This idea that nobody knows whats inside is bullshit.
The assembly language community pretty much has the architecture down cold, and by architecture I do not mean the instruction set. See Agner Fog, for instance.
True, but if choosing something else means you can't interoperate with 90% of the world, it's not necessarily much of a choice.
But you can. I hear this all the time, but have not seen actual evidence to the contrary. I just see unclear reasoning about people making choices that dont fit with yours.
After I do that, there will still be millions of Windows desktops out there that can't connect to my AFP share.
I see, so if I go ahead and make Rockoon File Protocol (RFP) for Linux, I get to jump up and down and cry and moan like a fucking girl because Windows and Mac don't have built-in functionality?
The only way that you will be happy seems to be if everyone runs the same operating system, yet you cry and moan because most of the world IS running the same operating system.
No, there doesnt really have to be something better. There are many ways to view things, and certainly x86 is one of the ugliest instruction sets still in use.
But the modern x86 architecture has almost all the key features that make processors faster, and x64 has the one thing that x86 lacked (gratuitous amounts of registers)
Well I didn't say that Microsoft controls 90% of the market; I'm saying Windows controls 90% of desktop computers.
You made that clear the first time, and its still wrong when you repeat it.
Being on 90% of computers is different than being on control of 90% of computers.
Popularity is not equivalent to control. AT&T had control because it owned all the lines. Microsoft isnt in control because it does NOT own all of the operating systems, nor the computers. We are all free to choose a different one and that by definition means there isnt the measure of control that you are so flagrantly suggesting.
But this means something. It means, for example, that 90% of desktop computers can't easily connect to an NFS or AFP share, and can't read ext3 partitions.
Yes they can. Install something which does that. You can do that on hundreds of machines this week, yourself. By the end of next year you can have done it to thousands and thousands of machines.
The level of control you are suggesting does not exist in the case of Microsoft, but as others have pointed out it does exist on some computing devices (locked down cell phones, for instance.)
In the only sense that follows a rational train of thought. We are talking about features of the operating system, not marketing tactics.
You dont get to argue that Microsoft leverages its monopoly position in one way as a testimony that shows that it leverages it in another way. Different things are different things.
I dont need to see a disclaimer to form my opinion here.
Chase is donating 3.5 million bucks to charities, and the result is a bunch of fucking assholes with the nerve to bitch and complain about how they are doing it.
It would require quoting you quoting me, and then your response text. If what you wrote was not a refutation to what you quoted, why did you quote it?
I'm still waiting for your refutation.
you have to reach back into the days of Netscape to find a time when the Mozilla codebase was less compliant than IE.
Whats this about being LESS compliant? One of them has to be LESS compliant, by definition since none are FULLY compliant. The fact that one has MORE compliance is not the subject of discussion. FireFox is less compliant than Opera, Safari, *AND* Chrome. That hurts, doesnt it? You have tried to turn this into a glory discussion about how great FireFox is, but neither the subject nor even true.
IE7 is a large improvement over 6, right? right? But you somehow amazingly, and I quote, "cannot see it"
I've dealt with his kind before. One of his problems is that he thinks VM's are strictly a runtime phenomena, when the reality is that nearly all C compilers on the planet have a byte-code layer. They have this because some optimizations are simple on 3AC and stack based paradigms, but quite hard on AST's.
So we've got a situation where his favorite compiler goes:
source -> AST -> bytecode -> binary
..and he is arguing against is how java/c# does it:
source -> AST -> bytecode -> binary
In short, he doesnt really understand what the hell is going on. He wants to think that hes better than those "other" people, and no amount of trying to convince him otherwise will work. He's a language bigot.
If he wanted to argue that managed languages are less performant in general, then he would be on to something in some cases. But managed languages do not require VM's, and non-managed languages can and are be built on VM's.
When people pay me to work, if IE didn't exist (or when I don't have to support it), that immediately cuts 20% of my time on the project, thus 20% of the cost of implementing it. It means I can either spend that much less time working, or spend that much more time actually making progress rather than supporting Microsoft's mistake.
No, it means that your competitors will undercut you by 20% unless you also pass the savings off to the person with the purse strings.
That is true, and I don't believe I claimed it did.
Yes, you did.
The point you tried to refute, I will give you one more chance:
The people running IE6 have not updated their browser for at least 3 years (IE7 was late 2006), and maybe have not done so for as many as 8 years (IE6 was released in late 2001)
Now, what makes you think that these people will install FireFox 3.x from a ballot screen once and then update to FireFox 4.x, then 5.x, and then 6.x?
As I explained to you, the fact of the matter is that a large portion of the world does not update their browsers to new versions. FireFox 3.x does not entirely support DOM2 yet, so can I expect you to be crying about millions of FireFox 3.x users about 6 years from now because they dont have a browser that fully supports DOM2, or how about CSS3?
I am an Opera user, and have been for many many many years (long before FireFox.) I am not pro-internet explorer nor am I pro-microsoft. What I am is a bullshit detector and its plain bullshit to think that Microsoft created this "problem." This problem would have existed even if Microsoft never created a browser.
No, my complaint is that it's IE. 32/100 on Acid3, and that's with an IE9 preview.
What does ACID3 have to do with a component internal to the OS which is not meant to render arbitrary web pages?
Remember, your premise (and you were quite explicit) was that Trident should be engineered out of the OS, not that IE should render pages better. These are two different things, right?
I realize that plenty of people hate IE, but that has nothing to do with Windows having a integral Trident engine. And having such an engine as a standard part of the OS does not effect web developers AT ALL.
This isnt all of it really. Sure, they ignored the feature flags.. but they also intentionally did not do other far more general optimizations, such as eliminating dead and/or redundant code.
As someone who programs in assembly language, may I be the first to say that you are completely full of shit. The Intel compiler is not all that CPU specific. The Intel compiler, for the most part, performs more AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) optimizations than any other compiler. It is the AST optimizations that make it the greatest.
For the record, I am a big fan of ICC's optimizations. I am the sort of person who tells other programmers that if they arent using ICC then they shouldn't be performing micro-optimizations yet. The ICC vs AMD debacle is long over, and whats left is still the best C compiler on the planet. Its not even a close comparison. Its the best C compiler for Intel CPU's and its also the best C compiler for AMD CPU's. All they had to do to re-enable performing well on AMD's is to stop fucking them over on purpose.
As far as the response from Intel asking "what bug?" from you. I'll bet almost anything after reading your shit about architecture that you only think that you found a bug...
Possible, though unlikely -- the default configuration of Firefox on Windows is to auto-update, and this has been the case for some time.
..and wont (rightly) update 2.x to any version of 3
Have you actually checked your assumptions? I mean really spent more than a moment to think them through before bashing on your keyboard like an angry monkey in a dream world?
Yes, I must have imagined the years I spent as a professional web developer.
Way to miss the point. Missing the point is a key symptom of living in a dream world.
you must be living in the dream world where the latest release of IE actually makes an effort to support web standards.
The effort is there, its just not obvious to angry monkeys banging on their keyboard while living in a dream world.
You can talk about that Acid3 all you want.. (I am running a browser that scored 100/100 long before FireFox, so why arent you running Opera?) but its meaningless shit. Nobody supports DOM2 completely, and the CSS2 it tests isnt even part of CSS2.1. Acid3 is a fucked up metric to go by and anyone who mentions it as 'evidence' that IE isnt up to snuff obviously isnt a GOOD web developer.
There is a market of IE6 users. Either support them, or don't. Stop being a fucking crybaby and blaming the effort involved to support them on others. You are paid for that effort, jackass.
If C is near N because of "dodgy setups", then the setups arent actually dodgy.
You might be able to imagine a world where the majority of people have broken systems and thusly its the fault of the majority of the people that software X doesnt run on the majority of systems..
..but in the real world, when it doesnt run on the majority of computers, its because the developer is fucking over the majority of users.
From a competitiveness standpoint, the problem with this is that a: applications that embed IE will not respect your choice of browser rendering engine
The alternative is for the application to package and bundle its own rendering engine. Don't for a minute think that application developers want to display HTML using the random rendering engine the user has chosen. They crafted that HTML for a specific engine, and actually want it to do things like display the content as it was meant to be displayed.
Unlike web developers, application developers dont whine and cry about having multiple engines to support. They pick one, and then they use it. They dont want the user fucking with that choice, because doing so may fuck over their application.
So I don't really blame them for leaving the engine, though I do think it's a shitty situation and one that they should be engineering themselves out of.
On the contrary, the fact that a layout rendering engine comes standard is a good thing. It doesnt matter what rendering engine it is. If it magically became todays webkit build then 8 years from now you will be saying how shitty it is that the outdated rendering engine is included and should be engineered out of the OS.
The fact of the matter is that there is nothing wrong with having one come standard, and also that it doesnt change much (if at all) over extremely long periods. Moving targets are a headache for developers, and so is re-inventing the wheel.
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One could argue that they are easier, since the FireFox user will be grabbing stuff with Microsoft Update anyways...
This.
..add in all those plugins and its much worse.
Just about the only browser that loads slower than FireFox 3.x these days is Safari on Windows (don't know about on Mac)
Take my advice boys.. Chrome or Opera.
This idea that nobody knows whats inside is bullshit.
The assembly language community pretty much has the architecture down cold, and by architecture I do not mean the instruction set. See Agner Fog, for instance.
True, but if choosing something else means you can't interoperate with 90% of the world, it's not necessarily much of a choice.
But you can. I hear this all the time, but have not seen actual evidence to the contrary. I just see unclear reasoning about people making choices that dont fit with yours.
After I do that, there will still be millions of Windows desktops out there that can't connect to my AFP share.
I see, so if I go ahead and make Rockoon File Protocol (RFP) for Linux, I get to jump up and down and cry and moan like a fucking girl because Windows and Mac don't have built-in functionality?
The only way that you will be happy seems to be if everyone runs the same operating system, yet you cry and moan because most of the world IS running the same operating system.
No, there doesnt really have to be something better. There are many ways to view things, and certainly x86 is one of the ugliest instruction sets still in use.
But the modern x86 architecture has almost all the key features that make processors faster, and x64 has the one thing that x86 lacked (gratuitous amounts of registers)
Well I didn't say that Microsoft controls 90% of the market; I'm saying Windows controls 90% of desktop computers.
You made that clear the first time, and its still wrong when you repeat it.
Being on 90% of computers is different than being on control of 90% of computers.
Popularity is not equivalent to control. AT&T had control because it owned all the lines. Microsoft isnt in control because it does NOT own all of the operating systems, nor the computers. We are all free to choose a different one and that by definition means there isnt the measure of control that you are so flagrantly suggesting.
But this means something. It means, for example, that 90% of desktop computers can't easily connect to an NFS or AFP share, and can't read ext3 partitions.
Yes they can. Install something which does that. You can do that on hundreds of machines this week, yourself. By the end of next year you can have done it to thousands and thousands of machines.
The level of control you are suggesting does not exist in the case of Microsoft, but as others have pointed out it does exist on some computing devices (locked down cell phones, for instance.)
In what sense?
In the only sense that follows a rational train of thought. We are talking about features of the operating system, not marketing tactics.
You dont get to argue that Microsoft leverages its monopoly position in one way as a testimony that shows that it leverages it in another way. Different things are different things.
I dont need to see a disclaimer to form my opinion here.
Chase is donating 3.5 million bucks to charities, and the result is a bunch of fucking assholes with the nerve to bitch and complain about how they are doing it.
Popularity (your 90%) is not equivalent to control.
And monopolies per se are ok - it;s when you use that monopoly to exploit another business area when the line is crossed.
Even if all of your competitors offer the same functionality?
Nah, its nothing but bricks down at the bottom of Jailbreak Sea.
Quote me, then, explicitly.
It would require quoting you quoting me, and then your response text. If what you wrote was not a refutation to what you quoted, why did you quote it?
I'm still waiting for your refutation.
you have to reach back into the days of Netscape to find a time when the Mozilla codebase was less compliant than IE.
Whats this about being LESS compliant? One of them has to be LESS compliant, by definition since none are FULLY compliant. The fact that one has MORE compliance is not the subject of discussion. FireFox is less compliant than Opera, Safari, *AND* Chrome. That hurts, doesnt it? You have tried to turn this into a glory discussion about how great FireFox is, but neither the subject nor even true.
IE7 is a large improvement over 6, right? right? But you somehow amazingly, and I quote, "cannot see it"
Following your own logic, its not anti-competitive for Microsoft to intentionally break software.
After all, "You can't be anti-competitive in your own market."
Plenty of .NET video games now, especially from the indies.
I've dealt with his kind before. One of his problems is that he thinks VM's are strictly a runtime phenomena, when the reality is that nearly all C compilers on the planet have a byte-code layer. They have this because some optimizations are simple on 3AC and stack based paradigms, but quite hard on AST's.
..and he is arguing against is how java/c# does it:
So we've got a situation where his favorite compiler goes:
source -> AST -> bytecode -> binary
source -> AST -> bytecode -> binary
In short, he doesnt really understand what the hell is going on. He wants to think that hes better than those "other" people, and no amount of trying to convince him otherwise will work. He's a language bigot.
If he wanted to argue that managed languages are less performant in general, then he would be on to something in some cases. But managed languages do not require VM's, and non-managed languages can and are be built on VM's.
When people pay me to work, if IE didn't exist (or when I don't have to support it), that immediately cuts 20% of my time on the project, thus 20% of the cost of implementing it. It means I can either spend that much less time working, or spend that much more time actually making progress rather than supporting Microsoft's mistake.
No, it means that your competitors will undercut you by 20% unless you also pass the savings off to the person with the purse strings.
New to the business world?
That is true, and I don't believe I claimed it did.
Yes, you did.
The point you tried to refute, I will give you one more chance:
The people running IE6 have not updated their browser for at least 3 years (IE7 was late 2006), and maybe have not done so for as many as 8 years (IE6 was released in late 2001)
Now, what makes you think that these people will install FireFox 3.x from a ballot screen once and then update to FireFox 4.x, then 5.x, and then 6.x?
As I explained to you, the fact of the matter is that a large portion of the world does not update their browsers to new versions. FireFox 3.x does not entirely support DOM2 yet, so can I expect you to be crying about millions of FireFox 3.x users about 6 years from now because they dont have a browser that fully supports DOM2, or how about CSS3?
I am an Opera user, and have been for many many many years (long before FireFox.) I am not pro-internet explorer nor am I pro-microsoft. What I am is a bullshit detector and its plain bullshit to think that Microsoft created this "problem." This problem would have existed even if Microsoft never created a browser.
No, my complaint is that it's IE. 32/100 on Acid3, and that's with an IE9 preview.
What does ACID3 have to do with a component internal to the OS which is not meant to render arbitrary web pages?
Remember, your premise (and you were quite explicit) was that Trident should be engineered out of the OS, not that IE should render pages better. These are two different things, right?
I realize that plenty of people hate IE, but that has nothing to do with Windows having a integral Trident engine. And having such an engine as a standard part of the OS does not effect web developers AT ALL.
This isnt all of it really. Sure, they ignored the feature flags.. but they also intentionally did not do other far more general optimizations, such as eliminating dead and/or redundant code.
The first one is not what Intel did.
As someone who programs in assembly language, may I be the first to say that you are completely full of shit. The Intel compiler is not all that CPU specific. The Intel compiler, for the most part, performs more AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) optimizations than any other compiler. It is the AST optimizations that make it the greatest.
For the record, I am a big fan of ICC's optimizations. I am the sort of person who tells other programmers that if they arent using ICC then they shouldn't be performing micro-optimizations yet. The ICC vs AMD debacle is long over, and whats left is still the best C compiler on the planet. Its not even a close comparison. Its the best C compiler for Intel CPU's and its also the best C compiler for AMD CPU's. All they had to do to re-enable performing well on AMD's is to stop fucking them over on purpose.
As far as the response from Intel asking "what bug?" from you. I'll bet almost anything after reading your shit about architecture that you only think that you found a bug...
Possible, though unlikely -- the default configuration of Firefox on Windows is to auto-update, and this has been the case for some time.
Have you actually checked your assumptions? I mean really spent more than a moment to think them through before bashing on your keyboard like an angry monkey in a dream world?
Yes, I must have imagined the years I spent as a professional web developer.
Way to miss the point. Missing the point is a key symptom of living in a dream world.
you must be living in the dream world where the latest release of IE actually makes an effort to support web standards.
The effort is there, its just not obvious to angry monkeys banging on their keyboard while living in a dream world.
You can talk about that Acid3 all you want.. (I am running a browser that scored 100/100 long before FireFox, so why arent you running Opera?) but its meaningless shit. Nobody supports DOM2 completely, and the CSS2 it tests isnt even part of CSS2.1. Acid3 is a fucked up metric to go by and anyone who mentions it as 'evidence' that IE isnt up to snuff obviously isnt a GOOD web developer.
There is a market of IE6 users. Either support them, or don't. Stop being a fucking crybaby and blaming the effort involved to support them on others. You are paid for that effort, jackass.
If C is near N because of "dodgy setups", then the setups arent actually dodgy.
..but in the real world, when it doesnt run on the majority of computers, its because the developer is fucking over the majority of users.
You might be able to imagine a world where the majority of people have broken systems and thusly its the fault of the majority of the people that software X doesnt run on the majority of systems..
From a competitiveness standpoint, the problem with this is that a: applications that embed IE will not respect your choice of browser rendering engine
The alternative is for the application to package and bundle its own rendering engine. Don't for a minute think that application developers want to display HTML using the random rendering engine the user has chosen. They crafted that HTML for a specific engine, and actually want it to do things like display the content as it was meant to be displayed.
Unlike web developers, application developers dont whine and cry about having multiple engines to support. They pick one, and then they use it. They dont want the user fucking with that choice, because doing so may fuck over their application.
So I don't really blame them for leaving the engine, though I do think it's a shitty situation and one that they should be engineering themselves out of.
On the contrary, the fact that a layout rendering engine comes standard is a good thing. It doesnt matter what rendering engine it is. If it magically became todays webkit build then 8 years from now you will be saying how shitty it is that the outdated rendering engine is included and should be engineered out of the OS.
The fact of the matter is that there is nothing wrong with having one come standard, and also that it doesnt change much (if at all) over extremely long periods. Moving targets are a headache for developers, and so is re-inventing the wheel.