The Macs go to graphic designers, so they need the CPU and non-shared video. Except for developer PCs, the CPU is not a big issue, but 3GHz is just about as low as they come now days.
And many other custom Windows toolkits work great (example: Firefox).
A Windows program is supposed to read certain configuration entries from the registry: window colors, font, etc. The good custom toolkits do this and provide reasonable desktop look-n-feel.
The problem with X desktops is that there's no central configuration for these settings, and thus different toolkits present different enough looks that it is visually jarring.
No. Real Numbers state the cheapest PowerMac is $2000 and that's what being bought.
Shared video is absolutely not a problem for business PCs, and regardless real video is a cheap upgrade. Furthermore, I explained exactly why Minis are not being purchased, if you bother to read that far. A $550 PC might be junk, but it is fast, functional junk and that's what we need. Finally, this is not a game we're playing, this is real money being spent.
Why not just go MacTel when I buy my next PC in '06 or '07?
Sure, but only if "MacTel" allows Apple to provide a model lineup of the depth and cheapness of WinTel or LinTel.
The plain fact from a corporate purchasing standpoint is that one can get 4 Desktop PCs for the price of one PowerMac. Mac adovcates are saying all the time that the price difference is a myth, but those are real numbers from real POs.
Oranges to Apples comparision? Sure. But Apple doesn't sell the Orange, they only sell a couple different kinds of Apples. (There's iMacs which would require us to throw out perfectly good ADC flat panels, and there's the Mini which isn't performance-competitive with the G4 tower it replaces, and is hardly cheap for what you get by the time you put RAM into it.)
Now if a commodity Intel board allows Apple to sell something like a commodity Intel computer, maybe you have a winner on the corporate desktop. But I tend to believe that Apple just chooses not to compete in that space.
Good discussion. My underlying assumption (which I believe the graph backs up) is that Windows OS penetration is primarily driven by PC turnover and not in-place "upgrades". (With rare exceptions like Win95 or MacOSX.) And PC turnover is fairly constant. The idea that Longhorn will not be widely deployed is simply impossible.
Anyway, a lot of this PC OS debate is tangantal to the main point. IE7 will be a big deal with or without Longhorn, and webmasters will for the most part be quick to test and support it.
Ah, now I've definitely got you.
Do you? I will admit that Office 97 was foolhardly and would have broken MS's office suite monopoly if there was any decent competition at the time.
Otherwise, we aren't talking about "major compatibility problems", but minor or isolated ones. Will those happen with IE7? Certain some sites will have minor breakage. But they will be fixed and the world will move on. There will be no massive backlash.
Try reading what I actually wrote, for a change. Nobody was talking about IE7-only sites.
Joe User saw the shell "entirely overhauled" with Win2000 and he and 80% of his neighbors said "fuck that".
First, Joe User never saw the Windows 2000 shell because it was marketed as a business OS. Second, the shell was not overhauled, it was largely identical to Win98's.
What the hell are you talking about? WinME sold less copies (and had less copies pre-installed) than Win95, Win98, Win2000, and WinXP
Can't be bothered to prove it, but I'm fairly certain that ME PCs vastly outsold 2000 Professional PCs in the period when they were both current OEM products. Are you claming there was big drop-off in consumer PC sales during this period? Win2K never had more than 20% of the market.
But in case you haven't been following the figures, new computer sales are some of the lowest ever seen over the last decade.
And even if growth is slowing in a mature market, it doesn't mean that turnover is declining. In fact the exceptionally low prices will only accelerate new PCs coming on line.
The equipment Joe User has does just what he wants it to do; he doesn't want to go through yet another upgrade cycle
I bet you said the exact same thing the last 5 times MS released a new OS too.
Longhorn isn't going to take anything by storm. And by extension, neither will IE7.
Maybe you've forgotten about that monopoly? 90% of new PCs will come with Longhorn and IE7, and your factually impotent handwaving ain't going to change that fact.
Hate to make a me-too post, but I think your analysis of HP is spot-on. They've become a commodity marketing company that is unfortunatly still thinking and staffed like a top-tier engineering and sales company (in other words, like IBM). Sadly, it wouldn't suprise me to see HP come out of this less with less than 25% of the employees they had a few years ago.
Websites can't look good on modern browsers and be just barely readable on older ones (which is what happens if you use modern CSS techniques).
Maybe a few years ago, but what I'm seeing is that 99% of the users are "Version 6 or greater", and there's significantly more customer pressure for sites to display on smartphones, etc than on old v4 browsers.
Hmm. I would have assumed that the labor laws in the UK were much stronger than in the US. There really are cases where someone could be denied their paycheck?
any sort of law in the US these days, it's because it's stacked even further in favour of megacorps
Generally true, especially down South. But getting paid for hours worked would be nearly always be slam-dunk for an employee.
[60%] sure as hell isn't enough of a lead to dictate much of anything.
Even Apple's 3% marketshare is enough to dictate widescale Safari support, so this argument fails it. Some site is going to ignore 40% of the market? Please.
(from Joe User's perspective) appears to be another version of XP
From Joe User's perspective the shell will be entirely overhauled == New OS.
I'd say it's probably fair to assume that Longhorn is going to have the lowest adoption rate of all MS OS's,
I'd say that the adoption rate of MS OSes is determined almost entirely by the rate of PC turnover. ME didn't sell worse than any of the others. More wishful thinking at best.
The Win2K market share has been almost completely unaffected by the arrival of WinXP
Yeah. It seems that NT4/2K transitioned on one axis and 98/XP transitioned on another. Makes sense if you've been in Windows environments for a while.
then that suggests that the adoption of WinXP was only around half as fast as its predecessors.
No. the graph shows that it took about 3 years for 98, 98SE, and 98ME (which I believe is how it reported itself) to gain 55% marketshare, and it took about 3 years for XP to do the same.
Please think about what the figures in that graph represent for a minute.
I have. The obvious conclusion is that the PC turnover is remarkably constant, even in an economic recession. Now I won't deny that XP had it's stability appeal over 98, but there's simply no data to conclude that people will stop buying new PCs because Longhorn doesn't have WinFS or whatever. The flashy UI and normal upgrade-bait will be there, as will that very large group of old life-support W2K deployments.
Furthermore, it is quite possible that MS will repackage OEM XP to include IE7. They've done it before. I wish I could find numbers, but the IE5x -> IE6 transition line was much steeper than the one you see for XP.
Final answer: The monopoly dictates that IE7 is coming. Like it or not.
My argument (see my original post) is simply that the best strategy for web developers is to do nothing special for IE7. If it "just works", that policy won't cost them anything. It if doesn't, I think it will hurt Microsoft a lot more than it hurts the WWW.
The mistake is your assumption that this will "hurt Microsoft". It will be perceived by consumers to be a problem with the site, so a blase attitude towards IE7 will hurt the web developers more than anyone. (Regardless of any/. chatter about how their site's incompatibilities are all M$'s fault.)
Now, obviously if Microsoft pulls a Nutscrape and creates a "severe compatibility event", they might have problems. But this would go against their entire product marketing history, as well as the recent object lesson of Netscape 7's astounding 1% marketshare.
A more relevant example would be checking for XMLHttpRequest, but that involves two different code branches anyway due to the difference in instantiation between the ActiveX and native objects.
Exactly. DOM checking is certainly the right way, but on 2005, almost all of these sorts of checks require that a knowledgable coder create seperate paths. They are no longer any simple cases of the same method with two different names as there was in the v4 days.
In general, I dislike the code library approach because it tends to preserve buggy behavior forever. Most "getEl" scripts like yours put the document.all check first, which means that if the element doesn't exist, IE behaves differently than other browsers. Bug.
Adoption of new operating systems from Microsoft has been slowing dramatically since Win2K.
Utter bullshit. Check out the nice straight lines here: http://www.pegasus3d.com/osshare2.gif (original source, Google). In 18 months XP had the Windows marketshare lead.
they've cut most of the potentially great stuff out of it already; see Slashdot discussions passim. There's not much of a compelling driver for upgrades, which means the only way it's getting out there in serious volumes is via new PCs.
Slashdot FUD isn't much of a predictor of anything. New PCs, on the other hand, are the irresistible force. Longhorn would have to bomb worse than OS/2 1.0 for IE 7 to not have a huge market impact.
If they're lucky, they get a month or two, by which time if there are serious incompatibility flaws, every magazine, on-line review site, CIO journal and tech news forum is going to be carrying the fact that IE7 breaks web sites and the damage really starts, crippling further spread of IE7.
Sounds like your stay on Fantasy Island was enjoyable, but again this is all based on enormously unsubstantiated assumptions.
But if it was going to "just work", Microsoft wouldn't need to spend a fortune trying to get everyone to check their sites and fix the breakage early. They're worried it won't "just work", which is pretty telling
Well, I've provided an argument why it will mostly "just work", so you will need to provide one why it won't. The article (a dupe, btw) was simply a review of minor UA string changes, which of course affect every single browser ever made.
Gecko-based browsers have around 10% market share today, depending on who you ask, yet we're only just now seeing some key web sites (particularly those dealing with financial matters) upgrading in the face of customer pressure and bad PR.
Financial sites have their own reasons for blocking all but approved UAs. In many cases, these Firefox-incompatible sites were actually Gecko-compatible, but only supported official Netscape releases.
Additionally, Mozilla/Nutscrape was facing a situation where their installed base had basically fallen to zero, and their new product was significantly incompatibile with their old one. Neither situation applies to IE 7. Even assuming minimal adoption, sites will be under enormous pressure to be IE7-compatibile quickly.
most of the pros I know (of which there are quite a few, given I work in a big tech centre) are more than familiar with the W3C standards, and curse IE's insistence on doing things its own way regularly
I'm glad you work with competent people, but get real. Most of the "pros" know what button to push in Dreamweaver or GoLive and that's about it. Sophisticated CSS2-based design is still a tiny part of the market.
I'm pretty sure that if you're guilty of something as serious as deception or gross misconduct, the normal rules often don't always apply
Yes, the employee can be terminated immediately at any time and for just about any reason, and paid for hours worked. There is very little protection against firing in most of the US.
I'm curious what you do for a living. I'm sure it would be quite easy for your employeer to invent some reasoning you are incompetent and demand your last six months of paychecks, if it were legal to do so. Remember, you will not be tried by a technical expert but instead a "business-friendly" labor judge.
Furthermore, the OP stated that the employee completed the project, so despite his idiocy, arguing "gross misconduct" is probably not in the cards. (This would be something like stealing or being drunk on the job, not being ignorant of modern web design.)
probably something for an industrial tribunal or suitable court to decide
Apparently he made the complaint to the state Labor Board.
A better practice in 2005 is to drop this sort of script all together. It is only needed to support IE4.0, which nobody uses any more and probably won't render your site correctly regardless.
The need for the "Mozilla" UA substring comes from the retarded web devs, not Netscape
Well, Nutscape also invented the navigator.useragent API (along with the rest of JavaScript), and that was clearly meant for programmatic checking and not "statistical purposes".
I think you'll have trouble convincing people that Nutscrape was not encouring people to create pages "Best Viewed in Netscape".
MS should grow some balls and remove them from it's browser. It'll break some site? f*ing big deal, means that the websites were shitty in the first place.
Actually, it will break a lot of sites. Turns out the ASP.NET framework depends on that "Mozilla/4.0" bit to find Internet Explorer (due to a dumb default config file). Will Microsoft break their own framework? Har.
Face it: Fucked up User Agents are now a permanent part of the WWW. There's no fixing it.
And if you've ever tested some dHTML on Safari you'd know that Safari == Gecko DOM-wise.
Bah. Last time I checked it (admittedly about a year ago), Gecko's DOM support was significantly better than Safari's. You certainly can't blindly treat the two the same way -- you need to test everything. You'll have better luck treating IE6 and Gecko the same than you will with Safari.
(And now Safari's DOM is different from KHTML's too, so forget that part of the UA.)
I wouldn't be suprised if Safari's fucked-up UA was developed to work around one specific script library. It really is a big and maybe necessary kludge, not a "smart move".
It seems to me that you've jumped to a bunch of well-thought conclusions based on a bunch of really poorly thought-out assumptions.
Assumption #1: IE 7 will have a low marketshare.
Better prediction: Within a month or two, IE7 will have a greater marketshare than Firefox and all other alternative browsers combined. (Based on historical adoption of IE6.0). When Longhorn ships, the market will be predominately IE7 within months. Your statement that IE7 will not develop a huge market share either appears to be completely groundless -- just the shipment of new PCs alone negates it.
Assumption #2: IE 7 will have some major incompatibilities with IE 6.
Better prediction: In the vast majority of cases, IE 7 will just work. It will still contain all HTML3.2-era hacks and IE5-style BogoCSS. The most affected sites are the few that exploited CSS2 bugs to work around other CSS2 bugs in IE6.
Assumption #3: Major sites will be unprepared for IE 7
Better prediction: This is the biggest browser release in years, and sites will test with the beta releases. (Admittedly this is going to sorta suck for W2K shops like ours.)
Assumption #4: Microsoft "bullies the dev community right now because it has huge market share"
Reality: Most web developers are primary IE and are using simplistic techniques that generally work just fine on Firefox and Safari. The extreme CSS2 crowd that is bullied by IE6 is only a small portion of the market which will hopefully be happy with the IE7 improvements. This group will encourage IE7 enduser adoption rather than retard it.
I would have thought dropping the company/firing the individual without any pay whatsoever
The term "wages" implies that he was an hourly employee, and therefore would get paid for time worked, no matter how good or bad his work was. Slavery is illegal and stuff.
Obviously the guy wasn't supervised very well if it took them "a few weeks" to determine he was grossly incompetant at basic HTML editing. Who's fault is that? Plus that they would apparently blatently violate labor laws just because they didn't like his work indicates that the OP works for a pretty crappy outfit.
Now, if they had half-a-clue, they could have structured a contract in such a way where the guy would be paid $X on acceptable delivery, and it would have been quite easy for them to get away with not paying him all or some of the money owed.
Actually, it is you who missed the boat. The point of the article was that PCs are getting so cheap that repair costs are uneconomic. I think even with the most minimal Mac Mini+Monitor+Keyboard bundle, it would be hard to make that case. It is also not every writers' obligation to advocate for the Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
The Macs go to graphic designers, so they need the CPU and non-shared video. Except for developer PCs, the CPU is not a big issue, but 3GHz is just about as low as they come now days.
I don't think Novell would recommend that you put 5000 users on OpenXchange. They'd sell you GroupWise, which is of course licensed per client.
And many other custom Windows toolkits work great (example: Firefox).
A Windows program is supposed to read certain configuration entries from the registry: window colors, font, etc. The good custom toolkits do this and provide reasonable desktop look-n-feel.
The problem with X desktops is that there's no central configuration for these settings, and thus different toolkits present different enough looks that it is visually jarring.
No. Real Numbers state the cheapest PowerMac is $2000 and that's what being bought.
Shared video is absolutely not a problem for business PCs, and regardless real video is a cheap upgrade. Furthermore, I explained exactly why Minis are not being purchased, if you bother to read that far. A $550 PC might be junk, but it is fast, functional junk and that's what we need. Finally, this is not a game we're playing, this is real money being spent.
Why not just go MacTel when I buy my next PC in '06 or '07?
Sure, but only if "MacTel" allows Apple to provide a model lineup of the depth and cheapness of WinTel or LinTel.
The plain fact from a corporate purchasing standpoint is that one can get 4 Desktop PCs for the price of one PowerMac. Mac adovcates are saying all the time that the price difference is a myth, but those are real numbers from real POs.
Oranges to Apples comparision? Sure. But Apple doesn't sell the Orange, they only sell a couple different kinds of Apples. (There's iMacs which would require us to throw out perfectly good ADC flat panels, and there's the Mini which isn't performance-competitive with the G4 tower it replaces, and is hardly cheap for what you get by the time you put RAM into it.)
Now if a commodity Intel board allows Apple to sell something like a commodity Intel computer, maybe you have a winner on the corporate desktop. But I tend to believe that Apple just chooses not to compete in that space.
Good discussion. My underlying assumption (which I believe the graph backs up) is that Windows OS penetration is primarily driven by PC turnover and not in-place "upgrades". (With rare exceptions like Win95 or MacOSX.) And PC turnover is fairly constant. The idea that Longhorn will not be widely deployed is simply impossible.
Anyway, a lot of this PC OS debate is tangantal to the main point. IE7 will be a big deal with or without Longhorn, and webmasters will for the most part be quick to test and support it.
Ah, now I've definitely got you.
Do you? I will admit that Office 97 was foolhardly and would have broken MS's office suite monopoly if there was any decent competition at the time.
Otherwise, we aren't talking about "major compatibility problems", but minor or isolated ones. Will those happen with IE7? Certain some sites will have minor breakage. But they will be fixed and the world will move on. There will be no massive backlash.
I try to keep r/w NFS shares off the portions of the network that are used by people doing normal work.
Good for you, but again the point is that you need some sort of MAC or port security to really do this.
Otherwise it's the same argument as the Windows guy who patches routinely but gets attacked by the random consultant laptop.
Try reading what I actually wrote, for a change. Nobody was talking about IE7-only sites.
6 4/idc-raises-computer-sales
Joe User saw the shell "entirely overhauled" with Win2000 and he and 80% of his neighbors said "fuck that".
First, Joe User never saw the Windows 2000 shell because it was marketed as a business OS. Second, the shell was not overhauled, it was largely identical to Win98's.
What the hell are you talking about? WinME sold less copies (and had less copies pre-installed) than Win95, Win98, Win2000, and WinXP
Can't be bothered to prove it, but I'm fairly certain that ME PCs vastly outsold 2000 Professional PCs in the period when they were both current OEM products. Are you claming there was big drop-off in consumer PC sales during this period? Win2K never had more than 20% of the market.
But in case you haven't been following the figures, new computer sales are some of the lowest ever seen over the last decade.
You mean like these: http://www.computeractive.co.uk/vnunet/news/21381
And even if growth is slowing in a mature market, it doesn't mean that turnover is declining. In fact the exceptionally low prices will only accelerate new PCs coming on line.
The equipment Joe User has does just what he wants it to do; he doesn't want to go through yet another upgrade cycle
I bet you said the exact same thing the last 5 times MS released a new OS too.
Longhorn isn't going to take anything by storm. And by extension, neither will IE7.
Maybe you've forgotten about that monopoly? 90% of new PCs will come with Longhorn and IE7, and your factually impotent handwaving ain't going to change that fact.
Just look what it did with the technology assets it got from DEC and Compaq.
Maybe it wasn't the plan, but the Compaq Proliant line might just save their enterprise business.
Hate to make a me-too post, but I think your analysis of HP is spot-on. They've become a commodity marketing company that is unfortunatly still thinking and staffed like a top-tier engineering and sales company (in other words, like IBM). Sadly, it wouldn't suprise me to see HP come out of this less with less than 25% of the employees they had a few years ago.
Yes, but we're talking about random laptops plugged into your network, not designed configurations.
Websites can't look good on modern browsers and be just barely readable on older ones (which is what happens if you use modern CSS techniques).
Maybe a few years ago, but what I'm seeing is that 99% of the users are "Version 6 or greater", and there's significantly more customer pressure for sites to display on smartphones, etc than on old v4 browsers.
Hmm. I would have assumed that the labor laws in the UK were much stronger than in the US. There really are cases where someone could be denied their paycheck?
any sort of law in the US these days, it's because it's stacked even further in favour of megacorps
Generally true, especially down South. But getting paid for hours worked would be nearly always be slam-dunk for an employee.
[60%] sure as hell isn't enough of a lead to dictate much of anything.
Even Apple's 3% marketshare is enough to dictate widescale Safari support, so this argument fails it. Some site is going to ignore 40% of the market? Please.
(from Joe User's perspective) appears to be another version of XP
From Joe User's perspective the shell will be entirely overhauled == New OS.
I'd say it's probably fair to assume that Longhorn is going to have the lowest adoption rate of all MS OS's,
I'd say that the adoption rate of MS OSes is determined almost entirely by the rate of PC turnover. ME didn't sell worse than any of the others. More wishful thinking at best.
The Win2K market share has been almost completely unaffected by the arrival of WinXP
/. chatter about how their site's incompatibilities are all M$'s fault.)
Yeah. It seems that NT4/2K transitioned on one axis and 98/XP transitioned on another. Makes sense if you've been in Windows environments for a while.
then that suggests that the adoption of WinXP was only around half as fast as its predecessors.
No. the graph shows that it took about 3 years for 98, 98SE, and 98ME (which I believe is how it reported itself) to gain 55% marketshare, and it took about 3 years for XP to do the same.
Please think about what the figures in that graph represent for a minute.
I have. The obvious conclusion is that the PC turnover is remarkably constant, even in an economic recession. Now I won't deny that XP had it's stability appeal over 98, but there's simply no data to conclude that people will stop buying new PCs because Longhorn doesn't have WinFS or whatever. The flashy UI and normal upgrade-bait will be there, as will that very large group of old life-support W2K deployments.
Furthermore, it is quite possible that MS will repackage OEM XP to include IE7. They've done it before. I wish I could find numbers, but the IE5x -> IE6 transition line was much steeper than the one you see for XP.
Final answer: The monopoly dictates that IE7 is coming. Like it or not.
My argument (see my original post) is simply that the best strategy for web developers is to do nothing special for IE7. If it "just works", that policy won't cost them anything. It if doesn't, I think it will hurt Microsoft a lot more than it hurts the WWW.
The mistake is your assumption that this will "hurt Microsoft". It will be perceived by consumers to be a problem with the site, so a blase attitude towards IE7 will hurt the web developers more than anyone. (Regardless of any
Now, obviously if Microsoft pulls a Nutscrape and creates a "severe compatibility event", they might have problems. But this would go against their entire product marketing history, as well as the recent object lesson of Netscape 7's astounding 1% marketshare.
FUD. A Unix machine running NFS is an automatic security problem.
A more relevant example would be checking for XMLHttpRequest, but that involves two different code branches anyway due to the difference in instantiation between the ActiveX and native objects.
Exactly. DOM checking is certainly the right way, but on 2005, almost all of these sorts of checks require that a knowledgable coder create seperate paths. They are no longer any simple cases of the same method with two different names as there was in the v4 days.
In general, I dislike the code library approach because it tends to preserve buggy behavior forever. Most "getEl" scripts like yours put the document.all check first, which means that if the element doesn't exist, IE behaves differently than other browsers. Bug.
Utter bullshit. Check out the nice straight lines here: http://www.pegasus3d.com/osshare2.gif (original source, Google). In 18 months XP had the Windows marketshare lead.
Slashdot FUD isn't much of a predictor of anything. New PCs, on the other hand, are the irresistible force. Longhorn would have to bomb worse than OS/2 1.0 for IE 7 to not have a huge market impact.
Sounds like your stay on Fantasy Island was enjoyable, but again this is all based on enormously unsubstantiated assumptions.
Well, I've provided an argument why it will mostly "just work", so you will need to provide one why it won't. The article (a dupe, btw) was simply a review of minor UA string changes, which of course affect every single browser ever made.
Financial sites have their own reasons for blocking all but approved UAs. In many cases, these Firefox-incompatible sites were actually Gecko-compatible, but only supported official Netscape releases.
Additionally, Mozilla/Nutscrape was facing a situation where their installed base had basically fallen to zero, and their new product was significantly incompatibile with their old one. Neither situation applies to IE 7. Even assuming minimal adoption, sites will be under enormous pressure to be IE7-compatibile quickly.
I'm glad you work with competent people, but get real. Most of the "pros" know what button to push in Dreamweaver or GoLive and that's about it. Sophisticated CSS2-based design is still a tiny part of the market.
I'm pretty sure that if you're guilty of something as serious as deception or gross misconduct, the normal rules often don't always apply
Yes, the employee can be terminated immediately at any time and for just about any reason, and paid for hours worked. There is very little protection against firing in most of the US.
I'm curious what you do for a living. I'm sure it would be quite easy for your employeer to invent some reasoning you are incompetent and demand your last six months of paychecks, if it were legal to do so. Remember, you will not be tried by a technical expert but instead a "business-friendly" labor judge.
Furthermore, the OP stated that the employee completed the project, so despite his idiocy, arguing "gross misconduct" is probably not in the cards. (This would be something like stealing or being drunk on the job, not being ignorant of modern web design.)
probably something for an industrial tribunal or suitable court to decide
Apparently he made the complaint to the state Labor Board.
A better practice in 2005 is to drop this sort of script all together. It is only needed to support IE4.0, which nobody uses any more and probably won't render your site correctly regardless.
The need for the "Mozilla" UA substring comes from the retarded web devs, not Netscape
Well, Nutscape also invented the navigator.useragent API (along with the rest of JavaScript), and that was clearly meant for programmatic checking and not "statistical purposes".
I think you'll have trouble convincing people that Nutscrape was not encouring people to create pages "Best Viewed in Netscape".
MS should grow some balls and remove them from it's browser. It'll break some site? f*ing big deal, means that the websites were shitty in the first place.
Actually, it will break a lot of sites. Turns out the ASP.NET framework depends on that "Mozilla/4.0" bit to find Internet Explorer (due to a dumb default config file). Will Microsoft break their own framework? Har.
Face it: Fucked up User Agents are now a permanent part of the WWW. There's no fixing it.
And if you've ever tested some dHTML on Safari you'd know that Safari == Gecko DOM-wise.
Bah. Last time I checked it (admittedly about a year ago), Gecko's DOM support was significantly better than Safari's. You certainly can't blindly treat the two the same way -- you need to test everything. You'll have better luck treating IE6 and Gecko the same than you will with Safari.
(And now Safari's DOM is different from KHTML's too, so forget that part of the UA.)
I wouldn't be suprised if Safari's fucked-up UA was developed to work around one specific script library. It really is a big and maybe necessary kludge, not a "smart move".
It seems to me that you've jumped to a bunch of well-thought conclusions based on a bunch of really poorly thought-out assumptions.
Assumption #1: IE 7 will have a low marketshare.
Better prediction: Within a month or two, IE7 will have a greater marketshare than Firefox and all other alternative browsers combined. (Based on historical adoption of IE6.0). When Longhorn ships, the market will be predominately IE7 within months. Your statement that IE7 will not develop a huge market share either appears to be completely groundless -- just the shipment of new PCs alone negates it.
Assumption #2: IE 7 will have some major incompatibilities with IE 6.
Better prediction: In the vast majority of cases, IE 7 will just work. It will still contain all HTML3.2-era hacks and IE5-style BogoCSS. The most affected sites are the few that exploited CSS2 bugs to work around other CSS2 bugs in IE6.
Assumption #3: Major sites will be unprepared for IE 7
Better prediction: This is the biggest browser release in years, and sites will test with the beta releases. (Admittedly this is going to sorta suck for W2K shops like ours.)
Assumption #4: Microsoft "bullies the dev community right now because it has huge market share"
Reality: Most web developers are primary IE and are using simplistic techniques that generally work just fine on Firefox and Safari. The extreme CSS2 crowd that is bullied by IE6 is only a small portion of the market which will hopefully be happy with the IE7 improvements. This group will encourage IE7 enduser adoption rather than retard it.
I would have thought dropping the company/firing the individual without any pay whatsoever
The term "wages" implies that he was an hourly employee, and therefore would get paid for time worked, no matter how good or bad his work was. Slavery is illegal and stuff.
Obviously the guy wasn't supervised very well if it took them "a few weeks" to determine he was grossly incompetant at basic HTML editing. Who's fault is that? Plus that they would apparently blatently violate labor laws just because they didn't like his work indicates that the OP works for a pretty crappy outfit.
Now, if they had half-a-clue, they could have structured a contract in such a way where the guy would be paid $X on acceptable delivery, and it would have been quite easy for them to get away with not paying him all or some of the money owed.
Actually, it is you who missed the boat. The point of the article was that PCs are getting so cheap that repair costs are uneconomic. I think even with the most minimal Mac Mini+Monitor+Keyboard bundle, it would be hard to make that case. It is also not every writers' obligation to advocate for the Mac.