I agree - I'm not saying that this voting system is representative of public opinion (often petitions/etc are very bad indicators), but I fail to see why the perfectly valid viewpoint that perhaps people shouldn't be criminalised for doing something with their own bodies is cited as an example of the system going wrong.
I'm not sure what the point of this article is. It's not even referencing an article - it's just some random guy (theodp) making a comment based on what he's seen on the site. And it's a poor comment at that. Even if one believes that some (and only some) drugs should be criminalised, I don't see why this reflects poorly on the Open Government system.
In the UK, we have local elections coming up, and the main argument the Conservative leaflet made against the Liberal Democrats was "OMG, they don't want to put people in prison for simple possession of weed" as if that was of utmost importance with the economy going down the tubes. I was like "Wow, I didn't actually know that, another reason I'll vote Lib Dem then".
Also we have an online "No 10 Petition" system which sounds similar to this - it gets criticism that the Government never listens, but I think that's a good thing, as petitions generally allow vocal minorites to push bad laws. For every petition I agree with, there's plenty I'd hate to see acted on. It used to be the case that petitions were handed to No 10 in real life, which much media fanfare, causing the Government to think it must do something (e.g., the recent criminalisation of possession of adult images the Government doesn't like resulted from one such publicised petition).
I'm not sure what you're really saying here, but just about all phones have built-in memory of a few MBs at least, with the memory card on top - but moreover, memory card phones typically come with a memory card included in the place. I mean, when Nokia advertise their 8GB or 16GB models, I presume that's included in the price.
How often do you swap memory cards to get more space?
Often enough that it matters. E.g., 5 years ago my phone had 256MB which was large at the time. About a year ago, I upgraded it to 2GB for about a fiver. Without that option, I'd still be stuck at 256MB, or have to buy a complete new phone (both hassle, and costly).
Is it seriously true that the Iphone's memory isn't upgradeable?
A good UI is one that chicks dig. (If you didn't understand that already, my condolences on your lack of social life.)
Ah, another ad hominem.
The female percentage of the non-iPhone personal smartphone market bounces around between 6%-8%. The iPhone, on the other hand, has a female buyer percentage encroaching upon 30%.
I suspect that the percentage of mobile phones is close to 50%. Of course, you've done the trick of redefining the market to the ill-defined "smart phone". The problem with this is that most phones these days do what "smart" phones did in the past (e.g., Internet access, running programs). It's not clear why the Iphone gets counted as a "smart" phone, when other decent phones don't, when it misses out on basic features. Also, that market is biased, because it's going to include all the "smart" phones from years ago, when they were more of a "geek" thing.
Put it another way - what are the stats from a high end phone today from Nokia or Motorola? I suspect that they too will be higher, and it's only older "smart" phones that pull the percentage figure down.
And to be honest, as long as other companies are selling more phones (which Nokia are), I'm not sure why proportion of women matters, anymore than say proportion of people with different coloured hair - unless you're seriously suggesting buying an Iphone to think women will like you, in which case, my condolences on your lack of social life.
If it was really true that gender usage is an indicator of a good UI (which is one of the more ludicrous claims I've heard), then 30% sounds shockingly low - the much cheaper bog standard phones with a high share have, by your own argument, a far better UI than the Iphone, so you've disproved the claim yourself.
On the contrary, it's bad developers who think that UI is some mystical subjective thing, and that's why we end up with a UI that they think looks cool but is actually flawed, or we give up fundamental UI features such as copy/paste.
A good UI developer is aware of what objective things make up what a user subjectively perceives as a "good UI" (e.g., Fitts's law).
Indeed - I bet it won't be long before we have Apple stories about rumours that there's going to be a rumour about some possible new product (that yes, will have been done by everyone else years ago).
i can tell you sugar is sweet. if you ask me what sweet is, will you be equally adamant in accepting my answer, "but i cannot objectively explain that - you just have to taste it!" ? Is that too vaguely subjective for you? sometimes just experiencing it is the only way (or at least, the best way) to understand something. particularly an experience, such as usage of a UI.
So I see you adopted for the "vague subjective claims" option. I'm not sure what your argument is - things such as sweetness can be objectively defined and measured. But even if it couldn't, it would be a fallacy to claim that because we can't define sweetness, we therefore can't define a good UI. Moreover, even if we accept that a good UI is purely subjective, then you've lost, because whether the Iphone is good or not is purely a personal opinion, and no longer a fact, and people who claim other phones have the best UI are just as correct as you are.
Honestly, this sounds like a theist's "But atheists believe in love!" claim in order to justify their claim of "God exists" - except it's "Sugar is sweet" in order to justify "The Iphone has the best UI".
look at the iPhone ads
I would prefer to be told here, rather than subject myself to even more Apple marketing (what with the emails they spam me with, and the daily Slashdot stories)...
Like the one where you want to find a sushi place - it will give you directions, reviews and a phone number to call and make a reservation - all within an extremely simple UI where you don't have to hunt for the info one by one.
At last, an example, thank you. Sounds like Google maps. Although to be honest, I think this is more of an "application features", rather than user interface - unless you can explain something about that interface that makes it better than the same applications in other phones. And "feature lists" are often hand-waved away by Iphone fans as not being important. But still, this is the sort of thing I do like to hear more about - useful applications on a range of phones - so thank you for the example.
i sincerely wish you could shed your unreasonable antipathy towards actually trying to use the iPhone UI, so you can be a better judge of it yourself.
"But You Just Have To Use It". Sorry, I haven't used the Iphone. There are loads of phones I haven't used - I bet the same is true for you too. You suggest that not spending thousands of pounds on every phone is "unreasonable antipathy"? If you're going to claim the Iphone is the best, without having used all other phones yourself, then you'd better be able to justify that, rather than expecting us to use your phone.
Personally I think that usability is of utmost important. But despite all their claims, it's rare for someone making this claim of the Iphone, or any Apple product, to explain why. Usability isn't some mystical property - or indeed, an ornamenation. It's something that can be measured objectively - and hell, we had better be able to do this, if it is really so important. Add to that the fact that it lacks fundamental UI features such as copy/paste, or that the phone needs to be hacked to get basic features such as tethering working (so much for Just Works), it makes me rather suspicious of all the unsupported claims people make of its UI.
But hey, keep preaching your bullshit and struggle to get anything Open Source that's intended for actual end users to crawl up to a full 1% market share.
So we're mocking platforms that don't have great market share? Well I guess OS X is crappy too, as far more people use Windows. And Apple aren't doing great against Nokia either, when it comes to phones.
There have always been products competing with both the iPod and iPhone that have a longer and more impressive bullet list of features.
Ah yes, it's the "Grumpy Featurism" hand-wave. Let's brush all the objective, reasoned, based-on-evidence arguments aside, and claim they are trumped by my personal claim of "It's better".
Well you're both wrong, I might as well claim that the Motorola V980 is the Best Phone Ever.
The problem being, the average person doesn't enjoy using them and half those features are so poorly implemented they are just painful to use. Many geeks are happy to work around poorly designed interfaces for the sake of overall functionality.
What a load of weasel words. Citations, please?
Based on hard sales figures, the "average person" most certainly prefers Nokia phones in general to Apple phones.
Apple doesn't have dominance in any markets
I am in full agreement.
I still wonder if Android would exist or if it would have the level of functionality it does if Apple were not providing such strong competition.
The rapid and continual march of technology in the billion dollar mobile phone market has been going on for a decade or so, but Google would've only took interest in response to a Johnny come lately that, as you agree yourself, is not the dominant player in the market? Please...
For many people the iPhone is still the best offering. Since we're not dealing with a significantly broken market for smartphones, people should pick what works best for them, be it iPhone or an Android or some other phone.
Right. Which, again, based on hard sales figures, the overwhelming majority of people do. But it's just a shame we never hear about this technology on Slashdot. Reading Slashdot, you'd think that the mobile phone market considered of Apple as a dominant player, and only Android coming along afterwards to provide competition (and based on some of the "But hey, you can read a website on the Iphone!" comments, I'd say that many readers here do think that that's the case - in fact, I recently responded to a poster who actually thought that Apple were the market leader in mobile phones). It would be like Slashdot only covering OS X, giving a brief mention to Ubuntu, and never mentioning a major player like Windows at all. That would be fine if it was Apple-dot, I suppose.
If it's wrong, explain why it's wrong. Modding it down leaves us no idea whether the anonymous silent modder is the one in the right, or not.
I have to browse Apple stories on -1 anyway, as it's the one subject area where negative mods are used for "I disagree". A "wrong" option would just make that even worse.
Why the hell would Apple leak it when it can just as easily make the front page of Slashdot next week when they show off the new features at WWDC.
Because it's twice as much publicity.
Only Apple get three times the publicity hype that everyone else gets - one story for the product, one for the announcement, and one for the rumour about the announcement. Hell, some products don't even get the story for the product, even when it's from a phone company with much larger market share, that's implemented the features years ago. Sigh - I remember when Slashdot and geek was about being intersted in new cutting edge technology, but hey, I guess rumour of a niche phone doing something a few years later is now sTuff tHat mAtters for nerds.
You have been able to shoot video on the iPhone once jailbroken.
Apple - it Just Works!
But seriously, this is even worse - it's capable, but Apple decided to disallow it?
Now to submit my Slashdot article about my five year old Motorola V980, I heard a rumour that it does video Out Of The Box. Obviously this is earth shattering news that everyone must hear about.
Only on an Apple article would an ad hominem get +5 insightful.
Care to explain why the UI is better than all other phones, using evidence, reasoning, and objective examples, as opposed to ad hominems, vague subjective claims, or the "But You Just Have To Use It" claims that we typically get? Or will my honest question just be hidden by the mods so the reasonable questions don't even have to be answered?
Not sure why you were modded troll - it's got worse than daily now, in that there are two Iphone stories on the front page today that are nothing more than rumour or speculation, and a third story that probably wouldn't have been worth covering if it wasn't for the Iphone connection.
sLashdot - iPhone rUmours fOr nErds, sTuff tHat dOesn't mAtter?
Incidentally, I recently used my Motorola V980 to access a website - I'll have to submit a news story, as that's obviously news worthy, right.
Making a biased edit isn't sufficient for a ban - in fact, admins are incredibly generous in that even outright vandalism won't get a ban on a first try, only a polite "please don't do this" style message to begin with.
It can be funny, actually, when someone playing in a non-World of Warcraft MMO tries to justify why their MMO has less than 1% of the subscribers than WoW has despite being "so much better."
As opposed to a WoW fan trying to justify his purchase by mocking a small number of people playing some other game?
Quake was a significant game, but I think you're overstating the effect. Whilst Quake may have been most well known, there were other 3D games around, and the demand for faster 3D graphics would have still remained. I think the Playstation probably did far more to demonstrate how powerful having dedicated 3D hardware could be.
I'm not sure what you mean by your claim "So many 3D apps have little bits of quake code in them" - whilst there are probably a far number of games that licence the Quake engine, this would not be true in general of 3D applications.
Doom probably is a better choice for "killer" app - it seemed that people were buying then-expensive 486 PCs to play the game. This was at a time when PCs were previously seen mainly as business computers, and traditionally the home market had been ruled by other platforms. Quake did this too, but probably to a less extent.
BASICs such as AMOS and Blitz on the Amiga allowed people to easily create games and other applications, and were similarly cheap, far cheaper than commercial C compilers back then.
The Amiga also came with a free BASIC, Microsoft BASIC, but that was good for almost nothing, and no one ever used that unless you were insane, and didn't realise there were better alternatives...
(Blitz BASIC survives to this day, although I personally started out on AMOS instead.)
They mentioned graphics programs Photoshop and Quark, but not a mention of Lightwave, used for 3D rendering. And this was a killer app in the traditional sense of the term for the Amiga - graphics companies made render farms out of Amigas, all because of Lightwave.
Firefox, it showed that it was possible to reopen the browser to innovation and standardization after the rise of IE.
It wasn't the first of the post IE/Netscape browsers - at the least, there was Opera.
Not that I think this counts as being a killer app. People didn't buy computers to run Firefox (or Opera). The web would have still carried on without them. Yes, I love Opera, and Firefox is okay too, but this isn't anywhere near on the same scale as the initial development of the web and web browsers.
Ubuntu (yes, its not an application), it gave Linux to the masses and made it
So shouldn't every other OS get listed there too? Why is a version of Linux a killer application, and no other OS?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree - I'm not saying that this voting system is representative of public opinion (often petitions/etc are very bad indicators), but I fail to see why the perfectly valid viewpoint that perhaps people shouldn't be criminalised for doing something with their own bodies is cited as an example of the system going wrong.
I'm not sure what the point of this article is. It's not even referencing an article - it's just some random guy (theodp) making a comment based on what he's seen on the site. And it's a poor comment at that. Even if one believes that some (and only some) drugs should be criminalised, I don't see why this reflects poorly on the Open Government system.
In the UK, we have local elections coming up, and the main argument the Conservative leaflet made against the Liberal Democrats was "OMG, they don't want to put people in prison for simple possession of weed" as if that was of utmost importance with the economy going down the tubes. I was like "Wow, I didn't actually know that, another reason I'll vote Lib Dem then".
Also we have an online "No 10 Petition" system which sounds similar to this - it gets criticism that the Government never listens, but I think that's a good thing, as petitions generally allow vocal minorites to push bad laws. For every petition I agree with, there's plenty I'd hate to see acted on. It used to be the case that petitions were handed to No 10 in real life, which much media fanfare, causing the Government to think it must do something (e.g., the recent criminalisation of possession of adult images the Government doesn't like resulted from one such publicised petition).
I'm not sure what you're really saying here, but just about all phones have built-in memory of a few MBs at least, with the memory card on top - but moreover, memory card phones typically come with a memory card included in the place. I mean, when Nokia advertise their 8GB or 16GB models, I presume that's included in the price.
How often do you swap memory cards to get more space?
Often enough that it matters. E.g., 5 years ago my phone had 256MB which was large at the time. About a year ago, I upgraded it to 2GB for about a fiver. Without that option, I'd still be stuck at 256MB, or have to buy a complete new phone (both hassle, and costly).
Is it seriously true that the Iphone's memory isn't upgradeable?
Parents leaving their kids unattended is hardly a lightening strike.
I mean the probability of being kidnapped.
And talking of those...how about for planes rather than kids...given the recent news that is.
Indeed - perhaps a (Linux based) lightning conductor system for your child is the more urgent need here after all.
A good UI is one that chicks dig. (If you didn't understand that already, my condolences on your lack of social life.)
Ah, another ad hominem.
The female percentage of the non-iPhone personal smartphone market bounces around between 6%-8%. The iPhone, on the other hand, has a female buyer percentage encroaching upon 30%.
I suspect that the percentage of mobile phones is close to 50%. Of course, you've done the trick of redefining the market to the ill-defined "smart phone". The problem with this is that most phones these days do what "smart" phones did in the past (e.g., Internet access, running programs). It's not clear why the Iphone gets counted as a "smart" phone, when other decent phones don't, when it misses out on basic features. Also, that market is biased, because it's going to include all the "smart" phones from years ago, when they were more of a "geek" thing.
Put it another way - what are the stats from a high end phone today from Nokia or Motorola? I suspect that they too will be higher, and it's only older "smart" phones that pull the percentage figure down.
And to be honest, as long as other companies are selling more phones (which Nokia are), I'm not sure why proportion of women matters, anymore than say proportion of people with different coloured hair - unless you're seriously suggesting buying an Iphone to think women will like you, in which case, my condolences on your lack of social life.
If it was really true that gender usage is an indicator of a good UI (which is one of the more ludicrous claims I've heard), then 30% sounds shockingly low - the much cheaper bog standard phones with a high share have, by your own argument, a far better UI than the Iphone, so you've disproved the claim yourself.
On the contrary, it's bad developers who think that UI is some mystical subjective thing, and that's why we end up with a UI that they think looks cool but is actually flawed, or we give up fundamental UI features such as copy/paste.
A good UI developer is aware of what objective things make up what a user subjectively perceives as a "good UI" (e.g., Fitts's law).
and know they're not giving false information with a weapon to their head.
You mean you haven't agreed a duress signal in advance with your child?
Indeed - I bet it won't be long before we have Apple stories about rumours that there's going to be a rumour about some possible new product (that yes, will have been done by everyone else years ago).
A single case out of millions of children, over a period of years? You might as well worry about lightning strikes. Next on Slashdot:
Making a Lighting Conductor System For Your Child (must run Linux).
But if you're prepared to build some kind of custom GPS system, wouldn't it be simpler to, you know, lock the door instead?
i can tell you sugar is sweet. if you ask me what sweet is, will you be equally adamant in accepting my answer, "but i cannot objectively explain that - you just have to taste it!" ? Is that too vaguely subjective for you? sometimes just experiencing it is the only way (or at least, the best way) to understand something. particularly an experience, such as usage of a UI.
So I see you adopted for the "vague subjective claims" option. I'm not sure what your argument is - things such as sweetness can be objectively defined and measured. But even if it couldn't, it would be a fallacy to claim that because we can't define sweetness, we therefore can't define a good UI. Moreover, even if we accept that a good UI is purely subjective, then you've lost, because whether the Iphone is good or not is purely a personal opinion, and no longer a fact, and people who claim other phones have the best UI are just as correct as you are.
Honestly, this sounds like a theist's "But atheists believe in love!" claim in order to justify their claim of "God exists" - except it's "Sugar is sweet" in order to justify "The Iphone has the best UI".
look at the iPhone ads
I would prefer to be told here, rather than subject myself to even more Apple marketing (what with the emails they spam me with, and the daily Slashdot stories)...
Like the one where you want to find a sushi place - it will give you directions, reviews and a phone number to call and make a reservation - all within an extremely simple UI where you don't have to hunt for the info one by one.
At last, an example, thank you. Sounds like Google maps. Although to be honest, I think this is more of an "application features", rather than user interface - unless you can explain something about that interface that makes it better than the same applications in other phones. And "feature lists" are often hand-waved away by Iphone fans as not being important. But still, this is the sort of thing I do like to hear more about - useful applications on a range of phones - so thank you for the example.
i sincerely wish you could shed your unreasonable antipathy towards actually trying to use the iPhone UI, so you can be a better judge of it yourself.
"But You Just Have To Use It". Sorry, I haven't used the Iphone. There are loads of phones I haven't used - I bet the same is true for you too. You suggest that not spending thousands of pounds on every phone is "unreasonable antipathy"? If you're going to claim the Iphone is the best, without having used all other phones yourself, then you'd better be able to justify that, rather than expecting us to use your phone.
That's what Overrated is for, surely? I.e., you disagree with the reasons it was modded up.
Right or wrong is not decided by a vote, and if people could apply that mod, it would easily get misused, I fear.
Personally I think that usability is of utmost important. But despite all their claims, it's rare for someone making this claim of the Iphone, or any Apple product, to explain why. Usability isn't some mystical property - or indeed, an ornamenation. It's something that can be measured objectively - and hell, we had better be able to do this, if it is really so important. Add to that the fact that it lacks fundamental UI features such as copy/paste, or that the phone needs to be hacked to get basic features such as tethering working (so much for Just Works), it makes me rather suspicious of all the unsupported claims people make of its UI.
But hey, keep preaching your bullshit and struggle to get anything Open Source that's intended for actual end users to crawl up to a full 1% market share.
So we're mocking platforms that don't have great market share? Well I guess OS X is crappy too, as far more people use Windows. And Apple aren't doing great against Nokia either, when it comes to phones.
There have always been products competing with both the iPod and iPhone that have a longer and more impressive bullet list of features.
Ah yes, it's the "Grumpy Featurism" hand-wave. Let's brush all the objective, reasoned, based-on-evidence arguments aside, and claim they are trumped by my personal claim of "It's better".
Well you're both wrong, I might as well claim that the Motorola V980 is the Best Phone Ever.
The problem being, the average person doesn't enjoy using them and half those features are so poorly implemented they are just painful to use. Many geeks are happy to work around poorly designed interfaces for the sake of overall functionality.
What a load of weasel words. Citations, please?
Based on hard sales figures, the "average person" most certainly prefers Nokia phones in general to Apple phones.
Apple doesn't have dominance in any markets
I am in full agreement.
I still wonder if Android would exist or if it would have the level of functionality it does if Apple were not providing such strong competition.
The rapid and continual march of technology in the billion dollar mobile phone market has been going on for a decade or so, but Google would've only took interest in response to a Johnny come lately that, as you agree yourself, is not the dominant player in the market? Please...
For many people the iPhone is still the best offering. Since we're not dealing with a significantly broken market for smartphones, people should pick what works best for them, be it iPhone or an Android or some other phone.
Right. Which, again, based on hard sales figures, the overwhelming majority of people do. But it's just a shame we never hear about this technology on Slashdot. Reading Slashdot, you'd think that the mobile phone market considered of Apple as a dominant player, and only Android coming along afterwards to provide competition (and based on some of the "But hey, you can read a website on the Iphone!" comments, I'd say that many readers here do think that that's the case - in fact, I recently responded to a poster who actually thought that Apple were the market leader in mobile phones). It would be like Slashdot only covering OS X, giving a brief mention to Ubuntu, and never mentioning a major player like Windows at all. That would be fine if it was Apple-dot, I suppose.
If it's wrong, explain why it's wrong. Modding it down leaves us no idea whether the anonymous silent modder is the one in the right, or not.
I have to browse Apple stories on -1 anyway, as it's the one subject area where negative mods are used for "I disagree". A "wrong" option would just make that even worse.
Why the hell would Apple leak it when it can just as easily make the front page of Slashdot next week when they show off the new features at WWDC.
Because it's twice as much publicity.
Only Apple get three times the publicity hype that everyone else gets - one story for the product, one for the announcement, and one for the rumour about the announcement. Hell, some products don't even get the story for the product, even when it's from a phone company with much larger market share, that's implemented the features years ago. Sigh - I remember when Slashdot and geek was about being intersted in new cutting edge technology, but hey, I guess rumour of a niche phone doing something a few years later is now sTuff tHat mAtters for nerds.
You have been able to shoot video on the iPhone once jailbroken.
Apple - it Just Works!
But seriously, this is even worse - it's capable, but Apple decided to disallow it?
Now to submit my Slashdot article about my five year old Motorola V980, I heard a rumour that it does video Out Of The Box. Obviously this is earth shattering news that everyone must hear about.
Only on an Apple article would an ad hominem get +5 insightful.
Care to explain why the UI is better than all other phones, using evidence, reasoning, and objective examples, as opposed to ad hominems, vague subjective claims, or the "But You Just Have To Use It" claims that we typically get? Or will my honest question just be hidden by the mods so the reasonable questions don't even have to be answered?
Not sure why you were modded troll - it's got worse than daily now, in that there are two Iphone stories on the front page today that are nothing more than rumour or speculation, and a third story that probably wouldn't have been worth covering if it wasn't for the Iphone connection.
sLashdot - iPhone rUmours fOr nErds, sTuff tHat dOesn't mAtter?
Incidentally, I recently used my Motorola V980 to access a website - I'll have to submit a news story, as that's obviously news worthy, right.
Making a biased edit isn't sufficient for a ban - in fact, admins are incredibly generous in that even outright vandalism won't get a ban on a first try, only a polite "please don't do this" style message to begin with.
It can be funny, actually, when someone playing in a non-World of Warcraft MMO tries to justify why their MMO has less than 1% of the subscribers than WoW has despite being "so much better."
As opposed to a WoW fan trying to justify his purchase by mocking a small number of people playing some other game?
What censorship?
Quake was a significant game, but I think you're overstating the effect. Whilst Quake may have been most well known, there were other 3D games around, and the demand for faster 3D graphics would have still remained. I think the Playstation probably did far more to demonstrate how powerful having dedicated 3D hardware could be.
I'm not sure what you mean by your claim "So many 3D apps have little bits of quake code in them" - whilst there are probably a far number of games that licence the Quake engine, this would not be true in general of 3D applications.
Doom probably is a better choice for "killer" app - it seemed that people were buying then-expensive 486 PCs to play the game. This was at a time when PCs were previously seen mainly as business computers, and traditionally the home market had been ruled by other platforms. Quake did this too, but probably to a less extent.
BASICs such as AMOS and Blitz on the Amiga allowed people to easily create games and other applications, and were similarly cheap, far cheaper than commercial C compilers back then.
The Amiga also came with a free BASIC, Microsoft BASIC, but that was good for almost nothing, and no one ever used that unless you were insane, and didn't realise there were better alternatives...
(Blitz BASIC survives to this day, although I personally started out on AMOS instead.)
Well, according to them, only MacOS and Windows had GUIs. They probably think that on Linux, you're stuck with that "complicated command line".
They mentioned graphics programs Photoshop and Quark, but not a mention of Lightwave, used for 3D rendering. And this was a killer app in the traditional sense of the term for the Amiga - graphics companies made render farms out of Amigas, all because of Lightwave.
Firefox, it showed that it was possible to reopen the browser to innovation and standardization after the rise of IE.
It wasn't the first of the post IE/Netscape browsers - at the least, there was Opera.
Not that I think this counts as being a killer app. People didn't buy computers to run Firefox (or Opera). The web would have still carried on without them. Yes, I love Opera, and Firefox is okay too, but this isn't anywhere near on the same scale as the initial development of the web and web browsers.
Ubuntu (yes, its not an application), it gave Linux to the masses and made it
So shouldn't every other OS get listed there too? Why is a version of Linux a killer application, and no other OS?
I can remember my ICQ number from 10 years ago, but I can't remember the usernames I've used for other IM programs more recently to that...