I'm sorry, but you're completely out in left field on this. Everyone involved in ISO knows how ISO works, and what Fast Track means. Nobody voted thinking ISO would control it. If they did, then they have no business voting in the first place.
Whether or not MS made comments that could be interpreted as "promises" is irrelevant. Rob knew all along that ISO would not control a Fast Tracked standard, and if he had problems with MS statements, he should have called them on those statements at the time they were made, not waiting until he could pull a strawman out of his ass.
I don't interpret any of the statements that Rob (taken out of context, of course) offers as promises of an ISO control, but rather that ISO "locks in" a given set of documentation as a standard. ISO can then control whether changes that are submitted later continue to be part of the standard or not.
What Rob wants to FUD by insinuation (knowing full well that this isn't the case) is that Microsoft will somehow, miraculously be able to change the standard at their whim after it's been ratified. That's simply not the case. Even though Microsoft will be responsible for any maintenance or evolution of the format, ISO still controls what is called an ISO standard or not. If ISO says "no" to a change, it doesn't make it into a later version of the standard. That's all there is to it.
Nobody should be surprised by this, much less Rob Weir. He feigns surprise and acts like this is a shocking development.
Here's news for you, and Rob, and everyone else. *NO FAST TRACK ISO STANDARD IS OWNED BY ISO*. Fast tracking, by it's very design, puts the onus on standards maintenance and evolution on the standards body that submits it.
Rob knows this, but he's being deliberately disingenuous.
By the way, the same is true for ODF. OASIS is the steward for current ODF maintenance and improvement.
My bad, where I use FF, they apparently have the spelling checker disabled.
Still, FF is missing a lot of functionality that IE has out of the box as well. It works both ways. FF doesn't have "QuickTabs" or here's a thought, how about allowing users to easily change the search engine used (including topic searches). What about the combined forward/back menu (that's something I constantly miss when I use FF). How about security zones?
Not that FF isn't good, but please... pretending that FF is perfect is stupid.
There are solutions to most of your complaints. How about, instead of tabbing from address bar, you just use the shortcut key Ctrl-E. When javascript hids the menu bar, just press alt once and the menu appears. IE will save the default save as format, but you have to be careful that another instance of IE doesn't save over this setting later. You can have it go directly to a page by importing it's certificate into IE's default certificates page. A lot of your other arguments are a misunderstanding of what IE is doing and why.
The UI was designed to help make it difficult for phishers to simulate and take over the UI, that's why the UI is fixed and where it is. The buttons were placed and designed by user feedback. The fact that you dislike them just means that you're minority input was not a popular one. Your claim that the back and forward buttons are "too far away" now is kind of odd, since they're in the exact same place as they are in Firefox and Safari. Also, Firefox doesn't come with a spell checker either. There is, however, a free one you can download called IE7Pro that gives you many of the other things you complain about as well.
"inexplicably"? Considering that Mozilla doesn't even fully support DOM Level 2 (Particularly in regards to large parts of CSS and Events), that's kind of funny.
The fact of the matter is, writing standards compliant code is hard. So hard that even Mozilla, who claim to have nothing but standards as their goal can't even do the job. I think you're claim that this is somehow malevolent is wishful thinking on your part.
First, the article is about the beta 1 release of IE7 that didn't have many of the fixes that were in Beta 2.
Second, I assume you're referring to the "doesn't plan to fully support CSS" comment. Chris Wilson is on record that they fully intend to support CSS, there was only so much they could do in IE7, though, and concentrated on fixing the biggest problems developers were having with the CSS support that was in IE6. Despite that, they did add a number of new CSS features to IE7. This isn't "We are deliberately not supporting standards" it's "We want to fully support the standards, but we don't have the time or resources to do it in this first release".
Also, Please spare me the "This is microsoft, they have virtually limitless resources and could have done it if it was important enough to them". The fact is, even Microsoft has to schedule its resources and has deadlines. IE as a whole is not as important to them as, say Vista or Office as a whole is. That much is true, but the IE team is very serious about standards support in my opinion. They just need time. After all, it took Mozilla about 5 years to finally release a version of Mozilla that didn't flat out suck.
I fully expect IE8 to make significant improvements in standards conformance.
I think you need to brush up on your web history a bit.
The problem with IE is not that it "intentionally" doesn't follow standards, it's that it "intentionally" was left to rot for 5 years after the only other competition whithered and died.
When IE6 was released, it had the best standards compliance, best CSS implementaiton, best HTML and XHTML implementations of any major browser. That's not to say it didn't have lots of bugs (it did) but at the time, there simply wasn't anything else even close. Then, nothing happened, and products like Mozilla and Opera really walked all over IE in terms of conformance (but they took many years to get there, years that Microsoft spent ignoring browsers).
IE7 came a long way in a short time in improving things. It still needs lots of work to be sure, but this BS that Microsoft is "intentionally" not following web standards is just poppycock.
Since it's GPL software, any employee who gets their hands on it can then redistribute it for free.
There's some disagreement on that.
One of the arguments anti-GPL people have is that if you incorporate GPL software in to your internal code base, then that would allow any employee to distribute the code outside the company, thus allowing a contractor or employee to "poison" the internal code base with GPL'd code. Many GPL advocates have responded that merely being an employee does not give one distribution rights, since the company is the organization that distributes the code to itself.
This is especially important given RMS's encouragement that GPL defenders use the GPL to "help get permission" to distribute code, which some people view as RMS advocating back-dooring GPL'd code into internal code bases to force companies to release it. The response has been that "internal code" isn't distributed, even if you give it to employees or consultants.
"The WebCalendar demo page has been taken offline due to some malicious users. I anticipate putting it back online shortly. Check back in a few days..."
That fills me with confidence as to the security and robustness of it...
Indeed. The people that make this claim are hyperbolists.
MS settled and agreed to various conditions as part of a settlement in a *CIVIL* action brought by the DOJ. Even if the there had been no settlement and the court found entirely in the DOJ's favor, it still would only be a civil action, not a criminal one.
Conviction means "found guilty of a crime".
Whatever Microsoft did, no matter how bad or evil you might consider it to be, it doesn't justify false comments like that. But "Microsoft settled out of court for a civil action" just doesn't have the same ring to it I guess.
You don't get it. Sending an email to "confirm" something the boss hasn't said is pointless. The boss isn't saying "install unlicensed software", he's saying "make it work, or you're fired" and pretty much your only options are to quit (or be fired) and install illegal software.
The boss thinks he can just "will" any problems away. He says "just make it work" and then he's not liable. Not true, of course, but that's what he thinks.
If you really think businesses pay that, you're crazy.
A typical Microsoft volume license (even for a relatively small shop) is between $150 and $200 per seat, and that includes the OS, Office, SQL Server or other CAL's, etc..
Sure, still more than $0, but the license cost is nothing compared to the costs of rolling out a whole new platform.
For me, Outlook 2003 had one killer feature. The ability to minimize to the task tray. This one feature alone made me go from hating Outlook for being in my way all the time to making it a dream to use. I never realized just how much the fact that Outlook just sat in my alt-tab list when switching between programs annoyed me.
Still, while XP may be "one generation' to you, in reality it was about 3 generations, it's just that Microsoft gave free upgrades to them. In particular, there's XP Gold, XP SP2, and XP MediaCenter. Throw in Windows 2003 as a "generation" and it's 4.
I find it very hard to believe that Vista wouldn't work with any router. A router just routes packets, it doesn't care where they come from. Maybe you meant your wireless network adapter. Which one was it?
Vista works fine with all versions of Office AFAIK. I've definitely used Office XP and 2000 on it. The only issue i'm aware of is Outlook not saving passwords.
Look, the fact of the matter is, there's going to be pain involved with major change. It sucks, but it's necessary to move on to a more secure environment. In a few years time, most of these issues will be forgotten.
2,500,000,000 bytes (let's make it simple and not make them GiB) in 1 hour. 2500/60=41 MB/m. Now, Firewire is capable of 400Mb/s or 50 MB/s (unless you're using FW 800, which is pretty rare in both FW implementations and external drives). 50MB/s = 3000 MB/m or 73 times slower than peak. Of course all that ignores that you never achieve peak for various reasons, but i'd say (conservatively) that it's at least 40x slower than should be expected.
Having said that, I'll bet that your problem was related to permissions. Bad permissions cause Vista to copy files VERY slowly because it has to reset them on all files. I copy Gigabytes to USB exernal drives and it typically takes about 3min/GB and USB's performance issues are legendary.
Where I live, they use paper ballots with optical scanners. It's amazing how many of these get rejected and require them to be re-filled out because someone accidentally voted for the wrong candidate and thought they could just "cross it out" or somethign stupid like that.
The nice thing about printing the vote is that you get the electronic tally right away, so the world can know a "tentative" result by that evening, while a full count could take all night, or or maybe even a few days to certify.
Really? Then explain why Microsoft adapted XmlHttpRequest() to be a native function call, rather than an ActiveX object in IE7. They did this to improve compatibility with Mozilla, Safari and Opera. If MS really didn't want XmlHttpRequest(), they would have phased it out in IE7, since it was never part of the browser itself.
I'm sorry. No. I don't get it. Silverlight/WPF and Javascript don't solve the same problems. They're different things. Silverlight (at least in its current form) simply isn't able to "replace" javascript.
I think all those people making this claim are simply jerking their knees in response to MS making a fairly common sense argument. There are enough incompatibilities in Javascript today, introducing more will just exacerbate the problem.
In my mind it would be fine to extend ES as much as you like, so long as it's a totally new type that cannot be "accidentally" executed by older ES implementations. In effect, making ES4 an entirely new language, even if it is largely based on ES3.
Stop making this a MS vs Everyone else argument. Stop trying to see imagined motivations and then arguing against those motivations. Address the actual arguments.
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I'm sorry, but you're completely out in left field on this. Everyone involved in ISO knows how ISO works, and what Fast Track means. Nobody voted thinking ISO would control it. If they did, then they have no business voting in the first place.
Whether or not MS made comments that could be interpreted as "promises" is irrelevant. Rob knew all along that ISO would not control a Fast Tracked standard, and if he had problems with MS statements, he should have called them on those statements at the time they were made, not waiting until he could pull a strawman out of his ass.
I don't interpret any of the statements that Rob (taken out of context, of course) offers as promises of an ISO control, but rather that ISO "locks in" a given set of documentation as a standard. ISO can then control whether changes that are submitted later continue to be part of the standard or not.
What Rob wants to FUD by insinuation (knowing full well that this isn't the case) is that Microsoft will somehow, miraculously be able to change the standard at their whim after it's been ratified. That's simply not the case. Even though Microsoft will be responsible for any maintenance or evolution of the format, ISO still controls what is called an ISO standard or not. If ISO says "no" to a change, it doesn't make it into a later version of the standard. That's all there is to it.
Nobody should be surprised by this, much less Rob Weir. He feigns surprise and acts like this is a shocking development.
Here's news for you, and Rob, and everyone else. *NO FAST TRACK ISO STANDARD IS OWNED BY ISO*. Fast tracking, by it's very design, puts the onus on standards maintenance and evolution on the standards body that submits it.
Rob knows this, but he's being deliberately disingenuous.
By the way, the same is true for ODF. OASIS is the steward for current ODF maintenance and improvement.
My bad, where I use FF, they apparently have the spelling checker disabled.
Still, FF is missing a lot of functionality that IE has out of the box as well. It works both ways. FF doesn't have "QuickTabs" or here's a thought, how about allowing users to easily change the search engine used (including topic searches). What about the combined forward/back menu (that's something I constantly miss when I use FF). How about security zones?
Not that FF isn't good, but please... pretending that FF is perfect is stupid.
Umm.. You do understand how Wiki's work right. Anyone can edit them by default (though they can be configured to require accounts).
Saying that someone editing a wiki "hacked" it, is like saying someone is a pirate for using open source.
There are solutions to most of your complaints. How about, instead of tabbing from address bar, you just use the shortcut key Ctrl-E. When javascript hids the menu bar, just press alt once and the menu appears. IE will save the default save as format, but you have to be careful that another instance of IE doesn't save over this setting later. You can have it go directly to a page by importing it's certificate into IE's default certificates page. A lot of your other arguments are a misunderstanding of what IE is doing and why.
The UI was designed to help make it difficult for phishers to simulate and take over the UI, that's why the UI is fixed and where it is. The buttons were placed and designed by user feedback. The fact that you dislike them just means that you're minority input was not a popular one. Your claim that the back and forward buttons are "too far away" now is kind of odd, since they're in the exact same place as they are in Firefox and Safari. Also, Firefox doesn't come with a spell checker either. There is, however, a free one you can download called IE7Pro that gives you many of the other things you complain about as well.
"inexplicably"? Considering that Mozilla doesn't even fully support DOM Level 2 (Particularly in regards to large parts of CSS and Events), that's kind of funny.
The fact of the matter is, writing standards compliant code is hard. So hard that even Mozilla, who claim to have nothing but standards as their goal can't even do the job. I think you're claim that this is somehow malevolent is wishful thinking on your part.
You're misinterpreting that article.
First, the article is about the beta 1 release of IE7 that didn't have many of the fixes that were in Beta 2.
Second, I assume you're referring to the "doesn't plan to fully support CSS" comment. Chris Wilson is on record that they fully intend to support CSS, there was only so much they could do in IE7, though, and concentrated on fixing the biggest problems developers were having with the CSS support that was in IE6. Despite that, they did add a number of new CSS features to IE7. This isn't "We are deliberately not supporting standards" it's "We want to fully support the standards, but we don't have the time or resources to do it in this first release".
Also, Please spare me the "This is microsoft, they have virtually limitless resources and could have done it if it was important enough to them". The fact is, even Microsoft has to schedule its resources and has deadlines. IE as a whole is not as important to them as, say Vista or Office as a whole is. That much is true, but the IE team is very serious about standards support in my opinion. They just need time. After all, it took Mozilla about 5 years to finally release a version of Mozilla that didn't flat out suck.
I fully expect IE8 to make significant improvements in standards conformance.
I think you need to brush up on your web history a bit.
The problem with IE is not that it "intentionally" doesn't follow standards, it's that it "intentionally" was left to rot for 5 years after the only other competition whithered and died.
When IE6 was released, it had the best standards compliance, best CSS implementaiton, best HTML and XHTML implementations of any major browser. That's not to say it didn't have lots of bugs (it did) but at the time, there simply wasn't anything else even close. Then, nothing happened, and products like Mozilla and Opera really walked all over IE in terms of conformance (but they took many years to get there, years that Microsoft spent ignoring browsers).
IE7 came a long way in a short time in improving things. It still needs lots of work to be sure, but this BS that Microsoft is "intentionally" not following web standards is just poppycock.
Since it's GPL software, any employee who gets their hands on it can then redistribute it for free.
There's some disagreement on that.
One of the arguments anti-GPL people have is that if you incorporate GPL software in to your internal code base, then that would allow any employee to distribute the code outside the company, thus allowing a contractor or employee to "poison" the internal code base with GPL'd code. Many GPL advocates have responded that merely being an employee does not give one distribution rights, since the company is the organization that distributes the code to itself.
This is especially important given RMS's encouragement that GPL defenders use the GPL to "help get permission" to distribute code, which some people view as RMS advocating back-dooring GPL'd code into internal code bases to force companies to release it. The response has been that "internal code" isn't distributed, even if you give it to employees or consultants.
Check out the demo.
"The WebCalendar demo page has been taken offline due to some malicious users. I anticipate putting it back online shortly. Check back in a few days..."
That fills me with confidence as to the security and robustness of it...
Indeed. The people that make this claim are hyperbolists.
MS settled and agreed to various conditions as part of a settlement in a *CIVIL* action brought by the DOJ. Even if the there had been no settlement and the court found entirely in the DOJ's favor, it still would only be a civil action, not a criminal one.
Conviction means "found guilty of a crime".
Whatever Microsoft did, no matter how bad or evil you might consider it to be, it doesn't justify false comments like that. But "Microsoft settled out of court for a civil action" just doesn't have the same ring to it I guess.
You don't get it. Sending an email to "confirm" something the boss hasn't said is pointless. The boss isn't saying "install unlicensed software", he's saying "make it work, or you're fired" and pretty much your only options are to quit (or be fired) and install illegal software.
The boss thinks he can just "will" any problems away. He says "just make it work" and then he's not liable. Not true, of course, but that's what he thinks.
Actually, it's more likely that this is the case.
(1) OWIG (over-worked IT Guy) tells bosses they need to buy licenses for the 5 new computers they just bought.
(2) Bosses tell him "not in the budget" and not to bother him, just "make it work".
(3) OWIG knows if he doesn't give the people the software they need, he will be fired
(4) OWIG is forced to install pirated software to keep his job, conveniently allowing bosses to stay "blissfully ignorant".
(5) After a while, OWIG decides to find a new job
(6) Rats out former bosses to BSA
(7) Former Bosses say "We didn't know, that damn OWIG kept us in the dark" when in reality they kept themselves in the dark.
If you really think businesses pay that, you're crazy.
A typical Microsoft volume license (even for a relatively small shop) is between $150 and $200 per seat, and that includes the OS, Office, SQL Server or other CAL's, etc..
Sure, still more than $0, but the license cost is nothing compared to the costs of rolling out a whole new platform.
For me, Outlook 2003 had one killer feature. The ability to minimize to the task tray. This one feature alone made me go from hating Outlook for being in my way all the time to making it a dream to use. I never realized just how much the fact that Outlook just sat in my alt-tab list when switching between programs annoyed me.
Still, while XP may be "one generation' to you, in reality it was about 3 generations, it's just that Microsoft gave free upgrades to them. In particular, there's XP Gold, XP SP2, and XP MediaCenter. Throw in Windows 2003 as a "generation" and it's 4.
OSX had similar problems when it moved from OS9 to OSX, these are similar growing pains.
I find it very hard to believe that Vista wouldn't work with any router. A router just routes packets, it doesn't care where they come from. Maybe you meant your wireless network adapter. Which one was it?
Vista works fine with all versions of Office AFAIK. I've definitely used Office XP and 2000 on it. The only issue i'm aware of is Outlook not saving passwords.
Look, the fact of the matter is, there's going to be pain involved with major change. It sucks, but it's necessary to move on to a more secure environment. In a few years time, most of these issues will be forgotten.
I think your math is off.
2,500,000,000 bytes (let's make it simple and not make them GiB) in 1 hour. 2500/60=41 MB/m. Now, Firewire is capable of 400Mb/s or 50 MB/s (unless you're using FW 800, which is pretty rare in both FW implementations and external drives). 50MB/s = 3000 MB/m or 73 times slower than peak. Of course all that ignores that you never achieve peak for various reasons, but i'd say (conservatively) that it's at least 40x slower than should be expected.
Having said that, I'll bet that your problem was related to permissions. Bad permissions cause Vista to copy files VERY slowly because it has to reset them on all files. I copy Gigabytes to USB exernal drives and it typically takes about 3min/GB and USB's performance issues are legendary.
There's a GPL version of Orecx
In fact, there are entire open source and commercial products predicated on being able to do this.
For example:
http://www.orecx.com/
Where I live, they use paper ballots with optical scanners. It's amazing how many of these get rejected and require them to be re-filled out because someone accidentally voted for the wrong candidate and thought they could just "cross it out" or somethign stupid like that.
The nice thing about printing the vote is that you get the electronic tally right away, so the world can know a "tentative" result by that evening, while a full count could take all night, or or maybe even a few days to certify.
Really? Then explain why Microsoft adapted XmlHttpRequest() to be a native function call, rather than an ActiveX object in IE7. They did this to improve compatibility with Mozilla, Safari and Opera. If MS really didn't want XmlHttpRequest(), they would have phased it out in IE7, since it was never part of the browser itself.
Both silverlight and C# are PATENT encumbered!
Really? Which Patents?
You don't know?
Seriously? How do you make that statement if you don't know?
All of MS's patents are available as public infomration on the USPTO website. Why has nobody been able to identify these supposed patent encumbrances?
I'm sorry. No. I don't get it. Silverlight/WPF and Javascript don't solve the same problems. They're different things. Silverlight (at least in its current form) simply isn't able to "replace" javascript.
I think all those people making this claim are simply jerking their knees in response to MS making a fairly common sense argument. There are enough incompatibilities in Javascript today, introducing more will just exacerbate the problem.
In my mind it would be fine to extend ES as much as you like, so long as it's a totally new type that cannot be "accidentally" executed by older ES implementations. In effect, making ES4 an entirely new language, even if it is largely based on ES3.
Stop making this a MS vs Everyone else argument. Stop trying to see imagined motivations and then arguing against those motivations. Address the actual arguments.
Darwin is in Nutty Butty's. Darwin is in Joan Rivers, but he's trying to get out.
Michael J. Fox has no Darwin in him.