That's the whole point the GP was making - you insert a standard submit button in the page, then you use javascript to replace that button with your fancy image. If some visitors then have javascript disabled, they will still see the standard submit button and hopefully be able to use the site. Everyone else will get the prettified version.
In this case, conditional comments aren't the way to go if you need to maintain a particular design - javascript will serve the design as its meant to look to the most number of users while allowing the site to gracefully degrade for users savvy enough to disable scripting. Using conditional comments to hide the image submit from IE (and I don't believe for a second that image submits don't work in IE7, I mean FTW?) would just deny the site design to the vast majority of your audience. In terms of most styling issues though, you are 100% correct, conditional comments beat hacks every time because they are future-proof in a way hacks were never guaranteed to be.
Remember, there's nothing wrong with using javascript so long as your site works just as well with scripting disabled.
If you're asked to do something that uses IE specific functionality that your boss/customer/client knows can be done, but it requires the use of something non-standard, what are you suppose to do once you've pointed out the downside of proceeding? Quit?!? Refuse?!?
Use conditional comments.
Let's face it, as web developers we've known IE7 was coming for quite a while now, and we've also known (or should have known, there's been enough written about it) that many of the old hacks would be removed. Conditional comments have also been around long enough for us to realise that they are a much safer option for providing IE6/5 workarounds which will degrade well in the future.
Personally, I adopted this approach early and, when IE7 did hit the streets, I found it worked almost flawlessly with my standard stylesheets with very little tweaking needed, while IE6 still played nicely with its own stylesheet. Selector support is still not great, but I tend to use universally safe (if not exactly pretty) workarounds for those anyway.
At the end of the day, IE7 is still pretty broken, it's still holding back developers who know what could be possible with better CSS support, but it's such a massive leap over IE6 that, even if it does mean fixing millions of b0rked websites, hopefully that's a one-off and we can now focus on much more standards-compliant sites going forward.
If they already have such people, why wouldn't their present hiring practices be fine for finding them?
The hiring process at Google is very long-winded, involving several interviews (some people claim a dozen or more) and I seem to remember reading that Brin and Page like to be involved in the process personally, maybe vetting the final candidates if not directly speaking to them. That's simply not scalable if they want to maintain the same personality mix they have now while doubling personnel every year - as the number of people with hiring ability grows, there are bound to be branches of new employees hired that have differing personalities, experience, qualifications, etc. Everyone has their own view of what is the most important quality to bring to a role, and this will weight their hiring decisions.
In light of this it would seem to make perfect sense to the Google boys to solve the problem the way they tried to solve search, with an algorithm. If the same algorith is applied universally to vet the vast majority of applicants (and then the ones shortlisted are interviewed by real people maybe), they're likely to hire people with the same general outlook. If they can tweak that the imitate the mix they already have and like, maybe this could work and be scalable as the company expands.
I wonder how long it'll be before we see Job Application Optimisation company's springing up, though...
Well, it seems a lot of people are missing the point that this tells us why people buy, not just whether they will buy. Although the idea of an MRI at a checkout is a bit of silly fun, it's interesting (if true) that people's choices are really based on pleasure of buying/pain of spending rather than pleasure of buying/delayed gratification of buying elsewhere. A lot of stores make a big play of loyalty card schemes and competitive pricing, but this seems to suggest that people are prepared to forget the fact that they can save a few pennies elsewhere if you just make the buying process a bit more pleasurable - maybe smaller queues, friendlier staff, etc. I'm all for that...
Why would cameras only provide temporary safety? If this crime had happened in 2050, would the cameras have somehow stopped working?
Well, once people are more aware and accustomed to the presence of cameras and their effectiveness in fighting crime, the criminal element will take greater steps to avoid them. So while they won't have stopped working, maybe they'll just gradually become less effective. The next logical step from there would be to have cameras in private areas (businesses, maybe even homes) as well as public areas, hence the quote - the safety gains are temporary but the loss of liberty is near impossible to reverse.
Just to play devil's advocate's advocate, we're not talking about stealing music - whether you buy from AoMP3 or download free torrents, it's not theft. You deprive nobody of their property. It may be an infringement of the copyright owner's rights, but that's not the same as theft. That's an important distinction, and one people always seem to miss.
To correct your example, it would be like his car being destroyed in an accident so he makes an exact copy of your car (or pays someone a fee to make him a copy), identical in every way to, but without depriving you of, your car. He makes one single copy, merely to replace his car (which was destroyed in a natural disaster beyond his control, after all). Suddenly that seems a little more reasonable, doesn't it? If it costs you nothing for him to replace what he lost through no fault of his own, I should think it would be uncharitable to say the least for you to deny him that option.
Now, if someone said their CD collection was destroyed and they were stealing CD's from stores to replace them, your analogy would have been appropriate. Since that's not the case here, you might want to be a little more careful with the FUD spreading?
It's not much different to paying for an "implied license" to listen to music and in return receiving a digital download which you're not entitled to resell and, should anything happen to the file, which you're not entitled to have replaced free of charge (regardless that your "implied license" theoretically still exists). If someone deletes your $5k music collection, have they actually committed any crime? These are strange times...
I think the moral question is more that quarantine assumes that someone with the virus would knowingly infect others. It's quite possible for someone with the virus to go about a relatively normal life and the means of transmission are few and very well defined - by segregating that person from the rest of society you are raising some serious moral issues; essentially you're saying they can't be trusted not to commit acts which might spread the virus. That being the case, why stop at HIV? You could then go on to make a case for segregating sufferers of lots of other illnesses. Carry on down that route and you end up with a society where the sick are a sub-class.
If pirates didn't exist, **AA would have to invent them.
Piracy is a convenient justification for **AA creating ways to control your media, definitely. If it didn't exist, they'd find a different justification. Your approach would work if sufficient numbers of people followed it (and I'm talking regular buyers, not pirates - after all pirates are already not buying, so not pirating as well wouldn't be any more of an economic burden to the **AA's). Unfortunately that's unlikely to ever happen, instead the masses will just blithely accept the gradual loss of usage rights.
You might not agree with piracy, but at least it's a hot topic issue and brings this loss of rights somewhat more into the limelight.
I knew it, Blizzard has no plans whatsoever to make games anymore. As long as WoW is played, Blizzard are not developers, they are simply maintainers. Don't take this the wrong way though, would you or I honestly continue to make new games if we're constantly making billions on one game?
The problem with that approach is that when WoW does fall out of favour (and it will, nothing lasts forever), Blizzard will need a follow-up. At the moment they have a solid reputation for releasing great games. If they don't release anything for four years (or more) they'll sorely damage that reputation and lose ground to the competition. So, you see, even though they're making money hand-over-fist right now, they still need to look to the future (and besides, I'm sure they'll also want to be the ones to develop the WoW-killer).
This is a great idea, the only problem I see is how to police it. Someone might take the money and then goof off for a year. At the very least they might decide not to release their more impressive works into the public domain, choosing to put off releasing them until after the year is through (who is to say when they wrote a particular theory down for the first time, after all?).
Besides, I'll bet a large portion of those 1,000 smartest people are already making money over and above their salary through publishing of their works. If you tell them you'll pay them $100k for a year but you own everything they write down during that year, it suddenly becomes a less attractive prospect.
I still think it's a great idea in principle, and I'm sure there would be many academics who'd sign up just for the pleasure of being paid to work on their pet theories for a year without the hassles of academia getting in the way, but I can see how it could be exploited too.
Wouldn't it be sweet if it were true. I have to admit, putting a different version of DRM in all your hardware and software then advising customers to circumvent it certainly seems like they're doing their damndest to make this behaviour accepted by the masses. But then I remember it's MS.
Actually I think the GP is on to something. You do have to care more about your vinyl than CD, which does create an extra level of investment in the music. CDs just represent a disk full of data, vinyls are real music.
I thought the purpose of the console was pretty much to allow us to play games in the living room without all the hassles associated with installation and load times you get with PCs. Besides, MS have always been pretty open about the fact that the XBOX is their attempt to eventually get a computer into the living room controlling all your media, and if they're ever going to achieve that they need to ensure their console keeps pace with the available media.
On the flip side, maybe if the people in charge lived for hundreds of years they'd be less willing to screw over the planet for future generations in order to make a quick profit.
All you have to do is get enough money together for the first trip. Then you just take along as much modern day kitsch as you can carry. When you pop out in the future it will be worth a small fortune and you can fund your next trip. Economies may come and go, but people will always buy old crap.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be a hell of a blast until it gets shut down for some please-think-of-the-children reason.
It's in Romania - all the children are either in orphanages or sweatshops.
That's the whole point the GP was making - you insert a standard submit button in the page, then you use javascript to replace that button with your fancy image. If some visitors then have javascript disabled, they will still see the standard submit button and hopefully be able to use the site. Everyone else will get the prettified version.
In this case, conditional comments aren't the way to go if you need to maintain a particular design - javascript will serve the design as its meant to look to the most number of users while allowing the site to gracefully degrade for users savvy enough to disable scripting. Using conditional comments to hide the image submit from IE (and I don't believe for a second that image submits don't work in IE7, I mean FTW?) would just deny the site design to the vast majority of your audience. In terms of most styling issues though, you are 100% correct, conditional comments beat hacks every time because they are future-proof in a way hacks were never guaranteed to be.
Remember, there's nothing wrong with using javascript so long as your site works just as well with scripting disabled.
If you're asked to do something that uses IE specific functionality that your boss/customer/client knows can be done, but it requires the use of something non-standard, what are you suppose to do once you've pointed out the downside of proceeding? Quit?!? Refuse?!?
Use conditional comments.
Let's face it, as web developers we've known IE7 was coming for quite a while now, and we've also known (or should have known, there's been enough written about it) that many of the old hacks would be removed. Conditional comments have also been around long enough for us to realise that they are a much safer option for providing IE6/5 workarounds which will degrade well in the future.
Personally, I adopted this approach early and, when IE7 did hit the streets, I found it worked almost flawlessly with my standard stylesheets with very little tweaking needed, while IE6 still played nicely with its own stylesheet. Selector support is still not great, but I tend to use universally safe (if not exactly pretty) workarounds for those anyway.
At the end of the day, IE7 is still pretty broken, it's still holding back developers who know what could be possible with better CSS support, but it's such a massive leap over IE6 that, even if it does mean fixing millions of b0rked websites, hopefully that's a one-off and we can now focus on much more standards-compliant sites going forward.
If they already have such people, why wouldn't their present hiring practices be fine for finding them?
The hiring process at Google is very long-winded, involving several interviews (some people claim a dozen or more) and I seem to remember reading that Brin and Page like to be involved in the process personally, maybe vetting the final candidates if not directly speaking to them. That's simply not scalable if they want to maintain the same personality mix they have now while doubling personnel every year - as the number of people with hiring ability grows, there are bound to be branches of new employees hired that have differing personalities, experience, qualifications, etc. Everyone has their own view of what is the most important quality to bring to a role, and this will weight their hiring decisions.
In light of this it would seem to make perfect sense to the Google boys to solve the problem the way they tried to solve search, with an algorithm. If the same algorith is applied universally to vet the vast majority of applicants (and then the ones shortlisted are interviewed by real people maybe), they're likely to hire people with the same general outlook. If they can tweak that the imitate the mix they already have and like, maybe this could work and be scalable as the company expands.
I wonder how long it'll be before we see Job Application Optimisation company's springing up, though...
Well, it seems a lot of people are missing the point that this tells us why people buy, not just whether they will buy. Although the idea of an MRI at a checkout is a bit of silly fun, it's interesting (if true) that people's choices are really based on pleasure of buying/pain of spending rather than pleasure of buying/delayed gratification of buying elsewhere. A lot of stores make a big play of loyalty card schemes and competitive pricing, but this seems to suggest that people are prepared to forget the fact that they can save a few pennies elsewhere if you just make the buying process a bit more pleasurable - maybe smaller queues, friendlier staff, etc. I'm all for that...
Why would cameras only provide temporary safety? If this crime had happened in 2050, would the cameras have somehow stopped working?
Well, once people are more aware and accustomed to the presence of cameras and their effectiveness in fighting crime, the criminal element will take greater steps to avoid them. So while they won't have stopped working, maybe they'll just gradually become less effective. The next logical step from there would be to have cameras in private areas (businesses, maybe even homes) as well as public areas, hence the quote - the safety gains are temporary but the loss of liberty is near impossible to reverse.
Just to play devil's advocate's advocate, we're not talking about stealing music - whether you buy from AoMP3 or download free torrents, it's not theft. You deprive nobody of their property. It may be an infringement of the copyright owner's rights, but that's not the same as theft. That's an important distinction, and one people always seem to miss.
To correct your example, it would be like his car being destroyed in an accident so he makes an exact copy of your car (or pays someone a fee to make him a copy), identical in every way to, but without depriving you of, your car. He makes one single copy, merely to replace his car (which was destroyed in a natural disaster beyond his control, after all). Suddenly that seems a little more reasonable, doesn't it? If it costs you nothing for him to replace what he lost through no fault of his own, I should think it would be uncharitable to say the least for you to deny him that option.
Now, if someone said their CD collection was destroyed and they were stealing CD's from stores to replace them, your analogy would have been appropriate. Since that's not the case here, you might want to be a little more careful with the FUD spreading?
It's not much different to paying for an "implied license" to listen to music and in return receiving a digital download which you're not entitled to resell and, should anything happen to the file, which you're not entitled to have replaced free of charge (regardless that your "implied license" theoretically still exists). If someone deletes your $5k music collection, have they actually committed any crime? These are strange times...
I think the moral question is more that quarantine assumes that someone with the virus would knowingly infect others. It's quite possible for someone with the virus to go about a relatively normal life and the means of transmission are few and very well defined - by segregating that person from the rest of society you are raising some serious moral issues; essentially you're saying they can't be trusted not to commit acts which might spread the virus. That being the case, why stop at HIV? You could then go on to make a case for segregating sufferers of lots of other illnesses. Carry on down that route and you end up with a society where the sick are a sub-class.
"Plays... for Now"
If pirates didn't exist, **AA would have to invent them. Piracy is a convenient justification for **AA creating ways to control your media, definitely. If it didn't exist, they'd find a different justification. Your approach would work if sufficient numbers of people followed it (and I'm talking regular buyers, not pirates - after all pirates are already not buying, so not pirating as well wouldn't be any more of an economic burden to the **AA's). Unfortunately that's unlikely to ever happen, instead the masses will just blithely accept the gradual loss of usage rights. You might not agree with piracy, but at least it's a hot topic issue and brings this loss of rights somewhat more into the limelight.
1. Next question?
The problem with that approach is that when WoW does fall out of favour (and it will, nothing lasts forever), Blizzard will need a follow-up. At the moment they have a solid reputation for releasing great games. If they don't release anything for four years (or more) they'll sorely damage that reputation and lose ground to the competition. So, you see, even though they're making money hand-over-fist right now, they still need to look to the future (and besides, I'm sure they'll also want to be the ones to develop the WoW-killer).
This is a great idea, the only problem I see is how to police it. Someone might take the money and then goof off for a year. At the very least they might decide not to release their more impressive works into the public domain, choosing to put off releasing them until after the year is through (who is to say when they wrote a particular theory down for the first time, after all?).
Besides, I'll bet a large portion of those 1,000 smartest people are already making money over and above their salary through publishing of their works. If you tell them you'll pay them $100k for a year but you own everything they write down during that year, it suddenly becomes a less attractive prospect.
I still think it's a great idea in principle, and I'm sure there would be many academics who'd sign up just for the pleasure of being paid to work on their pet theories for a year without the hassles of academia getting in the way, but I can see how it could be exploited too.
If the net effect is only that Apple think to themselves, hmm, DRM is costing us sales, and ditch it... would that be a bad thing?
Wouldn't it be sweet if it were true. I have to admit, putting a different version of DRM in all your hardware and software then advising customers to circumvent it certainly seems like they're doing their damndest to make this behaviour accepted by the masses. But then I remember it's MS.
Having a finger cut off is better than having an arm cut off. It still doesn't mean you want either in an ideal world.
Actually I think the GP is on to something. You do have to care more about your vinyl than CD, which does create an extra level of investment in the music. CDs just represent a disk full of data, vinyls are real music.
Oh, so you have been to Bristol.
I think in the original universe he killed himself after his vinyl record shop went down the tubes.
But I would never buy a Microsoft product, so I'll have to consider the PS3.
That seems a strangely arbitrary decision. Let's face it, neither MS or Sony are going to be winning the consumer's friend award.
I thought the purpose of the console was pretty much to allow us to play games in the living room without all the hassles associated with installation and load times you get with PCs. Besides, MS have always been pretty open about the fact that the XBOX is their attempt to eventually get a computer into the living room controlling all your media, and if they're ever going to achieve that they need to ensure their console keeps pace with the available media.
On the flip side, maybe if the people in charge lived for hundreds of years they'd be less willing to screw over the planet for future generations in order to make a quick profit.
All you have to do is get enough money together for the first trip. Then you just take along as much modern day kitsch as you can carry. When you pop out in the future it will be worth a small fortune and you can fund your next trip. Economies may come and go, but people will always buy old crap.
I like connecting to the internet in just my underwear. Unfortunately my colleagues/bosses frown upon it.