Did I misunderstand "If every song you hear through your PC is streamed, my guess is it would choke internet more than the current BitTorrent traffic"? Sounded like you were talking about additional bandwidth requirements, although you didn't specifically limit it to home users.
It doesn't cost $3000. It happened to a series of domains a company I worked for owned.. a squatter registered a bunch of similar sounding domains and started trying to get us to pay him money. Unluckily for him our CEO was an ex lawyer... ICANN awarded us every domain without question in about 3 weeks and as far as I know it didn't cost us a penny (in fact we started legal action against the squatter at the same time and it cost him a hell of a lot instead).
What's the procedure for doing this? Do you have to have a legitimate trademark claim, or can you do it for any random domain being used by a sleazeball?
I ask, because I've collected a database of thousands of domain names that are owned by spammers (even worse than squatters!), and I would dearly love to see all of them go away, but I have no idea how to go about making it happen. I'm assuming the whois contact information on many of them is bogus, which violates ICANN policy.
I'm having a hard time seeing that as an argument that Firefox changed computing. Firefox is an end-user application. Even in the darkest days of IE dominance, end users could choose from several browsers that worked decently enough.
There were several browsers that worked decently enough for most sites, but things like online banking were quite often inaccessible to the average user. Since the average user is only dimly aware of what a browser is, the idea of switching back and forth between browsers is just too much for them, and IETab wouldn't be an option either (they don't know it exists and wouldn't understand how to configure it).
It's because of Firefox's increasing popularity, both among the general public and among web developers, that these IE-only sites getting updated to work in non-IE browsers. They didn't get fixed because of Opera or Safari, they got fixed because of Firefox.
Even for web developers, better compliance with standards hasn't changed things that much. Professional web designers still have to make sure everything works in IE6.
This is true now, but it won't be in two years. Some sites have already dropped IE6 support; others are warning their users that they soon will. Within two years, IE6 will be a distant memory, and yes, that's because of Firefox. When Firefox hit 10% market share and looked like the numbers were going to continue to climb, Microsoft sat up and took notice. They started working on fixing Internet Explorer, and adopted the attitude that they're not in a dominant position anymore and they need to play nice in order to catch up. That's why we have IE8 today, and why it doesn't suck ass.
And yet I still see professionally-done pages that don't render correctly in Linux Firefox. dominos.com is unusable under Linux Firefox, for example. Whether that's a bug in the page or Firefox or Flash or Firefox's embedding of Flash, it shows that web standards haven't changed the basic rule of cross-browser rendering: if the developers are committed to testing and tweaking their code against a browser, then it will work with that browser. Otherwise, it's a crapshoot.
Yes, it's a Flash problem. That's why HTML5 is so important: by making the things that web developers want to do available as part of HTML (with CSS and JavaScript), they'll be able to build the kind of sites they want without using Flash. It will take a few years before this becomes a reality for sites like dominos.com, but unless Adobe and/or Microsoft throw a ton of money at them, it will happen (Microsoft would like them to switch to Silverlight, of course).
So, given the continuing need to make everything work under IE6, it seems like the only thing that web standards changed is that there are now four or five decent rendering engines instead of two or three. You still can't be a web designer without being a student of browser quirks. Even if you attributed the entire HTML/CSS/Javascript standardization phenomenon to Firefox, it still wouldn't qualify as one of the top ten apps that "changed computing."
IE6 will be dead within two years, and you won't have to develop for it at all anymore. Yes, there are four decent rendering engines (Gecko, WebKit, Trident, Presto), but there are also ACID tests from the Web Standards Project that help browser developers find and eliminate bugs that cause compatibility issues. The formation of WHATWG has pulled the W3C back into reality, and HTML5 is being crafted by people who really know what they're doing and want to make the web better for everyone (Hixie rocks). Not everything is totally compatible between browsers today, but that's the goal everyone is shooting for, and we have tools in place to make it a realistic goal.
We're not there yet, but a few years ago it was difficult to imagine every major browser being able to correctly render something as complicated as the ACID2 test, and today ev
Buying an expensive T1 for reliability only makes sense for servers. The normal workstations should be connected to a cheap DSL or Cable line.
When the entire business relies on online connectivity, paying for more reliable service is worth it. Obviously many businesses can afford to go without Internet access for a day or two and it's no big deal, so cheaper service makes a lot more sense for them.
You were talking about the additional bandwidth requirements from home users choking the Internet, and that's true. I simply wanted to point out that business usage is already a huge problem, for a slightly different reason.
Let's say you've got 24 employees working at your company. You've got a T1 line, but the only thing it's being used for is e-mail and a little light web surfing, so the bandwidth is sufficient.
Now half the staff starts streaming Internet radio. Your T1 line is now completely saturated, so you have to get another one. This doubles your monthly bill!
Sure, you could get a cable modem instead and save a bundle, but cable modems are unreliable compared to a T1. You could keep one T1 and add a cable modem, but your one part-time IT guy doesn't know how to set up the network to route Internet radio over the cable modem while keeping everything else on the T1. He explains to you, using a lot of technical-sounding words you don't understand, why it would be very difficult to get that to work reliably, and even though it's theoretically possible, it would require a lot of hands-on babysitting to make sure it kept working the way it's supposed to.
So what do you do? You either cough up the dough for a second T1 line, or you institute a company-wide no-Internet-radio policy, which will make the staff think the IT guy's only source of joy in life is the unhappiness of others.
(Internet radio is usually streamed over standard HTTP on port 80. Because everybody keeps changing stations, it's not practical to keep track of every stream everyone might want to listen to and add static routes for those IPs. The streaming URLs may not have any sort of identifiable pattern, so the only way you can identify streaming audio is by MIME type, which isn't available until after the request is made. You should be able to set up a proxy server that would check the MIME type of every URL requested, and hack it to reroute through the cable modem if it matches, but that's an enormous pain in the ass. You could route all HTTP traffic over the cable modem, but then you need some sort of failover in case the cable modem goes down. All of this is possible, but it's not simple.)
Still one should be aware that in many places (like Texas) your "Phone Call" has to be a collect phone call through some third party.... I am not entirely clear why so many states like Texas have decided that it is a great idea to only give people the right to a COLLECT phone call to a LAND LINE ONLY in this day and age, but that is the way it is.
Because the third party you mentioned, which is owned by somebody who used to play golf with the politicians who came up with this scheme, is making an assload of money on those phone calls, and they're sending a percentage of the profits to the jail. The jail would stand to lose a lot of revenue if they changed anything.
The cell tower probably has batteries, and might have a small generator if you're lucky. In an extended power outage, once the generator runs out of fuel, that's it, no more cell phone service - they're not going to send somebody out to fill up the generator and restart it until after the emergency has passed.
The CO will definitely have at least one generator, likely extra fuel stored on site, and contracts with multiple oil companies to provide additional fuel in the event of an extended outage. They also have staff who regularly work on-site, who will easily be able to monitor things and deal with any problems. As you mentioned, they'll also have redundancy, including redundant lines to the local 911 emergency call center.
If the land line is still connected, 911 service should still work, even if you're not paying for phone service. As you said, 911 service from a land line is more reliable than a cell phone (911 from my cell phone goes to a regional call center; 911 from my land line goes directly to the police station two blocks from my house). Corded phones still work during a power outage, too.
So that's my advice. Leave it hooked up. Make a test call to 911 to make sure it works; DO NOT HANG UP until you've explained to the operator that you're testing the line and they're convinced there is no real emergency.
If it doesn't work, find out whether it's supposed to work. You might be out of luck, but if it's supposed to work, ask the phone company to fix it.
Some of us have broader tastes. Please understand that while your solution works for you, it does not work well for us. Our solution may not be better for you than what you're already using, but it would probably work just as well, once you got used to it. (Of course, you have your system, and switching to a new system could involve a lot of tedious work, so if there's no benefit to you, you shouldn't switch.)
I prefer Microsoft's model. They only charge for major upgrades (like XP to Vista) not minor ones. IMHO Apple should do the same and only charge if the user jumps from 10.x to 11.x - all other upgrades should be free of charge.
If they weren't major upgrades, then new applications would still work on the old versions. Apple does not charge for minor updates; upgrading from 10.5 to 10.5.1, 10.5.2, 10.5.3, 10.5.4, 10.5.5, 10.5.6 and 10.5.7 are all free. Of course that doesn't include the security patches released between versions (although each version upgrade includes some security patches as well).
What's confusing you is that Apple's marketing department has decided to call these versions 10.4, 10.5 and 10.5.7 instead of simply 4.0, 5.0 and 5.7, which would make them sound more like major upgrades.
It's important to get the implementation of HTML5 video working well first. I didn't mean to suggest that content providers should immediately begin switching all their content over; you're right that we're not ready for that.
Once the implementation is solid, and good codecs are in place, then content providers can start offering two versions of their content. Users can choose what works best for them, and once the benefit becomes clear, developers will work on improving HTML5 video.
Then we'll start seeing things like YouTube Podcasts, and people will come up with other cool things that couldn't easily be done with Flash video.
2004's OS10.2 refuses to run new software. I like machines that last ten years(and save money) and apparently Macs don't
Two points: 1) Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" was released in October 2003, so your "2004's OS10.2" isn't quite right.
2) Rather than the OS refusing to run new software, it's actually the applications that are refusing to run on the old OS. This includes both Apple applications and third-party applications (for example, both iTunes 8 and Firefox 3 require at least Mac OS X 10.4).
As Apple adds new features to their OS, developers start using the new features. At some point, it becomes easier to require the new features than to make the application work without them. I understand that if Apple would stop adding new features, or slow it down to Microsoft's pace, then you wouldn't have the problem you do. Too bad.
You know, a system that manages files? Like media files?
Only if your filesystem understands the kind of metadata that ID3 tags offer, and searching is as efficient as querying a database. For example, if I do a search for "Tchaikovsky", I want to find everything he composed, regardless of who performed it or the title of the album it's on. And yes, that includes the first nine tracks of Duke Ellington's Three Suites (but not the rest of that album).
Oh, your filesystem only understands filenames, and a hierarchical directory structure where you've organized it by artist and album? Sure, that was fine ten years ago, but we have a better system now.
While I am happy to see that Mozilla and Firefox are setting the standards, let me remind readers that previous evaluations have found the Theora encoders inferior compared to contemporary video codecs. In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.
The important thing is that we move toward open standards, away from proprietary solutions, because open standards allow us to do more cool stuff with them.
Remember RealPlayer? Remember all the bitching about what a piece of crap it was? People had to have it, even though it sucked, because a lot of content was only available in RealAudio format. Today, RealPlayer is all but gone, and you can play the same type of content using whatever software you like. Why? Because when Apple added Podcast support to iTunes, Podcasts suddenly became hugely popular, and virtually all of the content providers that used to offer only RealAudio now offer Podcasts instead. This means that users are free to choose whatever software they want, and competition will drive the software to improve.
In the same way, if web sites move away from Flash video players to using HTML5's video tag, it will mean users will no longer be dependent on Adobe's plugin to access the content. Unfortunately we still have patent issues to deal with; Ogg is unencumbered, but better quality codecs will be supported by most browsers, and if we can get content providers to get used to the idea of making their video content freely available (instead of wrapping it up in Flash), there can be competition among codecs too.
It's not a perfect world, but it's one step closer.
Now that IE8 is out, it is perfectly reasonable to tell IE6 users to upgrade. You don't have to tell them to switch to a different browser (Firefox, etc.), which many users aren't comfortable with (they'll have two different browser icons on their desktop, and one of them doesn't have the familiar blue "e" they've always used). IE8 isn't great, it's a couple years behind the curve, but it passes ACID2 and they're at least trying to fix the bugs. From a developer perspective, it's another browser you have to test for, but it's not a steaming pile of crap. There's absolutely no reason why IE6 users shouldn't upgrade, unless they need to use intranet or vendor sites that break in IE8.
Having said that, as many others have pointed out, not everyone has the choice, either because they do need to access other sites that only work in IE6, or because their IT department is dumb. Either way, be aware that some people won't be able to switch to a better browser.
IE8 doesn't have a "render like IE6 would" option; it only has a "render like IE7 would" option. If companies are still forcing IE6, it's quite possible that their intranet sites don't work in IE7, which means IE8's compatibility mode won't work either.
Also, I've heard that there are some things that work in IE7 that don't work in IE8's IE7 compatibility mode. I haven't been doing web development for awhile, so I don't know what things these might be.
Standards have nothing to do with it. Browsers are supported on the basis of market share, nothing else. In other words, there's no chance that a sizeable number of people would be left without a working browser. Maybe we'd all be stuck with IE6 (and slightly crappy IE6 renderer-clones on Linux, like we have OpenOffice and KOffice for MS Office docs) -- but what would have been radically different about that?
Standards aren't important to end users, but they're critical to developers. Standards provide documentation. Microsoft's documentation for Internet Explorer was incomplete, and IE6 was full of bugs. If Microsoft's documentation for IE6 was complete and the implementation matched the documentation, then that could have been the standard, but that wasn't the case.
An encrypted config file can be considered to be quite similar to DRM. It won't work. If FF can read it somehow, then anyone else can read it by looking at how FF does it. It's even easier because FF is open source.
With that said, an open, unencrypted system that allows updates to be automatically added, but gives you a list of which ones were added since you last started FF would be very similar, without making companies try to work around it.
Except that in order for Firefox to give you a list of which add-ons have been added since the last time you started FF, it has to keep track of a list of which add-ons were installed the last time you started FF. All Microsoft has to do is append their add-on to this list, and the next time you launch FF, it'll think you already had this add-on installed before, the user has already been notified, etc. That was the reason for the encryption suggestion, but you're right, if Firefox can edit the encrypted list, anybody else can edit the encrypted list too.
Well, to be fair, Firefox is significant precisely because of its success: were it not for Firefox, we might all be stuck using IE6 today. Firefox's growing popularity among web developers contributed to web developers designing their sites to work correctly in a browser that attempts to support W3C standards. Firefox's growing popularity among users (which wouldn't have been possible if most popular web sites didn't work in it already) led users to put pressure on the remaining companies whose sites were still broken. This change is what made Safari, Chrome, and indeed IE8 possible; if it weren't for Firefox's influence on the web, these other browsers wouldn't be able to display many sites correctly.
Of course, the other reason we have IE8 today is that Microsoft restarted IE development after Firefox gained significant marketshare. They're a few years behind, but they're trying to catch up.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, this is true.
However, if their whois information is fake, maybe that rule would apply instead?
Can anybody else think of a fun thing to do with several thousand spammer domains?
a decently hardened copied of XP is more than sufficient for the minimal work that an ATM has to do.
It's the precise nature of the "more than" that has us worried.
Did I misunderstand "If every song you hear through your PC is streamed, my guess is it would choke internet more than the current BitTorrent traffic"? Sounded like you were talking about additional bandwidth requirements, although you didn't specifically limit it to home users.
It doesn't cost $3000. It happened to a series of domains a company I worked for owned.. a squatter registered a bunch of similar sounding domains and started trying to get us to pay him money. Unluckily for him our CEO was an ex lawyer... ICANN awarded us every domain without question in about 3 weeks and as far as I know it didn't cost us a penny (in fact we started legal action against the squatter at the same time and it cost him a hell of a lot instead).
What's the procedure for doing this? Do you have to have a legitimate trademark claim, or can you do it for any random domain being used by a sleazeball?
I ask, because I've collected a database of thousands of domain names that are owned by spammers (even worse than squatters!), and I would dearly love to see all of them go away, but I have no idea how to go about making it happen. I'm assuming the whois contact information on many of them is bogus, which violates ICANN policy.
I'm having a hard time seeing that as an argument that Firefox changed computing. Firefox is an end-user application. Even in the darkest days of IE dominance, end users could choose from several browsers that worked decently enough.
There were several browsers that worked decently enough for most sites, but things like online banking were quite often inaccessible to the average user. Since the average user is only dimly aware of what a browser is, the idea of switching back and forth between browsers is just too much for them, and IETab wouldn't be an option either (they don't know it exists and wouldn't understand how to configure it).
It's because of Firefox's increasing popularity, both among the general public and among web developers, that these IE-only sites getting updated to work in non-IE browsers. They didn't get fixed because of Opera or Safari, they got fixed because of Firefox.
Even for web developers, better compliance with standards hasn't changed things that much. Professional web designers still have to make sure everything works in IE6.
This is true now, but it won't be in two years. Some sites have already dropped IE6 support; others are warning their users that they soon will. Within two years, IE6 will be a distant memory, and yes, that's because of Firefox. When Firefox hit 10% market share and looked like the numbers were going to continue to climb, Microsoft sat up and took notice. They started working on fixing Internet Explorer, and adopted the attitude that they're not in a dominant position anymore and they need to play nice in order to catch up. That's why we have IE8 today, and why it doesn't suck ass.
And yet I still see professionally-done pages that don't render correctly in Linux Firefox. dominos.com is unusable under Linux Firefox, for example. Whether that's a bug in the page or Firefox or Flash or Firefox's embedding of Flash, it shows that web standards haven't changed the basic rule of cross-browser rendering: if the developers are committed to testing and tweaking their code against a browser, then it will work with that browser. Otherwise, it's a crapshoot.
Yes, it's a Flash problem. That's why HTML5 is so important: by making the things that web developers want to do available as part of HTML (with CSS and JavaScript), they'll be able to build the kind of sites they want without using Flash. It will take a few years before this becomes a reality for sites like dominos.com, but unless Adobe and/or Microsoft throw a ton of money at them, it will happen (Microsoft would like them to switch to Silverlight, of course).
So, given the continuing need to make everything work under IE6, it seems like the only thing that web standards changed is that there are now four or five decent rendering engines instead of two or three. You still can't be a web designer without being a student of browser quirks. Even if you attributed the entire HTML/CSS/Javascript standardization phenomenon to Firefox, it still wouldn't qualify as one of the top ten apps that "changed computing."
IE6 will be dead within two years, and you won't have to develop for it at all anymore. Yes, there are four decent rendering engines (Gecko, WebKit, Trident, Presto), but there are also ACID tests from the Web Standards Project that help browser developers find and eliminate bugs that cause compatibility issues. The formation of WHATWG has pulled the W3C back into reality, and HTML5 is being crafted by people who really know what they're doing and want to make the web better for everyone (Hixie rocks). Not everything is totally compatible between browsers today, but that's the goal everyone is shooting for, and we have tools in place to make it a realistic goal.
We're not there yet, but a few years ago it was difficult to imagine every major browser being able to correctly render something as complicated as the ACID2 test, and today ev
Buying an expensive T1 for reliability only makes sense for servers. The normal workstations should be connected to a cheap DSL or Cable line.
When the entire business relies on online connectivity, paying for more reliable service is worth it. Obviously many businesses can afford to go without Internet access for a day or two and it's no big deal, so cheaper service makes a lot more sense for them.
Sorry, I got a little sidetracked. ;-)
You were talking about the additional bandwidth requirements from home users choking the Internet, and that's true. I simply wanted to point out that business usage is already a huge problem, for a slightly different reason.
I mentioned using a proxy server. How does that magically solve the problem?
Let's say you've got 24 employees working at your company. You've got a T1 line, but the only thing it's being used for is e-mail and a little light web surfing, so the bandwidth is sufficient.
Now half the staff starts streaming Internet radio. Your T1 line is now completely saturated, so you have to get another one. This doubles your monthly bill!
Sure, you could get a cable modem instead and save a bundle, but cable modems are unreliable compared to a T1. You could keep one T1 and add a cable modem, but your one part-time IT guy doesn't know how to set up the network to route Internet radio over the cable modem while keeping everything else on the T1. He explains to you, using a lot of technical-sounding words you don't understand, why it would be very difficult to get that to work reliably, and even though it's theoretically possible, it would require a lot of hands-on babysitting to make sure it kept working the way it's supposed to.
So what do you do? You either cough up the dough for a second T1 line, or you institute a company-wide no-Internet-radio policy, which will make the staff think the IT guy's only source of joy in life is the unhappiness of others.
(Internet radio is usually streamed over standard HTTP on port 80. Because everybody keeps changing stations, it's not practical to keep track of every stream everyone might want to listen to and add static routes for those IPs. The streaming URLs may not have any sort of identifiable pattern, so the only way you can identify streaming audio is by MIME type, which isn't available until after the request is made. You should be able to set up a proxy server that would check the MIME type of every URL requested, and hack it to reroute through the cable modem if it matches, but that's an enormous pain in the ass. You could route all HTTP traffic over the cable modem, but then you need some sort of failover in case the cable modem goes down. All of this is possible, but it's not simple.)
Still one should be aware that in many places (like Texas) your "Phone Call" has to be a collect phone call through some third party.... I am not entirely clear why so many states like Texas have decided that it is a great idea to only give people the right to a COLLECT phone call to a LAND LINE ONLY in this day and age, but that is the way it is.
Because the third party you mentioned, which is owned by somebody who used to play golf with the politicians who came up with this scheme, is making an assload of money on those phone calls, and they're sending a percentage of the profits to the jail. The jail would stand to lose a lot of revenue if they changed anything.
The cell tower probably has batteries, and might have a small generator if you're lucky. In an extended power outage, once the generator runs out of fuel, that's it, no more cell phone service - they're not going to send somebody out to fill up the generator and restart it until after the emergency has passed.
The CO will definitely have at least one generator, likely extra fuel stored on site, and contracts with multiple oil companies to provide additional fuel in the event of an extended outage. They also have staff who regularly work on-site, who will easily be able to monitor things and deal with any problems. As you mentioned, they'll also have redundancy, including redundant lines to the local 911 emergency call center.
Actually, you raise a few good points.
If the land line is still connected, 911 service should still work, even if you're not paying for phone service. As you said, 911 service from a land line is more reliable than a cell phone (911 from my cell phone goes to a regional call center; 911 from my land line goes directly to the police station two blocks from my house). Corded phones still work during a power outage, too.
So that's my advice. Leave it hooked up. Make a test call to 911 to make sure it works; DO NOT HANG UP until you've explained to the operator that you're testing the line and they're convinced there is no real emergency.
If it doesn't work, find out whether it's supposed to work. You might be out of luck, but if it's supposed to work, ask the phone company to fix it.
Some of us have broader tastes. Please understand that while your solution works for you, it does not work well for us. Our solution may not be better for you than what you're already using, but it would probably work just as well, once you got used to it. (Of course, you have your system, and switching to a new system could involve a lot of tedious work, so if there's no benefit to you, you shouldn't switch.)
I prefer Microsoft's model. They only charge for major upgrades (like XP to Vista) not minor ones. IMHO Apple should do the same and only charge if the user jumps from 10.x to 11.x - all other upgrades should be free of charge.
If they weren't major upgrades, then new applications would still work on the old versions. Apple does not charge for minor updates; upgrading from 10.5 to 10.5.1, 10.5.2, 10.5.3, 10.5.4, 10.5.5, 10.5.6 and 10.5.7 are all free. Of course that doesn't include the security patches released between versions (although each version upgrade includes some security patches as well).
What's confusing you is that Apple's marketing department has decided to call these versions 10.4, 10.5 and 10.5.7 instead of simply 4.0, 5.0 and 5.7, which would make them sound more like major upgrades.
It's important to get the implementation of HTML5 video working well first. I didn't mean to suggest that content providers should immediately begin switching all their content over; you're right that we're not ready for that.
Once the implementation is solid, and good codecs are in place, then content providers can start offering two versions of their content. Users can choose what works best for them, and once the benefit becomes clear, developers will work on improving HTML5 video.
Then we'll start seeing things like YouTube Podcasts, and people will come up with other cool things that couldn't easily be done with Flash video.
2004's OS10.2 refuses to run new software. I like machines that last ten years(and save money) and apparently Macs don't
Two points:
1) Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" was released in October 2003, so your "2004's OS10.2" isn't quite right.
2) Rather than the OS refusing to run new software, it's actually the applications that are refusing to run on the old OS. This includes both Apple applications and third-party applications (for example, both iTunes 8 and Firefox 3 require at least Mac OS X 10.4).
As Apple adds new features to their OS, developers start using the new features. At some point, it becomes easier to require the new features than to make the application work without them. I understand that if Apple would stop adding new features, or slow it down to Microsoft's pace, then you wouldn't have the problem you do. Too bad.
You know what else makes a good media manager?
A filesystem.
You know, a system that manages files? Like media files?
Only if your filesystem understands the kind of metadata that ID3 tags offer, and searching is as efficient as querying a database. For example, if I do a search for "Tchaikovsky", I want to find everything he composed, regardless of who performed it or the title of the album it's on. And yes, that includes the first nine tracks of Duke Ellington's Three Suites (but not the rest of that album).
Oh, your filesystem only understands filenames, and a hierarchical directory structure where you've organized it by artist and album? Sure, that was fine ten years ago, but we have a better system now.
While I am happy to see that Mozilla and Firefox are setting the standards, let me remind readers that previous evaluations have found the Theora encoders inferior compared to contemporary video codecs. In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.
The important thing is that we move toward open standards, away from proprietary solutions, because open standards allow us to do more cool stuff with them.
Remember RealPlayer? Remember all the bitching about what a piece of crap it was? People had to have it, even though it sucked, because a lot of content was only available in RealAudio format. Today, RealPlayer is all but gone, and you can play the same type of content using whatever software you like. Why? Because when Apple added Podcast support to iTunes, Podcasts suddenly became hugely popular, and virtually all of the content providers that used to offer only RealAudio now offer Podcasts instead. This means that users are free to choose whatever software they want, and competition will drive the software to improve.
In the same way, if web sites move away from Flash video players to using HTML5's video tag, it will mean users will no longer be dependent on Adobe's plugin to access the content. Unfortunately we still have patent issues to deal with; Ogg is unencumbered, but better quality codecs will be supported by most browsers, and if we can get content providers to get used to the idea of making their video content freely available (instead of wrapping it up in Flash), there can be competition among codecs too.
It's not a perfect world, but it's one step closer.
Yes, absolutely.
Now that IE8 is out, it is perfectly reasonable to tell IE6 users to upgrade. You don't have to tell them to switch to a different browser (Firefox, etc.), which many users aren't comfortable with (they'll have two different browser icons on their desktop, and one of them doesn't have the familiar blue "e" they've always used). IE8 isn't great, it's a couple years behind the curve, but it passes ACID2 and they're at least trying to fix the bugs. From a developer perspective, it's another browser you have to test for, but it's not a steaming pile of crap. There's absolutely no reason why IE6 users shouldn't upgrade, unless they need to use intranet or vendor sites that break in IE8.
Having said that, as many others have pointed out, not everyone has the choice, either because they do need to access other sites that only work in IE6, or because their IT department is dumb. Either way, be aware that some people won't be able to switch to a better browser.
IE8 doesn't have a "render like IE6 would" option; it only has a "render like IE7 would" option. If companies are still forcing IE6, it's quite possible that their intranet sites don't work in IE7, which means IE8's compatibility mode won't work either.
Also, I've heard that there are some things that work in IE7 that don't work in IE8's IE7 compatibility mode. I haven't been doing web development for awhile, so I don't know what things these might be.
Here's a Safari screen shot showing the comment reply box, which used to work fine but has been broken for awhile now.
Standards have nothing to do with it. Browsers are supported on the basis of market share, nothing else. In other words, there's no chance that a sizeable number of people would be left without a working browser. Maybe we'd all be stuck with IE6 (and slightly crappy IE6 renderer-clones on Linux, like we have OpenOffice and KOffice for MS Office docs) -- but what would have been radically different about that?
Standards aren't important to end users, but they're critical to developers. Standards provide documentation. Microsoft's documentation for Internet Explorer was incomplete, and IE6 was full of bugs. If Microsoft's documentation for IE6 was complete and the implementation matched the documentation, then that could have been the standard, but that wasn't the case.
An encrypted config file can be considered to be quite similar to DRM. It won't work. If FF can read it somehow, then anyone else can read it by looking at how FF does it. It's even easier because FF is open source.
With that said, an open, unencrypted system that allows updates to be automatically added, but gives you a list of which ones were added since you last started FF would be very similar, without making companies try to work around it.
Except that in order for Firefox to give you a list of which add-ons have been added since the last time you started FF, it has to keep track of a list of which add-ons were installed the last time you started FF. All Microsoft has to do is append their add-on to this list, and the next time you launch FF, it'll think you already had this add-on installed before, the user has already been notified, etc. That was the reason for the encryption suggestion, but you're right, if Firefox can edit the encrypted list, anybody else can edit the encrypted list too.
HyperCard also inspired AppleScript and Visual Basic.
I still have a boxed copy sitting on my shelf.
Well, to be fair, Firefox is significant precisely because of its success: were it not for Firefox, we might all be stuck using IE6 today. Firefox's growing popularity among web developers contributed to web developers designing their sites to work correctly in a browser that attempts to support W3C standards. Firefox's growing popularity among users (which wouldn't have been possible if most popular web sites didn't work in it already) led users to put pressure on the remaining companies whose sites were still broken. This change is what made Safari, Chrome, and indeed IE8 possible; if it weren't for Firefox's influence on the web, these other browsers wouldn't be able to display many sites correctly.
Of course, the other reason we have IE8 today is that Microsoft restarted IE development after Firefox gained significant marketshare. They're a few years behind, but they're trying to catch up.