When you were connected to a network / DSL in XP, you had the nice little "two monitors" icon notification in your systray, and you could actually see at a glance if your connectivity had dropped out because the icon used to light up with incoming and outgoing packets.
In Vista, they screwed this up, the icon is still there, but doesn't flash anymore, and has some kind of blue toadstool on top of it ??? Oh, wait, it's supposed to be a globe of the earth, my mistake.
Please please bring back my flashing notification icons, so I don't have to click through 5 screens just to find out I'm not receiving any packets.
The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.
Yes, and this is where I feel they have lost their way. Not so long ago, the police had to "actively" prevent the crime from occurring, or at least be on the scene to capture the perpetrators immediately afterwards with enough evidence to make sure they were put away for a long time.
But what with the mess that is the judicial system (pick any country you like, they all have lawyers) where any criminal can walk on a technicality... and the police's semming inability to solve REAL crime anymore, they have gradually moved across to what I call "passive" prevention
i.e. enforcing trivial little rules like public disorder, congregation in public places, speeding, running red lights, by placing security cameras at every turn... and browsing through people's laptops at airports looking for files called "kiddy_porn.zip".
Policing is now more than ever a "numbers game"... while the real criminals literally get away with murder.
I can quite happily go into Program Files and delete iexplore.exe... so Internet Explorer doesn't run anymore. I can even delete the icon from my desktop, shortcut bar, or wherever. But any other applications that use the underlying rendering engine contained in mshtml.dll WILL still work.
Please stop speading FUD, it's not big, and it's not clever.
What an excellent point, shame about the clueless mods.
This whole case revolves around MS offering something for free back in the 90's, when the competition (I use the word very loosely as Netscape 4 DID suck) was trying to sell their product.
If Internet Explorer had never been bundled, and always been a separate saleable product, I wonder what the impact of something like Firefox (which is free if you don't count the Google sponsorship) would have been ? Would Mozilla / Google have been guilty of uncompetitive practices by giving away their browser, while all the competition had paid offerings ?
Really, I don't see how something they did 15 years ago has any relevance on the situation today. Anyone with any common sense understands that ANY O/S has to offer internet connectivity and a method to browse it. So what MIGHT have been a marketable product 15 years ago would have turned into a bundled extra anyway, simply by logical progression.
So because of what they did a long time ago, they can now longer compete on an equal footing, when Mac OSX can offer their Safari, Linux can offer whatever the distro compiler chooses, but MS MUST offer both their own browser and a choice of alternatives. And on top of that, any browser manufacturer who wants to increase his market share can "assist the EU in the anti-trust case".
Thank god Firefox at least has realised how stupid this would be, Opera are still sulking becaus e no one bought their paid piece of crap, and now Google are on the bandwagon so they can push android.
It seems strange that whilst Google arguably has the market share in terms of search resources, THEY can still bundle their bloody toolbar with every group you join, every email you read, and every other opportunity they can grab. Why is THAT not monopolistic behaviour (and a damn sight more relevant to the internet than a 15 year old browser war) ?
To be honest, I preferred the concept of "mutually assured destruction", that the current "US guaranteed destruction".
The US wasn't quite so blase about wandering into foreign countries and trying to impose their view on things, when they thought the USSR might have something to say about it.
There was a barrier to things, the US tried not to piss off the neighbours too often... now they wander all over the neighbours lawn and let their dog shit on it.
Like sendmail never needed patching, and openssh never had any flaws, and MySQL never needed upgrading to fix bugs.
NO O/S is a one-time-cost experience. The fact that Linux has no initial payment involved doesn't mean it doesn't still have a financial impact in terms of user's / sysadmin's time.
Or maybe you think all Linux users are geeks with infinite time on their hands, and nothing to do but sit in the basement hacking source ?
Try taking all the webkit libraries out of Mac OSX, and see how much that breaks ?
Try removing libsncurses or whatever it's called from a Linux distro, ditto above ?
In a culture where we it is engrained to "reuse" code, and avoid redundancy, your criticize Microsoft for doing exactly that, while both the other "major" O/S do exactly the same thing to a degree. Every piece of code is going to have SOME dependencies, otherwise everything would be so bloated and no one could use anyone elses code.
Yes, that functionality *COULD* be replicated by a third party library... but you'd better be sure it's a 100% functional replacement, otherwise we end up with more pitiful OSS excuses and half-done software such as the monstrosity that is OpenOffice "opens nearly all your documents TM".
People don't want stuff that works "most of the time", especially when it's being touted that it's such-a-good-thing to be able to use a slot in replacement. It's only good if it does exactly the same thing and is transparent to the end-user. If it has better security and closes some holes, then great, I'm all for it... but it had better be 100% compatible or no chance.
Having said that, a third party library could possibly even "break" the non standard stuff like ActiveX... what better way to force the webdesigners to STOP relying on non standard extensions, than to not support them at all.
Then the choice would be, use the MS library that has more holes than a tramp's hammock... or use the Mozilla slot-in replacement library that is more secure, but sorry doesn't support ActiveX. I'm not sure what the takeup rate would be in the general populace, but at least the geeks amongst us would have a viable alternative.
Now if MS were to document all the function calls to mshtml.dll, and together with the DOM documents, *COULD* a third party make such a slot in replacement, based on perhaps the Mozilla engine ?
Yes, they could, but it wouldn't be a great move in terms of their market share. Instead of offering a free browser (complete with Google backhanders^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsponsorship), all they could offer would be a free browser rendering library. Great for users, but killer for the Firefox browser. So there's no incentive for any of the competing browser makers to do it anyway.
Mah, I don't know. Just been watching CNN interview Buzz Aldrin approximately 40 years after they first landed on the moon. It's such a shame the Cold War ended, at least then we had a goal to chase, even if it was only "beating the commies". Also, maybe the US wouldn't be throwing it's weight around quite so much and sticking it's noses into the world's affairs.
It's a sad fact that government based email messages have a tendency to "disappear" when the politician in question comes under internal investigation (US, I'm looking at you).
Providing a hotmail account is accessed every 30 days, I think Jack would have a much harder time "disappearing" those messages... so in terms or transparency / auditability, maybe it's better to leave things as they are ?
So if I wander around for a while sniffing other peoples butts, regurgitate my own sick and eat it again, then curl up to lick my own balls for a while, that'd be okay with you ? After all, animals do it !
Yes I'm with you on most of your points, except this one
* allow ISPs to charge a monthly fee to proxy with PIN number server-side, much like they do for VOD.
Surely the privacy advocates would be even more up in arms on this one... it's essentially making a declaration "I want access to unfiltered content". That list would be extremely hot property for anyone wanting to narrow a search for "potential bad people".
It's taking the IP = Person paradigm (which we all know is nonsense right now), and reinforcing it with a PIN / signup mechanism which ties a definate user to a definate action (i.e. looking at unfiltered content).
And when confronted about your choice, it would be all too easy for someone to tar you with the "You wanted unfiltered content, therefore you must be a bad person / radical / pedo" brush.
Netscape NEEDED to be put in the slaughterhouse, because their browser sucked. At a time when everyone wanted DHTML, the best Netscape could do was the layer tag, which didn't reflow dynamically, so you could only design by allowing enough space in the initial layer for everything you might need to insert inside it.
It is a plain fact that NEITHER of the competing browsers were standards compliant at that time, and MS simply had the better product, whether offered free or not. I'm not debating that the "free" part helped, but bear in mind, if someone asked you now in 2009 to PAY for Firefox, would you do it ? Seen what's happened to Opera recently ?
Finally, were you even BORN in the 90's or do you just repeat verbatim everything you read on Slashdot ?
and make their locked down features (like Acivex) (sic) work with other vendor's products
Well there is I believe an ActiveX wrapper addon for Firefox, though I can't imagine why anyone would want it.
But really, how deep does this need to go ? How is ActiveX gonna work with Mac or Linux anyway ? Cannot find win32.dll ? Well no shit Sherlock.
Or is it only limited to things that you can run "inside a browser", as if the whole spectrum of other applications that have dependencies to the Trident engine are somehow exempt, but Internet Explorer is evil.
Turning this on it's head, is there any form of slot in replacement for mshtml.dll that uses the Mozilla rendering engine ? Maybe, if you want to stop all these exploits and security issues, it should be Mozilla themselves to push this out ?
Without some solution like this, there's gonna be a whole lot more broken apps out there than just Internet Explorer.
Yes, but this is the same argument as saying "it's okay to commit a crime, just don't get caught".
So Apple, Firefox, whoever, can leverage THEIR market share at the detriment of MS, until they are in a position of 49% dominance, and MS is on 51% dominance ?
It's okay to leverage and foist your product using bundling No matter how shitty / proprietary ala iTunes, Adobe etc), provided you don't step over the magic line, is that it ?
Slashdot Mirror
"Wives" that have "inflate to 25 PSI" written on their foreheads do NOT count !
When you were connected to a network / DSL in XP, you had the nice little "two monitors" icon notification in your systray, and you could actually see at a glance if your connectivity had dropped out because the icon used to light up with incoming and outgoing packets.
In Vista, they screwed this up, the icon is still there, but doesn't flash anymore, and has some kind of blue toadstool on top of it ??? Oh, wait, it's supposed to be a globe of the earth, my mistake.
Please please bring back my flashing notification icons, so I don't have to click through 5 screens just to find out I'm not receiving any packets.
No, they decided on "Off-White Haze of Confusion" instead. Didn't you get the minutes from that meeting ?
33. Developers! Developers! Developers!
34. Sweat-stained shirts washed while you wait!
35. ????
36. Profit!
There, completed the list for you ;-)
Actually, 35. was going to be "Flying Chair Screensaver Now Included!", but then I couldn't have got in the gnomes reference.
I was going to form a rebuttal along the lines of "no, surely not, say it isn't so" ... then I saw it was a "kdawson".
Amazing how a proper noun can become a derogatory adjective, I just love our language.
I'd really like to add him to my blocked editors list, but if I did that, there'd be nothing whatsoever to read on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
I know I'm probably being pedantic, or maybe it might be a valid point.
Are you saying that a US citizen LEAVING the US might be protected via 5th amendment rights, but a US citizen ENTERING the US might not be protected.
Or are borders something like grey areas where ALL rights are given up, no matter if you are standing on US or Canadian / Mexican soil ?
The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.
Yes, and this is where I feel they have lost their way. Not so long ago, the police had to "actively" prevent the crime from occurring, or at least be on the scene to capture the perpetrators immediately afterwards with enough evidence to make sure they were put away for a long time.
But what with the mess that is the judicial system (pick any country you like, they all have lawyers) where any criminal can walk on a technicality ... and the police's semming inability to solve REAL crime anymore, they have gradually moved across to what I call "passive" prevention
i.e. enforcing trivial little rules like public disorder, congregation in public places, speeding, running red lights, by placing security cameras at every turn ... and browsing through people's laptops at airports looking for files called "kiddy_porn.zip".
Policing is now more than ever a "numbers game" ... while the real criminals literally get away with murder.
However, on the other hand don't for a minute believe that society needs to bend over for you as well
Freudian Slip ?
Unfortunately, at least when it comes to religion, it IS morally right to crusade and try to convert people.
Catholics say their's is the only true God, the others are fake, join with us ...
Muslims say their's is the only true God, the others are fake, join with us ...
Hindus say their's is the only true God(s) ... they have like 5000 but what the hell, the others are fake, join with us ...
The Sith say they are the true Gods, Obi Wan, join with us ... (in Christopher Lee's voice)
Awww, I got nothing ... just ignore this ;-)
Yes but that's the whole point isn't it ?
I can quite happily go into Program Files and delete iexplore.exe ... so Internet Explorer doesn't run anymore. I can even delete the icon from my desktop, shortcut bar, or wherever. But any other applications that use the underlying rendering engine contained in mshtml.dll WILL still work.
Please stop speading FUD, it's not big, and it's not clever.
What an excellent point, shame about the clueless mods.
This whole case revolves around MS offering something for free back in the 90's, when the competition (I use the word very loosely as Netscape 4 DID suck) was trying to sell their product.
If Internet Explorer had never been bundled, and always been a separate saleable product, I wonder what the impact of something like Firefox (which is free if you don't count the Google sponsorship) would have been ? Would Mozilla / Google have been guilty of uncompetitive practices by giving away their browser, while all the competition had paid offerings ?
Really, I don't see how something they did 15 years ago has any relevance on the situation today. Anyone with any common sense understands that ANY O/S has to offer internet connectivity and a method to browse it. So what MIGHT have been a marketable product 15 years ago would have turned into a bundled extra anyway, simply by logical progression.
So because of what they did a long time ago, they can now longer compete on an equal footing, when Mac OSX can offer their Safari, Linux can offer whatever the distro compiler chooses, but MS MUST offer both their own browser and a choice of alternatives. And on top of that, any browser manufacturer who wants to increase his market share can "assist the EU in the anti-trust case".
Thank god Firefox at least has realised how stupid this would be, Opera are still sulking becaus e no one bought their paid piece of crap, and now Google are on the bandwagon so they can push android.
It seems strange that whilst Google arguably has the market share in terms of search resources, THEY can still bundle their bloody toolbar with every group you join, every email you read, and every other opportunity they can grab. Why is THAT not monopolistic behaviour (and a damn sight more relevant to the internet than a 15 year old browser war) ?
To be honest, I preferred the concept of "mutually assured destruction", that the current "US guaranteed destruction".
The US wasn't quite so blase about wandering into foreign countries and trying to impose their view on things, when they thought the USSR might have something to say about it.
There was a barrier to things, the US tried not to piss off the neighbours too often ... now they wander all over the neighbours lawn and let their dog shit on it.
Ah FUD FUD FUD ...
Like sendmail never needed patching, and openssh never had any flaws, and MySQL never needed upgrading to fix bugs.
NO O/S is a one-time-cost experience. The fact that Linux has no initial payment involved doesn't mean it doesn't still have a financial impact in terms of user's / sysadmin's time.
Or maybe you think all Linux users are geeks with infinite time on their hands, and nothing to do but sit in the basement hacking source ?
Yes, but at least with closed-source, the wheel is generally wheel-shaped.
OSS tends to be a semi-defined octagon shape, and you have to hack the source to round the edges a bit.
Ouch, these analogies are giving me a headache ... couldn't you have used something involving cars ?
program in PHP ?
That's like saying I build dams, bridges and other critical structures, with LEGO.
Try taking all the webkit libraries out of Mac OSX, and see how much that breaks ?
Try removing libsncurses or whatever it's called from a Linux distro, ditto above ?
In a culture where we it is engrained to "reuse" code, and avoid redundancy, your criticize Microsoft for doing exactly that, while both the other "major" O/S do exactly the same thing to a degree. Every piece of code is going to have SOME dependencies, otherwise everything would be so bloated and no one could use anyone elses code.
Yes, that functionality *COULD* be replicated by a third party library ... but you'd better be sure it's a 100% functional replacement, otherwise we end up with more pitiful OSS excuses and half-done software such as the monstrosity that is OpenOffice "opens nearly all your documents TM".
People don't want stuff that works "most of the time", especially when it's being touted that it's such-a-good-thing to be able to use a slot in replacement. It's only good if it does exactly the same thing and is transparent to the end-user. If it has better security and closes some holes, then great, I'm all for it ... but it had better be 100% compatible or no chance.
Having said that, a third party library could possibly even "break" the non standard stuff like ActiveX ... what better way to force the webdesigners to STOP relying on non standard extensions, than to not support them at all.
Then the choice would be, use the MS library that has more holes than a tramp's hammock ... or use the Mozilla slot-in replacement library that is more secure, but sorry doesn't support ActiveX. I'm not sure what the takeup rate would be in the general populace, but at least the geeks amongst us would have a viable alternative.
Now if MS were to document all the function calls to mshtml.dll, and together with the DOM documents, *COULD* a third party make such a slot in replacement, based on perhaps the Mozilla engine ?
Yes, they could, but it wouldn't be a great move in terms of their market share. Instead of offering a free browser (complete with Google backhanders^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsponsorship), all they could offer would be a free browser rendering library. Great for users, but killer for the Firefox browser. So there's no incentive for any of the competing browser makers to do it anyway.
Back to square one no ?
1. Futility
2. Disappointment
3. Legacy
4. Dinosaur
Mah, I don't know. Just been watching CNN interview Buzz Aldrin approximately 40 years after they first landed on the moon. It's such a shame the Cold War ended, at least then we had a goal to chase, even if it was only "beating the commies". Also, maybe the US wouldn't be throwing it's weight around quite so much and sticking it's noses into the world's affairs.
</us-rant>
It's a sad fact that government based email messages have a tendency to "disappear" when the politician in question comes under internal investigation (US, I'm looking at you).
Providing a hotmail account is accessed every 30 days, I think Jack would have a much harder time "disappearing" those messages ... so in terms or transparency / auditability, maybe it's better to leave things as they are ?
You just described Vista ...
So if I wander around for a while sniffing other peoples butts, regurgitate my own sick and eat it again, then curl up to lick my own balls for a while, that'd be okay with you ? After all, animals do it !
Yes I'm with you on most of your points, except this one
* allow ISPs to charge a monthly fee to proxy with PIN number server-side, much like they do for VOD.
Surely the privacy advocates would be even more up in arms on this one ... it's essentially making a declaration "I want access to unfiltered content". That list would be extremely hot property for anyone wanting to narrow a search for "potential bad people".
It's taking the IP = Person paradigm (which we all know is nonsense right now), and reinforcing it with a PIN / signup mechanism which ties a definate user to a definate action (i.e. looking at unfiltered content).
And when confronted about your choice, it would be all too easy for someone to tar you with the "You wanted unfiltered content, therefore you must be a bad person / radical / pedo" brush.
Netscape NEEDED to be put in the slaughterhouse, because their browser sucked. At a time when everyone wanted DHTML, the best Netscape could do was the layer tag, which didn't reflow dynamically, so you could only design by allowing enough space in the initial layer for everything you might need to insert inside it.
It is a plain fact that NEITHER of the competing browsers were standards compliant at that time, and MS simply had the better product, whether offered free or not. I'm not debating that the "free" part helped, but bear in mind, if someone asked you now in 2009 to PAY for Firefox, would you do it ? Seen what's happened to Opera recently ?
Finally, were you even BORN in the 90's or do you just repeat verbatim everything you read on Slashdot ?
and make their locked down features (like Acivex) (sic) work with other vendor's products
Well there is I believe an ActiveX wrapper addon for Firefox, though I can't imagine why anyone would want it.
But really, how deep does this need to go ? How is ActiveX gonna work with Mac or Linux anyway ? Cannot find win32.dll ? Well no shit Sherlock.
Or is it only limited to things that you can run "inside a browser", as if the whole spectrum of other applications that have dependencies to the Trident engine are somehow exempt, but Internet Explorer is evil.
Turning this on it's head, is there any form of slot in replacement for mshtml.dll that uses the Mozilla rendering engine ? Maybe, if you want to stop all these exploits and security issues, it should be Mozilla themselves to push this out ?
Without some solution like this, there's gonna be a whole lot more broken apps out there than just Internet Explorer.
Yes, but this is the same argument as saying "it's okay to commit a crime, just don't get caught".
So Apple, Firefox, whoever, can leverage THEIR market share at the detriment of MS, until they are in a position of 49% dominance, and MS is on 51% dominance ?
It's okay to leverage and foist your product using bundling No matter how shitty / proprietary ala iTunes, Adobe etc), provided you don't step over the magic line, is that it ?
You have a strange world view my friend.
Silvio has banned the internet, so no one can post videos to YouTube of all the asinine things he comes away with.
Damn, he owns just about everything else in Italy, I'd be surprised if he doesn't have an interest in the internet already.