Just in case you were thinking Microsoft might consider relinquishing their plans for global domination, think again. There’s been deep-seated speculation on the status of the next Internet Explorer release, and now Zeldman finds that “IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.”
Whazzat?! Allow me to translate: ‘you have to pay for future versions of IE!’ If the statements from that TechNet document are accurate, new IE releases will not be available for download. Meaning that if you intend to upgrade beyond Win IE6 SP1, or Mac IE5, you will need to purchase whichever new OS Redmond spits out.
NoTitleYet says those pesky American tourists are at it again in Vancouver:
“older redneck tourist lady: ‘Wow. It the sun sets a lot later here in Vancouver!’
older redneck tourist man: ‘Of course it does dear! It’s because we’re further West!’
in unison (muttering): ‘Yes… yes… of course, further West. That’s it.’”
Pretty damn shrewd: Calgary Gas Prices. Pricewatch eat your heart out!
Wired has a writeup on the hacking of Shadowbane (an online game) last week. Pretty funny actually.
”…players noticed that their money and weapons had suddenly vanished. A few whispered that tonight the monsters somehow seemed slightly bigger and meaner…
…hackers managed to completely alter the rules of Shadowbane — turning a suddenly wrathful game loose on its players.
‘At first, players started speculating that there was a really bad bug in the game code,’ player Tim Wheating said. ‘Then we realized that somehow an insane god had taken control of our world and was out to kill us all.’ …The population of an entire Shadowbane town was forcibly moved to the bottom of the sea, where they drowned. City guards turned feral and attacked town residents. Mobs of never-before-seen superpowerful creatures, seemingly spontaneously spawned from the ether, began to prowl the streets unchecked, killing characters in the most painful way possible.”
Then I was watching a pretty boring segment of Extreme-Machines on Discovery Channel this afternoon. It portrayed one of those Back to the Future/5th Element type scenes where the cars ‘fly’ between buildings at different levels, and went on about how the collissions would be avoided by having a ‘traffic control’ computer system regulate the movements of the cars.
I just had to nod my head. Oh what fun a couple of overly-creative hacker-types could get up to on a lazy Saturday afternoon, or taking out the frustration of a long day at work from their cubicle during rush-hour!
It’s Friday, you deserve a good laugh, so check out this great Matrix spoof. It takes aim at the nVIDIA vs. ATI video card wars, and benchmark ‘cheating’ of late. Good stuff, I hope the guy keeps going with it, it needs an ending. [via hardocp]
Gearing up for their shoot-out with Google, MSN Search isn’t just hiring, it sounds like they’re actively seeking out the right people for the job. Search engine engineer, and Idle Words author, Maciej Ceglowski reveals:
“I just got a headhunting letter from one Kat Morrell, inviting me to apply for a job with the MSN Search people, as part of ” an ambitious project to create a revolutionary new search engine from scratch”. From the letter, it sounds like they’re preparing the Anti-Google — indexing the entire Internet to create “a search engine that will leapfrog over current technologies”.
”…I find it fascinating that they’re sifting through weblogs to find people interested in search technology. It was obvious that the recruiter had spent more than a few minutes actually reading the site.”
In case you missed it, Movable Type 2.64 is out. Nothing ‘stupendous’ to be had, just the usual bugfix or two. Although I’m not usually a big fan of ‘updating’ software — I prefer clean installs — everything seems to be working fine, so I won’t complain.
Commenting on his team’s unimpressive performance at the recent Austrian F1 Grand Prix, WilliamsF1 Chief Operations Engineer, Sam Michael said that, “Juan [Pablo Montoya] was on line to win the race - he had enough fuel in the car to finish that off.” [BBC] I’m afraid I don’t like that suggestion very much.
Montoya made one refuelling/tyres stop during his race, pulling into the pits for a total of 28.787 seconds (from pit-lane entry to exit) on lap 20 — eleven laps before his engine petered out. I find it amusing that Sam Michael would have us believe that his driver’s car had taken on 49 laps worth of fuel (it’s a 69 lap race) in the sixth-fastest pit-stop of the day, while everyone else — his own teammate included — only managed to fill up with 25-30 laps worth.
Even if it that were possible (with the helpd of some miracle), the car would be so weighted down by the extra fuel that the other cars would easily catch it up. Nevermind that his heavily worn tyres would be no match for the fresh ones of all the drivers breathing down his neck. Nope, not buying it, Keep dreaming Sam, and leave the bullshit at home next time!
Forgive the mess. My stylesheet seems to have had one too many martinis. I’m looking into it.
I’ve been working on something where there’s a need to mark up some content in the form of an unordered list — for contextual purposes. The page contains more than one list, and I’d like to apply separate styles to a number of them. At first I tried to do this using the form: .class>li but IE doesn’t support rules with the selector in that form.
Using li.class is another option, but not a great one — especially where, as in this case, long lists are concerned. It works, but only when each of your tags contain the actual class declatarion — not very efficient. Inserting all that seemingly unecessary code is time-consuming, and can increase page sizes where a great deal of it is involved.
If I’ve missed something, correct me, but I’m left wondering what went wrong on the drawing board with this one. The form li.class implies 2 objectives: to endow coders with a method for producing more than a single style for H1, list, and P type elements; and to eliminate the recurring need to declare the class of these elements (thereby achieving a third objective by reducing page weight).
update: I’ve put my foot in my mouth. Tomas kindly points out that the .class li structure is what I was searching for. However did I miss that? *whistle*
A few milestones in the history of the internet:
- 1972 - Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack get stoned out of their minds and build a computer that costs a fortune and runs no software. “Everyone will want one of these!”, says Jobs.
- 1978 - Dan Bricklin invents the spreadsheet. It will be 5 more years before anyone knows what they’re for, and another decade before anyone knows how to use them.
- 1992 - Mosaic - the first major web browser - is released. Users complain that it should support animated gifs, or at least a BLINK tag. Yeah, that would look AWESOME!
- 1995 - Support for animated .GIF files and MIDI music on webpages becomes widespread. “Make it stop! MAKE IT STOP!”, scream users.
- 1997 - Internet introduced to businesses. Worker productivity up 35%; internet Porn introduced to businesses. Worker productivity down 97%; Scam e-mails replace oil as the chief export of Nigeria.
- 2000 - EPA warns that entire surface of the earth will be completely blanketed with AOL CDs by the end of 2007
Well worth a few laughs after a tough day at the office, check it out. [via one.point.zero]
“My name is Bob, and I’m a Firebird addict.” Or something like that. Mozilla’s Firebird browser (formerly known as Phoenix) impresses me. “Snappy”, standards compliant, and sprinkled with key features like tabbed browsing, text zooming, and pop-up blocking. It’s a bit of a memory whore, but I expect that they’re working on that.
This piece on browser innovation hints at the benefits of building with XUL (Mozilla’s cross-platform interface language):
“In some cases a XUL application has a “look and feel” very similar to that of an application written for a specific platform. For example, Mozilla’s Phoenix browser on Win XP looks and feels very much like a native application”
No kidding! I keep having to remind myself that Firebird hasn’t actually been engineered as part XP. Despite the fact that there’s no real OS integration, it still feels like part of the OS — very much unlike Mozilla where you’re left in no doubt at all as to the fact that you’re launching an entirely separate application.
I expected that a number of sites (including my own) might of course display somewhat differently in the browser, but that hasn’t been the case. Of course there are a couple of bug reports out there, but we’re talking version 0.6 here so it goes with the terrirtory - I haven’t run into a single problem so far though.
Firebird is my new prefered browser. It’s quicker, and lighter than big brother Mozilla, and also embodies a range of features sorely missing in IE6. Good work guys, keep at it!
Oxford University took their 71st win this afternoon, in the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Today’s race was the most closely contested in the event’s 174-year history, ending in a photo-finish with the Oxford eight crossing the line just a foot ahead of Cambridge crew. I can hardly wait to get back on the water, and start rowing again.
Dave Shea laments at the prospect of ‘IE being the new NN4’. I’ve been noticing that a great deal too, well with IE5 anyhow. All too often while working with someone else’s computer, I’ll load up a site, only to have it then dawn on me that I’m suddenly back in Kansas — overcome by the urge to beat my head against the desk until it all just goes away.
Short of a miracle, and every non-compliant/outmoded browser version on the planet turning into chocolate fudge though, our fate is sealed:
“Everytime I proclaim that NN4 is dead a group of NN4 clerics assemble to inform me that 4 Tibetan monks will no longer be able to surf the web freely. Further, Tunisian camel herders will no longer be able to order supplies. Then there’s Bill. Apparently Bill is a wealthy professional, loves to order products over the web and absolutely refuses to surf with any browser other than NN4. What’s worse is that there are literally millions of Bills and while all those NN4 users might make up less than 1% of the surfing population apparently they are responsible for 25% of the purchases made on the web. or some such nonsense…” [via roulston.org]
I have the slowest internet connection in the universe today. Hold on a sec, let me check… Yup! The bytes received counter might as well be going in reverse. I’ll take whatever comfort I can find in that I’m not the only one suffering though. Since yesterday afternoon, bandwidth seems to have halved on at least 3 different dial-up ISPs that I can access. Hope it’s nothing permanent.
So while I’m not busy blowing a gasket as I wait the 3-5 minutes it takes to load a relatively simple site, I’m getting a kick out of this.
Congratulations, and best wishes to Mark and Dora, today is their big day!
Tim has an interesting take on the whole Matrix deal in this morning’s strip.
“If anyone asks me if I think the matrix could be real, I just let them use my computer for about half-an-hour to try to download a couple of MP3 while simultaneously surfing the internet and running photoshop. That always seems to be enough to convince them of whethor or not I believe computers could ever take over the world.
All that musing led me to this conclusion: it’s too bad for Neo and the gang that the AI didn’t try running the matrix using ME [windows ME]. I can hear it now, ‘Agent Smith, we need to reboot the matrix… again.’”
Yeesh! Don’t remind me. One of my buddies in college had the brainwave of ‘upgrading’ to WinME. As the designated IT guy amongst my friends, I think I suffered more than he did, having to kick its memory leaking ass back into gear every time he called me up in the middle of the night with a paper due first thing the next day.
Bug & Slug is a fresh new comic strip from the very talented Tim Andress. Check it out.
A Canadian woman is suing her husband for damages, after the couple’s car ran into a ditch when the husband passed out at the wheel and lost control of the vehicle. The wife has since suffered from chronic pain making her unable to work. The husband lost consciousness after a coughing fit brought on by drinking coffee — the man is allergic to coffee, and has been warned off it by doctors on previous occassions.
Albeit rather bizarre, it’s almost logical for one party to sue the other for the loss of income as a result of the injuries sustained. What a scam though, what a scam! Why didn’t I think of it?!
You knew that it wouldn’t be long before someone would want to access/share their iTunes Music Store purchases with Windows machines. As Mike points out, there are already codecs and plugins floating around out there.
I don’t really see why so many people have been so eager to use Apple’s new service. Yes there’s the potential convenience of being able to find what you want quickly, knowing that it’s a decent version, and not having to worry about any thorny legal issues. Unfortunately, an album’s worth of songs is still going to cost you about the price of a CD (although you can now avoid those ‘filler’ tracks). You’re stuck with lousy 128k quality, and a proprietary format that shows no signs of being taken cross-platform by its purveryors. Worst of all, at the end of the day you’re helping a dinosaur of a business model maintain fat margins in an age of shrinking profits, and that persists in refusing to pass the cost-savings of digital on to the consumer.
While in South Africa, I meant to comment on how Madonna decried public reaction to her opposition of the war in Iraq. Seeing Reid Scott mention that Susan Sarandon was also whining -about a similar response to her anti-war campaigning - jogged my memory. Speaking about the outrage expressed at the original version of her American Life music video, Madonna said:
“You know, it’s ironic that we were fighting for democracy in Iraq because we ultimately aren’t celebrating democracy here. Anybody who has anything to say against the war or against the president or whatever is punished, and that’s not democracy, it’s people being intolerant. And everyone is entitled to their opinion for or against. That’s what our constitutional rights are supposed to be, that we all have freedoms to express ourselves and to voice our dissent if we have that.”
What kind of naive, self-contradicting, air-headed perspective is that? Seeing that her response defies her argument, i.e. “everyone is entitled to their opinion for or against”, it’s obvious that she knows the words, but doesn’t quite understand them. She thinks democracy means: ‘everyone is entitled to their own opinion for or against, so long as it doesn’t hurt her album sales’.
The guys at this store won’t be enthused by Kodak’s most recent overtures to realize that long awaited appliance: the stand-alone photo kiosk.
“Digital PIC is a non-chemical process for developing standard color negative film. It produces a digital image file that can be used to print photographs and be written to a CD. As a result, Kodak’s will have the only kiosks capable of taking any input, including film, and giving the consumer the prints they want, in minutes.”
I eagerly anticipate the opportunity to walk over to such a machine (at any metro station, gas station, mall, convenience store), download the images from a full CF card to a CD, pay a few bucks, dump the CD in my bookbag, and resume shooting. Ideal for trips when you just don’t have enough extra removable media cards on your person, and it sure beats the stress of lugging around your notebook PC.
Consumers will no doubt wait to see whether the process actually produces non-corrupted images. Vendors will also need to address privacy concerns, and the inevitable prospect of some genius ‘getting their virus on’.
I referred to the system as an ‘appliance’ because there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be just that. Surely such a device would be great for in-home processing, where you just load your film, or insert your removable media, and the images are all transmitted to your computer’s hard disk. Let it not forget that it’s more environmentally friendly too!
A recent survey by England’s Manchester University reveals that the 8 Mile soundtrack is inspiring English footballers to go that extra mile:
”…players were motivated by Eminem’s determined, repetitive dance rhythms combined with cutting lyrics that were often themed around reclaiming pride and self-confidence in the face of difficult circumstances.”
Eric links to news of the world’s new tallest rollercoaster. I had a bit of fun with some friends on some wild rides on my recent trip to South Africa, but nothing like this. At 420-feet (128m), and 120mph (192km/h) that’s a serious adrenalin rush! We’ll have to arrange a field trip.
Dave Shea invites you to participate in shaping Zen Garden into a showcase for the capabilities of CSS. Submit your own modified versions the Zen Garden styleheet to demonstrate how a website can change its spots without the need for modifying its HTML. [via Antipixel]
Forgive the lack of updates recently. I’ve just been caught up with preparations for moving to Canada next month. A feeling limbo has taken hold, and my mindset is neither here, nor there — as such, I’m not quite in blogging mode. Let’s hope I can snap out of it soon.
It was 32C in the shade here today. I shudder to think what kind of heat that means August will bring — Romania’s hottest month, nicknamed ‘month of the oven’! Fortunately for me, I’ll be in Calgary from June.
Emese is my hero today for sharing the link to a collection of high-res car pics at dieselstation.
It’s a grandprix weekend, and Ferrari’s new car is shining on it’s debut. Should be an interesting race tomorrow, I look forward to seeing the middle order guys like Button, and Panis fighting it out with each other. You have to feel sorry for the Williams-BMW guys though, they just don’t have the pace to keep up with Ferrari, McLaren, and the middle order upstarts this season.
