Nothing that anyone could take seriously. Just a notch above the "free energy" kooks. But it made me think.
The premise is that a large solid core in a gas giant like Jupiter is unstable, and every once in awhile it kicks out a terrestrial-sized planet. A hot one. I'm not sure if it's actually better than Jeebusistic creationism or not, but it's interesting. I like ideas that are different.
Collecting data on which submodels of cable boxes were in use in which cable franchise. I had little traffic, I think maybe less than 800 submissions over the lifetime of the site. But not once did anyone screw with it, despite there being several freeform fields. I would have thought I'd get at least one "FUCK OYU" plugged in there, before I started. Never once.
Maybe I was below the traffic threshold for trolls to show up.
They aren't the most cunning warriors in the empire. They get in alot of trouble, sent on a mission to protect the backwater sectors. But it all works out in the end.
(Cameos by Dorn and Frakes) Captain Riker: "These have to be the stupidest klingons I've ever met!" First Officer Worf, holding forehead in his hand, just sighs...
Mostly as a Lone Gunmen-esque action comedy, complete spoken in thlinganHol with subtitles. It could work!
Season 4 was enough to fix the rest. I gave up somewhere in 3... bought season 4 thinking that it couldn't possibly be worth the $100. I was floored. I stopped just before it got good.
Um. Fixing IE is simple, just figure out how to package the mozilla activex control into a self-installing cab file. Haven't had so much luck with that myself, though...
Subscribe to the www-style mailing list, please, and let those chumps know how badly CSS is screwed up. They've just been tinkering around not knowing what in the hell they've been doing all these years, after all.
"Hairy" meaning anything even remotely interesting, of course.
Suppose you have some background images, alpha png of course, and you want to do rollovers. Well, the right way to do it is to put all the images into a single image file, so that they'll all load at once, and help conserve bandwidth and http connections. You use background-position and width/height to specify which portion of the image to display where ever whatever.
Of course, 3 months later and IE7 is still lingering in the 15% of all unique visitors range, and IE6 is in the 30% + area.
So, you can do your background-position thing, or your alpha transparency thing. But god help you if you want both, because that nasty-assed filter hack might give you alpha, but totally fucks background-position (it's no longer a real background-image, after all).
IE7 is no better. Still no border-radius? That property alone would save who knows how many ters of bandwidth on the internet by reducing obscene javascript chicanery, round images, and godawful markup (bullets for rounded corners WTF!?!?!?). The same with box-shadow and text-shadow... these are things that a talented programmer could manage in just a few hours each, Microsoft. Worst of all, the pus-filled pimple that is the filter property and its equivalents are just so goddamn lame, that even if we don't mind writing non-validating stylesheets by including them, they won't look comparable enough to the moz/konq/webkit/opera/icab versions for us to use the stylesheet. Thanks Microsoft for guaranteeing another 10 years of using background images all over the goddamned place to do something css shoulda been able to do back in 2003.
Any serious non-contracted web designer does so on the equipment provided.... So, I bring my laptop along to test Konqy,
Thought you only work on the hardware provided.
By the way, who cares about iCab? It's used by the 1% of the 4% of the computer using population that uses Apple with OS 9.
1) If it's just a numbers thing for you, test on IE6/7, and ignore everyone else. I test on everything possible, not because many use it, or because I like it, but because that's how you make it usable for everyone. On a more practical note, testing like this often exposes subtle problems early, rather than after you've already invested time and effort.
2) It runs on OSX, though it has some legacy OS9 support.
3) While still a about in third place (Webkit in first, either opera or gecko in second, I can't tell which) as far as CSS3 goes, I did notice that it does text-shadow last week. The author hinted that he might get around to doing border-radius here before Opera does, too...
Testing a page rendering in virtualization is a Bad Thing. There's too many variables between the system and the actual browser that may interfere with rendering.
I believe you're referring to WINE, and it's inability to do some things on IE. Virtualization will render things correctly though, at most you'd have to worry about stability, and whether you have to keep resetting the VM as it crashes during testing.
I could VMWare to OS-X (Yes, you haughty little Mac User, it works the other way too).
Actually, I'm a linux user too. Only have the mac at work, though I've grown to like it. It's one of the few correct decisions my boss has made so far (the other being to use Catalyst on the backend).
Nevermind that you'd have to use more VMs on windows to test everything, than you do on OSX.
PS I won't tell Steve Jobs that you're pirating OSX for VMware use.;-)
Any serious web developer does so on a Mac, where they have access to both the webkit, icab, opera, and gecko rendering engines natively, and to khtml and ie via Parallels.
(For that matter, native khtml won't be too long now, I anticipate it within the year).
We're not talking about their OS. We're talking about browsers. If they want to check if the OS is valid, fine, but tying downloads of IE7 to this is bad for everyone.
Same with security patches... even if it's a pirated copy of windows, having it unsecure harms everyone. And for a company that had no problem with piracy when it was doing them good, to turn around and pull this stunt, well, it's pretty damn low. Even for them.
Has IE suddenly started to cost money without me noticing?
Yes. If it is tied to a WGA-validated copy of windows, then it is no longer free. It is some unknown fraction of the retail cost of an XP license. For instance, a free (as in beer) copy of IE7 might still run on linux through wine, but they disallow this. It's not free, it has a hidden cost. Economically-speaking, this can't be disputed.
All in all some of MS's business practices are shady to say the least, but you can't badmouth them for actually releasing IE7 if even for a limited subset of OS-versions now, can you?
Yes, for limiting the release where there is no good excuse to do so. A month after, every XP machine that doesn't have automatic update disabled should have the damn thing already. We shouldn't have to be dealing with IE6 bullshit at this point, and we still are. Screw that.
It finally supports alpha transparency. The problem is, with their WGA bullshit and abandonment of older platforms, IE7 will never become the 99% adoption (among IE users) that it needs to become, not in any sane period of time. Just dropping WGA and pushing it out as a critical update, we'd be able to ignore filter() bullshit by the end of January.
They're not interested in giving out their browser, so much as forcing obselensence to sell copies of the new OS. Funny how their browser was only free long enough to scuttle the competition. (Or is it really an OS subsystem component?)
I assume you mean "modern" engines, because you're missing things like the pre-gecko Netscape engines. Or the fact that the Mac version of IE was totally different from the PC version.
Yeh, but I also expect the user to upgrade to the latest version of the browser of their choice before complaining. If he were using Opera 5, well, it's his own damn problem. I don't expect a Mosaic 1.0 compliant site, or a NeXTStep browser.app version.
Yeah, but what percentage of them are coming to your local transportation information website?
Out of a city with about 1 million internet users? 15,000 or so might be using Opera. Let's say it's a small business though with only 500 customers total. That's still 7 or 8 customers... a small business either "could really use" or "desperately needs" those 7 or 8. No matter the size of your business, 1% is generally significant. In many cases, it can make the difference between staying afloat and being genuinely successful. And to not cater to them because you have incompetent web devlopers, that's just stupid.
Code to standards, watch it work equally well in Safari, Firefox and Opera. You can probably get away with not testing in Opera, and then bitching when your Opera user complains about a minor glitch. Truth told, if they had told him to switch after he claimed there was some slight problem because of one of the rarely seen rendering differences between FF and Opera, I'd have been on their side too.
Sorry Charlie, but in the real world there are always tradeoffs...
Incompetent people always claim this, usually becase they wasted too much time trying to decide inane shit. "Gee, do we code this in.NET or go with tried and true ASP?!?!"
First, yes if a business wants to reach people using the most modern hardware and software then they are going to have to go out of their way to support a wide variety of standards and browsers.
You clearly know nothing about this subject, nor does anyone that modded you up. They only have to support two standards, the real one, and enough to get IE working. There are no others.
On the other hand, if your browser isn't worth supporting from a dollars and cents point of view that is your problem, not theirs.
This follows from your previous view. That there are a million standards, and they'll go down the list from most-used to least-used until they run out of web development budget. Well, since there are only two, this doesn't make sense. My own banking website will let me use Safari at 3% marketshare, but not Firefox at 9% marketshare. It's one example of completely arbitrary bullshit that we have to put up with because the people in charge of those companies are borderline incompetent. In many cases, Opera will render everything just fine but is denied the webpage if it identifies itself to the web server.
You see the same thing in the Linux community (and oh god am I going to get modded down/flamed for this)
Nice way to pre-emptively martyr yourself. I don't think you should be modded down so much as you should never be allowed to make any decisions concerning technology. Go bag groceries....". Games don't get released on OS's where it is physically imposable to recoup the cost of development from the install base
Funny change of subject. Let's roll with that. Sure, they can't ever recoup the cost. They're busy bloating up the development costs to Hollywood blockbuster levels, and using marketing manipulation to make up for the fact that the games suck. They're busy corning entire distribution channels to make sure indy game designers don't have a chance. In other words, it's an engineered scenario, this one where they can only hope to do better than even if they sell 50 million copies. Cue the violin music.
Large commercial websites don't support browsers that don't have enough users to pay for it.
You act like there are so many. There are only a handful of rendering engines (and of course, completely degraded mode which blind users or the oddball lynx user needs). IE. Gecko. Webkit. Opera. iCab. That's it. And except for the first, the latter all do pretty well at rendering the same things. Not to mention, that when you start realizing that the entire world is connected to the internet, that even Opera's lousy little 1.5% or whatever it is ends up being *millions* of users. What business manager would kick out millions of potential customers, unless someone in charge of technology were painting him the wrong picture? A picture where it takes 20 times the effort to make things work in real browsers like Opera? (In truth, things make sense in moz/safari/opera, and take 20 times the effort to make IE behave).
This base assumption of deserving support is arrogant and counter productive.
Some users are entitled to support by law. You can't kick a wheelchair-bound person out of your store, for instance. Considering that Opera has the best support for voice stylesheets, something important to blind users (who are entitled), it may or may not qualify. But just on general principles, people using standard clients/tools/whatever have gotten used to being able to go where they should be allowed to go. It's pretty american, I think. If you want to act like you're some exclusive club, in which only certain people are allowed, so be it. But I can't see how the website in question feels this is a reasonable business model.
You know what it is with people like you? You have too much invested, not emotionally, that's not quite right, but it's close. Too much invested in the way things are, and you want them to continue to be that way. Hell, I'm like that too. Trouble is, those people on
The number of houses that have regular telephone lines laid in the 1960s vastly outnumbers those that have something more modern.
So, we have telecom companies lobbying congress to outlaw net neutrality while they roll out half-assed DSL products that give us the bandwidth we should have had in the early 90s, instead of giving us modern infrastructure. We lose, they get to save a few bucks, even as they continue to rake it in.
FIOS TV. They lobby congress to make sure they don't have to share access to the fiber, while they give us half-assed TV products that use wiring put in by the cable company (which apparently wasn't cheapskate enough to not install it). We lose, they get to save a few bucks, even as they continue to rake it in.
The cost of the set top box would not be any higher, if it had a fiber jack. The cost of the cabling that they had to install (did you read the article?) wouldn't have been more. It would not have taken any longer to install it. That's hardly brilliant, it's lazy and irresponsible.
Did you know that there is a looming worldwide shortage of copper ore? Using copper for telecom is not a waste of money, it's just forward thinking. We have no worldwide shortage of sand that I am aware of.
As is said on Slashdot over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, you cannot compare numbers accordingly. The population densities of the vast majority of countries in Europe and Asia compared to the population density of the United States make any such comparisons completely baseless.
Which explains nothing at all except why some rural areas might go without. NYC has density as high as anywhere else, so if I move there I can certainly get 100mbit service? Hardly. Something else is going on.
The cable company seems to get along fine putting wiring in houses that don't have it. I can't believe that it would be such a greater cost for Verizon to do it. Being fucking cheapskates (while continuing to pull in federal money to upgrade all sorts of things) is why we still have second-class network infrastructure compared to say nearly any country in Europe or Asia.
Sorry, but I'd rather pay an extra $150, and have real fiber. If it even cost that much, the bulk of the cost would be in the hourly wages of those pulling the cable.
The "already there" stuff was bad. It's actually more expensive in bulk. And there is no such thing as "plenty of bandwidth".
DVD's are digital, too. And yet we're already seeing a format shift again, though they've only been around half as long as VHS was before it.
If you install fiber now, you never install anything again. Ever. The same glass that they run gigabit (or more likely in Verizon's half-assed case, ATM25) over will do terabit as soon as that becomes affordable. His grandchildren would be using it for petabit 50 years from now...
If you use coax to hook all the TVs up? Screw that.
Verizon oughtta start pumping out multicast MPEG2 over IP, and give everyone a small IPTV reciever with fiber gigabit port on the back. So. Fucking. Lame.
They have specifications that are generally clear as to what the intent is, and don't rely on proprietary technologies like DirectX?
Personally, I like background-image:url(foo.png) alot better than filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImag eLoader(src='foo.png',sizingMethod='crop');...
But then, that's just me. BTW, you have a really fucked up notion of "equally better".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a flunky, incapable of the math. But I don't think that that's the problem so much.
It's one of circularizing the orbit to Venus's current one, especially in so short a time, that is problematic.
Nothing that anyone could take seriously. Just a notch above the "free energy" kooks. But it made me think.
The premise is that a large solid core in a gas giant like Jupiter is unstable, and every once in awhile it kicks out a terrestrial-sized planet. A hot one. I'm not sure if it's actually better than Jeebusistic creationism or not, but it's interesting. I like ideas that are different.
I've read things that suggest that Venus might only be a few thousand years old, and not because that's when Jeebus got around to creationing it.
Things that suggest it might have been ejected from Jupiter's core.
But there's still hope for this planet!
Collecting data on which submodels of cable boxes were in use in which cable franchise. I had little traffic, I think maybe less than 800 submissions over the lifetime of the site. But not once did anyone screw with it, despite there being several freeform fields. I would have thought I'd get at least one "FUCK OYU" plugged in there, before I started. Never once.
Maybe I was below the traffic threshold for trolls to show up.
Star Trek: Klingon Glory
They aren't the most cunning warriors in the empire. They get in alot of trouble, sent on a mission to protect the backwater sectors. But it all works out in the end.
(Cameos by Dorn and Frakes)
Captain Riker: "These have to be the stupidest klingons I've ever met!"
First Officer Worf, holding forehead in his hand, just sighs...
Mostly as a Lone Gunmen-esque action comedy, complete spoken in thlinganHol with subtitles. It could work!
Season 4 was enough to fix the rest. I gave up somewhere in 3... bought season 4 thinking that it couldn't possibly be worth the $100. I was floored. I stopped just before it got good.
No wonder they canceled it.
Um. Fixing IE is simple, just figure out how to package the mozilla activex control into a self-installing cab file. Haven't had so much luck with that myself, though...
Div, float: left; Div, float: left; clear: left; Div, float: left; clear: left;
Oh my god, I just solved 3 column layouts!
Subscribe to the www-style mailing list, please, and let those chumps know how badly CSS is screwed up. They've just been tinkering around not knowing what in the hell they've been doing all these years, after all.
"Hairy" meaning anything even remotely interesting, of course.
Suppose you have some background images, alpha png of course, and you want to do rollovers. Well, the right way to do it is to put all the images into a single image file, so that they'll all load at once, and help conserve bandwidth and http connections. You use background-position and width/height to specify which portion of the image to display where ever whatever.
Of course, 3 months later and IE7 is still lingering in the 15% of all unique visitors range, and IE6 is in the 30% + area.
So, you can do your background-position thing, or your alpha transparency thing. But god help you if you want both, because that nasty-assed filter hack might give you alpha, but totally fucks background-position (it's no longer a real background-image, after all).
IE7 is no better. Still no border-radius? That property alone would save who knows how many ters of bandwidth on the internet by reducing obscene javascript chicanery, round images, and godawful markup (bullets for rounded corners WTF!?!?!?). The same with box-shadow and text-shadow... these are things that a talented programmer could manage in just a few hours each, Microsoft. Worst of all, the pus-filled pimple that is the filter property and its equivalents are just so goddamn lame, that even if we don't mind writing non-validating stylesheets by including them, they won't look comparable enough to the moz/konq/webkit/opera/icab versions for us to use the stylesheet. Thanks Microsoft for guaranteeing another 10 years of using background images all over the goddamned place to do something css shoulda been able to do back in 2003.
Any serious non-contracted web designer does so on the equipment provided. ... So, I bring my laptop along to test Konqy,
;-)
Thought you only work on the hardware provided.
By the way, who cares about iCab? It's used by the 1% of the 4% of the computer using population that uses Apple with OS 9.
1) If it's just a numbers thing for you, test on IE6/7, and ignore everyone else. I test on everything possible, not because many use it, or because I like it, but because that's how you make it usable for everyone. On a more practical note, testing like this often exposes subtle problems early, rather than after you've already invested time and effort.
2) It runs on OSX, though it has some legacy OS9 support.
3) While still a about in third place (Webkit in first, either opera or gecko in second, I can't tell which) as far as CSS3 goes, I did notice that it does text-shadow last week. The author hinted that he might get around to doing border-radius here before Opera does, too...
Testing a page rendering in virtualization is a Bad Thing. There's too many variables between the system and the actual browser that may interfere with rendering.
I believe you're referring to WINE, and it's inability to do some things on IE. Virtualization will render things correctly though, at most you'd have to worry about stability, and whether you have to keep resetting the VM as it crashes during testing.
I could VMWare to OS-X (Yes, you haughty little Mac User, it works the other way too).
Actually, I'm a linux user too. Only have the mac at work, though I've grown to like it. It's one of the few correct decisions my boss has made so far (the other being to use Catalyst on the backend).
Nevermind that you'd have to use more VMs on windows to test everything, than you do on OSX.
PS I won't tell Steve Jobs that you're pirating OSX for VMware use.
Any serious web developer does so on a Mac, where they have access to both the webkit, icab, opera, and gecko rendering engines natively, and to khtml and ie via Parallels.
(For that matter, native khtml won't be too long now, I anticipate it within the year).
But from a home automation standpoint, who would ever want a machine that doesn't have crond?
From this perspective, only OSX and linux are contenders. Vista is a total loser.
Hooking it up into the home automation system would be nice.
We're not talking about their OS. We're talking about browsers. If they want to check if the OS is valid, fine, but tying downloads of IE7 to this is bad for everyone.
Same with security patches... even if it's a pirated copy of windows, having it unsecure harms everyone. And for a company that had no problem with piracy when it was doing them good, to turn around and pull this stunt, well, it's pretty damn low. Even for them.
Has IE suddenly started to cost money without me noticing?
Yes. If it is tied to a WGA-validated copy of windows, then it is no longer free. It is some unknown fraction of the retail cost of an XP license. For instance, a free (as in beer) copy of IE7 might still run on linux through wine, but they disallow this. It's not free, it has a hidden cost. Economically-speaking, this can't be disputed.
All in all some of MS's business practices are shady to say the least, but you can't badmouth them for actually releasing IE7 if even for a limited subset of OS-versions now, can you?
Yes, for limiting the release where there is no good excuse to do so. A month after, every XP machine that doesn't have automatic update disabled should have the damn thing already. We shouldn't have to be dealing with IE6 bullshit at this point, and we still are. Screw that.
It finally supports alpha transparency. The problem is, with their WGA bullshit and abandonment of older platforms, IE7 will never become the 99% adoption (among IE users) that it needs to become, not in any sane period of time. Just dropping WGA and pushing it out as a critical update, we'd be able to ignore filter() bullshit by the end of January.
They're not interested in giving out their browser, so much as forcing obselensence to sell copies of the new OS. Funny how their browser was only free long enough to scuttle the competition. (Or is it really an OS subsystem component?)
Thank you. My joke wasn't nearly clumsy enough on its own, I needed someone completely oblivious to sarcasm to come along and add that part in.
PNG was almost 10 years old when IE finally supported it! Maybe this means that IE8* will have CSS! Hurray!
*IE8 is expected to debut sometime in late 2018.
I assume you mean "modern" engines, because you're missing things like the pre-gecko Netscape engines. Or the fact that the Mac version of IE was totally different from the PC version.
.NET or go with tried and true ASP?!?!"
Yeh, but I also expect the user to upgrade to the latest version of the browser of their choice before complaining. If he were using Opera 5, well, it's his own damn problem. I don't expect a Mosaic 1.0 compliant site, or a NeXTStep browser.app version.
Yeah, but what percentage of them are coming to your local transportation information website?
Out of a city with about 1 million internet users? 15,000 or so might be using Opera. Let's say it's a small business though with only 500 customers total. That's still 7 or 8 customers... a small business either "could really use" or "desperately needs" those 7 or 8. No matter the size of your business, 1% is generally significant. In many cases, it can make the difference between staying afloat and being genuinely successful. And to not cater to them because you have incompetent web devlopers, that's just stupid.
Code to standards, watch it work equally well in Safari, Firefox and Opera. You can probably get away with not testing in Opera, and then bitching when your Opera user complains about a minor glitch. Truth told, if they had told him to switch after he claimed there was some slight problem because of one of the rarely seen rendering differences between FF and Opera, I'd have been on their side too.
Sorry Charlie, but in the real world there are always tradeoffs...
Incompetent people always claim this, usually becase they wasted too much time trying to decide inane shit. "Gee, do we code this in
First, yes if a business wants to reach people using the most modern hardware and software then they are going to have to go out of their way to support a wide variety of standards and browsers.
...". Games don't get released on OS's where it is physically imposable to recoup the cost of development from the install base
You clearly know nothing about this subject, nor does anyone that modded you up. They only have to support two standards, the real one, and enough to get IE working. There are no others.
On the other hand, if your browser isn't worth supporting from a dollars and cents point of view that is your problem, not theirs.
This follows from your previous view. That there are a million standards, and they'll go down the list from most-used to least-used until they run out of web development budget. Well, since there are only two, this doesn't make sense. My own banking website will let me use Safari at 3% marketshare, but not Firefox at 9% marketshare. It's one example of completely arbitrary bullshit that we have to put up with because the people in charge of those companies are borderline incompetent. In many cases, Opera will render everything just fine but is denied the webpage if it identifies itself to the web server.
You see the same thing in the Linux community (and oh god am I going to get modded down/flamed for this)
Nice way to pre-emptively martyr yourself. I don't think you should be modded down so much as you should never be allowed to make any decisions concerning technology. Go bag groceries.
Funny change of subject. Let's roll with that. Sure, they can't ever recoup the cost. They're busy bloating up the development costs to Hollywood blockbuster levels, and using marketing manipulation to make up for the fact that the games suck. They're busy corning entire distribution channels to make sure indy game designers don't have a chance. In other words, it's an engineered scenario, this one where they can only hope to do better than even if they sell 50 million copies. Cue the violin music.
Large commercial websites don't support browsers that don't have enough users to pay for it.
You act like there are so many. There are only a handful of rendering engines (and of course, completely degraded mode which blind users or the oddball lynx user needs). IE. Gecko. Webkit. Opera. iCab. That's it. And except for the first, the latter all do pretty well at rendering the same things. Not to mention, that when you start realizing that the entire world is connected to the internet, that even Opera's lousy little 1.5% or whatever it is ends up being *millions* of users. What business manager would kick out millions of potential customers, unless someone in charge of technology were painting him the wrong picture? A picture where it takes 20 times the effort to make things work in real browsers like Opera? (In truth, things make sense in moz/safari/opera, and take 20 times the effort to make IE behave).
This base assumption of deserving support is arrogant and counter productive.
Some users are entitled to support by law. You can't kick a wheelchair-bound person out of your store, for instance. Considering that Opera has the best support for voice stylesheets, something important to blind users (who are entitled), it may or may not qualify. But just on general principles, people using standard clients/tools/whatever have gotten used to being able to go where they should be allowed to go. It's pretty american, I think. If you want to act like you're some exclusive club, in which only certain people are allowed, so be it. But I can't see how the website in question feels this is a reasonable business model.
You know what it is with people like you? You have too much invested, not emotionally, that's not quite right, but it's close. Too much invested in the way things are, and you want them to continue to be that way. Hell, I'm like that too. Trouble is, those people on
The number of houses that have regular telephone lines laid in the 1960s vastly outnumbers those that have something more modern.
So, we have telecom companies lobbying congress to outlaw net neutrality while they roll out half-assed DSL products that give us the bandwidth we should have had in the early 90s, instead of giving us modern infrastructure. We lose, they get to save a few bucks, even as they continue to rake it in.
FIOS TV. They lobby congress to make sure they don't have to share access to the fiber, while they give us half-assed TV products that use wiring put in by the cable company (which apparently wasn't cheapskate enough to not install it). We lose, they get to save a few bucks, even as they continue to rake it in.
The cost of the set top box would not be any higher, if it had a fiber jack. The cost of the cabling that they had to install (did you read the article?) wouldn't have been more. It would not have taken any longer to install it. That's hardly brilliant, it's lazy and irresponsible.
Did you know that there is a looming worldwide shortage of copper ore? Using copper for telecom is not a waste of money, it's just forward thinking. We have no worldwide shortage of sand that I am aware of.
As is said on Slashdot over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, you cannot compare numbers accordingly. The population densities of the vast majority of countries in Europe and Asia compared to the population density of the United States make any such comparisons completely baseless.
Which explains nothing at all except why some rural areas might go without. NYC has density as high as anywhere else, so if I move there I can certainly get 100mbit service? Hardly. Something else is going on.
The cable company seems to get along fine putting wiring in houses that don't have it. I can't believe that it would be such a greater cost for Verizon to do it. Being fucking cheapskates (while continuing to pull in federal money to upgrade all sorts of things) is why we still have second-class network infrastructure compared to say nearly any country in Europe or Asia.
Sorry, but I'd rather pay an extra $150, and have real fiber. If it even cost that much, the bulk of the cost would be in the hourly wages of those pulling the cable.
The "already there" stuff was bad. It's actually more expensive in bulk. And there is no such thing as "plenty of bandwidth".
DVD's are digital, too. And yet we're already seeing a format shift again, though they've only been around half as long as VHS was before it.
If you install fiber now, you never install anything again. Ever. The same glass that they run gigabit (or more likely in Verizon's half-assed case, ATM25) over will do terabit as soon as that becomes affordable. His grandchildren would be using it for petabit 50 years from now...
If you use coax to hook all the TVs up? Screw that.
Verizon oughtta start pumping out multicast MPEG2 over IP, and give everyone a small IPTV reciever with fiber gigabit port on the back. So. Fucking. Lame.
They have specifications that are generally clear as to what the intent is, and don't rely on proprietary technologies like DirectX?
g eLoader(src='foo.png',sizingMethod='crop'); ...
Personally, I like background-image:url(foo.png) alot better than filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaIma
But then, that's just me. BTW, you have a really fucked up notion of "equally better".