Unfortunately IE6 is still at 27% on our site (enterprisy web apps). And the percentage used by our customers on their desktops is significantly higher still (over 50%).
We can only forlornly hope that 2010 will be the year of "Anything except XP" on the desktop...
The fact that the IE market is split between 6.X, 7.X and 8.X doesn't not detract from the (regrettable) fact that Internet Explorer is the most popular browser, worldwide. Different versions do not a different browser make.
Sure, if you are just a spectator cheering for your team from the sidelines.
But not if you are a web developer/designer, the different versions are very different browsers. In terms of making a modern website work there is much more difference between IE8 and IE6 than there is between IE8 and FF/Safari/Chrome/Opera etc.
You're not thinking of Korea maybe? North Korea and China were close buddies. North Vietnam was better friends with the Soviets, and never really got on well with China.
The tensions between Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge that led to Vietnam invading Cambodia was a chance for the Soviets and the Chinese to have a little war of their own.
Indeed I shall - it got him a series of logical arguments with which to dispute the wisdom of the time. Gradually, through debate and observation and experimentation, more and more people realised he had made a series of logical points that disproved the old ways of doing things.
Exactly. Not only that, but the scientists of the time were already aware of limitations in the prevailing models. There were many other scientists unsuccessfully trying to solve the same issues.
Einstein's breakthrough wasn't disproving existing physics, but with coming up with a new elegant model that addressed its already known limitations in ways others had failed to.
If all ideas are NOT equally valid, then I challenge them to even predict what the weather will be over my house, in exactly 7 days from now !
Shouldn't you be challenging a meteorologist instead? Why should a climatologist have to accept a meteorology challenge from someone too stupid to tell the difference?
Even I can tell you pretty conclusively whether or not the average June 2010 temperatures going to be hotter or colder here than the current average temp will be this month (December). Hell I'd even extend my predictions to June 2011, June 2012 etc. The difference between those kind of overall trends and telling you whether or not it will be raining next Tuesday is the difference between climatology and meteorology.
You see the problem is, climatologists can't even predict the "small stuff" to any degree of accuracy, yet will quite happily stand 100% by their conclusions on what will happen in 10 years fro now, declaring that they know better, and everyone else is either unqualified, or misguided, or a moron.
No climatologist is "standing 100% by their conclusions on what will happen 10 yrs from now" - that is a total strawman. Especially as climatologists don't deal with the small stuff anyway.
These things are predictions of the overall trends based on lots of data and understanding of the physical processes involved. There aren't statements of what things are going to be exactly like. While the overall direction of the trend is no longer disputed by climatologists, predictions of how fast things will change and exactly what the results will be are by no means certain.
And don't talk to me about localised effects being difficult to predict... when it comes to floods, droughts, hurricanes, typhoons etc, they *are* localised effects. They ARE important to the survival of the human race. So it's 0.6 oC warmer in the Antarctic... who gives a fuck ? When there's 8 foot of water in your living room, THATS IMPORTANT !!
So are they localised or are they important to the human race? Which is it?
Whether or not you will have 8ft, 2ft, or no water in your living room on some particular future date is impossible to even guess at without someone knowing more about your living room. I presume no climatologist has issued a global warning for your living room yet. Shocking, I know.
Local predictions of local events are made locally by eg meteorologists or hydrologists or even geographers etc that partially base their predictions on the data and predictions made by local climatologists who then base their predictions on what the global climatologists predict. You are wanting that info from the wrong people, and expecting more than a weeks warning of a dramatic weather event is currently unreasonable.
Averaging out the whole planet and then declaring "yes it it getting warmer" is hardly a PhD conclusion...
And yet the public debate and media coverage seems to be around that very question.
Hitler just didn't need to invade Switzerland. Like Sweden it was neutral and no threat to Germany. Switzerland was culturally similar to Germany, it was surrounded by the Germans, Germany controlled all trade in and out, and it was useful to them (eg banking).
The other western European countries were either threats or were important strategic buffers against the French and British forces.
Switzerland would've been very tough to invade sure, but that had just as much to do with other factors like the terrain, the extensive well developed and stocked fortifications, the publicised plans to destroy all vital transport links, the decentralised government etc than your Red Dawn fantasies would like to imply.
Hitler wasn't afraid to take on anyone - if he felt Switzerland needed invading he would've tried it even if it was doomed to ultimately fail. That was his downfall - he certainly wasn't afraid of anyone or of biting off more than he could chew.
Owning a gun to protect the nation is as much true today as it was in the late 18th century. In Switzerland, they still believe it, and to this day they don't waste any money on a standing army. Instead, every militia member (which is every male 18-45) has a fully-automatic rifle in his house, ready to defend his nation if necessary. When WWII came around and Hitler and Mussolini invaded almost every country in Europe, he left little Switzerland alone because of this.
Let me get this straight... Hitler and Mussolini didn't invade Switzerland because of a few rifles? But they were willing to take on (with the exception of Japan) practically every other major military force in the world?
Why do people insist on trotting out their own experiences of success on a limited subset of hardware as if they somehow negate the fact that people are suffering because of the Ubuntu developer's subservience to the tyranny of the "Six Month Release Cycle (OMG)." Even your example fails since you are having difficulties but are willing to brush them off.
Jumping to conclusions about their motivations? Maybe that persons experience was trotted out purely because the story summary itself asked for peoples experiences.
And here is mine: Two clean installs (no upgrades yet), and no apparent problems.
One could argue that there's been no new technology since the wheel... everything since is just a derivative.
Just as well you used the word "since" - otherwise you would've been flamed to death by the Inclined Plane fanbois. They're still bitter about the wheel getting all the attention lately.
The main reason why Amiga users rarely if ever had virus problems was because it was largely in the pre-Internet era. I used an Amiga for a long time and never actually saw a machine with so much as a network card. Sneaker net was the rule. So unless you were pirating software from nefarious sources, virus infections were rare, about as rare as on the Mac, which didn't have any protection either, apparently not any at all until Mac OS X was released.
Amiga viruses were rare? I've never experienced a platform with more viruses than the Amiga had due to the way floppy disks got shared around between teenage gamers and the rarity of virus scanners. Most infected Amiga users probably didn't even realise it. On the whole the Amiga viruses weren't actually very destructive though - one of the common symptoms was not being able to format floppies anymore.
Obviously nobody is going to succeed on that level without talent, hardwork and insight etc.
But you'd still need plenty of luck as well. There would've been many 50/50 line calls Bill Gates made early on that only in hindsight turned out to be right or if they were wrong not big enough to sink him. There also could've been many other events or factors outside his control that could've sunk him in those early days too.
You do know that this isn't the warmest the Earth's ever been, right?
Yep. It was a lot warmer back in the days before all that carbon we're releasing got sequested underground as oil and coal.
Unfortunately all the ecosystems and species adapted for those conditions aren't really around anymore - they eventually got replaced by ones better adapted to cooler conditions.
I'm not going to go so far as to say with 100% certainty that mankind isn't responsible for any of the warming. However, until you (and pro-global warming people like you) even acknowledge that the planet changes its temperate most of the time, I just can't take you seriously.
Huh? Of course the climate changes a lot naturally - it always has. The issue is how fast change is happening and how disruptive that change will be to societies and ecosystems. Obviously the faster it changes the harder it will be to adapt and the more damaging the change will be.
The Earth and life in general eventually adapts just fine, but it is usually always at the expense of the predominate species (ie us this time around). I'm sure humans as a species will adapt too (we're like that), but it could be very costly in the meantime.
Not only are they far more common, they are also a 'worse case' compared a straight head on. ie roughly the same amount of energy is being absorbed by a smaller portion of the cars structure.
I can probably name over twenty-five distinct products released in the last decade that marketers touted using the EXACT same phrase to the letter, and so far, none of them have replaced the telephone and E-mail to any substantial degree.
Yeah but the hype is not coming from marketers so much as from people who have watched the live demo, and played with the bits and pieces that have been released so far and can see the potential.
If Wave was just a Google product and wasn't a set of open/federated protocols, then it probably wouldn't have much chance of actually changing anything. After all the telephone and email aren't products, they are ways of interoperably connecting different systems to each other world wide so that anyone can communicate with anyone else.
I don't know about you, but in my experience telephone and email usage is getting replaced by other things. email replaced a lot of phone calls and and nearly all fax usage, and now email is getting replaced by other things like task specific web apps (eg wikis, ticket trackers, project management apps etc etc) even without those apps being focused on communication. Most of this is limited to usage within an organisation.
Wave has the potential to transform the communication aspect of these kinds of web apps. I don't see it's potential as replacing email or IM or wikis etc, but as unifying them all and allowing a new generation of really collaborative and interoperable web apps to be built on top of it that can work easily within or between organisations.
I'm not going to claim it absolutely really will replace anything (I'm too cynical for that), but watching the demo was the first time I've got excited by a new communication technology in a long time (hell, I don't even like IM and think Twitter is moronic). I'm normally very jaded about this kind of thing, and I also thought it was just a bunch of hype at first.
Could somebody verify this runs under IE8, IE7 and IE6 ? If the answer is nope, then this functionality is exactly "vapor-web"
Huh? It does actually exist, and 4 out of the 5 main browser makers support it. How is that vapor?
Vapor doesn't mean "not supported by a common legacy application" - it means "announced but may never actually be released".
That would've been like calling DVDs vapor because some people won't get themselves a DVD player just because their VCR company hasn't made one yet. Even if that company had a 75% market share - it wouldn't make DVDs any less real.
On slashdot, everyone can hear you quote the WRONG MOVIE!
This is ALIEN, not ALIENS.
Huh, wouldn't an Alien prequel be an Aliens prequel too? It's called a series.
Unless of course you would also have a problem with people discussing the Empire Strikes Back when it was announced that they were making Star Wars prequels?
I first saw this movie when I was entirely too young to be watching such things. It was on TV one night and I was watching it with my father.
Speaking of fathers....
I first saw it (or at least the first half) during my 10th birthday a couple of years after it came out. VHS was still a very new thing in NZ at the time, and my father had rented this huge beast of a top loading VCR and a camera (also rather large and wired to the VCR) on a tripod to record the event. And he also rented a movie (you guessed it) for the gathered 10yr olds to watch while eating:)
It wasn't long until there were only two kids left in the room watching - me and Jake. I was merely glued there by the shock of it all, but I think Jake thought it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen. About halfway in, my folks decided that it probably wasn't the best idea after all and stopped it. Jake spent the next weeks trying to draw the Alien from memory, before finally getting to see the rest of the movie himself.
Also, destroying the competitive advantage of Exchange and Lotus Notes will have certain long-term strategic benefits.
And Sharepoint too.
Google's success (for it's applications at least) lies in reducing peoples dependence on non web applications. The more people are happy to use web apps for their everyday computing needs, the more Google stands to benefit as they have the scope to dominate the market for webapps.
Anything that provides alternatives or improvements over existing apps helps their overall goal, even if that particular app isn't profitable by itself. In terms of Googles overall revenue, releasing these little projects isn't expensive.
Another possible goal: MS (and to a lesser extent Yahoo) are probably the only companies that can threaten their search ads gravy train. If Google can hurt their competitors other revenue streams by commoditising and/or open sourcing them - then their competitors have less resources to attack Googles search ad business.
If Google can make their competitors have to respond to these developments and play catch up, then that helps. Joels old article "Fire and Motion" talked about that as a MS strategy in the early.NET days - but Vista seems to have hurt their momentum over the last few years, and now Google seems to be using it against MS now.
It's both the ports and the drives, but more likely to be the drives these days. There are low powered ports out there (G4 Powerbooks were really bad), but as these 2.5" drives get bigger they also seem to be sucking more power.
These days it seems most (certainly all the ones I've used) disks above say 160GB now need extra power - eg a USB Y cable or separate power cable. Even on ports that previously ran 80GB disks just fine. Maybe the move from IDE to SATA might also have something to do with increased power requirements.
While I'm teetering on the brink of ranting, so Google is releasing an OS, while they continue to overload the web browser with javascript and flash in an effort to turn it into an operating system. Again, we've already done this. We have these tools already. It's called a Native Application. Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app. Maybe some QT/OpenGL? Writing all these applications for the browser is putting a square peg in a round hole.
Nothing about Wave prevents that.
Wave is a bunch of things: a server app that handles the live syncing stuff, a Google web interface built with GWT, a bunch of APIs and libraries for extensions, and an open network protocol based on XMPP (ie jabber). The protocols and APIs aren't tied to the current implementations.
People will be able to use the protocols, libraries and APIs to build their own clients and servers. One of the Google videos showed a curses based client running in a terminal - no web browser or javascript in sight.
If this stuff takes off, you can bet people will be writing native clients.
So when (assuming it was under the AGPL rather than the GPL) I modify my Drupal settings.php file to include the connection string to my database, do I have to share that with my site visitors? Or do passwords want to be free as well?
The legal advice the Drupal community has got from the FSF with regards to the GPL is that with PHP apps any PHP include files fall under their linking clauses and are subject to the GPL as well. Which means that every Drupal (and also many other similar PHP apps) sites out there are running with code modifications.
I couldn't see anything obvious in the license that provides for situations like this.
I'd love Windows to have a built-in rsync client/server component that could be enabled in the control panel. Although I'd still want a built-in SSH component too.
Slashdot Mirror
PEP 8 (the Python style guide) disagrees...
Look closer, I think you meant 5% :)
Unfortunately IE6 is still at 27% on our site (enterprisy web apps). And the percentage used by our customers on their desktops is significantly higher still (over 50%).
We can only forlornly hope that 2010 will be the year of "Anything except XP" on the desktop...
Sure, if you are just a spectator cheering for your team from the sidelines.
But not if you are a web developer/designer, the different versions are very different browsers. In terms of making a modern website work there is much more difference between IE8 and IE6 than there is between IE8 and FF/Safari/Chrome/Opera etc.
You're not thinking of Korea maybe? North Korea and China were close buddies. North Vietnam was better friends with the Soviets, and never really got on well with China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
The tensions between Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge that led to Vietnam invading Cambodia was a chance for the Soviets and the Chinese to have a little war of their own.
Exactly. Not only that, but the scientists of the time were already aware of limitations in the prevailing models. There were many other scientists unsuccessfully trying to solve the same issues.
Einstein's breakthrough wasn't disproving existing physics, but with coming up with a new elegant model that addressed its already known limitations in ways others had failed to.
Shouldn't you be challenging a meteorologist instead? Why should a climatologist have to accept a meteorology challenge from someone too stupid to tell the difference?
Even I can tell you pretty conclusively whether or not the average June 2010 temperatures going to be hotter or colder here than the current average temp will be this month (December). Hell I'd even extend my predictions to June 2011, June 2012 etc. The difference between those kind of overall trends and telling you whether or not it will be raining next Tuesday is the difference between climatology and meteorology.
No climatologist is "standing 100% by their conclusions on what will happen 10 yrs from now" - that is a total strawman. Especially as climatologists don't deal with the small stuff anyway.
These things are predictions of the overall trends based on lots of data and understanding of the physical processes involved. There aren't statements of what things are going to be exactly like. While the overall direction of the trend is no longer disputed by climatologists, predictions of how fast things will change and exactly what the results will be are by no means certain.
So are they localised or are they important to the human race? Which is it?
Whether or not you will have 8ft, 2ft, or no water in your living room on some particular future date is impossible to even guess at without someone knowing more about your living room. I presume no climatologist has issued a global warning for your living room yet. Shocking, I know.
Local predictions of local events are made locally by eg meteorologists or hydrologists or even geographers etc that partially base their predictions on the data and predictions made by local climatologists who then base their predictions on what the global climatologists predict. You are wanting that info from the wrong people, and expecting more than a weeks warning of a dramatic weather event is currently unreasonable.
And yet the public debate and media coverage seems to be around that very question.
So why didn't Hitler invade Sweden then?
Hitler just didn't need to invade Switzerland. Like Sweden it was neutral and no threat to Germany. Switzerland was culturally similar to Germany, it was surrounded by the Germans, Germany controlled all trade in and out, and it was useful to them (eg banking).
The other western European countries were either threats or were important strategic buffers against the French and British forces.
Switzerland would've been very tough to invade sure, but that had just as much to do with other factors like the terrain, the extensive well developed and stocked fortifications, the publicised plans to destroy all vital transport links, the decentralised government etc than your Red Dawn fantasies would like to imply.
Hitler wasn't afraid to take on anyone - if he felt Switzerland needed invading he would've tried it even if it was doomed to ultimately fail. That was his downfall - he certainly wasn't afraid of anyone or of biting off more than he could chew.
There was far more involved than lots of rifles.
Let me get this straight... Hitler and Mussolini didn't invade Switzerland because of a few rifles? But they were willing to take on (with the exception of Japan) practically every other major military force in the world?
Was it rifles that saved Sweden too?
Jumping to conclusions about their motivations? Maybe that persons experience was trotted out purely because the story summary itself asked for peoples experiences.
And here is mine: Two clean installs (no upgrades yet), and no apparent problems.
Just as well you used the word "since" - otherwise you would've been flamed to death by the Inclined Plane fanbois. They're still bitter about the wheel getting all the attention lately.
Amiga viruses were rare? I've never experienced a platform with more viruses than the Amiga had due to the way floppy disks got shared around between teenage gamers and the rarity of virus scanners. Most infected Amiga users probably didn't even realise it. On the whole the Amiga viruses weren't actually very destructive though - one of the common symptoms was not being able to format floppies anymore.
Why do you think it is an either/or thing?
Obviously nobody is going to succeed on that level without talent, hardwork and insight etc.
But you'd still need plenty of luck as well. There would've been many 50/50 line calls Bill Gates made early on that only in hindsight turned out to be right or if they were wrong not big enough to sink him. There also could've been many other events or factors outside his control that could've sunk him in those early days too.
Yep. It was a lot warmer back in the days before all that carbon we're releasing got sequested underground as oil and coal.
Unfortunately all the ecosystems and species adapted for those conditions aren't really around anymore - they eventually got replaced by ones better adapted to cooler conditions.
Huh? Of course the climate changes a lot naturally - it always has. The issue is how fast change is happening and how disruptive that change will be to societies and ecosystems. Obviously the faster it changes the harder it will be to adapt and the more damaging the change will be.
The Earth and life in general eventually adapts just fine, but it is usually always at the expense of the predominate species (ie us this time around). I'm sure humans as a species will adapt too (we're like that), but it could be very costly in the meantime.
Not only are they far more common, they are also a 'worse case' compared a straight head on. ie roughly the same amount of energy is being absorbed by a smaller portion of the cars structure.
Yeah but the hype is not coming from marketers so much as from people who have watched the live demo, and played with the bits and pieces that have been released so far and can see the potential.
If Wave was just a Google product and wasn't a set of open/federated protocols, then it probably wouldn't have much chance of actually changing anything. After all the telephone and email aren't products, they are ways of interoperably connecting different systems to each other world wide so that anyone can communicate with anyone else.
I don't know about you, but in my experience telephone and email usage is getting replaced by other things. email replaced a lot of phone calls and and nearly all fax usage, and now email is getting replaced by other things like task specific web apps (eg wikis, ticket trackers, project management apps etc etc) even without those apps being focused on communication. Most of this is limited to usage within an organisation.
Wave has the potential to transform the communication aspect of these kinds of web apps. I don't see it's potential as replacing email or IM or wikis etc, but as unifying them all and allowing a new generation of really collaborative and interoperable web apps to be built on top of it that can work easily within or between organisations.
I'm not going to claim it absolutely really will replace anything (I'm too cynical for that), but watching the demo was the first time I've got excited by a new communication technology in a long time (hell, I don't even like IM and think Twitter is moronic). I'm normally very jaded about this kind of thing, and I also thought it was just a bunch of hype at first.
Huh? It does actually exist, and 4 out of the 5 main browser makers support it. How is that vapor?
Vapor doesn't mean "not supported by a common legacy application" - it means "announced but may never actually be released".
That would've been like calling DVDs vapor because some people won't get themselves a DVD player just because their VCR company hasn't made one yet. Even if that company had a 75% market share - it wouldn't make DVDs any less real.
What website would that be then?
As long as the telephone sanitisers stay behind this time round.
Huh, wouldn't an Alien prequel be an Aliens prequel too? It's called a series.
Unless of course you would also have a problem with people discussing the Empire Strikes Back when it was announced that they were making Star Wars prequels?
Speaking of fathers....
I first saw it (or at least the first half) during my 10th birthday a couple of years after it came out. VHS was still a very new thing in NZ at the time, and my father had rented this huge beast of a top loading VCR and a camera (also rather large and wired to the VCR) on a tripod to record the event. And he also rented a movie (you guessed it) for the gathered 10yr olds to watch while eating :)
It wasn't long until there were only two kids left in the room watching - me and Jake. I was merely glued there by the shock of it all, but I think Jake thought it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen. About halfway in, my folks decided that it probably wasn't the best idea after all and stopped it. Jake spent the next weeks trying to draw the Alien from memory, before finally getting to see the rest of the movie himself.
Good times :)
And Sharepoint too.
Google's success (for it's applications at least) lies in reducing peoples dependence on non web applications. The more people are happy to use web apps for their everyday computing needs, the more Google stands to benefit as they have the scope to dominate the market for webapps.
Anything that provides alternatives or improvements over existing apps helps their overall goal, even if that particular app isn't profitable by itself. In terms of Googles overall revenue, releasing these little projects isn't expensive.
Another possible goal: MS (and to a lesser extent Yahoo) are probably the only companies that can threaten their search ads gravy train. If Google can hurt their competitors other revenue streams by commoditising and/or open sourcing them - then their competitors have less resources to attack Googles search ad business.
If Google can make their competitors have to respond to these developments and play catch up, then that helps. Joels old article "Fire and Motion" talked about that as a MS strategy in the early .NET days - but Vista seems to have hurt their momentum over the last few years, and now Google seems to be using it against MS now.
It's both the ports and the drives, but more likely to be the drives these days. There are low powered ports out there (G4 Powerbooks were really bad), but as these 2.5" drives get bigger they also seem to be sucking more power.
These days it seems most (certainly all the ones I've used) disks above say 160GB now need extra power - eg a USB Y cable or separate power cable. Even on ports that previously ran 80GB disks just fine. Maybe the move from IDE to SATA might also have something to do with increased power requirements.
Nothing about Wave prevents that.
Wave is a bunch of things: a server app that handles the live syncing stuff, a Google web interface built with GWT, a bunch of APIs and libraries for extensions, and an open network protocol based on XMPP (ie jabber). The protocols and APIs aren't tied to the current implementations.
People will be able to use the protocols, libraries and APIs to build their own clients and servers. One of the Google videos showed a curses based client running in a terminal - no web browser or javascript in sight.
If this stuff takes off, you can bet people will be writing native clients.
So when (assuming it was under the AGPL rather than the GPL) I modify my Drupal settings.php file to include the connection string to my database, do I have to share that with my site visitors? Or do passwords want to be free as well?
The legal advice the Drupal community has got from the FSF with regards to the GPL is that with PHP apps any PHP include files fall under their linking clauses and are subject to the GPL as well. Which means that every Drupal (and also many other similar PHP apps) sites out there are running with code modifications.
I couldn't see anything obvious in the license that provides for situations like this.
You read my mind.
I'd love Windows to have a built-in rsync client/server component that could be enabled in the control panel. Although I'd still want a built-in SSH component too.