Whenever this comes up here I always get a big chuckle because IBM is just doing what it does best (much like Microsoft), except that they've amusingly managed to do it completely out in the open. So while Rob Weir might be nothing more than a shill, he actually admits he's a shill by virtue of being a full-time salaried employee of IBM, a company that just happens to be offering a range of products (including an office suite) that compete with Microsoft Office. Everyone else just puts their fingers in their ears and goes la-la-la-la-la.
Remember Peter Torr? He wrote a blog post not long after Firefox hit 1.0 where he questioned why the Firefox installer was not digitally signed. What he said was completely true - so true in fact that not long after that Mozilla started signing the installer. That didn't prevent few thousand raving lunatics from descending on his blog and calling him a shill and an idiot. To paraphrase you, yes his company maybe bias in not wanting the [browser to succeed], but does that make what he says less true? The facts speak the truth.
So essentially we have situations where the source of income and ulterior motives of one person should not be questioned because the topic is unpopular and everybody knows he must be right. On the other hand we have people whose motives *must* be automatically questioned solely because of their source of income and ulterior motives.
The truth is that Weir should have recused himself from all this a long time ago. That he hasn't done that tells you a lot about him and his employers.
You might argue that Microsoft had all this coming. You might argue that OOXML is not a good standard. You might argue a lot of things, but none of them make IBM's conduct in all this (including the whole ISO thing) any less dishonest.
Just over 15 years ago, Microsoft used the press to spread its FUD via monthly printed tech journals and when it was exposed, they would print tiny retractions a few months later.
Keep in mind this is no different from the barrage of FUD being thrown at Microsoft every day from sites like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. Slashdot in particular has turned Microsoft bashing into a profitable business model. This article is just one of the thousands of examples of that. Do they report the bad things accurately? Sure. That doesn't mean they don't spend the rest of their time exaggerating and misreporting everything else in order to generate more page views and mode ad revenue.
FUD is that, FUD. Lies are just that - lies. It doesn't matter who is responsible for them. Just because you've managed to be disingenuous enough to claim the moral high ground or convince yourself that your opponent is "evil" doesn't mean it's OK to stoop to the same level as them.
I'm getting really sick and tired of educating you guys
If you spent half the time you spend on this annoying and arrogant "evangelism" drive of yours on actually doing something of value to reduce the amount of dependency people have on Microsoft technologies, the world would be an awesome place indeed. Alas, 15 years of bitching has produced exactly nothing of value as far as I can tell.
All you armchair advocates are the same. People pay attention to what you're saying and understand your opinions if you are honest, humble, mature and truthful. They don't have to be forced to believe.
he talked about making the Browser as the new platform
He did, in a way, but not exactly. Netscape was flush with IPO money and continued success in the as of yet unresolved browser wars when they started talking about "collaboration" and "groupware". They wanted to turn their product (Navigator) into something that would allow people to collaborate seamlessly in many different ways (something that no one really accomplished until Ray Ozzie took the lessons he learned with Notes and and created Groove). They then proceeded to systematically butcher the core web browser in the name of progress, until they were left with a mess that wasn't a browser *or* a collaboration product, let along a groupware platform.
Then they piggybacked Sun's antitrust complaints against Microsoft and created the classic "Microsoft killed Netscape" meme, when the reality is they committed lack-of-focus-and-feature-creep suicide quite effectively without any outside help. Of course Microsoft's bundling prevented further competition (and stagnated the browser market and the web in the process), but by then Netscape had become incapable of shipping working software and were completely irrelevant other than the fact they had created a broken "standard" that we were all forced to support (NS4) for the next half decade or so.
The other day I read an article (something related to the Yahoo deal) where Marc Andreessen calls Microsoft a great company. I think he's probably starting to feel guilty in his old age.
The packages (or whatever passes for that in this thing) will be signed by Apple. The device will refuse to install anything not signed by Apple.
Someone will defeat that. ScrewTheMan Software will create their iSuperDownloadApps website, which will sell software for less but requires that you jailbreak/brick your phone to use them.
Apple will file injunctions and issue press releases and DMCA takedowns, lawyers will make lots of money. Eventually (as usual) the majority of iPhone users could give a crap about cheaper apps, so they'll just continue forking money over to Steve Jobs. iSuperDownloadApps will transform into a niche community of bricked iPhone users scraping by on PayPal donations. Apple will continue to control the platform and make money.
Then MobileBonziBuddy (a fully legit Nigerian LLC based in Romania) will also create their site for the iPhone... and maybe we'll all get to have the last chuckle.
The entire conversation about tweaking her WP entry was published elsewhere, along with the more puerile parts. Wales did not bother to refute them.
AFAIK she is not accusing Wales of anything, so your reference is irrelevant. The fact that she works for Fox is irrelevant. The fact that you don't consider her a "peach" is irrelevant.
In the past three days a veritable army of astroturfers and apologists have been furiously committing character assasination on this woman all over the place. The same thing happens whenever some not-so-rosy news is published about Wikipedia. This is not news, you all take WP too seriously, the woman is evil, etc.
When WP claims (or rather, Jimmy Wales claims) that WP is the most important thing on the internet then we are all supposed to take WP very seriously. When the shit hits the fan (remember Essjay?) then we're all being too critical. You can't have your cake and eat it.
Wrongdoing is never relative. Unless of course you are predisposed to consider it that way. I doubt anyone else would get a pass in this case.
Funny Slashdot didn't mention the "I want to fuck your brains out" part of the Mardsen thing. Anyone else and it would have been regurgitated front and center.
Not for PHP applications, no. Good enough for light testing, but not production.
.NET-based applications on the other hand, work great. Server 2003 and 2008 now are great platforms for them. So when you say "isn't a great server", I expect you mean "for the language/technology I choose to work for", much as Mono-based apps are not exactly mainstream or very well tested in Apache.
PHP on IIS5/6 had to run as a CGI application, because their ISAPI handler implementation was historically crappy and unstable under load. CGI under the thread-oriented (as opposed to process-oriented in *nix) pipelining model of Windows was usually not a good performer. IIS7 introduced FastCGI, which is what Zend used to "certify" PHP to run on Server 2008. But FastCGI is not an optimization, it's a new execution mode for IIS. Nor was PHP modified (AFAIK) in any way to run effectively on FastCGI. Python apps also run very well on it (which personally is more exciting to me than PHP).
They just thought it was the best thing to do. After all, they're going to be breaking a lot of intranet crap, which won't make them lots of fans.
But that doesn't get the juices flowing as effectively as the "they did it because I think they're scared of the EU" editorial byline. Must have those ad impressions.
You're going to get modded as troll here, but I think there's been a huge backlash against Ruby lately (just read programming.reddit.com once in a while), and rather than blaming the language or the toolset itself I think the problem is that it was so excessively hyped (mostly because of Rails) that whenever people find a problem somewhere then the whole thing is declared as lacking.
Personally I don't like Ruby, but that doesn't mean the language is not good. It has some interesting syntactic sugar. And Rails didn't really invent anything new. MVC and ActiveRecord for example had been done to death before, but it packaged them in an attractive and simple little box with a nice glue language that made 80% of building a web app simple. It's always the remaining 20% that's hard, and I think Rails was not designed well enough to enable developers to jump the last hurdles. Much of the criticism I've read in the past few months about Rails is related to problems with how the public Rails API is designed and how too many developers are using runtime hacks to extend objects instead of having sane, language-specific inheritance/override methods for extension purposes. Again, nothing to do with Ruby the language, but you can't reall discuss Ruby without Rails because in the real world it's what currently drives its adoption. I doubt many people are writing desktop apps with it.
Let this be a warning to framework designers: your language, runtime and toolset better match the amount of hype you pile on your work. It's not good enough to have a cool language to go along. The popular Perl (Mason, etc), Python (Django, etc) and PHP frameworks prove it can be done.
until they GPL Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office
Besides the arrogance of using the GPL as the measuring stick (as if all the other licenses were irrelevant), if this is your threshold for acceptable action by the part of Microsoft I'd recommend just keeping up the "lalalala i can't hear you" routine. It will be much more rewarding in the long term.
Disassembly shows these WK functions are mostly just wrappers around undocumented framework functions. The source to the WK wrappers is not available; the implementations are in a binary blob library that you download with the Webkit sources. It appears the sole purpose of closing the source to this library is to conceal the signatures of the undocumented framework APIs used by Webkit, presumably so that ISVs like us can't use them.
FOSS would have also have destroyed the shareware software market completely. I don't really have a strong opinion about whether or not companies like Nico Mak, Helios, Impact or JASC should have existed or made some money for their founders, but I do know that they made pretty good products (WinZip, TextPad, Microangelo and PaintShop Pro) that I paid for at some point because they represented an excellent deal for the money. Human nature being largely what it is, does anyone think that these applications would have had the same financial success if they were based on some tip jar model? And these are just the big boys of shareware, there are literally thousands of them still around.
How much revenue are you going to get out of supporting a text editor or an archive program? For a 100K-level individual user base? Probably none. The support model might work in the enterprise space where a CTO pays lots of money as CYA insurance so he can point the finger at the vendor when the shit hits the fan, but it does not work at most other levels.
The shareware model might be odious to many people here, but it was a good business for a lot of people who don't think selling bits is a blasphemy. And that's still the majority of people. Not everyone can write web browsers and get $20M deals with multi-billion dollar search engines. It's the simpler, more niche software that would be impossible to monetize.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to say that there aren't any, but of course as usual the negatives have to be amplified and exaggerated in the name of freedom and ad impressions.
Remember Peter Torr? He wrote a blog post not long after Firefox hit 1.0 where he questioned why the Firefox installer was not digitally signed. What he said was completely true - so true in fact that not long after that Mozilla started signing the installer. That didn't prevent few thousand raving lunatics from descending on his blog and calling him a shill and an idiot. To paraphrase you, yes his company maybe bias in not wanting the [browser to succeed], but does that make what he says less true? The facts speak the truth.
So essentially we have situations where the source of income and ulterior motives of one person should not be questioned because the topic is unpopular and everybody knows he must be right. On the other hand we have people whose motives *must* be automatically questioned solely because of their source of income and ulterior motives.
The truth is that Weir should have recused himself from all this a long time ago. That he hasn't done that tells you a lot about him and his employers.
You might argue that Microsoft had all this coming. You might argue that OOXML is not a good standard. You might argue a lot of things, but none of them make IBM's conduct in all this (including the whole ISO thing) any less dishonest.
No, he is doubting it because of what he is.
I do not think this means what you think it means.
Oh, and this comes to mind as well. Opera's biggest enemy is not IE, it's Firefox.
And they are bringing IE8 into compliance because...?
Keep in mind this is no different from the barrage of FUD being thrown at Microsoft every day from sites like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. Slashdot in particular has turned Microsoft bashing into a profitable business model. This article is just one of the thousands of examples of that. Do they report the bad things accurately? Sure. That doesn't mean they don't spend the rest of their time exaggerating and misreporting everything else in order to generate more page views and mode ad revenue.
FUD is that, FUD. Lies are just that - lies. It doesn't matter who is responsible for them. Just because you've managed to be disingenuous enough to claim the moral high ground or convince yourself that your opponent is "evil" doesn't mean it's OK to stoop to the same level as them.
If you spent half the time you spend on this annoying and arrogant "evangelism" drive of yours on actually doing something of value to reduce the amount of dependency people have on Microsoft technologies, the world would be an awesome place indeed. Alas, 15 years of bitching has produced exactly nothing of value as far as I can tell.
All you armchair advocates are the same. People pay attention to what you're saying and understand your opinions if you are honest, humble, mature and truthful. They don't have to be forced to believe.
He did, in a way, but not exactly. Netscape was flush with IPO money and continued success in the as of yet unresolved browser wars when they started talking about "collaboration" and "groupware". They wanted to turn their product (Navigator) into something that would allow people to collaborate seamlessly in many different ways (something that no one really accomplished until Ray Ozzie took the lessons he learned with Notes and and created Groove). They then proceeded to systematically butcher the core web browser in the name of progress, until they were left with a mess that wasn't a browser *or* a collaboration product, let along a groupware platform.
Then they piggybacked Sun's antitrust complaints against Microsoft and created the classic "Microsoft killed Netscape" meme, when the reality is they committed lack-of-focus-and-feature-creep suicide quite effectively without any outside help. Of course Microsoft's bundling prevented further competition (and stagnated the browser market and the web in the process), but by then Netscape had become incapable of shipping working software and were completely irrelevant other than the fact they had created a broken "standard" that we were all forced to support (NS4) for the next half decade or so.
The other day I read an article (something related to the Yahoo deal) where Marc Andreessen calls Microsoft a great company. I think he's probably starting to feel guilty in his old age.
Someone will defeat that. ScrewTheMan Software will create their iSuperDownloadApps website, which will sell software for less but requires that you jailbreak/brick your phone to use them.
Apple will file injunctions and issue press releases and DMCA takedowns, lawyers will make lots of money. Eventually (as usual) the majority of iPhone users could give a crap about cheaper apps, so they'll just continue forking money over to Steve Jobs. iSuperDownloadApps will transform into a niche community of bricked iPhone users scraping by on PayPal donations. Apple will continue to control the platform and make money.
Then MobileBonziBuddy (a fully legit Nigerian LLC based in Romania) will also create their site for the iPhone... and maybe we'll all get to have the last chuckle.
To follow your logic, we should all ignore Rob Weir's opinions on ODF/OOXML, since he's a full-time salaried employee of IBM.
Double standards are great, eh?
AFAIK she is not accusing Wales of anything, so your reference is irrelevant. The fact that she works for Fox is irrelevant. The fact that you don't consider her a "peach" is irrelevant.
In the past three days a veritable army of astroturfers and apologists have been furiously committing character assasination on this woman all over the place. The same thing happens whenever some not-so-rosy news is published about Wikipedia. This is not news, you all take WP too seriously, the woman is evil, etc.
When WP claims (or rather, Jimmy Wales claims) that WP is the most important thing on the internet then we are all supposed to take WP very seriously. When the shit hits the fan (remember Essjay?) then we're all being too critical. You can't have your cake and eat it.
Funny Slashdot didn't mention the "I want to fuck your brains out" part of the Mardsen thing. Anyone else and it would have been regurgitated front and center.
Yes, Blockbuster is the same. It's annoying.
Only on Slashdot can someone get modded up and then two posts down say "fuck you asshole, I have a sockpuppet" without repercussions.
Try and sell Shane Caraveo's unofficial and unsupported library to the average Fortune 1000 CTO and let me know how it goes.
Not for PHP applications, no. Good enough for light testing, but not production.
PHP on IIS5/6 had to run as a CGI application, because their ISAPI handler implementation was historically crappy and unstable under load. CGI under the thread-oriented (as opposed to process-oriented in *nix) pipelining model of Windows was usually not a good performer. IIS7 introduced FastCGI, which is what Zend used to "certify" PHP to run on Server 2008. But FastCGI is not an optimization, it's a new execution mode for IIS. Nor was PHP modified (AFAIK) in any way to run effectively on FastCGI. Python apps also run very well on it (which personally is more exciting to me than PHP).
But that doesn't get the juices flowing as effectively as the "they did it because I think they're scared of the EU" editorial byline. Must have those ad impressions.
Personally I don't like Ruby, but that doesn't mean the language is not good. It has some interesting syntactic sugar. And Rails didn't really invent anything new. MVC and ActiveRecord for example had been done to death before, but it packaged them in an attractive and simple little box with a nice glue language that made 80% of building a web app simple. It's always the remaining 20% that's hard, and I think Rails was not designed well enough to enable developers to jump the last hurdles. Much of the criticism I've read in the past few months about Rails is related to problems with how the public Rails API is designed and how too many developers are using runtime hacks to extend objects instead of having sane, language-specific inheritance/override methods for extension purposes. Again, nothing to do with Ruby the language, but you can't reall discuss Ruby without Rails because in the real world it's what currently drives its adoption. I doubt many people are writing desktop apps with it.
Let this be a warning to framework designers: your language, runtime and toolset better match the amount of hype you pile on your work. It's not good enough to have a cool language to go along. The popular Perl (Mason, etc), Python (Django, etc) and PHP frameworks prove it can be done.
What is this "standard" and who established it?
Besides the arrogance of using the GPL as the measuring stick (as if all the other licenses were irrelevant), if this is your threshold for acceptable action by the part of Microsoft I'd recommend just keeping up the "lalalala i can't hear you" routine. It will be much more rewarding in the long term.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/02/platform_tilt.html
Disassembly shows these WK functions are mostly just wrappers around undocumented framework functions. The source to the WK wrappers is not available; the implementations are in a binary blob library that you download with the Webkit sources. It appears the sole purpose of closing the source to this library is to conceal the signatures of the undocumented framework APIs used by Webkit, presumably so that ISVs like us can't use them.
Yup.
You try that with WebKit and get back to us. After all, IE is nothing more than a thin UI shell around MSHTML and a few other components.
How much revenue are you going to get out of supporting a text editor or an archive program? For a 100K-level individual user base? Probably none. The support model might work in the enterprise space where a CTO pays lots of money as CYA insurance so he can point the finger at the vendor when the shit hits the fan, but it does not work at most other levels.
The shareware model might be odious to many people here, but it was a good business for a lot of people who don't think selling bits is a blasphemy. And that's still the majority of people. Not everyone can write web browsers and get $20M deals with multi-billion dollar search engines. It's the simpler, more niche software that would be impossible to monetize.