Yet again, Microsoft can't be arsed to do a proper job with a product. It's hardly as if it's a couple of guys in a garage, it it?
So what are they saying? W2K is so fundamentally buggered that we can't fix it? Or is it really a case of we'd like you to pointlessly trade up to another OS which will offer you very few additional features if you're a desktop user?
However, Microsoft have yet again shot themselves in the foot. Their whole recent history with IE in fact has been a disaster and I would have hoped that by now they would have blasted enough bits off themselves to realise that they are making a stupid mistake. After all, one reason IE grew so quickly to begin with was that Microsoft aggressively developed versions of IE for any flavour of Windows they could lay their hands on - including Win 3.1, W95 etc etc. What is happening *now* is that Microsoft are displaying their typical complacency about their market share. Sure, they have 85% or so which is pretty good, but we all know that the competition is eating into their market share.
Worse still, this whole effort is very half-hearted. Originally, MS weren't going to build an IE7 *at all*. Presumably they thought that IE6 was going to be the best browser ever. Maybe one too many Microsofties got 0wned?
Microsoft have been trying for years (well, a few) to shift Windows on cellphones. And sure, there are some Windows cellphones out there.. but not a lot. Nokia doesn't have any. Sony Ericsson doesn't have any. Siemens doesn't have any (apart from a couple of badge engineered ones). Motorola and Samsung do have some Windows devices, but they're not exclusive and heck Motorola is even running with Linux on phones. And Motorola cancelled the MPx100 and MPx/MPx300 Windows devices before they got to market in the US and Europe.
So who *is* actually building Windows phones in quantity? Well HP is.. a little tiny bit, but most of the world's Windows phones are manufacturerd by HTC of Taiwan and then just rebadged. Sure.. HTC is doing well, and the HTC Universal certainly rocks.. when it eventually comes out. But for all the squillions that Microsoft has put into this project, they haven't seen an awful lot come out.
Oh yes.. the iPod. Well, on one part we have these "jack of all trades" devices that have a so-so camera, music player, phone and PDA built into one. There's a market for "unified devices". There's also a market for focussed devices that are of a better quality. There's a market for both. Don't forget that Microsoft has been failing to kill off Apple for over twenty years too..
World's Smallest Slashdot Effect Found
on
Idle Loop Optimized
·
· Score: 4, Funny
After a huge run of articles, the world record for the lowest number of hits on a website due to the usually massive Slashdot was recorded.
The webmaster in question said "yeah, I noticed a couple of extra visitors, but my TRS80-based web server coped just fine.".
You contact user support and use the keyword "canonicalpage" in your report.. So how much reports has all this work gotten me? The last time I checked, it was under 30
Well shucks GG, not every webmaster is glued to WMW and other forums.. and even if they did the signal/noise ratio on this topic is so low that you probably couldn't find the information even if you were looking. It's hardly an obvious reporting mechanism. Although posting it on/. should help some, so that's appreciated. Thanks.
But look - what we have here are a whole bunch of webmasters who have been nuked off the face of the earth by 302 redirects and just don't have the technical knowledge to try and fix it. Mom and Pop stores, hobbyists, nonprofits etc etc. These people are just gonna get pasted.. they'll just be wondering why they don't get any visitors any more.
This is a HUGELY serious problem - and it's getting worse all the time as more and more people deliberately try to exploit the 302 bug. I've been hit by this bug myself, and let me tell you that unless you know EXACTLY what to look for you'd be stuffed - all you'd see is your traffic flatlining.
The key issue here - and it's the kind of issue that will really, really hit the headlines when it's exploited is redirection. Sure, I can use a 302 and send Googlebot to the correct page.. so first of all I basically 0wn the content of that page not the publisher. *Then* I insert an exploit into the 302 redirect.. and hey presto, I've 0wned hundreds of thousands if not millions of computers. *That's* going to make unpleasant reading for Google when it hits the headlines - "Use Google and Get Owned". Nasty.
It happened to me, and I'm sure by accident. I have a reference page that gets about 1000 hits a day.. and all of a sudden traffic dried up. It wasn't that it had gone down - Google was suddenly sending zilch.
Well, I knew about the 302 bug (in fact, it's been known for months in professional webmaster circles).. so, I did an allinurl:mydomain.com/mypage.htm search on Google to find the culprit. Low and behold, it was some blog page about one PR below my page with a script that redirected through a 302. The catch was that this redirect script ONLY worked if you clicked on it from the blog itself - if you clicked on it from the Google SERPs you got a 500 server error.. so in effect, Google misidentified the redirect page as my actual page and then subsequently tried to spider it from the URL directly and got a 500 error.. the result being that I was dropped from the index. Was this malicious? Hardly - the webmaster had compiled a small list of cool, useful links - not knowing that his buggy redirector was killing those sites off.
So whaddya do? I tried emailing the webmaster but everything bounced. It looks like he was out of the country. I tried giving Google feedback, but frankly that's just like offering up a prayer to the Great Google God - so I also used the BASE HREF trick mentioned in the article, and after a few days the page came back in the index as normal. So, either that trick worked or the Google God answered my prayers. I'm guessing at the former.
It's definitely Shaun - as in the Joy of Shaun. I have to confess to being a Shaun-worshipper. In our household there are three Shaunie soft toys, plus an array of other stuff like socks. If archaeologists uneathered my home they'd definitely think that Shaun was some sort of God or idol. Shaun rocks. Did I mention that I like Shaun?
I guess really though I'm more like Grommit in real life. I suppose being Shaun might be considered an aspirational thing if you're Grommit.
Funny that nobody mentioned the Wayback Machine where you can see somewhat broken examples of these sites from early in their histories.. for example - Yahoo in October 1996. It's still quite usable, but alas not all the early archives are.
And Google Groups is always a lot of fun.. you can see Jeff Bezos asking some questions about marketing Amazon here, and even searching for developers here
I know somewhere the very first attempt at a bookstore by Jeff Bezos is still archived, but I can't remember where..
It's a looong time since I was a VMS admin, but in about 5 years the mini (a VAX 11/750) we were running on crashed exactly twice, possibly because the hardware was so old. The fact that you could still get 30 people happily compiling and testing Pascal on a system that was a decade old is testament to the lean efficiency of the system.
There's a lot of stuff in VMS that's still extremely nifty. Self tuning, stability and consistency across the OS. Nope, it's not a sexy OS, but sometimes you need something reliable.
A decade on and we still use VMS in my current organisation. While I'm busy worrying about patch levels on my Windows systems, battling spyware and having to roll out increasingly complex and powerful systems just to keep up, our warehouse just runs on VT510s and OpenVMS. Reliably. If anything ever goes wrong, you can betcha it's not the OS.
MelbourneIT are very often used by spammers and feed the registrar clearly fake details. If you're lucky, Melbourne might reply to a complaint about this in a couple of weeks, else they'll ignore it. Sure, every registrar has this problem.. it's just that Melbourne don't seem to care.
Ben Edelman is one of the good guys in the fight against cruft that installs on your computer without your knowledge. The work he does is both comprehensive and shocking.. if you haven't checked out his site do so now. Particularly, look at some of the videos and documentary evidence at what actually happens, despite the claims otherwise of the scumware publishers themseves.
There are a handful of other people I can think of who've done a similar amount of work. Merijin Bellekom, Patrick Kolla and Andrew Clover spring to mind, although there are others.
Firefox hasn't affected my use of Mozilla at all. I guess that most/many Mozilla users had been using it for a while before Firefox came out and see no reason to change.
I'm very happy to recommend Firefox for IE users though - Mozilla's Netscape-style interface can be a bit confusing if you haven't seen them before.
This is *old* news. That list has been around since about 2002, pretty much unchanged. If you think of everything that's happened since 9/11, you'd expect a few more things in that timeline.
OMG.. it's truly awful. They've completely ruined it, and whats with the "Create New Groups" feature. Do we really want newbies to create Usenet groups? And talk about taking away the useful features! The old Google Groups was an easy-to-use, simple tool. This looks like it's been hacked together by a bunch of teenagers.
Luckily the rot hasn't spread to the national Googles yet, so you can still use Google UK if you need it.. at least until they ruin that too.
You know that sinking feeling when you've just pressed the wrong button...
..of course, it seems to be our friends EDS behind it, who are just great at making a mess of government contracts.. and then, the government just gives them another one.
Actually gas is about $7/US Gal here. Top speed isn't the point. Heck a lot of cars can go faster in a straight line, which is fine if you live in Arizona or something, but for the rest of the world we have these things called bends.
And although the Honda Civic EX/Type R/whatever is a decent car from a mechanical point of view, it's basically just a bland Japanese thing with zero character. If I wanted a dull car, I'd buy one perhaps. It might be fun to drive, but no-one would care.
Where the heck am I gonna do more that 120mph anyway? And horsepower doesn't matter when you weigh about 800kg. That's the whole point of any roadster vehicle.. small, light and with good handling. It's just coincidence that the fuel economy is so good (45MPG incidentally, even though I've been driving like a nutter).
The bottom line though is this - everybody likes something different. That's choice for you.:)
This "beer can" has a watercooled turbo, traction control, electronic stability, tiptronic six speed gearbox, cruise control and the works. One key difference between a European car and a US car is that Europeans like to go round corners.. that the Smart Roadster is easily one of the best handling cards of it's type. A small roadster isn't for everybody, but if you're looking for a Mazda MX-5/Miata size car then it's pretty good. These little roadsters aren't designed for drag racing.. they're designed to be fun!
It's called "Smart" for a reason. The whole thing is based around a nearly-indestructable safety cage like an F1 car. They are incredibly safe. Yeah, a bit strange to drive though.
Actually, you'd come out of that kind of collission pretty well. The Smart's tridion safety cage is almost indestructable. I've seen this thing crash tested.. the outside of the car is the entire crumple zone, and the passengers are protected in the safety cell. No cabin instrusions, nothing. Up against a normal road car, the Smart usually comes off better.
The FourTwo is OK, but I just got myself one of these babies.. a Smart Roadster Couple Brabus. Pretty much all of the fuel ecomomy and a top speed of 120mph. Sorted. Oh yes, you cant't get them in North America for at least a couple of years.. heheh:)
Slashdot Mirror
So what are they saying? W2K is so fundamentally buggered that we can't fix it? Or is it really a case of we'd like you to pointlessly trade up to another OS which will offer you very few additional features if you're a desktop user?
However, Microsoft have yet again shot themselves in the foot. Their whole recent history with IE in fact has been a disaster and I would have hoped that by now they would have blasted enough bits off themselves to realise that they are making a stupid mistake. After all, one reason IE grew so quickly to begin with was that Microsoft aggressively developed versions of IE for any flavour of Windows they could lay their hands on - including Win 3.1, W95 etc etc. What is happening *now* is that Microsoft are displaying their typical complacency about their market share. Sure, they have 85% or so which is pretty good, but we all know that the competition is eating into their market share.
Worse still, this whole effort is very half-hearted. Originally, MS weren't going to build an IE7 *at all*. Presumably they thought that IE6 was going to be the best browser ever. Maybe one too many Microsofties got 0wned?
So who *is* actually building Windows phones in quantity? Well HP is.. a little tiny bit, but most of the world's Windows phones are manufacturerd by HTC of Taiwan and then just rebadged. Sure.. HTC is doing well, and the HTC Universal certainly rocks.. when it eventually comes out. But for all the squillions that Microsoft has put into this project, they haven't seen an awful lot come out.
Oh yes.. the iPod. Well, on one part we have these "jack of all trades" devices that have a so-so camera, music player, phone and PDA built into one. There's a market for "unified devices". There's also a market for focussed devices that are of a better quality. There's a market for both. Don't forget that Microsoft has been failing to kill off Apple for over twenty years too..
The webmaster in question said "yeah, I noticed a couple of extra visitors, but my TRS80-based web server coped just fine.".
'nuff said ;)
Enough already! Can't we ditch these heavy news items in favor of something a little more lighthearted, like some April Fool's Stuff?
Well shucks GG, not every webmaster is glued to WMW and other forums.. and even if they did the signal/noise ratio on this topic is so low that you probably couldn't find the information even if you were looking. It's hardly an obvious reporting mechanism. Although posting it on /. should help some, so that's appreciated. Thanks.
But look - what we have here are a whole bunch of webmasters who have been nuked off the face of the earth by 302 redirects and just don't have the technical knowledge to try and fix it. Mom and Pop stores, hobbyists, nonprofits etc etc. These people are just gonna get pasted.. they'll just be wondering why they don't get any visitors any more.
This is a HUGELY serious problem - and it's getting worse all the time as more and more people deliberately try to exploit the 302 bug. I've been hit by this bug myself, and let me tell you that unless you know EXACTLY what to look for you'd be stuffed - all you'd see is your traffic flatlining.
The key issue here - and it's the kind of issue that will really, really hit the headlines when it's exploited is redirection. Sure, I can use a 302 and send Googlebot to the correct page.. so first of all I basically 0wn the content of that page not the publisher. *Then* I insert an exploit into the 302 redirect.. and hey presto, I've 0wned hundreds of thousands if not millions of computers. *That's* going to make unpleasant reading for Google when it hits the headlines - "Use Google and Get Owned". Nasty.
Well, I knew about the 302 bug (in fact, it's been known for months in professional webmaster circles).. so, I did an allinurl:mydomain.com/mypage.htm search on Google to find the culprit. Low and behold, it was some blog page about one PR below my page with a script that redirected through a 302. The catch was that this redirect script ONLY worked if you clicked on it from the blog itself - if you clicked on it from the Google SERPs you got a 500 server error.. so in effect, Google misidentified the redirect page as my actual page and then subsequently tried to spider it from the URL directly and got a 500 error.. the result being that I was dropped from the index. Was this malicious? Hardly - the webmaster had compiled a small list of cool, useful links - not knowing that his buggy redirector was killing those sites off.
So whaddya do? I tried emailing the webmaster but everything bounced. It looks like he was out of the country. I tried giving Google feedback, but frankly that's just like offering up a prayer to the Great Google God - so I also used the BASE HREF trick mentioned in the article, and after a few days the page came back in the index as normal. So, either that trick worked or the Google God answered my prayers. I'm guessing at the former.
I guess really though I'm more like Grommit in real life. I suppose being Shaun might be considered an aspirational thing if you're Grommit.
And Google Groups is always a lot of fun.. you can see Jeff Bezos asking some questions about marketing Amazon here, and even searching for developers here
I know somewhere the very first attempt at a bookstore by Jeff Bezos is still archived, but I can't remember where..
They're made by Boundless Technologies these days. Frankly the new ones don't seem are reliable as the old Digital manufactured ones though.
There's a lot of stuff in VMS that's still extremely nifty. Self tuning, stability and consistency across the OS. Nope, it's not a sexy OS, but sometimes you need something reliable.
A decade on and we still use VMS in my current organisation. While I'm busy worrying about patch levels on my Windows systems, battling spyware and having to roll out increasingly complex and powerful systems just to keep up, our warehouse just runs on VT510s and OpenVMS. Reliably. If anything ever goes wrong, you can betcha it's not the OS.
MelbourneIT are very often used by spammers and feed the registrar clearly fake details. If you're lucky, Melbourne might reply to a complaint about this in a couple of weeks, else they'll ignore it. Sure, every registrar has this problem.. it's just that Melbourne don't seem to care.
There are a handful of other people I can think of who've done a similar amount of work. Merijin Bellekom, Patrick Kolla and Andrew Clover spring to mind, although there are others.
I want one.. but only because it would look really, really cool in my server rack.
I'm very happy to recommend Firefox for IE users though - Mozilla's Netscape-style interface can be a bit confusing if you haven't seen them before.
This is *old* news. That list has been around since about 2002, pretty much unchanged. If you think of everything that's happened since 9/11, you'd expect a few more things in that timeline.
Luckily the rot hasn't spread to the national Googles yet, so you can still use Google UK if you need it.. at least until they ruin that too.
And although the Honda Civic EX/Type R/whatever is a decent car from a mechanical point of view, it's basically just a bland Japanese thing with zero character. If I wanted a dull car, I'd buy one perhaps. It might be fun to drive, but no-one would care.
Where the heck am I gonna do more that 120mph anyway? And horsepower doesn't matter when you weigh about 800kg. That's the whole point of any roadster vehicle.. small, light and with good handling. It's just coincidence that the fuel economy is so good (45MPG incidentally, even though I've been driving like a nutter).
The bottom line though is this - everybody likes something different. That's choice for you. :)
This "beer can" has a watercooled turbo, traction control, electronic stability, tiptronic six speed gearbox, cruise control and the works. One key difference between a European car and a US car is that Europeans like to go round corners.. that the Smart Roadster is easily one of the best handling cards of it's type. A small roadster isn't for everybody, but if you're looking for a Mazda MX-5/Miata size car then it's pretty good. These little roadsters aren't designed for drag racing.. they're designed to be fun!
I stand corrected! Buy one.. I've been grinning like a lunatic ever since I got it!
It's called "Smart" for a reason. The whole thing is based around a nearly-indestructable safety cage like an F1 car. They are incredibly safe. Yeah, a bit strange to drive though.
Coupé I meant!
Actually, you'd come out of that kind of collission pretty well. The Smart's tridion safety cage is almost indestructable. I've seen this thing crash tested.. the outside of the car is the entire crumple zone, and the passengers are protected in the safety cell. No cabin instrusions, nothing. Up against a normal road car, the Smart usually comes off better.
The FourTwo is OK, but I just got myself one of these babies.. a Smart Roadster Couple Brabus. Pretty much all of the fuel ecomomy and a top speed of 120mph. Sorted. Oh yes, you cant't get them in North America for at least a couple of years.. heheh :)