for Adobe Reader (the stylized "A" suddenly gets larger relative to the rest of the icon). MacDict X is a more extreme example, with completely different icons for all three sizes.
As far as I know, the only desktop system to use pure vector icons was the old Magic Desktop on IRIX boxes, and the shapes were limited to filled polygons.