But that doesn't make sense - why is this guy entitled to more money just because of where he was born? Why should I (as the customer wanting my bathroom tiled) pay more just because he wants me to?
You're missing the point: people who hire illegal immigrants are often doing so because they're also violating other labor laws. Not only do they pay below what we would consider a "working wage", but they often enough pay below minimum wage.
In essence, you're selling a product on the market, but you're being undercut by the black market. No one owes me customers, but people are supposed to follow the law.
But no, it's not really the fault of "the mexicans". It's the fault of businesses who seek out and use illegal workers, and who lobby against immigration reform. They don't want the illegal immigrants out of the country, and they don't want them to become legal either. They want a large army of illegal immigrants who will be too afraid of being deported to report labor law violations and unsafe working conditions.
Well it's not exactly that illegal immigrants ruined the economy. There were multiple factors, including manipulation in the housing and finance sectors. We've also refused to invest in public infrastructure, which isn't doing us any favors.
However, even the specific problem you're talking about isn't just an issue of illegal immigration, but an erosion of the value of blue collar work. We outsource things overseas, and for the things we can't outsource, we bring in illegal immigrants. People have the problem a bit backwards and they blame the immigrants themselves, but really we're enticing them to come. We're offering them jobs which, by their standards might be high-paying, but by our standards are inhumane.
We also teach our children that they shouldn't be interested in any kind of blue collar work, since manual labor is for the lazy and the stupid. We don't teach our kids that there's any honor in a hard day's work. Meanwhile, we don't provide good public education because we think it would be "communist".
It's almost as if we're trying to create a perfect storm of economic collapse.
Well, this completely solves the illegal immigration problem! I mean, it's not like people will give illegal immigrants jobs if they don't have valid "job cards." After all, then they would need to pay the immigrants cash under the table or something. And, of course, these cards will be 100% forgery proof so immigrants won't be able to just get a fake ID.
Well part of the problem is that you can't currently prosecute people for hiring illegal immigrants, at least not very easily, because it's easy enough to claim, "I didn't know." Employers can't even seek to verify whether they're legal very easily, since they could run afoul of discrimination laws.
So if you want to be able to crack down on businesses that employ illegal immigrants, then you need to provide them with a framework where they can verify that someone is legally allowed to work. There aren't many ways to do that.
Sorry, but at least part of the problem is, why am I expected to buy separate data plans for each mobile device that I have? I have paid for a data plan for my phone, so why should I have to pay for an additional plan for either the iPad or the MiFi?
That's the reason you get such a discount compared to a $60 a month 5 GB plan...
What's the reason? Is the "unlimited" data plan for the iPhone or iPad capped under 5GB? If AT&T wanted to charge $60 for 5GB, they easily could have done that, but they chose to charge $30 for "unlimited" data. If I use a set amount of data, what difference does it make to them if some of that data passes to another device?
Let's just be honest hear: They're charging too much and imposing arbitrary restrictions because there's minimal competition, minimal regulation, and they believe that their customers will put up with being charged for a separate plan for each and every device they own.
... you don't have to worry about different versions, updating is a snap...
Only problem here, and it's worth mentioning: it also means that you can't just stick with a stable version.
No, no, not "stable" like "doesn't crash". "Stable" like "doesn't change". There are users out there happily using Office 2000 and it hasn't changed because it is installed locally on their computers. There isn't going to be anyone happily using a 3-year-old version of Google Docs, since it's seamlessly automatically upgraded behind the scenes. Wake up one day, and things are different.
Not that it's the end of the world. I just think it's good to recognize that many times perfectly good features like "automatically and seamlessly updates itself to always have the newest version" have a flip side that might possibly annoy the crap out of someone.
Not Flash, but Adobe pushes a little sometimes. Sometimes they push directly on consumers, and sometimes they push on their partners (e.g. Apple, Microsoft). There was a story about Adobe trying to block certain features from HTML 5 because they would diminish the need for Flash.
I wouldn't say that Adobe is a bigger bully than Apple or Microsoft. But yes, Adobe is pushing against improving web standards that would make it unnecessary for web developers to buy Flash.
WoW isn't "human contact" either. Video chat is getting close, since you can actually see people, but it's still psychologically and experientially different than sitting in the same room as someone.
When you have VR where you can feel the sensation of giving a hug, holding a hand, and elbowing someone in the ribs (unscripted and natural gestures), then we'll talk.
They're pulling people away from Flash because they want to be the gateway to Internet content, via the sweet deal with MPEG LA (who owns the H.264 patent) that will keep other players--especially open source software--out of the market.
How is Apple going to be the gateway for all H264 content?
If Apple really had our best interests at heart, they would be either 1) pushing Ogg Theora as a baseline video standard, or 2) working to release H.264 into the public domain so that everyone can use the arguably "better" codec.
Well I don't think they have control of the H264 patents, so I'm not sure they can do much to force it into the public domain. As for Ogg Theora, it's necessary to ask the question, why didn't Apple use it as their format of choice? There may be various kinds of reasons.
In fact, speaking of an unencumbered codec, have you noticed that Safari, by deliberate choice, does not support Ogg Theora?
Well I'm not sure what you mean by "by deliberate choice". Apple doesn't include a codec for Ogg in Quicktime by default, but you can download the codec from Xiph and install it. Safari plays whatever formats Quicktime plays.
Microsoft is blissfully quiet on the matter and doesn't support either yet. But Safari? The odd man out, the only browser that could support both and has chosen not to.
No, Microsoft supports H264 in the default install of Windows 7, but they don't support Ogg. Also, many open source projects support H264 in some form, depending on how observant they are of US patent laws. Also, though Google has Ogg support in Chrome, they generally aren't supporting Ogg on their sites. Safari isn't really odd-man-out here.
Well "put an end to Flash" for what? AFAIK HTML5 still can't replicated Flash games very well, so there will probably still be a use for Flash.
However, most of what people use Flash and Silverlight for these days is watching movies. More and more, the videos are MPEG4 videos using H264 and AAC. People tend to use Flash and Silverlight as players, but really that's all they are-- media players. Flash is taking the place of VLC or Quicktime or WMP, decoding H264.
The reason people have used Flash for this purpose is largely because it could be embedded in the website. Up until recently, embedding a video into a webpage wasn't supported very well by most browsers. The normal methods for embedding video didn't provide much control, and it was hard to tell how the client browser would respond. Using Flash, you could tell it, "Don't load the video right away, but just show a thumbnail with video playback controls. Make the controls look like this. When the video is done playing, automatically play the next video in this playlist..." along with a lot of other controls. If you didn't use Flash, then the video might get loaded by Quicktime, WMP, Real Player, VLC, or god-knows-what video player and you had no idea what the player would present the user with.
So now HTML5 comes along and provides better controls for those sorts of things. It may not be perfect, but if the functionality is sufficient it's preferable to decode the video in your system's media player. Flash isn't very efficient or stable on anything other than Windows, and often isn't installed by standard on Linux systems. Plus, it's one less arbitrary piece of software that you need to install on every system, and one fewer instance of vendor lock-in.
So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.
Well they haven't really solved those problems. Nobody has solved those problems yet. Instead, I'd say they did something like... provide us with such an addictive semi-social activity that we don't realize how isolated we are. It is indeed very clever and profitable.
Reading and posting on a social networking site is not "human contact". Maybe we will someday have such a terrific VR system on the Internet that we can emulate genuine human contact and provide most of the physical/psychology health benefits of interacting people other people, but Facebook aint it.
Well I think it's a bit more complicated than that. It's true that different people come to HTML looking for different things. Some people are happier looking at HTML in a text-based browser like Links, while some want very pretty custom-designed pages that are pixel-perfect and identical on all browsers. The split between content and presentation theoretically allows for both camps (and everyone in between) to walk away satisfied. Well, maybe not completely happy, but close enough to make it a good all-around solution.
Unfortunately, HTML and CSS have some problems of their own. There were places where the standards weren't specific enough or failed to anticipate how the technology would actually be used. Some of this is being improved. They're adding better animation, layout, and multimedia support to HTML 5. Or another example: you're starting to see browser provide better support for custom web fonts, which is important for providing control over layout and display.
Another problem is that a lot of people have thrown themselves into the world of "web development" without educating themselves on how it's supposed to work. There's not much you can do there. Even if the standards themselves were perfect, you can't stop people from using them badly.
I don't know if HTML will ever become quite as pixel-perfect across all systems as a PDF, but HTML+CSS does provide decent control right now. A even bigger problem is the fact that 1 browser in particular has spent years flouting standards, thereby requiring designers to employ various hacks to accomplish even simple layouts.
Well yes, that's why I said that each can be improved. I can't say I'm exactly happy with CSS and HTML either in design or implementation, but I like the general setup of having a semantic markup with a separate style sheet that instructs how things should be displayed. In my opinion, CSS should continue to be updated to diminish the need for javascript for animations and things.
As far as I understand, your link to "semantics through CSS" is just using the class of an object for semantic information, which I don't think is much of a violation.
I think the biggest screwiness in the system comes from (a) hacks to support browsers that aren't compliant; (b) hacks to provide functionality that isn't yet available in HTML or CSS; and (c) the fact that having a dynamic page probably means having a weird mix of javascript, HTML, XML, CSS, and PHP (or some other server-side language). The hacks may be dealt with as HTML and CSS are improved, but (c) will linger a bit unless there's more of a fundamental shift.
Still, however good a system you create, you won't be able to keep people from doing things in weird and/or improper ways. Still, I like the idea of a semi-MVC breakdown that allows you to structure documents in a sensible way and then to give context-specific instructions on how to display that information.
You have a text markup language based on the idea of the client choosing how to display data being used to display pixel perfect displays.
This is the part of it that I really don't have a problem with. I think it's great that HTML is somewhat separated from layout and display, since it theoretically enables people to create semantic markup and then create a style somewhat separately. Though HTML and CSS can each be improved, I like the fact that there is that split. The semantic markup theoretically allows for the content to be parsed for different purposes, e.g. screen readers, news feeds, alternate displays.
At the same time, I live in NYC and can't get DSL, let alone FIOS. Yes, there are metro ethernet providers, if you want to spend several hundred dollars a month for 10Mbps, and that's only available maybe sort-of in some places, if you're lucky. The *only* option is cable, which... yes, it's true, if you want to lock yourself into a 3 year contract at $100/month, you can get 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up.
Yeah, I know, lots of people in the US would give their left arm for a $100/month 50Mbps download pipe, but still, I'm not impressed. It's one of the largest, richest, most influential cities in the world, and if I want an upload faster than 5Mbps, I have to spend at least $1,500/month. Also, that $1,500/month connection will take at least 3-4 months from the order date until it gets turned on. Seriously.
Oh, and also that $100/month 50Mbps connection drops at least once a day, often enough requiring you to reboot the cable modem. Yay!
I wish TV shows would start finding ways to cut both "networks" and "cable providers" out of the whole deal and take the show to the consumers. I know there aren't great business models yet, but just create those business models and keep all those millions in "retransmission fees" for yourselves.
Well I'm not so much questioning whether the Steam client will be done through WINE. A lot of the client is done with HTML anyway, so I don't think that's too interesting of a question. I was more wondering whether they'd support games like Portal and Half Life on Mac, but using WINE instead of trying to port them.
Heck, it's a great way to play Valve's games on MacOS (at least until Steam comes to native OS X).
I've really been wondering if Steam is going to be completely native, or if they'll just offer a reskinned version which includes some kind of embedded version of WINE. I played Portal and Half Life Ep 2 on a mac using Codeweavers, and it wasn't bad. I can see Steam just supporting that sort of configuration rather than trying to port completely native versions of all their games.
Yeah, well... that's why I asked the question. However, if the boss isn't around too often and his son is somewhat manageable and the economy is falling apart and you have an otherwise good, high-paying job, you might not want to quit immediately.
If the boss isn't intelligent enough I wouldn't expect him or her to remain in business long
Meh. You really buy into the idea that success is determined by ability and virtue, or what? Like bad businesses never make money? If a company manages to stay afloat, it means the owner was smart and mature and professional?
Doesn't really work that way. You just need to be entrenched, be less incompetent than your direct competition, or have better connections than your competition. Sometimes it's better sales and marketing, worse product. Sometimes your boss is good at some things that really matter, but still an unprofessional irrational bastard. And sometimes your boss isn't so bad when you add it all up, but he's still not emotionally detached enough to stay rational when he thinks his son is being insulted.
The standard is not at fault when people simply don't implement it correctly. "Slightly altered" usually means "violating the spec" and "working only by coincidence".
Depends on how flexible the container is and how explicit the standard is. If the standard leaves room for interpretation and alternate implementations, then it may be possible to create two incompatible yet standard-compliant implementations.
But yes, if all video players came with full support for every codec and every variation of every container format, then we wouldn't have practical compatibility issues. On the other hand, almost every graphic viewer can read both GIFs and JPEGs, but that hasn't incited us to use the same file extensions.
Yes, the situation is getting better as everyone is migrating to H264 and AAC, but I see that as supporting my side of the argument here: it's often easier when you standardize rather than trying to devise a way to support every last possible variation.
Slashdot Mirror
But that doesn't make sense - why is this guy entitled to more money just because of where he was born? Why should I (as the customer wanting my bathroom tiled) pay more just because he wants me to?
You're missing the point: people who hire illegal immigrants are often doing so because they're also violating other labor laws. Not only do they pay below what we would consider a "working wage", but they often enough pay below minimum wage.
In essence, you're selling a product on the market, but you're being undercut by the black market. No one owes me customers, but people are supposed to follow the law.
But no, it's not really the fault of "the mexicans". It's the fault of businesses who seek out and use illegal workers, and who lobby against immigration reform. They don't want the illegal immigrants out of the country, and they don't want them to become legal either. They want a large army of illegal immigrants who will be too afraid of being deported to report labor law violations and unsafe working conditions.
... especially not if you're planning to have a "cold dead body".
Well it's not exactly that illegal immigrants ruined the economy. There were multiple factors, including manipulation in the housing and finance sectors. We've also refused to invest in public infrastructure, which isn't doing us any favors.
However, even the specific problem you're talking about isn't just an issue of illegal immigration, but an erosion of the value of blue collar work. We outsource things overseas, and for the things we can't outsource, we bring in illegal immigrants. People have the problem a bit backwards and they blame the immigrants themselves, but really we're enticing them to come. We're offering them jobs which, by their standards might be high-paying, but by our standards are inhumane.
We also teach our children that they shouldn't be interested in any kind of blue collar work, since manual labor is for the lazy and the stupid. We don't teach our kids that there's any honor in a hard day's work. Meanwhile, we don't provide good public education because we think it would be "communist".
It's almost as if we're trying to create a perfect storm of economic collapse.
Well, this completely solves the illegal immigration problem! I mean, it's not like people will give illegal immigrants jobs if they don't have valid "job cards." After all, then they would need to pay the immigrants cash under the table or something. And, of course, these cards will be 100% forgery proof so immigrants won't be able to just get a fake ID.
Well part of the problem is that you can't currently prosecute people for hiring illegal immigrants, at least not very easily, because it's easy enough to claim, "I didn't know." Employers can't even seek to verify whether they're legal very easily, since they could run afoul of discrimination laws.
So if you want to be able to crack down on businesses that employ illegal immigrants, then you need to provide them with a framework where they can verify that someone is legally allowed to work. There aren't many ways to do that.
Oh, or support meaningful regulation.
Well one alternative is to not buy a data plan.
There's no real reason that I should have to buy a MiFi and swap SIMs in and out. My phone has WiFi and should be able to set up an ad-hock network.
Jobs, or AT&T?
Sorry, but at least part of the problem is, why am I expected to buy separate data plans for each mobile device that I have? I have paid for a data plan for my phone, so why should I have to pay for an additional plan for either the iPad or the MiFi?
That's the reason you get such a discount compared to a $60 a month 5 GB plan...
What's the reason? Is the "unlimited" data plan for the iPhone or iPad capped under 5GB? If AT&T wanted to charge $60 for 5GB, they easily could have done that, but they chose to charge $30 for "unlimited" data. If I use a set amount of data, what difference does it make to them if some of that data passes to another device?
Let's just be honest hear: They're charging too much and imposing arbitrary restrictions because there's minimal competition, minimal regulation, and they believe that their customers will put up with being charged for a separate plan for each and every device they own.
... you don't have to worry about different versions, updating is a snap...
Only problem here, and it's worth mentioning: it also means that you can't just stick with a stable version.
No, no, not "stable" like "doesn't crash". "Stable" like "doesn't change". There are users out there happily using Office 2000 and it hasn't changed because it is installed locally on their computers. There isn't going to be anyone happily using a 3-year-old version of Google Docs, since it's seamlessly automatically upgraded behind the scenes. Wake up one day, and things are different.
Not that it's the end of the world. I just think it's good to recognize that many times perfectly good features like "automatically and seamlessly updates itself to always have the newest version" have a flip side that might possibly annoy the crap out of someone.
Not Flash, but Adobe pushes a little sometimes. Sometimes they push directly on consumers, and sometimes they push on their partners (e.g. Apple, Microsoft). There was a story about Adobe trying to block certain features from HTML 5 because they would diminish the need for Flash.
I wouldn't say that Adobe is a bigger bully than Apple or Microsoft. But yes, Adobe is pushing against improving web standards that would make it unnecessary for web developers to buy Flash.
WoW isn't "human contact" either. Video chat is getting close, since you can actually see people, but it's still psychologically and experientially different than sitting in the same room as someone.
When you have VR where you can feel the sensation of giving a hug, holding a hand, and elbowing someone in the ribs (unscripted and natural gestures), then we'll talk.
They're pulling people away from Flash because they want to be the gateway to Internet content, via the sweet deal with MPEG LA (who owns the H.264 patent) that will keep other players--especially open source software--out of the market.
How is Apple going to be the gateway for all H264 content?
If Apple really had our best interests at heart, they would be either 1) pushing Ogg Theora as a baseline video standard, or 2) working to release H.264 into the public domain so that everyone can use the arguably "better" codec.
Well I don't think they have control of the H264 patents, so I'm not sure they can do much to force it into the public domain. As for Ogg Theora, it's necessary to ask the question, why didn't Apple use it as their format of choice? There may be various kinds of reasons.
In fact, speaking of an unencumbered codec, have you noticed that Safari, by deliberate choice, does not support Ogg Theora?
Well I'm not sure what you mean by "by deliberate choice". Apple doesn't include a codec for Ogg in Quicktime by default, but you can download the codec from Xiph and install it. Safari plays whatever formats Quicktime plays.
Microsoft is blissfully quiet on the matter and doesn't support either yet. But Safari? The odd man out, the only browser that could support both and has chosen not to.
No, Microsoft supports H264 in the default install of Windows 7, but they don't support Ogg. Also, many open source projects support H264 in some form, depending on how observant they are of US patent laws. Also, though Google has Ogg support in Chrome, they generally aren't supporting Ogg on their sites. Safari isn't really odd-man-out here.
Well "put an end to Flash" for what? AFAIK HTML5 still can't replicated Flash games very well, so there will probably still be a use for Flash.
However, most of what people use Flash and Silverlight for these days is watching movies. More and more, the videos are MPEG4 videos using H264 and AAC. People tend to use Flash and Silverlight as players, but really that's all they are-- media players. Flash is taking the place of VLC or Quicktime or WMP, decoding H264.
The reason people have used Flash for this purpose is largely because it could be embedded in the website. Up until recently, embedding a video into a webpage wasn't supported very well by most browsers. The normal methods for embedding video didn't provide much control, and it was hard to tell how the client browser would respond. Using Flash, you could tell it, "Don't load the video right away, but just show a thumbnail with video playback controls. Make the controls look like this. When the video is done playing, automatically play the next video in this playlist..." along with a lot of other controls. If you didn't use Flash, then the video might get loaded by Quicktime, WMP, Real Player, VLC, or god-knows-what video player and you had no idea what the player would present the user with.
So now HTML5 comes along and provides better controls for those sorts of things. It may not be perfect, but if the functionality is sufficient it's preferable to decode the video in your system's media player. Flash isn't very efficient or stable on anything other than Windows, and often isn't installed by standard on Linux systems. Plus, it's one less arbitrary piece of software that you need to install on every system, and one fewer instance of vendor lock-in.
If something is done in flash, it is almost definitely done using a proprietary codec(either one of Adobe's weirdo legacy proprietary codecs, or h264)
For the record, Adobe's "weirdo legacy proprietary codec" was basically h263.
Not that I disagree with your post in general. Just letting you know.
So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.
Well they haven't really solved those problems. Nobody has solved those problems yet. Instead, I'd say they did something like... provide us with such an addictive semi-social activity that we don't realize how isolated we are. It is indeed very clever and profitable.
Reading and posting on a social networking site is not "human contact". Maybe we will someday have such a terrific VR system on the Internet that we can emulate genuine human contact and provide most of the physical/psychology health benefits of interacting people other people, but Facebook aint it.
Well I think it's a bit more complicated than that. It's true that different people come to HTML looking for different things. Some people are happier looking at HTML in a text-based browser like Links, while some want very pretty custom-designed pages that are pixel-perfect and identical on all browsers. The split between content and presentation theoretically allows for both camps (and everyone in between) to walk away satisfied. Well, maybe not completely happy, but close enough to make it a good all-around solution.
Unfortunately, HTML and CSS have some problems of their own. There were places where the standards weren't specific enough or failed to anticipate how the technology would actually be used. Some of this is being improved. They're adding better animation, layout, and multimedia support to HTML 5. Or another example: you're starting to see browser provide better support for custom web fonts, which is important for providing control over layout and display.
Another problem is that a lot of people have thrown themselves into the world of "web development" without educating themselves on how it's supposed to work. There's not much you can do there. Even if the standards themselves were perfect, you can't stop people from using them badly.
I don't know if HTML will ever become quite as pixel-perfect across all systems as a PDF, but HTML+CSS does provide decent control right now. A even bigger problem is the fact that 1 browser in particular has spent years flouting standards, thereby requiring designers to employ various hacks to accomplish even simple layouts.
Well yes, that's why I said that each can be improved. I can't say I'm exactly happy with CSS and HTML either in design or implementation, but I like the general setup of having a semantic markup with a separate style sheet that instructs how things should be displayed. In my opinion, CSS should continue to be updated to diminish the need for javascript for animations and things.
As far as I understand, your link to "semantics through CSS" is just using the class of an object for semantic information, which I don't think is much of a violation.
I think the biggest screwiness in the system comes from (a) hacks to support browsers that aren't compliant; (b) hacks to provide functionality that isn't yet available in HTML or CSS; and (c) the fact that having a dynamic page probably means having a weird mix of javascript, HTML, XML, CSS, and PHP (or some other server-side language). The hacks may be dealt with as HTML and CSS are improved, but (c) will linger a bit unless there's more of a fundamental shift.
Still, however good a system you create, you won't be able to keep people from doing things in weird and/or improper ways. Still, I like the idea of a semi-MVC breakdown that allows you to structure documents in a sensible way and then to give context-specific instructions on how to display that information.
You have a text markup language based on the idea of the client choosing how to display data being used to display pixel perfect displays.
This is the part of it that I really don't have a problem with. I think it's great that HTML is somewhat separated from layout and display, since it theoretically enables people to create semantic markup and then create a style somewhat separately. Though HTML and CSS can each be improved, I like the fact that there is that split. The semantic markup theoretically allows for the content to be parsed for different purposes, e.g. screen readers, news feeds, alternate displays.
At the same time, I live in NYC and can't get DSL, let alone FIOS. Yes, there are metro ethernet providers, if you want to spend several hundred dollars a month for 10Mbps, and that's only available maybe sort-of in some places, if you're lucky. The *only* option is cable, which... yes, it's true, if you want to lock yourself into a 3 year contract at $100/month, you can get 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up.
Yeah, I know, lots of people in the US would give their left arm for a $100/month 50Mbps download pipe, but still, I'm not impressed. It's one of the largest, richest, most influential cities in the world, and if I want an upload faster than 5Mbps, I have to spend at least $1,500/month. Also, that $1,500/month connection will take at least 3-4 months from the order date until it gets turned on. Seriously.
Oh, and also that $100/month 50Mbps connection drops at least once a day, often enough requiring you to reboot the cable modem. Yay!
Keep your ABC channels... and Fuck Cablevision.
I wish TV shows would start finding ways to cut both "networks" and "cable providers" out of the whole deal and take the show to the consumers. I know there aren't great business models yet, but just create those business models and keep all those millions in "retransmission fees" for yourselves.
Well I'm not so much questioning whether the Steam client will be done through WINE. A lot of the client is done with HTML anyway, so I don't think that's too interesting of a question. I was more wondering whether they'd support games like Portal and Half Life on Mac, but using WINE instead of trying to port them.
Heck, it's a great way to play Valve's games on MacOS (at least until Steam comes to native OS X).
I've really been wondering if Steam is going to be completely native, or if they'll just offer a reskinned version which includes some kind of embedded version of WINE. I played Portal and Half Life Ep 2 on a mac using Codeweavers, and it wasn't bad. I can see Steam just supporting that sort of configuration rather than trying to port completely native versions of all their games.
Yeah, well... that's why I asked the question. However, if the boss isn't around too often and his son is somewhat manageable and the economy is falling apart and you have an otherwise good, high-paying job, you might not want to quit immediately.
If the boss isn't intelligent enough I wouldn't expect him or her to remain in business long
Meh. You really buy into the idea that success is determined by ability and virtue, or what? Like bad businesses never make money? If a company manages to stay afloat, it means the owner was smart and mature and professional?
Doesn't really work that way. You just need to be entrenched, be less incompetent than your direct competition, or have better connections than your competition. Sometimes it's better sales and marketing, worse product. Sometimes your boss is good at some things that really matter, but still an unprofessional irrational bastard. And sometimes your boss isn't so bad when you add it all up, but he's still not emotionally detached enough to stay rational when he thinks his son is being insulted.
The standard is not at fault when people simply don't implement it correctly. "Slightly altered" usually means "violating the spec" and "working only by coincidence".
Depends on how flexible the container is and how explicit the standard is. If the standard leaves room for interpretation and alternate implementations, then it may be possible to create two incompatible yet standard-compliant implementations.
But yes, if all video players came with full support for every codec and every variation of every container format, then we wouldn't have practical compatibility issues. On the other hand, almost every graphic viewer can read both GIFs and JPEGs, but that hasn't incited us to use the same file extensions.
Yes, the situation is getting better as everyone is migrating to H264 and AAC, but I see that as supporting my side of the argument here: it's often easier when you standardize rather than trying to devise a way to support every last possible variation.