Maybe they just have different priorities or don't care or whatever. But it's easier for you to assume they're just not as smart as you.
Regardless of what the cause is, if people aren't going to take steps to protect themselves, and if the government has an obligation to protect its people, then the only solution is regulation. I'm not trying to argue in favor of more government regulation, I'm just saying that if those assumptions hold, then the conclusion is more regulation. The opposite of government regulation is personal responsibility, and there's a notable lack of that floating around lately.
tyranny of the majority
"Tyranny of the majority" is just another way of describing democracy while using the word tyranny. The fact is that he head of state of the United States is not a tyrant. Within our laws it's not even possible for the holder of that office to become a tyrant.
Smaller competitors are nimbler or can offer personalized service but can't get close to our price on similar products.
Nonsense! We've got a world-class application which we can customize for customers if necessary, and it's ridiculously low-priced. The price is so low in fact, that my boss can't afford to hire more than one programmer. So we'll see how well that works out. The good(?) news is that my work schedule extends into August, assuming no new business. The bad news is that when I'm dealing with developing, maintaining and supporting two online service applications, plus debugging the stuff the rest of the company is working on, it sort of makes the stress level come up a bit.
And you expect most Facebook users to discern that difference?
No, most users are apparently clueless and stupid and government regulation is required to protect them since they won't do it themselves.
The people who would argue with that are probably the same people who think that a democratically-elected group of legislators passing a bill which the majority agreed with means that we're living under a tyranny. Possibly even the same people who don't understand the difference between socialism, communism, fascism, and the Nazis.
Sure-- a 91 rated wine is "better" than a 90 rated wine. But for MOST people, it's not $45 dollars a bottle better.
Right, but what if all of the bottles are free? Are you going to take the least among them?
Back to my company, we are less and less likely to write applications.
If you guys have a history of writing IE6-only applications, then that's probably a good thing. Maybe you can become one of my customers in the future, so it's good for me too. You can rest easy knowing that my applications don't require any one browser in order to function.
This conversation regarding applications and ROI is a little vague. For many companies, there certainly is a substantial ROI associated with developing or using software that is not tied to a specific browser. All of these variables are specific to the applications and companies in question, there's not a general rule which says that upgrading from IE6 has no ROI associated with it, and vice versa. But it's a fact that if IE6 is holding you back, even though you might not see an ROI in moving away from it, you're continuing to pay costs associated with ongoing maintenance and possibly even loss of productivity or business just for the pleasure of being able to use a 9 year old browser. By the time you retire your application IE6 will be 12 years old, and it's likely that we'll be discussing IE10.
The thing that makes no sense to me is that this isn't a new problem. 5 years ago when Firefox came out everyone saw the problem then, they realized that a dependence on IE6 is not a good thing. These issues aren't new, so it doesn't make any business sense to me when companies are reacting to this only now, 5 years later.
thousands of people defending smoking as "mostly harmless", and second hand smoke as completely inoffensive
Can you provide even a single reference for that? The reason people smoke is not because they believe it's "mostly harmless". They understand the danger, they just don't care. This is not the attitude that should be taken by any competent IT department. This quote from TFA is interesting:
"It almost looks like individual Internet users are more tech-advanced at home than the IT departments where they work," said Alden DoRosario, Chitika's CTO, in a statement. "It's crazy to think that people whose job description revolves around employees having secure ways to browse the Web would keep IE6 alive, while these same employees go home to more secure browsers."
Wait, is it "not your choice" or is your policy to only fix "absolute brokens" (whatever those are)?
Secondly, I do not understand what all these "performance" comments are lately. I havnt' seen any browser that had bad performance on a modern machine. What are you doing, playing networked quake???
No, I'm not playing games, I'm writing large-scale online service applications. You know, the same sort of Javascript-powered applications that Google produces (Maps, Gmail, Docs, etc).
Here's an example. This is a Javascript benchmark for several recent browsers. You can see that IE8 is an order of magnitude slower than everything else:
Also notice that IE9 is there, it's faster than Firefox 3.7. Notice also what's missing from that graph: IE6 and IE7. If you look at that graph and think that IE8 is pretty far behind, take a look at this:
The first graph on that page shows IE7. While IE8 on that graph is 2x slower than the next slowest, IE7 is nearly 4x slower than IE8. IE7 is more than 10x slower than the fastest browser in that graph.
And I'm just talking about IE7 here. IE7 was an improvement over IE6, so you can imagine where IE6 would place there. In fact, IE6 is both so old and so bad that I'm having a hard time even finding benchmarks which include it.
But hey, since you clearly have access to IE6, go ahead and take the test yourself:
Keep in mind that lower is better because it's a measure of time, and that Microsoft is reporting a score for Opera 10.5 at about 300ms. I just ran the test here on my POS laptop with Opera 10.5 with 12 other tabs open, and it completed the test in 1126ms. You go ahead and run that test with IE6 and, assuming it's even able to finish it, then maybe you'll understand what all this "performance" talk is about.
I havnt' seen any browser that had bad performance on a modern machine.
No, I disagree, I think that you haven't seen a browser which had good performance on a modern machine, and you don't even realize there's an alternative to the only thing you know.
You ever hear the phrase "if we're not moving forward, we're standing still?" You're advocating using a 9 year old browser which is quite literally orders of magnitude slower with modern web applications, and you think it's a good idea to stick with that plan?
funny, i thought i remember something about anonymous sources being protected.
Where does it say that anonymous sources of stolen property are protected? Do those same protections also apply to anonymous sources of narcotics? How about anonymous sources of murder-for-hire, or prostitution?
Just because he's a "journalist" doesn't mean that he's allowed to break whatever laws he wants.
That's a great defense, should hold up really well in court. It's not receiving stolen property because there was the possibility that it may have been counterfeit. You should be a lawyer.
The only reason that, traditionally, journalists had extra privileges was because they worked for large litigious media outlets who wouldn't put up with that horseshit, and the government was rightfully wary. These days, not so much.
No, the reason that journalists had immunity was so that a large litigious company could not sue a journalist or new organization for the purpose of finding out the names of the sources that they got their information from.
This isn't information that some company might want withheld, this is stolen property, so that shouldn't apply. It doesn't matter what the occupation of the guy who knowingly buys stolen property is, he's still knowingly buying stolen property.
How do you determine the area of a circle with a radius of 25.0 units, without "expressing an infinitely repeating number as a finite value"?
Pi is not a repeating number, it's an irrational number. When you're dealing with an irrational number the only way you can express it is by itself. Pi is pi, that's it. The only value equal to pi is pi. If you're using pi in a calculation, you don't use a fraction, you use pi. 22/7 is sometimes used to estimate pi, but that's not correct either.
Thankfully, legislative decisions are not based on irrational numbers, they are based on fractions.
I get that Apple competitors post here and are trying to drum up some lame anti-Apple sentiment, but lying will get you nowhere.
Neither will a lack of basic fact checking. For the past week, here's the tally:
Apple product articles: 10 Linux articles: 5
I didn't count the 2 articles about the cartoonist being blocked and then allowed back in (those seemed to be about the cartoonist), I didn't count the 2 articles about Opera Mini for the iPhone (those seemed to be about Opera), and I didn't count articles about the open source community in general nor the GPL, just Linux specifically.
So yeah, there were twice as many articles on Slashdot last week about Apple products as there were about Linux.
Maybe for the average fanboy 10 articles in a week is "barely any", but for everyone not holding Apple's hand it does seem to be a little excessive at times.
The fact that Apple is apparently not pursuing Gizmodo over this doesn't indicate to me that the product is not genuine, it indicates to me that Apple was complicit in Gizmodo getting this device. It was on purpose, Apple handed the thing straight to them (in a bar in Redwood City, apparently).
You know what's a great idea when you're trying to market your new product virally? You "leak" a prototype of it, except have the case and all of the hardware inside clearly labeled as being copyrighted by your competitor, including their logo displayed prominently on the case. It's genius!
It's not the only one. Also from the Macrumors site, from the article summarizing Steve Jobs' talk:
- App Store: over 4 billion apps sold, with over 185,000 apps available in the store, 3,500 iPad apps.... - Over 50 million iPhones sold. Add in iPod touches and we're over 85 million total.
85 million devices into 4 billion downloads is an average of almost 48 apps per device. That seems a little high also.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they just have different priorities or don't care or whatever. But it's easier for you to assume they're just not as smart as you.
Regardless of what the cause is, if people aren't going to take steps to protect themselves, and if the government has an obligation to protect its people, then the only solution is regulation. I'm not trying to argue in favor of more government regulation, I'm just saying that if those assumptions hold, then the conclusion is more regulation. The opposite of government regulation is personal responsibility, and there's a notable lack of that floating around lately.
tyranny of the majority
"Tyranny of the majority" is just another way of describing democracy while using the word tyranny. The fact is that he head of state of the United States is not a tyrant. Within our laws it's not even possible for the holder of that office to become a tyrant.
Oh, it's far worse than that: one of his competitors thinks it's not a good format.
Smaller competitors are nimbler or can offer personalized service but can't get close to our price on similar products.
Nonsense! We've got a world-class application which we can customize for customers if necessary, and it's ridiculously low-priced. The price is so low in fact, that my boss can't afford to hire more than one programmer. So we'll see how well that works out. The good(?) news is that my work schedule extends into August, assuming no new business. The bad news is that when I'm dealing with developing, maintaining and supporting two online service applications, plus debugging the stuff the rest of the company is working on, it sort of makes the stress level come up a bit.
And you expect most Facebook users to discern that difference?
No, most users are apparently clueless and stupid and government regulation is required to protect them since they won't do it themselves.
The people who would argue with that are probably the same people who think that a democratically-elected group of legislators passing a bill which the majority agreed with means that we're living under a tyranny. Possibly even the same people who don't understand the difference between socialism, communism, fascism, and the Nazis.
The Senators aren't telling people how to use Facebook, they're telling Facebook how (not) to use their customer's data.
Sure-- a 91 rated wine is "better" than a 90 rated wine. But for MOST people, it's not $45 dollars a bottle better.
Right, but what if all of the bottles are free? Are you going to take the least among them?
Back to my company, we are less and less likely to write applications.
If you guys have a history of writing IE6-only applications, then that's probably a good thing. Maybe you can become one of my customers in the future, so it's good for me too. You can rest easy knowing that my applications don't require any one browser in order to function.
This conversation regarding applications and ROI is a little vague. For many companies, there certainly is a substantial ROI associated with developing or using software that is not tied to a specific browser. All of these variables are specific to the applications and companies in question, there's not a general rule which says that upgrading from IE6 has no ROI associated with it, and vice versa. But it's a fact that if IE6 is holding you back, even though you might not see an ROI in moving away from it, you're continuing to pay costs associated with ongoing maintenance and possibly even loss of productivity or business just for the pleasure of being able to use a 9 year old browser. By the time you retire your application IE6 will be 12 years old, and it's likely that we'll be discussing IE10.
The thing that makes no sense to me is that this isn't a new problem. 5 years ago when Firefox came out everyone saw the problem then, they realized that a dependence on IE6 is not a good thing. These issues aren't new, so it doesn't make any business sense to me when companies are reacting to this only now, 5 years later.
thousands of people defending smoking as "mostly harmless", and second hand smoke as completely inoffensive
Can you provide even a single reference for that? The reason people smoke is not because they believe it's "mostly harmless". They understand the danger, they just don't care. This is not the attitude that should be taken by any competent IT department. This quote from TFA is interesting:
"It almost looks like individual Internet users are more tech-advanced at home than the IT departments where they work," said Alden DoRosario, Chitika's CTO, in a statement. "It's crazy to think that people whose job description revolves around employees having secure ways to browse the Web would keep IE6 alive, while these same employees go home to more secure browsers."
Firstly, it's not my choice.
Wait, is it "not your choice" or is your policy to only fix "absolute brokens" (whatever those are)?
Secondly, I do not understand what all these "performance" comments are lately. I havnt' seen any browser that had bad performance on a modern machine. What are you doing, playing networked quake???
No, I'm not playing games, I'm writing large-scale online service applications. You know, the same sort of Javascript-powered applications that Google produces (Maps, Gmail, Docs, etc).
Here's an example. This is a Javascript benchmark for several recent browsers. You can see that IE8 is an order of magnitude slower than everything else:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/benchmarks/SunSpider/Default.html
Also notice that IE9 is there, it's faster than Firefox 3.7. Notice also what's missing from that graph: IE6 and IE7. If you look at that graph and think that IE8 is pretty far behind, take a look at this:
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/
The first graph on that page shows IE7. While IE8 on that graph is 2x slower than the next slowest, IE7 is nearly 4x slower than IE8. IE7 is more than 10x slower than the fastest browser in that graph.
And I'm just talking about IE7 here. IE7 was an improvement over IE6, so you can imagine where IE6 would place there. In fact, IE6 is both so old and so bad that I'm having a hard time even finding benchmarks which include it.
But hey, since you clearly have access to IE6, go ahead and take the test yourself:
http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html
Keep in mind that lower is better because it's a measure of time, and that Microsoft is reporting a score for Opera 10.5 at about 300ms. I just ran the test here on my POS laptop with Opera 10.5 with 12 other tabs open, and it completed the test in 1126ms. You go ahead and run that test with IE6 and, assuming it's even able to finish it, then maybe you'll understand what all this "performance" talk is about.
I havnt' seen any browser that had bad performance on a modern machine.
No, I disagree, I think that you haven't seen a browser which had good performance on a modern machine, and you don't even realize there's an alternative to the only thing you know.
Only fix absolute brokens.
You ever hear the phrase "if we're not moving forward, we're standing still?" You're advocating using a 9 year old browser which is quite literally orders of magnitude slower with modern web applications, and you think it's a good idea to stick with that plan?
Why does it take you 9 years to fix your broken applications? How much more time is required?
funny, i thought i remember something about anonymous sources being protected.
Where does it say that anonymous sources of stolen property are protected? Do those same protections also apply to anonymous sources of narcotics? How about anonymous sources of murder-for-hire, or prostitution?
Just because he's a "journalist" doesn't mean that he's allowed to break whatever laws he wants.
That's a great defense, should hold up really well in court. It's not receiving stolen property because there was the possibility that it may have been counterfeit. You should be a lawyer.
The only reason that, traditionally, journalists had extra privileges was because they worked for large litigious media outlets who wouldn't put up with that horseshit, and the government was rightfully wary. These days, not so much.
No, the reason that journalists had immunity was so that a large litigious company could not sue a journalist or new organization for the purpose of finding out the names of the sources that they got their information from.
This isn't information that some company might want withheld, this is stolen property, so that shouldn't apply. It doesn't matter what the occupation of the guy who knowingly buys stolen property is, he's still knowingly buying stolen property.
And in another thread, somebody told me I'm "eccentric" because I fear the government doing exactly what they did to Gizmodo's Editor.
And what exactly did the big bad government do to Gizmodo's editor? Are you referring to this search warrant as some sort of injustice?
Yeah, I didn't word that very well. I'm sure you know what I meant.
How do you determine the area of a circle with a radius of 25.0 units, without "expressing an infinitely repeating number as a finite value"?
Pi is not a repeating number, it's an irrational number. When you're dealing with an irrational number the only way you can express it is by itself. Pi is pi, that's it. The only value equal to pi is pi. If you're using pi in a calculation, you don't use a fraction, you use pi. 22/7 is sometimes used to estimate pi, but that's not correct either.
Thankfully, legislative decisions are not based on irrational numbers, they are based on fractions.
137 votes is not "at least 2/3" of 206, 138 votes is "at least 2/3". 137 votes is still less than 2/3. This isn't difficult.
Significant figures are important. In this case, the 2/3rds rule, being a constant, MUST be taken to at least 3 digits.
Uh.. how about not expressing an infinitely repeating number as a finite value?
(206 * 2) / 3 = 137.33~ = 138 votes to meet the minimum
Not that hard. Significant digits don't come into play. The value of two thirds is 2/3, not some decimal value.
Now why the hell does a story about new pictures from NASA link to Network World instead of, oh, say, NASA?
Art is anything that has the ability to inspire emotions in people.
Like abortion, religion, drugs, illegal immigration, and homosexuality?
I get that Apple competitors post here and are trying to drum up some lame anti-Apple sentiment, but lying will get you nowhere.
Neither will a lack of basic fact checking. For the past week, here's the tally:
Apple product articles: 10
Linux articles: 5
I didn't count the 2 articles about the cartoonist being blocked and then allowed back in (those seemed to be about the cartoonist), I didn't count the 2 articles about Opera Mini for the iPhone (those seemed to be about Opera), and I didn't count articles about the open source community in general nor the GPL, just Linux specifically.
So yeah, there were twice as many articles on Slashdot last week about Apple products as there were about Linux.
Maybe for the average fanboy 10 articles in a week is "barely any", but for everyone not holding Apple's hand it does seem to be a little excessive at times.
The fact that Apple is apparently not pursuing Gizmodo over this doesn't indicate to me that the product is not genuine, it indicates to me that Apple was complicit in Gizmodo getting this device. It was on purpose, Apple handed the thing straight to them (in a bar in Redwood City, apparently).
$5 says its some wannabe iPhone killer
You know what's a great idea when you're trying to market your new product virally? You "leak" a prototype of it, except have the case and all of the hardware inside clearly labeled as being copyrighted by your competitor, including their logo displayed prominently on the case. It's genius!
That number of 185,000 is VERY SUSPICIOUS.
It's not the only one. Also from the Macrumors site, from the article summarizing Steve Jobs' talk:
- App Store: over 4 billion apps sold, with over 185,000 apps available in the store, 3,500 iPad apps. ...
- Over 50 million iPhones sold. Add in iPod touches and we're over 85 million total.
85 million devices into 4 billion downloads is an average of almost 48 apps per device. That seems a little high also.
Thanks for taking the time to write a decent summary.