Steam also tends to sell games for dirt cheap, or at least below retail value. Being unable to re-sell off of Steam is bad, don't get me wrong, but the punch hurts a little less if I can't sell the $5 Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, as opposed to the $60 copy of HALO 4.
In general (but not always), people tend to accept the lack of being able to resale as a trade-off for lower prices, digital download, etc. Maybe one day (pipe dream), Steam will set up an e-Used Game Market that Steam users could buy, sell, and trade games around with. I have no idea how legal it would be for them to do that (i.e. certain publishers might not like it, be able to stop it, etc.), but it would certainly alleviate a lot of concerns.
That is a pretty crappy scenario, definitely. It's really silly that one has to have deep pockets to fight the silliness that is the telecom lobby, but if it has to be done, I'm glad Google is fighting the "good" fight, I guess.
If someone has a client that can't render a standard page, then that's their problem and we should have left them to it - eventually they would have complained to the relevant person and their browser would become closer to the standard.
Not every client can get their browser changed. Not every client is willing to lift a finger to improve their standard either, and can happily move on to a competitor who's more than willing to accommodate them.
If you have CSS, in this day and age, that does detection of the user-agent, then that's your problem
Tell that to clients who want a particular design. They don't care about standards, they care that the pages look correct across all browsers, including legacy versions of IE dating back to 7 (or, even in some cases, 6), and on mobile devices. They're not going to say "oh, IE 7 doesn't support [standard]? Okay, you can cut that piece out then. ^^" They're going to not appreciate that your pages don't look right, and they won't care why.
Personally, I use Opera - have done for nearly a decade now. If it doesn't work in Opera, I move on and go somewhere else.
Yeah, filtering one's web traffic based on user-agent string is stupid. I think it was a poor attempt to say "we only have to design for one web site!" by "forcing" users to use "correct" browsers. That being said, I've not seen this practice used for some time (maybe because I use Chrome? I've not seen it at work either...)
And as others have said, the fancy stuff usually is mandated by people over the site designers' heads, either for the client, or because Mister Boss Man wants it, or for some other reason. Yes, in a perfect world, we'd only use HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc that we knew worked 100% of the time across any medium that can display a web page, but that just isn't how the world turns.
I E-file, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, though, it gives me peace of mind to get the instant feedback, and getting it all taken care of as soon as my W2s are in order. Federal, State, Local all online.
To when web sites tried to disable right-clicking to "hide" their source code. I was in middle school and knew that was baloney...
Actually, this reminds me of web sites hosting lyrics, too, that either attempt to disable right-click or insert their website in tiny text between words of lyrics.
Reading the article tells me that this sort of "fee" doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. I've never been to the web site in question, but if I ever needed to and wished to copy some text, nothing prevents me from doing so (heck, I'm running NotScript now, so I'd get no pop-up anyway)...
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand
