Oh please, I've gotten a lot of expensive stuff stolen from me, and I've never tried to (as a result) hit somebody over it. Even if your scenario was the case, the robot would protect the *thief*, not the ex-owner, as the thief would be the one on the ass-end of an ass-beating.
The real problem is that Asimov was up in his logic-heavy world and didn't spend a second's thought on real life practical issues.
No, it stopped Microsoft from destroying their sales due to their own dumb-ass decision. What possible motive would Microsoft have to "destroy PDF," assuming they were even capable of doing so? I guess it's completely impossible that Microsoft customers *asked them* to implement the feature, right?
I guess they'd just do it because in your little world, Microsoft is basically the software company equivalent to Snidely Whiplash, right? They're EVIL!! Whatever. Grow up.
The Three Laws were proof that humanity was already stupid. Any yokel could simply steal a robot by walking up to it and saying, "hey robot, you belong to me now." I don't recall Asimov ever addressing that particular point in his books.
The other, rather important, point you're missing is that the loading gauge is how wide/tall the tunnels are. If your load is too wide, it'll get thrashed as soon as the train hits the first tunnel or underpass.
You can't say it's an open standard, then prevent someone from using it. You can't have it both ways. Adobe is full of two-faced liars, that's all there is to it.
Hey, the Titanic was a fine *design*. They just cheaped-out on the building materials. I mean, let's be fair here.
On another, almost wholly-unrelated, point: that disaster earned Margaret Brown the nickname "Unsinkable"-- The Unsinkable Molly Brown-- which has to be one of the best nicknames in history.
If you're using a wiki now, Sharepoint is just a slightly-more-structured wiki. If not, you might find that you benefit from a wiki-like website at your workplace.
The beauty of XHTML Strict is that it forced you to write correct code. (If you don't want to, there was always transitional.) I am 99% sure that the w3c documents for all HTML specs only cover how to render correct code, not incorrect code or quirks.
Well, first of all, the W3C documentation is shitty, and the only progress made on the web has been by companies either extending on the W3C documentation (like XMLHttpRequest, document.readyState, innerText). If the W3C thinks XHTML is going to be the Next Big Thing, so much so that they don't even bother to work on the next version of HTML, you can pretty much guarantee they've completely misjudged the market once again and are completely wrong. So there's that.
Secondly, existing browsers already had code in place to render incorrect code and quirky code. That's a good thing. One of the design principles of programming is that you should be liberal in what you accept, and strict in what you output. If I'm a browser, and I can handle the case where two tags are closed in the wrong order *that is a good thing*.
The only chance we have to make average, normal human beings as able to publish to the web as everybody else is to make HTML dead simple. Maybe this is a bit less important now that there are decent GUI page editors around, but it's still a noble cause and should be championed.
XHTML doesn't do that. XHTML Strict is so strict that accidentally capitalizing one letter could break the formatting of your entire document. That's just crap.
This means if you F-up your webpage in plain old HTML, it is not reasonable to expect it to render consistently between browsers, even if they are standards complaint.
There are two problems with this statement:
1) Browsers aren't guaranteed to render content consistently, anyway. That's another one of those HTML philosophies that seems to be lost in the modern web development world. If Firefox decided tomorrow that A tags in HTML should be boxed instead of underlined, that's perfectly fine and valid.
2) In practice (that thing that the brainiacs at the W3C seem completely unaware of) invalid HTML already worked fine in browsers before XHTML came around. Netscape and IE generally "normalized" incorrect HTML in the same fashion, and produced close-enough results.
3) Sorry thought of a point 3: No matter how fancy and awesome XHTML is, the simple fact remains that there are still thousands or millions of websites written in HTML 1-4 that the browser needs to cope with. By adding XHTML to the mix, browsers now need to cope with not only HTML 1-4 (and soon 5) but XHTML 1 and XHTML Transistional. You've now increased the workload on browser makers by a ton for barely any reason at all. (Since XHTML doesn't do anything that HTML 4 couldn't already do.) It's kind of amazing to me that any browsers even bothered with XHTML at all instead of just saying "fuck this".
Worse yet, your page is more likely to break in future browsers.
That's why HTML has version numbers. This "problem" is already solved in the current file format, there was no reason to go though and XML-ize it to solve it all over again.
That is why I don't think XHTML was a waste of time.
Well, I've been doing web apps for many years, and I've yet to see a single compelling reason I should switch to XHTML over HTML 4. All I see is, "it's a pain to make it work in IE," "You can't include Flash without breaking validation", "You can't put an image inside a noscript tag" (which breaks many web analytics tags), etc etc.
XHTML's a giant pain in the ass, and you get nothing in return.
No, Adobe can't say in one breath that PDF is an open standard, then in the next prevent Microsoft from releasing PDF-capable software. That's a gigantic douchebag move, and a huge "fuck you" to everybody working on PDF software who now are in doubt as to whether Adobe will, at any given moment, change their mind and sic 400 lawyers on them.
Did you see disaster they call ODF support? Will it serve to ODF or completely hurt its image?
ODF has a shitty spec, Microsoft implemented their shitty spec and the result is shitty. What did ODF supporters expect the results to be? If spreadsheet formulas aren't in the spec, and you have a company implementing the spec against their will, of course they're not going to implement spreadsheet formulas. Duh. Maybe the EU should wait until they have a non-shitty spec *then* ask Microsoft to use it.
I am sure there are some free PDF printers for Windows and I didn't see them get sued yet. Lets not talk about paying 400 dollars to MS Office and yet demanding pro quality PDF support for free...
That's odd; I thought it PDF was an "open standard" and *anybody* could create *any* application they wanted using the PDF file format, no matter how "pro quality" it was. Apparently, according to you, we should have just known that Adobe was being a two-faced liar when they told us it was an open standard.
They may have good reasons.
"We said it was an open standard, released the specs, then panicked when we realized that move might have hurt our business" is *not* a good reason to show Microsoft (or anybody else) the finger. Where I come from, we have a saying: "You made your bed, you sleep in it."
Opera actually goes above and beyond the standards, at least over Firefox. For example, Opera supports document.readyState. As does IE, Safari, Chrome-- every browser except Firefox, actually.
(Which makes developing a bookmarklet that needs to make DOM changes in Firefox a COMPLETE PAIN IN THE ASS! I don't care if it's in the standards, it's fucking useful, put it the fuck in!)
XHTML was nothing but a giant waste of time. Microsoft never supported it in IE, and when you think about it: why should they have? XHTML gives you absolutely nothing you didn't already have in HTML 4, it was just a bigger pain-in-the-ass to implement.
Then they threatened to sue Microsoft for including PDF support in Office 2007. Between that, and turning Flash's UI to shit in the last two versions (CS3 and CS4), they lost whatever goodwill from me they once had.
The thing you miss is that all this cruft does exist in Windows-- and yet Windows is still JUST AS GOOD as all the competing OSes. (Worse in some areas, and better in others.)
In short, if the shims don't affect featureset or performance, why the hell should I, as a consumer, give a flying fuck whether it's "less crufty" without them?
ISVs can create a "manifest" with their application telling Windows which shims need to be in-place to run the application correctly, without changing their code and without having access to the Windows source code. That's the point.
But they can't force ISVs to run it, and they can't force ISVs to fix the problems it finds. What they can do is say, "hey, this shim is an easier fix than the compatibility checker you're already too fucking lazy to run" and hope that sticks.
How about "lazy development organization." But I think in the vast majority of cases, it's the lazy developers and not their managers at fault. Either way, it doesn't change the thrust of the argument.
Vista *does* have these shims in-place, and a huge database of applications that require them to work. The point of this article is that they're telling network administrators how to identify which applications (that Microsoft probably doesn't already know about) require the use of the shims, and how to set policies to tell Windows to "shim them." (Or whatever term they use.)
So congratulations, your post is not only factually wrong, but completely misses the point of the topic we're talking about.
Well, I'm just saying if there's some specific feature you're missing, then by all means complaint about it not being there. But if you just don't like it because it's not "changed" enough, that just strikes me as making-up excuses to not like it.
Oh. Well you seemed upset that it's not "remarkably changed", but you don't know which remarkable change you're waiting for? Seems like a goofy complaint to me.
Ah, but just because both store some kind of data, doesn't mean they're both equal. I guarantee you there's a standard somewhere in some help file.
I can guarantee the help file doesn't even mention "DPS" at all. Remember back a few postings on this thread? I tried that already. If Ubuntu didn't document "DPS" for normal users, what are the odds they documented it for software developers?
I applaud the coders behind the Firefox build for trying to do everything they can to get something to work, but it's still Firefox's fault for looking for information in a non-standard place,
But there's two different places to store the information! WHY!??! What possible use could that possibly be, ever? If there were only ONE place to store the ONE piece of DPS information, it wouldn't matter which one is the "standard" because it would just. fucking. work. For both Firefox and normal users like me.
Jesus Christ, I can't believe the lengths you're going to to justify a asinine engineering decision on Ubuntu's part.
just as it is Internet Explorer's fault for looking for "conditional" CSS.
And that has... what, exactly, to do with Firefox being buggy in Ubuntu? Or are you just throwing in a random Microsoft bash out of nowhere? (Even though changing the DPS in Windows *gasp* works fine in Firefox!)
The 2008 version is further evolved, but nothing completely breathtaking.
What kind of changes are you expecting to see? You're right that, fundamentally, SSMS is just Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer combined, but it's also a pretty damned mature field. What kind of revolution are you waiting for?
Enterprise Manager has changed remarkably little since it was taken over by Microsoft.
Hasn't Enterprise Manager been completely obsolete for the last two releases? You're supposed to be using SQL Server Management Studio. (I don't know if you'd consider that better or worse, but... at least it's "remarkably changed" from Enterprise Manager.)
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Oh please, I've gotten a lot of expensive stuff stolen from me, and I've never tried to (as a result) hit somebody over it. Even if your scenario was the case, the robot would protect the *thief*, not the ex-owner, as the thief would be the one on the ass-end of an ass-beating.
The real problem is that Asimov was up in his logic-heavy world and didn't spend a second's thought on real life practical issues.
No, it stopped Microsoft from destroying their sales due to their own dumb-ass decision. What possible motive would Microsoft have to "destroy PDF," assuming they were even capable of doing so? I guess it's completely impossible that Microsoft customers *asked them* to implement the feature, right?
I guess they'd just do it because in your little world, Microsoft is basically the software company equivalent to Snidely Whiplash, right? They're EVIL!! Whatever. Grow up.
The Three Laws were proof that humanity was already stupid. Any yokel could simply steal a robot by walking up to it and saying, "hey robot, you belong to me now." I don't recall Asimov ever addressing that particular point in his books.
The other, rather important, point you're missing is that the loading gauge is how wide/tall the tunnels are. If your load is too wide, it'll get thrashed as soon as the train hits the first tunnel or underpass.
Ah! The typical open source supporter: instead of just admitting we can't meet your need, we'll just pretend your need doesn't exist.
You can't say it's an open standard, then prevent someone from using it. You can't have it both ways. Adobe is full of two-faced liars, that's all there is to it.
Hey, the Titanic was a fine *design*. They just cheaped-out on the building materials. I mean, let's be fair here.
On another, almost wholly-unrelated, point: that disaster earned Margaret Brown the nickname "Unsinkable"-- The Unsinkable Molly Brown-- which has to be one of the best nicknames in history.
If you're using a wiki now, Sharepoint is just a slightly-more-structured wiki. If not, you might find that you benefit from a wiki-like website at your workplace.
The beauty of XHTML Strict is that it forced you to write correct code. (If you don't want to, there was always transitional.) I am 99% sure that the w3c documents for all HTML specs only cover how to render correct code, not incorrect code or quirks.
Well, first of all, the W3C documentation is shitty, and the only progress made on the web has been by companies either extending on the W3C documentation (like XMLHttpRequest, document.readyState, innerText). If the W3C thinks XHTML is going to be the Next Big Thing, so much so that they don't even bother to work on the next version of HTML, you can pretty much guarantee they've completely misjudged the market once again and are completely wrong. So there's that.
Secondly, existing browsers already had code in place to render incorrect code and quirky code. That's a good thing. One of the design principles of programming is that you should be liberal in what you accept, and strict in what you output. If I'm a browser, and I can handle the case where two tags are closed in the wrong order *that is a good thing*.
The only chance we have to make average, normal human beings as able to publish to the web as everybody else is to make HTML dead simple. Maybe this is a bit less important now that there are decent GUI page editors around, but it's still a noble cause and should be championed.
XHTML doesn't do that. XHTML Strict is so strict that accidentally capitalizing one letter could break the formatting of your entire document. That's just crap.
This means if you F-up your webpage in plain old HTML, it is not reasonable to expect it to render consistently between browsers, even if they are standards complaint.
There are two problems with this statement:
1) Browsers aren't guaranteed to render content consistently, anyway. That's another one of those HTML philosophies that seems to be lost in the modern web development world. If Firefox decided tomorrow that A tags in HTML should be boxed instead of underlined, that's perfectly fine and valid.
2) In practice (that thing that the brainiacs at the W3C seem completely unaware of) invalid HTML already worked fine in browsers before XHTML came around. Netscape and IE generally "normalized" incorrect HTML in the same fashion, and produced close-enough results.
3) Sorry thought of a point 3: No matter how fancy and awesome XHTML is, the simple fact remains that there are still thousands or millions of websites written in HTML 1-4 that the browser needs to cope with. By adding XHTML to the mix, browsers now need to cope with not only HTML 1-4 (and soon 5) but XHTML 1 and XHTML Transistional. You've now increased the workload on browser makers by a ton for barely any reason at all. (Since XHTML doesn't do anything that HTML 4 couldn't already do.) It's kind of amazing to me that any browsers even bothered with XHTML at all instead of just saying "fuck this".
Worse yet, your page is more likely to break in future browsers.
That's why HTML has version numbers. This "problem" is already solved in the current file format, there was no reason to go though and XML-ize it to solve it all over again.
That is why I don't think XHTML was a waste of time.
Well, I've been doing web apps for many years, and I've yet to see a single compelling reason I should switch to XHTML over HTML 4. All I see is, "it's a pain to make it work in IE," "You can't include Flash without breaking validation", "You can't put an image inside a noscript tag" (which breaks many web analytics tags), etc etc.
XHTML's a giant pain in the ass, and you get nothing in return.
No, Adobe can't say in one breath that PDF is an open standard, then in the next prevent Microsoft from releasing PDF-capable software. That's a gigantic douchebag move, and a huge "fuck you" to everybody working on PDF software who now are in doubt as to whether Adobe will, at any given moment, change their mind and sic 400 lawyers on them.
Did you see disaster they call ODF support? Will it serve to ODF or completely hurt its image?
ODF has a shitty spec, Microsoft implemented their shitty spec and the result is shitty. What did ODF supporters expect the results to be? If spreadsheet formulas aren't in the spec, and you have a company implementing the spec against their will, of course they're not going to implement spreadsheet formulas. Duh. Maybe the EU should wait until they have a non-shitty spec *then* ask Microsoft to use it.
I am sure there are some free PDF printers for Windows and I didn't see them get sued yet. Lets not talk about paying 400 dollars to MS Office and yet demanding pro quality PDF support for free...
That's odd; I thought it PDF was an "open standard" and *anybody* could create *any* application they wanted using the PDF file format, no matter how "pro quality" it was. Apparently, according to you, we should have just known that Adobe was being a two-faced liar when they told us it was an open standard.
They may have good reasons.
"We said it was an open standard, released the specs, then panicked when we realized that move might have hurt our business" is *not* a good reason to show Microsoft (or anybody else) the finger. Where I come from, we have a saying: "You made your bed, you sleep in it."
Works fine on my 64-bit Windows Vista install. Both the Flash application, and the browser plug-in.
I've not seen anything to suggest it's not supported.
Opera actually goes above and beyond the standards, at least over Firefox. For example, Opera supports document.readyState. As does IE, Safari, Chrome-- every browser except Firefox, actually.
(Which makes developing a bookmarklet that needs to make DOM changes in Firefox a COMPLETE PAIN IN THE ASS! I don't care if it's in the standards, it's fucking useful, put it the fuck in!)
XHTML was nothing but a giant waste of time. Microsoft never supported it in IE, and when you think about it: why should they have? XHTML gives you absolutely nothing you didn't already have in HTML 4, it was just a bigger pain-in-the-ass to implement.
Then they threatened to sue Microsoft for including PDF support in Office 2007. Between that, and turning Flash's UI to shit in the last two versions (CS3 and CS4), they lost whatever goodwill from me they once had.
The thing you miss is that all this cruft does exist in Windows-- and yet Windows is still JUST AS GOOD as all the competing OSes. (Worse in some areas, and better in others.)
In short, if the shims don't affect featureset or performance, why the hell should I, as a consumer, give a flying fuck whether it's "less crufty" without them?
ISVs can create a "manifest" with their application telling Windows which shims need to be in-place to run the application correctly, without changing their code and without having access to the Windows source code. That's the point.
Microsoft already ships a compatibility checker utility: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=24da89e9-b581-47b0-b45e-492dd6da2971
But they can't force ISVs to run it, and they can't force ISVs to fix the problems it finds. What they can do is say, "hey, this shim is an easier fix than the compatibility checker you're already too fucking lazy to run" and hope that sticks.
How about "lazy development organization." But I think in the vast majority of cases, it's the lazy developers and not their managers at fault. Either way, it doesn't change the thrust of the argument.
Vista *does* have these shims in-place, and a huge database of applications that require them to work. The point of this article is that they're telling network administrators how to identify which applications (that Microsoft probably doesn't already know about) require the use of the shims, and how to set policies to tell Windows to "shim them." (Or whatever term they use.)
So congratulations, your post is not only factually wrong, but completely misses the point of the topic we're talking about.
Next you'll be telling me you can't switch to another virtual console if your GUI crashes,
Your GUI crashes? Seriously?
If that *ever* happens, you should just pack up and move OSes. Not acceptable.
Well, I'm just saying if there's some specific feature you're missing, then by all means complaint about it not being there. But if you just don't like it because it's not "changed" enough, that just strikes me as making-up excuses to not like it.
Oh. Well you seemed upset that it's not "remarkably changed", but you don't know which remarkable change you're waiting for? Seems like a goofy complaint to me.
Ah, but just because both store some kind of data, doesn't mean they're both equal. I guarantee you there's a standard somewhere in some help file.
I can guarantee the help file doesn't even mention "DPS" at all. Remember back a few postings on this thread? I tried that already. If Ubuntu didn't document "DPS" for normal users, what are the odds they documented it for software developers?
I applaud the coders behind the Firefox build for trying to do everything they can to get something to work, but it's still Firefox's fault for looking for information in a non-standard place,
But there's two different places to store the information! WHY!??! What possible use could that possibly be, ever? If there were only ONE place to store the ONE piece of DPS information, it wouldn't matter which one is the "standard" because it would just. fucking. work. For both Firefox and normal users like me.
Jesus Christ, I can't believe the lengths you're going to to justify a asinine engineering decision on Ubuntu's part.
just as it is Internet Explorer's fault for looking for "conditional" CSS.
And that has... what, exactly, to do with Firefox being buggy in Ubuntu? Or are you just throwing in a random Microsoft bash out of nowhere? (Even though changing the DPS in Windows *gasp* works fine in Firefox!)
The 2008 version is further evolved, but nothing completely breathtaking.
What kind of changes are you expecting to see? You're right that, fundamentally, SSMS is just Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer combined, but it's also a pretty damned mature field. What kind of revolution are you waiting for?
Enterprise Manager has changed remarkably little since it was taken over by Microsoft.
Hasn't Enterprise Manager been completely obsolete for the last two releases? You're supposed to be using SQL Server Management Studio. (I don't know if you'd consider that better or worse, but... at least it's "remarkably changed" from Enterprise Manager.)
Because web hosting companies don't install it. They install MySQL, or MS SQL (if they're .net hosts.) That's it.