This is my little page to do rants. Here they are!
I was receintly given a url that did not have an extention. The web server said that the page was text/plain because it did not know better, which Netscape correctly displays as raw text. The page was actually suppose to be an html page. It turns out that Microsoft decided not to trust what the web server says (why should you trust what the author of the page wrote? He doesn't know what he wants the user to see!) and see that you have html tags in your document, and display it as html. You don't even have to have your document wrapped in the html tag for it to interpet it as html! This is such broken behavior that it isn't even funny!
I wrote a test page to show you how broken IE is. If you open it under Netscape, you will see the html tags, but if you open it under IE, you will get your title set, and it displayed in a pretty font, with a horizontal rule in it. I have receintly tested and seen that even the latest IE (5.5) still does this. Yeh for Microsoft.
They send your order confirmation in HTML e-mail messages to make sure that everyone cannont read them. So, for people like me, who continue to use a text based email client, has to go through about five steps to read them. They also don't even support setting an option to NOT send HTML email which ever other decent company does!
You'd think a company would want to make products that are less work for them instead of more work. Look at their M5271 combo Firewire (1394a) and USB 2.0 chip. Instead of making a simple multifunction PCI device that follows the standards for both interfaces (FW-OHCI for Firewire and EHCI for USB), they decide to invent their own Access Bus single interface. This means that special code will have to be written for operating systems like FreeBSD and Linux to work with this card.
I have sent a request for a data sheet for the chip on January 2, 2005. I said that NDA was N/A since some data will end up being public. We'll see how well they want to support open source.
It's now the 11th of January and I have yet to hear from ALi. So, I sent them one more email, but unless I hear back from them in the next day or two, I will give up, and assume ALi has no intrest in supporting the card.
Ok, I gave them one more chance. Used their web form to send one last message on the 19th. I haven't even heard a single thing from them. Unless I hear back in the next couple days, I'll make sure this gets documented as completely unsupported.