Jonathan's Blog

Reading the GNU Project philosophy essays in your lunchbreak from testing proprietary software.

Microsoft (sorry, Windows in a vain attempt to reduce the risk of anti-trust suits) Internet Explorer 8 has “compatibility mode” (read incompatibility), to “improve the appearance of web pages designed for older browsers”. In other words: now we’ve built a standards-compliant-ish browser, we need a mode that makes it render like its older, non-compliant siblings because every site on the web serves bad code when it sees our user agent. Once again, Microsoft is hoist upon its own petard.

http://achallengerapproaches.com/ With thanks (and a bullet in the post) to Sean, Ben and whoever else chipped in to the domain, and Jim who took the photo. I HAZ A MEME!

I’ve just been installing Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 (I’ll give it a quick post by the end of the holiday), and was amused by the DRM:

I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that the process of making an installable copy is as simple as ignoring that notice and copying the contents of the CD. You don’t even need the disc in the drive to run it!

Oh, happy days. Now even the £5 Spore Creature Creator requires periodic online checking that you legal copy hasn’t somehow become pirated – although EA have said that they will remove that part from Spore itself (although online activation will still be required). This Penny Arcade on the subject is quite funny.