That was one of the best rants ever. It reminds me exactly of places I have worked. I can completely understand the desire not to come back to the IT world after that. It seems sometimes that many employers think that there will always be enough people coming straight out of training desperate for work to fill all the roles they'll ever need. Of course, when apps have legacy workarounds, experience is the key.
One of the places I worked at was ridiculous. Fortunately, I worked in the web design shop, and didn't have to support anything. Basically, though, we had an ISP that provided server co-location and webhosting in an unsecured basement directly under sprinklers. The patch panels for the network were wide open at any time. We had technicians for hardware support who were near useless. The boss tried to run everything like he was still in the Army and we were supposed to respect the chain of command. Well, if productivity goes up when the boss goes away, you know what the problem is.
The most ridiculous thing was when we decided to come in as a web team and blow off steam for the week playing games on our LAN in the web office. We used our own machines for doing web work, since our boss continually bought second-hand (or even third-hand) crap off of eBay. He threw a fit about us using company resources, even though we paused to help out customer support when the phones rang too much.
Given the contact information on the site regarding previous warranties, I suspect that they filed bankruptcy. Case number 03-03874-JM7 looks suspiciously like a bankruptcy code.
In order to meet creditors, they would have liquidated assets, which would have included the name, the business records, customer lists, etc. However, the new company that took over the name would be a brand new corporation. A bankruptcy filing with liquidation would have wiped out any such debts.
Confirmation: Greg Akers, as listed, is a Chapter 7 trustee.
I'm in firm agreement. Broadcasting is broadcasting.
If I want a true expectation of privacy, then I need to secure my network. That means physical security. If you tap into my line and read my data, then I'll be relatively upset, and I think you've done something wrong. If you overhear what I'm saying, then that's my stupid fault.
Granted, there are limits to this. I think it's wrong to go around with laser microphones and try to listen in on people's conversations when there is an expectation of privacy. I don't think trying to overhear someone's mobile phone conversation is a good use either.
But if you think you shouldn't be able to be tracked by your broadcast of EM waves, then you're stupid. The towers need to hear you. If you're looking at people in the aggregate by EM, it's no different than using other camera that measure visual or infrared.
Barring piracy, given the number of online gamers in South Korea, wouldn't this just encourage game developers to develop for other platforms?
If they had to develop for Linux because that was the only legally available platform that could run on their hardware with gaming support, then game companies would likely have the critical mass they'd need to start really building for Linux.
Even if they just wanted to continue developing for Windows, I'm sure a number of publishers would push a lot more support for Wine development, so as not to lose sales in South Korea.
It's always a bad threat when following through will cause the one threatening more harm than good.
IntProp laws are dumb in the way patents have been applied to processes and also in the way copyright keeps being extended forever.
I just had to respond to the Wikipedia reference due to the joy of recently seeing a Jewish dietary law listing eating hamburgers or some other fast food nonsense, which was clearly NOT relevant to the article, nor factually correct.
Having lived for a number of years outside the US and also taken courses (in the US) on the history of US foreign policy, I can understand the trepidation felt by a number of countries regarding US control of root servers. Arguments of having built it are ridiculous. It's like saying that Italy should have control over all our spelling for those of us using Latin-based character sets.
I do agree that I wouldn't want to see a country like North Korea deciding who gets cut off, but moreover, now that I live in St. Paul, Minnesota, I really don't want Norm Coleman making any such decisions, either.
I harp on this a lot, but doesn't it just seem like this is yet again another aspect of the push for a service economy? When we stop producing real goods, and start simply tweaking tech to provide new services, and ONLY doing that, doesn't it make sense that business will push to patent ideas and processes, instead of patenting technology?
I can hardly blame the businesses for wanting this and pushing for this, but it also smacks of a serious lack of leadership in the country, as well. What happens then is that business management is more important than science. Haven't heard that we have a lack of scientists lately, right?
Many arguments have been made regarding the fact that we don't know much about the circumstances of these individuals and what kind of contracts they may have, when they've been working on it, etc. However, there are some things we can probably ascertain.
We do know that they are customer-service reps. Which means two very likely things. First, they were not hired for their programming skills, which means they are likely not being adequately compensated for this software. Second, they are probably not under a non-compete clause of any kind. While programmers and high-level managers are often put under such things (which in my experience don't hold up very well unless they are extremely explicit), customer service reps are RARELY if EVER put under such restrictions. Why? Because the industry knowledge is pretty well standard for most of those things, they rarely have access to real trade-secrets, and most of their skills involvin simply talking and entering data - mundane everyday stuff.
The problem is that somehow they worked on software in their own time, at the company or not, and their bosses are going to try to make a credit claim. If they want credit at the company, they need to start writing documentation, documenting out the development process, the origin of the idea, and so on. Get those documents out to the right people and let them look over them. Put down where the project stands, how many hours of work they estimate they need to get to a completed project, and what a reasonable compensation level would be.
Lastly, they should sign their code, so that when some stupid boss claims credit for it, they can point to the code itself.
The big question would be whether the whole organisation is made up of jerks, or just their immediate bosses who might try to claim credit for it. If they don't think there is any fair management there, they should just stop working on the code, or write some psuedo-modules that make no sense and if implemented by someone who can't write code proeprly would eat the system, or else mess up the logic of the app for the uninitiated. Then they should quit and get better jobs.
This is just my experience, but pretty much every system I've dealt with that had MSN Messenger on it was eventually completely riddled with viruses and spyware. Because of that risk, I eliminated it from my system.
Yeah, I know it's popular with European kids. My parents have exchange students every year, and they ALL want the latest greatest features. That is until the computer stops working.
I don't know if anyone has connected the latest growth of phishing scams with European teenagers using MSN, but I know it is exceptionally popular in Spain, which has just recently seen a spike in phishing attempts.
I wouldn't worry about falling behind. Eventually advertisers will realise that people who use such crap are likely to become identity theft victims and not be able to buy anything. Of course, the ones who aren't yet victims are also exceptionally gullible, so then again, cheapcrap.com may have use for advertising there.
I personally like the nifty extra features, mind you. I just think they should be made with some level of compatibility for those of use who don't want whizbang graphics and silly sounds going off while we're trying to get some coding done.
It's really frightening how many nationalist posts there are here.
So many arguments about how other nations will control things and how there's censorship, etc., etc.
Well, I hate to mention it, but the MPAA and RIAA are American organizations that persist in changing US legislation to crack down on anything that even remotely impacts their business model.
Without considering human rights or agressive military aid and intervention by the US government, just consider that we have a government in which fair use is being bought and sold away from the American people. With ICANN under the oversight of the Department of Commerce, who's to say that such power would not extend further?
International agencies are often slow to response to crises, but they also make it a lot harder for a single entity with those agencies to take control. Ceding control of the root servers to such an agency would be more likely to prevent Americans losing control to their own corporations.
Unfortunately, we have a lot of nationalists who can't see what's wrong in America, having been fooled into believing that patriotism and blind faith in the nation are the same thing. They are most certainly not.
Remember the Ike didn't trust the military-industrial complex during the Cold War. Why should I trust Hollywood/Mass-Media backed legislators now?
(There's no such thing as liberal mass-media. When was the last time you saw a liberal corporation on Wall Street?)
The problem is that the 20 people are not the people being linked to by the link. Those are senators. Yes, getting them to be opposed to broadcast flags is a good idea. But there's not point in flaming them, yet. (Even Trent Lott...)
As linked to elsewhere, here are the jerks who have sold their souls to media:
Well, the 'list' is simply the members of the committee. As to what the individual members are thinking, or what their positions are is up in the air.
As for my remarks regarding the so-called evangelicals, it is because I find a number of the members who claim to be scripturally bound hypocritical. It is far less distasteful for me to put up with someone who claims no beliefs to be corrupt than someone who claims to be following holy scripture.
The split on the committee will roughly represent the split within the Senate itself, with a slight Republican majority.
As for my own political bent, I miss the days of true conservatism. I wish the Republican party would kick out the former Dixiecrats.
Of course, the problem with a consumer society is the same problem as exists with a so-called service economy. It will lead to dependence and stagnation.
We already face problems in that we continue to send manufacturing outside the country. So we stop really producing anything. All we have to offer now is services, which rely on a certain level of creativity. If we remove the ability of people to engage in creative development (which a lot of do-it-yourself activity is), then we become unable to create anything.
In the end, as crass as it sounds, we become as useful and interesting to the global economy as a drug-addicted prostitute who lacks the energy to do anything but lie on her back and take it from whomever.
<irony> I find it rather interesting that often-times, these so-called evangelical conservatives continue to support this kind of legislation. Unfortunately, the removal of creativity will turn the United States into the Biblical Babylon the Whore. </irony>
Part of me wonders if this isn't simply a seasonal shift, as well, as I've noted before regarding other numbers.
Many students heading off to college just got new machines which, for the vast majority, run Windows and had IE on them right away. Until they've been at college for a while and have been burned by spyware, malware, or otherwise, this will be a factor.
Additionally, this is the time of year when a number of job changes happen. I know that I moved into a corporation where IE is the browser. Yeah, I work in IT, but I don't have a say on the corporate policy (yet!), and so I'm stuck without Firefox or Opera. Previously, I was working as a web developer, so all the sites I visited in the day would note a Firefox visitor, and then in the evening, I also use Firefox. However, now I spend a lot more time at work, stuck using IE.
Honestly, I hated coding for IE. Will IE 7 be better? I hope so. But as long as so many companies force IE usage at work, we won't see a major change in those numbers. Does this mean Firefox is going to 'lose'? Not at all. There are two kinds of web developers out there, those that like to code to features, and those that like to use Microsoft tools. The vast majority of developers I know hate IE currently, and so that may be the shift. Business may still require IE, and home usage may shift to Firefox, Opera, etc.
Given the corporate trend of keeping people at work too many hours a week (it's called mismanagement), chances are IE will not drop under 85% until another OS starts to make serious inroads into the corporate workplace.
In response, to Mr. Pendergast's comments, I would ask under what conditions Calc takes more than 100 times longer to create and load spreadsheets? What version of OpenOffice is he using? I've used Calc many times and actually found it easier for what I like to do, and noticed no discernable difference.
What I have noticed, though, is sometimes the system takes a little longer to load on my Windows system if I don't have the quick loader running. But then, I have a sneaking suspicion that MS Office is using elements of the Explorer shell to run. (I remember an IE 6.0 requirement long ago.) If that's the case, well, then again, it's been optimised to run on the system. But, again, that's proprietary use, and more Microsoft monopoly speaking than anything else.
As noted before, OpenDocument is an XML standard. Touting XML doesn't reall say much about features. And just because Microsoft's XML may validate, it doesn't mean it's well-written XML.
The worst part about this article isn't that it's supporting Microsoft against OpenDocument... The worst part is that it includes allegations, without supporting reference, and is mostly an op-ed piece, posing as news.
My experience over the years has been that David Coursey is a total MS fanboy, and is often exceptionally undereducated on the technology or simply facts at hand. The fact that Ziff-Davis even pays this guy shocks me to no end.
Is OpenDocument perfect? No. Is it easier to build accessibility to it? Yes. Would it be less costly to continue to retrofit current screenreaders in Windows? Of course.
All this harping on about not meeting standards or being left behind is a matter of comparing technology feel to technology knowledge. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts wants to be able to take apart and put back together the information they have. I agree. Given the current XML sludge that comes in a standard Word doc saved as XML on my machine with Word 2003, I can't exactly disagree.
The reality in the American business model today is that most workers are not paid appropriately for what is supposedly expected out of them. So, the average American worker compensates by downgrading their productivity level.
While this may seem lazy, often the corporate has erred by locating their corporate offices in the centre of traffic issues, resulting in extended commute times. Workers make up for this by paying bills, ordering gifts, etc. during said expected work time.
When there is a clear expectation of a possibility of a raise, then most workers will work hard to compete for that raise. Unfortunately, in the current American work climate, the most likely raise would come from changing jobs, hence researching other positions also becomes a way to waste time at work.
So, in response, the average American worker, if foolish enough to blindly believe that working harder will get them a raise, would more likely work themselves into burnout or at least severe disillusion on your recommendation.
I remember the height of the cola wars with the Coke/Pepsi taste tests. Yeah, Pepsi initiated them and Coke still dominates, but both companies benefitted, and neither of them was exactly young.
Where you ostensibly see immature, some of us might see refreshing.
Instead of sending regular e-mail, perhaps she could send out voice recordings.
With a simple interface, she could record the messages she wants to send, have them converted to.mp3 or.ogg or whatever, and send them to family. Granted, I would recommend that the family all get Gmail accounts or similar for space.
With a good user-friendly interface, she could then get replies from the family, read them, and record a reply.
While her voice may not be good enough for voice recognition software, I'm sure that someone could help her get set up to at least record her voice well enough that her family could receive it.
Well, it's nice to see someone rant at the wide number of incompetent decision-makers out there. I wish there were more details as to what some companies purchasing decisions were, and the circumstance were surrounding them, so that we could all go out and ridicule them.
The nice part is that DiDio is basically pointing out that most companies can't make a TCO argument since they lack that basic element (i.e. a clue). Hence, she's someone poking in Microsoft's eye regarding all these TCO reports.
The reality is that most companies go with what they know, and most bosses go with what they think they can understand. That means Microsoft tends to stick everywhere, unless they put Unix in. If it ain't Microsoft, Sun, or Apple running the operating system, well, that's a rarity, and you've got a situation with a boss who's a bit more experimental than chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Linux, well, that's like 51 flavours.
Where I've been working, if it were up to me, we'd have ripped out Windows long ago. We're still on Windows 2000, and we continue to face all kinds of issues. We stick with Windows because the boss in comfortable with it and we have software vendors stuck on it. But the number of tech support requests is phenomenal. Most are caused by users doing stupid things, which in turn eventually corrupt the registry.
It seems a break from the usual DiDio article. Maybe she's taken up drinking. It doesn't make here a better writer, but maybe the attitude will shift enough.
A small percentage shift for the visitors, etc. doesn't really mean much. No one really explains how these visitor numbers are calculated.
I know how it is at my mom's house. First off, during the school year, she's the primary user, but in the summer, there are kids visiting sites all day. So their usage and number of sites visited goes up, likely resulting in more hits on those sites tracked.
Second, my mom uses Firefox all year round, but she dumps the kids into AOL's browser, which, in her version, is really IE with AOL surfing blocking. So, yeah, there's more IE stuff.
Third, a bunch of people are buying computers for their kids over the summer and graduation and going to college presents (or required items). And gee, I bet those machines have IE preinstalled. Ding! Increase in numbers again.
Lastly, since I bet that those sites are using cookies to track users, a number of people who use spybot and/or ad-aware will be wiping out those cookies and getting counted multiple times. During the year, my mom runs it once every two weeks, but in the summer, with all the crap those kids try to download, she runs it about every two or three days, meaning that she's wiping the cookie 10 times a month.
Multiply that to many, many households, and you start to wonder how much the IE figure could actually be inflated.
It's not that there can't be a drop in Firefox and a rise in IE. But without stats, reports, real academic information with methodology, well, it means diddly.
I loved the biting wit of that article. (Oh no, now I'll be dropped by Google.) The reality that Google needs to understand is that if people are doing research using Google to get publically available information, then that's fine. If Google doesn't like that, then they need some clear TOS with authentication and log-in. (And then we'll all jump over to Yahoo! to do research.)
If we all put robots.txt files up and complained about Google in protest, Google wouldn't exist. It's time to climb down from the high horse. Failure to do so will often result in being dismounted by falling share prices.
Assuming the site only works for IE, that means, chances are that the site is in violation of federal law.
I urge people to check all.gov and.mil sites in the US and urge them to comply with section 508. If they fail to do so, they may be vulnerable to a lawsuit in Federal Court.
Actually, I think this is more a matter of certain Democrats continuing the party legacy of telling us how to live our lives, what values we should have, etc.
The Republicans didn't do anywhere near as much of that until the neo-conservatives hijacked the party.
The funniest thing I find is that politicians are all for regulating someone else's behaviour. Anti-abortion policies until their daughter is pregnant, then hush-hush, let's get them to Canada or similar.
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That was one of the best rants ever. It reminds me exactly of places I have worked. I can completely understand the desire not to come back to the IT world after that. It seems sometimes that many employers think that there will always be enough people coming straight out of training desperate for work to fill all the roles they'll ever need. Of course, when apps have legacy workarounds, experience is the key.
One of the places I worked at was ridiculous. Fortunately, I worked in the web design shop, and didn't have to support anything. Basically, though, we had an ISP that provided server co-location and webhosting in an unsecured basement directly under sprinklers. The patch panels for the network were wide open at any time. We had technicians for hardware support who were near useless. The boss tried to run everything like he was still in the Army and we were supposed to respect the chain of command. Well, if productivity goes up when the boss goes away, you know what the problem is.
The most ridiculous thing was when we decided to come in as a web team and blow off steam for the week playing games on our LAN in the web office. We used our own machines for doing web work, since our boss continually bought second-hand (or even third-hand) crap off of eBay. He threw a fit about us using company resources, even though we paused to help out customer support when the phones rang too much.
Given the contact information on the site regarding previous warranties, I suspect that they filed bankruptcy. Case number 03-03874-JM7 looks suspiciously like a bankruptcy code.
In order to meet creditors, they would have liquidated assets, which would have included the name, the business records, customer lists, etc. However, the new company that took over the name would be a brand new corporation. A bankruptcy filing with liquidation would have wiped out any such debts.
Confirmation: Greg Akers, as listed, is a Chapter 7 trustee.
Check USBC Southern District of California's site for more information.
With the case code, you should be able to pull up records of the bankruptcy, as well.
I'm in firm agreement. Broadcasting is broadcasting.
If I want a true expectation of privacy, then I need to secure my network. That means physical security. If you tap into my line and read my data, then I'll be relatively upset, and I think you've done something wrong. If you overhear what I'm saying, then that's my stupid fault.
Granted, there are limits to this. I think it's wrong to go around with laser microphones and try to listen in on people's conversations when there is an expectation of privacy. I don't think trying to overhear someone's mobile phone conversation is a good use either.
But if you think you shouldn't be able to be tracked by your broadcast of EM waves, then you're stupid. The towers need to hear you. If you're looking at people in the aggregate by EM, it's no different than using other camera that measure visual or infrared.
Barring piracy, given the number of online gamers in South Korea, wouldn't this just encourage game developers to develop for other platforms?
If they had to develop for Linux because that was the only legally available platform that could run on their hardware with gaming support, then game companies would likely have the critical mass they'd need to start really building for Linux.
Even if they just wanted to continue developing for Windows, I'm sure a number of publishers would push a lot more support for Wine development, so as not to lose sales in South Korea.
It's always a bad threat when following through will cause the one threatening more harm than good.
IntProp laws are dumb in the way patents have been applied to processes and also in the way copyright keeps being extended forever.
I just had to respond to the Wikipedia reference due to the joy of recently seeing a Jewish dietary law listing eating hamburgers or some other fast food nonsense, which was clearly NOT relevant to the article, nor factually correct.
Having lived for a number of years outside the US and also taken courses (in the US) on the history of US foreign policy, I can understand the trepidation felt by a number of countries regarding US control of root servers. Arguments of having built it are ridiculous. It's like saying that Italy should have control over all our spelling for those of us using Latin-based character sets.
I do agree that I wouldn't want to see a country like North Korea deciding who gets cut off, but moreover, now that I live in St. Paul, Minnesota, I really don't want Norm Coleman making any such decisions, either.
Not that wikipedia is exactly the best place to claim evidence to refute an argument.
I harp on this a lot, but doesn't it just seem like this is yet again another aspect of the push for a service economy? When we stop producing real goods, and start simply tweaking tech to provide new services, and ONLY doing that, doesn't it make sense that business will push to patent ideas and processes, instead of patenting technology?
I can hardly blame the businesses for wanting this and pushing for this, but it also smacks of a serious lack of leadership in the country, as well. What happens then is that business management is more important than science. Haven't heard that we have a lack of scientists lately, right?
Many arguments have been made regarding the fact that we don't know much about the circumstances of these individuals and what kind of contracts they may have, when they've been working on it, etc. However, there are some things we can probably ascertain.
We do know that they are customer-service reps. Which means two very likely things. First, they were not hired for their programming skills, which means they are likely not being adequately compensated for this software. Second, they are probably not under a non-compete clause of any kind. While programmers and high-level managers are often put under such things (which in my experience don't hold up very well unless they are extremely explicit), customer service reps are RARELY if EVER put under such restrictions. Why? Because the industry knowledge is pretty well standard for most of those things, they rarely have access to real trade-secrets, and most of their skills involvin simply talking and entering data - mundane everyday stuff.
The problem is that somehow they worked on software in their own time, at the company or not, and their bosses are going to try to make a credit claim. If they want credit at the company, they need to start writing documentation, documenting out the development process, the origin of the idea, and so on. Get those documents out to the right people and let them look over them. Put down where the project stands, how many hours of work they estimate they need to get to a completed project, and what a reasonable compensation level would be.
Lastly, they should sign their code, so that when some stupid boss claims credit for it, they can point to the code itself.
The big question would be whether the whole organisation is made up of jerks, or just their immediate bosses who might try to claim credit for it. If they don't think there is any fair management there, they should just stop working on the code, or write some psuedo-modules that make no sense and if implemented by someone who can't write code proeprly would eat the system, or else mess up the logic of the app for the uninitiated. Then they should quit and get better jobs.
This is just my experience, but pretty much every system I've dealt with that had MSN Messenger on it was eventually completely riddled with viruses and spyware. Because of that risk, I eliminated it from my system.
Yeah, I know it's popular with European kids. My parents have exchange students every year, and they ALL want the latest greatest features. That is until the computer stops working.
I don't know if anyone has connected the latest growth of phishing scams with European teenagers using MSN, but I know it is exceptionally popular in Spain, which has just recently seen a spike in phishing attempts.
I wouldn't worry about falling behind. Eventually advertisers will realise that people who use such crap are likely to become identity theft victims and not be able to buy anything. Of course, the ones who aren't yet victims are also exceptionally gullible, so then again, cheapcrap.com may have use for advertising there.
I personally like the nifty extra features, mind you. I just think they should be made with some level of compatibility for those of use who don't want whizbang graphics and silly sounds going off while we're trying to get some coding done.
It's really frightening how many nationalist posts there are here.
So many arguments about how other nations will control things and how there's censorship, etc., etc.
Well, I hate to mention it, but the MPAA and RIAA are American organizations that persist in changing US legislation to crack down on anything that even remotely impacts their business model.
Without considering human rights or agressive military aid and intervention by the US government, just consider that we have a government in which fair use is being bought and sold away from the American people. With ICANN under the oversight of the Department of Commerce, who's to say that such power would not extend further?
International agencies are often slow to response to crises, but they also make it a lot harder for a single entity with those agencies to take control. Ceding control of the root servers to such an agency would be more likely to prevent Americans losing control to their own corporations.
Unfortunately, we have a lot of nationalists who can't see what's wrong in America, having been fooled into believing that patriotism and blind faith in the nation are the same thing. They are most certainly not.
Remember the Ike didn't trust the military-industrial complex during the Cold War. Why should I trust Hollywood/Mass-Media backed legislators now?
(There's no such thing as liberal mass-media. When was the last time you saw a liberal corporation on Wall Street?)
The problem is that the 20 people are not the people being linked to by the link. Those are senators. Yes, getting them to be opposed to broadcast flags is a good idea. But there's not point in flaming them, yet. (Even Trent Lott...)
As linked to elsewhere, here are the jerks who have sold their souls to media:
Find out who your representative is, and make sure these people get nailed.
Well, the 'list' is simply the members of the committee. As to what the individual members are thinking, or what their positions are is up in the air.
As for my remarks regarding the so-called evangelicals, it is because I find a number of the members who claim to be scripturally bound hypocritical. It is far less distasteful for me to put up with someone who claims no beliefs to be corrupt than someone who claims to be following holy scripture.
The split on the committee will roughly represent the split within the Senate itself, with a slight Republican majority.
As for my own political bent, I miss the days of true conservatism. I wish the Republican party would kick out the former Dixiecrats.
Of course, the problem with a consumer society is the same problem as exists with a so-called service economy. It will lead to dependence and stagnation.
We already face problems in that we continue to send manufacturing outside the country. So we stop really producing anything. All we have to offer now is services, which rely on a certain level of creativity. If we remove the ability of people to engage in creative development (which a lot of do-it-yourself activity is), then we become unable to create anything.
In the end, as crass as it sounds, we become as useful and interesting to the global economy as a drug-addicted prostitute who lacks the energy to do anything but lie on her back and take it from whomever.
<irony> I find it rather interesting that often-times, these so-called evangelical conservatives continue to support this kind of legislation. Unfortunately, the removal of creativity will turn the United States into the Biblical Babylon the Whore. </irony>
Part of me wonders if this isn't simply a seasonal shift, as well, as I've noted before regarding other numbers.
Many students heading off to college just got new machines which, for the vast majority, run Windows and had IE on them right away. Until they've been at college for a while and have been burned by spyware, malware, or otherwise, this will be a factor.
Additionally, this is the time of year when a number of job changes happen. I know that I moved into a corporation where IE is the browser. Yeah, I work in IT, but I don't have a say on the corporate policy (yet!), and so I'm stuck without Firefox or Opera. Previously, I was working as a web developer, so all the sites I visited in the day would note a Firefox visitor, and then in the evening, I also use Firefox. However, now I spend a lot more time at work, stuck using IE.
Honestly, I hated coding for IE. Will IE 7 be better? I hope so. But as long as so many companies force IE usage at work, we won't see a major change in those numbers. Does this mean Firefox is going to 'lose'? Not at all. There are two kinds of web developers out there, those that like to code to features, and those that like to use Microsoft tools. The vast majority of developers I know hate IE currently, and so that may be the shift. Business may still require IE, and home usage may shift to Firefox, Opera, etc.
Given the corporate trend of keeping people at work too many hours a week (it's called mismanagement), chances are IE will not drop under 85% until another OS starts to make serious inroads into the corporate workplace.
In response, to Mr. Pendergast's comments, I would ask under what conditions Calc takes more than 100 times longer to create and load spreadsheets? What version of OpenOffice is he using? I've used Calc many times and actually found it easier for what I like to do, and noticed no discernable difference.
What I have noticed, though, is sometimes the system takes a little longer to load on my Windows system if I don't have the quick loader running. But then, I have a sneaking suspicion that MS Office is using elements of the Explorer shell to run. (I remember an IE 6.0 requirement long ago.) If that's the case, well, then again, it's been optimised to run on the system. But, again, that's proprietary use, and more Microsoft monopoly speaking than anything else.
As noted before, OpenDocument is an XML standard. Touting XML doesn't reall say much about features. And just because Microsoft's XML may validate, it doesn't mean it's well-written XML.
The worst part about this article isn't that it's supporting Microsoft against OpenDocument... The worst part is that it includes allegations, without supporting reference, and is mostly an op-ed piece, posing as news.
My experience over the years has been that David Coursey is a total MS fanboy, and is often exceptionally undereducated on the technology or simply facts at hand. The fact that Ziff-Davis even pays this guy shocks me to no end.
Is OpenDocument perfect? No. Is it easier to build accessibility to it? Yes. Would it be less costly to continue to retrofit current screenreaders in Windows? Of course.
All this harping on about not meeting standards or being left behind is a matter of comparing technology feel to technology knowledge. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts wants to be able to take apart and put back together the information they have. I agree. Given the current XML sludge that comes in a standard Word doc saved as XML on my machine with Word 2003, I can't exactly disagree.
The reality in the American business model today is that most workers are not paid appropriately for what is supposedly expected out of them. So, the average American worker compensates by downgrading their productivity level.
While this may seem lazy, often the corporate has erred by locating their corporate offices in the centre of traffic issues, resulting in extended commute times. Workers make up for this by paying bills, ordering gifts, etc. during said expected work time.
When there is a clear expectation of a possibility of a raise, then most workers will work hard to compete for that raise. Unfortunately, in the current American work climate, the most likely raise would come from changing jobs, hence researching other positions also becomes a way to waste time at work.
So, in response, the average American worker, if foolish enough to blindly believe that working harder will get them a raise, would more likely work themselves into burnout or at least severe disillusion on your recommendation.
Does anyone here actually believe that the CEO of a juggernaut like Microsoft isn't a psychopath?
See previous Slashdot article.
And your off-the-cuff remark is based on what?
I remember the height of the cola wars with the Coke/Pepsi taste tests. Yeah, Pepsi initiated them and Coke still dominates, but both companies benefitted, and neither of them was exactly young.
Where you ostensibly see immature, some of us might see refreshing.
Instead of sending regular e-mail, perhaps she could send out voice recordings.
With a simple interface, she could record the messages she wants to send, have them converted to .mp3 or .ogg or whatever, and send them to family. Granted, I would recommend that the family all get Gmail accounts or similar for space.
With a good user-friendly interface, she could then get replies from the family, read them, and record a reply.
While her voice may not be good enough for voice recognition software, I'm sure that someone could help her get set up to at least record her voice well enough that her family could receive it.
Well, it's nice to see someone rant at the wide number of incompetent decision-makers out there. I wish there were more details as to what some companies purchasing decisions were, and the circumstance were surrounding them, so that we could all go out and ridicule them.
The nice part is that DiDio is basically pointing out that most companies can't make a TCO argument since they lack that basic element (i.e. a clue). Hence, she's someone poking in Microsoft's eye regarding all these TCO reports.
The reality is that most companies go with what they know, and most bosses go with what they think they can understand. That means Microsoft tends to stick everywhere, unless they put Unix in. If it ain't Microsoft, Sun, or Apple running the operating system, well, that's a rarity, and you've got a situation with a boss who's a bit more experimental than chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Linux, well, that's like 51 flavours.
Where I've been working, if it were up to me, we'd have ripped out Windows long ago. We're still on Windows 2000, and we continue to face all kinds of issues. We stick with Windows because the boss in comfortable with it and we have software vendors stuck on it. But the number of tech support requests is phenomenal. Most are caused by users doing stupid things, which in turn eventually corrupt the registry.
It seems a break from the usual DiDio article. Maybe she's taken up drinking. It doesn't make here a better writer, but maybe the attitude will shift enough.
A small percentage shift for the visitors, etc. doesn't really mean much. No one really explains how these visitor numbers are calculated.
I know how it is at my mom's house. First off, during the school year, she's the primary user, but in the summer, there are kids visiting sites all day. So their usage and number of sites visited goes up, likely resulting in more hits on those sites tracked.
Second, my mom uses Firefox all year round, but she dumps the kids into AOL's browser, which, in her version, is really IE with AOL surfing blocking. So, yeah, there's more IE stuff.
Third, a bunch of people are buying computers for their kids over the summer and graduation and going to college presents (or required items). And gee, I bet those machines have IE preinstalled. Ding! Increase in numbers again.
Lastly, since I bet that those sites are using cookies to track users, a number of people who use spybot and/or ad-aware will be wiping out those cookies and getting counted multiple times. During the year, my mom runs it once every two weeks, but in the summer, with all the crap those kids try to download, she runs it about every two or three days, meaning that she's wiping the cookie 10 times a month.
Multiply that to many, many households, and you start to wonder how much the IE figure could actually be inflated.
It's not that there can't be a drop in Firefox and a rise in IE. But without stats, reports, real academic information with methodology, well, it means diddly.
Agreed.
I loved the biting wit of that article. (Oh no, now I'll be dropped by Google.) The reality that Google needs to understand is that if people are doing research using Google to get publically available information, then that's fine. If Google doesn't like that, then they need some clear TOS with authentication and log-in. (And then we'll all jump over to Yahoo! to do research.)
If we all put robots.txt files up and complained about Google in protest, Google wouldn't exist. It's time to climb down from the high horse. Failure to do so will often result in being dismounted by falling share prices.
IANAL
Assuming the site only works for IE, that means, chances are that the site is in violation of federal law.
I urge people to check all .gov and .mil sites in the US and urge them to comply with section 508. If they fail to do so, they may be vulnerable to a lawsuit in Federal Court.
Actually, I think this is more a matter of certain Democrats continuing the party legacy of telling us how to live our lives, what values we should have, etc.
The Republicans didn't do anywhere near as much of that until the neo-conservatives hijacked the party.
The funniest thing I find is that politicians are all for regulating someone else's behaviour. Anti-abortion policies until their daughter is pregnant, then hush-hush, let's get them to Canada or similar.