Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate
on
IE7 Details Emerge
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Firefox is not so much a threat (its market share is still tiny) as an embarassment. It's evidence that Microsoft is way behind in figuring out what kind of software people need and getting it out the door. That's always been an issue (remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor?) but when they screw up with something as conspicuous as a web browser, people notice.
That sounds strange, considering how many theaters there are in greater London. The official line is, "no theatre [was] available to accommodate the massive and technically complex three-hour production". I suspect there was, but the one in Toronto was cheaper. So if the Toronto production doesn't do well enough to justify the expense of staging it in Toronto, the show will never make it back to London.
You describe several good reasons why Mozilla will always be more secure than IE. But here's the big one: it's open source. Whatever the financial limitations of the OS model, it's a nice way to get a lot of people checking the integrity of your code. With IE, nobody hears about exploits until they appear in the wild.
Never in my wildest dreams did I think a botnet would grow above a few tens of thousands hosts.
Lots of people did, though. Not botnets as such, but it's been clear for several years that Windows is extremely vulnerable to automated infiltration.
There's no explanation for such a botnet other than a professional full-time organization specifically created for profit.
A "professional full-time organization" can be one guy. But I'm guessing you mean something more serious, like somebody's raised some investment capital, hired a team of programmers, and is quietly selling botnet services.
That's not impossible, or even terribly unlikely, but it doesn't follow from the evidence stated. The size of a botnet isn't proof of anything, not when the propogation is automated. That's especially true when the bots are also viruses, that is, in charge of their own propagation. Then you get exponential growth.
That's the first question most of us would ask. A related question: what's the significance of Ben Goodger switching his employment from Mozilla Foundation to Google? Is this just a device to offload some of your payroll costs?
I downloaded one and tried to understand it, but the 'claims' section (arguably the most important part) is made up of utterly incomprehensible patentese, and I can't afford to hire a patent attorney to help me understand it.
At one place I worked, our lawyers urged developers not to read patents. Makes it harder for them to defend you.
If this project is a commerical one, and you can't afford to provide proper legal protection for your product, I'd recommend abandoning it -- there's no way you'll ever make a buck on it. On the other hand, if you're doing an open source project, I'd recommend that you just go ahead and do it, and not worry about legal issues. If your product's any good, then it will develop a following that will help you fight any patent infringement suits. Remember, the patent holder has to show that you're infringing, and that his patent is valid.
You're an asshole if you're so anxious to pick an argument, you can't even keep track of what you're arguing about. As you did when you got from here to here. Your tendency to phrase all arguments as insults doesn't quite help either.
Being opinionated is not quite the same thing. You can feel strongly about your opinions, and still show respect for people who disagree with you. Not to mention actually listening to what they say.
Disneyland follows a very special business model. You pay big bucks to enter the "Magic Kingdom" (scary name, that) and you don't leave for hours. (Or, in the case of Disney World, days.) The only web sites that follow anything like that model are porn sites.
We can argue analogies forever. I'll say it one last time: you can't seriously claim that micropayments won't work until serious web content providers try that model. To this date, none has.
I must be stupid. I just don't see how going to a glorified, overbranded amusement park resembles reading an article about Bolivian politics.
And most newspapers.
None of which force you to subscribe to read them. You do have to buy a whole issue at once, but that's the smallest unit that's practical in a newstand. Which is hardly true for online content.
And Cable TV.
Which is a damned monopoly. It's not a reasonable model for anything.
Most of the stuff I read online would be expensive and inconvenient to get in hard copy, if I could get it at all. Do they sell the L.A. Times, the Manchester Guardian, and Toronto Glob and Mail on your street corner?
I don't tell Sara Lee to change their entire production line just because I think they should put less of ingredient X in their product, I buy it or I don't.
This isn't about the product, it's about how they go about selling it. If I wanted to eat frozen pound cake (yuck!) and Sara Lee couldn't figure out how to make a profit selling it to me and I knew a distribution model that might make me a profitable customer, why shouldn't I speak up?
The whole idea of "micropayments" was only ever "embraced" by people who will spend an hour to save 50 cents.
No, it's embraced by people who don't want to spend $5-$20 to subscribe to a web site, just to read one or two articles occasionally.
In any case, nobody really knows who would embrace micropayments, because content providers have never really tried it. Can you name a single major online news source that has? If my favorite news sites all announced tomorrow that I'd have to pay, say, $0.005 for each article I read, I wouldn't rebel. Maybe others would, but we don't really know until somebody tries it. And nobody has.
Flat rate for a lot of stuff would appeal to a lot of people a whole lot more.
And your basis for that assertion is...?
Flat rate sucks for online content. It's a subscription, and subscriptions aren't worth the money unless you read a lot of the material your subscribing to. When you subscribe to a dead-tree newspaper, you tend to read a lot of articles in a lot of issues. If you're not doing that, then the subscription becomes wasteful, and it makes more sense to buy a single copy when you feel like reading that particular paper. Which is almost like a micropayment.
Online content supports a sort of grazing model, and I think that's what most online readers do. I know I do: I sort through the headlines and news summaries. I tend to follow specific writers rather than specific news sites. If I had to pay subscriptions for every site I visit, the cost would be extreme.
I used to like to read Kenneth Turan's movie reviews -- one of the few film critics I don't consider a dweeb. Can't any more, because the LA Times Calendar web site now charges $5 a month for access. A reasonable subscription fee if you read most of the site on a regular basis, but not to read just one columnist.
We might as well forget about grammatical terminology -- like you, I tend to go by intuition.
You've got the Sugar and US usage right, and I'll have to accept your word for the European usage of "Lego". So OK, in Europe you say "a box of Lego". The difference seems to be that to you guys "Lego" refers to some abstract thing, while to us a "Lego" is a plastic brick.
... a lot of companies out there dont mind tossing $50 a year toward a desktop just so that they can call and yell at somebody when something goes wrong.
Not enough to keep Red Hat in the desktop business.
I didn't see a picture of a kernel. It looks like Gnome...
You've never heard of Colonel Gnome?
Seriously, though, Java Desktop is just Sun's version of Gnome. They must of done something serious with it to justify charging $50 for it. Not clear what though.
Does anyone find it a bit disconcerting that answers.com gets ad revenue for wikipedia's content.
They're one of many. Wikipedia content is licensed under the GFDL, which means anybody can use Wikipedia content to create their own online reference. There are many of these, but Answers.com is the only one I've seen that isn't a complete joke. In fact, Answers.com has a lot more to it than just reformatted Wikipedia entries, as you'll soon see if you browse their site.
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Firefox is not so much a threat (its market share is still tiny) as an embarassment. It's evidence that Microsoft is way behind in figuring out what kind of software people need and getting it out the door. That's always been an issue (remember how many versions of MS-DOS shipped without a decent text editor?) but when they screw up with something as conspicuous as a web browser, people notice.
That sounds strange, considering how many theaters there are in greater London. The official line is, "no theatre [was] available to accommodate the massive and technically complex three-hour production". I suspect there was, but the one in Toronto was cheaper. So if the Toronto production doesn't do well enough to justify the expense of staging it in Toronto, the show will never make it back to London.
You describe several good reasons why Mozilla will always be more secure than IE. But here's the big one: it's open source. Whatever the financial limitations of the OS model, it's a nice way to get a lot of people checking the integrity of your code. With IE, nobody hears about exploits until they appear in the wild.
Sure, going to the wrong page once is not a big deal. And getting one spam message isn't a big deal either...
That's not impossible, or even terribly unlikely, but it doesn't follow from the evidence stated. The size of a botnet isn't proof of anything, not when the propogation is automated. That's especially true when the bots are also viruses, that is, in charge of their own propagation. Then you get exponential growth.
That's the first question most of us would ask. A related question: what's the significance of Ben Goodger switching his employment from Mozilla Foundation to Google? Is this just a device to offload some of your payroll costs?
If this project is a commerical one, and you can't afford to provide proper legal protection for your product, I'd recommend abandoning it -- there's no way you'll ever make a buck on it. On the other hand, if you're doing an open source project, I'd recommend that you just go ahead and do it, and not worry about legal issues. If your product's any good, then it will develop a following that will help you fight any patent infringement suits. Remember, the patent holder has to show that you're infringing, and that his patent is valid.
Being opinionated is not quite the same thing. You can feel strongly about your opinions, and still show respect for people who disagree with you. Not to mention actually listening to what they say.
Yes, but BSD is... Oh, never mind.
Very impressive. Which assholes do you model yourself upon? Or do you consider yourself unique?
So, were you born an asshole, or did you have to study?
We can argue analogies forever. I'll say it one last time: you can't seriously claim that micropayments won't work until serious web content providers try that model. To this date, none has.
You seem to have short-term memory issues.
No, it's great. VB6 supports all your Windows 98 programming needs!
In any case, nobody really knows who would embrace micropayments, because content providers have never really tried it. Can you name a single major online news source that has? If my favorite news sites all announced tomorrow that I'd have to pay, say, $0.005 for each article I read, I wouldn't rebel. Maybe others would, but we don't really know until somebody tries it. And nobody has.
Flat rate sucks for online content. It's a subscription, and subscriptions aren't worth the money unless you read a lot of the material your subscribing to. When you subscribe to a dead-tree newspaper, you tend to read a lot of articles in a lot of issues. If you're not doing that, then the subscription becomes wasteful, and it makes more sense to buy a single copy when you feel like reading that particular paper. Which is almost like a micropayment.
Online content supports a sort of grazing model, and I think that's what most online readers do. I know I do: I sort through the headlines and news summaries. I tend to follow specific writers rather than specific news sites. If I had to pay subscriptions for every site I visit, the cost would be extreme.
I used to like to read Kenneth Turan's movie reviews -- one of the few film critics I don't consider a dweeb. Can't any more, because the LA Times Calendar web site now charges $5 a month for access. A reasonable subscription fee if you read most of the site on a regular basis, but not to read just one columnist.
You've got the Sugar and US usage right, and I'll have to accept your word for the European usage of "Lego". So OK, in Europe you say "a box of Lego". The difference seems to be that to you guys "Lego" refers to some abstract thing, while to us a "Lego" is a plastic brick.
Seriously, though, Java Desktop is just Sun's version of Gnome. They must of done something serious with it to justify charging $50 for it. Not clear what though.
Oh yeah, and it is available for linux.
What's presumptuous is to assume that somebody who refuses to watch Disney crap hasn't seen any good animation.
Since I've never seen the Disney movies to which you refer (Evil! Evil!) my feelings can only be described as an absence of feeling.