VeriSign has defended Site Finder by saying it offers a better way to handle nonexistent or misspelled domain names than the unhelpful error messages that some Web browsers currently provide.
The advantage of having the browser deal with it is that I can turn it on or off (or even customise it) and that it doesn't affect anyone else. The higher up the chain you make the changes, the more people and things you affect.
Talking of error messages, Verisign does have a point when it comes to Firefox. I find their error messages really rather poor (that is, the ones that the browser shows once you've dug out the option from the bowels which really, IMO, should be on by default).
If I submitted better formatted and more informative descriptions for them do you think they'd even consider it? Or is it handled a different way?
If I were AOL or Yahoo, I'm not so sure i would want Microsoft providing the software to provide the intermediary connections.
If I was AOL or Yahoo I'd be happy with MS doing it.
Why? Because neither AOL and Yahoo probably have the development resources to do this and, by having Microsoft, you're almost certain that it'll gain widespread adoptance as soon as they bundle the service into the default install of their server or integrate it into Microsoft Outlook.
In addition, if it all falls apart, it's Microsoft that has put the most time and resources into it.
Take a look at Micrsofts behaviour with MS Office, it's a complete cash cow because they can update it when they want and force people into upgrading with changed document types.
Maybe before, but the document format hasn't changed since Office 2000.
You can send me a document written in Word 2003 and I can happily open it in Word 2000.
Neither prepackaged nor custom-written software is fully able to meet the need
I disagree. It's got nothing to do with the software but the data.
If the data format is clearly documentented, then it doesn't matter whether the application that generated it is open or closed.
True, you could argue that since the code is open the data format is also documented, but personally I'd find it easier if it was written in a properly structured document.
Otherwise you'd have to resort to learning and then plouging through an application written in some 200 year old programming language (by someone who possibly hacked it up with a hangover at the time) to try and understand what they were doing and why.
but in this case I believe he is at least partially correct.
I think you're right too. If you replace "DVD" with "CD" in his quote you can see that we are starting (albeit slowly) to move away from carrying around a bag full of CD's to a hard disk player than contains many more than we could possibly hold.
DVDs would be the next logical thing and we're starting to see the portal media centres arrive. Like this rather nice looking Archos AV400.
If you mind not spreading fud and educating yourself have a look at This Page Which tells you how to not only recover the problem, but avoid it all together.
My god. Have you seen how big it is?
I'm sorry, but I (like many others out there) am lazy. There is no way in hell I'm going through all those steps to ensure that this doesn't happen. Because knowing my luck, I'll get into a problem that these instructions don't cover and then I don't have a bootable PC.
Thanks but no thanks. I'll wait until this 2.6 bug (as your link calls it) is fixed and then I'll think about getting off Redhat 9.
This whole incident is a huge black-eye for Open Source's theory of many eyes. The eyes saw. The fingers fixed. The brain ignored.
Consider this:
Every time someone says "But Windows always is going to get more attacks and viruses because it's popular", the standard retort is "but Apache has vastly more installs than ISS and doesn't get a tenth of the problems".
Now consider this, "OSS is good for security because many eyes can see the problem and it gets fixed quickly" which will now have the standard retort "but Mozilla Firefox, one of the most prolific OSS applications sat on a bug for 2 years until an exploit hit the wild".
Sure, it's one counter example from many other good arguments, but the same could probably be said of the Apache/Windows one.
What I'm saying is that if someone comes back with the "many eyes" retort, you can't all call foul as you've been doing the very same with the "many users" one.
It was hardly a stupid decision. Passing unhandled URIs to the OS is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Unless you think that handling things like ed2k: URIs and other yet-to-be-invented URIs is a bad thing.
Passing unhandled URI's to the OS is fine as long as you give the user the opportunity to allow this to happen and maintain a list of those which the user agrees can be handled this way.
Perhaps the URI handler built into the OS needs a local versus foreign flag.
Alternativily, it would be a lost faster if you just implemented whitelisting in Firefox. Which is what I think they are planning on doing.
As of 0.9, firefox has an automatic update checker thing to let the user know when new versions are availible. It seill has a few kinks to be worked out, but they're going in the right direction.
A few kinks is a slight understatement. I'm runing 0.9.0 and I still haven't been informed about 0.9.1 let alone 0.9.2 and I have all the settings on that should tell me so.
Out of morbid curiosity, I've held off upgrading to see how long it will last before it finally tells me that there is a new version...
At the end of the day, all these scams center around one thing - that is, that the person is greedy enough to be prepared to bend a few rules to get hold of a seemingly preposterious amount of money.
Every time I see a TV programme where someone who was interviewed who had been ripped off, I have to keep remembering that all semblence of common sense and decency went out of their minds in the pursuit of wealth.
For example, who really thinks that there is nothing wrong with going about pretending to be a dead persons uncle to claim money that isn't rightfully yours?
How does not understanding something equate with "lazy"?
It doesn't. I did not say that.
Joe User? They won't be informed necessarily, and MS is predatory based on their ignorance.
And this is different for any other company in the world how exactly? If you don't have a better product then you're flat out relying on uninformed people to keep you afloat.
Why can't you comment on them? Why wouldn't you implement the CSS3 standard? Am I missing something here?
Yep, he doesn't have the authority to decide. Hachamovitch does not appear to be the Product Manager and therefore he does not decide what does and what doesn't get into a release.
Secondly, even if he were, you generally do not announce functionality which will get reported in the press because it can get rather embarassing if you decide not to ship with it for whatever reasons.
Every time you complain to any software company about a bug, a misfeature, or a problem, you are giving them something pretty valuable, something they would otherwise have to pay a lot of money to find through testing. But all your investment in time and bug reporting is repaid by--having to pay for the next upgrade.
There are plenty of companies who do not charge you for bug fixes.
Since we're talking about Microsoft, as far I can remember, their service packs (and not just the ones for Windows) have been free of charge too.
However what they do is integrate all of their products with the OS such that it becomes highly unlikely that you would exert any effort to replace those products.
...and whose fault is that if I'm too damn lazy to look for alternatives?
My mom certainly has no clue that there even IS anything other than IE to use. Most of our mothers probably don't even realize that IE is not "the Internet".
...
I find Microsoft guility of contempt -- contempt of not upgrading their browser. They kept quoting x-million users but then saying they had a choice. No they didn't.
I'm afriad you are wrong. There is a difference between not having the choice to install something else (as in the OS says "sorry, you cannot install this") and not knowing that you can install something else (as in, you don't know there are alternatives).
(Note, I'm ignoring desktops/installs owned and managed by someone else - eg. corporate, because those users don't often have a choice)
You cannot use the latter excuse to claim that the former is true. If it really was true, Firefox couldn't be installed, Winamp couldn't be installed and countless other packages couldn't be installed on Windows - and this is simply not the case.
They used what popped up when they clicked on a Web address somewhere on their computer, and they've used that default browser from Day fucking One.
If anything, it's the users who are guilty of contempt in putting up with IE for so long without investigating alternatives. If people moved off IE then they would improve it, but people are lazy.
It is true that it is more tempting to use something that comes pre-installed with your PC rather than download something else (especially if you're on a 56k modem), but again, that does not imply that they have no choice.
To everyone, please drop the "users have no choice" argument, it doesn't work and it isn't true. You're trying to imply that just because users are lazy, that somehow they have no choice. It doesn't work.
Oddly, all recordings defaulted to starting five minutes before the scheduled time.
Not really. Back in the days when you had to manually enter the start and end time of a programme and set the clock by hand it was common for people to set the video to start 5 minutes before and let it run up to 15 minutes after.
This was to ensure that if your clock was slow, you didn't miss the first minute or so and if it overran, you didn't miss the crucial last scenes.
Even software such as Gemstars Video+ system puts 5 minutes before and 10 minutes after by default.
Of course in this day and age of self correcting clocks, on screen programming and the special tag that tells you when a programme finishes this buffer probably makes less and less sense.
...then what's stopping you from using it? 5% or browsers will benefit;
Because when you're working on a corporate project that costs money, it's very difficult to put a business case forward for something which will only be of benefit to a very small number of visitors.
Most clients would rather pay for something that directly benefits the browsing experience of the other 95%.
Not true. Britannica's articles are probably checked by a handful of editors. Wikipedia's articles can be (and some are) checked over by hundreds and theoretically an infinite number of people.
True, but not all of those theoretically infinite number of people are experts in the field that they're checking over.
Even worse if they think they are expects but actually aren't.
(Additionally, if you are an expert in that field, why would you be looking it up on Wikipedia?)
I understand the reasons they do it, I respect the reasons they do it -- but in all honesty, I think it's a pretty silly idea to make users jump through hoops so they can listen to their MP3's.
We complain about Microsoft bundling stuff within Windows -- but it's got to the point where a user expects a certain number of applications to come with the Operating System and I would consider MP3 support to be one of them.
Sure, I know it's a no-brainer to install it afterwards but if Fedora's goal is to encourage mass market adoption, then they should consider that an individuals first impression counts - even more so when something they take for granted isn't there from the beginning.
Something similar was trialled a couple of years ago called "Mobile Grafitti" which basically worked the same way. You could write and "drop" messages anywhere and then others could pick them up.
Unfortunately it got canned early on for several reasons, one was that locations were rather broad which meant that often the note made no sense as it covered a wide area and secondly because it was abused chronically.
We already have Neverwinter Nights (and expansions), Quake 1-3, UT2004 (and no doubt all the sequels, because the UT engine supports Linux so well), we're getting Doom 3. Why do you need Windows compatibility?
Damn right. We have 5 games that work under Linux, who wants to play the other 299,995 anyway?:o)
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The advantage of having the browser deal with it is that I can turn it on or off (or even customise it) and that it doesn't affect anyone else. The higher up the chain you make the changes, the more people and things you affect.
Talking of error messages, Verisign does have a point when it comes to Firefox. I find their error messages really rather poor (that is, the ones that the browser shows once you've dug out the option from the bowels which really, IMO, should be on by default).
If I submitted better formatted and more informative descriptions for them do you think they'd even consider it? Or is it handled a different way?
If I was AOL or Yahoo I'd be happy with MS doing it.
Why? Because neither AOL and Yahoo probably have the development resources to do this and, by having Microsoft, you're almost certain that it'll gain widespread adoptance as soon as they bundle the service into the default install of their server or integrate it into Microsoft Outlook.
In addition, if it all falls apart, it's Microsoft that has put the most time and resources into it.
Maybe before, but the document format hasn't changed since Office 2000.
You can send me a document written in Word 2003 and I can happily open it in Word 2000.
I disagree. It's got nothing to do with the software but the data.
If the data format is clearly documentented, then it doesn't matter whether the application that generated it is open or closed.
True, you could argue that since the code is open the data format is also documented, but personally I'd find it easier if it was written in a properly structured document.
Otherwise you'd have to resort to learning and then plouging through an application written in some 200 year old programming language (by someone who possibly hacked it up with a hangover at the time) to try and understand what they were doing and why.
Bill Gates claimed he never said that and, since then, no good evidence has sufaced that disproves this.
but in this case I believe he is at least partially correct.
I think you're right too. If you replace "DVD" with "CD" in his quote you can see that we are starting (albeit slowly) to move away from carrying around a bag full of CD's to a hard disk player than contains many more than we could possibly hold.
DVDs would be the next logical thing and we're starting to see the portal media centres arrive. Like this rather nice looking Archos AV400.
My god. Have you seen how big it is?
I'm sorry, but I (like many others out there) am lazy. There is no way in hell I'm going through all those steps to ensure that this doesn't happen. Because knowing my luck, I'll get into a problem that these instructions don't cover and then I don't have a bootable PC.
Thanks but no thanks. I'll wait until this 2.6 bug (as your link calls it) is fixed and then I'll think about getting off Redhat 9.
Consider this:
Every time someone says "But Windows always is going to get more attacks and viruses because it's popular", the standard retort is "but Apache has vastly more installs than ISS and doesn't get a tenth of the problems".
Now consider this, "OSS is good for security because many eyes can see the problem and it gets fixed quickly" which will now have the standard retort "but Mozilla Firefox, one of the most prolific OSS applications sat on a bug for 2 years until an exploit hit the wild".
Sure, it's one counter example from many other good arguments, but the same could probably be said of the Apache/Windows one.
What I'm saying is that if someone comes back with the "many eyes" retort, you can't all call foul as you've been doing the very same with the "many users" one.
Don't attribute to malice what could be easily explained by stupidity.
Passing unhandled URI's to the OS is fine as long as you give the user the opportunity to allow this to happen and maintain a list of those which the user agrees can be handled this way.
Perhaps the URI handler built into the OS needs a local versus foreign flag.
Alternativily, it would be a lost faster if you just implemented whitelisting in Firefox. Which is what I think they are planning on doing.
A few kinks is a slight understatement. I'm runing 0.9.0 and I still haven't been informed about 0.9.1 let alone 0.9.2 and I have all the settings on that should tell me so.
Out of morbid curiosity, I've held off upgrading to see how long it will last before it finally tells me that there is a new version...
Every time I see a TV programme where someone who was interviewed who had been ripped off, I have to keep remembering that all semblence of common sense and decency went out of their minds in the pursuit of wealth.
For example, who really thinks that there is nothing wrong with going about pretending to be a dead persons uncle to claim money that isn't rightfully yours?
It doesn't. I did not say that.
Joe User? They won't be informed necessarily, and MS is predatory based on their ignorance.
And this is different for any other company in the world how exactly? If you don't have a better product then you're flat out relying on uninformed people to keep you afloat.
Yep, he doesn't have the authority to decide. Hachamovitch does not appear to be the Product Manager and therefore he does not decide what does and what doesn't get into a release.
Secondly, even if he were, you generally do not announce functionality which will get reported in the press because it can get rather embarassing if you decide not to ship with it for whatever reasons.
There are plenty of companies who do not charge you for bug fixes.
Since we're talking about Microsoft, as far I can remember, their service packs (and not just the ones for Windows) have been free of charge too.
Hint: It's not Microsoft.
I find Microsoft guility of contempt -- contempt of not upgrading their browser. They kept quoting x-million users but then saying they had a choice. No they didn't.
I'm afriad you are wrong. There is a difference between not having the choice to install something else (as in the OS says "sorry, you cannot install this") and not knowing that you can install something else (as in, you don't know there are alternatives).
(Note, I'm ignoring desktops/installs owned and managed by someone else - eg. corporate, because those users don't often have a choice)
You cannot use the latter excuse to claim that the former is true. If it really was true, Firefox couldn't be installed, Winamp couldn't be installed and countless other packages couldn't be installed on Windows - and this is simply not the case.
They used what popped up when they clicked on a Web address somewhere on their computer, and they've used that default browser from Day fucking One.
If anything, it's the users who are guilty of contempt in putting up with IE for so long without investigating alternatives. If people moved off IE then they would improve it, but people are lazy.
It is true that it is more tempting to use something that comes pre-installed with your PC rather than download something else (especially if you're on a 56k modem), but again, that does not imply that they have no choice.
To everyone, please drop the "users have no choice" argument, it doesn't work and it isn't true. You're trying to imply that just because users are lazy, that somehow they have no choice. It doesn't work.
Not really. Back in the days when you had to manually enter the start and end time of a programme and set the clock by hand it was common for people to set the video to start 5 minutes before and let it run up to 15 minutes after.
This was to ensure that if your clock was slow, you didn't miss the first minute or so and if it overran, you didn't miss the crucial last scenes.
Even software such as Gemstars Video+ system puts 5 minutes before and 10 minutes after by default.
Of course in this day and age of self correcting clocks, on screen programming and the special tag that tells you when a programme finishes this buffer probably makes less and less sense.
Because when you're working on a corporate project that costs money, it's very difficult to put a business case forward for something which will only be of benefit to a very small number of visitors.
Most clients would rather pay for something that directly benefits the browsing experience of the other 95%.
Not very well I hasten to add, GIF's are still used rather a lot and even Slashdot hasn't bothered to convert all their images to PNG.
Actually scratch that, how about one that prevents him from proposing any bills whatsoever? The guy certainly seems to need a cooling off period.
True, but not all of those theoretically infinite number of people are experts in the field that they're checking over.
Even worse if they think they are expects but actually aren't.
(Additionally, if you are an expert in that field, why would you be looking it up on Wikipedia?)
We complain about Microsoft bundling stuff within Windows -- but it's got to the point where a user expects a certain number of applications to come with the Operating System and I would consider MP3 support to be one of them.
Sure, I know it's a no-brainer to install it afterwards but if Fedora's goal is to encourage mass market adoption, then they should consider that an individuals first impression counts - even more so when something they take for granted isn't there from the beginning.
Unfortunately it got canned early on for several reasons, one was that locations were rather broad which meant that often the note made no sense as it covered a wide area and secondly because it was abused chronically.
Damn right. We have 5 games that work under Linux, who wants to play the other 299,995 anyway? :o)
Unless you're in a very small company, the CTO would be a better bet.
If you're in a really big company, then the chances are it should be going to the Director of IT.
Don't immediately shoot yourself in the foot by annoying people whose job is not to consider/deal with these issues.