Yahoo/Oddpost could try to make it work on Mozilla/Firefox, etc. but I think that it requires some particular extensions built into IE 5+, to do stuff relating to SOAP and drag/drop, I think. At a minimum, some mechanism is required to talk to the server to avoid doing full web page refreshes.
I think you're projecting here. Mozilla / Firefox supports the same XMLHttpRequest functionality that IE does for avoiding full refreshes. There isn't anything really unique to what Oddpost is doing that couldn't be replicated for Moz/IE.
Poor architectural decisions like this were some of the rejection points when Oddpost tried to sell itself to the company I work for a while back. I guess Yahoo is less discriminating.
That being said, I agree that it would probably be best to focus efforts on the more mature technologies. But I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unproductive: rather, they're producing something, but there may be a lot of overlap between it and any other browser-type app out there.
From a development point of view, maybe it isn't unproductive. But from a technology adoption point of view it is.
Companies and web sites that consider whether or not to certify on a particular operating system or browser will consider supporting a single Linux browser with 5-10% market share over 5 Linux browsers each with 1%. In the end, when faced with 5 times the testing cost or the risk of alienating different users, the easiest solution is "unsupported".
It's the same reason many companies certify their applications on only one or two Linux distributions, or none at all.
Wow, It's not that hard to file. I got maybe 4 forms sent to me already in the mail. I thought the deadline was long ago (mid-March), but it seems to have been extended to April 28.
As long as you are filing for less than $100 reimbursement, you do not need to provide any product keys or proof. You just have to provide a list of what you bought, and most consumers will easily fall within the $100 limit and qualify for the standard (easy) form.
In other words, fill out a form saying "I bought Windows 98 on or about this date" and you get a voucher.
That's it. No proof necessary if your filing is under $100 and fewer than 5 products purchased. So get your forms, because time is running out! Go to the web site and request a standard claim form now.
Real Audio is a dying format and Glasser knows this. This is a last ditch effort to try and make something before they begin to fold. Why would Microsoft suddenly work with them after Real just fucked them over in Europe?
Probably for the same reasons Microsoft would want to work with Sun after Sun dogged them for years. Microsoft would look at the deal objectively, and not emotionally, the way you did.
There are still plenty of sites out there that use or require the RealAudio format, and it's not dying anytime soon. Getting Real to switch to WMA would give Microsoft a slam dunk monopoly in streaming media. Why wouldn't Microsoft want that?
A used XBOX will be _much_ cheaper than it is now when a new one is just $100.
Exactly. So anyone out there is planning on buying an Xbox of any kind over the next few months, you should probably hold off. And tell your friends, too.
Now we'll see what 8 months of rumors of impending and drastic price cuts do for current Xbox sales.
But if you write the app w/ standards in mind, and also see that it runs on *some* browser, it is fair to expect the other browser to catch up.
Fair maybe, but a terrible business decision. IE hasn't done much catching up for the last few years. I wouldn't say it's a very good business decision to not support IE until it "catches up" with Mozilla's standards support.
Or maybe you should rethink your earlier statement about only "crappy" and "broken" applications needing to be explicitly certified on a particular browser. To criticize people and organizations who are going out of their way to invest in supporting platforms with miniscule market share doesn't really help your cause of standards promotion.
If you believe that the browsers themselves adhere to the standards, then you are very naive.
Not to mention that Mozilla (and other browsers) regularly introduce bugs and regressions in subsequent versions. IE's Javascript alone has changed a lot over the last few versions.
"Support" doesn't mean writing to a theoretical markup language, crossing your fingers, and handing your product over to customers. It means guarantees and testing, which have real costs if you've worked on anything besides a small scale hobby.
I work on Oracle's HTML technologies (don't want to say more).
Much of the problem involves bugs and different behaviors in Javascript and CSS implementations across browsers. Sometimes the standards are interpreted differently, or areas of a standard aren't supported. None of the problems are insurmountable, but the sad reality is that anyone doing advanced DHTML and CSS is forced to use different code paths in at least a few places. Web application authors will know what I mean.
The applications have generally worked well already because the developers inside Oracle often prefer to use Mozilla as their day-to-day browser.
The important point of the announcement (at least as far as the HTML apps are concerned) is support; committing to testing those various browsers across such a large set of projects is no trivial cost, even for a large company.
And it's not like Mozilla doesn't come out with a new version every three months or so, with it's own new regressions.
This is just another step in helping to give Mozilla corporate acceptance, and that will be good for everyone.
Not to mention that many government agencies don't actually test against the spec, but rather they try to run the web application with buggy screen readers like JAWS which don't even support the specs very well. It is immensely frustrating to code to the spec, only to find that a customer uses a buggy tool to verify "compliance" and thinks your application doesn't meet guidelines.
We've tried to solve this by generating different web applications based on a user's accessibility preferences. Disabled users get pages generated for them which are optimized for screen readers and other users get smaller downloads. It's a lot of work, but the only approach we've found which doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator.
The big difference between the ASP.NET paradigm and that of, say, Java Servlet Pages, or XSP, etc. lies in the event-based nature of ASP.NET pages.
Anyone in the J2EE community looking for similar event-based behavior should be keeping an eye on JavaServer Faces. One big problem is getting it to work on the existing JSP architecture, though, as JSP still has no server-side component model.
As a DirecTV customer, I'm very happy to see this happening. Any media service owned by News Corp. is one not owned by Microsoft.
Uhhh.. I hate to burst your bubble, but we aren't out of the woods yet. You see, the first time around when Murdoch made a bid for DirecTV, he brought Microsoft with him to the table. You can find a little more info on this here. Microsoft really wants to get its software into all these set-top boxes, you see.
But what happened behind the scenes is more interesting. Microsoft was all poised to take over the software for DirecTV boxes in a deal with BSkyB, and they were pissed when Murdoch left the bargaining table, which meant they couldn't get exclusive rights to power the boxes. (This would have been bad for companies like Tivo, btw.) You can bet now that Murdoch is taking over Microsoft will be coming back to attempt it once again, if they haven't already...
Sounds like the Mozilla gang is a more miffed than previously believed.
Maybe, but I also find it interesting that David Hyatt is listed as one of the authors of this new roadmap. Hyatt went to Apple to help work on the Safari browser (if sources are to be believed).
Apple claims it went with KHTML because of its modularity and speed. Could a move to make Mozilla more modular mean that Apple might reconsider making Safari based on Gecko at some later date? I certainly hope so, b/c testing my company's web apps in yet another rendering engine -- KHTML -- just is not worth the effort. I really wish Apple had gone with Gecko in the first place.
I don't know why the gamers.com site seems to miss this point, but according to the BAM website for the game it is also being published for the GameCube.
Nintendo hasn't released some of its best titles in the UK yet, so it's suffering there. But in the US, sales in February were up quite a lot (110%) last month. And Zelda has massive preorder numbers: 600,000 already.
Why don't people say: "Those guys on TV in that NASCAR race are just wasting resources we could be using in the war on cancer!" For some reason they don't.
Because if you put all your resources into finding the cure for cancer, and none into entertainment, the quality of life drops, your citizens revolt, and then the other players launch an attack on you. Didn't you ever play the game "Civilization"?
Re:I think it's an opportunity for Larry Ellison
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 1
And Oracle is dropping JDeveloper in a flavor of Eclipse (can't find the link... anyone?).
Sure, here's a link to an article that debunks your statement.
It would have been much cheaper for Microsoft to bundle some of their own games, like Halo, with the Xbox. Instead they chose to bundle two games which Sega made exclusive to Xbox, and which didn't sell very well in their own right: Sega GT and Jet Set Radio Future.
My guess is that Microsoft did this to appease Sega and boost sales of their titles, in order to keep Sega making Xbox exclusives.
Sure, the Democrats are the source of the problem NOW. The Republicans were the source of the problem when Clinton was in office, doing even more of the same. Both times nominations were blocked that were perceived as too far to one side of the political spectrum.
This time, Judge Shedd is being protested because of his record on civil rights and disability cases. Other times a nominee is rejected because they are too far in favor of or against abortion rights.
If one side backs down, then the other side ends up stacking the judiciary with judges who make decisions against their own position. You at least ought to be fair in your diatribe.
Much mirth was had in Mountain View on Wednesday when a certain party favor from the previous night's launch event for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 landed on the lawn of Netscape's world headquarters. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere, the giant "e", (which was subsequently decorated by Netscape employees with a Mozilla doll) was surreptitiously transported from the San Francisco waterfront site of the launch party down the Peninsula by a group of unidentified Microsoft employees, and precipitated a pissing match between Microsoft and Netscape spokespersons over how sophomoric the prank was. What's being covered up in all this, of course, is exactly how high up the Microsoft command chain the conspiracy extended. It's not as if anyone's asking, "What did Bill Gates know, and when did he know it?" But we can tell you that many key, senior members of the IE team were co-conspirators. Indeed, there are even reports that the president of a Seattle-area company best known for its major-media-brand Web sites was among the crew joy-riding on the flatbed wielding the "e."
While Microsoft may bundle UltimateTV functionality in with the games...
As a user of UltimateTV, I don't even think that is likely, unless they include completely separate hardware to handle the tv side. And that would mean losing more money on each Xbox than they already do now.
UltimateTV seems to peg its CPU once it has one or two recordings going on at the same time. The UI becomes very sluggish, with a few seconds for each remote response. Can you imagine what it would be like to be playing an Xbox game and have it slow to a crawl because it started recording a program in the background?
All the companies that watched how Microsoft competed with its platform partners over the last few years are not going to jump ship and make themselves dependent on the new Microsoft technology.
The recent market rejection of Microsoft Hailstorm /.Net My Services shows that the world has wised up.
If something does replace Java, it won't be the solution controlled by Microsoft.
WMP is not the dominant media player. No way, no how. We saw what happened after making Microsoft the dominant operating system and browser. But third parties have finally started to wise up to Microsoft's practices.
Years ago, everyone bought their line... "Hey world, come join us and develop for Windows, we'll support you all the way!"
Then we watched while Microsoft systematically identified all the successful third parties building apps on their platform and picked them off.
Now we have Microsoft saying "Hey world, come join us and develop for.NET, and we'll support you all the way!" The rejection of Hailstorm is more evidence that the industry has learned its lesson.
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Yahoo/Oddpost could try to make it work on Mozilla/Firefox, etc. but I think that it requires some particular extensions built into IE 5+, to do stuff relating to SOAP and drag/drop, I think. At a minimum, some mechanism is required to talk to the server to avoid doing full web page refreshes.
I think you're projecting here. Mozilla / Firefox supports the same XMLHttpRequest functionality that IE does for avoiding full refreshes. There isn't anything really unique to what Oddpost is doing that couldn't be replicated for Moz/IE.
Poor architectural decisions like this were some of the rejection points when Oddpost tried to sell itself to the company I work for a while back. I guess Yahoo is less discriminating.
That being said, I agree that it would probably be best to focus efforts on the more mature technologies. But I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unproductive: rather, they're producing something, but there may be a lot of overlap between it and any other browser-type app out there.
From a development point of view, maybe it isn't unproductive. But from a technology adoption point of view it is.
Companies and web sites that consider whether or not to certify on a particular operating system or browser will consider supporting a single Linux browser with 5-10% market share over 5 Linux browsers each with 1%. In the end, when faced with 5 times the testing cost or the risk of alienating different users, the easiest solution is "unsupported".
It's the same reason many companies certify their applications on only one or two Linux distributions, or none at all.
Wow, It's not that hard to file. I got maybe 4 forms sent to me already in the mail. I thought the deadline was long ago (mid-March), but it seems to have been extended to April 28.
As long as you are filing for less than $100 reimbursement, you do not need to provide any product keys or proof. You just have to provide a list of what you bought, and most consumers will easily fall within the $100 limit and qualify for the standard (easy) form.
In other words, fill out a form saying "I bought Windows 98 on or about this date" and you get a voucher.
That's it. No proof necessary if your filing is under $100 and fewer than 5 products purchased. So get your forms, because time is running out! Go to the web site and request a standard claim form now.
Real Audio is a dying format and Glasser knows this. This is a last ditch effort to try and make something before they begin to fold. Why would Microsoft suddenly work with them after Real just fucked them over in Europe?
Probably for the same reasons Microsoft would want to work with Sun after Sun dogged them for years. Microsoft would look at the deal objectively, and not emotionally, the way you did.
There are still plenty of sites out there that use or require the RealAudio format, and it's not dying anytime soon. Getting Real to switch to WMA would give Microsoft a slam dunk monopoly in streaming media. Why wouldn't Microsoft want that?
A used XBOX will be _much_ cheaper than it is now when a new one is just $100.
Exactly. So anyone out there is planning on buying an Xbox of any kind over the next few months, you should probably hold off. And tell your friends, too.
Now we'll see what 8 months of rumors of impending and drastic price cuts do for current Xbox sales.
But if you write the app w/ standards in mind, and also see that it runs on *some* browser, it is fair to expect the other browser to catch up.
Fair maybe, but a terrible business decision. IE hasn't done much catching up for the last few years. I wouldn't say it's a very good business decision to not support IE until it "catches up" with Mozilla's standards support.
Or maybe you should rethink your earlier statement about only "crappy" and "broken" applications needing to be explicitly certified on a particular browser. To criticize people and organizations who are going out of their way to invest in supporting platforms with miniscule market share doesn't really help your cause of standards promotion.
If you believe that the browsers themselves adhere to the standards, then you are very naive.
Not to mention that Mozilla (and other browsers) regularly introduce bugs and regressions in subsequent versions. IE's Javascript alone has changed a lot over the last few versions.
"Support" doesn't mean writing to a theoretical markup language, crossing your fingers, and handing your product over to customers. It means guarantees and testing, which have real costs if you've worked on anything besides a small scale hobby.
I work on Oracle's HTML technologies (don't want to say more).
Much of the problem involves bugs and different behaviors in Javascript and CSS implementations across browsers. Sometimes the standards are interpreted differently, or areas of a standard aren't supported. None of the problems are insurmountable, but the sad reality is that anyone doing advanced DHTML and CSS is forced to use different code paths in at least a few places. Web application authors will know what I mean.
The applications have generally worked well already because the developers inside Oracle often prefer to use Mozilla as their day-to-day browser.
The important point of the announcement (at least as far as the HTML apps are concerned) is support; committing to testing those various browsers across such a large set of projects is no trivial cost, even for a large company.
And it's not like Mozilla doesn't come out with a new version every three months or so, with it's own new regressions.
This is just another step in helping to give Mozilla corporate acceptance, and that will be good for everyone.
And here I thought Max OS X was the leading Unix desktop environment...
Not to mention that many government agencies don't actually test against the spec, but rather they try to run the web application with buggy screen readers like JAWS which don't even support the specs very well. It is immensely frustrating to code to the spec, only to find that a customer uses a buggy tool to verify "compliance" and thinks your application doesn't meet guidelines.
We've tried to solve this by generating different web applications based on a user's accessibility preferences. Disabled users get pages generated for them which are optimized for screen readers and other users get smaller downloads. It's a lot of work, but the only approach we've found which doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator.
The big difference between the ASP.NET paradigm and that of, say, Java Servlet Pages, or XSP, etc. lies in the event-based nature of ASP.NET pages.
Anyone in the J2EE community looking for similar event-based behavior should be keeping an eye on JavaServer Faces. One big problem is getting it to work on the existing JSP architecture, though, as JSP still has no server-side component model.
It's notable that this functionality is customizable.
Please tell me how, b/c this isn't entirely obvious from the user interface options.
As a DirecTV customer, I'm very happy to see this happening. Any media service owned by News Corp. is one not owned by Microsoft.
Uhhh.. I hate to burst your bubble, but we aren't out of the woods yet. You see, the first time around when Murdoch made a bid for DirecTV, he brought Microsoft with him to the table. You can find a little more info on this here.
Microsoft really wants to get its software into all these set-top boxes, you see.
But what happened behind the scenes is more interesting. Microsoft was all poised to take over the software for DirecTV boxes in a deal with BSkyB, and they were pissed when Murdoch left the bargaining table, which meant they couldn't get exclusive rights to power the boxes. (This would have been bad for companies like Tivo, btw.) You can bet now that Murdoch is taking over Microsoft will be coming back to attempt it once again, if they haven't already...
Sounds like the Mozilla gang is a more miffed than previously believed.
Maybe, but I also find it interesting that David Hyatt is listed as one of the authors of this new roadmap. Hyatt went to Apple to help work on the Safari browser (if sources are to be believed).
Apple claims it went with KHTML because of its modularity and speed. Could a move to make Mozilla more modular mean that Apple might reconsider making Safari based on Gecko at some later date? I certainly hope so, b/c testing my company's web apps in yet another rendering engine -- KHTML -- just is not worth the effort. I really wish Apple had gone with Gecko in the first place.
I don't know why the gamers.com site seems to miss this point, but according to the BAM website for the game it is also being published for the GameCube.
It's also listed on Nintendo's master game list under "W".
Nintendo hasn't released some of its best titles in the UK yet, so it's suffering there. But in the US, sales in February were up quite a lot (110%) last month. And Zelda has massive preorder numbers: 600,000 already.
Why don't people say: "Those guys on TV in that NASCAR race are just wasting resources we could be using in the war on cancer!" For some reason they don't.
Because if you put all your resources into finding the cure for cancer, and none into entertainment, the quality of life drops, your citizens revolt, and then the other players launch an attack on you. Didn't you ever play the game "Civilization"?
And Oracle is dropping JDeveloper in a flavor of Eclipse (can't find the link... anyone?).
Sure, here's a link to an article that debunks your statement.
It would have been much cheaper for Microsoft to bundle some of their own games, like Halo, with the Xbox. Instead they chose to bundle two games which Sega made exclusive to Xbox, and which didn't sell very well in their own right: Sega GT and Jet Set Radio Future.
My guess is that Microsoft did this to appease Sega and boost sales of their titles, in order to keep Sega making Xbox exclusives.
Are here and here. Note that the first has a second page.
Sure, the Democrats are the source of the problem NOW. The Republicans were the source of the problem when Clinton was in office, doing even more of the same. Both times nominations were blocked that were perceived as too far to one side of the political spectrum.
This time, Judge Shedd is being protested because of his record on civil rights and disability cases. Other times a nominee is rejected because they are too far in favor of or against abortion rights.
If one side backs down, then the other side ends up stacking the judiciary with judges who make decisions against their own position. You at least ought to be fair in your diatribe.
Yeah, Microsoft would NEVER do anything childish.
From Wired News October 6, 1997:
Much mirth was had in Mountain View on Wednesday when a certain party favor from the previous night's launch event for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 landed on the lawn of Netscape's world headquarters. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere, the giant "e", (which was subsequently decorated by Netscape employees with a Mozilla doll) was surreptitiously transported from the San Francisco waterfront site of the launch party down the Peninsula by a group of unidentified Microsoft employees, and precipitated a pissing match between Microsoft and Netscape spokespersons over how sophomoric the prank was. What's being covered up in all this, of course, is exactly how high up the Microsoft command chain the conspiracy extended. It's not as if anyone's asking, "What did Bill Gates know, and when did he know it?" But we can tell you that many key, senior members of the IE team were co-conspirators. Indeed, there are even reports that the president of a Seattle-area company best known for its major-media-brand Web sites was among the crew joy-riding on the flatbed wielding the "e."
While Microsoft may bundle UltimateTV functionality in with the games...
As a user of UltimateTV, I don't even think that is likely, unless they include completely separate hardware to handle the tv side. And that would mean losing more money on each Xbox than they already do now.
UltimateTV seems to peg its CPU once it has one or two recordings going on at the same time. The UI becomes very sluggish, with a few seconds for each remote response. Can you imagine what it would be like to be playing an Xbox game and have it slow to a crawl because it started recording a program in the background?
All the companies that watched how Microsoft competed with its platform partners over the last few years are not going to jump ship and make themselves dependent on the new Microsoft technology.
.Net My Services shows that the world has wised up.
The recent market rejection of Microsoft Hailstorm /
If something does replace Java, it won't be the
solution controlled by Microsoft.
WMP is not the dominant media player. No way, no how. We saw what happened after making Microsoft the dominant operating system and browser. But third parties have finally started to wise up to Microsoft's practices.
.NET, and we'll support you all the way!" The rejection of Hailstorm is more evidence that the industry has learned its lesson.
Years ago, everyone bought their line... "Hey world, come join us and develop for Windows, we'll support you all the way!"
Then we watched while Microsoft systematically identified all the successful third parties building apps on their platform and picked them off.
Now we have Microsoft saying "Hey world, come join us and develop for