I'm surprised nobody has caught the obvious here, that IE8 is gaining ground thanks to a two-pronged strategy. The first is Microsoft pushing IE8 out forcefully to everyone via windows/microsoft update. Even on the server side of things. They rank it as a critical download rather than optional, so if you just have important updates turned on, it will show up all by itself eventually. The second is that Windows 7 and Server 2008 are both gaining momentum as people buy new stuff and companies begin to upgrade their infrastructures. It's a new year which means a new budget and money to spend on replacing dead or dying computers and servers.
All this results in IE8 gaining marketshare. It will end up capturing as much, if not more, of IE7's share over time. There may always be some old holdouts from companies running some crazy in-house web-based app that only works on IE6, but I'm sure there are still NT4 boxen humming away in some dusty server closets somewhere too.
My only beef with IE8 is how the rendering engine destroys some pages. Buttons don't appear, images and text gets cut off, and I'll be damned if the page printing feature doesn't still chop the sides off of pages rather than reformat them to fit the page for printing. MS releases "compatibility" updates for it nearly every week or two, just to get it to render as cleanly (which is relative at this point) as IE7. At many companies I take care of, I have intentionally disabled IE8 from WSUS and unchecked it from Windows Update using the "fuck you don't come back" button due to rendering problems that end up crippling some work-related sites.
"IT departments seem hopelessly caught up in their own inertia"
That may be true in megacorps like J&J but not all IT departments act like this. However, once you have a unified environment, where every workstation is identical and running a trusted OS with trusted apps, and everything is well-documented, you'd be a fool to rock that boat. Management is much simpler in an environment like this, upgrades are usually a snap (hardware, sometimes software) and you have a solid test bed that you can say, without question, will work equally well in a live environment.
Most IT departments should be running XP only, or throw a few Macs in for the mouse-challenged design staff or some Linux boxen for development/hosting. Vista is junk, IT knows it, and nobody that I know of has even considered implementing it yet.
Everyone said "wait for SP1" then it dropped...and nothing really changed. Vista still destroyed the user experience for everyone and ran apps at half the speed while eating a ginormous swap file and thrashing hard drives constantly for no apparent reason. Sure, if the search indexing wasn't so damn busy all the time it would be handy. Prefetch may play into this too, but when your drive is too busy to load apps, it's pointless.
Vista is like Doom3. It was created with some future technology in mind that never really materialized. Well...only with Doom3 eventually it did.
Why am I not surprised that the industry at large isn't embracing another me-too Microsoft knock-off product? To this day I can't name 2 websites that use Silverlight, and one of them is Microsoft themselves.
Xune, Vista, Silverlight. Oh Microsoft, can you please look up "innovation" in the dictionary?
If only that worked for bastard children that are somehow hard wired to rhythmically kick your seat when you're in front of them. The more you ignore them, the more they kick.
You're right about TMO. I keep wondering why every Sidekick revision is stuck on slow data access when it's a nice little data device, but TMO is partly to blame here for not embracing 3G yet. It was nice when it went to using Edge last year, but that's still not good enough.
Well, it's kind of a catch-22 for Comcast and other cable providers. Until they get their improvement in place (every single channel is streamed on demand), they'll keep over compressing channels and pissing off people that are paying a premium. Time Warner is also guilty of this, and if they don't get it right when DirecTV or Dish cuts over to h.264/mpeg4 with a billion HD channels, they're going to lose alot of subscribers.
I know they've been experimenting with the channel on demand technology for awhile now and it's supposed to be working fine. Once it's this way for everyone, which I believe requires a 100% digital transmission (rather than mixed analog which is what they use now), they'll have crazy amounts of bandwidth to pump 1080i channels for everything that broadcasts in high def and won't have to crush it to death with mpeg2.
No, what Microsoft is doing wrong is their implementation. On client desktops it makes sense to drop in a one-piece OS. On the server it makes sense to fragment to allow you to install the core plus daemons. XP had this covered well enough but then they fragmented the hell out of Vista (6 choices of operating systems? n-word please).
True. However, if I wait around for another week or two, hopefully SP3 will finally get released. It includes some new Vista interop stuff so it's not like I could just slipstream 90+ KB's into a disc and have an equivalent.
You forgot to throw in the extra 1+ hours for all 90+ of Microsoft update patches since XP SP3 still hasn't been released. I should know, I do XP Pro installs just about every day. No, I don't do them the integrate-everything-into-an-install-CD way, it won't fit and I'm too lazy. Caching proxy FTW!
Ha! Another Casino Royale fan. It's the little dark dirty place right next to Harrah's isn't it? Played there on my wedding night, it's good times and you usually get a younger / more interesting crowd there.
Slashdot Mirror
Number of people that care: zero. Number of francophiles that may care: estimated to be >=1.
You kids and your fancy high UIDs.
I'm surprised nobody has caught the obvious here, that IE8 is gaining ground thanks to a two-pronged strategy. The first is Microsoft pushing IE8 out forcefully to everyone via windows/microsoft update. Even on the server side of things. They rank it as a critical download rather than optional, so if you just have important updates turned on, it will show up all by itself eventually. The second is that Windows 7 and Server 2008 are both gaining momentum as people buy new stuff and companies begin to upgrade their infrastructures. It's a new year which means a new budget and money to spend on replacing dead or dying computers and servers.
All this results in IE8 gaining marketshare. It will end up capturing as much, if not more, of IE7's share over time. There may always be some old holdouts from companies running some crazy in-house web-based app that only works on IE6, but I'm sure there are still NT4 boxen humming away in some dusty server closets somewhere too.
My only beef with IE8 is how the rendering engine destroys some pages. Buttons don't appear, images and text gets cut off, and I'll be damned if the page printing feature doesn't still chop the sides off of pages rather than reformat them to fit the page for printing. MS releases "compatibility" updates for it nearly every week or two, just to get it to render as cleanly (which is relative at this point) as IE7. At many companies I take care of, I have intentionally disabled IE8 from WSUS and unchecked it from Windows Update using the "fuck you don't come back" button due to rendering problems that end up crippling some work-related sites.
Nvidia owners.
None of the CAD companies we use have certified their apps for Vista. They don't plan on it either.
"IT departments seem hopelessly caught up in their own inertia"
That may be true in megacorps like J&J but not all IT departments act like this. However, once you have a unified environment, where every workstation is identical and running a trusted OS with trusted apps, and everything is well-documented, you'd be a fool to rock that boat. Management is much simpler in an environment like this, upgrades are usually a snap (hardware, sometimes software) and you have a solid test bed that you can say, without question, will work equally well in a live environment.
Most IT departments should be running XP only, or throw a few Macs in for the mouse-challenged design staff or some Linux boxen for development/hosting. Vista is junk, IT knows it, and nobody that I know of has even considered implementing it yet.
Everyone said "wait for SP1" then it dropped...and nothing really changed. Vista still destroyed the user experience for everyone and ran apps at half the speed while eating a ginormous swap file and thrashing hard drives constantly for no apparent reason. Sure, if the search indexing wasn't so damn busy all the time it would be handy. Prefetch may play into this too, but when your drive is too busy to load apps, it's pointless.
Vista is like Doom3. It was created with some future technology in mind that never really materialized. Well...only with Doom3 eventually it did.
You can go ahead and skip 3. Everybody knows it's ??? and 4 is profit.
Wow I actually got marked as a troll? I guess things have changed in my 6 month Slashdot hiatus.
Yay Microsoft, I hope Silverlight catches on?
Too late, it has already been born. Stillborn maybe, but born nonetheless.
Why am I not surprised that the industry at large isn't embracing another me-too Microsoft knock-off product? To this day I can't name 2 websites that use Silverlight, and one of them is Microsoft themselves.
Xune, Vista, Silverlight. Oh Microsoft, can you please look up "innovation" in the dictionary?
Hahah...yeah it's amazing how many people will act friendly and go along with your plans when you press a loaded gun into the small of their backs.
If only that worked for bastard children that are somehow hard wired to rhythmically kick your seat when you're in front of them. The more you ignore them, the more they kick.
As fat as americans are becoming, turning off the heat is a viable option for many. Air conditioning, however, makes up for the difference. :)
That baseball might be a good clue, let's investigate that first.
You're right about TMO. I keep wondering why every Sidekick revision is stuck on slow data access when it's a nice little data device, but TMO is partly to blame here for not embracing 3G yet. It was nice when it went to using Edge last year, but that's still not good enough.
Well, it's kind of a catch-22 for Comcast and other cable providers. Until they get their improvement in place (every single channel is streamed on demand), they'll keep over compressing channels and pissing off people that are paying a premium. Time Warner is also guilty of this, and if they don't get it right when DirecTV or Dish cuts over to h.264/mpeg4 with a billion HD channels, they're going to lose alot of subscribers.
I know they've been experimenting with the channel on demand technology for awhile now and it's supposed to be working fine. Once it's this way for everyone, which I believe requires a 100% digital transmission (rather than mixed analog which is what they use now), they'll have crazy amounts of bandwidth to pump 1080i channels for everything that broadcasts in high def and won't have to crush it to death with mpeg2.
No, what Microsoft is doing wrong is their implementation. On client desktops it makes sense to drop in a one-piece OS. On the server it makes sense to fragment to allow you to install the core plus daemons. XP had this covered well enough but then they fragmented the hell out of Vista (6 choices of operating systems? n-word please).
Here, I was going through your sock drawer and found your /rant tag. Apply it to the end of a post like this next time.
I just thought it was highlights from a Bush speech.
True. However, if I wait around for another week or two, hopefully SP3 will finally get released. It includes some new Vista interop stuff so it's not like I could just slipstream 90+ KB's into a disc and have an equivalent.
You forgot to throw in the extra 1+ hours for all 90+ of Microsoft update patches since XP SP3 still hasn't been released. I should know, I do XP Pro installs just about every day. No, I don't do them the integrate-everything-into-an-install-CD way, it won't fit and I'm too lazy. Caching proxy FTW!
That was from 300. Say hello to that friendly grub worm that lives under your rock with you.
More pages = more adspace. More adspace = more potential revenue. It's not hard to see the strategy here.
Ha! Another Casino Royale fan. It's the little dark dirty place right next to Harrah's isn't it? Played there on my wedding night, it's good times and you usually get a younger / more interesting crowd there.
"90% of the movies I rent aren't available yet in HD, so "meh"."
Don't worry dude. Panty Party 29 and Girls Gone Wild in Lower Mongolia 14 are coming to Blu-ray soon.