This blog is moving to Yahoo! Profiles at http://profiles.yahoo.com/blog/GSBHPXZFNRM2QRAP3PXNGFMFVU. The blog facilities at Profiles are strictly inferior to those at 360. Hopefully, Profiles will quickly improve over time. I wish that Yahoo had made Profiles strictly better than 360 before shutting 360 down.

The only honest browser is Opera, which identifies itself as Opera. Unfortunately, Opera has been snagged by another dimension of webmaster stupidity.

Opera is now testing Opera 10. It turns out that Opera 10 fails on many sites that tolerate Opera because there are imbecilic coders who assumed that the version number would always be less than 10. So Opera has been forced to lie. It is going to be identifying Opera 10 and above as Opera 9.80.

Opera is the first to get to 10. Netscape's failures stopped it at 8. IE stopped at 6 because Microsoft thought the web was finished. They have resumed, but have only gotten up to 8 since the hiatus.

If you are a developer, check your code. It really isn't hard to do this stuff correctly. It really isn't.

Web security is like medicine - trying to do good for an evolved body of kludges.
Mark Miller

The DLNA home network becomes a vector for delivering viruses, assault advertising, and spam programming to every digital media device in the home. DLNA will make it possible for people to experience everything they hate about their computers and the Internet with their TVs. Viruses that take over the PC will be able to take control of all home media. Viruses can change channels, delete programs, replace programs with evil programs, and possibly infect the other devices. A virus in the computer can launch a Denial of Service attack against the TV. DLNA has no security mechanism of any kind to protect the home system.

He said that no one would create such attacks. I reminded him about the current state of email and spam, and then he admitted that the attacks were likely. He suggested that a solution might be to have the TV and computer authenticate each other. I showed him why that wouldn't work. He then suggested that people would need to get firewalls in their home between the computer and DLNA devices. I explained why that was also a really bad idea. Finally he expressed optimism that eventually DLNA will eventually identify and solve the problem somehow.

I think that the computer-engineering approach to convergence can be just as wrong as Hollywood's approach. Consumers do not need and have not asked for the Digital Living Room. They will reject it if it is not really easy to use, or if it does not deliver high value and convenience, or if it introduces problems. The media companies have looked at the threats but not the opportunities. The technology companies have looked at the opportunities but not the threats.

They offer this as evidence that Microsoft is incorrigible and unrepentant:

As just one example, Microsoft recently announced that Internet Explorer 8 would support a feature called “local storage,” which allows websites to store a limited amount of data on users’ computers so that users can interact with those sites offline, a feature that could help web applications become effective replacements for traditional desktop applications. This feature is part of HTML 5, the next version of the HTML standard used for writing web pages. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s implementation is subtly incompatible with the standard, which could lead web developers who test their sites in Internet Explorer 8 to write their sites in a way that will not work in other browsers.

HTML 5 is not the next version of the standard. It is a proposal, a work in progress. It has not been through a formal review process. It has not been officially approved by W3C or by any other standards body. Until it is formally adopted, no browser maker should be compelled to implement it. Being subtly incompatible with a working draft is not evidence of bad intent. Indeed, there are some people (such as me, for example), who feel that the whole HTML 5 process is out of control and should be reset, starting over with new rules and better management.

Microsoft has done bad things in the past, and I think ECIS does good in reviewing those sins. I do not know if Microsoft has reformed and is now blameless. If in fact Microsoft is still behaving badly, then I demand that ECIS get its fact straight. A committee for interoperable systems should demonstrate a deeper understanding of the way that standards work.

A Turkish Airlines Airbus A340-300, registration TC-JDK performing flight TK-2 from New York JFK,NY (USA) to Istanbul Ataturk (Turkey) with 185 passengers and 15 crew, experienced cabin pressurization problems just before reaching Wales (UK) while enroute over the Irish Sea and initiated an emergency descent reaching 9000 feet westnorthwest of Cardiff,WL (UK). The crew decided to divert to London Heathrow,EN (UK), where the airplane landed safely about 1 hour later around 6:30 local (05:30Z). No injuries were reported.

The airplane was repaired, departed again around 09:00 local (08:00Z) and reached Istanbul with a total delay of 4.5 hours.

Passengers reported, that they suffered from shortness of breath, ear pain and suffocating feelings. The captain warned in an announcement, that the oxygen masks may come down, the masks however did not deploy.

I was on that flight. We were told that we were going to land in Shannon for repairs, which changed to Manchester, and finally changed to Heathrow. The worst part was the heat. The air was stale and very hot. I wanted to crack open a window, but I had an aisle seat. There is nothing to the speculation that the problem was caused by goats getting into the machinery. There were no goats on this flight. None.

不得不说，我葱白他。

According to Yahoo's Babelfish it means

Can not but say, my onion in vain he.

Google's translation is

Have to say that I very light blue him.

which I like better, but I still don't know what it means.

So I tried several free online translation services to get another opinion, and they all returned either the Yahoo version or the Google version. It seems that so much of the Open Web is just parasites repackaging Yahoo and Google's free services. Except for Microsoft's Live, which offered

have to say, i worship him.

It is not often that I get to say this: I think Microsoft got it right.