IMHO, it will be impossible to kill Microsoft even if Windows is supplanted. Microsoft will instead move to being a premier software provider for another platform, and continue to hang around as IBM did after they lost the market.
That would be awesome. Microsoft is capable of writing good software, the problem is that protecting their monopoly is always getting in the way. If they lose Windows and have to reinvent themselves as a real software company... well, let's just say I might buy a Microsoft product again.
Hey, Windows users: Use whatever you like. I don't give a fuck. If one of you decides that switching to the Mac is a good idea, it really donesn't make my preference of computers any better.
Since Mac OS X came out I've been a happy Mac user, but I'd just assume the world stay on Windows (or Linux)... Why? Because the fewer Macs there are the less target they are for virus and exploit writers.
Sure I believe Mac OS X is more secure than Windows (how could it not be), but let's not fool ourselves. Securing something as complex as an operating system is no trivial task. Given the average user's distaste for software update, a critical mass of the all-too-uniform Mac OS X could create an unpleasant security situation. Compare to Linux which (at present) has the diversity to survive any attack.
If you are thinking of replying to this, and you've ever had a virus, spyware, a trojan, your browser hijacked (or been the victim of an exploit not DIRECTLY targeted at you), then please, save yourself the time and don't bother. Your opinion means nothing.
Oh yeah, because anyone who doesn't spend their free time reading up on the latest windows viruses, updating their firewalls, and tweaking their system is basically ripe for genocide, right?
Just because everyone in high school thought you were worthless doesn't mean the inverse is true. Please grow up and get a life.
See, that's my plan. I have a really great lightweight templating system for Apache that makes me design websites twice as fast and makes maintenance and updates even easier, especially sitewide changes which become O(1).
It's a pretty small piece of code (about 1500 lines), but definitely innovative in that it solves many of the problems larger content management systems try to address, but with the absolute minimum of overhead and sticking very close to the dominant Apache paradigm of static files.
If I thought there was a market for this sort of thing I would sell it in a heart beat, but it makes more economic sense to open-source it, build a small community around it to see where it can go, then it becomes a very powerful selling point to my consultant business. Much more so than if I just kept it proprietary and said, "Hey, I have this really cool software that will make your site twice as easy to maintain, but no one's ever seen it so you just have to take my word for it."
Quite honestly javascript is a very poor language.
Actually, Javascript is surprisingly robust. Probably you're referring the platform inconsistencies, which have long been a showstopper. But with recent versions of browsers supporting the javascript standard (ie. ECMAScript) increasingly well, a lot of the major wholes are closing, and you really can write cross-platform javascript with a minimal compatibility layer.
Javascript is not meant to be a large-scale programming language... it doesn't have strong-typing or other features that you want when developing million-line applications. However, it is still an extremely powerful language providing things like full object-orientation (everything is secretly descended from the window object), comprehensive hooks to HTML, functions as data, regular expressions, flexible data access (eg. objects as hashes), and robust event handling.
I used to think of javascript as a toy language, but when you get to down to it, it does what it needs to do very cleanly and efficiently without imposing unnecessary overhead on the programmer.
I don't doubt that MS will try to leverage XAML against Google (not to mention Firefox, and the web stanards world in general), but I think they will fail.
Certainly XAML will be able to do some cool things, but it takes more than technology to create good interfaces. I don't see Microsoft being able to produce anything that is cool enough to draw people away from Google.
Also, as far as speed of development is concerned, Google has a ton of cross-platform javascript code it can use to streamline development. For all we know they could have their own development tools by now. I know when I write JavaScript it tends to be more cut and paste than actual typing. Contrast to XAML which will be much easier to develop, but is also immature and without deep developer knowledge. That will cost Microsoft a lot of dev time to get their web services up to speed.
Not to mention that any Longhorn-only web apps are going to be a non-starter for at least 3 years (possibly forever) after Longhorn is released. Microsoft's only real option to make the standard js/css version and add an XAML-enhanced version for Longhorn users. Admittedly this could be a huge draw for Longhorn users if done correctly, but Microsoft is so big and clumsy that I have to put my money on Google.
On a side note, XAML is cool, and xhtml/js/css can be a huge pain sometimes, but I'll be damned if I'm going to invest my time in a proprietary technology that lives and dies at the whim of marketeers in Redmond. I believe (and hope) that XAML is too little too late, and web standards will be too firmly entrenched for Microsoft's little gambit to pay off.
There are some definite pros from a business perspective, but look at the facts. After dumping Motorola, Apple's machines are finally starting to catch up to the field. Dual 2.7g G5s are not the fastest machines out there, but you have to admit that with the 1.35ghz bus they're more competitive than they've been in the past.
Now factor in the amount of disruption to the code base, the sheer number of hours Apple would have to invest to bring everything up to date, not to mention the difficult transition period for the Mac development community.
Then after it's all done, Apple would be stuck in the same boat with the PC market with little chance for architecture differentiation.
No, the more I think about it, the more crazy an idea it really does seem.
So far this month I have about 2% IE 5-5.5 and 1.9% NS 7. Interestingly I have about twice as many NS3 hits as I do NS4
Anyway though, I guess my point is that in contrast to 3 or 4 years ago when IE5 was still a major shareholder, now I only care that those users can access the site... if non-critical rendering problems I just ignore them.
I coordially invite someone to give me one reason why XHTML (in its current form, served as text/html or text/xml) is better than HTML 4.0 strict?
Purists always like to trot out this argument, because of course it's true that IE pretty much guarantees you won't be able to send the proper mime type for a long long time to come.
But come on, foregoing XHTML syntax because of this minor issue (which will be easily fixable for all your legacy documents 10 or 15 years from now) is pretty much cutting off your nose to spite your face.
XHTML means easier parsing, better code support in the future, and helps you develop good habits. So, while I'm not advocating updating all your old HTML, might as well start writing XHTML sooner rather than later.
Why is this the case? In authoring the post, I was of the impression that Firefox is 100% compliant.
The reason is because the spec is incredibly difficult to implement. Mozilla is damn close to full compliance, but the fact is that the CSS spec suffers from varying levels of vagueness when it comes time to actually sit down and implement a rendering engine.
The real problem is that it's impossible to anticipate all the ways that people might attempt to use CSS, and the gray areas can really only be standardized by browser makers after years of web development by the public at large. CSS 2 is really just starting to hit its stride now that Netscape 4 is effectively dead, but it won't be able to take another quantum leap until IE6 is dead (assuming IE7 makes good on their standards-compliancy promises).
Sadly, web design is one of the most difficult technical disciplines because browsers grew like cancer in the 90s and now the browser makers are all obligated to support all that cruft. IE has some truly mind boggling bugs that will probably have to remain because people depend on that buggy behaviour.
What I would like to see is a book that skips all the fluff that we've seen before and goes straight to browser bugs.
Absolutely. There are a million tutorials that will teach you all about CSS in theory, and once you have a reasonable base knowledge you can actually go into the W3C spec itself and dig into the details, but when it comes time to make your pretty new XHTML/CSS2 page work in IE you better have a boatload of knowledge.
After 5 years, and the thankful death of NS4 and IE5 (for the most part), I can debug my XHTML/CSS pages extremely efficient, but good references are still necessary. My two favorites:
No, people who use page modifying settings are not mostly people who know what they're doing. For example, there are readymade user-stylesheets for blocking ads. People want to block ads, but they can't be bothered to learn how to do it so that they know how to fix problems which are a result of ad-blocking.
I'm sorry, but where's the evidence? I know tons of people who switched to Firefox, but not a single layperson installing extensions or user stylesheets. I've fielded hundreds if not thousands of complaints about my sites (at a large public University), many of which were due to some form of user error, but nothing ever sounded like the result of browser customization. My experience may be anecdotal, but it's based on 5 years professional experience over a diverse user base. What's your experience?
It's not something everyone has to get all up in arms about. It's a presentation of information. If you don't like it, go somewhere else! If he chooses to display it and prevent this extension from running on his site, so be it! He's well within his rights to do such.
Of course he's within his rights. The real question is what's the benefit to him? People using greasemonkey tend to be people who know what they're doing, so if they break something on a site they'll likely be able to fix it. But just like the article, there seems to be this paranoia that greasmonkey will run rampant and ruin everyone's browsing experience.
Bah! When I go to the poster's website, you know what I see? Overlapping content because I don't run a 1024x768 window. I could fix it with greasemonkey, but that would be 'breaking' the designer's intentions.
I'm a web designer, and I truly believe that a good designer knows better than a user how things should look 95% of the time... but if a user wants to override my design choices that is fine with me. Of course my sites may end up looking up broken and discombobulated, but why should that matter to me? Anyone doing that should know why things are broken, and if not than it's not really worth my time to worry about it. I'd rather have a few idiots think I'm a shitty designer than have my fellow web hackers think I'm a control freak.
At least I RTFA. It's not my job to verify their claims. If you're so fucking enlightened then maybe you should post some truth instead of calling people names.
Considering that this thing has been discussed quite a bit recently, I would have guessed that by now everyone who is interested on this would have read the ORIGINAL messages that sparked this whole thing? I mean this message
Incidentally, no I hadn't read that. I really don't see how all the linked articles follow from that (completely reasonable post). Must be a hugely escalated flamewar which I had no business getting involved in. I apologize.
However, they are angry at something: people like you. Coming here on/. and making a completely backwards post that misrepresents everything they stand for. Sit down and STFU.
Why don't you put your name next to your ignorant bile. I am not the one misrepresenting anyone. I just READ THE GODDAMN ARTICLE AND RESPONDED TO THE CLAIMS IT MADE. If those are false, than maybe someone should mention that instead of anonymously flaming a random response.
Key to the open source community's concerns has been Apple's actions in fixing bugs in such a way that they could not be integrated back into the open source code base.
Nowhere in any of the linked material does it mention that the beef is actually with users. If so, you should be complaining about the shitty journalism, not me who happens to be responding to it.
Maybe if he spent a little less time blogging about KDE and a little more time working on Firefox, the security holes wouldn't be there.
You mean like Firefox 1.0.4? Anyway, the poster may have had a point if the dev was blogging about KHTML security, but he wasn't even remotely near that topic. Hence, troll. (but at least not AC troll like you).
Apple went with KHTML instead of Mozilla. Instead of gratitude, the KDE devs are angry that Apple isn't tailoring their patches for them? The fact that Safari uses KHTML has done more for web page compability with Konqueror than years of development and advocacy could ever have done. Just look at the proportion of top-tier web designers on Macs.
Now, as a web designer myself, of course I don't want a divergent code base. I'd much prefer that testing in Safari guarantees Konqueror compatibility as well, but claims that Apple is not being a good member of the open-source community is just a bunch of self-important bullshit. Companies aren't out there to 'help the community.' If their interests happen to coincide with yours for a while, then take what you can get, but don't expect any more.
I also suspect there's fear of the unknown on the boss's part -- ooh, those bbs things were full of mean people -- perceptual selection error. Kinda like introducing someone to usenet by way of talk.politics.*
And speaking of GPL paranoia, any programmer can steal GPL code whether or not his boss knows about it. So really the boss is neutered and has no control of the situation, regardless of whatever 'decree' he might feel self-important enough to make about the use of GPLed code.
The long service life of Macs adds significantly to the installed user base. I'd like to see more reliable recent figures, if anyone knows where I can find them.
Seems like such statistics would be impossible to generate reliably.
This is really what it comes down to. Windows' inertia is astonishing. What makes it even harder to combat is the fractured nature of the Linux desktop. As geeks we want to be able to customize everything, which I believe is open source software's greatest gift to humanity. Unfortunately all this configurability comes at the price of usability. As Linux gains more momentum, hopefully some company will emerge that can provide a 'standard' window manager and desktop environment that can gain critical mass and public acceptance. The beauty of Linux is that the other options will continue to exist for anyone who wants them.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, it will be impossible to kill Microsoft even if Windows is supplanted. Microsoft will instead move to being a premier software provider for another platform, and continue to hang around as IBM did after they lost the market.
That would be awesome. Microsoft is capable of writing good software, the problem is that protecting their monopoly is always getting in the way. If they lose Windows and have to reinvent themselves as a real software company... well, let's just say I might buy a Microsoft product again.
Hey, Windows users: Use whatever you like. I don't give a fuck. If one of you decides that switching to the Mac is a good idea, it really donesn't make my preference of computers any better.
Since Mac OS X came out I've been a happy Mac user, but I'd just assume the world stay on Windows (or Linux)... Why? Because the fewer Macs there are the less target they are for virus and exploit writers.
Sure I believe Mac OS X is more secure than Windows (how could it not be), but let's not fool ourselves. Securing something as complex as an operating system is no trivial task. Given the average user's distaste for software update, a critical mass of the all-too-uniform Mac OS X could create an unpleasant security situation. Compare to Linux which (at present) has the diversity to survive any attack.
If you are thinking of replying to this, and you've ever had a virus, spyware, a trojan, your browser hijacked (or been the victim of an exploit not DIRECTLY targeted at you), then please, save yourself the time and don't bother. Your opinion means nothing.
Oh yeah, because anyone who doesn't spend their free time reading up on the latest windows viruses, updating their firewalls, and tweaking their system is basically ripe for genocide, right?
Just because everyone in high school thought you were worthless doesn't mean the inverse is true. Please grow up and get a life.
We'd all be consultants.
See, that's my plan. I have a really great lightweight templating system for Apache that makes me design websites twice as fast and makes maintenance and updates even easier, especially sitewide changes which become O(1).
It's a pretty small piece of code (about 1500 lines), but definitely innovative in that it solves many of the problems larger content management systems try to address, but with the absolute minimum of overhead and sticking very close to the dominant Apache paradigm of static files.
If I thought there was a market for this sort of thing I would sell it in a heart beat, but it makes more economic sense to open-source it, build a small community around it to see where it can go, then it becomes a very powerful selling point to my consultant business. Much more so than if I just kept it proprietary and said, "Hey, I have this really cool software that will make your site twice as easy to maintain, but no one's ever seen it so you just have to take my word for it."
Quite honestly javascript is a very poor language.
Actually, Javascript is surprisingly robust. Probably you're referring the platform inconsistencies, which have long been a showstopper. But with recent versions of browsers supporting the javascript standard (ie. ECMAScript) increasingly well, a lot of the major wholes are closing, and you really can write cross-platform javascript with a minimal compatibility layer.
Javascript is not meant to be a large-scale programming language... it doesn't have strong-typing or other features that you want when developing million-line applications. However, it is still an extremely powerful language providing things like full object-orientation (everything is secretly descended from the window object), comprehensive hooks to HTML, functions as data, regular expressions, flexible data access (eg. objects as hashes), and robust event handling.
I used to think of javascript as a toy language, but when you get to down to it, it does what it needs to do very cleanly and efficiently without imposing unnecessary overhead on the programmer.
One method might be XAML.
I don't doubt that MS will try to leverage XAML against Google (not to mention Firefox, and the web stanards world in general), but I think they will fail.
Certainly XAML will be able to do some cool things, but it takes more than technology to create good interfaces. I don't see Microsoft being able to produce anything that is cool enough to draw people away from Google.
Also, as far as speed of development is concerned, Google has a ton of cross-platform javascript code it can use to streamline development. For all we know they could have their own development tools by now. I know when I write JavaScript it tends to be more cut and paste than actual typing. Contrast to XAML which will be much easier to develop, but is also immature and without deep developer knowledge. That will cost Microsoft a lot of dev time to get their web services up to speed.
Not to mention that any Longhorn-only web apps are going to be a non-starter for at least 3 years (possibly forever) after Longhorn is released. Microsoft's only real option to make the standard js/css version and add an XAML-enhanced version for Longhorn users. Admittedly this could be a huge draw for Longhorn users if done correctly, but Microsoft is so big and clumsy that I have to put my money on Google.
On a side note, XAML is cool, and xhtml/js/css can be a huge pain sometimes, but I'll be damned if I'm going to invest my time in a proprietary technology that lives and dies at the whim of marketeers in Redmond. I believe (and hope) that XAML is too little too late, and web standards will be too firmly entrenched for Microsoft's little gambit to pay off.
This is not an entirely crazy idea.
There are some definite pros from a business perspective, but look at the facts. After dumping Motorola, Apple's machines are finally starting to catch up to the field. Dual 2.7g G5s are not the fastest machines out there, but you have to admit that with the 1.35ghz bus they're more competitive than they've been in the past.
Now factor in the amount of disruption to the code base, the sheer number of hours Apple would have to invest to bring everything up to date, not to mention the difficult transition period for the Mac development community.
Then after it's all done, Apple would be stuck in the same boat with the PC market with little chance for architecture differentiation.
No, the more I think about it, the more crazy an idea it really does seem.
So far this month I have about 2% IE 5-5.5 and 1.9% NS 7. Interestingly I have about twice as many NS3 hits as I do NS4
Anyway though, I guess my point is that in contrast to 3 or 4 years ago when IE5 was still a major shareholder, now I only care that those users can access the site... if non-critical rendering problems I just ignore them.
I coordially invite someone to give me one reason why XHTML (in its current form, served as text/html or text/xml) is better than HTML 4.0 strict?
Purists always like to trot out this argument, because of course it's true that IE pretty much guarantees you won't be able to send the proper mime type for a long long time to come.
But come on, foregoing XHTML syntax because of this minor issue (which will be easily fixable for all your legacy documents 10 or 15 years from now) is pretty much cutting off your nose to spite your face.
XHTML means easier parsing, better code support in the future, and helps you develop good habits. So, while I'm not advocating updating all your old HTML, might as well start writing XHTML sooner rather than later.
Why is this the case? In authoring the post, I was of the impression that Firefox is 100% compliant.
The reason is because the spec is incredibly difficult to implement. Mozilla is damn close to full compliance, but the fact is that the CSS spec suffers from varying levels of vagueness when it comes time to actually sit down and implement a rendering engine.
The real problem is that it's impossible to anticipate all the ways that people might attempt to use CSS, and the gray areas can really only be standardized by browser makers after years of web development by the public at large. CSS 2 is really just starting to hit its stride now that Netscape 4 is effectively dead, but it won't be able to take another quantum leap until IE6 is dead (assuming IE7 makes good on their standards-compliancy promises).
Sadly, web design is one of the most difficult technical disciplines because browsers grew like cancer in the 90s and now the browser makers are all obligated to support all that cruft. IE has some truly mind boggling bugs that will probably have to remain because people depend on that buggy behaviour.
Ah, well, that's job security for me.
What I would like to see is a book that skips all the fluff that we've seen before and goes straight to browser bugs.
Absolutely. There are a million tutorials that will teach you all about CSS in theory, and once you have a reasonable base knowledge you can actually go into the W3C spec itself and dig into the details, but when it comes time to make your pretty new XHTML/CSS2 page work in IE you better have a boatload of knowledge.
After 5 years, and the thankful death of NS4 and IE5 (for the most part), I can debug my XHTML/CSS pages extremely efficient, but good references are still necessary. My two favorites:
CSS-discuss mailing list wiki
&
Position is Everything
I'm sorry.
Let me guess you're a help desk guy with dreams of becoming a network technician.
No, people who use page modifying settings are not mostly people who know what they're doing. For example, there are readymade user-stylesheets for blocking ads. People want to block ads, but they can't be bothered to learn how to do it so that they know how to fix problems which are a result of ad-blocking.
I'm sorry, but where's the evidence? I know tons of people who switched to Firefox, but not a single layperson installing extensions or user stylesheets. I've fielded hundreds if not thousands of complaints about my sites (at a large public University), many of which were due to some form of user error, but nothing ever sounded like the result of browser customization. My experience may be anecdotal, but it's based on 5 years professional experience over a diverse user base. What's your experience?
It's not something everyone has to get all up in arms about. It's a presentation of information. If you don't like it, go somewhere else! If he chooses to display it and prevent this extension from running on his site, so be it! He's well within his rights to do such.
Of course he's within his rights. The real question is what's the benefit to him? People using greasemonkey tend to be people who know what they're doing, so if they break something on a site they'll likely be able to fix it. But just like the article, there seems to be this paranoia that greasmonkey will run rampant and ruin everyone's browsing experience.
Bah! When I go to the poster's website, you know what I see? Overlapping content because I don't run a 1024x768 window. I could fix it with greasemonkey, but that would be 'breaking' the designer's intentions.
I'm a web designer, and I truly believe that a good designer knows better than a user how things should look 95% of the time... but if a user wants to override my design choices that is fine with me. Of course my sites may end up looking up broken and discombobulated, but why should that matter to me? Anyone doing that should know why things are broken, and if not than it's not really worth my time to worry about it. I'd rather have a few idiots think I'm a shitty designer than have my fellow web hackers think I'm a control freak.
Real classy... my 8-year-old brother coulda come up with that, the only difference is he has a reason to be living with his mother.
At least I RTFA. It's not my job to verify their claims. If you're so fucking enlightened then maybe you should post some truth instead of calling people names.
Considering that this thing has been discussed quite a bit recently, I would have guessed that by now everyone who is interested on this would have read the ORIGINAL messages that sparked this whole thing? I mean this message
Incidentally, no I hadn't read that. I really don't see how all the linked articles follow from that (completely reasonable post). Must be a hugely escalated flamewar which I had no business getting involved in. I apologize.
However, they are angry at something: people like you. Coming here on /. and making a completely backwards post that misrepresents everything they stand for. Sit down and STFU.
Why don't you put your name next to your ignorant bile. I am not the one misrepresenting anyone. I just READ THE GODDAMN ARTICLE AND RESPONDED TO THE CLAIMS IT MADE. If those are false, than maybe someone should mention that instead of anonymously flaming a random response.
Okay genius, from the article:
Key to the open source community's concerns has been Apple's actions in fixing bugs in such a way that they could not be integrated back into the open source code base.
Nowhere in any of the linked material does it mention that the beef is actually with users. If so, you should be complaining about the shitty journalism, not me who happens to be responding to it.
Maybe if he spent a little less time blogging about KDE and a little more time working on Firefox, the security holes wouldn't be there.
You mean like Firefox 1.0.4? Anyway, the poster may have had a point if the dev was blogging about KHTML security, but he wasn't even remotely near that topic. Hence, troll. (but at least not AC troll like you).
Apple went with KHTML instead of Mozilla. Instead of gratitude, the KDE devs are angry that Apple isn't tailoring their patches for them? The fact that Safari uses KHTML has done more for web page compability with Konqueror than years of development and advocacy could ever have done. Just look at the proportion of top-tier web designers on Macs.
Now, as a web designer myself, of course I don't want a divergent code base. I'd much prefer that testing in Safari guarantees Konqueror compatibility as well, but claims that Apple is not being a good member of the open-source community is just a bunch of self-important bullshit. Companies aren't out there to 'help the community.' If their interests happen to coincide with yours for a while, then take what you can get, but don't expect any more.
I also suspect there's fear of the unknown on the boss's part -- ooh, those bbs things were full of mean people -- perceptual selection error. Kinda like introducing someone to usenet by way of talk.politics.*
And speaking of GPL paranoia, any programmer can steal GPL code whether or not his boss knows about it. So really the boss is neutered and has no control of the situation, regardless of whatever 'decree' he might feel self-important enough to make about the use of GPLed code.
That's never stopped anyone from coming up with those types of statistics before...
You're right! I hereby declare the Mac install base to be 20% of all desktop computers. Take that Microsoft!
The long service life of Macs adds significantly to the installed user base. I'd like to see more reliable recent figures, if anyone knows where I can find them.
Seems like such statistics would be impossible to generate reliably.
It's all about people being used to Windows.
This is really what it comes down to. Windows' inertia is astonishing. What makes it even harder to combat is the fractured nature of the Linux desktop. As geeks we want to be able to customize everything, which I believe is open source software's greatest gift to humanity. Unfortunately all this configurability comes at the price of usability. As Linux gains more momentum, hopefully some company will emerge that can provide a 'standard' window manager and desktop environment that can gain critical mass and public acceptance. The beauty of Linux is that the other options will continue to exist for anyone who wants them.