If someone wants to spend their money advertising to me, say by putting a billboard on the street (assuming it's not offensive - most countries have regulations about that) then it's costing the advertiser money, and not interfering in my life.
If I've just got my baby to sleep and some arsehole phones up asking if I want a 2nd mortgage, that is costing me more than money, that is interfering in my family life.
Of course, if you're after multi-platform support, you could go to Sun for your SPARC support, etc, etc, etc... that's *actual* support, not the (normally great) support you get from the F/OSS community.
Germans insist on calling their country Deutschland. I still call it Germany.
In Britain, it makes more sense, to me, to call it "Lie-nucks." In practice, I do about 50/50.
Microsoft were bundling an incompatible Java-like VM and calling it Java. They were rightly stopped from doing this, so instead of fixing it, or bundling Sun's JVM, they just didn't release a VM.
That screws all MS users, and MS say, "Sorry, Sun sued us. Sun don't care about you like we do."
This (and broken MSJVM making Java look bad) are deliberate MS actions to make Java look bad, which helps MS use their monopoly position to push.NET as the "only" option (because MS have (wrongly) discredited Java).
While real Java is distributed as part of MS, they can't abuse their monopoly position as easily to promote.NET.
Sounds like an IE problem, not a Java problem. Under Netscape, you can, for example, select either the built-in JVM, or the JVM plugin, for those instances where you need different versions for different tasks.
And killing others whilst driving on crack, etc, etc. This issue isn't quite as simple as that, unfortunately.
Hence "decriminalising" is a popular move - it's still illegal, but don't waste police resources on busting someone with an 8th of dope.
Same incentive as fonts - they're licensed, as is a ton of other stuff. Check the "About" box of just about any MS app / applet, other companies are credited (and paid for every copy sold, normally).
That is a part of the cost of Windows - same thing for OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, it's paid per-copy because Sun pay royalties per-copy.
If I'm visiting a web site, I'm actively wanting to be a customer of that company. That company should not care what browser I use to view their website, any more than they care what telephone I use to call them, what fax machine I choose to send/receive faxes from them.
The phone and fax have defined standards - HTML also has defined standards, but web designers seem to think that they can get away with breaking these standards because "It works with IE".
At this point, I'm not a Mozilla/IE/Opera/Konquereor customer, I'm a www.example.com customer, who either can or cannot purchase your product. Worse, I'm a www.bank.example.com customer, who cannot pay someone because bank.example.com's web developers are too short-sighted to ensure that all of bank.example.com's customers (including those with disabilites) are able to use the site.
To say "IE is the standard - browsers must comply with what IE does" when IE is not documented, not secure, not coherent, benefits nobody; especially when a perfectly good standard exists, which does accomodate those with disabilites, and those who choose not to use IE (which didn't even exist until 4 years after HTML was devised) does not benefit browser users, nor website users.
It is relevant to programmers - knowing how a CPU will pipleine your instructions can help in structuring a loop to be efficient; tied-in with this is caching strategies: how you read / write your data can have a huge impact on the program's performance.
I've posted the link earlier, but here it is again... Alan Cox recently gave an IRC talk: here.
I knew this before I did a BSc in CS; what I learned later, was the real stuff - how memory speed affects pipelining; memory has not got significantly faster in the past decade, where CPUs have gone from 30MHz to 3GHz. Therefore even more pipelines are required now, as we sit around, cycle upon cycle, waiting for memory to feed us some data.
In fact, Alan Cox gave a talk on this recently:
UMeet2002.
It is not a particularly open standard - for example, pagenumbers in headers / footers (a pretty common thing to use) is not even mentioned in the specification - the only way to work out how to do it, is to do it in Word, save as RTF, and work out what it does.
I know - I've had to do it! Even for a relatively simple document, the RTF Spec is not much use - you just have to do it in Word, and replicate that in your own code.
Oh, and if Word decides it doesn't like the document, it doesn't return an error message, an ill-formatted RTF file is guaranteed to kill Word, and very likely to kill Windows.
Re:Building on the existing infrastructure
on
DSL Rising
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· Score: 2
Mine (in the UK) seems to need all 4 - 2 for voice, 2 redirected for data
Would you prefer a C compiler which accepted sloppy C code? One which just "decided" that you "probably meant" to initialise that variable?
A lot of people are trying to make money out of, or through, the Internet, (more power to them). If they wrote to W3C standards, tested against them, then it'd work in Mozilla.
The only reason this utopia does not exist, is that IE does not render valid HTML correctly, and - as a bonus - renders some invalid HTML as the developer expected.
This is not a platform on which people can make their business.
Hmm - maybe someone should take MS to court for forcing IE on the world at the expense of Netscape? Oh yeah, they did. But then Monkey-Boy Bush got a lucky seat in the WhiteHouse, and the entire world benefits from continued MS domination.
Dear Florida: Thanks - from The Rest Of The World.
If a potential customer comes into your store, speaking Esperanto, you've got to decide if you'll learn Esperanto (a fully-documented human language) or lose that customer.
A lot of sites have lost my custom (argos.co.uk is a great example - even in Konquereor, it tells you that it doesn't support Moz-based browsers!)
If I can't use your site, I can't buy from you. That's the vendor's problem, not the customer's.
As for "blaming IE", that'd be stupid - it's not about blaming IE for being crap - that's IE's choice - but blaming web developers for saying, "It works in IE, 95% of the web uses IE, so that's Good Enough." Fine, I've not got a problem with people making that decision, they can live without my business. It won't hurt them to lose 5% of customers, I'm sure, and it won't hurt me to shop elsewhere.
My sites are (mainly) HTML 4.xx compliant, and work in every major browser (Moz, NSCPx.xx, IE, Konqueror, Lynx) - if a site I wrote didn't work acceptably in all of these, I'd rewrite it. The problem belongs to the web designer, not the browser author - all these browsers work with well-written HTML. It's not exactly a difficult language to understand.
As for Moz not working with "Designed for IE" sites being "Moz's choice and Moz's fault", if the Moz developers had (and wanted) access to the IE source, they could make Moz work as badly as IE, including all the security flaws released each week. Personally, I'm glad they have a different goal.
Phoenix (a subset of Moz, with just the browser) has a "search bar" next to the "location bar" where you can type a search-term and go straight to the results. If you're lucky, typing a search-term into the location bar could get you the "I Feel Lucky" result, but that doesn't work as well.
Two comments from my steve-parker.org domain:
1) Tends to be in the top 3 of any search engine for "bourne shell programming tutorial" or similar searches.
2) My employer (netops.co.uk), who host steve-parker.org as a "fringe benefit" typed into Google what we do (Sun solaris stuff, not sure of his exact search string) and my CV came up as the top result.
(1) above gives me a warm glow.
(2) above gave me an uncomfortable explanation about how search engines work.
About (1) :
Even though I get in the top 3 on most search engines, my Page Rank seems to be middling. However, I plugged sysview.net from steve-parker.org, and sysview.net rose up Google's rankings.
About (2) :
Okay, the search was looking for those skills, both my CV and netops.co.uk matched, but mine had a higher PageRank (due to having actual content, not just "this is netops!"), but in two different contexts, I'd want one or the other. Google doesn't understand the concept of context.
There is tons of room for improvement - my personal hope is that someone usurps Google, then someone usurps them, etc, etc - otherwise we've another Netscape/IE issue but far more serious - not just the UI, but the data people can find on the net. Control that, and you have a *lot* of power.
alltheweb.com can find stuff which Google doesn't - don't know anything about how it works, but two different algorithms are bound to come up with different results.
As The Register pointed out, Google are getting themselves into a pretty powerful position - competition is a Good Thing; we don't want to become dependant on Google, just to let them do a Microsoft on us:)
I've nothing against the way Google are going about their business, they're doing very well for themselves and for consumers, but a realist must ask where Google want to go next... an alternative is a Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
If I've just got my baby to sleep and some arsehole phones up asking if I want a 2nd mortgage, that is costing me more than money, that is interfering in my family life.
Just switch off that brain - not like it was given to you for a reason, or anything...
Experience counts for a lot in a sysadmin, whatever the OS.
If only 95% of the users didn't use MS stuff, wouldn't the world be a better place?
Sad fact - they do, and it isn't.
Of course, if you're after multi-platform support, you could go to Sun for your SPARC support, etc, etc, etc ... that's *actual* support, not the (normally great) support you get from the F/OSS community.
Post aborted! Reason: Please use less whitespace.
Thanks, slashdot. Since I can't post it here, check http://steve-parker.org/zd.txt instead.
Ah! So that where the phrase "Per-Seat Licensing" comes from :)
Germans insist on calling their country Deutschland. I still call it Germany. In Britain, it makes more sense, to me, to call it "Lie-nucks." In practice, I do about 50/50.
.... after you get out of kindergarten?
Microsoft were bundling an incompatible Java-like VM and calling it Java. They were rightly stopped from doing this, so instead of fixing it, or bundling Sun's JVM, they just didn't release a VM. That screws all MS users, and MS say, "Sorry, Sun sued us. Sun don't care about you like we do." This (and broken MSJVM making Java look bad) are deliberate MS actions to make Java look bad, which helps MS use their monopoly position to push .NET as the "only" option (because MS have (wrongly) discredited Java).
While real Java is distributed as part of MS, they can't abuse their monopoly position as easily to promote .NET.
Sounds like an IE problem, not a Java problem. Under Netscape, you can, for example, select either the built-in JVM, or the JVM plugin, for those instances where you need different versions for different tasks.
And killing others whilst driving on crack, etc, etc. This issue isn't quite as simple as that, unfortunately. Hence "decriminalising" is a popular move - it's still illegal, but don't waste police resources on busting someone with an 8th of dope.
Ahah! So that's who's got the domain I wanted :)
Glad to see we agree on Americans with Guns, though!
Same incentive as fonts - they're licensed, as is a ton of other stuff. Check the "About" box of just about any MS app / applet, other companies are credited (and paid for every copy sold, normally). That is a part of the cost of Windows - same thing for OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, it's paid per-copy because Sun pay royalties per-copy.
The phone and fax have defined standards - HTML also has defined standards, but web designers seem to think that they can get away with breaking these standards because "It works with IE".
At this point, I'm not a Mozilla/IE/Opera/Konquereor customer, I'm a www.example.com customer, who either can or cannot purchase your product. Worse, I'm a www.bank.example.com customer, who cannot pay someone because bank.example.com's web developers are too short-sighted to ensure that all of bank.example.com's customers (including those with disabilites) are able to use the site.
To say "IE is the standard - browsers must comply with what IE does" when IE is not documented, not secure, not coherent, benefits nobody; especially when a perfectly good standard exists, which does accomodate those with disabilites, and those who choose not to use IE (which didn't even exist until 4 years after HTML was devised) does not benefit browser users, nor website users.
I've posted the link earlier, but here it is again... Alan Cox recently gave an IRC talk: here.
In fact, Alan Cox gave a talk on this recently: UMeet2002.
It is not a particularly open standard - for example, pagenumbers in headers / footers (a pretty common thing to use) is not even mentioned in the specification - the only way to work out how to do it, is to do it in Word, save as RTF, and work out what it does.
I know - I've had to do it! Even for a relatively simple document, the RTF Spec is not much use - you just have to do it in Word, and replicate that in your own code.
Oh, and if Word decides it doesn't like the document, it doesn't return an error message, an ill-formatted RTF file is guaranteed to kill Word, and very likely to kill Windows.
Mine (in the UK) seems to need all 4 - 2 for voice, 2 redirected for data
Would you prefer a C compiler which accepted sloppy C code? One which just "decided" that you "probably meant" to initialise that variable? A lot of people are trying to make money out of, or through, the Internet, (more power to them). If they wrote to W3C standards, tested against them, then it'd work in Mozilla. The only reason this utopia does not exist, is that IE does not render valid HTML correctly, and - as a bonus - renders some invalid HTML as the developer expected. This is not a platform on which people can make their business. Hmm - maybe someone should take MS to court for forcing IE on the world at the expense of Netscape? Oh yeah, they did. But then Monkey-Boy Bush got a lucky seat in the WhiteHouse, and the entire world benefits from continued MS domination. Dear Florida: Thanks - from The Rest Of The World.
If a potential customer comes into your store, speaking Esperanto, you've got to decide if you'll learn Esperanto (a fully-documented human language) or lose that customer. A lot of sites have lost my custom (argos.co.uk is a great example - even in Konquereor, it tells you that it doesn't support Moz-based browsers!) If I can't use your site, I can't buy from you. That's the vendor's problem, not the customer's. As for "blaming IE", that'd be stupid - it's not about blaming IE for being crap - that's IE's choice - but blaming web developers for saying, "It works in IE, 95% of the web uses IE, so that's Good Enough." Fine, I've not got a problem with people making that decision, they can live without my business. It won't hurt them to lose 5% of customers, I'm sure, and it won't hurt me to shop elsewhere. My sites are (mainly) HTML 4.xx compliant, and work in every major browser (Moz, NSCPx.xx, IE, Konqueror, Lynx) - if a site I wrote didn't work acceptably in all of these, I'd rewrite it. The problem belongs to the web designer, not the browser author - all these browsers work with well-written HTML. It's not exactly a difficult language to understand. As for Moz not working with "Designed for IE" sites being "Moz's choice and Moz's fault", if the Moz developers had (and wanted) access to the IE source, they could make Moz work as badly as IE, including all the security flaws released each week. Personally, I'm glad they have a different goal.
Phoenix (a subset of Moz, with just the browser) has a "search bar" next to the "location bar" where you can type a search-term and go straight to the results. If you're lucky, typing a search-term into the location bar could get you the "I Feel Lucky" result, but that doesn't work as well.
Two comments from my steve-parker.org domain: 1) Tends to be in the top 3 of any search engine for "bourne shell programming tutorial" or similar searches. 2) My employer (netops.co.uk), who host steve-parker.org as a "fringe benefit" typed into Google what we do (Sun solaris stuff, not sure of his exact search string) and my CV came up as the top result. (1) above gives me a warm glow. (2) above gave me an uncomfortable explanation about how search engines work. About (1) : Even though I get in the top 3 on most search engines, my Page Rank seems to be middling. However, I plugged sysview.net from steve-parker.org, and sysview.net rose up Google's rankings. About (2) : Okay, the search was looking for those skills, both my CV and netops.co.uk matched, but mine had a higher PageRank (due to having actual content, not just "this is netops!"), but in two different contexts, I'd want one or the other. Google doesn't understand the concept of context. There is tons of room for improvement - my personal hope is that someone usurps Google, then someone usurps them, etc, etc - otherwise we've another Netscape/IE issue but far more serious - not just the UI, but the data people can find on the net. Control that, and you have a *lot* of power.
alltheweb.com can find stuff which Google doesn't - don't know anything about how it works, but two different algorithms are bound to come up with different results. As The Register pointed out, Google are getting themselves into a pretty powerful position - competition is a Good Thing; we don't want to become dependant on Google, just to let them do a Microsoft on us :)
I've nothing against the way Google are going about their business, they're doing very well for themselves and for consumers, but a realist must ask where Google want to go next ... an alternative is a Good Thing.
No direct link - great, so they get slashdotted, and don't even know why!