You can think of Windows XP as a house with a second floor built of spackle, wood filler and duct tape.
This is correct, but misleading. The main floor of Windows is built of balsa wood with a nice hardwood veneer. It looks solid to the casual observer, but isn't. As for the foundation, styrofoam sure can look like concrete blocks with a nice coat of gray paint.
And as someone else pointed out elsewhere, you're renting this house, and the landlord insists that all you need for a back door is strings of beads, which they add more of every time someone just walks into the house.
The main difference between all versions of Windows is that the house just keeps getting bigger, but not much stonger.
Some things just shouldn't be run across a network. File storage? Fine (local network). Email? Fine. The apps themselves, over the Internet, even? No way. I don't have that level of trust in the network, it's just not as reliable as the software on my local disk (especially when factors like, say... Comcast* are involved). I wouldn't even use OpenOfficeOnline if there were such a thing.
To sum up, quoting the Verizon guy: "It's the network."
* Comcastic == teh suck.
Did Sony buy this article?
on
Will the Wii Work?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There's no mention of the opening unit count for PS3: 400,000. According to this article, that's 10% of the number of Wii's expected to ship this year. Sony will have a hard time recovering from the glut of bad press surrounding PS3's near unavailability, combined with the inevitable "game stores hock their PS3s on eBay for $$$$$$$$". It happened with Xbox 360, it'll happen with PS3. Id bet that there's at least 400k hard-core console gamers between the US and Japan... it's possible that 60% of the units end up on eBay for prices upwards of $3000 (360 auctions peaked at around $1900, iirc). No less-than-hard-core console gamer (who happen to have a pile of cach on hand) is going to get their hands on a PS3 for months.
Then there's the PS3 sub distribution: 80% of all PS3's will be the more expensive units that can display HD content. HD isn't going anywhere as fast as the media indistry hoped. Sony is betting on a miracle.
Meanwhile, MS is going to keep pushing products that fit in with the market they watched boom for 10 years or more with little change. MS doesn't even fully understand games. They don't innovate anywhere, they're certainly not going to start here.
Nintendo has once again realized that the console market has stagnated, and have taken upon themselves to pull out of the rut. The original NES was innovative, and the Wii is more so. Every console system since 1985 has been based partly on the NES (mostly the controller). I fully expect console gaming 20 years from now to be ready to pull out of the rut created when the entire industry decided to copycat the Wiimote.
Verdict:
PS3: Low availability + insane price = failure
XBox 360: status quo + time = status quo
Wii: Low price + innovative game play + (compelling & exclusive titles) = winner
I'm not a console gamer, but I have some common sense
First off, when I (and many other/.ers) think shell, we think command line. This site obviously isn't about Monad (or even DOS). Windows doesn't have anything that resembles a typical shell. Call it desktoprevealed.com or something.
Then I go there, and get greeted with a masthead image that fills 2/3 of my window. I don't want to see a picture of where they smoke their crack. That and the light text on dark backgrounds design (harder to read) exemplifies the UI team's (subconscious?) philosophy: screw the user, we'll make them do things our way. I'm certain that AeroGlass will be the default visual style, so Vista's reason for existence ("ooh, shiny") will be obvious to all.
When MS finally realizes that all design (phisical or virtual) must adhere to "form follows function", rather than "function follows form", "function follows corporate strategy", or "form follows corporate strategy" then they will produce a natural, usable interface. They also need to get their act together with regard to consistency. Apple knows how to do these things. Even Gnome and KDE have picked up on them.
As long as the face that Windows presents to the user is guided by marketshare maintenance and implemented haphazardly, people will complain, no matter how shiny and transparent and whiz-bang visual effects they pile up on it. MS has to spout "it'll be easier for the user" on random topics because they make other random topics confusing on purpose.
No, it won't become a standard. At least not to the degree that previous versions have.
(Yet another poster omits "de facto" when they say standard.)
There's no compelling reason to upgrade from XP, and MS knows this. That's why they're keeping lots of features out of XP (or crippling them) that deserve to be there: DX10, HD playback, IE7's "improved" security model, etc.
Businesses might upgrade more readily if things like WinFS and Monad hadn't been axed.
The only consumers who care are the hard core gamers that subsist on eye candy.
Consumer sales will basically consist of MS fanboys and tech elites who need to have everything. System vendors better be prepared to sell Vista and XP in parallel for at least a year... they'll be getting lots of orders from people who have a reason not to get Vista.
But MS will probably prevent this by requiring that all PCs sold have Vista within 3-6 months of launch. At this point, the demand for non-OS systems will increase.
Vista will take a long time to gain marketshare. No one sees a reason to have it.
Now, Vista could also be a stepping stone. There's been a lot of talk lately about how the next version of Windows has to be radically different. I don't think this is referring to system design or software architecture. It has to do with sales model.
MS knows (and revels in) that they have an absurd monopoly built on a house of cards. However, not everybody upgrades with every product release (it's called free will, Bill). So what is MS to do? Live Onecare is probably a peek.
Windows after Vista will be sold with a 1 or 2 year license (both OEM and retail). 90 days before that time is up, the users starts getting nagged to renew their subscription for a year, at a cost of $49 to $89 (renew for multiple years for discounts!). Let your license expire, and your machine refuses to allow logins until you pay the renewal plus an additional restoration fee.
Of course, you'll be able to renew via a control panel applet which conveniently stores your credit card info somewhere on your HD in plain text. A redefining of Microsoft Tax, if you will.
It wouldn't surprise me if the subscription model gets applied to Vista within two years, because MS can (but shouldn't), and to really get the lock-in on people.
* Except when the user may undermine the marketing efforts of MS by deactivating features designed to enhance mindhsare of MS products, those of its partners, and the rights of big media crooks.
Next they'll bring back Clippy, except this time he'll be embedded in the kernel.
Forums are fine when there is a small number of focused participants. Once the user base expands beyond some unknown critical point, the newer, and generally less-internet experienced, users invariably dilute the value of the forum. This is where the forum noise comes from: useless replies in threads that are simply "LOL" (or some other AOLbonics) or a long string of smilies, unnecessarily long and image bloated signatures, which lead to the inevitable "off topic" section of the forum.
I understand the power of personalization, but I'll leave a forum if half the page load is giant jpgs or animated gifs embedded in everyone else's sigs. It's simply useless, distracting clutter and a waste of the site's bandwidth. Same thing with avatars... I'm not on a forum to experience the vanity of the users, I'm there for information. The n00bs take it too far.
25 copies of the same smiley in one line really gets me, especially if that's the entirety of the post. I simply disallow (graphical) smileys on the forums I run, and redirect the complaints to/dev/null. The poeple who can interpret text smilies are better forum citizens anyway.
Most Linux people that I've seen really don't want mainstream types using Linux, and by the same token, mainstream types by definition generally don't want to get within 50 km of Linux.
Or, to put it in the assumed perspective of a member of each group: "N00bs are dumb!" for the first, and "What's Linux?" or "Linux is hard!" for the second.
The *NIX-using crowd needs to get off it's high horse and stop thumbing their noses at users of "inferior" OSes. I can't count how many times I've heard something like, "Those [distro of choice] people are assholes, all I did was ask a question!" from a relatively new user. The barrier to entry for Linux isn't the application base, it's the elitism of the community.
What we really need to realize is that these "n00bs" are where every one of us once was. The key to computer competence is the willingness to fuck up your system, deal with the possible consequences, and find out what went wrong and how. Don't forget that the average person has spent most if not all of their computer-using experience being simultaneously told "computers are easy to use" and nothing about how to get anything done. The *NIX "n00bs", at some level, have realized this discrepancy, and are willing to do something about it. It's up to us to get then going, not send them on their way with a rude "RTFM and STFU."
Knowledge is power. Isn't the FOSS movement at least partly about empowering the user?
As to the topic at hand, what about the opposite route? If some FOSS sympathizing philanthropist was to give Sony/Toshiba/Apple/whoever a huge chunk of money and tell them "I get this back plus interest in 2 years if all your media players don't support Ogg by then", would that have a significantly different result other than this godsend becoming a cult hero among geeks? Granted it's probably not going to happen, but we can hope.
Aside from the insane value of the buyout (as previously commented), the simple fact remains that MS' management is too egotistical to allow this to happen. If anyone did put forth any effort on a buyout, the MS spin machinery would immediately set its sights on their own shareholders to dissuade them.
Video and other electrinic games do not belong at GenCon. The tabletop gaming market shrinks year after year (some say by as much as 10% yearly), and video games are a major factor in that, along with lack of time, and increasing social isolation.
Two related analogies I must present yet again, the significance of which will be apparent to most gamers on/.:
Wizards of the Coast is to tabletop gaming as Microsoft is to software
d20 is to game systems as Windows is to operating systems
WotC is the self-declared king of the gaming market. They, like MS, try to have a presence in every niche created by others, with lackluster, seldom innovative products which survive only because of their marketing budgets. Fortunately, there's very little FUD in the gaming industry.
d20 is one of the worst systems ever developed. Rather than fix all of the inherent problems in D&D, d20 relies on most of them, and throws in some dirty hacks on top. The d20 and OGL licenses are both laughable from an "open source" standpoint. All the "games" built around d20 are really little more than desktop themes. Here is the prime example of WotC using their marketing clout to make a bad product the core of an industry. I still can't wait for d20 to die.
You know what you were told to do, and you know what you were told not to do. I think that meeting went something like...
"Firefox is making people realize that IE is crap, we need to do some damage control. We need a new version of IE."
"OK."
"Plus, Longhorn is a good enough reason to upgrade IE, right? Add IE7 to the list of Vista-only features... On second thought, since we don't know when Longhorn will ship, we better be prepared with a build for XP, but only for Service Pack 2."
"Security improvements are top priority. Exploits for IE are coming out almost weekly, and the patch team can't keep up."
"Yessir."
"But those damn developers have been whining for standards compliance for years now. Let's throw them a bone or two. What can we fix to shut them up for a while?"
"Well, there's a lot we don't have right, sir... PNG transparency, various RFC violations, real XML support, our CSS could really use a major overhaul--"
"Alright, let's give 'em PNG transparency. Most people seemed to buy the bullshit we've been stalling with for this."
"Yessir."
"But most of the compliance complaints I hear about have to do with this CSS thing. Apparently there's this site called, um... Position Is Everything dot net that has better documentation of these CSS bugs than our internal tools."
"Yessir."
"I dunno, pick 10 or so that'll take the least amount of time to fix, but that we can make the biggest deal about. Try to pick the ones with names, and make the developers rue the day they asked for standards compliance in IE."
"Yessir."
"But remember, only spend about 10% of your time on compliance. There's a new security model to develop before it goes to retail for testing, and we might as well make the user interface of the new IE completely different from the other browsers... so if anyone switches from IE, they won't be able to figure out how to use Firefox. Move the buttons around or something."
"Yessir. But won't a new UI confuse the people still using IE6?"
"They'll just have to get used to it. Now get to work."
Now, almost 2 years later, we get to see the results, and the numbers don't lie. Sorry, Chris, we know a mandated token effort when we see one.
No, naming the bridge would go to the Congressman who sponsored the bill (or more likely, pork barrel amendment) to build the bridge, because said corporate bidder made ginormous contributions to the congressman's (re)election campaign.
The most obnoxious breed of advertising (sometimes including the other two, frickin' infuriating)
Apparently the development tools still have the same problems they did when I toyed with Flash 4 and 5: horrible and intrusive UI, memory glutton, general instability. After 5 years they can't fix that?
Then the output plagues users with horrible usability, non-existent accessibility, produced by a horde of developers/designers who generally don't know squat about good interface design. What does it take to make a form in Flash let me tab through the inputs instead of clicking on each one and hoping it gets focused?
IMO, 85% of what Flash is usesd for is possible in web standards. The other 15% boils down to audio, and IE's crappy standards support. In the future, the portion of what you don't need Flash for can only grow as SVG, the canvas element, CSS3, and proper PNG support in IE arrive.
Which leaves audio in websites. I don't see why audio couldn't be applied to a page via CSS. Background music? body {sound-file: url(some_audio_file.mp3); loop: forever/* otherwise, an int */; }
. Button press? input[type=button]:click {sound-file: url(button_noise.ogg); loop: 0; }. Control it just like you would everything else on the page: Javascript + DOM.
Flash really is a solution looking for a problem. I was hoping that Adobe would kill flash, or turn it into a tool to develop with open standards as outlined above. Oh, well... I guess IE can't be the only thing I hate about the internet.
Yes, essentially IE7 is going to make the developer's job harder (another version of IE to support), while IE8+ will simultaneously make the job harder (yet more versions of IE to support) and simpler (the newest version causes less mental breakdowns).
Backwards compatibility is a philosophy that will very quickly bite MS in the ass (within the browser space, as well as with Vista in general). IE is their mess, it is MS' responsibility to clean it up. I would sooner whack them with a mop, if they handed me one, than help them clean up their mess. I have no sympathy for Microsoft.
And yes, I understand that XHTML support is not as simple as my original comment may have implied. My point about the mime type is that the Specs say that XHTML must be served with this mime type. IE has always (and will continue to) choke on content served with this mime type. Implementing correct box, float, DOM, and event models are entirely separate, yet related, issues.
Regarding your table snippet: yes, XHTML would create 3 elements. But there are 4 nodes present: table, tr, td, and the text node '...' contained by the td.
I think we can agree that the opportunity you speak of has indeed been squandered. It remains to be seen what kind of usage share IE7 will get... I expect it to ramp up much slower than IE6 did, considering IE7 will only be available on XPSP2 (no 100% penetration there), and Vista (which is its own liability). Also, IE6 had no publicly visible competition when it was released, unlike now (Firefox, especially).
First of all, a correction to the article itself. IE hasn't set back web development, it has held back web development, since IE6 was released
The ACID2 test may seem irrelevant based on its content (the smiley face), but it is actually a very intense yet concise test of CSS2 box model and selectors support. IE7 fails ACID2, so your claim that IE7 fixes box model support is false.
MS has only taken the occasion of IE7 to fix the specific issues that developers have been shouting the loudest about for more than half a decade, most of which you list. Unfortunately, from what I've seen, they have added more hacks to the clunky rendering engine from IE5 (or earlier), instead of developing a new rendering core from scratch. IE7 will still not have the level of support for web standards that other browsers have had for years.
MS has specifically stated that IE7 will not support the application/xml+xhtml mime type. This is a simple thing that most people overlook the importance of. The so-called "Web 2.0" cannot be fully realized without it.
Excluding Netscape 4.x, IE has the worst support for W3C standards of any mainstream GUI browser. IE7 will only make marginal improvements. The lastest verbal vomit from Redmond regarding compliance improvements basically says, "wait for IE8 and 9". I've seen nothing about IE7 and CSS3, of which all other modern GUI browsers now implement some subset.
So, what has MS been doing with IE7? Much ado about almost nothing. IE7 seems to have the same incremental standards support that Firefox 2 will have; the main goal of both of these seems to be user interface, privacy, and security improvements. In 2 years, we'll see how Firefox 3, Opera 10, Safari, and IE7.1 compare.
MS is a software company not hardware. Although, in the last decade it can be argued that the products only exist to give the marketing department something to do.
This "Industrial Design Toolkit" screams "we're afraid of Apple". MS obvisously wants to strongarm the OEMs into creating simulacrums of Apple's product design philosophy. It works for Apple because there's really only one person at the top: Steve Jobs. Never mond the fact that Apple hardware and software visually mesh, with the design itself being clean and elegant, if not minimalist.
MS plus all the OEMs will not be able to pull this off. Will Dell, HP, Lenovo, or any other OEM be willing to adhere to design guidelines that reduce or eliminate the recognizability of their products for the sake of the software installed on them (which is not their product)? Hell no. The next step would be for MS to require that all laptops have a light-up Windows logo on the back of the screen in order for the OEM to get reduced cost Windows licensing. The OEMs will laugh at that, and many lawyers will get rich off of the lawsuits.
The only way an industry wide hardware branding for Vista can happen is if MS outright buys the PC divisions of every OEM in existance, and begin to make themselves into a mirror of Apple. But, they won't do that, because a 400% margin on software (Office) is more profitable than an 8% margin on all the hardware to run Office. Of course, it's more than likely that they would completely botch this, and in 10 years there would be little left of the PC market.
Plus, this is just another seemingly innocent move which reveals that MS is very afraid that Vista won't sell on its own.
call me when you guys spend billions of dollars on a web browser and actually implement CSS2
Whoa, hold on there, punchy. Before fully implementing CSS2 (which MS believes is horribly broken), there is a laundry list of things they still need to get right:
I wish I had mod points to repeatedly stab you with.
Flash will never conquer anything except the minds of more graphically-centric "designers" such as yourself. The people who don't understand that the web is fundamentally about text, which is accessible, can be converted to non-visual media (aural browsers), can have semantics applied, and is not bandwidth intensive.
Bang! Shiny! Animated! Gradients! BFD? What's that tiny pixel-font text read at the bottom? Brash and obnoxious presentation adds nothing to the actual information it obscures. This is when I close the window (er, tab) on your site.
Also, if the web wasn't about text, then there would have been a corporate binary format war in the mid-90's, which means right now you'd be trying to figure out why some VB macro that does OLE twiddling is mangling your flash in www.yoursite.com/default.doc, and hoping Office doesn't crash for the 17th time since the top of the hour, because everyone knows Office can barely deal with complex debugging of web pages. [/hypothecial]
Flash is capable of being pretty (when the "desiger" shows taste, restraint, and has some respect for the user), but it is incapable of being accessible, and more often than not has horrible usability.
KHTML, Gecko, and Opera are leaps and bounds ahead of IE (even IE7) when it comes to standards compliance. The other problem with the W3C is that all these standards are created in a vacuum of theory. It's been largely up to the browser vendors to implement all the pie-in-the-sky recommendations and expose the flaws.
Now, unless you plan on welcoming Your New De-Facto Standard Corporate Overlords, I suggest you start hoping the W3C pulls its head out of its ass soon: it's the only organization we have.
Oops, I'm sorry... you apparently already drank a few gallons of the Macromedia Kool-Aid.
The W3C should be absorbed by a more stable, functional, and respected international standards entity such as IEEE.
While I believe in what the W3C does and produces, that's irrelevant when they produce next to nothing over the course of six years (which many thousands of people work with daily).
That Vista will get released to OEMs sometime next June, and hit retail shelves sometime in July, just in time to face off with OSX 10.5 in the back to school computer sales rush.
So, 80% of search requests from Microsoft's network go to Google. On the surface, one might assume that this is entirely MS employees (ie, humans) generating this traffic.
But, how much of it could be MSN Search servers mining Google for content?
Slashdot Mirror
This is correct, but misleading. The main floor of Windows is built of balsa wood with a nice hardwood veneer. It looks solid to the casual observer, but isn't. As for the foundation, styrofoam sure can look like concrete blocks with a nice coat of gray paint.
And as someone else pointed out elsewhere, you're renting this house, and the landlord insists that all you need for a back door is strings of beads, which they add more of every time someone just walks into the house.
The main difference between all versions of Windows is that the house just keeps getting bigger, but not much stonger.
Five letters: RDBMS.
I use MySQL. I hear PostGres is nice. There are many others which are free.
Some things just shouldn't be run across a network. File storage? Fine (local network). Email? Fine. The apps themselves, over the Internet, even? No way. I don't have that level of trust in the network, it's just not as reliable as the software on my local disk (especially when factors like, say... Comcast* are involved). I wouldn't even use OpenOfficeOnline if there were such a thing.
To sum up, quoting the Verizon guy: "It's the network."
* Comcastic == teh suck.
There's no mention of the opening unit count for PS3: 400,000. According to this article, that's 10% of the number of Wii's expected to ship this year. Sony will have a hard time recovering from the glut of bad press surrounding PS3's near unavailability, combined with the inevitable "game stores hock their PS3s on eBay for $$$$$$$$". It happened with Xbox 360, it'll happen with PS3. Id bet that there's at least 400k hard-core console gamers between the US and Japan... it's possible that 60% of the units end up on eBay for prices upwards of $3000 (360 auctions peaked at around $1900, iirc). No less-than-hard-core console gamer (who happen to have a pile of cach on hand) is going to get their hands on a PS3 for months.
Then there's the PS3 sub distribution: 80% of all PS3's will be the more expensive units that can display HD content. HD isn't going anywhere as fast as the media indistry hoped. Sony is betting on a miracle.
Meanwhile, MS is going to keep pushing products that fit in with the market they watched boom for 10 years or more with little change. MS doesn't even fully understand games. They don't innovate anywhere, they're certainly not going to start here.
Nintendo has once again realized that the console market has stagnated, and have taken upon themselves to pull out of the rut. The original NES was innovative, and the Wii is more so. Every console system since 1985 has been based partly on the NES (mostly the controller). I fully expect console gaming 20 years from now to be ready to pull out of the rut created when the entire industry decided to copycat the Wiimote.
Verdict:
I'm not a console gamer, but I have some common sense
First off, when I (and many other /.ers) think shell, we think command line. This site obviously isn't about Monad (or even DOS). Windows doesn't have anything that resembles a typical shell. Call it desktoprevealed.com or something.
Then I go there, and get greeted with a masthead image that fills 2/3 of my window. I don't want to see a picture of where they smoke their crack. That and the light text on dark backgrounds design (harder to read) exemplifies the UI team's (subconscious?) philosophy: screw the user, we'll make them do things our way. I'm certain that AeroGlass will be the default visual style, so Vista's reason for existence ("ooh, shiny") will be obvious to all.
When MS finally realizes that all design (phisical or virtual) must adhere to "form follows function", rather than "function follows form", "function follows corporate strategy", or "form follows corporate strategy" then they will produce a natural, usable interface. They also need to get their act together with regard to consistency. Apple knows how to do these things. Even Gnome and KDE have picked up on them.
As long as the face that Windows presents to the user is guided by marketshare maintenance and implemented haphazardly, people will complain, no matter how shiny and transparent and whiz-bang visual effects they pile up on it. MS has to spout "it'll be easier for the user" on random topics because they make other random topics confusing on purpose.
It be rum we pirates fancy!
No, it won't become a standard. At least not to the degree that previous versions have.
(Yet another poster omits "de facto" when they say standard.)
There's no compelling reason to upgrade from XP, and MS knows this. That's why they're keeping lots of features out of XP (or crippling them) that deserve to be there: DX10, HD playback, IE7's "improved" security model, etc.
Businesses might upgrade more readily if things like WinFS and Monad hadn't been axed.
The only consumers who care are the hard core gamers that subsist on eye candy.
Consumer sales will basically consist of MS fanboys and tech elites who need to have everything. System vendors better be prepared to sell Vista and XP in parallel for at least a year... they'll be getting lots of orders from people who have a reason not to get Vista.
But MS will probably prevent this by requiring that all PCs sold have Vista within 3-6 months of launch. At this point, the demand for non-OS systems will increase.
Vista will take a long time to gain marketshare. No one sees a reason to have it.
Now, Vista could also be a stepping stone. There's been a lot of talk lately about how the next version of Windows has to be radically different. I don't think this is referring to system design or software architecture. It has to do with sales model.
MS knows (and revels in) that they have an absurd monopoly built on a house of cards. However, not everybody upgrades with every product release (it's called free will, Bill). So what is MS to do? Live Onecare is probably a peek.
Windows after Vista will be sold with a 1 or 2 year license (both OEM and retail). 90 days before that time is up, the users starts getting nagged to renew their subscription for a year, at a cost of $49 to $89 (renew for multiple years for discounts!). Let your license expire, and your machine refuses to allow logins until you pay the renewal plus an additional restoration fee.
Of course, you'll be able to renew via a control panel applet which conveniently stores your credit card info somewhere on your HD in plain text. A redefining of Microsoft Tax, if you will.
It wouldn't surprise me if the subscription model gets applied to Vista within two years, because MS can (but shouldn't), and to really get the lock-in on people.
* Except when the user may undermine the marketing efforts of MS by deactivating features designed to enhance mindhsare of MS products, those of its partners, and the rights of big media crooks.
Next they'll bring back Clippy, except this time he'll be embedded in the kernel.
Forums are fine when there is a small number of focused participants. Once the user base expands beyond some unknown critical point, the newer, and generally less-internet experienced, users invariably dilute the value of the forum. This is where the forum noise comes from: useless replies in threads that are simply "LOL" (or some other AOLbonics) or a long string of smilies, unnecessarily long and image bloated signatures, which lead to the inevitable "off topic" section of the forum.
I understand the power of personalization, but I'll leave a forum if half the page load is giant jpgs or animated gifs embedded in everyone else's sigs. It's simply useless, distracting clutter and a waste of the site's bandwidth. Same thing with avatars... I'm not on a forum to experience the vanity of the users, I'm there for information. The n00bs take it too far.
25 copies of the same smiley in one line really gets me, especially if that's the entirety of the post. I simply disallow (graphical) smileys on the forums I run, and redirect the complaints to /dev/null. The poeple who can interpret text smilies are better forum citizens anyway.
Nothing more, nothing less.
The ultimate proof of #2 is the self checkout lanes at most grocery stores nowadays.
Or, to put it in the assumed perspective of a member of each group: "N00bs are dumb!" for the first, and "What's Linux?" or "Linux is hard!" for the second.
The *NIX-using crowd needs to get off it's high horse and stop thumbing their noses at users of "inferior" OSes. I can't count how many times I've heard something like, "Those [distro of choice] people are assholes, all I did was ask a question!" from a relatively new user. The barrier to entry for Linux isn't the application base, it's the elitism of the community.
What we really need to realize is that these "n00bs" are where every one of us once was. The key to computer competence is the willingness to fuck up your system, deal with the possible consequences, and find out what went wrong and how. Don't forget that the average person has spent most if not all of their computer-using experience being simultaneously told "computers are easy to use" and nothing about how to get anything done. The *NIX "n00bs", at some level, have realized this discrepancy, and are willing to do something about it. It's up to us to get then going, not send them on their way with a rude "RTFM and STFU."
Knowledge is power. Isn't the FOSS movement at least partly about empowering the user?
As to the topic at hand, what about the opposite route? If some FOSS sympathizing philanthropist was to give Sony/Toshiba/Apple/whoever a huge chunk of money and tell them "I get this back plus interest in 2 years if all your media players don't support Ogg by then", would that have a significantly different result other than this godsend becoming a cult hero among geeks? Granted it's probably not going to happen, but we can hope.
Aside from the insane value of the buyout (as previously commented), the simple fact remains that MS' management is too egotistical to allow this to happen. If anyone did put forth any effort on a buyout, the MS spin machinery would immediately set its sights on their own shareholders to dissuade them.
Video and other electrinic games do not belong at GenCon. The tabletop gaming market shrinks year after year (some say by as much as 10% yearly), and video games are a major factor in that, along with lack of time, and increasing social isolation.
Two related analogies I must present yet again, the significance of which will be apparent to most gamers on /.:
WotC is the self-declared king of the gaming market. They, like MS, try to have a presence in every niche created by others, with lackluster, seldom innovative products which survive only because of their marketing budgets. Fortunately, there's very little FUD in the gaming industry.
d20 is one of the worst systems ever developed. Rather than fix all of the inherent problems in D&D, d20 relies on most of them, and throws in some dirty hacks on top. The d20 and OGL licenses are both laughable from an "open source" standpoint. All the "games" built around d20 are really little more than desktop themes. Here is the prime example of WotC using their marketing clout to make a bad product the core of an industry. I still can't wait for d20 to die.
You know what you were told to do, and you know what you were told not to do. I think that meeting went something like...
Now, almost 2 years later, we get to see the results, and the numbers don't lie. Sorry, Chris, we know a mandated token effort when we see one.
No, naming the bridge would go to the Congressman who sponsored the bill (or more likely, pork barrel amendment) to build the bridge, because said corporate bidder made ginormous contributions to the congressman's (re)election campaign.
Flash has only three purposes on the web today:
Apparently the development tools still have the same problems they did when I toyed with Flash 4 and 5: horrible and intrusive UI, memory glutton, general instability. After 5 years they can't fix that?
Then the output plagues users with horrible usability, non-existent accessibility, produced by a horde of developers/designers who generally don't know squat about good interface design. What does it take to make a form in Flash let me tab through the inputs instead of clicking on each one and hoping it gets focused?
IMO, 85% of what Flash is usesd for is possible in web standards. The other 15% boils down to audio, and IE's crappy standards support. In the future, the portion of what you don't need Flash for can only grow as SVG, the canvas element, CSS3, and proper PNG support in IE arrive.
Which leaves audio in websites. I don't see why audio couldn't be applied to a page via CSS. Background music? body {sound-file: url(some_audio_file.mp3); loop: forever /* otherwise, an int */; }
. Button press? input[type=button]:click {sound-file: url(button_noise.ogg); loop: 0; }. Control it just like you would everything else on the page: Javascript + DOM.
Flash really is a solution looking for a problem. I was hoping that Adobe would kill flash, or turn it into a tool to develop with open standards as outlined above. Oh, well... I guess IE can't be the only thing I hate about the internet.
Yes, essentially IE7 is going to make the developer's job harder (another version of IE to support), while IE8+ will simultaneously make the job harder (yet more versions of IE to support) and simpler (the newest version causes less mental breakdowns).
Backwards compatibility is a philosophy that will very quickly bite MS in the ass (within the browser space, as well as with Vista in general). IE is their mess, it is MS' responsibility to clean it up. I would sooner whack them with a mop, if they handed me one, than help them clean up their mess. I have no sympathy for Microsoft.
And yes, I understand that XHTML support is not as simple as my original comment may have implied. My point about the mime type is that the Specs say that XHTML must be served with this mime type. IE has always (and will continue to) choke on content served with this mime type. Implementing correct box, float, DOM, and event models are entirely separate, yet related, issues.
Regarding your table snippet: yes, XHTML would create 3 elements. But there are 4 nodes present: table, tr, td, and the text node '...' contained by the td.
I think we can agree that the opportunity you speak of has indeed been squandered. It remains to be seen what kind of usage share IE7 will get... I expect it to ramp up much slower than IE6 did, considering IE7 will only be available on XPSP2 (no 100% penetration there), and Vista (which is its own liability). Also, IE6 had no publicly visible competition when it was released, unlike now (Firefox, especially).
First of all, a correction to the article itself. IE hasn't set back web development, it has held back web development, since IE6 was released
The ACID2 test may seem irrelevant based on its content (the smiley face), but it is actually a very intense yet concise test of CSS2 box model and selectors support. IE7 fails ACID2, so your claim that IE7 fixes box model support is false.
MS has only taken the occasion of IE7 to fix the specific issues that developers have been shouting the loudest about for more than half a decade, most of which you list. Unfortunately, from what I've seen, they have added more hacks to the clunky rendering engine from IE5 (or earlier), instead of developing a new rendering core from scratch. IE7 will still not have the level of support for web standards that other browsers have had for years.
MS has specifically stated that IE7 will not support the application/xml+xhtml mime type. This is a simple thing that most people overlook the importance of. The so-called "Web 2.0" cannot be fully realized without it.
Excluding Netscape 4.x, IE has the worst support for W3C standards of any mainstream GUI browser. IE7 will only make marginal improvements. The lastest verbal vomit from Redmond regarding compliance improvements basically says, "wait for IE8 and 9". I've seen nothing about IE7 and CSS3, of which all other modern GUI browsers now implement some subset.
So, what has MS been doing with IE7? Much ado about almost nothing. IE7 seems to have the same incremental standards support that Firefox 2 will have; the main goal of both of these seems to be user interface, privacy, and security improvements. In 2 years, we'll see how Firefox 3, Opera 10, Safari, and IE7.1 compare.
MS is a software company not hardware. Although, in the last decade it can be argued that the products only exist to give the marketing department something to do.
This "Industrial Design Toolkit" screams "we're afraid of Apple". MS obvisously wants to strongarm the OEMs into creating simulacrums of Apple's product design philosophy. It works for Apple because there's really only one person at the top: Steve Jobs. Never mond the fact that Apple hardware and software visually mesh, with the design itself being clean and elegant, if not minimalist.
MS plus all the OEMs will not be able to pull this off. Will Dell, HP, Lenovo, or any other OEM be willing to adhere to design guidelines that reduce or eliminate the recognizability of their products for the sake of the software installed on them (which is not their product)? Hell no. The next step would be for MS to require that all laptops have a light-up Windows logo on the back of the screen in order for the OEM to get reduced cost Windows licensing. The OEMs will laugh at that, and many lawyers will get rich off of the lawsuits.
The only way an industry wide hardware branding for Vista can happen is if MS outright buys the PC divisions of every OEM in existance, and begin to make themselves into a mirror of Apple. But, they won't do that, because a 400% margin on software (Office) is more profitable than an 8% margin on all the hardware to run Office. Of course, it's more than likely that they would completely botch this, and in 10 years there would be little left of the PC market.
Plus, this is just another seemingly innocent move which reveals that MS is very afraid that Vista won't sell on its own.
Whoa, hold on there, punchy. Before fully implementing CSS2 (which MS believes is horribly broken), there is a laundry list of things they still need to get right:
Pretty much every W3C Reccommendation since 1996.
I wish I had mod points to repeatedly stab you with.
Flash will never conquer anything except the minds of more graphically-centric "designers" such as yourself. The people who don't understand that the web is fundamentally about text, which is accessible, can be converted to non-visual media (aural browsers), can have semantics applied, and is not bandwidth intensive.
Bang! Shiny! Animated! Gradients! BFD? What's that tiny pixel-font text read at the bottom? Brash and obnoxious presentation adds nothing to the actual information it obscures. This is when I close the window (er, tab) on your site.
Also, if the web wasn't about text, then there would have been a corporate binary format war in the mid-90's, which means right now you'd be trying to figure out why some VB macro that does OLE twiddling is mangling your flash in www.yoursite.com/default.doc, and hoping Office doesn't crash for the 17th time since the top of the hour, because everyone knows Office can barely deal with complex debugging of web pages. [/hypothecial]
Flash is capable of being pretty (when the "desiger" shows taste, restraint, and has some respect for the user), but it is incapable of being accessible, and more often than not has horrible usability.
KHTML, Gecko, and Opera are leaps and bounds ahead of IE (even IE7) when it comes to standards compliance. The other problem with the W3C is that all these standards are created in a vacuum of theory. It's been largely up to the browser vendors to implement all the pie-in-the-sky recommendations and expose the flaws.
Now, unless you plan on welcoming Your New De-Facto Standard Corporate Overlords, I suggest you start hoping the W3C pulls its head out of its ass soon: it's the only organization we have.
Oops, I'm sorry... you apparently already drank a few gallons of the Macromedia Kool-Aid.
The W3C should be absorbed by a more stable, functional, and respected international standards entity such as IEEE.
While I believe in what the W3C does and produces, that's irrelevant when they produce next to nothing over the course of six years (which many thousands of people work with daily).
That Vista will get released to OEMs sometime next June, and hit retail shelves sometime in July, just in time to face off with OSX 10.5 in the back to school computer sales rush.
So, 80% of search requests from Microsoft's network go to Google. On the surface, one might assume that this is entirely MS employees (ie, humans) generating this traffic.
But, how much of it could be MSN Search servers mining Google for content?
AOL is hemorrhaging 300 customers an hour.