X11 hasn't figured out the existence of "laptops" yet. It also has trouble with that whole "plug and play" concept that's only around 20 years old or so at this point.
The problem is that people like us go into the discussion saying, "X11 doesn't work with multiple monitors," then someone on the other side will reply, "OH YES IT DOES! Use this program which isn't installed by default on any Linux distro and it works!"
But what he doesn't mention is that he's running it on a desktop computer, and he never hot-swaps monitors. Most people use multiple monitor support to dock their laptop temporarily, or plug in a projector temporary. And that use-case, which is undoubtedly the most common, X11 doesn't support worth crap.
And all Office users are customers; MS Office doesn't come preinstalled on computers.
No it doesn't, but 99% of Office copies are purchased by OEMs or large corporations.
See that's the problem - I am (or was) a customer, buying an OS in the box. They and you both consider me, who shells out over $100 for a product, not a customer, and you nor they can see anything wrong with this.
You're the 0.01% of Microsoft's customers. They don't really care about you. I'm sorry to break this news to you.
Agreed, they're improving, but how buggy and unstable is your car? Occasionally there are recalls, but with software (not just Microsoft, either) the attitude is "shove it out the door, we can issue a patch later". I find this practice abhorrent.
I'd rather have feature-full software that crashes once a month than wait an additional 2-3 years for Microsoft to iron out *every* crashing bug, and then never install new hardware (since Microsoft hasn't had a chance to vet the drivers, they could be unstable.)
In short, I understand the trade-off and I'm taking it. Everybody else seems to agree with me, since the trade-off is pretty goddamned popular.
Like I said, it's not just Microsoft, it's tha whole industry's prevailing attitude.
If you're not griping about Windows specifically, and "that whole industry" (presumably meaning software), why the hell are you shoving that in an anti-Microsoft screed? It comes across as "damn that Microsoft, they're on-par with other companies in their same industry! Bastards!" Ridiculous.
Windows has always been less buggy and more stable than any Linux distribution I've tried, and I've tried several on several different pieces of hardware. Apple *might* have them beat, but since Apple doesn't support the hardware I prefer to run (netbooks, tablets, and cheap-ish desktops with good video), Apple's a non-option as far as I'm concerned.
To me, of all things that have been considered as a remedy against Microsoft monopoly abuse, the only one that is logical and practical would be to stop them from bundling hardware and software.
Microsoft doesn't bundle hardware and software. Microsoft doesn't even make hardware that runs desktop Windows. ("Desktop" used to exclude the Zune OS and Xbox OS.) OEMs do.
And the reason the courts don't do, or even propose, this? Is that nobody wants this. Nobody wants to buy a computer that is unusable when unboxed.
1) Three bullet-points that apply as well to any corporation, ever as they do to Microsoft.
2) A bunch of mouth-foaming about being called a paranoid loon that somehow does absolutely nothing to discredit the idea that you are, indeed, a paranoid loon.
3) Intense focused rage that Microsoft is doing the very action you want them to do: release software under the GPL. "Treachery?" Christ.
My problem with Microsoft isn't their business practices (it would be if I were their partner of competetitor), it's their software design and overall philosophy: "Do it the Microsoft way or no way. We have a monopoly so the customer doesn't matter."
You're not a Microsoft customer. (Likely.) OEMs and large corporations are Microsoft customers. Oh, there is a tiny group of people who go out to a retail store and buy a copy of Windows, but they are extremely few and extremely far-between.
From their changing each version of almost any product as to cause one to need a complete retraining,
So you're upset at Microsoft for improving their product? Do you take the same attitude towards other products that are improved?
"Damn these new Chevy cars! Crumplezones, air bags, they keep changing things around! They should just keep making the Chevy Vega until the end of time!"
I mean, you might have some valid gripes about Microsoft, but "changing their product" surely isn't one of them. It's called "improvement." Oh, and all of Microsoft's competitors do it, too!
to their lack of quality control,
Hard to judge this one without any examples.
Vista is a higher quality product than XP, which is a higher quality product than 98. I don't know exactly what you're griping about in regards to quality control, but each version of Windows is more stable and less buggy than all versions that preceded it. (Except perhaps Windows ME.)
to their onorous "activation" and the need to type in a long string of alphanumerc characters just to install an OS
That's a non-issue for Microsoft customers, since Microsoft customers have their products pre-activated. (Remember: Microsoft sells to OEMs and large corporations; you're neither.)
to Active-X and non-standards compliance
They've downplayed ActiveX as much as possible while still retaining backwards-compatibility. It's actually extremely difficult to run ActiveX applet on IE7 and IE8.
IE8 is on-par, standards-compliance-wise, with all other modern browsers.
Things have changed since 1999, you know.
I avoid Microsoft whenever I can because I, personally, don't like their products (Excel is an exception; but maybe it's only good because the others are so gawdoffal bad).
Actually Excel is pretty bad in many, many notable ways. Of all Microsoft products, I wouldn't list Excel among their best. (Most popular? Yes. Best? Not by a long shot.)
I'm glad I have no need of a spreadsheet at home, maybe one of these days I'll fire up the OO spreadsheet just to see how it compares.
Like all OO products, it lacks enough critical features that you'd soon get pissed at it and go back to Microsoft Office.
But lot s and lots and lots of people would use that up very quickly - so the fact that you are paying about 6 times as much for your vice time is a huge difference.
The problem is that the voice and Internet time all comes in a single bill. Since unlimited Internet is apples, and 3 GB/month is oranges, you can't really compare them across the board and say "6 times as much."
As for data a lot of people wouldn't get anywhere near 3GB a month so for them 3GB for about half the price is again a huge difference.
Then those people should move to Austria. What's your point?
The point I was trying to make is that US plans *aren't* necessarily overpriced when you consider all factors. I think I made that point.
It reminds me of this article a while back, which was trying to scare people off air travel by mentioning that some wires in airplanes were being measured with a piece of paper:
During a visit to one parts supplier, the inspector general's office observed an employee who "used a piece of paper, scotch-taped to the work surface, as a measuring device for a length of wire on an oil and fuel pressure transmitter."
Sure it sounds scary, until you actually engage your brain and realize that paper can actually be cut to a specific length, just like wire! Amazing.
Read the comments, one of the authors/supporters of the study responded to my blog posting, but never bothered to explain why exactly measuring a piece of wire with a piece of paper was scary.
For $27.78 you get 1000 min/month and 3GB/month of data. For $50 USD, I get 300 min/month voice (much, much more than I ever would use), and unlimited data. And a nice iPhone to use it all with.
I listen to Internet radio on my phone every day-- at 3GB/month, I'd be capped in a week and a half or so. That's hardly "unlimited."
In short, pricing isn't nearly as far off as you imagine it is.
The real innovation in The Jetsons wasn't that the car flew, but that it folded up into a briefcase that was light enough to casually carry into the office. That'd save me 12 dollars a day in parking fees! Screw flying, I want a briefcase car.
Javascript is an amazing language. If there's anything holding back development of rich Internet applications, it's not Javascript, but DOM... DOM is an amazingly poorly-conceived and clunky standard. DOM's gotten faster, but it still lacks... well, the vast majority of stuff needed for desktop-like applications. (CSS is also a load of crap, but I won't get into that right now.)
Remember, DOM != Javascript. If you wrote a browser that supported [script type="text/python"], Python would be just as constrained by the DOM-beast as Javascript is now.
People seem to generally conflate these two entirely different technologies, experience crappy DOM performance and functionality, and assume it's Javascript's fault. Not so!
This isn't a coke vs. pepsi thing. I can run MS excel with 20 megs of ram. Google spreedsheet in firefox takes over 100 megs of ram. An ftp socket and script to upload my excel file somewhere for sharing doesn't account for 80 megs worth of space complexity: 400% more resources than the thick client app!
So that's 4096 MB for $50.99, or 1.2 cents per megabyte. (Not dollars, cents.)
Your "memory gap" of 80 MB costs you... strangely, exactly one dollar when rounded. Assuming you have a job, and that you were at that job when you wrote your little boldfaced rant, you probably made well over a dollar in the time it took you to type it out.
In short, you have absolutely NO sense of proportion. Get a grip.
(That all said, there are good reasons to use Excel over Google Spreadsheet-- for example, the fact that Google Spreadsheet has crappy usability and lacks tons of features-- but memory cost ain't one of them.)
This is the mother of all 'get off my lawn' arguments. Using existing technology is what brings us most innovations. In fact, using existing technology is what every programmer does.
I'm sure there's some complete open source nerd who is, right now, attempting to write his own BIOS.
But not only is using existing technologies the best way to innovate, it's also the best way to write software. If you don't use the C++ STL, odds your containers will have memory leaks and bugs. (Time spent debugging those *could* have been spend adding features!) If you don't use the OS' widgets, odds are your software will be difficult to use and not support accessibility features. (Just try using a GTK+ application on Windows on a tablet-- or using Windows voice recognition. Does not work.)
Do you think Napster (one of the most, if not the most, innovative applications in recent memory) could have been built if Fanning spent all his time writing his own button and menu code? He'd have given up.
I honestly believe half of the items above are "standard" simply because the W3C (and Mozilla) always do things the exact opposite of the way Microsoft did them. Mostly out of spite. Especially blatant ones, like "textContent"... seriously, it might as well read "textContentToBreakInteroperability".
The lack of a readyState and a sane button definition are just due to the W3C being ivory tower occupants who have zero imagination and even less practical experience building websites. Nothing else explains the moronity that was XHTML.
I mean, it takes imagination to conceive of a Javascript that needs to know if the DOM is ready without hooking into the ONLOAD event (since the event may have already fired), since it's not exactly the most common scenario. The fact is, though, IE supports that scenario and standards-compliant browsers don't, and can't.
Either the guy who sent the servers didn't know what product Opera made, or it didn't occur to him to check. Guess what? People screw up sometimes! OH NOES!
"Web application doesn't support Opera" isn't particularly newsworthy, since Opera has a minuscule marketshare and there's no reason to believe it'll ever skyrocket in the near future. Despite being free now, they're still number 5 out of 5 as far as major browsers go-- hell, even when Safari only ran on Mac, Opera couldn't pull ahead. The only reason this is "news" is that it bit some vendor in the butt. Big deal; shit happens.
They couldn't predict the future. Let's say that application was written 2 years ago, who could have predicted that: Opera would *ever* make a huge, huge server purchase?
Most likely, the spec didn't call for Opera support, they ran into bugs, so they said "fuck it."
It mostly works. It's possible, but not likely, that IE's version of getElementsByClassName does something differently than Firefox's version, but the odds are if they implemented it at all, it's correct.
There are lots of places where a check like this won't help you at all, though. For example, try to figure out which mouse button is pressed when an event occurs-- IE and Firefox/DOM use different methods: http://www.quirksmode.org/js/events_properties.html#button
Now here comes the place where I get modded down for trolling: the IE way of doing things frequently, in fact almost always, makes a hell of a lot more sense than the W3C way. Examples:
1) The existence of "document.readyState" allows a Javascript to know if the document is ready for DOM manipulation even if the Javascript was injected into the page after the ONLOAD event already fired (for example, a Javascript which can either be included in the page or as a bookmarklet.) There's no way to do this using the standards.
2) The IE property name "innerText" makes a hell of a lot more sense than "textContent", since "innerHTML" is already in the standards. "innerHTML" should match "innerText", or "textContent" should match "HTMLContent". The standards make no sense here. Given, IE should implement "textContent" (and in fact I think IE8 does), but FF should also implement "innerText".
3) The above-mentioned mouse button handling code. In Firefox and other standards compliant browsers, there's no way to tell if two buttons were pressed simultaneously. Additionally, there's no (reliable) way for the browser to communicate that no button was pressed at all when the event occurred. The standards on this are retarded.
4) The way IE handles events makes it possible to include static event handlers (i.e. event handlers hard-coded into the HTML) and still receive an event object. As far as I can work out, there's no standards-compliant way to do this.
There must be more recent examples which I don't know about.
That's a shame, since your examples are ancient and petty. Making a transition from NetBIOS a bigger pain? That's seriously the best you have?
Hell, you don't even make it clear Microsoft did anything wrong on the second example... ok so there was "a clear algorithm" defined, but was it a standard? Had Microsoft ever signed off on it, or even see it for that matter? Was it not implemented out of spite, or was it a simple bug?
Reading your post, I almost feel like your opinion just cemented like 15 years ago, and now you're completely unwilling or unable to re-consider anything. Is it the same with all the opinions you hold? For example, are you wearing hammer pants and a hypercolor t-shirt right now because they're so cool? It's fascinating.
God the paranoia on this site is thick. It increases the value of Hyper-V to Microsoft clients, as their Linux virtual machines will run more efficiently in it. That's it. That's all. Relax. Breathe into a paper bag for a few minutes until you're under control again. The sky is not falling. Dogs and cats are not sleeping together.
You need to do the math in CSS because CSS knows how big a "em" is at runtime, and Javascript doesn't.
Take an example where you want a box to be "5em + 10px" tall. How could you do that in Javascript? (I guess you could set it to just 5em and then use JS to determine it's existing pixel size, then add 10px, then re-set the style, but man-- talk about a hack! And it wouldn't work when the user resized the font, unless they also reloaded the page.)
I'm not sure I understand how you start by saying that CSS barely works for the target environment - BILLIONS of web pages are served every day in a (relatively) cross-platform fashion.
That doesn't mean it doesn't "barely work." Hell, CSS doesn't have variables, it can't do math, it took until version 3 to get extremely basic, obvious features like columns... it's god-awful. "Barely works" is appropriate in my opinion.
So I'd have to argue that CSS doesn't work. The areas where CSS is weak consist primarily of CSS specs that have NOT been implemented (*ahem* IE) or implemented in a bone-headed way (*ahem* IE) not in areas of weakness within the CSS spec itself.
So the fact that I can't say "headercolor = '#ffaacc'; #header {backgroundColor = headercolor;}" is *not* an area of weakness within the CSS spec? Or the fact that I can't add the runtime metrics together with the designtime metrics? (i.e. add pixels, known at design-time, to em, which can't be known until runtime.)
Here's a challenge: center content with arbitrary dimensions vertically using CSS. You can do this in HTML using a table in like 4 lines of code; In CSS it's virtually impossible.
If you don't think CSS has major flaws, then you don't have much imagination.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about CSS is how trouble-free its implementation has been, and just how smooth the transition actually has been.
Old stuff still basically works, new stuff just basically works better.
Same could be said for HTML. But HTML doesn't suck as much as CSS. (DOM does, though... don't even get me started on DOM!)
4000x3000 resolution, probably at a totally difference aspect ratio than the image provided to wikipedia, and probably as a PNG/raw/GIF rather than a lossy jpeg file.
Wow, I was taking your post seriously until I saw the acronym GIF. GIF, non-lossy? Seriously?
Especially since the only reason people turn off Javascript is so they can post snooty messages on Slashdot about how cool they are since they keep Javascript turned off. (See also: Flash)
Slashdot Mirror
X11 hasn't figured out the existence of "laptops" yet. It also has trouble with that whole "plug and play" concept that's only around 20 years old or so at this point.
The problem is that people like us go into the discussion saying, "X11 doesn't work with multiple monitors," then someone on the other side will reply, "OH YES IT DOES! Use this program which isn't installed by default on any Linux distro and it works!"
But what he doesn't mention is that he's running it on a desktop computer, and he never hot-swaps monitors. Most people use multiple monitor support to dock their laptop temporarily, or plug in a projector temporary. And that use-case, which is undoubtedly the most common, X11 doesn't support worth crap.
And all Office users are customers; MS Office doesn't come preinstalled on computers.
No it doesn't, but 99% of Office copies are purchased by OEMs or large corporations.
See that's the problem - I am (or was) a customer, buying an OS in the box. They and you both consider me, who shells out over $100 for a product, not a customer, and you nor they can see anything wrong with this.
You're the 0.01% of Microsoft's customers. They don't really care about you. I'm sorry to break this news to you.
Agreed, they're improving, but how buggy and unstable is your car? Occasionally there are recalls, but with software (not just Microsoft, either) the attitude is "shove it out the door, we can issue a patch later". I find this practice abhorrent.
I'd rather have feature-full software that crashes once a month than wait an additional 2-3 years for Microsoft to iron out *every* crashing bug, and then never install new hardware (since Microsoft hasn't had a chance to vet the drivers, they could be unstable.)
In short, I understand the trade-off and I'm taking it. Everybody else seems to agree with me, since the trade-off is pretty goddamned popular.
Like I said, it's not just Microsoft, it's tha whole industry's prevailing attitude.
If you're not griping about Windows specifically, and "that whole industry" (presumably meaning software), why the hell are you shoving that in an anti-Microsoft screed? It comes across as "damn that Microsoft, they're on-par with other companies in their same industry! Bastards!" Ridiculous.
Windows has always been less buggy and more stable than any Linux distribution I've tried, and I've tried several on several different pieces of hardware. Apple *might* have them beat, but since Apple doesn't support the hardware I prefer to run (netbooks, tablets, and cheap-ish desktops with good video), Apple's a non-option as far as I'm concerned.
To me, of all things that have been considered as a remedy against Microsoft monopoly abuse, the only one that is logical and practical would be to stop them from bundling hardware and software.
Microsoft doesn't bundle hardware and software. Microsoft doesn't even make hardware that runs desktop Windows. ("Desktop" used to exclude the Zune OS and Xbox OS.) OEMs do.
And the reason the courts don't do, or even propose, this? Is that nobody wants this. Nobody wants to buy a computer that is unusable when unboxed.
To sum up your little rant:
1) Three bullet-points that apply as well to any corporation, ever as they do to Microsoft.
2) A bunch of mouth-foaming about being called a paranoid loon that somehow does absolutely nothing to discredit the idea that you are, indeed, a paranoid loon.
3) Intense focused rage that Microsoft is doing the very action you want them to do: release software under the GPL. "Treachery?" Christ.
My problem with Microsoft isn't their business practices (it would be if I were their partner of competetitor), it's their software design and overall philosophy: "Do it the Microsoft way or no way. We have a monopoly so the customer doesn't matter."
You're not a Microsoft customer. (Likely.) OEMs and large corporations are Microsoft customers. Oh, there is a tiny group of people who go out to a retail store and buy a copy of Windows, but they are extremely few and extremely far-between.
From their changing each version of almost any product as to cause one to need a complete retraining,
So you're upset at Microsoft for improving their product? Do you take the same attitude towards other products that are improved?
"Damn these new Chevy cars! Crumplezones, air bags, they keep changing things around! They should just keep making the Chevy Vega until the end of time!"
I mean, you might have some valid gripes about Microsoft, but "changing their product" surely isn't one of them. It's called "improvement." Oh, and all of Microsoft's competitors do it, too!
to their lack of quality control,
Hard to judge this one without any examples.
Vista is a higher quality product than XP, which is a higher quality product than 98. I don't know exactly what you're griping about in regards to quality control, but each version of Windows is more stable and less buggy than all versions that preceded it. (Except perhaps Windows ME.)
to their onorous "activation" and the need to type in a long string of alphanumerc characters just to install an OS
That's a non-issue for Microsoft customers, since Microsoft customers have their products pre-activated. (Remember: Microsoft sells to OEMs and large corporations; you're neither.)
to Active-X and non-standards compliance
They've downplayed ActiveX as much as possible while still retaining backwards-compatibility. It's actually extremely difficult to run ActiveX applet on IE7 and IE8.
IE8 is on-par, standards-compliance-wise, with all other modern browsers.
Things have changed since 1999, you know.
I avoid Microsoft whenever I can because I, personally, don't like their products (Excel is an exception; but maybe it's only good because the others are so gawdoffal bad).
Actually Excel is pretty bad in many, many notable ways. Of all Microsoft products, I wouldn't list Excel among their best. (Most popular? Yes. Best? Not by a long shot.)
I'm glad I have no need of a spreadsheet at home, maybe one of these days I'll fire up the OO spreadsheet just to see how it compares.
Like all OO products, it lacks enough critical features that you'd soon get pissed at it and go back to Microsoft Office.
But lot s and lots and lots of people would use that up very quickly - so the fact that you are paying about 6 times as much for your vice time is a huge difference.
The problem is that the voice and Internet time all comes in a single bill. Since unlimited Internet is apples, and 3 GB/month is oranges, you can't really compare them across the board and say "6 times as much."
As for data a lot of people wouldn't get anywhere near 3GB a month so for them 3GB for about half the price is again a huge difference.
Then those people should move to Austria. What's your point?
The point I was trying to make is that US plans *aren't* necessarily overpriced when you consider all factors. I think I made that point.
It reminds me of this article a while back, which was trying to scare people off air travel by mentioning that some wires in airplanes were being measured with a piece of paper:
http://blakeyrat.com/index.php/2008/03/a-critical-reading-of-the-news-faa-criticized-in-report-on-airline-parts/
During a visit to one parts supplier, the inspector general's office observed an employee who "used a piece of paper, scotch-taped to the work surface, as a measuring device for a length of wire on an oil and fuel pressure transmitter."
Sure it sounds scary, until you actually engage your brain and realize that paper can actually be cut to a specific length, just like wire! Amazing.
Read the comments, one of the authors/supporters of the study responded to my blog posting, but never bothered to explain why exactly measuring a piece of wire with a piece of paper was scary.
I hate fear-mongoring.
EUR 19.50 = USD $27.78.
For $27.78 you get 1000 min/month and 3GB/month of data. For $50 USD, I get 300 min/month voice (much, much more than I ever would use), and unlimited data. And a nice iPhone to use it all with.
I listen to Internet radio on my phone every day-- at 3GB/month, I'd be capped in a week and a half or so. That's hardly "unlimited."
In short, pricing isn't nearly as far off as you imagine it is.
The real innovation in The Jetsons wasn't that the car flew, but that it folded up into a briefcase that was light enough to casually carry into the office. That'd save me 12 dollars a day in parking fees! Screw flying, I want a briefcase car.
Yeah, it's really about time we took a look at that magnetic anomaly near Tycho crater. That thing's been bugging me for 8 years now...
Amen.
Javascript is an amazing language. If there's anything holding back development of rich Internet applications, it's not Javascript, but DOM... DOM is an amazingly poorly-conceived and clunky standard. DOM's gotten faster, but it still lacks... well, the vast majority of stuff needed for desktop-like applications. (CSS is also a load of crap, but I won't get into that right now.)
Remember, DOM != Javascript. If you wrote a browser that supported [script type="text/python"], Python would be just as constrained by the DOM-beast as Javascript is now.
People seem to generally conflate these two entirely different technologies, experience crappy DOM performance and functionality, and assume it's Javascript's fault. Not so!
This isn't a coke vs. pepsi thing. I can run MS excel with 20 megs of ram. Google spreedsheet in firefox takes over 100 megs of ram. An ftp socket and script to upload my excel file somewhere for sharing doesn't account for 80 megs worth of space complexity: 400% more resources than the thick client app!
Ok, I just checked NewEgg. You can buy 4 GB of RAM for $50.99: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231166&cm_sp=DailyDeal-_-20-231-166-_-Product
So that's 4096 MB for $50.99, or 1.2 cents per megabyte. (Not dollars, cents.)
Your "memory gap" of 80 MB costs you... strangely, exactly one dollar when rounded. Assuming you have a job, and that you were at that job when you wrote your little boldfaced rant, you probably made well over a dollar in the time it took you to type it out.
In short, you have absolutely NO sense of proportion. Get a grip.
(That all said, there are good reasons to use Excel over Google Spreadsheet-- for example, the fact that Google Spreadsheet has crappy usability and lacks tons of features-- but memory cost ain't one of them.)
This is the mother of all 'get off my lawn' arguments. Using existing technology is what brings us most innovations. In fact, using existing technology is what every programmer does.
I'm sure there's some complete open source nerd who is, right now, attempting to write his own BIOS.
But not only is using existing technologies the best way to innovate, it's also the best way to write software. If you don't use the C++ STL, odds your containers will have memory leaks and bugs. (Time spent debugging those *could* have been spend adding features!) If you don't use the OS' widgets, odds are your software will be difficult to use and not support accessibility features. (Just try using a GTK+ application on Windows on a tablet-- or using Windows voice recognition. Does not work.)
Do you think Napster (one of the most, if not the most, innovative applications in recent memory) could have been built if Fanning spent all his time writing his own button and menu code? He'd have given up.
I honestly believe half of the items above are "standard" simply because the W3C (and Mozilla) always do things the exact opposite of the way Microsoft did them. Mostly out of spite. Especially blatant ones, like "textContent"... seriously, it might as well read "textContentToBreakInteroperability".
The lack of a readyState and a sane button definition are just due to the W3C being ivory tower occupants who have zero imagination and even less practical experience building websites. Nothing else explains the moronity that was XHTML.
I mean, it takes imagination to conceive of a Javascript that needs to know if the DOM is ready without hooking into the ONLOAD event (since the event may have already fired), since it's not exactly the most common scenario. The fact is, though, IE supports that scenario and standards-compliant browsers don't, and can't.
Either the guy who sent the servers didn't know what product Opera made, or it didn't occur to him to check. Guess what? People screw up sometimes! OH NOES!
"Web application doesn't support Opera" isn't particularly newsworthy, since Opera has a minuscule marketshare and there's no reason to believe it'll ever skyrocket in the near future. Despite being free now, they're still number 5 out of 5 as far as major browsers go-- hell, even when Safari only ran on Mac, Opera couldn't pull ahead. The only reason this is "news" is that it bit some vendor in the butt. Big deal; shit happens.
They couldn't predict the future. Let's say that application was written 2 years ago, who could have predicted that: Opera would *ever* make a huge, huge server purchase?
Most likely, the spec didn't call for Opera support, they ran into bugs, so they said "fuck it."
It mostly works. It's possible, but not likely, that IE's version of getElementsByClassName does something differently than Firefox's version, but the odds are if they implemented it at all, it's correct.
There are lots of places where a check like this won't help you at all, though. For example, try to figure out which mouse button is pressed when an event occurs-- IE and Firefox/DOM use different methods: http://www.quirksmode.org/js/events_properties.html#button
Now here comes the place where I get modded down for trolling: the IE way of doing things frequently, in fact almost always, makes a hell of a lot more sense than the W3C way. Examples:
1) The existence of "document.readyState" allows a Javascript to know if the document is ready for DOM manipulation even if the Javascript was injected into the page after the ONLOAD event already fired (for example, a Javascript which can either be included in the page or as a bookmarklet.) There's no way to do this using the standards.
2) The IE property name "innerText" makes a hell of a lot more sense than "textContent", since "innerHTML" is already in the standards. "innerHTML" should match "innerText", or "textContent" should match "HTMLContent". The standards make no sense here. Given, IE should implement "textContent" (and in fact I think IE8 does), but FF should also implement "innerText".
3) The above-mentioned mouse button handling code. In Firefox and other standards compliant browsers, there's no way to tell if two buttons were pressed simultaneously. Additionally, there's no (reliable) way for the browser to communicate that no button was pressed at all when the event occurred. The standards on this are retarded.
4) The way IE handles events makes it possible to include static event handlers (i.e. event handlers hard-coded into the HTML) and still receive an event object. As far as I can work out, there's no standards-compliant way to do this.
There must be more recent examples which I don't know about.
That's a shame, since your examples are ancient and petty. Making a transition from NetBIOS a bigger pain? That's seriously the best you have?
Hell, you don't even make it clear Microsoft did anything wrong on the second example... ok so there was "a clear algorithm" defined, but was it a standard? Had Microsoft ever signed off on it, or even see it for that matter? Was it not implemented out of spite, or was it a simple bug?
Reading your post, I almost feel like your opinion just cemented like 15 years ago, and now you're completely unwilling or unable to re-consider anything. Is it the same with all the opinions you hold? For example, are you wearing hammer pants and a hypercolor t-shirt right now because they're so cool? It's fascinating.
God the paranoia on this site is thick. It increases the value of Hyper-V to Microsoft clients, as their Linux virtual machines will run more efficiently in it. That's it. That's all. Relax. Breathe into a paper bag for a few minutes until you're under control again. The sky is not falling. Dogs and cats are not sleeping together.
You need to do the math in CSS because CSS knows how big a "em" is at runtime, and Javascript doesn't.
Take an example where you want a box to be "5em + 10px" tall. How could you do that in Javascript? (I guess you could set it to just 5em and then use JS to determine it's existing pixel size, then add 10px, then re-set the style, but man-- talk about a hack! And it wouldn't work when the user resized the font, unless they also reloaded the page.)
I'm not sure I understand how you start by saying that CSS barely works for the target environment - BILLIONS of web pages are served every day in a (relatively) cross-platform fashion.
That doesn't mean it doesn't "barely work." Hell, CSS doesn't have variables, it can't do math, it took until version 3 to get extremely basic, obvious features like columns... it's god-awful. "Barely works" is appropriate in my opinion.
So I'd have to argue that CSS doesn't work. The areas where CSS is weak consist primarily of CSS specs that have NOT been implemented (*ahem* IE) or implemented in a bone-headed way (*ahem* IE) not in areas of weakness within the CSS spec itself.
So the fact that I can't say "headercolor = '#ffaacc'; #header {backgroundColor = headercolor;}" is *not* an area of weakness within the CSS spec? Or the fact that I can't add the runtime metrics together with the designtime metrics? (i.e. add pixels, known at design-time, to em, which can't be known until runtime.)
Here's a challenge: center content with arbitrary dimensions vertically using CSS. You can do this in HTML using a table in like 4 lines of code; In CSS it's virtually impossible.
If you don't think CSS has major flaws, then you don't have much imagination.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about CSS is how trouble-free its implementation has been, and just how smooth the transition actually has been.
Old stuff still basically works, new stuff just basically works better.
Same could be said for HTML. But HTML doesn't suck as much as CSS. (DOM does, though... don't even get me started on DOM!)
4000x3000 resolution, probably at a totally difference aspect ratio than the image provided to wikipedia, and probably as a PNG/raw/GIF rather than a lossy jpeg file.
Wow, I was taking your post seriously until I saw the acronym GIF. GIF, non-lossy? Seriously?
That's your state, specifically. Not "the United States." Elections are quite reasonable where I live (also in the US.)
Mozy is dirt cheap and has unlimited storage. I wouldn't call it a "joke", unless you have more than, say, a hundred gigs to back up.
Especially since the only reason people turn off Javascript is so they can post snooty messages on Slashdot about how cool they are since they keep Javascript turned off. (See also: Flash)