Did these guys actually look at the sales figures for Starcraft? It was in the top 10 continously for *two* years for crying out loud! Saying its in trouble is a stretch to say the least.
Of course then you have crap like Tiberian Sun, but saying the whole genre is dying is rediculous, unless it happened very recently. Starcraft should prove just how popular it can be among the people who find FPS games boring.
Gamecenter seems to want insane amounts of innovation, but thats not how things work. The best way to do it is to add a few new things, but to stick with what works to make a fun game. Its more important that the game be fun and playable then cutting edge.
(besides, by the standard of innovation, the FPS genre is more then dead, fancier graphics are not innovation)
Most of the other ones seem to actually be in trouble, but I'm not worried about RTS games. Well, I *am* worried about Warcraft 3 sucking, but thats more of a problem with Blizzard lately (Diablo 2 is nowhere near as good as it should be, and with the constant change in directions Warcraft 3 is taking, I'm not even sure if they know what they're making anymore).
Wow... there's so much zealotry in this thread its almost scary.
No companies will move people over en-masse to something like StarOffice because work would essentially *stop* as people adjusted to it from MS Office.
If you put MS Office on Linux, you eliminate that problem, and give it a lot more credibility as a desktop OS.
Go out and ask people on the street if they've heard of StarOffice. Now ask them if they've heard of Word.
Which one do you think will win?
Any Zealots who refuse to use it no matter what don't have to, much like Mac users don't have to use Internet Explorer (although it is a good browser on the Mac), and I don't have to use Opera.
Why is it that more choice is a good thing unless one of the options is by Microsoft? With the amount of money Office makes for them, they have every reason to be interested in having it on as many OS's as they possibly can. And by the same idea, the OS's should be happy to have it, since its a big, established, and extremely well known application in Offices around the world.
I just can't quite figure it out... assuming they actually release it and its not full of bugs, whats the downside here?
(and as for the paperclip, am I the only person on the planet who knows about the option to permanently turn it off? As well as the one to not install it at all? Yeesh.)
due to a very massive drop in Rambus prices lately (probably due to nobody wanting to hold on to it anymore in inventory), you probably can't do it for the same price anymore. my bad.
We did work it out back when rambus was 4x the cost of PC133 SDRAM though, and we got some very interesting numbers. (on the price difference for 256mb, we found a way to store 16 weeks of 128kbps mp3 music)
What happened is that Rambus was around 10% of the industry's memory production, but it never got anywhere near 10% of the industry sales. (the last figures I saw were more like 1%, but that wasn't very recent)
Its coming down like a rock now because people don't want to be stuck with mass inventories of it hanging around forever, not because its suddenly gotten cheaper. The success of motherboards like the Asus A7V (which is a great board) and in general anything that doesn't use Rambus has left the people holding stockpiles of it high and dry. They have to recoup at least *some* of what they originally thought they could make off it, and the way to do that is to sell it at a loss to simply get rid of it.
Don't be surprised if after they sell it all off (if they do), many places stop selling it entirely. There is simply no market for memory that expensive that doesn't do anything for my real world performance. (and all the theoretical stuff aside, its what it does to my real world speed that matters! I don't care if Rambus *might* be better when somebody makes a better memory controller or when they do this and that, I care what it does for me now. Paying 2-4x as much for something that does nothing useful for me is... well... stupid.)
Unless of course your doing disk access, in which case your far better off performance wise with PC133 and a SCSI Disk subsystem... which interestingly enough, can be done for still less money then 256MB of 800mhz RDRAM costs.
Yeah... you take your RDRAM, I'll take my Ultra160 controller and 10k RPM drive, and we'll see just who beats who as soon as you have to stop to access your good old IDE hard drive.
I prefer Lynx to either Mozilla or Netscape. Then again I also prefer Opera in no images mode over anything else. So I'm not really a good indication of the mass market.:)
Thats the whole bloody point, a minimal install of IE *DOESNT* come with a mail client, a news client, an irc client, a redefinition of quantum physics on your computer, and whatever the hell else they felt like jamming in there. Its a browser. If Netscape releases a version of Mozilla without all the crap, then life will be good. But they won't.
Mozilla's problem is that they don't have any marketing people. Someone in marketing with half a brain would be able to tell them "stop adding crap that 95% of the market doesn't give a rats ass about and release the fucking browser". Do you think most of the people they want to win over care if the browser comes with stuff that other programs already do better or that they can rewrite the Interface? No. They care if it browses better then what they have now and if the interface it ships with looks nice.
And the answers are No and No when you compare it to IE. So far as memory goes I agree, you can't easily measure just what IE is using. That doesn't give Mozilla much execuse for using more then Frontpage 2k, Word 2k, and Winamp combined.
I've found Opera to be usable on most if not virtually all sites I visit, because I don't frequent sites that are entirely eye candy. On those sites, it won't work at all, thats not what its designed to do.
I'm using 3.62 right now, haven't made the move to 4 permanently yet because of some nagging issues still. It is useable though, which is far more then can be said of Mozilla.
Definately worth the money if you want an actual small and fast browser under Windows.
There is a working and useable version of the kernel out right now though. Nothing mozilla has released even remotely resembles a useful and working browser (no, "it sucks less then Netscape 4" != working and usable).
This sort of expansion and feature creep is ok if there is something thats usable out there right now, like if they made a working browser and *then* went to add all the extra stuff. Thats totally different then making all the extra stuff at the expense of the browser.
The comparison isn't really valid, because I have a fully functional and quite happy kernel running right now, so if they want to add more features, why not? The same can't be said of Mozilla, when comparing it to IE isn't a total joke anymore, then maybe.
Funny, a minimal IE5.5 install is right around the same size as the zipped mozilla download (*not* the install). What does that get you? A functional and fast browser as well as several OS level upgrades.
Opera 3.62 is 1.5MB and doesn't consume 30MB of ram to load a webpage.
The day mozilla is lightweight is the day they change the meaning of overweight to mean "only programs bigger then Office 2000", or in real life terms, "only people larger then 400 pounds".
The windows market is much the same. Mozilla is a total failure in the two biggest markets, the ones where people have a surprising amount of common sense.
"Oh well Mozilla does this and this and has all these cool shit features!"
"Yes, but does it browse better then IE on either platform?"
"Well.. umm... err... uhh... its got its own widgets!"
"But thats not a good thing, I like the widgets that I'm already used to."
"No you don't, we're mozilla, we know whats best for you!"
Mozilla's goal is *NOT* a 100% standards compliant cross platform browser. Mozillas goal has become to be the biggest bloatware application in the history of computing.
Since when does a browser do Mail? News? Instant Messaging? IRC!?
A browser views webpages. Nothing more. If they wanted to create a web browser, they could have had a really good one out by now. But no, instead they want to do all this other stuff too.
Clearly, "browser" is not anywhere on their adjenda anymore.
I would argue that Mozilla has about as many users as Opera, that being statistically totally insignificant in any way shape or form.
Mozilla doesn't whip the shit out of anything, I could have 5 instances of Opera running in the same amount of memory. IE actually works and has a responsive GUI that doesn't look like someone puked and then turned it into an interface.
No... mozilla shows just what happens when you don't listen to the person yelling "stop adding features and release the damn thing!"
And lets face it, it *is* dead in that market. There is no way that Mozilla can even put a dent in IE's lead in the Windows market unless they stop adding crap and release a *browser*. And lets face it, if it doesn't make a dent in the Windows market, its totally insignificant according to the stats on who is using what browser, and that means developers won't develop pages for it. If they don't do that, then there's no incentive to use it.
I find it very hard to explain to somebody why they should use Mozilla... I mean yes, the rendering engine is good. But, I don't need another mail/news client, I already have more then enough. I don't need an IRC client, you will *never* make MozillaIRC better then mIRC, I'm sorry to tell you. An HTML editor? Umm... sorry, there's lots of those already too. Chromes? Well, yeah, maybe if you made the widgets look anything even remotely like those in every *other* program inside the OS it would matter. (excluding monstrosities like Media player 7 and Quicktime 4 of course, which are great examples of what not to do) But you can't tell me that the ability to make the browser look different is more important then having a browser at all.
Lets take a quick look at the marketplace and at just what we need and don't need from Mozilla:
- Mail: don't need it, there is pleanty of other mail clients out there that are dedicated to doing mail. - News: ditto - IRC: ditto again - Instant Messaging: umm, yeah, thanks but I've got no shortage of these either, I don't need a special version of AIM. - HTML Editing: nope, no shortage here either - Chromes: Well technically this doesn't exist, however considering the number of alternate UI's out there for Internet Explorer already (Neoplanet, Enigma, ), this is not going to win people over en masse. - A fast and functional browser: Oh my god! I found it! We have a severe lack of these!
Now of course, why are they working on all the other stuff instead of simply releasing a browser?
I think the Manager who originally screwed up Netscape is still there, because he's doing it again. I mean come on, during IE setup I can tell it I don't want mail, use "Program X", I can tell it I don't want News, use "Program Y", I can tell it I don't want Frontpage Express, use "Editor Z". Hell, I can even tell it I don't want all the language support, VBScript, and Java.
You people were supposed to make a browser. For the love of god, actually make a fucking browser!
Until somebody at Mozilla does that, Suck and the WaSP are right, Mozilla is dead in the mainstream market, and thats where the marketshare is.
I guess they finally figured out that if all the clients could talk to each other, it'd be better for everybody. Well, every one of the players listed there anyway.
I mean really, between what all those people offer, there is a client type that can make anybody happy (unless you like ICQ's bloat anyway). Now if they could all talk to each other, that'd be even better, I could choose a client based on how well it works instead of which network has more of my friends on it.
AOL has no real interest right now because they have a monopoly to protect, however if this takes off (and as soon as they have it working I'm going to switch over to it, I really really hate AIM and ICQ) then we can end up with two big incompatable networks, oh joy.
Well, maybe somebody on the IMUnified side can make a client that doesn't suck, lord knows ICQ hasn't been able to do that since version 2.
The biggest problem with Opera is that its a niche product. It'll never catch on in the mainstream, even if it was free. The simple problem is that it just functions too differently from IE/NN, which are more or less the same in basic UI design.
Its amazing how fast I can throw somebody off simply by putting them in front of Opera.
Now if 4.1 has SDI (which it might), that could go a long way in solving that problem.
I really wish it would catch on, Opera is a great little browser, useful for those of us who don't want everything but the kitchen sink with our browsers (*ahem* Mozilla).
Netscape did that for years, creating their own standards as they went along.
They stopped doing it because Microsoft not only implemented the standards and Netscapes variants, but created their own as well.
Thats the difference, Microsoft made it so their browser could do the standard stuff, most of the Netscape stuff, *and* the Microsoft stuff. Netscape hasn't been able to compete with that.
I use it enough to know that its in no way ready for the mainstream market, it needs a lot of polish. Especially in the Interface department, its just too slow.
Its been getting better every release, so I have hopes for it being halfway decent if it ever actually comes out. But is it going to win in a competition with IE in the mainstream market right now (the market that matters considering how huge it is)?
Sure, blame the MS monopoly on Netscape's market share MozillaZine.... blame it all you want.
I'm a former Netscape supporter. I didn't leave because of the Monopoly. I left because Netscape hadn't released anything that didn't suck in well over a year, and Mozilla was ages away from being usable.
Its been a year since then, and whats changed? Netscape hasn't released anything that doesn't suck in well over two years now, and Mozilla still isn't usable compaired to IE.
Thats where the biggest loss of market share has come. People like me aren't computer gods, but we're vocal enough that we do make a difference. People come and ask me for browser help, and I use to tell them that they could solve many of their IE problems by installing Netscape. Do I tell them that anymore?
Of course not. Now I tell them that they can solve their Netscape problems by installing IE.
Its sad, I'd rather support Netscape. But when they ask me for advice on whats best for them, 99% of the time the answer is IE. Occasionally I recommend Opera (which I'm using right now) to people I figure will like it, but its definately not suited to the average user.
So please, don't try to pin the blame on the monopoly. In my experience, far more people have switched then have never heard of Netscape. Many of those have switched because people like me were forced into advising them to switch, because Netscape gave us nothing to work with, while Microsoft does.
(its probably also important to mention that yes, many people haven't herad of Netscape these days. But why would you hear of it? Don't blame the monopoly. Blame lack of word of mouth. Napster spread like wildfire because people were talking about it. Nobody is talking about Netscape because it sucks right now. If Mozilla.org can come out with something better then IE, people will start talking and it'll catch on. Trying to hide behind the claim of the evil Redmond giant when its really Netscape's own fault is pretty silly there MozillaZine.)
The DoJ got major headlines for everybody involved by going after Microsoft, because the common public can more or less understand "Windows is a monopoly" type stuff.
Try explaining to a common person whats going on here, and why RDRAM sucks in comparison to SDRAM. They won't have any idea of what your talking about, nor will they really care.
Besides, the real problem here is more the patent system then anything else, and the government wont scrap the patent system unless we either fire all of their sorry asses and elect people with a clue, or we start patenting everything in existance and get it to the point where the big corporations dont want to deal with all our patents anymore.
Of course, there's always an open revolt, but with a strong ecnonomy and sunday football, Joe Schmoe isn't likely to care about trying to overthrow the patent office.
Rambus can't even keep up with SDRAM on 1ghz processors. On a 2ghz processor, the latency issues of rambus are just going to kill it against DDR SDRAM.
Sorry, but I won't be thankful at the idea that they want me to pay 4x as much for slower memory. I'd rather use the extra money on things like burners and gigantic hard drives. (hell, with the price difference between 256mb of rdram vs sdram, you could get a bigass flat panel display)
NSI changed their polices so they own your domain name no matter what. Now if they get your contact info wrong for some reason or you change email addresses, its next to impossible to change said information.
So, yes, everyone using NSI is at risk of being affected by this, not just deadbeats.
The really scary thing here is not that they're actioning off names of deadbeats to recoup losses, thats fine.
But lets think for a moment...
They *own* your domain name, not you. If you loose it for whatever reason, too bad.
They can now auction off deadbeat names instead of sending them back into the pool, with the potential to make huge sums of money.
Their billing practices are horrible (read further down this thread for examples).
So... for all you conspiracy theorists, whats to stop a big company from simply paying someone at NSI off to "accidentally loose" your billing info. You don't get the handy reminder that its time to pay, in the hope that you forget about it for whatever reason. You do that, it goes on the auction market, somebody else buys it out from under you for a large sum of money. You have no recourse, because they own the domains and can do whatever they want with them.
Feel free to add your own conspiracy theories, thats just a sample. The real point is that this is almost a license for them to print money. Not that it'll help anybody steal names from big corporations who can just sue over them anyway, but the little people will get shafted around nicely here.
Especially if you take it to the next logical step. If this sticks, whats to stop them from auctioning off *all* domains? Think about it. Its not that far away from this, because once again they own the domain. So, you could pay $35 to renew it, but what happens if someone else is willing to pay $100? $1000? $10000? That may sound rediculous now, but go back a couple short years, and the notion that anybody but you owned your domain names was equally rediculous. Its not that far fetched do this kind of auctioning anymore.
I really hope ICANN does something about this, but... yeah right. ICANN seems to work for NSI, not the other way around.
They had a patent on a closed videotext system or some such thing, and they went after Microsoft with the patent. MS then partenered up with them as part of a settlement, and they went after Netscape. Netscape asked for help, and the case was summarily dismissed.
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Did these guys actually look at the sales figures for Starcraft? It was in the top 10 continously for *two* years for crying out loud! Saying its in trouble is a stretch to say the least.
Of course then you have crap like Tiberian Sun, but saying the whole genre is dying is rediculous, unless it happened very recently. Starcraft should prove just how popular it can be among the people who find FPS games boring.
Gamecenter seems to want insane amounts of innovation, but thats not how things work. The best way to do it is to add a few new things, but to stick with what works to make a fun game. Its more important that the game be fun and playable then cutting edge.
(besides, by the standard of innovation, the FPS genre is more then dead, fancier graphics are not innovation)
Most of the other ones seem to actually be in trouble, but I'm not worried about RTS games. Well, I *am* worried about Warcraft 3 sucking, but thats more of a problem with Blizzard lately (Diablo 2 is nowhere near as good as it should be, and with the constant change in directions Warcraft 3 is taking, I'm not even sure if they know what they're making anymore).
Wow... there's so much zealotry in this thread its almost scary.
No companies will move people over en-masse to something like StarOffice because work would essentially *stop* as people adjusted to it from MS Office.
If you put MS Office on Linux, you eliminate that problem, and give it a lot more credibility as a desktop OS.
Go out and ask people on the street if they've heard of StarOffice. Now ask them if they've heard of Word.
Which one do you think will win?
Any Zealots who refuse to use it no matter what don't have to, much like Mac users don't have to use Internet Explorer (although it is a good browser on the Mac), and I don't have to use Opera.
Why is it that more choice is a good thing unless one of the options is by Microsoft? With the amount of money Office makes for them, they have every reason to be interested in having it on as many OS's as they possibly can. And by the same idea, the OS's should be happy to have it, since its a big, established, and extremely well known application in Offices around the world.
I just can't quite figure it out... assuming they actually release it and its not full of bugs, whats the downside here?
(and as for the paperclip, am I the only person on the planet who knows about the option to permanently turn it off? As well as the one to not install it at all? Yeesh.)
due to a very massive drop in Rambus prices lately (probably due to nobody wanting to hold on to it anymore in inventory), you probably can't do it for the same price anymore. my bad.
We did work it out back when rambus was 4x the cost of PC133 SDRAM though, and we got some very interesting numbers. (on the price difference for 256mb, we found a way to store 16 weeks of 128kbps mp3 music)
What happened is that Rambus was around 10% of the industry's memory production, but it never got anywhere near 10% of the industry sales. (the last figures I saw were more like 1%, but that wasn't very recent)
Its coming down like a rock now because people don't want to be stuck with mass inventories of it hanging around forever, not because its suddenly gotten cheaper. The success of motherboards like the Asus A7V (which is a great board) and in general anything that doesn't use Rambus has left the people holding stockpiles of it high and dry. They have to recoup at least *some* of what they originally thought they could make off it, and the way to do that is to sell it at a loss to simply get rid of it.
Don't be surprised if after they sell it all off (if they do), many places stop selling it entirely. There is simply no market for memory that expensive that doesn't do anything for my real world performance. (and all the theoretical stuff aside, its what it does to my real world speed that matters! I don't care if Rambus *might* be better when somebody makes a better memory controller or when they do this and that, I care what it does for me now. Paying 2-4x as much for something that does nothing useful for me is... well... stupid.)
Unless of course your doing disk access, in which case your far better off performance wise with PC133 and a SCSI Disk subsystem... which interestingly enough, can be done for still less money then 256MB of 800mhz RDRAM costs.
Yeah... you take your RDRAM, I'll take my Ultra160 controller and 10k RPM drive, and we'll see just who beats who as soon as you have to stop to access your good old IDE hard drive.
I prefer Lynx to either Mozilla or Netscape. Then again I also prefer Opera in no images mode over anything else. So I'm not really a good indication of the mass market. :)
Thats the whole bloody point, a minimal install of IE *DOESNT* come with a mail client, a news client, an irc client, a redefinition of quantum physics on your computer, and whatever the hell else they felt like jamming in there. Its a browser. If Netscape releases a version of Mozilla without all the crap, then life will be good. But they won't.
Mozilla's problem is that they don't have any marketing people. Someone in marketing with half a brain would be able to tell them "stop adding crap that 95% of the market doesn't give a rats ass about and release the fucking browser". Do you think most of the people they want to win over care if the browser comes with stuff that other programs already do better or that they can rewrite the Interface? No. They care if it browses better then what they have now and if the interface it ships with looks nice.
And the answers are No and No when you compare it to IE. So far as memory goes I agree, you can't easily measure just what IE is using. That doesn't give Mozilla much execuse for using more then Frontpage 2k, Word 2k, and Winamp combined.
I've found Opera to be usable on most if not virtually all sites I visit, because I don't frequent sites that are entirely eye candy. On those sites, it won't work at all, thats not what its designed to do.
I'm using 3.62 right now, haven't made the move to 4 permanently yet because of some nagging issues still. It is useable though, which is far more then can be said of Mozilla.
Definately worth the money if you want an actual small and fast browser under Windows.
There is a working and useable version of the kernel out right now though. Nothing mozilla has released even remotely resembles a useful and working browser (no, "it sucks less then Netscape 4" != working and usable).
This sort of expansion and feature creep is ok if there is something thats usable out there right now, like if they made a working browser and *then* went to add all the extra stuff. Thats totally different then making all the extra stuff at the expense of the browser.
The comparison isn't really valid, because I have a fully functional and quite happy kernel running right now, so if they want to add more features, why not? The same can't be said of Mozilla, when comparing it to IE isn't a total joke anymore, then maybe.
Funny, a minimal IE5.5 install is right around the same size as the zipped mozilla download (*not* the install). What does that get you? A functional and fast browser as well as several OS level upgrades.
Opera 3.62 is 1.5MB and doesn't consume 30MB of ram to load a webpage.
The day mozilla is lightweight is the day they change the meaning of overweight to mean "only programs bigger then Office 2000", or in real life terms, "only people larger then 400 pounds".
The windows market is much the same. Mozilla is a total failure in the two biggest markets, the ones where people have a surprising amount of common sense.
"Oh well Mozilla does this and this and has all these cool shit features!"
"Yes, but does it browse better then IE on either platform?"
"Well.. umm... err... uhh... its got its own widgets!"
"But thats not a good thing, I like the widgets that I'm already used to."
"No you don't, we're mozilla, we know whats best for you!"
*Goes and turns on IE*
Mozilla's goal is *NOT* a 100% standards compliant cross platform browser. Mozillas goal has become to be the biggest bloatware application in the history of computing.
Since when does a browser do Mail? News? Instant Messaging? IRC!?
A browser views webpages. Nothing more. If they wanted to create a web browser, they could have had a really good one out by now. But no, instead they want to do all this other stuff too.
Clearly, "browser" is not anywhere on their adjenda anymore.
I would argue that Mozilla has about as many users as Opera, that being statistically totally insignificant in any way shape or form.
Mozilla doesn't whip the shit out of anything, I could have 5 instances of Opera running in the same amount of memory. IE actually works and has a responsive GUI that doesn't look like someone puked and then turned it into an interface.
No... mozilla shows just what happens when you don't listen to the person yelling "stop adding features and release the damn thing!"
And lets face it, it *is* dead in that market. There is no way that Mozilla can even put a dent in IE's lead in the Windows market unless they stop adding crap and release a *browser*. And lets face it, if it doesn't make a dent in the Windows market, its totally insignificant according to the stats on who is using what browser, and that means developers won't develop pages for it. If they don't do that, then there's no incentive to use it.
I find it very hard to explain to somebody why they should use Mozilla... I mean yes, the rendering engine is good. But, I don't need another mail/news client, I already have more then enough. I don't need an IRC client, you will *never* make MozillaIRC better then mIRC, I'm sorry to tell you. An HTML editor? Umm... sorry, there's lots of those already too. Chromes? Well, yeah, maybe if you made the widgets look anything even remotely like those in every *other* program inside the OS it would matter. (excluding monstrosities like Media player 7 and Quicktime 4 of course, which are great examples of what not to do) But you can't tell me that the ability to make the browser look different is more important then having a browser at all.
Lets take a quick look at the marketplace and at just what we need and don't need from Mozilla:
- Mail: don't need it, there is pleanty of other mail clients out there that are dedicated to doing mail.
- News: ditto
- IRC: ditto again
- Instant Messaging: umm, yeah, thanks but I've got no shortage of these either, I don't need a special version of AIM.
- HTML Editing: nope, no shortage here either
- Chromes: Well technically this doesn't exist, however considering the number of alternate UI's out there for Internet Explorer already (Neoplanet, Enigma, ), this is not going to win people over en masse.
- A fast and functional browser: Oh my god! I found it! We have a severe lack of these!
Now of course, why are they working on all the other stuff instead of simply releasing a browser?
I think the Manager who originally screwed up Netscape is still there, because he's doing it again. I mean come on, during IE setup I can tell it I don't want mail, use "Program X", I can tell it I don't want News, use "Program Y", I can tell it I don't want Frontpage Express, use "Editor Z". Hell, I can even tell it I don't want all the language support, VBScript, and Java.
You people were supposed to make a browser. For the love of god, actually make a fucking browser!
Until somebody at Mozilla does that, Suck and the WaSP are right, Mozilla is dead in the mainstream market, and thats where the marketshare is.
I guess they finally figured out that if all the clients could talk to each other, it'd be better for everybody. Well, every one of the players listed there anyway.
I mean really, between what all those people offer, there is a client type that can make anybody happy (unless you like ICQ's bloat anyway). Now if they could all talk to each other, that'd be even better, I could choose a client based on how well it works instead of which network has more of my friends on it.
AOL has no real interest right now because they have a monopoly to protect, however if this takes off (and as soon as they have it working I'm going to switch over to it, I really really hate AIM and ICQ) then we can end up with two big incompatable networks, oh joy.
Well, maybe somebody on the IMUnified side can make a client that doesn't suck, lord knows ICQ hasn't been able to do that since version 2.
The biggest problem with Opera is that its a niche product. It'll never catch on in the mainstream, even if it was free. The simple problem is that it just functions too differently from IE/NN, which are more or less the same in basic UI design.
Its amazing how fast I can throw somebody off simply by putting them in front of Opera.
Now if 4.1 has SDI (which it might), that could go a long way in solving that problem.
I really wish it would catch on, Opera is a great little browser, useful for those of us who don't want everything but the kitchen sink with our browsers (*ahem* Mozilla).
Netscape did that for years, creating their own standards as they went along.
They stopped doing it because Microsoft not only implemented the standards and Netscapes variants, but created their own as well.
Thats the difference, Microsoft made it so their browser could do the standard stuff, most of the Netscape stuff, *and* the Microsoft stuff. Netscape hasn't been able to compete with that.
They were beaten at their own game.
I use it enough to know that its in no way ready for the mainstream market, it needs a lot of polish. Especially in the Interface department, its just too slow.
Its been getting better every release, so I have hopes for it being halfway decent if it ever actually comes out. But is it going to win in a competition with IE in the mainstream market right now (the market that matters considering how huge it is)?
Nope.
Sure, blame the MS monopoly on Netscape's market share MozillaZine.... blame it all you want.
I'm a former Netscape supporter. I didn't leave because of the Monopoly. I left because Netscape hadn't released anything that didn't suck in well over a year, and Mozilla was ages away from being usable.
Its been a year since then, and whats changed? Netscape hasn't released anything that doesn't suck in well over two years now, and Mozilla still isn't usable compaired to IE.
Thats where the biggest loss of market share has come. People like me aren't computer gods, but we're vocal enough that we do make a difference. People come and ask me for browser help, and I use to tell them that they could solve many of their IE problems by installing Netscape. Do I tell them that anymore?
Of course not. Now I tell them that they can solve their Netscape problems by installing IE.
Its sad, I'd rather support Netscape. But when they ask me for advice on whats best for them, 99% of the time the answer is IE. Occasionally I recommend Opera (which I'm using right now) to people I figure will like it, but its definately not suited to the average user.
So please, don't try to pin the blame on the monopoly. In my experience, far more people have switched then have never heard of Netscape. Many of those have switched because people like me were forced into advising them to switch, because Netscape gave us nothing to work with, while Microsoft does.
(its probably also important to mention that yes, many people haven't herad of Netscape these days. But why would you hear of it? Don't blame the monopoly. Blame lack of word of mouth. Napster spread like wildfire because people were talking about it. Nobody is talking about Netscape because it sucks right now. If Mozilla.org can come out with something better then IE, people will start talking and it'll catch on. Trying to hide behind the claim of the evil Redmond giant when its really Netscape's own fault is pretty silly there MozillaZine.)
Ok... so this benchmark is skewered in favor of Windows.
The other recently posted benchmark showing that linux was so much faster as a webserver was skewered in favor of Linux.
I'll just dismiss both of them as meaningless now.
The DoJ got major headlines for everybody involved by going after Microsoft, because the common public can more or less understand "Windows is a monopoly" type stuff.
Try explaining to a common person whats going on here, and why RDRAM sucks in comparison to SDRAM. They won't have any idea of what your talking about, nor will they really care.
Besides, the real problem here is more the patent system then anything else, and the government wont scrap the patent system unless we either fire all of their sorry asses and elect people with a clue, or we start patenting everything in existance and get it to the point where the big corporations dont want to deal with all our patents anymore.
Of course, there's always an open revolt, but with a strong ecnonomy and sunday football, Joe Schmoe isn't likely to care about trying to overthrow the patent office.
Rambus can't even keep up with SDRAM on 1ghz processors. On a 2ghz processor, the latency issues of rambus are just going to kill it against DDR SDRAM.
Sorry, but I won't be thankful at the idea that they want me to pay 4x as much for slower memory. I'd rather use the extra money on things like burners and gigantic hard drives. (hell, with the price difference between 256mb of rdram vs sdram, you could get a bigass flat panel display)
NSI changed their polices so they own your domain name no matter what. Now if they get your contact info wrong for some reason or you change email addresses, its next to impossible to change said information.
So, yes, everyone using NSI is at risk of being affected by this, not just deadbeats.
The really scary thing here is not that they're actioning off names of deadbeats to recoup losses, thats fine.
But lets think for a moment...
They *own* your domain name, not you. If you loose it for whatever reason, too bad.
They can now auction off deadbeat names instead of sending them back into the pool, with the potential to make huge sums of money.
Their billing practices are horrible (read further down this thread for examples).
So... for all you conspiracy theorists, whats to stop a big company from simply paying someone at NSI off to "accidentally loose" your billing info. You don't get the handy reminder that its time to pay, in the hope that you forget about it for whatever reason. You do that, it goes on the auction market, somebody else buys it out from under you for a large sum of money. You have no recourse, because they own the domains and can do whatever they want with them.
Feel free to add your own conspiracy theories, thats just a sample. The real point is that this is almost a license for them to print money. Not that it'll help anybody steal names from big corporations who can just sue over them anyway, but the little people will get shafted around nicely here.
Especially if you take it to the next logical step. If this sticks, whats to stop them from auctioning off *all* domains? Think about it. Its not that far away from this, because once again they own the domain. So, you could pay $35 to renew it, but what happens if someone else is willing to pay $100? $1000? $10000? That may sound rediculous now, but go back a couple short years, and the notion that anybody but you owned your domain names was equally rediculous. Its not that far fetched do this kind of auctioning anymore.
I really hope ICANN does something about this, but... yeah right. ICANN seems to work for NSI, not the other way around.
They had a patent on a closed videotext system or some such thing, and they went after Microsoft with the patent. MS then partenered up with them as part of a settlement, and they went after Netscape. Netscape asked for help, and the case was summarily dismissed.