What's this have to do with being grown up? These emotions [greed, selfishness, etc.] are part of what makes us human.
Yes, they are. But part of maturing is learning when to place reasoned judgements ahead of emotional reactions. Many of the decisions and policies mentioned during this discussion shouldn't be made based on emotional reactions, at least not if you want a good outcome.
Would it be much better if we just built the machines and leave these people unemployed? You want to live in a world where everyone gives a thirsty man a drink, but I think you give human nature too much credit.
No, I want to live in a world where, since there's abundant supply of water, no man is ever thirsty in the first place. Your arguments based on employment all essentially presuppose an inadequacy of supply and a money-driven economy. I am simply pointing out that in today's world, with the resources and tools available to mankind, these traditional assumptions simply don't hold any more.
The kernel of your argument appears to be "it's not fair!" I've heard that from a number of children.
You are an idiot! How do you think the available technology and resources came to be? They came from long hours of hard work!
A good workman knows his tools, and a good workman with good tools can produce higher-quality work at a faster rate than the same workman without the tools. Why spend long hours doing hard work by hand, when you can develop a tool that does the same job just as well with less effort, and then devote the freed resources to more useful tasks?
How long do you think the technology and resources would continue to last if everyone started doing half the work or less? Not long at all.
As others have pointed out, this is exactly what humans have done throughout their history, yet in recent years our technology is improving at probably the fastest rate in human history. We have developed effective, world-wide communications and transport infrastructure. We have manufacturing processes, and design and engineering tools that surpass anything we had 50 years ago, never mind 500 or 5,000.
Moreover, a lot of people in this thread make an unfounded assumption that putting in longer hours of harder work actually results in doing a better job. This is known to be untrue among research circles -- there isn't really any doubt left about that one -- yet incompetent managers persist in believing it. This is simply another example of my original point: our current ways of organising society, in particular at the senior management/politico level, is not acting in the best interests of our society, but the system functions as a vicious circle that acts to prevent change for the better.
There is enough food in the world to feed every human on the planet, though hundreds of people starve to death every day.
There would be enough shelter in the world too, if we only looked after what we had and built things to last.
Practical clothes can be churned out by machines in a matter of seconds, if we set them up and tell them to do it, yet much of what is worn in the so-called first world is made by hand by people leaving in poverty conditions in less-developed countries.
One can say similar things about medicine, education, the natural environment, and a host of other important issues.
What's the common thread among all of these shortcomings? A lot of adults haven't grown up, and still suffer from greed, selfishness, and other negative emotions. With the resources and technology we have available to humanity today, we could provide for every human being on the planet, and we could all work only 20 hours a week.
If you're an adult who has grown up, please consider what you can do to help. Make a small donation to a charity that supports someone less fortunate than you. Change something in your life to be a little more environmentally friendly. Volunteer a couple of hours of your time to a good cause. Have the courage to vote for a someone who stands for these values, even if they have no chance of getting elected (this time), and tell everyone why you voted that way.
The more people grow up, take some personal responsibility for the state of the world, and do their small part in improving it, the better life will be, and there's really nothing indulgent about it.
Or we could just say "Yeah, whatever" and make it someone else's problem. Not that that would be childish, or anything.
Meanwhile FPS games are generally very limited. They generally few enough maps to count on your hand, and similarly few weapons. Further an argument can be made that all games from the same generation are fairly the same save causmetics.
I think your last point here is the key one.
Personally, I'm currently replaying Baldur's Gate II/Throne of Bhaal. My most-played game is Total Annihilation. My favourite FPS of all time for multiplayer is still Quake, and my favourite for single player is probably Deus Ex. Can anyone spot the connection between all of these titles?
It's not that I haven't tried more recent games. I have. But while Halo had a couple of nice features, it wasn't much different to the FPS of ten years ago. I played it once, but felt no particular desire to replay it. Similarly, Neverwinter Nights was terribly pretty, yet completely lacked the story-driven nature and character interactions of the BG series, and I lost interest after a few hours. Quake III Arena was far less fun than Quake, because when you're up against people with one-shot-kill weapons and a much lower ping than you, your skill and tactics become pretty much irrelevant. (I'm in the UK, and it seems there aren't a lot of local servers for most games around here.)
As for the latest crop, I just feel no inclination to try them. I've seen demos of many a FPS, but while they all look flashy, none of them seems to offer enough playability to be worth shelling out a few hundred for a graphics card capable of playing them at a decent frame rate. Likewise I've heard all about MMORPGs, but never heard of one that actually has the kind of well-thought-out story arcs I experienced in some of the Black Isle/Bioware titles of yesteryear.
I just want someone to come up with an original idea, or at least a new slant on an existing genre that consists of more than some new artwork and different lighting/fog effects. Until then, I shall carry on happily playing my favourite games of yesteryear, and spending very little money on newer titles.
Web developers aren't some kind of automaton. They have a responsibility to develop valid pages while fulfilling any other requirements.
I'm sorry, but that simply isn't true. Some professions, like engineering, medicine, law and finance, have inalienable legal responsibilities imposed on practitioners for ethical reasons. However, we're not talking about them. A professional web developer's obligation is to do what is set out in his job spec, as directed by his manager, and that's it. If his manager wants him to write IE-only code for some reason, then that's what he should write.
Now, of course there is always the question of whether software "engineering" should be a true engineering discipline, with all the personal responsibility for software engineers that implies. Personally, I think the world would be a better place if we could get to that situation. But that's a different question.
Again, look at his website. What do you get from that? 90% of the material there is crap. It's all about interviews that he has done. It's him posting about sites that are "interesting" because they've posted about him because he was "interesting" when he commented on sites that he thought were "interesting". That's just derivative.
I seem to recall someone analysing useit.com using Nielsen's own techniques a couple of years back, and demonstrating (as conclusively as anything Nielsen himself ever published) that the quality of the site (using Nielsen's own metrics) had dropped a great deal since it was first created.:-)
They're both standards. Internet Explorer is a de facto standard. The W3C is the de jure standard. The former got established by ruthless arm-twisting, anti-competitive behavior and the illegal exploitation of a monopolistic position.
No, it got established because several years ago, it sucked less than Netscape and innovated faster. It's very trendy around here to slam Microsoft for being convicted monopolists, yada yada yada, but it's not like you wake up one morning and suddenly find your business has a monopoly without doing anything better than the competition. How they've maintained that position is dubious, to be sure, but then again until the much more recent past no-one was seriously trying to compete with them anyway.
As for de jure standards, you're basically making an appeal to the W3C's authority, which brings us back to where we started. If the dev teams behind, say, IE, Firefox, and Opera sat down and wrote out a spec together that was going to be followed by three of the biggest name browsers in the market today, that would be a de jure standard worth something.
The W3C publishes their specs; Microsoft does not. If they did, I'm sure the Mozilla folks would be more than happy to implement it. As it stands, they're forced to try and emulate some of IE's bugs and quirks in order to render poorly-written, IE-only pages correctly.
But as I pointed out earlier in the discussion, they generally haven't done this. Historically, their attitude has been that they would support only the "official" (i.e., W3C and such) specs, and would not implement any concessions to IE compatibility. For all the bitching some people have been doing in this discussion about MS not documenting anything, they've also been bitching about IE6 has been standing still for years. It's not like there's a moving target to emulate, and the main differences are well enough known that pro web developers use them on auto-pilot these days! So as I said before, I think refusing to provide any sort of IE-compatibility mode is a pretty clear own goal for those browsers that take this approach: projects that refuse to play nice with what their target audience is already doing rarely succeed.
It's all well and good to be smug and practical about this kind of thing. "Well Microsoft dominates so just live with it." But some of us are, you know, interested in making things better than how they are, not waiting for our Benevolent Microsoft Gods to give us their blessings.
Yes, I do understand that. In fact, I'm one of you. As I keep saying, in an attempt to avoid anyone misunderstanding my position, I do not like Microsoft's actions or think they are in the best interests of the web as a whole. What I'm stating here is simply the business case for them to behave as they do. Businesses, for the most part, really don't care about "making things better than how they are", unless doing so generates additional revenue, and that goes as much for web development companies as for Microsoft.
It doesn't matter what the browser market share is in terms of installed base. That's entirely irrelevant to this discussion.
The real market share is the number of pages on the net that are coded to some IE standard rather than the open standard. That's the real market share here.
Do you honestly believe that there is no connection between those two ideas?
So really IE can hang themselves if they want, it's not up to their idiots users, it's up to the web developers.
Actually, for the most part on professional sites, it's up to the business guys who tell the web developers what to do. And I guarantee you, not many business guys are going to prioritise anything above catering to 90% of their target market.
Because that's what 90% of the market uses to read their pages. We're in a vicious circle.
If they just wrote the way web pages should be...
Your sentence contains the implicit assumption that following W3C specs is "the way web pages should be", but in effect, that's exactly the proposition I'm challenging in this thread.
The people writing the web pages are, for the most part, just trying to get their content across to the web-browsing public. The most effective way to do that is to support the software used by that public; any "web standards" are simply a means to achieve this end. How much more you support when one browser already has 90% of the market is a matter of how much any extra part of the potential market is worth to you, and how much of a diminishing return is still worthwhile.
... wouldn't more people start to use these alternatives?
I doubt it. In reality, I suspect people would start using alternatives to your unfriendly sites, which didn't tell them off for using the software they always have. If it were as simple to shift as you suggest, it would be odd that so few web sites have adopted that approach.
Obligatory disclaimer: As I've said throughout this discussion, I don't like the current situation. Personally, my web sites are written to W3C standards, with suitable tweaks to guarantee they work with IE as well, but then I don't write them for money and my target audience is not 90% IE-using. In any case, in this thread, I'm just telling it like it is, not saying I like it that way.
Some of the hooks existed already as part of Microsoft's great failure: placing "user-friendly" over security.
It's only a great failure if you consider completely dominating your market for several years a failure.
Microsoft are a business, and for whatever reason, they have decided to compete for the web browser market. Whatever we may think of the ethics of their decisions, it is undeniable that they deliver what the market wants better than anyone else, even if that means a technologically inferior product that comes pre-installed and places user friendliness over security.
That's unfortunate, because it seems like a simple thing to comply to some web standards and then, if you think you can do better, create your own standard to compete with it and get all the other browsers to support it, too.
As I always have to point out in these discussions, when you have around 90% of the market share, you define the standard. Anything with less than 10% support in the market isn't a standard, it's just a formal specification, no matter who writes it. This may not be ideal, but it is the way this sort of market works.
If you think you can do better than CSS, and you're in business, and you have 90% market share, then you probably just go ahead and do your own thing. It doesn't matter if other browsers don't support it, because 90% of users will be fine, and of the other 10%, the vast majority will just think those other browsers are broken and load up yours instead. This is why the stubborn insistence of certain other browser development groups that they will only support W3C specs is the biggest own goal since the last World Cup.
Yes, I know, this sucks for the consumer. Yes, I know, most of us here in a geeky community would agree that the W3C specs are far more useful than IE. I'm not disputing any of this. I'm simply giving a straightforward business case, from MS' perspective, for doing their own thing regardless of what the W3C say. This is why unregulated monopolies, or near-monopolies, suck.
Do you think the W3C development process is too slow?
If you look around the web, every funky new site and its brother use rounded corners on their boxes.
If you're a programmer, you'll know that implementing such a feature in a browser is a relatively easy thing to do.
If you follow developments in W3C standards, you'll know that CSS3 is likely to provide a way to specify rounded corners, but it's a long way away.
In other words, there is demand for a simple feature, it's easy to implement, but it's not actually being implemented (-moz variant aside) because it's part of the as-yet-unfinished CSS3 monolith. So yes, in at least some respects, the W3C processes are currently way too slow to have any practical value.
That argument is a logical fallacy: someone who never has the data to lose is never able to lose it.
Precisely. How many of the organisations that collect personal data about you actually need all of that data to fulfill whatever relationship they have with you?
Just off the top of my head I can think of any major operating system today (Solaris/AIX/etc.), programming langauges (Java), any major distributed computing environment/banking/etc. (CapitalOne, Bank of America, DOD, etc.) that are equal or greater in complexity to any software written by Microsoft.
I seriously doubt that any of the above (with the possible but unlikely exception of Java) are used in anything close to as many different contexts as Windows, or have anything like as many different functions that potentially interact.
There's no doubt that Ozzie has some programming credit... But despite his desire to streamline programs, reduce the bloat, and re-establish some respectability, he's not going to get very far.... Then he'll find that Microsoft has become so mired in its own muck that spurring the current crop of programmers who've been indoctrinated in the "Microsoft Way" will prove nigh impossible.... I give him 18 months before he resigns in frustration.
I'd seriously consider taking that bet.
I submit two simple points for consideration.
Microsoft has a lot of very smart people working for it. They may have drunk some corporate Kool-Aid in some cases, but they're still very smart. If Ozzie comes up with the goods, I think they'll recognise that pretty quickly and back him up.
Major changes in direction are possible in the software industry, even in flagship products with a huge user base, within a relatively short period of time. Apple did it with OS X. Just a few years ago, no-one had heard of Google. MS has more than enough money in the bank to take a hit for 2-3 years and do things properly, if the guys at the top are willing to buy into it and can take the shareholders with them.
I think it's been widely acknowledged that the biggest problem with MS is the sheer scale of what they've tried to do in recent years. There's little experience in the industry of how to develop projects on the scale of Windows or Office effectively, no handbook of how to keep the bug count down and avoid introducing security flaws, performance hits, or whatever other scalability problems in software with dev teams of the size they use.
With that in mind, I find it strangely reassuring that the first comments from the new guy at (almost) the top involved simplifying everything down to reduce the dangers in these areas.
I don't think expressive power and syntactic sugar are independent concepts in practice. (C.f. any language is syntactic sugar, equivalence of Turing-complete languages, everything gets turned into machine code eventually, etc.)
But the original comment was that C++ made it more difficult to use complex data structures, and given that we can express several useful concepts much more concisely using language features such as those I mentioned than is possible with C++, I think that's a fair claim.
I notice you've ducked my direct question about your challenge on Nielsen.
As for the typography thing, perhaps the most obvious recent example is the use of Verdana and Georgia on the web. Both fonts are designed for screen use and then heavily hinted to allow them to display well at the kinds of resolutions used on-screen. In readability studies, Verdana is consistently favoured over Arial by a large margin at the font sizes typically used on web pages.
For display use, anti-aliasing is the best technological answer to this problem in use today, and the sub-pixel anti-aliasing in Microsoft's ClearType technology is very impressive. Even then, though, they still use tools like Visual TrueType to keep the rendering "honest".
The above is most relevant to display on-screen, since they are much lower resolution than printed matter. However, many of the same legibility/readability issues arise in printing, which is why professional-grade fonts often come with several "optical" variations intended for use at different size ranges (typically a "caption" version for 6-8pt, a "regular" version for say 9-13pt, a "subhead" version for 14-24pt, and a "display" version for 25+pt). These have small adjustments that don't change the flavour of the font, but make it easier to read or more visually appealing at the different design sizes. Caption fonts intended for use at smaller point sizes employ many of the same tricks as those designed for screen: slightly larger bowls, for example. The larger fonts tend to tighten up the spacing a touch, to avoid the kind of disconnected appearance you get with a poorly-kerned font at body text sizes, which again is something consistently shown to hurt readability in studies.
So, although I was talking about "hinting", which is primarily a concept relating to screen fonts, the same sorts of ideas apply to printed typography as well. Again, today's automated scaling technologies haven't yet caught up with the fine adjustments a human typographer would make. This isn't to say that it couldn't be done, but right now AFAIK it hasn't been, and if it has, it certainly hasn't entered the mainstream yet.
So, which parts of the above do you think the research contradicts? And which of Nielsen's claims are you going to critique, since you're so keen on specific claims and specific evidence?
C++ makes it difficult to use complex data structures...
It does? I've always managed, somehow.
As have I, but I'd certainly rather manage in languages that support first order data structures, "for each" loops for iterations, proper disjunctive types, pattern matching, and so on. C++ is better than it used to be, but all the data structures and algorithms in the standard library barely hold a candle to the expressive power of many functional programming and "scripting" languages.
So, assuming you know this to be the case and your post wasn't intended to by a joke, wouldn't it make more sense to use the number of working days in the year? That would give a figure pretty close to the 20 lines/day I've heard, as it happens...
Slashdot Mirror
You can read the NYT? I went along, and all I got was this lousy "free registration required" message. :-p
I did. Thanks. :-)
Yes, they are. But part of maturing is learning when to place reasoned judgements ahead of emotional reactions. Many of the decisions and policies mentioned during this discussion shouldn't be made based on emotional reactions, at least not if you want a good outcome.
No, I want to live in a world where, since there's abundant supply of water, no man is ever thirsty in the first place. Your arguments based on employment all essentially presuppose an inadequacy of supply and a money-driven economy. I am simply pointing out that in today's world, with the resources and tools available to mankind, these traditional assumptions simply don't hold any more.
Does that make it any less true?
Blockquoth the AC:
A good workman knows his tools, and a good workman with good tools can produce higher-quality work at a faster rate than the same workman without the tools. Why spend long hours doing hard work by hand, when you can develop a tool that does the same job just as well with less effort, and then devote the freed resources to more useful tasks?
As others have pointed out, this is exactly what humans have done throughout their history, yet in recent years our technology is improving at probably the fastest rate in human history. We have developed effective, world-wide communications and transport infrastructure. We have manufacturing processes, and design and engineering tools that surpass anything we had 50 years ago, never mind 500 or 5,000.
Moreover, a lot of people in this thread make an unfounded assumption that putting in longer hours of harder work actually results in doing a better job. This is known to be untrue among research circles -- there isn't really any doubt left about that one -- yet incompetent managers persist in believing it. This is simply another example of my original point: our current ways of organising society, in particular at the senior management/politico level, is not acting in the best interests of our society, but the system functions as a vicious circle that acts to prevent change for the better.
There is enough food in the world to feed every human on the planet, though hundreds of people starve to death every day.
There would be enough shelter in the world too, if we only looked after what we had and built things to last.
Practical clothes can be churned out by machines in a matter of seconds, if we set them up and tell them to do it, yet much of what is worn in the so-called first world is made by hand by people leaving in poverty conditions in less-developed countries.
One can say similar things about medicine, education, the natural environment, and a host of other important issues.
What's the common thread among all of these shortcomings? A lot of adults haven't grown up, and still suffer from greed, selfishness, and other negative emotions. With the resources and technology we have available to humanity today, we could provide for every human being on the planet, and we could all work only 20 hours a week.
If you're an adult who has grown up, please consider what you can do to help. Make a small donation to a charity that supports someone less fortunate than you. Change something in your life to be a little more environmentally friendly. Volunteer a couple of hours of your time to a good cause. Have the courage to vote for a someone who stands for these values, even if they have no chance of getting elected (this time), and tell everyone why you voted that way.
The more people grow up, take some personal responsibility for the state of the world, and do their small part in improving it, the better life will be, and there's really nothing indulgent about it.
Or we could just say "Yeah, whatever" and make it someone else's problem. Not that that would be childish, or anything.
I think your last point here is the key one.
Personally, I'm currently replaying Baldur's Gate II/Throne of Bhaal. My most-played game is Total Annihilation. My favourite FPS of all time for multiplayer is still Quake, and my favourite for single player is probably Deus Ex. Can anyone spot the connection between all of these titles?
It's not that I haven't tried more recent games. I have. But while Halo had a couple of nice features, it wasn't much different to the FPS of ten years ago. I played it once, but felt no particular desire to replay it. Similarly, Neverwinter Nights was terribly pretty, yet completely lacked the story-driven nature and character interactions of the BG series, and I lost interest after a few hours. Quake III Arena was far less fun than Quake, because when you're up against people with one-shot-kill weapons and a much lower ping than you, your skill and tactics become pretty much irrelevant. (I'm in the UK, and it seems there aren't a lot of local servers for most games around here.)
As for the latest crop, I just feel no inclination to try them. I've seen demos of many a FPS, but while they all look flashy, none of them seems to offer enough playability to be worth shelling out a few hundred for a graphics card capable of playing them at a decent frame rate. Likewise I've heard all about MMORPGs, but never heard of one that actually has the kind of well-thought-out story arcs I experienced in some of the Black Isle/Bioware titles of yesteryear.
I just want someone to come up with an original idea, or at least a new slant on an existing genre that consists of more than some new artwork and different lighting/fog effects. Until then, I shall carry on happily playing my favourite games of yesteryear, and spending very little money on newer titles.
I'm sorry, but that simply isn't true. Some professions, like engineering, medicine, law and finance, have inalienable legal responsibilities imposed on practitioners for ethical reasons. However, we're not talking about them. A professional web developer's obligation is to do what is set out in his job spec, as directed by his manager, and that's it. If his manager wants him to write IE-only code for some reason, then that's what he should write.
Now, of course there is always the question of whether software "engineering" should be a true engineering discipline, with all the personal responsibility for software engineers that implies. Personally, I think the world would be a better place if we could get to that situation. But that's a different question.
I seem to recall someone analysing useit.com using Nielsen's own techniques a couple of years back, and demonstrating (as conclusively as anything Nielsen himself ever published) that the quality of the site (using Nielsen's own metrics) had dropped a great deal since it was first created. :-)
No, it got established because several years ago, it sucked less than Netscape and innovated faster. It's very trendy around here to slam Microsoft for being convicted monopolists, yada yada yada, but it's not like you wake up one morning and suddenly find your business has a monopoly without doing anything better than the competition. How they've maintained that position is dubious, to be sure, but then again until the much more recent past no-one was seriously trying to compete with them anyway.
As for de jure standards, you're basically making an appeal to the W3C's authority, which brings us back to where we started. If the dev teams behind, say, IE, Firefox, and Opera sat down and wrote out a spec together that was going to be followed by three of the biggest name browsers in the market today, that would be a de jure standard worth something.
But as I pointed out earlier in the discussion, they generally haven't done this. Historically, their attitude has been that they would support only the "official" (i.e., W3C and such) specs, and would not implement any concessions to IE compatibility. For all the bitching some people have been doing in this discussion about MS not documenting anything, they've also been bitching about IE6 has been standing still for years. It's not like there's a moving target to emulate, and the main differences are well enough known that pro web developers use them on auto-pilot these days! So as I said before, I think refusing to provide any sort of IE-compatibility mode is a pretty clear own goal for those browsers that take this approach: projects that refuse to play nice with what their target audience is already doing rarely succeed.
Yes, I do understand that. In fact, I'm one of you. As I keep saying, in an attempt to avoid anyone misunderstanding my position, I do not like Microsoft's actions or think they are in the best interests of the web as a whole. What I'm stating here is simply the business case for them to behave as they do. Businesses, for the most part, really don't care about "making things better than how they are", unless doing so generates additional revenue, and that goes as much for web development companies as for Microsoft.
I take it you've never encountered an IE-only web page, then?
Do you honestly believe that there is no connection between those two ideas?
Actually, for the most part on professional sites, it's up to the business guys who tell the web developers what to do. And I guarantee you, not many business guys are going to prioritise anything above catering to 90% of their target market.
Because that's what 90% of the market uses to read their pages. We're in a vicious circle.
Your sentence contains the implicit assumption that following W3C specs is "the way web pages should be", but in effect, that's exactly the proposition I'm challenging in this thread.
The people writing the web pages are, for the most part, just trying to get their content across to the web-browsing public. The most effective way to do that is to support the software used by that public; any "web standards" are simply a means to achieve this end. How much more you support when one browser already has 90% of the market is a matter of how much any extra part of the potential market is worth to you, and how much of a diminishing return is still worthwhile.
I doubt it. In reality, I suspect people would start using alternatives to your unfriendly sites, which didn't tell them off for using the software they always have. If it were as simple to shift as you suggest, it would be odd that so few web sites have adopted that approach.
Obligatory disclaimer: As I've said throughout this discussion, I don't like the current situation. Personally, my web sites are written to W3C standards, with suitable tweaks to guarantee they work with IE as well, but then I don't write them for money and my target audience is not 90% IE-using. In any case, in this thread, I'm just telling it like it is, not saying I like it that way.
It's only a great failure if you consider completely dominating your market for several years a failure.
Microsoft are a business, and for whatever reason, they have decided to compete for the web browser market. Whatever we may think of the ethics of their decisions, it is undeniable that they deliver what the market wants better than anyone else, even if that means a technologically inferior product that comes pre-installed and places user friendliness over security.
As I always have to point out in these discussions, when you have around 90% of the market share, you define the standard. Anything with less than 10% support in the market isn't a standard, it's just a formal specification, no matter who writes it. This may not be ideal, but it is the way this sort of market works.
If you think you can do better than CSS, and you're in business, and you have 90% market share, then you probably just go ahead and do your own thing. It doesn't matter if other browsers don't support it, because 90% of users will be fine, and of the other 10%, the vast majority will just think those other browsers are broken and load up yours instead. This is why the stubborn insistence of certain other browser development groups that they will only support W3C specs is the biggest own goal since the last World Cup.
Yes, I know, this sucks for the consumer. Yes, I know, most of us here in a geeky community would agree that the W3C specs are far more useful than IE. I'm not disputing any of this. I'm simply giving a straightforward business case, from MS' perspective, for doing their own thing regardless of what the W3C say. This is why unregulated monopolies, or near-monopolies, suck.
If you look around the web, every funky new site and its brother use rounded corners on their boxes.
If you're a programmer, you'll know that implementing such a feature in a browser is a relatively easy thing to do.
If you follow developments in W3C standards, you'll know that CSS3 is likely to provide a way to specify rounded corners, but it's a long way away.
In other words, there is demand for a simple feature, it's easy to implement, but it's not actually being implemented (-moz variant aside) because it's part of the as-yet-unfinished CSS3 monolith. So yes, in at least some respects, the W3C processes are currently way too slow to have any practical value.
Precisely. How many of the organisations that collect personal data about you actually need all of that data to fulfill whatever relationship they have with you?
Someone who never has the data to lose in the first place.
I seriously doubt that any of the above (with the possible but unlikely exception of Java) are used in anything close to as many different contexts as Windows, or have anything like as many different functions that potentially interact.
Tell that to Google.
I'd seriously consider taking that bet.
I submit two simple points for consideration.
I think it's been widely acknowledged that the biggest problem with MS is the sheer scale of what they've tried to do in recent years. There's little experience in the industry of how to develop projects on the scale of Windows or Office effectively, no handbook of how to keep the bug count down and avoid introducing security flaws, performance hits, or whatever other scalability problems in software with dev teams of the size they use.
With that in mind, I find it strangely reassuring that the first comments from the new guy at (almost) the top involved simplifying everything down to reduce the dangers in these areas.
I don't think expressive power and syntactic sugar are independent concepts in practice. (C.f. any language is syntactic sugar, equivalence of Turing-complete languages, everything gets turned into machine code eventually, etc.)
But the original comment was that C++ made it more difficult to use complex data structures, and given that we can express several useful concepts much more concisely using language features such as those I mentioned than is possible with C++, I think that's a fair claim.
I notice you've ducked my direct question about your challenge on Nielsen.
As for the typography thing, perhaps the most obvious recent example is the use of Verdana and Georgia on the web. Both fonts are designed for screen use and then heavily hinted to allow them to display well at the kinds of resolutions used on-screen. In readability studies, Verdana is consistently favoured over Arial by a large margin at the font sizes typically used on web pages.
For some examples of the problems with not hinting fonts, please see The raster tragedy at low resolution at Microsoft Typography.
For display use, anti-aliasing is the best technological answer to this problem in use today, and the sub-pixel anti-aliasing in Microsoft's ClearType technology is very impressive. Even then, though, they still use tools like Visual TrueType to keep the rendering "honest".
The above is most relevant to display on-screen, since they are much lower resolution than printed matter. However, many of the same legibility/readability issues arise in printing, which is why professional-grade fonts often come with several "optical" variations intended for use at different size ranges (typically a "caption" version for 6-8pt, a "regular" version for say 9-13pt, a "subhead" version for 14-24pt, and a "display" version for 25+pt). These have small adjustments that don't change the flavour of the font, but make it easier to read or more visually appealing at the different design sizes. Caption fonts intended for use at smaller point sizes employ many of the same tricks as those designed for screen: slightly larger bowls, for example. The larger fonts tend to tighten up the spacing a touch, to avoid the kind of disconnected appearance you get with a poorly-kerned font at body text sizes, which again is something consistently shown to hurt readability in studies.
So, although I was talking about "hinting", which is primarily a concept relating to screen fonts, the same sorts of ideas apply to printed typography as well. Again, today's automated scaling technologies haven't yet caught up with the fine adjustments a human typographer would make. This isn't to say that it couldn't be done, but right now AFAIK it hasn't been, and if it has, it certainly hasn't entered the mainstream yet.
So, which parts of the above do you think the research contradicts? And which of Nielsen's claims are you going to critique, since you're so keen on specific claims and specific evidence?
As have I, but I'd certainly rather manage in languages that support first order data structures, "for each" loops for iterations, proper disjunctive types, pattern matching, and so on. C++ is better than it used to be, but all the data structures and algorithms in the standard library barely hold a candle to the expressive power of many functional programming and "scripting" languages.
So, assuming you know this to be the case and your post wasn't intended to by a joke, wouldn't it make more sense to use the number of working days in the year? That would give a figure pretty close to the 20 lines/day I've heard, as it happens...