It's a testament to how well designed the web was that the first web page still renders perfectly well in modern web browsers. If you view the source, you can see it was actually written in a proto-HTML and uses tags and attributes that aren't used today.
I bought my 160 GB iPod Classic six years ago, and yes, I'm quite pleased it's still going strong, despite being dropped who-knows-how-many times and spending most of its life in my cars (often in somewhat extreme temperatures for a consumer electronics device).
I much prefer it to an iPod Touch or iPhone for playing music because of the much larger capacity, the simple interface, great battery life (even after all this time), and the physical buttons that are easy to use while driving (I can skip, pause, or replay a song without taking my eyes off the road). I much prefer it to offerings from other manufacturers because it has a cleaner interface, syncs automatically with iTunes (all I have to do is plug it in every few weeks when it needs a charge), and use databases and metadata in an intelligent way. All the other players I've seen have busy, garish interfaces, have controls that may approach but can't match the elegance of the click wheel, and use the file system for both adding music from the computer and playing it from the device, which is far from ideal, even with a well organized collection.
Really, the only substantial ways Apple could have improved it would be to switch to flash memory (say 256 GB, for even better battery life, reliability, thinness, and probably most importantly, parts availability) and switch out the old dock connector for Lightning. It's remarkable that the iPod has fallen so far from prominence since the iPhone that it isn't worth updating it at all anymore.
Unfortunately, my iPod won't last forever; the hard drive or the battery will eventually give out. I'll do my best to find parts and keep it going, but it would be nice if there were something on the market I would consider for a replacement. From my perspective, there isn't; everything else falls short.
I could see that. What I can't see in a million years is an OS X tablet, which is what an Apple version of the Surface Pro would be. It just doesn't make any sense with Apple's platform strategy.
Frankly, the only reason Microsoft takes this approach is because of the massive disparity between regular Windows apps and Metro apps. Being able to run the massive library of Windows applications is the primary thing that makes the devices useful. Apple has no such problem with iOS.
I wear a watch every day as well, partly because it's a more convenient and graceful way to tell the time than pulling out my phone and partly, I suppose, as a bit of a quaint affectation.
However, a big part of it is also that a good-looking watch is fashionable and attractive. None of the current crop of smart watches are anything close to fashionable, and I was convinced Apple would be the company to bridge that crucial gap and create a smartwatch that people would wear even if it didn't do anything cool (something like this mock-up). I don't see the Apple Watch as being such a device. Maybe the whole concept is stillborn. Maybe it'll be an awkward stepping stone on the path to more wearable and increasingly intimate tech (like the Newton and Palm Pilot were indirect antecedents of the iPhone). Maybe this thing will defy my expectations and sell like crazy. Who knows? But I don't see myself wearing one (or any of its competitors).
One bum note is that they are no longer selling the iPod Classic as of today, quietly ending thirteen years of scroll-wheel iPods.
That's too bad, as it's a much better music player than the iTouch and the iPhone, with its larger storage capacity and controls with tactile feedback.
I wear a wrist watch most of the time. I wear a belt loop watch when I think I might bang up a wrist watch.
Not that I think that form factor is going to light the world on fire, but I find them as convenient and accessible as a wrist watch, and they're not as unabashedly quaint as a pocket watch.
Tablets existed LONG before Apple. They even ran Windows. Post-iPAD tablets are released all the time. You want rugged? Its there. You want built-in bar code scanners? There. Digitizers instead of touch? Yup, you can get them. Digitizers AND touch? EEE has one coming.
Win7 runs like a champ on them, especially if they are pen and not touch based. Touch works, but nevermind that touch-based PCs have been around for ages (HP sells a lot of them), not many app vendors actually try their apps on them. Complain to your app vendors if you don't like how their apps behave on them.
Problem: people didn't know how they wanted apps to behave on tablet form factors until Apple showed them.
And it's not that there's anything magical about Apple, it's that that they did the work of figuring out the best approaches for the form factor and working out all the details--work that anyone else could have done but that no one else actually did. Microsoft tried--admirably!--but stopped short, putting crutches on an interface designed for keyboards and traditional pointing devices.
Look, there's presumably some reason people want iPads but didn't want Windows XP Tablet Edition. It's not users' faults for failing to unlock the potential of the tablet form factor. It wasn't our job! Apple pulled some M. Night Shyamalan shit with the iPad; nobody thought of it themselves, but after it was revealed, it was obvious. Now everybody takes it for granted how obvious it is and comes up with really cynical reasons why nobody saw it before.
I will say this though, i used it in alpha... it ran faster than Firefox.
The first releases of Flock were based on the nightly builds of what would become Firefox 1.5. This was before Firefox 1.5 came out, so your point of comparison was probably Firefox 1.0. I doubt Flock has any speed advantage anymore.
I like the design, overall, so I figure it's time to pick nits. And what's with using Tahoma? Not as bad as Verdana, but still, ugh. What's next,.aspx pages served from IIS?
I find it bizarre too that Slashdot is now using the same font as the Windows UI. I thought hating Microsoft was the one thing we all had in common here.
Why not a trifecta of Bitstream Vera (for Linux users), Lucida Grande (for Mac users), and Lucida Sans (for Windows users)? They all look similar at this size and, as far as I know, none of them was explicitly designed to replace MS Sans Serif.
Even if we must use a Microsoft font, Verdana is a better choice since a) it's basically identical to Tahoma except with less claustrophobic spacing and b) it's free-as-in-beer-ly available to everybody as it's part of Microsoft's core web fonts.
Well, first thing to check: go to View|Page Style and make sure it's set to "Cavendish."
That might not work, though. I've noticed that recent versions of Firefox occasionally stop loading styles for certain pages for no reason. Clearing the cache fixes it.
Ruby On Rails came up with 97% of the famous quotes from Napoleon Dynamite."
The constellation 'Ruby On Rails' is made up by connecting every single star of the night sky.
For a brief period in history, Ruby On Rails had stolen the letter F from the alphabet, that is why we have words such as Photo and Dr. Phil.
Ruby On Rails' leg hair is harvested bi-monthly for use in fine Scandinavian carpets due to it's extreme strength, durability, and ability to ward off Russians.
Pick any two consecutive digits of the number pi. Added up, they will always equal Ruby On Rails' age.
On the third day God actually said, "Let there be France!" So Ruby On Rails killed him, became God, and uttered the now famous, "Let there be Light!"
If one attempts to calculate the awesomeness factor of Ruby On Rails, cubed by the awesomeness of a badger divided by the awesomeness of ninja-pirates, one has the basis for the weapon that destroys the universe.
Ruby On Rails: Rockin the bitches since 1863.
When Ruby On Rails told the Microsoft Word paper clip to go away, it never came back.
Ruby On Rails possesses Excalibur.
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: Ruby On Rails, who investigates crime; and Ruby On Rails, who prosecutes the offenders.
Ruby On Rails owns 90% of patents in the USPTO under false names.
Both Lee Harvey Oswald and Ruby On Rails killed JFK. Oswald fired Ruby On Rails out of his rifle. Ruby On Rails penetrated JFK's head then exploded.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, and his son's favorite web development framework, Ruby On Rails. Whoeverso believes in his son, and programs web applications with Ruby On Rails, shall not perish, but have eternal life. Whoever forgoes Ruby On Rails will burn for all eternity. -John 3:16 (more or less)
To have fun! We know there will be critics who say sponsoring a hacking contest proves nothing. If the IIS server remains unbroken, it still doesn't mean that IIS is really "secure." True, and if I weren't the contest's team leader, I'd probably be the first one to say so. Hacking contests rarely prove something is secure, although it only takes a single successful hack to prove something is not secure.
So why do it? There are very few places on the Internet where hackers, good and bad, can hack legally. Windows IT Pro thought the contest would be a fun way to interact with the hacker community (they realize most hackers have good intentions) and provide a practical way for readers of Windows IT Pro to learn about security (of course, the magazine will disavow all responsibility and blame me solely if the server gets hacked) *grin*.
So, welcome to the contest! Hack away. If the IIS server goes unhacked during the extended time period, it might not mean that IIS is "unhackable", but if the site does survive the contest it might convince a few people that that you can implement a relatively secure Web server platform with IIS if you follow best practices and take reasonable precautions. After all, over 20 percent of the Internet relies on IIS, including some of the largest Web sites in the world.
I know IIS is an "M$" product so the moderators will eat up any and all defamation, but would it kill anyone to actually read the site before divining its intentions?
There's a "tour" of the test available that explains exactly what each row is meant to test, and it all looks like pretty fundamental stuff, so I wouldn't write it all off as a "corner case."
If nothing else, it helped Hyatt corner a number of outright glitches and bugs. I hope the Mozilla and IE7 teams follow his lead.
Yeah, the FreeBSD part is a "kernel within a kernel" (kind of like the executive in Windows NT). And of course, there actually is an x86 port of the whole mess. It doesn't come with the GUI jazz, but if you slap on GNUStep, you've basically got a NeXT box, which ain't a bad start.
As for Apple entering the x86 arena full-force, don't look forward to it. I don't think Apple is eager to compete in the same razor-thin margin market that even IBM couldn't turn a profit on. Competing with Dell is dumb. Competing with Microsoft is dumb too; I'd rather see Apple relegated to perpetual niche status than perpetual death status like Be was or NeXT nearly was.
And the hardware's pretty nice in its own right too.
I think the trend is for the computer to organize your file hierarchy for you. Look at iTunes and iPhoto; you don't interact with the files directly, you work with them through the application and the database it keeps and through any associated devices (in this case, a digital music player or digital camera respectively). The applications name and sort your files for you, and you don't have to be directly aware of it if you don't want to.
This has some advantages. The obvious one is that the program keeps track of metadata for you, so you can find your data based on what it is instead of what it's named or where it is. You also get a robust, specialized interface for each function; Microsoft sort of tried to do this in XP by bolting things onto Windows Explorer (thumbnail/slideshow views for pictures, artist/album column types for music, etc.), but that (arguably) just made the file manager sloppy and unwieldy. Of course, there isn't a special manager for every file you could possibly have, but I think this is generally the direction we're moving in (Spotlight's supposed to be an iTunes for your entire operating system, but I'd have to use it to judge for myself).
The next biggest advantage is that you're offloading some mundane, repetitive thing (organizing your files) to the computer, where it belongs (it's better at it, after all). I think Apple's been making a lot of strides in this area; Automator, for instance, brings the power of scripting to the layman in a way even AppleScript couldn't. File paths are a somewhat arcane concept; you have to build and maintain a mental model of your file system. This isn't an incredibly draining task, but nonetheless, it's one better suited for a computer, so us human types can do what we're better at, which is creating all these files to begin with.
They're not forcing you to upgrade, though. PSDs from CS work fine in 7 and 6 (not sure about versions older than that) and vice versa, and I don't imagine it'll change much in CS2. There's even an option to maximize PSD backwards-compatibility (forgot if it's on by default or not). So it's not like they're pulling a Microsoft Word.
Nor do they need to. As you suggested, the software stands on its own merit.
I agree that the program basically topped out at version 6. Subsequent releases are probably mostly just to look alive. They don't hurt, though.
Hey, it's cool. This reply is so much calmer and more reasonable that I feel bad for snapping back at you, heh.
You're right that I should probably give Windows 98 a fair shake before dismissing the 9x line entirely. I tried to do so recently, actually, but it didn't have drivers for hardly anything on my test machine (and I was too lazy at the time to hunt them all down).
You have two misconceptions, though. One, Internet Explorer is no more integrated into XP than it is into 98. There's still a separate explorer.exe and iexplore.exe, and you still need a third-party utility to uninstall IE (this is, funnily enough, one of the things that kept me off 98 when it first came out; by the time I got over it, ME was out, and I didn't know any better so I ran that for a while...).
Also, while NT was originally supposed to be O/S 2 3.0, it was a rewrite and a completely different codebase from OS/2 2.0 (it had subsystems for OS/2, Windows, and even a POSIX-compliant one for a while). My source for this is Microsoft's own Inside Windows NT book, which goes out of its way to dispel the notion. The most hackish part now is the Win32 API, which they're trying to phase out in Longhorn.
I agree that it takes a while for Microsoft to get their kinks ironed out. XP definitely wasn't ready security-wise until SP2 (if even then), to give an obvious example. The whole mess is definitely a work-in-progress (and from what I'm reading about Longhorn, it's hard to tell if it's going to get better or worse); I'm not saying it isn't, just that it's gotten better. Which is an arguable point, as we've demonstrated.
Slashdot Mirror
Even that might not be all it's cracked up to be...
It's a testament to how well designed the web was that the first web page still renders perfectly well in modern web browsers. If you view the source, you can see it was actually written in a proto-HTML and uses tags and attributes that aren't used today.
I bought my 160 GB iPod Classic six years ago, and yes, I'm quite pleased it's still going strong, despite being dropped who-knows-how-many times and spending most of its life in my cars (often in somewhat extreme temperatures for a consumer electronics device).
I much prefer it to an iPod Touch or iPhone for playing music because of the much larger capacity, the simple interface, great battery life (even after all this time), and the physical buttons that are easy to use while driving (I can skip, pause, or replay a song without taking my eyes off the road). I much prefer it to offerings from other manufacturers because it has a cleaner interface, syncs automatically with iTunes (all I have to do is plug it in every few weeks when it needs a charge), and use databases and metadata in an intelligent way. All the other players I've seen have busy, garish interfaces, have controls that may approach but can't match the elegance of the click wheel, and use the file system for both adding music from the computer and playing it from the device, which is far from ideal, even with a well organized collection.
Really, the only substantial ways Apple could have improved it would be to switch to flash memory (say 256 GB, for even better battery life, reliability, thinness, and probably most importantly, parts availability) and switch out the old dock connector for Lightning. It's remarkable that the iPod has fallen so far from prominence since the iPhone that it isn't worth updating it at all anymore.
Unfortunately, my iPod won't last forever; the hard drive or the battery will eventually give out. I'll do my best to find parts and keep it going, but it would be nice if there were something on the market I would consider for a replacement. From my perspective, there isn't; everything else falls short.
I could see that. What I can't see in a million years is an OS X tablet, which is what an Apple version of the Surface Pro would be. It just doesn't make any sense with Apple's platform strategy.
Frankly, the only reason Microsoft takes this approach is because of the massive disparity between regular Windows apps and Metro apps. Being able to run the massive library of Windows applications is the primary thing that makes the devices useful. Apple has no such problem with iOS.
I wear a watch every day as well, partly because it's a more convenient and graceful way to tell the time than pulling out my phone and partly, I suppose, as a bit of a quaint affectation.
However, a big part of it is also that a good-looking watch is fashionable and attractive. None of the current crop of smart watches are anything close to fashionable, and I was convinced Apple would be the company to bridge that crucial gap and create a smartwatch that people would wear even if it didn't do anything cool (something like this mock-up). I don't see the Apple Watch as being such a device. Maybe the whole concept is stillborn. Maybe it'll be an awkward stepping stone on the path to more wearable and increasingly intimate tech (like the Newton and Palm Pilot were indirect antecedents of the iPhone). Maybe this thing will defy my expectations and sell like crazy. Who knows? But I don't see myself wearing one (or any of its competitors).
Just caught this bit on their Apple Watch overview page:
Pretty funny when the majority of Macs are sold with trackpads and now all iPods are sold with touchscreens.
One bum note is that they are no longer selling the iPod Classic as of today, quietly ending thirteen years of scroll-wheel iPods.
That's too bad, as it's a much better music player than the iTouch and the iPhone, with its larger storage capacity and controls with tactile feedback.
I wear a wrist watch most of the time. I wear a belt loop watch when I think I might bang up a wrist watch.
Not that I think that form factor is going to light the world on fire, but I find them as convenient and accessible as a wrist watch, and they're not as unabashedly quaint as a pocket watch.
Problem: people didn't know how they wanted apps to behave on tablet form factors until Apple showed them.
And it's not that there's anything magical about Apple, it's that that they did the work of figuring out the best approaches for the form factor and working out all the details--work that anyone else could have done but that no one else actually did. Microsoft tried--admirably!--but stopped short, putting crutches on an interface designed for keyboards and traditional pointing devices.
Look, there's presumably some reason people want iPads but didn't want Windows XP Tablet Edition. It's not users' faults for failing to unlock the potential of the tablet form factor. It wasn't our job! Apple pulled some M. Night Shyamalan shit with the iPad; nobody thought of it themselves, but after it was revealed, it was obvious. Now everybody takes it for granted how obvious it is and comes up with really cynical reasons why nobody saw it before.
Aljaeguhn Tyabha is junk, it won't even play back my multiplexed Ogg Rectum streams.
Finally, the stability and security of Windows with the application availability of Linux.
Don't forget "redesigned init system," for those times when you want an init replacement besides launchd, eINIT, initng, upstart, and Sun's SMF.
The first releases of Flock were based on the nightly builds of what would become Firefox 1.5. This was before Firefox 1.5 came out, so your point of comparison was probably Firefox 1.0. I doubt Flock has any speed advantage anymore.
I find it bizarre too that Slashdot is now using the same font as the Windows UI. I thought hating Microsoft was the one thing we all had in common here.
Why not a trifecta of Bitstream Vera (for Linux users), Lucida Grande (for Mac users), and Lucida Sans (for Windows users)? They all look similar at this size and, as far as I know, none of them was explicitly designed to replace MS Sans Serif.
Even if we must use a Microsoft font, Verdana is a better choice since a) it's basically identical to Tahoma except with less claustrophobic spacing and b) it's free-as-in-beer-ly available to everybody as it's part of Microsoft's core web fonts.
The latest stable release of Camino has ad-blocking built-in (plus all the Cocoa goodness you get from Safari).
Well, first thing to check: go to View|Page Style and make sure it's set to "Cavendish."
That might not work, though. I've noticed that recent versions of Firefox occasionally stop loading styles for certain pages for no reason. Clearing the cache fixes it.
Don't forget scrollbars. Scrollbars in combo boxes. Scrollbars in tab sets. Scrollbars in the start menu. Scrollbars in scrollbars.
Random facts about Ruby On Rails:
Ruby On Rails came up with 97% of the famous quotes from Napoleon Dynamite."
The constellation 'Ruby On Rails' is made up by connecting every single star of the night sky.
For a brief period in history, Ruby On Rails had stolen the letter F from the alphabet, that is why we have words such as Photo and Dr. Phil.
Ruby On Rails' leg hair is harvested bi-monthly for use in fine Scandinavian carpets due to it's extreme strength, durability, and ability to ward off Russians.
Pick any two consecutive digits of the number pi. Added up, they will always equal Ruby On Rails' age.
On the third day God actually said, "Let there be France!" So Ruby On Rails killed him, became God, and uttered the now famous, "Let there be Light!"
If one attempts to calculate the awesomeness factor of Ruby On Rails, cubed by the awesomeness of a badger divided by the awesomeness of ninja-pirates, one has the basis for the weapon that destroys the universe.
Ruby On Rails: Rockin the bitches since 1863.
When Ruby On Rails told the Microsoft Word paper clip to go away, it never came back.
Ruby On Rails possesses Excalibur.
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: Ruby On Rails, who investigates crime; and Ruby On Rails, who prosecutes the offenders.
Ruby On Rails owns 90% of patents in the USPTO under false names.
Both Lee Harvey Oswald and Ruby On Rails killed JFK. Oswald fired Ruby On Rails out of his rifle. Ruby On Rails penetrated JFK's head then exploded.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, and his son's favorite web development framework, Ruby On Rails. Whoeverso believes in his son, and programs web applications with Ruby On Rails, shall not perish, but have eternal life. Whoever forgoes Ruby On Rails will burn for all eternity. -John 3:16 (more or less)
(with apologies...)
RTFA:
I know IIS is an "M$" product so the moderators will eat up any and all defamation, but would it kill anyone to actually read the site before divining its intentions?
Yes, funnily enough, hackiis6.com used to be a gardening web site.
There's a "tour" of the test available that explains exactly what each row is meant to test, and it all looks like pretty fundamental stuff, so I wouldn't write it all off as a "corner case."
If nothing else, it helped Hyatt corner a number of outright glitches and bugs. I hope the Mozilla and IE7 teams follow his lead.
Yeah, the FreeBSD part is a "kernel within a kernel" (kind of like the executive in Windows NT). And of course, there actually is an x86 port of the whole mess. It doesn't come with the GUI jazz, but if you slap on GNUStep, you've basically got a NeXT box, which ain't a bad start.
As for Apple entering the x86 arena full-force, don't look forward to it. I don't think Apple is eager to compete in the same razor-thin margin market that even IBM couldn't turn a profit on. Competing with Dell is dumb. Competing with Microsoft is dumb too; I'd rather see Apple relegated to perpetual niche status than perpetual death status like Be was or NeXT nearly was.
And the hardware's pretty nice in its own right too.
I think the trend is for the computer to organize your file hierarchy for you. Look at iTunes and iPhoto; you don't interact with the files directly, you work with them through the application and the database it keeps and through any associated devices (in this case, a digital music player or digital camera respectively). The applications name and sort your files for you, and you don't have to be directly aware of it if you don't want to.
This has some advantages. The obvious one is that the program keeps track of metadata for you, so you can find your data based on what it is instead of what it's named or where it is. You also get a robust, specialized interface for each function; Microsoft sort of tried to do this in XP by bolting things onto Windows Explorer (thumbnail/slideshow views for pictures, artist/album column types for music, etc.), but that (arguably) just made the file manager sloppy and unwieldy. Of course, there isn't a special manager for every file you could possibly have, but I think this is generally the direction we're moving in (Spotlight's supposed to be an iTunes for your entire operating system, but I'd have to use it to judge for myself).
The next biggest advantage is that you're offloading some mundane, repetitive thing (organizing your files) to the computer, where it belongs (it's better at it, after all). I think Apple's been making a lot of strides in this area; Automator, for instance, brings the power of scripting to the layman in a way even AppleScript couldn't. File paths are a somewhat arcane concept; you have to build and maintain a mental model of your file system. This isn't an incredibly draining task, but nonetheless, it's one better suited for a computer, so us human types can do what we're better at, which is creating all these files to begin with.
They're not forcing you to upgrade, though. PSDs from CS work fine in 7 and 6 (not sure about versions older than that) and vice versa, and I don't imagine it'll change much in CS2. There's even an option to maximize PSD backwards-compatibility (forgot if it's on by default or not). So it's not like they're pulling a Microsoft Word.
Nor do they need to. As you suggested, the software stands on its own merit.
I agree that the program basically topped out at version 6. Subsequent releases are probably mostly just to look alive. They don't hurt, though.
Hey, it's cool. This reply is so much calmer and more reasonable that I feel bad for snapping back at you, heh.
You're right that I should probably give Windows 98 a fair shake before dismissing the 9x line entirely. I tried to do so recently, actually, but it didn't have drivers for hardly anything on my test machine (and I was too lazy at the time to hunt them all down).
You have two misconceptions, though. One, Internet Explorer is no more integrated into XP than it is into 98. There's still a separate explorer.exe and iexplore.exe, and you still need a third-party utility to uninstall IE (this is, funnily enough, one of the things that kept me off 98 when it first came out; by the time I got over it, ME was out, and I didn't know any better so I ran that for a while...).
Also, while NT was originally supposed to be O/S 2 3.0, it was a rewrite and a completely different codebase from OS/2 2.0 (it had subsystems for OS/2, Windows, and even a POSIX-compliant one for a while). My source for this is Microsoft's own Inside Windows NT book, which goes out of its way to dispel the notion. The most hackish part now is the Win32 API, which they're trying to phase out in Longhorn.
I agree that it takes a while for Microsoft to get their kinks ironed out. XP definitely wasn't ready security-wise until SP2 (if even then), to give an obvious example. The whole mess is definitely a work-in-progress (and from what I'm reading about Longhorn, it's hard to tell if it's going to get better or worse); I'm not saying it isn't, just that it's gotten better. Which is an arguable point, as we've demonstrated.