Free to air statellite has been big in Europe since the 1980s, and digital (DVD-S) since the 1990s.
Hacked Linux-based receivers have pretty much dominated the European DVB-S market for the last decade, and especialy in FTA.
It's a shame that it has had little attention from Slashdot and other mainstream open source media over the years, because that has left the field free for some pretty unsavoury people in the TV encryption cracking market.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that cracked satellite receivers were up there with cracked routers as a major source of Linux malware.
Your problem with CSS appears to be that you aren't familiar enough with it to use it effectively. That's expected, and the same would be true for any sufficiently complicated system.
Mod my parent up. The vast majority of the anti-CSS comments here appear to come from hubris-sufferers who couldn't be bothered to research the language or the browsers properly.
Truth is, practically all serious problems and divergencies come from one family of browsers (we all know which). If you understand how to put them into their standards modes and how to control their ridiculous hasLayout property, all of the problems described so far go away instantly.
The report could be dismissed as statistical noise if the slight decline weren't also reflected at sites like w3schools.
As we all know, surveys are no more reliable than their sampling procedures and reliable surveys are not necessarily valid.
For the time being, I'm inclined to accept the argument for noise, but there are also many anti-firefox biases in standard browser counting methods.
Most are relatively consistent over time, but there is one obvious one which increases with firefox use.
With experience, Firefox users increasingly find and deploy extensions which block the images and scripts that research companies use to count user behaviour.
I try to avoid blocking the more obvious ones, but it's far from easy to distinguish them from spam-minded market research.
I beg to differ with you too. I am typing this from the UK on a machine bought new directly from Dell (a reasonably well-known brand) six months ago for exactly 200 pounds including the tax. That's 361.33 US dollars at today's rate. I believe that you got fewer dollars to the pound six months ago. The chip may be cellery, but it's fast enough for most non-gamers.
"Microsoft won't implement it [XForms] and instead use its XAML form specification. And since IE has over 90% of the market, that would make Xforms essentially irrelevant... So it is a pretty big deal".
You are so right, and the decisive factor is timing.
Given the fact that everyone but Microsoft (EBM) can implement backwards compatible Web Forms 2.0 pretty much immediately, and the fact that XForms has no chance of achieving widespread delpoyment before Longhorn arrives, people who are serious about standards-based (in practice) have virtually no choice at all.
In the short term, standards practitioners have to support Web Forms 2.0 and to argue for its adoption by W3C. The only alternative is to sit on the sidelines whingeing, while hordes of MS-only web developers gradually transform the web into a.Net walled garden.
As the coexistence of transitional/strict HTML and XHTML (or CSS and XSLT) demonstrate, there is no reason why you can't have two or more competing standards covering the same area, especially when one can be considered a pragmatic precursor/pre-requisite for the other.
If XAML is the success that Microsoft hope for, there will simply never be any signifiant implementation of XForms.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of content by origin.
I suspect a much higher proportion of the content is uk originated and older than many of our American cousins would think.
Sure, the lag between US and UK airing of big new shows is important, but the UK has a huge back catalogue of high quality indigenous content.
The blessed BBC and our private sector public service broadcasters have decades' worth of timeless gems sitting in their archives.
Only a very tiny proportion of this back catalogue is actually aired, mainly due to licencing deals with subscription based digital channels.
As a consequence there is significant demand for downloaded DVD rips of series from the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, that haven't been seen on free-to-air TV for decades. The first re-showing of "The Prisoner" for ages and the recent revival of Doctor Who are indicators of this demand.
Anyone who is interested in improving the web or merely keeping the web open.
So long as 90 percent of users see the web through IE, it will remain crippled and vulnerable to desktop client-based lock-in.
All of Microsoft's published plans and statements about IE and Longhorn confirm their intention to engineer the maximum tie-in between the web and.Net.
The Apache webserver enables the technical possibility of an open web, but dominance of the desktop client is required to guarrantee it's practical likelihood.
Only by taking share off IE is it possible to build sites which demonstrate the practical benefits of standards-based web design to non-technical users.
Right now, up to 90 percent of the effort in standards-based design goes into accomodating IE's crippled CSS... which is why many web designers can't be bothered.
And the US Federal budget is not on top of US state budgets?
I believe that the Californian state budget is several times larger than the UK national budget.
The total annual EU budget is about 200 million Euros ( http://europa.eu.int/comm/budget/faq/index_en.htm# 2)
The CIA (admittedly an unreliable source) reckons that 2003 US Federal revenue was 1.782 trillion dollars and expenditure 2.156 trillion dollars.... tthe deficit has risen considerably since. (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factb ook/geos/us.html#Govt)
The US population and economy are considerably smaller than those of the EU.
Slashdot Mirror
Free to air statellite has been big in Europe since the 1980s, and digital (DVD-S) since the 1990s.
Hacked Linux-based receivers have pretty much dominated the European DVB-S market for the last decade, and especialy in FTA.
It's a shame that it has had little attention from Slashdot and other mainstream open source media over the years, because that has left the field free for some pretty unsavoury people in the TV encryption cracking market.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that cracked satellite receivers were up there with cracked routers as a major source of Linux malware.
I certainly spend more time dealing with webkit quirks than IE quirks these days, thanks to the demise of IE6 and IE7.
So far, few of the visual 'bugs' I've encountered in webkit have been strictly 'non-standard'.
They pretty much ll fall into two categories:
Your problem with CSS appears to be that you aren't familiar enough with it to use it effectively. That's expected, and the same would be true for any sufficiently complicated system.
Mod my parent up. The vast majority of the anti-CSS comments here appear to come from hubris-sufferers who couldn't be bothered to research the language or the browsers properly. Truth is, practically all serious problems and divergencies come from one family of browsers (we all know which). If you understand how to put them into their standards modes and how to control their ridiculous hasLayout property, all of the problems described so far go away instantly.
The report could be dismissed as statistical noise if the slight decline weren't also reflected at sites like w3schools.
As we all know, surveys are no more reliable than their sampling procedures and reliable surveys are not necessarily valid.
For the time being, I'm inclined to accept the argument for noise, but there are also many anti-firefox biases in standard browser counting methods.
Most are relatively consistent over time, but there is one obvious one which increases with firefox use.
With experience, Firefox users increasingly find and deploy extensions which block the images and scripts that research companies use to count user behaviour.
I try to avoid blocking the more obvious ones, but it's far from easy to distinguish them from spam-minded market research.
I beg to differ with you too. I am typing this from the UK on a machine bought new directly from Dell (a reasonably well-known brand) six months ago for exactly 200 pounds including the tax. That's 361.33 US dollars at today's rate. I believe that you got fewer dollars to the pound six months ago. The chip may be cellery, but it's fast enough for most non-gamers.
"Microsoft won't implement it [XForms] and instead use its XAML form specification. And since IE has over 90% of the market, that would make Xforms essentially irrelevant ... So it is a pretty big deal".
.Net walled garden.
You are so right, and the decisive factor is timing.
Given the fact that everyone but Microsoft (EBM) can implement backwards compatible Web Forms 2.0 pretty much immediately, and the fact that XForms has no chance of achieving widespread delpoyment before Longhorn arrives, people who are serious about standards-based (in practice) have virtually no choice at all.
In the short term, standards practitioners have to support Web Forms 2.0 and to argue for its adoption by W3C. The only alternative is to sit on the sidelines whingeing, while hordes of MS-only web developers gradually transform the web into a
As the coexistence of transitional/strict HTML and XHTML (or CSS and XSLT) demonstrate, there is no reason why you can't have two or more competing standards covering the same area, especially when one can be considered a pragmatic precursor/pre-requisite for the other.
If XAML is the success that Microsoft hope for, there will simply never be any signifiant implementation of XForms.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of content by origin.
I suspect a much higher proportion of the content is uk originated and older than many of our American cousins would think.
Sure, the lag between US and UK airing of big new shows is important, but the UK has a huge back catalogue of high quality indigenous content.
The blessed BBC and our private sector public service broadcasters have decades' worth of timeless gems sitting in their archives.
Only a very tiny proportion of this back catalogue is actually aired, mainly due to licencing deals with subscription based digital channels.
As a consequence there is significant demand for downloaded DVD rips of series from the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, that haven't been seen on free-to-air TV for decades. The first re-showing of "The Prisoner" for ages and the recent revival of Doctor Who are indicators of this demand.
"Who really cares if it competes with IE?"
.Net.
... which is why many web designers can't be bothered.
Anyone who is interested in improving the web or merely keeping the web open.
So long as 90 percent of users see the web through IE, it will remain crippled and vulnerable to desktop client-based lock-in.
All of Microsoft's published plans and statements about IE and Longhorn confirm their intention to engineer the maximum tie-in between the web and
The Apache webserver enables the technical possibility of an open web, but dominance of the desktop client is required to guarrantee it's practical likelihood.
Only by taking share off IE is it possible to build sites which demonstrate the practical benefits of standards-based web design to non-technical users.
Right now, up to 90 percent of the effort in standards-based design goes into accomodating IE's crippled CSS
And the US Federal budget is not on top of US state budgets? I believe that the Californian state budget is several times larger than the UK national budget.
Oh really?
# 2)
... tthe deficit has risen considerably since.b ook/geos /us.html#Govt)
The total annual EU budget is about 200 million Euros ( http://europa.eu.int/comm/budget/faq/index_en.htm
The CIA (admittedly an unreliable source) reckons that 2003 US Federal revenue was 1.782 trillion
dollars and expenditure 2.156 trillion dollars.
(http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/fact
The US population and economy are considerably smaller than those of the EU.