"And the rest of us that open ODF files in Google Docs or Wordpad are just fine. FWIW, businesses upgrade to the most recent version of Office when they upgrade the systems, because you can't get the depreciation tax deduction on fully depreciated hardware (assuming your company is profitable enough to want the deduction).
"
If a client has to do that they will just ignore you and use a competitor instead. Doesn't even run Office WTF?!
I am not saying I agree with this as this is how MS created their monopoly ecosystem in the enterprise when supperior products were available. But in Business you have to look professional and take care of everything yesterday. Those who cater the most and look professional are the ones people trust their hard earned dollars with.
I am seriously not a troll, but Linux/LibreOffice do not belong in a place where customers and documents need to be flawless and delivered with the employees focusing on providing customer value rather than technology. Linux is great on the server but the MS compatibility file formats is what keeps people in and at the end of the day it is worth the costs. Add people sending Quickbook and photoshop files and you have more hassles.
Today with OpenXML businesses do not have to upgrade Office as much but 10 years ago that was a problem and bosses would actually check to see how professional another business was by sending the most recent documents to see if they could read them.
Not a viable option. If you work hard making a resume in LibrOffice yet it looks like crap on my system with MSOffice I will throw it in the recycling bin. It is ludricrious to send and receive documents without Windows and Office as it means unprofessionalism and lost sales. The sole reason businesses upgrade in the past was because customers would send attachments that only worked in newer versions of Office. Besides Windows is reliable now and just works. Linux can break during an updateand users are more familiar with windows.
Problem is software is an expense that adds little value to bottom line unless your a software company. Therefore go cheap and invest in more sales and accounting gurus who can better raise the stock price and bring better value to the shareholders. That is what is taught in business school and makes sense. You dont save anything as it never generates revenue.
May it rest in peace. Your right fixing is boring and for free developing is fun. Project managment is a must. Who the hell wants to be told what to do for free? Bsd unix was awesome when it still was managed by UC at berkeley. Its not a gnu problem. Firefox went to hell when the CIO quit and Asa went crazy afterwards. They had money unlike most free software. Just bad managment. Gnome 3 went to hell because Miguel left too. He wanted Gnome to be. NET based so that would be unpopular move anyway
Hey Hairy! You thought FF is bad under Windows? Yikes!
I admit I use AMD processors and FF uses the intel compiler but it just chokes on any video or heavy javascript multimedia on my old laptop. FF runs sluggish but brearable with Windows 7 on the same system. Chrome and IE 9 about the same performance and sites like www.newsweek.com are only usable with these 2 browsers. I admit that was with FF 4 and 5. I have not tried out FF 7 which is supposed to be much lighter and better for older machines. At this point I do not care anymore. FF is dying fast according to g.statcounter.com if you look at marketshare. Hell even IE 8 is growing!... I think the reason for the resurgence in IE 8 is because of corporations switching back to IE thanks to ASA's big mouth.
Dragon is not bad but I do not like the fact that the plugins are not updated automatically for regular users. Flash is worse than IE 7 with vulnerabilities right now and even slashdotters do not understand this. A patched system with Flash 9 can be infected quickly. Asus computers still include flash 9 by default in its image. Yikes
IT is so much of I could get fired if this breaks instead of looking foward to the next great thing.
Corporations need to test and do case anaylsis studies before each update. Without it the company can't operate if a serious problem arrises and you will lose your job. Plain and simple. If something breaks slowly and you find out 2 weeks later after 15 updates with 4 products how do you fix it? What caused the random corruption? Windows? SQL Server? Our Access product? Or Access? etc.
Chrome is too fast. But I have to admit it is engineered for frequent updates to not wreck havoc unlike Firefox but still you never know in a corporate environment.
IE now is updating more rapdily because the grandfather is right. The web is growing fast. An annual update of IE every March is Microsoft's approach and is a good compromise. You can still get all the updates as Chrome but they will come as just one massive dump instead. Many consumers like this too as they just want to use their computer for work and not worry about updating stuff.
What really hurt IE was the IPhone believe it or not.... and of course the IPAD next which is its cousin.
CEOs who loved IE 6 and MS technology thinking it was uber high-tech had to ask why their intranet sites looked like crap or would not work on their IPADs? More and more people are browsing the net with them since 2008. In emerging markets like Asia and the middle east a phone or tablet is the prefered method of internet access. IE specific code has way to work in.
There was pocket IE which I think used IE 6's engine right for WindowsCE? Windows PHone 7.5 has great ratings but man did MS lose the marketshare of a lifetime since Iphone and Andriods are eating into Windows marketshare for consumers.
According to www.zdnet.com, last year the vast majority of consumers held off on IPads as they wanted Windows 76%! Today that number is like 38% as people realize they do not need Windows to post on facebook and they do not have to worry about malware or complications like a PC.
The mobile market is what really put IE and its proprietary standards in the dumb. IE 9 is good now because it has to be. Metro has an uphill battle and requiring proprietary and broken code will make developers ignore IE and focus on the IPAD instead. Ouch.
MS is turning more and more into IBM. It just wont ever be like it was with fear of using a non IBM platform once they lost control
It seems great opensource products come about that are supperior to closed source products in emerging markets. But after they become complex they start to suck and corporate counterparts improve.
Case in point It pains me to write this, but I agree. I use WIndows now. I used to love Linux and then love FreeBSD even more. The FreeBSD 4.x versions ROCKED! Stable, reliable, the ports, everything just worked except I always had to tinker to get something working hardware wise. Linux had supperior power management and was a real multitasking, multiuser OS when Windows 98 did not know the concepts and had real mode DOS apps writting and even over-writting ram addresses crashing win32 programs. UGh. You can't mix unaware non multitasking DOS code with win32 code that managed memory and not have random crashes, GP faults, bsdos, and other nasties.
The free GNU software was amazing 10 years ago! You could do things that Windows couldn't.
Today 10 years later. Gnome is shit, Linux has regressions, RHES has regressions, FBSD is trying to recover its past glory with less bugs, Java is shit (ok not all open source), KDE is shit, Firefox is shit, Amarok is shit! Windows 7 has more advanced security features, just works now, no more DOS nightmares, has real multi user and and multitasking kernel complete with ACLS, and.NET blows the 10 year old development tools out of the water. FreeBSD is buggy mess since FBSD 5.x and still is trying to be as stable as 4.x from 2004/2005.
Firefox was awesome too. Light stable, simple, and worked when it first came out.
Opensource software just can't get people managed. Once something gets complex it goes to shit when you have someone like Asa in charge of FF. That is my take and for those who say they are l33t and better well you need to live in this decade. If Linux had the issues 10 years ago where I had to compile or look for someone making obsolete guis (like Mate, and the KDE 3.x) I would be scratching my head on why people think it is so great. I read a post about someone losing a friend when he installed SuSE with KDE on his laptop when he insisted on Windows. His friend that this guy was an idiot for not knowing anything about computers since Windows was so awesome. Sigh... sadly he was right.
You are not alone in reverting back. What a dissapointment
Yep. I have been looking at web statistics from g.statcounter.com and until this month most Chrome users came from IE believe it or not. Good for them as they might not have the expertise to know different browsers or know enough that IE keeps getting infected with XP. This last month most users are switching back to IE.
My guess is not from Chrome, but rather Firefox. It is really buggy and has issues. If the blue E just works click on it and most clueless users use Firefox becuase someone like yourself or a relative recommended it.
IE 9 & 10 are perfectly relevant to talk about today in regards to corporate desktops.
Sites like g.statcounter show a different picture of XP marketshare if you search for operating systems under the US. XP is dying FAST. XP had only 1 in 4 users in the US and 1 in 3 in Europe with Windows 7 quickly taking 10 - 15% marketshare year after year. My guess is most are corporate and they know time is running out.
The rest of the 50% you see quoted in Slashdot from around the world are from China which skew the results due to piracy. Same is true with IE 6 usage as no one outside Asia uses it really as WPA makes sure you have a legit copy of XP before you can upgrade and banks require ActiveX so your stuck with it.
Corporations are either in the planning stages or will be in the planning stages after January on Windows 7 migrations according to Forbes. If 26% of people use Xp now it will be 12 - 8% at the current rate if not much less as corporations leave in force. Sadly you are right with refreshes and I cringe to be running Windows 7 in 2019 but you know these same businesses learned to love obsolete software and unlike Xp Windows 7 is MUCH MORE secure. Even less of a reason to leave. Unless of course METRO applets are the next wave of business software or something.
You know I had that issue on my pc about a week ago after a fresh reinstall. I traced it down to flash. With a restore and an older version of flash it was snappy again. My guess is hardware acceleration got turned off. Youtube was less responsive but gmail was fine oddly enough. On my computer they both load about the same and maybe slighter slower with IE 9. However graphics heavy sites like www.newsweek.com are better in IE 9 because I have an ATI 5750.
Maybe because I worked in both hospitals and schools with laws and very strict confidentiality that I find this appauling! If anyone dared looked up a record on a student or patient they would be fired right on the spot. They are HIPPA documents.
I guess once you are conditioned into what is normal and not you think differently but to me looking at someone's records is no different than showing up for work naked. You just do not do that. Fired and maybe arrested if someone else finds out about it. If you work in a publically traded company you can open your employer to liabilities like insider trading and sexual harrasement and other issues. If you worked under me I would fire you for doing this.
Windows XP has less than 25% marketshare in the US. Probably mostly offices. The rest are in China, and they have their own internet which is mostly IE 6 still and do not go to our internet. XP is dying very fast but you are right iwth the plugins.
Chrome wants people to run cloud apps and have the browser a fast thin layer with nothing special. Want to do XYZ? Go run this Google cloud app for $4.99 a month etc. I don't like it.
MS had a monopoly that was different. New (l)users who got a computer for the first time in 1996 - 1999 didn't know any better or what a download even was. By the time they learned webmasters started coding IE specific sites in 2004. Firefox had issues with IE oriented sites for years. Remember?
Sometimes better marketing wins. MS had the monopoly just because IBM had the monopoly which was because you needed specific software to read everyone else's files... cough Office.
The free market normally applies when you are not tied into anything. I do fear Chrome more than IE actually in 2011. Google is not even covering up the fact they want Chrome only HTML 5 websites, with proprietary javscript extensions, dart, and Chrome cloud apps that run in Chrome browser/OS. IE 10 is not doing any of that and instead just wants standard apps with just some.NET glue if you want your homepage to be a Metro app.
IE was not always horrible. It was the best browser before MS abandonded it in 2002 with IE 6 (IE 7 is a minor update to a 2001 browser).
Today, IE 9 is better than Firefox in almost every way with the exception of a few HTML 5 tags. IE 10 which will be released next March will be a top challenger believe it or not. Javscript acid tests show IE 10 to be a top performer with 100$ compliance shockingly enough!
As for a user (non web developer) IE is more stable, uses less memory, more secure, and uses all of the GPU for smoother multimedia acceleration. It is sad to see it that way, but good as Grandmas and I.T. departments wont ever leave IE so we might as well not hold the web back. As a webmaster life will be easier as you can work with standards again if your users use at least IE 9.
Not to say Chrome is bad, but for Grandma FF is just buggy and slow compared to IE 8 or higher. My parents have had it up to here with Thunderbird and my Mom wants to switch to Chrome. Quality of FF is really bad.
We all hate firing people and want be everyone's friend at work.
One bad apple such as Asa can surely ruin the whole batch. Talka bout a negative return. If Mozilla had some balls and threaten to fire Asa after Firefox 4.0 if he did the 6 week release or at least re-engineer the browser and add-ons to be designed for agile development like Chrome before making the leap.
You can design a system that can be agile like the flash trading computers at Wall Street where programmers make changes within the hour of a screaming trader without a crash. Chrome is it, but sadly Firefox was not.
The CEO of Mozilla needed to ahve more vision and that included the CIO who left for Facebook who probably kept Firefox stable before he quit. I no longer run Firefox but I hate to see it go. Many schools I worked at k-12 and individuals depend on Firefox because it is Mac and Windows friendly and so much more stable and secure than IE 6.
Lets hope Chrome does not monopolize the web as Google's actions make me nervous and remind me of IE 5 in many ways. Dart, custom Javascript, and their C++ api (forgot name) is very proprietary. I do not like it! Not Chrome per say but rather the proprietary add-ons.
By hiring more cost accountants and requiring special and complicated business case studies with a thorough financial analysis on even the most mundane upgrade on how it will raise the companys stock price. Just ask any visionary MBA? Always buy cheap consumer grade stuff and view talent as unneccesary expenses. Do that and you will never have problems. What could go wrong?
Just wait until MS cripples Windows8 so that the mouse and keyboard appear awkward when you use METRO. That alone will drive people to tablets. I dont like it one bit but I sense it is the wave of the future. Windows 8 sucks on anything but non desktop. Mix Office to be Metro based and the you can do work on it.
Just wait until malware hits Android and Ios. Infact I believe I got hit by one piece on my phone. Its been acting slow since I visited a naughty site and erratic. Unlike a PC I cant get rid of it. All the antivirus software doesnt work and AT&t wont let me ugrade beyond Android 2.1. So unlike a PC you cant getsecurity as the carriers want you to buy a new phone each time withanother year contract. That lovely walled garden is surely not ours. We rent it. A malware nightmare is brewing and believe when I say it makes XP and IE 6 pre sp2 look like a picnic. Pcs at least have malware proctections and are fairly secure now if you no longer run XP
Why are industrial systems wired to the internet and using old versions of Windows and requiring IE 6 to log in anyway?
If Stuxnet got into Iran my guess would be a spy loaded it with a flash drive. Who would be retarded enough to put a nuclear reactor... I wont go there as I know what the answer is and I do not like it.
Windows is needed by people to run Office and use their pcs as linux is questionable still. But industrial equipment does not require ole, office, activeX, and other MS desktop standards to run. Good God
Yes! Linux is suspectable as much as Windows absolutely
How do hackers break into computers? 1. Buffer overflows (Anything written in C/C++) 2. Vector attacks (Flash, Java... both are on Linux as well) 3. Social engineering tricks 4. Buggy exception handling where you can get the program to run your injected code by knowing where the computer will look up the ram address when it throws an exception 5. Sql injection
Linux has every single problem Windows has as it is written in C which adds all the vulnerabilities associated with it. Linux machines are targeted because they are more than likely servers on the net and you can do some phishing, insert SEO ads for malware trojaned clones of Firefox, Chrome and other programs (Bing served them too), can be used to steal credit card information on customers, etc. Windows is ahead because it supports DEP, ASLR, and special compilations in VC 9 to make sure no exception handling gets thrown insecurely. With random address layering it makes it very hard to exploit a vector attack and Linux doesn't even support it. Add then that anti virus products on Windows shield and do more than scan a system after it is infected make Windows more secure. Does Linux even know the difference between executable vs storage data? VMS and mainframes had this protection for years and is a problem for Linux if it does not fully support it as it still is for XP.
By more secure I mean Widows 7 with IE 9 and Office 2010. Not Windows XP, IE 6, Mcaffe 2003. The fact that even slashdotters now think WindowsXP is an awesome OS that is stable and perfect for business in 2011 is nausating and it is true activeX and RPC made XP/IE 6 very insecure. But that is not true anymore. More malware writters do not even target Windows anymore but simply Flash, Java, and Chrome. If you run Linux as a workstation it is just as vulnerable if not more because distros do not update software as quickly as these do on Windows.
Your example of passowrds and configuring a system properly only go so far as this was the pre-2000 way to secure a system from dictionary attacks or password sniffing. Today it is to smash stacks, overrun buffers, and find exploits etc. UAC, root/non-root wont matter as an exploit simply goes around it and talks directly to the hardware.
I am guessing if it is a financial institution that many customers are business customers that have to use IE for work. Small business owners sometimes check daily while consumers check monthly when bills are do and of course the small business owner is probably using IE more than an average consumer on a home PC. If you work for citigroup or Chase I can tell you your site is buggy on non IE browsers. Especially your student loan site where the tables are not where they should be. I always use IE for these sites generally.
On slashdot only 10% of users use IE. Arstechnica.com showed something like only 15% used IE. It depends on your users indeed and these polls test overall traffic from the US.
IE was the only browser after 2000. Netscape was proprietary as well and sucked. MS was the standard that everyone else was using. After 2004 websites only worked with IE which gave the illusion of IE being a superior product.
Firefox was an uphill battle in its early years. People who switched kept switching back to IE 6 because it felt familiar and all the websites just worked on it. It really wasn't until 2008 before websites started putting in hacks to work for standards like Safari and Firefox. Being hacked did help people leave IE but I remember those days. It was not like today where any modern browser can simple just work and you can get one easily.
Before Firefox there were 4 years from 2000 - 2004/5 where no real browser that was competitive existed.
.. and for those of us who need to target IE only businesses for support or websites I have to say even IE is MUCH IMPROVED with IE 9 and IE 10 is the most standards compliant out there with 100% Javascript conformance believe it or not.
MS has learned their lesson from IE 6 not to be proprietary and they have no desire at all whatsoever as they want want applets from IOS and Android ported to Metro. Funny that seems to happen when you lose marketshare.
Chrome however is showing signs similiar to IE 4/5 with proprietarness that I am wary of. Dart is 100% proprietary and so is the HTML 5 code from that demo posted on slashdot a few months ago. It wont work on any browser but Chrome. Worse are the applets.
I believe Google plans a whole ecosystem inside the browser itself similar to ActiveX but Chrome will be more of an operating system rather than just a jar to run win32 objects like IE was.
In that regards Mozilla surely does not want Chrome to succeed to be the next platform and has a vested interest to see Chrome as just a browser instead.
Cable is the easiest bill to cut out entirely, and would be the first I would axe completely if I lost my job (and of course that same demographic is also very much impacted by the crappy economy and high unemployment
No kidding. 20 years ago cable was $40 a month. Then $40 a month plus $10 a month for each TV. Then $60 a month + $15 a month for only 13 channels. $89 a rest for a tier including other channels. Then $119 a month for HD + $25 a month for each set.... today a family of 3 with 4 TVs with one set with a DVR + HBO and showtime and one other HD set is $200 a month!
Gee, how much is a monthly car payment? Gee $200 - $300 a month. Is TV worth the price of a car. Hell no!
$200 a month more into your retirement and wihtin 30 years you can a house paid for in cash. Or you can pay 1/4th the cost of both your kids college.
With crappy wages, high unemployment, and little value it makes sense to unplug. However some people born before 1990 absolutely HAVE TO HAVE TV. Sigh. It is like electricty to them and I frankly do not get it. I was born in the 1970s but never liked TV as I viewed it as harmful. If you are unemployed TV has got to go. Keeping an internet connection, water, and electricty are more important to keep you alive and search for work.
Slashdot Mirror
"And the rest of us that open ODF files in Google Docs or Wordpad are just fine. FWIW, businesses upgrade to the most recent version of Office when they upgrade the systems, because you can't get the depreciation tax deduction on fully depreciated hardware (assuming your company is profitable enough to want the deduction).
"
If a client has to do that they will just ignore you and use a competitor instead. Doesn't even run Office WTF?!
I am not saying I agree with this as this is how MS created their monopoly ecosystem in the enterprise when supperior products were available. But in Business you have to look professional and take care of everything yesterday. Those who cater the most and look professional are the ones people trust their hard earned dollars with.
I am seriously not a troll, but Linux/LibreOffice do not belong in a place where customers and documents need to be flawless and delivered with the employees focusing on providing customer value rather than technology. Linux is great on the server but the MS compatibility file formats is what keeps people in and at the end of the day it is worth the costs. Add people sending Quickbook and photoshop files and you have more hassles.
Today with OpenXML businesses do not have to upgrade Office as much but 10 years ago that was a problem and bosses would actually check to see how professional another business was by sending the most recent documents to see if they could read them.
Not a viable option. If you work hard making a resume in LibrOffice yet it looks like crap on my system with MSOffice I will throw it in the recycling bin. It is ludricrious to send and receive documents without Windows and Office as it means unprofessionalism and lost sales. The sole reason businesses upgrade in the past was because customers would send attachments that only worked in newer versions of Office. Besides Windows is reliable now and just works. Linux can break during an updateand users are more familiar with windows.
Problem is software is an expense that adds little value to bottom line unless your a software company. Therefore go cheap and invest in more sales and accounting gurus who can better raise the stock price and bring better value to the shareholders. That is what is taught in business school and makes sense. You dont save anything as it never generates revenue.
May it rest in peace. Your right fixing is boring and for free developing is fun. Project managment is a must. Who the hell wants to be told what to do for free? Bsd unix was awesome when it still was managed by UC at berkeley. Its not a gnu problem. Firefox went to hell when the CIO quit and Asa went crazy afterwards. They had money unlike most free software. Just bad managment. Gnome 3 went to hell because Miguel left too. He wanted Gnome to be. NET based so that would be unpopular move anyway
Hey Hairy! You thought FF is bad under Windows? Yikes!
I admit I use AMD processors and FF uses the intel compiler but it just chokes on any video or heavy javascript multimedia on my old laptop. FF runs sluggish but brearable with Windows 7 on the same system. Chrome and IE 9 about the same performance and sites like www.newsweek.com are only usable with these 2 browsers. I admit that was with FF 4 and 5. I have not tried out FF 7 which is supposed to be much lighter and better for older machines. At this point I do not care anymore. FF is dying fast according to g.statcounter.com if you look at marketshare. Hell even IE 8 is growing! ... I think the reason for the resurgence in IE 8 is because of corporations switching back to IE thanks to ASA's big mouth.
Dragon is not bad but I do not like the fact that the plugins are not updated automatically for regular users. Flash is worse than IE 7 with vulnerabilities right now and even slashdotters do not understand this. A patched system with Flash 9 can be infected quickly. Asus computers still include flash 9 by default in its image. Yikes
IT is so much of I could get fired if this breaks instead of looking foward to the next great thing.
Corporations need to test and do case anaylsis studies before each update. Without it the company can't operate if a serious problem arrises and you will lose your job. Plain and simple. If something breaks slowly and you find out 2 weeks later after 15 updates with 4 products how do you fix it? What caused the random corruption? Windows? SQL Server? Our Access product? Or Access? etc.
Chrome is too fast. But I have to admit it is engineered for frequent updates to not wreck havoc unlike Firefox but still you never know in a corporate environment.
IE now is updating more rapdily because the grandfather is right. The web is growing fast. An annual update of IE every March is Microsoft's approach and is a good compromise. You can still get all the updates as Chrome but they will come as just one massive dump instead. Many consumers like this too as they just want to use their computer for work and not worry about updating stuff.
What really hurt IE was the IPhone believe it or not. ... and of course the IPAD next which is its cousin.
CEOs who loved IE 6 and MS technology thinking it was uber high-tech had to ask why their intranet sites looked like crap or would not work on their IPADs? More and more people are browsing the net with them since 2008. In emerging markets like Asia and the middle east a phone or tablet is the prefered method of internet access. IE specific code has way to work in.
There was pocket IE which I think used IE 6's engine right for WindowsCE? Windows PHone 7.5 has great ratings but man did MS lose the marketshare of a lifetime since Iphone and Andriods are eating into Windows marketshare for consumers.
According to www.zdnet.com, last year the vast majority of consumers held off on IPads as they wanted Windows 76%! Today that number is like 38% as people realize they do not need Windows to post on facebook and they do not have to worry about malware or complications like a PC.
The mobile market is what really put IE and its proprietary standards in the dumb. IE 9 is good now because it has to be. Metro has an uphill battle and requiring proprietary and broken code will make developers ignore IE and focus on the IPAD instead. Ouch.
MS is turning more and more into IBM. It just wont ever be like it was with fear of using a non IBM platform once they lost control
Very ballsy post right there.
It seems great opensource products come about that are supperior to closed source products in emerging markets. But after they become complex they start to suck and corporate counterparts improve.
Case in point
It pains me to write this, but I agree. I use WIndows now. I used to love Linux and then love FreeBSD even more. The FreeBSD 4.x versions ROCKED! Stable, reliable, the ports, everything just worked except I always had to tinker to get something working hardware wise. Linux had supperior power management and was a real multitasking, multiuser OS when Windows 98 did not know the concepts and had real mode DOS apps writting and even over-writting ram addresses crashing win32 programs. UGh. You can't mix unaware non multitasking DOS code with win32 code that managed memory and not have random crashes, GP faults, bsdos, and other nasties.
The free GNU software was amazing 10 years ago! You could do things that Windows couldn't.
Today .NET blows the 10 year old development tools out of the water. FreeBSD is buggy mess since FBSD 5.x and still is trying to be as stable as 4.x from 2004/2005.
10 years later.
Gnome is shit, Linux has regressions, RHES has regressions, FBSD is trying to recover its past glory with less bugs, Java is shit (ok not all open source), KDE is shit, Firefox is shit, Amarok is shit! Windows 7 has more advanced security features, just works now, no more DOS nightmares, has real multi user and and multitasking kernel complete with ACLS, and
Firefox was awesome too. Light stable, simple, and worked when it first came out.
Opensource software just can't get people managed. Once something gets complex it goes to shit when you have someone like Asa in charge of FF. That is my take and for those who say they are l33t and better well you need to live in this decade. If Linux had the issues 10 years ago where I had to compile or look for someone making obsolete guis (like Mate, and the KDE 3.x) I would be scratching my head on why people think it is so great. I read a post about someone losing a friend when he installed SuSE with KDE on his laptop when he insisted on Windows. His friend that this guy was an idiot for not knowing anything about computers since Windows was so awesome. Sigh ... sadly he was right.
You are not alone in reverting back. What a dissapointment
Yep. I have been looking at web statistics from g.statcounter.com and until this month most Chrome users came from IE believe it or not. Good for them as they might not have the expertise to know different browsers or know enough that IE keeps getting infected with XP. This last month most users are switching back to IE.
My guess is not from Chrome, but rather Firefox. It is really buggy and has issues. If the blue E just works click on it and most clueless users use Firefox becuase someone like yourself or a relative recommended it.
IE 9 & 10 are perfectly relevant to talk about today in regards to corporate desktops.
Sites like g.statcounter show a different picture of XP marketshare if you search for operating systems under the US. XP is dying FAST. XP had only 1 in 4 users in the US and 1 in 3 in Europe with Windows 7 quickly taking 10 - 15% marketshare year after year. My guess is most are corporate and they know time is running out.
The rest of the 50% you see quoted in Slashdot from around the world are from China which skew the results due to piracy. Same is true with IE 6 usage as no one outside Asia uses it really as WPA makes sure you have a legit copy of XP before you can upgrade and banks require ActiveX so your stuck with it.
Corporations are either in the planning stages or will be in the planning stages after January on Windows 7 migrations according to Forbes. If 26% of people use Xp now it will be 12 - 8% at the current rate if not much less as corporations leave in force. Sadly you are right with refreshes and I cringe to be running Windows 7 in 2019 but you know these same businesses learned to love obsolete software and unlike Xp Windows 7 is MUCH MORE secure. Even less of a reason to leave. Unless of course METRO applets are the next wave of business software or something.
You know I had that issue on my pc about a week ago after a fresh reinstall. I traced it down to flash. With a restore and an older version of flash it was snappy again. My guess is hardware acceleration got turned off. Youtube was less responsive but gmail was fine oddly enough. On my computer they both load about the same and maybe slighter slower with IE 9. However graphics heavy sites like www.newsweek.com are better in IE 9 because I have an ATI 5750.
On my older laptop there is no difference.
Maybe because I worked in both hospitals and schools with laws and very strict confidentiality that I find this appauling! If anyone dared looked up a record on a student or patient they would be fired right on the spot. They are HIPPA documents.
I guess once you are conditioned into what is normal and not you think differently but to me looking at someone's records is no different than showing up for work naked. You just do not do that. Fired and maybe arrested if someone else finds out about it. If you work in a publically traded company you can open your employer to liabilities like insider trading and sexual harrasement and other issues. If you worked under me I would fire you for doing this.
Windows XP has less than 25% marketshare in the US. Probably mostly offices. The rest are in China, and they have their own internet which is mostly IE 6 still and do not go to our internet. XP is dying very fast but you are right iwth the plugins.
Chrome wants people to run cloud apps and have the browser a fast thin layer with nothing special. Want to do XYZ? Go run this Google cloud app for $4.99 a month etc. I don't like it.
MS had a monopoly that was different. New (l)users who got a computer for the first time in 1996 - 1999 didn't know any better or what a download even was. By the time they learned webmasters started coding IE specific sites in 2004. Firefox had issues with IE oriented sites for years. Remember?
Sometimes better marketing wins. MS had the monopoly just because IBM had the monopoly which was because you needed specific software to read everyone else's files ... cough Office.
The free market normally applies when you are not tied into anything. I do fear Chrome more than IE actually in 2011. Google is not even covering up the fact they want Chrome only HTML 5 websites, with proprietary javscript extensions, dart, and Chrome cloud apps that run in Chrome browser/OS. IE 10 is not doing any of that and instead just wants standard apps with just some .NET glue if you want your homepage to be a Metro app.
IE was not always horrible. It was the best browser before MS abandonded it in 2002 with IE 6 (IE 7 is a minor update to a 2001 browser).
Today, IE 9 is better than Firefox in almost every way with the exception of a few HTML 5 tags. IE 10 which will be released next March will be a top challenger believe it or not. Javscript acid tests show IE 10 to be a top performer with 100$ compliance shockingly enough!
As for a user (non web developer) IE is more stable, uses less memory, more secure, and uses all of the GPU for smoother multimedia acceleration. It is sad to see it that way, but good as Grandmas and I.T. departments wont ever leave IE so we might as well not hold the web back. As a webmaster life will be easier as you can work with standards again if your users use at least IE 9.
Not to say Chrome is bad, but for Grandma FF is just buggy and slow compared to IE 8 or higher. My parents have had it up to here with Thunderbird and my Mom wants to switch to Chrome. Quality of FF is really bad.
We all hate firing people and want be everyone's friend at work.
One bad apple such as Asa can surely ruin the whole batch. Talka bout a negative return. If Mozilla had some balls and threaten to fire Asa after Firefox 4.0 if he did the 6 week release or at least re-engineer the browser and add-ons to be designed for agile development like Chrome before making the leap.
You can design a system that can be agile like the flash trading computers at Wall Street where programmers make changes within the hour of a screaming trader without a crash. Chrome is it, but sadly Firefox was not.
The CEO of Mozilla needed to ahve more vision and that included the CIO who left for Facebook who probably kept Firefox stable before he quit. I no longer run Firefox but I hate to see it go. Many schools I worked at k-12 and individuals depend on Firefox because it is Mac and Windows friendly and so much more stable and secure than IE 6.
Lets hope Chrome does not monopolize the web as Google's actions make me nervous and remind me of IE 5 in many ways. Dart, custom Javascript, and their C++ api (forgot name) is very proprietary. I do not like it! Not Chrome per say but rather the proprietary add-ons.
By hiring more cost accountants and requiring special and complicated business case studies with a thorough financial analysis on even the most mundane upgrade on how it will raise the companys stock price. Just ask any visionary MBA? Always buy cheap consumer grade stuff and view talent as unneccesary expenses. Do that and you will never have problems. What could go wrong?
Just wait until MS cripples Windows8 so that the mouse and keyboard appear awkward when you use METRO. That alone will drive people to tablets. I dont like it one bit but I sense it is the wave of the future. Windows 8 sucks on anything but non desktop. Mix Office to be Metro based and the you can do work on it.
Just wait until malware hits Android and Ios. Infact I believe I got hit by one piece on my phone. Its been acting slow since I visited a naughty site and erratic. Unlike a PC I cant get rid of it. All the antivirus software doesnt work and AT&t wont let me ugrade beyond Android 2.1. So unlike a PC you cant getsecurity as the carriers want you to buy a new phone each time withanother year contract. That lovely walled garden is surely not ours. We rent it. A malware nightmare is brewing and believe when I say it makes XP and IE 6 pre sp2 look like a picnic. Pcs at least have malware proctections and are fairly secure now if you no longer run XP
Why are industrial systems wired to the internet and using old versions of Windows and requiring IE 6 to log in anyway?
If Stuxnet got into Iran my guess would be a spy loaded it with a flash drive. Who would be retarded enough to put a nuclear reactor ... I wont go there as I know what the answer is and I do not like it.
Windows is needed by people to run Office and use their pcs as linux is questionable still. But industrial equipment does not require ole, office, activeX, and other MS desktop standards to run. Good God
Yes! Linux is suspectable as much as Windows absolutely
How do hackers break into computers? ... both are on Linux as well)
1. Buffer overflows (Anything written in C/C++)
2. Vector attacks (Flash, Java
3. Social engineering tricks
4. Buggy exception handling where you can get the program to run your injected code by knowing where the computer will look up the ram address when it throws an exception
5. Sql injection
Linux has every single problem Windows has as it is written in C which adds all the vulnerabilities associated with it. Linux machines are targeted because they are more than likely servers on the net and you can do some phishing, insert SEO ads for malware trojaned clones of Firefox, Chrome and other programs (Bing served them too), can be used to steal credit card information on customers, etc. Windows is ahead because it supports DEP, ASLR, and special compilations in VC 9 to make sure no exception handling gets thrown insecurely. With random address layering it makes it very hard to exploit a vector attack and Linux doesn't even support it. Add then that anti virus products on Windows shield and do more than scan a system after it is infected make Windows more secure. Does Linux even know the difference between executable vs storage data? VMS and mainframes had this protection for years and is a problem for Linux if it does not fully support it as it still is for XP.
By more secure I mean Widows 7 with IE 9 and Office 2010. Not Windows XP, IE 6, Mcaffe 2003. The fact that even slashdotters now think WindowsXP is an awesome OS that is stable and perfect for business in 2011 is nausating and it is true activeX and RPC made XP/IE 6 very insecure. But that is not true anymore. More malware writters do not even target Windows anymore but simply Flash, Java, and Chrome. If you run Linux as a workstation it is just as vulnerable if not more because distros do not update software as quickly as these do on Windows.
Your example of passowrds and configuring a system properly only go so far as this was the pre-2000 way to secure a system from dictionary attacks or password sniffing. Today it is to smash stacks, overrun buffers, and find exploits etc. UAC, root/non-root wont matter as an exploit simply goes around it and talks directly to the hardware.
I am guessing if it is a financial institution that many customers are business customers that have to use IE for work. Small business owners sometimes check daily while consumers check monthly when bills are do and of course the small business owner is probably using IE more than an average consumer on a home PC. If you work for citigroup or Chase I can tell you your site is buggy on non IE browsers. Especially your student loan site where the tables are not where they should be. I always use IE for these sites generally.
On slashdot only 10% of users use IE. Arstechnica.com showed something like only 15% used IE. It depends on your users indeed and these polls test overall traffic from the US.
IE was the only browser after 2000. Netscape was proprietary as well and sucked. MS was the standard that everyone else was using. After 2004 websites only worked with IE which gave the illusion of IE being a superior product.
Firefox was an uphill battle in its early years. People who switched kept switching back to IE 6 because it felt familiar and all the websites just worked on it. It really wasn't until 2008 before websites started putting in hacks to work for standards like Safari and Firefox. Being hacked did help people leave IE but I remember those days. It was not like today where any modern browser can simple just work and you can get one easily.
Before Firefox there were 4 years from 2000 - 2004/5 where no real browser that was competitive existed.
.. and for those of us who need to target IE only businesses for support or websites I have to say even IE is MUCH IMPROVED with IE 9 and IE 10 is the most standards compliant out there with 100% Javascript conformance believe it or not.
MS has learned their lesson from IE 6 not to be proprietary and they have no desire at all whatsoever as they want want applets from IOS and Android ported to Metro. Funny that seems to happen when you lose marketshare.
Chrome however is showing signs similiar to IE 4/5 with proprietarness that I am wary of. Dart is 100% proprietary and so is the HTML 5 code from that demo posted on slashdot a few months ago. It wont work on any browser but Chrome. Worse are the applets.
I believe Google plans a whole ecosystem inside the browser itself similar to ActiveX but Chrome will be more of an operating system rather than just a jar to run win32 objects like IE was.
In that regards Mozilla surely does not want Chrome to succeed to be the next platform and has a vested interest to see Chrome as just a browser instead.
Cable is the easiest bill to cut out entirely, and would be the first I would axe completely if I lost my job (and of course that same demographic is also very much impacted by the crappy economy and high unemployment
No kidding. 20 years ago cable was $40 a month. Then $40 a month plus $10 a month for each TV. Then $60 a month + $15 a month for only 13 channels. $89 a rest for a tier including other channels. Then $119 a month for HD + $25 a month for each set .... today a family of 3 with 4 TVs with one set with a DVR + HBO and showtime and one other HD set is $200 a month!
Gee, how much is a monthly car payment? Gee $200 - $300 a month. Is TV worth the price of a car. Hell no!
$200 a month more into your retirement and wihtin 30 years you can a house paid for in cash. Or you can pay 1/4th the cost of both your kids college.
With crappy wages, high unemployment, and little value it makes sense to unplug. However some people born before 1990 absolutely HAVE TO HAVE TV. Sigh. It is like electricty to them and I frankly do not get it. I was born in the 1970s but never liked TV as I viewed it as harmful. If you are unemployed TV has got to go. Keeping an internet connection, water, and electricty are more important to keep you alive and search for work.