Everyone agrees on this, this is the one thing they had.
best email
If we're comparing it to what was on phones in 1995, then sure, but BB's email is all around shitty in pretty much every way. It only happened to be considerably less shitty than affordable device implementations at the time. Porting PINE to a RIM device would be an upgrade for their mail client in every single possible way, assuming PINE supports IMAP IDLE, without the need for a bunch of RIM middleware because they couldnt' be bothered to develop software with a clue.
strong battery life
Meh, it was fine, but it wasn't impressive considering the device doesn't really do anything particularly impressive.
RIM needs to get their key features ported onto Android and make a telephone based on that or they will die.
That would be a dumb idea.
Unless something major changes, Android is on a race to the bottom. Manufactures really SHOULDN'T be screwing with Android, so its consistent to users, so they can't compete based on OS. That means they have to compete based on hardware. In every situation in history like this, the race is a race to the cheapest, most easily mass produced with the largest possible margins. Since there are a large number of companies competing, the margins are hardly worth bothering with, making it impossible to really make your device stand out among the others.
If they DO mess with the consistency, well then the problems you introduce by not being standard makes the fact that your android compatible practically worthless.
So basically, Android doesn't offer RIM anything better than they already have, a second rate option where the best they can hope for is to not go out of business quickly, so they can milk it for a few years to selling to the highest bidder, for pennies on the dollar.
Now, if you're belief is that RIM doesn't stand a snowballs chance in hell, then sure, throw android on all their devices and milk it out as long as you can. I'd say you'd probably be right, RIM clearly doesn't get it. They never really did, they just happen to be the option that sucked less than the non-existent option before them. Lets face it, RIM devices have always sucked ass, its just that they were slightly more usable than Windows Mobile devices. When the iPhone came out and set a reasonable standard for 'smart phones', RIM suddenly doesn't even really look like a 'dumb phone' anymore, its more like your inbred daughter of your third cousin who married her grandpa. They had a usable (not GOOD, just usable) email client on a phone while everyone else was dicking around being morons about it. No web browser, no HTML email, hardly presentable text even, but you could actually read it, and they came quickly, so it was good. Once you started seeing a web browser that didn't look like ass and pretty graphics on a phone that could be had for less than $500 (I'm ignoring other ridiculously over priced smart phones before the iPhone, which were $500-600 WITH a contract.), you know, an acceptable device for todays world, then the realization came out that RIM devices are actually really shitty. So they made new models... and in those new models, in there effort to look like Apple, they threw out the only things people actually liked about them and also utterly failed to understand why Apple devices are liked.
They thought that Monkey See, Monkey Do would work... except they were to stupid to realize they we watching the monkey... while everyone else was impressed with what the bikini model standing next to the monkey was doing.
If you want to be anything other than a commodity hardware manufacture, you don't want to run Android on your devices.
If his arguments truly have no merit, then it won't make a splash in the tech press. People will simply blow him off as a disgruntled employee. So this is only bad if you feel that loyalty is more important than producing a good product.
What box or rock have you been living under?
There have been numerous idiots running their mouths I can think of in recent years. Hell, you've got the current Mozilla moron whos spouting about how companies are wrong and he knows the way the business world should work... because he works on a web browser... its not like thats been on slashdot or anything... or all over other news resources, or The Woz from Apple who is about as disgruntled and upset that he didn't make the splash that steve does that it oozes from every pore in his body constantly, and the media is happy to run with his ignorant statements.
No former Microsoft/Google/Apple/Yahoo/Sun/SCO bigwigs have made utterly fucking stupid and incorrect in every way statements that the press ran with like the word of god or anything... thats not ever happened.
Well, its not happened in the last 30 seconds or so, but probably has happened again by the time you read this post.
Again I ask, what rock have you been living under?
That would be wrong in many cases. Your corporate charter defines the goals of the company, which may not be how much you as a shareholder or management earn. RIM's goals probably include making money, but its certainly not a requirement for public companies to focus on shareholder profit.
As a general rule however, public perception is one of the biggest determining factors in profit. If you are perceived as worthless, no one will buy your product for any reason, which there are numerous companies you can use as examples for this one. If you are perceived as cool, trendy OR required for a happy day on the planet... such as say Apple and Oil companies are perceived by most people, then you can sale your wares regardless of what you do to the customer or how absolutely worthless your product is... which from a practical perspective, can lead to more earnings. Just look at people who bought into BitCoin... perception is EVERYTHING. Reality is irrelevant. Logic does not apply here, only emotion and how you can use the customers emotion to your advantage.
You'd also gain an employee who clearly won't keep their mouth shut. While you may agree that he's right in this situation, you'd be stupid to think you'd feel the same way if he called you out. You'd be wise to consider that he'd probably be very happy to do the same thing to you. Do you really want to be in the same position as RIM? Do you really think you're immune to having a situation created that he wouldn't feel the same about?
The guy may be right, but I certainly wouldn't hire him. The company is already in a shitty spot, showing the public that the employees have no confidence as well is just bad form. Its unprofessional. He's more or less throwing a temper tantrum. "You aren't doing what I want, so I'm going to tell the world... anonymously cause I don't really have the balls to say it", says the cowardly RIM employee.
Just because he happened to be right, doesn't mean what he did was a good thing in any way. Pointing out the obvious doesn't make you a hero.
It is possible to render a complex static scene entirely on the card with a single command now. Even some simply non-static values can be handled as well.
Mind you, for anything other than a 'see, I told you I could render the scene entirely on the card', the CPU is doing a bunch of work... but it is possible to render a decent scene on the GPU entirely, once you've loaded all the data to the GPU. Its really actually gotten to the point using shaders and sneaking in data to the shaders via textures that you can do everything on the card. GPUs just suck at many things, branching for instance just destroys a shaders performance to the point that if you're branching in the shader, you're probably making it worse than letting the CPU do it, even on a high end GPU.
So... it can be done, but from a practical perspective, you are correct, it doesn't happen entirely on the GPU.
Imagine that you have the ultimate badass GPU that can render anything in 0ms, but the processor is just average and takes 30ms to calculate physics and run the AI. So in the end, despite the super-fast graphics card, you're still only going to get at most ~33 FPS.
Sounds like you need to move the physics and AI code into a shader!
While it may not exist yet, with those 400 shader processes available, I'm pretty confident you could decode h.264 in a shader pretty easily. All it'd take is someone bothering to write the shader to do it, which has already been done actually.
The problem with Sandy Bridge in this case is actually 'it has built in h.264 decoding'. Okay, so those aren't really problems, lets face it, the codecs built in to it are the ones people are going to use anyway, so for the sake of discussion, lets assume we're speaking about raw tech specs rather than perfectly sufficient for current uses...
A better GPU allows you to shift to new encoding/decoding methods.
More flexibility is good, hard coded instructions for specific ways of doing things today are useful, but not as useful as something just as fast that can be reconfigured via software for other things in the future.
GPUs started out with fixed pipelines, good at handling that fixed pipeline, then the realization came along that making that pipeline more flexible would provide WAY must usefulness for very little cost... and along came the rise of OpenGL 3, DirectX 9, and most importantly, shaders.
On chip decoders for h.264 is great, but not as good as a reprogrammable processor capable of doing the same thing at the same cost (power usage/time to complete).
That is assuming you can find someone to give you something other than the finger when you try to sell them bitcoins... which have already been show trivial to counter fit both in theory and in practice... hence why we're having this discussion about them in the first place.
Sure, you might be able to make a profit at it, but you're more likely to make a profit using a Nigerian Prince with financial funneling SPAM kit and sending a few hundred thousands spams via someones botnet, seems kinda silly to consider either one of them worth the effort of doing.
Seems like 350 watts from the wall at 100% efficiency would still be too little to meet the requirements of that system, making it impossible for you to run on that in the real world once you take into the massive losses in the power supply and on board voltage regulators.
The EXACT same way you do it when your baking it onto the board? You glue it on. Of course on a normal PCB when its then baked to melt the solder, it gets a much stronger bond from the solder... but glue is what holds the SMDs and such on until they get baked.
Yea, but do you know how well a ball point pen works on PCB? Pretty poorly, which is why we use felt.
I'd bet a good chunk of money this isn't even the first 'ball point pen with conductive ink', its more likely that intelligent people realized a long time ago that ball point pens work really poorly on surfaces with no texture to cause them to roll... like say a perfectly smooth fibreglass PCB backing that you'd want to draw conductive lines on.
People running solaris machines that cost multiple 100s of thousands of dollars which power the applications that ARE their business... aren't using cracked OSes to do it on.
They will however begin the long task of not using Sun or Oracle products anymore, and while Oracle will rape them for a few years, after that few years is up, Oracle will have fewer customers than they did before they bought out Sun, all paying them less money as they will be working their way away from Oracle to avoid this sort of shafting in the future.
A) The reason they paid 5 times as much for your hardware up front was to get 3 times the life out of it. B) They still pay for support C) They still buy new hardware since they want stuff that works well with their existing machines and as a migration path for old services.
You're an idiot if you think someone stops being a customer the instant they've paid you for a server and aren't buying new ones.
Larry is losing customers year after year, they just keep charging the ones that are really completely locked into Oracle more and more.
Oracle has no software advantage over the competition anymore, the only thing they offer that other vendors don't is the name Oracle and a little less effort porting old databases to new versions of Oracle. The lock in of massive systems that are built around Oracle is the only thing that keeps them alive. They offer an inferior product to the competition in every way. Its just a matter of time before they sink, because Larry is being a dick and some other people realized that Oracles only advantage was the amount of time it had been around, so they just started making alternatives. Hell, theres even a free database that can take out any use of Oracle on the small end.
The idea is that you trust some to make a security ONLY or bug fix ONLY patch that is unlikely to break existing functionality as the changes SHOULD ONLY BE VERY MINOR fixes, not feature or API changes.
Mozilla has said 'we're not supporting any sort of stable target, we will be intentionally breaking things in every single release we make, with no regard for what affect that will have on you, you must patch all of your websites to work with our NEW AND EXCITING bugs after every release we make if you want to have any security patches. We, Mozilla, are the reason you exist and without us, there would be no web, now do what we say!'
And everyones response is to sort of look at them funny, call them barking mad, then just ignore them till they crawl in a whole and die.
I expect 4.0.1 to work exactly like 4.0, except with some bug/security fixes.
I make very limited about 5.x acting anything like 4.x.
Actually, now I don't really expect anything from Mozilla, we just dropped support for it yesterday at our company, which means I don't have to maintain the plugins anymore... yay! Thanks Mozilla, your ignorant change that would normally have resulted in a fuckton more work actually resulted in less as you no longer matter. You guys are still the best.
Anyone want to take bets on the name of the next incarnation of Netscape after Mozilla goes belly up in a year or two? This has all happened before and it will all happen again.
Strange, most place I dealt with the server was gone when the support ran out, which was typically 3 to 5 years depending on the contract.
Thats because you think Dell sells 'Servers'.
Theres a difference between anything you buy from Dell and a 64 processor Sun cabinet, and part of that difference is 10s of thousands of dollars price difference. Oh and the Sun server was actually expected to last longer than the warranty on it.
Sadly, you don't seem to know what a 'big' server looks like. Let me give you one little hint, Microsoft doesn't sell software designed to run on a medium to large server. At best, even a big Windows install is still 'Small'
For those that are still running what is frankly in computing terms ancient hardware it isn't like there aren't free Linux distros that will run on these machines
Right, because I'm using this big iron to run a Webserver... which Linux would be fine at... rather than using it to run a big application that makes our business work and needs a stable platform, and of course considering its developers actually need to product to work rather than spend their time chasing down 492 possible Linux variations, they just target Solaris and call it a day.
Basically, your post was written by someone who has clearly never worked with large hardware, you simply don't understand the difference between the toys your playing with and high end equipment, which is probably an artifact of living in a x86 dominated world where you throw more nodes at the problem rather than bigger nodes.
Oracle is relevant since it still provides some advantages over the competition
At this point, the only actual advantage Oracle has is that some apps are built entirely around Oracle and are non-trivial to port to a new system.
They have no other actual advantage, unless you call working with software that still thinks working with it should be just like the experience was in the 70s an advantage.
Theres a front end for ntpdate on android? Why the fuck doesn't it use the time from the cell network, which is kind of required to be accurate if you want the phone to actually... you know, make calls.
What? You mean an android developer processes their own payments on someone elses store? I don't buy it.
Whoever runs the marketplace could handle the refunds if they can take the payments. If they don't know how to handle the refunds you probably shouldn't be buying from them anyway as its highly unlikely they were capable of making a secure site for processing payments in the first place.
We take CCs and send them off to our provider via a SOAP request, we then get a transaction id back, for 30 days we can issue a refund on any part of that transaction, after which its settled and we can issue a refund, but it costs us a quarter or something like that extra to do so as they actually have to transfer money between banks again.
To issue a refund is simply another SOAP request with the transaction id and the amount and/or items to refund.
Corporate users who can't update their browsers because of some persnickety internal application they have to use, but who then go and use that same browser on the public Internet.
Dear Mozilla Foundation,
Perhaps if you took a few minutes from your day to actually write quality code rather than racing to be the shiniest widget on the block... that you copied from Google... poorly, the perhaps those old browsers wouldn't be a threat.
I find it wildly amusing that as an enterprise user I'm being told that I'm the bad guy... because their software is so poorly written that its full of exploitable bugs.
The browser is NOT more complex than an OS, yet I have several machines with uptimes over 4 years now... that you couldn't exploit if your life depended on it... yet for some reason... its different for a browser.
No, its not different, you just fucking suck as developers and your focus is wrong, and you're blaming us because you're incapable of writing a stable, secure piece of software. If you did your job right the first time, old versions of your browser wouldn't be an issue, but instead you rush rush rush and write shit code.
You fucked up Mozilla, not me, YOU FIX YOUR PROBLEMS and stop blaming your problems on me. I have a simple solution to not running your old buggy ass browser anymore, I'll use something else from someone who puts at least a little effort into it. You're making IE security look completely acceptable, how pathetic does that make you?
So you've never dealt with the Mozilla code base I see.
If you want long term compat, you use the Frozen APIs... thats what they say, not me. That in theory should me the API always functions as documented, even in future versions.
There are two problems with that, first... the Frozen API is so limited that you can't do much without using non-frozen interfaces.
The second is... a newly frozen API in FF4, will be depreciated and replaced with a new unfrozen API in FF5. Effectively making their 'frozen' API a lie.
The web is a constantly changing place, with websites redesigning themselves without warning. Maybe enterprises need a more rapid web browser deployment system that can keep up with Firefox, Chrome, and IE's upcoming rapid release system.
A new skin on a website doesn't require a new browser.
Maybe enterprises need a more stable browser developer rather than a bleeding edge always partially broken and doing something or unexpected Firefox?
Lets see, they could use IE, Opera, or Safari and get the same net effect with far less gross work.
Maybe... JUST MAYBE... Mozilla should consider what their consumers are saying and asking for rather than telling them its wrong. The Mozilla Foundation most certainly isn't an example any intelligent business would model itself after.
There are far more people who are just as intelligent saying this is a dumb idea than there are people saying this is a great idea. The ONLY advantage this offers is a marketing bullet point, yet it brings with it several NEGATIVE marketing bullet points that CLEARLY are more important to people than the first, and then it also brings with it a metric fuckton of technical headaches.
The only thing this shows is how not to run your company.
Slashdot Mirror
best keyboard
Everyone agrees on this, this is the one thing they had.
best email
If we're comparing it to what was on phones in 1995, then sure, but BB's email is all around shitty in pretty much every way. It only happened to be considerably less shitty than affordable device implementations at the time. Porting PINE to a RIM device would be an upgrade for their mail client in every single possible way, assuming PINE supports IMAP IDLE, without the need for a bunch of RIM middleware because they couldnt' be bothered to develop software with a clue.
strong battery life
Meh, it was fine, but it wasn't impressive considering the device doesn't really do anything particularly impressive.
RIM needs to get their key features ported onto Android and make a telephone based on that or they will die.
That would be a dumb idea.
Unless something major changes, Android is on a race to the bottom. Manufactures really SHOULDN'T be screwing with Android, so its consistent to users, so they can't compete based on OS. That means they have to compete based on hardware. In every situation in history like this, the race is a race to the cheapest, most easily mass produced with the largest possible margins. Since there are a large number of companies competing, the margins are hardly worth bothering with, making it impossible to really make your device stand out among the others.
If they DO mess with the consistency, well then the problems you introduce by not being standard makes the fact that your android compatible practically worthless.
So basically, Android doesn't offer RIM anything better than they already have, a second rate option where the best they can hope for is to not go out of business quickly, so they can milk it for a few years to selling to the highest bidder, for pennies on the dollar.
Now, if you're belief is that RIM doesn't stand a snowballs chance in hell, then sure, throw android on all their devices and milk it out as long as you can. I'd say you'd probably be right, RIM clearly doesn't get it. They never really did, they just happen to be the option that sucked less than the non-existent option before them. Lets face it, RIM devices have always sucked ass, its just that they were slightly more usable than Windows Mobile devices. When the iPhone came out and set a reasonable standard for 'smart phones', RIM suddenly doesn't even really look like a 'dumb phone' anymore, its more like your inbred daughter of your third cousin who married her grandpa. They had a usable (not GOOD, just usable) email client on a phone while everyone else was dicking around being morons about it. No web browser, no HTML email, hardly presentable text even, but you could actually read it, and they came quickly, so it was good. Once you started seeing a web browser that didn't look like ass and pretty graphics on a phone that could be had for less than $500 (I'm ignoring other ridiculously over priced smart phones before the iPhone, which were $500-600 WITH a contract.), you know, an acceptable device for todays world, then the realization came out that RIM devices are actually really shitty. So they made new models ... and in those new models, in there effort to look like Apple, they threw out the only things people actually liked about them and also utterly failed to understand why Apple devices are liked.
They thought that Monkey See, Monkey Do would work ... except they were to stupid to realize they we watching the monkey ... while everyone else was impressed with what the bikini model standing next to the monkey was doing.
If you want to be anything other than a commodity hardware manufacture, you don't want to run Android on your devices.
If his arguments truly have no merit, then it won't make a splash in the tech press. People will simply blow him off as a disgruntled employee. So this is only bad if you feel that loyalty is more important than producing a good product.
What box or rock have you been living under?
There have been numerous idiots running their mouths I can think of in recent years. Hell, you've got the current Mozilla moron whos spouting about how companies are wrong and he knows the way the business world should work ... because he works on a web browser ... its not like thats been on slashdot or anything ... or all over other news resources, or The Woz from Apple who is about as disgruntled and upset that he didn't make the splash that steve does that it oozes from every pore in his body constantly, and the media is happy to run with his ignorant statements.
No former Microsoft/Google/Apple/Yahoo/Sun/SCO bigwigs have made utterly fucking stupid and incorrect in every way statements that the press ran with like the word of god or anything ... thats not ever happened.
Well, its not happened in the last 30 seconds or so, but probably has happened again by the time you read this post.
Again I ask, what rock have you been living under?
That would be wrong in many cases. Your corporate charter defines the goals of the company, which may not be how much you as a shareholder or management earn. RIM's goals probably include making money, but its certainly not a requirement for public companies to focus on shareholder profit.
As a general rule however, public perception is one of the biggest determining factors in profit. If you are perceived as worthless, no one will buy your product for any reason, which there are numerous companies you can use as examples for this one. If you are perceived as cool, trendy OR required for a happy day on the planet ... such as say Apple and Oil companies are perceived by most people, then you can sale your wares regardless of what you do to the customer or how absolutely worthless your product is ... which from a practical perspective, can lead to more earnings. Just look at people who bought into BitCoin ... perception is EVERYTHING. Reality is irrelevant. Logic does not apply here, only emotion and how you can use the customers emotion to your advantage.
You'd also gain an employee who clearly won't keep their mouth shut. While you may agree that he's right in this situation, you'd be stupid to think you'd feel the same way if he called you out. You'd be wise to consider that he'd probably be very happy to do the same thing to you. Do you really want to be in the same position as RIM? Do you really think you're immune to having a situation created that he wouldn't feel the same about?
The guy may be right, but I certainly wouldn't hire him. The company is already in a shitty spot, showing the public that the employees have no confidence as well is just bad form. Its unprofessional. He's more or less throwing a temper tantrum. "You aren't doing what I want, so I'm going to tell the world ... anonymously cause I don't really have the balls to say it", says the cowardly RIM employee.
Just because he happened to be right, doesn't mean what he did was a good thing in any way. Pointing out the obvious doesn't make you a hero.
It is possible to render a complex static scene entirely on the card with a single command now. Even some simply non-static values can be handled as well.
Mind you, for anything other than a 'see, I told you I could render the scene entirely on the card', the CPU is doing a bunch of work ... but it is possible to render a decent scene on the GPU entirely, once you've loaded all the data to the GPU. Its really actually gotten to the point using shaders and sneaking in data to the shaders via textures that you can do everything on the card. GPUs just suck at many things, branching for instance just destroys a shaders performance to the point that if you're branching in the shader, you're probably making it worse than letting the CPU do it, even on a high end GPU.
So ... it can be done, but from a practical perspective, you are correct, it doesn't happen entirely on the GPU.
Imagine that you have the ultimate badass GPU that can render anything in 0ms, but the processor is just average and takes 30ms to calculate physics and run the AI. So in the end, despite the super-fast graphics card, you're still only going to get at most ~33 FPS.
Sounds like you need to move the physics and AI code into a shader!
While it may not exist yet, with those 400 shader processes available, I'm pretty confident you could decode h.264 in a shader pretty easily. All it'd take is someone bothering to write the shader to do it, which has already been done actually.
The problem with Sandy Bridge in this case is actually 'it has built in h.264 decoding'. Okay, so those aren't really problems, lets face it, the codecs built in to it are the ones people are going to use anyway, so for the sake of discussion, lets assume we're speaking about raw tech specs rather than perfectly sufficient for current uses ...
A better GPU allows you to shift to new encoding/decoding methods.
More flexibility is good, hard coded instructions for specific ways of doing things today are useful, but not as useful as something just as fast that can be reconfigured via software for other things in the future.
GPUs started out with fixed pipelines, good at handling that fixed pipeline, then the realization came along that making that pipeline more flexible would provide WAY must usefulness for very little cost ... and along came the rise of OpenGL 3, DirectX 9, and most importantly, shaders.
On chip decoders for h.264 is great, but not as good as a reprogrammable processor capable of doing the same thing at the same cost (power usage/time to complete).
I'll take either one, but I'd prefer the second.
That is assuming you can find someone to give you something other than the finger when you try to sell them bitcoins ... which have already been show trivial to counter fit both in theory and in practice ... hence why we're having this discussion about them in the first place.
Sure, you might be able to make a profit at it, but you're more likely to make a profit using a Nigerian Prince with financial funneling SPAM kit and sending a few hundred thousands spams via someones botnet, seems kinda silly to consider either one of them worth the effort of doing.
According to what? How did you measure it?
Seems like 350 watts from the wall at 100% efficiency would still be too little to meet the requirements of that system, making it impossible for you to run on that in the real world once you take into the massive losses in the power supply and on board voltage regulators.
The EXACT same way you do it when your baking it onto the board? You glue it on. Of course on a normal PCB when its then baked to melt the solder, it gets a much stronger bond from the solder ... but glue is what holds the SMDs and such on until they get baked.
Yea, but do you know how well a ball point pen works on PCB? Pretty poorly, which is why we use felt.
I'd bet a good chunk of money this isn't even the first 'ball point pen with conductive ink', its more likely that intelligent people realized a long time ago that ball point pens work really poorly on surfaces with no texture to cause them to roll ... like say a perfectly smooth fibreglass PCB backing that you'd want to draw conductive lines on.
People running solaris machines that cost multiple 100s of thousands of dollars which power the applications that ARE their business ... aren't using cracked OSes to do it on.
They will however begin the long task of not using Sun or Oracle products anymore, and while Oracle will rape them for a few years, after that few years is up, Oracle will have fewer customers than they did before they bought out Sun, all paying them less money as they will be working their way away from Oracle to avoid this sort of shafting in the future.
Thats fucking funny.
Its absolutely hilarious as 'it still supports all my old hardware' is one of the Linux Standard Battlecrys.
You guys can't even keep your own fanboying straight anymore.
Yes, they are still customers because
A) The reason they paid 5 times as much for your hardware up front was to get 3 times the life out of it.
B) They still pay for support
C) They still buy new hardware since they want stuff that works well with their existing machines and as a migration path for old services.
You're an idiot if you think someone stops being a customer the instant they've paid you for a server and aren't buying new ones.
Larry is losing customers year after year, they just keep charging the ones that are really completely locked into Oracle more and more.
Oracle has no software advantage over the competition anymore, the only thing they offer that other vendors don't is the name Oracle and a little less effort porting old databases to new versions of Oracle. The lock in of massive systems that are built around Oracle is the only thing that keeps them alive. They offer an inferior product to the competition in every way. Its just a matter of time before they sink, because Larry is being a dick and some other people realized that Oracles only advantage was the amount of time it had been around, so they just started making alternatives. Hell, theres even a free database that can take out any use of Oracle on the small end.
The idea is that you trust some to make a security ONLY or bug fix ONLY patch that is unlikely to break existing functionality as the changes SHOULD ONLY BE VERY MINOR fixes, not feature or API changes.
Mozilla has said 'we're not supporting any sort of stable target, we will be intentionally breaking things in every single release we make, with no regard for what affect that will have on you, you must patch all of your websites to work with our NEW AND EXCITING bugs after every release we make if you want to have any security patches. We, Mozilla, are the reason you exist and without us, there would be no web, now do what we say!'
And everyones response is to sort of look at them funny, call them barking mad, then just ignore them till they crawl in a whole and die.
I expect 4.0.1 to work exactly like 4.0, except with some bug/security fixes.
I make very limited about 5.x acting anything like 4.x.
Actually, now I don't really expect anything from Mozilla, we just dropped support for it yesterday at our company, which means I don't have to maintain the plugins anymore ... yay! Thanks Mozilla, your ignorant change that would normally have resulted in a fuckton more work actually resulted in less as you no longer matter. You guys are still the best.
Anyone want to take bets on the name of the next incarnation of Netscape after Mozilla goes belly up in a year or two? This has all happened before and it will all happen again.
Strange, most place I dealt with the server was gone when the support ran out, which was typically 3 to 5 years depending on the contract.
Thats because you think Dell sells 'Servers'.
Theres a difference between anything you buy from Dell and a 64 processor Sun cabinet, and part of that difference is 10s of thousands of dollars price difference. Oh and the Sun server was actually expected to last longer than the warranty on it.
Sadly, you don't seem to know what a 'big' server looks like. Let me give you one little hint, Microsoft doesn't sell software designed to run on a medium to large server. At best, even a big Windows install is still 'Small'
For those that are still running what is frankly in computing terms ancient hardware it isn't like there aren't free Linux distros that will run on these machines
Right, because I'm using this big iron to run a Webserver ... which Linux would be fine at ... rather than using it to run a big application that makes our business work and needs a stable platform, and of course considering its developers actually need to product to work rather than spend their time chasing down 492 possible Linux variations, they just target Solaris and call it a day.
Basically, your post was written by someone who has clearly never worked with large hardware, you simply don't understand the difference between the toys your playing with and high end equipment, which is probably an artifact of living in a x86 dominated world where you throw more nodes at the problem rather than bigger nodes.
Oracle is relevant since it still provides some advantages over the competition
At this point, the only actual advantage Oracle has is that some apps are built entirely around Oracle and are non-trivial to port to a new system.
They have no other actual advantage, unless you call working with software that still thinks working with it should be just like the experience was in the 70s an advantage.
Theres a front end for ntpdate on android? Why the fuck doesn't it use the time from the cell network, which is kind of required to be accurate if you want the phone to actually ... you know, make calls.
What? You mean an android developer processes their own payments on someone elses store? I don't buy it.
Whoever runs the marketplace could handle the refunds if they can take the payments. If they don't know how to handle the refunds you probably shouldn't be buying from them anyway as its highly unlikely they were capable of making a secure site for processing payments in the first place.
We take CCs and send them off to our provider via a SOAP request, we then get a transaction id back, for 30 days we can issue a refund on any part of that transaction, after which its settled and we can issue a refund, but it costs us a quarter or something like that extra to do so as they actually have to transfer money between banks again.
To issue a refund is simply another SOAP request with the transaction id and the amount and/or items to refund.
Corporate users who can't update their browsers because of some persnickety internal application they have to use, but who then go and use that same browser on the public Internet.
Dear Mozilla Foundation,
Perhaps if you took a few minutes from your day to actually write quality code rather than racing to be the shiniest widget on the block ... that you copied from Google ... poorly, the perhaps those old browsers wouldn't be a threat.
I find it wildly amusing that as an enterprise user I'm being told that I'm the bad guy ... because their software is so poorly written that its full of exploitable bugs.
The browser is NOT more complex than an OS, yet I have several machines with uptimes over 4 years now ... that you couldn't exploit if your life depended on it ... yet for some reason ... its different for a browser.
No, its not different, you just fucking suck as developers and your focus is wrong, and you're blaming us because you're incapable of writing a stable, secure piece of software. If you did your job right the first time, old versions of your browser wouldn't be an issue, but instead you rush rush rush and write shit code.
You fucked up Mozilla, not me, YOU FIX YOUR PROBLEMS and stop blaming your problems on me. I have a simple solution to not running your old buggy ass browser anymore, I'll use something else from someone who puts at least a little effort into it. You're making IE security look completely acceptable, how pathetic does that make you?
So if the web browser previously support INPUT fields, and those go away in the next version, you're telling me that someone is lying?
Are you stupid?
So you've never dealt with the Mozilla code base I see.
If you want long term compat, you use the Frozen APIs ... thats what they say, not me. That in theory should me the API always functions as documented, even in future versions.
There are two problems with that, first ... the Frozen API is so limited that you can't do much without using non-frozen interfaces.
The second is ... a newly frozen API in FF4, will be depreciated and replaced with a new unfrozen API in FF5. Effectively making their 'frozen' API a lie.
The web is a constantly changing place, with websites redesigning themselves without warning. Maybe enterprises need a more rapid web browser deployment system that can keep up with Firefox, Chrome, and IE's upcoming rapid release system.
A new skin on a website doesn't require a new browser.
Maybe enterprises need a more stable browser developer rather than a bleeding edge always partially broken and doing something or unexpected Firefox?
Lets see, they could use IE, Opera, or Safari and get the same net effect with far less gross work.
Maybe ... JUST MAYBE ... Mozilla should consider what their consumers are saying and asking for rather than telling them its wrong. The Mozilla Foundation most certainly isn't an example any intelligent business would model itself after.
There are far more people who are just as intelligent saying this is a dumb idea than there are people saying this is a great idea. The ONLY advantage this offers is a marketing bullet point, yet it brings with it several NEGATIVE marketing bullet points that CLEARLY are more important to people than the first, and then it also brings with it a metric fuckton of technical headaches.
The only thing this shows is how not to run your company.