Implementor

So the BBC has this 10 Things We Didn’t Know This Time Last Week page on Ceefax and, it turns out, on their web site. Sometimes it mentions some recent scientific discovery of tremendous import, but mostly it’s amusing trivia. I think that link may change during the week, but today it said this:

In a fight between a polar bear and a lion, the polar bear would win.

Intrigued, I followed the link to the citation, which was also on the BBC’s site. So it must be true, right? Hmm.

It turns out that this snippet of information came from their report on IssueBits’ new Any Question Answered service. The premise of this service being that you send them a text message with a question in it and then they charge you a pound and send you a text message with the answer. Neat!

The only mention of the polar bear question is this:

There are other questions which are clearly about settling an argument. Such as ‘If a polar bear and a lion had a fight who would win?’ A polar bear, generally you don’t want to come up against a bear.

Now, I truly wouldn’t want to come up against a bear. The polar bear is assuredly a fierce and powerful predator and twice the weight of a lion. But I wondered at the science of this. How many instances of lion/polar bear combat do they have to draw on? I’m betting probably none. Lions don’t exactly look a pushover, do they? And I bet the average lion has quicker reflexes than a bear, which would be handy. They also fail to stipulate the venue for this contest. On the baking African savannah, a polar bear would rapidly overheat, whereas the Arctic icecap would provide poor footing for a lion.

Obviously this wasn’t a question I could answer alone. But for £1, I could call upon the resources of AQA and solve my quandary! Thus:

What is your source for that polar bear versus lion question, as featured on the BBC? I find it hard to believe such a contest has ever taken place.

The answer came back (a mere six minutes later, despite the early hour):

AQA uses statistics of found information, and deducts the most possible outcome, on such occasions. When asked to speculate, that is all AQA can do.

I assume they mean “deduces” rather than “deducts”, and will forgive them both that and their clumsy grammar, but the point seems to be that they made it up. That’s pretty shoddy service for a quid, if you ask me.

Anyway, if you have a question in need of answering, Chiara has pointed out the excellent Question Swap web site, where you can trade questions and answers with other web site users. It’s probably no more or less accurate than AQA (or spending five minutes on google or wikipedia for that matter) and doesn’t cost a pound a go.

Meanwhile, I’m offering a bounty of one British Pound Sterling to anyone who does know who would win in a fight between a polar bear and a lion, and can back it up with firm scientific evidence. Or at least with an impressively entertaining lie.

So I finally got round to downloading the IE7 preview. I didn’t really want it, but a lot of sites are effectively my problem now, so I thought I ought to check if our stuff was going to work all right.

The first thing I noticed was an absolute abortion of a user interface, but it’s hardly as though I’d ever seriously consider using it as my main browser anyway, so I skipped ahead to testing some of the problems they claimed to have fixed in order to be more standards–compliant.

Thing is, in the main, the problems they’ve fixed aren’t the problems anyone had, erm, a problem with. What they’ve fixed are all the bugs that people used to get around the actual crippling flaws in the IE rendering engine. The shitty positioning errors are still there. The margin implementation is still fucked. Still no support for min/max width and height. The hacks to avoid those problems don’t work any more.

Amusingly, last year the IE development team chided people for using those hacks and suggested seriously that everyone immediately remove them, replacing them with another shitty IE–only fix. Incidentally, at that point there wasn’t a public release of IE7 to test those changes in.

An uncharitable observer might suggest that it’s unreasonable to expect people to make changes against a piece of software that’s in a constant state of flux and that you can’t even see. Me, I think it was taking fucking liberties.

Still, we all have our valued users to think of, right?

Now, it’s still in beta, sure. Maybe everything will be peaches and cream come the final release. But any software developer not clinically retarded should know better than to fix the fix before fixing the problem. Personally, I’ve already had enough. IE6 is the last browser for which I’m going to make exceptions. Right now, this page doesn’t serve any CSS to IE7 whatsoever. That might change when IE7 Final ships, but if it’s still broken, it won’t.

Microsoft are the richest software company in the world. Apparently they “hope” to have min/max width and height sorted out for the final release. What kind of software company doesn’t a) know what features they’re actually building for a particular release and b) can even consider it acceptable to ship without basic, fundamental functionality missing? A shit software company, that’s what kind. So fuck ‘em.

And y’know, much as I’d like to, obviously I can’t do that in my day job. Management are never going to go for shutting out potentially 90% of your user base. But I don’t know. Fast internet connections are commonplace now. You can switch to a better browser in about five minutes. And the browser isn’t the application. The web that it browses is.

In 1993, iD Software released Doom and people spent hundreds of pounds on new PCs to play it. If a few cool, popular web applications — last.fm, flickr, myspace, heck, even google, etc. — required that people download Firefox or Opera, you can bet they’d do it. Mostly, they don’t give a shit what they use to get the job done. We have to care about that; they’ll use whatever it takes to get at the cool web site their mates are all talking about. Nobody bitches about downloading a Flash plug–in to watch the latest retarded cartoon going round the office. Firefox doesn’t take any longer.

Imagine if a handful of sites like that closed their doors to IE tomorrow. Would the sites die or would IE? What do you reckon IE’s share of the market would be the day after? How compliant do you think the next version of IE would be?

We’re constantly told that we have to support old browsers, browsers that don’t obey the standards, browsers that actively and purposefully break the standards.

Says who?

Review: Tiger and Napoleon Dynamite EPs — The Hussy’s (available from the band by post or ebay).

Tiger opens with the bouncy, slightly Coral–ish title track, which reminds me of Dreaming Of You quite a bit. Then there’s the spikily accusing We Expected and Warm & Fuzzy, which brought to mind ace but search engine unfriendly Danes Nu (whatever happened to them, anyway?). It closes with the super–sweet, Spector–esque, wall–of–sound lament of Snowboard, which is definitely my favourite track from either CD. These are great songs and I’ve been playing this all day.

Napoleon Dynamite is maybe a little bit more gimmicky in places but the influences (or similarities anyway) are harder to place. The eighties, novelty song, one–hit–wonderness of Rock Concert could easily outstay its welcome, I expect, but ends just in time. The falsetto backing singers on Friends Reunited made me laugh, in a good way. And again, the last track, Marty, is maybe the strongest.

(I suspect I’m not selling this terribly well. Hang on…)

Spangly, jangly indiepop that’s too chirpily cheerful for me not to love, with the sort of bitter–sweet, magic in the mundane lyrics that characterized much of C86. Looking forward to seeing them live sometime. Also: girls with pink hair = hott, obv.