And yet, we have developed more knowledge of science and engineering in the past few years than in the few centuries before them. Somehow, despite most people working within the framework of copyright, or advances in technology and communications still allow ideas to be shared and progress to be made.
Neither scientific advances nor engineering advances are protected by copyrights, so your argument is spurious.
And, in any case, we are talking about music here, not science or engineering. Having copyrights for the latest Britney Spears song is not going to advance science or engineering.
Those nations that have strong copyright and patent laws have developed far beyond those that make at most a token effort, while the latter commonly derive a significant part of their economic value from a black market in trading the former's work, rather than creating work of a similar calibre on their own.
There is a correlation, but you are getting cause and effect wrong. The US was infamous for ignoring copyright and patent laws during its best years. The US computer industry became strong before patents and mostly before copyrights on computer software became a factor.
So, economically successful nations have strong patent and copyright laws, but they have them because economically successful nations also have powerful industry lobbies that use patents and copyrights to exclude competition. And you only need to look at the UK to see what the long term consequences of that are.
My ancestors were European peasants as far back as we can trace it (the 30 years war, around the time of the Mayflower). They did not enslave or harm anybody, they were mostly trying to scrape together a living while armies marauded through Europe, and I would say that that's the typical European ancestry. You can't blame your troubles on me or my ancestors.
But many of those "white Europeans" that you are so fond of complaining about didn't come to the US to rape and pillage, they were facing starvation or execution (often for petty offenses) in Europe and were effectively also slaves in the US; when they finally managed to free themselves, of course, they did whatever it took to survive. Likewise, many (most?) of those Africans that were sent to the US as slaves weren't captured and transported by white Europeans, they were enslaved and shipped over to the US by other Africans.
Finally, I ask you: what notions of human rights and liberty have non-Europeans produced? Prior to the age of European empires, much of the world consisted of traditional tribal cultures, and the few big cultures like India and China were ossified, stratified, and had made racism and classism an integral part of their culture. If you view Islam as a non-European culture, then it has perhaps the closest claim of any of the other cultures to recognizing human rights and liberty, but that's a distant second to what European philosophers and humanists produced.
You know, if white Europeans hadn't gone around and made their presence known throughout the entire planet by a combination of villainy, trickery and outright infamy,...
... then the Arabs or the Chinese or the Japanese or the Africans or whatever would have done it once they had reached the necessary level of technology and economic power.
Of course, they lacked the technology to do so. And why did they lack the technology? Because for all its faults, in the end, among all the nations of the earth, Europe was still the most advanced in terms of giving people freedom, liberty, and individual rights, all apparently necessary prerequisites for rapid technological and economic development.
a) kill millions of Native Americans (which the first right brilliant whites thought were Indians), b) bring in Africans to fill in the sudden drop in the cheap labor pool, c) declare those lucky Africans to be non-persons and property, d) have a few nasty wars against each other in which some whites convinced Indians that they were really friends before e) attempting to wipe them out of the Great Plains so that whites could move in.
Trouble with your history is that it wasn't just Europeans that were doing those things, many nations were, Europeans just happened to be better at it. And it was Europeans that laid the philosophical and political foundations for ending those practices as well.
Now maybe in a reality-free zone where everybody works for the common good and nobody takes more than his* fair share, that would be a reasonable thing to pass off as a fact. But Stallman's "facts" are impractial in the real world.
Human beings have produced great art, science, and engineering for millennia in the absence of copyright protection. The assertion that copyrights and patents have any social or economic merit at all is at best unproven.
So, the ideologues trying to push unproven ideas on the rest of us are people like you, people who make strained arguments that somehow society needs to bear the costs and complexities of IP law.
Go prove your case before you whine about Stallman.
There's no excuse for buffer overflows and memory leaks in C++, not with TR1's smart pointers and not with the standard library's containers.
I've been using smart pointers for nearly as long as I have been using C++, and I can assure you: they don't guarantee correct memory management. There simply is no way to do predictable, safe, well-defined memory management in C++. All smart pointers can do is reduce the probability that you screw up, but at a steep cost in terms of performance, and without any guarantee that third party code is as careful as you.
That's not even considering garbage collectors which have been available in C++ for years.
The only garbage collectors that work with normal C++ implementations are conservative, and those are both inefficient and not accurate.
You can't fix C++ without massive backwards incompatibilities.
Maybe the way to deal with shared memory is to just apportion it to applications. If there are 5 applications sharing 100M then each gets 20M. That way, we can get a better idea of how much impact each individual application has, assuming everything else remains the same.
Since there have been observations of galaxies consisting almost entirely of dark matter, it doesn't seem like a modification of the gravitational law is sufficient to account for the observations.
Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th
on
Google Delists BMW-Germany
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's like if Microsoft decided to cut off sales of Windows SDKs to an application software vendor who it decided didn't play by the rules... but of course, they're free to develop desktop applications for other operating systems.
You mean like they effectively do with driver signing and co-branding?
One can argue that BMW's behavior was improper and that Google's reaction was justified. But claiming that displaying different content to different classes of users (crawler, real-life person) constitutes "fraud" is going over the top.
No, it is NOT fraud to display different kinds of content to different site visitors, and I hope it never will be. And if it were fraud, it would be a matter for the police, not Google's page rank algorithm.
Photoshop didn't use to have 16 bit/channel images, and apparently it was good enough for "professional" use back then.
There is legitimate usability complaints and then there is whining. There are legitimate usability complaints one can make about both the Gimp and Photoshop. But the dislike of those vocal "professionals" for the Gimp is mostly whining: they aren't willint to learn anything that's different from what they are used to.
Let these people stick with Photoshop on Windows and pay a significant part of their earnings to those copmanies. Sooner or later, a new generation is going to figure it out.
This excuse is something that i expect to hear from someone with a tenuous grasp on programming who thinks the industry owes it to them to make things so simple that even they can do it.
Whether I can hack all the messy, complicated standards the industry has settled on doesn't matter--what matters is that is hard and costly to hire people who can. But, of course, you probably like that.
I see you think extensibility in programming languages is bad too;
Extensibility often is bad, yes. Furt ragles frimands in English(*).
IM and P2P are good innovations period, the fact that you cant see the technology despite the greedy companies shows a lack of vision.
The fact that you think that IM and P2P are innovations shows a lack of historical awareness.
C, C++, UNIX/Linux, VMS/NT --- all brilliant pieces of software responsible for nothing short of changing the world.
Stalin was also brilliant and changed the world.
Your clueless if you think that any of these were a bad move or a failure. Building on that software was entering the dark ages?
Yes, as in buffer overruns, MS Office crashes and data corruption, software projects that are years late, and operating systems that have 512M as a minimum requirement and run like molasses on 1GHz machines. You know, that kind of bad.
Go ahead and explain where they should have gone instead when you get the chance.
Where the industry is going today with Java and C#: object-oriented languages with garbage collection, dynamic typing, reflection, sound error checking, and killer IDEs. All of that existed in the early 1980's, even commercially.
(*) furt:= new vocabulary, ragles:= negatively affects, frimands:= understanding
We have license plates for this purpose. You read the number and can report it later. Many commercial vehicles also have 800 numbers on them that you can call to report dangerous driving.
Well the web and this site itself shows that there are plenty that are getting by just fine.
No, the web and this site shows that people are not getting by fine. HTML fails to achieve its stated design goals: almost nobody produces correct semantic markup, and even as far as physical markup goes, there are an enormous number of problems in areas such as rendering on small or large screens.
In this case i would figure that you would support XHTML due to its extensibility and its ability to be validated at edit time easily (features your blowing off in earlier posts)
Any formal language can be "validated at edit time", including HTML and SGML. As for extensibility, it often harms usability.
Although people do put thought into ease of use in their languages; functionality, portability and performance are the factors that really make a language gain ground
Indeed. And that's why the world is full of languages with lots of features and poor usability. Like (X)HTML. My point exactly.
"You aren't seriously asserting that there has been a lot of innovation in software over the last decade, are you?"
Every application on your computer. Even if they werent invented in the past 10 years, like MP3s, instant messenging and P2P apps, you wouldnt trade them for their 1995 counterparts. Obviously plenty of innovation going on.
Some time in the 1980's, computer science and industry entered the dark ages; instead of building on an enormous amount of innovation in the 1970's and 1980's, they adopted C, C++, UNIX/Linux, and VMS/NT. You can bet that I would prefer an updated version of the 1980's apps to the dregs that are currently being distributed. The reason why I don't use the old technologies has nothing to do with innovation, it has to do with interoperability: the languages and libraries of the 1980's simply don't have the tools to interoperate with the hare-brained standards that industry has settled on and in my work, that matters. Some other people around my age still use the old environments because they can and because nothing better has come along since.
MP3 is just one of many reasonable audio coding methods; what really made MP3 and other digital media happening is the increase in Internet bandwidth (when I started using it, it was 64kbits/sec between nodes, and even then, we were already thinking of, and playing around with, VoIP and video).
As for IM and P2P, they are the antithesis of innovation: instead of using the Internet the way it was supposed do (like early messaging and file sharing software did), IM and P2P add a host of features whose primary function is to tie the user to some kind of proprietary service. That's neither progress nor innovation.
There are a bunch of observations of anomalies there, but no clear statement of the structure of the theory he proposes, either qualitatively or quantitatively. As for his Stanford address, he is an "Affiliate" of the university, not faculty or staff, and he has no bio or publication list on his pages that I can see, so we can't give him the benefit of the doubt based on past work. If you want to see how physics papers describing a new theory ought to be written, look at Einstein's papers.
Muddled as they were, I saw nothing in his slides or chapters that suggests anything higher dimensional than the spacetime physicists are currently using. Dimensions are not some esotheric concept, they have observable meaning, and any extra dimensions in the observable universe either have to be very small, or they have to be very hard to move around in.
We all enjoy watching you argue just to argue, but really, toss a couple of facts in there somewhere - just to keep 'em guessing.
The facts in this case are that people are having a lot of problems writing good HTML; hence the book review, hence the reviewer's comments. But if you seriously think all is fine and dandy in HTML markup land, run some HTML validators over some real web sites some time.
By the way, usability is a term relating to viewing a page, not coding it, and that statement really had nothing to do with the topic.
That's where you're wrong. There are two kinds of usability related to HTML: usability from the point of view of the end user (of web pages produced in HTML), and usability from the point of view of the content creator. The latter matters a great deal, because if it's difficult for content creators to produce correct markup, there will be less correct markup on the web and the web will be less useful for people.
Id love to hear you define a 'good' markup language in the first place.
A good markup language is one that satisfies its requirements (i.e., it needs to be capable of delivering the content in the required form) and works well for its users (i.e., authors), according to formal usability tests and real-world metrics. As far as I can tell, the designers of (X)HTML haven't done any usability work (just like you, they probably haven't even thought about it), and the problems people are having with producing correct and portable (X)HTML in practice suggests that there are indeed design problems with it.
These people didnt have hindsight and blogs on why XHTML and CSS sucks to develop their ideas from - they did it the hard way, they broke new ground.
A, yes, throngs of 20-somethings busily reinventing the wheel "the hard way", in complete ignorance of the previous half century of computer science. You aren't seriously asserting that there has been a lot of innovation in software over the last decade, are you?
If you think CSS is more typing than plain HTML formatting and attributes, you obviously havent done much CSS
If you think that that's what I said, you have problems with English reading comprehension.
XHTML doesnt add much code and allows you much more functionality such as searching your tags and translating pages from your site into other formats using XLST or some other transform
The issue isn't all the nifty new features XHTML has added (which may or may not be a good idea), the issue is that XHTML is an even worse markup language than HTML was.
And I think you yourself illustrate why: you have no taste and you do not think about usability, and there are so many people like you around in this industry that we are saddled with disasters like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as "industry standards".
I personally disagree. With non-self-ending tags (p, etc), it is a huge amount easier to keep track of where something ends if you HAVE to close every tag. And it's easier to visually keep track of what needs closing and what does not when that which does not is self-closed (eg. )
The notion that paragraph, line, and page breaks need an "end" is in itself broken; very few other markup languages do it that way because it is unintuitive. It shoehorning the user into a convenient representation for the computer.
I also find it much easier to keep track of what I've done with id'd tags and CSS than by embedding styles in HTML (or in style="" attributes).
Yes, on balance, having CSS is better than not having it. But CSS itself is a poor implementation of that kind of functionality.
(X)HTML and CSS are just awful designs, and XHTML fails to fix what's wrong with HTML--it merely introduces even more obscure computer science concepts into what ought to be an easy to use markup language.
Advertising for membership in the general chat areas is as public as you can get on the game. As such, they were NOT keeping it "in private". Furthermore, the advertising is what Blizzard discouraged, not the guild itself. If you're going to call someone a bigot, at least get your facts right.
Your mistake is that you consider the mere advertising of a GLBT-clan to be tactless. Heterosexuals kiss on television and in the streets, they marry in public, their practices are discussed on talk shows, their affairs are the subject of just about every TV show, and rampant heterosexuality is an integral part of most games. Heterosexuals use homosexual terms in the game as terms of abuse and insult in the game and Blizzard isn't doing anything about it. But if homosexuals as much as mention that they exist, you throw a hissy fit about how tactless they are.
Mind you, I'm pretty conservative and dislike overt sexual displays of any kind (heterosexual or homosexual) in public. But that's not the issue here: advertising a GLBT-friendly clan is not a display of homosexuality, it's simply mentioning the existence of homosexuality, and even that isn't voluntary, it's the result of the use of foul and abusive languages by heterosexual gamers in the rest of the game.
Don't give us this "some of my best friends are homosexuals" bullshit; your gay "friends" simply are to tactful to call you what you really are: a bigot, and a pretty bad one at that. It's people like you that make life for gay teenagers so miserable.
XHTML and CSS simply aren't very good for entering manually; only total gearheads would think that XHTML is an improvement over HTML (it's an improvement only in that it is better defined).
So, just use one of the many tools like Textile, or use a WYSIWYG editor.
I am not looking for "Better" or "More Intelligent" or "More Reasonable" restrictions, I am looking to live without restrictions.
Well, then GPL'ed software isn't for you.
As a hobby, I am writing a web based strategy game. I have certain mechanisms to hide certain pieces of information in order to eliminate cheating, real life harrasment of players, or whatever. Is this DRM? Although it is not exactly like encrypting a sound file to only play on one PC, some people might consider it to be DRM.
I have no particular opinion yet on whether the DRM provisions in GPLv3 are problematic; they may be or they may not be. But if you want to make an argument against those provisions, you'll have to make it on issues releated specifically to those provisions; "restrictions are bad" are not going to convince most GPL adopters because they already believe that some restrictions are good.
No, my argument is that imposing restrictions is generally not considered evil by itself by most people. If Linus wants to make a convincing argument against the DRM provisions in GPLv3, his argument needs to be made on the issue of those specific restrictions; "telling hardware manufacturers what to do is immoral" simply isn't going to cut it as an argument for most people.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet, we have developed more knowledge of science and engineering in the past few years than in the few centuries before them. Somehow, despite most people working within the framework of copyright, or advances in technology and communications still allow ideas to be shared and progress to be made.
Neither scientific advances nor engineering advances are protected by copyrights, so your argument is spurious.
And, in any case, we are talking about music here, not science or engineering. Having copyrights for the latest Britney Spears song is not going to advance science or engineering.
Those nations that have strong copyright and patent laws have developed far beyond those that make at most a token effort, while the latter commonly derive a significant part of their economic value from a black market in trading the former's work, rather than creating work of a similar calibre on their own.
There is a correlation, but you are getting cause and effect wrong. The US was infamous for ignoring copyright and patent laws during its best years. The US computer industry became strong before patents and mostly before copyrights on computer software became a factor.
So, economically successful nations have strong patent and copyright laws, but they have them because economically successful nations also have powerful industry lobbies that use patents and copyrights to exclude competition. And you only need to look at the UK to see what the long term consequences of that are.
(The reason we didn't need COPYRIGHT LAW for so long was that it was so damn hard to COPY THINGS. Duh.)
Incorrect. Printing was the primary means of copying, and many famous musical pieces and literary works were indeed widely copied and distributed.
My ancestors were European peasants as far back as we can trace it (the 30 years war, around the time of the Mayflower). They did not enslave or harm anybody, they were mostly trying to scrape together a living while armies marauded through Europe, and I would say that that's the typical European ancestry. You can't blame your troubles on me or my ancestors.
But many of those "white Europeans" that you are so fond of complaining about didn't come to the US to rape and pillage, they were facing starvation or execution (often for petty offenses) in Europe and were effectively also slaves in the US; when they finally managed to free themselves, of course, they did whatever it took to survive. Likewise, many (most?) of those Africans that were sent to the US as slaves weren't captured and transported by white Europeans, they were enslaved and shipped over to the US by other Africans.
Finally, I ask you: what notions of human rights and liberty have non-Europeans produced? Prior to the age of European empires, much of the world consisted of traditional tribal cultures, and the few big cultures like India and China were ossified, stratified, and had made racism and classism an integral part of their culture. If you view Islam as a non-European culture, then it has perhaps the closest claim of any of the other cultures to recognizing human rights and liberty, but that's a distant second to what European philosophers and humanists produced.
... then the Arabs or the Chinese or the Japanese or the Africans or whatever would have done it once they had reached the necessary level of technology and economic power.
Of course, they lacked the technology to do so. And why did they lack the technology? Because for all its faults, in the end, among all the nations of the earth, Europe was still the most advanced in terms of giving people freedom, liberty, and individual rights, all apparently necessary prerequisites for rapid technological and economic development.
a) kill millions of Native Americans (which the first right brilliant whites thought were Indians), b) bring in Africans to fill in the sudden drop in the cheap labor pool, c) declare those lucky Africans to be non-persons and property, d) have a few nasty wars against each other in which some whites convinced Indians that they were really friends before e) attempting to wipe them out of the Great Plains so that whites could move in.
Trouble with your history is that it wasn't just Europeans that were doing those things, many nations were, Europeans just happened to be better at it. And it was Europeans that laid the philosophical and political foundations for ending those practices as well.
Now maybe in a reality-free zone where everybody works for the common good and nobody takes more than his* fair share, that would be a reasonable thing to pass off as a fact. But Stallman's "facts" are impractial in the real world.
Human beings have produced great art, science, and engineering for millennia in the absence of copyright protection. The assertion that copyrights and patents have any social or economic merit at all is at best unproven.
So, the ideologues trying to push unproven ideas on the rest of us are people like you, people who make strained arguments that somehow society needs to bear the costs and complexities of IP law.
Go prove your case before you whine about Stallman.
Sooner or later, pretty much all Internet traffic will be encrypted end-to-end--it's pretty much inevitable.
There's no excuse for buffer overflows and memory leaks in C++, not with TR1's smart pointers and not with the standard library's containers.
I've been using smart pointers for nearly as long as I have been using C++, and I can assure you: they don't guarantee correct memory management. There simply is no way to do predictable, safe, well-defined memory management in C++. All smart pointers can do is reduce the probability that you screw up, but at a steep cost in terms of performance, and without any guarantee that third party code is as careful as you.
That's not even considering garbage collectors which have been available in C++ for years.
The only garbage collectors that work with normal C++ implementations are conservative, and those are both inefficient and not accurate.
You can't fix C++ without massive backwards incompatibilities.
Maybe the way to deal with shared memory is to just apportion it to applications. If there are 5 applications sharing 100M then each gets 20M. That way, we can get a better idea of how much impact each individual application has, assuming everything else remains the same.
Since there have been observations of galaxies consisting almost entirely of dark matter, it doesn't seem like a modification of the gravitational law is sufficient to account for the observations.
That's like if Microsoft decided to cut off sales of Windows SDKs to an application software vendor who it decided didn't play by the rules... but of course, they're free to develop desktop applications for other operating systems.
You mean like they effectively do with driver signing and co-branding?
One can argue that BMW's behavior was improper and that Google's reaction was justified. But claiming that displaying different content to different classes of users (crawler, real-life person) constitutes "fraud" is going over the top.
No, it is NOT fraud to display different kinds of content to different site visitors, and I hope it never will be. And if it were fraud, it would be a matter for the police, not Google's page rank algorithm.
Photoshop didn't use to have 16 bit/channel images, and apparently it was good enough for "professional" use back then.
There is legitimate usability complaints and then there is whining. There are legitimate usability complaints one can make about both the Gimp and Photoshop. But the dislike of those vocal "professionals" for the Gimp is mostly whining: they aren't willint to learn anything that's different from what they are used to.
Let these people stick with Photoshop on Windows and pay a significant part of their earnings to those copmanies. Sooner or later, a new generation is going to figure it out.
This excuse is something that i expect to hear from someone with a tenuous grasp on programming who thinks the industry owes it to them to make things so simple that even they can do it.
:= new vocabulary, ragles := negatively affects, frimands := understanding
Whether I can hack all the messy, complicated standards the industry has settled on doesn't matter--what matters is that is hard and costly to hire people who can. But, of course, you probably like that.
I see you think extensibility in programming languages is bad too;
Extensibility often is bad, yes. Furt ragles frimands in English(*).
IM and P2P are good innovations period, the fact that you cant see the technology despite the greedy companies shows a lack of vision.
The fact that you think that IM and P2P are innovations shows a lack of historical awareness.
C, C++, UNIX/Linux, VMS/NT --- all brilliant pieces of software responsible for nothing short of changing the world.
Stalin was also brilliant and changed the world.
Your clueless if you think that any of these were a bad move or a failure. Building on that software was entering the dark ages?
Yes, as in buffer overruns, MS Office crashes and data corruption, software projects that are years late, and operating systems that have 512M as a minimum requirement and run like molasses on 1GHz machines. You know, that kind of bad.
Go ahead and explain where they should have gone instead when you get the chance.
Where the industry is going today with Java and C#: object-oriented languages with garbage collection, dynamic typing, reflection, sound error checking, and killer IDEs. All of that existed in the early 1980's, even commercially.
(*) furt
<sarcasm>But now it's patented and that makes it, well, better, you know.</sarcasm>
We have license plates for this purpose. You read the number and can report it later. Many commercial vehicles also have 800 numbers on them that you can call to report dangerous driving.
Well the web and this site itself shows that there are plenty that are getting by just fine.
No, the web and this site shows that people are not getting by fine. HTML fails to achieve its stated design goals: almost nobody produces correct semantic markup, and even as far as physical markup goes, there are an enormous number of problems in areas such as rendering on small or large screens.
In this case i would figure that you would support XHTML due to its extensibility and its ability to be validated at edit time easily (features your blowing off in earlier posts)
Any formal language can be "validated at edit time", including HTML and SGML. As for extensibility, it often harms usability.
Although people do put thought into ease of use in their languages; functionality, portability and performance are the factors that really make a language gain ground
Indeed. And that's why the world is full of languages with lots of features and poor usability. Like (X)HTML. My point exactly.
"You aren't seriously asserting that there has been a lot of innovation in software over the last decade, are you?"
Every application on your computer. Even if they werent invented in the past 10 years, like MP3s, instant messenging and P2P apps, you wouldnt trade them for their 1995 counterparts. Obviously plenty of innovation going on.
Some time in the 1980's, computer science and industry entered the dark ages; instead of building on an enormous amount of innovation in the 1970's and 1980's, they adopted C, C++, UNIX/Linux, and VMS/NT. You can bet that I would prefer an updated version of the 1980's apps to the dregs that are currently being distributed. The reason why I don't use the old technologies has nothing to do with innovation, it has to do with interoperability: the languages and libraries of the 1980's simply don't have the tools to interoperate with the hare-brained standards that industry has settled on and in my work, that matters. Some other people around my age still use the old environments because they can and because nothing better has come along since.
MP3 is just one of many reasonable audio coding methods; what really made MP3 and other digital media happening is the increase in Internet bandwidth (when I started using it, it was 64kbits/sec between nodes, and even then, we were already thinking of, and playing around with, VoIP and video).
As for IM and P2P, they are the antithesis of innovation: instead of using the Internet the way it was supposed do (like early messaging and file sharing software did), IM and P2P add a host of features whose primary function is to tie the user to some kind of proprietary service. That's neither progress nor innovation.
There are a bunch of observations of anomalies there, but no clear statement of the structure of the theory he proposes, either qualitatively or quantitatively. As for his Stanford address, he is an "Affiliate" of the university, not faculty or staff, and he has no bio or publication list on his pages that I can see, so we can't give him the benefit of the doubt based on past work. If you want to see how physics papers describing a new theory ought to be written, look at Einstein's papers.
Muddled as they were, I saw nothing in his slides or chapters that suggests anything higher dimensional than the spacetime physicists are currently using. Dimensions are not some esotheric concept, they have observable meaning, and any extra dimensions in the observable universe either have to be very small, or they have to be very hard to move around in.
We all enjoy watching you argue just to argue, but really, toss a couple of facts in there somewhere - just to keep 'em guessing.
The facts in this case are that people are having a lot of problems writing good HTML; hence the book review, hence the reviewer's comments. But if you seriously think all is fine and dandy in HTML markup land, run some HTML validators over some real web sites some time.
By the way, usability is a term relating to viewing a page, not coding it, and that statement really had nothing to do with the topic.
That's where you're wrong. There are two kinds of usability related to HTML: usability from the point of view of the end user (of web pages produced in HTML), and usability from the point of view of the content creator. The latter matters a great deal, because if it's difficult for content creators to produce correct markup, there will be less correct markup on the web and the web will be less useful for people.
Id love to hear you define a 'good' markup language in the first place.
A good markup language is one that satisfies its requirements (i.e., it needs to be capable of delivering the content in the required form) and works well for its users (i.e., authors), according to formal usability tests and real-world metrics. As far as I can tell, the designers of (X)HTML haven't done any usability work (just like you, they probably haven't even thought about it), and the problems people are having with producing correct and portable (X)HTML in practice suggests that there are indeed design problems with it.
These people didnt have hindsight and blogs on why XHTML and CSS sucks to develop their ideas from - they did it the hard way, they broke new ground.
A, yes, throngs of 20-somethings busily reinventing the wheel "the hard way", in complete ignorance of the previous half century of computer science. You aren't seriously asserting that there has been a lot of innovation in software over the last decade, are you?
If you think CSS is more typing than plain HTML formatting and attributes, you obviously havent done much CSS
If you think that that's what I said, you have problems with English reading comprehension.
XHTML doesnt add much code and allows you much more functionality such as searching your tags and translating pages from your site into other formats using XLST or some other transform
The issue isn't all the nifty new features XHTML has added (which may or may not be a good idea), the issue is that XHTML is an even worse markup language than HTML was.
And I think you yourself illustrate why: you have no taste and you do not think about usability, and there are so many people like you around in this industry that we are saddled with disasters like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as "industry standards".
I personally disagree. With non-self-ending tags (p, etc), it is a huge amount easier to keep track of where something ends if you HAVE to close every tag. And it's easier to visually keep track of what needs closing and what does not when that which does not is self-closed (eg.
)
The notion that paragraph, line, and page breaks need an "end" is in itself broken; very few other markup languages do it that way because it is unintuitive. It shoehorning the user into a convenient representation for the computer.
I also find it much easier to keep track of what I've done with id'd tags and CSS than by embedding styles in HTML (or in style="" attributes).
Yes, on balance, having CSS is better than not having it. But CSS itself is a poor implementation of that kind of functionality.
(X)HTML and CSS are just awful designs, and XHTML fails to fix what's wrong with HTML--it merely introduces even more obscure computer science concepts into what ought to be an easy to use markup language.
Advertising for membership in the general chat areas is as public as you can get on the game. As such, they were NOT keeping it "in private". Furthermore, the advertising is what Blizzard discouraged, not the guild itself. If you're going to call someone a bigot, at least get your facts right.
Your mistake is that you consider the mere advertising of a GLBT-clan to be tactless. Heterosexuals kiss on television and in the streets, they marry in public, their practices are discussed on talk shows, their affairs are the subject of just about every TV show, and rampant heterosexuality is an integral part of most games. Heterosexuals use homosexual terms in the game as terms of abuse and insult in the game and Blizzard isn't doing anything about it. But if homosexuals as much as mention that they exist, you throw a hissy fit about how tactless they are.
Mind you, I'm pretty conservative and dislike overt sexual displays of any kind (heterosexual or homosexual) in public. But that's not the issue here: advertising a GLBT-friendly clan is not a display of homosexuality, it's simply mentioning the existence of homosexuality, and even that isn't voluntary, it's the result of the use of foul and abusive languages by heterosexual gamers in the rest of the game.
Don't give us this "some of my best friends are homosexuals" bullshit; your gay "friends" simply are to tactful to call you what you really are: a bigot, and a pretty bad one at that. It's people like you that make life for gay teenagers so miserable.
XHTML and CSS simply aren't very good for entering manually; only total gearheads would think that XHTML is an improvement over HTML (it's an improvement only in that it is better defined).
So, just use one of the many tools like Textile, or use a WYSIWYG editor.
I am not looking for "Better" or "More Intelligent" or "More Reasonable" restrictions, I am looking to live without restrictions.
Well, then GPL'ed software isn't for you.
As a hobby, I am writing a web based strategy game. I have certain mechanisms to hide certain pieces of information in order to eliminate cheating, real life harrasment of players, or whatever. Is this DRM? Although it is not exactly like encrypting a sound file to only play on one PC, some people might consider it to be DRM.
I have no particular opinion yet on whether the DRM provisions in GPLv3 are problematic; they may be or they may not be. But if you want to make an argument against those provisions, you'll have to make it on issues releated specifically to those provisions; "restrictions are bad" are not going to convince most GPL adopters because they already believe that some restrictions are good.
No, my argument is that imposing restrictions is generally not considered evil by itself by most people. If Linus wants to make a convincing argument against the DRM provisions in GPLv3, his argument needs to be made on the issue of those specific restrictions; "telling hardware manufacturers what to do is immoral" simply isn't going to cut it as an argument for most people.
If Vista doesn't fly on this laptop then MS has done something wrong, not the hardware boys.
And that's different from previous Windows versions how exactly?