Microsoft are just flushing their platform down the toilet by not realising where the value is in it.
Definitely agree. It's bizarre how little MS understands how people use many of their technologies.
I remember at some early.NET preview meetings I talked to the presenters about obvious things they'd missed that were going to piss people off. They didn't think anyone used the features I was talking about. They didn't think edit-and-continue was important. It was clear they had certain expectations for how people used VB, and those expectations didn't fit at all with real life.
Or later, they killed the DHTML edit control in IE. They didn't really announce it - just somewhere on a blog they wrote something like "we looked around and didn't see many sites using this control". That's because they don't see weird old intranet sites - but those sites are everywhere once you start lifting rocks. I know 3 or 4 businesses that are still on XP/IE6 solely for this reason.
I think they're starting to figure this out - but at this point the chain is already far too broken for them to fix.
Sorry, so sharing cam versions online doesn't hurt movie sales - and nobody said they did? That's a strawman?
That doesn't really go along with the facts: there's ridiculous measures to prevent cams at many theaters, new laws were put in place in many jurisdictions, and draconian enforcement has literally jailed people for things like "taking a picture of a friend, at a movie with the screen in the background".
You may have known this coming in, but it's certainly not just strawmen holding the position that online cam versions hurt sales.
Well, it's not just how they sell their products, it's the laws and prosecution they want to support that model. I'd suggest that the severe enforcement actions they demand (and usually get), have a negative impact on society and are also unnecessary for them to exist and profit (even without changing their business model) - and I believe that last part is the main point of this Slashdot article.
I think eventually these businesses will shift to models that don't require this kind of enforcement, that provide a better product to more people, and with better margins - and that not much time will be spent worrying about piracy because it won't be a significant problem to people. In the meantime, I think laws should be much more in favor of consumers: penalties should be smaller and rights to privacy should be preserved. These companies do not need legal protection that is draconian, and that extends well beyond the protection others get for their physical property.
Sorry, I wasn't perfectly clear. The ones proposing this at the board meeting would normally be execs, who could be fired.
What if that "one solitary idiot" is the single largest shareholder (directly representing himself)?
Somebody whistle-blows this (one or more of the original scientists, some middle manager, an executive, or a board member) and gets themselves a tidy book deal and is the hero who fought back to cure cancer. But even that's unlikely to be necessary - again, we're imagining human behavior that's very rare, and even more rare for someone who's very successful. Even if someone privately thought this would be profitable to bury (which it almost certainly wouldn't be), they'd have to be non-functionally psychopathic to actually suggest it out loud.
Look, I fully agree corporations (and people in general) do bad things. You can get a weird group-think going where everyone does something that nobody individually would do. Humans can do all sorts of bad things when they're scared. Many times you can get a horrible result through a chain of events that are all, themselves, reasonably innocuous. People will go a long ways to rationalize their own failures. Few people respect the categorical imperative; they'll do things that contribute to problems while denying their own responsibility or moral failure.
There's lots of mechanisms that result in bad behavior - but almost all of them share some characteristics; in very few do the functional people involved feel like they're actually doing something importantly wrong. In the case of a "burying the cure for cancer", that's a very hard leap to make, and suppressing a cure over time is going to take a large number of those leaps by a lot of people (and many of these steps don't make any business sense, let alone moral sense).
This kind of thinking is fantastically disconnected from reality - naive, junior-high, my-parents-don't-get-it thinking. Big pharma execs would do anything for a cancer cure; it would mean fame, money, and prestige out their eyes. And if one solitary idiot at that board meeting said something about not releasing it because of long term profits (or some other BS) he'd get laughed out of a job and be a funny story in someone's memoirs.
Now sure, they'd do what they could to milk it for profits - but they'd be damn sure it got out there before anyone else could. Hell, even if releasing it wasn't profitable at all (and it would be - obviously, obviously, obviously, obviously), they'd burn their company down if they had to.
Very, very few people would consider holding back on a cure for money; not many of those psychopaths have the personal skills to end up at the top of a big corporation, and getting a whole raft of them together would be nigh impossible. Imagining collusion across all the companies on something like this is ridiculous.
Re:Shouldn't shareholders demand an asset auction.
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BlackBerry 10 Unveiled
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Thing is, capitalism wasn't "designed" to distribute wealth.
Agree. But when the economy is heavily "people churning out stuff", capitalism distributes wealth pretty reasonably as kind of a side effect. Most people can create a reasonable amount of value, enough to support themselves as well as a surplus that creates employment opportunities.
I agree that there's a strong positive-feedback cycle in multi-generational capitalism, but that's much more manageable than the collapse that's coming when a large percentage of people have nothing to offer the economy.
Re:Shouldn't shareholders demand an asset auction.
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BlackBerry 10 Unveiled
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I agree in large part, and RIM could have outs. If I was RIM, I'd focus on their advantages in hardware (good battery life, good reception, good keyboards, that little light when you have an e-mail) and corporate integration. If they were doing that, I'd have a lot more faith in their prospects. I think that market is solid, and may actually rebuild as people get tired of unreliable (by comparison) iPhones and cheap Androids.
This, though, seems like a too-late, too-fast, too-big move into app-phones - and I think they're going to bungle it like the bungled the Playbook, and the fail will taint their other products.
Honestly, I wish them all the best. It's a cool idea, and I don't have any real love for the other mobile platforms (I carry an ancient Nokia). I just don't think they'll pull it off great, and I don't think the market will have much patience for even small failures in the new product.
Re:Shouldn't shareholders demand an asset auction.
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BlackBerry 10 Unveiled
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The only reason they're selling a few million is because they used to be selling many millions. On their current course (which they seem to be accelerating on), they soon won't be a small player, they'll be non-existent. As the parent poster suggests, at that point the random shareholders lose everything and anything of value they've made will be lost. If they sell now, it means the random investors get something out, and the things of value they've created will be more likely to be preserved. It also means some executives have to swallow some pride and find a new job, so it won't happen.
If products were made, marketed and sold locally, the distribution of wealth wouldn't be so skewed.
For most of history, this was the case. Almost everything people used was made within a few mile radius (often by themselves). I don't think you want to live in "most of history". Tremendous specialization of labor and mass production are what created modern civilization, and neither of those ideas work without large distribution networks.
Distribution of wealth is a growing problem because individual humans are worth less and less to the economy. The economy used to need more people for all sorts of things. Now it needs less. Eventually it will need very few. People will cling to capitalism long after it has ceased to be an effective way to distribute wealth.
OK, got it. If a newspaper does something bad, it's not really a newspaper - it's an advocacy site or a right-wing tabloid.
So these PR people can feel free to answer quickly to newspapers, they just have to be careful about tabloids, magazines, periodicals, rogue reporters, and temporary lapses in judgement that are not indicative of a paper's overall quality.
Or, they could assume the worst of all media, just as so many journalists are trained to assume anyone they interview are lying liars telling lies.
"Let me read my notes back to you to make sure I'm getting you right."
Lol. Do you read the papers? Most reporters today aren't in the business of making sure they get the right quote. They're in the business of waiting for a mistake (or an isolated sentence or phrase that could be construed as one) - and, if they get one, putting it as a headline and milking it for all it's worth. The current Republican primary has turned on stupid phrases; the Alberta election coverage (I live in Alberta) has orbited around them as well. It hasn't given many journalists pause as to whether those quotes represent what those candidates think or feel - they've scored their points and made their splash.
If you can't imagine a journalist salivating about the prospect of reporting "government boondoggle spends x million dollars finding out it's snowing", then you just aren't paying attention. This isn't partisan, this isn't a bureaucratic problem, it's a problem with the perverse relationship that journalists now have with the public. They have tremendous pressure to be permanently adversarial to everyone - many seem to believe that's somehow what journalism is about - and it means that people are loath to be candid or off-the-cuff with any media.
These bureaucrats spending some time to avoid a trumped-up scandal probably saves the government a lot of time and money.
You want loudness control? Movies AND documentaries?
Resuming play?(!!)
You're going to need a lot of FPGAs, and you're going to need to rewrite a lot of popular codecs. Movie codecs. Documentary codecs. TV episode codecs. Audio codecs (with loudness control).
Thinking about this some more, are you sure the "popular" codecs meet all your requirements? Those codecs are for the kind of people satisfied without a customized library screen. Think big. You need to write some of your own codecs, running on your own optimized OS, and your own network protocols. Then shoot your own movies.
Well, at least we know how you approach these sorts of discussions.
If by "these sorts of discussions" you mean "discussions where I correct an idiot, and where I know that idiot will be unable to resist a stupid response" then yes, that is how I approach "these discussions". I find it entertaining to watch people desperately try to defend their ill-thought-out positions - and the barb on my post pretty much ensures they will, as you have. So, thanks.
But really, look at yourself objectively: your proposition is "buying someone the thing they would have bought if they had one more dollar" is "not even slightly similar" to "giving them $1". That's where you've arrived at. If I'm insulting you now it's because that's all that's left to do. What argument could make it any more clear that you're wrong?
As to the rest of the post, it's understandable that you'd try to deflect rather than actually defend that position. You may not see it that way. I don't care; I don't think I'll get any more entertainment out of this discussion. Bye.
I could spend $1 on my own campaign, or you could spend $1 for me. If you spend it, you have $1 less and I have $1 more. It's true you didn't pay me $1 directly, but the net effect is pretty similar.
It doesn't always work exactly like that, but hopefully you get the general idea - well, unless you're really, really fantastically stupid (which I imagine you'll demonstrate very clearly in a response).
And that actually gave me a good indication of both of your skills...
I was joking, clearly. And I kind of hope you were too, as otherwise that's a very sad observation there.
You've never had a debugging problem where paring down you attention to a few variables, and tracking the changes to them, was important?
Yes, I have had problems like that.
Here's a question that's a bit more relevant: "Have you ever had a problem where you had 7 variables you need to track in your mind?" The answer to that, for me, is no. My experience includes hundreds of hours doing programming competitions with problems purposefully designed to be convoluted, and I've never felt the need to track anywhere near 7 of them in my mind. Tracking 7 variables in your mind is not a core programming skill, nor close to one.
Yes, you can "interpert" him as saying something else. However, I was having a conversation with him, rather than an imaginary version of him that said something that wasn't stupid and wrong.
Anyone who can clearly explain a topic in English probably won't write readable code either.
Is this a clever dig at native English speaking programmers?
(which 7 variables do you need to track in your mind at any one time)
After 15 years of business programming, a smattering of embedded and OS programming, and a lot of algorithm programming competitions, I can't imagine a kind of programming where "which 7 variables do you need to track in your mind" is of any relevance. If this normally comes up for you, you're doing something very wrong.
I feel a bit bad about it, but as I read the summary I was thinking: this guy is poison. I manage a team of developers, and I see a big red flag whenever I hear about a guy who figures he's doing more than his share, keeps secrets/hoards knowledge, thinks he's irreplaceable, or plays ultimatums.
Kills morale, usually means the guy isn't actually pulling his weight, kills positive relationships, creates politics, and generally poisons the workplace.
Oh, and by the way, via Google, I couldn't find any reference to the line "hate the sin, love the sinner" as actually being anywhere in the Bible, Old or New Testament.
Yeah... I don't think you'll find that. God loving righteous people and hating sinners is a major theme of the Bible. He just, uh, comes out and says it multiple times.
Psalms 11:5 - The Lord trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth
But Christians, as they exist today in the States, typically don't give two craps for the Bible. There's about 20 verses of generic Oprah-isms that they hold dear, and the rest is a pick-and-choose buffet.
Meh, there's still plenty of browser incompatibilities and quirks. You can get around a lot of them with things like jQuery, but you still run into some that are difficult. I was just doing a "code completion" popup thingee a bit ago, and there was quite a few places I had to split code for Firefox vs. IE - and it doesn't work in Chrome (yet) though I have no idea why. I can certainly understand how, if you can target only one browser, it's tempting to do so; even though doing a cross browser solutions are much easier than they used to be they're still not free.
Lol. You haven't spent a long time in corporate development I guess. For many companies, they're just starting to transition off parts of their 1983 mainframe/terminal setup, and they're happy to be getting most of their people on XP because now they can have people all remote into the same crazy old computer that terminals into their older, larger crazy old computer.
The 1998 website that only works in IE 6 is "the new system" for many, many companies.
To be fair, the situation looked a lot different in 1998. I mean, look at what web standards defined in 1998 (almost nothing) vs. what managers demanded from these web applications (pretty much everything we have now, plus some other stuff).
So say you want a page that can update dynamically? What are you going to tell your manager: wait for some more tech to be invented and put into a standard? OK, fine - we'll just sit out for 5 years while we get trampled.
Oh, or we'll go "cross browser" and limit ourselves to stuff you could get to work in Netscape 3 (hint: the answer is nothing, and you had to pay out the nose in layers and BS and image pre-load scripts to get that nothing).
No - you did what you could: and sometimes that meant using IE specific DOM and events, ActiveX BS, iFrames, showModalDialog, the wacky DHTML Edit control, and maybe you try to find some CSS that works in the browsers you try to support.
Some of that stuff worked out fine, by the way (lots of that IE specific DOM code eventually became standard - as did, in a practical sense, the XMLHTTP ActiveX control) - and other stuff didn't.
Sometimes you guessed wrong, sometimes you guessed right; sometimes you knew you were guessing wrong (as with ActiveX) but didn't have another real choice. Say you want your software to be able to save locally in the case of a downed network connection (remember, this is 1998) - what was your good option for the shiny new web app that's going to make your business millions?
Oh and if you, instead, try to write some native app you got destroyed by the market because people didn't want bloody native apps - and you have an even harder transition to come because many as cool as native apps weren't in 1998, they were even less cool in 2003.
Many companies have lax or no update control, and many allow logins from home computers and what not. People will end up in a version they didn't mean to get and that will create work for other people.
Not end of the world, and again I'm not saying the decision's wrong - I just think they're crazy if they don't expect some significant problems and complaints.
IE 6 is a very, very different browser from IE 9. We've had plenty of clients who can't move off IE 6 (or are in the middle of a large project to do so) because it's the only one that will run their Intranet site correctly. I've seen MS make this type of mistake before - they don't see many public-facing sites using a technology, so they feel safe getting rid of it. Well, yes, very few public-facing sites are going to use crazy IE specific stuff, and most are (by now) going to be making reasonable efforts to work between browsers.
Intranet sites are a whole other kettle of fish; corporate programmers often target a single browser - and for many of them, that was IE for a long time. They got away with that from IE 4 to IE 6 because MS just added stuff. With IE 7 and, particularly, Vista, they started fixing insecure and non-standard behaviors - and that's part of why so many companies are still on XP and IE 6.
If MS does this, there will be a lot of pissed off people and gnashing of teeth. I'm not saying it's the wrong choice but "once they've assured there's no issues" sounds pretty silly.
I think they do realize that - and I think they realize that in many of these models there's no box for "publisher" at all. They're not fighting for artists or consumers, they're fighting for their own existence.
If Louis just sells stuff from his website to people, there's not a lot of other people who get to feed off that.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops - accidentally marked your post as troll (was aiming for something more positive). Posting to cancel that.
Microsoft are just flushing their platform down the toilet by not realising where the value is in it.
Definitely agree. It's bizarre how little MS understands how people use many of their technologies.
I remember at some early .NET preview meetings I talked to the presenters about obvious things they'd missed that were going to piss people off. They didn't think anyone used the features I was talking about. They didn't think edit-and-continue was important. It was clear they had certain expectations for how people used VB, and those expectations didn't fit at all with real life.
Or later, they killed the DHTML edit control in IE. They didn't really announce it - just somewhere on a blog they wrote something like "we looked around and didn't see many sites using this control". That's because they don't see weird old intranet sites - but those sites are everywhere once you start lifting rocks. I know 3 or 4 businesses that are still on XP/IE6 solely for this reason.
I think they're starting to figure this out - but at this point the chain is already far too broken for them to fix.
Sorry, so sharing cam versions online doesn't hurt movie sales - and nobody said they did? That's a strawman?
That doesn't really go along with the facts: there's ridiculous measures to prevent cams at many theaters, new laws were put in place in many jurisdictions, and draconian enforcement has literally jailed people for things like "taking a picture of a friend, at a movie with the screen in the background".
You may have known this coming in, but it's certainly not just strawmen holding the position that online cam versions hurt sales.
Well, it's not just how they sell their products, it's the laws and prosecution they want to support that model. I'd suggest that the severe enforcement actions they demand (and usually get), have a negative impact on society and are also unnecessary for them to exist and profit (even without changing their business model) - and I believe that last part is the main point of this Slashdot article.
I think eventually these businesses will shift to models that don't require this kind of enforcement, that provide a better product to more people, and with better margins - and that not much time will be spent worrying about piracy because it won't be a significant problem to people. In the meantime, I think laws should be much more in favor of consumers: penalties should be smaller and rights to privacy should be preserved. These companies do not need legal protection that is draconian, and that extends well beyond the protection others get for their physical property.
Sorry, I wasn't perfectly clear. The ones proposing this at the board meeting would normally be execs, who could be fired.
Somebody whistle-blows this (one or more of the original scientists, some middle manager, an executive, or a board member) and gets themselves a tidy book deal and is the hero who fought back to cure cancer. But even that's unlikely to be necessary - again, we're imagining human behavior that's very rare, and even more rare for someone who's very successful. Even if someone privately thought this would be profitable to bury (which it almost certainly wouldn't be), they'd have to be non-functionally psychopathic to actually suggest it out loud.
Look, I fully agree corporations (and people in general) do bad things. You can get a weird group-think going where everyone does something that nobody individually would do. Humans can do all sorts of bad things when they're scared. Many times you can get a horrible result through a chain of events that are all, themselves, reasonably innocuous. People will go a long ways to rationalize their own failures. Few people respect the categorical imperative; they'll do things that contribute to problems while denying their own responsibility or moral failure.
There's lots of mechanisms that result in bad behavior - but almost all of them share some characteristics; in very few do the functional people involved feel like they're actually doing something importantly wrong. In the case of a "burying the cure for cancer", that's a very hard leap to make, and suppressing a cure over time is going to take a large number of those leaps by a lot of people (and many of these steps don't make any business sense, let alone moral sense).
This kind of thinking is fantastically disconnected from reality - naive, junior-high, my-parents-don't-get-it thinking. Big pharma execs would do anything for a cancer cure; it would mean fame, money, and prestige out their eyes. And if one solitary idiot at that board meeting said something about not releasing it because of long term profits (or some other BS) he'd get laughed out of a job and be a funny story in someone's memoirs.
Now sure, they'd do what they could to milk it for profits - but they'd be damn sure it got out there before anyone else could. Hell, even if releasing it wasn't profitable at all (and it would be - obviously, obviously, obviously, obviously), they'd burn their company down if they had to.
Very, very few people would consider holding back on a cure for money; not many of those psychopaths have the personal skills to end up at the top of a big corporation, and getting a whole raft of them together would be nigh impossible. Imagining collusion across all the companies on something like this is ridiculous.
Agree. But when the economy is heavily "people churning out stuff", capitalism distributes wealth pretty reasonably as kind of a side effect. Most people can create a reasonable amount of value, enough to support themselves as well as a surplus that creates employment opportunities.
I agree that there's a strong positive-feedback cycle in multi-generational capitalism, but that's much more manageable than the collapse that's coming when a large percentage of people have nothing to offer the economy.
I agree in large part, and RIM could have outs. If I was RIM, I'd focus on their advantages in hardware (good battery life, good reception, good keyboards, that little light when you have an e-mail) and corporate integration. If they were doing that, I'd have a lot more faith in their prospects. I think that market is solid, and may actually rebuild as people get tired of unreliable (by comparison) iPhones and cheap Androids.
This, though, seems like a too-late, too-fast, too-big move into app-phones - and I think they're going to bungle it like the bungled the Playbook, and the fail will taint their other products.
Honestly, I wish them all the best. It's a cool idea, and I don't have any real love for the other mobile platforms (I carry an ancient Nokia). I just don't think they'll pull it off great, and I don't think the market will have much patience for even small failures in the new product.
The only reason they're selling a few million is because they used to be selling many millions. On their current course (which they seem to be accelerating on), they soon won't be a small player, they'll be non-existent. As the parent poster suggests, at that point the random shareholders lose everything and anything of value they've made will be lost. If they sell now, it means the random investors get something out, and the things of value they've created will be more likely to be preserved. It also means some executives have to swallow some pride and find a new job, so it won't happen.
For most of history, this was the case. Almost everything people used was made within a few mile radius (often by themselves). I don't think you want to live in "most of history". Tremendous specialization of labor and mass production are what created modern civilization, and neither of those ideas work without large distribution networks.
Distribution of wealth is a growing problem because individual humans are worth less and less to the economy. The economy used to need more people for all sorts of things. Now it needs less. Eventually it will need very few. People will cling to capitalism long after it has ceased to be an effective way to distribute wealth.
OK, got it. If a newspaper does something bad, it's not really a newspaper - it's an advocacy site or a right-wing tabloid.
So these PR people can feel free to answer quickly to newspapers, they just have to be careful about tabloids, magazines, periodicals, rogue reporters, and temporary lapses in judgement that are not indicative of a paper's overall quality.
Or, they could assume the worst of all media, just as so many journalists are trained to assume anyone they interview are lying liars telling lies.
Lol. Do you read the papers? Most reporters today aren't in the business of making sure they get the right quote. They're in the business of waiting for a mistake (or an isolated sentence or phrase that could be construed as one) - and, if they get one, putting it as a headline and milking it for all it's worth. The current Republican primary has turned on stupid phrases; the Alberta election coverage (I live in Alberta) has orbited around them as well. It hasn't given many journalists pause as to whether those quotes represent what those candidates think or feel - they've scored their points and made their splash.
If you can't imagine a journalist salivating about the prospect of reporting "government boondoggle spends x million dollars finding out it's snowing", then you just aren't paying attention. This isn't partisan, this isn't a bureaucratic problem, it's a problem with the perverse relationship that journalists now have with the public. They have tremendous pressure to be permanently adversarial to everyone - many seem to believe that's somehow what journalism is about - and it means that people are loath to be candid or off-the-cuff with any media.
These bureaucrats spending some time to avoid a trumped-up scandal probably saves the government a lot of time and money.
You want loudness control? Movies AND documentaries?
Resuming play?(!!)
You're going to need a lot of FPGAs, and you're going to need to rewrite a lot of popular codecs. Movie codecs. Documentary codecs. TV episode codecs. Audio codecs (with loudness control).
Thinking about this some more, are you sure the "popular" codecs meet all your requirements? Those codecs are for the kind of people satisfied without a customized library screen. Think big. You need to write some of your own codecs, running on your own optimized OS, and your own network protocols. Then shoot your own movies.
You're going to need a lot of books for this.
Well, at least we know how you approach these sorts of discussions.
If by "these sorts of discussions" you mean "discussions where I correct an idiot, and where I know that idiot will be unable to resist a stupid response" then yes, that is how I approach "these discussions". I find it entertaining to watch people desperately try to defend their ill-thought-out positions - and the barb on my post pretty much ensures they will, as you have. So, thanks.
But really, look at yourself objectively: your proposition is "buying someone the thing they would have bought if they had one more dollar" is "not even slightly similar" to "giving them $1". That's where you've arrived at. If I'm insulting you now it's because that's all that's left to do. What argument could make it any more clear that you're wrong?
As to the rest of the post, it's understandable that you'd try to deflect rather than actually defend that position. You may not see it that way. I don't care; I don't think I'll get any more entertainment out of this discussion. Bye.
I could spend $1 on my own campaign, or you could spend $1 for me. If you spend it, you have $1 less and I have $1 more. It's true you didn't pay me $1 directly, but the net effect is pretty similar.
It doesn't always work exactly like that, but hopefully you get the general idea - well, unless you're really, really fantastically stupid (which I imagine you'll demonstrate very clearly in a response).
And that actually gave me a good indication of both of your skills...
I was joking, clearly. And I kind of hope you were too, as otherwise that's a very sad observation there.
You've never had a debugging problem where paring down you attention to a few variables, and tracking the changes to them, was important?
Yes, I have had problems like that.
Here's a question that's a bit more relevant: "Have you ever had a problem where you had 7 variables you need to track in your mind?" The answer to that, for me, is no. My experience includes hundreds of hours doing programming competitions with problems purposefully designed to be convoluted, and I've never felt the need to track anywhere near 7 of them in my mind. Tracking 7 variables in your mind is not a core programming skill, nor close to one.
Yes, you can "interpert" him as saying something else. However, I was having a conversation with him, rather than an imaginary version of him that said something that wasn't stupid and wrong.
Anyone who can clearly explain a topic in English probably won't write readable code either.
Is this a clever dig at native English speaking programmers?
(which 7 variables do you need to track in your mind at any one time)
After 15 years of business programming, a smattering of embedded and OS programming, and a lot of algorithm programming competitions, I can't imagine a kind of programming where "which 7 variables do you need to track in your mind" is of any relevance. If this normally comes up for you, you're doing something very wrong.
I mean, fake obviously but still more interesting than the 45th "I'm too cool for 3d, which isn't even really 3d" pile-on thread.
Oh, and here's a video of someone who actually implemented a Meissner effect racetrack, complete with elevation changes: here
I feel a bit bad about it, but as I read the summary I was thinking: this guy is poison. I manage a team of developers, and I see a big red flag whenever I hear about a guy who figures he's doing more than his share, keeps secrets/hoards knowledge, thinks he's irreplaceable, or plays ultimatums.
Kills morale, usually means the guy isn't actually pulling his weight, kills positive relationships, creates politics, and generally poisons the workplace.
Oh, and by the way, via Google, I couldn't find any reference to the line "hate the sin, love the sinner" as actually being anywhere in the Bible, Old or New Testament.
Yeah... I don't think you'll find that. God loving righteous people and hating sinners is a major theme of the Bible. He just, uh, comes out and says it multiple times.
Psalms 11:5 - The Lord trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth
But Christians, as they exist today in the States, typically don't give two craps for the Bible. There's about 20 verses of generic Oprah-isms that they hold dear, and the rest is a pick-and-choose buffet.
Meh, there's still plenty of browser incompatibilities and quirks. You can get around a lot of them with things like jQuery, but you still run into some that are difficult. I was just doing a "code completion" popup thingee a bit ago, and there was quite a few places I had to split code for Firefox vs. IE - and it doesn't work in Chrome (yet) though I have no idea why. I can certainly understand how, if you can target only one browser, it's tempting to do so; even though doing a cross browser solutions are much easier than they used to be they're still not free.
Lol. You haven't spent a long time in corporate development I guess. For many companies, they're just starting to transition off parts of their 1983 mainframe/terminal setup, and they're happy to be getting most of their people on XP because now they can have people all remote into the same crazy old computer that terminals into their older, larger crazy old computer.
The 1998 website that only works in IE 6 is "the new system" for many, many companies.
To be fair, the situation looked a lot different in 1998. I mean, look at what web standards defined in 1998 (almost nothing) vs. what managers demanded from these web applications (pretty much everything we have now, plus some other stuff).
So say you want a page that can update dynamically? What are you going to tell your manager: wait for some more tech to be invented and put into a standard? OK, fine - we'll just sit out for 5 years while we get trampled.
Oh, or we'll go "cross browser" and limit ourselves to stuff you could get to work in Netscape 3 (hint: the answer is nothing, and you had to pay out the nose in layers and BS and image pre-load scripts to get that nothing).
No - you did what you could: and sometimes that meant using IE specific DOM and events, ActiveX BS, iFrames, showModalDialog, the wacky DHTML Edit control, and maybe you try to find some CSS that works in the browsers you try to support.
Some of that stuff worked out fine, by the way (lots of that IE specific DOM code eventually became standard - as did, in a practical sense, the XMLHTTP ActiveX control) - and other stuff didn't.
Sometimes you guessed wrong, sometimes you guessed right; sometimes you knew you were guessing wrong (as with ActiveX) but didn't have another real choice. Say you want your software to be able to save locally in the case of a downed network connection (remember, this is 1998) - what was your good option for the shiny new web app that's going to make your business millions?
Oh and if you, instead, try to write some native app you got destroyed by the market because people didn't want bloody native apps - and you have an even harder transition to come because many as cool as native apps weren't in 1998, they were even less cool in 2003.
Many companies have lax or no update control, and many allow logins from home computers and what not. People will end up in a version they didn't mean to get and that will create work for other people.
Not end of the world, and again I'm not saying the decision's wrong - I just think they're crazy if they don't expect some significant problems and complaints.
after they have assured there are no issues
IE 6 is a very, very different browser from IE 9. We've had plenty of clients who can't move off IE 6 (or are in the middle of a large project to do so) because it's the only one that will run their Intranet site correctly. I've seen MS make this type of mistake before - they don't see many public-facing sites using a technology, so they feel safe getting rid of it. Well, yes, very few public-facing sites are going to use crazy IE specific stuff, and most are (by now) going to be making reasonable efforts to work between browsers.
Intranet sites are a whole other kettle of fish; corporate programmers often target a single browser - and for many of them, that was IE for a long time. They got away with that from IE 4 to IE 6 because MS just added stuff. With IE 7 and, particularly, Vista, they started fixing insecure and non-standard behaviors - and that's part of why so many companies are still on XP and IE 6.
If MS does this, there will be a lot of pissed off people and gnashing of teeth. I'm not saying it's the wrong choice but "once they've assured there's no issues" sounds pretty silly.
I think they do realize that - and I think they realize that in many of these models there's no box for "publisher" at all. They're not fighting for artists or consumers, they're fighting for their own existence.
If Louis just sells stuff from his website to people, there's not a lot of other people who get to feed off that.