The W3C started thinking about CSS long after Nutscrape invented FONT and CENTER -- My impression was that W3C's only concern was physics papers and they assumed that all "style" handling could be in the browser preferences.
Adding Style tags to HTML was the obvious thing to do for the medium -- You can't really blame Netscape for not using a stylesheet system that wasn't even concieved at the time. Their real crime was the pathethic CSS support in v4.x, which kept FONT tags on the web five years longer than it they should have been.
IE only had 60% marketshare when Netscape cancelled v5.0, even with the bundling. They wouldn't have stayed there while Nutscrape went on a five year hiatus and rewrote everything from scratch.
I agree that a seeing a real browserwar is unlikely, but I think you will see enough compeition to keep the IE development team alive this time.
You're both right. IE got 90% marketshare because it was (A) On your desktop already, and (B) Better than Netscape.
In addition, you have (C) Free corporate and ISP deployment costs, (D) Illegal Sherman Act activities, (E) Better low-spec machine performance, (F) Better development platform, (G) Nutscrape's inability to ship v5, (H) Nutscrape v6/Mozilla being a hunk of crap a few years ago, (I) AOL, (J) etc etc
Any one of these could be used to partially explain IE's dominance, so take your pick.
The real problem is that IE is extremely permissive, and most of this world's sites are built specifically for IE. This was a deliberate move by Microsoft.
Yes, and the reasoning was that old versions of Nutscrape were extremely permissive, and most of the world's sites were built specifically for Nutscrape (which had 90% marketshare). So MS was deliberately backward compatible with a lot of cruddy web pages.
Even before then, "Permissiveness" was touted as the killer feature of HTML -- the syntax rules were lax and it was easy for beginners to hand code pages.
Finally, by default, FireFox is in qurks mode, and is very tolerant of legacy pages. If it wasn't, you couldn't use it to surf slashdot, for example. So, I don't see anyone breaking the cycle of permissiveness anytime soon -- future browsers will always have to emulate the slop of their predecessors.
We don't even need one version of PHP. Javascript makes an excellent language for server-side scripting, and would be a worthy standards-based replacement for the proprietary & screwy PHP language.
I've read various remarks from Steve Jobs, Movie Studio CEO, where he seemed quite public in his support for DRM. He just wants to to be largely tranparent for the legal user, that's all.
AFAIK, there's no real public documentation on Apple's chipsets, so they they could contain hardware DRM for all we know. I may be a tinfoil-hatter, but considering the overall industry support for DRM, I belive it's quite likely that Macs have hardware DRM, and eventually a software update will enable it.
The guy who edits Kernel Traffic doesn't always take a neutral voice.
What I saw on the kernel lists were a bunch of big name Linux developers trying to troll a flamewar out of McVoy, continually over the period of a year or more. (Sometimes this bordered on the juvinile, like Alan Cox calling it "ButtCreeper" or "BitCoffin".) I think they (rightly) knew that if they kept pushing McVoy's buttons, he'd eventually snap and go away.
If Linus ever showed up, they'd quiet down until the next flamewar, because even though he made the decision, nobody was willing to take up the arguement with him.
I would say they fixed it by adding context menu support an an "Eject" key to the keyboard of newer macs. Drag-To-The-Trash is there for the oldtime users.
(A new user would not be likely to (A) just start dragging a disk around aimlessly, and (B) notice that the trash icon had changed, and (C) put the two together.)
As I understand the case, the judge said that a technology would be legal if it was demonstratably useful and intended for legal purposes. Napster failed that test, because there simply wasn't an existing base of legal music files at the time. Kazza succeeded because it was able to show that its design allowed for any type of file regardless of legality.
This might have been an issue, but the determining legal point was that Napster was a centralized system and therefore knew full well that copyright infringement was occurring and could have acted to stop it. Futhermore, Napster had a huge papertrail describing their infringement-based business model.
Systems like Kazaa are decentrilized to the point where Kazaa themselves can't stop any particular file from being traded. So while their intent is to support copyright infrimgent, they've sofar escaped on technicalities. Unfortunately, most "tracker" sites are more like Napster than Kazaa.
You missed the news -- Mozilla does support document.all! The trick is that the support is "silent" -- document.all==false, but the object still works.
[document.all is kind of a crappy example because it's a legacy feature from IE4.0 and is only used in old scripts and those written by numbskulls. It also never really worked as a browser sniffer because of IE/Mac and Opera.]
The standards jihad is over. Mozilla is now adding many IE6 DOM methods. You will have to ask them how tney check compatibility (in most cases, I'm sure the functionality is obvious.)
The big burst of interest is because Firefox, Opera, and Safari now support XmlHttpRequest, so you can deploy a public web application which uses it. And yes, gmail showed people how.
Microsoft devs have known about this techinque for a while, but it was catgorized as one of those "Evil IE-Only ActiveX" things that you could only get away with in single platform intranet apps. I also think that most people coming from a non-MS webdev background don't really know anything about proprietary IE APIs other than you shouldn't use them.
Apparently someone chained 23 Firewire drives together, and then complained about the performance of Spotlight. Not the most realistic example
Video editors tend to use firewire drives like people used to use floppy or Zip disks -- they've stacks of them and are plugging them in or moving them around to grab stuff. I agree that's a "ghetto" way of doing things, but one of the selling points of the Mac is that it's a cheap video platform, so not everyone's buying big storage RAIDs.
I haven't noticed any particular problems with spotlight, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have a global option to disable indexing.
Point taken. However, I think it's going to be a long while before you see the expertise level needed in a significant number of small/medium businesses, athough it's possible that service providers might change the equasion.
One big reason that Linux is "Wall Street" rather than "Main Street" is that financial companies have enormous Unix expertise, so it's a natural fit.
I also disagree that MS doesn't care -- they've spent an extrodinary effort focusing on 'SMB' and that's really their area of greatest strength. There's a reason that NT came with GUI admin tools, you know. The Great Plains division would love to know about your million dollar DOS using friend, that's their bread-n-butter.
I don't see Google switching to mainframes. But if it makes sense for you, buy one, I don't really care. Just don't get angry when competitors point out the huge costs in doing so. (MS is just saying the same thing that Sun and HP have for years.)
How is it a lie? IBM is pushing Linux Mainframes as a general server solution, when due to the ridiclous maintanance costs and godawful cpu performance it's a pretty specialized need at best.
If you gave IBM a blank check, they would sell you a Linux Mainframe -- even if your needs would be better served by Windows PCs. (For example, IBM has a document about what a great SMB server mainframes are). Why shouldn't competitors point that out?
But then, I'm 99.999999999999999999% sure you are a fanboy or an ABMer.
Microsoft isn't really fighting war with a free product here, they are fighting a war against expensive IBM and Oracle products that are based on a free product. If you actually "Got the Facts" (read the reports), you'd see this.
I don't totally agree with the conclusions, but there's nothing really wrong with pointing out the price tag of WebSphere and Oracle.
There's a certain amount of FUD here on slashdot where MS is the expensive vendor and Linux users all run Debian & Postgres for free. The reality is that Linux is being positioned as a high-end Enterprise product and is priced accordingly. I don't see any movement from RedHat and Novell to sell Linux to Small/Medium Businesses.
(old man mode) When I first saw Notes, it was about 12 years ago, and it was primarily used as a database application used by project managers hacking out tracking apps. If you wanted threading, you clicked a menu, went into the "view designer" and mades some settings.
Over time it somehow got morphed into a mail/calendar program, and the DB stuff was mostly forgotten. IBM removed the development tools from the standard client, and IBM consultants were there to "fix" the obvious flaws in the stock mail template.
Having been forced to use Notes on-and-off for my entire career has left me in a pretty pessimistic state about Linux as a business desktop. With consulting shops like IBM and RedHat running the show, it's almost guaranteed to remain a permenant semi-broken state to keep the service revenue flowing.
Microsoft? Guckert? Faith in Democracy? Goddamn, that's the best troll I've read in a long while on/. But, you got to get shit that in early on a political story to work.
And I didn't say he never bothered to learn how to use a computer, I said he never bothered to learn when he was president. Just to put things in perspective, he was elected only a short bit after Windows 3.1 was released. Take off your blue dress and provide some contrary evidence.
I would add that the security track record of Windows 2000 (awful) actually compares pretty well to the security track record of Linux 2000 (the awful Redhat 5/6 for example).
Both companies have cleaned up their act, but MS still has to deal with a massive W2K installed base, and RedHat does not.
Slashdot Mirror
The W3C started thinking about CSS long after Nutscrape invented FONT and CENTER -- My impression was that W3C's only concern was physics papers and they assumed that all "style" handling could be in the browser preferences.
Adding Style tags to HTML was the obvious thing to do for the medium -- You can't really blame Netscape for not using a stylesheet system that wasn't even concieved at the time. Their real crime was the pathethic CSS support in v4.x, which kept FONT tags on the web five years longer than it they should have been.
Nutscrape/Mozilla didn't put out a good product between Navigator v3 and Firefox, so yes you should rejoice.
IE only had 60% marketshare when Netscape cancelled v5.0, even with the bundling. They wouldn't have stayed there while Nutscrape went on a five year hiatus and rewrote everything from scratch.
I agree that a seeing a real browserwar is unlikely, but I think you will see enough compeition to keep the IE development team alive this time.
You're both right. IE got 90% marketshare because it was (A) On your desktop already, and (B) Better than Netscape.
In addition, you have (C) Free corporate and ISP deployment costs, (D) Illegal Sherman Act activities, (E) Better low-spec machine performance, (F) Better development platform, (G) Nutscrape's inability to ship v5, (H) Nutscrape v6/Mozilla being a hunk of crap a few years ago, (I) AOL, (J) etc etc
Any one of these could be used to partially explain IE's dominance, so take your pick.
The real problem is that IE is extremely permissive, and most of this world's sites are built specifically for IE. This was a deliberate move by Microsoft.
Yes, and the reasoning was that old versions of Nutscrape were extremely permissive, and most of the world's sites were built specifically for Nutscrape (which had 90% marketshare). So MS was deliberately backward compatible with a lot of cruddy web pages.
Even before then, "Permissiveness" was touted as the killer feature of HTML -- the syntax rules were lax and it was easy for beginners to hand code pages.
Finally, by default, FireFox is in qurks mode, and is very tolerant of legacy pages. If it wasn't, you couldn't use it to surf slashdot, for example. So, I don't see anyone breaking the cycle of permissiveness anytime soon -- future browsers will always have to emulate the slop of their predecessors.
We don't even need one version of PHP. Javascript makes an excellent language for server-side scripting, and would be a worthy standards-based replacement for the proprietary & screwy PHP language.
I've read various remarks from Steve Jobs, Movie Studio CEO, where he seemed quite public in his support for DRM. He just wants to to be largely tranparent for the legal user, that's all.
AFAIK, there's no real public documentation on Apple's chipsets, so they they could contain hardware DRM for all we know. I may be a tinfoil-hatter, but considering the overall industry support for DRM, I belive it's quite likely that Macs have hardware DRM, and eventually a software update will enable it.
The guy who edits Kernel Traffic doesn't always take a neutral voice.
What I saw on the kernel lists were a bunch of big name Linux developers trying to troll a flamewar out of McVoy, continually over the period of a year or more. (Sometimes this bordered on the juvinile, like Alan Cox calling it "ButtCreeper" or "BitCoffin".) I think they (rightly) knew that if they kept pushing McVoy's buttons, he'd eventually snap and go away.
If Linus ever showed up, they'd quiet down until the next flamewar, because even though he made the decision, nobody was willing to take up the arguement with him.
I would say they fixed it by adding context menu support an an "Eject" key to the keyboard of newer macs. Drag-To-The-Trash is there for the oldtime users.
(A new user would not be likely to (A) just start dragging a disk around aimlessly, and (B) notice that the trash icon had changed, and (C) put the two together.)
As I understand the case, the judge said that a technology would be legal if it was demonstratably useful and intended for legal purposes. Napster failed that test, because there simply wasn't an existing base of legal music files at the time. Kazza succeeded because it was able to show that its design allowed for any type of file regardless of legality.
This might have been an issue, but the determining legal point was that Napster was a centralized system and therefore knew full well that copyright infringement was occurring and could have acted to stop it. Futhermore, Napster had a huge papertrail describing their infringement-based business model.
Systems like Kazaa are decentrilized to the point where Kazaa themselves can't stop any particular file from being traded. So while their intent is to support copyright infrimgent, they've sofar escaped on technicalities. Unfortunately, most "tracker" sites are more like Napster than Kazaa.
You missed the news -- Mozilla does support document.all! The trick is that the support is "silent" -- document.all==false, but the object still works.
[document.all is kind of a crappy example because it's a legacy feature from IE4.0 and is only used in old scripts and those written by numbskulls. It also never really worked as a browser sniffer because of IE/Mac and Opera.]
The standards jihad is over. Mozilla is now adding many IE6 DOM methods. You will have to ask them how tney check compatibility (in most cases, I'm sure the functionality is obvious.)
Agreed about MSDN.
0 00/javascript/1.3/reference/frames.html
If it says it is not part of any standard, that basically means not to expect it to work in anything but IE
Actually, there's a lot of DOM that is commonly supported but has never been standardized. window.open() being an obvious example. I've cross-checked stuff against the Nutscrape 4 docs, which is close to the common baseline for most browsers. (except for layers).
http://devedge-temp.mozilla.org/library/manuals/2
The big burst of interest is because Firefox, Opera, and Safari now support XmlHttpRequest, so you can deploy a public web application which uses it. And yes, gmail showed people how.
Microsoft devs have known about this techinque for a while, but it was catgorized as one of those "Evil IE-Only ActiveX" things that you could only get away with in single platform intranet apps. I also think that most people coming from a non-MS webdev background don't really know anything about proprietary IE APIs other than you shouldn't use them.
Internet Explorer lets you create modal dialogs -- window.showModalDialog().
[And before anyone says anything about extend-n-embrace, the entire window object is non-standard.]
Apparently someone chained 23 Firewire drives together, and then complained about the performance of Spotlight. Not the most realistic example
Video editors tend to use firewire drives like people used to use floppy or Zip disks -- they've stacks of them and are plugging them in or moving them around to grab stuff. I agree that's a "ghetto" way of doing things, but one of the selling points of the Mac is that it's a cheap video platform, so not everyone's buying big storage RAIDs.
I haven't noticed any particular problems with spotlight, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have a global option to disable indexing.
Point taken. However, I think it's going to be a long while before you see the expertise level needed in a significant number of small/medium businesses, athough it's possible that service providers might change the equasion.
One big reason that Linux is "Wall Street" rather than "Main Street" is that financial companies have enormous Unix expertise, so it's a natural fit.
I also disagree that MS doesn't care -- they've spent an extrodinary effort focusing on 'SMB' and that's really their area of greatest strength. There's a reason that NT came with GUI admin tools, you know. The Great Plains division would love to know about your million dollar DOS using friend, that's their bread-n-butter.
I don't see Google switching to mainframes. But if it makes sense for you, buy one, I don't really care. Just don't get angry when competitors point out the huge costs in doing so. (MS is just saying the same thing that Sun and HP have for years.)
How is it a lie? IBM is pushing Linux Mainframes as a general server solution, when due to the ridiclous maintanance costs and godawful cpu performance it's a pretty specialized need at best.
If you gave IBM a blank check, they would sell you a Linux Mainframe -- even if your needs would be better served by Windows PCs. (For example, IBM has a document about what a great SMB server mainframes are). Why shouldn't competitors point that out?
But then, I'm 99.999999999999999999% sure you are a fanboy or an ABMer.
Good deal, but www.novell.com is down for me, so I can't get the facts.
Microsoft isn't really fighting war with a free product here, they are fighting a war against expensive IBM and Oracle products that are based on a free product. If you actually "Got the Facts" (read the reports), you'd see this.
I don't totally agree with the conclusions, but there's nothing really wrong with pointing out the price tag of WebSphere and Oracle.
There's a certain amount of FUD here on slashdot where MS is the expensive vendor and Linux users all run Debian & Postgres for free. The reality is that Linux is being positioned as a high-end Enterprise product and is priced accordingly. I don't see any movement from RedHat and Novell to sell Linux to Small/Medium Businesses.
(old man mode) When I first saw Notes, it was about 12 years ago, and it was primarily used as a database application used by project managers hacking out tracking apps. If you wanted threading, you clicked a menu, went into the "view designer" and mades some settings.
Over time it somehow got morphed into a mail/calendar program, and the DB stuff was mostly forgotten. IBM removed the development tools from the standard client, and IBM consultants were there to "fix" the obvious flaws in the stock mail template.
Having been forced to use Notes on-and-off for my entire career has left me in a pretty pessimistic state about Linux as a business desktop. With consulting shops like IBM and RedHat running the show, it's almost guaranteed to remain a permenant semi-broken state to keep the service revenue flowing.
Sure you are, because you're a troll. Or a crazy person, but I like to assume the best in people. And you're dead wrong about my politics.
Microsoft? Guckert? Faith in Democracy? Goddamn, that's the best troll I've read in a long while on /. But, you got to get shit that in early on a political story to work.
And I didn't say he never bothered to learn how to use a computer, I said he never bothered to learn when he was president. Just to put things in perspective, he was elected only a short bit after Windows 3.1 was released. Take off your blue dress and provide some contrary evidence.
I would add that the security track record of Windows 2000 (awful) actually compares pretty well to the security track record of Linux 2000 (the awful Redhat 5/6 for example).
Both companies have cleaned up their act, but MS still has to deal with a massive W2K installed base, and RedHat does not.