Ahh I was given wrong info then, when Midland Mainline abolished smoking I read on some news site that GNER was the only one that did this.
Virgin scrapped it a long time ago, GNER can easily offer smoking because all their trains are at least 9 carriages long (they increased the length of their 8 carriage 125's last year), whereas Virgin indruced new trains that were actually shorter than their old ones on the cross country route (5 carriages max)
Because flying on the cheap airlines is not a pleasant experience, I know people who've flown on a cheap airline and have not being allowed to board because they have the wrong type of ID (e.g. they have the old style driving licence that has no photocard) and not even given a refund. Customer service is terrible and the fact is you should not need ID just for a domestic flight.
Also trains run more frequently than planes, so by the time you add the getting from the town centre to the airport, having to check in early, etc it's often quicker overall to just get the train.
Also if you prefer to travel flexibly (not be tied down to travelling on certain services) it's a lot easier to get a flexible ticket for train travel.
But not all of the line is electrified, GNER services from Edinburgh to Aberdeen and Inverness are still run using diesel trains as there's no power lines north of Edinburgh. I suspect this is because the main Scottish rail operatior, ScotRail, doesn't have any plans to introduce electric trains so GNER need to make do as well for this part of the route
I posted that original article, that was when the GNER service was a trial, now it appears the trial was successful and will be rolled out in the entire fleet.
GNER is the only decent train company in the UK, it's the only one that still offers a smoking carriage, it gives regular travellers a loyalty card like many airlines do, in has a proper restaurant service and I've not had too many problems with their timekeeping.
The only thing I can say bad about them is that they used to sell bottled real ales in the buffet car, but they stopped doing those October last year, now you've got only canned mainstream beers which ain't the same. GNER are usually good at listening to feedback so if you're a regular traveller and miss the guest ales then email them and let them know. Vist www.gner.co.uk and click on the 'contact us' link, then select customer relations.
That is true, I wouldn't expect Google to package up pre-release browsers, however if they did decide on this course of action they could perhaps pay for a few more developers to work on the project, I'm fairly sure Ben and Scott are paid by the foundation but it'd be nice to see others.
I'm looking forward to the smartupdate feature in Firefox and hopefully there'll be enough people to test it to death when it arrives in 0.9 so that we can get a really solid 1.0
Here's what I think the apps need to be successful (fortunately these seemed to be planned for before 1.0): - The auto update feature for both the mail and browser apps - Auto disabling of extensions not compatible with the current release - An installer for Thunderbird - Common plugins automatically installed (e.g. Flash/java) - optional of course - Not stealing image associations on windows (already fixed in latest nightlies)
I think Google would rather target a product that people actually use i.e. IE rather than some microsegment
More people would use Mozilla products if they were aware of them and Google has the name to push them. Continuing to depend on IE for their toolbar product sounds like a bad idea when they've got the opportunity to entice people over to a browser that's not written by a company that's currently hostile towards Google.
Of course, Google would still work in IE, just like it does now (unlikely MS would do anything that bad to stop people visiting google.com), so IE users can still happily use Google.
POP is almost useless in a webmail situation, IMAP works well with webmail because it allows you to mark messages as read while keeping them on the server, and move mail around different folders on the server.
If google are serious about free mail services then it probably is more to get Hotmail users away from Hotmail because MS does pose the biggest threat to Google
With Google doing mail, I'm sure they will add IMAP support and be a little more "User Friendly" to us Linux users. (Not to mention No ads !)
They need to make money somehow, so there'll be ads but almost certainly text based ads like there already is on Google.
If they make their mail service accessible via IMAP how will they make money out of it? One method would be to clearly add some advertising text at the end of each message you receive (don't think that'd be popular). However, Google might decide to make IMAP access a premium service, if they decide to make their own branded Firefox/Thunderbird combo they might make it accessible for free through that too, to compete with Microsofts Hotmail in Outlook Express integration.
The main thing is whatever they do they retain their simple search interface. But if they do go the route of a mail service provider then it might be a good idea to investigate closer links with the Mozilla project.
I already suggested the benefits for both Google and mozilla.org for Google to replace their IE Toolbar with an official Google branded Firefox. If they don't want to make their mail service freely available through IMAP or POP3 then they could do what Netscape did in NS 7.x and make their mail servers accessible to their own branded mozilla client. Although it would be nice if Google mail would be based on Thunderbird rather than the suite.
Hotmail is available through Outlook Express, so it'd be nice if Google did something similar without the tie in to MS products.
In W3C specifications a SHOULD is not a MUST (they usually write them uppercase in the specs), so items labelled SHOULD are more of the nice to have things, not essential for standards compliance.
No you're still competing primarily on search (Google's strongpoint) but you're leveraging the trust and brand name (the same name that's got many people installing the Google toolbar for IE) to get people to download a better browser. Therefore moving your customers to a browser not owned by your biggest rival and reducing the chance of their competitor gaining search market shar from you in the future.
If you like this idea (or even if you don't) blog about it and give your views on it. Let as many people see the idea so we can get the pros and cons discussed.
At one time when Netscape was big lazy people never bothered checking their sites would work in IE, now just about every site will work because it has a good market share. Of course I mean lazy people on Windows, people who designed sites under Linux couldn't test on IE back then as wine wasn't as mature and Mac users had their own IE which had a different rendering engine to the Windows one!
These days people who use Windows and write sites have no excuse but ignorance for not testing in Mozilla based browsers, and Google would make the browser a lot better known.
Firebird isn't standards-compliant. For instance, there are many things wrong with slashdot but Firebird doesn't throw errors or warnings, it just renders the page (test system: Firebird 0.7 on Linux 2.4.20). If you wanted standards-compliance, you'd want Google-Amaya, and I doubt any sane person would use that:-).
Well just because it renders a non-standards compliant site does not mean that the browser is not standards compliance. The key is to render as many sites that are out there in the real world while still supporting the standards.
Mozilla has two rendering modes - quirks mode, for 'pea soup' style HTML and standards compliance mode for properly written HTML.
Have a look at View -> Page Info (Mozilla) or Tools -> Page Info (Firebird) to see the rendering mode on each page. Try it with slashdot.org and w3.org
We have now entered a mobius strip of problems when it comes to pushing a new browser. Joe Sixpack wants the page to look exactly like it does with IE.
Your (not you in general, but other/.ers) answer might be "switch banks to one that supports Mozilla" or "don't use [insert_favorite_website] and change to [another_website]".
Well although there's still some sites that don't work with Mozilla (although personally it's rarely I use them) the point is with someone like Google behind Mozilla people will make the effort to get their sites to work because Mozilla's market share would rise.
At one time when Netscape was big lazy people never bothered checking their sites would work in IE, now just about every site will work because it has a good market share.
Longhorn has an accesible API open to all developers. If anything changes, Google can read the docs and recode the toolbar.
That relies on having to trust MS to not play dirty, and when Microsoft wants to take over a market they often play by their own rules.
Even if they keep details of their API fully documented and up to date they can still do things that would make users not want to install the Google toolbar e.g. making the MSN toolbar unremovable to that if you wanted the Google one you'd have to put up with the loss of screenspace of having two toolbars.
If Google get their toolbar users onto an open source browser long before MS launch longhorn they've got a better chance of keeping their users (plus allowing their toolbar users to switch platforms without losing functionality)
That is not the point, the point is that more people have heard of Google than they've heard of Mozilla, Opera or even Netscape.
The idea is, people who downloaded the Google toolbar are a prime audience for a Google browser, that removes the IE tie-in for Google and increases the percentage of standards compliant browser users out there.
Plus Google could bring features from the toolbar that's currently not in Firebird such as PageRank (for some reason a lot of people like to know this info)
The way Google needs to compete is to show their users that there's no need for Microsoft.... Why? Because MS may just do its best to stop the Google toolbar working in IE for Longhorn. Microsoft have already 'innovated' an MSN toolbar that looks very similar to the Google offering.
So instead of offering their official toolbar for IE only (the one for Mozilla is unofficial), start to slowly phase out the Google Toolbar and replace it with the Google Browser which would basically be a Google branded Mozilla Firebird. With all the features that make Firebird great like Tabbed Browsing, with the addition of the Google Toolbar features such as PageRank, etc. All on a cross platform basis.
If people get used to downloading better browsers now, then they won't even notice when the next release of IE starts to reject the Google Toolbar.
The DoS attack will start at 16:09:18 UTC (08:09:18 PST) on February 1, 2004. The worm checks the local system time and date to determine if it should initiate the DoS attack
I'm typing this and the time is currently 14:30UTC.
For those who are interested, it does appear to work in wine, before the news of it reached slashdot, I ran a copy of it in controlled conditions under Wine to see what it would do. It appears to be mainly a spam relay with SCO DOS'ing added as an afterthought.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh I was given wrong info then, when Midland Mainline abolished smoking I read on some news site that GNER was the only one that did this.
Virgin scrapped it a long time ago, GNER can easily offer smoking because all their trains are at least 9 carriages long (they increased the length of their 8 carriage 125's last year), whereas Virgin indruced new trains that were actually shorter than their old ones on the cross country route (5 carriages max)
Because flying on the cheap airlines is not a pleasant experience, I know people who've flown on a cheap airline and have not being allowed to board because they have the wrong type of ID (e.g. they have the old style driving licence that has no photocard) and not even given a refund. Customer service is terrible and the fact is you should not need ID just for a domestic flight.
Also trains run more frequently than planes, so by the time you add the getting from the town centre to the airport, having to check in early, etc it's often quicker overall to just get the train.
Also if you prefer to travel flexibly (not be tied down to travelling on certain services) it's a lot easier to get a flexible ticket for train travel.
But not all of the line is electrified, GNER services from Edinburgh to Aberdeen and Inverness are still run using diesel trains as there's no power lines north of Edinburgh. I suspect this is because the main Scottish rail operatior, ScotRail, doesn't have any plans to introduce electric trains so GNER need to make do as well for this part of the route
That's a coincidence, Thames Trains have nothing to do with GNER which is the company introducing WiFI.
I posted that original article, that was when the GNER service was a trial, now it appears the trial was successful and will be rolled out in the entire fleet.
GNER is the only decent train company in the UK, it's the only one that still offers a smoking carriage, it gives regular travellers a loyalty card like many airlines do, in has a proper restaurant service and I've not had too many problems with their timekeeping.
The only thing I can say bad about them is that they used to sell bottled real ales in the buffet car, but they stopped doing those October last year, now you've got only canned mainstream beers which ain't the same. GNER are usually good at listening to feedback so if you're a regular traveller and miss the guest ales then email them and let them know. Vist www.gner.co.uk and click on the 'contact us' link, then select customer relations.
Why would you want to do that when you can get the cross platform Firefox that doesn't have the inbuilt holes that anything that embeds IE has.
Also IMO Firefox has a nicer interface.
Note: MyIE2 does also support the Gecko engine in recent versions but enabling it isn't obvious and there's a few bugs in the integration.
Looks like he'll be doing the first useful thing in his presidential career...
:)
Giving people a reason to ditch IE and run Firefox!
Still he's not getting my vote, well as I'm English I couldn't anyway!
You can always submit the idea to Google directly?
...
I know they have a feedback email (feedback@google.com, I think?) as well as various forms, etc.
suggestions@google.com is their feedback email.
Source: http://www.google.com/contact/search.html
That is true, I wouldn't expect Google to package up pre-release browsers, however if they did decide on this course of action they could perhaps pay for a few more developers to work on the project, I'm fairly sure Ben and Scott are paid by the foundation but it'd be nice to see others.
I'm looking forward to the smartupdate feature in Firefox and hopefully there'll be enough people to test it to death when it arrives in 0.9 so that we can get a really solid 1.0
Here's what I think the apps need to be successful (fortunately these seemed to be planned for before 1.0):
- The auto update feature for both the mail and browser apps
- Auto disabling of extensions not compatible with the current release
- An installer for Thunderbird
- Common plugins automatically installed (e.g. Flash/java) - optional of course
- Not stealing image associations on windows (already fixed in latest nightlies)
I think Google would rather target a product that people actually use i.e. IE rather than some microsegment
More people would use Mozilla products if they were aware of them and Google has the name to push them. Continuing to depend on IE for their toolbar product sounds like a bad idea when they've got the opportunity to entice people over to a browser that's not written by a company that's currently hostile towards Google.
Of course, Google would still work in IE, just like it does now (unlikely MS would do anything that bad to stop people visiting google.com), so IE users can still happily use Google.
POP is almost useless in a webmail situation, IMAP works well with webmail because it allows you to mark messages as read while keeping them on the server, and move mail around different folders on the server.
If google are serious about free mail services then it probably is more to get Hotmail users away from Hotmail because MS does pose the biggest threat to Google
With Google doing mail, I'm sure they will add IMAP support and be a little more "User Friendly" to us Linux users. (Not to mention No ads !)
They need to make money somehow, so there'll be ads but almost certainly text based ads like there already is on Google.
If they make their mail service accessible via IMAP how will they make money out of it? One method would be to clearly add some advertising text at the end of each message you receive (don't think that'd be popular). However, Google might decide to make IMAP access a premium service, if they decide to make their own branded Firefox/Thunderbird combo they might make it accessible for free through that too, to compete with Microsofts Hotmail in Outlook Express integration.
I already suggested the benefits for both Google and mozilla.org for Google to replace their IE Toolbar with an official Google branded Firefox. If they don't want to make their mail service freely available through IMAP or POP3 then they could do what Netscape did in NS 7.x and make their mail servers accessible to their own branded mozilla client. Although it would be nice if Google mail would be based on Thunderbird rather than the suite.
Hotmail is available through Outlook Express, so it'd be nice if Google did something similar without the tie in to MS products.
In W3C specifications a SHOULD is not a MUST (they usually write them uppercase in the specs), so items labelled SHOULD are more of the nice to have things, not essential for standards compliance.
No you're still competing primarily on search (Google's strongpoint) but you're leveraging the trust and brand name (the same name that's got many people installing the Google toolbar for IE) to get people to download a better browser. Therefore moving your customers to a browser not owned by your biggest rival and reducing the chance of their competitor gaining search market shar from you in the future.
Doing a bit of Googling for people with similar ideas I came across the following blogs:o gleBrowser 7 26.php
http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/07/17/theGo
and http://www.dashes.com/anil/index.php?archives/006
If you like this idea (or even if you don't) blog about it and give your views on it. Let as many people see the idea so we can get the pros and cons discussed.
Of course I mean lazy people on Windows, people who designed sites under Linux couldn't test on IE back then as wine wasn't as mature and Mac users had their own IE which had a different rendering engine to the Windows one!
These days people who use Windows and write sites have no excuse but ignorance for not testing in Mozilla based browsers, and Google would make the browser a lot better known.
Well just because it renders a non-standards compliant site does not mean that the browser is not standards compliance. The key is to render as many sites that are out there in the real world while still supporting the standards.
Mozilla has two rendering modes - quirks mode, for 'pea soup' style HTML and standards compliance mode for properly written HTML.
Have a look at View -> Page Info (Mozilla) or Tools -> Page Info (Firebird) to see the rendering mode on each page. Try it with slashdot.org and w3.org
Your (not you in general, but other
Well although there's still some sites that don't work with Mozilla (although personally it's rarely I use them) the point is with someone like Google behind Mozilla people will make the effort to get their sites to work because Mozilla's market share would rise.
At one time when Netscape was big lazy people never bothered checking their sites would work in IE, now just about every site will work because it has a good market share.
That relies on having to trust MS to not play dirty, and when Microsoft wants to take over a market they often play by their own rules.
Even if they keep details of their API fully documented and up to date they can still do things that would make users not want to install the Google toolbar e.g. making the MSN toolbar unremovable to that if you wanted the Google one you'd have to put up with the loss of screenspace of having two toolbars.
If Google get their toolbar users onto an open source browser long before MS launch longhorn they've got a better chance of keeping their users (plus allowing their toolbar users to switch platforms without losing functionality)
The idea is, people who downloaded the Google toolbar are a prime audience for a Google browser, that removes the IE tie-in for Google and increases the percentage of standards compliant browser users out there.
Plus Google could bring features from the toolbar that's currently not in Firebird such as PageRank (for some reason a lot of people like to know this info)
So instead of offering their official toolbar for IE only (the one for Mozilla is unofficial), start to slowly phase out the Google Toolbar and replace it with the Google Browser which would basically be a Google branded Mozilla Firebird. With all the features that make Firebird great like Tabbed Browsing, with the addition of the Google Toolbar features such as PageRank, etc. All on a cross platform basis.
If people get used to downloading better browsers now, then they won't even notice when the next release of IE starts to reject the Google Toolbar.
Let them know what you think
It's easy, stop selling software and then they won't be in that situation!
Seriously though, this does seem a bit unfair on Microsoft this time.
From this page:
The DoS attack will start at 16:09:18 UTC (08:09:18 PST) on February 1, 2004. The worm checks the local system time and date to determine if it should initiate the DoS attack
I'm typing this and the time is currently 14:30UTC.
For those who are interested, it does appear to work in wine, before the news of it reached slashdot, I ran a copy of it in controlled conditions under Wine to see what it would do. It appears to be mainly a spam relay with SCO DOS'ing added as an afterthought.