It is relevant, to a point. Many lower-end cards can only drive a max of 1920x1200 since they don't support dual-link DVI; I've yet to see a (non-TV) 30" monitor that's not 2560x1600. Likewise, I've never heard of a monitor smaller than 30" that requires dual-link DVI.
So while the card doesn't care about the physical size of the display, it does care about the resolution - and that tends to scale with the physical size.
That would eliminate data corruption, not loss. If the OS crashes and it never makes it to the log, then you've lost data.
Don't get me wrong - that's a good thing. But you contradict yourself saying that completely avoiding data loss is possible and then following that up with "If it fails during the log write, it can be wiped and ignored."
Also speaking as a photographer, I'm perpetually running out of storage - and that's with the biggest drives available (with new DSLRs now shooting 1080p video, that's getting even worse). Now granted, the actual disk capacity hasn't changed by a single bit as a result of changing the notation from a mislabeled TiB to actual base-10 TB, but it at least makes buying the biggest, most expensive drives a little less painful since they don't appear 10% smaller right out of the box.
As far as I'm concerned, this change is entirely psychological, but long overdue. It will eliminate a lot of confusion, change the OS to actually use the correct* units, and make it a little bit easier for people like me who go through storage absurdly fast to know when they need to buy yet another drive.
*ie, not putting the base-10 unit next to a base-2 number. Which one is more appropriate is an entirely separate matter which I'd argue is more down to opinion than anything else at this point.
You say that in jest, but I know the flightcaster team and it's four times bigger than it should be for a company as young as they are. I wouldn't be surprised if they picked up a couple of slashdotters in the past few days.
I'm no patent lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that when you've patented your product and then your competition introduces a product that is in complete violation of said patent, you'd be idiotic not to sue for damages. My understanding is that the whole point of patents is to be granted a temporary monopoly on new technology so that you're willing to innovate precisely because this kind of behavior is legally prevented.
Of course, that doesn't bring into account the legitimacy of the patent at all - just the theory behind how the system is designed to work (to the best of my knowledge).
That logic held a couple of years ago. Especially in the last couple of months, IE (6 in particular) is increasingly getting the finger - even on large, highly-trafficked sites such as YouTube. Nobody uses ActiveX anymore, and even Microsoft is pushing the standards-compliant* IE8. Desktop apps may not be dead, but things are clearly migrating towards web apps everywhere. Either MS can piss off web developers who will then in turn actively tell their users to switch away from IE, or they can do what the rest of the world has been doing for the past half-decade and render sites properly - and NOT give developers any more reason to try and foist Microsoft's competition upon their visitors.
I for one outright don't support IE6. I have much better things to be doing with my time than trying to guess what element planted the explosive that caused the page to blow up. Maybe several months from now once multiple cross-site integrations are complete I'll even be able to think about it, but I expect that there will always be more pressing issues than trying to debug a stylesheet through random guesswork for a decade-old browser that's losing market share every day.
In short, it no longer suits Microsoft's best interest to active vendor lock-in through a non-standards-compliant browser. Rather than catering to a degraded experience, developers are actively fighting it. As crazy as Ballmer sounded doing his "developers!" dance, he's absolutely right to attribute Windows' success to the developers that write software for it. Continuing to piss off those developers will hurt MS rather than help them.
*Not perfect, but close enough. If you can live without the nice graphical add-ons that CSS3 offers, it tends to render standards-compliant sites just as well as Firefox and Safari.
So a bug will be found, exploited on a few machines, and then patched. This is different than any other technology how? It's sure safer than Javascript, and the internet (paranoid/.ers excluded, of course) hasn't disabled that just because there may be a couple security holes still floating around.
If a CSS property being unsupported breaks the layout, don't use it. Most of CSS3 stuff is page enhancement (when used appropriately) - rounded corners, text and box shadows, etc. There's no reason to avoid using stuff like that. I could argue that even CSS3 columns are safe to use, since the browser will simply fall back to one wide block of text rather than several narrow ones if the property is unsupported. Much nicer degradation than checking out pretty much anything in IE6 that was built to standards, with elements being shifted about the page seemingly at random.
If 100% consistency is your only concern, then obviously avoid anything that's less than ten years old.
It doesn't take longer to load. The font is downloaded asynchronously and then the text on the page is re-rendered once the font download completes. Until the font is finished downloading, you can read it in any of the standard fonts on your system as otherwise specified by the stylesheet.
TwitPic is run by one guy (maybe two now, there was a blog post on the site a while ago looking for another coder) with a couple servers. Even if he gave enough of a damn to try to filter out torrent-containing images (which I doubt is the case), I'm sure he has much better stuff to spend his time on.
While I'm no fan of rate hikes, getting any sort of physical entity across the country in a couple of days for under fifty cents is pretty much a modern miracle.
IE8 allows you to disable standards-compliance mode for just this reason - in fact, I believe it even defaults to IE6's rendering engine for any intranet address.
Unless you're on Win2k or older, there's absolutely no reason to still be using IE6.
Photographers (more often than not) are attempting to tell a specific story, and will very intentionally compose a photo accordingly. So while photos aren't lies (excluding work in photoshop), they can and do often take a small section of the truth way out of context.
That only applies to the significantly cheaper Starter Edition that's designed for netbooks. There's nothing stopping manufacturers from using a different version of Win7 that doesn't have those artificial restrictions in place, though of course there's also nothing stopping them from using Linux either, as you point out.
I think it'll prompted increased Linux availability on higher-end netbooks, but I still imagine Windows will significantly outsell them if only because that's what the vast majority of people are familiar with.
Hard drives have been shipping with 16MB cache for several years now, and plenty are available with 32MB. RAM is so damn cheap though that they should be seriously considering stuff in the 1GB range for high-end drives.
Sequential reads on large-capacity drives are often in the 70-90MB/s range (yes MB, not Mb), bursting into the 200MB/s range. Hell, I've seen 50MB/s+ for at least the last half a decade. High-quality (read: expensive) SSDs can roughly double that.
And of course, the spec is in gigabits per second, not gigabytes, and includes overhead. Actual supported, sustained transfer is supported at 150MB/s, 300MB/s, and 600MB/s on SATAI-III respectively.
Google Apps is free (or has a free edition, though you have to hunt for it a bit now since they're pushing the paid version), so you're only out ten bucks for the domain.
Also, as a former Powweb user... damn their hosting got really slow. Way oversold, like all other $5/mo shared hosts. MySQL especially was a major bottleneck (I'm inclined to blame Wordpress, since that's probably what half their customers are running).
As someone that DOES do web development, I'll say that "a lot" is probably a good 50% of the total front-end time. Thankfully javascript libraries have almost completely eliminated the cross-browser scripting incompatibilities, but hacking around its incomplete and inaccurate rendering abilities still takes a huge amount of time.
As such, I fully welcome IE8. Not because I like Microsoft or its products, but because it does a pretty good job adhering to standards (those that it misses tend to be pretty non-critical presentation issues, many of which are still upcoming/"beta" standards) and also has its backwards-compatibility mode so there's now ZERO reason not to upgrade. Would I prefer that people used better, faster, and more secure browsers? Yes. Do I? Yes. But when 75% or so of the world is using IE, it makes my life a hell of a lot easier when they're using a version that doesn't completely suck.
Of course, if all of the early IE6-only intranets were built in a way that jives with what you said (build to standards then add hacks where necessary), this wouldn't be a problem in the first place. Unfortunately, back in 2001, it was pretty much the only option. More of a problem is that there's no financial incentive to revamp all of these old IE6 web apps to standards-compliant things, so it doesn't happen (thankfully since IE6 is now TWO versions out of date, plenty of public sites are now giving the finger to IE6 so companies may finally be forced to make the upgrade).
Chrome gaining market share will do little to dent Microsoft's dominance, but it's certainly in Google's best interest as a web company to eliminate the need for browser-specific hacks. Half of my time on a project spent trying to guess what hacks I need to make my site IE6-friendly might cost a few grand; half of a Google development team's time being wasted on such a task could easily cost millions.
I should also point out that it wastes more of Alienware's money in terms of time to take a call and argue with a customer about whether he can buy a part than it would to just sell him the part in the first place.
If Alienware had shelves full of spare parts sitting around, that would be true. However, Alienware is owned by Dell, and they do no such thing. With very, very few exceptions, every part in a Dell-owned building has already been sold to a customer; ordering extras "out-of-cycle" is actually a fairly large issue to them, and obviously not one that costs less than $150 to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because console games are never pirated. Oh, wait.
That won't stop publishers making the argument, but there would be no argument at all if one side wasn't completely invalid.
It is relevant, to a point. Many lower-end cards can only drive a max of 1920x1200 since they don't support dual-link DVI; I've yet to see a (non-TV) 30" monitor that's not 2560x1600. Likewise, I've never heard of a monitor smaller than 30" that requires dual-link DVI.
So while the card doesn't care about the physical size of the display, it does care about the resolution - and that tends to scale with the physical size.
That would eliminate data corruption, not loss. If the OS crashes and it never makes it to the log, then you've lost data.
Don't get me wrong - that's a good thing. But you contradict yourself saying that completely avoiding data loss is possible and then following that up with "If it fails during the log write, it can be wiped and ignored."
Is that so? If I go and buy a 1KM tape measure (!), it'll be 1024 meters long? News to me.
Also speaking as a photographer, I'm perpetually running out of storage - and that's with the biggest drives available (with new DSLRs now shooting 1080p video, that's getting even worse). Now granted, the actual disk capacity hasn't changed by a single bit as a result of changing the notation from a mislabeled TiB to actual base-10 TB, but it at least makes buying the biggest, most expensive drives a little less painful since they don't appear 10% smaller right out of the box.
As far as I'm concerned, this change is entirely psychological, but long overdue. It will eliminate a lot of confusion, change the OS to actually use the correct* units, and make it a little bit easier for people like me who go through storage absurdly fast to know when they need to buy yet another drive.
*ie, not putting the base-10 unit next to a base-2 number. Which one is more appropriate is an entirely separate matter which I'd argue is more down to opinion than anything else at this point.
You outlaw wooshing and only outlaws will fail to get the joke
You say that in jest, but I know the flightcaster team and it's four times bigger than it should be for a company as young as they are. I wouldn't be surprised if they picked up a couple of slashdotters in the past few days.
I'm no patent lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that when you've patented your product and then your competition introduces a product that is in complete violation of said patent, you'd be idiotic not to sue for damages. My understanding is that the whole point of patents is to be granted a temporary monopoly on new technology so that you're willing to innovate precisely because this kind of behavior is legally prevented.
Of course, that doesn't bring into account the legitimacy of the patent at all - just the theory behind how the system is designed to work (to the best of my knowledge).
That logic held a couple of years ago. Especially in the last couple of months, IE (6 in particular) is increasingly getting the finger - even on large, highly-trafficked sites such as YouTube. Nobody uses ActiveX anymore, and even Microsoft is pushing the standards-compliant* IE8. Desktop apps may not be dead, but things are clearly migrating towards web apps everywhere. Either MS can piss off web developers who will then in turn actively tell their users to switch away from IE, or they can do what the rest of the world has been doing for the past half-decade and render sites properly - and NOT give developers any more reason to try and foist Microsoft's competition upon their visitors.
I for one outright don't support IE6. I have much better things to be doing with my time than trying to guess what element planted the explosive that caused the page to blow up. Maybe several months from now once multiple cross-site integrations are complete I'll even be able to think about it, but I expect that there will always be more pressing issues than trying to debug a stylesheet through random guesswork for a decade-old browser that's losing market share every day.
In short, it no longer suits Microsoft's best interest to active vendor lock-in through a non-standards-compliant browser. Rather than catering to a degraded experience, developers are actively fighting it. As crazy as Ballmer sounded doing his "developers!" dance, he's absolutely right to attribute Windows' success to the developers that write software for it. Continuing to piss off those developers will hurt MS rather than help them.
*Not perfect, but close enough. If you can live without the nice graphical add-ons that CSS3 offers, it tends to render standards-compliant sites just as well as Firefox and Safari.
So a bug will be found, exploited on a few machines, and then patched. This is different than any other technology how? It's sure safer than Javascript, and the internet (paranoid /.ers excluded, of course) hasn't disabled that just because there may be a couple security holes still floating around.
If a CSS property being unsupported breaks the layout, don't use it. Most of CSS3 stuff is page enhancement (when used appropriately) - rounded corners, text and box shadows, etc. There's no reason to avoid using stuff like that. I could argue that even CSS3 columns are safe to use, since the browser will simply fall back to one wide block of text rather than several narrow ones if the property is unsupported. Much nicer degradation than checking out pretty much anything in IE6 that was built to standards, with elements being shifted about the page seemingly at random.
If 100% consistency is your only concern, then obviously avoid anything that's less than ten years old.
It doesn't take longer to load. The font is downloaded asynchronously and then the text on the page is re-rendered once the font download completes. Until the font is finished downloading, you can read it in any of the standard fonts on your system as otherwise specified by the stylesheet.
http://www.apple.com/feedback/
TwitPic is run by one guy (maybe two now, there was a blog post on the site a while ago looking for another coder) with a couple servers. Even if he gave enough of a damn to try to filter out torrent-containing images (which I doubt is the case), I'm sure he has much better stuff to spend his time on.
While I'm no fan of rate hikes, getting any sort of physical entity across the country in a couple of days for under fifty cents is pretty much a modern miracle.
IE8 allows you to disable standards-compliance mode for just this reason - in fact, I believe it even defaults to IE6's rendering engine for any intranet address.
Unless you're on Win2k or older, there's absolutely no reason to still be using IE6.
Photographers (more often than not) are attempting to tell a specific story, and will very intentionally compose a photo accordingly. So while photos aren't lies (excluding work in photoshop), they can and do often take a small section of the truth way out of context.
In the event of a nuclear attack, you probably have more pressing issues to deal with than your server uptime.
That only applies to the significantly cheaper Starter Edition that's designed for netbooks. There's nothing stopping manufacturers from using a different version of Win7 that doesn't have those artificial restrictions in place, though of course there's also nothing stopping them from using Linux either, as you point out.
I think it'll prompted increased Linux availability on higher-end netbooks, but I still imagine Windows will significantly outsell them if only because that's what the vast majority of people are familiar with.
Hard drives have been shipping with 16MB cache for several years now, and plenty are available with 32MB. RAM is so damn cheap though that they should be seriously considering stuff in the 1GB range for high-end drives.
Sequential reads on large-capacity drives are often in the 70-90MB/s range (yes MB, not Mb), bursting into the 200MB/s range. Hell, I've seen 50MB/s+ for at least the last half a decade. High-quality (read: expensive) SSDs can roughly double that.
And of course, the spec is in gigabits per second, not gigabytes, and includes overhead. Actual supported, sustained transfer is supported at 150MB/s, 300MB/s, and 600MB/s on SATAI-III respectively.
Google Apps is free (or has a free edition, though you have to hunt for it a bit now since they're pushing the paid version), so you're only out ten bucks for the domain.
Also, as a former Powweb user... damn their hosting got really slow. Way oversold, like all other $5/mo shared hosts. MySQL especially was a major bottleneck (I'm inclined to blame Wordpress, since that's probably what half their customers are running).
They're reproducing in record numbers, so are also ineligible.
As someone that DOES do web development, I'll say that "a lot" is probably a good 50% of the total front-end time. Thankfully javascript libraries have almost completely eliminated the cross-browser scripting incompatibilities, but hacking around its incomplete and inaccurate rendering abilities still takes a huge amount of time.
As such, I fully welcome IE8. Not because I like Microsoft or its products, but because it does a pretty good job adhering to standards (those that it misses tend to be pretty non-critical presentation issues, many of which are still upcoming/"beta" standards) and also has its backwards-compatibility mode so there's now ZERO reason not to upgrade. Would I prefer that people used better, faster, and more secure browsers? Yes. Do I? Yes. But when 75% or so of the world is using IE, it makes my life a hell of a lot easier when they're using a version that doesn't completely suck.
Of course, if all of the early IE6-only intranets were built in a way that jives with what you said (build to standards then add hacks where necessary), this wouldn't be a problem in the first place. Unfortunately, back in 2001, it was pretty much the only option. More of a problem is that there's no financial incentive to revamp all of these old IE6 web apps to standards-compliant things, so it doesn't happen (thankfully since IE6 is now TWO versions out of date, plenty of public sites are now giving the finger to IE6 so companies may finally be forced to make the upgrade).
Chrome gaining market share will do little to dent Microsoft's dominance, but it's certainly in Google's best interest as a web company to eliminate the need for browser-specific hacks. Half of my time on a project spent trying to guess what hacks I need to make my site IE6-friendly might cost a few grand; half of a Google development team's time being wasted on such a task could easily cost millions.
I should also point out that it wastes more of Alienware's money in terms of time to take a call and argue with a customer about whether he can buy a part than it would to just sell him the part in the first place.
If Alienware had shelves full of spare parts sitting around, that would be true. However, Alienware is owned by Dell, and they do no such thing. With very, very few exceptions, every part in a Dell-owned building has already been sold to a customer; ordering extras "out-of-cycle" is actually a fairly large issue to them, and obviously not one that costs less than $150 to deal with.