If you had released your browser 7 years ago you would have had other programmers helping you to improve it.
I want results. In return for my 5 line freeBSD patch and 30 line KDE patch, I get an excellent system that works how I want it to. I cannot get that value anywhere else. Microsoft Windows XP, or Apple OSX is not as high quality as KDE/FreeBSD (My personal opinion, many will disagree), yet buying either of the former would cost me more money. I don't count my time because I enjoy programing.
OS also helps me as a programmer. Most people compile with GCC in the embedded market. When I use Emacs my boss doesn't have to approve the purchase price for my editor.
I think you have made a large mistake. Programs are mostly not things that run on the desktop. As a programmer I can still find jobs programing microwaves, car control systems, assembly lines, and the like. Open source will never be big in those areas because it is custom software for each. Microsoft Windows never ran on a majority of the computers shipped - the embedded market is invisible, but it is much larger than the desktop market.
I don't directly care about my company. I don't own them. (Company is not public - I have been promissed stock options, but so far have not got any) However I do not like looking for a new job, and so far things are fairly interesting. I would prefer they not go out of business. So if given a choice I will choose to not spend money that doesn't pay off for them. I recognize that something that costs me a week costs them about 5 grand. (My salary, loss from me not doing something else in that time, and general overhead)
Exchange is big, I will grant you that. However it is not everything. Most home users do not have Exchange, could not afford it if they wanted it, nor could they administer it if they had it. ISPs generally cannot afford to provide exchange for all their customers.
I use KDEPIM all the time at both work (We are too small for a corporate exchange server) and home. It does what I need - but I don't need much. This is the market that open source coveres better than outlook.
Get a cheap low power computer with a PCI slot. Some old P2 machine, or better yet a low power mini-itx board. You now have a place for a FXO/FXS card, and can have your laptop connect to that as needed. (Depending on your situation you may want to take the server off of your laptop entirely.
No, making it work on other browsers costs essentially nothing because we make the site following the directions set out by the w3c, and we have to spend that much. We then have to figure out why IE isn't working and find a work around that works. Even dropping the others this is more work than designing the site right to begin with.
We know for a fact that some of our customers are Windows only, and others are unix (AIX). The former are either clueless, or very locked down - for either IE is the most likely choice. They will not install firefox for us. IE doesn't run on AIX, so we have to support firefox.
Half the developers prefer a Unix desktop, and run Konqueror/safari (one guy brings his own laptop cause we only supply x86), while the Windows people run firefox. We could drop Konqueror/safari, but once you have firefox those are trivial. We cannot drop IE or firefox because there are known customers that are locked into one.
I thought of that. However there were two objections:
Most of our customers use IE, and it is hard to call something easy to use when you force them to install a different browser.
I'm a great fan of Anybrowser, from back when netscape 1.1 was polluting the cross platform web. I still have not forgiven Netscape for introducing Frames and javascript - which were heavily abused in those days to lock out any other browser. (Javascript has uses, but it was mostly abused 10 years ago. Frames are evil)
I agree that IE is dangerous. However we are not in the business of recommending browsers.
Actually no. They do take customer input on where to put towers. It takes a year to install one, and they might decide not to put one up. If you don't ask for it though, they will never know you want it. If there is demand in one area and none in a different, they fill the demand. If there is a tower that nobody uses it is a waste to put it up.
Not to mention there is always some rich fool who can afford a hostile take over of a cell phone company just to force a tower in that area.
I may not claim that our code is perfect when we first write it. We make it work in Konqueror first, but sometimes Konqueror is more forgiving of our mistakes. The tweaks needed for firefox and Safari are tiny, and they don't break Konqueror. You can argue that in many cases the the problems are out fault, not the browser. (
Don't read this as Konqueror being wrong, they are often areas where the standard doesn't say what should happen if you abuse things in that way)
IE is a different story. The tweaks needed to make IE work bring our code away from the standard, not closer to it.
I know tabs are the killer that takes users from IE, but I'd prefer they work on their rendering. Their CSS doesn't work.
We make all our sites to work in Konqueror now, and only minor tweaking is needed for Firefox and safari. Easy enough, all are so close to the standard that there is little difficulty. IE doesn't work. We have to spend three times the effort to make it work in IE without breaking the rest. (We have chosen to not detect IE and give you a different page. I'm still not sure about the wisdom of that)
Typical Microsoft though, make it look nice, who cares if it works right so long as the users don't know.
Odds are you can't do anything yourself (FCC). However your provider can. Complain that you don't have strong service and they might put a new tower up in your area. Depending on how much money you have to spend they might allow you to connect your VOIP network.
Computers can already land airplanes. It is a short step to pre-program the computer to fly the plane the entire way and have passangers in the cockpit.
Hijack? Sorry, the flight path can only be programed when the engines are off. Flight control is handled by computers using strong encryption between planes. Human pilots are not allowed on the runways computer controlled aircraft use, so the planes just decide landing/takeoff orders themselves.
Mind several redundant systems are required to do this. And I want the strong encryption reviewed by experts, not snake oil salesmen. Still humans are not perfect either.
Not checking grandma was specifically rejected in the US because there are grandma's who are terrorists. Some of the suicide bombers in Israel appeared to be normal grandma's until they set the bomb off and killed some people.
I personally work with a couple Muslims in the late 20s, and they are fine people. There is no more reason to believe they are terrorists than there is to believe grandma or I am one.
In fact profiling makes security WORSE! The terrorist only need a tiny number of people to achieve their goals. If you only target the 25 year olds who are, those people make sure they are clean and do nothing when they travel. They spend their time recruiting grandmas to do the dirty work. Remember there are millions of grandma's in the world, they only need a few willing to do the dirty work. It doesn't matter if half of all 25 year old male Muslims are terrorists (to pick something extreme), you cannot to anything about them if they are clean. In the mean time the 1 in a million grandmas are killing people because you are ignoring them.
I can't stand coffee. I could see my self needing internet, and trying a coffee shop without buying anything (though I would first look at their pastry selection, and buy one if there were any). However if the shop is half full I'd walk right out, if not I ask if they mind. Even then I pay attention, when the shop gets half full I'm out anyway.
When I'm just a body surrounded by empty seats it costs nothing. When I'm a non-paying body taking up a seat a customer could otherwise take I'm costing them. In fact you could argue that my presence makes it look like the place is more 'happening', which could attract customers.
This is a subtile hint: start changing your and everyone else's thinking. People buy the old bulbs out of habit. Start thinking of the energy efficient bulbs as standard, and use the old energy wasters only where you must.
Compact fluorescent is no longer 10x the cost of a old bulb, though they are more expensive by several times. They last 10x as long though.
The credit card companies work for me. I pay off my credit card every month, and they pay me 1% for using their card. I also pay my bill after the first of the month, which means the money has earned a little interest sitting in my savings account in the mean time.
If you are like the millions who use the credit card for credit, you are stupid. (there are some exceptions, but they are rare) If you use the credit card as I do, - I have the cash for the purchase in the bank, and pay it off when the next bill comes - then it the credit card companies work for you.
There are cards that give a better deal than 1%, but they have restrictions on the deal so I don't personally use them. The restrictions might work out better for you though, depending on your needs.
Microsoft Windows does the same thing - include all current drivers. However they do not do regular updates. Last time I installed Microsoft Windows 2000 on a "designed for Windows 2000" box it didn't have the drivers I needed, and I had to search for them. I'm geek enough to pry the heatsink off the northbridge and google the numbers found, I don't know what the average person would do.
Linux is updated often, so it is more likely to have drivers for new stuff in my experience.
User friendly? When I have to double click? Double clicking it hard. Hard in software (all the time outs must be just right so you get the double click vs. two single clicks in a row right), and hard on people. (Ever try to teach an old person to double click? Some of them can't move their fingers that fast)
OSX is nice, don't get me wrong. However it is not perfect. KDE works the way I want my OS to run, in part because it is configured to work the way I've been used to my interface working for years.
The test was in 6th grade. At that time I was writing everything out by hand, and showing no improvement. I'll grant that my hand writing has gone down since then (because I no longer have reason to hand write), but lack of practice doesn't fit, at the time I spent most of my day writing things out by hand. There was a computer lab (Apple//s), but we didn't use it for our writing.
Practice only makes perfect if you body has the ability to become perfect. My muscles do not work that way, for whatever reason. Saying that I would be better at hand writing if I practiced is like saying that someone confined to a wheelchair should practice walking. I know a few people in wheel chairs who can walk (with help) a couple steps, but their body cannot do more no matter how much the practice. (MS does that) My disability is tiny, but it is still there.
Back in school they tested me and discovered that at best my handwriting is like a second grader. That is when I'm really trying my best to write neat, normal writing that I'm in a hurry to get down is much worse. (There is a name for this condition, but I don't care enough about it to remember)
Find yourself a real, old fashioned style, bakery and get some real donuts. Krispy Kreme's are good only in comparison to what you buy in the local big box grocery store. A real bakery much better.
I have lived in a house built sometime in the 1880's. Other than the architecture being obviously the old there is no way to tell. We tore down one wall, and discovered that the studs still look and feel new.
Wood rots, and is damaged by termites (and others) but not if you take care to prevent it.
Brick tends to absorb water and then explode when it (the water) freezes. Most brick also decays over time. (There are millions of different brick recipes, each with good and bad points)
Steel rusts and corrodes, particularly when wet.
There is no perfect building material. Wood is no worse than the others.
China isn't in Europe. Nor is Egypt. Nor were the Aztecs. I don't think I'd count several of the middle Easy civilizations, as Europe either. (though that is debatable)
There were independent civilizations in America long before Europe came and imposed their own.
Western civilization arose in Europe, but there were plenty of others that came before or independently.
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If you had released your browser 7 years ago you would have had other programmers helping you to improve it.
I want results. In return for my 5 line freeBSD patch and 30 line KDE patch, I get an excellent system that works how I want it to. I cannot get that value anywhere else. Microsoft Windows XP, or Apple OSX is not as high quality as KDE/FreeBSD (My personal opinion, many will disagree), yet buying either of the former would cost me more money. I don't count my time because I enjoy programing.
OS also helps me as a programmer. Most people compile with GCC in the embedded market. When I use Emacs my boss doesn't have to approve the purchase price for my editor.
I think you have made a large mistake. Programs are mostly not things that run on the desktop. As a programmer I can still find jobs programing microwaves, car control systems, assembly lines, and the like. Open source will never be big in those areas because it is custom software for each. Microsoft Windows never ran on a majority of the computers shipped - the embedded market is invisible, but it is much larger than the desktop market.
I don't directly care about my company. I don't own them. (Company is not public - I have been promissed stock options, but so far have not got any) However I do not like looking for a new job, and so far things are fairly interesting. I would prefer they not go out of business. So if given a choice I will choose to not spend money that doesn't pay off for them. I recognize that something that costs me a week costs them about 5 grand. (My salary, loss from me not doing something else in that time, and general overhead)
Exchange is big, I will grant you that. However it is not everything. Most home users do not have Exchange, could not afford it if they wanted it, nor could they administer it if they had it. ISPs generally cannot afford to provide exchange for all their customers.
I use KDEPIM all the time at both work (We are too small for a corporate exchange server) and home. It does what I need - but I don't need much. This is the market that open source coveres better than outlook.
Get a cheap low power computer with a PCI slot. Some old P2 machine, or better yet a low power mini-itx board. You now have a place for a FXO/FXS card, and can have your laptop connect to that as needed. (Depending on your situation you may want to take the server off of your laptop entirely.
No, making it work on other browsers costs essentially nothing because we make the site following the directions set out by the w3c, and we have to spend that much. We then have to figure out why IE isn't working and find a work around that works. Even dropping the others this is more work than designing the site right to begin with.
We know for a fact that some of our customers are Windows only, and others are unix (AIX). The former are either clueless, or very locked down - for either IE is the most likely choice. They will not install firefox for us. IE doesn't run on AIX, so we have to support firefox.
Half the developers prefer a Unix desktop, and run Konqueror/safari (one guy brings his own laptop cause we only supply x86), while the Windows people run firefox. We could drop Konqueror/safari, but once you have firefox those are trivial. We cannot drop IE or firefox because there are known customers that are locked into one.
I thought of that. However there were two objections:
Most of our customers use IE, and it is hard to call something easy to use when you force them to install a different browser.
I'm a great fan of Anybrowser, from back when netscape 1.1 was polluting the cross platform web. I still have not forgiven Netscape for introducing Frames and javascript - which were heavily abused in those days to lock out any other browser. (Javascript has uses, but it was mostly abused 10 years ago. Frames are evil)
I agree that IE is dangerous. However we are not in the business of recommending browsers.
Actually no. They do take customer input on where to put towers. It takes a year to install one, and they might decide not to put one up. If you don't ask for it though, they will never know you want it. If there is demand in one area and none in a different, they fill the demand. If there is a tower that nobody uses it is a waste to put it up.
Not to mention there is always some rich fool who can afford a hostile take over of a cell phone company just to force a tower in that area.
I may not claim that our code is perfect when we first write it. We make it work in Konqueror first, but sometimes Konqueror is more forgiving of our mistakes. The tweaks needed for firefox and Safari are tiny, and they don't break Konqueror. You can argue that in many cases the the problems are out fault, not the browser. ( Don't read this as Konqueror being wrong, they are often areas where the standard doesn't say what should happen if you abuse things in that way)
IE is a different story. The tweaks needed to make IE work bring our code away from the standard, not closer to it.
I know tabs are the killer that takes users from IE, but I'd prefer they work on their rendering. Their CSS doesn't work.
We make all our sites to work in Konqueror now, and only minor tweaking is needed for Firefox and safari. Easy enough, all are so close to the standard that there is little difficulty. IE doesn't work. We have to spend three times the effort to make it work in IE without breaking the rest. (We have chosen to not detect IE and give you a different page. I'm still not sure about the wisdom of that)
Typical Microsoft though, make it look nice, who cares if it works right so long as the users don't know.
Odds are you can't do anything yourself (FCC). However your provider can. Complain that you don't have strong service and they might put a new tower up in your area. Depending on how much money you have to spend they might allow you to connect your VOIP network.
Computers can already land airplanes. It is a short step to pre-program the computer to fly the plane the entire way and have passangers in the cockpit.
Hijack? Sorry, the flight path can only be programed when the engines are off. Flight control is handled by computers using strong encryption between planes. Human pilots are not allowed on the runways computer controlled aircraft use, so the planes just decide landing/takeoff orders themselves.
Mind several redundant systems are required to do this. And I want the strong encryption reviewed by experts, not snake oil salesmen. Still humans are not perfect either.
Not checking grandma was specifically rejected in the US because there are grandma's who are terrorists. Some of the suicide bombers in Israel appeared to be normal grandma's until they set the bomb off and killed some people.
I personally work with a couple Muslims in the late 20s, and they are fine people. There is no more reason to believe they are terrorists than there is to believe grandma or I am one.
In fact profiling makes security WORSE! The terrorist only need a tiny number of people to achieve their goals. If you only target the 25 year olds who are, those people make sure they are clean and do nothing when they travel. They spend their time recruiting grandmas to do the dirty work. Remember there are millions of grandma's in the world, they only need a few willing to do the dirty work. It doesn't matter if half of all 25 year old male Muslims are terrorists (to pick something extreme), you cannot to anything about them if they are clean. In the mean time the 1 in a million grandmas are killing people because you are ignoring them.
I can't stand coffee. I could see my self needing internet, and trying a coffee shop without buying anything (though I would first look at their pastry selection, and buy one if there were any). However if the shop is half full I'd walk right out, if not I ask if they mind. Even then I pay attention, when the shop gets half full I'm out anyway.
When I'm just a body surrounded by empty seats it costs nothing. When I'm a non-paying body taking up a seat a customer could otherwise take I'm costing them. In fact you could argue that my presence makes it look like the place is more 'happening', which could attract customers.
I consider this basic.
This is a subtile hint: start changing your and everyone else's thinking. People buy the old bulbs out of habit. Start thinking of the energy efficient bulbs as standard, and use the old energy wasters only where you must.
Compact fluorescent is no longer 10x the cost of a old bulb, though they are more expensive by several times. They last 10x as long though.
The credit card companies work for me. I pay off my credit card every month, and they pay me 1% for using their card. I also pay my bill after the first of the month, which means the money has earned a little interest sitting in my savings account in the mean time.
If you are like the millions who use the credit card for credit, you are stupid. (there are some exceptions, but they are rare) If you use the credit card as I do, - I have the cash for the purchase in the bank, and pay it off when the next bill comes - then it the credit card companies work for you.
There are cards that give a better deal than 1%, but they have restrictions on the deal so I don't personally use them. The restrictions might work out better for you though, depending on your needs.
Don't tell me you are one of those fools stuck using (and replacing) those old energy wasters. A regular light bulb is now 13 watts.
BTW, even the old energy wasters were normally 60 watts, not 90, so your half figure is still high.
Microsoft Windows does the same thing - include all current drivers. However they do not do regular updates. Last time I installed Microsoft Windows 2000 on a "designed for Windows 2000" box it didn't have the drivers I needed, and I had to search for them. I'm geek enough to pry the heatsink off the northbridge and google the numbers found, I don't know what the average person would do.
Linux is updated often, so it is more likely to have drivers for new stuff in my experience.
User friendly? When I have to double click? Double clicking it hard. Hard in software (all the time outs must be just right so you get the double click vs. two single clicks in a row right), and hard on people. (Ever try to teach an old person to double click? Some of them can't move their fingers that fast)
OSX is nice, don't get me wrong. However it is not perfect. KDE works the way I want my OS to run, in part because it is configured to work the way I've been used to my interface working for years.
I was in 6th grade though. Back in second grade I was well below my peers in ability, daily practice up until then brought me up to that level.
The test was in 6th grade. At that time I was writing everything out by hand, and showing no improvement. I'll grant that my hand writing has gone down since then (because I no longer have reason to hand write), but lack of practice doesn't fit, at the time I spent most of my day writing things out by hand. There was a computer lab (Apple //s), but we didn't use it for our writing.
Practice only makes perfect if you body has the ability to become perfect. My muscles do not work that way, for whatever reason. Saying that I would be better at hand writing if I practiced is like saying that someone confined to a wheelchair should practice walking. I know a few people in wheel chairs who can walk (with help) a couple steps, but their body cannot do more no matter how much the practice. (MS does that) My disability is tiny, but it is still there.
You have not seen my handwriting.
Back in school they tested me and discovered that at best my handwriting is like a second grader. That is when I'm really trying my best to write neat, normal writing that I'm in a hurry to get down is much worse. (There is a name for this condition, but I don't care enough about it to remember)
Find yourself a real, old fashioned style, bakery and get some real donuts. Krispy Kreme's are good only in comparison to what you buy in the local big box grocery store. A real bakery much better.
I have lived in a house built sometime in the 1880's. Other than the architecture being obviously the old there is no way to tell. We tore down one wall, and discovered that the studs still look and feel new.
Wood rots, and is damaged by termites (and others) but not if you take care to prevent it.
Brick tends to absorb water and then explode when it (the water) freezes. Most brick also decays over time. (There are millions of different brick recipes, each with good and bad points)
Steel rusts and corrodes, particularly when wet.
There is no perfect building material. Wood is no worse than the others.
China isn't in Europe. Nor is Egypt. Nor were the Aztecs. I don't think I'd count several of the middle Easy civilizations, as Europe either. (though that is debatable)
There were independent civilizations in America long before Europe came and imposed their own.
Western civilization arose in Europe, but there were plenty of others that came before or independently.