I agree entirely that browser diversity is a good thing. The wider the variety of browsers available, the more necessary it is for them to comply with Open Standards. No browser with a minority market share can expect web developers to code to their non-standard behaviour.
That's a bit harsh. Someone's lost a child, here. What's needed here is publicity to help others avoid this mistake and, ideally, a ban on firearms in domestic environments.
Is it just Google that you want to stand up to the Chinese, or should the rest of the businesses in the world follow suit?
Indeed, should our governments "show a little spine"?
Get into the real world.
Quite right - especially the Celine Dion bit.
Sony used to be a quality brand, but their love of DRM and proprietary solutions should be enough to warn anyone to stear well clear of their products.
An excellent point, well made.
The real believers rarely make it to power, as they are, by definition, utter retards.
However, the example of George W Bush makes me quite afraid and as for Sarah Palin...
For god's sake, please stop associating good interface design with nontechnical users. There are plenty of very competent technical users out there that prefer a well designed interface because it makes things easier.
The non-technical consumers are the ones who would not understand the DRM that is tying them to a single supplier. We all like a good interface, but not at that price.
As far as I can see, this is a comparison of Firefox 3.1 with IE7, not IE8 as the summary seems to imply.
I am as happy as the next man that FF3.1 is faster, but as a benchmarking exercise, this is pretty limited.
How about a comparison including IE8, Opera, Chrome and Safari?
This is typical poor reporting of a scientific study. From the evidence provided in the article, it's possible to provide several explanations of the observed results. Most obviously that younger people use more brain activity than older people when using a search engine. However, they have leapt to the conclusion that the key factor is whether or not the individuals are "internet savvy".
Surely it would have been possible to obtain people from all walks of life with differnt levels of internet experience. There's plenty of older folk who have used Google!
Right on! A good programmer will learn any programming language in a fortnight. But sadly average programers don't.
That's a very glib statement. I agree that any programmer should be able to pick up the syntax of a new language very quickly, but syntax is just the tip of the iceberg.
Mastering all of the capabilities of an environment or run time and establishing how best to architect a solution is an entirely different scale of undertaking. If you could gain a thorough understanding of J2EE, it's runtime and numerous associated frameworks, that would be impressive.
I'm a huge Stephen Fry fan, but I've always understood him to be an Apple fan boy. I can't find any references at the moment, but I'm sure that in his obituary piece for Douglas Adams, he waxes lyrical about Apple and how he and Adams would spend ages discussing Apple's latest gadgets. From memory, he described such moments as "Douglassy".
Do fuel cells really produce no carbon emissions?
Granted, the cars themselves should produce nothing but water, but how do we produce the hydrogen? Does that not require energy? I simply don't believe that all of the hydrogen plants are powered by nuclear or hydroelectric energy.
I am not against these ideas at all, but let's not get carried away. I've no doubt that fuel cells are much cleaner than internal combustion, but provide the real facts, please.
Be careful. Before you know it, you'll be quality manager, configuration manager and development manager and pretty soon you'll have no time to cut any code at all.
It's all very well getting a raise, but not if it takes you out of a job you enjoy to a job you loath.
Fundamentally, the people at fault here are the so-called professionals who allow their certificates to expire. Why should I trust their site's security if they can't manage a simple administration function like that. Thawte and Verisign provide you with enough reminders that your certs are about to expire, so you don't even need to diarise it yourself.
I do have more sympathy with self-signed certificates.There is no excuse for corporates to be using them, but for small, non-profit sites, self-signed is understandable. Mozilla could help this situation by providing support for CACert and similar organisations, by including their signing certs in their browsers, by default.
Don't underestimate package management - it is critical. It is the main differentiator between distros and it is the key to Ubuntu's current success.
It's also one of the main reasons that Linux is so much more stable than Windows.
Sorry, but you have to live in the real world. Many websites are run for commercial reasons. They cannot deliberately provide a poor experience for most of their customers, just in order to wage a standards war.
Like most developers, my company develops against Firefox and then spends time ensuring that it works acceptably on IE.
In spite of this move from MS (which I welcome), the problem will not go away for some years. We will have to consider IE6 and IE7 for a long time, yet as they will continue to have a significant market share, long after IE8 makes it's debut.
The airlines will happily give you more leg room. All you have to do is give them more money. It's called 1st class.
If you like cheap flights, there's not much point in bitching about comfort.
Indeed. This isn't a coding error, it's a testing error. Or perhaps a process design error. Excellent point. I work for a financial institution that I'd better not name. The business are constantly complaining about the cost and lead time involved in new IT development. In particular, we have been pressed on whether all the testing we do is really necessary. No doubt, if/when we cut corners and problems occur, those same people will be looking to blame the coders.
You're quite right. Looking further into the article, Tesco (a major supermarket - think WalMart for the UK) is considering action, too.
In a statement, Tesco also said that it is "disappointed at Google's recent changes to their trademark policy as we think that consumers are the people who will be disadvantaged." Now, what kind of screwy logic leads them to think that when searching for Tesco and being presented with ads for a bunch of supermarkets could lead to consumers being disadvantaged? How thick do they think consumers are?
This has got to be to the consumers advantage. It lets us know what other companies operate in the same domain. OK, for supermarkets, this is pretty obvious, but less so for, say, Tool Hire. If I want to know about tool hire companies, I could type HSS and get a list of relevant companies, simply because I know of one. Poor example, as I could have just searched on "Tool Hire", but you take my point, I hope.
Show me a technology where they did not try to seek to tie people into their proprietary solution - Betamax, Memory Stick, MiniDisc, UMD, BlueRay, to name just a few.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree entirely that browser diversity is a good thing. The wider the variety of browsers available, the more necessary it is for them to comply with Open Standards. No browser with a minority market share can expect web developers to code to their non-standard behaviour.
That's a bit harsh. Someone's lost a child, here. What's needed here is publicity to help others avoid this mistake and, ideally, a ban on firearms in domestic environments.
Careful.Hollywood will try to ban dd, next.
Is it just Google that you want to stand up to the Chinese, or should the rest of the businesses in the world follow suit? Indeed, should our governments "show a little spine"? Get into the real world.
Quite right - especially the Celine Dion bit. Sony used to be a quality brand, but their love of DRM and proprietary solutions should be enough to warn anyone to stear well clear of their products.
An excellent point, well made. The real believers rarely make it to power, as they are, by definition, utter retards. However, the example of George W Bush makes me quite afraid and as for Sarah Palin...
try it for yourself
I can't. It wont run on my platform.
aimed at nontechnical consumers
For god's sake, please stop associating good interface design with nontechnical users. There are plenty of very competent technical users out there that prefer a well designed interface because it makes things easier.
The non-technical consumers are the ones who would not understand the DRM that is tying them to a single supplier. We all like a good interface, but not at that price.
As far as I can see, this is a comparison of Firefox 3.1 with IE7, not IE8 as the summary seems to imply. I am as happy as the next man that FF3.1 is faster, but as a benchmarking exercise, this is pretty limited. How about a comparison including IE8, Opera, Chrome and Safari?
This is typical poor reporting of a scientific study. From the evidence provided in the article, it's possible to provide several explanations of the observed results. Most obviously that younger people use more brain activity than older people when using a search engine. However, they have leapt to the conclusion that the key factor is whether or not the individuals are "internet savvy". Surely it would have been possible to obtain people from all walks of life with differnt levels of internet experience. There's plenty of older folk who have used Google!
Right on! A good programmer will learn any programming language in a fortnight. But sadly average programers don't.
That's a very glib statement. I agree that any programmer should be able to pick up the syntax of a new language very quickly, but syntax is just the tip of the iceberg. Mastering all of the capabilities of an environment or run time and establishing how best to architect a solution is an entirely different scale of undertaking. If you could gain a thorough understanding of J2EE, it's runtime and numerous associated frameworks, that would be impressive.
Adams was particularly keen on hand held computers, as he thought he might be able to write his books whilst having a bath.
I'm a huge Stephen Fry fan, but I've always understood him to be an Apple fan boy. I can't find any references at the moment, but I'm sure that in his obituary piece for Douglas Adams, he waxes lyrical about Apple and how he and Adams would spend ages discussing Apple's latest gadgets. From memory, he described such moments as "Douglassy".
Do fuel cells really produce no carbon emissions?
Granted, the cars themselves should produce nothing but water, but how do we produce the hydrogen? Does that not require energy? I simply don't believe that all of the hydrogen plants are powered by nuclear or hydroelectric energy.
I am not against these ideas at all, but let's not get carried away. I've no doubt that fuel cells are much cleaner than internal combustion, but provide the real facts, please.
Be careful. Before you know it, you'll be quality manager, configuration manager and development manager and pretty soon you'll have no time to cut any code at all.
It's all very well getting a raise, but not if it takes you out of a job you enjoy to a job you loath.
Fundamentally, the people at fault here are the so-called professionals who allow their certificates to expire. Why should I trust their site's security if they can't manage a simple administration function like that. Thawte and Verisign provide you with enough reminders that your certs are about to expire, so you don't even need to diarise it yourself.
I do have more sympathy with self-signed certificates.There is no excuse for corporates to be using them, but for small, non-profit sites, self-signed is understandable. Mozilla could help this situation by providing support for CACert and similar organisations, by including their signing certs in their browsers, by default.
Some people report success building and running this under Cygwin.
Don't underestimate package management - it is critical. It is the main differentiator between distros and it is the key to Ubuntu's current success. It's also one of the main reasons that Linux is so much more stable than Windows.
Sorry, but you have to live in the real world. Many websites are run for commercial reasons. They cannot deliberately provide a poor experience for most of their customers, just in order to wage a standards war.
Like most developers, my company develops against Firefox and then spends time ensuring that it works acceptably on IE.
In spite of this move from MS (which I welcome), the problem will not go away for some years. We will have to consider IE6 and IE7 for a long time, yet as they will continue to have a significant market share, long after IE8 makes it's debut.
The airlines will happily give you more leg room. All you have to do is give them more money. It's called 1st class. If you like cheap flights, there's not much point in bitching about comfort.
The leading manufacturer of GPUs wants GPUs to become ever more important.
Why worry about a 300MB download? Is this 1995?
This has got to be to the consumers advantage. It lets us know what other companies operate in the same domain. OK, for supermarkets, this is pretty obvious, but less so for, say, Tool Hire. If I want to know about tool hire companies, I could type HSS and get a list of relevant companies, simply because I know of one. Poor example, as I could have just searched on "Tool Hire", but you take my point, I hope.
Show me a technology where they did not try to seek to tie people into their proprietary solution - Betamax, Memory Stick, MiniDisc, UMD, BlueRay, to name just a few.