I don't get why NZ and Australia have such crappy connections. Japan also happens to be an island, and they have some of the best home connections in the world.
Now I'm not familiar with Boxee or with Hulu's RSS feed, so I cannot comment on the specifics, but, unless Boxee is actually modifying the contents of the RSS feed, it seems to me that Hulu are acting like jerks.
Well, you might want to look into that. Hulu's RSS just links to the hulu.com page where you can watch and provides a little information about the show (rating, run-time, etc.). Boxee is (presumably) following that link and then page-scraping the video into their own interface. I hear that there are significant performance improvements by using Boxee's player over Hulu's so they may be scraping the video stream directly rather than just embedding the player in a different interface, but in either case the video definitely isn't coming in directly through the feed.
Just so I don't have to respond to your other response: yes, RSS is meant for content syndication. Hulu (and/or its corporate sponsors) have decided to syndicate the link to watch the show as well as some metadata, and are not syndicating the show itself. It's very much akin to a TV Guide - it tells you where to go and how to watch, but you can't watch the show from the little booklet.
Actually Hulu does have traditional ads on the video pages as well, but I'd imagine that they're considerably less lucrative than the ones injected in the videos.
They've been doing that for quite a while, actually. Ever seen a bunch of red dots flash onscreen for a frame a couple times during a movie? (if not, you will now - sorry) Those are to determine what theatre a leaked cam copy came from.
Well let's say that you're using SharePoint internally, and there's a bug in it. It's not exposed to the entire world, but it IS exposed to the entire organization (which can be just as bad, depending on the bug). More importantly, it's on a hundred thousand different sysadmins to patch said bug on their own MOSS installations, rather than a SAAS company patching it once and having the bug fixed for everyone.
Imagine for a moment if IE was somehow SAAS instead of a desktop app. That would mean that IE6 would NO LONGER EXIST, and that everyone would have an up-to-date version of IE7. And as soon as IE8 comes out of beta, IE7 will also die - instantly, worldwide - and then web developers everywhere will rejoice.
Obviously that simply doesn't work for a web browser (well, it could, but not as it's done now - and it's obviously not the most practical approach), but for all of the problems that SAAS can bring, it also solves a tremendous number of other issues. For something where security is priority number one, it's often not the best choice, but you can't beat it for keeping things up to date. And when you're dealing with closed-source software, that's already beyond your control so you might as well reap the benefits of the instant updates.
If they kill RSS, then shows stop showing up in my Google Reader and I go back to TBP.
They're welcome to do so - TBP tends to have the shows online an hour of two earlier, which is a good thing for me (though by the time most shows are finished downloading off a torrent, they're on Hulu anyways). If their corporate parters are so stupid as to kill off the only way they'll make money off me, that's their problem.
I don't mind the 5-to-30 second ads on Hulu. I haven't sat down and watched a TV in years, but doing the math puts about 2.5 minutes of commercials per break times three breaks; fuck that. If they were smart, they'd turn Hulu into some sort of Facebook app and use all of my data to make ads that are actually targeted to me, rather than using the generic crap that tries to appeal to a time-slot and ends up targeting precisely nobody.
But if they want to continue ignoring ways to make money that are actually effective... oh well.
I'd like to point out that it's those kinds of nonsensical, fuck-the-standards ideas that gave us IE6.
Yes, if you're writing in greek, then Ï is just another letter. If you're doing math, then Ï is defined to be the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter, just like other pre-defined irrational numbers like e and i. Your concept applies to theta, since it's just a symbol frequently used to denote angles, but not a specific angle.
Could we have defined any other letter/symbol to be this ratio? Sure. But someone chose Ï and it stuck, and it's not going to change. Standards exist for a reason. And I'll also point out that the quote you're responding to is in reference to when an elected group did just that (I think in Kansas, but I could be wrong) in an attempt to redefine the ratio (not the symbol, but the ratio) as precisely 3 because of some bullshit passage in the bible.
(umm, pretend Ï is the symbol for pi, and go kick whoever is responsible for slashdot's unicode support in the groin)
I guess you haven't seen how disgusting a mighty mouse gets after only a couple weeks of use. I can only assume that someone goes around the Apple stores at the end of the day and wipes them all down with disinfectant.
Of course, Apple has always sucked at mice. Something that's fundamentally a pair of buttons really doesn't go well when your CEO hates buttons, but there you are. I can't decide whether to be amused by their conundrum or annoyed that they're still willing to release such shitty mice.
Luckily they haven't yet tried to take the keyboard off my MBP.
From my understanding, most of the delays relating to @font-face were due to concerns over font licensing*, not the implementation of the standard (I imagine that as far as developing a browser goes, it would be one of the easier tasks). It's still a concern for that matter, but I think the Webkit team basically said "fuck it", implemented the proposal, and hoped that the other browsers would follow suit. Doing a bit more searching, it also looks like the biggest issues lingering (once Firefox 3.1 hits) are in.otf Open-Type fonts vs.eot Embedded Open-Type fonts. Those who care, this article might be worth a read.
*You can bet that some font designers would want some sort of per-domain licensing system that would attach a license key to the @font-face declaration. I'll leave you to imagine the myriad problems that could go along with that.
I don't think that web fonts are really being held back by any specific browser. If you want to use a non-standard font on your site as the default, make the appropriate declaration in your CSS, set is as the default body font, and have a couple of web-safe fallbacks. Browsers that support @font-face will grab the font and use it, and the others will just skip to the next one it sees. Graceful degradation if I've ever seen it.
No, you won't have pixel-for-pixel accuracy across browsers, but is it really worth it? My IE users get square corners since IE doesn't do border-radius (and -ie-border-radius doesn't exist) unless it's absolutely critical to the design; likewise, they won't get nice fonts unless it's critical to the design. This isn't ideal, but it saves me a tremendous amount of non-critical work, and it also allows me to avoid non-necessary hacked-together markup (<span class="corner-top-left"> kind of stuff). Could I get identical rendering across all major browsers? Sure - but for a lot of the CSS2/CSS3 niceties, it's simply not worth the extra effort, not to mention all of the extra markup and images that you'll need to get it working consistently.
That said, I do a lot of back-end work where I can set system requirements like any other piece of software. So I can say that you need IE8, Firefox 3, or Safari (or Opera, Chrome, etc.), which obviously isn't an option for public-facing stuff. I'd never do a public site that has browser requirements or falls apart completely in IE6, but I'm also no longer going to obsess over a few pixels for people using an 8-year-old browser.
If reselling my used and unwanted games falls into a moral gray area, we had better start torching any library in sight - the evil communist hideouts! And add yet another reason to hate on used car dealers.
They can say whatever the fuck they want. A physical product is changing hands - only one person can use it at a time. Does this piss off publishers? Absolutely, but no more than my selling a used book pisses off book publishers. Will they try to stop it using technical means? Sure, and every other industry on the planet would love to do the same thing, it's just not feasible. Is it legal for them to do so? That's for the courts to decide when it's tested - I think probably not unless they also exclusively control the original distribution platform that requires you to agree to their terms before buying, at which point it really does become more of a service than a product.
This isn't even a fair use thing. A trademark, as the name suggests, allows you to create a brand around a type of product without worrying about someone trying to use your name to push their own competing product under the implication that it's one of your products (look at Chinese knock-off brands, for example). So if you come up with the best cola formula ever, you can't start selling under the name Coca-Cola nor a name that's intentionally close to Coke's trademark in order to confuse people into buying your product over Coke's. If you compare your product to Coke on some marketing material, you're fine (assuming you don't violate any libel laws, but that's an unrelated issue).
Trademark law isn't about stopping competition trying to grab your customers, it's about stopping this misrepresentation of your product.
For example, do a google search for "sugarcrm". One of the ads you see will almost certainly be for SalesForce, a competing product. People searching for sugarcrm are looking for some sort of CRM product (not necessarily that specific one), and SalesForce happens to offer one. This ad placement is totally fair. What wouldn't be OK is if SalesForce were to have their ad say "Get SugarCRM Here" that clicks through to their own sales page; double not-OK if they were to call their own product SugarCRM (or SweetCRM; etc - something confusingly close to the trademarked product) on that landing page. That's the potential bait-and-switch that trademark law is designed to prevent. But buying keywords on the name of your competitor's products? That's just suggesting alternatives, and not doing that when you have a superior product is just leaving money on the table.
I don't think I've ever seen a music torrent complete in less time than it would take me to rip a CD and grab the track listing from CDDB. Maybe usenet is faster; I wouldn't know. Regardless, there are probably about ten people alive who have "pirated" music simply to avoid ripping it from a CD they already own.
Only to a select few. With the frequently-run Amazon MP3 specials putting ten or more tracks out there for $2-4, I find myself buying a decent amount of music recently. It takes two minutes to download (ignoring the time spent to FIND a good torrent, they're still almost always much slower), has all the metadata and cover art done correctly (torrents VERY rarely can say the same), and there's no question to the legality. I've bought from iTunes once, and have avoided it entirely since having been burned by DRM (even though there's no DRM anymore); up until recently, I still preferred having the CD hard-copy, but for two bucks, I'm fine with a 256k MP3 from Amazon.
Naturally, I'm a single data point, but I can at least assure you that I'm less likely to spend/have disposable income these days than when I pirated more content, so it's not as if I've suddenly won the lottery and decided to go legit for my media sources.
Will some people always steal it? Sure. Just like some will always pay. For the rest of us, it's simply a matter of finding the right price point. $2-4 for an album is great for me.
So shitty software should be illegal? The only reasonable thing a government can do is mandate that IE not be used on government computers (and to comply with accessibility laws, that's not out of the question). If there's anywhere the government would need to intervene, it's with some of the screwy results you can get out of Excel.
As a web developer, I've seen no serious issues with IE8. It'd be nice if it supported some of the newer CSS3 properties, but it seems to handle existing standards-compliant code pretty well. It's not perfect, but it's enough of an improvement that I'll immediately update all sites I control to tell IE6/7 users to upgrade as soon as 8 is out of beta. Granted, I haven't done a whole lot of JS testing, but all of the major javascript libraries fix all of the cross-browser inconsistencies so I don't honestly care anymore.
Browser-based applications, while certainly not as powerful as most desktop apps (I've seen some web apps that are, but of course those tend to be the exception to the rule), are totally platform-independent*. When you write for the desktop, you're writing for a specific platform, and quite possibly a specific set of versions for that single platform. Web apps require no installation and will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux no problem. When someone creates an agreed-upon framework that's cross-platform, let me know; for now, that framework appears to be the haphazard combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Yes, there's always the Java VM option, but the web-based approach is still preferable for many things for a number of reasons. Maybe OpenCL or some derivative of it will take over eventually, but that day isn't today.
*Ignoring IE6 and earlier anyways. IE7 is usually close enough, and IE8 has behaved pretty predictably for me.
Ok, so pretend that ActiveX doesn't exist (as it shouldn't; it's not exactly widely used these days outside of very old intranet apps) - now what? Writing standards-compliant CSS isn't exactly difficult for a seasoned coder, and IE8 handles CSS nearly as well as Firefox and Safari. Not perfectly, mind you, but unless you're doing newer CSS3 stuff you probably won't see any severe issues. JS libraries do all of the heavy lifting in terms of cross-browser compatibility, and make development a hell of a lot faster and easier to boot.
While I can't be surprised that Microsoft.com of all sites is likely to have some compatibility issues, I'm pretty damn sure that Microsoft's web developers are cursing IE's lack of standards compliance just as much as the rest of the world.
Why not try changing your "if ie" to "if lte ie7" and stop confusing the hell out of the poor thing? Unless you've done some bizarre javascript (please tell me you're using one of the plethora of fully-cross-browser libraries!), this shouldn't really be an issue. At least not a significant one - it may not be pixel-perfect, but easily close enough. My brief testing in IE8 has it rendering stuff just as well as Firefox or Safari.
I realize that it's not always (read: almost never) an option with CSS, but it's far better if you can avoid browser-specific conditions by other means. For instance, you can check if a recent JS/DOM method exists (getElementsByClassName, for instance), use it if so, otherwise revert to your fallback/ugly/slow code. If/when the browser gets the method in question (not that it's at all likely, but what if MS patched some of the flaws in IE6/7?), your code will automatically use the better version without you having to touch it after the fact, and no browser sniffing.
Less than 10 seconds is fast? I know I'm used to the responsiveness of an SLR, but IMO camera-phones are still worthless until they can at least match the start-up speed of a normal point and shoot.
Well, cross-browser javascript problems go away* with JS frameworks such as jQuery, and unless you're doing something insane (read: probably wrong) with CSS, coding logically and to standards** will get it correct in Firefox/Safari/Opera/IE8, pretty damn close in IE7, and still quite reasonable in IE6. I'm certainly not defending IE6/7 nor the practices of the developers who cater to those browsers - if you can even call them developers - but a lot of problems are as much the fault of bad CSS/HTML as they are the fault of IE6's FUBAR CSS rendering.
Thankfully, Microsoft seems to have listened to the outcry of developers when it comes to IE8 - I've had no issues with it so far, other than it still having very poor JS performance. It seems to be pretty smart about when to render in standards mode and when to render in IE6/IE7 fallback mode. It certainly won't become my every-day browser by any stretch of the imagination, but it'll take a good chunk out of the "time spent cursing Microsoft" wedge of the web development time usage pie chart.
*well, 99% of the time, at least. Of the rare problems I've seen, it's more a DOM issue than one specific to any one browser. Like innerHTML always returning HTML instead of XHTML, even with an XHTML doctype. Honestly, that's about it, from what I've noticed.
**CSS2 is pretty safe, at least. As you rightly mention, some properties such as opacity fall apart in older versions of Firefox, not to mention the -webkit/-moz properties and pseudo-selectors.
I learned a decent amount from Essential PHP Security*. It doesn't cover everything, but should cover most of the crazy-stupid errors that crop up in a lot of novice php/mysql stuff. Not that the information isn't out there in plenty of places (just like every other topic humanity has ever thought up), but for twenty bucks it's nice to have a hard copy of the essentials in one place.
*Yes, that's a referral link to amazon. But I'd recommend it either way for people getting started with securing their basic LAMP sites.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get why NZ and Australia have such crappy connections. Japan also happens to be an island, and they have some of the best home connections in the world.
Now I'm not familiar with Boxee or with Hulu's RSS feed, so I cannot comment on the specifics, but, unless Boxee is actually modifying the contents of the RSS feed, it seems to me that Hulu are acting like jerks.
Well, you might want to look into that. Hulu's RSS just links to the hulu.com page where you can watch and provides a little information about the show (rating, run-time, etc.). Boxee is (presumably) following that link and then page-scraping the video into their own interface. I hear that there are significant performance improvements by using Boxee's player over Hulu's so they may be scraping the video stream directly rather than just embedding the player in a different interface, but in either case the video definitely isn't coming in directly through the feed.
Just so I don't have to respond to your other response: yes, RSS is meant for content syndication. Hulu (and/or its corporate sponsors) have decided to syndicate the link to watch the show as well as some metadata, and are not syndicating the show itself. It's very much akin to a TV Guide - it tells you where to go and how to watch, but you can't watch the show from the little booklet.
Actually Hulu does have traditional ads on the video pages as well, but I'd imagine that they're considerably less lucrative than the ones injected in the videos.
Sweet - all the more reason to just stay home and watch a downloaded copy for free.
They've been doing that for quite a while, actually. Ever seen a bunch of red dots flash onscreen for a frame a couple times during a movie? (if not, you will now - sorry) Those are to determine what theatre a leaked cam copy came from.
Well let's say that you're using SharePoint internally, and there's a bug in it. It's not exposed to the entire world, but it IS exposed to the entire organization (which can be just as bad, depending on the bug). More importantly, it's on a hundred thousand different sysadmins to patch said bug on their own MOSS installations, rather than a SAAS company patching it once and having the bug fixed for everyone.
Imagine for a moment if IE was somehow SAAS instead of a desktop app. That would mean that IE6 would NO LONGER EXIST, and that everyone would have an up-to-date version of IE7. And as soon as IE8 comes out of beta, IE7 will also die - instantly, worldwide - and then web developers everywhere will rejoice.
Obviously that simply doesn't work for a web browser (well, it could, but not as it's done now - and it's obviously not the most practical approach), but for all of the problems that SAAS can bring, it also solves a tremendous number of other issues. For something where security is priority number one, it's often not the best choice, but you can't beat it for keeping things up to date. And when you're dealing with closed-source software, that's already beyond your control so you might as well reap the benefits of the instant updates.
If there's a tornado watch, what the hell are you doing sitting around staring at the TV?
If they kill RSS, then shows stop showing up in my Google Reader and I go back to TBP.
They're welcome to do so - TBP tends to have the shows online an hour of two earlier, which is a good thing for me (though by the time most shows are finished downloading off a torrent, they're on Hulu anyways). If their corporate parters are so stupid as to kill off the only way they'll make money off me, that's their problem.
I don't mind the 5-to-30 second ads on Hulu. I haven't sat down and watched a TV in years, but doing the math puts about 2.5 minutes of commercials per break times three breaks; fuck that. If they were smart, they'd turn Hulu into some sort of Facebook app and use all of my data to make ads that are actually targeted to me, rather than using the generic crap that tries to appeal to a time-slot and ends up targeting precisely nobody.
But if they want to continue ignoring ways to make money that are actually effective... oh well.
I'd like to point out that it's those kinds of nonsensical, fuck-the-standards ideas that gave us IE6.
Yes, if you're writing in greek, then Ï is just another letter. If you're doing math, then Ï is defined to be the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter, just like other pre-defined irrational numbers like e and i. Your concept applies to theta, since it's just a symbol frequently used to denote angles, but not a specific angle.
Could we have defined any other letter/symbol to be this ratio? Sure. But someone chose Ï and it stuck, and it's not going to change. Standards exist for a reason. And I'll also point out that the quote you're responding to is in reference to when an elected group did just that (I think in Kansas, but I could be wrong) in an attempt to redefine the ratio (not the symbol, but the ratio) as precisely 3 because of some bullshit passage in the bible.
(umm, pretend Ï is the symbol for pi, and go kick whoever is responsible for slashdot's unicode support in the groin)
Nah, go all the way. inUrMethodSendinUrMessage() or bust.
I guess you haven't seen how disgusting a mighty mouse gets after only a couple weeks of use. I can only assume that someone goes around the Apple stores at the end of the day and wipes them all down with disinfectant.
Of course, Apple has always sucked at mice. Something that's fundamentally a pair of buttons really doesn't go well when your CEO hates buttons, but there you are. I can't decide whether to be amused by their conundrum or annoyed that they're still willing to release such shitty mice.
Luckily they haven't yet tried to take the keyboard off my MBP.
From my understanding, most of the delays relating to @font-face were due to concerns over font licensing*, not the implementation of the standard (I imagine that as far as developing a browser goes, it would be one of the easier tasks). It's still a concern for that matter, but I think the Webkit team basically said "fuck it", implemented the proposal, and hoped that the other browsers would follow suit. Doing a bit more searching, it also looks like the biggest issues lingering (once Firefox 3.1 hits) are in .otf Open-Type fonts vs .eot Embedded Open-Type fonts. Those who care, this article might be worth a read.
*You can bet that some font designers would want some sort of per-domain licensing system that would attach a license key to the @font-face declaration. I'll leave you to imagine the myriad problems that could go along with that.
I don't think that web fonts are really being held back by any specific browser. If you want to use a non-standard font on your site as the default, make the appropriate declaration in your CSS, set is as the default body font, and have a couple of web-safe fallbacks. Browsers that support @font-face will grab the font and use it, and the others will just skip to the next one it sees. Graceful degradation if I've ever seen it.
No, you won't have pixel-for-pixel accuracy across browsers, but is it really worth it? My IE users get square corners since IE doesn't do border-radius (and -ie-border-radius doesn't exist) unless it's absolutely critical to the design; likewise, they won't get nice fonts unless it's critical to the design. This isn't ideal, but it saves me a tremendous amount of non-critical work, and it also allows me to avoid non-necessary hacked-together markup (<span class="corner-top-left"> kind of stuff). Could I get identical rendering across all major browsers? Sure - but for a lot of the CSS2/CSS3 niceties, it's simply not worth the extra effort, not to mention all of the extra markup and images that you'll need to get it working consistently.
That said, I do a lot of back-end work where I can set system requirements like any other piece of software. So I can say that you need IE8, Firefox 3, or Safari (or Opera, Chrome, etc.), which obviously isn't an option for public-facing stuff. I'd never do a public site that has browser requirements or falls apart completely in IE6, but I'm also no longer going to obsess over a few pixels for people using an 8-year-old browser.
If reselling my used and unwanted games falls into a moral gray area, we had better start torching any library in sight - the evil communist hideouts! And add yet another reason to hate on used car dealers.
They can say whatever the fuck they want. A physical product is changing hands - only one person can use it at a time. Does this piss off publishers? Absolutely, but no more than my selling a used book pisses off book publishers. Will they try to stop it using technical means? Sure, and every other industry on the planet would love to do the same thing, it's just not feasible. Is it legal for them to do so? That's for the courts to decide when it's tested - I think probably not unless they also exclusively control the original distribution platform that requires you to agree to their terms before buying, at which point it really does become more of a service than a product.
This isn't even a fair use thing. A trademark, as the name suggests, allows you to create a brand around a type of product without worrying about someone trying to use your name to push their own competing product under the implication that it's one of your products (look at Chinese knock-off brands, for example). So if you come up with the best cola formula ever, you can't start selling under the name Coca-Cola nor a name that's intentionally close to Coke's trademark in order to confuse people into buying your product over Coke's. If you compare your product to Coke on some marketing material, you're fine (assuming you don't violate any libel laws, but that's an unrelated issue).
Trademark law isn't about stopping competition trying to grab your customers, it's about stopping this misrepresentation of your product.
For example, do a google search for "sugarcrm". One of the ads you see will almost certainly be for SalesForce, a competing product. People searching for sugarcrm are looking for some sort of CRM product (not necessarily that specific one), and SalesForce happens to offer one. This ad placement is totally fair. What wouldn't be OK is if SalesForce were to have their ad say "Get SugarCRM Here" that clicks through to their own sales page; double not-OK if they were to call their own product SugarCRM (or SweetCRM; etc - something confusingly close to the trademarked product) on that landing page. That's the potential bait-and-switch that trademark law is designed to prevent. But buying keywords on the name of your competitor's products? That's just suggesting alternatives, and not doing that when you have a superior product is just leaving money on the table.
I don't think I've ever seen a music torrent complete in less time than it would take me to rip a CD and grab the track listing from CDDB. Maybe usenet is faster; I wouldn't know. Regardless, there are probably about ten people alive who have "pirated" music simply to avoid ripping it from a CD they already own.
Only to a select few. With the frequently-run Amazon MP3 specials putting ten or more tracks out there for $2-4, I find myself buying a decent amount of music recently. It takes two minutes to download (ignoring the time spent to FIND a good torrent, they're still almost always much slower), has all the metadata and cover art done correctly (torrents VERY rarely can say the same), and there's no question to the legality. I've bought from iTunes once, and have avoided it entirely since having been burned by DRM (even though there's no DRM anymore); up until recently, I still preferred having the CD hard-copy, but for two bucks, I'm fine with a 256k MP3 from Amazon.
Naturally, I'm a single data point, but I can at least assure you that I'm less likely to spend/have disposable income these days than when I pirated more content, so it's not as if I've suddenly won the lottery and decided to go legit for my media sources.
Will some people always steal it? Sure. Just like some will always pay. For the rest of us, it's simply a matter of finding the right price point. $2-4 for an album is great for me.
So shitty software should be illegal? The only reasonable thing a government can do is mandate that IE not be used on government computers (and to comply with accessibility laws, that's not out of the question). If there's anywhere the government would need to intervene, it's with some of the screwy results you can get out of Excel.
As a web developer, I've seen no serious issues with IE8. It'd be nice if it supported some of the newer CSS3 properties, but it seems to handle existing standards-compliant code pretty well. It's not perfect, but it's enough of an improvement that I'll immediately update all sites I control to tell IE6/7 users to upgrade as soon as 8 is out of beta. Granted, I haven't done a whole lot of JS testing, but all of the major javascript libraries fix all of the cross-browser inconsistencies so I don't honestly care anymore.
Browser-based applications, while certainly not as powerful as most desktop apps (I've seen some web apps that are, but of course those tend to be the exception to the rule), are totally platform-independent*. When you write for the desktop, you're writing for a specific platform, and quite possibly a specific set of versions for that single platform. Web apps require no installation and will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux no problem. When someone creates an agreed-upon framework that's cross-platform, let me know; for now, that framework appears to be the haphazard combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Yes, there's always the Java VM option, but the web-based approach is still preferable for many things for a number of reasons. Maybe OpenCL or some derivative of it will take over eventually, but that day isn't today.
*Ignoring IE6 and earlier anyways. IE7 is usually close enough, and IE8 has behaved pretty predictably for me.
Ok, so pretend that ActiveX doesn't exist (as it shouldn't; it's not exactly widely used these days outside of very old intranet apps) - now what? Writing standards-compliant CSS isn't exactly difficult for a seasoned coder, and IE8 handles CSS nearly as well as Firefox and Safari. Not perfectly, mind you, but unless you're doing newer CSS3 stuff you probably won't see any severe issues. JS libraries do all of the heavy lifting in terms of cross-browser compatibility, and make development a hell of a lot faster and easier to boot.
While I can't be surprised that Microsoft.com of all sites is likely to have some compatibility issues, I'm pretty damn sure that Microsoft's web developers are cursing IE's lack of standards compliance just as much as the rest of the world.
Why not try changing your "if ie" to "if lte ie7" and stop confusing the hell out of the poor thing? Unless you've done some bizarre javascript (please tell me you're using one of the plethora of fully-cross-browser libraries!), this shouldn't really be an issue. At least not a significant one - it may not be pixel-perfect, but easily close enough. My brief testing in IE8 has it rendering stuff just as well as Firefox or Safari.
I realize that it's not always (read: almost never) an option with CSS, but it's far better if you can avoid browser-specific conditions by other means. For instance, you can check if a recent JS/DOM method exists (getElementsByClassName, for instance), use it if so, otherwise revert to your fallback/ugly/slow code. If/when the browser gets the method in question (not that it's at all likely, but what if MS patched some of the flaws in IE6/7?), your code will automatically use the better version without you having to touch it after the fact, and no browser sniffing.
Less than 10 seconds is fast? I know I'm used to the responsiveness of an SLR, but IMO camera-phones are still worthless until they can at least match the start-up speed of a normal point and shoot.
Well, cross-browser javascript problems go away* with JS frameworks such as jQuery, and unless you're doing something insane (read: probably wrong) with CSS, coding logically and to standards** will get it correct in Firefox/Safari/Opera/IE8, pretty damn close in IE7, and still quite reasonable in IE6. I'm certainly not defending IE6/7 nor the practices of the developers who cater to those browsers - if you can even call them developers - but a lot of problems are as much the fault of bad CSS/HTML as they are the fault of IE6's FUBAR CSS rendering.
Thankfully, Microsoft seems to have listened to the outcry of developers when it comes to IE8 - I've had no issues with it so far, other than it still having very poor JS performance. It seems to be pretty smart about when to render in standards mode and when to render in IE6/IE7 fallback mode. It certainly won't become my every-day browser by any stretch of the imagination, but it'll take a good chunk out of the "time spent cursing Microsoft" wedge of the web development time usage pie chart.
*well, 99% of the time, at least. Of the rare problems I've seen, it's more a DOM issue than one specific to any one browser. Like innerHTML always returning HTML instead of XHTML, even with an XHTML doctype. Honestly, that's about it, from what I've noticed.
**CSS2 is pretty safe, at least. As you rightly mention, some properties such as opacity fall apart in older versions of Firefox, not to mention the -webkit/-moz properties and pseudo-selectors.
I learned a decent amount from Essential PHP Security*. It doesn't cover everything, but should cover most of the crazy-stupid errors that crop up in a lot of novice php/mysql stuff. Not that the information isn't out there in plenty of places (just like every other topic humanity has ever thought up), but for twenty bucks it's nice to have a hard copy of the essentials in one place.
*Yes, that's a referral link to amazon. But I'd recommend it either way for people getting started with securing their basic LAMP sites.