But you kind of hit on the reason why this problem is the fundamental problem, but also why getting musicians to act can't possibly be the solution.
That reason is that people like Lily Allen only succeded in the industry because her dad got her there due to his contacts. The fact is the music industry is absolutely full of acts who just wouldn't have gotten anywhere without the industry to turn them into a product. These artists wont leave the industry because it's the only way they can make a living doing what they love - they sure as hell couldn't go it alone because without the music industry's cartel operation to prop them up they wouldn't stand a chance in a free market where they're competing based on talent.
The industry keeps these people employed as "artists" whilst keeping any uncontrolled real talent that hasn't signed up out. It's a protection racket, unless you sign up you've got no hope, and half those who have signed up signed up because they had no hope otherwise anyway due to them having a severe lack of talent compared to everyone else.
There's just trash after trash after trash - Nikki Minaj seems to be the latest abysmal excuse for an artist that's being thrust repeatedly on the radio here in the UK right now. A few good artists make it through, like Rihanna does actually seem to have some talent, for example, but even they get used as tools to prop up the shite - case in point, I don't know what song it is because I don't care but there was a song on the radio a few weeks back which involved some fairly decent singing from Rihanna and then you get that silly Minaj bitch come on to just completely destroy the track. Had she not had Rihanna to prop up the song most sane people would just completely and utterly ignore the track. Christ, I don't even like this type of music, but again, because of the cartel, there's really little choice to listen to anything else during my commute as it's all the radio stations play in the UK.
Asking employees to be mature, not break sexual harassment laws, and suggest they tell their colleagues to do the same is exploitative?
The fact is the default situation is that they should NOT be doing what they're doing, so asking them to do what they're contractually and legally obliged to do - behave - is about as far from exploitative as you can get. It sounds if anything like the employees have been exploiting weak management letting them get away with not fulfilling their legal obligations to not sexually harass women.
The alternative is just sack them, they should be grateful they're being given that opportunity and not just being hauled up in front of an employment tribunal. Even if it was deemed to be extra duties, simply saying to your colleagues "Come on guys, leave her alone" when they step out of line is such a negligible amount of extra duty that the compensation for it would probably round to roughly $0 an hour anyway so I'm not really sure what your point is.
On one hand you have live HD/3D streaming of a bunch of different sports events running solidly for a few weeks.
On the other you have something that sure, sounds interesting, but the only access to information on it is the odd article in a newspaper/on the internet about it.
I'm sure if they also had video of the event which they could broadcast in HD/3D then people really would flock to the TV to watch it, but you can't realistically expect people to spend more time reading a few paragraphs of text on a subjct than you can watching a few weeks worth of video content.
Microsoft has been making a profit on this division for some years now, and their entertainment and devices division has made enough to make back the losses it took for some years, such that even over the last 10 - 12 year period it could now be deemed to be entirely profitable. The money pit argument comes from the supposed $6bn or so black hole Microsoft had from the R&D costs of developing the original two XBoxes and the $1bn warranty write off from the RROD fiasco. Obviously Microsoft's profits frim this division probably aren't quite up to the $6bn mark yet, but the $6bn number came from Sony fanboys wanting to troll Microsoft and was simply a combination of Microsoft's large lump sum costs like those mentioned above, without any consideration of how much of that was absorbed into revenue. The answer was quite a lot, so the real loss on the division was much much lower.
It's not entirely uptodate as it doesn't cover sales so far this year, and unfortunately they seem to have gotten rid of some of the more useful historic charts they used to have, but this site is quite useful:
You can see entertainment and devices is not the weak division now - it's online services that's the issue. E&D looks set to earn about $2bn in profit this year I believe.
My personal feeling on it is that I suspect a lot of it is driven by XBox Live subscriptions, I believe Microsoft have about 35 - 40 million gold subscribers (may even be higher now, this figure was from a few years ago IIRC), and they don't really provide anything for that service as all gaming etc. is peer to peer. It costs around £40 a year RRP, but you can get it for about £32, however even at this lower price I suspect all those subscribers are going to equate to about $1bn in sheer profit when you do the £ to dollar conversion, and remove costs of providing the service. Take this away, and the E&D division doesn't look so healthy making maybe only £200mill - £300mill, which is nothing to cough at, but still small in big boy terms. Effectively it seems they're not making as much on console sales/games/digital content outside of XBL subscriptions as they really might hope to be.
Bwahahahaha, god, it still makes me laugh to this day.
Romero, with his massive ego, sat in his highly expensive Dallas office, certain that he was the king of computer games, basically telling the world this, telling them how all the money he'd spent on his fancy office was to create a culture and environment to create the greatest game ever known......and he comes out with what is probably still the biggest most overhyped flop in the history of computer games.
Yeah, I think I'll take anything he says and continue to believe the opposite, because if there's one thing Romero is a fucking genius at, it's being completely and utterly wrong. When it comes to computing he has one of the best CVs on the planet for incorrect predictions.
Ideally this lobby will push an anti-SOPA too that enshrines in law all the things that would prevent the RIAA from arbitrarily censoring the internet, would prevent companies having to give up user data, or even retain it etc. etc.
Something the net would actually get behind, just like it worked against SOPA, and would hence likely have a strong chance of passing.
I really hope they put the same effort into lobbying as those they're claiming to compete against, and push back in the other direction - to push laws that actually help the internet, rather than simply act as a reactionary force to content industry lobbyists.
It's not a quick process sure, but the trick is divide and conquer. You can guarantee the group will have different levels of immaturity, but left unchecked will stoop to the levels of the lowest common denominator. The key is to pull those aside who are most mature and sit down with them and say "Look, we've got this new girl starting, and I don't want her to have a hard time. Also it's a bit unfair on the existing women in the workplace. Can you tell the other guys to cut it out if they make remarks the girls may find sexist?". If they don't do this then you have more serious problems, you've got no respect from your employees, and you probably need to clean house anyway, so putting them up in front of a sexual harrasment warning is probably necessary.
In most workplaces though, the sensible ones will take this on board - especially the ones who are career driven and will see you coming to them as you also rating them as more likely to be next in line for promotion so will actuall do as you ask as a sign of accepting that implicit responsibility you've given them. When this happens it then becomes much more difficult for the less sensible ones to do it, because your peers telling you it is not acceptable is far more effective than your boss. It's about making the responsibility to act more maturely trickle through the group by selecting the most realistic point of entry in injecting that ideology into the group, and removing any that wont buy into that ideology full stop from the company. Building a company culture is no different to building a specific type of team (e.g. a dev team, a marketing team, a support team) - it's about training those staff you can, removing those you can't, and ensuring any new hires fit the required checklist.
It should never have really reached the point where it's seen as acceptable in the first place though, again, this is a failure of management.
It's not even a net neutrality pledge anyway. It's got far far too many get-out clauses that ISPs can use as an excuse to not enforce net neutrality on their network.
Still, at least some ISPs such as Virgin and Vodafone had the decency to admit outright that they wont sign the pledge because they wont even enforce a semblance of network neutrality. I'm not sure if that makes them better or worse than the ones who signed it pretending they care about net neutrality when they know full well they intend to use any of the many get-out clauses when it suits anyway.
Well in the UK I think we're probably prepared. This last 7 years or so we've seen everything from massive increases in rain through to winters that have been about 20C below historical averages.
In each case it's been because the jetstream has moved out of it's normal position. In March we had drought conditions across most of the country, since then we've had record historical rainfall ever recorded for the month of July and so forth. In 2010 we had a January/February that was so bad we hadn't seen one like it for about 40 years, by November that year it happened again, so from once in 40 years, to twice in a year. Last winter was unusually mild, we barely even went below 0C which was in stark contrast to the -20C we'd seen the two winters previous. For reference, normal winters would see lows of -6C to -8C where I live.
Perhaps it's a natural cycle, perhaps it's because of man's actions, but either way the jetstream running over the UK has been acting quite differently to what we're used to since at least 2005. It could well be that effects on the gulfstream are already causing what you suggest.
On the upside, whilst the weather we've had with a lack of jetstream in it's normal position is not pleasant, it's certainly not going to be the end of civilisation at least - we've managed to cope the last few years, but it seems it means we don't get proper summers anymore.
Yes, it's easy for them to criticise him, but what makes them so sure they're competent themselves? I'd wager if most of them asked their pupils they'd be in for a bit of a shock, in contrast, most people who have studied under Khan seem to have said they found his teaching great.
If I've learnt anything about maths teachers it's that the vast majority of them put people off of the subject for life, so this guy and those he says agree with him better be damned sure they're in the absolute minority that don't if they're going to criticise. Khan's writing some things off as "nitpicking" may not be ideal, but if he's teaching people 95% of the maths, then that's still 95% more than the teachers who put people off the subject altogether have achieved. People will learn those nitpicks themselves if they've learnt to love the subject because of a competent teacher.
It didn't really instill confidence in me that he really had much of a point when he resorted to the "Android is for nerds" argument.
One would've thought that the fact Android now has around 60% market share suggests that it's not in fact for nerds, or if it was, it would imply that most smartphone users on the planet are nerds and that nerds are a massively profitable market. Either way, the implication that Android is for nerds is true, or is a bad thing, is blatantly false. The fact is, far and away the vast majority of smartphone users prefer Android handsets.
The Android is only for nerds argument has long been well and truly debunked by the sales figures.
Besides, from his own page, he's not exactly the most objective source, he freely mentions on his homepage that he runs an entirely iOS/MacOS X development company so he has a vested interest in trolling other platforms to try and put people off of them.
What a lot of people miss is that many cameras they see are also just ANPR cameras which don't even store images, they simply read number plates and if a number plate is on the no insurance list or whatever an alert is sent out.
Similarly some people believe speed cameras are constantly filming or can constantly film, and stream back to some HQ, the reality is many of them don't even send back still, and they all only take still shots if you are actually speeding.
It's like with RIPA, where people still repeatedly parrot the idea that if a police officer asks you for an encryption key and you say no, then you can automatically get 5 years in jail. This simply isn't true as the law explicitly requires that the police have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you know the key, and the only time they've been able to do that is when people have been dumb enough to admit they know the key but aren't going to hand it over. If you say "I don't know the key" and stick to that story there's still really fuck all they can do, even with RIPA. The fact is that most people who do know the key simply crack under police questioning though "If we manage to prove you do have the key you'll get 5 years in jail, but if you just admit you know it we'll make sure it only has a minimal impact on your sentence" is usually enough to scare most people into breaking and admitting guilt on this sort of issue, but it isn't going to work on a smart criminal who knows their rights and knows the law.
This isn't to say I support all this still, but it's not the surveillance society police state many make out and certainly for the vast majority of even publicly owned cameras, they're certainly not watching you.
I agree also that this is no reason to be complacent either. Like you I'm still rather concerned by consecutive governments continuing to try and monitor more and more.
"See, the thing is that there is no such thing as a "version of a namespace" in XML. Just no such concept."
No, I'm well aware of that, and it's not what I said. What there is is a version of the spec which defines the two conflicting namespaces- you know the version of the spec, hence you know the version of functionality to apply to that namespace, providing you've sensibly ensured you have tracked the version of the spec to be applied to that specific namespace. Again, it's a common solution to a common problem.
"No, they were moving it to XML cargo-culting. 99% of the stuff pretending to be "XML syntax" was not well-formed XML."
99% is rather a gross over-exageration. Many, many businesses across the globe don't even hand craft XHTML, it's built automatically using tools like XSLT, so well formedness isn't even a problem.
"To some extent, yes. There _was_ a clash between "write specs that won't work with real-world content" and "write browsers that work with real-world content"..."
A spec isn't really meant to work with real world content. A spec is supposed to define what standards content should conform to going forward, that's kind of the point. If you write a spec to define the combined mess that is already there, then what exactly have you achieved? Throwing in a few bones like canvas don't exactly make up for the fact you've really failed to do anything worthwhile standards-wise because a competent standards process would both clean up the mess going forward, and give you those new features to boot.
"But the authoring of self-contradictory specs has nothing to do with desire for stability and everything to do with the fact that the "W3C" is a bunch of independent working groups, composed of independent members, each with their own political, technological, and business ends."...and that's different to WHATWG how? the difference is that WHATWG real controllers are a closed group, whilst the W3C's groups were at least open to all members. Further, those groups were still all at least much more represenatative than WHATWG which merely represents a couple of browser developers and nothing more, and again, those groups were at least democratic whilst WHATWG is entirely totalitarian. It's pretty clear that Hickson's personal distaste of XML has been a prime example of personal bias replacing rational decision making- at least in the W3C where there wasn't this King model of leadership, and more rational members of a group could rally against such personal stupidity. With WHATWG you don't have that, if the guy at the top makes a foolish decision and refuses to listen to millions of voices beneath him, you still all get screwed.
Personally, I support the ICC, but it's a perfectly fair thing to evaluate and question.
The ICC was created under the belief that some crimes against humanity are so bad that international prosecution is warranted. This means that a crime commited by an African leader that is deemed so bad (i.e. genocide) within his own country is bad enough to warrant punishment from outside his country.
There's a massive philosophical argument there in itself, as to whether anyone should be bound by laws outside their own nation, but it extends beyond that too - there are questions of enforcement, how effective it can be. What should happen if said perpetrator of such a crime travels through another state and the leader of that state despite being a signatory refuses to extradite him to the court? are they complicit in facilitating genocide if they allow such a person to go back to his home country and carry on committing these crimes that have been deemed to be of international consequence in nature? Again, should any crime ever even be classifiable as having consequences international in nature?
There are any number of questions you could go into quite a lot of detail on surrounding the ICC and there are a lot of remaining questions about the implications of certain events surrounding it including how obligations on signatories etc. should be enforced and so on.
A PhD is a doctorate of philosophy, and the ICC is ripe for philosophical questions. Particularly for someone who also wants to be engaged in politics.
Does it? other ex-USSR states seem to have done just fine.
Apart from the Russian sponsored coup in the Ukraine which reverted the democratically led orange revolution, Romania is largely an exception rather than the rule. Belarus being about the only other example, because Belarus never stopped being a dictatorship. I don't really see much difference between the leadership of countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and so on than other European leaderships the only difference being that their countries have less money to work with.
I have a hard time believing the leaderships of these afformentioned countries are any less corrupt, or any more incompetent than the leadership in countries like Italy or Greece have been.
The whole reason these countries broke away from the USSR in the first place is in fact precisely because the people did in fact understand democracy and the Western way of governance and because they wanted it rather than USSR led communist rule. It doesn't take generations when the people already get it.
"The basic "insoluble" problem is that XHTML1 and XHTML2 share a namespace. XML and the DOM specs define that the behavior and semantics of nodes depend only on their local name and namespace. But XHTML2 reuses some local names from XHTML1 but assigns different semantics to them."
But again, this isn't an uncommon problem in software engineering, it's simply a case of determining what actions you should take based on what version of the namespace you're dealing with, the fact you have the version information makes it trivial to do that.
"Tracking origin information in memory _could_ be done, but it would result in bizarre behavior where you recreate a node in a way that XML and the DOM say should give you the same thing as you already have... and it doesn't."
Once more it's not uncommon to solve this problem though. Sticking to the same example as before, if you transfer content between versions of Word you have to accept some limitations will be imposed on that content in some cases. This really isn't a new thing, and for the relatively few cases where people would want interop. in script between XHTML1 and XHTML2, and for something that would in effect merely be a transitional stage, it doesn't seem much of a big deal. It's certainly far better than the current status quo which has instead just chosen to take the rather backwards step of using standards to make abysmal quality markup the standard, rather than the XHTML approach which was to up the standard of markup meaning markup would be far more flexible, far more portable, and far more interoperable. The W3C approach was never going to be fast, it takes a long time to transition, but people were moving their markup to XML syntax, even if they weren't serving as XML, and that was a massive first step. The problem is that HTML5 seems to actively discourage the XML route (and yes, I've read Ian Hickson's rant about XML, but it's mostly FUD, arguments such as "different browsers render XML when not served as XML differently" are retarded in the context of the fact that HTML - even HTML5 with it's defined parsing exactly the same). The discouragement of XML seems to be more about some personal vendetta Ian Hickson has against the W3C rather than as a result of any rational reasoning. Even if WHATWG encouraged the XHTML5 route rather than the HTML5 route it would be something, but the fact they don't do that shows what a pathetic attempt it is at taking the web forward. Arguments such as "People find XML syntax too confusing" are more bollocks than they ever were nowadays, your average joe just doesn't touch the syntax anymore, it's all done through tools which developers develop, and they DO want decent syntax. HTML5 doesn't offer that.
One personal example I can give is that I had to deal with a system a few years back that was quite old, but not so old that it didn't at least make sure it output XHTML1 seemingly because at the time the product was developed it was a buzzword that gave salespeople a hardon. The product in question was an expert system, a closed source black box, that output XHTML wizard interfaces to work through branches of that expert system to find answers. I was given the task of integrating this into the company's new systems as part of an overall workflow process as an interim measure until a replacement was found, and because it output XML it was actually amazingly simple because I could simply apply XSLT transforms to the output of the system to integrate them directly into the output of the new web based system, and similarly issue responses back to the system in a trivial manner. If this was 10 years on, and the system was using HTML5, rather than XHTML5, then we'd be better just writing it off because the HTML5 standards are so awful that it's unlikely any tools will ever be as good as those available for XML. This is in large part, despite some years having gone by, there are still no HTML5 validators that are anything other than "highly experimental". It's easy for Hickson and co. to bitch abou
"Sure there is. Once nodes can be moved via script, your DOM may no longer match your DTD, because a DTD is a _syntax_ description."
Apologies, I'll try and be more clear, I wasn't referring to usage of the DTD itself to help define the DOM but merely to the fact your doctype declaration defines the version of the markup from which the DOM is created, and can hence be used to determine how the DOM can be manipulated, any cross-version DOM manipulation can similarly be handled based on the version information provided. The key is simply to ensure version information is available when handling manipulation - this is again exactly how many protocols work.
It's not going to be the most simple task to do throughout, but it's far from a particularly complex task. I've architected and worked on many business systems that deal with far more numerous and far complex DTDs than those provided by XHTML1 and 2, which result in in-memory representations that ultimately need to communicate in different manners based on their origins and I still simply don't see anything intractable about producing something that will handle both XHTML1 and XHTML2.
Do you have any examples of specific problems you feel would not realistically be solvable?
"Please read what I said more carefully. I addressed this."
The only address you made was to imply that Word is somehow different because you have to cater for interaction between two different versions in HTML when scripts interact with them. I pointed out that this isn't in fact any different because other applications, such as Word, do exactly this.
"Because what's serialized is the localname and namespace, and those are identical for the two elements that are supposed to have different behavior."
Yes, and you know what version you're dealing with and serialising to/from using the DTD, so there's no issue. This is a common problem in software, software dealing with multiple protocol versions for example also deal with this sort of thing all the time in that they have to alter their input/output, and how features are handled for the user based upon that. The key is good versioning information, and up until HTML5 we had that. Good versioning is not exactly something Mozilla has shown any competence in in recent times though, despite much of their userbase telling them how stupid the new versioning system is, so again, perhaps there is a culture problem there that leads to failing to grasp the importance of that.
"I think we're done here, since you've moved on to ad hominem attacks...."
Ah I see, so now it's clear that you're not exactly approaching the discussion from a neutral standpoint you cry foul?
Possibly. To make it worse though I updated my copy of Firefox at work today, and whilst I have the new home button, I have the old back button still rather than the new one. Both machines are Windows 7 x64, and both versions identically configured. It seems the changes aren't even consistent so you get UI differences now depending on some entirely non-obvious variable.
"You have to be able to move elements from one DOM to the other whenever script decides to do it. That's the whole problem, as you would have realized if you'd taken a moment to think about this instead of assuming that everyone else has no idea what they're doing."
This simply isn't true. You can perfectly well move content between different versions of Word/Excel documents using VBA.
"Of course with enough effort and pain and memory usage and indirection this is all achievable. You _can_ get to a world where two elements with the same tag name and namespace in the same document have totally different DOM behavior. It just means you can't serialize that document as XML. And violates some other W3C standards. But it _can_ be done."
Again, this is simply false. Why would your in-memory representation effect your serialisation to/from XML? Again, it's a pretty basic software engineering task to separate this sort of thing. Is the Firefox code base such a mess that it can no longer be properly architected without a re-write or something?
"Then the question becomes whether creating an inconsistent and confusing system that violates existing standards is better for the world than just ignoring XHTML2. This is indeed debatable, but in practice most people decided it's not."
Sure, "Most people" being a handful of self interested browser developers who apparently had no idea what they were doing. In fact, most people - i.e. by far the democratic majority were behind XHTML2 until browser devs scuppered it.
"And yes, I do have some grounding in software development. Both academic and practical. Though I've only been working on web browsers for about 12 years or so; obviously there are people who have more experience than me."
Right, well thank you for at least partially admitting where your bias stems from, although someone else had to disclose you're a Mozilla developer for me. I'm not suprised therefore that you're making excuses, because obviously this makes you part of the problem. It's no wonder browsers have consistently failed to implement standards, and even HTML5 is no different if the code bases are developed by people who simply cannot figure out how to decouple different sections of a system.
I can't be arsed to respond to most of it because it's largely bollocks, but I have to ask, do you actually have any grounding in software development? Your repeated suggestion that it would be impossible for browsers to support both HTML4/XHTML1 and XHTML2 without some changeover day is fucking laughable.
How the hell do you think applications such as Word deal with different file formats such as.doc and.docx? It's a long solved problem, if you can't figure out how to implement the relevant abstractions to be able to support multiple document formats you have absolutely no business whatsoever writing something like a web browser.
It is not an unsolveable problem, on the contrary, with a bit of competence it's a trivially solvable problem, even if it means supporting different DOM implementations. Suggesting magically behaving different is magic is absolute madness. Even a 1st year software engineering undergrad could tell you how to achieve it.
"They were failures caused by the spec being deliberately written to not match behavior of already existing and deployed systems."
If by deliberately you mean they came to a compromise because existing browsers implemented the feature inconsistently, hence the spec made a decision how to implement properly then yes, otherwise no, you're just making shit up.
"The point of standardization is generally to take a bunch of stuff that's going on already and reconcile it so that people all do it the same way."
No it's not, that's what HTML5 is doing and that's why it's failing miserably. The point of a specification is to specify how things should be done, it should focus towards best practice, to raise the standard, not cater to the lowest common denominator anything goes scenario like HTML5 else there's no point even bothering with a spec in the first place.
" It's a problem because it meant that there was no deployment path for XHTML2: no browser could actually implement it correctly without breaking their HTML4/XHTML1 support. And they had absolutely no incentive to do that."
What are you on about? You use your XML parser for XHTML (including 1 because it's XML, that's kind of the point) and your existing parser for HTML. It's not difficult, in fact, this is exactly what some browsers now do.
"Sure, but the "XML" bit wasn't the problem with XHTML2. Things like "assign different semantics than XHTML1 to the same namespace+localname pair" were a bit more of a problem."
Right, so one minute you're pretending there was no transitional tool (XHTML1) now you're complaining XHTML2 did things differently? Again, that's kind of the point. Seems like you just want to slag the W3C off whatever they do, because your argument isn't consistent.
"No, I'm writing off the particular _approach_ they took to that goal as a pie-in-the-sky project."
Right, because browser vendors were being childish because it meant they had to start doing things properly, something they decided not to do.
"1) Create a new version of HTML that no existing browser can implement without dropping support for the old version of HTML, the one that lots of sites already use."
Okay so what changed? why do browsers now support both is this is true? do you think there was some magical breakthrough in computer science that allowed browsers to have two parsers? No, the fact is it was always possible to handle two paths. It's basic software engineering, the parser should be separated from the renderer with an abstraction layer, it shouldn't care how the data is read and again, that's now exactly what happens with browsers supporting both paths.
Step 2 was never addressed because browser vendors found it too tempting to try and push the web they wanted, rather than the way everyone else wanted.
It's hard to have a deployment plan if the key players wont play ball making up nonsensical excuses about how they can't have two parsers, something they now magically have.
Yes, but all the kiddies complained about how HTML hurt their brain, how things like div soup was just too confusing for them, and so we got HTML5.
Problem is, the kiddies are now all off using Facebook, Joomla, Wordpress, Twitter, and Blogger, and so aren't touching HTML anyway, and here we are, those of us who do actually have to touch it, dealing with a shambolic mess.
It's a shame that web standards are ruled by those who simply don't have a clue about what it takes to write good quality software.
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But you kind of hit on the reason why this problem is the fundamental problem, but also why getting musicians to act can't possibly be the solution.
That reason is that people like Lily Allen only succeded in the industry because her dad got her there due to his contacts. The fact is the music industry is absolutely full of acts who just wouldn't have gotten anywhere without the industry to turn them into a product. These artists wont leave the industry because it's the only way they can make a living doing what they love - they sure as hell couldn't go it alone because without the music industry's cartel operation to prop them up they wouldn't stand a chance in a free market where they're competing based on talent.
The industry keeps these people employed as "artists" whilst keeping any uncontrolled real talent that hasn't signed up out. It's a protection racket, unless you sign up you've got no hope, and half those who have signed up signed up because they had no hope otherwise anyway due to them having a severe lack of talent compared to everyone else.
There's just trash after trash after trash - Nikki Minaj seems to be the latest abysmal excuse for an artist that's being thrust repeatedly on the radio here in the UK right now. A few good artists make it through, like Rihanna does actually seem to have some talent, for example, but even they get used as tools to prop up the shite - case in point, I don't know what song it is because I don't care but there was a song on the radio a few weeks back which involved some fairly decent singing from Rihanna and then you get that silly Minaj bitch come on to just completely destroy the track. Had she not had Rihanna to prop up the song most sane people would just completely and utterly ignore the track. Christ, I don't even like this type of music, but again, because of the cartel, there's really little choice to listen to anything else during my commute as it's all the radio stations play in the UK.
Asking employees to be mature, not break sexual harassment laws, and suggest they tell their colleagues to do the same is exploitative?
The fact is the default situation is that they should NOT be doing what they're doing, so asking them to do what they're contractually and legally obliged to do - behave - is about as far from exploitative as you can get. It sounds if anything like the employees have been exploiting weak management letting them get away with not fulfilling their legal obligations to not sexually harass women.
The alternative is just sack them, they should be grateful they're being given that opportunity and not just being hauled up in front of an employment tribunal. Even if it was deemed to be extra duties, simply saying to your colleagues "Come on guys, leave her alone" when they step out of line is such a negligible amount of extra duty that the compensation for it would probably round to roughly $0 an hour anyway so I'm not really sure what your point is.
To be fair, people would be interested, but...
On one hand you have live HD/3D streaming of a bunch of different sports events running solidly for a few weeks.
On the other you have something that sure, sounds interesting, but the only access to information on it is the odd article in a newspaper/on the internet about it.
I'm sure if they also had video of the event which they could broadcast in HD/3D then people really would flock to the TV to watch it, but you can't realistically expect people to spend more time reading a few paragraphs of text on a subjct than you can watching a few weeks worth of video content.
It's actually better for them than he points out.
Microsoft has been making a profit on this division for some years now, and their entertainment and devices division has made enough to make back the losses it took for some years, such that even over the last 10 - 12 year period it could now be deemed to be entirely profitable. The money pit argument comes from the supposed $6bn or so black hole Microsoft had from the R&D costs of developing the original two XBoxes and the $1bn warranty write off from the RROD fiasco. Obviously Microsoft's profits frim this division probably aren't quite up to the $6bn mark yet, but the $6bn number came from Sony fanboys wanting to troll Microsoft and was simply a combination of Microsoft's large lump sum costs like those mentioned above, without any consideration of how much of that was absorbed into revenue. The answer was quite a lot, so the real loss on the division was much much lower.
It's not entirely uptodate as it doesn't cover sales so far this year, and unfortunately they seem to have gotten rid of some of the more useful historic charts they used to have, but this site is quite useful:
http://www.tannerhelland.com/3958/microsoft-money-updated-2011/
You can see entertainment and devices is not the weak division now - it's online services that's the issue. E&D looks set to earn about $2bn in profit this year I believe.
My personal feeling on it is that I suspect a lot of it is driven by XBox Live subscriptions, I believe Microsoft have about 35 - 40 million gold subscribers (may even be higher now, this figure was from a few years ago IIRC), and they don't really provide anything for that service as all gaming etc. is peer to peer. It costs around £40 a year RRP, but you can get it for about £32, however even at this lower price I suspect all those subscribers are going to equate to about $1bn in sheer profit when you do the £ to dollar conversion, and remove costs of providing the service. Take this away, and the E&D division doesn't look so healthy making maybe only £200mill - £300mill, which is nothing to cough at, but still small in big boy terms. Effectively it seems they're not making as much on console sales/games/digital content outside of XBL subscriptions as they really might hope to be.
Hehehe, Daikatana.
Bwahahahaha, god, it still makes me laugh to this day.
Romero, with his massive ego, sat in his highly expensive Dallas office, certain that he was the king of computer games, basically telling the world this, telling them how all the money he'd spent on his fancy office was to create a culture and environment to create the greatest game ever known... ...and he comes out with what is probably still the biggest most overhyped flop in the history of computer games.
Yeah, I think I'll take anything he says and continue to believe the opposite, because if there's one thing Romero is a fucking genius at, it's being completely and utterly wrong. When it comes to computing he has one of the best CVs on the planet for incorrect predictions.
Any idea if the guy even gets compensation and the costs and fine he had to pay back?
I expect for the amount of damage this did to his career etc. he should deserve a fairly hefty compensation package.
Ideally this lobby will push an anti-SOPA too that enshrines in law all the things that would prevent the RIAA from arbitrarily censoring the internet, would prevent companies having to give up user data, or even retain it etc. etc.
Something the net would actually get behind, just like it worked against SOPA, and would hence likely have a strong chance of passing.
I really hope they put the same effort into lobbying as those they're claiming to compete against, and push back in the other direction - to push laws that actually help the internet, rather than simply act as a reactionary force to content industry lobbyists.
It's not a quick process sure, but the trick is divide and conquer. You can guarantee the group will have different levels of immaturity, but left unchecked will stoop to the levels of the lowest common denominator. The key is to pull those aside who are most mature and sit down with them and say "Look, we've got this new girl starting, and I don't want her to have a hard time. Also it's a bit unfair on the existing women in the workplace. Can you tell the other guys to cut it out if they make remarks the girls may find sexist?". If they don't do this then you have more serious problems, you've got no respect from your employees, and you probably need to clean house anyway, so putting them up in front of a sexual harrasment warning is probably necessary.
In most workplaces though, the sensible ones will take this on board - especially the ones who are career driven and will see you coming to them as you also rating them as more likely to be next in line for promotion so will actuall do as you ask as a sign of accepting that implicit responsibility you've given them. When this happens it then becomes much more difficult for the less sensible ones to do it, because your peers telling you it is not acceptable is far more effective than your boss. It's about making the responsibility to act more maturely trickle through the group by selecting the most realistic point of entry in injecting that ideology into the group, and removing any that wont buy into that ideology full stop from the company. Building a company culture is no different to building a specific type of team (e.g. a dev team, a marketing team, a support team) - it's about training those staff you can, removing those you can't, and ensuring any new hires fit the required checklist.
It should never have really reached the point where it's seen as acceptable in the first place though, again, this is a failure of management.
It's not even a net neutrality pledge anyway. It's got far far too many get-out clauses that ISPs can use as an excuse to not enforce net neutrality on their network.
Still, at least some ISPs such as Virgin and Vodafone had the decency to admit outright that they wont sign the pledge because they wont even enforce a semblance of network neutrality. I'm not sure if that makes them better or worse than the ones who signed it pretending they care about net neutrality when they know full well they intend to use any of the many get-out clauses when it suits anyway.
Well in the UK I think we're probably prepared. This last 7 years or so we've seen everything from massive increases in rain through to winters that have been about 20C below historical averages.
In each case it's been because the jetstream has moved out of it's normal position. In March we had drought conditions across most of the country, since then we've had record historical rainfall ever recorded for the month of July and so forth. In 2010 we had a January/February that was so bad we hadn't seen one like it for about 40 years, by November that year it happened again, so from once in 40 years, to twice in a year. Last winter was unusually mild, we barely even went below 0C which was in stark contrast to the -20C we'd seen the two winters previous. For reference, normal winters would see lows of -6C to -8C where I live.
Perhaps it's a natural cycle, perhaps it's because of man's actions, but either way the jetstream running over the UK has been acting quite differently to what we're used to since at least 2005. It could well be that effects on the gulfstream are already causing what you suggest.
On the upside, whilst the weather we've had with a lack of jetstream in it's normal position is not pleasant, it's certainly not going to be the end of civilisation at least - we've managed to cope the last few years, but it seems it means we don't get proper summers anymore.
Yes, it's easy for them to criticise him, but what makes them so sure they're competent themselves? I'd wager if most of them asked their pupils they'd be in for a bit of a shock, in contrast, most people who have studied under Khan seem to have said they found his teaching great.
If I've learnt anything about maths teachers it's that the vast majority of them put people off of the subject for life, so this guy and those he says agree with him better be damned sure they're in the absolute minority that don't if they're going to criticise. Khan's writing some things off as "nitpicking" may not be ideal, but if he's teaching people 95% of the maths, then that's still 95% more than the teachers who put people off the subject altogether have achieved. People will learn those nitpicks themselves if they've learnt to love the subject because of a competent teacher.
It didn't really instill confidence in me that he really had much of a point when he resorted to the "Android is for nerds" argument.
One would've thought that the fact Android now has around 60% market share suggests that it's not in fact for nerds, or if it was, it would imply that most smartphone users on the planet are nerds and that nerds are a massively profitable market. Either way, the implication that Android is for nerds is true, or is a bad thing, is blatantly false. The fact is, far and away the vast majority of smartphone users prefer Android handsets.
The Android is only for nerds argument has long been well and truly debunked by the sales figures.
Besides, from his own page, he's not exactly the most objective source, he freely mentions on his homepage that he runs an entirely iOS/MacOS X development company so he has a vested interest in trolling other platforms to try and put people off of them.
What a lot of people miss is that many cameras they see are also just ANPR cameras which don't even store images, they simply read number plates and if a number plate is on the no insurance list or whatever an alert is sent out.
Similarly some people believe speed cameras are constantly filming or can constantly film, and stream back to some HQ, the reality is many of them don't even send back still, and they all only take still shots if you are actually speeding.
It's like with RIPA, where people still repeatedly parrot the idea that if a police officer asks you for an encryption key and you say no, then you can automatically get 5 years in jail. This simply isn't true as the law explicitly requires that the police have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you know the key, and the only time they've been able to do that is when people have been dumb enough to admit they know the key but aren't going to hand it over. If you say "I don't know the key" and stick to that story there's still really fuck all they can do, even with RIPA. The fact is that most people who do know the key simply crack under police questioning though "If we manage to prove you do have the key you'll get 5 years in jail, but if you just admit you know it we'll make sure it only has a minimal impact on your sentence" is usually enough to scare most people into breaking and admitting guilt on this sort of issue, but it isn't going to work on a smart criminal who knows their rights and knows the law.
This isn't to say I support all this still, but it's not the surveillance society police state many make out and certainly for the vast majority of even publicly owned cameras, they're certainly not watching you.
I agree also that this is no reason to be complacent either. Like you I'm still rather concerned by consecutive governments continuing to try and monitor more and more.
"See, the thing is that there is no such thing as a "version of a namespace" in XML. Just no such concept."
No, I'm well aware of that, and it's not what I said. What there is is a version of the spec which defines the two conflicting namespaces- you know the version of the spec, hence you know the version of functionality to apply to that namespace, providing you've sensibly ensured you have tracked the version of the spec to be applied to that specific namespace. Again, it's a common solution to a common problem.
"No, they were moving it to XML cargo-culting. 99% of the stuff pretending to be "XML syntax" was not well-formed XML."
99% is rather a gross over-exageration. Many, many businesses across the globe don't even hand craft XHTML, it's built automatically using tools like XSLT, so well formedness isn't even a problem.
"To some extent, yes. There _was_ a clash between "write specs that won't work with real-world content" and "write browsers that work with real-world content"..."
A spec isn't really meant to work with real world content. A spec is supposed to define what standards content should conform to going forward, that's kind of the point. If you write a spec to define the combined mess that is already there, then what exactly have you achieved? Throwing in a few bones like canvas don't exactly make up for the fact you've really failed to do anything worthwhile standards-wise because a competent standards process would both clean up the mess going forward, and give you those new features to boot.
"But the authoring of self-contradictory specs has nothing to do with desire for stability and everything to do with the fact that the "W3C" is a bunch of independent working groups, composed of independent members, each with their own political, technological, and business ends." ...and that's different to WHATWG how? the difference is that WHATWG real controllers are a closed group, whilst the W3C's groups were at least open to all members. Further, those groups were still all at least much more represenatative than WHATWG which merely represents a couple of browser developers and nothing more, and again, those groups were at least democratic whilst WHATWG is entirely totalitarian. It's pretty clear that Hickson's personal distaste of XML has been a prime example of personal bias replacing rational decision making- at least in the W3C where there wasn't this King model of leadership, and more rational members of a group could rally against such personal stupidity. With WHATWG you don't have that, if the guy at the top makes a foolish decision and refuses to listen to millions of voices beneath him, you still all get screwed.
Personally, I support the ICC, but it's a perfectly fair thing to evaluate and question.
The ICC was created under the belief that some crimes against humanity are so bad that international prosecution is warranted. This means that a crime commited by an African leader that is deemed so bad (i.e. genocide) within his own country is bad enough to warrant punishment from outside his country.
There's a massive philosophical argument there in itself, as to whether anyone should be bound by laws outside their own nation, but it extends beyond that too - there are questions of enforcement, how effective it can be. What should happen if said perpetrator of such a crime travels through another state and the leader of that state despite being a signatory refuses to extradite him to the court? are they complicit in facilitating genocide if they allow such a person to go back to his home country and carry on committing these crimes that have been deemed to be of international consequence in nature? Again, should any crime ever even be classifiable as having consequences international in nature?
There are any number of questions you could go into quite a lot of detail on surrounding the ICC and there are a lot of remaining questions about the implications of certain events surrounding it including how obligations on signatories etc. should be enforced and so on.
A PhD is a doctorate of philosophy, and the ICC is ripe for philosophical questions. Particularly for someone who also wants to be engaged in politics.
Does it? other ex-USSR states seem to have done just fine.
Apart from the Russian sponsored coup in the Ukraine which reverted the democratically led orange revolution, Romania is largely an exception rather than the rule. Belarus being about the only other example, because Belarus never stopped being a dictatorship. I don't really see much difference between the leadership of countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and so on than other European leaderships the only difference being that their countries have less money to work with.
I have a hard time believing the leaderships of these afformentioned countries are any less corrupt, or any more incompetent than the leadership in countries like Italy or Greece have been.
The whole reason these countries broke away from the USSR in the first place is in fact precisely because the people did in fact understand democracy and the Western way of governance and because they wanted it rather than USSR led communist rule. It doesn't take generations when the people already get it.
"The basic "insoluble" problem is that XHTML1 and XHTML2 share a namespace. XML and the DOM specs define that the behavior and semantics of nodes depend only on their local name and namespace. But XHTML2 reuses some local names from XHTML1 but assigns different semantics to them."
But again, this isn't an uncommon problem in software engineering, it's simply a case of determining what actions you should take based on what version of the namespace you're dealing with, the fact you have the version information makes it trivial to do that.
"Tracking origin information in memory _could_ be done, but it would result in bizarre behavior where you recreate a node in a way that XML and the DOM say should give you the same thing as you already have ... and it doesn't."
Once more it's not uncommon to solve this problem though. Sticking to the same example as before, if you transfer content between versions of Word you have to accept some limitations will be imposed on that content in some cases. This really isn't a new thing, and for the relatively few cases where people would want interop. in script between XHTML1 and XHTML2, and for something that would in effect merely be a transitional stage, it doesn't seem much of a big deal. It's certainly far better than the current status quo which has instead just chosen to take the rather backwards step of using standards to make abysmal quality markup the standard, rather than the XHTML approach which was to up the standard of markup meaning markup would be far more flexible, far more portable, and far more interoperable. The W3C approach was never going to be fast, it takes a long time to transition, but people were moving their markup to XML syntax, even if they weren't serving as XML, and that was a massive first step. The problem is that HTML5 seems to actively discourage the XML route (and yes, I've read Ian Hickson's rant about XML, but it's mostly FUD, arguments such as "different browsers render XML when not served as XML differently" are retarded in the context of the fact that HTML - even HTML5 with it's defined parsing exactly the same). The discouragement of XML seems to be more about some personal vendetta Ian Hickson has against the W3C rather than as a result of any rational reasoning. Even if WHATWG encouraged the XHTML5 route rather than the HTML5 route it would be something, but the fact they don't do that shows what a pathetic attempt it is at taking the web forward. Arguments such as "People find XML syntax too confusing" are more bollocks than they ever were nowadays, your average joe just doesn't touch the syntax anymore, it's all done through tools which developers develop, and they DO want decent syntax. HTML5 doesn't offer that.
One personal example I can give is that I had to deal with a system a few years back that was quite old, but not so old that it didn't at least make sure it output XHTML1 seemingly because at the time the product was developed it was a buzzword that gave salespeople a hardon. The product in question was an expert system, a closed source black box, that output XHTML wizard interfaces to work through branches of that expert system to find answers. I was given the task of integrating this into the company's new systems as part of an overall workflow process as an interim measure until a replacement was found, and because it output XML it was actually amazingly simple because I could simply apply XSLT transforms to the output of the system to integrate them directly into the output of the new web based system, and similarly issue responses back to the system in a trivial manner. If this was 10 years on, and the system was using HTML5, rather than XHTML5, then we'd be better just writing it off because the HTML5 standards are so awful that it's unlikely any tools will ever be as good as those available for XML. This is in large part, despite some years having gone by, there are still no HTML5 validators that are anything other than "highly experimental". It's easy for Hickson and co. to bitch abou
"Sure there is. Once nodes can be moved via script, your DOM may no longer match your DTD, because a DTD is a _syntax_ description."
Apologies, I'll try and be more clear, I wasn't referring to usage of the DTD itself to help define the DOM but merely to the fact your doctype declaration defines the version of the markup from which the DOM is created, and can hence be used to determine how the DOM can be manipulated, any cross-version DOM manipulation can similarly be handled based on the version information provided. The key is simply to ensure version information is available when handling manipulation - this is again exactly how many protocols work.
It's not going to be the most simple task to do throughout, but it's far from a particularly complex task. I've architected and worked on many business systems that deal with far more numerous and far complex DTDs than those provided by XHTML1 and 2, which result in in-memory representations that ultimately need to communicate in different manners based on their origins and I still simply don't see anything intractable about producing something that will handle both XHTML1 and XHTML2.
Do you have any examples of specific problems you feel would not realistically be solvable?
"Please read what I said more carefully. I addressed this."
The only address you made was to imply that Word is somehow different because you have to cater for interaction between two different versions in HTML when scripts interact with them. I pointed out that this isn't in fact any different because other applications, such as Word, do exactly this.
"Because what's serialized is the localname and namespace, and those are identical for the two elements that are supposed to have different behavior."
Yes, and you know what version you're dealing with and serialising to/from using the DTD, so there's no issue. This is a common problem in software, software dealing with multiple protocol versions for example also deal with this sort of thing all the time in that they have to alter their input/output, and how features are handled for the user based upon that. The key is good versioning information, and up until HTML5 we had that. Good versioning is not exactly something Mozilla has shown any competence in in recent times though, despite much of their userbase telling them how stupid the new versioning system is, so again, perhaps there is a culture problem there that leads to failing to grasp the importance of that.
"I think we're done here, since you've moved on to ad hominem attacks...."
Ah I see, so now it's clear that you're not exactly approaching the discussion from a neutral standpoint you cry foul?
Possibly. To make it worse though I updated my copy of Firefox at work today, and whilst I have the new home button, I have the old back button still rather than the new one. Both machines are Windows 7 x64, and both versions identically configured. It seems the changes aren't even consistent so you get UI differences now depending on some entirely non-obvious variable.
"You have to be able to move elements from one DOM to the other whenever script decides to do it. That's the whole problem, as you would have realized if you'd taken a moment to think about this instead of assuming that everyone else has no idea what they're doing."
This simply isn't true. You can perfectly well move content between different versions of Word/Excel documents using VBA.
"Of course with enough effort and pain and memory usage and indirection this is all achievable. You _can_ get to a world where two elements with the same tag name and namespace in the same document have totally different DOM behavior. It just means you can't serialize that document as XML. And violates some other W3C standards. But it _can_ be done."
Again, this is simply false. Why would your in-memory representation effect your serialisation to/from XML? Again, it's a pretty basic software engineering task to separate this sort of thing. Is the Firefox code base such a mess that it can no longer be properly architected without a re-write or something?
"Then the question becomes whether creating an inconsistent and confusing system that violates existing standards is better for the world than just ignoring XHTML2. This is indeed debatable, but in practice most people decided it's not."
Sure, "Most people" being a handful of self interested browser developers who apparently had no idea what they were doing. In fact, most people - i.e. by far the democratic majority were behind XHTML2 until browser devs scuppered it.
"And yes, I do have some grounding in software development. Both academic and practical. Though I've only been working on web browsers for about 12 years or so; obviously there are people who have more experience than me."
Right, well thank you for at least partially admitting where your bias stems from, although someone else had to disclose you're a Mozilla developer for me. I'm not suprised therefore that you're making excuses, because obviously this makes you part of the problem. It's no wonder browsers have consistently failed to implement standards, and even HTML5 is no different if the code bases are developed by people who simply cannot figure out how to decouple different sections of a system.
Thank you, it's a shame he couldn't disclose his bias himself as is normal in such discussions.
I can't be arsed to respond to most of it because it's largely bollocks, but I have to ask, do you actually have any grounding in software development? Your repeated suggestion that it would be impossible for browsers to support both HTML4/XHTML1 and XHTML2 without some changeover day is fucking laughable.
How the hell do you think applications such as Word deal with different file formats such as .doc and .docx? It's a long solved problem, if you can't figure out how to implement the relevant abstractions to be able to support multiple document formats you have absolutely no business whatsoever writing something like a web browser.
It is not an unsolveable problem, on the contrary, with a bit of competence it's a trivially solvable problem, even if it means supporting different DOM implementations. Suggesting magically behaving different is magic is absolute madness. Even a 1st year software engineering undergrad could tell you how to achieve it.
"They were failures caused by the spec being deliberately written to not match behavior of already existing and deployed systems."
If by deliberately you mean they came to a compromise because existing browsers implemented the feature inconsistently, hence the spec made a decision how to implement properly then yes, otherwise no, you're just making shit up.
"The point of standardization is generally to take a bunch of stuff that's going on already and reconcile it so that people all do it the same way."
No it's not, that's what HTML5 is doing and that's why it's failing miserably. The point of a specification is to specify how things should be done, it should focus towards best practice, to raise the standard, not cater to the lowest common denominator anything goes scenario like HTML5 else there's no point even bothering with a spec in the first place.
" It's a problem because it meant that there was no deployment path for XHTML2: no browser could actually implement it correctly without breaking their HTML4/XHTML1 support. And they had absolutely no incentive to do that."
What are you on about? You use your XML parser for XHTML (including 1 because it's XML, that's kind of the point) and your existing parser for HTML. It's not difficult, in fact, this is exactly what some browsers now do.
"Sure, but the "XML" bit wasn't the problem with XHTML2. Things like "assign different semantics than XHTML1 to the same namespace+localname pair" were a bit more of a problem."
Right, so one minute you're pretending there was no transitional tool (XHTML1) now you're complaining XHTML2 did things differently? Again, that's kind of the point. Seems like you just want to slag the W3C off whatever they do, because your argument isn't consistent.
"No, I'm writing off the particular _approach_ they took to that goal as a pie-in-the-sky project."
Right, because browser vendors were being childish because it meant they had to start doing things properly, something they decided not to do.
"1) Create a new version of HTML that no existing browser can implement without dropping support for the old version of HTML, the one that lots of sites already use."
Okay so what changed? why do browsers now support both is this is true? do you think there was some magical breakthrough in computer science that allowed browsers to have two parsers? No, the fact is it was always possible to handle two paths. It's basic software engineering, the parser should be separated from the renderer with an abstraction layer, it shouldn't care how the data is read and again, that's now exactly what happens with browsers supporting both paths.
Step 2 was never addressed because browser vendors found it too tempting to try and push the web they wanted, rather than the way everyone else wanted.
It's hard to have a deployment plan if the key players wont play ball making up nonsensical excuses about how they can't have two parsers, something they now magically have.
Yes, but all the kiddies complained about how HTML hurt their brain, how things like div soup was just too confusing for them, and so we got HTML5.
Problem is, the kiddies are now all off using Facebook, Joomla, Wordpress, Twitter, and Blogger, and so aren't touching HTML anyway, and here we are, those of us who do actually have to touch it, dealing with a shambolic mess.
It's a shame that web standards are ruled by those who simply don't have a clue about what it takes to write good quality software.