Towards the end of January we had a little miniature heat wave of sorts in Chicago and I was chatting with some of the local teenagers and pre-teens about the consoles they'd gotten for Christmas. The twin boys who'd scored the Xbox had their father take it back several times because it wouldn't stay running for more than an hour; they finally managed to exchange it as a lemon for a PS2 which they vastlt prefer. The other family in the neighborhood that got an Xbox is happy enough with it but their father is kind of frustrated because the kids are always at somebody else's house playing some other game while the Xbox gathers dust. The Neighborhood Teenage Consensus is that the Xbox "blows", "sucks", and is otherwise unworthy of their attention. The crowd seems to prefer the PS2. And I assure you they could care less about Microsoft's business tactics or their hardware prowess or lack thereof.
I think they're responding with PR, but trying to get decent security into their products after the fact will be a daunting task indeed. I suspect we'll see token efforts and lots of marketing and not much else: can you imagine the effort of adding the security their products would need to those bazillions of lines of code? Not to mention how unfriendly the product might seem to the privacy-invaders Microsoft has coddled to date with IE's defaults.
Before Christmas, the twelve-year-old crowd in the neighborhood was talking about the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube with no big proportion going to any single platform.
Now that the big day has passed and a lucky few have collected, the crowd has had a chance to congregate and drool over each and the talk of the neighborhood is:
The PS2?
I don't get it. It's been out a year, right? But that's the one the crowd want, including the twins whose parents purchased an Xbox. (I gather their Xbox plays for less than an hour and freezes up and tech support has been less than helpful).
Anyway, the slightly pre-teen buzz round here is for the PS2. I don't know if that's the demographic Microsoft wanted, but if they were aiming for it they missed.
I find it interesting that every time there's any mention of Microsoft or any version of Windows on Slashdot, about twenty posters jump on and start shouting to the treetops about how insanely stable and all-powerful Windows 2000 has been for them as an OS. Even if it hasn't been mentioned at all or isn't under discussion.
For what it's worth, we tested Windows 2000 and found it to be so-so: not much more stable than NT 4 and certainly a hog if Active Directory was being used. Most of our clients found no compelling reason to upgrade and the few who have purchased any Win2K licenses are using them to run NT4 boxes. Microsoft's attempt to force everyone into an upgrade cycle that suits them(Microsoft) better has at least one of our clients actively pursuing a conversion away from Microsoft not only on the servers but potentially on the desktop as well. The surprising boost last year in our Microsoft sales came from some our clients stocking up on license packs for expiring OS's.
What did you expect them to do? Bush wasn't voted into office. I don't know if Gore would have made much of a difference (although I suspect he would not have been trying to let the country run on autopilot while catching up on naptimes) but did you think the citizens of the US were going to take to the streets or something?
Don't know about overheating but a friend of mine who was cadged by his young into buying an Xbox has taken it back twice for freezeup problems and even after trading for new units has gotten no satisfaction. It won't run for more than an hour, he says. If his tots weren't so in love with one game involving a little troll called Munch he would've dumped it as a lemon long ago.
Does anybody here really think that that the FCC mandate will stay in place if the current curve of non-compliance holds? Sure, some broadcasters are spotting the airwaves with bits of HDTV here and there, but they'd much rather use the extra free bandwith for more lucrative purposes. And if the content providers get their way technologically and the Disney/Betamax decision gets turns on its head so that the proletariat can't timeshift programming anymore, suddenly HDTV doesn't look sexy at all. Not to mention the huge installed base of rendered-incompatible NTSC boxes owned-by-voters-during-a-recession-or-worse: who will be the first to try to make political hay by standing up and decrying the mandated obsolescence of a bazillion consumer boxes of the most ubiquitous and popular technology in the country? (And by a group of unelected officials,no less!)
I don't care how many contributions have been rolling into the coffers, this deadline's going to slip, slip, slip and die. It was dead as soon as the technology chosen wasn't something that was also receivable, even if poorly, on Never Twice the Same Color sets.
"And if we really think our own government is so evil, why are we still here?"
Should be, "why is the government still there", but then again, that would date from the days when people in the United States expected their votes to be counted rather than ignored.
"Doesn't the Justice Department have a lot more to lose by lying about this?"
Again, only if they can be affected by a vote tally. Heck, the so-called opposition party in your country can't even muster enough gumption to ask Ashcroft a few good questions when he's at a Judiciary Committee hearing for the purpose of defending some of his recent decisions. So Justice can continue their great tradition of lying without any great problems developing from it.
Why are you astonished, or even surprised at this act? It's only been a few days since the current head of what is supposed to be the executive branch of your government issued an executive order that essentially turns the work of the legislative branch on its head, i.e. the law passed in 1978 mandating the release of Presidential records after 12 years. Bush issued an order saying that if the former or sitting president wants those records secret, tough luck, that will be the default and anybody saying otherwise gets to go to court. Precisely the opposite of the law. So why should Ashcroft care two figs about your laws?
Push that theory too far, and you'll ask who got the most benefit from the WTC attack and say that G. W. Bush was behind it since the attack pushed his approval ratings so high and solved so many knotty problems for him.
I've read all the questions and answers, all the comments posted up till now and usually I can see merit in many differing views. This is no exception but I think it boils down to one argument:
Will the Web flourish if RAND standards are NOT supported by the W3C?
It seems the W3C is worried that it won't. And therefore, they must at least consider allowing that camel's nose under the tentflap.
I disagree with that view and agree with the posters who have said that if the W3C allows RAND standards, then fork we must.
It is the only way to keep any part of the Web from being overrun by commercial interests. Sure, the Net has expanded since '91, but look at what's happened to the signal-to-noise ratio since then.
I'd really hate to fork and render the W3C irrelevant (and if you check my recent postings I was the first to yell about Amaya not working against msn.com when their claim was about W3C compliance) but if the W3C starts caring more about DRM, commercial interests or whatever has propelled them in this bad vector then they will have pronounced the verdict upon themselves.
Having worked in the publishing field years ago, I can tell you that the so-called wall between advertising revenue and editorial content was already near-transparent by the late eighties, and the publications you mention who gush over the latest/greatest advertised goods accept mucho dinero from Redmond.
On the anecdotal evidence side, I've been running betas and RTMs of Windows XP for a while on multiple platforms and can't see much to recommend it as an upgrade for speed or stability. I keep hearing posts boasting the latter, but a properly tuned/tweaked & maintained Win98SE box will scream compared to either Windows 2000 or Windows XP, and although I'd prefer using the NT kernel if I'm forced onto a Microsoft platform instead of Unix I can't in good conscience recommend the extra cost since so many apps demand running with admin rights anyway.
>>One possible answer to this relates to the reasons why IE is the most popular browser:
Functionality.
Don't be silly. IE's popularity has almost nothing to do with functionality. The principal reason it's popular is that it was bundled with the operating system which most PC manufacturers are locked in to selling by secret contracts with a convicted monopolist.
Reminds me of something that happened about two years ago: one of our suppliers dumped Apache in favor of IIS and for whatever reason, we just couldn't get his order page to work under Netscape. For security reasons, IE is banned inhouse. We had a long-term relationship with the supplier and spent a lot of time trying to iron out the incompatibilities with his new system. We continued placing orders by phone for a while, but it was a hassle compared with his old system which the owner refused to put back in place.
The majority of users visiting his site used IE. However, we found out after he went out of business that we provided him about 8% of his business and among his other Netscape clients who wouldn't or couldn't switch to IE he lost nearly a third of his regular customer base revenue. According to the former employee, the switch to IIS and the resulting collapse of his revenue stream was the major factor in the demise of his business.
The point? If a site is sufficiently unfriendly to non-IE users, the users may simply be ditching and the site's owners thus have no realistic idea of what the site's possibilities would be if the coding were more universal. In the case of the abovementioned supplier, he was getting lots of nibbles from IE users but a significant amount of revenue was being generated from government offices which were not allowed to use IE and therefore his analysis of the potential negative impact of the conversion was fatally flawed.
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. "For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the" standards.
What a bunch of lies. I just ran Amaya, the browser from the W3C, against msn.com and it didn't work, not even when run on a Windows platform. Does Microsoft now claim that W3C != W3C ?
>>You just compare how the average Mom would do on *nix compared to Windows. Hehe
I actually was forced to do just that recently, and the results surprised me.
Picture this: a fifty-year-old mother, going back to university to pick up her doctorate who has managed to completely avoid all home computers until now. Now she has to use one, and she's a friend.
OK. Her school has standardized on Windows and has training available in Learning Labs there and all her friends use Windows, so she wants to use Windows. Brand new computer and peripherals bought and installed, MS Office loaded, internet connection up and running, selected good bookmarks loaded into the browser and preliminary instruction given.
After two weeks of total frustration at trying to learn Word or understand why Excel doesn't perform certain statistical functions properly (and she ony saw ONE GPF in all that time and couldn't suss out why such a shoddy product as Windows would be allowed to be sold!), I created a second partition and made the machine dual-boot into Linux with WordPerfect and some other apps to replace the ones in the Windows partition as best I could.
Within four days she was banging away on WordPerfect as if she'd known it since its SPC days. The sole app I couldn't replace was Outlook and that I covered by having her use the Outlook Web version.
No lockups, freezeups or problems with the apps since July, with the exception of one website which she couldn't access (because of IE-only features, I'm guessing...doesn't matter since she bought what she wanted from a website that did work for her).
Had you told me in June to list what OS this lady would be best running as a total newcomer, Linux would have been at the bottom of my list. But after seeing the useability and stability of it in a home environment, I'm having second thoughts.
The one downside to the Windows-to-Linux conversion for her? Having to purchase an external modem since I couldn't find any cobbled-together drivers for her internal Windows modem.
"It's well known that roger ebert is a studio shill..."
Well known to whom? I know Roger, and although I disagree with him pretty strongly at times,he's no shill.
The only time I thought he betrayed his principles even a little bit was when he put Saturday Night Fever into his Great Films list after Siskel died. He'd only ranked it three-and-a-half before that.
Oh, c'mon. Advertising and marketing are generally the art of lying and getting away with it by doing it with enough art, skill or grace to make the customer forget what's really going on: a deception. If electrons or ink could defend themselves, 'advertising' and 'ethics' couldn't appear in the same paragraph, let alone in the same sentence.
Use Netscape 3.04 or 4.08, turn off Automatic load of images,disable cookies (if using 4) or ask to be warned about cookies and refuse them (if using 3), Java and Javascript and it works fine. And if there's an image you really want to see, right click its box and tell it to load.
>>...And a concept that web marketers don't seem to grasp is that maybe people will remember a product backed by an annoying ad, but how many people will really buy that product if they negatively remember the ads for that product?
Which exactly describes why I bought my initial batch of X-10 hardware from X10.com and then didn't order anything more from them since they started putting up some of the most annoying ads on the net. Their advertising made me direct my purchases elsewhere.
Well, I'll ask if no one else will. I'm curious and would like to see your list of reasons.
And of course you're going to get jumped for posting it; there are enough brainwashed-by-corporation fellows lurking that you'd think slashdot sold motivational tapes on the side! But watching them foam at the mouth and spout pre-programmed what's-good-for-GM-is-good-for-you propaganda can be amusing, if predictable.
People in the U.S. don't even have the constitutional right to have their votes counted. Not that anyone really noticed until the landslide winner didn't get the presidency.
At this point, what's legal in the U.S. is anybody's guess because it's hard to tell what sort of nonsense the courts are going to come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
Towards the end of January we had a little miniature heat wave of sorts in Chicago and I was chatting with some of the local teenagers and pre-teens about the consoles they'd gotten for Christmas. The twin boys who'd scored the Xbox had their father take it back several times because it wouldn't stay running for more than an hour; they finally managed to exchange it as a lemon for a PS2 which they vastlt prefer. The other family in the neighborhood that got an Xbox is happy enough with it but their father is kind of frustrated because the kids are always at somebody else's house playing some other game while the Xbox gathers dust. The Neighborhood Teenage Consensus is that the Xbox "blows", "sucks", and is otherwise unworthy of their attention. The crowd seems to prefer the PS2. And I assure you they could care less about Microsoft's business tactics or their hardware prowess or lack thereof.
Does this mean they'll finally lose NetBIOS?
I think they're responding with PR, but trying to get decent security into their products after the fact will be a daunting task indeed. I suspect we'll see token efforts and lots of marketing and not much else: can you imagine the effort of adding the security their products would need to those bazillions of lines of code? Not to mention how unfriendly the product might seem to the privacy-invaders Microsoft has coddled to date with IE's defaults.
Before Christmas, the twelve-year-old crowd in the neighborhood was talking about the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube with no big proportion going to any single platform.
Now that the big day has passed and a lucky few have collected, the crowd has had a chance to congregate and drool over each and the talk of the neighborhood is:
The PS2?
I don't get it. It's been out a year, right? But that's the one the crowd want, including the twins whose parents purchased an Xbox. (I gather their Xbox plays for less than an hour and freezes up and tech support has been less than helpful).
Anyway, the slightly pre-teen buzz round here is for the PS2. I don't know if that's the demographic Microsoft wanted, but if they were aiming for it they missed.
I find it interesting that every time there's any mention of Microsoft or any version of Windows on Slashdot, about twenty posters jump on and start shouting to the treetops about how insanely stable and all-powerful Windows 2000 has been for them as an OS. Even if it hasn't been mentioned at all or isn't under discussion.
For what it's worth, we tested Windows 2000 and found it to be so-so: not much more stable than NT 4 and certainly a hog if Active Directory was being used. Most of our clients found no compelling reason to upgrade and the few who have purchased any Win2K licenses are using them to run NT4 boxes. Microsoft's attempt to force everyone into an upgrade cycle that suits them(Microsoft) better has at least one of our clients actively pursuing a conversion away from Microsoft not only on the servers but potentially on the desktop as well. The surprising boost last year in our Microsoft sales came from some our clients stocking up on license packs for expiring OS's.
What did you expect them to do? Bush wasn't voted into office. I don't know if Gore would have made much of a difference (although I suspect he would not have been trying to let the country run on autopilot while catching up on naptimes) but did you think the citizens of the US were going to take to the streets or something?
Don't know about overheating but a friend of mine who was cadged by his young into buying an Xbox has taken it back twice for freezeup problems and even after trading for new units has gotten no satisfaction. It won't run for more than an hour, he says. If his tots weren't so in love with one game involving a little troll called Munch he would've dumped it as a lemon long ago.
Does anybody here really think that that the FCC mandate will stay in place if the current curve of non-compliance holds? Sure, some broadcasters are spotting the airwaves with bits of HDTV here and there, but they'd much rather use the extra free bandwith for more lucrative purposes. And if the content providers get their way technologically and the Disney/Betamax decision gets turns on its head so that the proletariat can't timeshift programming anymore, suddenly HDTV doesn't look sexy at all. Not to mention the huge installed base of rendered-incompatible NTSC boxes owned-by-voters-during-a-recession-or-worse: who will be the first to try to make political hay by standing up and decrying the mandated obsolescence of a bazillion consumer boxes of the most ubiquitous and popular technology in the country? (And by a group of unelected officials,no less!)
I don't care how many contributions have been rolling into the coffers, this deadline's going to slip, slip, slip and die. It was dead as soon as the technology chosen wasn't something that was also receivable, even if poorly, on Never Twice the Same Color sets.
"And if we really think our own government is so evil, why are we still here?"
Should be, "why is the government still there", but then again, that would date from the days when people in the United States expected their votes to be counted rather than ignored.
"Doesn't the Justice Department have a lot more to lose by lying about this?"
Again, only if they can be affected by a vote tally. Heck, the so-called opposition party in your country can't even muster enough gumption to ask Ashcroft a few good questions when he's at a Judiciary Committee hearing for the purpose of defending some of his recent decisions. So Justice can continue their great tradition of lying without any great problems developing from it.
Why are you astonished, or even surprised at this act? It's only been a few days since the current head of what is supposed to be the executive branch of your government issued an executive order that essentially turns the work of the legislative branch on its head, i.e. the law passed in 1978 mandating the release of Presidential records after 12 years. Bush issued an order saying that if the former or sitting president wants those records secret, tough luck, that will be the default and anybody saying otherwise gets to go to court. Precisely the opposite of the law. So why should Ashcroft care two figs about your laws?
Push that theory too far, and you'll ask who got the most benefit from the WTC attack and say that G. W. Bush was behind it since the attack pushed his approval ratings so high and solved so many knotty problems for him.
I've read all the questions and answers, all the comments posted up till now and usually I can see merit in many differing views. This is no exception but I think it boils down to one argument:
Will the Web flourish if RAND standards are NOT supported by the W3C?
It seems the W3C is worried that it won't. And therefore, they must at least consider allowing that camel's nose under the tentflap.
I disagree with that view and agree with the posters who have said that if the W3C allows RAND standards, then fork we must.
It is the only way to keep any part of the Web from being overrun by commercial interests. Sure, the Net has expanded since '91, but look at what's happened to the signal-to-noise ratio since then.
I'd really hate to fork and render the W3C irrelevant (and if you check my recent postings I was the first to yell about Amaya not working against msn.com when their claim was about W3C compliance) but if the W3C starts caring more about DRM, commercial interests or whatever has propelled them in this bad vector then they will have pronounced the verdict upon themselves.
Having worked in the publishing field years ago, I can tell you that the so-called wall between advertising revenue and editorial content was already near-transparent by the late eighties, and the publications you mention who gush over the latest/greatest advertised goods accept mucho dinero from Redmond.
On the anecdotal evidence side, I've been running betas and RTMs of Windows XP for a while on multiple platforms and can't see much to recommend it as an upgrade for speed or stability. I keep hearing posts boasting the latter, but a properly tuned/tweaked & maintained Win98SE box will scream compared to either Windows 2000 or Windows XP, and although I'd prefer using the NT kernel if I'm forced onto a Microsoft platform instead of Unix I can't in good conscience recommend the extra cost since so many apps demand running with admin rights anyway.
Microsoft has what it has always had:
Marketing.
>>One possible answer to this relates to the reasons why IE is the most popular browser:
Functionality.
Don't be silly. IE's popularity has almost nothing to do with functionality. The principal reason it's popular is that it was bundled with the operating system which most PC manufacturers are locked in to selling by secret contracts with a convicted monopolist.
Reminds me of something that happened about two years ago: one of our suppliers dumped Apache in favor of IIS and for whatever reason, we just couldn't get his order page to work under Netscape. For security reasons, IE is banned inhouse. We had a long-term relationship with the supplier and spent a lot of time trying to iron out the incompatibilities with his new system. We continued placing orders by phone for a while, but it was a hassle compared with his old system which the owner refused to put back in place.
The majority of users visiting his site used IE. However, we found out after he went out of business that we provided him about 8% of his business and among his other Netscape clients who wouldn't or couldn't switch to IE he lost nearly a third of his regular customer base revenue. According to the former employee, the switch to IIS and the resulting collapse of his revenue stream was the major factor in the demise of his business.
The point? If a site is sufficiently unfriendly to non-IE users, the users may simply be ditching and the site's owners thus have no realistic idea of what the site's possibilities would be if the coding were more universal. In the case of the abovementioned supplier, he was getting lots of nibbles from IE users but a significant amount of revenue was being generated from government offices which were not allowed to use IE and therefore his analysis of the potential negative impact of the conversion was fatally flawed.
In the Yahoo article:
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. "For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the" standards.
What a bunch of lies. I just ran Amaya, the browser from the W3C, against msn.com and it didn't work, not even when run on a Windows platform. Does Microsoft now claim that W3C != W3C ?
>>You just compare how the average Mom would do on *nix compared to Windows. Hehe
I actually was forced to do just that recently, and the results surprised me.
Picture this: a fifty-year-old mother, going back to university to pick up her doctorate who has managed to completely avoid all home computers until now. Now she has to use one, and she's a friend.
OK. Her school has standardized on Windows and has training available in Learning Labs there and all her friends use Windows, so she wants to use Windows. Brand new computer and peripherals bought and installed, MS Office loaded, internet connection up and running, selected good bookmarks loaded into the browser and preliminary instruction given.
After two weeks of total frustration at trying to learn Word or understand why Excel doesn't perform certain statistical functions properly (and she ony saw ONE GPF in all that time and couldn't suss out why such a shoddy product as Windows would be allowed to be sold!), I created a second partition and made the machine dual-boot into Linux with WordPerfect and some other apps to replace the ones in the Windows partition as best I could.
Within four days she was banging away on WordPerfect as if she'd known it since its SPC days. The sole app I couldn't replace was Outlook and that I covered by having her use the Outlook Web version.
No lockups, freezeups or problems with the apps since July, with the exception of one website which she couldn't access (because of IE-only features, I'm guessing...doesn't matter since she bought what she wanted from a website that did work for her).
Had you told me in June to list what OS this lady would be best running as a total newcomer, Linux would have been at the bottom of my list. But after seeing the useability and stability of it in a home environment, I'm having second thoughts.
The one downside to the Windows-to-Linux conversion for her? Having to purchase an external modem since I couldn't find any cobbled-together drivers for her internal Windows modem.
"It's well known that roger ebert is a studio shill..."
Well known to whom? I know Roger, and although I disagree with him pretty strongly at times,he's no shill.
The only time I thought he betrayed his principles even a little bit was when he put Saturday Night Fever into his Great Films list after Siskel died. He'd only ranked it three-and-a-half before that.
But a shill? Examples, please.
Oh, c'mon. Advertising and marketing are generally the art of lying and getting away with it by doing it with enough art, skill or grace to make the customer forget what's really going on: a deception. If electrons or ink could defend themselves, 'advertising' and 'ethics' couldn't appear in the same paragraph, let alone in the same sentence.
Use Netscape 3.04 or 4.08, turn off Automatic load of images,disable cookies (if using 4) or ask to be warned about cookies and refuse them (if using 3), Java and Javascript and it works fine. And if there's an image you really want to see, right click its box and tell it to load.
Pages load a lot faster, too.
>> ...And a concept that web marketers don't seem to grasp is that maybe people will remember a product backed by an annoying ad, but how many people will really buy that product if they negatively remember the ads for that product?
Which exactly describes why I bought my initial batch of X-10 hardware from X10.com and then didn't order anything more from them since they started putting up some of the most annoying ads on the net. Their advertising made me direct my purchases elsewhere.
Well, I'll ask if no one else will. I'm curious and would like to see your list of reasons.
And of course you're going to get jumped for posting it; there are enough brainwashed-by-corporation fellows lurking that you'd think slashdot sold motivational tapes on the side! But watching them foam at the mouth and spout pre-programmed what's-good-for-GM-is-good-for-you propaganda can be amusing, if predictable.
And what did Reagan do after the car bomb took out, what was it, more than 300 marines?
Didn't he just pull 'em out?
People in the U.S. don't even have the constitutional right to have their votes counted. Not that anyone really noticed until the landslide winner didn't get the presidency.
At this point, what's legal in the U.S. is anybody's guess because it's hard to tell what sort of nonsense the courts are going to come up with.