Republicans have been whining about the "liberal media" for several decades, what did they do about it? Repeal the Fairness Doctrine, then continue to whine about the "liberal media".
Does that make any sense?
The Republicans created the opportunity for an actual "liberal media", but it never happened because, by and large, the Republicans control it; even more now than in 1987, before all the media consolidation happened. The "liberal media" is a myth created and fostered by conservatives in order to make the media less liberal, by degrees.
The Fairness Docrine needs to come back, no matter who wants it. It's the correct (not left or right) thing to do.
The end of the fairness doctrine is what allowed corporate news outlets to project their owner's agenda onto the public, and allowed the birth of Fox News. You think Fox could continue to exist unchanged if the Fairness Doctrine was reinstated? Unlikely. O'Reilly's "shut up" and "turn his mike off" rudeness would be the first thing to go... good riddance. Subtler changes would certainly follow at the other news networks.
Edward R. Murrow has been spinning in his grave for 20 because of this. Can someone check if he's slowed down yet?
If everything that could possibly be used to cause bodily harm got banned, there'd hardly be anything left. This is why banning gels and liquids on airplanes is so rediculously stupid (not to mention an overreaction to a scientifically infeasable plot).
New Line may have the production rights to The Hobbit, but MGM has the distribution rights. IT was MGM who approached New Line about doing the Hobbit movie(s), and MGM wants Jackson to direct. So does Saul Zaents.
IIRC, production rights revert back to Saul Zaents some time this year if New Line has not legitimately begun production.
Since MGM and New Line are partnering up to do the Hobbit (neither can do it alone, since the rights are split up), MGM could simply stall the process until New Line loses the production rights. Then MGM relicenses production from Zaents, asks Jackson to direct, and everyone is happy.
Except the fans (who may have to wait a while longer for a "proper" Hobbit film to get done), and Bob Shaye, who will miss out on the preciousss profitses from the Hobbit. He simply needs to STFU and allow the audits of the LOTR films to happen.
the reason Firefox and Opera are "more secure" is that there are less people using them
I'm sick of this argument that basically amounts to security by obscurity, which everyone knows doesn't work. It also insults the Mozilla and Opera developers, who don't have the advantage of dovetailing their browser with the underlying operating system, and the disadvantage of being steered by non-technical forces such as marketing.
Almopst every browser security related story on/. for the last 2.5 years has at least one anecdote that amounts to "I replaced IE with [browser] on my [personal relation]'s Windows PC, and now they have [a better experience]". Attack vectors have nothing to do with market share.
What was the story the other day, IE unpatched for 284 days last year compared to Firefox's 9? That right there catapults the marketshare security drivel right out the window.
The reason Firefox and Opera are more secure is the design and execution of their code.
Maybe MS' plan was to fragment the community, but so far I've only seen two opinions about the MS/Novell deal: either "it's evil" or "hmm". I have yet to see anyone cheering the deal, much less defiantly declaring that they will stay at their jobs because this deal is a good idea.
And if Novell wants to keep hyping the interoperability side of the deal, that lies solely in MS' hands. Only MS can provide the specifications to make interop with Windows happen. Interop with Linux is easy, because the specs and code are freely available. If MS really wanted interop, they could have done it themselves a long time ago without help from anyone.
Trouble is, they've proven time and again that they don't want interop with anything. Such is the life of a convicted monopolist.
I'm specifically interested in this so-called "perfect website" that was used as a baseline.
Other factors could contribute also, from the ergonomics and lighting of the testing facility to the colors of the sites presented.
How many of these sites were Flash vs standards-based? What was the average text size? Contrast between text and background? Number of images, and their sizes? How about CSS vs table layouts? How did "Pretty" sites (eg, digg.com) fare against "ugly" sites (eg, cragslist)? Static navigation elements vs complex multi-level fly-out menus? There are a lot of possible factors and criteria that go unmentioned, at least in TFA.
"The message is clear: Businesses need to provide simple and easy-to-navigate layouts, whilst focusing on speed and uptime."
I'm not sure if I completely agree with the implication that hardware infrastructure and network reliability trumps usability. For me, a site that is designed badly or behaves badly on the browser side is a greater offense than a site that loads a little slower than most.
Navigation is but a portion of layout. Other studies have shown that the brain subconsciously identifies all the major areas of a web page (header, navigation, main content, ancillary content) in 1/20 of a second after the page loads, and that the common practice of placing navigation/secondary content a left-hand column causes people to ignore anything in the right-side column (a phenomenon known as "right side blindness"), because people have learned that most of the time, what's in the right-hand column is less related (if it's relevant at all) to their task at hand... typically third party banners or other cruft.
I hope that the conclusion is that modern, CSS driven, user-centric designs are less stress inducing than bloated, image-laden table layouts, but I get the feeling that the reseearchers aren't prepared to commit to saying it.
millions of Internet users who will soon be running IE7
This depends on millions of new Intel machines being purchased after January 30. Febrary and March are the slowest period of the year for any non-essential item, as people are recovering from their holiday spending binges. Retail box sales of Vista will be all but limited to hard core gamers who want DirectX 10 a year before any games actually take advantage of it.
Ok, so IE7 is available on XP if you have SP2 installed. Still not staggering market share if you ask me.
The typical user doesn't notice anything above the top of the page, including the address bar, which is why there's an anti-phishing toolbar in the first place. They'll only notice the color change the first time it happens because a semi-helpful, condescending dialog box will pop up, which the user will check the "do not display again" box, click OK, and continue on their oblivious way without having read the actual message. After that, they'll probably never realize that it changes colors, and if they do, they'll momentarily wonder why, and continue on their merry way.
If something is routinely ignored, it's not useful because it's not being used. This is just one more thing that users will ignore while they submit their credit card info to http://amazon.com.hahawepwnyou.com/ to buy the latest American Idol greatest hits CD.
MS is widely considered to overdo it with the handholding of Windows users, making everything seem cozy and easy, and then they go and implement this toolbar which only gives the illusion of security, in the hopes that the ignorant masses they've created will pay attention to it.
Not gonna happen. Phishing will continue until people learn to use the Internet, jsut like spam will continue until SMTP is replaced.
The real effect of CSS (and its goal) is separation of content from presentation.
CSS is about as much programming as HTML. Ever tried to execute a stylesheet? I don't think so. Calling it a macro system proves you have no idea what you're talking about.
The only added complexity in using CSS is that it's another syntax to learn. Offsetting that is the fact that table layouts are bloated and their structure is hard to follow. CSS layouts result in leaner, cleaner documents. As they say, "It's about content, stupid."
As for the "artists", they're still around, thinking that a web page is a canvas that they can paint whatever they like on. They never knew HTML, they didn't bother to learn CSS, they have no use for any web standards because they are ar-teests, that's why they use Flash. Or still slice up their Photoshop mockups into tables.
I'm baffled and saddened that you're proud of this. Do you still have a Pentium I as your main desktop? How's that bandwidth bill treating you, since your Intarweb pages are 20% to 60% more bloated than they could be?
I keep a somewhat comprehensive (18,000 line) hosts file on my machine, and have for a few years now. I don't get barraged with as many cookies (or banners) as most people.
This cookies-in-the-results behavior isn't a pre-fetch issue. It started well after I switched (from Mozilla) to Firefox 1.5.x in August, maybe in the last month or so.
Other key features for cookie blocking are to block cookies from domains other than the window's URI, and block cookies returned from non text/* or application/* mime types (images, I'm looking at you).
It took me a while to get FilterSetG to block urchin.js, but I think I finally managed to.
Cookie abuse reached new heights a few weeks ago when top sites in Google search results throw cookies on the search results page. So far it's not a guaranteded occurance, and only happens for the top search result. Still, it's jumping the gun.
I can't wait for the Mozilla devs to clean up their cookie code so that blocking cookies is as easy and configurable as blocking images. Even being able to prompt to block everything other than a session cookie would be a nice improvement.
This isn't about Free Software, this is about Web Standards and freedom of choice.
if a business wants to reach people using the most modern hardware and software then they are going to have to go out of their way to support a wide variety of standards and browsers
As a developer, I can tell you that I don't have to go out of my way to support modern browsers. I have to go very far out of my way to support Internet Explorer which can't be considerd a modern browser (even IE7), whose standards support is abysmal compared to everything else on the market today. This is a side effect of my knowing how to do my job well.
Once again, an innocent suffers in the name of one of MS' shitty products.
Making a business decision is one thing, but telling your customers to fuck off because your business decision doesn't jive with their personal choices is downright rude.
As for games, it is a more similar issue than you probably realize, because the same people are meddling with the market. If game studios would stop developing against DirectX and start using OpenGL instead, it would be much easier for them to support platforms other than Windows.
How many cars and trucks are sold in France without a driver? By his reasoning, a vehicle without a driver is not a product because it doesn't work.
How many pastry ovens are sold in France without a heat source? By his reasoning, a pastry oven without gas or electricity is not a product because it doesn't work.
How many wine glasses are sold in France without wine? By his reasoning, an wine galss without wine in it is not a product because it doesn't work.
Even a 10 year old running a lemonade stand could see that this logic doesn't have a hole, because it is a hole.
So, we officially need to find a replacement word for the first A in RIAA, because it doesn't standa for Artists anymore. I suggest something like this:
Recording Industry Asshats of America.
If this doesn't get the artists' attention, nothing will. I wonder what Lars thinks about it. He managed to sue Napster out of any meaningful existence, maybe he can be of use here. It's not like Metallica is doing much of anything now anyway.
MS Office formats have always been a "de facto" standard, meaning they appear to be standards merely because a majority of people use them, and because there is only one implementation of them (regardless of versions). No matter how many industry groups, in this case ECMA, give them a stamp of approval, they will never achieve true "standard" status.
Just because the vast majority of people use something (especially when they have no means to consider alternatives) does not make it a standard. That is textbook "de facto" status.
Standards are what everyone agrees on after open, cooperative discussion. MS simply churns out what they think would be useful, influenced more by their bottom line than by user need. As long as alternative formats exist, are implemented, and are actively used and developed, MS Office formats will never be truly "standard", no matter how lopsided the usage shares are. The patent and IP issues just make this more true.
I'm sure everyone would laugh just as hard if ECMA (or any other group) had declared AIM a standard over Jabber, ICQ, MSN messenger, Yahoo IM, or even IRC (Jabber and IRC being the closest thing to standards among all of them).
There are countless examples of multiple ends to the same means in hardware and software. Which is the standard among SCSI/IDE/SATA? AMD vs Intel? MP3 vs Ogg? Gnome vs KDE? Emacs vs vi? None of them.
MS is incapable of producing a real standard, unlike the *NIX community which has been doing so for decades. I can't think of a single RFC published by MS that has influenced other platforms, meanwhile MS is forced to implement (sometimes badly) such things as TCP/IP and email (among many other).
Calling the MS Office formats a true standard is a meaningless label that can only be explained by MS having bought it. So they put a bright red "ECMA says this is standard" sticker on every box of Office 2007... the average person has no idea what the ECMA is.
Regardless of whether this article has any substance or is merely a frothing rant on PJ's part, I think (inadvertently?) she's overestimating the adoption rate of GPLv3.
Linus has clearly stated that he intends to keep the kernel under v2, and most of the larger projects have yet to make any meaningful statement about it.
Never mind the scores of smaller projects that don't have the resources or prowess to make an informed descision about which GPL version to use; most of them will stick with v2. I wouldn't be surprised if most projects simply followed Linus' example.
First, an exploit in IE causes MS to tell us to type in links manually rather than click them.
Now MS advises everyone not to use their flagship bloatware? There simply aren't enough R's, O's, F's and L's in the fabric of space-time to express how funny this is.
Or they're just scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas on how to get people to upgrade to Vista and Office 2007.
Web 2.0 is an empty buzzword for the evolution of the internet. There is no single event that can be unequivocably be called the atart of "Web 2.0".
According to Daniel Glazman, Tim Berners-Lee has officially given up on XHTML as of last week's W3C Advisory Committee meeting in Tokyo, and then apparently explains what Web 3.0 is supposed to be.
TBL is apparently not the visionary we all thought he was. Apparently no one in the W3C can (or is willing to) figure out how to relegate HTML to the junk heap, like a 286 computer: it was a good idea at the time, but newer technology has come along. Eventually, someone will want to see one in a museum. Contrary to popular reports, the W3C has not fixed itself, but merely rolled back the clock on itself a decade or so.
After 8 years, what do all the developers who embraced XHTML get for our efforts? Our smorgasboard of web standards becomes a (tag) soup kitchen once again.
Web 2.0 is a fleeting concept with no substance, it's existence can only be inferred by serruptitiously attributing semi-related events to its influence. Now that the inventor of the WWW has bought into this folly, and simultaneously abandoned one of the W3C's greatest achievements, how can anyone put any stock in what he or anyone else at W3C says?
I held out longer than most in my hopes that web standards could be straightened out, but now the W3C is dead by its own hand, after 6 or more years of atrophy, manic depression, and schizophrenia.
Or maybe it is just that people in marketing or somewhere else have more say in the matter and end up overriding the right decisions.
This is one of the most insightful things about the design of MS products that I've ever read.
Oh sure, they say they do everything for the benefit of the user, but rarely do we (the informed users) see the payoff. There's always some ulterior motive behind the scenes which makes more sense. Users don't want DRM. A transparent UI will lose its novelty in a matter of weeks. It's 2006 for shit's sake, we don't need 16 bit compatibility, but we want 64 bit functionality.
I believe that after the success of DOS MS went into a stagnant marketing mode for Windows and everything that rides on it. With each new version of Windows, the emphasis is less on actually using the product than on the new features that will entice people to buy the product. Windows isn't designed to be used, it's designed to be sold. Vista doesn't have a compelling set of new features, so expect the marketing blitz to ring rather hollow.
Never mind that the Vista launch will happen in the dead of winter, the slowest business period of any year. People spend January, February and sometimes March recovering from their holiday debt, er, shopping, sprees. By the time people have money to spend, OSX Leopard will be the buzz in everyone's ear.
Slashdot Mirror
Republicans have been whining about the "liberal media" for several decades, what did they do about it? Repeal the Fairness Doctrine, then continue to whine about the "liberal media".
Does that make any sense?
The Republicans created the opportunity for an actual "liberal media", but it never happened because, by and large, the Republicans control it; even more now than in 1987, before all the media consolidation happened. The "liberal media" is a myth created and fostered by conservatives in order to make the media less liberal, by degrees.
The Fairness Docrine needs to come back, no matter who wants it. It's the correct (not left or right) thing to do.
The end of the fairness doctrine is what allowed corporate news outlets to project their owner's agenda onto the public, and allowed the birth of Fox News. You think Fox could continue to exist unchanged if the Fairness Doctrine was reinstated? Unlikely. O'Reilly's "shut up" and "turn his mike off" rudeness would be the first thing to go... good riddance. Subtler changes would certainly follow at the other news networks.
Edward R. Murrow has been spinning in his grave for 20 because of this. Can someone check if he's slowed down yet?
The people who use them are.
If everything that could possibly be used to cause bodily harm got banned, there'd hardly be anything left. This is why banning gels and liquids on airplanes is so rediculously stupid (not to mention an overreaction to a scientifically infeasable plot).
New Line may have the production rights to The Hobbit, but MGM has the distribution rights. IT was MGM who approached New Line about doing the Hobbit movie(s), and MGM wants Jackson to direct. So does Saul Zaents.
IIRC, production rights revert back to Saul Zaents some time this year if New Line has not legitimately begun production.
Since MGM and New Line are partnering up to do the Hobbit (neither can do it alone, since the rights are split up), MGM could simply stall the process until New Line loses the production rights. Then MGM relicenses production from Zaents, asks Jackson to direct, and everyone is happy.
Except the fans (who may have to wait a while longer for a "proper" Hobbit film to get done), and Bob Shaye, who will miss out on the preciousss profitses from the Hobbit. He simply needs to STFU and allow the audits of the LOTR films to happen.
I'm sick of this argument that basically amounts to security by obscurity, which everyone knows doesn't work. It also insults the Mozilla and Opera developers, who don't have the advantage of dovetailing their browser with the underlying operating system, and the disadvantage of being steered by non-technical forces such as marketing.
Almopst every browser security related story on /. for the last 2.5 years has at least one anecdote that amounts to "I replaced IE with [browser] on my [personal relation]'s Windows PC, and now they have [a better experience]". Attack vectors have nothing to do with market share.
What was the story the other day, IE unpatched for 284 days last year compared to Firefox's 9? That right there catapults the marketshare security drivel right out the window.
The reason Firefox and Opera are more secure is the design and execution of their code.
So what if IBM's new chips run at 5GHz or more? What about gigaflops?
I had hoped the majority of slashdotters would be able to see past the megahertz myth by now.
Apparently not.
That TFA can only document "safe" status regarding known vulnerabilities for IE or real browsers.
Someone needs to report that IE (6 and 7) has had craptastic standards support for 2195 days of this century (as of 4 Jan 2007).
Maybe MS' plan was to fragment the community, but so far I've only seen two opinions about the MS/Novell deal: either "it's evil" or "hmm". I have yet to see anyone cheering the deal, much less defiantly declaring that they will stay at their jobs because this deal is a good idea.
And if Novell wants to keep hyping the interoperability side of the deal, that lies solely in MS' hands. Only MS can provide the specifications to make interop with Windows happen. Interop with Linux is easy, because the specs and code are freely available. If MS really wanted interop, they could have done it themselves a long time ago without help from anyone.
Trouble is, they've proven time and again that they don't want interop with anything. Such is the life of a convicted monopolist.
I'm specifically interested in this so-called "perfect website" that was used as a baseline.
Other factors could contribute also, from the ergonomics and lighting of the testing facility to the colors of the sites presented.
How many of these sites were Flash vs standards-based? What was the average text size? Contrast between text and background? Number of images, and their sizes? How about CSS vs table layouts? How did "Pretty" sites (eg, digg.com) fare against "ugly" sites (eg, cragslist)? Static navigation elements vs complex multi-level fly-out menus? There are a lot of possible factors and criteria that go unmentioned, at least in TFA.
I'm not sure if I completely agree with the implication that hardware infrastructure and network reliability trumps usability. For me, a site that is designed badly or behaves badly on the browser side is a greater offense than a site that loads a little slower than most.
Navigation is but a portion of layout. Other studies have shown that the brain subconsciously identifies all the major areas of a web page (header, navigation, main content, ancillary content) in 1/20 of a second after the page loads, and that the common practice of placing navigation/secondary content a left-hand column causes people to ignore anything in the right-side column (a phenomenon known as "right side blindness"), because people have learned that most of the time, what's in the right-hand column is less related (if it's relevant at all) to their task at hand... typically third party banners or other cruft.
I hope that the conclusion is that modern, CSS driven, user-centric designs are less stress inducing than bloated, image-laden table layouts, but I get the feeling that the reseearchers aren't prepared to commit to saying it.
This depends on millions of new Intel machines being purchased after January 30. Febrary and March are the slowest period of the year for any non-essential item, as people are recovering from their holiday spending binges. Retail box sales of Vista will be all but limited to hard core gamers who want DirectX 10 a year before any games actually take advantage of it.
Ok, so IE7 is available on XP if you have SP2 installed. Still not staggering market share if you ask me.
The typical user doesn't notice anything above the top of the page, including the address bar, which is why there's an anti-phishing toolbar in the first place. They'll only notice the color change the first time it happens because a semi-helpful, condescending dialog box will pop up, which the user will check the "do not display again" box, click OK, and continue on their oblivious way without having read the actual message. After that, they'll probably never realize that it changes colors, and if they do, they'll momentarily wonder why, and continue on their merry way.
If something is routinely ignored, it's not useful because it's not being used. This is just one more thing that users will ignore while they submit their credit card info to http://amazon.com.hahawepwnyou.com/ to buy the latest American Idol greatest hits CD.
MS is widely considered to overdo it with the handholding of Windows users, making everything seem cozy and easy, and then they go and implement this toolbar which only gives the illusion of security, in the hopes that the ignorant masses they've created will pay attention to it.
Not gonna happen. Phishing will continue until people learn to use the Internet, jsut like spam will continue until SMTP is replaced.
The real effect of CSS (and its goal) is separation of content from presentation.
CSS is about as much programming as HTML. Ever tried to execute a stylesheet? I don't think so. Calling it a macro system proves you have no idea what you're talking about.
The only added complexity in using CSS is that it's another syntax to learn. Offsetting that is the fact that table layouts are bloated and their structure is hard to follow. CSS layouts result in leaner, cleaner documents. As they say, "It's about content, stupid."
As for the "artists", they're still around, thinking that a web page is a canvas that they can paint whatever they like on. They never knew HTML, they didn't bother to learn CSS, they have no use for any web standards because they are ar-teests, that's why they use Flash. Or still slice up their Photoshop mockups into tables.
I'm baffled and saddened that you're proud of this. Do you still have a Pentium I as your main desktop? How's that bandwidth bill treating you, since your Intarweb pages are 20% to 60% more bloated than they could be?
I keep a somewhat comprehensive (18,000 line) hosts file on my machine, and have for a few years now. I don't get barraged with as many cookies (or banners) as most people.
This cookies-in-the-results behavior isn't a pre-fetch issue. It started well after I switched (from Mozilla) to Firefox 1.5.x in August, maybe in the last month or so.
Other key features for cookie blocking are to block cookies from domains other than the window's URI, and block cookies returned from non text/* or application/* mime types (images, I'm looking at you).
It took me a while to get FilterSetG to block urchin.js, but I think I finally managed to.
Cookie abuse reached new heights a few weeks ago when top sites in Google search results throw cookies on the search results page. So far it's not a guaranteded occurance, and only happens for the top search result. Still, it's jumping the gun.
I can't wait for the Mozilla devs to clean up their cookie code so that blocking cookies is as easy and configurable as blocking images. Even being able to prompt to block everything other than a session cookie would be a nice improvement.
This isn't about Free Software, this is about Web Standards and freedom of choice.
As a developer, I can tell you that I don't have to go out of my way to support modern browsers. I have to go very far out of my way to support Internet Explorer which can't be considerd a modern browser (even IE7), whose standards support is abysmal compared to everything else on the market today. This is a side effect of my knowing how to do my job well.
Once again, an innocent suffers in the name of one of MS' shitty products.
Making a business decision is one thing, but telling your customers to fuck off because your business decision doesn't jive with their personal choices is downright rude.
As for games, it is a more similar issue than you probably realize, because the same people are meddling with the market. If game studios would stop developing against DirectX and start using OpenGL instead, it would be much easier for them to support platforms other than Windows.
How many cars and trucks are sold in France without a driver? By his reasoning, a vehicle without a driver is not a product because it doesn't work.
How many pastry ovens are sold in France without a heat source? By his reasoning, a pastry oven without gas or electricity is not a product because it doesn't work.
How many wine glasses are sold in France without wine? By his reasoning, an wine galss without wine in it is not a product because it doesn't work.
I can't think of an example involving cheese.
Does the phrase "the Crusades" ring any bells here?
How about the cultural damage done to such peoples as the Celts, Native Americans, and Southeast Asians, among many others?
What's their problem with this game, evangelism, murder, or the propogation of fabricated cultural stereotypes?
Even a 10 year old running a lemonade stand could see that this logic doesn't have a hole, because it is a hole.
So, we officially need to find a replacement word for the first A in RIAA, because it doesn't standa for Artists anymore. I suggest something like this:
If this doesn't get the artists' attention, nothing will. I wonder what Lars thinks about it. He managed to sue Napster out of any meaningful existence, maybe he can be of use here. It's not like Metallica is doing much of anything now anyway.
MS Office formats have always been a "de facto" standard, meaning they appear to be standards merely because a majority of people use them, and because there is only one implementation of them (regardless of versions). No matter how many industry groups, in this case ECMA, give them a stamp of approval, they will never achieve true "standard" status.
Just because the vast majority of people use something (especially when they have no means to consider alternatives) does not make it a standard. That is textbook "de facto" status.
Standards are what everyone agrees on after open, cooperative discussion. MS simply churns out what they think would be useful, influenced more by their bottom line than by user need. As long as alternative formats exist, are implemented, and are actively used and developed, MS Office formats will never be truly "standard", no matter how lopsided the usage shares are. The patent and IP issues just make this more true.
I'm sure everyone would laugh just as hard if ECMA (or any other group) had declared AIM a standard over Jabber, ICQ, MSN messenger, Yahoo IM, or even IRC (Jabber and IRC being the closest thing to standards among all of them).
There are countless examples of multiple ends to the same means in hardware and software. Which is the standard among SCSI/IDE/SATA? AMD vs Intel? MP3 vs Ogg? Gnome vs KDE? Emacs vs vi? None of them.
MS is incapable of producing a real standard, unlike the *NIX community which has been doing so for decades. I can't think of a single RFC published by MS that has influenced other platforms, meanwhile MS is forced to implement (sometimes badly) such things as TCP/IP and email (among many other).
Calling the MS Office formats a true standard is a meaningless label that can only be explained by MS having bought it. So they put a bright red "ECMA says this is standard" sticker on every box of Office 2007... the average person has no idea what the ECMA is.
Regardless of whether this article has any substance or is merely a frothing rant on PJ's part, I think (inadvertently?) she's overestimating the adoption rate of GPLv3.
Linus has clearly stated that he intends to keep the kernel under v2, and most of the larger projects have yet to make any meaningful statement about it.
Never mind the scores of smaller projects that don't have the resources or prowess to make an informed descision about which GPL version to use; most of them will stick with v2. I wouldn't be surprised if most projects simply followed Linus' example.
First, an exploit in IE causes MS to tell us to type in links manually rather than click them.
Now MS advises everyone not to use their flagship bloatware? There simply aren't enough R's, O's, F's and L's in the fabric of space-time to express how funny this is.
Or they're just scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas on how to get people to upgrade to Vista and Office 2007.
Web 2.0 is an empty buzzword for the evolution of the internet. There is no single event that can be unequivocably be called the atart of "Web 2.0".
According to Daniel Glazman, Tim Berners-Lee has officially given up on XHTML as of last week's W3C Advisory Committee meeting in Tokyo, and then apparently explains what Web 3.0 is supposed to be.
TBL is apparently not the visionary we all thought he was. Apparently no one in the W3C can (or is willing to) figure out how to relegate HTML to the junk heap, like a 286 computer: it was a good idea at the time, but newer technology has come along. Eventually, someone will want to see one in a museum. Contrary to popular reports, the W3C has not fixed itself, but merely rolled back the clock on itself a decade or so.
After 8 years, what do all the developers who embraced XHTML get for our efforts? Our smorgasboard of web standards becomes a (tag) soup kitchen once again.
Web 2.0 is a fleeting concept with no substance, it's existence can only be inferred by serruptitiously attributing semi-related events to its influence. Now that the inventor of the WWW has bought into this folly, and simultaneously abandoned one of the W3C's greatest achievements, how can anyone put any stock in what he or anyone else at W3C says?
I held out longer than most in my hopes that web standards could be straightened out, but now the W3C is dead by its own hand, after 6 or more years of atrophy, manic depression, and schizophrenia.
That is all.
The MS deal was done to promote interoperability. Yeah, right.
Novell says the money they are getting from MS as a result of that deal will go towards more OSS developers. Yeah, right.
Let's make it official. I'm calling shenanigans on Novell. Who's with me?
This is one of the most insightful things about the design of MS products that I've ever read.
Oh sure, they say they do everything for the benefit of the user, but rarely do we (the informed users) see the payoff. There's always some ulterior motive behind the scenes which makes more sense. Users don't want DRM. A transparent UI will lose its novelty in a matter of weeks. It's 2006 for shit's sake, we don't need 16 bit compatibility, but we want 64 bit functionality.
I believe that after the success of DOS MS went into a stagnant marketing mode for Windows and everything that rides on it. With each new version of Windows, the emphasis is less on actually using the product than on the new features that will entice people to buy the product. Windows isn't designed to be used, it's designed to be sold. Vista doesn't have a compelling set of new features, so expect the marketing blitz to ring rather hollow.
Never mind that the Vista launch will happen in the dead of winter, the slowest business period of any year. People spend January, February and sometimes March recovering from their holiday debt, er, shopping, sprees. By the time people have money to spend, OSX Leopard will be the buzz in everyone's ear.