Now who's got the flawed advertising model? You pay and take a gamble; with affiliates, you don't pay until you get paid. Which model is better?
That depends on who you ask. I will bet any survey will show a 50/50 response. If I am paying you for ads, of course I only want to pay you for that ad when I get a sale. If you are paying me to advertise for _you_, of course I want to be paid for my time/space/property/etc. Why should I only be paid to advertise for you based on your skills as a sales person? whether you sell a product or not, I still had to waste space to advertise for you when I could have used that space for a more profitable company.
Its not costing you anything. Even the image for the advert isn't eating into your bandwidth because its sourced from the affiliate server.
Huh? I can _only_ fit 5 ads on my site so that my end-users do not see too much clutter and so that they do not have a slow experience. Of those 5 advertising spots, I allow you one of them. If you do not return value to me, then I have wasted precious advertising space. So, yes, it costs me a potential fortune to advertise for you if you are not able to turn sales.
Its about time advertisers took some responsibility for their claims. Thats why affiliate programs shine.
Umm, it is not the claim of a company selling advertising space. It is the claim of a company trying to sell their product. I do agree with you though that it _is_ about time companies live up to their claims.
Affiliate programs only work for BIG and well established companies. Who would take a chance on a no-name company with new ProductX when you can be guaranteed a return on ads from BIG CompanyZ? So your "solution" only works for well established BIG corps and again puts the little man out of business.
Advertising is always a gamble. If you want to advertise your product XYZ, it is up to _YOU_ to know how to best market XYZ. If you fail, that doesn't mean that I should fail with you for allowing you to place ads on my site. If you want to advertise, then pay the damn money and take your chances with _YOUR_ product. Don't expect some socialist economy where advertiser will now take a chance with you.
No major advertiser will ever go for your method. It just makes no sense in a capitalistic system. Now if we were in socialist Russia, than maybe you would have a point about sellers and advertiser having to _both_ succeed or fail. But we are not!
There are a lot of problems with your method. Here are two examples.
I put an ad on my site to your store. Because of my ad, you get 10 new sales per week. How exactly am I to know that you are getting 10 extra sales per week from the ads on my site? Should I trust that you will report all 10 sales to me and pay me for those 10 sales? What if you want to save some money and only report and pay me for 8 of the 10 sales I generated for you? How would I ever find out? Should I have to go take you to court to prove how many sales per week I generated for you?
There is also the problem of not many people wanting to do this method. For example, if I put an ad on tv, I PAY FOR THE AD UP FRONT. If that tv ad generates 10,000 new sales or 0 new sales doesn't matter. I still pay the same price for that ad. If I advertise for you, I personally do not care if you get a sale from it. I am using my time/property/etc to advertise for you, I want to be paid for that. Once a customer clicks an ad on my site and goes to your site, the rest of the transaction is out of my hands. If your site is slow or poorly designed and you lose the sale, why should I have to also lose money? If I advertise for you I want to be paid, regardless of you being able to complete the sale.
Why did mods mod up the GP and not this? I always hear about how "Sun boxes are tanks". However I have not seen that to be the case. Sun boxes fail as much as any other box. A Sun server will have redundant parts, just as any other real server should have. I work at a fortune 500 and all of our Oracle and PeopleSoft servers are running on Sun/Sparc boxes (though I pushed for x86 Linux which was 1/3 the cost and at least twice the performance, though I digress). In the past year we have had two processors fail, some memory sticks fail and about 8 NICs fail on our Sun boxes. So exactly _where_ is this great Sun/Sparc reliability? I will admit that Sun has very good enterprise class support, though so do many other big vendors. Sun doesn't make all the internals, just like no other major U.S. computer vendor does. So your are really not going to get any more hardware reliability from a Sun/Sparc server than you would get with a _much_ faster and far less expensive x86 based server. Heck, if you don't need more than a 2-way box, you can get better price and performance from an Apple Xserve G5.
Your not going to get any more reliability out of a Sun server than you would get with an equivalent, yet less expensive, x86 based server.
Oh, and to get back on topic, why would someone want a dog-slow Sparc for a laptop? Is there really any software out there that _only_ runs on Sparc Solaris and not x86 Solaris or Linux? Your going to get far more performance and a much better price out of an x86 laptop than a Sparc based one. Just RTFA! The Sparc laptop is $3,400! The specs on it suck. 512MB and 40GB? For $3,400 for a laptop, I better be getting some state-of-the-art hardware and not some dog-slow sparc with poor specs. ; )
They invented the damn object and now you're telling them how they should use it...brilliant.
Huh? When did MS invent the XMLHttpRequest object? MS made Microsoft.XMLHTTP and Msxml2.XMLHTTP and use in IE as an ActiveX object. MS didn't code the XMLHttpRequest objects in all the other browsers. The XMLHttpRequest object is just modeled on the same interface as Msxml2.XMLHTTP to make coding easier.
The funny thing is that in most cases AJAX is built on and largely relies in a proprietary Microsoft invented extension to DHTML. The XMLHttpRequest object.
The XMLHttpRequest object doesn't rely on the MS invented ActiveX object. Under IE one uses Microsoft.XMLHTTP or Msxml2.XMLHTTP. The good thing about the XMLHttpRequest object is that it is modeled on the same interface(s) as the MS ActiveX object(s) which makes coding easier.
XMLHttpRequest is not part of any standard
I know it is not part of a written standard, though I consider it one since you can use it in all the major browsers with only a slight tweak for IE. Maybe one day the W3C will make it "official", however as GMail has shown, there is no need to wait around for that ; )
Do you realize the XMLHttpRequest Object (the core javascript object in which AJAX would not exist without) is not a W3C standard?
And where did I say it was a W3C standard? I said it was a standard. If you can use the XMLHttpRequest object in all modern browsers, then IMO it is a standard. I personally do not need the blessing of the W3C before I use it.
It was first implemented in IE5 as an ActiveX Object (new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")) and latered implemented by Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, etc.
Thanks for the news flash Caption Obvious!
Of course, you won't find anyone giving MS credit for innovation here
Did I say MS was not innovative in this regard? Personally I do not consider the MS version as innovative as a native XMLHttpRequest object. The MS version is an ActiveX control that only works in IE under MS windows.
You've never used the XmlHttpRequest object, have you?
Yes I have, thanks. The XMLHttpRequest object is a built-in object in Mozilla/Gecko that was modelled on Microsoft's XMLHTTP ActiveX object.
But if Microsoft makes their library only use the ActiveX version, then it simply won't work on anything except IE/Win.
Which is the route I bet MS will take.
By the way, there is no standard yet. XmlHttpRequest is a non-standard technology at the moment.
While it is not an "official" standard, XmlHttpRequest is now implemented in all the major non-IE browsers, which is as good as a standard IMO. Not that long ago if you wanted to use XmlHttpRequest you were limited to an ActiveX object in IE or the XmlHttpRequest object in Gecko. Safari, Konq and Opera did not have support, now that they do, to me that is almost as good as a standard. The only browser not supporting it is IE which requires ActiveX.
MS doesn't need to "support" other browsers. All MS needs to do is follow standards! Make their AJAX JavaScript standards compliant and no one could complain. If their AJAX is standards compliant JavaScript and it doesn't work with WebBrowser X, then it is the fault of WebBrowser X and not Microsoft's.
I believe he is/was using their menu control. However, the poor page layout is due to.Net. If you spoof Firefox as IE, the page layout works fine. The page layout is not controlled by the menu control. However, the control is not that great itself. As Firefox, the menu control works but it does not change the cursor to a hand properly as it does for IE. If you change Firefix to spoof IE, the menu looks the same but you get a bunch of JavaScript errors.
This is the exact same thing done in aggregate, and I am sure someone will use it to invalidate this dumb patent.
Don't be so sure. To invalidate this dumb patent will require _lots_ and _lots_ of money. How many companies out there will be willing to pay that bill? Most will just pay Amazon a _much_ smaller "fee" to use this "innovative and unique" patent.
VS.NET is great as a WYSIWYG dynamic content web page designer. Your friend just needs to clean up his page for Firefox. It is not hard.
I agree with you and this is the approach I take. However, my friend (who is a really nice guy) grew up with MS only tools under MS only OSes. So to me he is typical of all the "MS Developers" that I have met. They have never been exposed to non-MS stuff and are not familiar with it. I have found that it is hard to teach these type of programmers about standards and non-MS products. The concept seems so foreign to them. The majority of the fortune 500 (I have worked for 3 of them) seem to be flooded with these type of MS-Only guys/girls and the general momentum seems to want to continue down the path-of-least-resistance and keep to the "well it works in IE or it works in MS-blah" approach. To me this is frustrating since it doesn't take too much effort to creat usable standards compliant web apps even in ASP.Net.
I have been playing around with "browsercaps" crap under IIS for a while. IMO, there is really no need for it. ASP/ASP.Net _should_ just send down standards compliant HTML/Javascript. If a browser cannot handle it, then it is the browsers fault and not the fault of MS, ASP or ASP.Net.
I will try to play around with the browsercap stuff some more. As I pointed out in my post, if you set Firefox to pretend to be IE, the HTML usually displays _much_ better, however the Javascript gets all crappy and non-standards compliant and breaks things. If you have Firefox just be Firefox, then none of the validation controls work. They will require a round-trip to the server. However, in IE they will do basic Javascript and _not_ require a server round trip just to make sure a text control is not empty. I seriously do not see why MS could not use _standards_ compliant Javascript to check a text input. I mean it is as simple as something like:
if (document.Form1.txtUserName.value == "") {alert("Enter a value!"); return false;}
I hope.Net 2.x really comes through and "just works" (tm) in a standards compliant mode. Though with MS I will not count on it.
There are plenty. A good Free/Open one is called Eclipse. It is plug-in based and supports Java/Servlet/JSP/C++ and others. You can just download Eclipse and Tomcat and have a complete JSP/Servelt web application framework that works on MS Windows or Linux. Now just buy a JSP/Servlet book or search Google for a JSP/Servlet tutorial and your all set ; )
Re:from the oxymoron dept...
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Effective C#
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· Score: 3, Informative
I use C#/.Net and Java and agree with you that C# _is_ a nice language. However, Windows.Forms is _NOT_ open and MS could shut down implementations of it if they wanted to. Just because MS realeased C# as a spec doesnt' mean they did the same for their _whole_.Net framework. It is _very_ important for the _whole_ framework to be open so applications can be implemented once and ran on multiple OSes. Sun's Java hasn't tried to limit where you can run Java applications, only MS has tried that with their.Net framework.
There are also tons of other problems I have run into with the.Net framework over the last few years. Here is a _major_ problem for me that I just posted about.
.NET is _not_ a "godsend". The Java framework has had all of the.Net framework functionality for a while now, and Java still manages to be cross-platform. The only people that think.Net is a "godsend" are peopel who only know VB and VBScript/ASP.
I am not a.Net hater, I am just an MS hater. Why? Because of the intentional things MS does to stop other products from working. For example, ASP.Net (in C# or whatever) should put out standards compliant HTML, regardless of browser. However, that is not the case. A fellow programming friend of mine who, sadly, grew up in the "MS only camp" made this page. Go to this URL in IE, then under the "Quick. Cheap. Easy." flash, click on Info. Notice that everything looks fine? Now do the _same_ steps, but do them in Firefox/Mozilla. Once you click the "Info" link the page looks like crap. After talking to my friend, it turns out that he used _nothing_ but MS supplied.Net controls. Now, I want you to do a few more experiments (I have already done them and know the outcome). Download and install the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox. Make Firefox "pretend" to be IE 6 and go back to the link above.!!!!! Wow, the MS ASP.Net framework sends down different HTML depending on whether you are using IE or not! Making Firefox "pretend" to be IE, causes the MS ASP.Net framework to send down IE-Only Code that actually happens to make the site look correct in Firefox.
Now, there is one other experiment for us. Go back to the link as Firefox. Then go under File -> Save Page As and pick Web Page Complete. This option will save all the images, scripts and HTML of the page that was sent to Firefox. Now, open up IE and drag-n-drop the complete HTML or HTM page that you saved from Firefox to IE. Do you notice ANYTHING STRANGE? IE renders the Firefox delivered page just as poorly as Firefox does!
So to sum up my thoughts on MS.Net. I love C#. It is a very nice language. I think the MS.Net framework is very nice. However, I also hate the MS.Net framework because it is designed for crap MS only. For all of the ASP.Net/C# Web apps I have made, I have had to actually _fight_ against the MS Visual Studio IDE to force it to make standard compliant web apps. It seems that the latest versions of MS Visual Studio IDE just want to produce IE/MS only web apps. To me that is not acceptable. I personally would rather stick to Java/Servlets/JSP or PHP and have total control myself, than put up with MS intentionally trying to break non-IE browser.
For all the MS-apologist, please save your excuses. MS could have made there ASP.Net framework deliver the _same_ HTML across all browsers. All MS had to do was make ASP.Net standards compliant, which it is _not_!
It would have an autostart, be easy to install and the description of each app would be written by the vendor.
Kinda like the The OpenCD? This sounds exactly like what your are describing. Pop in the OpenCD and you have a nice Gecko(KMellon) based autostart. From there you get menus to application type, i.e. network, graphics, etc, and then nice descripitons of the applications. One click and the application is installed.
Hmm, maybe _two_ successful antitrust lawsuits in _two_ different nations? Heck, I think one successful antitrust lawsuit should be enough to break up a company. However, I doubt MS will get any big hit soon. It took the US govt. more than forty years to deal with the anticompetitive harms caused by AT&T's monopoly over all aspects of the telecommunications industry. I guess MS has about another 20 years or so ; (
One post, just one and the site is/.ed. I guess this is one of those, hey look at my little review and/. me so I can brag to my friends how my little home system was/.ed.
Or maybe it's their (MS) attempt at bringing a simple vector + pixel editing program to the masses
I agree with you about the poor "review" (this guy seems like such a zealot to me and I _really_ don't like MS). However, I really do not agree with your statement above. I downloaded and tried Acrylic. It has a UI _very_ similar to Photoshop. The Acrylic UI is _not_ a Joe User UI. Acrylic as it is or will be, will never be a "program for the masses".
I think this is MS's answer for Photoshop fans that don't need all the features of Photoshop at the extreme price. If MS can deliver this product for say $120 USD or less, they _could_ get a lot of Win32 Photoshop users to convert that do not need to pay $400+ for Photoshop.
For me personally, Gimp does everything I need under Win32 and Linux. There is no need for me to spend money for features I will never use.
Also, Acrylic was _very_ slow on my AMD 2800+ with 1GB of memory. Just bringing up the preference dialog had a very noticeable lag. From what I have seen, I don't think Acrylic is at Beta level just yet. MS has a lot of work to do on this app to make the general UI to be much more responsive.
I agree with you Apple _could_ make a killing if they did what you suggested. However this suggestion of yours:
If Apple allows the OS to run on any vanilla flavored x86 or x86-64 box
has already been denied by Steve Jobs. He stated he would not allow that to happen. So the only way to get Mac OS X would be to pay the Apple preimum for hardware. However, if they are using basically commodity components (especially after going Intel), I don't see many "Joe Users" wanting to pay the extra money for that premium. I think most "Joe Users" will still just assume MS Windows is good enough and not pay the few extra hundred for Apple branded computers. Now if Apple had very competitve prices for _good_ computers (not slow MacMini types) they could pull it off.
I think Apple should really focus on being a software company. It has make MS super rich and IMO, Apple's OS and other software is much better than the comparative offerings from MS.
but atleast it didn't took me 4 years to get my printer up and running.
But atleast it didn't took you? Did it took you 4 years to pass English 101?
How did it take you "4 years to get your printer up and running"? I installed my HP PSC Scanner/Printer/Copier under Fedora Core Linux in about 15 seconds. It actually took less time under Linux than under MS Windows XP. Under WinXP I had to follow _very_ critical step as to when I plugged in the USB printer. If you plug the USB cable too soon, you would have to download a special remove program from HP and start over. Under Linux, I booted with the HP printer plugged in, and then just picked it from a list and it was installed with support for scanning and printing. Maybe try not to be so theatrical next time?
but why does it always have to be win=bad lin=good everywhere.
I know it is not everywhere. There are plenty of pro-MS sites you can go to that pretty much sound the reverse of/. as in "win=good, lin=bad, mac=bad". Heck, most of the major game sites are all pro-MS. Those game site users don't care about OS features, they only care about being able to play games. Again, most of the pro-gamers out there think "win=good,lin=bad,mac=bad". It all comes down to the audience. Most of the/. users are smart geeks and as such see through the MS marketing crap.
So companies should be allowed to get away with whatever they want? If other companies see Lexmark getting away with locking in their customers, other companies will do the same. Say goodbye to the "free" market once that starts to happen.
ps. Are you sure that your friends didn't create an LLC (Limited Liability Company). In that case there is no need for articles of incorporation.
My brother-in-law recently create an LLC with his friend when they started their own ice cream shop. However, all of my programming friends that I were referring to did create a corporation.
Did you read some of the comments from the link? Some of them, IMO, are pretty scarry.
Launch of Microsoft Office 2004 was best product launch for Mac OS X. New version of Messenger due for Macs in the next few months. Additionally, a new update for Exchange users. MacBU commits to delivering a "Universal Binary" for Microsoft Office. Jobs also invites Bruce Chizen of Adobe on stage to talk about Intel-based Mac transition. Adobe says it is committed bringing its applications to Intel-based Macs.
Is it just me or does it sound like Apple has sold out to MS? Why would Apple give a sh!t about those MS products?
Rosetta is a dymanic binary translator. Runs PowerPC code on Intel-baesd Macs. Transparent to users. Pretty fast (not fast but "pretty" fast). Jobs demos Rosetta used to run PowerPC macs on Intel-based Macs. Jobs shows Microsoft Excel/Word running on Intel-based Mac (without any porting and/or recompiling). Jobs also shows Photoshop CS2 with all plugins that are translated and run on Intel-based Mac without significant speed decrease.
Mac OS X has been leading secret double life. Every Mac project build for Intel and PowerPC and Intel. Every release of Mac OS X has been built for both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs. For the last 5 years.
What happened to Apple being so anti-MS? What happened or is going to happend to Apple's nice new office apps? I personally do not consider this a "good thing". It looks like Apple is just going to become another software company, especially based on this comment by Jobs:
Next year will be about Leopards, the next version of Mac OS X. More than processor, hardware, the "soul of the Mac" is the operating system.
How many Apple fans are going to change their tune from "Apple has always been a hardware company" to "Apple has always been a software company"? What a complete 180 for Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Affiliate programs only work for BIG and well established companies. Who would take a chance on a no-name company with new ProductX when you can be guaranteed a return on ads from BIG CompanyZ? So your "solution" only works for well established BIG corps and again puts the little man out of business.
Advertising is always a gamble. If you want to advertise your product XYZ, it is up to _YOU_ to know how to best market XYZ. If you fail, that doesn't mean that I should fail with you for allowing you to place ads on my site. If you want to advertise, then pay the damn money and take your chances with _YOUR_ product. Don't expect some socialist economy where advertiser will now take a chance with you.
No major advertiser will ever go for your method. It just makes no sense in a capitalistic system. Now if we were in socialist Russia, than maybe you would have a point about sellers and advertiser having to _both_ succeed or fail. But we are not!
I put an ad on my site to your store. Because of my ad, you get 10 new sales per week. How exactly am I to know that you are getting 10 extra sales per week from the ads on my site? Should I trust that you will report all 10 sales to me and pay me for those 10 sales? What if you want to save some money and only report and pay me for 8 of the 10 sales I generated for you? How would I ever find out? Should I have to go take you to court to prove how many sales per week I generated for you?
There is also the problem of not many people wanting to do this method. For example, if I put an ad on tv, I PAY FOR THE AD UP FRONT. If that tv ad generates 10,000 new sales or 0 new sales doesn't matter. I still pay the same price for that ad. If I advertise for you, I personally do not care if you get a sale from it. I am using my time/property/etc to advertise for you, I want to be paid for that. Once a customer clicks an ad on my site and goes to your site, the rest of the transaction is out of my hands. If your site is slow or poorly designed and you lose the sale, why should I have to also lose money? If I advertise for you I want to be paid, regardless of you being able to complete the sale.
Your not going to get any more reliability out of a Sun server than you would get with an equivalent, yet less expensive, x86 based server.
Oh, and to get back on topic, why would someone want a dog-slow Sparc for a laptop? Is there really any software out there that _only_ runs on Sparc Solaris and not x86 Solaris or Linux? Your going to get far more performance and a much better price out of an x86 laptop than a Sparc based one. Just RTFA! The Sparc laptop is $3,400! The specs on it suck. 512MB and 40GB? For $3,400 for a laptop, I better be getting some state-of-the-art hardware and not some dog-slow sparc with poor specs. ; )
They invented the damn object and now you're telling them how they should use it...brilliant. Huh? When did MS invent the XMLHttpRequest object? MS made Microsoft.XMLHTTP and Msxml2.XMLHTTP and use in IE as an ActiveX object. MS didn't code the XMLHttpRequest objects in all the other browsers. The XMLHttpRequest object is just modeled on the same interface as Msxml2.XMLHTTP to make coding easier.
MS doesn't need to "support" other browsers. All MS needs to do is follow standards! Make their AJAX JavaScript standards compliant and no one could complain. If their AJAX is standards compliant JavaScript and it doesn't work with WebBrowser X, then it is the fault of WebBrowser X and not Microsoft's.
I believe he is/was using their menu control. However, the poor page layout is due to .Net. If you spoof Firefox as IE, the page layout works fine. The page layout is not controlled by the menu control. However, the control is not that great itself. As Firefox, the menu control works but it does not change the cursor to a hand properly as it does for IE. If you change Firefix to spoof IE, the menu looks the same but you get a bunch of JavaScript errors.
Good for you fan-boy.
I will try to play around with the browsercap stuff some more. As I pointed out in my post, if you set Firefox to pretend to be IE, the HTML usually displays _much_ better, however the Javascript gets all crappy and non-standards compliant and breaks things. If you have Firefox just be Firefox, then none of the validation controls work. They will require a round-trip to the server. However, in IE they will do basic Javascript and _not_ require a server round trip just to make sure a text control is not empty. I seriously do not see why MS could not use _standards_ compliant Javascript to check a text input. I mean it is as simple as something like:
I hope .Net 2.x really comes through and "just works" (tm) in a standards compliant mode. Though with MS I will not count on it.
Thanks for the link ; )
There are plenty. A good Free/Open one is called Eclipse. It is plug-in based and supports Java/Servlet/JSP/C++ and others. You can just download Eclipse and Tomcat and have a complete JSP/Servelt web application framework that works on MS Windows or Linux. Now just buy a JSP/Servlet book or search Google for a JSP/Servlet tutorial and your all set ; )
There are also tons of other problems I have run into with the .Net framework over the last few years. Here is a _major_ problem for me that I just posted about.
I am not a .Net hater, I am just an MS hater. Why? Because of the intentional things MS does to stop other products from working. For example, ASP.Net (in C# or whatever) should put out standards compliant HTML, regardless of browser. However, that is not the case. A fellow programming friend of mine who, sadly, grew up in the "MS only camp" made this page. Go to this URL in IE, then under the "Quick. Cheap. Easy." flash, click on Info. Notice that everything looks fine? Now do the _same_ steps, but do them in Firefox/Mozilla. Once you click the "Info" link the page looks like crap. After talking to my friend, it turns out that he used _nothing_ but MS supplied .Net controls. Now, I want you to do a few more experiments (I have already done them and know the outcome). Download and install the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox. Make Firefox "pretend" to be IE 6 and go back to the link above.!!!!! Wow, the MS ASP.Net framework sends down different HTML depending on whether you are using IE or not! Making Firefox "pretend" to be IE, causes the MS ASP.Net framework to send down IE-Only Code that actually happens to make the site look correct in Firefox.
Now, there is one other experiment for us. Go back to the link as Firefox. Then go under File -> Save Page As and pick Web Page Complete. This option will save all the images, scripts and HTML of the page that was sent to Firefox. Now, open up IE and drag-n-drop the complete HTML or HTM page that you saved from Firefox to IE. Do you notice ANYTHING STRANGE? IE renders the Firefox delivered page just as poorly as Firefox does!
So to sum up my thoughts on MS .Net. I love C#. It is a very nice language. I think the MS .Net framework is very nice. However, I also hate the MS .Net framework because it is designed for crap MS only. For all of the ASP.Net/C# Web apps I have made, I have had to actually _fight_ against the MS Visual Studio IDE to force it to make standard compliant web apps. It seems that the latest versions of MS Visual Studio IDE just want to produce IE/MS only web apps. To me that is not acceptable. I personally would rather stick to Java/Servlets/JSP or PHP and have total control myself, than put up with MS intentionally trying to break non-IE browser.
For all the MS-apologist, please save your excuses. MS could have made there ASP.Net framework deliver the _same_ HTML across all browsers. All MS had to do was make ASP.Net standards compliant, which it is _not_!
One post, just one and the site is /.ed. I guess this is one of those, hey look at my little review and /. me so I can brag to my friends how my little home system was /.ed.
I think this is MS's answer for Photoshop fans that don't need all the features of Photoshop at the extreme price. If MS can deliver this product for say $120 USD or less, they _could_ get a lot of Win32 Photoshop users to convert that do not need to pay $400+ for Photoshop.
For me personally, Gimp does everything I need under Win32 and Linux. There is no need for me to spend money for features I will never use.
Also, Acrylic was _very_ slow on my AMD 2800+ with 1GB of memory. Just bringing up the preference dialog had a very noticeable lag. From what I have seen, I don't think Acrylic is at Beta level just yet. MS has a lot of work to do on this app to make the general UI to be much more responsive.
I think Apple should really focus on being a software company. It has make MS super rich and IMO, Apple's OS and other software is much better than the comparative offerings from MS.
How did it take you "4 years to get your printer up and running"? I installed my HP PSC Scanner/Printer/Copier under Fedora Core Linux in about 15 seconds. It actually took less time under Linux than under MS Windows XP. Under WinXP I had to follow _very_ critical step as to when I plugged in the USB printer. If you plug the USB cable too soon, you would have to download a special remove program from HP and start over. Under Linux, I booted with the HP printer plugged in, and then just picked it from a list and it was installed with support for scanning and printing. Maybe try not to be so theatrical next time?
I know it is not everywhere. There are plenty of pro-MS sites you can go to that pretty much sound the reverse ofSo companies should be allowed to get away with whatever they want? If other companies see Lexmark getting away with locking in their customers, other companies will do the same. Say goodbye to the "free" market once that starts to happen.