light side, dark side, holds the universe together, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, George Lucas ruined this joke, since duct tape isn't made my symbiotic microorganisms living inside everything.
For many years now A List Apart has been pretty good at cross browser and cross platform rendering, and showing others how they can do it. I've used them a lot, especially for the mostly-css hover menu. However, having converted many of their menus and layouts to sites I've worked on, it's still not easy.
Besides, that just proves one of my points that accommodating multiple browsers requires a lot of work, extremely frustrating and boring work.
Some of those people could very well be buyers. There were a few things working against that. First of all, you have diminishing returns on each browser. Accommodating IE 5 and 6, at the time, caught 90% of the market. Accommodating Firefox would get another 5%, Safari 2-3%, and so on. Accommodating Firefox would take anywhere from 15-50% of the original development time for a site that utilized CSS-based layouts and some javascript. Accommodating Safari would require about half as much as firefox, assuming you made it work for firefox in the first place, otherwise it would take a little more time than firefox. Compound that with the unavailability of Safari outside of the mac until recently, and it was a monumental pain in the ass to develop for
I'm not advocating that we develop for only one browser. I'm writing this in firefox running on Ubuntu. What I am saying is that there is a very real, very legitimate argument for not developing for those platforms. For a lot of companies, especially companies struggling to break into the online space, lowering their development costs by 30-40% could justify leaving out 10% of their potential customer base.
"accommodating" them doesn't take any more time or effort than designing for IE alone Bwahahahaha! Oh man, that's good. I'm laughing myself to sleep tonight.
Saying "This site is designed for Internet Explorer only" is like putting up a sign outside the Wal-Mart parking lot saying "This lot is designed for GM vehicles only". You'll still get plenty of visitors, but is there some good reason for keeping people (and their money) out of your business? I'm sorry, but that's just wrong (although a popular opinion on slashdot). Until recently, IE enjoyed 90%+ market share and only linux users were completely unable to use IE, so it'd be more like saying that their store isn't designed for people wearing traditional Japanese kimonos and a cowboy hat. But for the analogy to really be correct, you'd have to add that people in kimonos and cowboy hats made it so that building a store and stocking the product on the shelves cost about 2x as much. The motivation for building for something else had to come from something other than profits.
Over the past 2 years or so, firefox and safari have taken off to the point where it makes good business sense to accommodate them. You'll also notice that most (good) web designers themselves use something other than IE. Overall, it's much better today than it used to be, but that's also because the browser market's more balanced.
What do you think? That linux is a dominant player in the server market and that Apple is pretty much negligible in either. With how similar Intel and AMD chips tend to be, I don't know that there's anything stopping Apple from switching to AMD at any time. Either way, it's a relatively small chunk of the desktop market.
The other potential AMD savior is Linux. Can the open source community deliver software that can take advantage of AMD's CPU-GPU architecture spectacularly enough to give AMD the sales it needs? This is an interesting question. When AMD comes out with their chips, if they really want to impress people with its abilities, they would do well to get some coders working on Folding@Home working on their new chips. It was impressive to see what ATI cards could do with the code, and it would be a great way to showcase the abilities to computationally heavy programs that run on servers (thereby breaking into that market).
On the desktop end they would have to get something working to showcase the performance in games. Unfortunately, open source doesn't have a lot of 3d games floating around.
Whatever happens, I think they're going to have to show something that works well with windows or else they're going to flop. If it works well enough with windows and they can show substantial performance improvements, then get manufacturing capacity up, they might be able to land an Apple contract. It would be huge for publicity and for a single contract, but for the overall market, it's not going to make or break them.
There's are 2 critical differences between Mark Twain's investing in a typesetting machine and me investing in AMD: I'm the target customer for AMD and I'm not going to invest principally in this one company. I would assume from your description of what happened to Mark Twain that he wasn't heavily involved with the people who used type setting machines and therefore made the purchasing decisions for them. On the other hand, I'm intimately familiar with all the reasons that people choose one company over another in computer parts.
So, to sum up my comment in an analogy, Mark Twain investing in type setting technology would be akin to me investing in a company that's trying to sell a new kind of fabrication technology. My investing in AMD would be more akin to Mark Twain investing in another author, or perhaps a particular publishing company.
Of course, since I haven't been in the stock market long enough to have any sort of track record, this is all armchair investing anyway.
Apparently you didn't RTFA, because they describe the problems that AMD is having and then go on to say why the problems may be surmounted. In other words, you're overlooking the obvious position that AMD's in. nVidia doesn't have a CPU line that's one of the top CPUs in the market and in performance. Intel doesn't have a GPU that's competitive in performance. With the market moving towards greater integration and interaction between the CPU and the GPU, there's only one company that can deliver both.
So it's going to come down to whether or not AMD has the ability right now to keep pushing their product lines and innovating fast enough to beat Intel and nVidia to the punch. Their financial situation hurts their chances, but it doesn't negate them completely.
You're not using your home network like you should be then. I often find myself transferring multiple gigabytes of information from one computer to another.
Unless things have changed drastically since the last time I looked, that's all the ram of a typical home system or 2-4x if you could those that were bought years ago.
I couldn't agree with your post more. My experience with ubuntu on my desktop has been almost perfect, definitely better than windows. I went to windows, to dual boot, to just ubuntu in about three months.
However, I deal with linux every day at work, and I'm reasonably good at it. I don't balk at the command line and even enjoy using it as long as it's working for me. My wife, on the other hand, couldn't care less about what she's running. When I asked her if she's enjoying Vista on her laptop, she just looked at me funny and asked what I was talking about. She won't touch my desktop to save her life. I'm sure that she'd be able to do everything she needs on it, but that's only because I've already set it up. She's installed windows from an image onto her laptop before without any trouble, but I don't think she could do ubuntu.
However, for people like me and (presumably) you who are willing and able to put in the small amount of work, it's great to have a free, high quality, easier-than-windows alternative. I'd recommend it to my parents or my siblings without hesitation as long as they had someone around to help them with it occasionally.
A whole new breed of middle-men would have to pop-up, existing solely for the purpose of figuring out who I have to collect sales taxes for. Perfect! They're creating jobs! This'll be great for the economy!
AMD earned my loyalty many times over the years, and now that it's fallen from the top of the price/performance heap, I feel bad buying another chip. This is the company who made the chip for my first computer, that made 64 bit mainstream, and made intel actually improve their products. They've done so much for the industry, it'd be a shame for them to continue taking a pounding like they have.
Pretty soon we'll realize that anything a human can discern on the internet a computer can discern. For about the last year I've noticed that CAPTCHA's have gotten so bad that I can barely read them and they've become an impediment to my surfing. It's ridiculous and it's the same way that studios use DRM: you stop the illegitimate use by making it harder on everyone, including legitimate users.
While kitten auth is an interesting concept, it won't last forever, and it's still a pain in the ass for the users. What happens when a computer learns the difference between a cat and a kitten? Are they going to start pushing the relative ages closer? distorting the image? Put a wav file of a "meow" on the page and make you tell them the cat's last meal? Have a customer service agent chat with you for a few minutes?
They need to start banning based on use and patterns. 1400 accounts created from the same IP on the same day? Cat knowledge or no, that's suspicious behavior. 90% of the emails from that gmail account are getting marked as spam on the other end? Send them an email and ask them what's going on. Every single one of their emails is to 1000 recipients, don't pass a spell check on any words at all, send these five or more times a day and they're suspiciously familiar? Block it.
Going to jail is a bit over the top How so? At the very least we know that for the last three years they granted access to thousands of social security numbers and medical records to anyone with internet access and rudimentary skills in sql. This isn't a situation where they made a small mistake, that on one of their report pages they didn't sanitize the 'sort by' field and they got burned. This is the absolute worst mistake that a programmer can make. The programmer should be charged with facilitating identity theft, and everyone in the state's employ whose responsibility was to make sure the site worked. They didn't do any security testing at all.
I know it sounds like a lot for making a mistake, but for someone in the web development business, this is a hole you could drive a truck through and the person who made it had to be so inexperienced or malicious that it should have been caught by someone above them. It's really hard to overstate how bad a programmer has to be to give the public complete database access like this.
If they're actually seeding it themselves then I expect to hear about a lawsuit Only if they actually seed it. They could advertise as a seeder, connect and receive connections, then not give you anything.
The support team that the author manages didn't get trained on the new version before it went into production. The author had requested it, but the release was pushed too fast for non-technical reasons.
They didn't know how to support it or even talk properly about the issues. It was a major bug that needed to be escalated immediately. He followed procedure and the other guy didn't.
They didn't follow up properly in documenting the case. Again, major error. When there's a big enough error on a production server, sometimes you don't document the problem. Sometimes you have to get up at 11 am and figure out why 30 leads are getting created every second by the same ip address and it's bringing down the server. As a tech support engineer (which I'm not, but assuming I am), at this point I can do one of two things: I can keep digging and documenting, or I can escalate. The author didn't tell us what the issue is, but he did say it was major.
They woke up the VP of software development at 3 AM without having good data for him. They called, he never answered.
I could continue, but I've got to ask: were you reading the same article I was? It's possible that the information that was given was wrong and biased, but there wasn't anything in the article that the author did blatantly wrong.
You should read the article. The guy that he's referring to was very abusive, refused to actually have dialog, and made the insults personal at every juncture. He was also the CTO, which means that I would get the fuck out of that company as soon as I could. C-level execs should be a pretty good barometer of the management at all levels, since they'll promote people like them and were chosen and kept on for a reason. The only way to deal with certains kinds of assholes with power is to not deal with them.
And that's what the author ended up doing. Personalities like that are a serious hindrance. I've seen my share of people who divert blame or refuse to admit they're wrong, and usually it's because they receive more blame than they deserve, and usually someone else is in the wrong (and that person is in a position to never have to be wrong). A lot of people in IT are there because they're extremely talented and are right much more often than they're wrong. It creates a lot of potential for misunderstandings.
I think there's also a fundamental difference between a bully who's a normal coworker and a bully who's above you in the chain of command. There's a big difference between the stress of dealing with and unfriendly person of equal power and the stress of dealing with an unfriendly person who has a lot of power over your company, and management can forget that. I had a boss like that and it was sometimes hard to work with him because he didn't realize that insults weren't appropriate from someone in his position.
Slashdot Mirror
light side, dark side, holds the universe together, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, George Lucas ruined this joke, since duct tape isn't made my symbiotic microorganisms living inside everything.
Break it up, guys. Let's leave the fighting in the stadiums and surrounding bars, all right?
Besides, that just proves one of my points that accommodating multiple browsers requires a lot of work, extremely frustrating and boring work. Some of those people could very well be buyers. There were a few things working against that. First of all, you have diminishing returns on each browser. Accommodating IE 5 and 6, at the time, caught 90% of the market. Accommodating Firefox would get another 5%, Safari 2-3%, and so on. Accommodating Firefox would take anywhere from 15-50% of the original development time for a site that utilized CSS-based layouts and some javascript. Accommodating Safari would require about half as much as firefox, assuming you made it work for firefox in the first place, otherwise it would take a little more time than firefox. Compound that with the unavailability of Safari outside of the mac until recently, and it was a monumental pain in the ass to develop for
I'm not advocating that we develop for only one browser. I'm writing this in firefox running on Ubuntu. What I am saying is that there is a very real, very legitimate argument for not developing for those platforms. For a lot of companies, especially companies struggling to break into the online space, lowering their development costs by 30-40% could justify leaving out 10% of their potential customer base.
Over the past 2 years or so, firefox and safari have taken off to the point where it makes good business sense to accommodate them. You'll also notice that most (good) web designers themselves use something other than IE. Overall, it's much better today than it used to be, but that's also because the browser market's more balanced.
On the desktop end they would have to get something working to showcase the performance in games. Unfortunately, open source doesn't have a lot of 3d games floating around.
Whatever happens, I think they're going to have to show something that works well with windows or else they're going to flop. If it works well enough with windows and they can show substantial performance improvements, then get manufacturing capacity up, they might be able to land an Apple contract. It would be huge for publicity and for a single contract, but for the overall market, it's not going to make or break them.
There's are 2 critical differences between Mark Twain's investing in a typesetting machine and me investing in AMD: I'm the target customer for AMD and I'm not going to invest principally in this one company. I would assume from your description of what happened to Mark Twain that he wasn't heavily involved with the people who used type setting machines and therefore made the purchasing decisions for them. On the other hand, I'm intimately familiar with all the reasons that people choose one company over another in computer parts.
So, to sum up my comment in an analogy, Mark Twain investing in type setting technology would be akin to me investing in a company that's trying to sell a new kind of fabrication technology. My investing in AMD would be more akin to Mark Twain investing in another author, or perhaps a particular publishing company.
Of course, since I haven't been in the stock market long enough to have any sort of track record, this is all armchair investing anyway.
Apparently you didn't RTFA, because they describe the problems that AMD is having and then go on to say why the problems may be surmounted. In other words, you're overlooking the obvious position that AMD's in. nVidia doesn't have a CPU line that's one of the top CPUs in the market and in performance. Intel doesn't have a GPU that's competitive in performance. With the market moving towards greater integration and interaction between the CPU and the GPU, there's only one company that can deliver both.
So it's going to come down to whether or not AMD has the ability right now to keep pushing their product lines and innovating fast enough to beat Intel and nVidia to the punch. Their financial situation hurts their chances, but it doesn't negate them completely.
You're not using your home network like you should be then. I often find myself transferring multiple gigabytes of information from one computer to another.
Unless things have changed drastically since the last time I looked, that's all the ram of a typical home system or 2-4x if you could those that were bought years ago.
I can think of a few customers that I have to support that may find those helpful...
I couldn't agree with your post more. My experience with ubuntu on my desktop has been almost perfect, definitely better than windows. I went to windows, to dual boot, to just ubuntu in about three months.
However, I deal with linux every day at work, and I'm reasonably good at it. I don't balk at the command line and even enjoy using it as long as it's working for me. My wife, on the other hand, couldn't care less about what she's running. When I asked her if she's enjoying Vista on her laptop, she just looked at me funny and asked what I was talking about. She won't touch my desktop to save her life. I'm sure that she'd be able to do everything she needs on it, but that's only because I've already set it up. She's installed windows from an image onto her laptop before without any trouble, but I don't think she could do ubuntu.
However, for people like me and (presumably) you who are willing and able to put in the small amount of work, it's great to have a free, high quality, easier-than-windows alternative. I'd recommend it to my parents or my siblings without hesitation as long as they had someone around to help them with it occasionally.
Right next to that nice Nigerian fellow. Don't worry, they won't take that list of verified email addresses and spam them; that would be illegal!
AMD earned my loyalty many times over the years, and now that it's fallen from the top of the price/performance heap, I feel bad buying another chip. This is the company who made the chip for my first computer, that made 64 bit mainstream, and made intel actually improve their products. They've done so much for the industry, it'd be a shame for them to continue taking a pounding like they have.
Also, I own some of their stock. Go team!
Pretty soon we'll realize that anything a human can discern on the internet a computer can discern. For about the last year I've noticed that CAPTCHA's have gotten so bad that I can barely read them and they've become an impediment to my surfing. It's ridiculous and it's the same way that studios use DRM: you stop the illegitimate use by making it harder on everyone, including legitimate users.
While kitten auth is an interesting concept, it won't last forever, and it's still a pain in the ass for the users. What happens when a computer learns the difference between a cat and a kitten? Are they going to start pushing the relative ages closer? distorting the image? Put a wav file of a "meow" on the page and make you tell them the cat's last meal? Have a customer service agent chat with you for a few minutes?
They need to start banning based on use and patterns. 1400 accounts created from the same IP on the same day? Cat knowledge or no, that's suspicious behavior. 90% of the emails from that gmail account are getting marked as spam on the other end? Send them an email and ask them what's going on. Every single one of their emails is to 1000 recipients, don't pass a spell check on any words at all, send these five or more times a day and they're suspiciously familiar? Block it.
Also, for amusing reuse and evolution of memes (along with not so amusing ones) and the creative-as-hell trolls.
I know it sounds like a lot for making a mistake, but for someone in the web development business, this is a hole you could drive a truck through and the person who made it had to be so inexperienced or malicious that it should have been caught by someone above them. It's really hard to overstate how bad a programmer has to be to give the public complete database access like this.
*checks difference between time of GP and parent*
Program in C, eh?
I could continue, but I've got to ask: were you reading the same article I was? It's possible that the information that was given was wrong and biased, but there wasn't anything in the article that the author did blatantly wrong.
You should read the article. The guy that he's referring to was very abusive, refused to actually have dialog, and made the insults personal at every juncture. He was also the CTO, which means that I would get the fuck out of that company as soon as I could. C-level execs should be a pretty good barometer of the management at all levels, since they'll promote people like them and were chosen and kept on for a reason. The only way to deal with certains kinds of assholes with power is to not deal with them.
And that's what the author ended up doing. Personalities like that are a serious hindrance. I've seen my share of people who divert blame or refuse to admit they're wrong, and usually it's because they receive more blame than they deserve, and usually someone else is in the wrong (and that person is in a position to never have to be wrong). A lot of people in IT are there because they're extremely talented and are right much more often than they're wrong. It creates a lot of potential for misunderstandings.
I think there's also a fundamental difference between a bully who's a normal coworker and a bully who's above you in the chain of command. There's a big difference between the stress of dealing with and unfriendly person of equal power and the stress of dealing with an unfriendly person who has a lot of power over your company, and management can forget that. I had a boss like that and it was sometimes hard to work with him because he didn't realize that insults weren't appropriate from someone in his position.
Their about page calls it the "perl interpreter" multiple times. How is it not an interpreted language?