Well, if it's a wireless card, you can get their product banned in some countries by violating their radio frequency laws, regardless of whether you wrote the driver or some random Joe did.
Seriously, there are very very good reasons for hardware to not be documented if you're a hardware maker and want to stay in business.
... or if you want the Xbox Live Arcade version, you can get Aegis Wing which is a pretty good 2-D shooter which supports 4 co-op players and currently costs precisely $0. Just have to do the obligatory Microsoft one-upping of Sony there.
Neither it nor Super Stardust are space shooter games like Sylpheed.
Ugh, would Mac fanboys please stop pointing to the iMac like it was the first all-in-one computer / monitor combo. Gateway was doing it for quite a while before they were.
If that's what you care about, I'd be a ton more worried about EA in the games industry than Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft's not small, but EA is huge-- and they have exclusive contracts with a disturbingly high number of sports leagues-- and they've attempted hostile takeovers of competitors in the past-- and they own 70%+ of the industry now.
Who cares? As a consumer, as long as the product is good and comes at a reasonable price, then Microsoft's bank account is Microsoft's problem-- not mine.
Nice strawman. CSS 1.0 was 11 years ago. Do you know how hard it is to make a 4-column table using HTML 2.0, which was the HTML standard 11 years ago?
So? The New York Times was around 111 years ago, and it uses columns every single day. Nobody in the CSS group thought that columns would be useful? Nobody at all? Come on, I find that hard to believe.
Wow, it only took 3 revisions to get a feature that was done very easily with the "deprecated" tables before. Of course, it's also appeared in pretty much every printed media ever since time began... how could they not anticipate the need to make columns for version 1.0? Every website using Tables for layout was using them to make columns. Every newspaper has columns. Many books have columns. Columns are all over!
Don't agree? Give me one good example where a client side include is a good idea. And it'd better be an example that isn't fully serviceable by using an iframe.
How about a header with Javascript menus that can extend below the header? How about a header which containing script (AJAX-y) that needs to communicate with Javascript functions on the content of the page? (Yes, yes, I know it's possible for iframe functions to communicate with JS on the outer page, but it's a pain in the rear.)
But honestly, I think the burden of proof is on you. Care to explain exactly why includes are so bad?
Their use typically exposes poor design.
Like what?
They are not maintainable.
How so?
The biggest problem with php is typically the massive overuse of includes...all together too much php code is a rats nest of includes.
1) And this is a problem because...?
2) Any programming language/feature can be abused; that says nothing about the quality of that language/feature. (Analogy: Dialog boxes are bad because a single application can create 5,000 of them and bog down the computer!)
Just like any other feature of the web, you'd obviously enforce the 'only from the same server' rule. It would be stupid to have the ability to include files from a local HD unless the HTML file was also from the same HD.
Which is retarded. If you leave it out, you don't validate because you're missing the required alt attribute. If you put it in and set it to "" (empty string), it DOES validate but it does absolutely nothing. If you're going to let me set it to "", why not just let me not set it at all? What is the reasoning behind that?
Interestingly, I think I found a Firefox bug on the "Public Account Request Form" that blog entry links to: http://www.w3.org/Help/Account/Request/Public . If I draw across the phone number text to select and copy it, my selection disappears as soon as I release the mouse button and the cursor instantly moves into the text field.
The problem seems to be that a significant percentage of web site developers lack the discipline or interest to follow rules.
The "rules" are stupid. Do you know how hard it is to make a 3-column or 4-column content site using CSS 1.0? Is it even possible? Yet I can "break" the rules, use table cells as layout, and accomplish the same thing in seconds.
Web developers would use the standards if the standards reflected the reality of their job and *made it easier*. In the same way software developers use APIs because the APIs *make their job easier*. (You don't have to worry about what monitor a window is on, you just call 'RefreshWindow' or whatever and it happens. CSS *should* have had a "style='3 column'" from the start.)
I'm a participant in the HTML Working Group [w3.org]
Wow. I hate you. Just, you know, putting that out there. I've never seen any "standards" as poorly put-together, poorly thought out and poorly implemented as in the web world. Imagine if C++ compilers could take the same liberties that web browsers could with the input! Or if the C++ spec was so vague that you could have two different compilers treat a particular piece of code in two mutually-exclusive ways, and both be "correct" according to the spec?
Because what the world really needs right now is another version of a web standard which has had hardly any full, correct implementations in any version that's ever existed.
Or are the W3C just trying to justify their existence?
I love web standards. They're made from this naive academic ivory tower with absolutely no recognition of the commercial or aesthetic requirements of the actual web as it's used by... everybody else, I guess.
For instance, CSS 1.0 had no (official) way of creating columns, and creating layouts with more than 2 columns was particularly difficult/complex. WTF! Nobody who worked on that standard had ever looked at a newspaper before? None of them had ever seen a news website before? It seems to me (a practical person) that if you're going to make a web standard to replace table layouts you should first figure out what people were using the table layouts for (columns mostly!) and provide the same functionality.
But, hey, what do I know? I'm just the poor sucker trying to get web pages to actually work, when JScript and Javascript have totally different ways of doing mundane things for no reason. e.g. textContent vs. innerText-- hey Firefox, 'innerText' matches 'innerHTML', why did you implement the exact same function with a worse name? Not that Javascript/JScript has any naming conventions whatsoever anyway... WTF is "XMLHttpRequest?" The naming rule is "the first acronym is capitalized but the second one isn't?" Forgetting the fact that the function has absolutely nothing to do with XML whatsoever. Go figure.
The 2% of people who know/care about proprietary formats are never going to change the 98% who don't know/care about proprietary formats. It's just not going to happen. In this case, Muhammad is going to have to go to the mountain.
THEY NEED TO BE TOLD.
THEY NEED TO BE TOLD AGAIN when it doesn't sink in.
I'm sure your yelling in all-caps format works really well to communicate this concept, also. Maybe it's not that it doesn't "sink in", maybe they just think you're a jerk.
Proprietary formats and software patents are both "problems in general" that effect every computer user regardless of platform.
Really? They don't affect me when I buy from iTunes and play DVDs on my Mac.
It must be made clear to those that complain about this sort of thing what the real problem is.
People who complain that Linux doesn't work as well as OS X/Windows at playing MP3s and watching DVDs are the *reason* Linux doesn't work as well? WTHolyF are you on about? That argument makes no sense at all.
It seems to me that if anybody's at fault, it's the Linux distro makers who are too cheap to pay the proper licensing fees like Microsoft and Apple do. (Except a couple; notably Linspire).
you have to admit that there's practically no doubt that second-hand smoke is dangerous.
Yes, it ranks maybe #14,240 in my "preventable daily threats to life". There's no doubt that second-hand smoke is dangerous, but I call BS on their propaganda of HOW dangerous it is. Second-hand smoke causes asthma in children? Hah! In the 50s, a much greater percentage of the population smoked and much fewer of them had asthma. Explain that one, "truth" ads, but I guess you're too busy telling the "truth" to actually bother to explain any of your insane ideas.
Sorry; I get worked up when I wake up in the USA and see blatant propaganda on my TV and on my radio. On my way to work on a highway that's about 50,000 times more dangerous to me than any amount of second-hand smoke.
Wow, you have an interesting idea of how the world works.
a. don't want their minds and skills to rot b. get bored by the easy stuff c. are not stressed by difficult hacking (stress comes from office politics) d. like to be admired for their ability to do the difficult stuff e. like to be in the company of peers who can do the difficult stuff
You're not describing hackers, you're describing anti-social assholes. Specifically the last two points, which sum basically to:
d. you want the idiot masses to bow before your superiority. e. you want to show-off to the people around you, but you need to believe that they're hackers, too, otherwise they won't get how great you are. f. (implied) hate working with anybody else ever on anything. Teamwork is for suckers!
Since C#/.net is very lame compared to the challenges of something like OpenMosix, we can pretty reliably conclude that the supposed hacker is not really qualified to hack on OpenMosix.
How do you know what he's doing in C#/.net? One's a computer language, one's a run-time environment... they can be used for lame as well as non-lame projects. How does the choice of language say anything about his capabilities?
You want to hear something *really* shocking? Some hackers do very challenging and difficult projects in JAVASCRIPT! Running in a web browser! Amazing.
(It was a mistake for the grandparent to even mention the language. Or, if he did, he should have lied and said Python or Ruby which are the same damned thing, but get more respect from people like parent because they're open source.)
(alternate theory: his dad is the CEO and so the pay is quite absurd for the job being done)
Maybe he just wants to go home at the end of the day, put his feet up, and relax. Instead of working 16 hours a day like most "real hackers" do. Maybe he wants to *gasp* spend time with his family and friends. Maybe he was doing "real hacking" and someone came along and offered him much more pay for equivalent work and he's not a total moron so he took it.
Want to hear something even more shocking? People PAY you for C#/.net work! Nobody pays for OpenMosix. (And talking some corporation into it would involve a lot of those "politics" that "real hackers" hate so much.)
The whole point of the site is that people send in tech stories. Are you saying that they shouldn't publish submissions? Or is this some kind of crack at the level of reporting at Network World?
Seriously, what's the complaint here? ("Those damned editors, publishing stories submitted from users! The bastards!")
Not to be a Star Trek geek (or too far off-topic), but weren't the Eugenics Wars actually *against* people who were engineered like that? If the last time they tried it, it almost meant the end of civilization as genetically-engineered warlords took over nations, I don't think 200 years would be long enough to take a risk trying it again.
I mean, haven't you seen Wrath of Khan? That guy was bad-ass.
Wow, this is a little law student website on the other side of the planet from Microsoft, and they have Office program managers patrolling cyberspace looking for any negative comments ?
Because it's impossible that somebody else reading your blog just happened to know a program manager at Microsoft and asked him about it? And he decided to reply directly instead of through that somebody else? Ever played the game "6 degrees of seperation?"
Christ, either you're really paranoid, or you have a hugely inflated sense of your own importance if you think Microsoft has staff dedicated to everything you write. Of course I guess those both end up equivalent to "paranoid."
Secondly, your post was pure flamebait. You even included a picture of a handcuffs, WTF? You come across as a total asshole, reading that. I hope that blog isn't sponsored by the school.
Thirdly, Brian Jones, instead of calling-out your flamebate post, simply posted a link with the compatibility pack and mentioned that even OpenOffice supports opening the new Office formats now. It's not like he's calling you a liar, or countering any of the claims you make.
That said: I agree that it's mildly deceptive for the Office 2007 trial to not support "Save As..." to older versions of the file format. It's not some huge conspiracy, it's just a minor usability bug that should have been fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if it's a wireless card, you can get their product banned in some countries by violating their radio frequency laws, regardless of whether you wrote the driver or some random Joe did.
Seriously, there are very very good reasons for hardware to not be documented if you're a hardware maker and want to stay in business.
... or if you want the Xbox Live Arcade version, you can get Aegis Wing which is a pretty good 2-D shooter which supports 4 co-op players and currently costs precisely $0. Just have to do the obligatory Microsoft one-upping of Sony there.
Neither it nor Super Stardust are space shooter games like Sylpheed.
Ugh, would Mac fanboys please stop pointing to the iMac like it was the first all-in-one computer / monitor combo. Gateway was doing it for quite a while before they were.
s 80.jpg. jpg
Wow, it was a joke. Calm down.
I doubt Gateway was the first, though. There were tons of all-in-ones in the "early days", like the Radio Shack Trash-80s and the original 1984 Macintosh:
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/trs80iii/tr
http://www.engadget.com/media/2006/03/originalmac
I doubt Gateway was the first, either.
If that's what you care about, I'd be a ton more worried about EA in the games industry than Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft's not small, but EA is huge-- and they have exclusive contracts with a disturbingly high number of sports leagues-- and they've attempted hostile takeovers of competitors in the past-- and they own 70%+ of the industry now.
Who cares? As a consumer, as long as the product is good and comes at a reasonable price, then Microsoft's bank account is Microsoft's problem-- not mine.
Isn't Ikaruga a rail-shooter?
Space shooter implies real freedom of movement, like Descent, the Wing Commander series, or the X-Wing series.
That's because it's a label, wired up to jump to the text field it is associated with as soon as you click.
And therefore copy and paste doesn't work. This kind of crap is exactly why I hate the web!
Nice strawman. CSS 1.0 was 11 years ago. Do you know how hard it is to make a 4-column table using HTML 2.0, which was the HTML standard 11 years ago?
So? The New York Times was around 111 years ago, and it uses columns every single day. Nobody in the CSS group thought that columns would be useful? Nobody at all? Come on, I find that hard to believe.
Wow, it only took 3 revisions to get a feature that was done very easily with the "deprecated" tables before. Of course, it's also appeared in pretty much every printed media ever since time began... how could they not anticipate the need to make columns for version 1.0? Every website using Tables for layout was using them to make columns. Every newspaper has columns. Many books have columns. Columns are all over!
Don't agree? Give me one good example where a client side include is a good idea. And it'd better be an example that isn't fully serviceable by using an iframe.
How about a header with Javascript menus that can extend below the header? How about a header which containing script (AJAX-y) that needs to communicate with Javascript functions on the content of the page? (Yes, yes, I know it's possible for iframe functions to communicate with JS on the outer page, but it's a pain in the rear.)
But honestly, I think the burden of proof is on you. Care to explain exactly why includes are so bad?
Their use typically exposes poor design.
Like what?
They are not maintainable.
How so?
The biggest problem with php is typically the massive overuse of includes...all together too much php code is a rats nest of includes.
1) And this is a problem because...?
2) Any programming language/feature can be abused; that says nothing about the quality of that language/feature. (Analogy: Dialog boxes are bad because a single application can create 5,000 of them and bog down the computer!)
Just like any other feature of the web, you'd obviously enforce the 'only from the same server' rule. It would be stupid to have the ability to include files from a local HD unless the HTML file was also from the same HD.
Which is retarded. If you leave it out, you don't validate because you're missing the required alt attribute. If you put it in and set it to "" (empty string), it DOES validate but it does absolutely nothing. If you're going to let me set it to "", why not just let me not set it at all? What is the reasoning behind that?
Maybe I'll do that.
Interestingly, I think I found a Firefox bug on the "Public Account Request Form" that blog entry links to: http://www.w3.org/Help/Account/Request/Public . If I draw across the phone number text to select and copy it, my selection disappears as soon as I release the mouse button and the cursor instantly moves into the text field.
The problem seems to be that a significant percentage of web site developers lack the discipline or interest to follow rules.
The "rules" are stupid. Do you know how hard it is to make a 3-column or 4-column content site using CSS 1.0? Is it even possible? Yet I can "break" the rules, use table cells as layout, and accomplish the same thing in seconds.
Web developers would use the standards if the standards reflected the reality of their job and *made it easier*. In the same way software developers use APIs because the APIs *make their job easier*. (You don't have to worry about what monitor a window is on, you just call 'RefreshWindow' or whatever and it happens. CSS *should* have had a "style='3 column'" from the start.)
I'm a participant in the HTML Working Group [w3.org]
Wow. I hate you. Just, you know, putting that out there. I've never seen any "standards" as poorly put-together, poorly thought out and poorly implemented as in the web world. Imagine if C++ compilers could take the same liberties that web browsers could with the input! Or if the C++ spec was so vague that you could have two different compilers treat a particular piece of code in two mutually-exclusive ways, and both be "correct" according to the spec?
Because what the world really needs right now is another version of a web standard which has had hardly any full, correct implementations in any version that's ever existed.
Or are the W3C just trying to justify their existence?
I love web standards. They're made from this naive academic ivory tower with absolutely no recognition of the commercial or aesthetic requirements of the actual web as it's used by... everybody else, I guess.
For instance, CSS 1.0 had no (official) way of creating columns, and creating layouts with more than 2 columns was particularly difficult/complex. WTF! Nobody who worked on that standard had ever looked at a newspaper before? None of them had ever seen a news website before? It seems to me (a practical person) that if you're going to make a web standard to replace table layouts you should first figure out what people were using the table layouts for (columns mostly!) and provide the same functionality.
But, hey, what do I know? I'm just the poor sucker trying to get web pages to actually work, when JScript and Javascript have totally different ways of doing mundane things for no reason. e.g. textContent vs. innerText-- hey Firefox, 'innerText' matches 'innerHTML', why did you implement the exact same function with a worse name? Not that Javascript/JScript has any naming conventions whatsoever anyway... WTF is "XMLHttpRequest?" The naming rule is "the first acronym is capitalized but the second one isn't?" Forgetting the fact that the function has absolutely nothing to do with XML whatsoever. Go figure.
I hate web standards.
It doesn't matter if they care or not.
The 2% of people who know/care about proprietary formats are never going to change the 98% who don't know/care about proprietary formats. It's just not going to happen. In this case, Muhammad is going to have to go to the mountain.
THEY NEED TO BE TOLD.
THEY NEED TO BE TOLD AGAIN when it doesn't sink in.
I'm sure your yelling in all-caps format works really well to communicate this concept, also. Maybe it's not that it doesn't "sink in", maybe they just think you're a jerk.
Proprietary formats and software patents are both "problems in general" that effect every computer user regardless of platform.
Really? They don't affect me when I buy from iTunes and play DVDs on my Mac.
It must be made clear to those that complain about this sort of thing what the real problem is.
People who complain that Linux doesn't work as well as OS X/Windows at playing MP3s and watching DVDs are the *reason* Linux doesn't work as well? WTHolyF are you on about? That argument makes no sense at all.
It seems to me that if anybody's at fault, it's the Linux distro makers who are too cheap to pay the proper licensing fees like Microsoft and Apple do. (Except a couple; notably Linspire).
Pretty sure Linspire is already doing that. One of their selling points is that they add proprietary software and codecs which Ubuntu do not have: http://www.linspire.com/products_linspire_whatis.p hp
you have to admit that there's practically no doubt that second-hand smoke is dangerous.
Yes, it ranks maybe #14,240 in my "preventable daily threats to life". There's no doubt that second-hand smoke is dangerous, but I call BS on their propaganda of HOW dangerous it is. Second-hand smoke causes asthma in children? Hah! In the 50s, a much greater percentage of the population smoked and much fewer of them had asthma. Explain that one, "truth" ads, but I guess you're too busy telling the "truth" to actually bother to explain any of your insane ideas.
Sorry; I get worked up when I wake up in the USA and see blatant propaganda on my TV and on my radio. On my way to work on a highway that's about 50,000 times more dangerous to me than any amount of second-hand smoke.
What the hell does this have to do with a media player? Why is this marked +5 Interesting? WTF!!!
Unless you're a paying customer. Which I am. Fix the damn problem.
Why should they fix it? You're still paying!
Wow, you have an interesting idea of how the world works.
a. don't want their minds and skills to rot
b. get bored by the easy stuff
c. are not stressed by difficult hacking (stress comes from office politics)
d. like to be admired for their ability to do the difficult stuff
e. like to be in the company of peers who can do the difficult stuff
You're not describing hackers, you're describing anti-social assholes. Specifically the last two points, which sum basically to:
d. you want the idiot masses to bow before your superiority.
e. you want to show-off to the people around you, but you need to believe that they're hackers, too, otherwise they won't get how great you are.
f. (implied) hate working with anybody else ever on anything. Teamwork is for suckers!
Since C#/.net is very lame compared to the challenges of something like OpenMosix, we can pretty reliably conclude that the supposed hacker is not really qualified to hack on OpenMosix.
How do you know what he's doing in C#/.net? One's a computer language, one's a run-time environment... they can be used for lame as well as non-lame projects. How does the choice of language say anything about his capabilities?
You want to hear something *really* shocking? Some hackers do very challenging and difficult projects in JAVASCRIPT! Running in a web browser! Amazing.
(It was a mistake for the grandparent to even mention the language. Or, if he did, he should have lied and said Python or Ruby which are the same damned thing, but get more respect from people like parent because they're open source.)
(alternate theory: his dad is the CEO and so the pay is quite absurd for the job being done)
Maybe he just wants to go home at the end of the day, put his feet up, and relax. Instead of working 16 hours a day like most "real hackers" do. Maybe he wants to *gasp* spend time with his family and friends. Maybe he was doing "real hacking" and someone came along and offered him much more pay for equivalent work and he's not a total moron so he took it.
Want to hear something even more shocking? People PAY you for C#/.net work! Nobody pays for OpenMosix. (And talking some corporation into it would involve a lot of those "politics" that "real hackers" hate so much.)
The whole point of the site is that people send in tech stories. Are you saying that they shouldn't publish submissions? Or is this some kind of crack at the level of reporting at Network World?
Seriously, what's the complaint here? ("Those damned editors, publishing stories submitted from users! The bastards!")
Not to be a Star Trek geek (or too far off-topic), but weren't the Eugenics Wars actually *against* people who were engineered like that? If the last time they tried it, it almost meant the end of civilization as genetically-engineered warlords took over nations, I don't think 200 years would be long enough to take a risk trying it again.
I mean, haven't you seen Wrath of Khan? That guy was bad-ass.
Wow, this is a little law student website on the other side of the planet from Microsoft, and they have Office program managers patrolling cyberspace looking for any negative comments ?
Because it's impossible that somebody else reading your blog just happened to know a program manager at Microsoft and asked him about it? And he decided to reply directly instead of through that somebody else? Ever played the game "6 degrees of seperation?"
Christ, either you're really paranoid, or you have a hugely inflated sense of your own importance if you think Microsoft has staff dedicated to everything you write. Of course I guess those both end up equivalent to "paranoid."
Secondly, your post was pure flamebait. You even included a picture of a handcuffs, WTF? You come across as a total asshole, reading that. I hope that blog isn't sponsored by the school.
Thirdly, Brian Jones, instead of calling-out your flamebate post, simply posted a link with the compatibility pack and mentioned that even OpenOffice supports opening the new Office formats now. It's not like he's calling you a liar, or countering any of the claims you make.
That said: I agree that it's mildly deceptive for the Office 2007 trial to not support "Save As..." to older versions of the file format. It's not some huge conspiracy, it's just a minor usability bug that should have been fixed.