You miss the point--people will have to write code specifically for this feature (which, incidentally, won't work in other browsers for a while yet), when if they were going to do that they could just have written it to work in the first place.
What makes you think people who can't manage to beat out a couple of lines of pretty simple code are going to be able to write code for "AJAX Navigation support" and do it in a way which degrades gracefully?
The whole thing is something that will make life easier for web developers in the long term, but have little effect in the short term. What it won't do is magically make life any easier for end users.
I've built sites in the past fortnight which use document.location.hash to allow navigation to/from different AJAXified or otherwise dynamic sections of a page (either by typing the URL with the anchor directly, or by using back/forward), and it works wonderfully in every browser I've tried including IE 6.
About the only "clever" bit here is firing an event automatically when it changes, which just removes the three lines of code I have checking whether window.location.hash is myfoo.savedHash or not in an interval ticker....and they turned this into a whole complete feature, and got somebody to think up a name for it?!
(Parent is quite clearly not a troll, incidentally)
Yes, there is a lot of illegally distributed-content. That's a given. What's not a given is how the ISPs (or indeed, anybody) is supposed to distinguish between the two at all reliably. Without a mechanism for that, the whole thing is moot.
Yup, but I'm pretty sure none but the cheapest of El Cheapo ISPs would implement a policy of no P2P whatsoever.
P2P traffic patterns just say you're doing P2P, not what you're sharing with peers. Plenty of legitimate applications use P2P (Skype, iPlayer, 4oD, not to mention legal BitTorrent sources).
It was widely reported (and by that I mean, Steve Jobs stood up on stage and announced it) that Google were storing all new videos as H.264 (and steadily converting old ones) for both the iPhone/iPod touch and Apple TV.
I would imagine this initiative is related to that.
[q]For example, the macbook air isn't very good as a main computer, and the lack of 3G iphones has to do with battery life - Apple has chosen to offer certain features which are mutually exclusive with other features - I'm glad someone... respectable... is saying it! [/q]
I hate to burst your bubble, but everyone except the most rabid of fanboys (and I'll concede that the likes of Slashdot has a tendency for attracting them) has consistently said as much: if doesn't offer the features you require, don't buy it, no matter if it is the prettiest/nicest designed/lickable/whatever.
Lots of people are content with EDGE (or just don't care), and Apple's been selling to those people--the reasons for not producing a 3G iPhone have been pretty clear from quite early on, but that doesn't mean the iPhone is suddenly everybody's only option and that they're somehow more limited by the iPhone's limitations than they were previously. I have plenty of Apple products, but I have plenty of products from other manufacturers too: I don't really understand the current trend for bashing a product because it doesn't meet an individual's specific requirements, when it's quite obvious that it does meet (or exceed) the requirements of more than enough people to keep Apple in business and the vast majority of its customers happy.
Which is pretty much what Akamai and friends do for them.
Akaima puts a great big honking cluster of machines in various ISPs, and all of their customers use those hosts in preference to something more distant. The hosted materials only come down from the outside world once, and all the ISP has to worry about is its internal network management.
Last I looked, iTunes did actually use Akamai (its Edgesuite service), which does make you wonder what the hell Time Warner are whinging about--in the UK, at least, even fairly minor ISPs host Akamai PoPs, and everything I've read suggests it's not dissimilar in the US.
The only other relevant thing I can think of is that some (all?) linux distros randomize MAC addresses of network cards on boot... woe to the user who tries to use the software you're referring to through wine! Presumably there are no DHCP or BOOTP clients for Linux, then?
You don't need to activate the specific device with GSM, but you do normally need to activate the SIM/your account, which for 99.9% of consumers amounts to exactly the same thing.
I don't know if you're in some position the vast majority of web developers aren't, but most of us don't have the ability to fix Microsoft's bugs for them.
For a while that's pretty much been the case: browsers that render standards-compliant mark-up and CSS without a good deal of tweaking are in the majority. IE 6 sits somewhere between 30% and 40% of the visitor share for e-commerce sites in the UK (our target market), so it's been the case for some time that standards-compliant mark-up hits the majority. The problem is, of course, that 30-40% is a hell of a lot of people, and so the hassle of the IE 6-specific workarounds still has to be endured until it drops to the sort of percentages we see for earlier versions.
Firefox, Opera, Safari, and the various other Gecko/KHTML/WebKit derivatives aren't on their own significant enough to warrant special treatment, but taken together (which makes sense, as they generally adhere to the same standards) they're a pretty persuasive argument for standards-compliant mark-up: especially when you take into account the fact that IE 7 isn't remotely as bad at dealing with it as IE 6 is.
Well, yes, but the amount of time required to tweak a reasonably complex standards-compliant site for IE 7 is (although non-zero), pretty minimal. The same can't be said for previous versions by any means.
That's an entirely fair point: I'm pretty conditioned to "not installing IE 7" being equivalent to "I'm sticking with IE 6".
Personally speaking, though, if I can't uninstall IE 6, I'd consider installing IE 7 to be the next best thing (there'll always be some weird piece of software [hello, Windows Update] that insists on using IE's components whether it's your default browser or not), but I get that other people don't necessarily evaluate it the same way.
Uh, the w3schools stats are only for visitors to w3schools.com, which given their high ranking in SERPs for HTML element and attribute names, CSS properties and JavaScript objects, are primarily web developers quickly looking something up via Google instead of reaching for a nearby book.
I'd be concerned if w3schools' stats showed Firefox at the same kind of penetration level it is on consumer sites.
Looking at the stats for the sites we run, the proportion of NT 4.0 users who don't install an alternative browser is so small that the time would be better spent just disabling CSS and JavaScript for older versions of IE.
If you've been running IE on NT 4.0 all this time and haven't noticed sites are broken, you either don't view many sites, or have a really warped view of the web:)
Seriously, that's fine. You keep using IE 6 all you like. Just bear in mind that once your preferred broken browser is in the minority, us web developers will stop spending hours or days at a time going out of way to make our sites not look and work like complete and total ass in it.
The standards were created so that we didn't have to do that for every site that gets built, and by and large they apply--except for IE 6 and IE 7 (IE 7's so much better than IE 6, though; it's a breeze in comparison).
So yeah... you use IE 6. Then you'll discover how its rendering engine really copes with standards-compliant mark-up (hint: it's not pretty).
As a web developer, I've been watching IE 6's share of the browser market decline steadily. I can only agree with the above comment--the sooner it dies a death, the better.
Unfortunately, we still have clients who insist on using Windows 2000 (which can't run IE 7). Thankfully, they don't stick to IE 5.5 and complain that the sites "don't look right" in it--they at least update as far as they can.
I've lost track of the number of occasions that I've held back on replacing all of the IE6-specific styling and scripting with a bit of client-side browser sniffing that simply displays a "Upgrade your browser, dumbass, it's 6 years old--that's like, 49 dog-years. Preferably upgrade it to Firefox." message. Each site build makes it increasingly more tempting.
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No they don't, because they licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft.
You miss the point--people will have to write code specifically for this feature (which, incidentally, won't work in other browsers for a while yet), when if they were going to do that they could just have written it to work in the first place.
What makes you think people who can't manage to beat out a couple of lines of pretty simple code are going to be able to write code for "AJAX Navigation support" and do it in a way which degrades gracefully?
The whole thing is something that will make life easier for web developers in the long term, but have little effect in the short term. What it won't do is magically make life any easier for end users.
I've built sites in the past fortnight which use document.location.hash to allow navigation to/from different AJAXified or otherwise dynamic sections of a page (either by typing the URL with the anchor directly, or by using back/forward), and it works wonderfully in every browser I've tried including IE 6.
...and they turned this into a whole complete feature, and got somebody to think up a name for it?!
About the only "clever" bit here is firing an event automatically when it changes, which just removes the three lines of code I have checking whether window.location.hash is myfoo.savedHash or not in an interval ticker.
(Parent is quite clearly not a troll, incidentally)
Yes, there is a lot of illegally distributed-content. That's a given. What's not a given is how the ISPs (or indeed, anybody) is supposed to distinguish between the two at all reliably. Without a mechanism for that, the whole thing is moot.
Yup, but I'm pretty sure none but the cheapest of El Cheapo ISPs would implement a policy of no P2P whatsoever.
P2P traffic patterns just say you're doing P2P, not what you're sharing with peers. Plenty of legitimate applications use P2P (Skype, iPlayer, 4oD, not to mention legal BitTorrent sources).
Notably posted the day that Trent Reznor releases a good chunk of an album on ThePirateBay (amusing in itself simply because of TPB's notoriety).
It was widely reported (and by that I mean, Steve Jobs stood up on stage and announced it) that Google were storing all new videos as H.264 (and steadily converting old ones) for both the iPhone/iPod touch and Apple TV.
I would imagine this initiative is related to that.
[q]For example, the macbook air isn't very good as a main computer, and the lack of 3G iphones has to do with battery life - Apple has chosen to offer certain features which are mutually exclusive with other features - I'm glad someone ... respectable ... is saying it! [/q]
I hate to burst your bubble, but everyone except the most rabid of fanboys (and I'll concede that the likes of Slashdot has a tendency for attracting them) has consistently said as much: if doesn't offer the features you require, don't buy it, no matter if it is the prettiest/nicest designed/lickable/whatever.
Lots of people are content with EDGE (or just don't care), and Apple's been selling to those people--the reasons for not producing a 3G iPhone have been pretty clear from quite early on, but that doesn't mean the iPhone is suddenly everybody's only option and that they're somehow more limited by the iPhone's limitations than they were previously. I have plenty of Apple products, but I have plenty of products from other manufacturers too: I don't really understand the current trend for bashing a product because it doesn't meet an individual's specific requirements, when it's quite obvious that it does meet (or exceed) the requirements of more than enough people to keep Apple in business and the vast majority of its customers happy.
Well... yes.
Or "fucktonne", as we often say over here.
(More commonly, it's "shitload" rather than "shiteload"... at least in the UK).
Which is pretty much what Akamai and friends do for them.
Akaima puts a great big honking cluster of machines in various ISPs, and all of their customers use those hosts in preference to something more distant. The hosted materials only come down from the outside world once, and all the ISP has to worry about is its internal network management.
Last I looked, iTunes did actually use Akamai (its Edgesuite service), which does make you wonder what the hell Time Warner are whinging about--in the UK, at least, even fairly minor ISPs host Akamai PoPs, and everything I've read suggests it's not dissimilar in the US.
And, er, DNS? ...and NTP?
And what do you do when you get a new SIM and account?
That's right, you activate it.
Do try to keep up.
You don't need to activate the specific device with GSM, but you do normally need to activate the SIM/your account, which for 99.9% of consumers amounts to exactly the same thing.
Given that he uses iTunes, maybe he just put in his Beatles CDs and let it rip them for him?
More important than being in favour of P2P - he's in favour of Fair Use.
I don't know if you're in some position the vast majority of web developers aren't, but most of us don't have the ability to fix Microsoft's bugs for them.
For a while that's pretty much been the case: browsers that render standards-compliant mark-up and CSS without a good deal of tweaking are in the majority. IE 6 sits somewhere between 30% and 40% of the visitor share for e-commerce sites in the UK (our target market), so it's been the case for some time that standards-compliant mark-up hits the majority. The problem is, of course, that 30-40% is a hell of a lot of people, and so the hassle of the IE 6-specific workarounds still has to be endured until it drops to the sort of percentages we see for earlier versions.
Firefox, Opera, Safari, and the various other Gecko/KHTML/WebKit derivatives aren't on their own significant enough to warrant special treatment, but taken together (which makes sense, as they generally adhere to the same standards) they're a pretty persuasive argument for standards-compliant mark-up: especially when you take into account the fact that IE 7 isn't remotely as bad at dealing with it as IE 6 is.
Well, yes, but the amount of time required to tweak a reasonably complex standards-compliant site for IE 7 is (although non-zero), pretty minimal. The same can't be said for previous versions by any means.
That's an entirely fair point: I'm pretty conditioned to "not installing IE 7" being equivalent to "I'm sticking with IE 6".
Personally speaking, though, if I can't uninstall IE 6, I'd consider installing IE 7 to be the next best thing (there'll always be some weird piece of software [hello, Windows Update] that insists on using IE's components whether it's your default browser or not), but I get that other people don't necessarily evaluate it the same way.
Uh, the w3schools stats are only for visitors to w3schools.com, which given their high ranking in SERPs for HTML element and attribute names, CSS properties and JavaScript objects, are primarily web developers quickly looking something up via Google instead of reaching for a nearby book.
I'd be concerned if w3schools' stats showed Firefox at the same kind of penetration level it is on consumer sites.
You can do it with MultipleIEs, an unofficial hack to install multiple versions of IE on a machine.
It works pretty well nowadays--it was a bit shaky when it was first released, though.
We use it for testing internally, though I do have VMs lying around for "just to be sure" testing.
Looking at the stats for the sites we run, the proportion of NT 4.0 users who don't install an alternative browser is so small that the time would be better spent just disabling CSS and JavaScript for older versions of IE.
:)
If you've been running IE on NT 4.0 all this time and haven't noticed sites are broken, you either don't view many sites, or have a really warped view of the web
Seriously, that's fine. You keep using IE 6 all you like. Just bear in mind that once your preferred broken browser is in the minority, us web developers will stop spending hours or days at a time going out of way to make our sites not look and work like complete and total ass in it.
The standards were created so that we didn't have to do that for every site that gets built, and by and large they apply--except for IE 6 and IE 7 (IE 7's so much better than IE 6, though; it's a breeze in comparison).
So yeah... you use IE 6. Then you'll discover how its rendering engine really copes with standards-compliant mark-up (hint: it's not pretty).
As a web developer, I've been watching IE 6's share of the browser market decline steadily. I can only agree with the above comment--the sooner it dies a death, the better.
Unfortunately, we still have clients who insist on using Windows 2000 (which can't run IE 7). Thankfully, they don't stick to IE 5.5 and complain that the sites "don't look right" in it--they at least update as far as they can.
I've lost track of the number of occasions that I've held back on replacing all of the IE6-specific styling and scripting with a bit of client-side browser sniffing that simply displays a "Upgrade your browser, dumbass, it's 6 years old--that's like, 49 dog-years. Preferably upgrade it to Firefox." message. Each site build makes it increasingly more tempting.