If you work for Mozzilla, I would like to make a suggestion.
Consider an Enterprise Edition of you product where you can do something like Firefox Enterprise 4 with fast releases like release 3, release 4, etc. This way you can still have agile development but can milestone it with corporate support and the plugins will not break. The customer can choose which release to upgrade. A year and a half later you can put put out Firefox Enterprise 5 release 1,... etc.
Or call it Firefox professional if you want more people to use it. They can select in the options menu whether they want a later release or not.
In many ways it is what Redhat does with Redhat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. Fedora code eventually enters Redhat Enterprise after 2-3 years and users are free to choose one or the other. Or that is an idea as well. It wont increase development costs as Firefox Pro is simply Firefox 4 and each release in it is Firefox 5, and 6.
Face it, it doesn't matter if html 5 and css 3 is the coolest thing ever! If 20% of users use older more mature browsers that are 5 years old like IE 8 then no webmaster will use it. Then who looses? The advantage then for using Firefox is gone because no one uses the cool things you do to your browser because they have all switched back to IE so why choose Firefox?
My biggest fear is that places like banks will only support IE and once that happens ActiveX and other things will come in and force everyone else to use IE like in Asia. That would be terrible.
Just an idea and I do not know how much of a pull you have, but I would advise you to bring it up fairly quickly before you loose corporate clients forever. They are leaving fast.
Google said they will only support the latest 2 releases of a major browser.
However in practice I believe this meant IE. Google would do the web a huge service by getting offices off of these 10 year old buggy browsers. IE 6 & IE 7 are majorly crappy, backwards, and far behind the times compared to Firefox 3.6. I see no reason why watching a video on youtube or using the Google Earth Plugin would not work well on Firefox 3.6. I no longer have Firefox 3.6 so I wonder if anyone can confirm if Google displays a warning message or not? My guess is no.
IE 8 in comparison is more like a real browser at about Firefox 2.x ish in terms of features and no real hacks and support headaches so you can do thinks like use Google Maps with it. I can see why Google would want to support that as the earlier browser and going backwards no further than that.
If Asa was not an asshole about it and trolled users on slashdot begging them to use IE 8 for work when they went out and put their reputation at risk to bat for Firefox then yes it could be more corporate friendly.
Chrome is not too bad for work either because the plugins do not break and you can manage it with group policies if you are still worried about it.
The problem is after... in the mind of the CIO... we got burned with Firefox, how do we know Google wont do the same thing? They are not an enterprise player like good old Microsoft our friend from way back then.
IE 8 also is the first version that is not plain horrible and is about at Firefox 2.x. No hacks needed with strange bugs. IE 9 supports basic HTML 5 and has beautiful hardware rendering with very smooth scrolling that is ahead of Chrome and Firefox and is about at Firefox 3.6. By next year IE 10 will be where Chrome is today and almost fully support the whole HTML 5 spec. So why not go with IE?
It is not the piece of garbage it once was. I love the features of Chrome and Firefox over IE 9, but IE 9 is my favorite for simple browsing, as its awesome scrolling and hardware rendering. I am waiting for Firefox to catch up. Does anyone know if the alpha versions of Chrome or Firefox support DirectX better or as good as IE 9?
So it looks like IE is going to have a return in the next few years sadly. I prefer more browsers but at least IE is in the same league as the other two. Mozilla blew it and could of gave IE a run for its money if Mozilla played their cards right. Many corporations have to keep IE 6 around for intranet apps and a second browser for the web would have been perfect.
The issue is the bloated glibc libraries eat up all the ram.
The libc ones in OpenBSD use much less memory and the system is less intensive. BSD init is much leaner as well. If I were bored I would install a BSD OS on such a beast and would not even consider Linux unless old 2001 era libc 5 is being used.
"People should stop living in the current deep suburbs"
Are you going to pay me $4,000 a month for rent for a 3 bedroom apartment downtown yet? How about pay for my kids private schooling as the local schools are too dangerous?
I think not. Suburbs are economic units for people to have better lives, raise families, and do so for a fraction of the cost of living in a city. Europe is expensive too which is why I put down $4,000 a month as it is what the going rate for a 2 bedroom apartment is downtown and trust me that price is much higher in a trendier area.
There are pedophiles too that you have to think of it you have a family so public transportation for them is not an option if they have soccer practice or band and you need a car to pick them up.
Taxing poor people is wrong even if I maybe modded down for such a post I would like to point out the other side.
Also in places like London and other European capitals non ghetto areas are too expensive but for the top 2% to live in these days thanks to investors buying up and raising prices. So living in the hood will still cost you a good $300,000 for a 1 bedroom apartment.
If they did this in the US a revolt would happen and the TEA party would be happy to supply it.
Public transportation is great if you are single and rich in a metropolitan area and can take the subway to work like in New York. What if you have a family? Can you afford a $500,000 1 bedroom apartment for everyone? No... you move to the suburbs an hour or 2 away.
This is where you need a car and who will be screwed by such a measure. People in Ohio will not take a bus as it wont even take you to where you need a car. A car is essential to live.
Besides if you want to cut pollution ban importing from China as they are the world's largest producer of Carbon from filthy factories and coal powered power plants. Trying to cut down car usage will hardly make a dent and just make people struggling to survive even poorer.
Also the cost of goods sold would go up as truck drivers would have to pay to ship everything. Food prices and everything up goes up in price. A terrible idea
How are they supposed to get to work when the cost of a 1 bedroom apartment costs $500,000 downtown?
What about families who need to pick up their kids from Soccer Practice? Vactions etc?
This is Europe folks and the cost of living is very expensive compared to a cheaper place. People who live out in suburbia do so because it is cheaper to live. Now they will be taxed just to show up from work because living close to work is too expensive. Screwed if you do and screwed if you don't.
My hatred for Microsoft all started with that in DOS. If I bought my first computer in 1993, 12 years after the 8088 in the XT then why the hell did i still have the limit! Memaker, custom autoexec.bats and config.syss for each program were TERRIBLE hacks. One program had its own drivers (thanks to DOS being braindead with no drivers) that used expanded ram. The other used extended so I would have to reboot per program as late as 1995. What a horrible operating system with just a simple command.com.... anyway I no longer hate MS as I once did but that took a good 15 years later. I am stil angry and would have bought a Mac at the time if it were not NT 4.0 and Linux saving me. OS/2 should have taken over and it only took MS 10 later OS/2 with NT 4.0.
The original PC was terrible too and a joke that never should have monopolized the market. The Mac and Amiga had graphics, mice, icons, multimedia, while the greenscreen IBM's had beeps, 640k ram limit, with an OS with a simple braindead command.com interpretter. This was not just in 1982, but stayed taht way until 1992 10 years later. I never used these platforms and I am not a zealot. I just hated my PC and felt ripped off. I guess people who used typewritters thought greenscreens and errors were awesome and did not know any better back in the 1980s. If they did the PC never would have become popular.
I saw a link, but can't find it where a user recommended a search engine similiar to Google's but is not prone to SEO, fake reviews, and other sleezy techniques that make Google less efficient than 10 years ago. Anyone know the name of it?
10 years ago you could find anything with Google without people trying to sell you crap and it was always accurate. Remember those days?
Anyway, a browser is free but advertisement is where it can make some money and I think Mozilla should hook up with that search engine or another small one that uses advanced analysis rather than keywords to find results, but is not prone to the man things that ruin Google. It would give them a black eye for sure and could generate serious revenue.
True I made the assumption that the costs were fixed. In a site they are mostly fixed with the bandwidth being the variable costs. This affects the profit margin because the cost is divided out evenly per transaction as they are fixed spread out to everyone. So if you make pennies on the dollar the last 5% will make you, much like how retailers only make money after black friday (hence the name) because of the smaller margins of profit. The costs are the same or close to it.
The shirt thing is a little different as people wont want to eat at your restaurant if those kinds of customers walk in and start sweating up in the booths and making it smell nasty.
I dunno as it depends what kind of site it is. This one I agree who cares about IE 6 for a stupid e-reader. Www.nasdaq.com or CDW.com I certainly would demand IE 6 compatiblity as big clients come to these sites as much as I cringe.
Try corporate clients who have large pocketbooks willing to pay $100,000 for orders on your site! That is who an IE 6 user is if own a corporate website. People on Firefox are consumers (cheap) or maybe small business owners who will spend smaller amounts of money.
If you write internet sites for businesses the large customers are the biggest pain in the ass, but you always bend over backwards because the payoff is the largest and likely they still use IE 6.
Walmart will pay you jack margins in comparison, but if you have a deal with them you can make insane revenues because the customer is so big. It is the same in the eCommerce world. Updating your blog in wordpress is not where the bucks are and who cares if it does not render in IE 6.
That's what Snotman is trying to say in this thread. It is frustrating, but the pull is too much for you to ignore. So you can write a site for John's Pizzera down the street for $50 whole bucks.. (dull voice) wahoo and yes ignore IE 7 and earlier. Or you can work on an IE 6 intranet project for a fortune 1,000 company for $250,00? Hmmm which would I prefer?
Even if IE 6 and IE 7 users only account for 10% of traffic combined, they will give 60% of the revenue. Of course I do assume business sites and not the pizzera one as an example. But most internet sites are to sell something. IE 6 is dying very fast as companies finally leave XP to Windows 7 and Windows 8 so the problem is only temporary. But, guess who will have the contacts and experience when IE 6/7 are gone?
I worked at a hospital for a client a few months ago. They still used SP2 because SP3 had compatibility issues for some of its medical equipment that hooked to the USB and serial ports.
Industrial or medical clients use SP2 because SP3 has crappy USB 2.1 support. Many in I.T. are so understaffed thanks to this recession that they do not have time to test SP3 for compatbility. Especially for 5,000 desktops with 30 different software combinations in several countries. So they stick with SP2.
It drove me nuts because they were insane about being comprised due to HIPPA and security, yet they run an unpatched XP network with IE 7. Sigh
Lets look at it this another way. If you owned a store or a restaurant and you told 1 out of 20 (5%) people to go fuck themselves would you stay in business long? If your customers profit margins is only 3 to 4% which is the new norm in this economy then telling the other 5% to screw themselves would put you in the red.
What about IE 7 which also sucks and is bad? It still uses the strange 14 year old implemented wrong CSS 1.0 box model which only works in IE 6 and 7? About 6 to 9% still use it, and that number is much higher for corporate users. Both IE 6 and 7 combined total 1 in 6 users and maybe as high as 50% if its corporate based! You are going to tell them to screw themselves too? A company like CDW filled with corporate customers need IE 6 to survive, while who cares about slashdot.org.
Google is not wise here and it sounds like the nerds whinning are in upper management there. Yes, newer things require AJAX such as google maps but business dont want to upgrade and will just use hotmail and bing instead. I have a feeling Google is trying to force users to upgrade to at least IE 8 but if you do not bow to the PHB they will find someone else who will.
I am not a fan of IE 6 or 7, but just stating the obvious that customers who are corporate have the big bucks while Johny's wordpress blog will pay you jack.
Maybe I should have phrased it differently. Saleles growth has been declining more and more while profitability has been declining year after year as well. Yes they still make sales but the growth rate is flat and dropping. In the 1990s people upgraded more and purchased more Microsoft software. Growth was in the double digits year after year as businesses upgraded every 2 years putting money in Microsoft's pockets. It is not true anymore. I am not a zealot and think Linux reaks on the desktop.
It is just people use older software, refuse to upgrade, and are no longer scared to purchase non MS products. Palm died because people wanted a WindowsCE product because MS was the standard. I remember.com companies doing an anaylsis to make sure their product wouldn't compete with the scary MS. Today, that is laughed at. People are excited about buying the latest IPhone and not waiting til midnight to buy the latest Dell or copy of Windows at BestBuy. The mobile market is where the new growth and excitement is and in the 3rd world this will cripple the desktop.
"These same posts have been showing up about MS for the past 10-15 years. yet year on year their sales grow not shrink"
Shoot didn't XBox finally made a profit last year? Bing is 3 billion in the red!
Got any numbers to back that up? I do not see corporations rushing to use IE 9, Windows 7, and Office 2010? Infact they still run Windows XP, IE 6, and Office 2003 and refuse to upgrade.
I do not see people rushing to buy Zunes either or switching to Bing because it comes from the almighty MS who sets standards.
They will never die yes, but they are not this powerhouse of fear. People no longer say dumb things like Foxfire?... how can it be good? It doens't come from Microsoft?
If MS was doing so great then why does Wall Street want to fire Balmer? MS could be profitable if they did not try to have so many tentacles but the desktop is why corporations buy Visual Studio. They have standardized on Microsoft 10 years ago. Now if the desktop is gone and Borland is back in the game then why would you need to only use Visual Studio? It already is in trouble from HTML 5 and Ajax.
Now is not a good time to own MS stock if you ask me and IBM is right. The old MS is gone.
Corporations like the bulky desktops because they can be managed and repaired and are not easily stolen. Old apps decades old will keep it like the mainframes that are still being run today. MS is like the IBM of the 1990s today and are in trouble.
MS is still in denial. But of course if IBM is right MS is screwed and why admit that. Even if Windows Mango is a great Phone OS it doesn't matter as they no longer set the standards or create lockin or slow the whole industry down to best help Microsoft. Infact, Apple is the new evil MS today but thankfully with Andriod there is hope.
The generation Ys and the millinium generation who browse slashdot do not realize how much power MS and the PC standard had back in the 1990s and even today. This is why no commercial desktop software exists for Linux. On the phone it is totally different thanks to not a single company trying to manage everything. Apple got very close before Andriod came to the rescue
Name one fringe left wing democrat? I mean one? Kucinich is the only one I know of. I laugh at those who say Obama is a radical socialist. He is far from it
There is a difference between bad and incompentent to dangerous.
Why they have so much power is because of the way primaries work. Only the most extreme reactionary neo-conservatives vote in the primaries. Many are so fringe that independents vote democratic as what happened in Deleware.
In the 1970s the democratic party was turning socialists as many hippies become activists in the party and elected people like Jimmy Carter. The end resut was Reagan which ended that.
For the Tea Party to be irrelevant Obama has to go and be replaced by someone in the far right. As more and more Americans find the republican party too extreme they will elect a far left president. Trust me Obama is not far left socialist at all lol. I mean an anti Reagan with an angry voter base and a changing demographic. This is what ended the far left in America from the 60s and 70s and created the neoConservative republican party today and its Tea Party. In many ways Obama is like the left verssion of Nixon. Unpopular but very moderate. Nixon would have to run as a democrat today as he would be a very big Rino and liberal for the republican base indeed.
So if Mitt Romey... actually more like Bachman comes in and goes insane with another recession we could see the end of the far right and a new democratic left arise.
Unfortunately the saying goes you never argue with a crazy man. You can't change their opinion and if they were informed they would not be Tea. Sure, they can bring conservative arguments about lower taxes and creating jobs but with the recent temper trandrum and blackmailing of the president with the debt talks it shows they are not in touch with reality and blame Obama for the downgrade. I have even seen them support Gadhaffi on MSNBC forums saying he was not evil at all (forgetting Pan Am) and that the Libyan rebels were part of Al Quada. Why? Because Obama supported action agaisn't him. Thats why. They are crazy and now I would say dangerous too.
Ignore Linux bias from slashdotters for a quick moment and think about what they are used for? If the kids are just browsing the web going to PBS kids or coolmath games then the OS should not matter. Ubuntu or whatever distro you want as long as the hardware works. If they want to run something like Meavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, MS Word/Works, and other kid software then you should choose Windows.
If you need or want the kid software for win32 then the donated computers must have the OEM license on them and you have to have the media restore cd's then you are good. You can order the restore CDs as well from the OEM. then I would keep Windows XP on them. If not and the computers have a volume licence from some organization then you legally can not donate them without wiping them.
If it is a non profit charity MS has an incentive program listed here with great discounts. I do not know how much ram this machines have but I think Windows 7 Starter Edition with the volume license might be very affordable as it works well with machines with just 1 gig of ram. I am thinking if you get donated old software then Windows XP might be a better.
Mathblaster and Lexia Lab really do work and children love them and I think would give them more value than just a machine to browse the web.
My exwife had one of those fancy Toshiba Qosmio gaming laptops. Lets look at it this way... she will never buy a laptop again. it is bulky, hot, and needs a USB fan underneath so it wont catch on fire. They draw power and are highly unreliable and black screen all the time.
Get an AMD Llamo if you want ok graphics in the low to medium settings as it has an ATI 68000 inside the CPU that shares its ram contoller so it does not have latency waiting for the chipset to access the ram. The AMD bulldozer should come out in a month or 2 that will offer higher bandwith and will be comeptitive with dedicated GPU systems. They are fit in regular laptops so you do not need a beast.
Windows 8 with accelerated HTML 5 and flash will fly on these. I can't wait and it will give Intel a run for the money if you need graphics performance and not follow simple CPU benchmarks only ignoring the video.
The AMD ones have an integrated ATi 6800 series graphics that is actual as good as a dedicated card from 3 years ago. The Intel ones seem 10 years behind and it is rediculous that games from 2002 barely play on an icore5 in this day and age because the Intel graphics are so horrible. It is ruining the pc as a gaming platform they are so terrible.
Anyway you can play wow with an AMD Llamo on medium settings and give the intel a run on the money. IE 9 and flash with 1080p fly on it too with hardware acceleration unlike an Intel one so they are becoming more important than just video games.
The Llamo shares the memory controller with the CPU so it is not as bottlnecked. It still is but nothing like the horrible solutions we have seen in the last 5 years.
We are having deflation right now. THe government is trying to hide it by printing more money which causes inflation. Our interest rates are near zero and still no inflation shows the market is strongly favoring deflation still and many things are going down in price.
I got flamed here for my post willing to work for less, but it beats McDonalds and people need to accept to work more for a lot less money to remain competitive. It is the new standard and Wall Street looks at numbers like salaries carefully. Until there is an economic recovery we all need to be willing to make sacrafices or move back in with our parents as no one wants to think we are worth anything.
Well in my case the bean counters looked at maintance costs and rides being down for the whole park because they did get struck by lightning in a continual basis.
If the bean counters stress no redundancy for the customers who demand 99.99 uptime in their contracts then the are retarded and not doing thier job. I do agree I hate PHBs too but a proper bean counter will do the analysis and look into all angles. We simply hate them because they never want to pay us more than the minimium.
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If you work for Mozzilla, I would like to make a suggestion.
Consider an Enterprise Edition of you product where you can do something like Firefox Enterprise 4 with fast releases like release 3, release 4, etc. This way you can still have agile development but can milestone it with corporate support and the plugins will not break. The customer can choose which release to upgrade. A year and a half later you can put put out Firefox Enterprise 5 release 1, ... etc.
Or call it Firefox professional if you want more people to use it. They can select in the options menu whether they want a later release or not.
In many ways it is what Redhat does with Redhat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. Fedora code eventually enters Redhat Enterprise after 2-3 years and users are free to choose one or the other. Or that is an idea as well. It wont increase development costs as Firefox Pro is simply Firefox 4 and each release in it is Firefox 5, and 6.
Face it, it doesn't matter if html 5 and css 3 is the coolest thing ever! If 20% of users use older more mature browsers that are 5 years old like IE 8 then no webmaster will use it. Then who looses? The advantage then for using Firefox is gone because no one uses the cool things you do to your browser because they have all switched back to IE so why choose Firefox?
My biggest fear is that places like banks will only support IE and once that happens ActiveX and other things will come in and force everyone else to use IE like in Asia. That would be terrible.
Just an idea and I do not know how much of a pull you have, but I would advise you to bring it up fairly quickly before you loose corporate clients forever. They are leaving fast.
Google said they will only support the latest 2 releases of a major browser.
However in practice I believe this meant IE. Google would do the web a huge service by getting offices off of these 10 year old buggy browsers. IE 6 & IE 7 are majorly crappy, backwards, and far behind the times compared to Firefox 3.6. I see no reason why watching a video on youtube or using the Google Earth Plugin would not work well on Firefox 3.6. I no longer have Firefox 3.6 so I wonder if anyone can confirm if Google displays a warning message or not? My guess is no.
IE 8 in comparison is more like a real browser at about Firefox 2.x ish in terms of features and no real hacks and support headaches so you can do thinks like use Google Maps with it. I can see why Google would want to support that as the earlier browser and going backwards no further than that.
If Asa was not an asshole about it and trolled users on slashdot begging them to use IE 8 for work when they went out and put their reputation at risk to bat for Firefox then yes it could be more corporate friendly.
Chrome is not too bad for work either because the plugins do not break and you can manage it with group policies if you are still worried about it.
The problem is after ... in the mind of the CIO ... we got burned with Firefox, how do we know Google wont do the same thing? They are not an enterprise player like good old Microsoft our friend from way back then.
IE 8 also is the first version that is not plain horrible and is about at Firefox 2.x. No hacks needed with strange bugs. IE 9 supports basic HTML 5 and has beautiful hardware rendering with very smooth scrolling that is ahead of Chrome and Firefox and is about at Firefox 3.6. By next year IE 10 will be where Chrome is today and almost fully support the whole HTML 5 spec. So why not go with IE?
It is not the piece of garbage it once was. I love the features of Chrome and Firefox over IE 9, but IE 9 is my favorite for simple browsing, as its awesome scrolling and hardware rendering. I am waiting for Firefox to catch up. Does anyone know if the alpha versions of Chrome or Firefox support DirectX better or as good as IE 9?
So it looks like IE is going to have a return in the next few years sadly. I prefer more browsers but at least IE is in the same league as the other two. Mozilla blew it and could of gave IE a run for its money if Mozilla played their cards right. Many corporations have to keep IE 6 around for intranet apps and a second browser for the web would have been perfect.
The issue is the bloated glibc libraries eat up all the ram.
The libc ones in OpenBSD use much less memory and the system is less intensive. BSD init is much leaner as well. If I were bored I would install a BSD OS on such a beast and would not even consider Linux unless old 2001 era libc 5 is being used.
"People should stop living in the current deep suburbs"
Are you going to pay me $4,000 a month for rent for a 3 bedroom apartment downtown yet? How about pay for my kids private schooling as the local schools are too dangerous?
I think not. Suburbs are economic units for people to have better lives, raise families, and do so for a fraction of the cost of living in a city. Europe is expensive too which is why I put down $4,000 a month as it is what the going rate for a 2 bedroom apartment is downtown and trust me that price is much higher in a trendier area.
There are pedophiles too that you have to think of it you have a family so public transportation for them is not an option if they have soccer practice or band and you need a car to pick them up.
Taxing poor people is wrong even if I maybe modded down for such a post I would like to point out the other side.
Also in places like London and other European capitals non ghetto areas are too expensive but for the top 2% to live in these days thanks to investors buying up and raising prices. So living in the hood will still cost you a good $300,000 for a 1 bedroom apartment.
If they did this in the US a revolt would happen and the TEA party would be happy to supply it.
Public transportation is great if you are single and rich in a metropolitan area and can take the subway to work like in New York. What if you have a family? Can you afford a $500,000 1 bedroom apartment for everyone? No ... you move to the suburbs an hour or 2 away.
This is where you need a car and who will be screwed by such a measure. People in Ohio will not take a bus as it wont even take you to where you need a car. A car is essential to live.
Besides if you want to cut pollution ban importing from China as they are the world's largest producer of Carbon from filthy factories and coal powered power plants. Trying to cut down car usage will hardly make a dent and just make people struggling to survive even poorer.
Also the cost of goods sold would go up as truck drivers would have to pay to ship everything. Food prices and everything up goes up in price. A terrible idea
How are they supposed to get to work when the cost of a 1 bedroom apartment costs $500,000 downtown?
What about families who need to pick up their kids from Soccer Practice? Vactions etc?
This is Europe folks and the cost of living is very expensive compared to a cheaper place. People who live out in suburbia do so because it is cheaper to live. Now they will be taxed just to show up from work because living close to work is too expensive. Screwed if you do and screwed if you don't.
If I were dutch I would be throwing a fit!
My hatred for Microsoft all started with that in DOS. If I bought my first computer in 1993, 12 years after the 8088 in the XT then why the hell did i still have the limit! Memaker, custom autoexec.bats and config.syss for each program were TERRIBLE hacks. One program had its own drivers (thanks to DOS being braindead with no drivers) that used expanded ram. The other used extended so I would have to reboot per program as late as 1995. What a horrible operating system with just a simple command.com. ... anyway I no longer hate MS as I once did but that took a good 15 years later. I am stil angry and would have bought a Mac at the time if it were not NT 4.0 and Linux saving me. OS/2 should have taken over and it only took MS 10 later OS/2 with NT 4.0.
The original PC was terrible too and a joke that never should have monopolized the market. The Mac and Amiga had graphics, mice, icons, multimedia, while the greenscreen IBM's had beeps, 640k ram limit, with an OS with a simple braindead command.com interpretter. This was not just in 1982, but stayed taht way until 1992 10 years later. I never used these platforms and I am not a zealot. I just hated my PC and felt ripped off. I guess people who used typewritters thought greenscreens and errors were awesome and did not know any better back in the 1980s. If they did the PC never would have become popular.
I saw a link, but can't find it where a user recommended a search engine similiar to Google's but is not prone to SEO, fake reviews, and other sleezy techniques that make Google less efficient than 10 years ago. Anyone know the name of it?
10 years ago you could find anything with Google without people trying to sell you crap and it was always accurate. Remember those days?
Anyway, a browser is free but advertisement is where it can make some money and I think Mozilla should hook up with that search engine or another small one that uses advanced analysis rather than keywords to find results, but is not prone to the man things that ruin Google. It would give them a black eye for sure and could generate serious revenue.
True I made the assumption that the costs were fixed. In a site they are mostly fixed with the bandwidth being the variable costs. This affects the profit margin because the cost is divided out evenly per transaction as they are fixed spread out to everyone. So if you make pennies on the dollar the last 5% will make you, much like how retailers only make money after black friday (hence the name) because of the smaller margins of profit. The costs are the same or close to it.
The shirt thing is a little different as people wont want to eat at your restaurant if those kinds of customers walk in and start sweating up in the booths and making it smell nasty.
I dunno as it depends what kind of site it is. This one I agree who cares about IE 6 for a stupid e-reader. Www.nasdaq.com or CDW.com I certainly would demand IE 6 compatiblity as big clients come to these sites as much as I cringe.
Try corporate clients who have large pocketbooks willing to pay $100,000 for orders on your site! That is who an IE 6 user is if own a corporate website. People on Firefox are consumers (cheap) or maybe small business owners who will spend smaller amounts of money.
If you write internet sites for businesses the large customers are the biggest pain in the ass, but you always bend over backwards because the payoff is the largest and likely they still use IE 6.
Walmart will pay you jack margins in comparison, but if you have a deal with them you can make insane revenues because the customer is so big. It is the same in the eCommerce world. Updating your blog in wordpress is not where the bucks are and who cares if it does not render in IE 6.
That's what Snotman is trying to say in this thread. It is frustrating, but the pull is too much for you to ignore. So you can write a site for John's Pizzera down the street for $50 whole bucks .. (dull voice) wahoo and yes ignore IE 7 and earlier. Or you can work on an IE 6 intranet project for a fortune 1,000 company for $250,00? Hmmm which would I prefer?
Even if IE 6 and IE 7 users only account for 10% of traffic combined, they will give 60% of the revenue. Of course I do assume business sites and not the pizzera one as an example. But most internet sites are to sell something. IE 6 is dying very fast as companies finally leave XP to Windows 7 and Windows 8 so the problem is only temporary. But, guess who will have the contacts and experience when IE 6/7 are gone?
I worked at a hospital for a client a few months ago. They still used SP2 because SP3 had compatibility issues for some of its medical equipment that hooked to the USB and serial ports.
Industrial or medical clients use SP2 because SP3 has crappy USB 2.1 support. Many in I.T. are so understaffed thanks to this recession that they do not have time to test SP3 for compatbility. Especially for 5,000 desktops with 30 different software combinations in several countries. So they stick with SP2.
It drove me nuts because they were insane about being comprised due to HIPPA and security, yet they run an unpatched XP network with IE 7. Sigh
"Latest stats show IE6 usage is now under 4%"
Lets look at it this another way. If you owned a store or a restaurant and you told 1 out of 20 (5%) people to go fuck themselves would you stay in business long? If your customers profit margins is only 3 to 4% which is the new norm in this economy then telling the other 5% to screw themselves would put you in the red.
What about IE 7 which also sucks and is bad? It still uses the strange 14 year old implemented wrong CSS 1.0 box model which only works in IE 6 and 7? About 6 to 9% still use it, and that number is much higher for corporate users. Both IE 6 and 7 combined total 1 in 6 users and maybe as high as 50% if its corporate based! You are going to tell them to screw themselves too? A company like CDW filled with corporate customers need IE 6 to survive, while who cares about slashdot.org.
Google is not wise here and it sounds like the nerds whinning are in upper management there. Yes, newer things require AJAX such as google maps but business dont want to upgrade and will just use hotmail and bing instead. I have a feeling Google is trying to force users to upgrade to at least IE 8 but if you do not bow to the PHB they will find someone else who will.
I am not a fan of IE 6 or 7, but just stating the obvious that customers who are corporate have the big bucks while Johny's wordpress blog will pay you jack.
Maybe I should have phrased it differently. Saleles growth has been declining more and more while profitability has been declining year after year as well. Yes they still make sales but the growth rate is flat and dropping. In the 1990s people upgraded more and purchased more Microsoft software. Growth was in the double digits year after year as businesses upgraded every 2 years putting money in Microsoft's pockets. It is not true anymore. I am not a zealot and think Linux reaks on the desktop.
It is just people use older software, refuse to upgrade, and are no longer scared to purchase non MS products. Palm died because people wanted a WindowsCE product because MS was the standard. I remember .com companies doing an anaylsis to make sure their product wouldn't compete with the scary MS. Today, that is laughed at. People are excited about buying the latest IPhone and not waiting til midnight to buy the latest Dell or copy of Windows at BestBuy. The mobile market is where the new growth and excitement is and in the 3rd world this will cripple the desktop.
People buy apps on their phone
"These same posts have been showing up about MS for the past 10-15 years. yet year on year their sales grow not shrink"
Shoot didn't XBox finally made a profit last year? Bing is 3 billion in the red!
Got any numbers to back that up? I do not see corporations rushing to use IE 9, Windows 7, and Office 2010? Infact they still run Windows XP, IE 6, and Office 2003 and refuse to upgrade.
I do not see people rushing to buy Zunes either or switching to Bing because it comes from the almighty MS who sets standards.
They will never die yes, but they are not this powerhouse of fear. People no longer say dumb things like Foxfire? ... how can it be good? It doens't come from Microsoft?
If MS was doing so great then why does Wall Street want to fire Balmer? MS could be profitable if they did not try to have so many tentacles but the desktop is why corporations buy Visual Studio. They have standardized on Microsoft 10 years ago. Now if the desktop is gone and Borland is back in the game then why would you need to only use Visual Studio? It already is in trouble from HTML 5 and Ajax.
Now is not a good time to own MS stock if you ask me and IBM is right. The old MS is gone.
Both will never go away.
Corporations like the bulky desktops because they can be managed and repaired and are not easily stolen. Old apps decades old will keep it like the mainframes that are still being run today. MS is like the IBM of the 1990s today and are in trouble.
MS is still in denial. But of course if IBM is right MS is screwed and why admit that. Even if Windows Mango is a great Phone OS it doesn't matter as they no longer set the standards or create lockin or slow the whole industry down to best help Microsoft. Infact, Apple is the new evil MS today but thankfully with Andriod there is hope.
The generation Ys and the millinium generation who browse slashdot do not realize how much power MS and the PC standard had back in the 1990s and even today. This is why no commercial desktop software exists for Linux. On the phone it is totally different thanks to not a single company trying to manage everything. Apple got very close before Andriod came to the rescue
Name one fringe left wing democrat? I mean one? Kucinich is the only one I know of. I laugh at those who say Obama is a radical socialist. He is far from it
There is a difference between bad and incompentent to dangerous.
Why they have so much power is because of the way primaries work. Only the most extreme reactionary neo-conservatives vote in the primaries. Many are so fringe that independents vote democratic as what happened in Deleware.
In the 1970s the democratic party was turning socialists as many hippies become activists in the party and elected people like Jimmy Carter. The end resut was Reagan which ended that.
For the Tea Party to be irrelevant Obama has to go and be replaced by someone in the far right. As more and more Americans find the republican party too extreme they will elect a far left president. Trust me Obama is not far left socialist at all lol. I mean an anti Reagan with an angry voter base and a changing demographic. This is what ended the far left in America from the 60s and 70s and created the neoConservative republican party today and its Tea Party. In many ways Obama is like the left verssion of Nixon. Unpopular but very moderate. Nixon would have to run as a democrat today as he would be a very big Rino and liberal for the republican base indeed.
So if Mitt Romey ... actually more like Bachman comes in and goes insane with another recession we could see the end of the far right and a new democratic left arise.
Funny
I just read your post after my own reply mentioning the Tea Party here. With my version including troll shirts of goatse.cx. Funny as hell but I admit not mature..
Unfortunately the saying goes you never argue with a crazy man. You can't change their opinion and if they were informed they would not be Tea. Sure, they can bring conservative arguments about lower taxes and creating jobs but with the recent temper trandrum and blackmailing of the president with the debt talks it shows they are not in touch with reality and blame Obama for the downgrade. I have even seen them support Gadhaffi on MSNBC forums saying he was not evil at all (forgetting Pan Am) and that the Libyan rebels were part of Al Quada. Why? Because Obama supported action agaisn't him. Thats why. They are crazy and now I would say dangerous too.
Part of my niave side thinks it would be hysterical to hide the goatse.cx image for a surprise. :-)
I do not know ... maybe give them out at a Tea Party event. Just saying ...
Ignore Linux bias from slashdotters for a quick moment and think about what they are used for? If the kids are just browsing the web going to PBS kids or coolmath games then the OS should not matter. Ubuntu or whatever distro you want as long as the hardware works. If they want to run something like Meavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, MS Word/Works, and other kid software then you should choose Windows.
If you need or want the kid software for win32 then the donated computers must have the OEM license on them and you have to have the media restore cd's then you are good. You can order the restore CDs as well from the OEM. then I would keep Windows XP on them. If not and the computers have a volume licence from some organization then you legally can not donate them without wiping them.
If it is a non profit charity MS has an incentive program listed here with great discounts. I do not know how much ram this machines have but I think Windows 7 Starter Edition with the volume license might be very affordable as it works well with machines with just 1 gig of ram. I am thinking if you get donated old software then Windows XP might be a better.
Mathblaster and Lexia Lab really do work and children love them and I think would give them more value than just a machine to browse the web.
My exwife had one of those fancy Toshiba Qosmio gaming laptops. Lets look at it this way ... she will never buy a laptop again. it is bulky, hot, and needs a USB fan underneath so it wont catch on fire. They draw power and are highly unreliable and black screen all the time.
Get an AMD Llamo if you want ok graphics in the low to medium settings as it has an ATI 68000 inside the CPU that shares its ram contoller so it does not have latency waiting for the chipset to access the ram. The AMD bulldozer should come out in a month or 2 that will offer higher bandwith and will be comeptitive with dedicated GPU systems. They are fit in regular laptops so you do not need a beast.
Windows 8 with accelerated HTML 5 and flash will fly on these. I can't wait and it will give Intel a run for the money if you need graphics performance and not follow simple CPU benchmarks only ignoring the video.
The AMD ones have an integrated ATi 6800 series graphics that is actual as good as a dedicated card from 3 years ago. The Intel ones seem 10 years behind and it is rediculous that games from 2002 barely play on an icore5 in this day and age because the Intel graphics are so horrible. It is ruining the pc as a gaming platform they are so terrible.
Anyway you can play wow with an AMD Llamo on medium settings and give the intel a run on the money. IE 9 and flash with 1080p fly on it too with hardware acceleration unlike an Intel one so they are becoming more important than just video games.
The Llamo shares the memory controller with the CPU so it is not as bottlnecked. It still is but nothing like the horrible solutions we have seen in the last 5 years.
We are having deflation right now. THe government is trying to hide it by printing more money which causes inflation. Our interest rates are near zero and still no inflation shows the market is strongly favoring deflation still and many things are going down in price.
I got flamed here for my post willing to work for less, but it beats McDonalds and people need to accept to work more for a lot less money to remain competitive. It is the new standard and Wall Street looks at numbers like salaries carefully. Until there is an economic recovery we all need to be willing to make sacrafices or move back in with our parents as no one wants to think we are worth anything.
Well in my case the bean counters looked at maintance costs and rides being down for the whole park because they did get struck by lightning in a continual basis.
If the bean counters stress no redundancy for the customers who demand 99.99 uptime in their contracts then the are retarded and not doing thier job. I do agree I hate PHBs too but a proper bean counter will do the analysis and look into all angles. We simply hate them because they never want to pay us more than the minimium.