Government assigns citizens unique numbers. News at 11.
email is a worldwide thing so individual government-based initiatives are bunk
A) Do you understand how X.509 works? B) Non-governmental certs (eg Verisign) are authenticated with your Passport/Drivers License/Government ID anyway.
X.400 was also designed WAY back, and it solves every problem people have with SMTP.
However in order to do this, you need central control (aka the Phone Company), which is exacty what the modern Internet was designed to avoid.
So, no, you're not going to get a wonderful replacement for SMTP that's spam/virus/fraud proof and still allows you to do things in a decentralized manner (like setup your own mailserver). Any fix people have come up with can easily be applied to SMTP email.
(If the government wanted to do us a favor, they'd give you a X.509 certificate along with your driver's licence.)
^ Just pointing out that this is a good object lesson on why/. Moderation sucks for political threads.
Sevn "scores a zinger" on jmorris42. So he ends up at 4 Insightful while jmorris is at 1 Flamebait even though jmorris probably had the more well thought-out and well stated post.
(I agree with Sevn, BTW, just trying to show how the peanut gallery gets involved in this.)
One of the goals of the Firefox project was to get rid of the 10,000 different nerd options from the dialogs. KISS.
This has nothing to do with "pre-1.0" and everything to do with a UI design decision. The theory is that someone will provide a "Advanced Options" extention.
(And there are IE features that are only available through the registry -- such as setting Quick Search shortcuts.)
You're right that these consumer reviews don't get the details 100% correct. But from a consumer standpoint, the most important fact is that iTMS only works with iPod and visa-versa. (Even if you decide that Apple's products are the best, you should know that going in.) The details beyond that don't really matter all that much.
For ripping your own stuff, the important fact is that everyone supports MP3 now (even WMP!) -- except for Sony who got tarred for it in the reviews. 'Most People' just want MP3 support -- they don't care about AAC/WMA/OGG/etc.
FWIW, Windows Media is now on a standards track with SMTPE (for video, don't know about audio), and is apparently a good deal cheaper than what Dolby etc charges for AAC.
Second, force all of Microsoft's web development tools to be 100% standards compliant.
At the time, IE was considered one of the most standard-compliant browser. You're basically saying that the government should have forced MS to drop support for Netscape 4 (which I'd go for, but it's not exactly what Netscape wanted out of the case).
Only mentioned it because I've been using mail.yahoo.com from Mozilla for years without any problems.
However, the fact is that Mozilla and IE are not 100% compatible with each other, so those sorts of incompatibilities are fair game for use statistics.
Oh, you're still amped up about some flamewar from 3 months ago, but since nobody cares anymore, you've somehow conflated it into your unhappy state of Apple Zealotry. Sounds more like your shrink's problem than mine.
Parent talks about iTMS, I say FairPlay is proprietary, and your swift rebuttal is that FairPlay is proprietary.
With a winning argument like that I can why you felt like your only exit strategy was to be an insulting jerk and to attempt to change the topic. Well, enough faulty thought from you -- go get a refund from whomever attempted to educate you, and check in with that shrink.
Google may not be the best site from which to gather browser usage statistics, but I think it's probably _one_ of the best ones these days.
Depending if you are counting unique users or hits. I might hit Google 10-20 a day -- while the average person maybe only runs 1-2 searches a week. So Google would be highly biased towards people doing research, or trying to find answers to technical questions.
I think you'd probably get the best stats from a general interest news site or perhaps mail.yahoo.com.
Linux users are definitely a significant segment of that market.
Depends what you mean by "Linux user" -- if you include hobbyists that futz around dualbooting when not playing their Windows games, then OK, I suppose there is a marginal reputation halo from having good Linux support. However, the vast majority of high-end card-buying casemod/alienware Gamer types either don't care about Linux or think it sucks.
The general profile of a Linux user is a system administrator who runs it on servers and doesn't give 2 craps about video drivers.
What can one say, but that you're wrong. iTunes Store uses 100% Apple-proprietary FairPlay DRM. OTOH, anyone (including Apple) can call up Microsoft and licence WMA DRM.
Not wanting to licence WMA is a valid concern, but the issue is that nobody can use FairPlay without Apple's permission (and if you reverse-engineer it, Apple will sue you).
Maybe you wouldn't be so sick of the iTMS comparison if you had your facts right.
The biggest problem is that both Old RedHat and Old Windows automatically started many services right after install. When you're talking about a window of only few minutes before you're cracked, that's not good even if the administrator realizes he needs to reconfigure and patch.
IIRC, the only reason why this is the default theme is because the "modern" theme doesn't display properly in 256 colours on certain systems
"Modern" also does not respect the Windows Appearance settings, which is an accesibility problem for people with poor eyesight etc. (Or it didn't -- maybe someone fixed it.)
Not that Modern is particularly nice looking either. It's sorta a shame that they spent so much time building a themeable app and the main themes are Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer clones.
What people fail to recognize when promoting Linux is that it's chief competetor is a corporate giant that has stagnated.
This statement would have been a lot more insightful if you were aware that Linux's chief competitor is actually Sun Solaris (and other System V UNIX) and not MS Windows...
(while you can complain about Windows, its hard to argue that it sat completely still like Solaris has for the last decade+.)
> No other operating system EVER MADE can compare to that.
Except RedHat Linux 5.x and 6.x.
The RH releases from the same era as W2K had dozens of remote holes in the install and had serveral worms targetting them, a long with lots of script kiddie activity. A study showed that an unpatched RedHat box would be owned in in a mean time of less than 5 minutes. Someone even made t-shirts that said "My other computer is your Linux box."
(However, like Win2000, a RH box could be secured by a competant administrator.)
Trying to judge technological inferiority by bug counts is inane, especially because Unix/Linux doesn't really have a significantly better record than Microsoft. (Compare the record of IIS6 versus Apache over the last year or so, for example...) So I would rephrase your statement: Slashdot is anti-microsoft for a reason -- Slashdot believes their shit don't stink
The vendors I mentioned see the potential of a services-based business model and realize it's a better fit for the industry. Like the buggy and whip makers...
Funny you put it that way, because Services is more of the past than the future (think paying out the ass to IBM and DEC). Its a good fit for large enterprise businesses with complex installs and a bad fit almost everywhere else.
Look at the big "Desktop Linux" packages where you need to pay annual rent just to get security patches. This is no real threat to the estabilished "self-support" Shrink Wrap model as popularlized by Microsoft, Apple and others.
The real "buggy-whip" companies is literally IBM with a massive amount of revenue coming from its legacy mainframe and AS/400 lines, most of which will be turned off over the next 10 years. The problem is that the rest of the market is wise to IBM's luxury pricing (except you Linux who lap up IBM propaganda). But if you want Linux to expand outside the "UNIX" market and really compete with Windows, you aren't going to do it with "Services".
No, I don't think its ridiclous to believe that Mozilla will be more popular now that they've finally started to listen to user complaints and address the issues.
The big knocks against Mozilla have been: (A) Bloat -> Firefox (B) Compatibility -> document.all was the biggie, but there's been many other IE DOM methods added.
They might not take over the world yet, but there's a lot of people that have been willing to download and try Mozilla but haven't 'converted' in the survey stats.
Since when have Mozilla folks started to work around IE brokenness, and why?
Maybe since years of a hardline position on the point have resulted in a 2% marketshare?
Maybe they finally realized that in the big picture, the minor naming issue of "all[]" versus "getElementById()" wasn't worth getting their panties in a wad over -- especially relative to the bigger issue of XHTML/CSS versus Vendor HTML?
Either way, I welcome the new Realism over at mozilla.org.
not to mention encourages writing MORE bad DHTML
Almost everyone who actually writes Javascript understands that document.all is legacy. However, a huge portion of DHTML is just copy-n-pasted over-n-over again by Dreamweaver jockeys -- who barely understand programming much less standards nuances. Mozilla was trying to educate a group that is impossible to educate.
I'm not sure what your example has to do with typing. If anything it just demonstrates that the interface for ASP.NET list controls sucks (like they just copied the client DOM interface without thinking about how you'd actually use it. There's other problems too, like difficulty in putting a dummy "--Select--" item into a databound dropdown list.)
Anyway, one of the first things I did was subclass WebControls.DropDownList and some of the others so the selected value could be get/set from a property.
what real benefits come from statically-compiled languages other than execution speed and perhaps some subtle runtime bugs difficult to discover?
Dynamic typing was a major source of bugs in a larger, multi-developer ASP Classic project I worked on. "Subtle Runtime Bugs" were by far the most time-consuming issues.
Not all of that was the typing system, but instead the VB Programmer mentality of "Don't worry about types" -- but you could argue that dynamic typing just encourages that attitute. When the "right way" to work in dynamic typed languages is to litter your code with casts, why not just use something statically typed?
(Not saying they're aren't advantages to dynamic types, and I've certainly used them -- just that "Quick and Buggy" isn't one of them.)
  is Mosaic-compatiblity. No shit. Theres other silly things which were done as to not break Netscape 3 stuff.
Anyway, it used to be that "getting away with murder" was seen as the main feature of the WWW -- no complexly or strictness. But not everyone making webpages has got the memo yet. (Mozilla also has a very tolerant engine that lets you get away with a ton of crap.)
I have to agree that if MS is upgrading IE they are doing it for their own reasons* and not because they are running scared of Mozilla or Firefox going from 1% to maybe 2%.
Everyone decided that Microsoft had "won the browser wars" when they got to 75% marketshare. Now they've got 95% or so. It's going to be a long time before the war even starts, much less is fought.
* XHTML/CSS = Better Tool support. Microsoft makes a lot of money from dev tools. In fact XHTML is an advertised feature of ASP.NET 2.0 -- you do the math.
Slashdot Mirror
Government assigns citizens unique numbers. News at 11.
email is a worldwide thing so individual government-based initiatives are bunk
A) Do you understand how X.509 works?
B) Non-governmental certs (eg Verisign) are authenticated with your Passport/Drivers License/Government ID anyway.
X.400 was also designed WAY back, and it solves every problem people have with SMTP.
However in order to do this, you need central control (aka the Phone Company), which is exacty what the modern Internet was designed to avoid.
So, no, you're not going to get a wonderful replacement for SMTP that's spam/virus/fraud proof and still allows you to do things in a decentralized manner (like setup your own mailserver). Any fix people have come up with can easily be applied to SMTP email.
(If the government wanted to do us a favor, they'd give you a X.509 certificate along with your driver's licence.)
^ Just pointing out that this is a good object lesson on why /. Moderation sucks for political threads.
Sevn "scores a zinger" on jmorris42. So he ends up at 4 Insightful while jmorris is at 1 Flamebait even though jmorris probably had the more well thought-out and well stated post.
(I agree with Sevn, BTW, just trying to show how the peanut gallery gets involved in this.)
One of the goals of the Firefox project was to get rid of the 10,000 different nerd options from the dialogs. KISS.
This has nothing to do with "pre-1.0" and everything to do with a UI design decision. The theory is that someone will provide a "Advanced Options" extention.
(And there are IE features that are only available through the registry -- such as setting Quick Search shortcuts.)
You're right that these consumer reviews don't get the details 100% correct. But from a consumer standpoint, the most important fact is that iTMS only works with iPod and visa-versa. (Even if you decide that Apple's products are the best, you should know that going in.) The details beyond that don't really matter all that much.
For ripping your own stuff, the important fact is that everyone supports MP3 now (even WMP!) -- except for Sony who got tarred for it in the reviews. 'Most People' just want MP3 support -- they don't care about AAC/WMA/OGG/etc.
FWIW, Windows Media is now on a standards track with SMTPE (for video, don't know about audio), and is apparently a good deal cheaper than what Dolby etc charges for AAC.
Second, force all of Microsoft's web development tools to be 100% standards compliant.
At the time, IE was considered one of the most standard-compliant browser. You're basically saying that the government should have forced MS to drop support for Netscape 4 (which I'd go for, but it's not exactly what Netscape wanted out of the case).
Only mentioned it because I've been using mail.yahoo.com from Mozilla for years without any problems.
However, the fact is that Mozilla and IE are not 100% compatible with each other, so those sorts of incompatibilities are fair game for use statistics.
Dont forget that Gmail is still invitation-only, and therefore a very biased sample.
Oh, you're still amped up about some flamewar from 3 months ago, but since nobody cares anymore, you've somehow conflated it into your unhappy state of Apple Zealotry. Sounds more like your shrink's problem than mine.
Parent talks about iTMS, I say FairPlay is proprietary, and your swift rebuttal is that FairPlay is proprietary.
With a winning argument like that I can why you felt like your only exit strategy was to be an insulting jerk and to attempt to change the topic. Well, enough faulty thought from you -- go get a refund from whomever attempted to educate you, and check in with that shrink.
Google may not be the best site from which to gather browser usage statistics, but I think it's probably _one_ of the best ones these days.
Depending if you are counting unique users or hits. I might hit Google 10-20 a day -- while the average person maybe only runs 1-2 searches a week. So Google would be highly biased towards people doing research, or trying to find answers to technical questions.
I think you'd probably get the best stats from a general interest news site or perhaps mail.yahoo.com.
Please, spare the weak flamage. (I don't even understand what you mean by the Moore reference.)
The argument was that iTunes Store-bought songs are more "open" than WMP Store-bought songs. Which is simply not the case.
Linux users are definitely a significant segment of that market.
Depends what you mean by "Linux user" -- if you include hobbyists that futz around dualbooting when not playing their Windows games, then OK, I suppose there is a marginal reputation halo from having good Linux support. However, the vast majority of high-end card-buying casemod/alienware Gamer types either don't care about Linux or think it sucks.
The general profile of a Linux user is a system administrator who runs it on servers and doesn't give 2 craps about video drivers.
What can one say, but that you're wrong. iTunes Store uses 100% Apple-proprietary FairPlay DRM.
OTOH, anyone (including Apple) can call up Microsoft and licence WMA DRM.
Not wanting to licence WMA is a valid concern, but the issue is that nobody can use FairPlay without Apple's permission (and if you reverse-engineer it, Apple will sue you).
Maybe you wouldn't be so sick of the iTMS comparison if you had your facts right.
The biggest problem is that both Old RedHat and Old Windows automatically started many services right after install. When you're talking about a window of only few minutes before you're cracked, that's not good even if the administrator realizes he needs to reconfigure and patch.
IIRC, the only reason why this is the default theme is because the "modern" theme doesn't display properly in 256 colours on certain systems
"Modern" also does not respect the Windows Appearance settings, which is an accesibility problem for people with poor eyesight etc. (Or it didn't -- maybe someone fixed it.)
Not that Modern is particularly nice looking either. It's sorta a shame that they spent so much time building a themeable app and the main themes are Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer clones.
What people fail to recognize when promoting Linux is that it's chief competetor is a corporate giant that has stagnated.
This statement would have been a lot more insightful if you were aware that Linux's chief competitor is actually Sun Solaris (and other System V UNIX) and not MS Windows...
(while you can complain about Windows, its hard to argue that it sat completely still like Solaris has for the last decade+.)
> No other operating system EVER MADE can compare to that.
Except RedHat Linux 5.x and 6.x.
The RH releases from the same era as W2K had dozens of remote holes in the install and had serveral worms targetting them, a long with lots of script kiddie activity. A study showed that an unpatched RedHat box would be owned in in a mean time of less than 5 minutes. Someone even made t-shirts that said "My other computer is your Linux box."
(However, like Win2000, a RH box could be secured by a competant administrator.)
Trying to judge technological inferiority by bug counts is inane, especially because Unix/Linux doesn't really have a significantly better record than Microsoft. (Compare the record of IIS6 versus Apache over the last year or so, for example...) So I would rephrase your statement: Slashdot is anti-microsoft for a reason -- Slashdot believes their shit don't stink
The vendors I mentioned see the potential of a services-based business model and realize it's a better fit for the industry. Like the buggy and whip makers ...
Funny you put it that way, because Services is more of the past than the future (think paying out the ass to IBM and DEC). Its a good fit for large enterprise businesses with complex installs and a bad fit almost everywhere else.
Look at the big "Desktop Linux" packages where you need to pay annual rent just to get security patches. This is no real threat to the estabilished "self-support" Shrink Wrap model as popularlized by Microsoft, Apple and others.
The real "buggy-whip" companies is literally IBM with a massive amount of revenue coming from its legacy mainframe and AS/400 lines, most of which will be turned off over the next 10 years. The problem is that the rest of the market is wise to IBM's luxury pricing (except you Linux who lap up IBM propaganda). But if you want Linux to expand outside the "UNIX" market and really compete with Windows, you aren't going to do it with "Services".
Works in IE :)
No, I don't think its ridiclous to believe that Mozilla will be more popular now that they've finally started to listen to user complaints and address the issues.
The big knocks against Mozilla have been:
(A) Bloat -> Firefox
(B) Compatibility -> document.all was the biggie, but there's been many other IE DOM methods added.
They might not take over the world yet, but there's a lot of people that have been willing to download and try Mozilla but haven't 'converted' in the survey stats.
Since when have Mozilla folks started to work around IE brokenness, and why?
Maybe since years of a hardline position on the point have resulted in a 2% marketshare?
Maybe they finally realized that in the big picture, the minor naming issue of "all[]" versus "getElementById()" wasn't worth getting their panties in a wad over -- especially relative to the bigger issue of XHTML/CSS versus Vendor HTML?
Either way, I welcome the new Realism over at mozilla.org.
not to mention encourages writing MORE bad DHTML
Almost everyone who actually writes Javascript understands that document.all is legacy. However, a huge portion of DHTML is just copy-n-pasted over-n-over again by Dreamweaver jockeys -- who barely understand programming much less standards nuances. Mozilla was trying to educate a group that is impossible to educate.
I'm not sure what your example has to do with typing. If anything it just demonstrates that the interface for ASP.NET list controls sucks (like they just copied the client DOM interface without thinking about how you'd actually use it. There's other problems too, like difficulty in putting a dummy "--Select--" item into a databound dropdown list.)
Anyway, one of the first things I did was subclass WebControls.DropDownList and some of the others so the selected value could be get/set from a property.
what real benefits come from statically-compiled languages other than execution speed and perhaps some subtle runtime bugs difficult to discover?
Dynamic typing was a major source of bugs in a larger, multi-developer ASP Classic project I worked on. "Subtle Runtime Bugs" were by far the most time-consuming issues.
Not all of that was the typing system, but instead the VB Programmer mentality of "Don't worry about types" -- but you could argue that dynamic typing just encourages that attitute. When the "right way" to work in dynamic typed languages is to litter your code with casts, why not just use something statically typed?
(Not saying they're aren't advantages to dynamic types, and I've certainly used them -- just that "Quick and Buggy" isn't one of them.)
Try putting the name of the item in -- it helps.
  is Mosaic-compatiblity. No shit. Theres other silly things which were done as to not break Netscape 3 stuff.
Anyway, it used to be that "getting away with murder" was seen as the main feature of the WWW -- no complexly or strictness. But not everyone making webpages has got the memo yet. (Mozilla also has a very tolerant engine that lets you get away with a ton of crap.)
I have to agree that if MS is upgrading IE they are doing it for their own reasons* and not because they are running scared of Mozilla or Firefox going from 1% to maybe 2%.
Everyone decided that Microsoft had "won the browser wars" when they got to 75% marketshare. Now they've got 95% or so. It's going to be a long time before the war even starts, much less is fought.
* XHTML/CSS = Better Tool support. Microsoft makes a lot of money from dev tools. In fact XHTML is an advertised feature of ASP.NET 2.0 -- you do the math.