I don't think this is quite the scalp everyone is looking for..
It is good enough. He was the one person in Australia who was preventing the R18+ rating from being introduced. He wasn't just one politician who was against it, he was someone who had veto power over the entire thing. Now that he is out of that key role, the way is clear for all Attorneys General to allow the change to go through.
It wasn't a great election result for Gamers4croydon, who were standing against the Attorney General on the platform of allowing R18+ ratings. They only received 3.7% of the vote. In fact, there were more informal (or invalid) votes at 5%.
Still, they will be happy with the final outcome, even if it wasn't a victory for grass roots campaigning.
how is the SA AG's view on computer games flawed? It should be obvious to anyone that he believes that the views of his constituency...are not supportive of a "wider range" of content in video games.
First of all, he doesn't believe that. In a recent letter he wrote about this, he stated "this issue has little traction with my constituents who are more concerned with real-life issues than home entertainment in imaginary worlds". So it seems that he is not representing the will of his constituents, but he thinks that they don't care about it.
As to why it is flawed, that is because it is so out of step with the rest of the country. Adding an R rating for video games requires the agreement of all Attorneys General of all the states. Michael Atkinson is the only one who will not agree to it, despite the evidence suggesting that the majority of Australians support the introduction.
The main problem is that it doesn't stop kids from seeing adult games. In fact, because there is no R rating, games that would have received that tend to get MA15+ ratings. Those that aren't banned, that is.
It can only have been based on experience with IE8, IE7, IE6, IE5, IE4, IE3, IE2, and IE1, with a large helping of extra Microsoft.
If you are going that far back, then you are including the time they attained parity with their main rival (Netscape Navigator) with IE3 and also where they exceeded the opposition in terms of stability, standards compliance and general user interface features in IE4 & IE5.
Unfortunately they rested on their laurels with IE6 during the time Netscape got reimplemented, so that when Mozilla Suite was released they were behind the eight ball (although it wasn't until the release of Firefox that IE got its real competition).
Still, you can't just say that IE9 will be bad because IE has always been the inferior product, because it is simply not true. They arrogantly allowed themselves to become the inferior product in just the same way that Netscape did back in the 90s.
Well, we don't actually know when the flaw was disclosed. We only know that it was acknowledged to be disclosed recently, but it could have been a while back. However, I don't have a problem with it taking time to do the find, fix and test. The fix for the bug may have ramifications in other parts of the code, and it takes time to check this.
I think people can be a bit unreasonable with their expectations of patch times.
Okay, so far, MSIE9 is technically an improvement, but not close enough to its competitors to be taken seriously.
It is a year away from being released, and not even in alpha yet. The only thing we have seen so far is a tech demo of the trident engine that didn't even have a full browser user interface. How can you be making any sort of judgement call about it is already?
Vista was a mess as we all know and most business users have skipped it entirely.
Except Vista isn't a mess. I didn't see it when it was first released (because I believed the naysayers here and avoided it), but post SP1 Vista works fine. Mind you, I was used to running as a non-Administrator user. As for business skipping it, why wouldn't they? Unless there is a compelling reason to upgrade, why spend the money? At my work, we are only just upgrading most of our workstations from Windows 2000!
Talk to me when Windows 7 Service Pack 2 comes out. That's when I'll start installing it for business users.
What is wrong with Windows 7 now? What are the deal-breaker bugs that you need to get fixed? I have been using it since the beta and it has been remarkably solid. I think you are just parrotting the old line about not using SP0 products without even checking that it is true this time.
My computer has a opengl32.dll, and it has a Microsoft copyright. However, it does require the graphics card manufacturer to provide a driver for their card. I don't know which graphics card would not come with one these days. Have a look at Windows Vista and OpenGL - the facts.
These sorts of comparisons between operating systems are always pointless. I just had a look at the major improvements of the various OS X editions and there was quite a lot of new features that were already in Windows. But in the Windows releases over the same time you will find features that already existed on the Mac.
The biggest problem occurs where people just don't know about the features of the other operating system. In your post, there were examples of this. Various Unix shells have been available from Microsoft since 1999 for NT 4.0 and up. NTFS is a journaling filesystem. The Windows Indexing Service was released in 1996 for Windows NT 4.0. IPv6 was released in Windows XP SP1 a year before the Mac, although the first unsupported version was released for NT 4.0 in 1998. And while Vista was the first Windows to not run as root by default, the ability to run as a normal user has been around since the very first version of Windows NT 3.1. Despite what people say it is not impossible to be a limited user under old Windows, but some third party programs do stuff up (which is why it wasn't the default until Vista - it certainly wasn't Microsoft's choice).
Other things are just not that relevent or required in Windows. The tendency of Windows users to run everything in maximized mode (which irritates me) means that things like Exposé and multiple desktops were not a great priority. The lack of DVD playing was no problems because every DVD player (and lots of video cards) came with their own software for Windows.
Finally, there are some things that they would not be allowed to do. Adobe would have something to say if Microsoft tried to include PDF viewing/creating in Windows.
wouldn't compiling THEN running the java script be overall slower because of it not being pre compiled?
If there were loops involved then compiling the loop once would be faster than interpreting loop each time. Also, a lot of Javascript runs in response to events. In those cases the compile time would likely be over before the event was triggered.
Lotus 123, Visicalc, WordPerfect,... I guess you can give MS PowerPoint.
Also Access from dBase. It is interesting that you include both Lotus 123 and Visicalc. It just goes to show that borrowing ideas has gone on since year dot. Even Visicalc was just a pretty interface to existing spreadsheet programs.
Just imagine how crap software would be these days if they had software patents back then. We would still be having to run our spreadsheet in non-interactive batch mode.
That's why I have no problems at all with incorporating ideas from proprietary software into open source projects. It is a time honoured tradition to look at something and say "I could do this, but better".
My only beef is when people get all high and mighty about ideas being borrowed in the other direction. Who cares if Microsoft or Apple take ideas that started in the open source world. The end result is an improved user experience for all software.
You write a number in the box. I write it backwards. Gun nuts get the highest number, the greens get the lowest (which is 1)
Oh, I get it. I was wondering why you wanted people to have to hold your ballot up to a mirror to find out what you wrote.
The counting down technique is exactly how I do it too. I call it the "who do I hate the most" principle. And never vote above the line for the senate, always fill in every single box. It is the same principle as wanting to see the source code. If the parties don't publicise how your vote will count if you give them a tick above the line then they don't deserve the vote.
Finally, I don't know why they didn't use the existing, reliable system that we already have. It is called Myki. They already have booths all over Victoria and they have an unenviable track record. The only problem is that you have to remember to vote twice, otherwise they charge you the full national debt.
The EU has certainly waited until far too late - this step should have been taken 10 years ago. However, I do support what they are doing simply because it will prevent history from repeating itself.
Won't happen, not in IE's favour anyway. 10 years ago Netscape 4 was crap compared to IE, and then they stopped development to rewrite it from scratch. This time, there are a number of different options around that one browser disappearing will not be so dramatic.
You *need* standards, otherwise you go back to a situation where the platforms have diverged and only the majority platform is supported
I agree that you need standards. I was saying that W3C has never been great at leading the standards. Way too often they were reacting to the extensions that the browsers came up with For example, Netscape's Javascript and tables. Also Microsoft's iframes and various DOM stuff. Fortunately they ignored Netscape's layers and <blink>other crap!</blink>
HTML 5 is a terrible design. XHTML introduced some real improvements over HTML 4.01, but a small number of vendors (Microsoft, Nokia, etc.) decided to raise two fingers at the W3C and implement their own badly designed standard instead (HTML 5).
I am not a great fan of HTML 5, but at least they are adding features that will be seen by the punters. Also, Microsoft and Nokia had nothing to do with HTML 5. According to the WHATWG FAQ it was started "by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software".
Finally, there is going to be an XHTML 5. I haven't look at it to know how useful it will be.
But the point is that the people who don't care are the ones who just wildly click on anything to make the dialog box go away and then complain that their computer is acting funny. I have no doubt that there will be some people who will call in a techie to remove a virus because their user interface has changed. This will not help those people.
The people who do care already had the option of installing another browser. We know this because we can see the increasing market share of the other browsers. This will not help those people either.
If people really wanted choice then Linux would have a greater market share than it does now.
We've already seen what happens when Microsoft gains an unopposed monopoly - IE6 caused the web to stagnate for *years* because they had destroyed the competition and so there was no longer anyone pushing MS into doing any further development work on it.
First of all, they don't have a monopoly anymore, so why bother doing this now. And they were certainly never unopposed.
But how did they cause the web to stagnate? Sure they didn't support PNG format properly until way too late, but really what makes the web so much better now than it was when Netscape threw in the towel and decided to rewrite their browser from scratch? We had CSS back then. In fact CSS 3 started in 1998 and it still isn't finalised - now that's criminal!
We already had Flash, Java and Javascript. The main thing that makes the web so much "better" than it was in 1998 was AJAX. And that was first developed by Microsoft.
I think the real problem for the web over the last decade was the W3C. HTML kept improving while the browser manufacturers kept adding features and W3C adopted what they liked. But now the emphasis is on the browsers strictly implementing the standard, the standards have just stopped moving. The successor to HTML 4 was XHTML, which was technical fiddling around the edges rather than adding something for the end user. Eventually we are going to get HTML 5, which will definitely add something to benefit the surfers. But it took WHATWG to get the ball rolling on that. "Now there's your problem!"
What's best for the general public is using more exploit resistant browsers - and now they have a chance.
They had a chance before. Just like the rest of us, there is nothing to stop them from downloading as many browsers as they want.
I'd love a prompt like that. How long until our government(s) get a clue and mandate it as well?
Why do you need a prompt before you are able to load another browser? If what other people say here is true, there is still a bit of IE left on your computer even if you select one of the other options. The prompt really doesn't change much from what we can already do now.
According to parent, we should all be forgetting about all the other browsers and just go with IE, because it's there and people don't care.
Really? Where did I say that? Where did I advocate what browser everyone should use? You are attempting to put words in my mouth (or on my keyboard).
All I did was describe what the general public currently want to do. They want to sit down at their computer and just jump on the web. They simply don't care what the program is. However, they will care if the user interface changes and things don't work as they used to because a court mandated Window Update changed it on them (they will forget they had to click through a browser choice window).
Except, of course, that we all still remember how much IE kept the Web back when it was the de facto standard. Just the same way that Windos has kept computing in the stone age. Maybe people don't care about the browser, but they do care about the detrimental effects of monopoly products, even if they don't understand what is happening why.
Why don't you go out and quiz the average Joe Public about this. Ask them how IE kept the Web back. Or how Windows has kept computing in the stone age. Ask them what they currently cannot do because they run Windows. Ask them that if they care about the detrimental effects of monopoly products, why did they still choose Microsoft Windows? It would be fascinating to find out what the answer is.
because IE is absolutely positively terrible.It has no redeeming qualities a home user would use.
Well it gets on to the web, is generally fast enough and surfs around without crashing. Surely that is what most people want. If IE were that terrible then we wouldn't need a browser choice system forced on us - people would be actively finding the alternatives themselves, just like your 60 woman.
One could argue that, in long-term, awareness that one can even choose a browser (or, in more extreme cases, awareness of what a "browser" even is, as a class of applications) is more beneficial for the society as a whole than just "using what they already know".
Feel free to make that argument. I would be interested in what the benefits are. But I maintain that people just want to use their computer as an appliance to get the job done. They don't care about the subtle differences between software, anymore than they would care about whether they used NTFS or ext4 for their file system. People like us might care, but other people have other priorities.
If they need to know about this stuff, then we developers have not done our job properly.
It actually does help them, because their own stupidity will be limited by the capabilities of the browser they choose. So if you gave them IE by default, the most clueless users would catch every IE/Windows related malware.
Yeah, but they will still want to run Flash, which is the biggest security problem in Windows these days. IE 8 is much better for security than previous versions, especially when running in protected mode. It is not a sure thing than someone running IE will get infected (not like it used to be).
That would be the reason why the change was necessary. MS doesn't do a particularly responsible job of supporting IE, and way too many people think that IE is the internet and Outlook is email.
But why should they care how they access the web. If they think that IE is the internet, then how is tricking them into loading another browser going to help them?
The browser choice system is designed to help the other browser makers like Mozilla and Opera. It is designed to help the website designers who bitch about CSS support in IE. It is not designed to help the people who actually own the computers that are being forced to re-choose their software.
The thing that everyone has forgotten here is what is best for the general public - the ones who aren't interested in tinkering with their computer and who just want to get onto the web. They don't care that there are other options out there, because they just want to use what they already know. They don't care if writing a website for IE is more work for the webmasters, because they don't see any of that and all they know is that all the websites that they want just work.
I couldn't even login to Google in the time it took to load Excel on a freshly booted system. If you are going to discount any preloading of Excel then surely you would have to also turn off the "Stay signed in" checkbox for Google and clear the browser cache so all the javascript files have to be downloaded.
That is unless you want to test the actual user experience of these products, which must surely be the most fair and useful test. In that case, you have to allow all the optimisation techniques for both products. On my system, the beta of Office 2010 is still the fastest. I have avoided using Microsoft Office products on my computers just to avoid the bloat - I use the shareware Spread32 for spreadsheets, which is really fast. But I have to say that I have been impressed with this beta. It loads faster than I recalled. Although admittedly my main experience with Office dates back to Office 97 so it is to be hoped that they had made improvements since then!
I didn't say they were the first to not follow standards; UNIX was developed in 1969.
Why should Unix have been considered to be the standard? It was just another operating system in competition with the rest. It would have been incredibly arrogant for them at the time to tell the rest of the world that the Unix way was the only way things should be done.
However, in regards to MS (and we're close to being offtopic here) when was the last time you heard about an Apache vuln? Apache is relatively solid
Both Apache and IIS are pretty secure, although I have no idea why you would run Apache on a Windows server.
My problems with MS, however, are philosophical. MS seems to revel in giving the finger to standards, from the backslash to everything else.
Oh dear, you didn't just claim that the forward slash was a standard, did you? MS-DOS 1 used the same conventions as CP/M and VMS for command line arguments: forward slash. When DOS 2.0 added directories, but they had to use backslash to prevent backwards compatibility problems. They couldn't use the Apple Mac's colon separator because they already used that for drive letters, and nobody wanted to be anything like VMS's square brackets []. (See, there really was no standard)
However, they did actually implement the paths using both / and \. You could change an environment variable to set the argument prefix. Then you could happily use "cd/DOS". Even today, both symbols work. You can try:
notepad c:\autoexec.bat notepad c:/autoexec.bat
The only time where / doesn't work is when it may be interpreted as a command line option. So "cd/Windows" doesn't work, but "cd./Windows" does work. The point is that there was no standard for directory separators because every operating system did things their own way. And even if they did differ, there was a valid reason to do so. It was not just "giving the finger to standards". There are examples of them not using standards, like the Outlook-Exchange interface (although they probably would have had to extend the interface to get it to work using the standards so there may have been no point).
As for your DNS story, of course Windows can set the DNS manually. Don't ask me to tell you where you set it, because they keep moving around the network configuration with every version of Windows. That really pisses me off. Every upgrade of Windows since Windows for Workgroups 3.11 has made networking harder. I don't know why they have to keep fiddling!
It was not Microsoft who claimed that it was cross platform. They were never trying for that. Eric Rudder explicitly said in the video how this was a demonstration of the "commonality of the platform across all of their offerings". This was just a demonstration of that, plus the use of the Live services to link that save games (which was the only thing that got any audience reaction).
The integration over the net sounds like a nice feature, but if it cannot also save locally then this is just another version of the Ubisoft DRM - where the game won't work without contacting their servers.
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I don't think this is quite the scalp everyone is looking for..
It is good enough. He was the one person in Australia who was preventing the R18+ rating from being introduced. He wasn't just one politician who was against it, he was someone who had veto power over the entire thing. Now that he is out of that key role, the way is clear for all Attorneys General to allow the change to go through.
It wasn't a great election result for Gamers4croydon, who were standing against the Attorney General on the platform of allowing R18+ ratings. They only received 3.7% of the vote. In fact, there were more informal (or invalid) votes at 5%.
Still, they will be happy with the final outcome, even if it wasn't a victory for grass roots campaigning.
how is the SA AG's view on computer games flawed? It should be obvious to anyone that he believes that the views of his constituency...are not supportive of a "wider range" of content in video games.
First of all, he doesn't believe that. In a recent letter he wrote about this, he stated "this issue has little traction with my constituents who are more concerned with real-life issues than home entertainment in imaginary worlds". So it seems that he is not representing the will of his constituents, but he thinks that they don't care about it.
As to why it is flawed, that is because it is so out of step with the rest of the country. Adding an R rating for video games requires the agreement of all Attorneys General of all the states. Michael Atkinson is the only one who will not agree to it, despite the evidence suggesting that the majority of Australians support the introduction.
The main problem is that it doesn't stop kids from seeing adult games. In fact, because there is no R rating, games that would have received that tend to get MA15+ ratings. Those that aren't banned, that is.
Probably a biased judgment
There is no "probably" about it.
It can only have been based on experience with IE8, IE7, IE6, IE5, IE4, IE3, IE2, and IE1, with a large helping of extra Microsoft.
If you are going that far back, then you are including the time they attained parity with their main rival (Netscape Navigator) with IE3 and also where they exceeded the opposition in terms of stability, standards compliance and general user interface features in IE4 & IE5.
Unfortunately they rested on their laurels with IE6 during the time Netscape got reimplemented, so that when Mozilla Suite was released they were behind the eight ball (although it wasn't until the release of Firefox that IE got its real competition).
Still, you can't just say that IE9 will be bad because IE has always been the inferior product, because it is simply not true. They arrogantly allowed themselves to become the inferior product in just the same way that Netscape did back in the 90s.
The flaw was disclosed to Mozilla only recently
Well, we don't actually know when the flaw was disclosed. We only know that it was acknowledged to be disclosed recently, but it could have been a while back. However, I don't have a problem with it taking time to do the find, fix and test. The fix for the bug may have ramifications in other parts of the code, and it takes time to check this.
I think people can be a bit unreasonable with their expectations of patch times.
Okay, so far, MSIE9 is technically an improvement, but not close enough to its competitors to be taken seriously.
It is a year away from being released, and not even in alpha yet. The only thing we have seen so far is a tech demo of the trident engine that didn't even have a full browser user interface. How can you be making any sort of judgement call about it is already?
Vista was a mess as we all know and most business users have skipped it entirely.
Except Vista isn't a mess. I didn't see it when it was first released (because I believed the naysayers here and avoided it), but post SP1 Vista works fine. Mind you, I was used to running as a non-Administrator user. As for business skipping it, why wouldn't they? Unless there is a compelling reason to upgrade, why spend the money? At my work, we are only just upgrading most of our workstations from Windows 2000!
Talk to me when Windows 7 Service Pack 2 comes out. That's when I'll start installing it for business users.
What is wrong with Windows 7 now? What are the deal-breaker bugs that you need to get fixed? I have been using it since the beta and it has been remarkably solid. I think you are just parrotting the old line about not using SP0 products without even checking that it is true this time.
My computer has a opengl32.dll, and it has a Microsoft copyright. However, it does require the graphics card manufacturer to provide a driver for their card. I don't know which graphics card would not come with one these days. Have a look at Windows Vista and OpenGL - the facts.
These sorts of comparisons between operating systems are always pointless. I just had a look at the major improvements of the various OS X editions and there was quite a lot of new features that were already in Windows. But in the Windows releases over the same time you will find features that already existed on the Mac.
The biggest problem occurs where people just don't know about the features of the other operating system. In your post, there were examples of this. Various Unix shells have been available from Microsoft since 1999 for NT 4.0 and up. NTFS is a journaling filesystem. The Windows Indexing Service was released in 1996 for Windows NT 4.0. IPv6 was released in Windows XP SP1 a year before the Mac, although the first unsupported version was released for NT 4.0 in 1998. And while Vista was the first Windows to not run as root by default, the ability to run as a normal user has been around since the very first version of Windows NT 3.1. Despite what people say it is not impossible to be a limited user under old Windows, but some third party programs do stuff up (which is why it wasn't the default until Vista - it certainly wasn't Microsoft's choice).
Other things are just not that relevent or required in Windows. The tendency of Windows users to run everything in maximized mode (which irritates me) means that things like Exposé and multiple desktops were not a great priority. The lack of DVD playing was no problems because every DVD player (and lots of video cards) came with their own software for Windows.
Finally, there are some things that they would not be allowed to do. Adobe would have something to say if Microsoft tried to include PDF viewing/creating in Windows.
wouldn't compiling THEN running the java script be overall slower because of it not being pre compiled?
If there were loops involved then compiling the loop once would be faster than interpreting loop each time. Also, a lot of Javascript runs in response to events. In those cases the compile time would likely be over before the event was triggered.
Lotus 123, Visicalc, WordPerfect, ... I guess you can give MS PowerPoint.
Also Access from dBase. It is interesting that you include both Lotus 123 and Visicalc. It just goes to show that borrowing ideas has gone on since year dot. Even Visicalc was just a pretty interface to existing spreadsheet programs.
Just imagine how crap software would be these days if they had software patents back then. We would still be having to run our spreadsheet in non-interactive batch mode.
That's why I have no problems at all with incorporating ideas from proprietary software into open source projects. It is a time honoured tradition to look at something and say "I could do this, but better".
My only beef is when people get all high and mighty about ideas being borrowed in the other direction. Who cares if Microsoft or Apple take ideas that started in the open source world. The end result is an improved user experience for all software.
You write a number in the box. I write it backwards. Gun nuts get the highest number, the greens get the lowest (which is 1)
Oh, I get it. I was wondering why you wanted people to have to hold your ballot up to a mirror to find out what you wrote.
The counting down technique is exactly how I do it too. I call it the "who do I hate the most" principle. And never vote above the line for the senate, always fill in every single box. It is the same principle as wanting to see the source code. If the parties don't publicise how your vote will count if you give them a tick above the line then they don't deserve the vote.
Finally, I don't know why they didn't use the existing, reliable system that we already have. It is called Myki. They already have booths all over Victoria and they have an unenviable track record. The only problem is that you have to remember to vote twice, otherwise they charge you the full national debt.
OK, non-Australians can come back again.
The EU has certainly waited until far too late - this step should have been taken 10 years ago. However, I do support what they are doing simply because it will prevent history from repeating itself.
Won't happen, not in IE's favour anyway. 10 years ago Netscape 4 was crap compared to IE, and then they stopped development to rewrite it from scratch. This time, there are a number of different options around that one browser disappearing will not be so dramatic.
You *need* standards, otherwise you go back to a situation where the platforms have diverged and only the majority platform is supported
I agree that you need standards. I was saying that W3C has never been great at leading the standards. Way too often they were reacting to the extensions that the browsers came up with For example, Netscape's Javascript and tables. Also Microsoft's iframes and various DOM stuff. Fortunately they ignored Netscape's layers and <blink>other crap!</blink>
HTML 5 is a terrible design. XHTML introduced some real improvements over HTML 4.01, but a small number of vendors (Microsoft, Nokia, etc.) decided to raise two fingers at the W3C and implement their own badly designed standard instead (HTML 5).
I am not a great fan of HTML 5, but at least they are adding features that will be seen by the punters. Also, Microsoft and Nokia had nothing to do with HTML 5. According to the WHATWG FAQ it was started "by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software".
Finally, there is going to be an XHTML 5. I haven't look at it to know how useful it will be.
But the point is that the people who don't care are the ones who just wildly click on anything to make the dialog box go away and then complain that their computer is acting funny. I have no doubt that there will be some people who will call in a techie to remove a virus because their user interface has changed. This will not help those people.
The people who do care already had the option of installing another browser. We know this because we can see the increasing market share of the other browsers. This will not help those people either.
If people really wanted choice then Linux would have a greater market share than it does now.
We've already seen what happens when Microsoft gains an unopposed monopoly - IE6 caused the web to stagnate for *years* because they had destroyed the competition and so there was no longer anyone pushing MS into doing any further development work on it.
First of all, they don't have a monopoly anymore, so why bother doing this now. And they were certainly never unopposed.
But how did they cause the web to stagnate? Sure they didn't support PNG format properly until way too late, but really what makes the web so much better now than it was when Netscape threw in the towel and decided to rewrite their browser from scratch? We had CSS back then. In fact CSS 3 started in 1998 and it still isn't finalised - now that's criminal!
We already had Flash, Java and Javascript. The main thing that makes the web so much "better" than it was in 1998 was AJAX. And that was first developed by Microsoft.
I think the real problem for the web over the last decade was the W3C. HTML kept improving while the browser manufacturers kept adding features and W3C adopted what they liked. But now the emphasis is on the browsers strictly implementing the standard, the standards have just stopped moving. The successor to HTML 4 was XHTML, which was technical fiddling around the edges rather than adding something for the end user. Eventually we are going to get HTML 5, which will definitely add something to benefit the surfers. But it took WHATWG to get the ball rolling on that. "Now there's your problem!"
What's best for the general public is using more exploit resistant browsers - and now they have a chance.
They had a chance before. Just like the rest of us, there is nothing to stop them from downloading as many browsers as they want.
I'd love a prompt like that. How long until our government(s) get a clue and mandate it as well?
Why do you need a prompt before you are able to load another browser? If what other people say here is true, there is still a bit of IE left on your computer even if you select one of the other options. The prompt really doesn't change much from what we can already do now.
According to parent, we should all be forgetting about all the other browsers and just go with IE, because it's there and people don't care.
Really? Where did I say that? Where did I advocate what browser everyone should use? You are attempting to put words in my mouth (or on my keyboard).
All I did was describe what the general public currently want to do. They want to sit down at their computer and just jump on the web. They simply don't care what the program is. However, they will care if the user interface changes and things don't work as they used to because a court mandated Window Update changed it on them (they will forget they had to click through a browser choice window).
Except, of course, that we all still remember how much IE kept the Web back when it was the de facto standard. Just the same way that Windos has kept computing in the stone age. Maybe people don't care about the browser, but they do care about the detrimental effects of monopoly products, even if they don't understand what is happening why.
Why don't you go out and quiz the average Joe Public about this. Ask them how IE kept the Web back. Or how Windows has kept computing in the stone age. Ask them what they currently cannot do because they run Windows. Ask them that if they care about the detrimental effects of monopoly products, why did they still choose Microsoft Windows? It would be fascinating to find out what the answer is.
because IE is absolutely positively terrible.It has no redeeming qualities a home user would use.
Well it gets on to the web, is generally fast enough and surfs around without crashing. Surely that is what most people want. If IE were that terrible then we wouldn't need a browser choice system forced on us - people would be actively finding the alternatives themselves, just like your 60 woman.
One could argue that, in long-term, awareness that one can even choose a browser (or, in more extreme cases, awareness of what a "browser" even is, as a class of applications) is more beneficial for the society as a whole than just "using what they already know".
Feel free to make that argument. I would be interested in what the benefits are. But I maintain that people just want to use their computer as an appliance to get the job done. They don't care about the subtle differences between software, anymore than they would care about whether they used NTFS or ext4 for their file system. People like us might care, but other people have other priorities.
If they need to know about this stuff, then we developers have not done our job properly.
It actually does help them, because their own stupidity will be limited by the capabilities of the browser they choose. So if you gave them IE by default, the most clueless users would catch every IE/Windows related malware.
Yeah, but they will still want to run Flash, which is the biggest security problem in Windows these days. IE 8 is much better for security than previous versions, especially when running in protected mode. It is not a sure thing than someone running IE will get infected (not like it used to be).
That would be the reason why the change was necessary. MS doesn't do a particularly responsible job of supporting IE, and way too many people think that IE is the internet and Outlook is email.
But why should they care how they access the web. If they think that IE is the internet, then how is tricking them into loading another browser going to help them?
The browser choice system is designed to help the other browser makers like Mozilla and Opera. It is designed to help the website designers who bitch about CSS support in IE. It is not designed to help the people who actually own the computers that are being forced to re-choose their software.
The thing that everyone has forgotten here is what is best for the general public - the ones who aren't interested in tinkering with their computer and who just want to get onto the web. They don't care that there are other options out there, because they just want to use what they already know. They don't care if writing a website for IE is more work for the webmasters, because they don't see any of that and all they know is that all the websites that they want just work.
I couldn't even login to Google in the time it took to load Excel on a freshly booted system. If you are going to discount any preloading of Excel then surely you would have to also turn off the "Stay signed in" checkbox for Google and clear the browser cache so all the javascript files have to be downloaded.
That is unless you want to test the actual user experience of these products, which must surely be the most fair and useful test. In that case, you have to allow all the optimisation techniques for both products. On my system, the beta of Office 2010 is still the fastest. I have avoided using Microsoft Office products on my computers just to avoid the bloat - I use the shareware Spread32 for spreadsheets, which is really fast. But I have to say that I have been impressed with this beta. It loads faster than I recalled. Although admittedly my main experience with Office dates back to Office 97 so it is to be hoped that they had made improvements since then!
I didn't say they were the first to not follow standards; UNIX was developed in 1969.
Why should Unix have been considered to be the standard? It was just another operating system in competition with the rest. It would have been incredibly arrogant for them at the time to tell the rest of the world that the Unix way was the only way things should be done.
However, in regards to MS (and we're close to being offtopic here) when was the last time you heard about an Apache vuln? Apache is relatively solid
Both Apache and IIS are pretty secure, although I have no idea why you would run Apache on a Windows server.
My problems with MS, however, are philosophical. MS seems to revel in giving the finger to standards, from the backslash to everything else.
Oh dear, you didn't just claim that the forward slash was a standard, did you? MS-DOS 1 used the same conventions as CP/M and VMS for command line arguments: forward slash. When DOS 2.0 added directories, but they had to use backslash to prevent backwards compatibility problems. They couldn't use the Apple Mac's colon separator because they already used that for drive letters, and nobody wanted to be anything like VMS's square brackets []. (See, there really was no standard)
However, they did actually implement the paths using both / and \. You could change an environment variable to set the argument prefix. Then you could happily use "cd /DOS". Even today, both symbols work. You can try:
notepad c:\autoexec.bat
notepad c:/autoexec.bat
The only time where / doesn't work is when it may be interpreted as a command line option. So "cd /Windows" doesn't work, but "cd ./Windows" does work. The point is that there was no standard for directory separators because every operating system did things their own way. And even if they did differ, there was a valid reason to do so. It was not just "giving the finger to standards". There are examples of them not using standards, like the Outlook-Exchange interface (although they probably would have had to extend the interface to get it to work using the standards so there may have been no point).
As for your DNS story, of course Windows can set the DNS manually. Don't ask me to tell you where you set it, because they keep moving around the network configuration with every version of Windows. That really pisses me off. Every upgrade of Windows since Windows for Workgroups 3.11 has made networking harder. I don't know why they have to keep fiddling!
Nice try Microsoft.
It was not Microsoft who claimed that it was cross platform. They were never trying for that. Eric Rudder explicitly said in the video how this was a demonstration of the "commonality of the platform across all of their offerings". This was just a demonstration of that, plus the use of the Live services to link that save games (which was the only thing that got any audience reaction).
The integration over the net sounds like a nice feature, but if it cannot also save locally then this is just another version of the Ubisoft DRM - where the game won't work without contacting their servers.