> Seems that Sidekick and Kin are counter-examples to that statement.
Microsoft threw away the working Sidekick OS and re-built it from the ground up on Win CE so that they could brand KIN as a "Windows Phone". So isn't that really a perfect example?
Exactly. Sidekick was thrown into the trash before the customers even knew it, and Kin was pitched into the dumpster before the launch party was even over.
The only non-Microsoft brand to come out of Microsoft is, curiously, the XBox.
You don't need a virtual machine to sandbox C++; or rather, there's already a virtual machine in action, in the form of virtual memory and CPU privilege levels. The only way C++ (or any other native language) has to access to the outside its world is through calls to the kernel. Without direct file I/O APIs, options are even more limited (e.g. you can't easily write your own DLL loader).
OS X/iOS use a 'sandbox' driver that utilizes TrustedBSD MAC infrastructure ( https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwi... ).
Basically, most system calls can be verified against one or more policy modules, and blocked if non-compliant.
Not really possible with Windows and its bajillion of syscalls (1000 in win32k alone afair)
It may be C++ but it is managed C++ that runs on the above the WinRT layer just like C#, and Javascript for metro. It will have the same restrictions as the other languages. It is actually interesting, in fact when you start a metro project at least in beta, you get the WinRT libraries and that's it. A ton of the traditional .NET classes have been moved into the WinRT library or removed all together.
> The whole point of not loading images is the privacy concern, so if your email client (which is any email client with any kind of traction in the past decade) offers (and defaults to) not loading images, it will indeed not hit the URL.
Several of the clients that is listed as displaying images by default doesn't do so any more. Yahoo, Hotmail, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook Express and Entourage are among these IIRC.
Perhaps "decade" was too generous a word to use. Certainly any client that has traction today defaults to not loading images. Now, that certainly doesn't mean that there are no clients that does this, and that no-one changed that setting.
That the possibility for an email client to be so configured that it would AUTOMATICALLY process a false positive validation, makes this system utterly unusable for any developer with a [brain|conscience].
If the purpose of the validation is simply validation, then what you call a false positive isn't actually false, as the e-mail address evidently was valid.
Including a very clear "I did not ask for this" link in the e-mail would allow false positives to undo any damage done.
Just because a technology can be used for bad (and this one is indeed - anyone auto-loading images in e-mail will be flooded with spam for that exact reason) it does not imply that any use of the technology is bad.
That's not just an IE6 problem. IE8 has full CSS 2.1 support but can't do css3 rounded corners, opacity, or shadows. You can sometimes fake it with -ms-filter and CSS expressions (htc files) but those work just as well on 6 and 7.
That said, I'm happy to drop IE 6 where not required by the client - 8 may not have html5 or CSS 3 features, but at least it's relatively bug free.
After scrolling down to the footer, I found http://robohash.org/ linked: "Robohash is a easy web service that makes it easy to provide unique, robot/alien/monster/whatever images for any text.
Put in any text, such as IP address, email, filename, userid, or whatever else you like, and get back a pretty image for your site."
His final words on the subject (from the next blog post):
"Having read through hundreds of comments from professionals, both civil and uncivil, I’m now convinced: Final Cut Pro X may indeed be ready for the future. But for professional video editors, it’s not yet ready for the present."
I think the "vote" recorded in the link is from a long time ago. Looking at the php.internals mailing list from today, this is what Rasmus is saying:
"Other than a couple of grumpy old-timers, I
think we are in agreement that we should add a short array syntax.
Whether we should extend that to also add a short object syntax is a
secondary question." (http://news.php.net/php.internals/52597)
If the GDrive were similar to Dropbox, a copy of all files would be stored locally and be accessible without an Internet connection.
Google Docs offline access isn't even going to relaunch till later this year, so right now, storing files exclusively in Docs is a non-starter without an always-on Internet connection.
Microsoft threw away the working Sidekick OS and re-built it from the ground up on Win CE so that they could brand KIN as a "Windows Phone". So isn't that really a perfect example?