It does. Install either (a) the Windows XP Virtual
Machine for Java from Windows Update or (b) the JRE from Sun.
Explorer supports style sheets
Internet Explorer does support CSS1 quite well.
Windows 3.11 supported DR-DOS
A beta of Windows 3.1 (not 3.11) would not run on
DR-DOS. Your exercise in gratuitous sarcasm has netted you one one half-accurate
fact. Congratulations.
Office supports XML
Yes, it does. Buy Office 2003 under volume licensing
and you'll see that Word, Excel and Access can indeed save their data as XML,
using documented schemas.
Windows Media Player supports MP3
Funny how my MP3 Winamp playlists play fine in WMP
then.
wheter intentional or not, the W's have created in Neo a fictional Christ figure with the potential to reinvigorate philosophical ponderings in the real world
In a story in Empire magazine when Reloaded was released, one of the Matrix crew (Gaeta?) said their goal was to show "the evolution of superhero" and that the Christ motif was not accidental. After seeing Revolutions, I'd have to say, it was intentional, and it worked pretty well. And a lot of people who're complaining about loose ends not being tied up need to lighten up a little.
Actually, as a Windows user, I bemoan the fact that all the good stuff comes to the Mac first. In all fairness, there may be much more software for the PC, but most of it is basically crap.
Yeah. Like Quark Express and Half Life 2. And the fact that Adobe's suite basically comes out on Windows first.
Mac fans spend too much time with their heads up Job's Reality Distortion Field to be able to talk sense.
Also, more time in the "lickable" Aqua world, and you will be instantly conscious of the mood altering effects of being surrounded by soft edges and clean surfaces with rich (but understated) textures [...]
I tried Foobar2000 a long time back, and it was very raw then. I installed it now, it seems much more complete. Dunno if I'll use it much (too used to my Winamp 2.81 shortcuts) but it's definitely worth a try. Thanks.
Good point, but survival (or fecundity, another natural trait) as an isAlive test in itself is not enough, legally speaking. Today, secular law tells us that a sterile quadriplegic is unquestionably alive and has rights, even though he probably wouldn't be able to survive without a great deal of support and technology infusion from care providers.
You called that shiny (ooh!) piece of geek orgasm-inducing goodness a `grossly overpriced mp3 player'? Philistine. You're probably one of teh lozers who surf AOL on their Windoze 98 boxes.
The main oversight I've noticed in reviews of iTunes is performance/efficiency, and it just so happens that performance is my major gripe with iTunes, and actually the main reason why I don't plan to use it.
No kidding. Perf in an MP3 player is important for me too, so I refuse to run any version of Winamp > 2.81 as well. (3 is bloat, 2.90 is lighter but still bloat). When I want a video player, I use DivX's or Media Player Classic. And I do have Musicmatch Free installed, it's a fine piece of software and I use it occasionally.
I think Apple should take its head out of its ass and design its Windows products like `real' Windows programs. Until they do that, they can stick with their 5% marketshare* and bemoan the fact that all the good stuff comes to the PC first.
> The math and logic skills involved in being a good programmer ARE quite rare.
Since you're a math hotshot: if your boss can product a gaggle of Bangalore geese who're *all* 75% as good as you are, and are so sheeplike that they all put together have 10% of your ego-related problems, AND will work for 1/6th of what you make, does it or does it not make sense for your boss to offshore your job?
I'm killing time right now, so I'm going to be long winded;)
> The Aryans, as an ancient civilization, grew up in what is now known as Iran
Persians do call their earliest civilization "Aryan", but so do parts of Germany and India. As far as I am concerned, "Aryan" is a term a lot of people are quick to claim, but have little to back it up. Here's what I understand from the mythology (you really can't call it history):
There was once a group of very early men (~4000 BC) who emerged out of Central Asia (and possibly Persia) and, in a Dune-like Scattering, went forth to South Asia towards the East and parts of Europe towards the West. Alternatively, they originated in Europe and spread Eastward. These people effectively were the stock from which all other Aryan nations originated.
There was never a "Aryan" civilization in the sense of a Greek, Roman , Chinese or Indus Valley civilization, i.e., pre/historic ruins and so forth. The only (scant) evidence is linguistic roots: words like "apel" (apple) and "mater" (mother) repeat time and again in several languages in the Indo-European family, suggesting a shared past.
> India never industrialized on their own
India was under British rule (the East India Company: case study of what happens when a giant multinational corporation owns a country:-D) at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and industrialization in India was discouraged when it was economically beneficial to Britain. Example: Cloth mills were not allowed in India for a very long time because the East India company's monopoly on importing cloth from England's famous Lancashire mills would be busted. (In fact, Gandhi later used the spinning wheel as a form of civil disobedience for just this reason -- he would rather make his rough homespun cloth himself than wear high-priced imported cloth)
After Independence, India _did_ industrialize. Not to the same extent as Europe/America, chiefly because (a) unfortunately because of a socialist/Gandhian hangover, India's early leaders somehow equated industry with evil (not unlike some slashdotters of today;), and (b) because India is very energy-poor country and simply cannot afford to buy the energy (i.e., oil/gas) it would take to have high levels of industrialization and (c) the large population makes labor cheap, so there's little incentive to build labor-saving devices.
> and to my knowledge has never been a world power (even in anciet times)
India, like Europe, was a collection of States. Before the British conquest, there were only 2 or 3 instances when one Indian ruler held territory equivalent to even ~80% of what India is today. The idea of "one India" is, ironically, an English one.
That said, like China for much of its history, kings of these Indian states had a rather inward-looking outlook (Something about Eastern philosophy?). It (generally) projected no naval power, sent out no missionaries nor missions of conquest (apart from some early forays into SE Asia, which is why the world largest Hindu temple is in Cambodia, not India).
> untouchable
Btw, untouchability is illegal under the Indian consitution. India has plenty of problem, yes, but untouchability in everyday life isn't one of them.
Even caste, that bugbear of Indian civilization is becoming less of problem (although it hasn't vanished) as folk become more educated and urbanized. It's often said that the degree to which caste is a problem in a given Indian region is inversely proportional to the spread of MTV, HBO and Pepsi there:)
> the most xenophobic, racist, and elitist society in history
Natch. that honour goes to their fellow Aryans, the mid-40s National Socialists (whose symbol incidentally was a bad copy of the Hindu swastika), who were xenophobic, racist and elitist, and claimed the lives of 6 million Jews to prove it.
Not just funny, +1 Insightful. I don't buy into the idea that long-lived beings would be more risk averse. If anything, they may actually be less risk averse because their medical tech would probably be more advanced than ours and they would judge the risks to be less.
Example: today most folk have an average life expectancy of 75+, compared to mid-40s in the middle ages (IIRC). On the other hand, I feel there are *more* who are into risk-prone leisure activity today than there were in the middle ages: bungee jumping, full contact combat, and so on. The lack of risk/challenge in everyday life has to be compensated somewhere, after all.
Also -- bottled water is insanely useful in areas without reliable water supply. In developing countries like India, Coke *and* Pepsi (and various local bottlers) sell 1 litre of bottled water for 20c and turn a profit. Interestingly, Evian sells for $1.60/litre here.
(Earlier post) They didn't provide training for Word or IE so why would they need to provide training for Open Office and Mozilla?
Products with dominant (85%+) marketshares usually get a free pass on the training. In fact, one reason to buy them is "less formal training", since there's a huge bunch of third party books/videos for that. One of the "hidden" costs of rolling out OpenOffice is also handling the training needs of people who are "used to Word" (or, worse, are Word 'power-users') and expect every last feature to work the same way.
And yes, there *are* users in the world who are more demanding than (from your accounts) "career soldiers". For example, PHBs. Ever tried telling a PHB his favorite spreadsheet template (which he's tended and watered for x years) won't open with OpenOffice? I wonder how the Army's PHB-equivalents feel about Calc vis-a-vis Excel.
So tell me, how can a dipshit like you make analysis about usage of computers in the Army without experience?... By using the same argument, Army should've never moved on to rifles from muskets since that would require money and time spent for aquiring and training for the new weapons.
Because the army is composed of humans (even ad-hominem spouting ones like you) and because humans have certain predictable reactions to change when the change isn't critical to their jobs. An infantryman will probably learn all about a new rifle even if there isn't a chance in hell of him using that in the near future. A geek like me will spend time downloading and evaluating everything from OpenOffice 6 to the new icc even if I only ever use vim and forte. But-- it does not follow that most infantrymen give a damn about what word processor they use: they just want to learn one and use it.
Infantryman is a bad example because I'm not speaking from personal knowledge -- for all I know, most infantrymen could be emacs fans. But if you substitute (say) 'financial analyst' above, it would be 100% a-ok.
It's mainly due to the fact that I'm sick tired of AC's who post "I'm right, you suck, just because I said so".
And I'm sick and tired of people proclaiming that that they other users "they know" somehow constitute valid user samples. (Hint: take any self-selected group with a pinch of salt.) Hence my I-don't-do/use-foo-hence-foo-sucks point.
------ (Since everyone else is handing out bios here, here's mine)
I'm about as far away from the Army as you can imagine (a developer for 5 years) and I have written code for Solaris and Linux in addition to Windows -- so I know a little about those three. I've been pretty fortunate of interacting with an IS staff that has to service a large number of demanding business users on a tight budget. So whatever I say is colored by that experience.
I use Linux and Windows together everyday. Windows on the laptop, Linux on a server I ssh to for mail etc. To me, the only usable part of Linux is the command line:-). For example, even the Gnome 2 on Redhat 8 hasn't figured out how to do dialog modality right, in spite of the Mac solving the problem in 1984 and Windows getting it right in v3.0 (1990-ish).
(Because I'm a private citizen I value my privacy somewhat, my name isn't on this public board, but my email address is bheer at myway dot com and I reply to any civil mail;-))
This is why Linux evangelists never make good analysts. Their logic goes like:
- I don't do/use foo. - All my friends don't do/use use bar instead of foo. - Windows users do/use foo easily. - Task/feature foo is worthless. - Lunix ru1ez!!!
Ever considered that you may not be the only user profile the army has to cater for? Ever consider that the vast majority of users are unfamiliar with the examples you cite and would probably view them as cheap knockoffs of the programs they are used to?
Ever consider the cost of retraining them? And providing support?
Naah. I thought not. Oh, btw, linux rules. Keep chanting that.
> Geeks everywhere have been doing this already > for a long time. It's nothing new or innovative.
Only, coming out with a crap-ass alpha isn't the only thing that counts as "innovation". Pushing it out into the "real world" and getting real people to use it also counts.
To that extent, Be is the only one who has innovated here - because they got a decent FS out into the hands of actual users (that they didn't get too many users is not totally thair fault). As for random geeks developing "their own libraries", and Gnome's VFS -- I suggest they ship something real before you start drooling about 'innovation'.
Outlook Express (and Outlook and Netscape Mail) have supported S/MIME for ages. All support keys signed by any CA. Hell, they'll even accept a self-signed key (no one else will probably accept it, though). You can get a free trialware-grade S/MIME key from Thawte, if you want to try S/MIME out, go to www.thawte.com and look for "free personal email certificate".
Btw, if you want free keys, stick to PGP. Signing X.509 certs (which is what S/MIME uses -- supported in Outlook Express, Outlook and Netscape Mail IIRC) is a costly affair -- due diligence in identity verification costs money, and any CA which doesn't charge is probably not doing identity verification and shouldn't be trusted.
Incidentally, the whole reason of why S/MIME never took off is that not too many people were willing to pay for signed CA certs (which use a pure X.509 hierarchical-trust model) for secure email where PGP keys could be had for free using a web-of-trust model.
> with a fingerprint, you dont need picture ID, and its more reliable.
The problem with any kind of biometric ID is that it's only as secure as the database that it checks against. Security based solely on biometric ID is very brittle -- because it's allegedly so "strong", once broken (by hacking into the database, by using someone else's eyeball) you have massive and nearly undetectable breaches of security.
The best security systems are not brittle. And for driver's licenses, photo ID does provide appropriate level of malleability.
IIRC providing incorrect contact info for your domain name leaves you vulnerable during domain name dispute resolution (if someone complains). e.g. WIPO:
5.4 In reference to paragraph 4(a)(iii) of the policy, the Complainant asserts that the domain name has been registered and used in bad faith because:
(a) Incorrect contact details were provided to the whois database. Neither telephone or facsimile contact information was given.
IE doesn't support XHTML 2.0, nor does Mozilla or Opera. The page to which you refer uses Appendix C XHTML 1.0 as an example of the new XHTML 2.0 features and their XHTML 1.0 equivalents.
Since when is the following valid XHTML 1.0 code? This is taken from the page I referred to. It may be that the XHTML 2.0 page is based on the draft standard, but I don't think this is valid XHTML 1.0. And even if it were, it would mean that Moz isn't as good as IE at displaying XHTML 1, and Opera doesn't display this at all. So which rendering engine is out-dated now?
> But take a look at 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.
Most of th the points in this page has to do with UI. (if we're talking about UI, the first thing I'd like to say is that Moz's GUI toolkit is f*ing ugly). A lot of us don't care for tabbed browsing (personally I think alt-tabbing through browser windows is the way to go). Since you called IE's rendering engine out-dated, could you point out a page with a comprehensive list of IE's rendering faults? (I know IE has a few rendering quirks, but I'll not accept that it's somehow as bad as Navigator 4 -- which is the impression being bandied about by most people in this thread.
Exactly how is this? I am not a web developer, but IIRC IE6 has pretty decent support for CSS1 and DOM level 1. Agree, IE hasn't kept up with bleeding edge stuff like CSS2 (and yes, transparent PNG support sucks), but that's hardly stagnation. Is there a link available somewhere (just so I could learn) that lists all the things IE6 does not do?
On the other hand, IE6 SP1 seems to render this XHTML 2.0 page slightly better then Phoenix 0.6 (Moz 1.4b) does. Opera 7.1 does not render it at all. For all its doodads (notes and all) isn't Opera 'stagnating' faster than IE?
As for UI tweaks, like tabs, gestures and popup blocking -- there are lots of IE "shells", like NetCaptor that add these to IE. Nothing stops someone from writing their own shell and giving it away.
Btw, I agree with you in principle -- with little competition in the marketplace, companies do have less incentive to add features. On the other hand, in practice, it is not clear that IE's competitors have produced a better product yet. Opera sucks memory, and even Firebird 0.6 (which I'm currently using because it's the best non-IE browser I've tried so far) has serious bugs with its History pane. I'd say basic features like those are way more important than chasing the latest standard-of-the-week from the W3C.
Mozilla is a fine browser and perhaps some groups in AOL need to be slapped into using it.
Browser -- yes. But Netscape was more than just a browser: it was a Communicator, remember? You might want to read this ZDNet story about how some Time-Warner employees who were directed to use Netscape software revolted -- back to Outlook and Lotus Notes.
I can sort of understand why they did that. We use Lotus Notes at work, and I've been fascinated by how expectations from email software of most business users differ radically from most techies.
Email for me is pieces of text exchanged back and forth. Email for my boss is
"groupware"
Integrated forms and scripting.
Workflow (ugh, hate that word)
"Rich text" -- HTML doesn't count, both Notes and Outlook allow Microsoft Word (!) to be used as the email editor.
"Blocking" mail from being forwarded outside the corporate network (yeah, I know it's stupid and so do the designers of Notes, but they implemented it nevertheless)
Integration with proprietary directories: Domino, AD.
I always laughed everytime I thought of the nsenterprise keyword on Bugzilla. Netscape never had a hope in hell of making it in the enterprise email market.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows XP supports Java
It does. Install either (a) the Windows XP Virtual Machine for Java from Windows Update or (b) the JRE from Sun.
Explorer supports style sheets
Internet Explorer does support CSS1 quite well.
Windows 3.11 supported DR-DOS
A beta of Windows 3.1 (not 3.11) would not run on DR-DOS. Your exercise in gratuitous sarcasm has netted you one one half-accurate fact. Congratulations.
Office supports XML
Yes, it does. Buy Office 2003 under volume licensing and you'll see that Word, Excel and Access can indeed save their data as XML, using documented schemas.
Windows Media Player supports MP3
Funny how my MP3 Winamp playlists play fine in WMP then.
Actually, as a Windows user, I bemoan the fact that all the good stuff comes to the Mac first. In all fairness, there may be much more software for the PC, but most of it is basically crap.
Yeah. Like Quark Express and Half Life 2. And the fact that Adobe's suite basically comes out on Windows first.
Mac fans spend too much time with their heads up Job's Reality Distortion Field to be able to talk sense.
Also, more time in the "lickable" Aqua world, and you will be instantly conscious of the mood altering effects of being surrounded by soft edges and clean surfaces with rich (but understated) textures [...]
Dude, get a life?
I tried Foobar2000 a long time back, and it was very raw then. I installed it now, it seems much more complete. Dunno if I'll use it much (too used to my Winamp 2.81 shortcuts) but it's definitely worth a try. Thanks.
Good point, but survival (or fecundity, another natural trait) as an isAlive test in itself is not enough, legally speaking. Today, secular law tells us that a sterile quadriplegic is unquestionably alive and has rights, even though he probably wouldn't be able to survive without a great deal of support and technology infusion from care providers.
You called that shiny (ooh!) piece of geek orgasm-inducing goodness a `grossly overpriced mp3 player'? Philistine. You're probably one of teh lozers who surf AOL on their Windoze 98 boxes.
> The math and logic skills involved in being a good programmer ARE quite rare.
Since you're a math hotshot: if your boss can product a gaggle of Bangalore geese who're *all* 75% as good as you are, and are so sheeplike that they all put together have 10% of your ego-related problems, AND will work for 1/6th of what you make, does it or does it not make sense for your boss to offshore your job?
Though the Really Extreme Programming where one developer sits on another developer's lap does show some promise
If my XP partner looked like this, oh yes. But usually they look like this, so XXXP ain't too hot for me.
I'm killing time right now, so I'm going to be long winded ;)
:-D) at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and industrialization in India was discouraged when it was economically beneficial to Britain. Example: Cloth mills were not allowed in India for a very long time because the East India company's monopoly on importing cloth from England's famous Lancashire mills would be busted. (In fact, Gandhi later used the spinning wheel as a form of civil disobedience for just this reason -- he would rather make his rough homespun cloth himself than wear high-priced imported cloth)
;), and (b) because India is very energy-poor country and simply cannot afford to buy the energy (i.e., oil/gas) it would take to have high levels of industrialization and (c) the large population makes labor cheap, so there's little incentive to build labor-saving devices.
:)
> The Aryans, as an ancient civilization, grew up in what is now known as Iran
Persians do call their earliest civilization "Aryan", but so do parts of Germany and India. As far as I am concerned, "Aryan" is a term a lot of people are quick to claim, but have little to back it up. Here's what I understand from the mythology (you really can't call it history):
There was once a group of very early men (~4000 BC) who emerged out of Central Asia (and possibly Persia) and, in a Dune-like Scattering, went forth to South Asia towards the East and parts of Europe towards the West. Alternatively, they originated in Europe and spread Eastward. These people effectively were the stock from which all other Aryan nations originated.
There was never a "Aryan" civilization in the sense of a Greek, Roman , Chinese or Indus Valley civilization, i.e., pre/historic ruins and so forth. The only (scant) evidence is linguistic roots: words like "apel" (apple) and "mater" (mother) repeat time and again in several languages in the Indo-European family, suggesting a shared past.
> India never industrialized on their own
India was under British rule (the East India Company: case study of what happens when a giant multinational corporation owns a country
After Independence, India _did_ industrialize. Not to the same extent as Europe/America, chiefly because (a) unfortunately because of a socialist/Gandhian hangover, India's early leaders somehow equated industry with evil (not unlike some slashdotters of today
> and to my knowledge has never been a world power (even in anciet times)
India, like Europe, was a collection of States. Before the British conquest, there were only 2 or 3 instances when one Indian ruler held territory equivalent to even ~80% of what India is today. The idea of "one India" is, ironically, an English one.
That said, like China for much of its history, kings of these Indian states had a rather inward-looking outlook (Something about Eastern philosophy?). It (generally) projected no naval power, sent out no missionaries nor missions of conquest (apart from some early forays into SE Asia, which is why the world largest Hindu temple is in Cambodia, not India).
> untouchable
Btw, untouchability is illegal under the Indian consitution. India has plenty of problem, yes, but untouchability in everyday life isn't one of them.
Even caste, that bugbear of Indian civilization is becoming less of problem (although it hasn't vanished) as folk become more educated and urbanized. It's often said that the degree to which caste is a problem in a given Indian region is inversely proportional to the spread of MTV, HBO and Pepsi there
> the most xenophobic, racist, and elitist society in history
Natch. that honour goes to their fellow Aryans, the mid-40s National Socialists (whose symbol incidentally was a bad copy of the Hindu swastika), who were xenophobic, racist and elitist, and claimed the lives of 6 million Jews to prove it.
Not just funny, +1 Insightful. I don't buy into the idea that long-lived beings would be more risk averse. If anything, they may actually be less risk averse because their medical tech would probably be more advanced than ours and they would judge the risks to be less.
Example: today most folk have an average life expectancy of 75+, compared to mid-40s in the middle ages (IIRC). On the other hand, I feel there are *more* who are into risk-prone leisure activity today than there were in the middle ages: bungee jumping, full contact combat, and so on. The lack of risk/challenge in everyday life has to be compensated somewhere, after all.
Also -- bottled water is insanely useful in areas without reliable water supply. In developing countries like India, Coke *and* Pepsi (and various local bottlers) sell 1 litre of bottled water for 20c and turn a profit. Interestingly, Evian sells for $1.60/litre here.
(Earlier post) They didn't provide training for Word or IE so why would they need to provide training for Open Office and Mozilla?
... By using the same argument, Army should've never moved on to rifles from muskets since that would require money and time spent for aquiring and training for the new weapons.
:-). For example, even the Gnome 2 on Redhat 8 hasn't figured out how to do dialog modality right, in spite of the Mac solving the problem in 1984 and Windows getting it right in v3.0 (1990-ish).
;-))
Products with dominant (85%+) marketshares usually get a free pass on the training. In fact, one reason to buy them is "less formal training", since there's a huge bunch of third party books/videos for that. One of the "hidden" costs of rolling out OpenOffice is also handling the training needs of people who are "used to Word" (or, worse, are Word 'power-users') and expect every last feature to work the same way.
And yes, there *are* users in the world who are more demanding than (from your accounts) "career soldiers". For example, PHBs. Ever tried telling a PHB his favorite spreadsheet template (which he's tended and watered for x years) won't open with OpenOffice? I wonder how the Army's PHB-equivalents feel about Calc vis-a-vis Excel.
So tell me, how can a dipshit like you make analysis about usage of computers in the Army without experience?
Because the army is composed of humans (even ad-hominem spouting ones like you) and because humans have certain predictable reactions to change when the change isn't critical to their jobs. An infantryman will probably learn all about a new rifle even if there isn't a chance in hell of him using that in the near future. A geek like me will spend time downloading and evaluating everything from OpenOffice 6 to the new icc even if I only ever use vim and forte. But-- it does not follow that most infantrymen give a damn about what word processor they use: they just want to learn one and use it.
Infantryman is a bad example because I'm not speaking from personal knowledge -- for all I know, most infantrymen could be emacs fans. But if you substitute (say) 'financial analyst' above, it would be 100% a-ok.
It's mainly due to the fact that I'm sick tired of AC's who post "I'm right, you suck, just because I said so".
And I'm sick and tired of people proclaiming that that they other users "they know" somehow constitute valid user samples. (Hint: take any self-selected group with a pinch of salt.) Hence my I-don't-do/use-foo-hence-foo-sucks point.
------
(Since everyone else is handing out bios here, here's mine)
I'm about as far away from the Army as you can imagine (a developer for 5 years) and I have written code for Solaris and Linux in addition to Windows -- so I know a little about those three. I've been pretty fortunate of interacting with an IS staff that has to service a large number of demanding business users on a tight budget. So whatever I say is colored by that experience.
I use Linux and Windows together everyday. Windows on the laptop, Linux on a server I ssh to for mail etc. To me, the only usable part of Linux is the command line
(Because I'm a private citizen I value my privacy somewhat, my name isn't on this public board, but my email address is bheer at myway dot com and I reply to any civil mail
This is why Linux evangelists never make good analysts. Their logic goes like:
- I don't do/use foo.
- All my friends don't do/use use bar instead of foo.
- Windows users do/use foo easily.
- Task/feature foo is worthless.
- Lunix ru1ez!!!
Ever considered that you may not be the only user profile the army has to cater for? Ever consider that the vast majority of users are unfamiliar with the examples you cite and would probably view them as cheap knockoffs of the programs they are used to?
Ever consider the cost of retraining them? And providing support?
Naah. I thought not. Oh, btw, linux rules. Keep chanting that.
> Geeks everywhere have been doing this already
> for a long time. It's nothing new or innovative.
Only, coming out with a crap-ass alpha isn't the only thing that counts as "innovation". Pushing it out into the "real world" and getting real people to use it also counts.
To that extent, Be is the only one who has innovated here - because they got a decent FS out into the hands of actual users (that they didn't get too many users is not totally thair fault). As for random geeks developing "their own libraries", and Gnome's VFS -- I suggest they ship something real before you start drooling about 'innovation'.
oops, my bad, root.sh already exists.
root.sh would be a cool domain to have. So would vul.va but I don't think the Vatican would like that very much ;)
Outlook Express (and Outlook and Netscape Mail) have supported S/MIME for ages. All support keys signed by any CA. Hell, they'll even accept a self-signed key (no one else will probably accept it, though). You can get a free trialware-grade S/MIME key from Thawte, if you want to try S/MIME out, go to www.thawte.com and look for "free personal email certificate".
Btw, if you want free keys, stick to PGP. Signing X.509 certs (which is what S/MIME uses -- supported in Outlook Express, Outlook and Netscape Mail IIRC) is a costly affair -- due diligence in identity verification costs money, and any CA which doesn't charge is probably not doing identity verification and shouldn't be trusted.
Incidentally, the whole reason of why S/MIME never took off is that not too many people were willing to pay for signed CA certs (which use a pure X.509 hierarchical-trust model) for secure email where PGP keys could be had for free using a web-of-trust model.
> with a fingerprint, you dont need picture ID, and its more reliable.
The problem with any kind of biometric ID is that it's only as secure as the database that it checks against. Security based solely on biometric ID is very brittle -- because it's allegedly so "strong", once broken (by hacking into the database, by using someone else's eyeball) you have massive and nearly undetectable breaches of security.
The best security systems are not brittle. And for driver's licenses, photo ID does provide appropriate level of malleability.
> But take a look at 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.
Most of th the points in this page has to do with UI. (if we're talking about UI, the first thing I'd like to say is that Moz's GUI toolkit is f*ing ugly). A lot of us don't care for tabbed browsing (personally I think alt-tabbing through browser windows is the way to go). Since you called IE's rendering engine out-dated, could you point out a page with a comprehensive list of IE's rendering faults? (I know IE has a few rendering quirks, but I'll not accept that it's somehow as bad as Navigator 4 -- which is the impression being bandied about by most people in this thread.
> IE6 has really stagnated
Exactly how is this? I am not a web developer, but IIRC IE6 has pretty decent support for CSS1 and DOM level 1. Agree, IE hasn't kept up with bleeding edge stuff like CSS2 (and yes, transparent PNG support sucks), but that's hardly stagnation. Is there a link available somewhere (just so I could learn) that lists all the things IE6 does not do?
On the other hand, IE6 SP1 seems to render this XHTML 2.0 page slightly better then Phoenix 0.6 (Moz 1.4b) does. Opera 7.1 does not render it at all. For all its doodads (notes and all) isn't Opera 'stagnating' faster than IE?
As for UI tweaks, like tabs, gestures and popup blocking -- there are lots of IE "shells", like NetCaptor that add these to IE. Nothing stops someone from writing their own shell and giving it away.
Btw, I agree with you in principle -- with little competition in the marketplace, companies do have less incentive to add features. On the other hand, in practice, it is not clear that IE's competitors have produced a better product yet. Opera sucks memory, and even Firebird 0.6 (which I'm currently using because it's the best non-IE browser I've tried so far) has serious bugs with its History pane. I'd say basic features like those are way more important than chasing the latest standard-of-the-week from the W3C.
Browser -- yes. But Netscape was more than just a browser: it was a Communicator, remember? You might want to read this ZDNet story about how some Time-Warner employees who were directed to use Netscape software revolted -- back to Outlook and Lotus Notes.
I can sort of understand why they did that. We use Lotus Notes at work, and I've been fascinated by how expectations from email software of most business users differ radically from most techies.
Email for me is pieces of text exchanged back and forth. Email for my boss is
- "groupware"
- Integrated forms and scripting.
- Workflow (ugh, hate that word)
- "Rich text" -- HTML doesn't count, both Notes and Outlook allow Microsoft Word (!) to be used as the email editor.
- "Blocking" mail from being forwarded outside the corporate network (yeah, I know it's stupid and so do the designers of Notes, but they implemented it nevertheless)
- Integration with proprietary directories: Domino, AD.
I always laughed everytime I thought of the nsenterprise keyword on Bugzilla. Netscape never had a hope in hell of making it in the enterprise email market.