The Vent and Rant Thread

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

=Man, what a revelation Opera has been. Fast, stable, good looking, has a lot of neat features built right in and completely standards compliant.

hm, i admit i've not yet tested v.10 too much, but i wouldn't say it was *completely* standards compliant ; there were some (minor but visible) differences in how opera rendered a few of my sites compared with any other browser.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Opera isn't completely standards compliant, but no browser is. Opera does do as good a job as any.
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Dennis

yeah, that sounds more like it.

Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm

See, Zelda - I'm not the only person who raves about how good Opera is

Minor rant - I do wish more people would code sites to work on all browsers, then I wouldn't have to use 3 of the sodding things.

ha !! i wish all the browser developpers would actually get it together and become COMPLETELY standards compliant (or at least agree to be non-compliant on the same things and in the same way, fachrissake), so that i wouldn't have to hack my nice clean code so my site will work the same on all 3 of the sodding things !

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I have an old friend who is a web developer who griped about the rise of Firefox. Before, he could just code to look okay in IE, and forget it. Now, he had to work harder.

I told him he had it backwards. He should code to look good in Firefox, than go back and handle all the special cases IE required because it wasn't standards compliant.

exactly.

IE 8 is supposed to be the big standards compliance push. I suspect it's about as standards compliant as IE 7 was "secure", but don't use it and can't say from experience.

lord preserve us from IE's idea of "standard compliant".

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I see occasional crashes of Firefox on Windows, but it always occurs on sites that are trying to load lots of images. I don't think it's an FF issue - I think it's a hardware problem on my desktop, and I have a flaky RAM stick. When FF hits that part of RAM...

It doesn't even crash, it just freezes the whole system, and I have to hit the reset switch to regain control.
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Dennis

see, that's the kind of thing that drives me completely MAD.

[pshrynk]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

It's Virgil Sams visiting Rigel in First Lensman. He inquires of his driver what the things are they are passing, and discovers they are advertising. The Rigelians have learned to ignore theirs the same way humans do.
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Dennis

You see, I knew that there would be someone out there with even more Geek Cred than I who would know the reference...

[markbot]

The solution to the world's energy diversification issue is so easy that it's quite frustrating. We don't need a lot of fuss and recriminations. Just implement a large fossil fuel tax and restart the nuclear energy industry in the US and in other countries.

It is ironic that the mindset of Greenpeace is what has caused its own fake global warming dilemma since if people didn't campaign against nuclear energy in the US, carbon emission would be a fraction of what they are now. The US is still the largest producer of nuclear energy but as a fraction of total generation it has fallen behind. There are a lot of political issues with nuclear power in the US, such as the fight for waste disposal with states and the fear over nuclear weapons. But, I think if the fake global warming threat were really taken seriously...nuclear energy would be one of the first things to be solved. Since, it isn't...I think this really means that we have called the global warming industry's bluff.

The UN is not really concerned about global warming since they don't want poor countries to maintain/cut carbon emissions. This has the effect of increasing overall carbon emission since manufacturing and energy production in the developed world is much more efficient...by multiples even. The global warming crusade is simply a wealth redistribution scheme.

The second part to the solution is to levy a large fossil fuel tax. This is the most efficient way to get people to stop buying SUVs. In the US, for example...the gas tax is only a few cents. Make the gas tax a couple of dollars and use that money to fund clean energy, like building solar power plants. But of course, it is difficult to trust politicians to do the right thing with that gas tax. What they will most likely do with it is pay off their constituency in the form of entitlement programs. Also the manufacturing trade unions are holding us all hostage since they would lose in the case of a gas tax. The socialists cause their own problem in the first place, then hold us hostage by withholding the obvious solution! Nice! At least we know where the conservatives stand...pro business. The socialists are pro our self destruction.

A $1 tax per gallon on gas would yield over $100B per year in the US. If we used all of that money to build solar or wind power plants, we'd have clean energy powering the US within 10 years. Hypothetically, if solar or wind energy costs $1M per MW. We could have all US base load electricity as solar or wind power within 10 years with this tax.....assuming we solve the electricity variability issue. Throwing in nuclear power...and we could make fossil fuel obsolete within a generation!!!! But NO!!! That would be too damn easy.

The energy diversification issue is actually a pretty easy problem to solve. The real problem is will the political system.

[pilotbob]

MS made a huge effort with IE8 on standards and submitted thousands of tests to the WC3. The problem with standards is that many of them are not very clear so different browsers interpret them differently. This is way having a huge set of tests will help everyone render the same markup the same.

BOb

[kennyc]

Here's my rant,

I'm sick of browser wars and sick of people complaining and trying to get them to all be the same!

Just let it go.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

hm, i admit i've not yet tested v.10 too much, but i wouldn't say it was *completely* standards compliant ; there were some (minor but visible) differences in how opera rendered a few of my sites compared with any other browser.

There will be. It's unavoidable.

ha !! i wish all the browser developpers would actually get it together and become COMPLETELY standards compliant (or at least agree to be non-compliant on the same things and in the same way, fachrissake), so that i wouldn't have to hack my nice clean code so my site will work the same on all 3 of the sodding things !

Only three?

You have IE, based on the Trident rendering engine, Firefox and SeaMonkey based on Mozilla's Gecko engine, Safari based on Webkit, and Opera based on Presto. And there's Chrome coming up on the outside, but I believe that also uses Webkit.

The developers do talk to each other (save possibly Microsoft), but you'll never see total standards compliance. Problem one is that any standard will have gray areas where two different vendors will come up with two different ways of implementing the standard that will have different results, but each way will be arguably correct as the standard is defined. Problem two is that standards are a moving target. Discussions are ongoing about HTML 5, CSS 3, and future revisions to ECMAScript (JavaScript). Once they get ratified, there will be a whole new area where things will be different between browsers in odd ways.

The best you can hope for is that most things will work the same in any browser, and the number of special cases you need to handle will diminish and be in more obscure areas.

lord preserve us from IE's idea of "standard compliant".

Microsoft is like pretty much everybody else: "We firmly support standards! Do it our way..."

see, that's the kind of thing that drives me completely MAD.

Yes, but at least I can make a case it's not a browser issue. If it was FF, I'd expect it to crash, or freeze and need to be terminated from Process Explorer. When I have to hit the reset switch and reboot the machine, it points at an underlying system problem.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by pshrynk

You see, I knew that there would be someone out there with even more Geek Cred than I who would know the reference...

It helps that I recently re-read the series and have a fresh memory of it.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Here's my rant,

I'm sick of browser wars and sick of people complaining and trying to get them to all be the same!

Just let it go.

If you are a web developer, you can't lt it go.
______
Dennis

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The developers do talk to each other (save possibly Microsoft),

<snip>

<snip>

Microsoft is like pretty much everybody else: "We firmly support standards! Do it our way..."

Wow, you really got it bad for MS. The attitudes you are talking about are long gone. The IE team has co-operated quite a bit with the Mozilla team and establishing tests and better documentation of vague standards during the last 2 or 3 years (since IE 7 started being worked on).

The biggest problem web devs (yes I'm one of them but we are lucky enough to specify a required browser for our apps) have these days is that there are still ALOT of people using IE6 and 7 and Firefox 2.x.

BOb

[happy_terd]

bah

Gotta SNES handheld that plays super nintendo games via handheld and attaches to the tv. Now i cant find all my Snes games I stored away somewhere in the house / garage.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by markbot

The solution to the world's energy diversification issue is so easy that it's quite frustrating. We don't need a lot of fuss and recriminations. Just implement a large fossil fuel tax and restart the nuclear energy industry in the US and in other countries.

That's beginning to happen. The Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, decided to restart a nuke plant they had shut down, and to resume construction on one they had interrupted. Nuclear power is beginning to come back into fashion in the US as electricity demands increase, oil becomes more expensive, and coal is widely understood to be a problem. (The average coal fired generating plant emits more stray radiation into the atmosphere than a nuclear plant, because coal contains radioactive isotopes, strip mining devastates large swaths or the territory it is done in, and coal minig has a variety of health hazards for those who do it.)

If oil were still as cheap as it was when people started deciding nuclear power was a Bad Thing, it might still be out of favor, but as oil prices rise, nuclear starts to look better.

It is ironic that the mindset of Greenpeace is what has caused its own fake global warming dilemma since if people didn't campaign against nuclear energy in the US, carbon emission would be a fraction of what they are now. The US is still the largest producer of nuclear energy but as a fraction of total generation it has fallen behind. There are a lot of political issues with nuclear power in the US, such as the fight for waste disposal with states and the fear over nuclear weapons. But, I think if the fake global warming threat were really taken seriously...nuclear energy would be one of the first things to be solved. Since, it isn't...I think this really means that we have called the global warming industry's bluff.

They don't think it's a bluff.

But the underlying question from where I sit is "If global warming is real, how much of it is caused by man, and how much is due to long term climate cycles beyond our control?" We are coming out of a period of glaciation.

The UN is not really concerned about global warming since they don't want poor countries to maintain/cut carbon emissions. This has the effect of increasing overall carbon emission since manufacturing and energy production in the developed world is much more efficient...by multiples even. The global warming crusade is simply a wealth redistribution scheme.

The UN is a political body, the majority of whose members are lesser developed countries. China may be the biggest sticking point, as they want to industrialize rapidly, are will to take environmental damage in the process, and have no patience with others trying to tell them not to.

The second part to the solution is to levy a large fossil fuel tax. This is the most efficient way to get people to stop buying SUVs. In the US, for example...the gas tax is only a few cents. Make the gas tax a couple of dollars and use that money to fund clean energy, like building solar power plants. But of course, it is difficult to trust politicians to do the right thing with that gas tax. What they will most likely do with it is pay off their constituency in the form of entitlement programs. Also the manufacturing trade unions are holding us all hostage since they would lose in the case of a gas tax. The socialists cause their own problem in the first place, then hold us hostage by withholding the obvious solution! Nice! At least we know where the conservatives stand...pro business. The socialists are pro our self destruction.

Tossing Socialism into the discussion muddies the waters. The underlying issues will be there regardless of political affiliation, and it's an oversimplification to lump Greenpeace, the "global warming industry", and Socialists into the same category. It would be nice if it were that simple...

A $1 tax per gallon on gas would yield over $100B per year in the US. If we used all of that money to build solar or wind power plants, we'd have clean energy powering the US within 10 years. Hypothetically, if solar or wind energy costs $1M per MW. We could have all US base load electricity as solar or wind power within 10 years with this tax.....assuming we solve the electricity variability issue. Throwing in nuclear power...and we could make fossil fuel obsolete within a generation!!!! But NO!!! That would be too damn easy.

We have a large fossil fuel tax. It's called high prices at the gas pump. Sales of things like SUVs are off because people can't afford the gas they require, and sales of RVs have largely stopped.

And Europe imposes that sort of tax now to encourage people to use less gas and decrease dependence on foreign oil.

But ultimately, economics rules. Back in the 70's, I worked for a government funded project to promote alternative energy, particularly solar. It was in the early days of OPEC, when gas prices at the pump were moving above (Gasp!) one dollar a gallon.

There were a variety of alternative energy possibilities, including hydro electric, geo-thermal, ocean-thermal, wind power, and biomass conversion. They achieved limited penetration because ultimately, they tended to be more expensive than coal, oil, or gasoline.

Alternative energy becomes competitive when its cost is.

The energy diversification issue is actually a pretty easy problem to solve. The real problem is will the political system.

Not entirely.

Nuclear power is an effective solution to meeting electrical energy demands, but electrical energy is only one form of power. The last I looked, electric power generation accounted for about 1/4 of the total US energy budget. The rest was residential/commercial heating and cooling, industrial heating and cooling, and transportation. Those still mostly use oil, natural gas, or coal, and largely have to.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Wow, you really got it bad for MS. The attitudes you are talking about are long gone. The IE team has co-operated quite a bit with the Mozilla team and establishing tests and better documentation of vague standards during the last 2 or 3 years (since IE 7 started being worked on).

Now they are. But how long did it take before they had that epiphany? Why did it take IE so long to recognize that CSS existed?

For that matter, consider Windows Updates, which can automatically download the latest critical security patches to your machine. I applaud the effort, but it took them long enough to realize secure code was a priority. The efforts that led to Windows Update really should have been started about 5 years earlier than they were.

The biggest problem web devs (yes I'm one of them but we are lucky enough to specify a required browser for our apps) have these days is that there are still ALOT of people using IE6 and 7 and Firefox 2.x.

And will be for some time.

For example, I run a Linux distribution called Puppy Linux. Puppy is intended and optimized for low end hardware, like my old Lifebook. It ships by default with SeaMonkey 1.X as the browser/email client, because it's relatively small and quick. Some folks moved to FF 2.0. A few are moving to FF 3.X, but not many, as it's simply too big and slow on the sort of gear Puppy gets run on. (FF 3.6 takes about 30 seconds to load and initialize on my notebook. It took 45 before I migrated from an ext3 to an ext4 file system.)

It's a variant of the issue that impeded adoption of Windows Vista. It was probably not until a year after that was released that the average system being sold had the horsepower to really run it effectively.
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Dennis

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Now they are. But how long did it take before they had that epiphany? Why did it take IE so long to recognize that CSS existed?

So, am I supposed to judge you as the way you were as a 7 year old? Or, they way you are today?

Keep in mind... IE was the first browser the brought a lot of stuff to the web like AJAX for one. At the time there were NO standards.

Anyway... I agree with you... we will always live with these issues as web devs. Even Gecko and Webkit and Opera render some stuff differently... and all the different javascript engines don't help either.

But, I do think blaming MS for all the ills of the world is just a bit to tunnel visioned for me. Hind sight is 20/20.

BOb

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by markbot

A $1 tax per gallon on gas would yield over $100B per year in the US. If we used all of that money to build solar or wind power plants, we'd have clean energy powering the US within 10 years. Hypothetically, if solar or wind energy costs $1M per MW. We could have all US base load electricity as solar or wind power within 10 years with this tax.....assuming we solve the electricity variability issue. Throwing in nuclear power...and we could make fossil fuel obsolete within a generation!!!! But NO!!! That would be too damn easy.

You really think so? We do have a huge taxation on gas. 2/3d of the price is caused by VAT, tax and something I've no idea how to translate in English. That money isn't going to alternative fuels, but rather in the building of more roads...

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

We have a large fossil fuel tax. It's called high prices at the gas pump. Sales of things like SUVs are off because people can't afford the gas they require, and sales of RVs have largely stopped.

An American saying they have high prices at the gas pump...

Your prices are nothing compared to ours. What you pay for a gallon is about the same as what we pay for a liter...

[lilac_jive]

The geek is strong in this thread.