Market Share based developement.

Its always nice to be proven right.

People that develop in CSS/AJAX/web2.0 tend to complain about IE not being standards compliant. I keep asking myself though, what makes something standard? I would imagine that to be a standard, it would be the most practiced practice. Aparently my belief in using dictionaries to define english words is misplaced.

IE6 is the "standard" as far as I'm concerned, but don't let just me tell you that. http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=3

The problem is that people that have to worry about code being standards compliant are usually very technical people. They are or are surrounded by linux nerds, OSS advocates, mac fanboi's and the like. This leads to a huge distortion in their minds as to whom they are developing for.

Let me enlighten you.

The most disturbing statistic on that page is that google only has 75ish % market share.

OMG its about effing time.

Our dreams of dropping 6 soldiers into a rival country with the mission of complete domination are one step closer today.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2006/10/19/invisibility-cloak.html

A few years ago the military was looking for research institutions to bid on the cost/timeframe of a few key technologies they wanted, like invisiblity cloaks, paperthin bulletproof fabric, exskeletons, and other fun toys. The requirement was that the research provide a working prototype in 10 years. My school lost out on the bids, but other schools won some of the contracts, so look for more of this good stuff in the coming decade.

Give the dude a break. He kills vampires.

If you find my consolidation of the internet's consolidation sites to be not consolidated and condensed enough, try http://primdr.spaces.live.com/

Its like a condensed consolidation of my consolidation of the iternet's consolidation sites.

If any readers manage to condense http://primdr.spaces.live.com/ into a news site that could otherwise be considered a blackhole of knowledge, let us know.

You know you want to blow $200 on your keyboard.

Following my philosophy that your Monitor is the single best thing to blow your money on when building a computer, by reason that its the only part you look at 99% of the time, I also highly suggest you invest in a fancy pants keyboard. Especially if you type with two fingers supported by the hunt and peck algorithm.

I've always thought about getting a DiNovo, but after seeing the new ones, I'd have felt like I'd bought the old model BMW. The DiNovo blade is indeed the keyboard to lust after.

Who doesn't want a keyboard made out of a single piece of metal?

Are your panties wet yet, ladies? You better have brought a whole Fruit of the Loom pack of panties for this.

Dungeon Master of Ceremonies has been released by MC Chris.
Buy it or steal it.

BTW I hear he's awesome in concert.

A throat needs slitting but we don't know who's throat to slit.

You can read the whole article for a chuckle, I always wonder if other people laugh at the same words that I do.

A Roman Catholic priest said he had an inappropriate two-year relationship with former Rep. Mark Foley in the 1960s that included massaging the boy in the nude, but he did not specifically remember having sex, a newspaper reported Thursday.
The Rev. Anthony Mercieca, 72, described several encounters that he said Foley might perceive as sexually inappropriate, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. They include massaging Foley while the boy was naked, skinny-dipping together at a secluded lake in Lake Worth and being nude in the same room on overnight trips.

Mercieca said there was one night when he was in a drug-induced stupor and there was an incident but he couldn't clearly remember, the newspaper reported.
"I have to confess, I was going through a nervous breakdown," the newspaper reported Mercieca as saying from his home on the island of Gozo, south of Italy. "I was taking pills tranquilizers. I used to take them all the time. They affected my mind a little bit."

God blesses the Roman Chatholic Priests, for sure.

On a more serious note, when the eff did fondling little boys become "inapropriate". Since when did the media start saying it was "inapropriate" for a CONGRESSMAN that we are paying $165,000/yer to try to get the highschool aged male interns to have SEX with him. Where is the sensationlist media I know and love! If Clinton had tried to get highschool boys to have SEX with him, they wouldn't be saying it was "inappropriate". I was always under the impression you got raped in prison for 12-16 months before your court appointed throat slitting.

Don't let the liberal media sensationalize your stories. They always support the damn Democrats.

IE7 is out.

http://www.microsoft.com/ie

Space Defense to Alpha Team, we have go, I repeat, we have go.

So in their infinate wisdom the government has announce that putting defence mechanisms into space is different from weaponizing space. And they reserve the right to nuke anyone that puts anything into space they don't like.

Putting anti-people rockets in your front yard as a defence mechanism is not the same as weaponizing your front yard. Rememeber that logic when your shopping at home depot this weekend.

Not that I have a problem with any of this, I just hate r-tard logic.

How long will my socket A last?

Curious about how long until you need a new socket?

The Inquirer has the deets on AM2+, AM3, and the rollout of DDR3 for the desktop market.

The easiest way to lose friends is to talk about politics.

Do you feel like your Congressmen represent you? So it would be fair to say you feel you have little to no representation? Is it fair to say that they take your money, and spend it on things you don't feel like they should be spending it on? Lets call that a tax.

Taxation without representation perhaps?

People bitch about the government all the time, about the twoparty system, about how we should be keeping dark-skinned people poor, or killing people to make room for trees, but I never hear anyone talking about one of the real problems.

Representation.

When the constitution was signed, we had one congressman for every 30,000 people in the US. Today we have 433 congressmen, and 300,000,000 citizens. Your government is trying to tell you that one man (or women, even though they don't really have anything important to say) is capable of representing 692,840 people. Those are some mighty special people. Maybe thats why they take bribe money and fondle children. They're trying to be the average of 700,000 people.

If we had the 10,000 congressmen we SHOULD have, we would instantly be doing better off. Just think about how much harder it is for a corporation to buy 5,001 votes instead of 217. How much easier it is for you to convince 30,000 people to give your third-party ass a chance at leading. People might say they'd never get anything accomplished trying to get 10,000 people to agree on anything. To that I'd say, we're actually trying to get 300,000,000 people to agree on something, where have you been. To that I'd say, GOOD, congress, amid their aproval of torture and the reunification of MaBell, has time to approve congressional congratulations to sports teams and the like, they obviously have too much time on their hands.

Let your congressman know how amazed you are that he can represent 700,000 people, call him (Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121) if you have Apple-sized balls.

Rotten Apples

"As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it."

Read that a few times.
Read the source if you want to read it again.

apparently a percentage of iPOD's that shipped after Sept 12th contain a virus that load on Windows machines when it is connected. You know what I see?

HUGE BALLS.

So Apple, who has no marketing about how virus-proof they are, who would stand nothing to gain from making their own virus, has "somehow" let a virus get onto their production iPOD's? And they claim they're upset with Windows?

It would be a shame if "somehow"an apple virus was slipped onto the Zune production models. Then Microsoft could be upset with Apple over not having a more hardy operating system.

The E ewwwwwwwwwww

Is the EU insane?
Honestly, bAtShIt crazy?
First they're up in MS's grill over Vista, the next truly great computer advancement, now this?
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35189

The US government makes its own incomprehensible laws, true, but those usually involve something serious, like electrocution isn't torture, or strip all civil liberties to battle the "terrorists" and "child molesters". The US government doesn't seem to hate the computer/internet/software industry nearly as much as the EU.

At least when the US government, with the exception of Iowa who is still "fighting the good fight" went after MS, they were honest in the fact that they just wanted money from the wealthiest man on earth. They took their cut, gave the citizens rediculously useless vouchers, and went on with their freemarket ideas. The EU hosed MS for $600,000,000+ for capitalism market practices, and then again for not opening up their interconnect software. Basically saying that MS should give everyone everything they spent money developing for free, because consumers want those features, and everyone else it too stupid to make better ones without stealing from MS.

People can bash MS all they want, but the truth is that this is a free market. If someone else made an OS that was truly better for average desktop users, then it would sell more copies, become more popular, and "win".

As far as the next truly great computer advancement goes, don't forget to kneel down and thank Microsoft for muscling the cable companies into allowing us to use Cablecards with our Vista PC's. Because I sure as hell didn't see Apple or any distro make it happen.

Next someone will complain that MS doesn't share the drivers for how to work the cablecard cards, and the man that cracks them will be heralded as a hero in the OSS world. The EU will then proceed to sue them for vague anti-competitive practices, citing how everyone says they're asshats over the cable card thing.

Someone call McAffe a waaambulance.

McAffe is at it again.

I seriously wish someone from Microsoft would email me and explain to me why they would give in to these loser companies. Or the EU for that matter.

Microsoft made a product. These companies found some flaws in the product and made money selling fixes. Now they're complaining that Microsoft won't a) let them know how their making their new product b) let them break the security features of their new product, all so that they can sell more fixes.

You know what, if you can't figure out how to fix it on your own, tough nuggets. Your company deserves to lose all of its buisness. I don't see Trend Micro or Sophos having a problem. Their buisnesses deserve to wipe McAffe and Symantec from the market place.

Scott Field wrote on his Microsoft blog, "We have also been asked to provide a supported way for 'known good' vendors to continue hooking the kernel but prevent others from doing so. Unfortunately, there is no reliable mechanism for us to distinguish between 'known good' software and malicious software. Moreover, we cannot prevent a malicious software author from 'bundling' purportedly good software in an attempt to thwart the system. Even if we could include such a mechanism, it's unclear if we could use this mechanism to selectively allow kernel hooking in a manner that provides an acceptable trade off between performance and reliability and security."

Is there anything even remotely unreasonable about this? Anything at all?

Vista is MS's toy, if anyone doesn't like it, then they dont' have to use it, and they don't have to support it.

If this all wasn't rediculous enough, just ask yourself, do YOU trust every employee of McAffe and Symantec? Every single one of them that will have access to the Vista kernal api anyway?

I don't trust any of them. I have no faith in a buisness who's buisness model is whining about what they wished they had. That means another 10 years of spyware bullshit to the fault of the first rat to jump ship with the api knowledge.

That goes for the EU as well. Microsoft is not a monopoly anymore. OSX and Ubuntu-ish linuxes are viable competitors. If Microsoft is what people want to buy, its because either a) they prefer it or b) they DO NOT CARE. In either case, people still have the CHOICE of another operating system. If the EU doesn't like Vista, then MS should just not sell it there. If that isn't enough, it should pull support for Office 2007 from the EU. Just wait it out for 6 months. Let the buisness owners in the EU have a few unfriendly talks with the lawmakers. They'll see the light, I PROMISE YOU.

He, Cringely

I think Cringely is a pretty smart guy when he's not ranting about Bill Gates and co.

Take
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html
for example.

His ideas make sense.

Sun thinks so too.
http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/

WTF is XNA?

A must read blog for anyone that owns a 360, a desire to make videogames, and a huge internet penis.

http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/

XBOX360 HD-DVD Drive for the unwashed masses

Micosoft recently let it be known that you will be able to use your usb HDDVD drive that you buy for you 360 with your desktop.

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/10/17/xbox_hddvd/

They aren't providing a driver as of yet, I'd imagine it will be supported by Vista though.
I'll cover the theoretical HDCP workaround later.