If you're that important a person, would you stay on with a company that had already filed for bankruptcy? Keep in mind that future bonuses are unlikely to be nearly as high as company performance is going to suck for a while.
The ship is burning. The captain offers you a bag of gold if you stay on the ship to help put out the fire. Do you jump ship or do you start hauling buckets?
You don't write web pages for browsers, you write web pages to standards [w3c.org].
Fair enough, but you write applications to features, web or not. If you can write something that extends or breaks the standard, but it's supported by 90% of the browsers out there, is it acceptable to do? It depends on the business case. Many times, the business case requires something that's visually impressive. Many of the problems that get introduced are based on the bells and whistles. I'm not a big fan of them because it's sometimes harder to use, but it works for a lot of people and management wants to see it -- plain and simple.
Your insistence that webpages and printed pages (or any other form of data) must be different, from both a technological and ideological, escapes me. The technology works and, when properly used, can satisfy both needs. You can't go around telling people how to use the technology. Sticking too closely to original design goals prevents reuse of technology. Stretching the limits of its abilities is the way to discover new applications.
Piracy hasn't been eliminated, but it's way down. No longer can the office secretary pass the copy of XP that she got with her computer around the office. She has to go find a warez group on IRC or on Usenet, download the ISO, and then burn it to disc, which are skills beyond the average Windows user. Microsoft's activation policy solved what it set out to do: prevent casual piracy.
Or
C. They're trying to get people to use the web because it only requires a couple of underpaid, Mountain Dew-drinking geeks to maintain it while you need a whole army of underpaid phone customer service reps.
Why should I HAVE to put effort into something to benefit EVERYONE? Why doesn't every website put out a version that I can read in English? It's surely a benefit for those people that couldn't use the site before due to not being able to read German/French/Russian/etc.
Sometimes, it's not about "functionality" -- it's sheerly about presentation. Fan sites for rock stars are way, way overloaded with images. I think someone once pointed out to me that the 'N Sync site was one huuuge Flash site. You can't go around telling the band or their fans that they're using HTML improperly and it should be laid out differently. In the entertainment biz, EVERYTHING has to be entertaining, including the site. And people will jump through hoops to make sure that it is. You can be sure that millions of screaming teens will wait double or triple the time to download the fancy images of Justin Timberlake bouncing across the screen. Not functionality as you and I call it, but functional to them.
Well, a catalog in my mailbox is as much a "place of exhibition, display, and a sales establishment" as my monitor is. It's just about as good, if not better, than the web site. It just has one helluva latency.
If you know of any visually-impaired versions of the Victoria's Secret catalog, please send it my way. I would love to feel... er, READ... a copy.
Sometimes it's not 5% more code. Sometimes it's a whole new release. Maybe I should have done it the first time? Wrong. You can't build something for every market out the door. You have to pick your target market first and then expand upon that. To try to do a take-all approach out the door is a sure sign for disaster for any company. If I wanted to sell computers and you told me I had to sell everything from PDAs to 4,096 processor behemoths, I'd tell you you're crazy. I'm going to make and sell the bread-and-butter: the desktop, and offer a few different choices. I'd love to cater to every market, but that's just not a reasonable choice.
Telling people that they should have catered to blind people is a noble cause, but not always a reasonable decision for companies to make. And getting the government to tell them that they have to is even worse. Especially if the product that they're selling is of no value to blind people.
Should Ferrari have a visually-impaired site featuring its cars? How many blind Ferrari owners are there? Or a poster store? Or a pornography store? 5% more time, effort, and money to make these sites but they will be 99% wasted. That's 4.95% in added wasted productivity.
Re:I'm sorry to say I agree with the court ruling
on
ADA Doesn't Apply to Web
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I repeat. The only problem arises from those who incorrectly try to use HTML as a graphic design medium.
This is where you're wrong. Content is NOT king. In fact, it's useless without being presented in a useful format. Headers, footers, and navigation are vital cues to the web being a useful medium. It's not about data... that's what XML is for. PEOPLE are reading webpages and we have to make them friendly for PEOPLE to use. You can't tell me that an article on CNN is much easier to read because of the familiar header/side menu/footer format than if you had pasted the whole document in Notepad and tried to read it there. The images, highlights, backgrounds, fonts, font sizes, and typefaces are very important to being able to recognize the desired text very easily. Ever come across a site that looked wrong because they put the wrong content in the wrong place? That's poor design.
Is that just your perception or are you basing that on actual data? Microsoft has tons of case studies where Windows 2000 was selected over the competition. I know what you're saying, but before you can really get a good handle on how many big businesses are selecting Linux vs Microsoft unless you have real data and not just your memory of headlines, as very few Microsoft installations are newsworthy. An increase of larger companies using Linux isn't necessarily a shift in the market toward Linux... it could simply be from the growth of clustering.
It seems that every car that cuts you off is another BMW, but we all know that's not really the case -- it's just perception. Be careful of drawing conclusions without real data.
Modify your car. I modified mine. That's not the issue. MS doesn't care if you modify your XBox. They do care if you duplicate the proprietary code and/or if you sell it. If you were to open up a shop that sold copied ECUs or aftermarket traction control units that were based on the factory code, there would be grounds for a copyright violation suit. That's why they went after Lik Sang and not you.
You are absolutely right. I see a lot of comments here saying that MS deserves to lose because they sold the boxes at the loss and that argument simply does not justify copyright violations.
Your problem is that you're looking at the issue in the wrong light. Who the hell cares what is going on elsewhere in the company. MS is failing to put out the games that they want to sell in this difficult economy and with stiff competition. Capitalism will sort out who wins that fight.
But that is NOT the issue. The problem is that someone violated a copyright. Every company and person has the right to protect their copyright and the government has a responsibility to enforce it. It doesn't matter what else is going on. Individual rights must be protected regardless of why the plaintiff wants the right protected. You can't just say, "you deserve to lose" and take it away from them.
That's not entrapment. Entrapment is coercing someone to do something that they would otherwise not do. If they left a car out and an undercover cop came along feigning an injury and said that they had to get to a hospital NOW and you should steal the car to get him there, that's entrapment. If they leave it out and someone comes by and steals it, that's not entrapment -- it's attempted theft.
A nuclear weapon *could* be used to kill millions of people. But it could also be used as a paperweight. Everyone should be allowed to have a nuke on their desk.
Maintaining lines of communication is key in any kind of operation. If the US was to be hit by a nuclear attack, whoever was left would have to be able to communicate in order to effective recover, regroup, and retailiate. When an invasion is planned, the highest priority targets are command, communication, and detection (radar). If you take out the command or deprive the ability of command to talk to its constituent units, you end up with a disorganized enemy that can't fight. If you can't talk to your rescue workers, you can't work effectively.
There are lots of projects that they've worked on that don't necessarily make it into their products. There are lots of details of some of their research at http://research.microsoft.com/research/. When they go recruiting at MIT, they don't recruit software engineers. They recruit research engineers that want to play with toys and develop new research, not write new software. Reading through their website, it looks very much like an academic institution's list of active research projects (with very academic titles and abstracts) and many documents are available for download.
It's for DISTRIBUTION, not acquisition. You could still be liable for possesion, but they want to hit up distribution big-time. Same as anything illegal. You get caught with a dime bag -- ok, you get fined, maybe some jail time. You get caught with a wad of dime bags -- that's intent to distribute and you go away for a long time. Unless you can turn in your supplier. Blah blah blah.
Follow the standards and anyone can lead the market if they implement them better. They will also avoid being blindsided by new MS "standards".
Standards are a great idea if people listen to them. But it's not Microsoft that's creating new standards. You're trying to enforce a standard on millions of HTML coders around the world. Ever try to get people in your roommates to flush the toilet after they're done? Or get co-workers to properly file memos? Or your bills to get sent to the proper address? These are all standards, but they're USELESS unless you can get individuals like you, me, and the nerd next door to use them.
Microsoft did three things: it built a buggy browser, introduced new tags that were an extension of the existing standard, and built a browser that would tolerate incorrect HTML.
The first is bad and should be resolved by Microsoft. Fortunately, 99% of the non-compliance doesn't affect most people. MS isn't in the business to create something that can't read webpages. They'll spend their money to get it right if it affects enough people.
The second is great, because it offers people the ability to add greater features to their webpages for the people that can understand it. However, if people are morons, they'll have a dependency upon the extensions without supporting the standards. We shouldn't discourage extensions to standards because not everyone can support it. Is anyone faulting Oracle for their bazillion extensions to SQL? I know ANSI SQL but frequently can't make heads or tails of a piece of Oracle SQL.
The third is that people write shitty HTML. I see it all the time. Not closing tags, overlapping tags, missing tags, extra tags, etc. I've also seen some browsers totally NOT SHOW TEXT when it runs across HTML that it screwed up on. For example, I think it was Netscape 4 that failed to show data in a table if the table wasn't closed. IE showed the data ok. Crappy HTML, but IE proved to be the better browser.
I'm not faulting standards at all -- I would love to see standards in a lot of stuff (especially instant messaging! ugh!). However, I just don't see anyone possibly succeeding at this effort. You sound as though companies should go against Microsoft simply because it's Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't "control" HTML. They're not fully supporting it, they're adding their own extensions, and they're making it more resilient to poor HTML.
If you've been Windows-free for 7 years, you're missing a lot of improvements. Multiple desktops never made it into the mix, but there are several ways to get it, including third party applications (free or shareware) and display device drivers, which frequently include it as a feature. Stability these days is very comparable to Linux and other operating systems and usability is much better. I'm not telling you should go buy Windows, but if you get a chance to play with XP for a day, I think you'll agree that it's substantially better. While it may not be right for you, you should at least check it out.
Which is just security through exclusivity/obscurity, right?
Yes. Security through obscurity is necessary, but not complete. It sure does help a whole lot, but you shouldn't rely upon it. If you think security through obscurity is useless, please forward your bank account numbers and PIN to me. Thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're that important a person, would you stay on with a company that had already filed for bankruptcy? Keep in mind that future bonuses are unlikely to be nearly as high as company performance is going to suck for a while.
The ship is burning. The captain offers you a bag of gold if you stay on the ship to help put out the fire. Do you jump ship or do you start hauling buckets?
Your insistence that webpages and printed pages (or any other form of data) must be different, from both a technological and ideological, escapes me. The technology works and, when properly used, can satisfy both needs. You can't go around telling people how to use the technology. Sticking too closely to original design goals prevents reuse of technology. Stretching the limits of its abilities is the way to discover new applications.
Piracy hasn't been eliminated, but it's way down. No longer can the office secretary pass the copy of XP that she got with her computer around the office. She has to go find a warez group on IRC or on Usenet, download the ISO, and then burn it to disc, which are skills beyond the average Windows user. Microsoft's activation policy solved what it set out to do: prevent casual piracy.
Or
C. They're trying to get people to use the web because it only requires a couple of underpaid, Mountain Dew-drinking geeks to maintain it while you need a whole army of underpaid phone customer service reps.
Why should I HAVE to put effort into something to benefit EVERYONE? Why doesn't every website put out a version that I can read in English? It's surely a benefit for those people that couldn't use the site before due to not being able to read German/French/Russian/etc.
Sometimes, it's not about "functionality" -- it's sheerly about presentation. Fan sites for rock stars are way, way overloaded with images. I think someone once pointed out to me that the 'N Sync site was one huuuge Flash site. You can't go around telling the band or their fans that they're using HTML improperly and it should be laid out differently. In the entertainment biz, EVERYTHING has to be entertaining, including the site. And people will jump through hoops to make sure that it is. You can be sure that millions of screaming teens will wait double or triple the time to download the fancy images of Justin Timberlake bouncing across the screen. Not functionality as you and I call it, but functional to them.
Well, a catalog in my mailbox is as much a "place of exhibition, display, and a sales establishment" as my monitor is. It's just about as good, if not better, than the web site. It just has one helluva latency.
... er, READ ... a copy.
If you know of any visually-impaired versions of the Victoria's Secret catalog, please send it my way. I would love to feel
Sometimes it's not 5% more code. Sometimes it's a whole new release. Maybe I should have done it the first time? Wrong. You can't build something for every market out the door. You have to pick your target market first and then expand upon that. To try to do a take-all approach out the door is a sure sign for disaster for any company. If I wanted to sell computers and you told me I had to sell everything from PDAs to 4,096 processor behemoths, I'd tell you you're crazy. I'm going to make and sell the bread-and-butter: the desktop, and offer a few different choices. I'd love to cater to every market, but that's just not a reasonable choice.
Telling people that they should have catered to blind people is a noble cause, but not always a reasonable decision for companies to make. And getting the government to tell them that they have to is even worse. Especially if the product that they're selling is of no value to blind people.
Should Ferrari have a visually-impaired site featuring its cars? How many blind Ferrari owners are there? Or a poster store? Or a pornography store? 5% more time, effort, and money to make these sites but they will be 99% wasted. That's 4.95% in added wasted productivity.
Is that just your perception or are you basing that on actual data? Microsoft has tons of case studies where Windows 2000 was selected over the competition. I know what you're saying, but before you can really get a good handle on how many big businesses are selecting Linux vs Microsoft unless you have real data and not just your memory of headlines, as very few Microsoft installations are newsworthy. An increase of larger companies using Linux isn't necessarily a shift in the market toward Linux ... it could simply be from the growth of clustering.
It seems that every car that cuts you off is another BMW, but we all know that's not really the case -- it's just perception. Be careful of drawing conclusions without real data.
2,512 times quieter than the 65 dB machine:
10^3.1 = 1,259
10^6.5 = 3,162,277
3,162,277 / 1,259 = 2,512
Damn, you're one bored mofo!
Modify your car. I modified mine. That's not the issue. MS doesn't care if you modify your XBox. They do care if you duplicate the proprietary code and/or if you sell it. If you were to open up a shop that sold copied ECUs or aftermarket traction control units that were based on the factory code, there would be grounds for a copyright violation suit. That's why they went after Lik Sang and not you.
You are absolutely right. I see a lot of comments here saying that MS deserves to lose because they sold the boxes at the loss and that argument simply does not justify copyright violations.
Your problem is that you're looking at the issue in the wrong light. Who the hell cares what is going on elsewhere in the company. MS is failing to put out the games that they want to sell in this difficult economy and with stiff competition. Capitalism will sort out who wins that fight.
But that is NOT the issue. The problem is that someone violated a copyright. Every company and person has the right to protect their copyright and the government has a responsibility to enforce it. It doesn't matter what else is going on. Individual rights must be protected regardless of why the plaintiff wants the right protected. You can't just say, "you deserve to lose" and take it away from them.
That's not entrapment. Entrapment is coercing someone to do something that they would otherwise not do. If they left a car out and an undercover cop came along feigning an injury and said that they had to get to a hospital NOW and you should steal the car to get him there, that's entrapment. If they leave it out and someone comes by and steals it, that's not entrapment -- it's attempted theft.
A nuclear weapon *could* be used to kill millions of people. But it could also be used as a paperweight. Everyone should be allowed to have a nuke on their desk.
Maintaining lines of communication is key in any kind of operation. If the US was to be hit by a nuclear attack, whoever was left would have to be able to communicate in order to effective recover, regroup, and retailiate. When an invasion is planned, the highest priority targets are command, communication, and detection (radar). If you take out the command or deprive the ability of command to talk to its constituent units, you end up with a disorganized enemy that can't fight. If you can't talk to your rescue workers, you can't work effectively.
There are lots of projects that they've worked on that don't necessarily make it into their products. There are lots of details of some of their research at http://research.microsoft.com/research/. When they go recruiting at MIT, they don't recruit software engineers. They recruit research engineers that want to play with toys and develop new research, not write new software. Reading through their website, it looks very much like an academic institution's list of active research projects (with very academic titles and abstracts) and many documents are available for download.
It's for DISTRIBUTION, not acquisition. You could still be liable for possesion, but they want to hit up distribution big-time. Same as anything illegal. You get caught with a dime bag -- ok, you get fined, maybe some jail time. You get caught with a wad of dime bags -- that's intent to distribute and you go away for a long time. Unless you can turn in your supplier. Blah blah blah.
Microsoft did three things: it built a buggy browser, introduced new tags that were an extension of the existing standard, and built a browser that would tolerate incorrect HTML.
The first is bad and should be resolved by Microsoft. Fortunately, 99% of the non-compliance doesn't affect most people. MS isn't in the business to create something that can't read webpages. They'll spend their money to get it right if it affects enough people.
The second is great, because it offers people the ability to add greater features to their webpages for the people that can understand it. However, if people are morons, they'll have a dependency upon the extensions without supporting the standards. We shouldn't discourage extensions to standards because not everyone can support it. Is anyone faulting Oracle for their bazillion extensions to SQL? I know ANSI SQL but frequently can't make heads or tails of a piece of Oracle SQL.
The third is that people write shitty HTML. I see it all the time. Not closing tags, overlapping tags, missing tags, extra tags, etc. I've also seen some browsers totally NOT SHOW TEXT when it runs across HTML that it screwed up on. For example, I think it was Netscape 4 that failed to show data in a table if the table wasn't closed. IE showed the data ok. Crappy HTML, but IE proved to be the better browser.
I'm not faulting standards at all -- I would love to see standards in a lot of stuff (especially instant messaging! ugh!). However, I just don't see anyone possibly succeeding at this effort. You sound as though companies should go against Microsoft simply because it's Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't "control" HTML. They're not fully supporting it, they're adding their own extensions, and they're making it more resilient to poor HTML.
If you've been Windows-free for 7 years, you're missing a lot of improvements. Multiple desktops never made it into the mix, but there are several ways to get it, including third party applications (free or shareware) and display device drivers, which frequently include it as a feature. Stability these days is very comparable to Linux and other operating systems and usability is much better. I'm not telling you should go buy Windows, but if you get a chance to play with XP for a day, I think you'll agree that it's substantially better. While it may not be right for you, you should at least check it out.