From Redmond With Love

theweatherelectric writes "Continuing the tradition, the Internet Explorer team has congratulated Mozilla on shipping Firefox 4. Given the proposed accelerated release reschedule for Firefox, Mozillians may need to watch their diet in future."

Comments

Nobody is completely bad

[Locke2005]

Once again, the IE folk have proven they are the coolest group in Redmond!

Re:Nobody is completely bad

[Locke2005]

Of course, that's kinda like being the least slutty girl at the Home for Wayward Girls...

Re:Nobody is completely bad

[WrongSizeGlass]

Once again, the IE folk have proven they are the coolest group in Redmond!

Um, nope ... the cake is a lie.

Re:Nobody is completely bad

[uvajed_ekil]

...and it will probably not arrive on time, will not be of the flavor you expected, and it might kill you.

Re:Nobody is completely bad

[Cyberax]

"And no... IE9 is not yet standards compliant - better, yes - but as good as Chrome or FF (in that department)? No. "

IE9 is as good as Chrome or FF for all practical purposes in regards to standards compliance. It passes ACID3 with the same score as FF4, for example.

Re:Nobody is completely bad

[lennier1]

Nah, they just forgot to mention you can't cut it without a Microsoft knife, or eat it without Microsoft spoons... ;)

Sounds less like a Microsoft cake and more like an Apple pie.

Rivalry

[xMrFishx]

That's the sort of rivalry I like. Competition between engineers tends to be good humored banter. Competition between marketeers seems to be cut throat warmongering. Shame really. It should go back to the days of jolly good what what old sport, I say good game with a touch of the old one two.

Re:Rivalry

[PopeRatzo]

Competition between engineers tends to be good humored banter.

Management hates this sort of thing.

Engineering used to be a career where you could make a good living and have a little dignity. More and more it seems, the people at the top would rather it not be that way. They don't like the notion of a sector of the work force that thinks it's almost as good as the guys who provide the capital. That's why most engineers' working conditions are worse today than they were ten years ago, and their purchasing power has declined. Ask someone who's looked for an engineering job recently. A lot of the fun and a surprising amount of the reward have gone out of it.

No matter how well trained, no matter how important you are, how vital your job, you are still just a worker, and as such, you cannot be allowed to get above your station. This is how ownership thinks.

Re:Rivalry

[ShakaUVM]

>>Management hates this sort of thing.

Yeah, because I'm sure the IE dev team sent the cake behind management's back. Err... again.

Those tricksy engineers! Got to keep them in their place.

Believe it or not, Microsoft treating their engineers like shit is a good way to get them to go work for Google. So they don't.

Re:Rivalry

[ShakaUVM]

>>Their engineers may be treated relatively well, but I bet they don't earn nearly as much as the managers do. They most probably have less secondary benefits as well.

From what I understand from my friends working for the evil empire, you have a RPG-esque "level" when you work at Microsoft. Collect enough "XP" among each of your rated categories, and you level up. Gain a pay raise, and later on, a promotion. You can either stay as a senior developer (or higher level titled developers) or branch into management at some point. From what I understand, in a general sense, your level controls your salary, but past a certain point it may be easier to level up as a manager instead of a developer.

Re:Rivalry

[10101001 10101001]

Wow, ya think so? So you're saying that the people above the engineers actually make more money and benefits than the people they're above? Get outta here *gay hand wave, cheesy smile*.

Just like the NBA, the NFL, etc. Oh, wait.. Yea, it'd almost seem like in some industries it's recognized that just because you're above someone else doesn't inherently mean you should be paid more. It's almost like, oh, experience, importance, and replace-ability also factor into it. For white collar workers, there's plenty of superstars which are pretty irreplaceable with plenty of experience and importance to the future of a department or a whole company. In the mean time, a newly hired manager might very well be rather replaceable even if he's above those superstars.

In short, why should it be presumed that a manager who is paid reasonable well and has the chance to be promoted in the future as he/she builds experience, importance, and proves his/her irreplaceableness should be paid more than his subordinates? Maybe it makes sense in blue collar work (although even there, I'd tend to disagree at times because in some industries the product sold has plenty of profit and the managers are as much or even more replaceable than a trained blue collar worker), but I can't see how one can presume it in white collar work, especially when the boss and subordinate are in different job classifications. Now, if it were one engineer and a subordinate engineer or one manager and a subordinate manager, I can see more room to presume. But, it's still always down to a case-by-case basis.

Re:Rivalry

[PopeRatzo]

So you're saying that the people above the engineers actually make more money and benefits than the people they're above?

Depends what you mean by "above". An associate dean for finance is "above" a superstar English prof sitting in a named chair, but certainly won't make more money. The top administrator of a hospital won't make as much as the top neurosurgeon.

Remember, these hierarchies were put in place artificially to reverse the natural order of labor preceding capital that would exist in a "free market". And since these hierarchies are put in place only when ownership is "free" to do so (when there's no organization of labor) it's another example of why "free markets" when it comes to employment do not and can not exist. And not only do these hierarchies exist, but they exist for the sole purpose of limiting the power of individual workers, to create insecurity among them and to keep them working for as little as possible.

When you look at the top of that same hierarchy, the same forces are not at work, again showing how capital when free to do so (when there's no regulation) will act to work against the free market. There is absolutely no good reason why senior management should earn more than 400 times what an average line worker makes. "But that's the "free market"" you will hear people say. But see, it's not at all.

On to something

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so the primary reason for Firefox moving to shorter releases is to get more cakes out of Redmond.

Nice try, Firefox.

1 Matthew Holloway on March 22nd, 2011 at 3:45 pm

I think Matthew Holloway (not me, BTW) may be on to something there.

Re:On to something

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's another good one: "Considering the way they drove Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox into near oblivion with devious practices, this seems a lot like sending a valentine’s day card to your rape victim, every year."

3 no on March 22nd, 2011 at 4:16 pm

Re:Browser wars, yay! (For real.)

[blair1q]

I'd bet the existence of Firefox means there are about 100 more IE devs employed than there would otherwise be.

The cake's a meager kickback.

Ah, the good ol' days!

[AsmCoder8088]

Nothing like a bit of friendly competition, heh..

Re:Lies

[blair1q]

> The cake is a lie9

FTFY.

Re:Terrible Cake

[blair1q]

Nope. Made it themselves, with MS Cake.

Re:Browser wars, yay! (For real.)

[kevinmenzel]

Get a new OS. Or a new computer. Seriously, I'm running Windows 7 on an 8 year old laptop right now, with 1GB of RAM. It's a 1.3 Celeron, and it runs just as good as XP did on the same machine. The laptop is so old that the screen hinges broke off, so it's hooked up to my CRT on input #2. Yes I have all the visual glitz turned off, but I still get the fancy new audio stack out of the bargain, plus it's running IE9. I pretty much just use that computer for web browsing, CD-burning, and some other basic tasks, but it does the job.

Cookie!

[hugetoon]

Talk about a big one...
Are they testing for a buffer overflow?

Re:Terrible Cake

[amicusNYCL]

Call down Mr. Waddams, hopefully you'll get some next year. Now back to Storage B with you.

Re:Browser wars, yay! (For real.)

[Dunbal]

With HTML5, IE9 might be able to run Win Xp?

Cool, but where are the standards?

[dmomo]

Sure that cake looks great with IE, but slap any other browser on it, and the "C" in "Congratulations" will be smack dab in the middle of the cake with all of the other text oozing of the right onto the table.