"Compatibility with the majority of websites" is a function of popularity and user-base. Some Facts:
When netscape 3.0 was the major player in the browser market, pages where built and tested against it, and sometimes tested against IE if the developers had the time.
When IE and NS both had 30+% market share, all developers made _sure_ sites worked correctly on both browsers.
As IE continued to gain market share (and because it was illegally bundled with the Operating System), developers started building more pages and only testing them against IE, because IE was _always_ going to be available on every windows PC, this trend is how IE became the dominate player in the browser space (it also, to be fair, had a very good, battle hardened development team who made amazing progress between versions 3 and 5).
I personally think Mozilla is making amazing progress, and with the Java and Flash plugins, there are very few websites it will not work with. I was wondering if you could point out a few incompatable websites, so that I could yell at them about not working with my favorite browser.
Also, worth noting is some of the "better" things about Mozilla. Such as
Tabs
Themes
IRC
XUL (ability to build true, rich GUIs for apps)
Control
Download Manager
Form Manager
Cookie Manager
Password Manager
Open Source
Bookmarks stored in single file (easy to share and put on the web)
Easy ways to reign in bad websites (see the Advanced/Scripts section under options, it is easy to kill pop-ups, bad javascript and other icky stuff websites do)
*Laugh* -- but honestly, I don't care if it does help sun. I personally enjoy coding both C# and java. J2EE has a much stronger backbone and better documentation. C# has better web services access via.net and a better IDE. But, I always support more options and competition.
I personally believe anything ".net" related is a good thing. ".net" is a tidal-wave, it will gain developers and mindshare, C# is a fairly good language, not perfect, but good. I think that _anything_ that opens up doors and options that were not previously available is a positive step. No one is forcing development or usage of these tools, it is simply an option.
Options are _good_.
Feel free to rip apart this post on the basis it is not anti-M$, my apologies!
As a developer, I completely agree with the comment on code reuse.
As an open-source user, I totally disagree with the statement that "code-duplication" is "time wasted", just because it doesn't produce something YOU use, doesn't mean it is "time wasted". That is how people learn, and having multiple "ICQ clients" just makes our platform more robust, because someday, someone will tweak, change and/or mangle the ICQ protocol, and 1 or 2 of those clients will be able to easily adapt to the new one, and 8 or 9 will not, and then some new coders will get interested and produce some new ones! I think multiple code bases that do the same thing function as a survival tool!:)
(Note: the aim protocol has been mangled multiple times, a couple of the text based aim clients made it thru the changes, many did not... same thing for gui clients)
Hundred? try Thousands. It ran 41,000 back about exactly one year ago (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/25/12542 50&mode=nested) and I have heard that they have been clocked with over 100,000 copies on them.
Yes.. that IS how "markets" work.. until there is no "market". Market is defined by competition, by choices. Let me give you an example from "current events".
Arthur Anderson Accounting was a very successful large company that did accounting, one of the "big 5" accounting firms. It has come to light that Arthur Anderson Accounting destoried documents, and did other "bad" things(read: enron). What was their customers reaction? They LEFT Arthur Anderson, and went to companies that are more respectable. Hence the system worked.
Now lets turn it around and say that Arthur Anderson Accounting was the ONLY accounting firm that could handle these big companies contracts. Well, then after they destoried docuemnts, and did other "bad" things(read: enron), the companies would have to stay with them, they would have to suck it up and deal with it. They would even possibly defend Arthur Anderson Accounting because they are so terribly dependant.
Now, imagine how angry a DEPENDANT company would have to be to risk going against the company they are dependant on. Imagine how much of a painful and scary business decision that must of have been. Companies who are dependant on M$ are going against them in open-court. The action to generate this type of reaction from successful companies (I believe) would have to go beyond just rude or "heavy-handed", they have to be down right predatory.
Just my 2 cents, if you don't like it, use the reply button.
I do not "hate" apple, nor do I believe do most of the posters here. I don't give a crap about the mouse, and I am hot and bothered to get my hands on OS-X... BUT... That "usual mac stuff" is how people make decisions! Hardware being too expensive is a BIG DEAL. For example
iMac: 1399
700Mhz
128Megs Ram
40Gig HD
15 inch flatscreen
Dell 4400: 1389
1600Mhz
512Megs ram
40Gig HD
19 inch CRT
This is _not_ a hard decision for me. Go do the price comparison yourself (and buy the way, that dell has 100 dollar mail in rebate, but I don't count it.. some might claim it is 1289).
The bottom line is there are LOTS of people who would love to be mac fans... but are not willing to buy 1 mac rather than 2 PCs (or in my case, 1 mac desktop rather than a very nice Sony Viao Laptop).
I just wanted to offer 2 equally good replacements for XFce, they are WindowMaker and IceWM. Both support great keybindings, are VERY light, and are VERY powerful. I also recommend kMail as the best "Bang for Buck" email client.
This is "The Way" comments should be written.. If only all the comments on slashdot were this interesting and well written. Pointful, Funny and intelligent! When I read
Now, I was with you all the way, and right there at the end you pissed me off...
I literally laughed out load, keep up the good work rho!
OR... it could be that java has lots of industry support, has a great library, scales well on the server side, and is (mostly) true OO rather than ugly bolt on hack OO like perl.
I am not sure I would call an OS built on top of another OS "100% new".
To quote apple.com/macosx/technologies/darwin.html
"At its core, Darwin uses BSD. If you're a hardcore geek, you'll like having a full command set available to you from the terminal. Developers will appreciate how easy it is to port existing UNIX applications to Mac OS X. Plus, Mac OS X incorporates the time-tested BSD networking stack, the backbone of most TCP/IP implementations on the Internet today."
I am happy that apple renamed the BSD core "darwin" and build lovely layers like Quartz and Cocoa on top of it, but I think you can still _hardly_ call it a "100% new OS", Apple also built their own filesystem for it, but the filesystem still is broke (so I hear, try "touch FileA" and "touch filea" to see the bug), and I don't count broken stuff..
-- Just my 2cents, but that doesn't mean I am wrong:)
I am not sure you will find an even close to decent metric. It depends on complexity, seperation, abstraction and a ton of other things ABOUT the application.
5000 lines of horribly written code can be a nightmare, and 100,000 lines of wondefully written, documentent code that comes with unit tests can be a dream.
You have alot of control over how maintainable the code is: Make sure it is documented, and generate documentation often. Make sure it is unit tested, and run those tests every time you change something. etc etc...
As a rule of thumb, if you are working over 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, and the work is growing not shrinking, look for a Jr. level coder to assist you. Maybe just a highschool kid, or someone going to college.
I am all for anti-terrorism and all that, but if BOOK BURNING(information destruction) doesn't raise some red flags, maybe terrorism isn't the thing we have to fear the most.
It bothers me that rather than coming up with creative and interesting ways to target advertisements to certain groups, interesting ways to add value while serving ads, etc, inif* these marketing droids would rather have your computer become a TV that just happens to be connected to the internet.
I hope the online community is strong enough to stave off the "dumbing down" of the internet.
-- MetaCosm
P.S. This posting made after being up all night without sleep, trying to hunt down one bug, and generally being grumpy, take it with a grain of salt, and PLEASE ignore spelling and "grammah":)
I hate to be the voice of reason, but these are the same type of numbers that lots of the dot bomb's used to validate their (now failed) business models.
Dot bombs were often quoted as saying stuff like "if we just get 25% of the market, *only* 15,000 subscribers we will..."
They expect to get 20,000 linux users to subscribe to a monthly service instead of dual booting. Personally I would rather pay for win98 once rather than pay a monthly fee for what is probably going to be a worse product.
It will probably be worse because they have to keep the API up to date against a fast moving target (direct X), and all this is entirely pointless if X and GNU/Linux doesn't keep up with the latest and greatest hardware that gamers crave.
I personally think Loki had the right idea, but they learned that people would rather just dual boot, it is simple, clean and flexable. Dual booting allows you to play WHATEVER windows games you want!
Reason I write (and USE) open source software. Because it does what I need to do. Plain, simple and straight forward.
There is an array of other reasons that people write and use open source, but my PRIMARY reason is to "scratch an itch" or complete whatever I need to complete.
Two (fake) Examples:
#1) I need software for a hotdog stand, I can't find any, or the software I found is too expensive. So I develop my own. Once I finish the software, I think it might be useful to others and that maybe
someone will improve it (and share the improvements), and therefore I will get a better piece of software so I release it open source.
#2) I need software for a hotdog stand, I can'f find any, or the software I found is too expensive. But I did find an open source pickle stand software that is similar to what I need to do. Rather than writing my own software from scratch, I modify the pickle stand to be a "generic" stand application, and I add a few features. I send the changes back to the orignal pickle stand author, and now we both have improved software and it is more useful to others, hopefully it will be more useful and get more development and continue to grow!
Those are just two very silly examples, but they show the (sometimes selfish) motivation for writing open source software.
I do not know of any open source alternative to the microsoft purposed system. But I have a concept (very off the cuff). What if you used FreeNet as the data-store. Your data would be replicated, cached and encrypted. Once you access it from your place of work, you place of work would have a cached verion of it, when you try to access it from somewhere else, whatever node you are using as your "server" will go out and look for you current information in the FreeNet service, replicating it along the way back. I am not going into details, because I don't know how this might work, is it possible? Anyone with more knowledge of freenet/universal login system care to comment? I just see there being LOTS of servers rather than a centralized few, and once you get your data in the building you are working at, it stays there until you try to access it from somewhere else (home) and then it is replicated. This would use the power of P2P to be the load of a universal login/data storage system to the edges of the network, decentralize control, and allow local administrators to setup Nodes for ther users data, which would become a part of the FreeNet network as needed (accessed). Just a comment, I don't know if it possible or what, just wanted to throw it out there.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally think Mozilla is making amazing progress, and with the Java and Flash plugins, there are very few websites it will not work with.
I was wondering if you could point out a few incompatable websites, so that I could yell at them about not working with my favorite browser.
Also, worth noting is some of the "better" things about Mozilla. Such as
Mossberg used windowsXP, windowsXP has a built in firewall, firewall blocks Zaurus, this is known and noted in the manual. *sigh* Mossberg is a moron.
Jython is very cool...
http://www.jython.org/
*Laugh* -- but honestly, I don't care if it does help sun. I personally enjoy coding both C# and java. J2EE has a much stronger backbone and better documentation. C# has better web services access via .net and a better IDE. But, I always support more options and competition.
I personally believe anything ".net" related is a good thing. ".net" is a tidal-wave, it will gain developers and mindshare, C# is a fairly good language, not perfect, but good. I think that _anything_ that opens up doors and options that were not previously available is a positive step. No one is forcing development or usage of these tools, it is simply an option.
Options are _good_.
Feel free to rip apart this post on the basis it is not anti-M$, my apologies!
Mid-may is when the PS2 pricedrop is coming.
If anyone had time to mirror this site, before it was hopelessly slashdotted, please reply on this thread. Thanks.
P.S. I would sure like to read this article.
As a developer, I completely agree with the comment on code reuse.
:)
... same thing for gui clients)
As an open-source user, I totally disagree with the statement that "code-duplication" is "time wasted", just because it doesn't produce something YOU use, doesn't mean it is "time wasted". That is how people learn, and having multiple "ICQ clients" just makes our platform more robust, because someday, someone will tweak, change and/or mangle the ICQ protocol, and 1 or 2 of those clients will be able to easily adapt to the new one, and 8 or 9 will not, and then some new coders will get interested and produce some new ones! I think multiple code bases that do the same thing function as a survival tool!
(Note: the aim protocol has been mangled multiple times, a couple of the text based aim clients made it thru the changes, many did not
Hundred? try Thousands. It ran 41,000 back about exactly one year ago (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/25/12542 50&mode=nested) and I have heard that they have been clocked with over 100,000 copies on them.
Yes.. that IS how "markets" work.. until there is no "market". Market is defined by competition, by choices. Let me give you an example from "current events".
Arthur Anderson Accounting was a very successful large company that did accounting, one of the "big 5" accounting firms. It has come to light that Arthur Anderson Accounting destoried documents, and did other "bad" things(read: enron). What was their customers reaction? They LEFT Arthur Anderson, and went to companies that are more respectable. Hence the system worked.
Now lets turn it around and say that Arthur Anderson Accounting was the ONLY accounting firm that could handle these big companies contracts. Well, then after they destoried docuemnts, and did other "bad" things(read: enron), the companies would have to stay with them, they would have to suck it up and deal with it. They would even possibly defend Arthur Anderson Accounting because they are so terribly dependant.
Now, imagine how angry a DEPENDANT company would have to be to risk going against the company they are dependant on. Imagine how much of a painful and scary business decision that must of have been. Companies who are dependant on M$ are going against them in open-court. The action to generate this type of reaction from successful companies (I believe) would have to go beyond just rude or "heavy-handed", they have to be down right predatory.
Just my 2 cents, if you don't like it, use the reply button.
Utter bullshit.
I do not "hate" apple, nor do I believe do most of the posters here. I don't give a crap about the mouse, and I am hot and bothered to get my hands on OS-X... BUT... That "usual mac stuff" is how people make decisions! Hardware being too expensive is a BIG DEAL. For example
iMac: 1399
700Mhz
128Megs Ram
40Gig HD
15 inch flatscreen
Dell 4400: 1389
1600Mhz
512Megs ram
40Gig HD
19 inch CRT
This is _not_ a hard decision for me. Go do the price comparison yourself (and buy the way, that dell has 100 dollar mail in rebate, but I don't count it.. some might claim it is 1289).
The bottom line is there are LOTS of people who would love to be mac fans... but are not willing to buy 1 mac rather than 2 PCs (or in my case, 1 mac desktop rather than a very nice Sony Viao Laptop).
I just wanted to offer 2 equally good replacements for XFce, they are WindowMaker and IceWM. Both support great keybindings, are VERY light, and are VERY powerful. I also recommend kMail as the best "Bang for Buck" email client.
This is "The Way" comments should be written.. If only all the comments on slashdot were this interesting and well written. Pointful, Funny and intelligent! When I read
Now, I was with you all the way, and right there at the end you pissed me off...
I literally laughed out load, keep up the good work rho!
OR... it could be that java has lots of industry support, has a great library, scales well on the server side, and is (mostly) true OO rather than ugly bolt on hack OO like perl.
I am not sure I would call an OS built on top of another OS "100% new".
:)
To quote apple.com/macosx/technologies/darwin.html
"At its core, Darwin uses BSD. If you're a hardcore geek, you'll like having a full command set available to you from the terminal. Developers will appreciate how easy it is to port existing UNIX applications to Mac OS X. Plus, Mac OS X incorporates the time-tested BSD networking stack, the backbone of most TCP/IP implementations on the Internet today."
I am happy that apple renamed the BSD core "darwin" and build lovely layers like Quartz and Cocoa on top of it, but I think you can still _hardly_ call it a "100% new OS", Apple also built their own filesystem for it, but the filesystem still is broke (so I hear, try "touch FileA" and "touch filea" to see the bug), and I don't count broken stuff..
-- Just my 2cents, but that doesn't mean I am wrong
unless of course you are using grep where -v means "not" :) Linux doesn't have internal consistency, but I still love it :)
I know that Apple is going to be making the switch from MacOS 9 to MacOS X in the near future (as their "default" OS), will these have OSX?
if you are not using PHPUnit and PHPDoc already, you really should be. :)
[PHPUnit's]
http://phpunit.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gpfr/ (has another php unit on its pages)
[PHPDoc's]
http://www.phpdoc.de/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpdoc
http://www.callowayprints.com/phpdoc/
I am not sure you will find an even close to decent metric. It depends on complexity, seperation, abstraction and a ton of other things ABOUT the application.
5000 lines of horribly written code can be a nightmare, and 100,000 lines of wondefully written, documentent code that comes with unit tests can be a dream.
You have alot of control over how maintainable the code is: Make sure it is documented, and generate documentation often. Make sure it is unit tested, and run those tests every time you change something. etc etc...
As a rule of thumb, if you are working over 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, and the work is growing not shrinking, look for a Jr. level coder to assist you. Maybe just a highschool kid, or someone going to college.
The holdup is _Micro Payments Will Never Work_! For more explaination, please read Clay Shirky's "The Case Against Micropayments"!
I am all for anti-terrorism and all that, but if BOOK BURNING(information destruction) doesn't raise some red flags, maybe terrorism isn't the thing we have to fear the most.
I want to be safe, but at what price...
It bothers me that rather than coming up with creative and interesting ways to target advertisements to certain groups, interesting ways to add value while serving ads, etc, inif* these marketing droids would rather have your computer become a TV that just happens to be connected to the internet.
:)
I hope the online community is strong enough to stave off the "dumbing down" of the internet.
-- MetaCosm
P.S. This posting made after being up all night without sleep, trying to hunt down one bug, and generally being grumpy, take it with a grain of salt, and PLEASE ignore spelling and "grammah"
I hate to be the voice of reason, but these are the same type of numbers that lots of the dot bomb's used to validate their (now failed) business models.
..."
Dot bombs were often quoted as saying stuff like "if we just get 25% of the market, *only* 15,000 subscribers we will
They expect to get 20,000 linux users to subscribe to a monthly service instead of dual booting. Personally I would rather pay for win98 once rather than pay a monthly fee for what is probably going to be a worse product.
It will probably be worse because they have to keep the API up to date against a fast moving target (direct X), and all this is entirely pointless if X and GNU/Linux doesn't keep up with the latest and greatest hardware that gamers crave.
I personally think Loki had the right idea, but they learned that people would rather just dual boot, it is simple, clean and flexable. Dual booting allows you to play WHATEVER windows games you want!
Reason I write (and USE) open source software. Because it does what I need to do. Plain, simple and straight forward.
There is an array of other reasons that people write and use open source, but my PRIMARY reason is to "scratch an itch" or complete whatever I need to complete.
Two (fake) Examples:
#1) I need software for a hotdog stand, I can't find any, or the software I found is too expensive. So I develop my own. Once I finish the software, I think it might be useful to others and that maybe
someone will improve it (and share the improvements), and therefore I will get a better piece of software so I release it open source.
#2) I need software for a hotdog stand, I can'f find any, or the software I found is too expensive. But I did find an open source pickle stand software that is similar to what I need to do. Rather than writing my own software from scratch, I modify the pickle stand to be a "generic" stand application, and I add a few features. I send the changes back to the orignal pickle stand author, and now we both have improved software and it is more useful to others, hopefully it will be more useful and get more development and continue to grow!
Those are just two very silly examples, but they show the (sometimes selfish) motivation for writing open source software.
I do not know of any open source alternative to the microsoft purposed system. But I have a concept (very off the cuff). What if you used FreeNet as the data-store. Your data would be replicated, cached and encrypted. Once you access it from your place of work, you place of work would have a cached verion of it, when you try to access it from somewhere else, whatever node you are using as your "server" will go out and look for you current information in the FreeNet service, replicating it along the way back. I am not going into details, because I don't know how this might work, is it possible? Anyone with more knowledge of freenet/universal login system care to comment? I just see there being LOTS of servers rather than a centralized few, and once you get your data in the building you are working at, it stays there until you try to access it from somewhere else (home) and then it is replicated. This would use the power of P2P to be the load of a universal login/data storage system to the edges of the network, decentralize control, and allow local administrators to setup Nodes for ther users data, which would become a part of the FreeNet network as needed (accessed). Just a comment, I don't know if it possible or what, just wanted to throw it out there.