I put off getting a cell phone until December 2004 because I didn't feel I needed one. I still don't use it that often.
The salesman seemed confused by the fact that I didn't want a camera phone, and having a speakerphone was more important. If I was going to get a new phone today, I'd want a video phone even less. I want a phone, just a phone, and nothing but a phone (so help me $DIETY), and I'm sure I'm not alone, even in the U.S.
Obviously, the phone carriers don't care that people like me exist in the U.S.
Microsoft created the need for these companies to exist. The near destruction of that need is a side effect of MS finally learning that security is part of the development process.
But as long as there is Windows, there will be a need for 3rd party Windows security software.
IE may not be dead now, but if MS don't stop implementing open standards how and if they feel like, IE will be loaded on the cart and clubbed in the head by Eric Idle.
Sure they've fixed a lot of stuff, but one of the most critical is the lack of support for the application/html+xml mime type.
Is there any doubt that IBM has done its own internal Windows vs Linux TCO studies?
Last year IBM announced they were moving all 330,000 desktops from IE to Firefox. Why wouldn't they drop MS completely?
Aside from the hardware upgrades required, some ingenious bean counter discovered how to save $100M. 330,000 * $299 = $98,670,000. That's not chump change for anyone, even IBM. Cost wise, this is a no-brainer.
And with all those desktops running dogfood, IBM has created its own internal testing army, which can only lead to those products getting better.
How does Lucas propose that the studios force the big name stars to take a lower salary?
They don't. I think George is also predicting the end of Hollywood celebrity. Let's face it, there's only so much fame to go around at any given point in time.
Price fixing has been a hallmark of the music industry for fifty years. Let's look at CD's.
It costs any record company, on average, about $0.25 to get one CD into a retail store. This includes:
Studio time
Engineering/mixing
Paying the artist
Promotion
Distribution
Normally, manufacturers strive to keep their cost per unit at or below 12.5% of the retail price. The distributor then buys the unit at 30% to 40% of retail. The retailer buys the unit at 60% of retail. The customer buys the unit at (you guessed it) full retail price.
Let's see how the typical $16 CD retail price breaks down:
$16.00: Cost to consumer
$9.60: retailer (wholesale) cost
$4.80 to $6.40: distributor cost
$2.00: production cost
But Wait!!! Most record companies are their own distributors. More profit for them.
We see now that $0.25 (real cost) is about 1/8 of the production cost calculated here. Following the model, one CD should cost about $2.00.
Which is still more than most of the trite crap produced these days is worth. Music isn't a cash cow, it's a cash herd.
One of the worst features is that making changes to the overall "look" of an osCommerce store requires editing some thirty or more source files.
This is the majority of why I don't like OSCommerce. The concept of templates is negligible at best, and nearly all the layout markup is tables. Same thing goes for Gallery and Gallery2. I've set up two OSC sites, and on the first (about three years ago) I remember having to make the same visual change in 11 (!) different files.
This is pretty much the equivalent to scratch and sniff perfume/cologne ads in magazines. The method here doesn't match the product as well, so I can't imagine this would be as effective.
People skip ads because they (maybe only subconsciously) realize that they don't care about the ads, because the ads are not content. TV advertising doesn't work on a conscious level anymore. People have learned to use them as an excuse for other things (make popcorn, check laundry), or to simply automatically tune them out, much like studies have shown that people ignore 468 x 60 images on the web.
A TiVo that can automatically skip ads based on a program's break time schedule is equivalent to AdBlock; the difference is that in one, you know when the ads are coming, and in the other you know where they are coming from.
TV is also in a rough spot because:
There hasn't been shit on TV in at least 20 years, probably longer
500 channels just means I have to spend more time looking at the program schedule to find the diamond in the rough
The same companies own the networks and the movie studios; the hydras have all chosen which of their heads to cannibalize
Games, Internet, and other activities (except reading, but that's another topic) take away from TV viewership
In a nutshell, TV is doomed in a similar way to radio. The inevitable disaster of the switch to digital TV may just be the killing blow.
And I say good riddance, until I can get a la carte programming.
OSX is part of what gets Macs out the door. Some of that is because OSX is what it is, and another portion is that it isn't Windows. Mac fans like their OS, and would be very vocal if it was eviscerated in such a moronic way. Steve knows this.
Apple's interface is so clean and intuitive that everyone else has been trying to copy it for years (yeah, I know, Xerox PARC blah blah blah), even though no one wants to admit to it.
Time to post this again:
*nix has users
Mac has fans
Windows has victims
Since OSX is built on BSD, it has both users and fans. If OSX were based on Windows... well, no sane person enjoys being a victim.
Of all the recruiters I've dealt with (at least 20), not one has even gotten me an interview.
Being a web developer who actually knows (X)HTML, I was once hung up on by a recruiter when I told her I don't use Dreamweaver. A year later, I start seeing job postings where DW experience is a disadvantage.
But, a recruiter is sometimes only as useful as the requirements they get. 10 years of.NET experience? 15 years of J2EE? The list of absurd requirements goes on and on.
As for one alternative, post on Cragslist in your area. Monster and Dice are becoming less and less useful as time goes on.
This tells me that MS knows there is at least a chance that the hard core computer gamers see little if any reason to upgrade to Vista on its own merits.
But if they restrict one of the most anticipated games to Vista, the computer gamers have no choice but to upgrade if they want to play the game.
I'd expect more marketing-driven announcements like this with other MS software (Office, IE7, etc) to give the same perceived need to the rest of the market.
(Sure, IE7 runs on XPSP2 now, but who says that won't change?)
Which basically begs the question, "Will IE ever 100% support any standard?" Sadly, the answer is probably not. IE doesn't even fully support HTML 3.2.
While HTML5 does have some good ideas, as a whole it is merely a revision of HTML4 (as is a stated goal). Nowhere in the HTML5 spec does it explicitly state whether it conforms to XML syntax; the various references to XML make this even less clear. The most conclusive evidence is near the end of section 1.8, where authoring formats are discussed:
For compatibility with existing content and prior specifications, this specification describes two authoring formats: one based on XML (referred to as XHTML), and one using a custom format inspired by SGML (referred to as HTML). Implementations may support only one of these two formats, although supporting both is encouraged.
This seens to indicate that HTML5 is not XML compliant. Emphasis mine.
Further, HTML5 still contains these presentational tags:
pre
small
m
All of these (and many more) could be supplanted by the XHTML2 role attribute. Who ever said semantics must be limited to the element name? Furthermore, some hold HTML4 elements have been repurposed (such as the i tag). This alone will make compatibility with HTML4 difficult.
Overall, HTML5 seems to me like a collection of minimal changes from HTML4, with specific extensions for specific shortcomings added on. Overall, not very elegant.
The power of web markup lies partly in the abstraction and modularization of its structure. XHTML2 and its siblings (XForms, XPath, XBL2, etc) being XML and capable of standing alone are the logical next step in this.
And to those who complain about XHTML(X) not taking off, it is the solely fault of Microsoft. Since apparently no version of IE will ever support the application/xml+html mime type, the web as a whole has two options: abandon IE, or make itself into an even more confusing, hacked up version of itself which makes developers' lives even more difficult.
Prove that most people (and WYSIWYGs) don't know how to produce valid and accessible markup. The img alt attibute (an accessibility requirement) was found significantly less than width, height, and border.
I'm working on a site now where the project owner is continually reducing usability and accessibilty of the entire site (Never mind that he secretly had a third party come up with an ugly design and ambushed the dev team with it).
I keep telling everyone to deconstruct the adage "form follows function". It means function comes first. He doesn't care what anything *is* or how it *works*, only what it looks like. And, of course, that it's ugly.
All of this junk is supposed to generate XAML for.NET apps to build their UI's with. In true MS fashion, XAML syntax is such an unmanagable mess that of course it needs graphical tools to generate the markup. XAML has less separation of content and presentation than HTML 3.2 (!). Come on, it's not 1997 any more, everyone with a brain doing markup-based UI design knows that color, margin, font family, and border are all style properties, not tag attributes.
Because of this, I consider XAML the undeniable proof that no one at MS truly understands what style is for, how a DOM is supposed to work, or what extensible means.
The only way this can possibly be a Flash killer is if all these are true:
The cost for developers is considerably less than Flash
The output is considerably better than solutions developed with open web standards
I'd like to implement a policy where where browsers that have not had major changes to their rendering engine within the last 4 years would be unsupported.
Conveniently, this *would* exclude IE: last major version from 2001.
Realistically though, even 4.x browsers is a real stretch.
Once upon a time I had one of my sites hosted at CiHost. During the summer of 2000 (I think). I had always thought it odd that their two DNS servers at the time were both on the same subnet, but thought nothing of it.
Until the cache on one of them got corrupted, propogated to the other, and restoring a backup failed. This ultimately resulted in all of the sites (tens of thousands, maybe more) they hosted being unreachable for 30 days.
I switched somethere else ASAP. I still get meil from them offering me overpriced hosting.
And I think they still use the same IP addresses for DNS: 216.221.162.81 and 216.221.162.111 (although there are two more now according to whois).
"We're pretty simple, because 30 years ago we said we were a software company and five years, 10 years from now we will say we're a software company."
30 years ago they were a ragtag crew of shoddy programmers.
25 years ago they managed to steal someone else's product and hoodwink IBM with it.
Now, they are a marketing company
In 10 years, they'll be in a similar place to where Novell was before MS was ordered to pay them $500M: marginalized and supporting crap nobody really wants.
I can only imagine this was done as an extension because XUL Runner isn't finished yet.
I think using the browser as a host for other apps is cool, there will be a bubble in this as there is in so many other internet trends. Right now we're in the "Wow, let's write an extension because we can!" phase (partly because the only practical way to develop with Gecko is as such, see above). When everyone gets over the cool factor of it, the projects that actually enhance (or even relate to, for that matter) the browser experience will be distilled away from what should have been standalone apps in the first place.
As much as some people want to think the OS will become merely a life support system for the browser, it just isn't going to happen; the network is not the right place for some things, and if one program has everything, it inevitably becomes bloated and slow.
Opera isn't really anything in the PC browser market, but they are by far the biggest player in the mobile browser market. Why not sell to one of the partners licensing mobile Opera? The phone manufacturers now provide nearly all of Opera's revenue.
MS wouldn't even consider buying Opera... they couldn't effectively use it until Vista2, and they've already implemented a silly, ass-backwards *ahem* XML namespace for display (XAML) which would require major hacking (code wise and philosophically) to get any browser other than IE7 to support it.
Google might be doing some shadowy things lately, but I really doubt they want to become an end-user software company. They do web apps, and they do them well.
I do get it. The reason why this debacle was so visible is that Cogent only had (or still has) one (1) peering agreement, and that was with Level 3. If they had more, as you claim all tier 1's do, then they could have routed over other peer(s).
Slashdot Mirror
I put off getting a cell phone until December 2004 because I didn't feel I needed one. I still don't use it that often.
The salesman seemed confused by the fact that I didn't want a camera phone, and having a speakerphone was more important. If I was going to get a new phone today, I'd want a video phone even less. I want a phone, just a phone, and nothing but a phone (so help me $DIETY), and I'm sure I'm not alone, even in the U.S.
Obviously, the phone carriers don't care that people like me exist in the U.S.
Microsoft created the need for these companies to exist. The near destruction of that need is a side effect of MS finally learning that security is part of the development process.
But as long as there is Windows, there will be a need for 3rd party Windows security software.
IE may not be dead now, but if MS don't stop implementing open standards how and if they feel like, IE will be loaded on the cart and clubbed in the head by Eric Idle.
Sure they've fixed a lot of stuff, but one of the most critical is the lack of support for the application/html+xml mime type.
Is there any doubt that IBM has done its own internal Windows vs Linux TCO studies?
Last year IBM announced they were moving all 330,000 desktops from IE to Firefox. Why wouldn't they drop MS completely?
Aside from the hardware upgrades required, some ingenious bean counter discovered how to save $100M. 330,000 * $299 = $98,670,000. That's not chump change for anyone, even IBM. Cost wise, this is a no-brainer.
And with all those desktops running dogfood, IBM has created its own internal testing army, which can only lead to those products getting better.
They don't. I think George is also predicting the end of Hollywood celebrity. Let's face it, there's only so much fame to go around at any given point in time.
Price fixing has been a hallmark of the music industry for fifty years. Let's look at CD's.
It costs any record company, on average, about $0.25 to get one CD into a retail store. This includes:
Normally, manufacturers strive to keep their cost per unit at or below 12.5% of the retail price. The distributor then buys the unit at 30% to 40% of retail. The retailer buys the unit at 60% of retail. The customer buys the unit at (you guessed it) full retail price.
Let's see how the typical $16 CD retail price breaks down:
But Wait!!! Most record companies are their own distributors. More profit for them.
We see now that $0.25 (real cost) is about 1/8 of the production cost calculated here. Following the model, one CD should cost about $2.00.
Which is still more than most of the trite crap produced these days is worth. Music isn't a cash cow, it's a cash herd.
This is the majority of why I don't like OSCommerce. The concept of templates is negligible at best, and nearly all the layout markup is tables. Same thing goes for Gallery and Gallery2. I've set up two OSC sites, and on the first (about three years ago) I remember having to make the same visual change in 11 (!) different files.
This is pretty much the equivalent to scratch and sniff perfume/cologne ads in magazines. The method here doesn't match the product as well, so I can't imagine this would be as effective.
People skip ads because they (maybe only subconsciously) realize that they don't care about the ads, because the ads are not content. TV advertising doesn't work on a conscious level anymore. People have learned to use them as an excuse for other things (make popcorn, check laundry), or to simply automatically tune them out, much like studies have shown that people ignore 468 x 60 images on the web.
A TiVo that can automatically skip ads based on a program's break time schedule is equivalent to AdBlock; the difference is that in one, you know when the ads are coming, and in the other you know where they are coming from.
TV is also in a rough spot because:
In a nutshell, TV is doomed in a similar way to radio. The inevitable disaster of the switch to digital TV may just be the killing blow.
And I say good riddance, until I can get a la carte programming.
OSX is part of what gets Macs out the door. Some of that is because OSX is what it is, and another portion is that it isn't Windows. Mac fans like their OS, and would be very vocal if it was eviscerated in such a moronic way. Steve knows this.
Apple's interface is so clean and intuitive that everyone else has been trying to copy it for years (yeah, I know, Xerox PARC blah blah blah), even though no one wants to admit to it.
Time to post this again:
Since OSX is built on BSD, it has both users and fans. If OSX were based on Windows... well, no sane person enjoys being a victim.
Of all the recruiters I've dealt with (at least 20), not one has even gotten me an interview.
Being a web developer who actually knows (X)HTML, I was once hung up on by a recruiter when I told her I don't use Dreamweaver. A year later, I start seeing job postings where DW experience is a disadvantage.
But, a recruiter is sometimes only as useful as the requirements they get. 10 years of .NET experience? 15 years of J2EE? The list of absurd requirements goes on and on.
As for one alternative, post on Cragslist in your area. Monster and Dice are becoming less and less useful as time goes on.
Does MS Anti-Spyware still not detect Gator^H^H^H^H^HClaria crap as malware?
This tells me that MS knows there is at least a chance that the hard core computer gamers see little if any reason to upgrade to Vista on its own merits.
But if they restrict one of the most anticipated games to Vista, the computer gamers have no choice but to upgrade if they want to play the game.
I'd expect more marketing-driven announcements like this with other MS software (Office, IE7, etc) to give the same perceived need to the rest of the market.
(Sure, IE7 runs on XPSP2 now, but who says that won't change?)
These things are fixed:
Which basically begs the question, "Will IE ever 100% support any standard?" Sadly, the answer is probably not. IE doesn't even fully support HTML 3.2.
While HTML5 does have some good ideas, as a whole it is merely a revision of HTML4 (as is a stated goal). Nowhere in the HTML5 spec does it explicitly state whether it conforms to XML syntax; the various references to XML make this even less clear. The most conclusive evidence is near the end of section 1.8, where authoring formats are discussed:
This seens to indicate that HTML5 is not XML compliant. Emphasis mine.
Further, HTML5 still contains these presentational tags:
All of these (and many more) could be supplanted by the XHTML2 role attribute. Who ever said semantics must be limited to the element name? Furthermore, some hold HTML4 elements have been repurposed (such as the i tag). This alone will make compatibility with HTML4 difficult.
Overall, HTML5 seems to me like a collection of minimal changes from HTML4, with specific extensions for specific shortcomings added on. Overall, not very elegant.
The power of web markup lies partly in the abstraction and modularization of its structure. XHTML2 and its siblings (XForms, XPath, XBL2, etc) being XML and capable of standing alone are the logical next step in this.
And to those who complain about XHTML(X) not taking off, it is the solely fault of Microsoft. Since apparently no version of IE will ever support the application/xml+html mime type, the web as a whole has two options: abandon IE, or make itself into an even more confusing, hacked up version of itself which makes developers' lives even more difficult.
Prove that most people (and WYSIWYGs) don't know how to produce valid and accessible markup. The img alt attibute (an accessibility requirement) was found significantly less than width, height, and border.
I'm working on a site now where the project owner is continually reducing usability and accessibilty of the entire site (Never mind that he secretly had a third party come up with an ugly design and ambushed the dev team with it).
I keep telling everyone to deconstruct the adage "form follows function". It means function comes first. He doesn't care what anything *is* or how it *works*, only what it looks like. And, of course, that it's ugly.
All of this junk is supposed to generate XAML for .NET apps to build their UI's with. In true MS fashion, XAML syntax is such an unmanagable mess that of course it needs graphical tools to generate the markup. XAML has less separation of content and presentation than HTML 3.2 (!). Come on, it's not 1997 any more, everyone with a brain doing markup-based UI design knows that color, margin, font family, and border are all style properties, not tag attributes.
Because of this, I consider XAML the undeniable proof that no one at MS truly understands what style is for, how a DOM is supposed to work, or what extensible means.
The only way this can possibly be a Flash killer is if all these are true:
I'd like to implement a policy where where browsers that have not had major changes to their rendering engine within the last 4 years would be unsupported.
Conveniently, this *would* exclude IE: last major version from 2001.
Realistically though, even 4.x browsers is a real stretch.
Once upon a time I had one of my sites hosted at CiHost. During the summer of 2000 (I think). I had always thought it odd that their two DNS servers at the time were both on the same subnet, but thought nothing of it.
Until the cache on one of them got corrupted, propogated to the other, and restoring a backup failed. This ultimately resulted in all of the sites (tens of thousands, maybe more) they hosted being unreachable for 30 days.
I switched somethere else ASAP. I still get meil from them offering me overpriced hosting.
And I think they still use the same IP addresses for DNS: 216.221.162.81 and 216.221.162.111 (although there are two more now according to whois).
Worst hosting EVAR.
30 years ago they were a ragtag crew of shoddy programmers.
25 years ago they managed to steal someone else's product and hoodwink IBM with it.
Now, they are a marketing company
In 10 years, they'll be in a similar place to where Novell was before MS was ordered to pay them $500M: marginalized and supporting crap nobody really wants.
I can only imagine this was done as an extension because XUL Runner isn't finished yet.
I think using the browser as a host for other apps is cool, there will be a bubble in this as there is in so many other internet trends. Right now we're in the "Wow, let's write an extension because we can!" phase (partly because the only practical way to develop with Gecko is as such, see above). When everyone gets over the cool factor of it, the projects that actually enhance (or even relate to, for that matter) the browser experience will be distilled away from what should have been standalone apps in the first place.
As much as some people want to think the OS will become merely a life support system for the browser, it just isn't going to happen; the network is not the right place for some things, and if one program has everything, it inevitably becomes bloated and slow.
Opera isn't really anything in the PC browser market, but they are by far the biggest player in the mobile browser market. Why not sell to one of the partners licensing mobile Opera? The phone manufacturers now provide nearly all of Opera's revenue.
MS wouldn't even consider buying Opera... they couldn't effectively use it until Vista2, and they've already implemented a silly, ass-backwards *ahem* XML namespace for display (XAML) which would require major hacking (code wise and philosophically) to get any browser other than IE7 to support it.
Google might be doing some shadowy things lately, but I really doubt they want to become an end-user software company. They do web apps, and they do them well.
ActiveX is one HELL of a typo.
If electricity were discovered today, it would be deemed too dangerous for the public.
I do get it. The reason why this debacle was so visible is that Cogent only had (or still has) one (1) peering agreement, and that was with Level 3. If they had more, as you claim all tier 1's do, then they could have routed over other peer(s).
Are they going to learn their lesson and strike peering agreements with more tier ones then just Level 3?