Month: January 2008

Sarkozy goes off the rails

Sarkozy declared the death of the 35-hour week, suggested that large companies may have to 2x or 3x the part of their profit they are obliged to share with employees and vowed to replace gross domestic product with a more holistic indicator of economic welfare. He would put a state bank in charge of defending French industry against sovereign wealth funds and other financial predators.

So much for that guy. Same old, same old.

Acid3

Now the top 4 browsers have either released or announced a version of their browser that passes Acid2 work on Acid3 has restarted and Ian Hickson has been adding testcases over the last few weeks. Acid3 is primarily concerned with ECMAScript and the DOM though Selectors Level 3, Media Queries, and data: URIs are also tested. The idea of the test is to run 100 ECMAScript functions that either return true (pass) or false (fail). I believe 16 of those functions are missing at the moment and people are encouraged to contribute. Tests need to be justified by a specification at W3C Candidate Recommendation, W3C Recommendation, or equivalent for non-W3C consortia, and be from 2004 or before. I believe that if browsers once again commit to fixing the bugs found by this test Web authoring will improve tremendously.

France Facebook President

He used that information and got some coverage with French media that started to report the news and really believed that a French man had become the new worldwide president of Facebook without event taking the time to validate the facts or understanding what this title implied.

looks like the “grandes ecoles” are producing morons, eh?

NAR Lies

December 4, 2006: Pending Home Sales Tumble
NAR: “It’s important to focus on where the housing market is now – it appears to be stabilizing, and comparisons with an unsustainable boom mask the fact that home sales remain historically high – they’ll stay that way through 2007.”

October 10, 2007: Realtors group lowers sales forecast
NAR: “The speculative excesses have been removed from the market and home sales are returning to fundamentally healthy levels.”

November 15, 2007: Realtors revise home sales forecast lower again
NAR: “It is possible for even higher home sales activity than we’re forecasting if buyers regain their confidence.”

the best outcome of the recession is if these guys go under.