Correct, if your site is fine in FF now, it should render OK in the IE8 standards compliant engine as well.
The problem is, that would still require a review of every existing legacy site to see if it does in fact render correctly in FF and IE8, and if it doesn't to alter the HTML to either use a different doctype/mode or to update the HTML to be standards compliant. That represents a huge investment.
The alternative, to continue using the non-standards compliant engine by default, and to use an IE8 specific tag to force non-default behavior with existing doctypes guaranties that existing pages will render the same as they had before, but allows developers to go forward with a fully standards compliant rendering.
Going forward, as new standards are released and doctypes set, we can hope that MS will remain standards compliant and we won't have to use a non-compliant tag like this to get standard compliant behavior by default. But for the existing realm of doctypes, it makes more sense to not risk the possibility of anything breaking and to give developers a flag to force compliance.
As has been said, it's trivial to put a line of code at the top of a document (especially if the header is a PHP include), and if standards push forward, this will only be necessary for older websites and web apps, which would then cease to be created further. Again, WHO would do this? One of the organizations I worked on a website for was a not for profit nature conservancy. They have 3 employees who have only a minimal level of IT knowledge. Yes, it would be trivial for anyone from/. to make the change, but they wouldn't even likely know about the issue (if there were one) for some time, and then they would have to have a consultant come out to take a look and see what the problem was, and then again to actually do the work. You could be talking about a $1,000-10,000 bill by the time the website is made fully standards compliant.
It makes significantly MORE sense to require the tag for compliance mode in NEW DEVELOPMENT. Since it's new development, there are already developers working on it. Since there are already (hopefully) skilled and knowledgeable developers on the project, the change becomes trivial and the requirement of adding 1 extra tag to every page would amount to maybe a few minutes over the length of the project.
Once the next standard is released, the whole issue become moot as (hopefully) MS continues to adhere to the standard.
Interestingly enough, I drive a diesel, It has a large mouth filler neck open to allow for the diesel specific pump nossles. But at my local gas station, on the diesel pump, they have both the small (standard gas engine filler neck) and the large (standard diesel engine filler neck) nossles.
You know why? Because it's easier to get the smaller nossle into most light duty vehicle filler necks. It's all about the user experience.
Yes, IE is broken, yes, it should be fixed, but it has to be fixed the right way. You have to look at the financial implications of the situation. Sure, a lot of people here are saying 'screw it, fix it and let the shit hit the fan' and that's great, until ecommerce sites have rendering issues interfering with people's purchases, interactive systems become difficult to use because of rendering differences, etc...
There is a whole lot of money to lose out there. Consumers don't care what standard you are using, they don't care about doc types and meta tags. They care about getting to the website they want to get to and doing what ever it is that they can do there. And if they just downloaded MS's latest greatest browser, and pages are breaking all over, there will be two issues:
1) Lots of negative feedback from users to MS about how IE8 is "broken", which leads to a slower penetration of IE8 and a longer time frame of IE6/7 hack support. 2) Fiscal ramifications for any organization that has a website that was designed with IE6/7 limitations in mind. Someone is going to have to go through those pages and update the HTML.
Users will not "slowly pressure the market". Users will scream and yell, abandon providers, and change software.
By using a tag with the current doctypes to use the compliance rendering engine you ensure that: 1) All existing web pages continue to render just as the always have. 2) Anyone doing new development has a standards compliant rendering engine available.
Require a non-compliant tag to force compliance mode in existing doctypes. For all future doctypes, maintain compliance.
There ya go, not a single broken website, and all it takes is using a non-compliant tag until the next standard is released. Sounds like a great compromise to me.
Yar, I should have clarified. I would assume that given the introduction of a new doctype, for which there is not a legacy support issue, that the default would be the most standards-compliant option. For existing doctypes, where there is a legacy support issue, the default should remain what it already is.
ACID is designed to test a browser's adherence to a set standard. Exactly. And from the sounds of it, IE8 will do very well (err, at least better than IE6/7) at it. BUT you have to give it a meta tag in order for it to do so. So for ACID to test the browser fully, it has to use all of the tools the browser has available.
Saying that ACID should test IE8's non-standards compliant rendering is just retarded. We already know that IE8's non-standards compliant rendering will not render ACID correctly. ACID needs to test the standards-compliant rendering.
The only question is how do you determine which rendering engine to use by default. If you use the standards compliant engine, you risk showing the user broken sites anytime they visit a page that was designed with IE6/7 limitations in mind. If you use the non-compliant engine, then there is no risk of breaking any existing pages (at least, not in ways that they weren't already broken). So using the non-compliant engine by default makes the most sense for the User as it will provide them with a more consistent experience. It is also the best option for web site providers as they won't have to invest the time and money into revamping legacy and live websites to remove the IE6/7 tricks.
If the only benefit to setting IE8 to use the standards compliant engine by default is that it will pass the existing ACID test, then there isn't much reason to do so.
If you disagree, that's fine. But I'll leave it up to you to work out the funding of all the projects that will need to be undertaken to correct legacy web sites.
What the hell are you talking about? I didn't rant at anyone for bashing MS. Hell, MS has been as the focal point of a good number of my own rants. I said look at the situation logically. If IE8 by default renders pages differently than IE6/7 with the same doctype, then anyone who has pages using IE6/7 specific rendering tricks will have to adjust their HTML. The financial investment involved would be huge. It would be foolish for MS to make such a change and then expect every organization an person to go through every live and legacy website to update code.
The logical decision from a real-world point of view is to leave legacy functionality as it is, and to require new functionality to differentiate itself from the old functionality. Whether that means a new doctype, meta-tags, IE8 specific tags, what ever. It minimizes the impact of the functional change and still allows people the full power of those changes without effecting other browsers (assuming they use meta-tags or IE8 specific tags).
My karma is fine. I say what I think. Some people agree, some people don't. But there is no '-1 Disagree' rating. If you want to talk about lack of reasoning and straw men, read the rest of the topics on this article. The vast majority are nothing by irrational flames of MS with no considerations to the technology or business that are the actual issues.
the tag should instead be a tag to go into "Legacy" mode. There's the problem... WHO is going to go through all of the Legacy websites to update that HTML?
In the last 8 years I've probably done 20 websites for various NFP's, schools, and organizations I've been a member of or was hired by. The vast majority of those sites are for organizations that have little to no internal IT department. If IE8 renders the page differently than IE6/7, even if it does so in a more standards compliant way, it is still going to make their pages appear incorrect, and they have no one on staff with the knowledge or ability to fix it.
Shove the anti-MS rhetoric in the closet for a moment and think about it.
IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style.
Alternatively, they can create a new doctype specifically for the new "more better" rendering. This way, the millions of existing pages that are already designed to render in the exiting style will continue to do so, and anyone looking to use a closer to the standards rendering has the option to.
That ACID(2,3) tests are designed to test browsers, browsers are not designed to test ACID. As such, ACID should be updated to include the new doctype option for IE.
Okay, NOW you can pull that anti-MS rhetoric back out and ask: "WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME?!?!?"
Right... because before (currently, I suppose) when there's increased demand on the toll road they just get magic money to pay for the repairs, they don't get it from the tax payers. Some toll roads are privately owned, so there is no option of turning to the tax payers. When demand increases on the toll road, the revenues increase. No taxes needed. The more people who use them, the more it costs to maintain them, and the more money the tolls pull in. If the toll money doesn't cover the cost of repairs/maintenance/profit, then increase the toll cost so that it matches the goals.
Maybe this scheme will work to motivate people to time shift or preferably (IMO) car pool. But I would sure hope they look at the side effects on traffic patterns, as damage to non-toll roads due to dispersion of traffic can only be payed through taxes.
What commuter cars do has very, very, little to do with how the surface streets wear. Almost no road damage comes from cars -- it all comes from trucks. I disagree. Yes, trucks do more damage with smaller volumes, but enough cars will do just as much damage. For instance, my home town, a little place with a population of about 7k, has a bypass around the historic down town. Last year the bypass was having significant road work done, so all of the traffic (which was almost exclusively light duty car/trucks), instead of taking the bypass had to come into the center of town, stop at a central intersection, and continue on the detour.
That intersection had been repaved about 2 years prior. The bypass was closed for about 4 months, by which time that 4-way stop downtown had degraded to the point that it was in dire need of reconstruction. So the city took another 4 months digging the whole downtown intersection out, they had to tear it out all the way down to fresh dirt, put in a new gravel foundation, and pour a whole new reinforced concrete street. And of course since the primary downtown intersection was closed that whole time, it pushed all the local traffic onto side streets that were meant for extremely light immediate traffic. Luckily the traffic interruption from the intersection closure was lighter than the bypass, and that traffic was more dispersed, but we still caused enough damage to those light duty streets to require 2 more side streets to need a new coat of pavement, 2 lesser intersections to get repaved, and 2 other streets that will need significant work in the next year.
As congestion increases, tolls increase, so more people, instead of traveling on toll roads designed to take the kind of abuse that volume and congestions provide, begin taking surface streets which are not designed for these kinds of volume.
So the toll makes out even, or slightly ahead at best. While the tax payers have to pick up the tab to repair the surface streets that are now getting heavier traffic because of increased pricing on toll roads.
So people with money get to work faster, and people with out will get taxed more. Sounds like a great idea.
Depending on the scope of the penalty, it may make more individual labels re-evaluate the risk-to-reward ratio that being a member of the RIAA represents.
IOW, this could be yet another nail in the coffin of the RIAA. The bright side is that it could lead to a wider variety of marketing schemes, competition, and better prices for the consumer. The dark side is that it will likely just turn into a series of buyouts until we wind up dealing with the 'Ma Bell' of the recording labels that owns everything that used to be other major labels. But that's capitalism for ya, surf on.
I would love to play more with burning things, but have nowhere nearby to do so safely and without causing alarm! Contact your local high school science teacher. They likely have better access to the materials and safety equipment, along with some knowledge of what to expect, safety measures to take, and best of all, they have a captive audience!..."And today students, we're going to help Mr. Smith, who's company sponsors our baseball team, along with learning about the chemical reaction associated with the rapid oxidization of aluminum."
It could have been a political issue in the industry as well. If there was strong opposition to any specific power over SATA spec, it could have held up the spec. Where as, going live with the widely accepted standard, and gaining a foothold, the spec now has the power to determine what the manufacturers should do as opposed to the other way around.
There are a lot of companies out there that have invested huge amounts of money in developing VB products and many of them just do not have the finances to rewrite everything. EXACTLY! There is no reason to re-write the vast majority of VB6 programs out there. Assuming a program written in VB6 is mature, stable, and feature full, requiring only the occasional maintenance work or tweaking, there is really no reason to make such a huge investment. Heck back in 2001-2003, even if it's not finished, but you already have a staff of skilled VB6 developers working on it, just finish it in VB6. The cost of re-tooling your IT department mid-stream would be outlandish, not to mention the delay of the project and the risks of working with a then new technology. Heck, VB6 has extended support through 2k9, by the time running 32b COM applications becomes an issue for OSs, the business needs will likely have shifted enough that the program could use a significant revamp, and if not, you're looking at normalizing the redesign costs over an 8 year window as opposed to a 1 year window.
NEW development on the other hand, should have been moving in the.Net direction with any require interfacing done through either a data source (database, XML, or the like) or via COM Interop.
Ford isn't about to recall every car they've produced just to retool them to the new year's standards just because the new standard is different. And an IT department shouldn't re-create software that already works just because there is a new language.
And as past experience with Visual Studio.NET has shown, upgrade tools are far less than perfect What the hell is the point of that statement??
1) It has nothing to do with the software in focus.
2) Converting from framework 1.0 to 1.1 was almost effortless, and while converting from 1.1 to 2.0 usually took a tad bit of refinement, compiling a 2.0 application for the 3.0 or 3.5 framework is trivial. VS.Net 2k8 has the option built in so that you can work on 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 framework compilations with nothing more than a project property change.
3) The VB6 to.Net 1.0 converter was actually highly functional, IF your VB6 code was abstracted and tiered in an OO manner. Unfortunately, most VB6 code was written, well, crappily as compared to current OO standards, and thus there was not much that could be done for automatic translation. Although the output would tell you specifically what wouldn't work, and where to read KB articles to learn about new ways of doing the same thing.
That aside, dropping VBA seems like an INSANE thing to do. Not that I like VBA, it's existance is a thorn in my side. But the fact that VBA is so ingrained into the corporate atmosphere. MS is in a pretty rough spot with Office. Office 2k was a great product. Office 2k3 introduced only marginal improvements that were hard to justify to the accountants. Office 2k7 has some neat stuff, but with the new interface and no new functionality for the majority of users, justifying it to both the accountants AND users was difficult. Now the next version of Office is going to abandon VBA, which means that the IT development departments are going to have to either develop real apps for all the users who depend on those heavily modified excel spread sheets, or you're going to have to get some training on the new scripting language for your employees. Either way, that is a HUGE financial investment beyond the $300 license.
I disagree. This model works really well for orderly, even rushed orderly egress. Those same patterns are actually visible if you are in a vantage point to see them. For instance, I used to go to rock concerts at an indoor stadium in Madison, WI called the Colosseum (I think it's now the 'Alliant Energy Center' or some non-sense). The floor was open admission, so there would be hundreds, if not thousands of people all in the one area. There were two main exits from the floor, both 20' wide tunnels that lead out to the lower ring. Both of these tunnels were choke points, almost identical to those shown in the software's demo. And the "panic" mode of the software showed exactly what would happen at the end of a concert. Not that there was any panic at the end of the concert. There was just a strong desire to get out of the Colosseum and off to the parking lot.
Compare that to say, a fire in a night club. People are not going to politely wait at the sides of the choke points for the central traffic to slide through. The are going to be crushing their way through.
Imagine a choke point and a long hallway. In one scenario, tell the subjects that everyone who is out of the building in 5 minutes (the amount of time expected to get 75% of the people out) will get $100 and let the people go. You'll probably see something very close to what this engine displays. In another scenario, tell the subjects that everyone who is still in the building in 5 minutes will be shot. You will see something vastly different. Heck, you'll likely have MORE people still inside the building in the 2nd scenario.
In short, I think the software would work beautifully at modeling the exit strategy of high population density areas with choke points under most normal situations. But I think it falls well short of modeling the true chaos of "panic".
If my son turns out to be gay, I will be supportive of his decision to be open about it, or supportive of the gay community if he remains closeted so that he can see that I will be accepting of him if and when he does decide to come out.
As for going to outrageous sites, when will he? As stated in my post, the PCs are all in a common part of the house and it's easy enough to set a time slot rule on the router to make sure he's not sneaking out for a midnight surf. But even that isn't for the purpose of censorship, it's so that he gets a good night's sleep instead of playing on the computer until 3 in the morning. My wife is a stay at home Mom, so it's not like he's going to have a whole lot of time unsupervised with the PC while he's still young.
I am not going to stop his browsing at another person's house, or at school, or at unprotected wifi hot spots. It is not my intent to stop his browsing in the least (except for general health concerns and social expectations, ie: no porno while people are in the room). It is my intent to teach him appropriate browsing habits, and to use what tools I have available to me as a parent to better understand my son.
In fact, I fully expect my son to not only discover, on his own, that I am listening on the line, but to also find a way to circumvent it. And when he does so, I won't punish him, more likely I will reward him for pursuing the knowledge and solution on his own. And the next day I will implement a new monitoring solution.
Once again, I'm not talking about being adversarial with my son, I'm not talking about limiting his ability to learn or experience all that the internet has to offer. I AM talking about using the information of what he looks at online to determine what life lessons could use the most reinforcement at relative times.
For instance, if my son were to post on his blog that he got stoned with his friends, I wouldn't confront him about his pot smoking. Instead I would probably queue up the pot smoking episode of South Park on the DVR for an after dinner show. Good for a few laughs, and a great opportunity to talk about the risks and responsibilities of smoking pot.
If I found an extreme case as you mentioned, planning theft or blackmail, so long as it was in the planning phase, I would probably sit him down for a talk about the value of anonymity and the lack there of on the internet. Explaining how IP's can be traced back to the provider and billing information can get them a name and number could strike some fear into him about something he is doing, and likely lead him to the conclusion that someone had contacted me because of something he posted that was tracked back to the house. This would also open up a great opportunity for the "is there anything you want to tell me line?" And if all of that fails to dissuade him from his planning, I can always confront him directly about it if I need to.
Maybe you think I'm being invasive, and maybe I am, but if the end result is that I have a better relationship with my son, more understanding about the difficulties he is facing, and a warning if something bad is going to happen, then I'll be a better parent for it.
And maybe if more parents expressed that level of interest and concern in their children, we wouldn't have these retarded 'think of the children' laws, and events like Columbine.
Same here. Our computers are all in an open common area, visible from the kitchen, living room and dining room. Preventing him from using the internet won't teach him how to use the internet wisely. He has to have room to explore, and a watchful eye to keep him from getting into trouble.
That said, I have every intention of keeping tabs on my son's browsing habits using what ever tools are necessary. I don't intend to spy and attack, but to use it as a tool to better understand my son. I know when I was a kid, back in the BBS days, I had friends online that I would discuss stuff with that I never would have told my parents, and really, life would have been better if I had discussed it with them.
Fact is, my son will with all likelihood smoke a joint, and drink booze, both well before he turns 18. If I know about these events in his life, I can use them to ground lessons of responsibility. Whether it's planning a nature hike the morning after a planned under-aged drinking party, or maybe a viewing of 'Train Spotting' after the first joint. Both of those would put us in a position where we would be together, in a good position to talk, and have an immediate relevance to him. And that to me is worth 1000 times more than being able to scold him for looking at porno.
The demo they show of the modeler shows scenarios where the subjects want to get to some place. That's neat and all, but in a panic, people aren't trying to get TO some place, they are trying to get AWAY from some place.
From the GAO website:
As of September 30, 2007 and 2006, federal debt managed by the bureau totaled about $8,993 billion and $8,493 billion, respectively, for moneys borrowed to fund the federal government's operations. As shown on the Schedules of Federal Debt, these balances consisted of approximately (1) $5,049 billion as of September 30, 2007, and $4,843 billion as of September 30, 2006, of debt held by the public and about (2) $3,944 billion as of September 30, 2007, and $3,650 billion as of September 30, 2006, of intragovernmental debt holdings. So, for 2k7, of the $8.9 trillion debt the US had, $5 trillion was owned by the public (ie: the government's loans to itself you described as being 90%), and $3.9 trillion was held by investment programs.
Also from the GAO:
According to amounts reported in the September 2007 Treasury Bulletin, Treasury estimates that the amount of Treasury securities held by foreign and international investors has increased $837 billion, from $1,383 as of June 30, 2003, to $2,220 billion as of June 30, 2007. As of June 30, 2007, this represents an estimated 45 percent of debt held by the public That means that of our nations $9 trillion debt, about a quarter of it is owned by foreign nations.
Bah, poorly worded on my part. I was trying to say that Ford is claiming that the calendar infringes on their trademarks (the Ford and Mustang logo), and that it could be that they are trying to claim that imagery the Ford Mustang (the car, not the logo) is in-itself a trademark. Meaning that even if you had a calendar with images of the Ford Mustang, stripped of all Ford/Mustang emblems, that they may still attempt to claim infringement. Not that I would imagine it would have any merit, but as the title says, IANAL.
4. abolish the Federal Reserve. It was setup illegally; it's a private bank. Did you know, for every dollar that the Federal Reserve prints, it charges the US gov't $1 + interest? over 90% of the US govt debt is owed to this private bank. And why? Because the US doesn't regulate it's own currency. Countries in the world w/ no debt, like say Russia, print and maintain their own currency. I'm just saying. I'd like to see where your numbers came from. Last I saw almost 1/2 of our national public debt is held by central banks of foreign countries (Japan and China being the two largest investors). And I'm pretty sure the total public debt makes up significantly more than 10% of all national debt.
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Correct, if your site is fine in FF now, it should render OK in the IE8 standards compliant engine as well.
The problem is, that would still require a review of every existing legacy site to see if it does in fact render correctly in FF and IE8, and if it doesn't to alter the HTML to either use a different doctype/mode or to update the HTML to be standards compliant. That represents a huge investment.
The alternative, to continue using the non-standards compliant engine by default, and to use an IE8 specific tag to force non-default behavior with existing doctypes guaranties that existing pages will render the same as they had before, but allows developers to go forward with a fully standards compliant rendering.
Going forward, as new standards are released and doctypes set, we can hope that MS will remain standards compliant and we won't have to use a non-compliant tag like this to get standard compliant behavior by default. But for the existing realm of doctypes, it makes more sense to not risk the possibility of anything breaking and to give developers a flag to force compliance.
-Rick
It makes significantly MORE sense to require the tag for compliance mode in NEW DEVELOPMENT. Since it's new development, there are already developers working on it. Since there are already (hopefully) skilled and knowledgeable developers on the project, the change becomes trivial and the requirement of adding 1 extra tag to every page would amount to maybe a few minutes over the length of the project.
Once the next standard is released, the whole issue become moot as (hopefully) MS continues to adhere to the standard.
-Rick
Interestingly enough, I drive a diesel, It has a large mouth filler neck open to allow for the diesel specific pump nossles. But at my local gas station, on the diesel pump, they have both the small (standard gas engine filler neck) and the large (standard diesel engine filler neck) nossles.
You know why? Because it's easier to get the smaller nossle into most light duty vehicle filler necks. It's all about the user experience.
Yes, IE is broken, yes, it should be fixed, but it has to be fixed the right way. You have to look at the financial implications of the situation. Sure, a lot of people here are saying 'screw it, fix it and let the shit hit the fan' and that's great, until ecommerce sites have rendering issues interfering with people's purchases, interactive systems become difficult to use because of rendering differences, etc...
There is a whole lot of money to lose out there. Consumers don't care what standard you are using, they don't care about doc types and meta tags. They care about getting to the website they want to get to and doing what ever it is that they can do there. And if they just downloaded MS's latest greatest browser, and pages are breaking all over, there will be two issues:
1) Lots of negative feedback from users to MS about how IE8 is "broken", which leads to a slower penetration of IE8 and a longer time frame of IE6/7 hack support.
2) Fiscal ramifications for any organization that has a website that was designed with IE6/7 limitations in mind. Someone is going to have to go through those pages and update the HTML.
Users will not "slowly pressure the market". Users will scream and yell, abandon providers, and change software.
By using a tag with the current doctypes to use the compliance rendering engine you ensure that:
1) All existing web pages continue to render just as the always have.
2) Anyone doing new development has a standards compliant rendering engine available.
I don't understand what people have against that.
-Rick
Or option 3:
Require a non-compliant tag to force compliance mode in existing doctypes.
For all future doctypes, maintain compliance.
There ya go, not a single broken website, and all it takes is using a non-compliant tag until the next standard is released. Sounds like a great compromise to me.
-Rick
Yar, I should have clarified. I would assume that given the introduction of a new doctype, for which there is not a legacy support issue, that the default would be the most standards-compliant option. For existing doctypes, where there is a legacy support issue, the default should remain what it already is.
-Rick
Saying that ACID should test IE8's non-standards compliant rendering is just retarded. We already know that IE8's non-standards compliant rendering will not render ACID correctly. ACID needs to test the standards-compliant rendering.
The only question is how do you determine which rendering engine to use by default. If you use the standards compliant engine, you risk showing the user broken sites anytime they visit a page that was designed with IE6/7 limitations in mind. If you use the non-compliant engine, then there is no risk of breaking any existing pages (at least, not in ways that they weren't already broken). So using the non-compliant engine by default makes the most sense for the User as it will provide them with a more consistent experience. It is also the best option for web site providers as they won't have to invest the time and money into revamping legacy and live websites to remove the IE6/7 tricks.
If the only benefit to setting IE8 to use the standards compliant engine by default is that it will pass the existing ACID test, then there isn't much reason to do so.
If you disagree, that's fine. But I'll leave it up to you to work out the funding of all the projects that will need to be undertaken to correct legacy web sites.
-Rick
What the hell are you talking about? I didn't rant at anyone for bashing MS. Hell, MS has been as the focal point of a good number of my own rants. I said look at the situation logically. If IE8 by default renders pages differently than IE6/7 with the same doctype, then anyone who has pages using IE6/7 specific rendering tricks will have to adjust their HTML. The financial investment involved would be huge. It would be foolish for MS to make such a change and then expect every organization an person to go through every live and legacy website to update code.
The logical decision from a real-world point of view is to leave legacy functionality as it is, and to require new functionality to differentiate itself from the old functionality. Whether that means a new doctype, meta-tags, IE8 specific tags, what ever. It minimizes the impact of the functional change and still allows people the full power of those changes without effecting other browsers (assuming they use meta-tags or IE8 specific tags).
My karma is fine. I say what I think. Some people agree, some people don't. But there is no '-1 Disagree' rating. If you want to talk about lack of reasoning and straw men, read the rest of the topics on this article. The vast majority are nothing by irrational flames of MS with no considerations to the technology or business that are the actual issues.
-Rick
In the last 8 years I've probably done 20 websites for various NFP's, schools, and organizations I've been a member of or was hired by. The vast majority of those sites are for organizations that have little to no internal IT department. If IE8 renders the page differently than IE6/7, even if it does so in a more standards compliant way, it is still going to make their pages appear incorrect, and they have no one on staff with the knowledge or ability to fix it.
-Rick
Shove the anti-MS rhetoric in the closet for a moment and think about it.
IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style.
Alternatively, they can create a new doctype specifically for the new "more better" rendering. This way, the millions of existing pages that are already designed to render in the exiting style will continue to do so, and anyone looking to use a closer to the standards rendering has the option to.
That ACID(2,3) tests are designed to test browsers, browsers are not designed to test ACID. As such, ACID should be updated to include the new doctype option for IE.
Okay, NOW you can pull that anti-MS rhetoric back out and ask: "WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME?!?!?"
-Rick
Maybe this scheme will work to motivate people to time shift or preferably (IMO) car pool. But I would sure hope they look at the side effects on traffic patterns, as damage to non-toll roads due to dispersion of traffic can only be payed through taxes.
-Rick
streets wear. Almost no road damage comes from cars -- it all comes from
trucks. I disagree. Yes, trucks do more damage with smaller volumes, but enough cars will do just as much damage. For instance, my home town, a little place with a population of about 7k, has a bypass around the historic down town. Last year the bypass was having significant road work done, so all of the traffic (which was almost exclusively light duty car/trucks), instead of taking the bypass had to come into the center of town, stop at a central intersection, and continue on the detour.
That intersection had been repaved about 2 years prior. The bypass was closed for about 4 months, by which time that 4-way stop downtown had degraded to the point that it was in dire need of reconstruction. So the city took another 4 months digging the whole downtown intersection out, they had to tear it out all the way down to fresh dirt, put in a new gravel foundation, and pour a whole new reinforced concrete street. And of course since the primary downtown intersection was closed that whole time, it pushed all the local traffic onto side streets that were meant for extremely light immediate traffic. Luckily the traffic interruption from the intersection closure was lighter than the bypass, and that traffic was more dispersed, but we still caused enough damage to those light duty streets to require 2 more side streets to need a new coat of pavement, 2 lesser intersections to get repaved, and 2 other streets that will need significant work in the next year.
-Rick
As congestion increases, tolls increase, so more people, instead of traveling on toll roads designed to take the kind of abuse that volume and congestions provide, begin taking surface streets which are not designed for these kinds of volume.
So the toll makes out even, or slightly ahead at best. While the tax payers have to pick up the tab to repair the surface streets that are now getting heavier traffic because of increased pricing on toll roads.
So people with money get to work faster, and people with out will get taxed more. Sounds like a great idea.
-Rick
Depending on the scope of the penalty, it may make more individual labels re-evaluate the risk-to-reward ratio that being a member of the RIAA represents.
IOW, this could be yet another nail in the coffin of the RIAA. The bright side is that it could lead to a wider variety of marketing schemes, competition, and better prices for the consumer. The dark side is that it will likely just turn into a series of buyouts until we wind up dealing with the 'Ma Bell' of the recording labels that owns everything that used to be other major labels. But that's capitalism for ya, surf on.
-Rick
...did not learn from this?? No idea, but a political argument theory holds more water than a "because they're dumb" theory IMO.-Rick
-Rick
It could have been a political issue in the industry as well. If there was strong opposition to any specific power over SATA spec, it could have held up the spec. Where as, going live with the widely accepted standard, and gaining a foothold, the spec now has the power to determine what the manufacturers should do as opposed to the other way around.
-Rick
NEW development on the other hand, should have been moving in the
Ford isn't about to recall every car they've produced just to retool them to the new year's standards just because the new standard is different. And an IT department shouldn't re-create software that already works just because there is a new language.
-Rick
1) It has nothing to do with the software in focus.
2) Converting from framework 1.0 to 1.1 was almost effortless, and while converting from 1.1 to 2.0 usually took a tad bit of refinement, compiling a 2.0 application for the 3.0 or 3.5 framework is trivial. VS.Net 2k8 has the option built in so that you can work on 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 framework compilations with nothing more than a project property change.
3) The VB6 to
That aside, dropping VBA seems like an INSANE thing to do. Not that I like VBA, it's existance is a thorn in my side. But the fact that VBA is so ingrained into the corporate atmosphere. MS is in a pretty rough spot with Office. Office 2k was a great product. Office 2k3 introduced only marginal improvements that were hard to justify to the accountants. Office 2k7 has some neat stuff, but with the new interface and no new functionality for the majority of users, justifying it to both the accountants AND users was difficult. Now the next version of Office is going to abandon VBA, which means that the IT development departments are going to have to either develop real apps for all the users who depend on those heavily modified excel spread sheets, or you're going to have to get some training on the new scripting language for your employees. Either way, that is a HUGE financial investment beyond the $300 license.
-Rick
I disagree. This model works really well for orderly, even rushed orderly egress. Those same patterns are actually visible if you are in a vantage point to see them. For instance, I used to go to rock concerts at an indoor stadium in Madison, WI called the Colosseum (I think it's now the 'Alliant Energy Center' or some non-sense). The floor was open admission, so there would be hundreds, if not thousands of people all in the one area. There were two main exits from the floor, both 20' wide tunnels that lead out to the lower ring. Both of these tunnels were choke points, almost identical to those shown in the software's demo. And the "panic" mode of the software showed exactly what would happen at the end of a concert. Not that there was any panic at the end of the concert. There was just a strong desire to get out of the Colosseum and off to the parking lot.
Compare that to say, a fire in a night club. People are not going to politely wait at the sides of the choke points for the central traffic to slide through. The are going to be crushing their way through.
Imagine a choke point and a long hallway. In one scenario, tell the subjects that everyone who is out of the building in 5 minutes (the amount of time expected to get 75% of the people out) will get $100 and let the people go. You'll probably see something very close to what this engine displays. In another scenario, tell the subjects that everyone who is still in the building in 5 minutes will be shot. You will see something vastly different. Heck, you'll likely have MORE people still inside the building in the 2nd scenario.
In short, I think the software would work beautifully at modeling the exit strategy of high population density areas with choke points under most normal situations. But I think it falls well short of modeling the true chaos of "panic".
-Rick
If my son turns out to be gay, I will be supportive of his decision to be open about it, or supportive of the gay community if he remains closeted so that he can see that I will be accepting of him if and when he does decide to come out.
As for going to outrageous sites, when will he? As stated in my post, the PCs are all in a common part of the house and it's easy enough to set a time slot rule on the router to make sure he's not sneaking out for a midnight surf. But even that isn't for the purpose of censorship, it's so that he gets a good night's sleep instead of playing on the computer until 3 in the morning. My wife is a stay at home Mom, so it's not like he's going to have a whole lot of time unsupervised with the PC while he's still young.
I am not going to stop his browsing at another person's house, or at school, or at unprotected wifi hot spots. It is not my intent to stop his browsing in the least (except for general health concerns and social expectations, ie: no porno while people are in the room). It is my intent to teach him appropriate browsing habits, and to use what tools I have available to me as a parent to better understand my son.
In fact, I fully expect my son to not only discover, on his own, that I am listening on the line, but to also find a way to circumvent it. And when he does so, I won't punish him, more likely I will reward him for pursuing the knowledge and solution on his own. And the next day I will implement a new monitoring solution.
Once again, I'm not talking about being adversarial with my son, I'm not talking about limiting his ability to learn or experience all that the internet has to offer. I AM talking about using the information of what he looks at online to determine what life lessons could use the most reinforcement at relative times.
For instance, if my son were to post on his blog that he got stoned with his friends, I wouldn't confront him about his pot smoking. Instead I would probably queue up the pot smoking episode of South Park on the DVR for an after dinner show. Good for a few laughs, and a great opportunity to talk about the risks and responsibilities of smoking pot.
If I found an extreme case as you mentioned, planning theft or blackmail, so long as it was in the planning phase, I would probably sit him down for a talk about the value of anonymity and the lack there of on the internet. Explaining how IP's can be traced back to the provider and billing information can get them a name and number could strike some fear into him about something he is doing, and likely lead him to the conclusion that someone had contacted me because of something he posted that was tracked back to the house. This would also open up a great opportunity for the "is there anything you want to tell me line?" And if all of that fails to dissuade him from his planning, I can always confront him directly about it if I need to.
Maybe you think I'm being invasive, and maybe I am, but if the end result is that I have a better relationship with my son, more understanding about the difficulties he is facing, and a warning if something bad is going to happen, then I'll be a better parent for it.
And maybe if more parents expressed that level of interest and concern in their children, we wouldn't have these retarded 'think of the children' laws, and events like Columbine.
-Rick
Same here. Our computers are all in an open common area, visible from the kitchen, living room and dining room. Preventing him from using the internet won't teach him how to use the internet wisely. He has to have room to explore, and a watchful eye to keep him from getting into trouble.
That said, I have every intention of keeping tabs on my son's browsing habits using what ever tools are necessary. I don't intend to spy and attack, but to use it as a tool to better understand my son. I know when I was a kid, back in the BBS days, I had friends online that I would discuss stuff with that I never would have told my parents, and really, life would have been better if I had discussed it with them.
Fact is, my son will with all likelihood smoke a joint, and drink booze, both well before he turns 18. If I know about these events in his life, I can use them to ground lessons of responsibility. Whether it's planning a nature hike the morning after a planned under-aged drinking party, or maybe a viewing of 'Train Spotting' after the first joint. Both of those would put us in a position where we would be together, in a good position to talk, and have an immediate relevance to him. And that to me is worth 1000 times more than being able to scold him for looking at porno.
-Rick
The demo they show of the modeler shows scenarios where the subjects want to get to some place. That's neat and all, but in a panic, people aren't trying to get TO some place, they are trying to get AWAY from some place.
-Rick
Also from the GAO: According to amounts reported in the September 2007 Treasury Bulletin, Treasury estimates that the amount of Treasury securities held by foreign and international investors has increased $837 billion, from $1,383 as of June 30, 2003, to $2,220 billion as of June 30, 2007. As of June 30, 2007, this represents an estimated 45 percent of debt held by the public That means that of our nations $9 trillion debt, about a quarter of it is owned by foreign nations.
-Rick
Bah, poorly worded on my part. I was trying to say that Ford is claiming that the calendar infringes on their trademarks (the Ford and Mustang logo), and that it could be that they are trying to claim that imagery the Ford Mustang (the car, not the logo) is in-itself a trademark. Meaning that even if you had a calendar with images of the Ford Mustang, stripped of all Ford/Mustang emblems, that they may still attempt to claim infringement. Not that I would imagine it would have any merit, but as the title says, IANAL.
-Rick
-Rick