Forced security. IT departments can lock down all sorts of things (require passwords, software versions, etc). Addionally it's designed securely, with (afaik) end to end encryption. (At least that's how it's sold).
For corporations/executives it's a much easier sell than "Well, if I lose my cell phone all my email is comprimised".
The blackberry hardware wipes the storage after 10 unsuccessful login attempts.
Plus it just works. It's a complete end to end package. Each provider's setup is generally the same, so it's provider neutral. No "install this version of this vpn software on this version of palm, or download this package for windows mobile 2005." A lot of the management is done server side so support issues are less of a problem.
Anyone notice he mentions a lot of products when he talks about the task they perform (OneNote, etc), but leaves out what desktop search he's using? Does MS have a working desktop search yet? Or is he using google's and doesn't want to mention it?:)
Can someone explain to me why tables are bad? Seriously, I haven't figured out how to not use them in certain situations. (Granted, I haven't looked that hard).
But say you have a form to be filled out, and on the left you have labels, and on the right you have inputs of varying height (think textarea), how do you present that without a table and get the equivalent of valign=top?
Also, using ajaxy stuff, custom attributes can make doing certain things really simple. (Like say you have mutliple text areas on a page, and you want to signal to js that some should be spellchecked. Adding spellcheck='true' as an attribute comes in handy since you don't have to keep track of it in more than one place.) At one point we tried providing custom DTDs, but we couldn't figure out a reason to go through the effort. Not a single validator would pick up the custom dtd nor would the browser request it.
I'd argue that firefox isn't faster than IE anymore (If it ever was.) It seems either the newer versions of ff are getting to be resource pigs or my honeymoon phase is over and I'm seeing it for what it is (a [more] standards compliant, trimmed down netscape navigator). Extensions are cool, but anyone who's tried to develop one has realized that memory management can be a bitch and most people disregard it. (Why am I leaking memory in a garbage collected language? The whole language revolves around closures, so not using them isn't an option).
Also, try this: Check your ff ram usage, go here, open the top 5 or 10 links in new tabs. Check ram usage. Close new tabs (but leave browser open). Check ram usage. Rinse, repeat until you use up all your swap. It's fun.
Interestingly, I'm finding the "legitimate" paid results - those down the right side of the screen, to often be more relevent to my searches than the top 10 URLs presented in the actual search body.
Lately I've seen the same thing when searching for product type stuff. (reviews, etc). I wonder if that's just coincidence or not. Which one makes money for google when you click it?
If hotmail is any indication, their 'solution' is crap. My wife has a small business run on a shared host. She has never sent bulk mail, or any automated email, yet she routinely ends up in the Junk folder on hotmail and msn. You'd think 50 people marking the only messages from a domain as not spam would 'teach' their filter.
She's got SPF set up (which is a complete joke), but the only thing MS offers (and even that isn't a guarantee) is getting sending bonded.
It's a pain in the ass when customers complain saying "Why haven't you responded" and there's nothing you can do about it unless they call. She finally went so far as to create a hotmail account that she can use to send to hotmail users. COMPLETE JOKE.
I'm not sure where but I remember reading that the signature's main purpose was not for identification, but to make something that would be a midemeanor (petty theft, shoplifted, etc) a felony (fraud).
I can't back this up, but seems to make sense given that teenagers at the GAP probably aren't forensic experts...
I think it's in Google's best interest to ween (sp?) people off of windows kind of like how they're doing with firefox.
If there's anything Microsoft is good at it's catching up. They don't even have to be better, just good enough because they can just toss whatever it is on top of windows. (Internet explorer, media player, etc). All of a sudden there's no significant reason to seek out a solution. [Normal] Users don't go looking for browsers and video players, if they click a link at it works they're happy.
So, from Google's perspective, MS is in a strong position to compete, even if they're late to the game. If Google doesn't take steps to lessen the OS advantage MS can still win with an inferior product.
Or, I could be wrong and Google has a name that will keep it on top (though does anyone know if the last xerox machine they used was a xerox?)
I'm not really sure about this argument. It's used a lot to support Linux as a secure OS.
If I'm running Linux (which I do), and running firefox as a user (which I also do), if there's a bug in firefox and I get infected about the only things malware CAN'T do is open privledged ports or overwrite system files. It could easily start up automatically by putting something in my.bashrc or.xinitrc, it could send spam, it could wipe out all of my important files (/etc is important, by not as much as/home/me).
So my question is, where does the seperation between user and admin help me on a single user pc?
You're perfectly welcome to your opinion, but you don't speak for 99% of the population. You can probably get something that just works and have a wonderful experience at the run down pawn shop in a seedy part of town. Most people aren't going to take that chance.
Similarly, a restuarant that doesn't take the time to sweep its floors isn't going to get my business.
You can have the most functional framework and a perfect design behind something, but most people aren't going to be impressed until it looks good.
My parents' '92 Geo Metro just works, it's not for me.
I see what you're trying to get at, that information is key, but trust in that information has a lot to do with the layout of the site.
Google is absolutley one of the best interfaces ever. Without a doubt. I know that, you know that. Joe sixpack does not. The majority of people (and most managers:) ) equate shiny clicky things with quality. (Over generalizing here a bit). I'm not saying that he requires shiny clicky for quality, but he equates the two more.
I said that making web pages for human beings was good.
I said that making web pages for art critics: not so much.
I'd argue that these are one and the same. Something made for humans has to be asthetically pleasing.
Also, making an ugly site can be as simple as putting a marque (does that still work?) tag somewhere. Not hard at all.
Is it possible to make a web site scale perfectly across all display sizes and browsers? Yes (well, maybe). Is it cost effective? Hell no.
I do web design for a couple small artsy type sites, and their biggest criteria is style. They could care less if your employer's treo can display it properly, they want it to be pixel perfect in IE (I do test on gecko and khtml). A big part of distinguishing yourself from the competition is how professional your site appears to be. A lot of the time that means your site is going to be composed of a _lot_ of images. Images for rounding corners, images for making the background of title bar not a solid color, images for displaying the product, etc. Browsers scale images like ass. Until IE does on the fly cubic resizing, it's simply not feasible to design a scalable image intensive site. Plus, when designing with CSS, a lot of the images are in the css background attribute. Last I checked those images couldn't be scaled even if you wanted to.
The best you can do is shoot for a _minimum_ size to work with. I believe that's what this topic is about: How wide should his masthead be? Is it worth still designing with 800x600 in mind? (In my experience it's still about %20 of visitors).
Scaling up is not to much of an issue, but scaling down is a huge hurdle. It's hard enough to ensure that your layout looks good when people start adjusting font sizes.
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot to be said for not designing for a specific case, but trying to design for ALL cases is simply not feasible.
Caveats: There are exceptions to this, but it all goes back to the site in question. Forums would probably benefit greatly from text only views. It's possible to have a central design that targets a minimum width, with alternate styles for text only. Whether this is even worthwile depends entirely on the site in question.
I probably started rambling in this post, sorry. I just find the posts that say "You should use standards only! Forget IE! Perfect design is king!" to be so something... Naive, pretentious, I don't know... something. The real world has compromise. Live with it.
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4 This bug affects me too. In linux moz/ff store the bitmap version of all images inside the X server. The following has only had ff up for 15 or so minutes, and the only tab open is this reply page.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2963 root 15 0 176m 45m 4112 S 1.7 4.5 4:06.32 X 26048 marwatk 15 0 112m 43m 17m S 0.0 4.3 0:52.99 firefox-bin
This would only be a problem if v3 was less restrictive than v2. If you don't like the new restrictions in v3, you simply leave it as is and people can either choose the less restricted v2, or the more restricted v3. The new restrictions about web services and production and such (if they actually go that route) won't apply to those that choose to still use v2 on your software. I don't see how it's a problem.
I use linux exclusively but there are huge features I miss from windows.
Note: Many of these gripes could be redhat specific, it's all I've ever used.
1. File associations Every app seems to have it's own method of determining what to use when I want to open a file. (The three big ones for me are firefox, wine and kde). I'm probably missing something here, but I haven't been able to figure out a way to make them all cohesive.
2. Multimedia 2a. Video Tried compiling mplayer or xine? And have them work with the majority of the codecs out there? And get it to run on your laptop display fullscreen without dropping frames? And get sounds from your IM app to play while you're watching something? WTF, this should not be this hard. 2b. Audio It may just be my config, but I had to manually add a software mixer in alsa to get my IM dings when playing any sort of music or movie. Add to that, my work voicemail system uses a GSM codec that I had to write a shell script to filter through sox and then a player in order to even hear it. I wouldn't even know where to begin if I wanted surround sound from a dvd.
3. Corporate groupware I hate exchange and notes as much as the next guy, but they or a [supported] comparable solution needs to be available without wine.
4. Firefox (or another browser) needs to be able to render any site IE can as IE does. If you're running linux exclusively and you need to, for example, do online banking, switching to IE 'really quick' isn't a viable option. It does not matter that those sites are in error by supporting IE only, that fact doesn't help me reconcile my checkbook any easier.
5. Wifi This is just a PITA for me for some reason. Is there a simple app out there that will let me scan for APs and connect to one without going through 8 different apps?
6. Fonts (minor) I miss in windows the wonderful Arial font that would always seem to be 1 pixel wide everywhere. In linux every font looks thick and just... I don't know, too thick. Java (jedit) seems to accomplish it even on linux, so I'm probably missing something to get it working in kde as a whole.
That's all I can think of at the moment. Games are a biggy, but that's always brought up. Some people seem to dislike oo.org but I don't have any complaints with it.
Multimonitor is definitely the way to go. I use three (2 CRTs, wish I had all flat panels).
My laptop runs everything from the far right display. The left monitor is running XP, controlled with x2vnc, and is used to see results (in both IE and Firefox). The middle monitor runs the highest resolution and is my code window. The right window (the actual laptop display) I usually have up some sort of documentation or reference material (or my mail client).
I think it's hugely beneficial to not have to hunt the taskbar for whatever you happen to be doing, so much easier to just move the mouse over to the other window(s). Especially when you're debugging and you're constantly moving from the editor to the browser and back checking minor changes to your code.
I visited Norad when I was a kid, and was SO disappointed that there was no huge room like in War Games (at least not that I saw). And visiting various NOCs they were always a let down...
Then I saw this one in person. Straight out of the movies. You can't see it in the picture, but there's a briefing center behind it with glass that's normally opaque (translucent really) but turns transparent when current is applied (Exactly like the congressional hearing scene in Sum of All Fears). Fun to watch peoples' faces when they hit the button.
The problem with your logic is there's no way to put up a sign that says "Come on in" with WIFI. I leave my AP open so that anyone can use it, in the hopes someone returns the favor. Some nice guy has an open AP at the pool in my community, so you can 'work' from the pool. How can you differentiate between someone letting you have access to their WIFI and someone too stupid to password protect it? Answer: You can't. So it should be assumed that an open hotspot is just that: OPEN.
IMHO the best cell phone ever made. I keep an extra on hand in case I break mine and can't find a new one (they're cheap now). I think they can only be found on ebay at this point, but the size, speed and feature set for people wanting just a phone can't be beat.
In related news, the Cable & Satellite Higher Subscription Fee Association released figures claiming that 72 percent of subscribers felt they were paying too little for their monthly programming. 18 percent said they'd gladly pay twice as much if the level of customer service could be lowered.
I agree, I'd gladly pay twice as much for even worse customer service. WTF. In addition, the $49 a month I pay for basic digital cable is WAY too low. It should definitely be more like a car payment, especially since I get so much joy out of commercials.
I know this is supposed to be funny. But think of someone who has the power to do this? Image if google all of a sudden put up a link on their front page: "Sorry, internet explorer is not longer supported by google. Please download Firefox here". Right now they're the only ones that can really pull a microsoft on microsoft.
Really all they'd have to do is make people aware of firefox on their front page.
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Forced security. IT departments can lock down all sorts of things (require passwords, software versions, etc). Addionally it's designed securely, with (afaik) end to end encryption. (At least that's how it's sold).
For corporations/executives it's a much easier sell than "Well, if I lose my cell phone all my email is comprimised".
The blackberry hardware wipes the storage after 10 unsuccessful login attempts.
Plus it just works. It's a complete end to end package. Each provider's setup is generally the same, so it's provider neutral. No "install this version of this vpn software on this version of palm, or download this package for windows mobile 2005." A lot of the management is done server side so support issues are less of a problem.
And wireless calendaring kicks ass.
Anyone notice he mentions a lot of products when he talks about the task they perform (OneNote, etc), but leaves out what desktop search he's using? Does MS have a working desktop search yet? Or is he using google's and doesn't want to mention it? :)
Can someone explain to me why tables are bad? Seriously, I haven't figured out how to not use them in certain situations. (Granted, I haven't looked that hard).
But say you have a form to be filled out, and on the left you have labels, and on the right you have inputs of varying height (think textarea), how do you present that without a table and get the equivalent of valign=top?
Also, using ajaxy stuff, custom attributes can make doing certain things really simple. (Like say you have mutliple text areas on a page, and you want to signal to js that some should be spellchecked. Adding spellcheck='true' as an attribute comes in handy since you don't have to keep track of it in more than one place.) At one point we tried providing custom DTDs, but we couldn't figure out a reason to go through the effort. Not a single validator would pick up the custom dtd nor would the browser request it.
I'd argue that firefox isn't faster than IE anymore (If it ever was.) It seems either the newer versions of ff are getting to be resource pigs or my honeymoon phase is over and I'm seeing it for what it is (a [more] standards compliant, trimmed down netscape navigator). Extensions are cool, but anyone who's tried to develop one has realized that memory management can be a bitch and most people disregard it. (Why am I leaking memory in a garbage collected language? The whole language revolves around closures, so not using them isn't an option).
Also, try this: Check your ff ram usage, go here, open the top 5 or 10 links in new tabs. Check ram usage. Close new tabs (but leave browser open). Check ram usage. Rinse, repeat until you use up all your swap. It's fun.
Interestingly, I'm finding the "legitimate" paid results - those down the right side of the screen, to often be more relevent to my searches than the top 10 URLs presented in the actual search body.
Lately I've seen the same thing when searching for product type stuff. (reviews, etc). I wonder if that's just coincidence or not. Which one makes money for google when you click it?
Just a thought...
If hotmail is any indication, their 'solution' is crap. My wife has a small business run on a shared host. She has never sent bulk mail, or any automated email, yet she routinely ends up in the Junk folder on hotmail and msn. You'd think 50 people marking the only messages from a domain as not spam would 'teach' their filter.
She's got SPF set up (which is a complete joke), but the only thing MS offers (and even that isn't a guarantee) is getting sending bonded.
It's a pain in the ass when customers complain saying "Why haven't you responded" and there's nothing you can do about it unless they call. She finally went so far as to create a hotmail account that she can use to send to hotmail users. COMPLETE JOKE.
I'm not sure where but I remember reading that the signature's main purpose was not for identification, but to make something that would be a midemeanor (petty theft, shoplifted, etc) a felony (fraud).
I can't back this up, but seems to make sense given that teenagers at the GAP probably aren't forensic experts...
I think it's in Google's best interest to ween (sp?) people off of windows kind of like how they're doing with firefox.
If there's anything Microsoft is good at it's catching up. They don't even have to be better, just good enough because they can just toss whatever it is on top of windows. (Internet explorer, media player, etc). All of a sudden there's no significant reason to seek out a solution. [Normal] Users don't go looking for browsers and video players, if they click a link at it works they're happy.
So, from Google's perspective, MS is in a strong position to compete, even if they're late to the game. If Google doesn't take steps to lessen the OS advantage MS can still win with an inferior product.
Or, I could be wrong and Google has a name that will keep it on top (though does anyone know if the last xerox machine they used was a xerox?)
I'm not really sure about this argument. It's used a lot to support Linux as a secure OS.
.bashrc or .xinitrc, it could send spam, it could wipe out all of my important files (/etc is important, by not as much as /home/me).
If I'm running Linux (which I do), and running firefox as a user (which I also do), if there's a bug in firefox and I get infected about the only things malware CAN'T do is open privledged ports or overwrite system files. It could easily start up automatically by putting something in my
So my question is, where does the seperation between user and admin help me on a single user pc?
You're perfectly welcome to your opinion, but you don't speak for 99% of the population. You can probably get something that just works and have a wonderful experience at the run down pawn shop in a seedy part of town. Most people aren't going to take that chance.
Similarly, a restuarant that doesn't take the time to sweep its floors isn't going to get my business.
You can have the most functional framework and a perfect design behind something, but most people aren't going to be impressed until it looks good.
My parents' '92 Geo Metro just works, it's not for me.
I see what you're trying to get at, that information is key, but trust in that information has a lot to do with the layout of the site.
:) ) equate shiny clicky things with quality. (Over generalizing here a bit). I'm not saying that he requires shiny clicky for quality, but he equates the two more.
Google is absolutley one of the best interfaces ever. Without a doubt. I know that, you know that. Joe sixpack does not. The majority of people (and most managers
I said that making web pages for human beings was good.
I said that making web pages for art critics: not so much.
I'd argue that these are one and the same. Something made for humans has to be asthetically pleasing.
Also, making an ugly site can be as simple as putting a marque (does that still work?) tag somewhere. Not hard at all.
This kind of thinking is just naive.
Is it possible to make a web site scale perfectly across all display sizes and browsers? Yes (well, maybe). Is it cost effective? Hell no.
I do web design for a couple small artsy type sites, and their biggest criteria is style. They could care less if your employer's treo can display it properly, they want it to be pixel perfect in IE (I do test on gecko and khtml). A big part of distinguishing yourself from the competition is how professional your site appears to be. A lot of the time that means your site is going to be composed of a _lot_ of images. Images for rounding corners, images for making the background of title bar not a solid color, images for displaying the product, etc. Browsers scale images like ass. Until IE does on the fly cubic resizing, it's simply not feasible to design a scalable image intensive site. Plus, when designing with CSS, a lot of the images are in the css background attribute. Last I checked those images couldn't be scaled even if you wanted to.
The best you can do is shoot for a _minimum_ size to work with. I believe that's what this topic is about: How wide should his masthead be? Is it worth still designing with 800x600 in mind? (In my experience it's still about %20 of visitors).
Scaling up is not to much of an issue, but scaling down is a huge hurdle. It's hard enough to ensure that your layout looks good when people start adjusting font sizes.
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot to be said for not designing for a specific case, but trying to design for ALL cases is simply not feasible.
Caveats:
There are exceptions to this, but it all goes back to the site in question. Forums would probably benefit greatly from text only views.
It's possible to have a central design that targets a minimum width, with alternate styles for text only. Whether this is even worthwile depends entirely on the site in question.
I probably started rambling in this post, sorry. I just find the posts that say "You should use standards only! Forget IE! Perfect design is king!" to be so something... Naive, pretentious, I don't know... something. The real world has compromise. Live with it.
I went to read that, it sounded interesting... Then I got to the word 'synergy' in the summary...
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4
This bug affects me too.
In linux moz/ff store the bitmap version of all images inside the X server. The following has only had ff up for 15 or so minutes, and the only tab open is this reply page.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2963 root 15 0 176m 45m 4112 S 1.7 4.5 4:06.32 X
26048 marwatk 15 0 112m 43m 17m S 0.0 4.3 0:52.99 firefox-bin
This would only be a problem if v3 was less restrictive than v2. If you don't like the new restrictions in v3, you simply leave it as is and people can either choose the less restricted v2, or the more restricted v3. The new restrictions about web services and production and such (if they actually go that route) won't apply to those that choose to still use v2 on your software. I don't see how it's a problem.
I use linux exclusively but there are huge features I miss from windows.
Note: Many of these gripes could be redhat specific, it's all I've ever used.
1. File associations
Every app seems to have it's own method of determining what to use when I want to open a file. (The three big ones for me are firefox, wine and kde). I'm probably missing something here, but I haven't been able to figure out a way to make them all cohesive.
2. Multimedia
2a. Video
Tried compiling mplayer or xine? And have them work with the majority of the codecs out there? And get it to run on your laptop display fullscreen without dropping frames? And get sounds from your IM app to play while you're watching something? WTF, this should not be this hard.
2b. Audio
It may just be my config, but I had to manually add a software mixer in alsa to get my IM dings when playing any sort of music or movie. Add to that, my work voicemail system uses a GSM codec that I had to write a shell script to filter through sox and then a player in order to even hear it. I wouldn't even know where to begin if I wanted surround sound from a dvd.
3. Corporate groupware
I hate exchange and notes as much as the next guy, but they or a [supported] comparable solution needs to be available without wine.
4. Firefox (or another browser) needs to be able to render any site IE can as IE does. If you're running linux exclusively and you need to, for example, do online banking, switching to IE 'really quick' isn't a viable option. It does not matter that those sites are in error by supporting IE only, that fact doesn't help me reconcile my checkbook any easier.
5. Wifi
This is just a PITA for me for some reason. Is there a simple app out there that will let me scan for APs and connect to one without going through 8 different apps?
6. Fonts (minor)
I miss in windows the wonderful Arial font that would always seem to be 1 pixel wide everywhere. In linux every font looks thick and just... I don't know, too thick. Java (jedit) seems to accomplish it even on linux, so I'm probably missing something to get it working in kde as a whole.
That's all I can think of at the moment. Games are a biggy, but that's always brought up. Some people seem to dislike oo.org but I don't have any complaints with it.
Multimonitor is definitely the way to go. I use three (2 CRTs, wish I had all flat panels).
My laptop runs everything from the far right display.
The left monitor is running XP, controlled with x2vnc, and is used to see results (in both IE and Firefox). The middle monitor runs the highest resolution and is my code window. The right window (the actual laptop display) I usually have up some sort of documentation or reference material (or my mail client).
I think it's hugely beneficial to not have to hunt the taskbar for whatever you happen to be doing, so much easier to just move the mouse over to the other window(s). Especially when you're debugging and you're constantly moving from the editor to the browser and back checking minor changes to your code.
I visited Norad when I was a kid, and was SO disappointed that there was no huge room like in War Games (at least not that I saw). And visiting various NOCs they were always a let down...
Then I saw this one in person. Straight out of the movies. You can't see it in the picture, but there's a briefing center behind it with glass that's normally opaque (translucent really) but turns transparent when current is applied (Exactly like the congressional hearing scene in Sum of All Fears). Fun to watch peoples' faces when they hit the button.
Finally I can write the plugin for GAIM I've always wanted: Filter IMs from unpopular people.
:)
Heh, seriously, someone is probably already hard at work writing something like this using this interface. Sad sad world...
The problem with your logic is there's no way to put up a sign that says "Come on in" with WIFI. I leave my AP open so that anyone can use it, in the hopes someone returns the favor. Some nice guy has an open AP at the pool in my community, so you can 'work' from the pool. How can you differentiate between someone letting you have access to their WIFI and someone too stupid to password protect it? Answer: You can't. So it should be assumed that an open hotspot is just that: OPEN.
IMHO the best cell phone ever made. I keep an extra on hand in case I break mine and can't find a new one (they're cheap now).
I think they can only be found on ebay at this point, but the size, speed and feature set for people wanting just a phone can't be beat.
In related news, the Cable & Satellite Higher Subscription Fee Association released figures claiming that 72 percent of subscribers felt they were paying too little for their monthly programming. 18 percent said they'd gladly pay twice as much if the level of customer service could be lowered.
I agree, I'd gladly pay twice as much for even worse customer service. WTF. In addition, the $49 a month I pay for basic digital cable is WAY too low. It should definitely be more like a car payment, especially since I get so much joy out of commercials.
Or 3) They realize that quality isn't worth the effort or money. 'Good enough' made them the largest software company in the world.
I know this is supposed to be funny. But think of someone who has the power to do this? Image if google all of a sudden put up a link on their front page: "Sorry, internet explorer is not longer supported by google. Please download Firefox here". Right now they're the only ones that can really pull a microsoft on microsoft.
Really all they'd have to do is make people aware of firefox on their front page.
This is slashdot, man. We are nothing without strife.