Recently, I've started thinking about a distributed computing project for language analysis... some statistical analyses and machine learning could very well be implemented in this way, especially if we use Google (with a limited number of searches per day) as a corpus...
The idea occured to me when I saw a presentation of a bootstrapping system that used Google, but the author said the access was severely limited -- he couldn't get access to more professional APIs without paying quite a lot of money, and as a mere student he couldn't afford it.
However, a distributed system would be able not only to sidestep this obstacle, but also do many other kinds of language analysis...
From 2.0 on, it's been getting on my nerves. Increasingly so.
I was never much of a KDE fan, but I think I'll switch camps.
And if KDE turns out to be so great, even better.
I have to see what I can do with E17 as well; maybe its stability has improved recently (haven't had the time to experiment with different desktops in the last year or so).
No one is talking here about REAL evolution. Mutations alone do not constitute real evolution. Random changes that serve no benefit over time are simply random. Natural selection pressures sort through this randomness and identify what's good and what's bad.
You forgot sexual selection, which other posters already pointed out.
Everyone seems to be missing the point that we have defeated natural selection, and that is poised to continue indefinitely unless there is a major and massive plague that is only non-lethal in those with natural resistance; ie. some outbreak that science can't deal with.
At that point, natural selection will take over again.
So alright, many people might die. So what? Should we let many people die now in order to gamble at preventing some possible future pandemic?
Of course, what this means is that while our randomness is increasing through diversity, there is no selection criteria to evaluate what genes are useful and should be passed on.
No, that just means we (i.e. our genes) have different criteria of usefulness right now.
There has been a disturbing rise in genetic defects and other childhood diseases like autism, and while the cause for this is not clear, its very possible that our genetic diversity has led to predispositions for more and more problems.
You have left out quite a number of variables.
For one, you disregard the fact that there are many more of us in the world than ever before.
This of course means that there are many more diseased children.
Furthermore, many childhood diseases of old have been but rooted out in modern times, at least in developed countries: thus we may see an increase in diseases and disorders which went unnoticed before.
Finally, autism was completely unknown a mere hundred years ago. It doesn't mean it didn't exist before; we have only recently been able to diagnose it.
And that's a very, very different matter.
The crux of all this is that humans will eventually need to assume responsibility for the selection process, since we consider it immoral to let nature do it for us. If we fail to do this, organisms that can truly EVOLVE at a much faster rate (bacteria, viruses) will always threaten us, as we've already seen from the antibiotic-resistant strains and mutating HIV virus.
Well, we're not the only ones that evolve. Nor is evoution a game in which we can somehow "win".
When X-Men 2 came to theatres, I went to see it with my friends.
At the very beginning, when Pic^H^Hatrick Stewart started his "Mutants..." speech, most of us ended the sentence with "... the final frontier."
We were a geeky audience, and I don't mean just my friends: "most of us" really means "most of the audience". And we're not even an English-speaking country.
And now, every time I see or hear "Mutants.", I mentally add "The final frontier."
Gentoo is a Swiss Army Knife you buy disassembled, selecting just the blades and tools you want, sharpen them just the way you like it, assemble them in the order you prefer, all the while consulting a thick manual and several hundred owners of a similar knife on the fine points of tuning the highly optional spring that does the tedious work of unfolding the blade for you. Then you configure the blades to sharpen themselves automatically.
After tweaking the bloody knife[1] for three whole days, you have a lean, mean killing machine[2] that is the envy of all your friends, neither of whom dares even touch it.
I'm a Gentoo user, I should know;)
[1] At some point, you must have cut yourself. Non-fatally, of course, but you have to have something to show and brag about besides the knife.
[2] After adding the unsupported blowdart module, at least. The gun module was kicked from Portage because users had complained it made way too much noise.
Actually, it would take only a couple of big sites to make people make the switch. What cnn.com says still has much greater relevance than what www.randomwebserver.tv/blog/~randomuser says.
Of course your numbers are more correct; multiply anything I wrote by a thousand or ten if you like, the ratio will remain the same.
Keep in mind that to do this, you entirely re-complie the kernel (and probably half the OS, i'm not much of a linux user). So yes, it's a swiss army knife but you have to put an edge on each blade when you pull it out.
Not really, no.
A Swiss Army Knife has different blades, tools and utensils for different purposes.
Each platform is a different purpose; a recompiled kernel (and userland) is a different blade/tool/utensil.
It is not users that need to recompile the kernel, which would be putting an edge on each and every blade -- it's the distro maintainers' job. Users just select the blade they need.
"My case"? All I said was that IE dominates the browser user base, and that the web developer has to live with that. You want me to be pissed at MS? Fine, I'm pissed. But my web applications still have to work on IE.
I wsn't speaking directly to you in this case, but to the imaginary user with a problem.
As for the rest: your choice.
If one website conforms to standards only and tells the users to get a real browser or bugger off, the users will bugger off.
If twenty websites do that, some users will switch.
If two thousand websites do that, most will switch.
But nobody wants to be the first.
The early bird may get the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese.
No, products need to please their creators, not their customers. Clearly you don't have any of your own.
Clearly you are talking out of your ass.
The fact that I don't like something I've made doesn't mean nobody can use it.
If you like it, knock yourself out, and I'll make something else that might please me more.
True that one business model, and indeed the one that consumers prefer, is to support the consumer. But the vast majority of product-oriented business do not follow that path.
In fact, most products that you purchase off of a store shelf are produced as-is, in the hopes that you'd purchase it. The manufacturer has no relationship with you. Their distributor may.
Those businesses tend to produce a product, listen to absolutely no feedback but the sales numbers, and couldn't care less if any one customers purchases the product.
If it's a plastic product, they can't easily make adjustments since each toolling comes with huge costs.
Off-the-shelf software is the same way. It's packaged software, and you get no changes, no alterations, and rarely any support. Games count. IE is no different.
So wait: do you get support for IE or not?
First you say you do, now you say you do not.
Kindly do make up your mind.
As for an opinion, as I said before, opinions tend to mean squat. That's why we have expert opinions -- to modify "opinion" to the point of worth.
We also have informed opinions, arguments, reasoning etc.
If you consider non-expert opinions worthless, that's your problem.
"may indirectly help someone devise" is five words that each mark a conditional restraint by one order of magnitude.
One order of magnitude, no less.
Would you care to provide me with the calculations?
You don't go around actively doing things indirectly.
Don't I?
A trivial example of actively doing things indirectly is voting in elections.
You won't do squat after the vote; but you'll influence the tally and help your candidate to win. Then your candidate will have an opportunity to realize his program, which benefits you more than the other candidates' one.
If you're expressing your opinion in the hopes that someone will read it, and notice that it indirectly helps them to think of an idea, that they will then still have to build, that's not really useful.
I hope for no such thing. But many ideas I've had were influenced by tidbits I'd read or heard somewhere; our whole civilisation is a consequence of our interaction.
My gripe with something may be heard by someone who can fix it. Or it may be heard by someone who will tell me to fuck off. Or it may give someone an idea for something completely unrelated.
Point is, if we all stay quiet, there will be fewer ideas.
Ideas are easy, doing shit is hard.
Getting the right idea is much more difficult than it sounds. And when you get the right idea, doing "shit" is just an exercise for the student.
Incidentally, I don't assess your level of understanding at all. I don't care to. Implicitly, you did. But never mind.
But what you had said lacked any useful detail. Hence, your opining wasn't useful.
... to you.
Your opinions are nearly useless to me (at least in the sense of usefulness you're talking about), yet I still talk to you.
Either use a standards compliant browser or get off my case.
Maybe you can afford to tell 90% of the web users out there that you don't give a shit. Most of us can't.
Yes, I know.
Point is, we shouldn't need to address every single quirk[1] IE's programmers incorporated; they should conform to standards.
Unless we sacrifice a little now to (already belatedly) educate our users, we'll be doing double amounts of work simply because Microsoft doesn't care, and users blame the designers.
We should start assigning the blame properly: if a standards-compliant web page doesn't look good in IE, it is Microsoft's fault. So take your case to Microsoft.
It doesn't make your opinion worthless as representing your opinion. It does, however, make your opinion useless, because it doesn't come from any sort of understanding of the solution.
Oooh, where did that leap of logic come from?
I just love how you can assess my level of understanding from a single post.
I can identify a problem -- humans can't live on Jupiter. I may even be able to describe why that's the case. But obvious or not, it doesn't help because I'm not in a position to help with the solution. When a Mars specialist describes why humans can't live on Mars, it does help, because they do so in trying to solve that very problem.
Obvious or not, your opinion may indirectly help someone else devise a solution.
You have quite a narrow, strictly utilitarian view of things. You should try for more... scope.
The same goes in the business world. I can say, in full agreement with most people here, that Microsoft and IE could be better in a dozen ways. I can say that I don't like some aspects of the way things are. But I won't say those things specifically because I know why they are the case. If I were in Microsoft's position, and I had the choice of helping my competition, or helping myself, you'd better as hell believe that I'd pick the latter over the former.
You seem to think that adhering to standards would help Microsoft's competition.
You also seem to endorse behaviour I could call unsporting. And while it is not uncommon for businesses to act in such manner in order to increase their short-term profit, eventually they piss off too many customers.
I will argue that by being such assholes about standards, Microsoft actually help their competition: were it not for the utter brokenness of IE and IE's utter dominance in the market, a movement such as Mozilla Firefox might never had happened.
Had Microsoft played fairly, they'd have a stable marketshare of some 60-70% (in some parts of Europe they're down to 40% or below). Firefox, however, has become more than just a browser: it is a religion.
And Microsoft helped make it so.
You mentioned your office suite. I've hated every office suite I've used since wordstar. Each has made my efforts more difficult, sometimes so much so that I've just done my thing in HTML. But I don't complain about the office suites. I don't because it's not important enough for me to do anything about it. Clearly, the existing office suites please their makers, and sometimes their users, and clearly, I'm not a part of that.
Maybe I use my office suite more than you do.
Maybe I use it for a different purpose and thus run into different problems.
Maybe I know what I want from a program, but just don't know how to code it.
Software needn't please its makers; it needs to please its users.
I focus my full attention, as you put it, on things that I can change. That's why I started my own business. That's when I started my own business. That's why I love it.
Good for you.
Not so good for many more people, but good for you.
Either use a standards compliant browser or get off my case.
If you have a problem with my site, take it to Microsoft; have them explain why IE can't render a page coded to spec.
If my page passes validation, I'm not the one to blame. Get a real browser.
To use a car analogy, if I sell gasoline which conforms to the appropriate standards and all car engines can use it, if suddenly Fords start blowing up, will Ford owners blame me or Ford?
You guys seem to forget something critical -- "standards" are supposed to be what most participants do, not what most participants should do, or are being told to do. In this case, there's only one plarey in the game that's been in teh game for more than five years: IE.
Well, I for one applaude your proper use of quotes.
"Standards" are indeed those de facto standards, where a monopolist does what it wills, and the rest ought to scramble after it.
Real standards, however, are specifications agreed upon by most or even all players, as you call them. The rules of the game, if you will.
You can't, or rather you shouldn't be complaining that IE doesn't support some arbitrary spec from some arbitrary corporation that's never built to their own spec. The W3C had a browser of their own for six seconds, and it never came close to adhering to their own standard. So they've decided to sit back and tell others what to do.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Microsoft a member of the W3C?
Besides, W3C is not a corporation (at least AFAIK), but a consortium. Do check the meaning of the abbreviation.
It's nice that FF has come along, and chosen to support much of what the W3C have said. But that too is a copp-out. They've decided to make no decisions, and simply to follow what someone else says -- in this case, someone else who's got absolutely no experience actually doing anything.
Oh, I'm sorry. I guess you want to say that a standardization body should actually implement each and every standard they make?
Would you then argue that ISO shouldn't make any standards, as they don't really implement most of them?
Standards are meant to be adhered to, not arbitrarily broken. That's why they're standards.
You also can't complain that a company has built a product that you don't like -- you don't have to use it, and you don't have to care. It's their product, and their service, and their business. If you don't like it, you're welcome to build your own product any day of the week.
*sniff* I smell an astroturfer.
You have said it yourself: Microsoft is (or at least was) the de facto monopolist in this field.
That, unfortunately for the point you're trying to make, means that sometimes you are forced to use that product.
Furthermore, Microsoft Embrace-Extend-Extinguish approach to standards means that some pages (fewer of them every day, but still) are built to be viewed exclusively using IE.
So stop complaining, and do it yourself. That's what business is all about.
Yes, but not everyone is in that business.
We all use products built by someone else.
Or will you tell me that you build all your own tools yourself, and if you buy something defective, you don't complain, ask for a refund and so on and so forth?
All of that said, I've got no problem with IE. I've got no problem supporting multiple browsers -- quite frankly, it benefits my business to do so and to have to do so.
If you're building websites for others, yes, I can see how it benefits your business.
However, your benefit is at the same time a loss for every client of yours.
But you don't have to. You can build your own browser. You can stop supporting browsers that you don't like. Hey, I did. I don't support Safari, I just don't like it. I don't support Opera either. Until this year, I didn't support FF, and I still don't support FF for backend components. That's my right, it's my business.
Now, this I like.
I, for one, do not support IE.
IE users get an alert that they should view the site from a real browser, e.g. Firefox, and are redirected to getfirefox.com.
If they do not wish to be redirected, their browser is crashed.
OK, so I can afford that kind of assholey behaviour because
But in related news, i did see that the Chinese Government attempted to hack into the Rolls Royce data center in Texas. The news article said everything was fine and dandy though so at least thats good.
Oh, right.
And if everything wasn't fine and dandy, they'd tell that to the public.
<borat>Pause not.</borat>
When war started in Croatia some 15 years ago, there were so many bombings, air raids and so on and so forth -- yet every single time there was an engagement, our national television broadcasted minimum losses on our side (most commonly, no casualties save for one wounded) and heavy losses on the opposite side.
I was but a kid then, but even then I found it... odd.
Likewise, I'm quite certain you Americans have quite a different view of the war in Iraq than the rest of the world does.
And by "different" I mean "much more filled with propaganda".
Apply to any kind of war-like conflict. The morale must be kept high, the opposite side's agents kept in the dark and fed false information -- and the best way to make sure they're fed crap is to feed everyone crap.
Generally problems with remembering wireless networks and the passwords that go with them are solved by going in and removing all of the "Preferred" networks from Sys Preferences > Network, then connecting to the networks again and clicking the "remember this network". I've seen problems like that since Jaguar, and that particular fix has always worked for me.
I've tried that, but to no avail - things keep returning from the dead.
I'll try a fresh install and see if it works. I only have to install bloody Windows on my desktop first.
I hate this crap.
Hm.
Come to think of it, I had a lot more patience for this kind of crap when I didn't have a girlfriend.
I act as a moderator of a big german mac-board, and I've not heard of one single Leopard-user switching back to Tiger. In fact, most of the Leo-crashing-problems stem from people using older versions of "hack-the-OS" - apps like application enhancer (APE).
Leopard is stable for the majority of all its users.
I have some issues with Leopard.
My networking, for one, is all messed up: I'd had several locations set up, but nothing really works anymore.
My college wireless network uses WPA2 Enterprise.
It took a little while to set up under Tiger, but at least once set up, it worked. After upgrading to Leopard, however, the network is recognized as WPA Enterprise, which doesn't work. And even when I tell it that it should a) use WPA2 Enterprise and b) remember the network, after a reboot everything's back the way it used to be.
Equally annoying, it plainly refuses to remember my password for this network.
OTOH, my home wireless network is remembered just fine, password and all. Not WPA2 Enterprise, though.
However, I had to delete my old location when I got WLAN at home (just a few days ago, actually): I used to use DSL, but the new network dialog doesn't appear to allow me to delete the old account. I deleted the data, but it came back; finally I removed the entire location.
I'm not even sure locations work, at least in the way I understood they should.
I'm considering a clean install of Leopard, to see if it's just an upgrade issue; it's the old networks I seem to have trouble with.
Oh, and anoher peeve: I told Disk Utility to reformat one partition on a hard disk with two NTFS partitions with data on them and one empty ReiserFS partition. It reformatted all partitions, and even repartitioned the drive - the nameless partition was d1s2, but after the reformat, it was d1s5.
I may have done something wrong myself, though, as I was distraught by my Windows install dying just yesterday for no apparent reason (except a possible drive failure).
Or just watch the value of the dollar slide to zero and trade a Euro for $40 trillion. You can then burn as many $20s as you want (it's still good for kindling...).
Nah.
I'd buy $40 gazillion (or was it brazillion?) for 1 Euro, then wait as the economy recovers.
Anyway, the point is that if I listened to you, I'd still burn *my* money, even if it's just 1 Euro.
The point is that you burn someone else's money.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's cat-lit dinner.
Recently, I've started thinking about a distributed computing project for language analysis... some statistical analyses and machine learning could very well be implemented in this way, especially if we use Google (with a limited number of searches per day) as a corpus...
The idea occured to me when I saw a presentation of a bootstrapping system that used Google, but the author said the access was severely limited -- he couldn't get access to more professional APIs without paying quite a lot of money, and as a mere student he couldn't afford it.
However, a distributed system would be able not only to sidestep this obstacle, but also do many other kinds of language analysis...
I have to find a good programmer, I think.
... but does this have any relation to OpenMoko?
Or will the OpenMoko guys have to play catch-up?
I used to like Gnome.
Back in the 1.4 times.
From 2.0 on, it's been getting on my nerves. Increasingly so.
I was never much of a KDE fan, but I think I'll switch camps.
And if KDE turns out to be so great, even better.
I have to see what I can do with E17 as well; maybe its stability has improved recently (haven't had the time to experiment with different desktops in the last year or so).
You forgot sexual selection, which other posters already pointed out.
Everyone seems to be missing the point that we have defeated natural selection, and that is poised to continue indefinitely unless there is a major and massive plague that is only non-lethal in those with natural resistance; ie. some outbreak that science can't deal with.At that point, natural selection will take over again.
Of course, what this means is that while our randomness is increasing through diversity, there is no selection criteria to evaluate what genes are useful and should be passed on.So alright, many people might die. So what? Should we let many people die now in order to gamble at preventing some possible future pandemic?
No, that just means we (i.e. our genes) have different criteria of usefulness right now.
There has been a disturbing rise in genetic defects and other childhood diseases like autism, and while the cause for this is not clear, its very possible that our genetic diversity has led to predispositions for more and more problems.You have left out quite a number of variables.
For one, you disregard the fact that there are many more of us in the world than ever before.
This of course means that there are many more diseased children.
Furthermore, many childhood diseases of old have been but rooted out in modern times, at least in developed countries: thus we may see an increase in diseases and disorders which went unnoticed before.
Finally, autism was completely unknown a mere hundred years ago. It doesn't mean it didn't exist before; we have only recently been able to diagnose it.
The crux of all this is that humans will eventually need to assume responsibility for the selection process, since we consider it immoral to let nature do it for us. If we fail to do this, organisms that can truly EVOLVE at a much faster rate (bacteria, viruses) will always threaten us, as we've already seen from the antibiotic-resistant strains and mutating HIV virus.And that's a very, very different matter.
Well, we're not the only ones that evolve. Nor is evoution a game in which we can somehow "win".
When X-Men 2 came to theatres, I went to see it with my friends.
At the very beginning, when Pic^H^Hatrick Stewart started his "Mutants..." speech, most of us ended the sentence with "... the final frontier."
We were a geeky audience, and I don't mean just my friends: "most of us" really means "most of the audience". And we're not even an English-speaking country.
And now, every time I see or hear "Mutants.", I mentally add "The final frontier."
Gentoo is a special case.
Gentoo is a Swiss Army Knife you buy disassembled, selecting just the blades and tools you want, sharpen them just the way you like it, assemble them in the order you prefer, all the while consulting a thick manual and several hundred owners of a similar knife on the fine points of tuning the highly optional spring that does the tedious work of unfolding the blade for you. Then you configure the blades to sharpen themselves automatically.
After tweaking the bloody knife[1] for three whole days, you have a lean, mean killing machine[2] that is the envy of all your friends, neither of whom dares even touch it.
I'm a Gentoo user, I should know ;)
[1] At some point, you must have cut yourself. Non-fatally, of course, but you have to have something to show and brag about besides the knife.
[2] After adding the unsupported blowdart module, at least. The gun module was kicked from Portage because users had complained it made way too much noise.
In any discussion, the probability of someone mentioning Vista or Bill Gates approaches 1?
Actually, it would take only a couple of big sites to make people make the switch. What cnn.com says still has much greater relevance than what www.randomwebserver.tv/blog/~randomuser says.
Of course your numbers are more correct; multiply anything I wrote by a thousand or ten if you like, the ratio will remain the same.
Not really, no.
A Swiss Army Knife has different blades, tools and utensils for different purposes.
Each platform is a different purpose; a recompiled kernel (and userland) is a different blade/tool/utensil.
It is not users that need to recompile the kernel, which would be putting an edge on each and every blade -- it's the distro maintainers' job. Users just select the blade they need.
I wsn't speaking directly to you in this case, but to the imaginary user with a problem.
As for the rest: your choice.
If one website conforms to standards only and tells the users to get a real browser or bugger off, the users will bugger off.
If twenty websites do that, some users will switch.
If two thousand websites do that, most will switch.
But nobody wants to be the first.
The early bird may get the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese.
I wouldn't like to either talk to someone on the phone or have to listen to other people's conversations while on a plane.
YMMV.
Clearly you are talking out of your ass.
The fact that I don't like something I've made doesn't mean nobody can use it.
True that one business model, and indeed the one that consumers prefer, is to support the consumer. But the vast majority of product-oriented business do not follow that path.If you like it, knock yourself out, and I'll make something else that might please me more.
In fact, most products that you purchase off of a store shelf are produced as-is, in the hopes that you'd purchase it. The manufacturer has no relationship with you. Their distributor may.
Those businesses tend to produce a product, listen to absolutely no feedback but the sales numbers, and couldn't care less if any one customers purchases the product.
If it's a plastic product, they can't easily make adjustments since each toolling comes with huge costs.
Off-the-shelf software is the same way. It's packaged software, and you get no changes, no alterations, and rarely any support. Games count. IE is no different.
So wait: do you get support for IE or not?
First you say you do, now you say you do not.
Kindly do make up your mind.
As for an opinion, as I said before, opinions tend to mean squat. That's why we have expert opinions -- to modify "opinion" to the point of worth.We also have informed opinions, arguments, reasoning etc.
If you consider non-expert opinions worthless, that's your problem.
"may indirectly help someone devise" is five words that each mark a conditional restraint by one order of magnitude.One order of magnitude, no less.
Would you care to provide me with the calculations?
You don't go around actively doing things indirectly.Don't I?
A trivial example of actively doing things indirectly is voting in elections.
You won't do squat after the vote; but you'll influence the tally and help your candidate to win. Then your candidate will have an opportunity to realize his program, which benefits you more than the other candidates' one.
If you're expressing your opinion in the hopes that someone will read it, and notice that it indirectly helps them to think of an idea, that they will then still have to build, that's not really useful.I hope for no such thing. But many ideas I've had were influenced by tidbits I'd read or heard somewhere; our whole civilisation is a consequence of our interaction.
My gripe with something may be heard by someone who can fix it. Or it may be heard by someone who will tell me to fuck off. Or it may give someone an idea for something completely unrelated.
Ideas are easy, doing shit is hard.Point is, if we all stay quiet, there will be fewer ideas.
Getting the right idea is much more difficult than it sounds. And when you get the right idea, doing "shit" is just an exercise for the student.
Incidentally, I don't assess your level of understanding at all. I don't care to. Implicitly, you did. But never mind. But what you had said lacked any useful detail. Hence, your opining wasn't useful.... to you.
Your opinions are nearly useless to me (at least in the sense of usefulness you're talking about), yet I still talk to you.
Yes, I know.
Point is, we shouldn't need to address every single quirk[1] IE's programmers incorporated; they should conform to standards.
Unless we sacrifice a little now to (already belatedly) educate our users, we'll be doing double amounts of work simply because Microsoft doesn't care, and users blame the designers.
We should start assigning the blame properly: if a standards-compliant web page doesn't look good in IE, it is Microsoft's fault. So take your case to Microsoft.
[1] bug
Oooh, where did that leap of logic come from?
I just love how you can assess my level of understanding from a single post.
I can identify a problem -- humans can't live on Jupiter. I may even be able to describe why that's the case. But obvious or not, it doesn't help because I'm not in a position to help with the solution. When a Mars specialist describes why humans can't live on Mars, it does help, because they do so in trying to solve that very problem.Obvious or not, your opinion may indirectly help someone else devise a solution.
You have quite a narrow, strictly utilitarian view of things. You should try for more... scope.
The same goes in the business world. I can say, in full agreement with most people here, that Microsoft and IE could be better in a dozen ways. I can say that I don't like some aspects of the way things are. But I won't say those things specifically because I know why they are the case. If I were in Microsoft's position, and I had the choice of helping my competition, or helping myself, you'd better as hell believe that I'd pick the latter over the former.You seem to think that adhering to standards would help Microsoft's competition.
You also seem to endorse behaviour I could call unsporting. And while it is not uncommon for businesses to act in such manner in order to increase their short-term profit, eventually they piss off too many customers.
I will argue that by being such assholes about standards, Microsoft actually help their competition: were it not for the utter brokenness of IE and IE's utter dominance in the market, a movement such as Mozilla Firefox might never had happened.
Had Microsoft played fairly, they'd have a stable marketshare of some 60-70% (in some parts of Europe they're down to 40% or below). Firefox, however, has become more than just a browser: it is a religion.
You mentioned your office suite. I've hated every office suite I've used since wordstar. Each has made my efforts more difficult, sometimes so much so that I've just done my thing in HTML. But I don't complain about the office suites. I don't because it's not important enough for me to do anything about it. Clearly, the existing office suites please their makers, and sometimes their users, and clearly, I'm not a part of that.And Microsoft helped make it so.
Maybe I use my office suite more than you do.
Maybe I use it for a different purpose and thus run into different problems.
Maybe I know what I want from a program, but just don't know how to code it.
Software needn't please its makers; it needs to please its users.
I focus my full attention, as you put it, on things that I can change. That's why I started my own business. That's when I started my own business. That's why I love it.Good for you.
Not so good for many more people, but good for you.
It's the way I do things, at least.
Either use a standards compliant browser or get off my case.
If you have a problem with my site, take it to Microsoft; have them explain why IE can't render a page coded to spec.
If my page passes validation, I'm not the one to blame. Get a real browser.
To use a car analogy, if I sell gasoline which conforms to the appropriate standards and all car engines can use it, if suddenly Fords start blowing up, will Ford owners blame me or Ford?
You guys seem to forget something critical -- "standards" are supposed to be what most participants do, not what most participants should do, or are being told to do. In this case, there's only one plarey in the game that's been in teh game for more than five years: IE.
Well, I for one applaude your proper use of quotes.
"Standards" are indeed those de facto standards, where a monopolist does what it wills, and the rest ought to scramble after it.
Real standards, however, are specifications agreed upon by most or even all players, as you call them. The rules of the game, if you will.
You can't, or rather you shouldn't be complaining that IE doesn't support some arbitrary spec from some arbitrary corporation that's never built to their own spec. The W3C had a browser of their own for six seconds, and it never came close to adhering to their own standard. So they've decided to sit back and tell others what to do.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Microsoft a member of the W3C?
Besides, W3C is not a corporation (at least AFAIK), but a consortium. Do check the meaning of the abbreviation.
It's nice that FF has come along, and chosen to support much of what the W3C have said. But that too is a copp-out. They've decided to make no decisions, and simply to follow what someone else says -- in this case, someone else who's got absolutely no experience actually doing anything.
Oh, I'm sorry. I guess you want to say that a standardization body should actually implement each and every standard they make?
Would you then argue that ISO shouldn't make any standards, as they don't really implement most of them?
Standards are meant to be adhered to, not arbitrarily broken. That's why they're standards.
You also can't complain that a company has built a product that you don't like -- you don't have to use it, and you don't have to care. It's their product, and their service, and their business. If you don't like it, you're welcome to build your own product any day of the week.
*sniff* I smell an astroturfer.
You have said it yourself: Microsoft is (or at least was) the de facto monopolist in this field.
That, unfortunately for the point you're trying to make, means that sometimes you are forced to use that product.
Furthermore, Microsoft Embrace-Extend-Extinguish approach to standards means that some pages (fewer of them every day, but still) are built to be viewed exclusively using IE.
So stop complaining, and do it yourself. That's what business is all about.
Yes, but not everyone is in that business.
We all use products built by someone else.
Or will you tell me that you build all your own tools yourself, and if you buy something defective, you don't complain, ask for a refund and so on and so forth?
All of that said, I've got no problem with IE. I've got no problem supporting multiple browsers -- quite frankly, it benefits my business to do so and to have to do so.
If you're building websites for others, yes, I can see how it benefits your business.
However, your benefit is at the same time a loss for every client of yours.
But you don't have to. You can build your own browser. You can stop supporting browsers that you don't like. Hey, I did. I don't support Safari, I just don't like it. I don't support Opera either. Until this year, I didn't support FF, and I still don't support FF for backend components. That's my right, it's my business.
Now, this I like.
I, for one, do not support IE.
IE users get an alert that they should view the site from a real browser, e.g. Firefox, and are redirected to getfirefox.com.
If they do not wish to be redirected, their browser is crashed.
OK, so I can afford that kind of assholey behaviour because
Actually, tabs can be disabled in Firefox. Just install TabMix Plus.
And your Cyber Dick is flat because when you get excited, you flap and clap your Cyber Flippers a bit too hard...
Oh, right.
And if everything wasn't fine and dandy, they'd tell that to the public.
<borat>Pause not.</borat>
When war started in Croatia some 15 years ago, there were so many bombings, air raids and so on and so forth -- yet every single time there was an engagement, our national television broadcasted minimum losses on our side (most commonly, no casualties save for one wounded) and heavy losses on the opposite side.
I was but a kid then, but even then I found it... odd.
Likewise, I'm quite certain you Americans have quite a different view of the war in Iraq than the rest of the world does.
And by "different" I mean "much more filled with propaganda".
Apply to any kind of war-like conflict. The morale must be kept high, the opposite side's agents kept in the dark and fed false information -- and the best way to make sure they're fed crap is to feed everyone crap.
I've tried that, but to no avail - things keep returning from the dead.
I'll try a fresh install and see if it works. I only have to install bloody Windows on my desktop first.
I hate this crap.
Hm.
Come to think of it, I had a lot more patience for this kind of crap when I didn't have a girlfriend.
Leopard is stable for the majority of all its users.
I have some issues with Leopard.
My networking, for one, is all messed up: I'd had several locations set up, but nothing really works anymore.
My college wireless network uses WPA2 Enterprise.
It took a little while to set up under Tiger, but at least once set up, it worked. After upgrading to Leopard, however, the network is recognized as WPA Enterprise, which doesn't work. And even when I tell it that it should a) use WPA2 Enterprise and b) remember the network, after a reboot everything's back the way it used to be.
Equally annoying, it plainly refuses to remember my password for this network.
OTOH, my home wireless network is remembered just fine, password and all. Not WPA2 Enterprise, though.
However, I had to delete my old location when I got WLAN at home (just a few days ago, actually): I used to use DSL, but the new network dialog doesn't appear to allow me to delete the old account. I deleted the data, but it came back; finally I removed the entire location.
I'm not even sure locations work, at least in the way I understood they should.
I'm considering a clean install of Leopard, to see if it's just an upgrade issue; it's the old networks I seem to have trouble with.
Oh, and anoher peeve: I told Disk Utility to reformat one partition on a hard disk with two NTFS partitions with data on them and one empty ReiserFS partition. It reformatted all partitions, and even repartitioned the drive - the nameless partition was d1s2, but after the reformat, it was d1s5.
I may have done something wrong myself, though, as I was distraught by my Windows install dying just yesterday for no apparent reason (except a possible drive failure).
Is that kind of like "we put that together just now and we believe it will fly... sorry, what do you mean by 'math'?"
Or is it "we need no machinery to reach the stars, Our Lord will take us there eventually"?
Nah.
I'd buy $40 gazillion (or was it brazillion?) for 1 Euro, then wait as the economy recovers.
Anyway, the point is that if I listened to you, I'd still burn *my* money, even if it's just 1 Euro.
The point is that you burn someone else's money.
So everything you have to do to make the dollar strong again is burn Bill Gates' money.
Instant-rich!