Well, being the evil company they are now, my first natural reaction is bullsh!t. So let's explore that a little further to see if that's a good reaction.
Google burst into the search scene with a no nonsense, pure search engine, and advertised it as a reaction against bloated portals. They concentrated on what mattered, search!, instead of bloat. Then they wanted to become really rich, and everything went wrong: Google become an ad-broker, and went public. The game here is that each year you have to have more profit and even a larger percentage of profit, or the stock will go down, and this is done by selling more ads, thus you need more page views, thus you need more services.
So now, because of the two guys' quest for monetary tokens, we have arrived at the opposite of Google's original self-aclaimed goal and purpose. Ok, but as anyone with a little sense knows, despite some blinded nerds and fanboys on Slashdot, all the extra services are kind of failures, as compared to search. Even something as cool as Google Maps, many have been fooled by the appeal the atlas had on them like a child.. a nice toy for a while but you're hardly searching the map everyday are you? Many of the services are kind of average. The problem arises because of two things: they lost their original focus and focus now on no particular thing; their interface model doesn't stand. The last one is like the story of the emperor without clothes. Google's interface is bad, for non-search services. Really, you can't expect to have a really basic search engine interface, and then transfer that to all those complex services. Gmail, I tell you, is a usability nightmare. If only they would have made it look like a real app/interface. All this interface knowledge about how to capture usablity complexity best is thrown away and had to make place for confusing "minimalistic" web page look, which isn't minimal anymore because of the complexity and runs out of steam as a concept.
Anyway, I'm sure many of you can have wonderful arguments against that, but in the end I and many others, especially the non-nerd population, find ourselves only or mainly using search, and the difference now is they don't focus anymore.
Now comes this press release. The prime and sole target seems to be stock holders. It's an admission of failure really, their "launch many services to get much more page views" strategy failed, and now they need to spin it. This message is targetted at spinning that failure for stock holders.
Also, to claim the cost and risc is minimal is arrogant and dangerous. Stock holders read that as: Google has an enormous amount of overhead, lowering the barrier of competing/market entrance, and making space for another company to do the same, better and cheaper. It's not like it hasn't been done before... (Admittedly Google's is trying its best to higher the barrier of entrance in all other ways.)
Baidu for instance doesn't buy token Internet pioneers or gives their employees bloated salaries to spend 20% on toy projects. Yahoo! Search is still inferior but their harvesting is already superior and their sandbox alltheweb.com looks promosing on the logic side. MS has proven many times you should never judge them on a version 1 or 2, just get more scared if the versions keep coming.
Google shouldn't do bullsh!t or damage control or hire expensive spin doctors or try to get Google to Mars. For me as a user, they should concentrate on search. As a stock holder I have conflicting wishes, they should do better on search and much better on other services, and their sole income, out of ads, scares the hell out of me with all the click fraud and spammers turning their attention on Google with link farms and zombie click farms. As a stockholder, their diversity strategy is failing, and the message they give me is: lalalala I can't hear you oh no it was supposed to be this way etc. etc. This will not do. Stock holders want to hear how they stop being boys and start earning them more money.
The ability to phone home, retreive data and update the page, without reload gives way to a whole range of new applications, not just the updated select boxes, rich internet applications and pimped sites. Essentially you can make anything you normally could with a custom client, limited by the mess that is javascript across browsers and your imagination. I myself have been exploring multi-user environments on web pages where the actions of one user has an effect on the pages of others (see sig). It's nonsense to say "AJAX is a fad" because it's an evolution of the browser that can't be turned back. Just like the gold fever that began a decade ago and ran for five years, where html, the web nor the internet went away. Many companies selling air, naming it "web 2.0" might go away, but that's another story.
Story? Tank-man. For the Chinese (and for yahoo.ch, google.ch etc.), he has been erased from history and memory. Chinese students today do not know who he is. The insane slaughter of thousands of civilians that took place and the following executions of student leaders have been erased from memory. Why? Because they were demonstrating for freedom. Yahoo, MS, and "No Evil" Google are collaborators of this regime, putting down freedom harshly. Taste the weight of that last line, and if you don't like it, point out corrections. May I repeat, with harshly I mean with executions. Like tank-man's. Google, for example, is extremely evil. Give some multi=miljonairs the prospect of some more bucks, and they sell their souls and the future of many Chinese without a flinch, oh, except for hiring some pr-guys from hell. Shameless. I wouldn't sleep if I'd have chosen money to erase tank-man from history and deny his existence. Moreover, if I was a multi-miljonair and in charge of so much information, I'd make it one of my goals to get it to the suppressed. We know the choices -they- made. It's a story.
"While many people dispute the notion, Orzack believes that game addiction is a true mental disorder."
I dispute the notion. Having been heavily addicted to MUD in the early nineties (and having seen people like Orzack around for that long), I've also seen 99% of the heavy MUD addicts move on, sooner of later. To claim that 40% are mentally disseased, to earn money, is a harsh statement which reflects badly on this person. In the Netherlands we have a saying for this based on a TV commercial: "We, from Toilet Duck, recommend: Toilet Duck!". Moreover, I question sales motives where one scares potential clients with making them feel sick, diseased and disordered. Bah!
For my AJAX open source project (see sig), I took a similar approach uptil now. I needed to built a lot of AJAX functionality, and the question is, do you start from scratch or use one of the libraries? I started from scratch because 1) I needed the master the technique, 2) Libraries are bloated with load times needing load indicators.. I don't want that, 3) Own implementation does exactly like I want it with relatively little code, 4) These AJAX libs are fairly young, to built a framework around and it see the landscape change totally in a year is a dangerous path.
However, when you start playing around with AJAX, you get a whole different abstraction of what you're doing. Basically a lot of GUI elements start to become part of the play, and it becomes a whole new ball game. Everybody is realizing this and building libraries, but none has reached a status yet where I'd consider it the great definite GUI toolkit, for the web using AJAX. This means that commiting to any of the current incarnations is like commiting to a dinosaur from the start.
This means when your AJAX complex reaches a fair amount of complexity, one is kinda stuck. Basic hacks don't cut it anymore, doing a great lib yourself is a complete project on itself, and commiting to other libs has the disadvantages named above. But I might be overgeneralizing.
I think I found middleground with the Jquery library:
http://jquery.com/
It's tiny (15K) yet powerful and takes a whole lot of work away, and therefore meets most of my requirements.
AJAX btw is quite enjoyable. On one hand you have the marketeers screaming blah at you like "web 2.0" for everything, and at the other hand you have the average ol' skool slashdotter screaming blah and fud at you for anything javascript or faintly smelling of "web 2.0", to point out their superiority;) I haven't seen so many smartasses since Gopher was hailed over Mosaic 0.9b as more secure, less bandwidth demanding, thus making the later unnecessary and bloated.
The problem is, the prime motivation of a convention should be sharing information. But in the convention business that has spawned, the primary motivation is, of course, making money. I know these conventions have "entry level products" for no costs where you can wander around etc., that's just part of the game. Just as calling it a "convention" is, and trying to give it reputation and a sense of authority, for example by hiring "key speakers." The better convention marketeers atatch some kind of "you must have been there or you don't count" feeling on it.
The funny part of it all is that a convention in these particular format is a tool for communication in a pre-Internet area. Hey, I love to hang out too with all kind of interesting people and talk about stuff. But that will be on the basis of equality. Sure you can charge me 2k. I charge you 2k back to talk to your holiness, -me-.
These conventions are not about sharing information. They are about selling "key speakers" to HRM departments of devevelopers in big businesses who like to get away from things. It's a selling trick. I don't know why any non corporate open source developer would pay that amount of money, so O'Reilly can become even richer, the same key speakers from the ol' boys network get richer, and the talk is all yada yada, mostly repeated what has been said on the net already. You don't gain wishdom. You don't gain status. If you really believe this conventions add anything, I wouldn't buy a second hand car on my own. You're just too easy a target. And if you really want to learn, talk to open source developers who develop instead of stalk conventions for their mega-bucks corp.
I'm already experiencing this with my 20Mbit connection (23.95 euro, FT as well, through their Orange label in the Netherlands).
I can count the sites that allow a 1.5MByte transfer/sec on one hand.
Ok, so I can download the FreeBSD ISO in 3 minutes, that's cool.
When browing or downloading elsewhere, I'm usually capped.
P2P is worse, because they depend my upload, which is only 1Mbit.
Having said that, it's always there to be used and allows me to run bittorrent, listen to my fav radio station, download something else and browse some pages at the same time and not notice anything slowing down. I like the redundancy.
Aaargh..19 small pages, each framed with 3 giant ads..I can't see! I can't read! the noise, the agony! Sorry, had to click away. So, what was the spammers conclusion about memory cards? How many ads can it hold?
You don't have to list the points I use myself when making websites;) I was explaining the choices portals and search engines have made in the past. These are getting much less valid over time of course for these particular examples.
But regarding your question, the answer, again, is: money.
Take any percentage of users with "old browsers" over the years, and against that you can put an audience break point where your neglectance or scaring away of those people costs more than serving them earns.
Although I like using the newest technologies and be on the frontier, commercially this is often a bad idea and one needs, on purpose, NOT be using the newest or for technology evangelists correct technologies, but those which are most mainstream. Like it or not, being two steps behind in browser land is best for sites with mass public. If you make a web site for the mass public, don't be an technology evangelist on the client side. It costs you.
I'm not saying I like this, or I didn't think of your points. As a developer, I don't like it. As a professional however, it is a fact I can't ignore for certain sites.
I see too many evangelists (and I'm paradoxically one of them if you look at my site only), for instance making sites requiring at least screens of 1024 pixels in width, and if you got 800x600 (last year >15%, I guess now 10%), you "should upgrade". One could argue about that, the point is shareholders won't, page & banner views and clicks don't lie, and profit is highest when they are not ignored. The summarize your question's answer again: money.
>You use tags to mark the beginning and ends of elements. That is all you can possibly do with them. You are talking about element types, not tags.
Whatever.
>Marketing isn't an end in itself. The objective is to make money.
You stole my argument. W3C isn't a goal in itself. Turning the argument around doesn't fix that. If so, please give a list of browsers that fail to render the tabled and fonted Google page otherwise.
Sorry for not stating the obvious before, but the use of these "illegal" tags is exactly to work around the flaws of "graceful degrading". These guys want their home page to look exactly alike in differert browsers, and not just simply degrade to something useful but not looking the way it is supposed to. Graceful degrading is from a technical point of view. Using bad tags to make it look the same is the marketing approach. For instance, I could use css to give a font a certain color, or the font tag. Both texts will render in old browsers, only the second with the color the marketing department ways. The rest is acedemical.
The reason is of course not that Google cannot make a page without the use of tables or the font tag, but that the pages work with even the oldest of browsers (except IE 2.0 which doesn't do tables). You can't DIV or CSS your way around that. Big sites like Google and Yahoo have always been breaking rules, either for speed (not using quotes etc.) or for backward compatability. W3C is nice but doesn't earn you money.
Brainpower, Dutch (or is it Vlamish?) rap band featuring white nerd with glasses as the lead singer.
http://www.mcbrainpower.nl/ (check out the tracks)
You should know better. As many will have noticed, this rant is almost identical to those one encountered in the mid-nineties, which protested all those ugly web pages people where suddenly able to make. First of all, why do you care about what others make, especially when you don't go there yourself. I think this is disturbing. Let them be. Second, all the ranting about ugliness and bar talk is irrelevant and takes the attention away from the real facts: people are empowered with communication tools; it will lead to many great things you couldn't imagine. The only narcissism witnessed here, is from the ranters. They want to control others. What others do, is not good enough for them, they feel superior, comfortably forgetting that when they were 15, they were watching crap like the A-team. Well I did. If it where up to you guys, the web would have been smothered in its early incarnations, because the vast majority made ugly pages. Aristocracy at these early point in Internet history is laughable really, and the way of the dinosaur. Better not listen to you;) I think what's far more interesting to explore is how people can have some kind of after-control or rights regarding their privacy online, in a general non-Myspace related way. Should people be able to tell Google to remove this or that embarrasing Usenet posting, or Archive.org to remove a particular site? Is that realistic? Etc. etc.
Good point. Another one is that it is crippleware which should be avoided like a plaque. Really, which project of volunteers is gonna pay for this kind of software. Now I'm not gonna judge anyone's business model or deny anyone an income, but preferring to leech volunteers over making their offering, JUST LIKE ANYONE ELSE, an unlimited open source licenced download.
One thing going for them is that with a 504MB download for what can't be more than a few MBs in code if you try really hard, surely pr0n is included to use as wallpapers for your project management. Cute!
Being an ISP is not so cool in the way that you need to go locally with hardware everywhere, even with wifi.
Why not start with exploring a Google Worldwide Proxy.
Google said they want to entrance to the market as high as possible, so you can't be beat by, say, two students with a good idea like concentrating on search alone.
So what if they offer everybody faster surfing experiences? I have a broadband connection, but don't enjoy full speed across the globe, because there's only that much my isp can do in peering arrangements. Google has the muscle to offer full speed everywhere and the brain to offer excellent pre-fetching and caching techniques. There's not much new about this, but then again Google never does something new, and my ISP's proxy is a real sucker.
Ah, and think of the price for Google. Everybodies exact surfing behaviour.
There is no 1:1 relationship between the "damages" and the penalty.
Among others, you can have two persons performing equal white collar crimes, resulting in wildly different damages.
There are crimes more evil than other crimes which are more profitable. White collar crime is an example itself, as petty thieves who use or threaten with violence on the streets are punished harder.
>It stinks that he is a sex offender because he'll be setting precedence in court by being convicted leaving the door open for other to be convicted on some charge like this
Also, it is irrelevant. Replace "being a sex offender" with "and he GOT A PARKING TICKET LAST MONTH, OMG", a much lesser but even so irrelevant violation of law, and I'm sure people see how ridiculous it looks. It's almost like they are FUDding someone who uses their open, public offering, which is also a violation. It's like the FUP From Hell, from a one-sided free offering. You use it in a way we don't like? We put a private investigator on your live and transmit any offense or anything we can use to the mass media. That will learn you! I'm sure there are many interesting and valid issues about offering free services to the public and people that abuse it, but engaging in dirt fights isn't among my favuourite solutions.
Moreover, consider two advertisements equal in quality placed on two equally visited pages.
One leads to a badly implemented site, the other to a better site which generates more sales.
The website should be payed equally because its service to the advertisers was equal. The payment should not be related in any way to the quality of the sales machine behind the click, because that is not within the website's scope of responsibility or powers.
There are two cases in which this setup would be acceptable. One is where the webmaster can hand-pick his advertisers. The other would be one where Google's great algorithms would in practice mean high revenue. What sells directly through gpay, gets advertised, what doesn't, should use pay per click.
I find this all highly entertaining. Google's is doing what pr0n sites have prevailed and mastered long ago. Do pay per click. Get spammed by click-fraud badly. Do pay per sale.
Google will have a much harder time though (no pun intended). They are ad-brokers, and expectations and growth models are all based on the faulty pay per click model. The fraud is huge, and they are earning money from it. So while investers and stock-owners are slowly realizing this, they must now start "experimenting" with pay per sale so they are ready for the future, but no too fast, or they will be canabalizing their own income. It's all about cushioning and leveling out.
If you have two or three "superstars" who, when they leave, would leave behind a project with a huge learning curve for new developers, they were no superstars to begin with. Of course, any project, especially as it gets more complex, will imply that it gets harder to get into. But I've been in many open projects for many years, some I've seen whither, some grow and survive after the original creators left or even the generation(s) after them. It all depends on how these developers are creating stuff and from what perspective they work. Many, most if you will, are the so called 80% developers, they love adding new stuff and features, but when it comes to making the code clean for others to understand, finish the glitches, work it better into the system, make documentation, they fail. These systems stabalize and/or die after one or two generations, they become unmaintainable. To survive, a better programmer is required. One that programs with this in mind: if I'm hit by a bus tomorrow, will this code be understood and survive? There will still be a learning curve, but much less steep and much more enjoyable and attractive. Moreover, it produces better code and more thought-out software. The downside: les "quick" success, which is not to be underestimated. Although it was closed software, this story in a nutshell would be the old Netscape Browser. My grandma would be ashamed of the source code, the same speed that produced that code allowed it to grow beyond dreams, and it was their downfall, among others.
It's a big problem. An Internet problem, or even a problem of society, not a Wikipedia problem. A lot of so called information is "democratic information". A rather innocent example would be placing some negative but true critical text about the iPod on Slashdot or Wikipedia, and see it modded down or changed by people who own the devices and don't like someone else saying negative stuff about it, even if true. Far less innocent is for instance what has been happening in the media, where unbiased information no longer sells advertisement time, but rather what their targeted audience wants to hear either from an entertainment or political agenda point of view, and the problem is much deeper than the Iraq war propoganda machine they turned in after 9-11, or Fox News.
I think they stated the reasons why Vista will be an inferior UI than Windows 2000 "Classic.", which most serious users on Windows XP use. For me and many others, the UI must be blant, boring almost. Otherwise the UI gets in the way and asks my cognitive system for attention all the time. This same mechamism, Microsoft uses as a marketing mechanism. The fact that Vista is "pretty" and that this is noticed, makes it inferior to an OS with the exact same functionaailty (click icon to launch prog in window) but where the app and its content shines. Aero glass is noise!
Or: How a large piece of text automatically gets modded up, no matter the nonsense.
>Open Source is basically FSF-lite and was invented to make the whole Free Software thing more palatable to businesses.
Ehm no. BSD or MIT for example was not created for the FSF, and existed well before the FSF.
>Free Software is about sharing. Open Source is about curiosity.
Ehm no. So you're saying all the fine non FS open source projects are not about sharing? This is the first time I've seen -this- definition.
>I can do what I want with a truly Free piece of software, including repackaging and selling it. With Open Source, all I usually get to do is look at the code (curiosity), and if I see anything I want to fix, I usually have to give my fix back to the original owner.
Now you're getting me all confused. It is RSM with his marketing/politcal ploy to redefine to term "free" that stands for the Free Software political movement, and it is ESR who "leads", if you will, the "open source" political movement. You've mixed 'em up? And of course you have folks who code and aren't into World Power. But with either GPL or the others, you can fix anything you like. What you're saying makes no sense at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Google burst into the search scene with a no nonsense, pure search engine, and advertised it as a reaction against bloated portals. They concentrated on what mattered, search!, instead of bloat. Then they wanted to become really rich, and everything went wrong: Google become an ad-broker, and went public. The game here is that each year you have to have more profit and even a larger percentage of profit, or the stock will go down, and this is done by selling more ads, thus you need more page views, thus you need more services.
So now, because of the two guys' quest for monetary tokens, we have arrived at the opposite of Google's original self-aclaimed goal and purpose. Ok, but as anyone with a little sense knows, despite some blinded nerds and fanboys on Slashdot, all the extra services are kind of failures, as compared to search. Even something as cool as Google Maps, many have been fooled by the appeal the atlas had on them like a child.. a nice toy for a while but you're hardly searching the map everyday are you? Many of the services are kind of average. The problem arises because of two things: they lost their original focus and focus now on no particular thing; their interface model doesn't stand. The last one is like the story of the emperor without clothes. Google's interface is bad, for non-search services. Really, you can't expect to have a really basic search engine interface, and then transfer that to all those complex services. Gmail, I tell you, is a usability nightmare. If only they would have made it look like a real app/interface. All this interface knowledge about how to capture usablity complexity best is thrown away and had to make place for confusing "minimalistic" web page look, which isn't minimal anymore because of the complexity and runs out of steam as a concept.
Anyway, I'm sure many of you can have wonderful arguments against that, but in the end I and many others, especially the non-nerd population, find ourselves only or mainly using search, and the difference now is they don't focus anymore.
Now comes this press release. The prime and sole target seems to be stock holders. It's an admission of failure really, their "launch many services to get much more page views" strategy failed, and now they need to spin it. This message is targetted at spinning that failure for stock holders.
Also, to claim the cost and risc is minimal is arrogant and dangerous. Stock holders read that as: Google has an enormous amount of overhead, lowering the barrier of competing/market entrance, and making space for another company to do the same, better and cheaper. It's not like it hasn't been done before... (Admittedly Google's is trying its best to higher the barrier of entrance in all other ways.)
Baidu for instance doesn't buy token Internet pioneers or gives their employees bloated salaries to spend 20% on toy projects. Yahoo! Search is still inferior but their harvesting is already superior and their sandbox alltheweb.com looks promosing on the logic side. MS has proven many times you should never judge them on a version 1 or 2, just get more scared if the versions keep coming.
Google shouldn't do bullsh!t or damage control or hire expensive spin doctors or try to get Google to Mars. For me as a user, they should concentrate on search. As a stock holder I have conflicting wishes, they should do better on search and much better on other services, and their sole income, out of ads, scares the hell out of me with all the click fraud and spammers turning their attention on Google with link farms and zombie click farms. As a stockholder, their diversity strategy is failing, and the message they give me is: lalalala I can't hear you oh no it was supposed to be this way etc. etc. This will not do. Stock holders want to hear how they stop being boys and start earning them more money.
Good thinking !== Fast thinking
The ability to phone home, retreive data and update the page, without reload gives way to a whole range of new applications, not just the updated select boxes, rich internet applications and pimped sites. Essentially you can make anything you normally could with a custom client, limited by the mess that is javascript across browsers and your imagination. I myself have been exploring multi-user environments on web pages where the actions of one user has an effect on the pages of others (see sig). It's nonsense to say "AJAX is a fad" because it's an evolution of the browser that can't be turned back. Just like the gold fever that began a decade ago and ran for five years, where html, the web nor the internet went away. Many companies selling air, naming it "web 2.0" might go away, but that's another story.
Story? Tank-man. For the Chinese (and for yahoo.ch, google.ch etc.), he has been erased from history and memory. Chinese students today do not know who he is. The insane slaughter of thousands of civilians that took place and the following executions of student leaders have been erased from memory. Why? Because they were demonstrating for freedom. Yahoo, MS, and "No Evil" Google are collaborators of this regime, putting down freedom harshly. Taste the weight of that last line, and if you don't like it, point out corrections. May I repeat, with harshly I mean with executions. Like tank-man's. Google, for example, is extremely evil. Give some multi=miljonairs the prospect of some more bucks, and they sell their souls and the future of many Chinese without a flinch, oh, except for hiring some pr-guys from hell. Shameless. I wouldn't sleep if I'd have chosen money to erase tank-man from history and deny his existence. Moreover, if I was a multi-miljonair and in charge of so much information, I'd make it one of my goals to get it to the suppressed. We know the choices -they- made. It's a story.
I dispute the notion. Having been heavily addicted to MUD in the early nineties (and having seen people like Orzack around for that long), I've also seen 99% of the heavy MUD addicts move on, sooner of later. To claim that 40% are mentally disseased, to earn money, is a harsh statement which reflects badly on this person. In the Netherlands we have a saying for this based on a TV commercial: "We, from Toilet Duck, recommend: Toilet Duck!". Moreover, I question sales motives where one scares potential clients with making them feel sick, diseased and disordered. Bah!
However, when you start playing around with AJAX, you get a whole different abstraction of what you're doing. Basically a lot of GUI elements start to become part of the play, and it becomes a whole new ball game. Everybody is realizing this and building libraries, but none has reached a status yet where I'd consider it the great definite GUI toolkit, for the web using AJAX. This means that commiting to any of the current incarnations is like commiting to a dinosaur from the start.
This means when your AJAX complex reaches a fair amount of complexity, one is kinda stuck. Basic hacks don't cut it anymore, doing a great lib yourself is a complete project on itself, and commiting to other libs has the disadvantages named above. But I might be overgeneralizing.
I think I found middleground with the Jquery library: http://jquery.com/
It's tiny (15K) yet powerful and takes a whole lot of work away, and therefore meets most of my requirements.
AJAX btw is quite enjoyable. On one hand you have the marketeers screaming blah at you like "web 2.0" for everything, and at the other hand you have the average ol' skool slashdotter screaming blah and fud at you for anything javascript or faintly smelling of "web 2.0", to point out their superiority ;) I haven't seen so many smartasses since Gopher was hailed over Mosaic 0.9b as more secure, less bandwidth demanding, thus making the later unnecessary and bloated.
The funny part of it all is that a convention in these particular format is a tool for communication in a pre-Internet area. Hey, I love to hang out too with all kind of interesting people and talk about stuff. But that will be on the basis of equality. Sure you can charge me 2k. I charge you 2k back to talk to your holiness, -me-.
These conventions are not about sharing information. They are about selling "key speakers" to HRM departments of devevelopers in big businesses who like to get away from things. It's a selling trick. I don't know why any non corporate open source developer would pay that amount of money, so O'Reilly can become even richer, the same key speakers from the ol' boys network get richer, and the talk is all yada yada, mostly repeated what has been said on the net already. You don't gain wishdom. You don't gain status. If you really believe this conventions add anything, I wouldn't buy a second hand car on my own. You're just too easy a target. And if you really want to learn, talk to open source developers who develop instead of stalk conventions for their mega-bucks corp.
I can count the sites that allow a 1.5MByte transfer/sec on one hand. Ok, so I can download the FreeBSD ISO in 3 minutes, that's cool.
When browing or downloading elsewhere, I'm usually capped.
P2P is worse, because they depend my upload, which is only 1Mbit.
Having said that, it's always there to be used and allows me to run bittorrent, listen to my fav radio station, download something else and browse some pages at the same time and not notice anything slowing down. I like the redundancy.
Aaargh..19 small pages, each framed with 3 giant ads..I can't see! I can't read! the noise, the agony! Sorry, had to click away. So, what was the spammers conclusion about memory cards? How many ads can it hold?
But regarding your question, the answer, again, is: money.
Take any percentage of users with "old browsers" over the years, and against that you can put an audience break point where your neglectance or scaring away of those people costs more than serving them earns.
Although I like using the newest technologies and be on the frontier, commercially this is often a bad idea and one needs, on purpose, NOT be using the newest or for technology evangelists correct technologies, but those which are most mainstream. Like it or not, being two steps behind in browser land is best for sites with mass public. If you make a web site for the mass public, don't be an technology evangelist on the client side. It costs you.
I'm not saying I like this, or I didn't think of your points. As a developer, I don't like it. As a professional however, it is a fact I can't ignore for certain sites.
I see too many evangelists (and I'm paradoxically one of them if you look at my site only), for instance making sites requiring at least screens of 1024 pixels in width, and if you got 800x600 (last year >15%, I guess now 10%), you "should upgrade". One could argue about that, the point is shareholders won't, page & banner views and clicks don't lie, and profit is highest when they are not ignored. The summarize your question's answer again: money.
Whatever.
>Marketing isn't an end in itself. The objective is to make money. You stole my argument. W3C isn't a goal in itself. Turning the argument around doesn't fix that. If so, please give a list of browsers that fail to render the tabled and fonted Google page otherwise.
Sorry for not stating the obvious before, but the use of these "illegal" tags is exactly to work around the flaws of "graceful degrading". These guys want their home page to look exactly alike in differert browsers, and not just simply degrade to something useful but not looking the way it is supposed to. Graceful degrading is from a technical point of view. Using bad tags to make it look the same is the marketing approach. For instance, I could use css to give a font a certain color, or the font tag. Both texts will render in old browsers, only the second with the color the marketing department ways. The rest is acedemical.
The reason is of course not that Google cannot make a page without the use of tables or the font tag, but that the pages work with even the oldest of browsers (except IE 2.0 which doesn't do tables). You can't DIV or CSS your way around that. Big sites like Google and Yahoo have always been breaking rules, either for speed (not using quotes etc.) or for backward compatability. W3C is nice but doesn't earn you money.
Brainpower, Dutch (or is it Vlamish?) rap band featuring white nerd with glasses as the lead singer. http://www.mcbrainpower.nl/ (check out the tracks)
You should know better. As many will have noticed, this rant is almost identical to those one encountered in the mid-nineties, which protested all those ugly web pages people where suddenly able to make. First of all, why do you care about what others make, especially when you don't go there yourself. I think this is disturbing. Let them be. Second, all the ranting about ugliness and bar talk is irrelevant and takes the attention away from the real facts: people are empowered with communication tools; it will lead to many great things you couldn't imagine. The only narcissism witnessed here, is from the ranters. They want to control others. What others do, is not good enough for them, they feel superior, comfortably forgetting that when they were 15, they were watching crap like the A-team. Well I did. If it where up to you guys, the web would have been smothered in its early incarnations, because the vast majority made ugly pages. Aristocracy at these early point in Internet history is laughable really, and the way of the dinosaur. Better not listen to you ;) I think what's far more interesting to explore is how people can have some kind of after-control or rights regarding their privacy online, in a general non-Myspace related way. Should people be able to tell Google to remove this or that embarrasing Usenet posting, or Archive.org to remove a particular site? Is that realistic? Etc. etc.
One thing going for them is that with a 504MB download for what can't be more than a few MBs in code if you try really hard, surely pr0n is included to use as wallpapers for your project management. Cute!
Why not start with exploring a Google Worldwide Proxy. Google said they want to entrance to the market as high as possible, so you can't be beat by, say, two students with a good idea like concentrating on search alone.
So what if they offer everybody faster surfing experiences? I have a broadband connection, but don't enjoy full speed across the globe, because there's only that much my isp can do in peering arrangements. Google has the muscle to offer full speed everywhere and the brain to offer excellent pre-fetching and caching techniques. There's not much new about this, but then again Google never does something new, and my ISP's proxy is a real sucker.
Ah, and think of the price for Google. Everybodies exact surfing behaviour.
Among others, you can have two persons performing equal white collar crimes, resulting in wildly different damages.
There are crimes more evil than other crimes which are more profitable. White collar crime is an example itself, as petty thieves who use or threaten with violence on the streets are punished harder.
Also, it is irrelevant. Replace "being a sex offender" with "and he GOT A PARKING TICKET LAST MONTH, OMG", a much lesser but even so irrelevant violation of law, and I'm sure people see how ridiculous it looks. It's almost like they are FUDding someone who uses their open, public offering, which is also a violation. It's like the FUP From Hell, from a one-sided free offering. You use it in a way we don't like? We put a private investigator on your live and transmit any offense or anything we can use to the mass media. That will learn you! I'm sure there are many interesting and valid issues about offering free services to the public and people that abuse it, but engaging in dirt fights isn't among my favuourite solutions.
One leads to a badly implemented site, the other to a better site which generates more sales.
The website should be payed equally because its service to the advertisers was equal.
The payment should not be related in any way to the quality of the sales machine behind the click, because that is not within the website's scope of responsibility or powers.
There are two cases in which this setup would be acceptable. One is where the webmaster can hand-pick his advertisers. The other would be one where Google's great algorithms would in practice mean high revenue. What sells directly through gpay, gets advertised, what doesn't, should use pay per click.
I find this all highly entertaining. Google's is doing what pr0n sites have prevailed and mastered long ago. Do pay per click. Get spammed by click-fraud badly. Do pay per sale.
Google will have a much harder time though (no pun intended). They are ad-brokers, and expectations and growth models are all based on the faulty pay per click model. The fraud is huge, and they are earning money from it. So while investers and stock-owners are slowly realizing this, they must now start "experimenting" with pay per sale so they are ready for the future, but no too fast, or they will be canabalizing their own income. It's all about cushioning and leveling out.
If you have two or three "superstars" who, when they leave, would leave behind a project with a huge learning curve for new developers, they were no superstars to begin with. Of course, any project, especially as it gets more complex, will imply that it gets harder to get into. But I've been in many open projects for many years, some I've seen whither, some grow and survive after the original creators left or even the generation(s) after them. It all depends on how these developers are creating stuff and from what perspective they work. Many, most if you will, are the so called 80% developers, they love adding new stuff and features, but when it comes to making the code clean for others to understand, finish the glitches, work it better into the system, make documentation, they fail. These systems stabalize and/or die after one or two generations, they become unmaintainable. To survive, a better programmer is required. One that programs with this in mind: if I'm hit by a bus tomorrow, will this code be understood and survive? There will still be a learning curve, but much less steep and much more enjoyable and attractive. Moreover, it produces better code and more thought-out software. The downside: les "quick" success, which is not to be underestimated. Although it was closed software, this story in a nutshell would be the old Netscape Browser. My grandma would be ashamed of the source code, the same speed that produced that code allowed it to grow beyond dreams, and it was their downfall, among others.
It's a big problem. An Internet problem, or even a problem of society, not a Wikipedia problem. A lot of so called information is "democratic information". A rather innocent example would be placing some negative but true critical text about the iPod on Slashdot or Wikipedia, and see it modded down or changed by people who own the devices and don't like someone else saying negative stuff about it, even if true. Far less innocent is for instance what has been happening in the media, where unbiased information no longer sells advertisement time, but rather what their targeted audience wants to hear either from an entertainment or political agenda point of view, and the problem is much deeper than the Iraq war propoganda machine they turned in after 9-11, or Fox News.
I think they stated the reasons why Vista will be an inferior UI than Windows 2000 "Classic.", which most serious users on Windows XP use. For me and many others, the UI must be blant, boring almost. Otherwise the UI gets in the way and asks my cognitive system for attention all the time. This same mechamism, Microsoft uses as a marketing mechanism. The fact that Vista is "pretty" and that this is noticed, makes it inferior to an OS with the exact same functionaailty (click icon to launch prog in window) but where the app and its content shines. Aero glass is noise!
>Open Source is basically FSF-lite and was invented to make the whole Free Software thing more palatable to businesses.
Ehm no. BSD or MIT for example was not created for the FSF, and existed well before the FSF.
>Free Software is about sharing. Open Source is about curiosity.
Ehm no. So you're saying all the fine non FS open source projects are not about sharing? This is the first time I've seen -this- definition.
>I can do what I want with a truly Free piece of software, including repackaging and selling it. With Open Source, all I usually get to do is look at the code (curiosity), and if I see anything I want to fix, I usually have to give my fix back to the original owner.
Now you're getting me all confused. It is RSM with his marketing/politcal ploy to redefine to term "free" that stands for the Free Software political movement, and it is ESR who "leads", if you will, the "open source" political movement. You've mixed 'em up? And of course you have folks who code and aren't into World Power. But with either GPL or the others, you can fix anything you like. What you're saying makes no sense at all.
>Rest of your comments
Blah yourself.