Too right - I don't want an expensive fully capable machine with a CD-burner and an architecture designed for general purpose computing. I want the rumoured 'Airport Express Video' and for the cable companies to sort out the integration of set-top box and home network.
Surely there is a difference between saying you WILL do something, and ruling out that you won't do something?
I read the article as 'we might if we need to' but not a SCO-like statement of war, or that MS were intending to make a business out of patent defence.
(Maybe there's a veiled threat that if push comes to shove they might need to do the latter, but there's big money behind Linux these days and I'm sure IBM and Novell have patents they can trade).
My understanding is it's the RAM i.e. Tiger IS faster on older hardware, but also more memory hungry.
What with slower HD on iBooks I presume paging memory to disk can cause a significant hit (Widgets take up barely any CPU but can consume quite a bit of memory).
I'm an 8-bit refugee. The main thing was that the first Macs were slow, so anyone comparing a text-only Word Processor with a WYSIWYG one would think 'It's nice, but I can type 10 times faster on this text based machine'. Of course, the hardware then caught up. I always liked the Amiga and ST - didn't need any revisions in CPU speed or OS changes, but people's programming got better over the years to get more out of them.
Apparently that's 'competitive with the retail price' - or rather the 'manufacturers retail price'.
Quick check at Amazon, CD Wow and Tesco showed it to be 60% over, meaning you would have to be pretty desparate not to wait 24 hours for your DVD to be delivered.
The specific things I've found useful are Expose, the RSS integration in Safari (can achieve similar in Firefox via plugins or a separate news reader), and the strong native PDF support (which has made me stop hating PDF). I think the quality of font rendering is a plus point (my wife noted it when using Word on the Mac rather than Word on Windows) - makes it easier to read. There's some other nice things, like just being able to drag and drop images between programs without having to copy and paste - but I had to read about that and still haven't got into the habit of using it - have to unlearn things. Still don't use the Services menu nearly enough.
(It's more the technical side that's impressed me - as someone whose never written a.BAT file in their life but comfortable with Unix shell scripting, the fact that it's easy to then put a GUI interface on top is great. I can see this wouldn't be true for someone who has spent years in the Windows world, and XCode could perhaps learn some tricks from Eclipse and Visual Studio - we're not all using 30" monitors).
Looks to me, having done a quick test, that the app is written using XUL rather than AJAX techniques - it's an exploitation of Ajax hype, on basis most people just think that means 'web apps'. Next : Flex apps marketed as AJAX.
Using GPU acceleration for the desktop can actually benefit older/limited hardware, by shifting workload off the CPU. That's long been the strategy on OS X - and certain Linux distributions like SLED (bascially any using XGL) are beginning to adopt it, as the article notes. It's not unreasonable to suppose that most desktop machines have at least a 16Mb GPU these days, which is largely underutilised (gaming for most people). Of course there's been resistance to XGL, much as people have criticised OS/X, as it breaks the traditional Unix X11 model.
I feel the 'All about Linux' article unfortunately misses the point, and makes a circular argument - that an OS with less eye candy is QED more productive. I'm a heavy vi user, and I think Eclipse takes an age to load up, but I wouldn't propose that vi is inherently more productive - understanding and customising your tools is where productivity comes from. I'm also an OS X user and I think the Expose effect (zoom out all open windows so that you can select one) is great - it clearly aids my productivity compared to tab-switching. Even the transparency comes in handy sometimes (I'll often run 'top' in a transparent terminal window). I'm also old enough to remember people saying the same about 16-bit machines and WIMP systems - it's all a waste of CPU and a con to get people to buy new machines.
The reality is also that consumers have no issue with replacing a 3 year old Dell with a new Dell, so long as it's twice as fast and the graphics are better. The majority of them couldn't even tell you if it was running ME, XP or Vista, it's just whatever came with the machine (I recently saw a poor saleman asking someone buying an iPod if they had Windows XP and completely baffling theme). These people are not feeling 'compelled' to upgrade. The mistake is in presuming they want to upgrade their OS and not their machine. They don't even want to update the OS with the latest patches, they want to buy something that will work until they replace it. They do not think like us.
Not directly, but they do benefit from software written to exploit it.
No one buys a Mac (or upgraded to OS X 10.3) for the Dock and Expose, they buy it for iLife, which in turn depends on CoreImage, CoreVideo, etc.
Re:Ron Moore put a lot of thought into this show.
on
GDC - Ron Moore Keynote
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Much as I like B5, I would agree that BSG has the edge. A lot of the enjoyment in B5 was spotting where things came from, and a lot of it was really fantasy literature rather than SF (Tolkein and Moorcock seemed to be the two major influences). It obviously set the scene by moving SF from the 'episode' paradigm to wider story arcs and character centered drama (and also by bringing politics in, rather than the presumed liberalism of early Star Trek shows).
The moment that sold BSG for me was the episode in the first series when due to sabotage they lost water, and they're discussing the logistics of the situation. Up to then there was still potential it was going to be one of those 'find a new alien race each episode' shows.
I think the 'moral ambiguity' is one of the most interesting parts of the show.
I don't think it's particularly subtle that the Cylcons think themselves to be more pure and moral than the humans (and therefore justified in their actions). I mean it probably all comes out of the budgetary decision to have them look human, but of course it's an interesting idea to change it from just a territorial war.
The one thing that I think was a big mistake was making the inside of the Cylon mothership the typical 'organic alien' living ship look - all gloomy and dark. Why would either type of Cylon live in an environment like that? There might have been more power in making the inside of their ships more like your typical 'light race' - your Vulcans, or the ones in Bab 5 whose name I forget - but your usual thing with crystal buildings and temples, and little young Cylons running around.
Would I be right in thinking that the Parliament act is also only supposed to be used with manifesto legislation? (i.e. with the fox-hunting bill, it was one of the policies the currrent government had been elected on, so could be considered 'the will of the people'). Or is that just a nicety.
Otherwise I entirely agree - this government does a whole lot of 'trust us' legislation, forgetting that should be 'do you trust anyone who might aquire the reigns of power' - would we want to hand these powers over to another Thatcher, let alone someone worse.
I was thinking much the same after I posted - also after thinking about it, 'thinner, smaller, longer battery life' will probably win in the laptop stakes, with larger media storage being external (if you can connect wirelessly with a 60G MP3 player, why duplicate the files on your laptop?).
>>Have you seen the price of MS Office? What is Apple's office suite? $79? >And? have you seen the difference in capabilities?
I've got both installed on my Mac, along with OpenOffice and NeoOffice (which are free and functionally capable). I'd say it's pretty daft to compare iWork and Office at all, but I don't think it's fair to suggest iWork is a Yugo.
Maybe a Vespa - i.e. it's not even addressing the same audience, but what it does offer it does very well, with style, and good value for money. It's DTP for people without graphic design skills, not an Office suite.
I think your mention of media hits the nail on the head - what we do expands to fit available capacity - give me enough diskspace and my CDs will all be re-encoded in a lossless format (I mean that's such an obvious upgrade for HDD based MP3 players to offer).
What I can see is hybrid devices, with flash memory providing a large buffer for the HD - certainly enough to have the entire OS in there, which would get us some way back to the 'instant on' days of 8 and 16 bit machines when the OS was on a ROM. My hunch is the sweet spot for that could be round about 8G (enough for the OS and all major apps).
Could maybe even have a socket for a more 'disposable' 1G chip which would take the brunt of, say, writing out the swap space on hibernation, while keeping the expensive ones for more static content. Add in some sensible heuristics as to which user files are kept in cache and which are read direct from disk (only cache if it's been read 3 times? Don't cache media files??).
I think iWork is a great app, but it's definitely not an Office suite - it's more a 'presentation suite'. Pages is template driven sub-DTP - it's way easier to create a slick-looking document than in Word, but overall it offers less functionality.
This isn't a bad thing - the 'on rails' approach of Apple's iApps is great for some people, and the worst thing about OpenOffice is that it's had to reproduce every feature of Office, whereas I think the opportunity lies in creating a simplified suite for 90% of users. The ones who were happy with Word 97 and don't really need collaboration and enterprise features. Remove the ability to customise toolbars, and cut down the number of icons until you've just got the set of features 90% of people actually use.
Unfortunately '100% compatibility with MS Office' is a far more important requirement, because people are still incredibly bad at working out what they actually need from software. (Do they actually even need an integrated office suite - how often do you really want to dynamically embed a spreadsheet inside a WP document, as opposed to a paste from a spreadsheet? Shouldn't 'Send to Mail' be supported at OS level in every program that can 'Save'?).
I'd definitely agree on the first point - throwing inappropriate people at a project doesn't work. That's very separate from how you direct the priorities of a team - especially when you've got limited resource.
I don't believe that I made any comment about graphic designers; I'd imagine that even within the IE team you're going to have a pretty clear split between the people implementing the UI and the renderer, and I'm under no illusion those skills are switchable. The reason I mentioned SVG and Flash is that I reckon that is probably the one area where you might get some overlap (they both concern developing high speed rendering from structured formats). I think it would also be naive to think that integrating with Metro won't have impacted on the IE team - which comes back to my point about setting priorities.
If Bill's No.1 priority had been 'the world's most standards compliant browser' do you have any doubt that is what you'd be seeing? Equally, why did Apple focus so much effort on getting Safari through ACID 2? It's not as if anyone anywhere designs web pages that only render well in Safari.
Anyway, I'm happy to read that they are committed - and look forward to them delivering on it.
I'm happy to believe that the development team are working their asses off - but like in any company they are doing so to the companies priorities, and, I would wager, with limited resources.
I'm well aware that you don't solve problems by throwing more people at them - but you do have to ask why an organisation the size of Microsoft is now lagging behind far smaller companies in this particular area. In terms of the user interface side, which is what the consumer will see, they've definitely put the effort in. As a company they've also managed to put time into creating a wholly new equivalent to SVG and Flash. That, for me, says where their priorities lie.
Hell, it's a big enough company that they should have been able carry on with support on IE6 while having a whole different team working on IE7 from the ground up. It's just that there is about 0% business benefit in doing so, if the world is willing to work around your bugs.
I think part of the issue relates to who is the consumer of the browser - web designers have been complaining about the difficulty of PNG transparency support in IE since the 90s. Now given that it's achievable through well-known JavaScript hacks, do IE users see a difference? No.
(That may be part of the issue - who is the consumer? For Flash, web designers are the real consumer. If HTML/CSS was a similar closed ecosystem - i.e. linked to Microsoft development tool - then I'd expect you'd have seen progress at the rate we have seen with MS other development tools).
Re:The Economist... only 20 years behind the times
on
Unusual Open Source
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· Score: 1
BTW - that possibly sounds like I'm disagreeing with you more than I am. Erm.
I think you're very right about the Economist (and economists) not understanding self-organisation - the article has a kind of circularity, in that I think part of the definition of 'success' favours a strongly branded project that one that has forked to fill many niches (Linux) or might be very widely used but little known outside techies (Tomcat).
Re:The Economist... only 20 years behind the times
on
Unusual Open Source
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· Score: 1
Actually the 'bazaar' you outline isn't that different from the free market economics many right-wing economists espouse - that there will be many 'errors' and 'dead projects', and iterations - and that market demand (pull) will weed out the failures.
In fact, these same economists make the same 'push' vs 'pull' comparison between free markets and planned economies - Socialist, Communist or just countries with large state sectors. What little business economics I did do also suggests that most economists think that if you're in the business of 'pushing' products that customers don't want, then you haven't got a long term business - so again I don't think there's a disagreement.
Of course, you might be right on the point of self-organisation - they don't get that - the article in the Economist is suggesting that successful FOSS is where projects follow a traditional structure, but I'm not sure what they're defining as successful.
Which brings me neatly onto . . I'd dispute whether these FOSS will ever truly fill all the niches in which it's needed - it's largely been successful where there is (a) a large overlap between users and programmers - i.e. the multitude of web tools - 'many hands make light work'. (b) a company using a free product to gain market entry to sell other services, willing to fund full-time development.
Where it's evidently been less successful is where there's a large gap between users and programmers. There is less 'pull' on the programmers to satisfy the users. The users have less understanding how to contribute feedback. Of course you could maybe interpret that as saying there is no need, for instance, for a FOSS equivalent of Apple's iWork. (Don't say Scribus! That's mistaking toolset for package - Pages, for instance, is pretty limited as a DTP tool, but aims to make it difficult for people to create bad looking documents by sticking them on rails).
I also thought that the 'bazaar' and 'cathedral' comparison also applied within FOSS - that certain personality led projects were just as much cathedrals as any closed-source company.
Do you mean complaints that existing websites don't render correctly, or issues with how it's rendering valid CSS and HTML?
I've no doubt that both Apple and Opera have deliberately focused their CSS implementation on passing ACID, but they're still way ahead of IE7, and at least have a commitment to implementing CSS standards, rather than 'implementing the bits we can be bothered to, and thus force web developers everywhere only to use what works on IE'.
What is interesting is what Adobe are doing - a new client that allows mixed PDF, Flash and HTML content with the guarantee of cross-browser rendering - i.e. it will render the HTML as well as the PDF and Flash. Granted, Adobe Acrobat is every/.'ers worst nightmare, and there's no statement on how much of CSS it will handle, but it's an interesting idea in itself. Of course it's a client rather than a plug-in, but there's an idea - 'fix' IE with a plug-in page rendering engine. Call it something non-scary so that users feel comfortable installing it, like they do with Flash.
There's a store back where my parents live that is doing a roaring trade - in vinyl.
They stopped stocking Top 40 CDs back at the start of the 90s, because they couldn't compete with the chain stores on price. When the Internet came along - they started a website early on, which last time I spoke to them was 50% of their business. They've even expanded into running their own label, pressing audiophile vinyl copies of music that had only been released on CD.
They also have a pretty good stock of CDs, but the key point is they have fantastic customer knowledge - I've been popping in, on and off, for 18 years. I can go in 2 years later and they'll remember who I am and actively try and sell me stuff 'Have you heard x'. I'll usually come out with at least something I didn't intend to buy and possibly something I didn't know existed.
They're still there when two of the major music chains have been and gone - point being that they long ago stopped trying to compete for the casual buyer in the supermarkets and realised the value was in catering to the specialist.
I think CDs do have a good few years to go though - the cost difference for downloads isn't quite compelling enough for me, and a lot of the time you can pick up the CD cheaper on ebay or second hand on Amazon than iTMS. They're also currently more 'portable'. I still have use a CD player inside the house rather than a computer.
Problem is with Oracle users, we don't really care if it's FOSS or not from a political standpoint - and Oracle XE has even removed the cost imperative for D/B of quite reasonable size.
If I was starting a wholly NEW project, I'd certainly consider it - PostgreSQL definitely looks the best of the free D/B, and is progressing at a good rate - it's enough of the way there that you could probably live without the additional features, which are more productivity than functional. We're using it for a new prototype app at work.
I think there's still some way to go with the procedural language (it's somewhere between Oracle 7 and 8 at the moment), and is also missing a number of the libraries / API that Oracle offers to pl/sql developers, making a direct migration less straightforward that it might seem. For starters it doesn't support Named parameters, which are a great way of protecting against interface change and increasing readability of code.
Aside from license costs, can anyone tell me what the compelling advantage is for postgres over Oracle?
Slashdot Mirror
Too right - I don't want an expensive fully capable machine with a CD-burner and an architecture designed for general purpose computing. I want the rumoured 'Airport Express Video' and for the cable companies to sort out the integration of set-top box and home network.
Surely there is a difference between saying you WILL do something, and ruling out that you won't do something? I read the article as 'we might if we need to' but not a SCO-like statement of war, or that MS were intending to make a business out of patent defence. (Maybe there's a veiled threat that if push comes to shove they might need to do the latter, but there's big money behind Linux these days and I'm sure IBM and Novell have patents they can trade).
My understanding is it's the RAM i.e. Tiger IS faster on older hardware, but also more memory hungry.
What with slower HD on iBooks I presume paging memory to disk can cause a significant hit (Widgets take up barely any CPU but can consume quite a bit of memory).
I'm an 8-bit refugee. The main thing was that the first Macs were slow, so anyone comparing a text-only Word Processor with a WYSIWYG one would think 'It's nice, but I can type 10 times faster on this text based machine'. Of course, the hardware then caught up. I always liked the Amiga and ST - didn't need any revisions in CPU speed or OS changes, but people's programming got better over the years to get more out of them.
Apparently that's 'competitive with the retail price' - or rather the 'manufacturers retail price'.
Quick check at Amazon, CD Wow and Tesco showed it to be 60% over, meaning you would have to be pretty desparate not to wait 24 hours for your DVD to be delivered.
Did you come to any conclusions?
.BAT file in their life but comfortable with Unix shell scripting, the fact that it's easy to then put a GUI interface on top is great. I can see this wouldn't be true for someone who has spent years in the Windows world, and XCode could perhaps learn some tricks from Eclipse and Visual Studio - we're not all using 30" monitors).
The specific things I've found useful are Expose, the RSS integration in Safari (can achieve similar in Firefox via plugins or a separate news reader), and the strong native PDF support (which has made me stop hating PDF). I think the quality of font rendering is a plus point (my wife noted it when using Word on the Mac rather than Word on Windows) - makes it easier to read.
There's some other nice things, like just being able to drag and drop images between programs without having to copy and paste - but I had to read about that and still haven't got into the habit of using it - have to unlearn things. Still don't use the Services menu nearly enough.
(It's more the technical side that's impressed me - as someone whose never written a
You do have to wonder what the centurions think of the new guys they created.
Looks to me, having done a quick test, that the app is written using XUL rather than AJAX techniques - it's an exploitation of Ajax hype, on basis most people just think that means 'web apps'. Next : Flex apps marketed as AJAX.
Using GPU acceleration for the desktop can actually benefit older/limited hardware, by shifting workload off the CPU. That's long been the strategy on OS X - and certain Linux distributions like SLED (bascially any using XGL) are beginning to adopt it, as the article notes. It's not unreasonable to suppose that most desktop machines have at least a 16Mb GPU these days, which is largely underutilised (gaming for most people). Of course there's been resistance to XGL, much as people have criticised OS/X, as it breaks the traditional Unix X11 model.
I feel the 'All about Linux' article unfortunately misses the point, and makes a circular argument - that an OS with less eye candy is QED more productive. I'm a heavy vi user, and I think Eclipse takes an age to load up, but I wouldn't propose that vi is inherently more productive - understanding and customising your tools is where productivity comes from. I'm also an OS X user and I think the Expose effect (zoom out all open windows so that you can select one) is great - it clearly aids my productivity compared to tab-switching. Even the transparency comes in handy sometimes (I'll often run 'top' in a transparent terminal window).
I'm also old enough to remember people saying the same about 16-bit machines and WIMP systems - it's all a waste of CPU and a con to get people to buy new machines.
The reality is also that consumers have no issue with replacing a 3 year old Dell with a new Dell, so long as it's twice as fast and the graphics are better. The majority of them couldn't even tell you if it was running ME, XP or Vista, it's just whatever came with the machine (I recently saw a poor saleman asking someone buying an iPod if they had Windows XP and completely baffling theme). These people are not feeling 'compelled' to upgrade. The mistake is in presuming they want to upgrade their OS and not their machine. They don't even want to update the OS with the latest patches, they want to buy something that will work until they replace it. They do not think like us.
Not directly, but they do benefit from software written to exploit it.
No one buys a Mac (or upgraded to OS X 10.3) for the Dock and Expose, they buy it for iLife, which in turn depends on CoreImage, CoreVideo, etc.
Much as I like B5, I would agree that BSG has the edge. A lot of the enjoyment in B5 was spotting where things came from, and a lot of it was really fantasy literature rather than SF (Tolkein and Moorcock seemed to be the two major influences). It obviously set the scene by moving SF from the 'episode' paradigm to wider story arcs and character centered drama (and also by bringing politics in, rather than the presumed liberalism of early Star Trek shows).
The moment that sold BSG for me was the episode in the first series when due to sabotage they lost water, and they're discussing the logistics of the situation. Up to then there was still potential it was going to be one of those 'find a new alien race each episode' shows.
I think the 'moral ambiguity' is one of the most interesting parts of the show.
I don't think it's particularly subtle that the Cylcons think themselves to be more pure and moral than the humans (and therefore justified in their actions). I mean it probably all comes out of the budgetary decision to have them look human, but of course it's an interesting idea to change it from just a territorial war.
The one thing that I think was a big mistake was making the inside of the Cylon mothership the typical 'organic alien' living ship look - all gloomy and dark. Why would either type of Cylon live in an environment like that? There might have been more power in making the inside of their ships more like your typical 'light race' - your Vulcans, or the ones in Bab 5 whose name I forget - but your usual thing with crystal buildings and temples, and little young Cylons running around.
Would I be right in thinking that the Parliament act is also only supposed to be used with manifesto legislation?
(i.e. with the fox-hunting bill, it was one of the policies the currrent government had been elected on, so could be considered 'the will of the people'). Or is that just a nicety.
Otherwise I entirely agree - this government does a whole lot of 'trust us' legislation, forgetting that should be 'do you trust anyone who might aquire the reigns of power' - would we want to hand these powers over to another Thatcher, let alone someone worse.
I was thinking much the same after I posted - also after thinking about it, 'thinner, smaller, longer battery life' will probably win in the laptop stakes, with larger media storage being external (if you can connect wirelessly with a 60G MP3 player, why duplicate the files on your laptop?).
>>Have you seen the price of MS Office? What is Apple's office suite? $79?
>And? have you seen the difference in capabilities?
I've got both installed on my Mac, along with OpenOffice and NeoOffice (which are free and functionally capable). I'd say it's pretty daft to compare iWork and Office at all, but I don't think it's fair to suggest iWork is a Yugo.
Maybe a Vespa - i.e. it's not even addressing the same audience, but what it does offer it does very well, with style, and good value for money.
It's DTP for people without graphic design skills, not an Office suite.
I think your mention of media hits the nail on the head - what we do expands to fit available capacity - give me enough diskspace and my CDs will all be re-encoded in a lossless format (I mean that's such an obvious upgrade for HDD based MP3 players to offer).
What I can see is hybrid devices, with flash memory providing a large buffer for the HD - certainly enough to have the entire OS in there, which would get us some way back to the 'instant on' days of 8 and 16 bit machines when the OS was on a ROM. My hunch is the sweet spot for that could be round about 8G (enough for the OS and all major apps).
Could maybe even have a socket for a more 'disposable' 1G chip which would take the brunt of, say, writing out the swap space on hibernation, while keeping the expensive ones for more static content. Add in some sensible heuristics as to which user files are kept in cache and which are read direct from disk (only cache if it's been read 3 times? Don't cache media files??).
I've got both iWork and MS Office on my Mac.
I think iWork is a great app, but it's definitely not an Office suite - it's more a 'presentation suite'. Pages is template driven sub-DTP - it's way easier to create a slick-looking document than in Word, but overall it offers less functionality.
This isn't a bad thing - the 'on rails' approach of Apple's iApps is great for some people, and the worst thing about OpenOffice is that it's had to reproduce every feature of Office, whereas I think the opportunity lies in creating a simplified suite for 90% of users. The ones who were happy with Word 97 and don't really need collaboration and enterprise features. Remove the ability to customise toolbars, and cut down the number of icons until you've just got the set of features 90% of people actually use.
Unfortunately '100% compatibility with MS Office' is a far more important requirement, because people are still incredibly bad at working out what they actually need from software. (Do they actually even need an integrated office suite - how often do you really want to dynamically embed a spreadsheet inside a WP document, as opposed to a paste from a spreadsheet? Shouldn't 'Send to Mail' be supported at OS level in every program that can 'Save'?).
Still there on PPC, but dead going forward. NeoOfficeJ or OpenOffice both available though.
I'd definitely agree on the first point - throwing inappropriate people at a project doesn't work. That's very separate from how you direct the priorities of a team - especially when you've got limited resource.
I don't believe that I made any comment about graphic designers; I'd imagine that even within the IE team you're going to have a pretty clear split between the people implementing the UI and the renderer, and I'm under no illusion those skills are switchable. The reason I mentioned SVG and Flash is that I reckon that is probably the one area where you might get some overlap (they both concern developing high speed rendering from structured formats). I think it would also be naive to think that integrating with Metro won't have impacted on the IE team - which comes back to my point about setting priorities.
If Bill's No.1 priority had been 'the world's most standards compliant browser' do you have any doubt that is what you'd be seeing?
Equally, why did Apple focus so much effort on getting Safari through ACID 2? It's not as if anyone anywhere designs web pages that only render well in Safari.
Anyway, I'm happy to read that they are committed - and look forward to them delivering on it.
I'm happy to believe that the development team are working their asses off - but like in any company they are doing so to the companies priorities, and, I would wager, with limited resources.
I'm well aware that you don't solve problems by throwing more people at them - but you do have to ask why an organisation the size of Microsoft is now lagging behind far smaller companies in this particular area. In terms of the user interface side, which is what the consumer will see, they've definitely put the effort in. As a company they've also managed to put time into creating a wholly new equivalent to SVG and Flash. That, for me, says where their priorities lie.
Hell, it's a big enough company that they should have been able carry on with support on IE6 while having a whole different team working on IE7 from the ground up. It's just that there is about 0% business benefit in doing so, if the world is willing to work around your bugs.
I think part of the issue relates to who is the consumer of the browser - web designers have been complaining about the difficulty of PNG transparency support in IE since the 90s. Now given that it's achievable through well-known JavaScript hacks, do IE users see a difference? No.
(That may be part of the issue - who is the consumer? For Flash, web designers are the real consumer. If HTML/CSS was a similar closed ecosystem - i.e. linked to Microsoft development tool - then I'd expect you'd have seen progress at the rate we have seen with MS other development tools).
BTW - that possibly sounds like I'm disagreeing with you more than I am. Erm.
I think you're very right about the Economist (and economists) not understanding self-organisation - the article has a kind of circularity, in that I think part of the definition of 'success' favours a strongly branded project that one that has forked to fill many niches (Linux) or might be very widely used but little known outside techies (Tomcat).
Actually the 'bazaar' you outline isn't that different from the free market economics many right-wing economists espouse - that there will be many 'errors' and 'dead projects', and iterations - and that market demand (pull) will weed out the failures.
In fact, these same economists make the same 'push' vs 'pull' comparison between free markets and planned economies - Socialist, Communist or just countries with large state sectors. What little business economics I did do also suggests that most economists think that if you're in the business of 'pushing' products that customers don't want, then you haven't got a long term business - so again I don't think there's a disagreement.
Of course, you might be right on the point of self-organisation - they don't get that - the article in the Economist is suggesting that successful FOSS is where projects follow a traditional structure, but I'm not sure what they're defining as successful.
Which brings me neatly onto . . I'd dispute whether these FOSS will ever truly fill all the niches in which it's needed - it's largely been successful where there is
(a) a large overlap between users and programmers - i.e. the multitude of web tools - 'many hands make light work'.
(b) a company using a free product to gain market entry to sell other services, willing to fund full-time development.
Where it's evidently been less successful is where there's a large gap between users and programmers. There is less 'pull' on the programmers to satisfy the users. The users have less understanding how to contribute feedback. Of course you could maybe interpret that as saying there is no need, for instance, for a FOSS equivalent of Apple's iWork. (Don't say Scribus! That's mistaking toolset for package - Pages, for instance, is pretty limited as a DTP tool, but aims to make it difficult for people to create bad looking documents by sticking them on rails).
I also thought that the 'bazaar' and 'cathedral' comparison also applied within FOSS - that certain personality led projects were just as much cathedrals as any closed-source company.
Do you mean complaints that existing websites don't render correctly, or issues with how it's rendering valid CSS and HTML?
/.'ers worst nightmare, and there's no statement on how much of CSS it will handle, but it's an interesting idea in itself. Of course it's a client rather than a plug-in, but there's an idea - 'fix' IE with a plug-in page rendering engine. Call it something non-scary so that users feel comfortable installing it, like they do with Flash.
I've no doubt that both Apple and Opera have deliberately focused their CSS implementation on passing ACID, but they're still way ahead of IE7, and at least have a commitment to implementing CSS standards, rather than 'implementing the bits we can be bothered to, and thus force web developers everywhere only to use what works on IE'.
What is interesting is what Adobe are doing - a new client that allows mixed PDF, Flash and HTML content with the guarantee of cross-browser rendering - i.e. it will render the HTML as well as the PDF and Flash. Granted, Adobe Acrobat is every
There's a store back where my parents live that is doing a roaring trade - in vinyl.
They stopped stocking Top 40 CDs back at the start of the 90s, because they couldn't compete with the chain stores on price. When the Internet came along - they started a website early on, which last time I spoke to them was 50% of their business. They've even expanded into running their own label, pressing audiophile vinyl copies of music that had only been released on CD.
They also have a pretty good stock of CDs, but the key point is they have fantastic customer knowledge - I've been popping in, on and off, for 18 years. I can go in 2 years later and they'll remember who I am and actively try and sell me stuff 'Have you heard x'. I'll usually come out with at least something I didn't intend to buy and possibly something I didn't know existed.
They're still there when two of the major music chains have been and gone - point being that they long ago stopped trying to compete for the casual buyer in the supermarkets and realised the value was in catering to the specialist.
I think CDs do have a good few years to go though - the cost difference for downloads isn't quite compelling enough for me, and a lot of the time you can pick up the CD cheaper on ebay or second hand on Amazon than iTMS. They're also currently more 'portable'. I still have use a CD player inside the house rather than a computer.
Problem is with Oracle users, we don't really care if it's FOSS or not from a political standpoint - and Oracle XE has even removed the cost imperative for D/B of quite reasonable size.
If I was starting a wholly NEW project, I'd certainly consider it - PostgreSQL definitely looks the best of the free D/B, and is progressing at a good rate - it's enough of the way there that you could probably live without the additional features, which are more productivity than functional. We're using it for a new prototype app at work.
I think there's still some way to go with the procedural language (it's somewhere between Oracle 7 and 8 at the moment), and is also missing a number of the libraries / API that Oracle offers to pl/sql developers, making a direct migration less straightforward that it might seem. For starters it doesn't support Named parameters, which are a great way of protecting against interface change and increasing readability of code.
Aside from license costs, can anyone tell me what the compelling advantage is for postgres over Oracle?