Very easy. It's just a standard Windows next-next-next installer. It also involves entering a username and password (which the user got from me upon purchase; they can use it to download updates). The program can be used within a few minutes.
"installation onto multiple machines on a home network"
My license is very flexible. People can install it on an unlimited number of computers, as long as the license holder (or someone close to him, like a family member of a close friend) are the only users of the program.
No. I sell a program for just $11.95. The program has a high user satisfaction rate, is very popular in that field, and you even get 1 year of free support and free upgrades. $11.95 is certainly not overpriced for the sheer quality you get. Heck, there's even a free version of the program (which has less features and is less user friendly) available. Yet "crack", "torrent", "warez" etc. are very common search terms.
"Shouldn't thins tell the company in question that they're charging too much for their software, rather than suing Google is easy money?"
No it does not. I'm selling a type program which is very popular in that field, and the price is just $11.95 - comparable to a McDonalds meal. That price is nothing compared to the quality (the user satisfaction is high) and the fact that people even get 1 year of free upgrades and free support for that price. Yet when I use Google Suggest to search for that program, it suggest "crack", "warez", "password", "free" and "torrent".
It does not matter how cheap and good a program is, there will always be freeloaders and kids who want to pirate things.
Why? Open source does not imply no trademarking. Look at RedHat for a good example. As this post said, Sun can make it so only compatible VMs can call themselves "Java". Isn't that THE ideal solution? Why don't people spend more time discussing this instead of yelling "OMG open source java evil nonononono!!!!" all the time?
1. Obviously there are people who like it and don't like it. I've been using spatial mode for 9 months now, and I can definitely say this: * It doesn't suck like the Windows 95 one. * It works pretty well. In fact, when I'm in Windows I'm having trouble navigating around because I can't easily open a new Explorer window like I can in Nautilus.
2. Huh? Type-ahead-find has been implemented in Nautilus for as long as I can remember. I use Nautilus 2.10 and type-ahead-find works just fine.
3. What version of Nautilus do you use? I use 2.10 and when I rightclick on a bunch of selected items, the selection doesn't disappear AND the Copy item is enabled. This has been the case since Nautilus 2.0.
4. What are you talking about? It works fine here.
Yes, I agree it is not good. That's why I wrote my own look-alike-code, which uses IE conditional statements instead. That way it will even work in browsers that fake the useragent.
Actually, no. With "these days" I mean the last few months. The auto-X-configuration feature in the Nvidia installer was probably implemented since end 2005. I think your pre-installed RedHat distro is out of date.
So you were using the NVidia driver? These days the NVidia driver installer automatically sets the X display driver to 'nvidia' so you don't have to do that anymore.
What's your video card? I can't even remember the last time I had to manually configure X. Since 4-5 years ago practically all Linux distro installers began to autodetect video card settings and automatically configure X for you at install time.
Uhm I don't know whether you read the article, but there's a level 1, 2 and 3 box. I chose level 2, which means that the visitor is strongly urged to not use IE, but can still choose to continue with IE. I never had the intention to use level 3 since the beginning.
"There is a name for those people who visit your site while using IE. They are called your customers. You sounds as if you do not care about your customers."
I care about my customers and users, and that's why I use level 2, and not level 3. Actually I use a variation of their code: my version displays the box with a half transparent gray shadow that covers the entire page. When the user clicks on 'Continue' it'll disappear without having to reload the page, and it won't come back for 3 days (that's the cookie timeout). And while I won't use it on my commercial sites, I will use it on my high-traffic non-commercial sites.
And those users and customers would benefit too if I spent the time I wasted on tweaking for IE on doing useful work.
"Some people don't use Firefox because they already have IE and it works."
The point is IE doesn't work - as I said, broken PNG alpha channel support and broken 'em' unit support, among other things. I'm not forcing everybody to use Firefox, I'm strongly urging my visitors to not use IE.
"-a mandatory search control toolbar - the kind of "browser helper" thing people have been told contain spyware (anyone remember "Gator"?). (if they wanted a Google, Yahoo or other search toolbar, they would have downloaded and installed one)"
Where do you see people ever complaining about search toolbars? I've seen enough average users who installed Yahoo/MSN/Google toolbars and they don't even realize it, let alone complain about it.
Anyway that's not the point. Then don't use Firefox. Then use Opera, or K-Meleon, or whatever. As long as it's not IE.
"http://home.nc.rr.com/emulroy/programg.htm"
I just tried it out in Firefox and IE. Other than the space difference between the left and right column, I don't see any other difference. But neither look correct. I don't know how it's supposed to look like.
"Many use IE so know it works. They normally prefer to not fix what they feel is not broken. If your web site is one of the rare ones that does not work with IE, they are more likely to decide the site is broken than that to download and use some other browser."
Tell the same thing to the people who create IE-only sites.
"and not some "Microsoft is the evil empire with all that money and we socialists object to that" type of drivel."
How about "it's safer and features like tabbed browsing makes life easier"? That's exactly what the Firefox box already says.
I thank you for not posting an inflammatory/trolling post like you did last time. However, I already know about IE's interpretation of the box model because it's documented on www.quirksmode.org. It's even documented that IE6 will switch to standards compliant mode if I set the HTML 4 strict doctype, which I did. But the problem is not the box model, it's IE's interpretation of the 'em' unit. 1em is being interpreted as smaller than it should be. And unfortunately I can't find anything about that in your links.
I think that after all these years it should be clear that no amount of discussing can solve the problem. People generally don't care enough until you force it to them. (Before you think 'force' is a bad thing: 10+ years ago not many people used computers. Then managers started forcing employees to use computers for work, even when employees don't really want it. Was that such a bad thing? Many high school kids don't care about homework. Teachers force them to do their homework. Is that such a bad thing?)
As long as people believe that the IE standard is the only standard that matters, innovation will be held back. Imagine what the world would be like if everybody uses MSML (a hypothetical Microsoft Markup Language, an undocumented binary format). Non-MS search engines would not exist because nobody knows how to read MSML. Mobile phones (except those that run Windows) wouldn't have browsers. Things like PHP would not exist. While the real world is not as bad as my hypothetical situation, the point remains: innovation would not be possible unless the format is open. That implies having formal specifications. There are no formal specifications for IE's interpretation of HTML.
"People who don't know what they are doing and complain about "em". This is you."
Then tell me what part of the following indicates that I don't know what I'm talking about: - I have a div which is supposed to be a side bar on my site. - The width attribute is set to 2cm. Note that according to http://www.quirksmode.org/, the width attribute defines the width of the inner part of a box, excluding padding borders. The padding is set to 1em. The div is floating to the right side. - What I want is that the main content's maximum width is the width of the div (including the div's padding), minus another em so there's a little space between the side bar and the main content. So I wrap the beforementioned div into another div, which has a padding-left of 3em (to compensate for the inner div's left padding, right padding, and the extra spacing). It should work. Works fine in Firefox. Passed the W3C validator. Broken in IE.
What part of that indicates that I don't know what I'm doing? Do you even know what 'em' is? It sounds like you are the one who doesn't know what you're talking about. In fact, you sound exactly like those Microsoft zealots who are constantly trolling users of alternative browsers.
That's still better than not supporting it at all. Just because Mozilla doesn't support it for printing doesn't justify the fact that IE doesn't support it at all.
Just because it's the reality doesn't mean it's a good thing. There will never be progress if everybody thinks like that.
"but the reality is that when Microsoft have 80+% market share, they define the only standard that matters."
They don't "define" the standard. In fact, the MS "standard" is not defined at all! What today is considered the standard can change at any time in any future version of IE. You're just designing for its quirks and bugs. Third party developers cannot create good implementations of the MS standard. Thinking that the MS standard is the only thing that matters is not looking further than today. Look around you - embedded devices are becoming increasingly popular. There are more and more mobile phones with Internet support, and many of them sure as hell don't run Windows or IE. On the other hand, the W3C standard *is* defined, and anybody can implement it. All browsers are working towards better W3C support, and most of them already have superb W3C support.
The problem with your "defacto standard" is that today's defacto standard can become something entirely different tomorrow. IE's "standard" is not defined. It can change in any future versions. It's impossible for other browsers to implement IE's "standard" properly because it isn't defined. W3C's standard on the other hand is defined, and you know that browsers are working towards it. Especially now, when web browsers on embedded devices (such as mobile phones) become increasingly more popular, support for the W3C standards becomes more important than ever.
And your "defacto standard" sucks in it's own way. IE's broken support for the 'em' unit and nonexistant alpha channel support are holding back a lot of people.
"When I look at my web sites visitors, the number of non-IE browser SIMPLY does not justify the work needed to support Firefox."
Well if your website doesn't render correctly in Firefox then of course no people would use Firefox to visit your website!
My dad is a real user. He has trouble remembering how to shut down the computer. He doesn't understand the concept of windows - when a dialog pops up, he asks how to get back to the previous page because he doesn't know he's supposed to click on the 'X'. He's a typical novice user with minimum computer skills. Yet he could smoothly switch back and forth between IE and Firefox. Heck, he can't even tell the difference. The back button still looks like a back button even when it's different. A window still looks like a window. But that's not all: he could switch between the Chinese Linux Firefox (which is what he usually uses) and the English IE (when I need Windows occasionally), even though he can't read English. So I have a hard time imagining that other people cannot recognize that a back button is a back button, when there's a text called "Back" written on it.
I'm supporting this campaign because it's in my best interest to have as many people as possible use a non-IE browser. It would lower the required to make it render correctly for everybody. That results in a better website, which is good for my visitors. Look at all the productivity that is currently lost because webmasters have to tweak the site for IE.
Using "users don't care" as an argument to not do something is not a good argument IMHO. Most people don't know or care about peak oil (Google it) and just want to live their lifes, but does that means that people shouldn't do something about it? If most people don't know or care what democracy is, does that mean that the people who do know shouldn't support it?
1. Do most people really "choose", or do they just use it because they don't know better? I think it's the latter. Installing Firefox or any other browser only takes a few seconds. 2. What about my ability to choose? As long as people continue to write IE-only websites, I cannot always use the browser I prefer. As long as IE has bad W3C support, I have to spend 50% of my time tweaking my sites. People force me to use IE, why is it not justified if I do the same to them?
The vast majority don't care about what you, I and other people in the tech community call "dirty", they don't even understand it away. And if playing the nice guy doesn't work, what other alternatives are there?
Slashdot Mirror
"And, BTW, teaching Java to kids?! What do you want? To scare them away?"
Tell that to the millions of kids out there who program in Visual Basic.NET.
"Are you servercheck? :-)"
No.
"Ease of installation"
Very easy. It's just a standard Windows next-next-next installer. It also involves entering a username and password (which the user got from me upon purchase; they can use it to download updates). The program can be used within a few minutes.
"installation onto multiple machines on a home network"
My license is very flexible. People can install it on an unlimited number of computers, as long as the license holder (or someone close to him, like a family member of a close friend) are the only users of the program.
Can you think of more reasons?
No. I sell a program for just $11.95. The program has a high user satisfaction rate, is very popular in that field, and you even get 1 year of free support and free upgrades. $11.95 is certainly not overpriced for the sheer quality you get. Heck, there's even a free version of the program (which has less features and is less user friendly) available. Yet "crack", "torrent", "warez" etc. are very common search terms.
"Shouldn't thins tell the company in question that they're charging too much for their software, rather than suing Google is easy money?"
No it does not. I'm selling a type program which is very popular in that field, and the price is just $11.95 - comparable to a McDonalds meal. That price is nothing compared to the quality (the user satisfaction is high) and the fact that people even get 1 year of free upgrades and free support for that price. Yet when I use Google Suggest to search for that program, it suggest "crack", "warez", "password", "free" and "torrent".
It does not matter how cheap and good a program is, there will always be freeloaders and kids who want to pirate things.
Uhm aren't peacock tails used to scare enemies because they look like hundreds of eyes?
"No Java trademarking,"
Why? Open source does not imply no trademarking. Look at RedHat for a good example. As this post said, Sun can make it so only compatible VMs can call themselves "Java". Isn't that THE ideal solution? Why don't people spend more time discussing this instead of yelling "OMG open source java evil nonononono!!!!" all the time?
1. Obviously there are people who like it and don't like it. I've been using spatial mode for 9 months now, and I can definitely say this:
* It doesn't suck like the Windows 95 one.
* It works pretty well. In fact, when I'm in Windows I'm having trouble navigating around because I can't easily open a new Explorer window like I can in Nautilus.
2. Huh? Type-ahead-find has been implemented in Nautilus for as long as I can remember. I use Nautilus 2.10 and type-ahead-find works just fine.
3. What version of Nautilus do you use? I use 2.10 and when I rightclick on a bunch of selected items, the selection doesn't disappear AND the Copy item is enabled. This has been the case since Nautilus 2.0.
4. What are you talking about? It works fine here.
Yes, I agree it is not good. That's why I wrote my own look-alike-code, which uses IE conditional statements instead. That way it will even work in browsers that fake the useragent.
Actually, no. With "these days" I mean the last few months. The auto-X-configuration feature in the Nvidia installer was probably implemented since end 2005. I think your pre-installed RedHat distro is out of date.
So you were using the NVidia driver? These days the NVidia driver installer automatically sets the X display driver to 'nvidia' so you don't have to do that anymore.
What's your video card? I can't even remember the last time I had to manually configure X. Since 4-5 years ago practically all Linux distro installers began to autodetect video card settings and automatically configure X for you at install time.
Uhm I don't know whether you read the article, but there's a level 1, 2 and 3 box. I chose level 2, which means that the visitor is strongly urged to not use IE, but can still choose to continue with IE. I never had the intention to use level 3 since the beginning.
"There is a name for those people who visit your site while using IE. They are called your customers. You sounds as if you do not care about your customers."
I care about my customers and users, and that's why I use level 2, and not level 3. Actually I use a variation of their code: my version displays the box with a half transparent gray shadow that covers the entire page. When the user clicks on 'Continue' it'll disappear without having to reload the page, and it won't come back for 3 days (that's the cookie timeout). And while I won't use it on my commercial sites, I will use it on my high-traffic non-commercial sites.
And those users and customers would benefit too if I spent the time I wasted on tweaking for IE on doing useful work.
"Some people don't use Firefox because they already have IE and it works."
The point is IE doesn't work - as I said, broken PNG alpha channel support and broken 'em' unit support, among other things. I'm not forcing everybody to use Firefox, I'm strongly urging my visitors to not use IE.
"- no "Stop" button on the toolbar"
What are you talking about?
"-a mandatory search control toolbar - the kind of "browser helper" thing people have been told contain spyware (anyone remember "Gator"?). (if they wanted a Google, Yahoo or other search toolbar, they would have downloaded and installed one)"
Where do you see people ever complaining about search toolbars? I've seen enough average users who installed Yahoo/MSN/Google toolbars and they don't even realize it, let alone complain about it.
Anyway that's not the point. Then don't use Firefox. Then use Opera, or K-Meleon, or whatever. As long as it's not IE.
"http://home.nc.rr.com/emulroy/programg.htm"
I just tried it out in Firefox and IE. Other than the space difference between the left and right column, I don't see any other difference. But neither look correct. I don't know how it's supposed to look like.
"Many use IE so know it works. They normally prefer to not fix what they feel is not broken. If your web site is one of the rare ones that does not work with IE, they are more likely to decide the site is broken than that to download and use some other browser."
Tell the same thing to the people who create IE-only sites.
"and not some "Microsoft is the evil empire with all that money and we socialists object to that" type of drivel."
How about "it's safer and features like tabbed browsing makes life easier"? That's exactly what the Firefox box already says.
I thank you for not posting an inflammatory/trolling post like you did last time. However, I already know about IE's interpretation of the box model because it's documented on www.quirksmode.org. It's even documented that IE6 will switch to standards compliant mode if I set the HTML 4 strict doctype, which I did. But the problem is not the box model, it's IE's interpretation of the 'em' unit. 1em is being interpreted as smaller than it should be. And unfortunately I can't find anything about that in your links.
I think that after all these years it should be clear that no amount of discussing can solve the problem. People generally don't care enough until you force it to them. (Before you think 'force' is a bad thing: 10+ years ago not many people used computers. Then managers started forcing employees to use computers for work, even when employees don't really want it. Was that such a bad thing? Many high school kids don't care about homework. Teachers force them to do their homework. Is that such a bad thing?)
As long as people believe that the IE standard is the only standard that matters, innovation will be held back. Imagine what the world would be like if everybody uses MSML (a hypothetical Microsoft Markup Language, an undocumented binary format). Non-MS search engines would not exist because nobody knows how to read MSML. Mobile phones (except those that run Windows) wouldn't have browsers. Things like PHP would not exist. While the real world is not as bad as my hypothetical situation, the point remains: innovation would not be possible unless the format is open. That implies having formal specifications. There are no formal specifications for IE's interpretation of HTML.
That's exactly the problem:
1. It's beta.
2. It has a neglible market share. Won't solve the problem until a significant number of people use it.
"People who don't know what they are doing and complain about "em". This is you."
Then tell me what part of the following indicates that I don't know what I'm talking about:
- I have a div which is supposed to be a side bar on my site.
- The width attribute is set to 2cm. Note that according to http://www.quirksmode.org/, the width attribute defines the width of the inner part of a box, excluding padding borders. The padding is set to 1em. The div is floating to the right side.
- What I want is that the main content's maximum width is the width of the div (including the div's padding), minus another em so there's a little space between the side bar and the main content. So I wrap the beforementioned div into another div, which has a padding-left of 3em (to compensate for the inner div's left padding, right padding, and the extra spacing).
It should work. Works fine in Firefox. Passed the W3C validator. Broken in IE.
What part of that indicates that I don't know what I'm doing? Do you even know what 'em' is? It sounds like you are the one who doesn't know what you're talking about. In fact, you sound exactly like those Microsoft zealots who are constantly trolling users of alternative browsers.
That's still better than not supporting it at all. Just because Mozilla doesn't support it for printing doesn't justify the fact that IE doesn't support it at all.
http://www.quirksmode.org/
Reproduce it yourself. Especially the broken alpha channel support and the broken 'em' unit support in IE are annoying.
Just because it's the reality doesn't mean it's a good thing. There will never be progress if everybody thinks like that.
"but the reality is that when Microsoft have 80+% market share, they define the only standard that matters."
They don't "define" the standard. In fact, the MS "standard" is not defined at all! What today is considered the standard can change at any time in any future version of IE. You're just designing for its quirks and bugs. Third party developers cannot create good implementations of the MS standard. Thinking that the MS standard is the only thing that matters is not looking further than today. Look around you - embedded devices are becoming increasingly popular. There are more and more mobile phones with Internet support, and many of them sure as hell don't run Windows or IE. On the other hand, the W3C standard *is* defined, and anybody can implement it. All browsers are working towards better W3C support, and most of them already have superb W3C support.
The problem with your "defacto standard" is that today's defacto standard can become something entirely different tomorrow. IE's "standard" is not defined. It can change in any future versions. It's impossible for other browsers to implement IE's "standard" properly because it isn't defined. W3C's standard on the other hand is defined, and you know that browsers are working towards it. Especially now, when web browsers on embedded devices (such as mobile phones) become increasingly more popular, support for the W3C standards becomes more important than ever.
And your "defacto standard" sucks in it's own way. IE's broken support for the 'em' unit and nonexistant alpha channel support are holding back a lot of people.
"When I look at my web sites visitors, the number of non-IE browser SIMPLY does not justify the work needed to support Firefox."
Well if your website doesn't render correctly in Firefox then of course no people would use Firefox to visit your website!
No. But companies still buy from RedHat because they care about support. And corporate customers is where most money comes from.
My dad is a real user. He has trouble remembering how to shut down the computer. He doesn't understand the concept of windows - when a dialog pops up, he asks how to get back to the previous page because he doesn't know he's supposed to click on the 'X'. He's a typical novice user with minimum computer skills. Yet he could smoothly switch back and forth between IE and Firefox. Heck, he can't even tell the difference. The back button still looks like a back button even when it's different. A window still looks like a window. But that's not all: he could switch between the Chinese Linux Firefox (which is what he usually uses) and the English IE (when I need Windows occasionally), even though he can't read English. So I have a hard time imagining that other people cannot recognize that a back button is a back button, when there's a text called "Back" written on it.
I'm supporting this campaign because it's in my best interest to have as many people as possible use a non-IE browser. It would lower the required to make it render correctly for everybody. That results in a better website, which is good for my visitors. Look at all the productivity that is currently lost because webmasters have to tweak the site for IE.
Using "users don't care" as an argument to not do something is not a good argument IMHO. Most people don't know or care about peak oil (Google it) and just want to live their lifes, but does that means that people shouldn't do something about it? If most people don't know or care what democracy is, does that mean that the people who do know shouldn't support it?
1. Do most people really "choose", or do they just use it because they don't know better? I think it's the latter. Installing Firefox or any other browser only takes a few seconds.
2. What about my ability to choose? As long as people continue to write IE-only websites, I cannot always use the browser I prefer. As long as IE has bad W3C support, I have to spend 50% of my time tweaking my sites. People force me to use IE, why is it not justified if I do the same to them?
The vast majority don't care about what you, I and other people in the tech community call "dirty", they don't even understand it away. And if playing the nice guy doesn't work, what other alternatives are there?