Huh? Netscape 6.0 had better CSS support than any version of IE has ever had.
It may have supported more, but it seemed to do so poorly.
It's all about the user experience - I'm just pointing out that, no matter how good it's specifications are one paper, no matter how useful it's email client and no matter how idealogically worthy it's production, AOL won't be able to slip it to 34 million user unless it's good enough at simple rendering for them not to notice the difference.
I'm really talking about the current situation and, in fact, the exodus isn't primarily what concerns designers.
The fact is that 6% of surfers still use NN and that's actually too big a minority to brush off on a mere whim.
What throws designers is that all the time you can save with CSS (and we're talking a HUGE amount of time if you maintain sizeable sites) is completely wasted again dealing with NN's lousy implementation of CSS.
By the way, I'm talking about NN6 here.
I know that many in the Mozzilla community were appalled by that release, feeling it was rushed out the door in an unfinished state, but, nevertheless, it was that release that soured most designers on the idea of catering to multiple browsers. And, btw, the last Opera release didn't exactly shine in that respect either.
Of course, most won't say so officially, and they'll still spout the official line but look at what they're actually producing: take NN6 out for a spin and see how many sites are just a MESS with it, a totally different user experience.
I haven't tried NN7 yet but the simple truth is that NN6 was a botched opportunity and, now that most designers have removed NN compatibility from their list of priorites, they won't be putting it back anytime soon.
With AOL's powerful market presence--numbering 34 million registered users--Netscape could be poised for a comeback if it replaces IE's role for AOL users.
Well, we all know that AOL is no slouch at slipping it hard and rough to their users but even AOL isn't going to be stupid enough to try foisting a noticeably slower browser on their users. MSN's marketing would go into overdrive.
People are used to IE, most sites were designed with it in mind; AOL might be big but they aren't big enough to pull off a coup like that.
Many of you may refuse to use IE for idealogical reasons, and that's valid, but nothing can change the fact that, when it comes to the simple activity of browsing, the MS product gives a smoother user experience.
We can only hope to succeed if we recognise the competition's strengths and, in this case, MS have done a great job; that's why they get away with slippin in the proprietry stuff.
As a Web Designer, this version had BETTER be a goddamn sight more compentant at rendering CSS.
God bless Jacob Nielsen and all that but there was a certain point were the vast majority of designers just washed their hands of even thinking about Netscape Navigator.
Life's too short
Re:Implications for Radio Astronomy. . .
on
Unlimited Airwaves
·
· Score: 1
As an aside: the Internet should have made the TelCos obsolete years ago;
PC telephony has always been too messy to make much of a dent. The way things are gearing up, it now looks as if it will be Microsoft that finally puts a final bullet in the telcos' heads.
There's a great scene in the Warren Beatty film "Bulworth" in which his character, Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, explains how the current distribution of the airwaves works. I can't remember the exact lines but the general jist was as follows:
The government takes a resource that's everyone's, that's just there, freely accessible to everyone, and calls it property.
It then auctions that property off to the networks for an absolute pittance because they depend on the donations of the networks' corporate owners (GE, Disney etc).
The politicians desperately need this money because, in order to get re-elected they must be able to buy TV commercials, tiny minute-long slices of the broadcast spectrum, back from the networks.
No politician can afford to confront this system or even acknowledge the massive warping effect it has upon democracy because, if they do, none of what they say will be reported by the mainstream press and they certainly won't be able to afford to get re-elected.
Maybe this unlimited bandwidth idea will solve that rotten cycle but I've got a bad, baaaad feeling that too many powerful people would have too much to lose.
How exactly is MS competing with the phone companies? Do they provide a service like the phone company?
They've bought strategic chunks of cable companies all over the world. I'm not sure about the situation in the the US but in much of the world, phone service provision has been deregulated, allowing cable companies to offer TV, broadband internet and a phone service.
Here in Scotland, I pay Telewest (23% MS owned) £50 per month for a phone line, about 80 TV channels and a 1MB 'Net connection.
A significant anomoly is that it costs me considerably less to make a PC phonecall via an MS partner company than it is to just pick up the phone. You can expect MS and their cable company partners to deal with this sort of canibalisation by using the Xbox to meet it half-way i.e. offering a not-quite-so-cheap but easier-to-use alternative to PC telephony.
An interesting precursor to this is the fact that I can currently opt to pay them an additional £15pm to make as many regular phone-calls as I want at any time of the day to any landline phone in the UK (a country of about 60 million) for free. At the moment I don't use the phone to "chat" and spend about £6 - £8pm on a per call basis. If Telewest/MS could persuade me to become a chatter and to sign up for that £15 subscription they would double their take without adding to their basic service provision costs.
You can expect the evolving Xbox services to be positioned in much the same way.
I'm amazed that I have yet to read a single article that draws together the most obvious strands of Microsoft's Xbox strategy.
1. It has nothing to do with the old razors/blades chestnut, whereby companies exclusively focused on gaming subsidized the hardware in order to make money on the software. Most commentators are so dazzled at their own brilliance in understanding that rather simple business strategy that they've failed to notice that the market has moved on, increased it's complexity and now has substantially expanded ambitions.
2. MS might be saying that their only focus is gaming but you'd have to be retarded to believe it. Their major international investments in cable companies make it obvious that some sort of Personal Video Recorder and possibly also basic decoder capability will work it's way into the next Xbox.
3. The current iteration of the Xbox is all about establishing it's credibility as a consumer device. They will achieve this because they have to and that sort of acceptance absolutely CAN be bought. I'm not saying that MS would madly throw money at this regardless of eventual profit but you have to realize that the eventual market they're aiming for is FAR larger than gaming.
4. Apart from PVR, Gaming, DVD and cable TV decoding, there's also the fact that the Xbox will be the hardware incarnation of MSN Messenger and THAT'S the biggest game in town. An often overlooked part of their upcoming online gaming package is the headset communicator that they're bundling with it. Stated purpose of this device: to allow gamers to lambast eachother while playing. Actual purpose: to allow millions of people to chat. THAT's why they're building data-centres with such massive capability. Think about it, they become the world's defacto IM service with no Yahoo or AOL to compete with them.
Let me just make this clear: the Xbox is going to be the world's telephone/watercooler/flirtation device. Your sister will buy one.
The proof: MS aren't going to reduce the Xbox's retail price any further but, by Xmas, they WILL add the headset communicator and a years subscription to the bundle. Seriously, this will happen.
Next, expect to see the introduction of a non-gaming based chat service by next summer.
5. MS don't have to keep lowering the Xbox price. In fact, a major sales channel that Sony and Nintendo don't have is the cable companies. Expect to see the Xbox offered as a rental item, for about $15 per month along with Xbox Live subscription and stripped-down broadband Internet
Connectivity (i.e. Xbox only).
I'm not for or against MS, I'm just calling it as I see it. Personally, I might buy a GameCube when Pikmin is released. I might also buy an Xbox when it's functionality stretches, as I've predicted, beyond just gaming.
> No, on 9/11 the world was not attacked > by mysterious aliens. Aliens and the > paranormal have fascinated people for > ages, and some things do not change, > buildings or no buildings.
True, but the way in which that traditionally niche fascination became, via the X-Files, a mainstream pre-occupation was a reflection of the times.
What I'm saying is that the times have now changed, drastically so. It is, of course, a touchy subject and I'm not really surprised my original post was unfairly moderated down, but if we want to get the full picture and, in this case, a clearer picture of what the X-Files really meant to our culture, we have to factor the major shifts that have happened since it's first airing.
Well-written though it undoubtedly is, if The X-Files were to launch today, post 9/11, it would have seemed naive and, well, off-topic, and would never have made it to a 2nd series.
For years now we've all been getting our viewing thrills by letting The X-Files work us into an enjoyable froth of paranoia and conspiracy theory.
Everything, however, has a sell-by date and time has moved on; now, after 9/11, we've got reality to worry us in a way in which no TV show can compete.
We're going to look back at Nineties TV, and the X-Files in particular, as representing an age of naive innocence, before our colective chickens came home to roost.
Um, I think you might have accidently replied to the wrong posting. I like their idea but I certainly never said "Every now and then, somebody breaks through with an idea that really changes how we think about things."
"Fastap could do for wireless phones what Apple Computer's desktop did for the PC."
-- Brad Smith
Wireless Week
----
Looks like the best career move any aspiring Tech billionaire could make is to go earn some bragging rights by spending a few weeks working for Apple. Seriously, if you've just graduated with your 1st in Comp Sci, go work as a toilet attendant in Cupertino, that sort of cred will make even your worst future start-ups seem like rosier prospects.
According to researchers at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab, voice-recognition will never play an important part in our interaction with Information Technology because we construct our spoken communication in the "short-term" part of our memory.
Well, yes, rip-off Britain is a factor but less so now that it's assumed that the UK will be entering a larger economic pool; pricing tends to flatten towards an international level the larger the grouping, so, anticipation of the Euro has generally caused UK prices to float downwards, not as much as actual countries in the Euro such as Ireland or the Netherlands but, nonetheless, it has been a factor in pricing decisions by the big movers.
Equally, the presumed downwards adjustment has been worked into the equation. In the case of the Xbox, for example, Microsoft have to observe the fact that consumers simply won't accept an upward movement in the price of luxury goods. Necessities such as petrol, bread etc. yes, what can you do, but when it comes to consoles the prices can only go down, otherwise the punter will feel they've lost before they've even started playing.
Economics is always hard to pin down but surely you'll accept that the rip-off Britain effect has softened somewhat since Euro-comparisions made it harder to hide.
I also hope you'll note that currency speculators are now assuming necessary 12% drop in the £ relative to the Euro, and that MS, in their long-term planning, would be insane not to follow that lead.
Slashdot Mirror
How about we put aside these childish video games and swap sisters?
Huh? Netscape 6.0 had better CSS support than any version of IE has ever had.
It may have supported more, but it seemed to do so poorly.
It's all about the user experience - I'm just pointing out that, no matter how good it's specifications are one paper, no matter how useful it's email client and no matter how idealogically worthy it's production, AOL won't be able to slip it to 34 million user unless it's good enough at simple rendering for them not to notice the difference.
they are not foisting the browser on the users, they are foisting the HTML rendering enguine.
Yes, but will it render as awkwardly as the engine in NN6?
Seriously, putting all partisanship aside, has the rendering engine's speed improved?
If it has, if it's as fast as IE or, at least, not noticeably slower, that's fine, no problem.
I'm really talking about the current situation and, in fact, the exodus isn't primarily what concerns designers.
The fact is that 6% of surfers still use NN and that's actually too big a minority to brush off on a mere whim.
What throws designers is that all the time you can save with CSS (and we're talking a HUGE amount of time if you maintain sizeable sites) is completely wasted again dealing with NN's lousy implementation of CSS.
By the way, I'm talking about NN6 here.
I know that many in the Mozzilla community were appalled by that release, feeling it was rushed out the door in an unfinished state, but, nevertheless, it was that release that soured most designers on the idea of catering to multiple browsers. And, btw, the last Opera release didn't exactly shine in that respect either.
Of course, most won't say so officially, and they'll still spout the official line but look at what they're actually producing: take NN6 out for a spin and see how many sites are just a MESS with it, a totally different user experience.
I haven't tried NN7 yet but the simple truth is that NN6 was a botched opportunity and, now that most designers have removed NN compatibility from their list of priorites, they won't be putting it back anytime soon.
From the article:
With AOL's powerful market presence--numbering 34 million registered users--Netscape could be poised for a comeback if it replaces IE's role for AOL users.
Well, we all know that AOL is no slouch at slipping it hard and rough to their users but even AOL isn't going to be stupid enough to try foisting a noticeably slower browser on their users. MSN's marketing would go into overdrive.
People are used to IE, most sites were designed with it in mind; AOL might be big but they aren't big enough to pull off a coup like that.
Many of you may refuse to use IE for idealogical reasons, and that's valid, but nothing can change the fact that, when it comes to the simple activity of browsing, the MS product gives a smoother user experience.
We can only hope to succeed if we recognise the competition's strengths and, in this case, MS have done a great job; that's why they get away with slippin in the proprietry stuff.
As a Web Designer, this version had BETTER be a goddamn sight more compentant at rendering CSS.
God bless Jacob Nielsen and all that but there was a certain point were the vast majority of designers just washed their hands of even thinking about Netscape Navigator.
Life's too short
As an aside: the Internet should have made the TelCos obsolete years ago;
PC telephony has always been too messy to make much of a dent. The way things are gearing up, it now looks as if it will be Microsoft that finally puts a final bullet in the telcos' heads.
There's a great scene in the Warren Beatty film "Bulworth" in which his character, Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, explains how the current distribution of the airwaves works. I can't remember the exact lines but the general jist was as follows:
The government takes a resource that's everyone's, that's just there, freely accessible to everyone, and calls it property.
It then auctions that property off to the networks for an absolute pittance because they depend on the donations of the networks' corporate owners (GE, Disney etc).
The politicians desperately need this money because, in order to get re-elected they must be able to buy TV commercials, tiny minute-long slices of the broadcast spectrum, back from the networks.
No politician can afford to confront this system or even acknowledge the massive warping effect it has upon democracy because, if they do, none of what they say will be reported by the mainstream press and they certainly won't be able to afford to get re-elected.
Maybe this unlimited bandwidth idea will solve that rotten cycle but I've got a bad, baaaad feeling that too many powerful people would have too much to lose.
How exactly is MS competing with the phone companies? Do they provide a service like the phone company?
They've bought strategic chunks of cable companies all over the world. I'm not sure about the situation in the the US but in much of the world, phone service provision has been deregulated, allowing cable companies to offer TV, broadband internet and a phone service.
Here in Scotland, I pay Telewest (23% MS owned) £50 per month for a phone line, about 80 TV channels and a 1MB 'Net connection.
A significant anomoly is that it costs me considerably less to make a PC phonecall via an MS partner company than it is to just pick up the phone. You can expect MS and their cable company partners to deal with this sort of canibalisation by using the Xbox to meet it half-way i.e. offering a not-quite-so-cheap but easier-to-use alternative to PC telephony.
An interesting precursor to this is the fact that I can currently opt to pay them an additional £15pm to make as many regular phone-calls as I want at any time of the day to any landline phone in the UK (a country of about 60 million) for free. At the moment I don't use the phone to "chat" and spend about £6 - £8pm on a per call basis. If Telewest/MS could persuade me to become a chatter and to sign up for that £15 subscription they would double their take without adding to their basic service provision costs.
You can expect the evolving Xbox services to be positioned in much the same way.
Three buttons: Power, Play and Buy the T-shirt.
Yup, you're absolutely right, I live in Scotland.
And, yeah, Super Monkey Ball does look good.
My only problem is, much as I love all this funky hardware, where the Hell am I goig to find the time to play video games?
Y'know, if someone sold a $10 per month subscription that created an extra two or three hours a day to play games, I'd buy it.
Christ, I'd play hundreds for that.
> If MS actually starts to be able
> to compete with the phone companies,
> then MS will be crushed.,
They are already competing with phone companies.
> There is no
> way that MS will be a phone company
Through their heavy cable investments, they already are a phone company
> they can't afford to do for free what
> the phone companies charge money for.
They won't be doing it for free, they'll be charging a monthly subscription and giving their hungry cable partners a bite.
I'm amazed that I have yet to read a single article that draws together the most obvious strands of Microsoft's Xbox strategy.
1. It has nothing to do with the old razors/blades chestnut, whereby companies exclusively focused on gaming subsidized the hardware in order to make money on the software. Most commentators are so dazzled at their own brilliance in understanding that rather simple business strategy that they've failed to notice that the market has moved on, increased it's complexity and now has substantially expanded ambitions.
2. MS might be saying that their only focus is gaming but you'd have to be retarded to believe it. Their major international investments in cable companies make it obvious that some sort of Personal Video Recorder and possibly also basic decoder capability will work it's way into the next Xbox.
3. The current iteration of the Xbox is all about establishing it's credibility as a consumer device. They will achieve this because they have to and that sort of acceptance absolutely CAN be bought. I'm not saying that MS would madly throw money at this regardless of eventual profit but you have to realize that the eventual market they're aiming for is FAR larger than gaming.
4. Apart from PVR, Gaming, DVD and cable TV decoding, there's also the fact that the Xbox will be the hardware incarnation of MSN Messenger and THAT'S the biggest game in town. An often overlooked part of their upcoming online gaming package is the headset communicator that they're bundling with it. Stated purpose of this device: to allow gamers to lambast eachother while playing. Actual purpose: to allow millions of people to chat. THAT's why they're building data-centres with such massive capability. Think about it, they become the world's defacto IM service with no Yahoo or AOL to compete with them.
Let me just make this clear: the Xbox is going to be the world's telephone/watercooler/flirtation device. Your sister will buy one.
The proof: MS aren't going to reduce the Xbox's retail price any further but, by Xmas, they WILL add the headset communicator and a years subscription to the bundle. Seriously, this will happen.
Next, expect to see the introduction of a non-gaming based chat service by next summer.
5. MS don't have to keep lowering the Xbox price. In fact, a major sales channel that Sony and Nintendo don't have is the cable companies. Expect to see the Xbox offered as a rental item, for about $15 per month along with Xbox Live subscription and stripped-down broadband Internet Connectivity (i.e. Xbox only).
I'm not for or against MS, I'm just calling it as I see it. Personally, I might buy a GameCube when Pikmin is released. I might also buy an Xbox when it's functionality stretches, as I've predicted, beyond just gaming.
Oh, I see, thanks, I'm still getting used to actually posting as opposed to just reading /.
> Who/What are you? JonKatz?
Boy, that's a low blow!
> No, on 9/11 the world was not attacked
> by mysterious aliens. Aliens and the
> paranormal have fascinated people for
> ages, and some things do not change,
> buildings or no buildings.
True, but the way in which that traditionally niche fascination became, via the X-Files, a mainstream pre-occupation was a reflection of the times.
What I'm saying is that the times have now changed, drastically so. It is, of course, a touchy subject and I'm not really surprised my original post was unfairly moderated down, but if we want to get the full picture and, in this case, a clearer picture of what the X-Files really meant to our culture, we have to factor the major shifts that have happened since it's first airing.
Well-written though it undoubtedly is, if The X-Files were to launch today, post 9/11, it would have seemed naive and, well, off-topic, and would never have made it to a 2nd series.
Why in the name of Hell was my comment rated off-topic?
I thought the meta-moderating system was meant to weed out these rogue moderators?
For years now we've all been getting our viewing thrills by letting The X-Files work us into an enjoyable froth of paranoia and conspiracy theory.
Everything, however, has a sell-by date and time has moved on; now, after 9/11, we've got reality to worry us in a way in which no TV show can compete.
We're going to look back at Nineties TV, and the X-Files in particular, as representing an age of naive innocence, before our colective chickens came home to roost.
> So, how long have you worked for the company?
Um, I think you might have accidently replied to the wrong posting. I like their idea but I certainly never said "Every now and then, somebody breaks through with an idea that really changes how we think about things."
Wow, they're really working David Levy's Apple background for all it's worth!
From the Digital Wireless Home-page:
"Fastap could do for wireless phones what Apple Computer's desktop did for the PC."
-- Brad Smith
Wireless Week ----
Looks like the best career move any aspiring Tech billionaire could make is to go earn some bragging rights by spending a few weeks working for Apple. Seriously, if you've just graduated with your 1st in Comp Sci, go work as a toilet attendant in Cupertino, that sort of cred will make even your worst future start-ups seem like rosier prospects.
In effect, they already have with their demo.
Surely, though, a virtual keyboard wouldn't need this?
According to researchers at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab, voice-recognition will never play an important part in our interaction with Information Technology because we construct our spoken communication in the "short-term" part of our memory.
This recent /. thread, discusses a Washington Post article, "A Visual Rather Than a Verbal Future", which details their work.
This is a great idea, I can really see it working BUT the method of entering numbers does sound a tad dodgy:
"Numbers are typed by pressing the four letter keys surrounding each numeral."
Surely sensing pressure centred on the actual number buttons themselves would make more sense?
Otherwise, though, great idea, even beats the Treo.
> I believe the correct term for
> multiple AOLers is "snert."
Well, I've certainly been feeling very snerted over the last few years.
I reckon we all deserve hefty compensation for having to the flood of morons AOL has unleashed onto the 'Net over the last five years.
Well, yes, rip-off Britain is a factor but less so now that it's assumed that the UK will be entering a larger economic pool; pricing tends to flatten towards an international level the larger the grouping, so, anticipation of the Euro has generally caused UK prices to float downwards, not as much as actual countries in the Euro such as Ireland or the Netherlands but, nonetheless, it has been a factor in pricing decisions by the big movers.
Equally, the presumed downwards adjustment has been worked into the equation. In the case of the Xbox, for example, Microsoft have to observe the fact that consumers simply won't accept an upward movement in the price of luxury goods. Necessities such as petrol, bread etc. yes, what can you do, but when it comes to consoles the prices can only go down, otherwise the punter will feel they've lost before they've even started playing.
Economics is always hard to pin down but surely you'll accept that the rip-off Britain effect has softened somewhat since Euro-comparisions made it harder to hide.
I also hope you'll note that currency speculators are now assuming necessary 12% drop in the £ relative to the Euro, and that MS, in their long-term planning, would be insane not to follow that lead.