Archives for 2001

Ed notes

October 30, 2001 by Michael Boyle

Ed notes that Byte Magazine is set to return in early 2002.

been interested in the way that newspapers cover stories, not just the stories themselves. What’s the slant? Is a theme evident that is responding to a particularly important piece of news? What about bias (corporate or individual)? Things like that. The Organization of News Ombudsmen site looks like it might be a good addition to my media diet.

Jonathan Schell has written

October 27, 2001 by Michael Boyle

a brilliant article in his Letters From Ground Zero series: Annihilation and the Ways of Peace. “The world is sick. It cannot be cured with America’s new war. The ways of peace–adopted not as a distant goal but as a practical necessity in the present–are the only cure.”

The wires were buzzing

October 25, 2001 by Michael Boyle

today when the story broke that MSN.com shuts out non-Microsoft browsers. Their stated reason? “‘For browsers that we know don’t support those standards or that we can’t insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the’ standards.”

It seems that they’re just pushing the browser upgrade campaign, as suggested by the nice folks at the Web Standards Project.

Well it might seem like that’s what this is about. But it’s not. They’ve clearly taken on similar tactics – but wrapping themselves up in W3C standards? It’s BS. Utter bullshit.

Fact is, for all their hemming and hawing about web standards, MSN works fine in Netscape 6.1 for OS X, Omniweb, and even Netscape 4.7x (well, it displays, if only minimally). No, this isn’t about web standards. This is obviously about trying to get people to upgrade to a particular standards-compliant browser.

I’m not surprised or angry with MS though. I expect this sort of behaviour from them. But to pervert the work of people legitimately trying to support and encourage web standards? Bullshit.

Fuck me

October 25, 2001 by Michael Boyle

Fuck me: just answering the call, as Heather put it.