Absolutely not! I'm not debating whether the product itself is good - I'm a professional developer, and we're currently working on some embedded Linux projects, so I know the ins and outs of the benefits. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Linux has come along leaps and bounds, and I would seriously consider it for the desktop if I were switching.
That's not the point, though. My boss, an IT-literate (as opposed to tech-literate) guy who has run a web dev firm for 8 years, is looking at it from a business perspective and it not familiar with the various distros. If his IT consultant suggests Ubuntu "Feisty Fawn" over Windows, it's not good enough to say it's better as he has no benchmark in real day-to-day terms, so he *can only* go on his perception of the brand.
"Vista" is not linguistically clever as a name, but it is focus grouped and you can guarantee MS spent a fortune working out, completely separately to the software development, how the public should see their product - and this is regardless of any actual features. Just look at Windows ME - it took a good few months for home users to work out they'd been conned into choosing an inferior product.
Open Sourcers seem to display a (slightly charming, admittedly) naivite about how marketing works - eye height, smells and audio are a big part of supermarket sales, for example, and unless thought is put into the tiny details like that, Linux will never get the chance to display its strengths to the wider world. That would be a terrible shame: once users get over the initial hurdle of acceptance, there's certainly enough there to keep them playing with the new platform's improvements.
Pretend I am a tech-illiterate typical PC user, with little to back up my choices apart from how professional each OS appears. Here are my choices:
1) Windows Vista from Microsoft, one of the world's largest software firms.
2) OS X Tiger, by Apple, world leaders in design and usability.
3) Feisty Fawn with "Beryl", whoever she is, written by a whole bunch of random geeks.
Someone *really* needs to realise the best product does not always get the most users - get with the programme... bad names don't sell good software! Even if it is free.
Seems to me that this is an ideal way to court legal action after a hapless user installs software "a friend gave me" and then ends up with a years' worth of financial records gone bye-bye.
Clearly, piracy is not a contentious moral issue in the case of small software developers charging reasonable prices for their work, but this appears to be going too far. If one can detect the key's pirated and disable the software, why be an asshole about it? This could *so* come back and bite him in the ass.
...I am pretty sure by the time the iPhone comes out, there will be significant spec improvements. I don't know how much "wiggle room" they'll have after being granted FCC approval, but I would expect them to use it to the maximum possible effect.
It's a sure thing that by the time it's released, their major competitors will have produced similar (if not quite as slick) devices at markedly lower prices, so Stevie J. likely has a plan.
Or maybe this is just naiveté about business! We shall see...
Oddly enough, I was ranting about exactly the same problem the other day to a colleague. Did it not, do you think, occur to anyone on the IE7 team that fixing the hacks without fixing the bugs might be a problem?
Way to go and break millions of sites simultaneously, huh?
Yeah, OK - an exaggeration. But you get the point.
I'm not implying that MS don't have limits just like the rest of us, but IE is pretty much the killer app these days, at least a far as (about) 85% of users are concerned.
Clearly, they've got to plan and budget, but if Opera can do it as a third-party software house and fewer resources, Microsoft can damn well make their own flagship browser work right! I'm actually getting quite angry about this, the more I think about it. It's kind of like Ford manufacturing cars with square steering wheels and going "What? What's the big problem? You can drive it, can't you?" when people notice. Everyone else makes circular ones - even tiny little Lotus, and it's about treating both the mechanics and the drivers well.
(Please don't flame me for the stretched analogy!)
It would be nice to see examples of failing code, for instance. I've not tried it myself yet. The author's English skills leave a lot to be desired, to the point of making his complaints a bit vague.
The upside to this is that the same "forced" upgrade procedure MS are using to roll out IE7 can also be used to roll out bigfixes without user intervention, if IE7 was originally installed transparently anyway.
Anyway, I can't say it a big surprise that IE7 has its own foibles. IE6 was also a developer's nightmare, with the DOM and JS environment behaving differently from Firefox, Opera etc, so it's just another workaround. I'm only disappointed that Microsoft didn't make more of an effort to bring it inline with the competition so we could avoid yet another set of JS and CSS hacks. It's not like they have limited resources!
I know someone who was a developer on a Gizmondo software project that never made it to light. Shortly before the whole thing collapsed, he had trouble getting a consulting invoice paid, so he went to their London HQ and basically camped out for the day in reception refusing to leave until Stefan Erikson's girlfriend, the finance director, paid his invoice. It very nearly got legal, until evidently ther got pissed off and wrote a cheque to get him out of the foyer.
You should have seen his face 2 weeks later when I showed him the lengthy article about the board of director's mafia connections...
I've been a long-term F2S customer for years and always found them good, but in recent months their support has been appalling. Once you get through to someone it's fine, but I was on hold for 2 and a half hours last week....
Maybe try in a few months when they've had a chance to boost their support staff...?
I won't bother linking to their site, since it doesn't feature the article, but this quarter's "2600" magazine has a feature on hacking this system. Essentially, it involves sending the verification SMS to the mobile to be tracked, and then spoofing the confirmation using one of the many available "fake" SMS message services to be found online.
Deeply dodgy, and were I to be of a paranoid nature, I would definitely be carrying my cellphone switched off.
I'm sure this paper has some merit, but the author does not lend himself credibility by sating that people believed the Earth was flat. It's a common myth, generally believed to have been encouraged by Washington Irving in his three-volume History of the Life, among other places. In fact, the significant belief at the time, encouraged by the Catholic Church, was that the Earth was the centre of all things with the sun travelling around it. Even then, a variety of cultures had already disproven that, including the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, who had an excellent understanding of the movements of the solar system.
Absolutely: Web 2.0 is like XML but less so
on
Web 3.0
·
· Score: 1
This reminds me of this time a few years ago, when XML was the big new thing, and every middle manager was insisting that their crappy little development project used it? It still seems like some have yet to realise that XML is about as exciting as when CSV files were invented. Useful and an improvement, yes - saviour of modern technology, no.
It's refreshing, in this article, to finally read a well constructed comment on the reality of the big loada bull that is "Web 2.0" - the whole concept has caused me such a headache. Every time my boss asks whether "we need to be using Web 2.0 for this?", I have to bang my head on a nearby wall.
I wonder....does anyone have more of an insight into why apparently intelligent (technically-minded!) people have this tendancy to strap a new name on a collection of pre-existing technology and tell us all that it's revolutionary? Was it still revolutionary when we were using AJAX-type stuff before anyone thought of the name "Web 2.0"?
Safari and Opera aren't related, and if you had read the comments attached to this article, you'd see that the problem occurs on Lynx under Linux, too. That one's text-based and doesn't have *any* connection to either of the above.
"Probably" isn't a suitable argument for the Slashdot crowd - you'll get flamed to shreds if you're not careful... regardless of whether this was GoDaddy's "fault" in the first place, it is most definitely their problem to fix, one way or another.
Telling people they should be using Firefox anyway is like telling a guy stuck in traffic on the freeway that he should have bought a helicopter - people have the right to use whatever browser they damn well like, and as long as the browser behaves how it should (and Opera and Safari do, in this case), it's up to the site operators to make sure *they* stick to standards rather than expecting the browsers to ignore their stupid config errors.
Mmmkay, that was kinda an invitation, wasn't it? My bad. I must not have been paying attention - I'm a professional developer and I've not heard of him...
Seriously, though, this guy (now that I've read around his background a bit) should really know better. Someone with his background should know not to make such enromously sweeping statements. I think it's quite telling, actually - it's this sort of semi-blind praise that's pushing "Web 2.0" as a buzzword, even though it doesn't really mean anything without context.
Sorta reminds me of a recent client who insisted (until I gave him an ultimatum) on my using XML files as a live database for a few tens of thousands of records. A cool idea, buzzword of the moment, but ultimately either inappropriate or pointless on its own. If you get my meaning. Just my $0.02.
Regardless of whether the author ever uses them, it does no harm and causes no confusion to include them. Also, if one is writing "proper" CSS, making use of intrisic HTML tags and applying styling directly where possible, I can think of many occasions where and smaller would be very useful.
This article is essentially a rather complex troll - a peice of writing by someone who's read an HTML book and chatted to some professionals, but almost certainly has never worked for a sustained period on a modern (X)HTML and CSS project. A genuinely workable content-presentation format has to cater for *everyone's* requirements adequately, not just some jerk who thinks he knows what's best for the Web.
As a developer using and its siblings frequently, the XHTML 2.0 system of calculated heriarchies sounds jolly useful as a replacement, though - if it ever happens.
Well, I was going to do the fairly obvious reply, but it looks like about a dozen others beat me to it.
One last one: TV - Nipkow, Rosing, Baird... German, Russian and Scots. Do you propose handing control of all worldwide TV networks to these nations? No...?
The parent poster may want to read this for further debating hints.
Yes, I do know who she is, and that she's not "some welfare black chick". However, the root DNS servers are an alien concept to most web developers (trust me; I've had to explain it god knows how many times to my colleagues who should know better), let alone a high-ranking cabinet member who has a million other things to worry about. Intelligence is no guarantee of breadth of knowledge, especially anything as specific as this.
I think the idea was to have an international organisation very similar to ICANN, comprised of multiple nations' representatives.
The main difference would not be in the operations, but simply that they would answer to the UN rather than the US. For what it's worth, I agree that the UN *directly* controlling the root DNS would be a disaster. But the same goes for the US government! That's why ICANN is made up of specialists, and are a separate entity.
What are the chances that Condoleezza Rice actually has any clue what the "authoritative root zone file" is?
I get the feeling that the head honchos at ICANN basically ran out of decent arguments for maintaining control ("erm, we just like the power buzz!") and just went for big political guns. I mean really, like there's a good excuse for keeping control other than potential political blackmail.
The Net was created by the US government, a whole bunch of US, Asian and Europeans built the hardware running it and a British guy invented the Web. Doesn't look like multicultural involvement has made it terribly unstable. I think China's Great Firewall is an excellent example of what happens when one government has too much control.
I'm sure it's occurred to many other Slashdotters, but this is probablly the best kind of press Wikipedia can get.
This, along with the London bombing coverage in Wikinews last month, is an excellent example of the power and self-healing of MediaWiki sites.
You can rant and rave about misuse, and I agree, but this is evidence in favour when the critics talk about how a community-edited encyclopedia can never be a reliable information resource.
Oddly enough, I actually switched from XP to OS X about 4 months ago, and transition-wise it took me all of about 2 hours to get used to.
I think that it gave me quite a useful perspective, too - there are a lot of things wrong with XP, as well as many excellent things (although it *has* taken them about 20 years to get there). Also, there are one or two small issues with OS X, but that's a whole other can 'o worms.
But yes, you're absolutely spot on: until there's a Linux distro that can offer the "comfort" factor, seriously replicating Windows and OSX ease of use, it's not a contender.
And you have my sympathy over the.NET issue, too - that's the only reason I still use my XP laptop for anything except website compatibility testing.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely not! I'm not debating whether the product itself is good - I'm a professional developer, and we're currently working on some embedded Linux projects, so I know the ins and outs of the benefits. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Linux has come along leaps and bounds, and I would seriously consider it for the desktop if I were switching.
That's not the point, though. My boss, an IT-literate (as opposed to tech-literate) guy who has run a web dev firm for 8 years, is looking at it from a business perspective and it not familiar with the various distros. If his IT consultant suggests Ubuntu "Feisty Fawn" over Windows, it's not good enough to say it's better as he has no benchmark in real day-to-day terms, so he *can only* go on his perception of the brand.
"Vista" is not linguistically clever as a name, but it is focus grouped and you can guarantee MS spent a fortune working out, completely separately to the software development, how the public should see their product - and this is regardless of any actual features. Just look at Windows ME - it took a good few months for home users to work out they'd been conned into choosing an inferior product.
Open Sourcers seem to display a (slightly charming, admittedly) naivite about how marketing works - eye height, smells and audio are a big part of supermarket sales, for example, and unless thought is put into the tiny details like that, Linux will never get the chance to display its strengths to the wider world. That would be a terrible shame: once users get over the initial hurdle of acceptance, there's certainly enough there to keep them playing with the new platform's improvements.
OK, let's get this straight.
Pretend I am a tech-illiterate typical PC user, with little to back up my choices apart from how professional each OS appears. Here are my choices:
1) Windows Vista from Microsoft, one of the world's largest software firms.
2) OS X Tiger, by Apple, world leaders in design and usability.
3) Feisty Fawn with "Beryl", whoever she is, written by a whole bunch of random geeks.
Someone *really* needs to realise the best product does not always get the most users - get with the programme... bad names don't sell good software! Even if it is free.
It was a shame, but the ugly MySpace pages were created Sports Racers specially for the competition ("I Got Me Some Ugly MySpace"). Transient, sadly.
I watched Ze's show every day for a year, and never really noticed how much it brightened my day up until it ended...
Seems to me that this is an ideal way to court legal action after a hapless user installs software "a friend gave me" and then ends up with a years' worth of financial records gone bye-bye.
Clearly, piracy is not a contentious moral issue in the case of small software developers charging reasonable prices for their work, but this appears to be going too far. If one can detect the key's pirated and disable the software, why be an asshole about it? This could *so* come back and bite him in the ass.
...I am pretty sure by the time the iPhone comes out, there will be significant spec improvements. I don't know how much "wiggle room" they'll have after being granted FCC approval, but I would expect them to use it to the maximum possible effect.
It's a sure thing that by the time it's released, their major competitors will have produced similar (if not quite as slick) devices at markedly lower prices, so Stevie J. likely has a plan.
Or maybe this is just naiveté about business! We shall see...
Oddly enough, I was ranting about exactly the same problem the other day to a colleague. Did it not, do you think, occur to anyone on the IE7 team that fixing the hacks without fixing the bugs might be a problem?
Way to go and break millions of sites simultaneously, huh?
Yeah, OK - an exaggeration. But you get the point.
I'm not implying that MS don't have limits just like the rest of us, but IE is pretty much the killer app these days, at least a far as (about) 85% of users are concerned.
Clearly, they've got to plan and budget, but if Opera can do it as a third-party software house and fewer resources, Microsoft can damn well make their own flagship browser work right! I'm actually getting quite angry about this, the more I think about it. It's kind of like Ford manufacturing cars with square steering wheels and going "What? What's the big problem? You can drive it, can't you?" when people notice. Everyone else makes circular ones - even tiny little Lotus, and it's about treating both the mechanics and the drivers well.
(Please don't flame me for the stretched analogy!)
It would be nice to see examples of failing code, for instance. I've not tried it myself yet. The author's English skills leave a lot to be desired, to the point of making his complaints a bit vague.
The upside to this is that the same "forced" upgrade procedure MS are using to roll out IE7 can also be used to roll out bigfixes without user intervention, if IE7 was originally installed transparently anyway.
Anyway, I can't say it a big surprise that IE7 has its own foibles. IE6 was also a developer's nightmare, with the DOM and JS environment behaving differently from Firefox, Opera etc, so it's just another workaround. I'm only disappointed that Microsoft didn't make more of an effort to bring it inline with the competition so we could avoid yet another set of JS and CSS hacks. It's not like they have limited resources!
Great, and very well designed!
:-)
Now, when do we get Google Earth?
I know someone who was a developer on a Gizmondo software project that never made it to light. Shortly before the whole thing collapsed, he had trouble getting a consulting invoice paid, so he went to their London HQ and basically camped out for the day in reception refusing to leave until Stefan Erikson's girlfriend, the finance director, paid his invoice. It very nearly got legal, until evidently ther got pissed off and wrote a cheque to get him out of the foyer.
You should have seen his face 2 weeks later when I showed him the lengthy article about the board of director's mafia connections...
I've been a long-term F2S customer for years and always found them good, but in recent months their support has been appalling. Once you get through to someone it's fine, but I was on hold for 2 and a half hours last week....
Maybe try in a few months when they've had a chance to boost their support staff...?
...that would kinda suggest that they're planning on either
...
1) A name change (again) in the near future
or
2) A different name for the Japanese market (a-la "Super Famicom")
3)
4) Profit!
Oh, wait - I think I got confused a little along the way...
I won't bother linking to their site, since it doesn't feature the article, but this quarter's "2600" magazine has a feature on hacking this system. Essentially, it involves sending the verification SMS to the mobile to be tracked, and then spoofing the confirmation using one of the many available "fake" SMS message services to be found online.
Deeply dodgy, and were I to be of a paranoid nature, I would definitely be carrying my cellphone switched off.
I'm sure this paper has some merit, but the author does not lend himself credibility by sating that people believed the Earth was flat. It's a common myth, generally believed to have been encouraged by Washington Irving in his three-volume History of the Life, among other places. In fact, the significant belief at the time, encouraged by the Catholic Church, was that the Earth was the centre of all things with the sun travelling around it. Even then, a variety of cultures had already disproven that, including the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, who had an excellent understanding of the movements of the solar system.
For more info, do what I did: Google!.
This reminds me of this time a few years ago, when XML was the big new thing, and every middle manager was insisting that their crappy little development project used it? It still seems like some have yet to realise that XML is about as exciting as when CSV files were invented. Useful and an improvement, yes - saviour of modern technology, no.
It's refreshing, in this article, to finally read a well constructed comment on the reality of the big loada bull that is "Web 2.0" - the whole concept has caused me such a headache. Every time my boss asks whether "we need to be using Web 2.0 for this?", I have to bang my head on a nearby wall.
I wonder....does anyone have more of an insight into why apparently intelligent (technically-minded!) people have this tendancy to strap a new name on a collection of pre-existing technology and tell us all that it's revolutionary? Was it still revolutionary when we were using AJAX-type stuff before anyone thought of the name "Web 2.0"?
Ideas, anyone?
Safari and Opera aren't related, and if you had read the comments attached to this article, you'd see that the problem occurs on Lynx under Linux, too. That one's text-based and doesn't have *any* connection to either of the above.
"Probably" isn't a suitable argument for the Slashdot crowd - you'll get flamed to shreds if you're not careful... regardless of whether this was GoDaddy's "fault" in the first place, it is most definitely their problem to fix, one way or another.
Telling people they should be using Firefox anyway is like telling a guy stuck in traffic on the freeway that he should have bought a helicopter - people have the right to use whatever browser they damn well like, and as long as the browser behaves how it should (and Opera and Safari do, in this case), it's up to the site operators to make sure *they* stick to standards rather than expecting the browsers to ignore their stupid config errors.
Mmmkay, that was kinda an invitation, wasn't it? My bad. I must not have been paying attention - I'm a professional developer and I've not heard of him...
Seriously, though, this guy (now that I've read around his background a bit) should really know better. Someone with his background should know not to make such enromously sweeping statements. I think it's quite telling, actually - it's this sort of semi-blind praise that's pushing "Web 2.0" as a buzzword, even though it doesn't really mean anything without context.
Sorta reminds me of a recent client who insisted (until I gave him an ultimatum) on my using XML files as a live database for a few tens of thousands of records. A cool idea, buzzword of the moment, but ultimately either inappropriate or pointless on its own. If you get my meaning. Just my $0.02.
Absolutely - I had a big problem with this, too.
Regardless of whether the author ever uses them, it does no harm and causes no confusion to include them. Also, if one is writing "proper" CSS, making use of intrisic HTML tags and applying styling directly where possible, I can think of many occasions where and smaller would be very useful.
This article is essentially a rather complex troll - a peice of writing by someone who's read an HTML book and chatted to some professionals, but almost certainly has never worked for a sustained period on a modern (X)HTML and CSS project. A genuinely workable content-presentation format has to cater for *everyone's* requirements adequately, not just some jerk who thinks he knows what's best for the Web.
As a developer using and its siblings frequently, the XHTML 2.0 system of calculated heriarchies sounds jolly useful as a replacement, though - if it ever happens.
Well, I was going to do the fairly obvious reply, but it looks like about a dozen others beat me to it.
One last one: TV - Nipkow, Rosing, Baird... German, Russian and Scots. Do you propose handing control of all worldwide TV networks to these nations? No...?
The parent poster may want to read this for further debating hints.
Well, duh.
Yes, I do know who she is, and that she's not "some welfare black chick". However, the root DNS servers are an alien concept to most web developers (trust me; I've had to explain it god knows how many times to my colleagues who should know better), let alone a high-ranking cabinet member who has a million other things to worry about. Intelligence is no guarantee of breadth of knowledge, especially anything as specific as this.
I think the idea was to have an international organisation very similar to ICANN, comprised of multiple nations' representatives. The main difference would not be in the operations, but simply that they would answer to the UN rather than the US. For what it's worth, I agree that the UN *directly* controlling the root DNS would be a disaster. But the same goes for the US government! That's why ICANN is made up of specialists, and are a separate entity.
What are the chances that Condoleezza Rice actually has any clue what the "authoritative root zone file" is?
I get the feeling that the head honchos at ICANN basically ran out of decent arguments for maintaining control ("erm, we just like the power buzz!") and just went for big political guns. I mean really, like there's a good excuse for keeping control other than potential political blackmail.
The Net was created by the US government, a whole bunch of US, Asian and Europeans built the hardware running it and a British guy invented the Web. Doesn't look like multicultural involvement has made it terribly unstable. I think China's Great Firewall is an excellent example of what happens when one government has too much control.
Call me cynical...
...but this was almost exactly the plotline of an episode of Sliders...I kid you not!
I'm sure it's occurred to many other Slashdotters, but this is probablly the best kind of press Wikipedia can get.
This, along with the London bombing coverage in Wikinews last month, is an excellent example of the power and self-healing of MediaWiki sites.
You can rant and rave about misuse, and I agree, but this is evidence in favour when the critics talk about how a community-edited encyclopedia can never be a reliable information resource.
Oddly enough, I actually switched from XP to OS X about 4 months ago, and transition-wise it took me all of about 2 hours to get used to.
.NET issue, too - that's the only reason I still use my XP laptop for anything except website compatibility testing.
I think that it gave me quite a useful perspective, too - there are a lot of things wrong with XP, as well as many excellent things (although it *has* taken them about 20 years to get there). Also, there are one or two small issues with OS X, but that's a whole other can 'o worms.
But yes, you're absolutely spot on: until there's a Linux distro that can offer the "comfort" factor, seriously replicating Windows and OSX ease of use, it's not a contender.
And you have my sympathy over the