Internet Tax

The Dutch government wants to save the newspapers and their little projects by adding tax to internet connections. It is going downhill for newspapers for quite a few years now, free newspapers and online news sites are far more populair than the paper versions. Lower advertising income is another cause to the deminishing of paper popularity.

As far as i'm concerned this is one of the biggest bullshit and time consuming discussions in the Dutch parliament. The people in The Hague are often busy with minor discussions about things they shouldn't be discussing about so it is not a surprise that they are talking about this. I'm opposed as you might have mentioned to internet tax for the benefit of a complete other business branche just for the purpose of saving that branche. We have a lot of news papers here and if a few go extinct, no one realy cares, it's not the protection of animal or plant life we are talking about, it's just a fucking news paper.

The news papers themselves have invested millions in internet, but every project is failing because they stick to their old conservative way of doing things. Internet is a whole new world, a new generation of users, of individuals. So the news paper companies should adapt or go extinct, don't try to get more money for doing the wrong business and clutter out internet, just for the purpose of journalism. I realy hate the arrogancy of those big companies, they are crying like babies with our government and are themselves not flexible enough to change their way of working.

Or should we introduce more tax on other product to save traditional companies? Should we raise taxes on cars to save the bicycle industry? Should we raise taxes on getting money from the ATM to save the banks? No, this is just another time waisting discussion for which the tax payers pay and which will only cost them more money in favor of a rotten industry.

IE6 on Vista

MS has decided to get rid of one of the most awefull browsers ever. IE6 does not run on MS Vista. And that is a bummer. Why? Because i'm a website developer and some companies still use this archaic stuff. Therefore i need to test my creations on IE6.

So there are some options:
1. don't use Vista
2. find some evil genius who ran IE6 on Vista

The first option is non negotiable, my company decided to install Vista on all workplaces and there is no rolling back.

So that leaves the second option, my friends at Tredosoft haven't found a solution yet (these are the guys that produce Multiple IE's; a package with IE3 and up). But via the comments on that site i found: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

It is not a real IE, but it does the trick, i can now succesfully test IE6 on Vista!

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

A must for every programmer to read this interesting and entertaining article by Joel Spolsky.

Quote:
"So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html