Changing the formula has a name. It's called the NGE. Pissing off a vast quantity of your existing customers is a poor idea when you're not at all guaranteed that the new formula is going to bring in enough new people to offset them.
Sony tried it, and it was a total disaster. I can't imagine anybody is insane enough to want to do that with a game that has the subscriber base of WoW. Even if it's peaked and is now on a gradual decline (as happens to all games, there was no way this could last forever) it's got years of major profitability left. Improving the game is good. Rocking the boat is career suicide.
I think WoW realized that if they change the existing trial program slightly (you now have longer then 10 days to reach level 20, not much else changed from something they've offered for YEARS) they can generate headlines and publicity without particularly doing anything.
And going by this post on Slashdot that acts like this is something new and shiny, they succeeded. In reality it's the existing trial without the 10 day limitation. But hey, minor details like facts should never get in the way of a good story.
They were used for laundering. Gold seller bot gets gold. Gives gold to level 5 trial account. Level 5 trial account buys weird gray items thrown up on AH by players who are buying gold for absurd amounts of gold, which is how the players get the gold they bought. Transaction log shows a level 5 trial account as the one buying the bogus auction.
It adds more steps to tracking it down to then have to sort out where that account got the gold from.
Seriously. This update schedule is even more innane for email clients then it is for the web browser (where at least there might be something new in one of these releases). Now they're just releasing stuff for the sake of sticking to some retarded schedule, no matter how little sense it makes.
There's only one thing I ask for above all else in an email client: stability. I want it to work, and I want it to hassle me as little as possible. Mozilla seems like their new goal is to annoy people into submission.
This is not good for the Enterprise. It's not good for Firefox or Mozilla, which is already losing marketshare and isn't going to benefit from pissing off very large users. It's not even good for "the web" despite their nebulous and poorly supported claim that it is.
In reality this is some blowhards like Asa making poor decisions and then trying to defend them when people point out that it's a poor decision. Normal users don't particularly benefit from more big downloads that break things more often and will sometimes get a new gee-whiz HTML 5 feature out the door a bit sooner (which then won't be adopted by any websites until a couple of versions of FF later because of the lag time required to, you know, develop stuff). Enterprise users clearly suffer because keeping up with this requires throwing testing out the window and will effectively just reinforce the idea that you should stick with IE (where Microsoft actually wants your business and doesn't give you a middle finger).
If driving people away from Firefox is "good for the web", then I guess this is good for the web. But here in reality it's good for IE and Chrome.
Better idea - we'll just use something else. Shave off several more percentage points of marketshare (and the ad revenue from Google that goes with it).
Yeah, because doing that every 6 weeks to meet Mozilla's delusional goal of catching up to Chrome on version numbers is certainly something I feel like doing with my time.
The same amount they get from you using it at home, except if we can convince one person to make the switch we bring a thousand users at once. And we're not very big.
IBM does contribute money to Firefox, and they're not exactly happy with this mess either. Piss off all the corporate users and you'll soon find that the corporate developers who were being paid to work with you (and the corporate donations) go with them. Then hey you're the #3 browser behind Chrome and suddenly nobody gives a shit about you.
It's not like a lot is actually being asked of them here. But since they really, REALLY want us to use something else, we'll oblige them.
Yeah, and having Firefox obsoleting itself and putting out a new version every 6 weeks isn't viable for a large company to deal with when you want to, you know, test shit.
Why do you think IE is still so popular in the enterprise? Because it does this stuff really well, rather then telling companies to screw off the way Mozilla just did.
You need to get the word on this out there, because Asa's blowhard comments are what people saw and they resonate very strongly at the management level. They read that and completely write Firefox off.
(And I only wish I was just guessing on that. It's exactly what happened in my office.)
We (as in most of IT) had been trying to get management on board with switching to Firefox for a while now in place of IE for various reasons, and were finally making some progress.
Then this idiocy happened. Management is back to being spooked. They like group policy. They like that they can deny pushing out a new version if it breaks apps until we can fix them, knowing that the previous version still has security updates for some timeframe > 0. IE gives them that. Chrome has some support for it. Firefox didn't really do much for us before in that area, but also didn't actively try to make it hard.
Then Mozilla (and Asa in particular) gave us the middle finger. Management noticed. There is zero chance of a migration happening now.
I've been trying to figure out if anybody outside of Mozilla thinks this is a good idea. It's like they have a reality distortion bubble over the place and when faced with the reality that this was a particularly bad idea for enterprise users simply decided they didn't like those people anyway rather then fess up to the reality that their new model sucks.
Lots of business don't in fact need ActiveX for legacy junk. But most businesses of significant size do want some control over when the browser will update major versions and potentially break all sorts of things.
A better example is the Robert Dziekaski Taser incident, where the cops tasered someone repeatidly for no reason and killed him. Lied about it. Confiscated the evidence to protect themselves. Only that video going public is what finally caused something to be done, because it so enraged the public that the government had no choice but to call an inquiry.
Actually, it was never just a browser. Even the first public version did mail, newsgroups, and more. Furthermore, site compatibility was a huge problem in the early days, and until recently. Opera now works with more sites than ever.
Opera 3 had rudimentary support, at best. Considerable effort was spent in creating M2 (the mail client in later versions) after the fact when they should have been focusing on the browser.
Good thing Opera is currently one of the fastest browsers, and still runs on slow hardware, them.
On the contrary. Opera is now faster than ever. It got bigger because it now handles a lot more open web standards and technologies than it used to. You'll notice that most of the growth comes from adding support for new web standards, and adding workarounds for broken sites.
Not in my experience. Opera lost most of its performance advantage several versions ago. They've probably regained some of it recently compared to Firefox because FF 4 is such a pig, but that's hardly a credit to them and more of a condemnation of Mozilla.
Such as?
Couple of the many that annoyed me:
In early versions if you closed the browser with multiple windows open, reopening the browser later would reload those windows from the server. They changed that later so that it would reload the cached versions, completely ignoring cache settings and bringing up stuff that could be *days* since expired. When I stopped using it, it was still doing that. Firefox does the same thing.
They also changed from the nice windowing model Opera 6 had to a less functional tab style version around Opera 9 (or maybe 10) where you couldn't layer things around inside the same window anymore, instead you had to split the tab off into its own window and then do it. Hell, Opera 3's MDI was more capable of that.
What are you talking about? The BitTorrent hasn't received a single update in several years. Mail was there from the very first public version, but was also left nearly untouched until quite recently, when they made a new mail panel for 11.0 or something like that.
The BitTorrent client was built before it was ignored, which was attention spent on something that was never needed. And really, ignoring stuff that needs work is the Opera way in some things. They had a great custom search functionality years before anybody else, but had no UI to edit it and sent people off to edit ini files instead. That's certainly fine in the first version it appears, but they left it that way for years to play around with other stuff instead.
Mail was there in some form in Opera 3, then totally redone in later versions, then ignored for a while.
It is clear that you have no idea what you are talking about.
Really? You're the one telling me the same mail client has been there all along when it really wasn't. They called it "M2" for a reason, and it wasn't because it was the first version.
Unite might be a web server, but what it enables is direct communication between devices. Opera is not just a desktop browser, but actually a cross-platform browser.
Unite is a web server stuck inside a web browser. It'd make more sense as a standalone app so that people could A) not install it, and B) keep it running after closing the browser. (Maybe they fixed B since I stopped using Opera, the first time they didn't fix windowing issues and instead announced a web server I decided I was done with them.)
You must be drunk or something. Jon himself wanted Opera to be everything for everyone. He was constantly going on about how great that was in various interviews./quote?
Jon was the CEO until last year. Have you EVER heard a CEO go on an interview and say "yeah we're doing this shit all wrong"?
I met Jon years ago, and found him to be a great guy. The company at the time was focused on making a good browser for power users, and they did that really well. It also helped that back then they were focused on performance and working on older systems.
At some point I noticed things changing years later. Opera got bigger, and slower. UI stuff that worked forever was broken in favor of a less flexible Firefox clone model. Attention was diverted to writing an email client. Then a BitTorrent client. Then a web server built into the browser. I only wish I was making that last one up.
The company lost focus on what made Opera good in the first place as they went from trying to be a good, fast browser to trying to do everything for everybody. Finally I stopped using it when the drift got so bad that it wasn't really better then Firefox at anything.
This drift coincided with the company growing in size and it being less about how it started: Jon and a few other guys trying to make a good browser.
New developers tend to use whatever their employer tells them. They only have more control at startups (because those tend to skew young and don't have established tech yet) and not many startups are using MS tech.
Some browsers (ones not named Internet Explorer) support some fancy javascript stuff that you can use to get those things when uploading files with AJAX.
Since the version numbering scheme is total nonsense anyway (this is hardly a major change over 4, it's more like 4.1) why not just leapfrog over everyone and call it Firefox 14? Then Chrome will have to play catchup!
This scheme is nothing more then a cash grab. It does nothing useful for domain names. The cost of one of these is sky high ($185,000). There's no need being filled. It's just ICANN trying to get people who already have big websites to pay for another domain for the same site to keep someone else from registering it.
This stuff should not be run on a "how do we extort more money out of DNS" methadology.
Well, yes. Remember that the US government is very pro freedom - the freedom of the US government to do whatever it wants and the freedom of everyone else to shut up and like it.
You hit the nail on the head. The real problem with this wasn't that ethanol itself is a bad idea. It's not. It's that CORN is a very bad way to make ethanol because there's not much energy in it. That only happened because Iowa is the first primary and thus gets highly disproportional attention, and they decided to suck money out of taxpayers for the corn industry.
Sugar based ethanol has proven to do far better because the energy content you get out of growing sugar gives a viable product at the end. Last I heard corn ethanol wasn't even energy positive.
Slashdot Mirror
Changing the formula has a name. It's called the NGE. Pissing off a vast quantity of your existing customers is a poor idea when you're not at all guaranteed that the new formula is going to bring in enough new people to offset them.
Sony tried it, and it was a total disaster. I can't imagine anybody is insane enough to want to do that with a game that has the subscriber base of WoW. Even if it's peaked and is now on a gradual decline (as happens to all games, there was no way this could last forever) it's got years of major profitability left. Improving the game is good. Rocking the boat is career suicide.
If anything this is more of a response to the rather poor reception and sagging numbers Cataclysm got.
I think WoW realized that if they change the existing trial program slightly (you now have longer then 10 days to reach level 20, not much else changed from something they've offered for YEARS) they can generate headlines and publicity without particularly doing anything.
And going by this post on Slashdot that acts like this is something new and shiny, they succeeded. In reality it's the existing trial without the 10 day limitation. But hey, minor details like facts should never get in the way of a good story.
They were used for laundering. Gold seller bot gets gold. Gives gold to level 5 trial account. Level 5 trial account buys weird gray items thrown up on AH by players who are buying gold for absurd amounts of gold, which is how the players get the gold they bought. Transaction log shows a level 5 trial account as the one buying the bogus auction.
It adds more steps to tracking it down to then have to sort out where that account got the gold from.
Seriously. This update schedule is even more innane for email clients then it is for the web browser (where at least there might be something new in one of these releases). Now they're just releasing stuff for the sake of sticking to some retarded schedule, no matter how little sense it makes.
There's only one thing I ask for above all else in an email client: stability. I want it to work, and I want it to hassle me as little as possible. Mozilla seems like their new goal is to annoy people into submission.
That tends to happen when you're using a long dead platform.
This is not good for the Enterprise. It's not good for Firefox or Mozilla, which is already losing marketshare and isn't going to benefit from pissing off very large users. It's not even good for "the web" despite their nebulous and poorly supported claim that it is.
In reality this is some blowhards like Asa making poor decisions and then trying to defend them when people point out that it's a poor decision. Normal users don't particularly benefit from more big downloads that break things more often and will sometimes get a new gee-whiz HTML 5 feature out the door a bit sooner (which then won't be adopted by any websites until a couple of versions of FF later because of the lag time required to, you know, develop stuff). Enterprise users clearly suffer because keeping up with this requires throwing testing out the window and will effectively just reinforce the idea that you should stick with IE (where Microsoft actually wants your business and doesn't give you a middle finger).
If driving people away from Firefox is "good for the web", then I guess this is good for the web. But here in reality it's good for IE and Chrome.
Better idea - we'll just use something else. Shave off several more percentage points of marketshare (and the ad revenue from Google that goes with it).
- Sincerely, the Enterprise.
Because they aren't allowed to, and trying to do so specifically doesn't work.
Yeah, because doing that every 6 weeks to meet Mozilla's delusional goal of catching up to Chrome on version numbers is certainly something I feel like doing with my time.
The same amount they get from you using it at home, except if we can convince one person to make the switch we bring a thousand users at once. And we're not very big.
IBM does contribute money to Firefox, and they're not exactly happy with this mess either. Piss off all the corporate users and you'll soon find that the corporate developers who were being paid to work with you (and the corporate donations) go with them. Then hey you're the #3 browser behind Chrome and suddenly nobody gives a shit about you.
It's not like a lot is actually being asked of them here. But since they really, REALLY want us to use something else, we'll oblige them.
Actually I think at this point users want something that's less of a bloated pig then FF has become, and for their addons to work.
I don't need an 18MB download every 6 weeks that reorganizes the toolbars and doesn't add much of anything else.
Mozilla should release a major version when they actually have something major to release, and not before.
Yeah, and having Firefox obsoleting itself and putting out a new version every 6 weeks isn't viable for a large company to deal with when you want to, you know, test shit.
Why do you think IE is still so popular in the enterprise? Because it does this stuff really well, rather then telling companies to screw off the way Mozilla just did.
You need to get the word on this out there, because Asa's blowhard comments are what people saw and they resonate very strongly at the management level. They read that and completely write Firefox off.
(And I only wish I was just guessing on that. It's exactly what happened in my office.)
We (as in most of IT) had been trying to get management on board with switching to Firefox for a while now in place of IE for various reasons, and were finally making some progress.
Then this idiocy happened. Management is back to being spooked. They like group policy. They like that they can deny pushing out a new version if it breaks apps until we can fix them, knowing that the previous version still has security updates for some timeframe > 0. IE gives them that. Chrome has some support for it. Firefox didn't really do much for us before in that area, but also didn't actively try to make it hard.
Then Mozilla (and Asa in particular) gave us the middle finger. Management noticed. There is zero chance of a migration happening now.
I've been trying to figure out if anybody outside of Mozilla thinks this is a good idea. It's like they have a reality distortion bubble over the place and when faced with the reality that this was a particularly bad idea for enterprise users simply decided they didn't like those people anyway rather then fess up to the reality that their new model sucks.
Lots of business don't in fact need ActiveX for legacy junk. But most businesses of significant size do want some control over when the browser will update major versions and potentially break all sorts of things.
A better example is the Robert Dziekaski Taser incident, where the cops tasered someone repeatidly for no reason and killed him. Lied about it. Confiscated the evidence to protect themselves. Only that video going public is what finally caused something to be done, because it so enraged the public that the government had no choice but to call an inquiry.
Actually, it was never just a browser. Even the first public version did mail, newsgroups, and more. Furthermore, site compatibility was a huge problem in the early days, and until recently. Opera now works with more sites than ever.
Opera 3 had rudimentary support, at best. Considerable effort was spent in creating M2 (the mail client in later versions) after the fact when they should have been focusing on the browser.
Good thing Opera is currently one of the fastest browsers, and still runs on slow hardware, them.
On the contrary. Opera is now faster than ever. It got bigger because it now handles a lot more open web standards and technologies than it used to. You'll notice that most of the growth comes from adding support for new web standards, and adding workarounds for broken sites.
Not in my experience. Opera lost most of its performance advantage several versions ago. They've probably regained some of it recently compared to Firefox because FF 4 is such a pig, but that's hardly a credit to them and more of a condemnation of Mozilla.
Such as?
Couple of the many that annoyed me:
In early versions if you closed the browser with multiple windows open, reopening the browser later would reload those windows from the server. They changed that later so that it would reload the cached versions, completely ignoring cache settings and bringing up stuff that could be *days* since expired. When I stopped using it, it was still doing that. Firefox does the same thing.
They also changed from the nice windowing model Opera 6 had to a less functional tab style version around Opera 9 (or maybe 10) where you couldn't layer things around inside the same window anymore, instead you had to split the tab off into its own window and then do it. Hell, Opera 3's MDI was more capable of that.
What are you talking about? The BitTorrent hasn't received a single update in several years. Mail was there from the very first public version, but was also left nearly untouched until quite recently, when they made a new mail panel for 11.0 or something like that.
The BitTorrent client was built before it was ignored, which was attention spent on something that was never needed. And really, ignoring stuff that needs work is the Opera way in some things. They had a great custom search functionality years before anybody else, but had no UI to edit it and sent people off to edit ini files instead. That's certainly fine in the first version it appears, but they left it that way for years to play around with other stuff instead.
Mail was there in some form in Opera 3, then totally redone in later versions, then ignored for a while.
It is clear that you have no idea what you are talking about.
Really? You're the one telling me the same mail client has been there all along when it really wasn't. They called it "M2" for a reason, and it wasn't because it was the first version.
Unite might be a web server, but what it enables is direct communication between devices. Opera is not just a desktop browser, but actually a cross-platform browser.
Unite is a web server stuck inside a web browser. It'd make more sense as a standalone app so that people could A) not install it, and B) keep it running after closing the browser. (Maybe they fixed B since I stopped using Opera, the first time they didn't fix windowing issues and instead announced a web server I decided I was done with them.)
You must be drunk or something. Jon himself wanted Opera to be everything for everyone. He was constantly going on about how great that was in various interviews./quote?
Jon was the CEO until last year. Have you EVER heard a CEO go on an interview and say "yeah we're doing this shit all wrong"?
I met Jon years ago, and found him to be a great guy. The company at the time was focused on making a good browser for power users, and they did that really well. It also helped that back then they were focused on performance and working on older systems.
At some point I noticed things changing years later. Opera got bigger, and slower. UI stuff that worked forever was broken in favor of a less flexible Firefox clone model. Attention was diverted to writing an email client. Then a BitTorrent client. Then a web server built into the browser. I only wish I was making that last one up.
The company lost focus on what made Opera good in the first place as they went from trying to be a good, fast browser to trying to do everything for everybody. Finally I stopped using it when the drift got so bad that it wasn't really better then Firefox at anything.
This drift coincided with the company growing in size and it being less about how it started: Jon and a few other guys trying to make a good browser.
New developers tend to use whatever their employer tells them. They only have more control at startups (because those tend to skew young and don't have established tech yet) and not many startups are using MS tech.
Some browsers (ones not named Internet Explorer) support some fancy javascript stuff that you can use to get those things when uploading files with AJAX.
Since the version numbering scheme is total nonsense anyway (this is hardly a major change over 4, it's more like 4.1) why not just leapfrog over everyone and call it Firefox 14? Then Chrome will have to play catchup!
This scheme is nothing more then a cash grab. It does nothing useful for domain names. The cost of one of these is sky high ($185,000). There's no need being filled. It's just ICANN trying to get people who already have big websites to pay for another domain for the same site to keep someone else from registering it.
This stuff should not be run on a "how do we extort more money out of DNS" methadology.
Well, yes. Remember that the US government is very pro freedom - the freedom of the US government to do whatever it wants and the freedom of everyone else to shut up and like it.
America, Fuck Yeah!
You hit the nail on the head. The real problem with this wasn't that ethanol itself is a bad idea. It's not. It's that CORN is a very bad way to make ethanol because there's not much energy in it. That only happened because Iowa is the first primary and thus gets highly disproportional attention, and they decided to suck money out of taxpayers for the corn industry.
Sugar based ethanol has proven to do far better because the energy content you get out of growing sugar gives a viable product at the end. Last I heard corn ethanol wasn't even energy positive.