All solid state electronics... very low power requirements.
There will be probably millions of these thing lying around for a long, long time if humanity suddenly goes poof. Many of them will be siting in protected, stable environments... all that will have to happen is for one to get exposed to light and the little 0 will show up on the screen, ready to take input.
Even if we found out we had an unlimited supply of carbon-based fuels, if you factor in all of the associated costs with burning them (production, transportation, environmental, health)... it turns out they're not really that cheap.
Unfortunately, we don't factor in ALL fo the costs into the price of our 'cheap' fuel sources... we're incurring a huge debt because of it, and the books are going to balance sooner or later. The environment will get its pound of flesh.
Obama's only been in office since Jan. 20th... in this time his primary focus has had to be the economic crisis and the wars in the Mid-East.
Bush had a full 8 years to put all of his policies into effect. Do you think it's reasonable that Obama could reverse all of that in such a short time in office? Our new President has been very efficient since taking office and has put many wheels in motion trying to reverse much of the damage that Bush Co. has done to our country. But he can't do it all with a simple stroke of the pen, and he doesn't have the Constitutional authority to just "make it so" with a stroke of his pen for many of the things he'd like to do. His policies must follow the process of law, or he's no better than Bush.
Any objective observer would give Obama very high marks for his first 74 days (as of this writing). Granted he's got many people on the right who will cry foul at many of his moves, and people from the left who are whining that he hasn't given attention to their pet issues, but you have to admit the man has been very busy and very efficient even if you can't agree with what he's done. It will take time for the 'cultural change' within the government to take hold. Many Bush appointees still hold office, many gov't agencies still have the mindset of the last 8 years and it takes time to enact cultural change within an organization as complex as the US Government.
It's not the time to judge Obama yet, give him time to get his agenda in place. Stay vigilant, yes. Complain that everything hasn't changed yet? C'mon... be realistic.
Mod parent up... this is probably the best choice.
We have several contract developers at our company who frequently work from remote locations. One of them from a cabin way the hell in the middle of nowhere in Northern Vermont.
They all connect to our corporate VPN using Verizon's EVDO broadband with an aircard. They claim it works great for them... would probably fit your parent's needs too.
I beleive the issue here is "intent". If you are shooting a street scene, and happen to catch something in your frame that is inside someone's house. That's OK. But if the photographer is standing in the same place, but has zoomed in on the window and the primary focus of your photo is what's going on inside that house, that's where you start getting in trouble. YOu're right... it'd be silly to put focal length limits on it since a given focal length is meaningful only for a given type of camera, and it's pretty hard to prove what kind of lense you used to make a shot after its printed.
I'm pretty sure Google has the law on thier side on this one.
The browser is an app that they are providing free with the operating system.
Office, on the other hand, is an application suite that must be purchased separately... and not cheaply.
Given that MS want to 1) maintain Office as the dominant productivity package, and 2) makes a nice profit selling Office, they have quite an incentive to make a Mac version.
Ok... I didn't RTFA, so I'm not going to comment on that.
First, let me state that it sucks to become a "medical victim" no matter how you got there. By my rant below, I don't want to take away from anything they're going through.
But, I'm going to take exception to the submitter's parenthetical comment "(without toes you cannot remain standing or walk, btw)", and call utter shenanigans.
1. I know someone who lost half a foot in a m'cycle accident. He walks without a perceptible limp, and can run too... but looks a little funny running, and can stand very well on his half-foot, while holding the other (good) foot in the air. He is not an athlete, or posessiong of any special abilities... just an "average joe" who had a bad accident.
2. Stiltwalkers don't have toes at the bottom of thier stilts. They walk and stand fine.
3. People with prothetic legs don't have toes. They stand pretty good too. Some of them even run phenominally well with those snazzy running legs. No toes there.
So... yes, it REALLY SUCKS what these people are suffering due to medical incompetence, but you don't need to add your own un-informed flavor to the headline.
3.
These are company policies, not legal requirements.
Companies have a policy to provide an application upon request because it helps them avoid discrimination cases.
If you take the decision about whether or not to give an application (which costs nothing) out of your employees' hands, then you remove an opportunity for personal bias (which can be very expensive) to creep in.
"If you are trainable, professional, and willing to work at Junior pay foryour entire career, there are many doors open for you.
There all fixed."
Simply not true. I had just finished my CS degree when the dotcom bubble burst. It sucked... it was really hard to find work as a programmer, so I took jobs that were closely related. Evenually, a friend of mine who had been working in IT before the bubble got laid off from his job. I left a job I hated (at Fidelity Investments making about 36K/yr), and he and I formed a Freelance web dev company.
We maintained that partnership for a year, and did "ok"... but he decided to go back to corporate work. I stuck out the freelance thing for another year and did "much better" than the previous year... I made about 50K pretax.
The end of this story is that I took a contract gig for for a fairly successful company about 8 months ago. Recently, they offered me a full-time salaried position for about 100K. Now, I actually work less hours than I did as a freelancer, and make more money... albeit I have less freedom... but that's ok because now I have good bennies and paid vacation. A trade I've been willing to make.
The moral of this story is that your career is what you make of it... not what you allow some employer to force-feed you. If you're making Junior salary after a decent period with your current employer, take your improved resume and look else where. Can't convince another employer you're worth more money? Try the freelance thing for a while.
Bottom line... people that get stuck with "junior level" salary throughout thier career just aren't trying hard enough, or aren't creative enough to find a way to better thier situation, and probably are earning the exact salary they deserve.
If you were going to program a system to be discriminatory... would you have it visibly break right in front of the person you're discriminating against, or would you just have the sytsem not bother to save the application at all once the process was done.
In the first case, you're giving a clue that your system is rigged, and somebody could demonstrate this in court by entering "undesirable" data and showing that it goes "boom" every time.
If you just fail to save the application, then you are at least not showing the applicant that something might not be on the level.
Now... this is easily demonstrable in court as well... but is less likely to be detected.
In the end... none of this "discriminatory programming" is a good idea, and probably would never be done by a company as large as Kroger's. (Maybe some little mom and pop shop if they acutally had the technology in place for electronic applications... but I digres...) If it's written in code, that's as good as having a written company policy advocating discrimination.
If discrimination is done at all and at any level... it would be in the human who finally downloads and reviews those applications. And if there is a company policy advocating discrimination... it's a whisper campaign and not written down anywhere... that's for damn sure.
So anybody that is looking at this and saying that Kroger's intentionally discriminated in this case or any case in accepting thier online applications just doesn't have the ability to think past thier initial emotional response.
So... I should shell out another $400 bucks because Microsoft is about to spew out yet another crappy bug-ridden browser? Look, I could afford it, really, but at present I've already got a little farm of computers.
1 - Windows 2003 server
2 - Linux box
3 - Mac mini for Mac compatibility testing.
4 - winXP pro.
Sure, I could dual-boot one of these machines, or even use VM ware... but what a pain in the ass simply to test compatibility for ONE MORE FREAKING BROWSER.
Here's what I predict will happen.
1. MS will eventually force users to upgrade to IE 7.
2. Many, MANY websites will not have bothered to check IE7 compatibility because the difficulties were talking about here.
3. They'll go to thier developers, and the developers (assuming they're not in-house) will say that the site was delivered according to standards, and nothing in thier contract guarantees compatibility with future browsers. They'll be happy to fix the rendering issues with IE7, but they'll have to bill them for the time.
4. Many lower-budget site owners, (and probably some bigger-budget ones) will just opt to put banners on thier site when IE7 is detected and instruct users to get a better browser.
5. Even if 4 doesn't happen, I beleive that IE7 users will see many broken websites, and get frustrated with IE7 all on thier own.
6. Alterna-browsers market share begins to decline.
7. Several years later, people will say "remember when Microsoft used to have a web browser?"
They don't, cause they know most webmasters will design for IE rather than get tons of complaints about their sites not working when they try to make it look good in all browsers at once.
Several years ago, you'd have an argument. It was fairly standard practice to "code for IE, and hack for the others". Now, that paradigm has reversed itself, and most COMPETENT developers are coding to standards and hacking for compatibility. This means your code usually just works in most browsers, and then you have to hack it up for IE compatibility.
See, the problem with Microsoft's strategy is that they left IE6 as 'abandonware' for too long. In the interim, the alternative browsers started introducing new and interesting features, piquing the interest of the Internet Browsing Public, and gaining market-share.
Additionally, Mac users are on the rise, as is desktop linux... neither of which have a version of IE to run. (Ok, the Mac has the now-abandoned IE 5.2 which was always terrible, and Linux users can run IE under Wine, but that's the long way around. I guess Mac users could too, but why would they want to) So, it's getting to the point now where if a developer is writing code for IE only, he does so at his own peril.
Now, IE7 has "fixed" their CSS support so that it essentially disables most of the CSS hacks developers were using to get around IE's poor implementation, but yet they seem to have failed to have fixed the CSS implementation flaws that the hacks were devised to deal with in the first place. The end result is that stuff that ONCE looked ok in IE, now breaks. I saw many examples of this in the hour or two that I spent browsing with IE7 yesterday.
My prediction on this IE7 release (when it comes out of beta) is that it may very well fall flat on its face. Users are going to install it, and start browsing websites, and finding sites that USED to look great suddenly look broken. They won't care what the reasons are, but they'll definitely associate it with thier newly installed IE7.
Now, lets look at it from the perspective of a website owner (not a developer, but perhaps a CPA with a website). Suddenly his website is going to look crappy in IE7... what's he going to do? Call the developer who is going to say, "The website is coded to standards, displays fine in all current browsers and all versions of IE prior to 7. I'll fix the problem, but it's going to cost you!"
End result? Lots of websites will continue to look broken in IE, and continue to display correctly in other browsers. MicroSoft made a HUGE mistake in thier complacency, and I think IE7... unless they make some major rendering changes before the final release, will turn out to be another nudge that's going to help them fall of the top of the heap in the browser market.
My sarcasm detector is ringing.:)
However, I think your point is misplaced. MS in fact won the browser wars precisely by making it easier for developers. So much so, that even bad HTML markup was tolerated, as were many other sloppy coding practices. In the early days, sites were far more likely to "Just Work" in IE.
Nowadays, however the developer-world is re-embracing the idea of producing clean, standards complient code, and Microsoft is finding themselves in the position of playing catchup... and tripping over themselves to get there.
If MS would indeed re-embrace "MS' long, solid history of making things easier for the web developer", but do so by rigorous implementation of established standards, then I think they could produce yet another dominating browser.
The only reason that IE hasn't lost the majority market share is because most users are too lazy to bother installing an alternative browser when the pre-installed IE6 is "good enuf" for most users. Heck, I even delayed for quite a while installing Firefox on my laptop because I use it only infrequently, and just never got around to it.
"The interface gets a bit messed up but it's definitely running a new engine (still some CSS bugs I can see tho, tut tut....)"
Ok, so installing IE7 as a stand-alone with the hack you mentioned messes up the interface. That's a bug you can see that's obvious. What are the non-obvious bugs that get introduced as a result of this hack? I don't know, and there is no way of knowing without some serious regression testing.
For now, the only option for a developer is to have IE7 installed on another machine for testing. That's just plain stupid.
I am a freelancer, so that means my boss is a real tightwad dick.
I can't affort to dedicate a whole machine to Internet Exploder testing. I have an idea... how about they decouple their friggin' web browser from the OS so that I can have different versions running on the same box?
>They've cleared-up UI - there's option to bring it back (tools->toolbars->classic menu)- and pressing ALT gives you access to it (no clicks).
Granted, I should give SOME credit where it's due. They've opened up a lot of real-estate by reducing the menubar area, and you CAN get the menu bar back... but when you do, it goes to the wrong place... more broken UI conventions. Anyway, all that real-estate just means that people will have MORE spyware toolbars installed before the entire client area is used up.:-D
I installed IE7 HOPING that they had come up with something good. In the end, I was disappointed in the product from both a user's and developer's standpoint, and uninstalled it because A) I don't really like it and B) I need to have IE6 available on my machine for development.
For now, view-source sitll uses notepad. I don't know if they've any intention to change this.
However, If you want contextual highlighting on IE view-source, just replace your OS-supplied notepad with one of the developer's notepad apps out there.
Really?? It failed miserably when I tried it. The pieces were spread all over the screen, some with scroll bars, and all layered in front of a big red background.
Heh... even if you graded them on a curve, they'd still get a D, since Firefox almost gets the acid2 test right.
It quick renders Digg.com (sometimes it takes ages on IE6), but I can barely click on the One Pixel Banner.
It renders Digg's HOME page fine, but click around the site, and you'll start noticing some positioning errors. Go to the "Digg For Stories" section, and you'll see some DIVs climbing over each other on the left nav.
Hmmm I didn't find the one-click uninstall option.
I had to go through add/remove programs, show updates, uninstall IE7.
It required a reboot on install and un-install.
This is a pain in the ass for developers, even if the one-click uninstall feature really does work.
I should be able to have IE6 AND IE7 on the same machine... websites are going to have to support BOTH versions of this shoddy browser for a long time to come. Developers need to be able to have both browsers available for cross-browser testing.
Really should be released with the OPTION of installing it as a stand-alone or as a replacement.
1. They are requesting that developers install it and test thier sites and report back. However, it installes OVER IE6, so you can't have them both on the same machine. This is a major showstopper for a developer, since we NEED to have IE6 installed for current functionality and compatibility.
2. Fails the Acid2 test miserably
3. They've moved the Refresh button to the right of the address bar, while the Forward and Back buttons remain in the same position... this is just dumb. All the navigation buttons should be grouped.
4. The "Stop Navigation" button has also been moved over to the right. They've also changed the look of the button to a red "X", so that it now looks like a "close something" button instead of a "stop this action" button.
5. They've "fixed" the functionality that allows you to utilize many CSS hacks to compensate for IE's rendering flaws, however they haven't fixed the underlying bugs that the "hacks" were intended to fix. As a result, a lot of sites I checked out that rendered just fine in all current browsers (including IE6) are now broken in IE7, because the "hacks" no longer work in IE7, but thier standards complience is still shoddy, and thier box-model still sucks.
6. The graphics for the tabs looks "clunky" as compared to other tabbed browsers.
7. They've hidden the main menu, so now you have to go through a few clicks to find the options that used to be only 1 or 2 clicks away.
Overall, I hope they don't think that this release is close to production readiness. They've changed a number of things just so that they look different, while in the process breaking a number of UI conventions that have long been established an work.
They've still got a lot of work to do in thier CSS support... I don't understand why even some of the most basic CSS functionality is beyond thier ability to grasp. I can understand some of the more 'advanced' CSS features being a little tricky to interpret and implement, but basic positioning, sizing, padding and margin issues should be pretty easy to understand.
They claim to have fixed.PNG alpha channel transparency, and that's true... to a point, but it doesn't work when the.png with transparency is used in a layer in some cases.
One thing I can applaud them on is that they've added the ability to use XMLHttpRequest without using thier proprietary ActiveX control, which will simplify those of us writing AJAX code into our web apps. They claim the old ActiveX method will still work for legacy support though.
So, that's my take. They've come a long way from IE6... but I beleive that they've got a long way to go in order to have a final release of IE7 that can truly compete against the other players in today's browser market.
My company uses software provided by Microsoft, Macromedia, Adobe, etc... All I know is we have licenses to these applications, and license to distribute anything we might create with these applications (where appropriate).
Do you know if thier source trees are clean? One might suspect they are, even be pretty confident that they are... but you just don't know for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
All solid state electronics ... very low power requirements.
There will be probably millions of these thing lying around for a long, long time if humanity suddenly goes poof. Many of them will be siting in protected, stable environments ... all that will have to happen is for one to get exposed to light and the little 0 will show up on the screen, ready to take input.
Even if we found out we had an unlimited supply of carbon-based fuels, if you factor in all of the associated costs with burning them (production, transportation, environmental, health) ... it turns out they're not really that cheap.
Unfortunately, we don't factor in ALL fo the costs into the price of our 'cheap' fuel sources ... we're incurring a huge debt because of it, and the books are going to balance sooner or later. The environment will get its pound of flesh.
Obama's only been in office since Jan. 20th ... in this time his primary focus has had to be the economic crisis and the wars in the Mid-East.
Bush had a full 8 years to put all of his policies into effect. Do you think it's reasonable that Obama could reverse all of that in such a short time in office? Our new President has been very efficient since taking office and has put many wheels in motion trying to reverse much of the damage that Bush Co. has done to our country. But he can't do it all with a simple stroke of the pen, and he doesn't have the Constitutional authority to just "make it so" with a stroke of his pen for many of the things he'd like to do. His policies must follow the process of law, or he's no better than Bush.
Any objective observer would give Obama very high marks for his first 74 days (as of this writing). Granted he's got many people on the right who will cry foul at many of his moves, and people from the left who are whining that he hasn't given attention to their pet issues, but you have to admit the man has been very busy and very efficient even if you can't agree with what he's done.
It will take time for the 'cultural change' within the government to take hold. Many Bush appointees still hold office, many gov't agencies still have the mindset of the last 8 years and it takes time to enact cultural change within an organization as complex as the US Government.
It's not the time to judge Obama yet, give him time to get his agenda in place. Stay vigilant, yes. Complain that everything hasn't changed yet? C'mon ... be realistic.
Mod parent up ... this is probably the best choice.
... would probably fit your parent's needs too.
We have several contract developers at our company who frequently work from remote locations. One of them from a cabin way the hell in the middle of nowhere in Northern Vermont.
They all connect to our corporate VPN using Verizon's EVDO broadband with an aircard. They claim it works great for them
I beleive the issue here is "intent". If you are shooting a street scene, and happen to catch something in your frame that is inside someone's house. That's OK. But if the photographer is standing in the same place, but has zoomed in on the window and the primary focus of your photo is what's going on inside that house, that's where you start getting in trouble. YOu're right ... it'd be silly to put focal length limits on it since a given focal length is meaningful only for a given type of camera, and it's pretty hard to prove what kind of lense you used to make a shot after its printed.
I'm pretty sure Google has the law on thier side on this one.
"DRM encumbered"
You misspelled "encrusted".
I think what you meant was "infected".
Actually, I think that's fairly easy to explain.
... and not cheaply.
The browser is an app that they are providing free with the operating system.
Office, on the other hand, is an application suite that must be purchased separately
Given that MS want to 1) maintain Office as the dominant productivity package, and 2) makes a nice profit selling Office, they have quite an incentive to make a Mac version.
You didn't RTFA, did you?
You need to actually download the app and install it and allow it to run.
It's just that Sony is making this an easy process and is endorsing it as a good thing to run on your PS3.
Don't want to do it, because you think it's a tinfoil hat defeater being installed by the gubmint, then don't install the software.
Why would running FaH on your PC preclude you from running in on your PS3?
... what's wrong with running it on two?
... you buy it for its other functionality, and let it fold protiens when you're done playing.
More machines = more work units. If you're already running it on one machine
But no, you wouldn't buy it just because it runs FaH
Ok ... I didn't RTFA, so I'm not going to comment on that.
First, let me state that it sucks to become a "medical victim" no matter how you got there. By my rant below, I don't want to take away from anything they're going through.
But, I'm going to take exception to the submitter's parenthetical comment "(without toes you cannot remain standing or walk, btw)", and call utter shenanigans.
1. I know someone who lost half a foot in a m'cycle accident. He walks without a perceptible limp, and can run too ... but looks a little funny running, and can stand very well on his half-foot, while holding the other (good) foot in the air. He is not an athlete, or posessiong of any special abilities ... just an "average joe" who had a bad accident.
2. Stiltwalkers don't have toes at the bottom of thier stilts. They walk and stand fine.
3. People with prothetic legs don't have toes. They stand pretty good too. Some of them even run phenominally well with those snazzy running legs. No toes there.
So ... yes, it REALLY SUCKS what these people are suffering due to medical incompetence, but you don't need to add your own un-informed flavor to the headline.
3.
These are company policies, not legal requirements.
Companies have a policy to provide an application upon request because it helps them avoid discrimination cases.
If you take the decision about whether or not to give an application (which costs nothing) out of your employees' hands, then you remove an opportunity for personal bias (which can be very expensive) to creep in.
"If you are trainable, professional, and willing to work at Junior pay foryour entire career, there are many doors open for you.
... it was really hard to find work as a programmer, so I took jobs that were closely related. Evenually, a friend of mine who had been working in IT before the bubble got laid off from his job. I left a job I hated (at Fidelity Investments making about 36K/yr), and he and I formed a Freelance web dev company.
... but he decided to go back to corporate work. I stuck out the freelance thing for another year and did "much better" than the previous year ... I made about 50K pretax.
... albeit I have less freedom ... but that's ok because now I have good bennies and paid vacation. A trade I've been willing to make.
... not what you allow some employer to force-feed you. If you're making Junior salary after a decent period with your current employer, take your improved resume and look else where. Can't convince another employer you're worth more money? Try the freelance thing for a while.
... people that get stuck with "junior level" salary throughout thier career just aren't trying hard enough, or aren't creative enough to find a way to better thier situation, and probably are earning the exact salary they deserve.
There all fixed."
Simply not true. I had just finished my CS degree when the dotcom bubble burst. It sucked
We maintained that partnership for a year, and did "ok"
The end of this story is that I took a contract gig for for a fairly successful company about 8 months ago. Recently, they offered me a full-time salaried position for about 100K. Now, I actually work less hours than I did as a freelancer, and make more money
The moral of this story is that your career is what you make of it
Bottom line
Think about this for a second.
... would you have it visibly break right in front of the person you're discriminating against, or would you just have the sytsem not bother to save the application at all once the process was done.
... this is easily demonstrable in court as well ... but is less likely to be detected.
... none of this "discriminatory programming" is a good idea, and probably would never be done by a company as large as Kroger's. (Maybe some little mom and pop shop if they acutally had the technology in place for electronic applications ... but I digres...) If it's written in code, that's as good as having a written company policy advocating discrimination.
... it would be in the human who finally downloads and reviews those applications. And if there is a company policy advocating discrimination ... it's a whisper campaign and not written down anywhere ... that's for damn sure.
If you were going to program a system to be discriminatory
In the first case, you're giving a clue that your system is rigged, and somebody could demonstrate this in court by entering "undesirable" data and showing that it goes "boom" every time.
If you just fail to save the application, then you are at least not showing the applicant that something might not be on the level.
Now
In the end
If discrimination is done at all and at any level
So anybody that is looking at this and saying that Kroger's intentionally discriminated in this case or any case in accepting thier online applications just doesn't have the ability to think past thier initial emotional response.
So ... I should shell out another $400 bucks because Microsoft is about to spew out yet another crappy bug-ridden browser? Look, I could afford it, really, but at present I've already got a little farm of computers.
1 - Windows 2003 server
2 - Linux box
3 - Mac mini for Mac compatibility testing.
4 - winXP pro.
Sure, I could dual-boot one of these machines, or even use VM ware ... but what a pain in the ass simply to test compatibility for ONE MORE FREAKING BROWSER.
Here's what I predict will happen.
1. MS will eventually force users to upgrade to IE 7.
2. Many, MANY websites will not have bothered to check IE7 compatibility because the difficulties were talking about here.
3. They'll go to thier developers, and the developers (assuming they're not in-house) will say that the site was delivered according to standards, and nothing in thier contract guarantees compatibility with future browsers. They'll be happy to fix the rendering issues with IE7, but they'll have to bill them for the time.
4. Many lower-budget site owners, (and probably some bigger-budget ones) will just opt to put banners on thier site when IE7 is detected and instruct users to get a better browser.
5. Even if 4 doesn't happen, I beleive that IE7 users will see many broken websites, and get frustrated with IE7 all on thier own.
6. Alterna-browsers market share begins to decline.
7. Several years later, people will say "remember when Microsoft used to have a web browser?"
Several years ago, you'd have an argument. It was fairly standard practice to "code for IE, and hack for the others". Now, that paradigm has reversed itself, and most COMPETENT developers are coding to standards and hacking for compatibility. This means your code usually just works in most browsers, and then you have to hack it up for IE compatibility.
See, the problem with Microsoft's strategy is that they left IE6 as 'abandonware' for too long. In the interim, the alternative browsers started introducing new and interesting features, piquing the interest of the Internet Browsing Public, and gaining market-share.
Additionally, Mac users are on the rise, as is desktop linux ... neither of which have a version of IE to run. (Ok, the Mac has the now-abandoned IE 5.2 which was always terrible, and Linux users can run IE under Wine, but that's the long way around. I guess Mac users could too, but why would they want to) So, it's getting to the point now where if a developer is writing code for IE only, he does so at his own peril.
Now, IE7 has "fixed" their CSS support so that it essentially disables most of the CSS hacks developers were using to get around IE's poor implementation, but yet they seem to have failed to have fixed the CSS implementation flaws that the hacks were devised to deal with in the first place. The end result is that stuff that ONCE looked ok in IE, now breaks. I saw many examples of this in the hour or two that I spent browsing with IE7 yesterday.
My prediction on this IE7 release (when it comes out of beta) is that it may very well fall flat on its face. Users are going to install it, and start browsing websites, and finding sites that USED to look great suddenly look broken. They won't care what the reasons are, but they'll definitely associate it with thier newly installed IE7.
Now, lets look at it from the perspective of a website owner (not a developer, but perhaps a CPA with a website). Suddenly his website is going to look crappy in IE7 ... what's he going to do? Call the developer who is going to say, "The website is coded to standards, displays fine in all current browsers and all versions of IE prior to 7. I'll fix the problem, but it's going to cost you!"
End result? Lots of websites will continue to look broken in IE, and continue to display correctly in other browsers. MicroSoft made a HUGE mistake in thier complacency, and I think IE7 ... unless they make some major rendering changes before the final release, will turn out to be another nudge that's going to help them fall of the top of the heap in the browser market.
My sarcasm detector is ringing. :)
However, I think your point is misplaced. MS in fact won the browser wars precisely by making it easier for developers. So much so, that even bad HTML markup was tolerated, as were many other sloppy coding practices. In the early days, sites were far more likely to "Just Work" in IE.
Nowadays, however the developer-world is re-embracing the idea of producing clean, standards complient code, and Microsoft is finding themselves in the position of playing catchup ... and tripping over themselves to get there.
If MS would indeed re-embrace "MS' long, solid history of making things easier for the web developer", but do so by rigorous implementation of established standards, then I think they could produce yet another dominating browser.
The only reason that IE hasn't lost the majority market share is because most users are too lazy to bother installing an alternative browser when the pre-installed IE6 is "good enuf" for most users. Heck, I even delayed for quite a while installing Firefox on my laptop because I use it only infrequently, and just never got around to it.
Ok, so installing IE7 as a stand-alone with the hack you mentioned messes up the interface. That's a bug you can see that's obvious. What are the non-obvious bugs that get introduced as a result of this hack? I don't know, and there is no way of knowing without some serious regression testing.
For now, the only option for a developer is to have IE7 installed on another machine for testing. That's just plain stupid.
I am a freelancer, so that means my boss is a real tightwad dick. I can't affort to dedicate a whole machine to Internet Exploder testing. I have an idea ... how about they decouple their friggin' web browser from the OS so that I can have different versions running on the same box?
>They've cleared-up UI - there's option to bring it back (tools->toolbars->classic menu)- and pressing ALT gives you access to it (no clicks). Granted, I should give SOME credit where it's due. They've opened up a lot of real-estate by reducing the menubar area, and you CAN get the menu bar back ... but when you do, it goes to the wrong place ... more broken UI conventions. Anyway, all that real-estate just means that people will have MORE spyware toolbars installed before the entire client area is used up. :-D
I installed IE7 HOPING that they had come up with something good. In the end, I was disappointed in the product from both a user's and developer's standpoint, and uninstalled it because A) I don't really like it and B) I need to have IE6 available on my machine for development.
For now, view-source sitll uses notepad. I don't know if they've any intention to change this.
However, If you want contextual highlighting on IE view-source, just replace your OS-supplied notepad with one of the developer's notepad apps out there.
Really?? It failed miserably when I tried it. The pieces were spread all over the screen, some with scroll bars, and all layered in front of a big red background.
Heh ... even if you graded them on a curve, they'd still get a D, since Firefox almost gets the acid2 test right.
It quick renders Digg.com (sometimes it takes ages on IE6), but I can barely click on the One Pixel Banner.It renders Digg's HOME page fine, but click around the site, and you'll start noticing some positioning errors. Go to the "Digg For Stories" section, and you'll see some DIVs climbing over each other on the left nav.
Hmmm I didn't find the one-click uninstall option. I had to go through add/remove programs, show updates, uninstall IE7. It required a reboot on install and un-install. This is a pain in the ass for developers, even if the one-click uninstall feature really does work. I should be able to have IE6 AND IE7 on the same machine ... websites are going to have to support BOTH versions of this shoddy browser for a long time to come. Developers need to be able to have both browsers available for cross-browser testing.
Really should be released with the OPTION of installing it as a stand-alone or as a replacement.
1. They are requesting that developers install it and test thier sites and report back. However, it installes OVER IE6, so you can't have them both on the same machine. This is a major showstopper for a developer, since we NEED to have IE6 installed for current functionality and compatibility.
... this is just dumb. All the navigation buttons should be grouped.
... I don't understand why even some of the most basic CSS functionality is beyond thier ability to grasp. I can understand some of the more 'advanced' CSS features being a little tricky to interpret and implement, but basic positioning, sizing, padding and margin issues should be pretty easy to understand.
.PNG alpha channel transparency, and that's true ... to a point, but it doesn't work when the .png with transparency is used in a layer in some cases.
... but I beleive that they've got a long way to go in order to have a final release of IE7 that can truly compete against the other players in today's browser market.
2. Fails the Acid2 test miserably
3. They've moved the Refresh button to the right of the address bar, while the Forward and Back buttons remain in the same position
4. The "Stop Navigation" button has also been moved over to the right. They've also changed the look of the button to a red "X", so that it now looks like a "close something" button instead of a "stop this action" button.
5. They've "fixed" the functionality that allows you to utilize many CSS hacks to compensate for IE's rendering flaws, however they haven't fixed the underlying bugs that the "hacks" were intended to fix. As a result, a lot of sites I checked out that rendered just fine in all current browsers (including IE6) are now broken in IE7, because the "hacks" no longer work in IE7, but thier standards complience is still shoddy, and thier box-model still sucks.
6. The graphics for the tabs looks "clunky" as compared to other tabbed browsers.
7. They've hidden the main menu, so now you have to go through a few clicks to find the options that used to be only 1 or 2 clicks away.
Overall, I hope they don't think that this release is close to production readiness. They've changed a number of things just so that they look different, while in the process breaking a number of UI conventions that have long been established an work.
They've still got a lot of work to do in thier CSS support
They claim to have fixed
One thing I can applaud them on is that they've added the ability to use XMLHttpRequest without using thier proprietary ActiveX control, which will simplify those of us writing AJAX code into our web apps. They claim the old ActiveX method will still work for legacy support though.
So, that's my take. They've come a long way from IE6
I really don't like the direction this country's taking. :(
... at least the 'Patriot Act' was not reapproved, but I'm sure they've got some other stick they're prepared to use.
Fundies, big-brother tactics
Hey, why's there a black heli......
My company uses software provided by Microsoft, Macromedia, Adobe, etc... All I know is we have licenses to these applications, and license to distribute anything we might create with these applications (where appropriate).
... but you just don't know for sure.
Do you know if thier source trees are clean? One might suspect they are, even be pretty confident that they are