Firefox is outstanding in part because it is just a browser that works well.
Why has Firefox rocketed in popularity when Mozilla has been around forever? Partly because they stripped out the mail/news reader and all of the other bloat that was unnecessary for a good web browser. ~4 MB download for an excellent browser. That's all I want and need.
The direction of Firefox specifically should proceed further down that road. Fix the bugs, make sure rendering is perfect according to web standards, and focus on the browsing experience. Continue to refine security and privacy features.
Plug-ins are fine; they leave the choice of including them to the user. But for Mozilla, just leave the browser lightweight and work on the way it does its job.
My antiquated 20 GB Archos Jukebox Multimedia has been playing MP3s and showing photos and videos for a few years (not to mention taking photos and videos through a low-quality camera attachment).
The iPod succeeded because of its tight integration and sync via iTunes and its superior UI. Syncing my Archos is a pain, but it is well ahead in the feature set.
Was Dean just as "geek friendly" when the campaign spammed users back in August?
Dean is going after low-hanging fruit. Go up to your average voter and mention that Dean released software under the GPL. Go ahead. After you get the brook-trout stare, consider the much-ballyhooed blogs of these candidates. High-tech tools to preach to the choir.
Great for shoring up the base, maybe a little grass-roots organization. Then throw in Clark or someone who actually affects the campaign on more than window-dressing geek issues and see how irrelevant it all becomes.
My grass needs a little (lot) of water...pretty danged brown right now.
"Students in computers" should be everyone
on
Computing's Lost Allure
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Knowing your way around a computer is such an essential business skill now.
Every kid in college, no matter his or her major, should know how to get around an Office suite, put into place a simple web site, and basic troubleshooting.
We're seeing the evolution of computer-technology-as-business-model into computer-technology-as-tool.
While it may be true that fewer kids are going into CS, what's also true is that the technology is penetrating deeper into the business school, journalism school, whererver where many things that were once the realm of CS or even MIS are now absorbed within a discipline that focuses on the application of that technology.
"The project, mostly paid for with a $200,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation and supported by companies like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft as well as public and nonprofit entities..."
So we have evil corporations, nonprofits, and public (funded by you and I) entities. The label "free access" sounds as if the bandwidth fairy visited Boston last week.
That's the point of a tax cut - the spending of more of your money is your choice. Donate it to NASA, invest in a promising aerospace company, hide it under the mattress, buy some beer - up to you. Money doesn't have to be taken with the IRS looming over you to benefit programs you approve of.
Broadband services are currently quite profitable for cable companies. Getting new customers at a lower price point would not necessarily be more profitable.
Set the price too high and of course no one signs up. Lower it like we'd all prefer, and not only is the impact on revenue marginal, but you incur costs in support and infrastructure to deal with the additional traffic on the network. Set the price at a point where it's reasonable to many users who just have to have that pipe, a little too high for many more, and which makes decent use of the network without bogging you down in support costs, and you've found your profit maximizing point.
That is a natural consequence of monopoly/oligopoly. So long as the last-mile connection is in relatively few hands and not subject to much competition, profit maximization will be the goal and not signing up new customers.
"Adventurer Steve Fossett"? This must be the first report I've seen in years that didn't say "Multi-Millionaire Steve Fossett". I had become convinced that Steve was his middle name.
In fact, there is an opposite concern. Whether through a network of links or through coordinated googlebombing [googlebombing.com], weblogs frequently show up near the top due to the nature of reciprocal linking between the blogs. Not saying that's good or bad (sometimes a sole voice is a better expert on a topic than CNN), but it is what it is. Ranking "links" seems valid enough, but then you ask if that includes machine-generated links by someone's aggregator and the issue becomes a little more cloudy.
Amazon's likely inability to maintain profit is their own problem and not an indication one way or the other whether online retailing has "come of age" (whatever that means).
There are plenty of us privately-held small companies out here with revenues under 100 million making money consistently even in this economy with online sales - we're just not screaming FOR THE LOVE OF OUR STOCK PRICE LOOK AT US on the cover of (fill in trendy New Economy magazine). We left "dot coms" behind as a benchmark long ago - we were interested in growing a business, not getting a Webby. We do it from small towns you fly over and get no closer to Silicon Valley than changing planes in SFO on our way to meet with a new supplier in Asia. We like Amazon if it gets our customers familiar with the idea of using a website to place an order (and Amazon has our attention and respect by doing many, many things worth emulating in terms of providing service to their customers) - but as far as strategy and finance go, we have much better and suitable models to follow.
Those who have been successful see this medium as simply another another sales channel, a mechanism to reduce expenses (particularly in transactions and support), and the extension of an already successful business model. We did not need 100 million of venture capital, an instant army of programmers, content managers costing half a million dollars, and consultants selling us "solutions". Instead the many silent successful firms grew our online sales channel just as we grew the rest of our business. Small at first, learn and add as necessary.
Catalog companies like LL Bean or Lands End are successful because they have taken advantage of the medium, yes, but also because they already have a super-efficient logistics system in place. That's one reason I'm surprised Wal-Mart is not a bigger online player - distribution and logistics innovations are what made them untouchable in the traditional retail arena.
People will bring servers to their knees to get the latest one-line change to the Linux kernel, and yet they'll run a mid-1990s version of the Windows lines and wonder why they have trouble.
God, that's about as annoying as "ogg vorbis" to try to pronounce and just as difficult to sell to your PHB without having him stumble all over the name next time it comes up in conversation.
Think I'm kidding? Microsoft didn't name everything "Word", "Office", "Publisher", etc by accident. Open source efforts more aimed at the enterprise really do need to rethink their naming strategies - your name is usually your most powerful marketing tool, so make it good.
Last I heard a lot of "big media" companies from CNN to the NY Times was laying off online staff and rethinking their commitments to the medium. Doesn't get much bigger than Time-Warner.
Instead of focusing on substantive problems like an acceptable model for compensation for providing content (which EVERYONE from huge conglomerate to one-man shops seem to be struggling with), we get another lament on a contrived theme.
I had to go to Popular Science to find out that this interesting product costs US$800. That's a good price point now that I know what it is. But I wish ReQuest could simply tell me an MSRP on their site instead of having me "contact the corresponding representative for your area code" because of some archaic territorial sales channel agreements.
Maybe it's just me and my experience with software companies who ask you to "contact us to discuss your enterprise solution" instead of disclosing price but I can't shake the sour taste that people who can't give prices up front have something to hide.
An interesting mention about style sheets on this page about the NeXT browser/editor TBL was demonstrating...
Even if that wasn't in the same context as what we've come to use as CSS now, I wonder why the separation of content from presentation took so long to come around (and is STILL not 100% properly implemented by major browsers) and how it got so far off track around, say, 1996 and the 2.0 browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox is outstanding in part because it is just a browser that works well.
Why has Firefox rocketed in popularity when Mozilla has been around forever? Partly because they stripped out the mail/news reader and all of the other bloat that was unnecessary for a good web browser. ~4 MB download for an excellent browser. That's all I want and need.
The direction of Firefox specifically should proceed further down that road. Fix the bugs, make sure rendering is perfect according to web standards, and focus on the browsing experience. Continue to refine security and privacy features.
Plug-ins are fine; they leave the choice of including them to the user. But for Mozilla, just leave the browser lightweight and work on the way it does its job.
My antiquated 20 GB Archos Jukebox Multimedia has been playing MP3s and showing photos and videos for a few years (not to mention taking photos and videos through a low-quality camera attachment).
The iPod succeeded because of its tight integration and sync via iTunes and its superior UI. Syncing my Archos is a pain, but it is well ahead in the feature set.
Would *South Korea* exist period?
What's "right for the country"?
Any Dawg can tell you that the University of Florida is a school to avoid. Who wants to wear jean shorts?
Was Dean just as "geek friendly" when the campaign spammed users back in August?
Dean is going after low-hanging fruit. Go up to your average voter and mention that Dean released software under the GPL. Go ahead. After you get the brook-trout stare, consider the much-ballyhooed blogs of these candidates. High-tech tools to preach to the choir.
Great for shoring up the base, maybe a little grass-roots organization. Then throw in Clark or someone who actually affects the campaign on more than window-dressing geek issues and see how irrelevant it all becomes.
My grass needs a little (lot) of water...pretty danged brown right now.
Knowing your way around a computer is such an essential business skill now.
Every kid in college, no matter his or her major, should know how to get around an Office suite, put into place a simple web site, and basic troubleshooting.
We're seeing the evolution of computer-technology-as-business-model into computer-technology-as-tool.
While it may be true that fewer kids are going into CS, what's also true is that the technology is penetrating deeper into the business school, journalism school, whererver where many things that were once the realm of CS or even MIS are now absorbed within a discipline that focuses on the application of that technology.
Free as in no cost for the end user, maybe.
"The project, mostly paid for with a $200,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation and supported by companies like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft as well as public and nonprofit entities..."
So we have evil corporations, nonprofits, and public (funded by you and I) entities. The label "free access" sounds as if the bandwidth fairy visited Boston last week.
That's the point of a tax cut - the spending of more of your money is your choice. Donate it to NASA, invest in a promising aerospace company, hide it under the mattress, buy some beer - up to you. Money doesn't have to be taken with the IRS looming over you to benefit programs you approve of.
Broadband services are currently quite profitable for cable companies. Getting new customers at a lower price point would not necessarily be more profitable.
Set the price too high and of course no one signs up. Lower it like we'd all prefer, and not only is the impact on revenue marginal, but you incur costs in support and infrastructure to deal with the additional traffic on the network. Set the price at a point where it's reasonable to many users who just have to have that pipe, a little too high for many more, and which makes decent use of the network without bogging you down in support costs, and you've found your profit maximizing point.
That is a natural consequence of monopoly/oligopoly. So long as the last-mile connection is in relatively few hands and not subject to much competition, profit maximization will be the goal and not signing up new customers.
to be called Mr., thank you.
The one with the homemade bacon - Scrap Iron Chef...took on both Iron Chef and Junkyard Wars at once. Clever show!
"Adventurer Steve Fossett"? This must be the first report I've seen in years that didn't say "Multi-Millionaire Steve Fossett". I had become convinced that Steve was his middle name.
In fact, there is an opposite concern. Whether through a network of links or through coordinated googlebombing [googlebombing.com], weblogs frequently show up near the top due to the nature of reciprocal linking between the blogs. Not saying that's good or bad (sometimes a sole voice is a better expert on a topic than CNN), but it is what it is. Ranking "links" seems valid enough, but then you ask if that includes machine-generated links by someone's aggregator and the issue becomes a little more cloudy.
Amazon's likely inability to maintain profit is their own problem and not an indication one way or the other whether online retailing has "come of age" (whatever that means).
There are plenty of us privately-held small companies out here with revenues under 100 million making money consistently even in this economy with online sales - we're just not screaming FOR THE LOVE OF OUR STOCK PRICE LOOK AT US on the cover of (fill in trendy New Economy magazine). We left "dot coms" behind as a benchmark long ago - we were interested in growing a business, not getting a Webby. We do it from small towns you fly over and get no closer to Silicon Valley than changing planes in SFO on our way to meet with a new supplier in Asia. We like Amazon if it gets our customers familiar with the idea of using a website to place an order (and Amazon has our attention and respect by doing many, many things worth emulating in terms of providing service to their customers) - but as far as strategy and finance go, we have much better and suitable models to follow.
Those who have been successful see this medium as simply another another sales channel, a mechanism to reduce expenses (particularly in transactions and support), and the extension of an already successful business model. We did not need 100 million of venture capital, an instant army of programmers, content managers costing half a million dollars, and consultants selling us "solutions". Instead the many silent successful firms grew our online sales channel just as we grew the rest of our business. Small at first, learn and add as necessary.
Catalog companies like LL Bean or Lands End are successful because they have taken advantage of the medium, yes, but also because they already have a super-efficient logistics system in place. That's one reason I'm surprised Wal-Mart is not a bigger online player - distribution and logistics innovations are what made them untouchable in the traditional retail arena.
People will bring servers to their knees to get the latest one-line change to the Linux kernel, and yet they'll run a mid-1990s version of the Windows lines and wonder why they have trouble.
Where the "B" is for "Bargain"!
I'd love to see if your "tech-illiterate wife" is happy with her choice.
So she's fed up with Microsoft, but why does she want Linux? Would she know Linux from *BSD from OS X?
Consumers pay for corporate income taxes through higher prices. Employees pay for payroll taxes through lower wages.
Eliminating corporate taxes would lower cost of doing business and in a competitive market allow room for lower prices.
Lower prices for consumers = a tax cut for the rich?
God, that's about as annoying as "ogg vorbis" to try to pronounce and just as difficult to sell to your PHB without having him stumble all over the name next time it comes up in conversation.
Think I'm kidding? Microsoft didn't name everything "Word", "Office", "Publisher", etc by accident. Open source efforts more aimed at the enterprise really do need to rethink their naming strategies - your name is usually your most powerful marketing tool, so make it good.
Be sure to find the one that mentions "corporations" - that was a good one.
Last I heard a lot of "big media" companies from CNN to the NY Times was laying off online staff and rethinking their commitments to the medium. Doesn't get much bigger than Time-Warner.
Instead of focusing on substantive problems like an acceptable model for compensation for providing content (which EVERYONE from huge conglomerate to one-man shops seem to be struggling with), we get another lament on a contrived theme.
I had to go to Popular Science to find out that this interesting product costs US$800. That's a good price point now that I know what it is. But I wish ReQuest could simply tell me an MSRP on their site instead of having me "contact the corresponding representative for your area code" because of some archaic territorial sales channel agreements.
Maybe it's just me and my experience with software companies who ask you to "contact us to discuss your enterprise solution" instead of disclosing price but I can't shake the sour taste that people who can't give prices up front have something to hide.
An interesting mention about style sheets on this page about the NeXT browser/editor TBL was demonstrating...
Even if that wasn't in the same context as what we've come to use as CSS now, I wonder why the separation of content from presentation took so long to come around (and is STILL not 100% properly implemented by major browsers) and how it got so far off track around, say, 1996 and the 2.0 browsers.