Netscape has lost all meaning to me
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 1
okay, I don't really post on Slashdot very often, but I feel like I would be doing a disservice to my own need to waste time right now bitching about Netscape if I did not bitch about Netscape, so here it is, in all its bitchy glory.
Netscape had a chance to be a great company. Instead, they blew it in a way reminiscent of the death star at the end of ANH and increasingly at the end of Jedi. They choked when Microsoft clued in and started beating them at their own game, but the shit they've done and continue to do is evidence that they don't need Microsoft beating them with their own severed limbs. Netscape makes me sad, because they were the only company who stood a chance of outdoing Microsoft in the market, and they blew it on just about every conceivable level. They had the browser, they had a loyal user base, they had THE CENTRAL web site for the first few years of the post-Navigator-1.1 web.
Every once in a while I think to myself "I wonder if Communicator still sucks ass" and download the new release, and get disappointed that my premonition was right. So when I see that 6.1 is out and that people on Slashdot aren't ripping it apart, I succumb to the feeling and install the thing.
What's the story with the widgets? I'm on Windows, and they use these funky buttons with nonstandard, frequently mismatching fonts, uncentered labels, and in places, text so small I have to change my resolution just to read it. But the splash screen looked pretty, so I keep going. I finish installing things, and find that it put FOUR new links on my desktop WITHOUT ASKING ME. WTF is NetPhone? I think that's what it was, I'm not sure. I just selected them all and deleted them.
I start it up. It prompts me for some bullshit username thing for their website. Cancel, cancel, whatever. Finally I am taken to the start page and am presented with the horror that is the 6.x series UI. The browser's buttons are ON TOP OF EACH OTHER. WTF?!? I click on something, some bullshit poll on their bullshit web site they've got set up as the start page even though I have IE and Netscape 4.non-suck set to something else. Half the text disappears and some of the graphics from the first page REMAIN ON THE SCREEN after the second page has loaded. I have to hide the window momentarily to force it to redraw in order to fix the problem.
I try the mail reader. (I'm a big fan of 4.non-suck's Messenger.) I edit/mail_settings and am confronted with the top most item listed as "notused on mail". WTF is that? Is that [username] on [mail host]? Has anybody at the former NSCP heard of usability or human factors? If they have, do they care at all?
Frustrated, I quit the entire thing. I go to start Winamp a few minutes later, this being the first time that I have use the Start button in Windows since my harrowing experience with 6.shit. Of course there's going to be an entry for it in the 'Programs' section, but they also stuck some useless marketroid shit on the first click menu, right above the 'Programs' submenu. WITHOUT ASKING ME. Whatever. Winamp starts, and NETSCAPE HAS DECIDED TO CHANGE MY SKIN FOR WINAMP WITHOUT ASKING ME. There's a big fatty advertisement for Netscape right there on my Winamp interface. Do they think they're gaining points by putting their logo in every fucking location on my computer? They don't even have a product any more. They just do what minimal things they can in order to sell advertising. Reminds me of a news article I read once, though Netscape isn't even good at advertising, only good at pissing me off and disappointing me.
It's shit like this that turns me off from sympathizing with the Slashdot worldview (to quote from an AC posting the other day) that MS is Borg / MS is Borg / MS is Borg. Netscape lost due to its incompentence, from making the worst calls at every point in their game for the last four years.
So, that's my rant. For best results, mod it down.
I like pink floyd. Who should I make the check out to? Roger? David? Or maybe I should send it to the funny farm, care of ol' pink. Then somebody will hop on their bike (because they don't like the oil companies and won't buy their product, so they don't have a car) and bring me a CD of their work.
This sort of idealism is bound to fail, because it describes a completely unsustainable economic model. A boycott is NOT the only way to defeat a company. It's foolish to think so. Of course, a well organized boycott can have an impact, but more in terms of public opinion and perceived long term financial loss than of actual financial pain.
Stephen King tried the route of having a direct financial connection with readers, and he got burned. Why would a record company or professional musician that wants to remain in business take the same risk that King did? They know full well that you won't send them a check, and if you did, someone at the funny farm would screw them over.
... I never really forward things that I get as forwards, but this is simply frightening (if it's true) : http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0228-09.htm
... Another concept of interest on this topic is Null Convention Logic. Here is a report to the NSF who apparently paid for some level of research on this.
Are you talking about J@red Polis? I probably voted for him, because I take the "If I don't know who these people are, i'll vote for the democrat" approach. But something that annoyed me about his campaign was how his name is spelled on the lawn signs: "J@red" Is that supposed to make me think, "Hmm, this guy has an at symbol in his name, therefore he must be into computers somehow, and computers are good, right? so i must vote for him". Oh well. I hope he can counteract some of the damage to the edu system that good ol' bill owens is doing and will do in the future. (sorry for the ramble...)
I saw something like this that IBM was demonstrating at their booth at CHI2000 in The Hague last April. It was called "Easy on the Eyes". They had a 23" monitor that (if memory serves) had 300dpi res. It was simply incredible. They had divided the screen up into quadrants, and each quadrant had a 16M video card running it's fourth of the screen.
As an example they were showing X rays. If you got your face right up next to the screen, you still couldn't identify individual pixels. In fact, it looked just like a piece of paper. The difference between this setup and a normal hi-res monitor is simply indescribable.
Don't run if you don't plan to accept. I would have accepted and given a speech rather than ungratefully ignoring the attention of the student
body.
This kid was just plain selfish. He could have given everyone a voice who couldn't speak for themself, and instead he wanted to show off
that he could walk away.
I think you're missing his point. (Or, you're getting his point, but you might be a more convention-abiding citizen than I.)
The reason he played the game is because (if he won) he wanted to do something that would make people actually stop and think. Assume for a moment that he won and accepted the crown, and during his speech he said something to the effect of "this is just one big popularity contest". Would that make any sort of impact whatsoever? Does anybody even listen to speeches like that?
Personally, I think he played this game to win, and he won it in the most interesting way. He intended to make a point in a way that people would notice. He did it peacefully and gracefully, and now people beyond his school district are talking about this. This kid is a winner.
I'll admit it. I used a Socialist political event as an excuse to go out with an unattainably cool (yet socialist) girl. "There's going to be lots of really weird people there," I warned her before we got there.
There must have been about thirty people in the audience, which probably comprises the entire journalist population of the city of Boulder who had written something about it in many of the left-leaning rags there. And it seems as though McReynolds knew them all by name. I'm not making this up. He did his speech (which was remarkably eloquent, if not nonsensical at points), and afterwards took questions. "Bill, then Susan over there, and, um, I think Hal has his hand up in the back..." I was tempted to ask a question just to see if he had some psychic ability to guess my name.
What was particularly amusing was that he seemed like he was campaigning for Ralph Nader. "Ralph is not a socialist, and I am. So if you're not a socialist, vote for Nader." Okay, David, I think I will.
ESR wisely stated that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". I'm sure that many of the people around here have read this, and possibly a disjoint set of people believe it, but I feel it is good to keep harping on that point. As the popularity of linux (any and all distros) increases, the number of reported bugs grows in proportion. This is the theory behind bughunts when groups such as mozilla want people to use their beta software-to find the bugs.
This is open source. Help fix bugs. Stop bitching.
This isn't really that the man is a dumbass, but rather that the credit card paradigm is fundamentally screwed. Ever work behind a cash register? Every time you handle a credit card, you have all the information you need to rob them. Name on the card, the card number, expiration date,... I know for a fact that i've sponsored dinner for a number of people that i had never met.
A disposable credit card or some equivalent, would offer protection in that ethically challenged people can only steal money from you up to the value of the card, which in this situation would not be very much.
My friends and I were talking about this the other day. If you're a competent user that is experiencing very bizarre problems, and you have to be the one to call into tech support, chances are you're going to connect with somebody who knows considerably less about the system than you do.
Our solution: provide a privatized testing service that can rank you as being either a moron (first level tech support) or and experienced person (second or higher level tech support). That way when you call up you can just tell the first tier tech support schmoe that you want to talk to somebody more knowledgable, and give them your tech-support-receiving rank.
(I guess this is sort of like the "stupid" stickers that comedian wanted dumb people to be forced to wear...)
Talking about human evolution in the modern sense is always tricky, because there is always the issue of people with disabilities (or for the severely depraved, ethnic differences that you may not like). But you're putting a politically-correct spin on your definition of evolution. We've changed evolution for our race (as well as others, given the horrific damage we've done to the planet) by growing this obnoxiously large brain. We've figured out how to outsmart nature to the point where natural selection doesn't enter into the equation. In this sense, evolution (for our species) is dead. I would suggest that another form of evolution is at work now, and it has scary, scary implications: social selection. Not natural. Social. This leads me into an entirely different offtopic rant, so I'll stop there.
1) Open your "Date & Time" control panel. 2) Set the date ahead a few years. 3) Close control panel 4) Launch Quicktime Movie Player 5) Click on "Register Later" 6) Go back to "Date & Time" and reset the year. 7) Now you won't see the banner for a few years at least.
Are you serious? You think users should have to be clever enough to do this? Do you think they should have to change their entire system's clock just to keep one application from doing something annoying?
This is just a minor comment that doesn't really get at the heart of what you were asking about, but it does address one question you had--what resources are there to support development.
I just started a project on sourceforge, and without sounding like sourceforge's advertising department, it rocks. I'm 'in charge' of the project, and my biggest fear was that the administrative BS would get in the way of letting me code. But sourceforge really addresses that problem well. I'm a coder, not a manager, but you couldn't tell that from how well organized we are after such a short period of time. If you do get your PHBs to bless the open sourcing of your code, you should give sourceforge a look.
Best quote from the interview: "I'll try to work on it more, but I'm a student so classwork sucks a lot of my time up." That's funny, that's exactly how I viewed classes, too. (Although I didn't produce anything nearly this brilliant.) The kids who studied and did well never really produced anything dumbfounding. The kids to watch were the ones who tolerated the classes just to get the information they needed, and then raced to the labs to do the real (albeit frivolous) work.
This is the problem with CS curricula. Actually, you can probably say that about any applied science. I predict that within ten years, the "good schools" will be the ones that bite the bullet and realize that hands on learning gets you much farther than the traditional drill-and-grill mode. So what kind of school do you go to?
What I'd like to see would be more like a 3d mouse. You hold it in your hand rather than laying it on a table. I recall seeing something similar for presentations, but looking at the description, it looked like it was more for just button pressing to move the slides rather than for moving a cursor on the screen.
There was an excellent paper at CHI 2000 this year that you might want to check out. Here's my bastardization of the abstract:
The device consists of a cube-shaped box with three perpendicular rodsd passing through the center and buttons on the top for additional control.... Pushing and pulling the rods specifies constrained motion along the corresponding axes. Embedded within the device is a six degree of freedom tracking sensor, which allows the rods to be continually aligned wit ha coordinate system located in a virtual world.
The paper is by Bernd Frohlich and John Plate, GMD/IMK.VE
Slashdot Mirror
okay, I don't really post on Slashdot very often, but I feel like I would be doing a disservice to my own need to waste time right now bitching about Netscape if I did not bitch about Netscape, so here it is, in all its bitchy glory.
Netscape had a chance to be a great company. Instead, they blew it in a way reminiscent of the death star at the end of ANH and increasingly at the end of Jedi. They choked when Microsoft clued in and started beating them at their own game, but the shit they've done and continue to do is evidence that they don't need Microsoft beating them with their own severed limbs. Netscape makes me sad, because they were the only company who stood a chance of outdoing Microsoft in the market, and they blew it on just about every conceivable level. They had the browser, they had a loyal user base, they had THE CENTRAL web site for the first few years of the post-Navigator-1.1 web.
Every once in a while I think to myself "I wonder if Communicator still sucks ass" and download the new release, and get disappointed that my premonition was right. So when I see that 6.1 is out and that people on Slashdot aren't ripping it apart, I succumb to the feeling and install the thing.
What's the story with the widgets? I'm on Windows, and they use these funky buttons with nonstandard, frequently mismatching fonts, uncentered labels, and in places, text so small I have to change my resolution just to read it. But the splash screen looked pretty, so I keep going. I finish installing things, and find that it put FOUR new links on my desktop WITHOUT ASKING ME. WTF is NetPhone? I think that's what it was, I'm not sure. I just selected them all and deleted them.
I start it up. It prompts me for some bullshit username thing for their website. Cancel, cancel, whatever. Finally I am taken to the start page and am presented with the horror that is the 6.x series UI. The browser's buttons are ON TOP OF EACH OTHER. WTF?!? I click on something, some bullshit poll on their bullshit web site they've got set up as the start page even though I have IE and Netscape 4.non-suck set to something else. Half the text disappears and some of the graphics from the first page REMAIN ON THE SCREEN after the second page has loaded. I have to hide the window momentarily to force it to redraw in order to fix the problem.
I try the mail reader. (I'm a big fan of 4.non-suck's Messenger.) I edit/mail_settings and am confronted with the top most item listed as "notused on mail". WTF is that? Is that [username] on [mail host]? Has anybody at the former NSCP heard of usability or human factors? If they have, do they care at all?
Frustrated, I quit the entire thing. I go to start Winamp a few minutes later, this being the first time that I have use the Start button in Windows since my harrowing experience with 6.shit. Of course there's going to be an entry for it in the 'Programs' section, but they also stuck some useless marketroid shit on the first click menu, right above the 'Programs' submenu. WITHOUT ASKING ME. Whatever. Winamp starts, and NETSCAPE HAS DECIDED TO CHANGE MY SKIN FOR WINAMP WITHOUT ASKING ME. There's a big fatty advertisement for Netscape right there on my Winamp interface. Do they think they're gaining points by putting their logo in every fucking location on my computer? They don't even have a product any more. They just do what minimal things they can in order to sell advertising. Reminds me of a news article I read once, though Netscape isn't even good at advertising, only good at pissing me off and disappointing me.
It's shit like this that turns me off from sympathizing with the Slashdot worldview (to quote from an AC posting the other day) that MS is Borg / MS is Borg / MS is Borg. Netscape lost due to its incompentence, from making the worst calls at every point in their game for the last four years.
So, that's my rant. For best results, mod it down.
There are some questions they can't ask. Then, there are some questions you shouldn't be asked.
Your bathroom only costs $1.99 to replace?
hello, this is reality calling.
I like pink floyd. Who should I make the check out to? Roger? David? Or maybe I should send it to the funny farm, care of ol' pink. Then somebody will hop on their bike (because they don't like the oil companies and won't buy their product, so they don't have a car) and bring me a CD of their work.
This sort of idealism is bound to fail, because it describes a completely unsustainable economic model. A boycott is NOT the only way to defeat a company. It's foolish to think so. Of course, a well organized boycott can have an impact, but more in terms of public opinion and perceived long term financial loss than of actual financial pain.
Stephen King tried the route of having a direct financial connection with readers, and he got burned. Why would a record company or professional musician that wants to remain in business take the same risk that King did? They know full well that you won't send them a check, and if you did, someone at the funny farm would screw them over.
(down at the bottom...)
... I never really forward things that I get as forwards, but this is simply frightening (if it's true) : http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0228-09.htm
... Another concept of interest on this topic is Null Convention Logic. Here is a report to the NSF who apparently paid for some level of research on this.
hey, fun game! that's 611 minutes!
Are you talking about J@red Polis? I probably voted for him, because I take the "If I don't know who these people are, i'll vote for the democrat" approach. But something that annoyed me about his campaign was how his name is spelled on the lawn signs: "J@red" Is that supposed to make me think, "Hmm, this guy has an at symbol in his name, therefore he must be into computers somehow, and computers are good, right? so i must vote for him". Oh well. I hope he can counteract some of the damage to the edu system that good ol' bill owens is doing and will do in the future. (sorry for the ramble...)
As an example they were showing X rays. If you got your face right up next to the screen, you still couldn't identify individual pixels. In fact, it looked just like a piece of paper. The difference between this setup and a normal hi-res monitor is simply indescribable.
I think you're missing his point. (Or, you're getting his point, but you might be a more convention-abiding citizen than I.)
The reason he played the game is because (if he won) he wanted to do something that would make people actually stop and think. Assume for a moment that he won and accepted the crown, and during his speech he said something to the effect of "this is just one big popularity contest". Would that make any sort of impact whatsoever? Does anybody even listen to speeches like that?
Personally, I think he played this game to win, and he won it in the most interesting way. He intended to make a point in a way that people would notice. He did it peacefully and gracefully, and now people beyond his school district are talking about this. This kid is a winner.
I'll admit it. I used a Socialist political event as an excuse to go out with an unattainably cool (yet socialist) girl. "There's going to be lots of really weird people there," I warned her before we got there.
There must have been about thirty people in the audience, which probably comprises the entire journalist population of the city of Boulder who had written something about it in many of the left-leaning rags there. And it seems as though McReynolds knew them all by name. I'm not making this up. He did his speech (which was remarkably eloquent, if not nonsensical at points), and afterwards took questions. "Bill, then Susan over there, and, um, I think Hal has his hand up in the back..." I was tempted to ask a question just to see if he had some psychic ability to guess my name.
What was particularly amusing was that he seemed like he was campaigning for Ralph Nader. "Ralph is not a socialist, and I am. So if you're not a socialist, vote for Nader." Okay, David, I think I will.
oops, my bad...
ESR wisely stated that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". I'm sure that many of the people around here have read this, and possibly a disjoint set of people believe it, but I feel it is good to keep harping on that point. As the popularity of linux (any and all distros) increases, the number of reported bugs grows in proportion. This is the theory behind bughunts when groups such as mozilla want people to use their beta software-to find the bugs.
This is open source. Help fix bugs. Stop bitching.
dude, you stole my post! i was going to say the exact same thing (even the bit about searching on 'bogo'). 1488.98 BogoMIPS... a mere abacus!
This isn't really that the man is a dumbass, but rather that the credit card paradigm is fundamentally screwed. Ever work behind a cash register? Every time you handle a credit card, you have all the information you need to rob them. Name on the card, the card number, expiration date, ... I know for a fact that i've sponsored dinner for a number of people that i had never met.
A disposable credit card or some equivalent, would offer protection in that ethically challenged people can only steal money from you up to the value of the card, which in this situation would not be very much.
My friends and I were talking about this the other day. If you're a competent user that is experiencing very bizarre problems, and you have to be the one to call into tech support, chances are you're going to connect with somebody who knows considerably less about the system than you do.
Our solution: provide a privatized testing service that can rank you as being either a moron (first level tech support) or and experienced person (second or higher level tech support). That way when you call up you can just tell the first tier tech support schmoe that you want to talk to somebody more knowledgable, and give them your tech-support-receiving rank.
(I guess this is sort of like the "stupid" stickers that comedian wanted dumb people to be forced to wear...)
Maybe somebody should write the "Linux-Conference HOWTO" based on the suggestions in this thread.
Talking about human evolution in the modern sense is always tricky, because there is always the issue of people with disabilities (or for the severely depraved, ethnic differences that you may not like). But you're putting a politically-correct spin on your definition of evolution. We've changed evolution for our race (as well as others, given the horrific damage we've done to the planet) by growing this obnoxiously large brain. We've figured out how to outsmart nature to the point where natural selection doesn't enter into the equation. In this sense, evolution (for our species) is dead. I would suggest that another form of evolution is at work now, and it has scary, scary implications: social selection. Not natural. Social. This leads me into an entirely different offtopic rant, so I'll stop there.
Go Greens!
- It's easy to post that sort of stuff anonymously. It takes away accountability.
- I'm interested in knowing more about this. Can you provide links and/or references to publications other than conspiricy theory zines?
(i'm neither democrat nor republican)1) Open your "Date & Time" control panel. 2) Set the date ahead a few years. 3) Close control panel 4) Launch Quicktime Movie Player 5) Click on "Register Later" 6) Go back to "Date & Time" and reset the year. 7) Now you won't see the banner for a few years at least.
Are you serious? You think users should have to be clever enough to do this? Do you think they should have to change their entire system's clock just to keep one application from doing something annoying?
I just started a project on sourceforge, and without sounding like sourceforge's advertising department, it rocks. I'm 'in charge' of the project, and my biggest fear was that the administrative BS would get in the way of letting me code. But sourceforge really addresses that problem well. I'm a coder, not a manager, but you couldn't tell that from how well organized we are after such a short period of time. If you do get your PHBs to bless the open sourcing of your code, you should give sourceforge a look.
This is the problem with CS curricula. Actually, you can probably say that about any applied science. I predict that within ten years, the "good schools" will be the ones that bite the bullet and realize that hands on learning gets you much farther than the traditional drill-and-grill mode. So what kind of school do you go to?
There was an excellent paper at CHI 2000 this year that you might want to check out. Here's my bastardization of the abstract:
The paper is by Bernd Frohlich and John Plate, GMD/IMK.VE