I tried to gloss over details that I didn't have to hand. Guess I didn't gloss enough.;) My point is that there was a good technical reason for why SMS is as long as it is (like you say, it piggybacked on a channel that wasn't really doing anything), and that the discussion over whether this was "enough" came after the fact.
The article states outright that the 160-character limit came before Hillebrand's "typewriter experiment", and that the experiment actually about because of an argument between Hillebrand and a coworker about whether 160 characters was sufficient for a sensible message. This meshes with what we already know about SMS, namely that it could never have been much more than 128 characters for technical reasons. Quite why the article structures its opening to suggest that Hillebrand pulled the number out of his arse after some typewriter time is a mystery.
The account's set up with your phone number, uses the same user identifier, travels with the phone number, and there's a billing infrastructure for it. Meanwhile the vast majority of phone users don't even have packet data plans. It's operator inertia, basically.
Things ministers have "considered" and things the Daily Mail in particular reports they have considered. No point here, it's just interesting how often the term is used, especially when it's something controversial. Like science, it's never "John Smith", the newspapers preferring to imply that the entire profession says/thinks so.
One could argue that MS could've chosen any formula spec it wanted and naturally went with Excel, leading to the incompatability, but the existing Cleverage ODF add-in was perfectly happy to read and write other ODF spreadsheet formula systems. There was no need for them to spend time and money creating a less compatible version of that bit of software, except with incompatability as a goal.
If those following the standard act in good faith and cooperate outwith the standard to ensure compatability, a flexible standard allows for innovation and invention. You can always pin things down further as the standard evolves, but you can't really undo excessive constraints further down the line. If one of the players decides to act in bad faith, then it falls apart. In this instance, MS is either only supporting ODF in the most box-checking token manner (as they have a long history of doing with important features), they're deliberately, or they're pulling the old "embrace, extend, extinguish". They're morons or assholes.
Yes, it's worth noting that the article only addresses that one filetype. On the other hand, it removes the formulas from spreadsheets when loading them, and writes formulas back out in an Excel-only syntax that nothing else can read. If that's MS's idea of shippable, consumer-ready interoperability I don't hold out much hope for its compatability with other file types. Its behavior reads like a half-assed homework assignment from a student who didn't give a shit.
For what it's worth, I didn't call this a "leak" in the original title. It was "Acer Bosses: Windows 7 launches 23rd October 2009". Clearly I should be a Slashdot editor.:) Sorry for the late reply, I had no idea this story was posted until right now because I'd unchecked kdawson in some sort of fit of pissiness.
So, we have Conficker infecting hospitals now. And meanwhile, after Conficker's payload goes live, there's a massive outbreak of swine flu. And conficker spreads spam... spam is a pork product... COINCIDENCE?!
I don't think it's something that's particularly cumulative. It'd take an awful lot of blogs for the average Facebook- and Youtube-prowling IE user to decide to switch over, they just won't read those blogs and be happy with it. If it starts happening with major segments of the internet en masse, so that you can't (for example) get onto any blog with IE, then it'd be effective.
Y'know what, in these days of feature-checklist bloat and inelegance, I'm appreciative that somebody actually hires staff who think it's worth knocking off about half a second from an operation if you can do it at no functionality cost. It's just old-fashioned good software design, and it doesn't deserve mockery, no matter how trivial an example it is.
Aaargh, it's infuriating that a thinktank that has the false authority to make proclaimations like this conflates network performance and computer performance. It's like Intel's "MMX makes the internet faster" crap, but in reverse. A slow network does not suddenly make your favourite offline photo editing app slow down.
(I will of course withdraw these objections if it transpires that the think-tank have come back from the near future where everything's done on The Cloud.)
Based on the beta, if by "disable a lot of functionality" you mean, "refuse to run for more than two hours consecutively", then yeah, that's how it'll work. You'd better either have your data off there by the time it expires, or figure out how to move it in blocks of 6600 seconds.
I'm not following how this plan is an inconvenience for people who can't change browser for whatever reason, or simply decline to. They can just ignore the message.
Actually the Win7 RC doesn't have any path to the full, licenced version of Win7 at the end of the testing period, because it's released for testing, not as a freebie.
I believe that the VM is freely downloadable for all users, but none of them come with an XP licence yet. I read somewhere that the final release will only differ by giving Pro and upwards the free XP licence: the VM will be available to anybody who has an XP licence to stick on it. That report is not substantiated though.
I think that on balance users will see the perceived cost* of switching browser as much greater than the perceived cost of not viewing your site. That's not a criticism on your site, I'm just saying for anything short of Facebook they're not going to bother.
Why not detect if they're using IE and have a pop-up saying "Does this site look broken? Your browser does not properly support internet standards." and direct them to the appropriate explaination, list of browsers, etc. That gets the same message across without costing you any readership, and it removes the elitist connotations that "special browsers" seem to have.
* Emphasis on "perceived". I do find that users adapt to new browsers more easily than they think: my mother wound up easily switching from IE to a customised Firefox-lookalike when her broadband company's setup disk automatically installed it.
A massive energy release. Much of the energy is released as EM, but a great deal of it comes in the form of gravity waves. Observatories like LIGO are hoping for black hole collisions, because they're some of the strongest gravity wave sources we'd expect to see.
Slashdot Mirror
My sentiments exactly. Dudes, we were quoting Kent Brockman. Chill.
Avoision.
I think that 256 words should be enough for everyone. It's not like ???INEXPRESSABLE CONCEPT ERROR????
I tried to gloss over details that I didn't have to hand. Guess I didn't gloss enough. ;) My point is that there was a good technical reason for why SMS is as long as it is (like you say, it piggybacked on a channel that wasn't really doing anything), and that the discussion over whether this was "enough" came after the fact.
I should clarify that I mean the SMS account here. If email was set up the same way, people would switch.
The article states outright that the 160-character limit came before Hillebrand's "typewriter experiment", and that the experiment actually about because of an argument between Hillebrand and a coworker about whether 160 characters was sufficient for a sensible message. This meshes with what we already know about SMS, namely that it could never have been much more than 128 characters for technical reasons. Quite why the article structures its opening to suggest that Hillebrand pulled the number out of his arse after some typewriter time is a mystery.
The account's set up with your phone number, uses the same user identifier, travels with the phone number, and there's a billing infrastructure for it. Meanwhile the vast majority of phone users don't even have packet data plans. It's operator inertia, basically.
Things ministers have "considered" and things the Daily Mail in particular reports they have considered. No point here, it's just interesting how often the term is used, especially when it's something controversial. Like science, it's never "John Smith", the newspapers preferring to imply that the entire profession says/thinks so.
You fail at reading the licence.
One could argue that MS could've chosen any formula spec it wanted and naturally went with Excel, leading to the incompatability, but the existing Cleverage ODF add-in was perfectly happy to read and write other ODF spreadsheet formula systems. There was no need for them to spend time and money creating a less compatible version of that bit of software, except with incompatability as a goal.
If those following the standard act in good faith and cooperate outwith the standard to ensure compatability, a flexible standard allows for innovation and invention. You can always pin things down further as the standard evolves, but you can't really undo excessive constraints further down the line. If one of the players decides to act in bad faith, then it falls apart. In this instance, MS is either only supporting ODF in the most box-checking token manner (as they have a long history of doing with important features), they're deliberately, or they're pulling the old "embrace, extend, extinguish". They're morons or assholes.
Yes, it's worth noting that the article only addresses that one filetype. On the other hand, it removes the formulas from spreadsheets when loading them, and writes formulas back out in an Excel-only syntax that nothing else can read. If that's MS's idea of shippable, consumer-ready interoperability I don't hold out much hope for its compatability with other file types. Its behavior reads like a half-assed homework assignment from a student who didn't give a shit.
To be fair, the kind of people who would make that assumption are the same kind of people who assume Windows is computing.
For what it's worth, I didn't call this a "leak" in the original title. It was "Acer Bosses: Windows 7 launches 23rd October 2009". Clearly I should be a Slashdot editor. :) Sorry for the late reply, I had no idea this story was posted until right now because I'd unchecked kdawson in some sort of fit of pissiness.
So, we have Conficker infecting hospitals now. And meanwhile, after Conficker's payload goes live, there's a massive outbreak of swine flu. And conficker spreads spam... spam is a pork product... COINCIDENCE?!
I don't think it's something that's particularly cumulative. It'd take an awful lot of blogs for the average Facebook- and Youtube-prowling IE user to decide to switch over, they just won't read those blogs and be happy with it. If it starts happening with major segments of the internet en masse, so that you can't (for example) get onto any blog with IE, then it'd be effective.
Y'know what, in these days of feature-checklist bloat and inelegance, I'm appreciative that somebody actually hires staff who think it's worth knocking off about half a second from an operation if you can do it at no functionality cost. It's just old-fashioned good software design, and it doesn't deserve mockery, no matter how trivial an example it is.
Aaargh, it's infuriating that a thinktank that has the false authority to make proclaimations like this conflates network performance and computer performance. It's like Intel's "MMX makes the internet faster" crap, but in reverse. A slow network does not suddenly make your favourite offline photo editing app slow down.
(I will of course withdraw these objections if it transpires that the think-tank have come back from the near future where everything's done on The Cloud.)
Based on the beta, if by "disable a lot of functionality" you mean, "refuse to run for more than two hours consecutively", then yeah, that's how it'll work. You'd better either have your data off there by the time it expires, or figure out how to move it in blocks of 6600 seconds.
I'm not following how this plan is an inconvenience for people who can't change browser for whatever reason, or simply decline to. They can just ignore the message.
Actually the Win7 RC doesn't have any path to the full, licenced version of Win7 at the end of the testing period, because it's released for testing, not as a freebie.
I believe that the VM is freely downloadable for all users, but none of them come with an XP licence yet. I read somewhere that the final release will only differ by giving Pro and upwards the free XP licence: the VM will be available to anybody who has an XP licence to stick on it. That report is not substantiated though.
I think that on balance users will see the perceived cost* of switching browser as much greater than the perceived cost of not viewing your site. That's not a criticism on your site, I'm just saying for anything short of Facebook they're not going to bother.
Why not detect if they're using IE and have a pop-up saying "Does this site look broken? Your browser does not properly support internet standards." and direct them to the appropriate explaination, list of browsers, etc. That gets the same message across without costing you any readership, and it removes the elitist connotations that "special browsers" seem to have.
* Emphasis on "perceived". I do find that users adapt to new browsers more easily than they think: my mother wound up easily switching from IE to a customised Firefox-lookalike when her broadband company's setup disk automatically installed it.
A massive energy release. Much of the energy is released as EM, but a great deal of it comes in the form of gravity waves. Observatories like LIGO are hoping for black hole collisions, because they're some of the strongest gravity wave sources we'd expect to see.
Maybe you sold it.