This viewpoint hints at Firefox’s miserable demise unless the Mozilla team wake up.
I believe that the successful drive to gain Mozilla users owes a great deal to the fact web developers standardized development using some version of Firefox 3.x and the Developer Toolbar plugin. This increased the adoption of web standards (HTML 4 and CSS 2) on the monopoly platform. The resulting black eye for IE forced MS to at least pay lip service to open web standards, with IE 9 being hailed (by MS, of course) as the most forward-looking and standards-compatible browser out there.
In other words, web developers, not regular users, led the adoption of Firefox.
In my case, I hadn’t even d/led Firefox until I started working as a front-end web developer. Prior to that (February 2010!), I used Safari (for Mac) as my main and only browser. To date, I only use Chrome because it’s a convenient way to tell Google I will not every be installing Flash on my system if I can help it. Chrome’s upgrade cycle puts me off. Firefox puts me off and frightens me at the same time.
I’m frightened because nearly every dev where I work (front- and back-end) is wringing his or her hands about Mozilla’s accelerated and backwards-incompatible upgrade scheme. There’s no good reason to have so quick a development cycle because (and here’s the secret) regular users don't care about upgrading.
Left to their own devices, regular users will use whatever browser their geek friend / dev spouse / prodigy child recommends, and I will guarantee you that if Mozilla keeps this up until July 2012 that Firefox will not be that browser for the simple reason that geeks, devs, and prodigies will not use Firefox because it’s too volatile a development platform.
So yeah, DEAR MOZILLA: Macs are targeted toward regular as opposed to corporate users. Have you seen the desktop browser share stats for Safari? Please, take a good hard look because that’s the future of Firefox on the desktop if Mozilla thinks it can safely ignore corporate (read developer) users.
One Mozilla loses its developer base, Firefox have a hard time making up that lost ground. Talk about technology death spirals will forever after reference Mozilla and the post-Firefox 4 upgrade scheme.
I hope Mozilla reconsiders, fires/demotes the managers who came up with this "copy Google" scheme, and goes back to making a stable foundation for web standards and cross-browser compatibility.
Phrases like 'my precious time' and 'will not contribute to making me better at my job' are huge red flags for a inflated sense of self-importance. Dismissing the entire range of liberal arts as merely 'useful and perhaps enriching' betrays a level of arrogance that has the potential to incite team-destroying conflict.
Excellent close reading of the text and analysis of available evidence, as if straight out of a university-level English class.
Creative beat Apple to market with the media player, Sandisk had some really nice offerings in the early days as well that easily competed with the early iPods. Palm beat Apple to market with the smart phone. Microsoft beat Apple to market with the idea of a media-center PC (which they were copying from programs available in Linux).... the list goes on.
The problem with such thinking is that it views innovation in terms of gadgets and standalone products rather than as interfaces to digital media systems. Even disregarding your casual dismissal of innovation in interface design for the iPod and iPhone, the innovations of these i-devices include the way in which they integrate with applications and media storage and delivery systems in their resident OSes.
Your mistake is the mistake of the mad-scientist inventor: you think a better lightbulb is what will capture the market and fail to realize that a lightbulb that can influence and respond to electrical production and distribution systems would be more likely to spur innovation and lead to market dominance.
In the near future, I think people will also look back at the desktop wars which Microsoft decisively won in the early 1990s and realize that victory was a shallow one at best. Apple (and Linux to a lesser extent) swallowed Microsoft OSes whole by means of third-party virtualization technologies. This means that only Apple machines have a standardized commercial solution to running multiple versions of Windows in a single host OS. The same is not available for Windows because of the proprietary lockdown of OS X.
The end result is that to run the most innovative browsers and software in a “standardized” UNIX environment, one must use Apple’s solution. Every other solution is partial. This fact allows one to reinterpret Microsoft’s obsessive pursuit and “successful” capture of the desktop as a failure to understand the real implications of the judicious use of proprietary lockdown. Where Apple uses intellectual property to protect things that differentiates their products, Microsoft uses intellectual property to dilute their product and force its distribution everywhere.
Only time will tell which business strategy is stronger.
OS X is a certified UNIX on which one can install just about any third-party proprietary app (made by, for example, Adobe and Microsoft) as wells as tons of open-source software. Much of the underpinnings of OS X is itself open source.
What precisely do you mean by "walled garden" given these facts? Oh, you were trolling. Never mind, then. Carry on.
But to ask 'do you think California misses you' is not only arrogant, it's ignorant: California is hemorrhaging people. There are still a lot of people there, and a lot of good ideas, to be sure -- but to look at what is happening in California and conclude that it's anything other than that it is very much in decline is pretty tough.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, pointers to facts, and honest assessment of my rhetorical posture. I'm a California native recently reuturned and I have trouble taking criticism of my home state. I have little experience with Texas, but I will say that a "troubled" California is, in my experience, preferable to a "healthy" southeastern Ohio or central Virginia.
I can't shed so much as a tear for them. I'm a 5th generation Californian. In 2004 I packed up and moved to Texas, and I brought my job with me. Oddly enough, my property taxes are about the same. But I got a 10% raise by loosing the income tax. Virtually all goods & services are much cheaper.
Do you think California misses you? Personally, I'm glad you left and hope you stay where you are. I have no doubt you feel the same.
Having lived in two other states with conservative/retrograde tax models, I will say California has the most developed and best public infrastructure I know. Energy is more expensive but my understanding is that even Californians are not paying the full cost of energy due to subsidization and unaccounted for externalities.
Plus, California is as awesome as you want to be: beautiful weather, innovative ideas, and a diverse population.
A couple years ago, I decided to learn the art of building custom bicycle frames. I'm a smart guy, how hard could it be? Turns out, it's pretty fucking hard. Welding, machining, etc. != low-skill job. It's just a different skillset than what you use.
I think it's more accurate to say low skill != easy. The fact of the matter is that many types of blue collar work do not require the same levels of education as white collar jobs. Education and length of training are what determine "low" versus "high" skill, not the difficulty of labor. It's the facts that it takes a decade or more to train a doctor or nuclear physicist while a five-year apprenticeship often suffices for a machinist or welder that give "high" and "low" their meaning when applied to job skill levels.
Pneumonia keeps one from breathing. Understood. Do we not yet know how to oxygenate the blood through alternative means? (In case it's not blindingly obvious, I know jack about medical science.)
You've appropriately been modded funny but I wonder what would happen if a prospective traveler took off his or her trousers and placed them in the X-Ray conveyor while standing aside for a pat-down.
If enough people did this (coordinated protesters) what would the TSA do? Can we travelers ram backscatter machines back down the TSA's bureaucratic throats?
Korea went from the nation in south-east Asia with the lowest literacy rate to the nation with the highest within a few decades of abandoning the Chinese ideographic writing system in favour of a phonographic one
Besides that you probably mean "phonetic" rather than "phonographic" o_O your suggestion is somewhat misleading. In Korea, the shift from an ideographic to a phonetic writing system began in 1446 and—dollars to donuts—there was no standardized international measure of literacy rates in 15th century Asia.
Bill Clegg was a well-known and well-regarded literary agent and editor. His childhood predisposed him to wanting to hide. From a review:
After several years representing a growing list of highly acclaimed writers, literary agent Bill Clegg walked away from his world and went on a two-month crack binge. He had been released from rehab nine months earlier, and his relapse would cost him his home, his money, his career, his status, and--very nearly--his life.
What is it that makes an exceptional young mind want to disappear? Clegg makes startlingly clear the powerful attraction of the reality-obliterating drug that had him in its thrall, calling its effect a state where "doom does not eclipse bliss." The terrifying story of Clegg's addiction is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood, when a harrowing physical condition is treated with mockery by one parent and with negligence by the other, shaping the future addict's desire to hide, to be "away."
I use iPad primarily for watching videos and reading (longform) PDFs. You owe it to yourself to give iAnnotate PDF a try. It's an amazing program, especially for getting annotations into PDFs that can be transferred to a computer and then used any which way you damn please.
If you use the open-source and free Skim, you'll be VERY pleased
Disclosure: None to speak of. Just a very satisfied end user.
You're missing the forest for the trees. Mac OS never asks for validation at any stage of installation. Just put your disc in, install, reboot. That's it. Change your hardware, no need to validate. Ever. Starting with Mac OS v.10.5, upgrade discs no longer checked to see if you had an older version already installed.
More significantly, every time a Mac user runs two processes at once, they're using the preemptive multitasking that was missing from MacOS 9, and was fixed by moving wholesale to a FOSS kernel.
For the record, Mac OS 9 could run multiple processes, as could any Mac OS since (I think) System 6. It’s just that these simultaneous processes used cooperative multitasking instead of preemptive multitasking which, in practice, meant a poorly coded (or crashing) program could refuse to cooperate and lock up all system resources. Preemptive multitasking, as users of Windows 95 and later know, enabled users to foreground background processes and spawn new processes at any time, including processes capable of reliably killing a background process.
Slashdot Mirror
ZARDOZ IS NOT GARBAGE!!!!
This viewpoint hints at Firefox’s miserable demise unless the Mozilla team wake up.
I believe that the successful drive to gain Mozilla users owes a great deal to the fact web developers standardized development using some version of Firefox 3.x and the Developer Toolbar plugin. This increased the adoption of web standards (HTML 4 and CSS 2) on the monopoly platform. The resulting black eye for IE forced MS to at least pay lip service to open web standards, with IE 9 being hailed (by MS, of course) as the most forward-looking and standards-compatible browser out there.
In other words, web developers, not regular users, led the adoption of Firefox.
In my case, I hadn’t even d/led Firefox until I started working as a front-end web developer. Prior to that (February 2010!), I used Safari (for Mac) as my main and only browser. To date, I only use Chrome because it’s a convenient way to tell Google I will not every be installing Flash on my system if I can help it. Chrome’s upgrade cycle puts me off. Firefox puts me off and frightens me at the same time.
I’m frightened because nearly every dev where I work (front- and back-end) is wringing his or her hands about Mozilla’s accelerated and backwards-incompatible upgrade scheme. There’s no good reason to have so quick a development cycle because (and here’s the secret) regular users don't care about upgrading.
Left to their own devices, regular users will use whatever browser their geek friend / dev spouse / prodigy child recommends, and I will guarantee you that if Mozilla keeps this up until July 2012 that Firefox will not be that browser for the simple reason that geeks, devs, and prodigies will not use Firefox because it’s too volatile a development platform.
So yeah, DEAR MOZILLA: Macs are targeted toward regular as opposed to corporate users. Have you seen the desktop browser share stats for Safari? Please, take a good hard look because that’s the future of Firefox on the desktop if Mozilla thinks it can safely ignore corporate (read developer) users.
One Mozilla loses its developer base, Firefox have a hard time making up that lost ground. Talk about technology death spirals will forever after reference Mozilla and the post-Firefox 4 upgrade scheme.
I hope Mozilla reconsiders, fires/demotes the managers who came up with this "copy Google" scheme, and goes back to making a stable foundation for web standards and cross-browser compatibility.
Excellent close reading of the text and analysis of available evidence, as if straight out of a university-level English class.
The problem with such thinking is that it views innovation in terms of gadgets and standalone products rather than as interfaces to digital media systems. Even disregarding your casual dismissal of innovation in interface design for the iPod and iPhone, the innovations of these i-devices include the way in which they integrate with applications and media storage and delivery systems in their resident OSes.
Your mistake is the mistake of the mad-scientist inventor: you think a better lightbulb is what will capture the market and fail to realize that a lightbulb that can influence and respond to electrical production and distribution systems would be more likely to spur innovation and lead to market dominance.
In the near future, I think people will also look back at the desktop wars which Microsoft decisively won in the early 1990s and realize that victory was a shallow one at best. Apple (and Linux to a lesser extent) swallowed Microsoft OSes whole by means of third-party virtualization technologies. This means that only Apple machines have a standardized commercial solution to running multiple versions of Windows in a single host OS. The same is not available for Windows because of the proprietary lockdown of OS X.
The end result is that to run the most innovative browsers and software in a “standardized” UNIX environment, one must use Apple’s solution. Every other solution is partial. This fact allows one to reinterpret Microsoft’s obsessive pursuit and “successful” capture of the desktop as a failure to understand the real implications of the judicious use of proprietary lockdown. Where Apple uses intellectual property to protect things that differentiates their products, Microsoft uses intellectual property to dilute their product and force its distribution everywhere.
Only time will tell which business strategy is stronger.
That must be some pretty hard pinching considering Lincoln’s bust is the one on US pennies.
OS X is a certified UNIX on which one can install just about any third-party proprietary app (made by, for example, Adobe and Microsoft) as wells as tons of open-source software. Much of the underpinnings of OS X is itself open source.
What precisely do you mean by "walled garden" given these facts? Oh, you were trolling. Never mind, then. Carry on.
But to ask 'do you think California misses you' is not only arrogant, it's ignorant: California is hemorrhaging people. There are still a lot of people there, and a lot of good ideas, to be sure -- but to look at what is happening in California and conclude that it's anything other than that it is very much in decline is pretty tough.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, pointers to facts, and honest assessment of my rhetorical posture. I'm a California native recently reuturned and I have trouble taking criticism of my home state. I have little experience with Texas, but I will say that a "troubled" California is, in my experience, preferable to a "healthy" southeastern Ohio or central Virginia.
Do you think California misses you? Personally, I'm glad you left and hope you stay where you are. I have no doubt you feel the same.
Having lived in two other states with conservative/retrograde tax models, I will say California has the most developed and best public infrastructure I know. Energy is more expensive but my understanding is that even Californians are not paying the full cost of energy due to subsidization and unaccounted for externalities.
Plus, California is as awesome as you want to be: beautiful weather, innovative ideas, and a diverse population.
Have fun in Texas!
I think it's more accurate to say low skill != easy. The fact of the matter is that many types of blue collar work do not require the same levels of education as white collar jobs. Education and length of training are what determine "low" versus "high" skill, not the difficulty of labor. It's the facts that it takes a decade or more to train a doctor or nuclear physicist while a five-year apprenticeship often suffices for a machinist or welder that give "high" and "low" their meaning when applied to job skill levels.
How long do you labor specialization has been such that the entities we call "employer" and "workers" exist? Hint: it's not thousands of years.
Thanks for answering. Much appreciated.
Pneumonia keeps one from breathing. Understood. Do we not yet know how to oxygenate the blood through alternative means? (In case it's not blindingly obvious, I know jack about medical science.)
John Gruber wrote a 1,000-word article that says much of what you're saying.
Let me fix that for you: Honoré de Balzac.
You've appropriately been modded funny but I wonder what would happen if a prospective traveler took off his or her trousers and placed them in the X-Ray conveyor while standing aside for a pat-down.
If enough people did this (coordinated protesters) what would the TSA do? Can we travelers ram backscatter machines back down the TSA's bureaucratic throats?
You are delusional if you believe Apple's ditching Flash is a sign of its supporting Silverlight.
It's Tux’s grandmarm.
Besides that you probably mean "phonetic" rather than "phonographic" o_O your suggestion is somewhat misleading. In Korea, the shift from an ideographic to a phonetic writing system began in 1446 and—dollars to donuts—there was no standardized international measure of literacy rates in 15th century Asia.
Bears love it, too.
Bill Clegg was a well-known and well-regarded literary agent and editor. His childhood predisposed him to wanting to hide. From a review:
I use iPad primarily for watching videos and reading (longform) PDFs. You owe it to yourself to give iAnnotate PDF a try. It's an amazing program, especially for getting annotations into PDFs that can be transferred to a computer and then used any which way you damn please.
If you use the open-source and free Skim, you'll be VERY pleased
Disclosure: None to speak of. Just a very satisfied end user.
Yeah, you probably are the only one since "diaspora" has nothing to do with exile.
You're missing the forest for the trees. Mac OS never asks for validation at any stage of installation. Just put your disc in, install, reboot. That's it. Change your hardware, no need to validate. Ever. Starting with Mac OS v.10.5, upgrade discs no longer checked to see if you had an older version already installed.
Lockdown!=Lockout
For the record, Mac OS 9 could run multiple processes, as could any Mac OS since (I think) System 6. It’s just that these simultaneous processes used cooperative multitasking instead of preemptive multitasking which, in practice, meant a poorly coded (or crashing) program could refuse to cooperate and lock up all system resources. Preemptive multitasking, as users of Windows 95 and later know, enabled users to foreground background processes and spawn new processes at any time, including processes capable of reliably killing a background process.