I'm a developer, and yes I know it so very well, my last project nearly completely sunk me, cross browser stuff was one of the big problems. Many things IE introduced are actually really handy things that "the standard" lacked or still lacks, and have allowed me to implement solutions in a shorter amount of time, which has been great for people with less money who just need something quick and useful that can free up an ongoing chunk of their time. If you come at it from resourceful attitude ("I need a solution for this problem, I have just this to work with, how does it work...") rather than as a dogmatic idealog ("I will learn 'the standards', and then fight till I'm blue trying to make reality fit with it") then IE's not the big pain to develop on, because they have implemented many ideas, not just stuck with the safe old "standards". Safari & Chrome are also pretty good, and their speed! Computers are my tool, they don't inspire a whole lot of emotion, just ideas for solving problems, but they actually got a wow out me. I am impressed with those. And, they take the code that works in IE, and have barely needed any tweaking to get working. Next up was Opera, which... yeah I wasn't expecting a lot, but was actually not too bad. Firefox?? That was an ordeal. Frustration was so high, I could've killed their developers had I've met them while fighting with it (*exageration, naturally:-p).
Why? Because Chrome, Safari and Opera are written with the idea of being able to show sites that exist, out there, in the real world. They have implemented things that IE invented that people decided they liked and use. They have their own motivations too of course, Opera wanting to be miniscule, Chrome wanting to be super fast for running webapps, Safari for catering to OSX users, and compatibility is important because achieving their primary goal without it is a waste of time. Firefox tho? No, they just don't wanna know, they want to do it their way, screw how people in the world do it, just scream "standards" at them and then implement a whole load of features and things so far off the "standards" it makes the IE team look like they wrote the freaking bible.
So yes, I know all about the cross browser compatiblity problem, and before it was basically MS vs Mozilla, the battle was pretty much over opinion over whose fault it was that some things worked in one browser but not the other. Now others are involved, and they have no problem with stuff FF refuses to even consider supporting, and writing webapps that support FF takes as much of my time and causes more frustration and stress than all the others put together. So yes, real life experience, and that's the reason why I disagree, not loyalty or fanboism or anything like that.
And you missed the point of my post. It's 2010. The browser's become such an intrinsic part of the functionality of the operation of a computer that we even have the beginnings of an operating system that's basically just a browser on legs, and not even as just some guys pet hobby, but that super massive all seeing all knowing being that lives in the clouds whose name begins with G. The browser's such a useful platform for quickly developing interfaces on, that it's become the runtime environment for many "apps" that people use, and even takes over many other functionality, such as for displaying help files, or used for the rendering of forms etc for underlying system configuration. Such to an extent is this true, that much of the Windows interface itself, and much 3rd party software, rely on it being there, just as they would any other subsystem, like win32 or qt or gtk. For basic Office type needs, the browser is completely fine. I and many many others don't even need office software installed on our local machines because using something like google apps in the browser is completely fine. An operating system without a browser is like an operating system without a GUI... sure you've got the choice of which GUI you install, whether you use X, whether you run gnome or kde on top... but it makes a hell of a lot more sense to have everything all packed together and integrated well so it Just Works. That's the entire(/a v.large) reason why people go for windows, and not ((linux/hurd)/gnu)/(free/open/net)bsd)+X+kde/gnome/lxde/etc/etc/etc. Path of least resistance is very attractive when you're busy and just need to get stuff done.
Perhaps, I must concede, you may view things differently if you are the end user and everything's done for you, and yeah I guess you wouldn't care who installs the browser for you... but computers are my line of business, and I seem to like (as I keep choosing to) working with people who can't afford a lot, and that includes not being able to afford to pay someone to set their machines up for them. I've worked with an underfunded school who just had the head IT teacher guy who had a nightmare having to upgrade the OS's on all the systems he was doing as it was, without having to add adding a browser on top of that. Yes it can be automated, answer files etc, I know this because it's my profession (windows isn't, I do nearly all my stuff on Linux, but it's handy for me to know as windows is what people run)... other people tho will run unstable systems for -ages- after too many 3rd party software packages didn't install/uninstall properly, *because* of how much time it is that they don't have for a full reinstall of the OS and everything else they need on top.
It might not be important to you who installs it, but that doesn't make it not important. I'm trying to give people their time back. Telling Microsoft that they can't make something a little more convenient because netscrape was crap is not on.
"Why taint a perfectly good standard with abominated things that are required to correctly display websites built in the distant past"
That hinges on there being "a perfectly good standard", and that's just not the case, never has been, and the day it becomes true will be the end of mankind, because it will be the day we stop striving for progress and advancement, and just settle. If the standard was "perfectly good", people would have used it, and not used any of the nonstandard features, because there would have been no need.
But yeah, just write that off as a troll, I'm sure that helps with the keeping your opinion stuck to "the standard", regardless of how well reality matches with it.
HTML5 is the first one in a long time where the standardising body are more interested in standardising on what browsers are and are going to be implementing. Others have been grossly incomplete at best, purely academic at worse. Becoming too "omg standards obsessed" gives you people arguing that letting a filesystem trash your files when there's a powerfailure or crash, unnecessarily, is fine because "posix allows this". It leads to 11 years and still no goddamn fully working perl6 goddamnit! In the real world, sometimes people just need to get things done, and have no time to waste on waiting for the mozilla slowpokes to get round to deciding that it might be brought up at the next meeting and then being unable to decide on it even then. Look at the state of video... browsers couldn't agree on a video format (or codec) so html5 dropped putting it into the standard (so that this time, the standard will actually reflect reality) and so how at 95% of people watching videos online? Yep, the completely unstandardsy Flash, because they went and made a multiplatform in-the-browser video player available years before browser makers even decided to start not being able to decide on how to do it in a "standards" way.
So now what... reality's a troll? And yes, I know, flash + linux, it's not been a happy story, but you can't wait for everyone or you'll be waiting forever... sometimes you just gotta go with reaching the majority of the population, and however annoyed we've gotten after each time of checking out the latest flash files and now konqueror crashes with that annoying nsplugin fault just by any random flashy advert on a webpage... that's our problem, I'm not gonna blame other people becaues they haven't written software to some fit basically a niche with the same kind of priority as they write for 99% of the rest of the population. Why? Because I'm not a whiney spoilt little kid.
My Mom had gotten used to netscrape and didn't want to switch, so she stuck to netscrape. She still uses some mozilla variant now (not firefox, can't remember its name).
So/I/ know that no choice was taken away. I physically saw it, a piece of software being run by someone, who's not a big techie or anything, just a causal user, that wasn't IE. If choice was, as you say, taken away, then I would not have seen that. The only thing that happened was that using a browser become more convenient, and netscrape lost out because it wasn't.
Proof is this little thing called "reality", as much as you think it sucks. I know a great many people who run firefox, who searched for, downloaded, and installed it themselves, despite being absolutely freakin clueless with everything else computer wise. Despite having IE on their desktop. Despite USING IE to search for it and download it.
Sorry to say, but if you think people all used IE instead of netscrape because "they had their choice taken away", you're a spaz.
Haha I love how if you look at my recent posts screen they usually have insightful/interesting/funny, and then whenever there's a story about IE, it's all "troll" *lol*
When I first got online I think was pre NS4 days, and whilst I already knew computers to a point (with programming under basics and assembly) I didn't really get the internet bit, with things like domains ending in.com confusing me with dos programs that ended in.com... so I didn't even really know the concept of "different browsers". The ISPs dialer was on the desktop, and that would connect 'n launch NS, which I think also had a desktop icon. No "choice". No "freedom".
One day I saved an html file to disk for some reason. At a later point, I double clicked the file, and it opened up in some weird (I guessed) offline viewer, which was cool cuz it did it in a fraction of the time NS would open up. After seeing it randomly a few times, I got more curious, and started trying things, like typing in addresses into the URL bar while I was connected (haha my cluelessness was comical). In those days, nothing here was flat rate, phone calls were billed by the minute, so having a browser that started up in no time was a big plus. Having a browser that didn't crash as often, giving you less reason to have to keep starting it up was a big plus. Plus we only had one pop3 mailbox with our ISP, by which I mean my parents, so I signed up for HTML mail (or "HoTMaiL") and so didn't want to be loading up something that had another mail client bolted onto it as well.
No anticompetativeness there, that was pure and simple, I was won over by a product being significantly and noticably even to someone as clueless as I was, being the better product... despite the other product getting a leg up 'n a head start, with desktop icons, and it being hidden away and found only by chance.
Not opinion. Not fanboism. Not contrived. Not nostalgia. As much as ppl on here try to convince otherwise, you just can't argue with reality!
Aww, you could've taken a bit of my post, copied 'n pasted it out of context into a new reply completely misrepresenting what I was actually saying, and then ask if that's what I was saying, and we could've kept the whole thing going!
"Sorry, but judging from their past behaviour, they don't get the benefit of the doubt this time"
That's assuming that this is subjective. Reality doesn't bend to the fact you've been burnt in the past. Quite frankly, reality doesn't care what you believe or doubt. I don't get rained on just because where I live now used to be trees, and it would be dumb of me to act as if it was.
"Microsoft's anti-competitive practices drove other browsers out of the market"
I remember them. I'm truely grateful. The alternatives were crap IMO right up until Konqueror which I liked 'n wasn't ugly 'n showed potential from an early age, and am most happy to see how far it has come thru forks etc to become safari 'n chrome. Netscrape though, yuck, good riddance.
Most people who tell you they feel free it's because they don't want to do those things and so those restrictions to them aren't technically restrictions.
Also, most people can steal, most people are even free to kill, with said freedom ending shortly (one hopes) after that point. Freedom doesn't guarentee consequenceless.
"Anarchy isn't possible and has never existed outside of imagination"
Not for a whole country, no that is a bit far fetched an idea, humans are a bit too complex and wanting of too different a things for self organisation to occur as it does elsewhere. A small number of like minded enough people can easily exist without hierarchy though, and often have a better existance, as true teams of people can perform really rather well. As the numbers of people get bigger though, you become more likely to have someone who isn't on board with the plan, at which point anarchy would usually be replaced by hierarchy (or have that person removed by consensus of the other people), either by act of having a mediator or by having someone being told "no".
Anarchy's kinda become impossible on this planet by act of us filling it to the point where there's just no room left to get away from people who are going to want something else of you or of where you are. I think if you tried hard enough, you could probably find somewhere, a small island or something, problem is most "anarchists" are only anarchists in theory, and could never give up the benefits that living in a civilisation affords.
As for the "cute" statement... I know you mean the idea, not the people, but after rescent clashes with some "anarchists", I just can't help but picture them alongside the word, they're basically what I imagine anarchists to look like, they sum it up... it's not a pretty picture! If they were cute, I might've been less willing to rile them by pointing out the hypocrisy in their suggesting that fascists shouldn't be allowed free speech. I like cute. Rough, however, doesn't even begin to describe it!
Standards are a joke. An excuse. A nice idea at best. Pre-IE, websites all just said "best viewed in netscape" on them instead. People need to get over this idea that non-standard defaults to bad. If standards don't do what you want/need them to, then a solution must by definition be non-standard. <frameset>'s, shockingly, weren't the answer to everything. Iframes, being a non-standard microsoft/IE invention solved a lot of problems.
At it's height, I was seeing 98-99% of traffic for customers sites being Internet Explorer. Official (ie, larger sample) figures had it a little under. That makes it pretty damn standard where I'm sitting, you don't get more standard than "everybody". But, the mozilla folks have always been resistant to additions, citing "not the standard" as their get out clause for not being arsed or having code that couldn't support the features. Safari/Chrome prove that that doesn't need to be the way, by striving for "real world compatibility" instead of "not the standard", sites actually work using them, they work quickly, and they work where firefox is now the only one that won't. IE might have a lot to answer for, but it has a lot to be credited for too.
As for the non-windows users argument - when there's enough of us, my clients will be interested in paying to make sure they're catered for. Otherwise, the onus falls on the other side. Be compatible with the other 98% of the world, or be excluded from it. Of course, that 98% has shrunk and fragmented, Chrome 'n Safari are giving compatibility of their chunks towards the rest, and *all* while MS is still bundling a free browser with their OS, because now, the competition is actually competative. Netscrape deserved the death it got, and left us in a much better place to build from.
Sounds more utopian than anarchist... you don't need hierarchy to have rules, so rules and anarchy aren't mutually exclusive, however anarchists get portrayed. A small non-hierarchical (ie, anarchy) community can work very well, but it does break down in larger numbers, as structure's needed to overcome entropy, at every level; atoms, cells, animals, packs, communities, civilisations. When they get too big, they will divide into smaller structures, where entropy can be managed.
Lots of people call themselves anarchists meaning "I should be allowed to do what I want". These people are in fact not anarchists, but your plain garden variety idiots.
Haha I love anarchists on the internet... oh no! Can't do a DNS lookup!!!
For a 'free market' you need for people to not be weak 'n spineless 'n never stand up for what's right. Can't have a monopoly that people don't use. Monopolies... by the people, for the people.
But yeah, that is quite a funny notion (it's funny because it'll never be true!)... better just get the guvvamunt in instead.
It didn't get the nickname "nutscrape" just because it sounded alike! And it didn't have its entire codebase thrown out for nothing. But, I had no choice but to use NS to browse with, that was the non-free-(as in "cough up, or tough") browser days, and NS has the monopoly on what ISPs would spend some of your monthly fee on to bundle a browser so you could do something other than look at the "connected" time going up. Then all of a sudden, there was this free alternative that I could choose to use instead.
Funny how history seems so different when you actually remember it.
Yep... yep... oh and a gig of ram before you even start up the software you want to run?! I also really don't want to be having an operating system that removes scroll bars and decides where it thinks I should be looking and scrolls/for/ me, see the left hand folder view of explorer in vista 'n 7. All that crap can go straight to hell, and then probably detroit. Keep what I want to do in my head, and doing it in the computer. Division of function, how it's meant to be. If only people weren't so stupid/adverse to learning, operating systems would be/so/ fast.
In "the developed world", that may be true. Other places, people use what they can get their hands on, and an OS that costs as much as feeding their entire family for months at least is what you'd call too expensive. IT & access to information opens up so much... imagine it, all across Africa, women instead of struggling to find enough water to give to their children, being instead in hot offices playing either solitair or minesweeper, and eventually even freecell. That's progress.
"If it had really been a superior product, nobody would have been making a fuss"
Do you even know where the word "sabotage" comes from? What an absolutely biggest load of crap ever, ever, EVAAH. Welcome to mankind. You must be new here. People make a fuss because they wanted a slice of the "people want to go online" pie, and by MS releasing a free browser, the only others that have been able to truely compete have had to switch to a F/OSS model... oh no, how terrible!
You know about the phrase 'spanner in the works'? How about the guy who designed a safer way to transfer light bulbs, causing fewer to be broken in transit. People who had made their living out of selling insurance against this were proper up in arms about it.
It doesn't even have to be an actual physical thing. Ideas too. People fight evolution just as people fought taking earth out of the center of the universe. No one cares about what's better or what's right, just what's most convenient... unless that convenience later becomes an inconvenience in which case they complain about the fact that things were made convenient to begin with.
I remember netscrape, without the nostalgia. Even its creators threw it out.
News update: it's 2010. An operating system without a browser is officially ridiculous. Lots of things were true in the 80s that shouldn't be repeated now. We shouldn't be made to jump through hoops just because people are too weak to exercise free (as in speech) will and instead blame it on the company who gave them something because they can't see any difference between not being forced to take a decision, and having that decision taken away. Hating the thing that people aren't choosing not to use doesn't change that.
aww and you just don't feel it anymore 'n that makes you all grumpy! Instead, you've just got slashdot without the excitement... ouch. I think I might actually cry!
"...it was his right to choose how it's copied? But that's not exactly correct"...and then...
"He just didn't get to stop me from making that one copy"
See the contradiction? Remembering that I'm not arguing ethical grounds here, just demonstrating the legal (which I won't try drill in cuz you understand the difference), where 'mostly's and 'yeah but's just don't fit in, because then, who gets to decide who the "yeah but it's just one person" is? What's stopping everyone from wanting to be that "just one person"? The law doesn't define what the average should be, because that's subjective, instead it must define the line. In the case of copyright, the law doesn't grant the copyright holder control over most of the distribution of their works, it grants a time limited monopoly right... mono = one, not mostly one but a little bit under but you won't notice it. Because it is absolutely defined, as long as our observations of reality are in agreement, we cannot argue over whether reality fits the definition or not... slighly less than all, by the most smallest amount, can not be equal to all, for any value of all.
So yes, trying not to repeat myself too much (long day so apologies if I am) you can see that in the context of what is legally defined, it has nothing to do with how much money they could've made, the size of the sale that was "lost", however much the MAFIAA focus on the money, only made 99bajillion dollars this year instead of 100 (how my heart doth bleed)... the deal is, a protected monopoly for the first x years, in exchange for it going public domain forever after that. The deal is between the artist/creator/inventor/etc and the greater society, as represented* by common law (*we are talking very ideally here!). By being the "just one person" who doesn't honour that deal, and making an unauthorised copy, you're welshing on that deal, on behalf of the society.
One final point I do want to make clear (will try keep it short!) is that I am guilty of doing this myself. I've downloaded and used stuff that there's no way I could afford. Even times where I've felt it's been necessary (without going into life story enough to explain 'necessary') I'm still not going to pretend that it's right, but I still do it, sometimes just for a laugh (like download a funny film when I'm bummed out that I know I don't have money to pay for). I'm not a bad person. I'm not perfect. I'm honest though. I say this because I think it emphasises how much what I say isn't me casting judgement... we're just not a perfect species! Better to put the effort into making up for it than trying to hide it.
Dude, suggesting that somebody's future predicting powers may not be 100% accurate 100% of the time is all the pleasure some people have in their lives goddamnit, don't take that away.
Perhaps he was more concerned over the fact that his right to choose how his software is copied ("copy" + "right" = "copyright") was taken when the software was copied, and unlike the software, which can be duplicated, the right to control the copying of your created works, and other people copying it without your permission, are mutually exclusive. Just because he was left with a copy of the software, doesn't mean nothing was taken that he wasn't left with ("copyright" - "right" = "copy") I understand that concept is quite abstracty and beyond people who can only deal with metaphors involving cars:-/
Oh, whether you think a person should have to right to control the use of their creation is another matter. Copyright means they have a legal right to, I'm not suggesting whether that right is either ethical or not. But you cannot argue that nothing is taken that the creator is thus prevented from using, as demonstrated above.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a developer, and yes I know it so very well, my last project nearly completely sunk me, cross browser stuff was one of the big problems. Many things IE introduced are actually really handy things that "the standard" lacked or still lacks, and have allowed me to implement solutions in a shorter amount of time, which has been great for people with less money who just need something quick and useful that can free up an ongoing chunk of their time. If you come at it from resourceful attitude ("I need a solution for this problem, I have just this to work with, how does it work...") rather than as a dogmatic idealog ("I will learn 'the standards', and then fight till I'm blue trying to make reality fit with it") then IE's not the big pain to develop on, because they have implemented many ideas, not just stuck with the safe old "standards". Safari & Chrome are also pretty good, and their speed! Computers are my tool, they don't inspire a whole lot of emotion, just ideas for solving problems, but they actually got a wow out me. I am impressed with those. And, they take the code that works in IE, and have barely needed any tweaking to get working. Next up was Opera, which... yeah I wasn't expecting a lot, but was actually not too bad. Firefox?? That was an ordeal. Frustration was so high, I could've killed their developers had I've met them while fighting with it (*exageration, naturally :-p).
Why? Because Chrome, Safari and Opera are written with the idea of being able to show sites that exist, out there, in the real world. They have implemented things that IE invented that people decided they liked and use. They have their own motivations too of course, Opera wanting to be miniscule, Chrome wanting to be super fast for running webapps, Safari for catering to OSX users, and compatibility is important because achieving their primary goal without it is a waste of time. Firefox tho? No, they just don't wanna know, they want to do it their way, screw how people in the world do it, just scream "standards" at them and then implement a whole load of features and things so far off the "standards" it makes the IE team look like they wrote the freaking bible.
So yes, I know all about the cross browser compatiblity problem, and before it was basically MS vs Mozilla, the battle was pretty much over opinion over whose fault it was that some things worked in one browser but not the other. Now others are involved, and they have no problem with stuff FF refuses to even consider supporting, and writing webapps that support FF takes as much of my time and causes more frustration and stress than all the others put together. So yes, real life experience, and that's the reason why I disagree, not loyalty or fanboism or anything like that.
And you missed the point of my post. It's 2010. The browser's become such an intrinsic part of the functionality of the operation of a computer that we even have the beginnings of an operating system that's basically just a browser on legs, and not even as just some guys pet hobby, but that super massive all seeing all knowing being that lives in the clouds whose name begins with G. The browser's such a useful platform for quickly developing interfaces on, that it's become the runtime environment for many "apps" that people use, and even takes over many other functionality, such as for displaying help files, or used for the rendering of forms etc for underlying system configuration. Such to an extent is this true, that much of the Windows interface itself, and much 3rd party software, rely on it being there, just as they would any other subsystem, like win32 or qt or gtk. For basic Office type needs, the browser is completely fine. I and many many others don't even need office software installed on our local machines because using something like google apps in the browser is completely fine. An operating system without a browser is like an operating system without a GUI... sure you've got the choice of which GUI you install, whether you use X, whether you run gnome or kde on top... but it makes a hell of a lot more sense to have everything all packed together and integrated well so it Just Works. That's the entire(/a v.large) reason why people go for windows, and not ((linux/hurd)/gnu)/(free/open/net)bsd)+X+kde/gnome/lxde/etc/etc/etc. Path of least resistance is very attractive when you're busy and just need to get stuff done.
Perhaps, I must concede, you may view things differently if you are the end user and everything's done for you, and yeah I guess you wouldn't care who installs the browser for you... but computers are my line of business, and I seem to like (as I keep choosing to) working with people who can't afford a lot, and that includes not being able to afford to pay someone to set their machines up for them. I've worked with an underfunded school who just had the head IT teacher guy who had a nightmare having to upgrade the OS's on all the systems he was doing as it was, without having to add adding a browser on top of that. Yes it can be automated, answer files etc, I know this because it's my profession (windows isn't, I do nearly all my stuff on Linux, but it's handy for me to know as windows is what people run)... other people tho will run unstable systems for -ages- after too many 3rd party software packages didn't install/uninstall properly, *because* of how much time it is that they don't have for a full reinstall of the OS and everything else they need on top.
It might not be important to you who installs it, but that doesn't make it not important. I'm trying to give people their time back. Telling Microsoft that they can't make something a little more convenient because netscrape was crap is not on.
It's a troll because I disagree with you?
"Why taint a perfectly good standard with abominated things that are required to correctly display websites built in the distant past"
That hinges on there being "a perfectly good standard", and that's just not the case, never has been, and the day it becomes true will be the end of mankind, because it will be the day we stop striving for progress and advancement, and just settle. If the standard was "perfectly good", people would have used it, and not used any of the nonstandard features, because there would have been no need.
But yeah, just write that off as a troll, I'm sure that helps with the keeping your opinion stuck to "the standard", regardless of how well reality matches with it.
HTML5 is the first one in a long time where the standardising body are more interested in standardising on what browsers are and are going to be implementing. Others have been grossly incomplete at best, purely academic at worse. Becoming too "omg standards obsessed" gives you people arguing that letting a filesystem trash your files when there's a powerfailure or crash, unnecessarily, is fine because "posix allows this". It leads to 11 years and still no goddamn fully working perl6 goddamnit! In the real world, sometimes people just need to get things done, and have no time to waste on waiting for the mozilla slowpokes to get round to deciding that it might be brought up at the next meeting and then being unable to decide on it even then. Look at the state of video... browsers couldn't agree on a video format (or codec) so html5 dropped putting it into the standard (so that this time, the standard will actually reflect reality) and so how at 95% of people watching videos online? Yep, the completely unstandardsy Flash, because they went and made a multiplatform in-the-browser video player available years before browser makers even decided to start not being able to decide on how to do it in a "standards" way.
So now what... reality's a troll? And yes, I know, flash + linux, it's not been a happy story, but you can't wait for everyone or you'll be waiting forever... sometimes you just gotta go with reaching the majority of the population, and however annoyed we've gotten after each time of checking out the latest flash files and now konqueror crashes with that annoying nsplugin fault just by any random flashy advert on a webpage... that's our problem, I'm not gonna blame other people becaues they haven't written software to some fit basically a niche with the same kind of priority as they write for 99% of the rest of the population. Why? Because I'm not a whiney spoilt little kid.
My Mom had gotten used to netscrape and didn't want to switch, so she stuck to netscrape. She still uses some mozilla variant now (not firefox, can't remember its name).
So /I/ know that no choice was taken away. I physically saw it, a piece of software being run by someone, who's not a big techie or anything, just a causal user, that wasn't IE. If choice was, as you say, taken away, then I would not have seen that. The only thing that happened was that using a browser become more convenient, and netscrape lost out because it wasn't.
Proof is this little thing called "reality", as much as you think it sucks. I know a great many people who run firefox, who searched for, downloaded, and installed it themselves, despite being absolutely freakin clueless with everything else computer wise. Despite having IE on their desktop. Despite USING IE to search for it and download it.
Sorry to say, but if you think people all used IE instead of netscrape because "they had their choice taken away", you're a spaz.
Haha I love how if you look at my recent posts screen they usually have insightful/interesting/funny, and then whenever there's a story about IE, it's all "troll" *lol*
When I first got online I think was pre NS4 days, and whilst I already knew computers to a point (with programming under basics and assembly) I didn't really get the internet bit, with things like domains ending in .com confusing me with dos programs that ended in .com... so I didn't even really know the concept of "different browsers". The ISPs dialer was on the desktop, and that would connect 'n launch NS, which I think also had a desktop icon. No "choice". No "freedom".
One day I saved an html file to disk for some reason. At a later point, I double clicked the file, and it opened up in some weird (I guessed) offline viewer, which was cool cuz it did it in a fraction of the time NS would open up. After seeing it randomly a few times, I got more curious, and started trying things, like typing in addresses into the URL bar while I was connected (haha my cluelessness was comical). In those days, nothing here was flat rate, phone calls were billed by the minute, so having a browser that started up in no time was a big plus. Having a browser that didn't crash as often, giving you less reason to have to keep starting it up was a big plus. Plus we only had one pop3 mailbox with our ISP, by which I mean my parents, so I signed up for HTML mail (or "HoTMaiL") and so didn't want to be loading up something that had another mail client bolted onto it as well.
No anticompetativeness there, that was pure and simple, I was won over by a product being significantly and noticably even to someone as clueless as I was, being the better product... despite the other product getting a leg up 'n a head start, with desktop icons, and it being hidden away and found only by chance.
Not opinion. Not fanboism. Not contrived. Not nostalgia. As much as ppl on here try to convince otherwise, you just can't argue with reality!
Aww, you could've taken a bit of my post, copied 'n pasted it out of context into a new reply completely misrepresenting what I was actually saying, and then ask if that's what I was saying, and we could've kept the whole thing going!
"Sorry, but judging from their past behaviour, they don't get the benefit of the doubt this time"
That's assuming that this is subjective. Reality doesn't bend to the fact you've been burnt in the past. Quite frankly, reality doesn't care what you believe or doubt. I don't get rained on just because where I live now used to be trees, and it would be dumb of me to act as if it was.
"Microsoft's anti-competitive practices drove other browsers out of the market"
I remember them. I'm truely grateful. The alternatives were crap IMO right up until Konqueror which I liked 'n wasn't ugly 'n showed potential from an early age, and am most happy to see how far it has come thru forks etc to become safari 'n chrome. Netscrape though, yuck, good riddance.
Most people who tell you they feel free it's because they don't want to do those things and so those restrictions to them aren't technically restrictions.
Also, most people can steal, most people are even free to kill, with said freedom ending shortly (one hopes) after that point. Freedom doesn't guarentee consequenceless.
"Anarchy isn't possible and has never existed outside of imagination"
Not for a whole country, no that is a bit far fetched an idea, humans are a bit too complex and wanting of too different a things for self organisation to occur as it does elsewhere. A small number of like minded enough people can easily exist without hierarchy though, and often have a better existance, as true teams of people can perform really rather well. As the numbers of people get bigger though, you become more likely to have someone who isn't on board with the plan, at which point anarchy would usually be replaced by hierarchy (or have that person removed by consensus of the other people), either by act of having a mediator or by having someone being told "no".
Anarchy's kinda become impossible on this planet by act of us filling it to the point where there's just no room left to get away from people who are going to want something else of you or of where you are. I think if you tried hard enough, you could probably find somewhere, a small island or something, problem is most "anarchists" are only anarchists in theory, and could never give up the benefits that living in a civilisation affords.
As for the "cute" statement... I know you mean the idea, not the people, but after rescent clashes with some "anarchists", I just can't help but picture them alongside the word, they're basically what I imagine anarchists to look like, they sum it up... it's not a pretty picture! If they were cute, I might've been less willing to rile them by pointing out the hypocrisy in their suggesting that fascists shouldn't be allowed free speech. I like cute. Rough, however, doesn't even begin to describe it!
Standards are a joke. An excuse. A nice idea at best. Pre-IE, websites all just said "best viewed in netscape" on them instead. People need to get over this idea that non-standard defaults to bad. If standards don't do what you want/need them to, then a solution must by definition be non-standard. <frameset>'s, shockingly, weren't the answer to everything. Iframes, being a non-standard microsoft/IE invention solved a lot of problems.
At it's height, I was seeing 98-99% of traffic for customers sites being Internet Explorer. Official (ie, larger sample) figures had it a little under. That makes it pretty damn standard where I'm sitting, you don't get more standard than "everybody". But, the mozilla folks have always been resistant to additions, citing "not the standard" as their get out clause for not being arsed or having code that couldn't support the features. Safari/Chrome prove that that doesn't need to be the way, by striving for "real world compatibility" instead of "not the standard", sites actually work using them, they work quickly, and they work where firefox is now the only one that won't. IE might have a lot to answer for, but it has a lot to be credited for too.
As for the non-windows users argument - when there's enough of us, my clients will be interested in paying to make sure they're catered for. Otherwise, the onus falls on the other side. Be compatible with the other 98% of the world, or be excluded from it. Of course, that 98% has shrunk and fragmented, Chrome 'n Safari are giving compatibility of their chunks towards the rest, and *all* while MS is still bundling a free browser with their OS, because now, the competition is actually competative. Netscrape deserved the death it got, and left us in a much better place to build from.
Sounds more utopian than anarchist... you don't need hierarchy to have rules, so rules and anarchy aren't mutually exclusive, however anarchists get portrayed. A small non-hierarchical (ie, anarchy) community can work very well, but it does break down in larger numbers, as structure's needed to overcome entropy, at every level; atoms, cells, animals, packs, communities, civilisations. When they get too big, they will divide into smaller structures, where entropy can be managed.
Lots of people call themselves anarchists meaning "I should be allowed to do what I want". These people are in fact not anarchists, but your plain garden variety idiots.
Haha I love anarchists on the internet... oh no! Can't do a DNS lookup!!!
For a 'free market' you need for people to not be weak 'n spineless 'n never stand up for what's right. Can't have a monopoly that people don't use. Monopolies... by the people, for the people.
But yeah, that is quite a funny notion (it's funny because it'll never be true!) ... better just get the guvvamunt in instead.
"Some people like to reach for the top. Other people would like the top to be brought closer"
haha love it
It didn't get the nickname "nutscrape" just because it sounded alike! And it didn't have its entire codebase thrown out for nothing. But, I had no choice but to use NS to browse with, that was the non-free-(as in "cough up, or tough") browser days, and NS has the monopoly on what ISPs would spend some of your monthly fee on to bundle a browser so you could do something other than look at the "connected" time going up. Then all of a sudden, there was this free alternative that I could choose to use instead.
Funny how history seems so different when you actually remember it.
"Windows doesn't have almost complete control of the PC OS market share because it's the best OS but because it isn't"
So you're saying that people are naturally drawn to lesser products, so to compete and win, other vendors need to make their OS's less-good?
Yep... yep... oh and a gig of ram before you even start up the software you want to run?! I also really don't want to be having an operating system that removes scroll bars and decides where it thinks I should be looking and scrolls /for/ me, see the left hand folder view of explorer in vista 'n 7. All that crap can go straight to hell, and then probably detroit. Keep what I want to do in my head, and doing it in the computer. Division of function, how it's meant to be. If only people weren't so stupid/adverse to learning, operating systems would be /so/ fast.
"Windows isn't that expensive"
In "the developed world", that may be true. Other places, people use what they can get their hands on, and an OS that costs as much as feeding their entire family for months at least is what you'd call too expensive. IT & access to information opens up so much... imagine it, all across Africa, women instead of struggling to find enough water to give to their children, being instead in hot offices playing either solitair or minesweeper, and eventually even freecell. That's progress.
"If it had really been a superior product, nobody would have been making a fuss"
Do you even know where the word "sabotage" comes from? What an absolutely biggest load of crap ever, ever, EVAAH. Welcome to mankind. You must be new here. People make a fuss because they wanted a slice of the "people want to go online" pie, and by MS releasing a free browser, the only others that have been able to truely compete have had to switch to a F/OSS model... oh no, how terrible!
You know about the phrase 'spanner in the works'? How about the guy who designed a safer way to transfer light bulbs, causing fewer to be broken in transit. People who had made their living out of selling insurance against this were proper up in arms about it.
It doesn't even have to be an actual physical thing. Ideas too. People fight evolution just as people fought taking earth out of the center of the universe. No one cares about what's better or what's right, just what's most convenient... unless that convenience later becomes an inconvenience in which case they complain about the fact that things were made convenient to begin with.
I remember netscrape, without the nostalgia. Even its creators threw it out.
News update: it's 2010. An operating system without a browser is officially ridiculous. Lots of things were true in the 80s that shouldn't be repeated now. We shouldn't be made to jump through hoops just because people are too weak to exercise free (as in speech) will and instead blame it on the company who gave them something because they can't see any difference between not being forced to take a decision, and having that decision taken away. Hating the thing that people aren't choosing not to use doesn't change that.
aww and you just don't feel it anymore 'n that makes you all grumpy! Instead, you've just got slashdot without the excitement... ouch. I think I might actually cry!
Community?? Slashdot?!! It's more like a demolishion derby of open source (and heavily forked) memes *lol* ...
"...it was his right to choose how it's copied? But that's not exactly correct" ...and then...
"He just didn't get to stop me from making that one copy"
See the contradiction? Remembering that I'm not arguing ethical grounds here, just demonstrating the legal (which I won't try drill in cuz you understand the difference), where 'mostly's and 'yeah but's just don't fit in, because then, who gets to decide who the "yeah but it's just one person" is? What's stopping everyone from wanting to be that "just one person"? The law doesn't define what the average should be, because that's subjective, instead it must define the line. In the case of copyright, the law doesn't grant the copyright holder control over most of the distribution of their works, it grants a time limited monopoly right... mono = one, not mostly one but a little bit under but you won't notice it. Because it is absolutely defined, as long as our observations of reality are in agreement, we cannot argue over whether reality fits the definition or not... slighly less than all, by the most smallest amount, can not be equal to all, for any value of all.
So yes, trying not to repeat myself too much (long day so apologies if I am) you can see that in the context of what is legally defined, it has nothing to do with how much money they could've made, the size of the sale that was "lost", however much the MAFIAA focus on the money, only made 99bajillion dollars this year instead of 100 (how my heart doth bleed) ... the deal is, a protected monopoly for the first x years, in exchange for it going public domain forever after that. The deal is between the artist/creator/inventor/etc and the greater society, as represented* by common law (*we are talking very ideally here!). By being the "just one person" who doesn't honour that deal, and making an unauthorised copy, you're welshing on that deal, on behalf of the society.
One final point I do want to make clear (will try keep it short!) is that I am guilty of doing this myself. I've downloaded and used stuff that there's no way I could afford. Even times where I've felt it's been necessary (without going into life story enough to explain 'necessary') I'm still not going to pretend that it's right, but I still do it, sometimes just for a laugh (like download a funny film when I'm bummed out that I know I don't have money to pay for). I'm not a bad person. I'm not perfect. I'm honest though. I say this because I think it emphasises how much what I say isn't me casting judgement... we're just not a perfect species! Better to put the effort into making up for it than trying to hide it.
End of rant *lol*
Dude, suggesting that somebody's future predicting powers may not be 100% accurate 100% of the time is all the pleasure some people have in their lives goddamnit, don't take that away.
Perhaps he was more concerned over the fact that his right to choose how his software is copied ("copy" + "right" = "copyright") was taken when the software was copied, and unlike the software, which can be duplicated, the right to control the copying of your created works, and other people copying it without your permission, are mutually exclusive. Just because he was left with a copy of the software, doesn't mean nothing was taken that he wasn't left with ("copyright" - "right" = "copy") I understand that concept is quite abstracty and beyond people who can only deal with metaphors involving cars :-/
Oh, whether you think a person should have to right to control the use of their creation is another matter. Copyright means they have a legal right to, I'm not suggesting whether that right is either ethical or not. But you cannot argue that nothing is taken that the creator is thus prevented from using, as demonstrated above.
and me :'(