Posts by Gary Turner

Huh?

"he faces a prison sentence of up to a month and a fine of up to €10,000 on charges of 'displaying contempt towards a public servant'."

There's a law against that? I'd consider that a gods-given right. No, not a right, an obligation.

PONTI?

Line grunts in Korea and Viet Nam had a much better acronym, REMF; Rear Echelon Mother eFfer.

The good colonel seems to have the truth of it.

Effing politicians and bureaucrats

"The authors argue that it is time to review Australia’s complex and inconsistent media content regulation system to take account of the online era."

I wonder how a democratic nation could even consider regulating media content. Obviously, hanging upside down in the land down under has caused a bureaucratic red-out.

Yes, I am aware of our own (U.S.) gummit asshats who's only concern is expanding their own power over the lowly unwashed masses, and controlling media content means their power affects everyone.

Again?

The French pulled the same stupid maneuver just 70 years earlier at Agincourt.. You'd think that folks who spend their lives beating up on each other would at least study a bit of military history. Well, them what ignore it are bound to repeat it.

cheers

Houlihan?

"Adobe spokeswoman Wiebke Lips …"

Do they call her Hot behind her back?

Who's there?

Yeah, but did anybody attend the screenings?

Didn't read the post?

By Adam Azarchs Posted Saturday 3rd October 2009 19:32 GMT

"Let's invent even more non-standard tags and fragment the browser design space further! This is exactly what the world needs now!"

It seems you missed something:

"Mozilla hopes it will become an open standard and is already shepherding it through the World Wide Web Consortium."

That doesn't look like an attempt to fragment or use non-standard tags. Just the opposite.

Bringing truth and light to MSS Fanboyz

By Anonymous Coward Posted Wednesday 9th September 2009 02:24 GMT

What happens if you put a FAT32 usb drive into your ubuntu machine and try to write to it?

Um, it writes a fat32 file? Actually for as long as I've used Debian (since 1999), portable storage has been mounted as an MS file system to make cross platform transfer of files easier. You can, of course, change file systems easily enough for some particular reason.

By Anonymous Coward Posted Wednesday 9th September 2009 04:20 GMT

Stop with the wine references. Saying that something runs on Linux via wine is misleading and dishonest(IMHO).

Why is that? Is saying that you can recharge you batteries from the wall socket misleading or dishonest? You do use a wall brick to transform the 120/240V 60/50Hz to a small DC voltage, don't you? How ever can you say you're charging from the house current?

WINE is simply a wall brick that provides Windows applications with the "right voltage" from the Linux house current.

No sh*t, Sherlock

"I'm not saying this is risk free: it will leave potential bruising and it could cause a contusion"

Does that mean the bruise will be bruised?

Siding with the devil

Gawd! It's so hard to come down on the Evil Empire's side.

I cannot imagine the thought process that allowed for the first software patent. I can support copyrighted software, in the same way that an author has copyright on his work. He still can't 'own' the words he uses, nor the plot; only the particular way he put it together in the whole.

Another IP whore

Pleadings and rulings are a part of the public record, and available to all. I wonder where they did their research on IP rulings. Don't they read common law as defined by the court cases, their pleadings and rulings in their research? Where did they think those books in their libraries, or the online resources came from? Surprised? Are they stupid, or simply unethical, venal whores?

If they want to stay private, they should settle out of court.

What a crock

The world would benefit from increased concentrations of CO₂, even if it has some small part in warming the planet, which would also be beneficial to life.

A Good First Step

It's enough for me that at this first attempt by MSFT to support web standards, IE8 passes acid2 with flying colors. I don't doubt that there are bugs that will bedevil us as we learn more about it, but for now, IE8 is a welcome addition to the list of modern browsers.

It will be a Good Thing® if MSFT will continue active development and issue timely bug fixes and improvements.

It's not so much what you don't know as what you do know that ain't so

Nobody is understanding the issue

By Anonymous Coward Posted Thursday 19th March 2009 18:44 GMT

> C'mon guys, am I the only person who can see what's going on here?

> When a web site sees that it's being accessed by IE, it serves its IE6/IE7/whatever non-standards-compliant pages.

> So , even if IE8 is standards-compliant, it's still going to get all the old IE6 pages from web servers.

That is not the case. Unless the developer is an incompetent boob, the server will not care which browser made the request, and will serve the same page to all browsers. (There are some exceptions based on the browser's accept header, but that's not the issue here.) No developer with a lick of sense will implement browser sniffing.

The problem lies with MSFT's efforts to lock customers in to their products by not supporting the common standards. Combine that with lazy developers who authored pages against the buggy models provided by IE5&6, IE7 being little more than a bug-fix patch to IE6, and you have a huge inventory of poorly written pages that do not render properly in a modern browser. IE8 has managed to squeeze into that category.

Just about any page that renders well in a modern browser will do so in IE8 also.

Raise the CO₂

@Plants...

By Craig Posted Thursday 12th March 2009 15:04 GMT

No need to worry about the plants. Raise the CO₂ levels to the 700–800PPM (presently about 380PPM) range, and plant yields would rise by 25–60%, as they can better use nutrients and sunlight.

That should please the anthropogenic global warning scare-mongers.

cheers

What would it prove?

I don't see how that would end any arguments. CO2 is not a pollutant, nor does it drive temperature. It is the other way around, temperature driving atmospheric CO2. The world is CO2 impoverished compared to historic geologic levels. The two most bio-diverse eras were the Cambrian and Permian, where CO2 levels were ten and seven and a half times current levels, respectively.

Elegantly argued

@ Peter Gathercole Posted Tuesday 17th February 2009 15:05 GMT

Thank you for a nicely turned argument. I have used Debian since 2000. With the exception of needing Win for IE (I'm a web developer), haven't found a thing in Win that I couldn't do in Linux—usually more easily, more configurable, and certainly more straightforward.

How have we survived?

I am always amazed the human race has survived, considering all those fatally toxic ingestibles dong their damnedest to do us in. People who would eat raw oysters may have a death wish, come to think of it.

--g

What's wrng with IE8?

Odd. I can visit those sites with Firefox, Opera, and Safari, all highly html4 and css2.1 compliant, without running into problems. What are the issues with IE8, and why am I not facing them with present modern browsers?

I'll grant you there are poorly built sites, and idiot developers that are IE5 oriented and have no concept of the standards. Those sites fail in all modern browsers. Any sites that render well in good browsers ought not cause problems for a standards compliant IE.

Do-gooders trying to keep the third world down

"… how in Nigeria alone more than half a million second-hand PCs arrive in Lagos every month, (all those nephews of the late, unlamented minister of whatever need those computers in order to find an honest person who will help them smuggle out their ill-gotten loot) even though only one in four works. (thank gawd for small favors)"

Of course it's Jesus

A lady friend of mine's first reaction on seeing the pic was, "Jesus! Now, that's a big one."

Get a clue

The term American applies to citizens of the United States of America, as Mexican applies to citizens of los Estados Unidos de México, Canada has Canadians and Guatemala has Guatemalans. The continents are North America and South America, and denizens of these continents are North and South Americans. There is no land mass, "America".

Find a more meaningful nit to pick. Certainly, check your prejudices and presumptions before exhibiting your ignorances in public.

MSFT lacking cojones

The weird thing is that MS want IE8 to act like IE7 unless you tell it to act like IE8.

There is a vast number of legacy pages that were written specifically for IE, and those pages are broken. It is obvious when viewed in a modern browser. The important thing to remember is that so many reside on intranets served to a captive IE audience. These business pages are what worry MS, as suddenly, "IE broke my pages" becomes the plaint heard 'round the world. Then there are all the banks and other financial institutions that have long written their customer applications to work only in (the non-compliant) IE.

To avoid appearing to break all these pages, MSFT want to have their shiny new v.8 browser default to the broken rendering mode. Those of us who actually write pages that are compliant are expected then to add a new http-equiv meta element to opt-in to standards mode in IE8. What a crock!

MSFT should have the balls to do the right thing. Make IE8 default to standards mode. Instead of putting the onus on developers to cover for their mistakes, let the user select the rendering mode. If a page breaks when viewed, let the reader click the switch.

One thing I have always admired in Netscape was their decision decision to bite the bullet when they found themselves on the losing side in the W3 standards wars. V.4 was orphaned and v.6 aimed at standards compliance. I remember running both v.4.7 and v.6 so I could view pages written against either. Netscape did the right thing. I doubt that IE will.

@Mark Rendle

"Is there a document available that catalogues the W3C standards which aren't supported in IE7?"

Yes, there is. See http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support

Unless you're a web developer, you'll be surprised at the poor level of standards compliance by IE7, never mind IE6. We work very hard so that the web site visitor is never aware of just how crappy IE is. A part of what we do is dumb the site down to IE's level. As a result, the web is being held back by that one majority browser.

Just so you realize just how far behind IE is, html4 was adopted in 1999. CSS1 (the core stuff) was adopted in 1996, and css2 (the positioning stuff) was adopted in 1998.

IE5, released in Mar., 1999 had poor/buggy support for css. IE6, Oct., 2001, was a great improvement, but certain software decisions (notably hasLayout, MSFT's block formatting context) created truly ugly rendering bugs. Mozilla's Phoenix 0.5, in late 2002, was considerably more standards aware and less buggy in its rendering. Since then, Opera, Konqueror/Safari and the Mozilla family have continued to improve, while IE was stagnant. IE7 was, in no way, any more than a bug fix, UI enhancement revision; certainly not a major version step, no matter how much the marketing department wishes it were. IE7 fixed several major bugs and added a very few css selectors. The rest was eye candy and jonesing, tabs for example.

Epiphany??

Epiphany, a descendant of the Galeon browser, is built on the Gecko rendering engine, using Gnome desktop components rather than XUL for a "native" desktop look. Think Mac.

Webkit is a fork off the KHTML engine which powers Konqueror and its KDE desktop components.

The next sub-major version of Gnome (v2.22, currently 2.20) will switch to the Webkit engine for Epiphany, but for now, it's a Gecko based browser.

The KHTML/Webkit engines are significantly less mature than the Gecko engine, but getting better.

Any browser engine, Presto (Opera), KHTML, Webkit or Gecko is better and safer than Trident (IE). So, take your pick

cheers

:shrug:

@Dave

The disclaimer came late, after the complaints about Simon mailing it in this week.