Whenever people refer to it as WP7, I momentarily get excited and wonder if Word Perfect has finally returned.
WordPerfect still exists. The most recent version was released in 2010, although it is only available as part of the WordPerfect Office Suite. But I am with you on this, I always think of WordPerfect first when I see WP7.
The article is considers Apple releasing this update on time and Microsoft releasing theirs late and in a piecemeal fashion as an indication of what the companies are like, but the author forgets two things. First, the iOS 4.2 was delayed (actually cancelled and later released as 4.2.1) when a WiFi bug was found. Granted it wasn't as long a Microsoft's delay, but still...
Second, the iPad was stuck at iOS 3.x for a long time after 4.x was available for the iPhone and iPod. It skipped 4.0 and 4.1 until it finally hit OS parity at 4.2.1. This was despite Apple controlling both the hardware and software as the article suggests.
As to Microsoft's offering, I have never considered WP7 to be a released product until they fixed the basic things like copy/paste. The old adage of always waiting for a ".1" release of a Microsoft product was true again. It was disappointing after they got it so right with Windows 7.
No, thatâ(TM)s not how it works. There is an assigned timeslot for each attacker/target pair. VUPEN/Safari was the first timeslot. The others followed later in the day.
How is that different from what I said? They have 30 minute timeslots, so when VUPEN was allocated Safari, other people were allocated the other browser/OS to hack. Therefore they were all hacked at the same time exactly as I said in my post.
Excuses, excuses. Your Mac is an insecure piece of shit.
That is just juvenile. The Mac is definitely not as magically secure as a lot of fans like to suggest, but it is not an "insecure piece of shit". Apple has been paying more attention to security these days, so the OS and browser will only get more secure as time goes by.
However, you are correct that the original poster was talking rubbish. Every year the Mac goes down first and every year people come up with the same excuse that the hackers target it because they want the prize more than the others. But as VUPEN's twitter post shows, they were allocated to the Mac first by the organisers. They got IE second, but I guess they must have been too late as someone else got that one.
Sitting on some damaging knowledge until you are paid to reveal it is plain extortion.
If I find a security hole in some software, I am under no obligation to tell anyone about it. But if a contest is set up (with the approval of the software companies) where I can use my knowledge to win a prize (and that knowledge is passed on the appropriate companies and NOT released to the public) then there is absolutely no problem.
It is only extortion if I contact the companies themselves and threaten to release the code to the world if I am not paid unless they pay me. But that is not what is happening here. Pwn2Own has been going on for years, and nobody has been arrested because of it.
Actually the reason Safari went down first was because it was the first target.
But they don't all hack the same computer at the same time. Everybody is allocated a 30 minute timeslot with the different computers and they all get attacked at the same time. At least, that is how it was described in previous years.
When Chaouki Bekrar was bringing down Safari, Stephen Fewer would have been launching his attack on IE8. IE took longer because as Fewer said "I had to chain multiple vulnerabilities to get it to work reliably." Bekrar only spoke of a single vulnerability in his comments. So the Mac was just easier to hack. Certainly all the excuses about hackers wanting the prize of a Macbook more than the others is just unfounded speculation.
I rather think that it means you're looking at the data too late. Of course MSIE was the dominant browser when it didn't have any real competition, but that was after the competition had been killed off. Before that, there was healthy competition between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
I have already posted a number of times that I believe that Netscape killed itself. They kept making their offering more buggy and bloated. Just look at the download sizes as the versions progressed. Netscape 3.03 was 3.3MB, Netscape 4.51 was 14.3MB and version 4.78 was 22.4MB. These days those figures seem tiny, but back that that was a big download. No wonder why it seemed so slow to run.
Why is it that they [Opera] never managed to sway a large percentage of users? Could it be because Opera, other than Netscape and IE, was never included on ISPs installation disks, included with shareware magazine's distributions, or bundled with operating systems on large scale?
Opera failed because it wasn't free. When they finally came out with a free version it was ad supported. Look around at how many people refuse to use a browser that does not have an ad blocker (even when the browser is free). I think that it is a great indication of how much people hated the idea of ads in their browser. Once Opera dropped the ads, it was too late - they missed their opportunity (despite being a good browser).
At some point, Microsoft apparently got worried enough about the competition on the browser front that they created an Internet Explorer team again. Yes, they had actually disbanded the IE team after the release of IE 6.
This illustrates my point, that all IE needed was a competitor. Once they got that, the browser market became innovative again.
Does bundling a browser with the operating system (or ISP service) give that browser a huge advantage over the competition? I think it is clear that it does.
Being the default browser will definitely be an advantage, but it doesn't make it unassailable. The current browser stats show this, as we now have the situation where there is more diversity than ever before and all while IE is still the default browser in Windows in most parts of the world.
But Netscape was cheated out of the market, and the market was cheated out of the superior browser, by Microsoft.
That is just wrong. Netscape Navigator evolved to be a bloated mess. It crashed all the time, and had much worse standard CSS and DOM support than IE. Why do you think Netscape felt the need to completely rewrite the code after Netscape 4.X?
They also had some kind of deal with an awful lot of software makers so, no matter what software you installed, for some reason that software installed Internet Explorer on your computer too.
I imagine that was because they made a good API for Internet Explorer so that you could plug it into 3rd party programs. They installed IE because they needed it. This is exactly the same as video software installing ffdshow or any one of the zillions of examples in the open source world (where programs use other programs as building blocks).
But all those factors were the same before and after the introduction of the browser choice system. If being the default browser was such had powerful effect on the adoption rates as was claimed by a lot of people, then there should have been some jump in the stats. The simple fact is that the browser stats don't match what you thought would happen, so you come up with all sorts of exuses to explain it away.
You might try to belittle me because I like to look for facts to back up what I say, but all you do is just ignore it because it is inconvenient for you. Which one of us really seems like one of those MBA types?
What a silly response. It is quite simple. Microsoft introduced the browser ballot window. The market trends for browsers after this happened turned out to be the same as they were prior to that. This isn't an opinion, it is on the graphs.
Are we expected to believe the scenario that another poster postulated that the almost constant drop in usage for Internet Explorer over the last 7 or 8 years would have coincidentally halted at around March 2010, and that the drop caused by the browser selection window would turn out to be EXACTLY that same as it was dropping before? Nary a blip on the chart! I think I will follow Occam's razor and stick with my simpler explanation.
The fact that Microsoft's browser usage had plummeted prior to it being removed as the default browser clearly shows that being the pre-installed is not a guarantee that you will win the browser wars.
Netscape was awesome back in the 3.1 days, and many people used it.
But then it stopped being awesome, and people stopped using it.
I remember when I first tried Internet Explorer and found it to be a breath of fresh air compared to Netscape Navigator. It was smaller, faster, and had a superior DOM. The only thing that I hated about it was the alert that popped up on virtually every page because I had ActiveX turned off. If there was one reason that we needed some competition for IE, then it was that we needed something that didn't support ActiveX.
But getting back to what the great-grandparent said, just because Netscape died a bloated death does not mean that there is no competition now.
According to this article, there was one worthwhile competitor. and it was shit.
That is why I added the adjective "worthwhile" to my sentence, just to exclude Netscape! Back in the day, I used to use lynx as an alternative to IE. I wouldn't consider that to be a maintream competitor either.
IE still has no real competion in my view - so what's your point.
My point is that eventually you will upgrade from Windows 3.1, and then you will find that there are other browser options out there. But until then, I hope that you have a WONDERF.ULL time in 16 bit land.
Yeah yeah, extrapolating future trends by drawing a straight line between past points. That is SUCH a reliable method.
But nobody even speculated about what will happen in the future. This discussion is purely about what happened once the EU forced Microsoft to implement the browser choice window. My only comment was the decline shows a fairly constant drop since Mozilla came out. I wouldn't dare predict what is going to happen in the future, mainly because I don't know how IE9 will be received.
The browser ballot changed things, would the lines have been as they are now without it? Nobody knows but it is not beyond imagination that IE would have bottomed out 50% instead and might even have climbed with the release of IE9.
The fact that there is absolutely no change in the trends in either direction is definitely an indication that the ballot had no effect. The idea that IE might have bottomed out at 50% is pure, unsupported speculation.
None of the trends reversed, but IE's decline and Chrome's rise accelerated a fair bit.
No, they didn't. There might appear to be a slight change in IE's descent in the graph in TFA but if you could zoom out the graph to show a larger timeframe then it is a pretty darn constant drop. The rise in Chrome would be because it was such a new browser, although the graph the TFA shows the exactly same gradient in the months before and after the browser choice system was implemented. The article itself says:
The big five - or should that be big three? - almost aren't the issue here. As the graph above shows, despite a few minor wobbles around the time of the ballot's launch (marked by the dotted line), all five browsers continued largely on the trend lines they'd been following for months beforehand.
I ran the browser usage by year through a spreadsheet a couple of months ago and found the same thing. The decline in Internet Explorer usage was remarkably consistent over the years. The EU's browser choice appeared to make no difference in the usage deltas for all the browsers. I didn't look at the less used browsers, but I imagine that they would be the true winners because hardly anybody would have heard of the minor players if it weren't for being on this list.
It just goes to show that the reason that IE got to have so much dominance was not because it was bundled with the operating system, but that for far too long it had no real competition.
And you still have somebands or musicians that are still making conceptual albums... So maybe you argument is bogus.
Or maybe a few examples are not enough to invalidate a trend. There is still new jazz and classical music being written today, but that doesn't mean that those genres are considered to be mainstream anymore. Vinyl records have been superceded, but a few people still buy music on that medium. Pianola rolls are still produced today, but I think that it would be safe to say that 99.999% of people would consider it to be a dead format.
CD sales are down but not out. Concept albums may be still be produced, but more and more they will become a niche, non-mainstream market.
Doesn't this disprove the theory that getting movies and music free gets people to buy more? Music has been declining in sales coincidentally since people started downloading and finding free web alternatives
It also coincides with the rise of the DVD. Prerecorded video sales have skyrocketed at the same time that music sales fell. DVD sales went up because they introduced the format that wouldn't wear out. More importantly however, the price of buying films went down. I have seen many occasions where buying a DVD of a film was much cheaper than buying the CD soundtrack of that film. People have a limited budget, so if they are going to buy films, something else has to go.
Also, as I said in another post, people will be more likely to buy an individual track at 99c than an entire CD and that MUST affect their bottom line.
But every generation thinks that modern music isn't as good as it used to be. There were plenty of people who hated the nice, clean sound of the Beatles, and who thought that Michael Jackson was just another generic pop singer pumping out tracks that sounded like all the other dross out there. In fact, listening to Jackson's later albums I can see where the basis for that opinion. But more importantly, you have forgotten just how much rubbish music you had to hear before you came across those memorable albums. How many times did you purchase an LP only to find that there was just one good track on it?
But the real killer of the unforgettable album is the ability to purchase individual tracks. The idea of making a concept album where the each track is related to the previous one died the when people could skip purchasing the songs they didn't like and then play them in shuffle mode so that there was no continuity.
We have come full circle to how things were at the start of the last century when all songs were purchased individually on wax cylinders. Back then you would buy one song at a time, just like you can with MP3s. Music survived that, and it will survive the move to the digital format now.
It's not as bad as it seems if you RTFA. The WiFi at the Capitol is just using a whitelist. It wasn't accessable, but it was added to the whitelist within 30 minutes of being notified that it was blocked.
Well sure, we know that now. But that is only because it has been over 30 minutes since the story was posted on Slashdot! We can finally read it now.
Let's face it. The best chance you have of being modded "+5 Informative" is to post early before you have had a chance to RTFA and become informed. I suggest we should introduce the moderation of "+5 Good Guess". Your post being the exception, naturally!;-)
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Whenever people refer to it as WP7, I momentarily get excited and wonder if Word Perfect has finally returned.
WordPerfect still exists. The most recent version was released in 2010, although it is only available as part of the WordPerfect Office Suite. But I am with you on this, I always think of WordPerfect first when I see WP7.
The article is considers Apple releasing this update on time and Microsoft releasing theirs late and in a piecemeal fashion as an indication of what the companies are like, but the author forgets two things. First, the iOS 4.2 was delayed (actually cancelled and later released as 4.2.1) when a WiFi bug was found. Granted it wasn't as long a Microsoft's delay, but still...
Second, the iPad was stuck at iOS 3.x for a long time after 4.x was available for the iPhone and iPod. It skipped 4.0 and 4.1 until it finally hit OS parity at 4.2.1. This was despite Apple controlling both the hardware and software as the article suggests.
As to Microsoft's offering, I have never considered WP7 to be a released product until they fixed the basic things like copy/paste. The old adage of always waiting for a ".1" release of a Microsoft product was true again. It was disappointing after they got it so right with Windows 7.
Look on the bright side - if the tsunami washes over Australia at least it'll put the bushfires out.
It was closer to the part of Australia that had the massive floods. The fires were on the far side of the country.
No, thatâ(TM)s not how it works. There is an assigned timeslot for each attacker/target pair. VUPEN/Safari was the first timeslot. The others followed later in the day.
How is that different from what I said? They have 30 minute timeslots, so when VUPEN was allocated Safari, other people were allocated the other browser/OS to hack. Therefore they were all hacked at the same time exactly as I said in my post.
Excuses, excuses. Your Mac is an insecure piece of shit.
That is just juvenile. The Mac is definitely not as magically secure as a lot of fans like to suggest, but it is not an "insecure piece of shit". Apple has been paying more attention to security these days, so the OS and browser will only get more secure as time goes by.
However, you are correct that the original poster was talking rubbish. Every year the Mac goes down first and every year people come up with the same excuse that the hackers target it because they want the prize more than the others. But as VUPEN's twitter post shows, they were allocated to the Mac first by the organisers. They got IE second, but I guess they must have been too late as someone else got that one.
Sitting on some damaging knowledge until you are paid to reveal it is plain extortion.
If I find a security hole in some software, I am under no obligation to tell anyone about it. But if a contest is set up (with the approval of the software companies) where I can use my knowledge to win a prize (and that knowledge is passed on the appropriate companies and NOT released to the public) then there is absolutely no problem.
It is only extortion if I contact the companies themselves and threaten to release the code to the world if I am not paid unless they pay me. But that is not what is happening here. Pwn2Own has been going on for years, and nobody has been arrested because of it.
Actually the reason Safari went down first was because it was the first target.
But they don't all hack the same computer at the same time. Everybody is allocated a 30 minute timeslot with the different computers and they all get attacked at the same time. At least, that is how it was described in previous years.
When Chaouki Bekrar was bringing down Safari, Stephen Fewer would have been launching his attack on IE8. IE took longer because as Fewer said "I had to chain multiple vulnerabilities to get it to work reliably." Bekrar only spoke of a single vulnerability in his comments. So the Mac was just easier to hack. Certainly all the excuses about hackers wanting the prize of a Macbook more than the others is just unfounded speculation.
How about video games? Epic Mickey for the Wii was released in November 2010. The character is definitely still in use.
Well I tried it and got:
However, the point is that the grandparent was a joke. You don't have to turn it into a OS war.
I rather think that it means you're looking at the data too late. Of course MSIE was the dominant browser when it didn't have any real competition, but that was after the competition had been killed off. Before that, there was healthy competition between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
I have already posted a number of times that I believe that Netscape killed itself. They kept making their offering more buggy and bloated. Just look at the download sizes as the versions progressed. Netscape 3.03 was 3.3MB, Netscape 4.51 was 14.3MB and version 4.78 was 22.4MB. These days those figures seem tiny, but back that that was a big download. No wonder why it seemed so slow to run.
Why is it that they [Opera] never managed to sway a large percentage of users? Could it be because Opera, other than Netscape and IE, was never included on ISPs installation disks, included with shareware magazine's distributions, or bundled with operating systems on large scale?
Opera failed because it wasn't free. When they finally came out with a free version it was ad supported. Look around at how many people refuse to use a browser that does not have an ad blocker (even when the browser is free). I think that it is a great indication of how much people hated the idea of ads in their browser. Once Opera dropped the ads, it was too late - they missed their opportunity (despite being a good browser).
At some point, Microsoft apparently got worried enough about the competition on the browser front that they created an Internet Explorer team again. Yes, they had actually disbanded the IE team after the release of IE 6.
This illustrates my point, that all IE needed was a competitor. Once they got that, the browser market became innovative again.
Does bundling a browser with the operating system (or ISP service) give that browser a huge advantage over the competition? I think it is clear that it does.
Being the default browser will definitely be an advantage, but it doesn't make it unassailable. The current browser stats show this, as we now have the situation where there is more diversity than ever before and all while IE is still the default browser in Windows in most parts of the world.
But Netscape was cheated out of the market, and the market was cheated out of the superior browser, by Microsoft.
That is just wrong. Netscape Navigator evolved to be a bloated mess. It crashed all the time, and had much worse standard CSS and DOM support than IE. Why do you think Netscape felt the need to completely rewrite the code after Netscape 4.X?
They also had some kind of deal with an awful lot of software makers so, no matter what software you installed, for some reason that software installed Internet Explorer on your computer too.
I imagine that was because they made a good API for Internet Explorer so that you could plug it into 3rd party programs. They installed IE because they needed it. This is exactly the same as video software installing ffdshow or any one of the zillions of examples in the open source world (where programs use other programs as building blocks).
But all those factors were the same before and after the introduction of the browser choice system. If being the default browser was such had powerful effect on the adoption rates as was claimed by a lot of people, then there should have been some jump in the stats. The simple fact is that the browser stats don't match what you thought would happen, so you come up with all sorts of exuses to explain it away.
You might try to belittle me because I like to look for facts to back up what I say, but all you do is just ignore it because it is inconvenient for you. Which one of us really seems like one of those MBA types?
Correlation is not causation. Remember?
What a silly response. It is quite simple. Microsoft introduced the browser ballot window. The market trends for browsers after this happened turned out to be the same as they were prior to that. This isn't an opinion, it is on the graphs.
Are we expected to believe the scenario that another poster postulated that the almost constant drop in usage for Internet Explorer over the last 7 or 8 years would have coincidentally halted at around March 2010, and that the drop caused by the browser selection window would turn out to be EXACTLY that same as it was dropping before? Nary a blip on the chart! I think I will follow Occam's razor and stick with my simpler explanation.
The fact that Microsoft's browser usage had plummeted prior to it being removed as the default browser clearly shows that being the pre-installed is not a guarantee that you will win the browser wars.
Netscape was awesome back in the 3.1 days, and many people used it.
But then it stopped being awesome, and people stopped using it.
I remember when I first tried Internet Explorer and found it to be a breath of fresh air compared to Netscape Navigator. It was smaller, faster, and had a superior DOM. The only thing that I hated about it was the alert that popped up on virtually every page because I had ActiveX turned off. If there was one reason that we needed some competition for IE, then it was that we needed something that didn't support ActiveX.
But getting back to what the great-grandparent said, just because Netscape died a bloated death does not mean that there is no competition now.
According to this article, there was one worthwhile competitor. and it was shit.
That is why I added the adjective "worthwhile" to my sentence, just to exclude Netscape! Back in the day, I used to use lynx as an alternative to IE. I wouldn't consider that to be a maintream competitor either.
IE still has no real competion in my view - so what's your point.
My point is that eventually you will upgrade from Windows 3.1, and then you will find that there are other browser options out there. But until then, I hope that you have a WONDERF.ULL time in 16 bit land.
Yeah yeah, extrapolating future trends by drawing a straight line between past points. That is SUCH a reliable method.
But nobody even speculated about what will happen in the future. This discussion is purely about what happened once the EU forced Microsoft to implement the browser choice window. My only comment was the decline shows a fairly constant drop since Mozilla came out. I wouldn't dare predict what is going to happen in the future, mainly because I don't know how IE9 will be received.
The browser ballot changed things, would the lines have been as they are now without it? Nobody knows but it is not beyond imagination that IE would have bottomed out 50% instead and might even have climbed with the release of IE9.
The fact that there is absolutely no change in the trends in either direction is definitely an indication that the ballot had no effect. The idea that IE might have bottomed out at 50% is pure, unsupported speculation.
what would have happened if this was in there from the start?
If there had been 12 worthwhile competitors to IE from the start then it would not have acheived such dominance. That the point of my last paragraph.
None of the trends reversed, but IE's decline and Chrome's rise accelerated a fair bit.
No, they didn't. There might appear to be a slight change in IE's descent in the graph in TFA but if you could zoom out the graph to show a larger timeframe then it is a pretty darn constant drop. The rise in Chrome would be because it was such a new browser, although the graph the TFA shows the exactly same gradient in the months before and after the browser choice system was implemented. The article itself says:
The big five - or should that be big three? - almost aren't the issue here. As the graph above shows, despite a few minor wobbles around the time of the ballot's launch (marked by the dotted line), all five browsers continued largely on the trend lines they'd been following for months beforehand.
Their conclusions are the same as mine.
I ran the browser usage by year through a spreadsheet a couple of months ago and found the same thing. The decline in Internet Explorer usage was remarkably consistent over the years. The EU's browser choice appeared to make no difference in the usage deltas for all the browsers. I didn't look at the less used browsers, but I imagine that they would be the true winners because hardly anybody would have heard of the minor players if it weren't for being on this list.
It just goes to show that the reason that IE got to have so much dominance was not because it was bundled with the operating system, but that for far too long it had no real competition.
And you still have some bands or musicians that are still making conceptual albums... So maybe you argument is bogus.
Or maybe a few examples are not enough to invalidate a trend. There is still new jazz and classical music being written today, but that doesn't mean that those genres are considered to be mainstream anymore. Vinyl records have been superceded, but a few people still buy music on that medium. Pianola rolls are still produced today, but I think that it would be safe to say that 99.999% of people would consider it to be a dead format.
CD sales are down but not out. Concept albums may be still be produced, but more and more they will become a niche, non-mainstream market.
Doesn't this disprove the theory that getting movies and music free gets people to buy more? Music has been declining in sales coincidentally since people started downloading and finding free web alternatives
It also coincides with the rise of the DVD. Prerecorded video sales have skyrocketed at the same time that music sales fell. DVD sales went up because they introduced the format that wouldn't wear out. More importantly however, the price of buying films went down. I have seen many occasions where buying a DVD of a film was much cheaper than buying the CD soundtrack of that film. People have a limited budget, so if they are going to buy films, something else has to go.
Also, as I said in another post, people will be more likely to buy an individual track at 99c than an entire CD and that MUST affect their bottom line.
But every generation thinks that modern music isn't as good as it used to be. There were plenty of people who hated the nice, clean sound of the Beatles, and who thought that Michael Jackson was just another generic pop singer pumping out tracks that sounded like all the other dross out there. In fact, listening to Jackson's later albums I can see where the basis for that opinion. But more importantly, you have forgotten just how much rubbish music you had to hear before you came across those memorable albums. How many times did you purchase an LP only to find that there was just one good track on it?
But the real killer of the unforgettable album is the ability to purchase individual tracks. The idea of making a concept album where the each track is related to the previous one died the when people could skip purchasing the songs they didn't like and then play them in shuffle mode so that there was no continuity.
We have come full circle to how things were at the start of the last century when all songs were purchased individually on wax cylinders. Back then you would buy one song at a time, just like you can with MP3s. Music survived that, and it will survive the move to the digital format now.
It's not as bad as it seems if you RTFA. The WiFi at the Capitol is just using a whitelist. It wasn't accessable, but it was added to the whitelist within 30 minutes of being notified that it was blocked.
Well sure, we know that now. But that is only because it has been over 30 minutes since the story was posted on Slashdot! We can finally read it now.
Let's face it. The best chance you have of being modded "+5 Informative" is to post early before you have had a chance to RTFA and become informed. I suggest we should introduce the moderation of "+5 Good Guess". Your post being the exception, naturally! ;-)