We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.” -- Apple
Is Apple actually calling iTunes for Windows for a sub-standard app? That perhaps should be banned from the platform?
Apple themselves are using non-native API intermediate layers such as CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics in their implementation of iTunes for Windows.
Until you can buy one at the store, it's another piece of vaporware from Microsoft.
Exactly. I liked how we never talked about the iPad before you could buy it for instance.
Except one company (Apple) has a history of delivering what they promise, and another (Microsoft) does not.
It's not about a general rule of "we don't discuss product announcements", it's a general rule of "Microsoft announces things, then only occasionally delivers them"
But it becomes a bit ironic when the big example of recent MS vaporware used by other posters right here in this thread is how MS dropped WinFS from Vista. Which is exactly matched by how Apple dropped ZFS from OSX;) http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=584
If you're logged in as Administrator or a user with administrative user rights/access, while surfing the web, checking your email, etc. --> you're vulnerable.
I don't disagree with it being better not running as admin, but a lot of malware will live quite happily in your userspace. And if a user privileged account is compromised there are privilege escalation exploits to get admin level, for fx rootkit if that is what they are after. MS is on to something with the IE8 protected mode sandbox in Vista/W7, running with lover privileges than even normal user. But it's just one part of this puzzle.
Personally, I see it the other way around, as an effective way of weeding out the managers you really don’t want to work for.
I’m a competent and experienced IT professional that have been using Hotmail for a long time, and I’m quite happy with it for the purpose it serves. Tried Gmail, didn’t see the reason to switch. I could say more about why I prefer Hotmail, but that’s not really the point here.
If I apply for a job and someone calling themselves a manager is so “clever” that s/he is actually judging people based on such inane criteria as the choice of email provider, not the CV or references, then I will be very, very, very happy that I don’t have to work for such a close-minded, judgmental manager that is not able to prioritize what’s important. Very happy, thank you!
I wouldn't question peoples personal faith as long as they leave me alone and don't make claim to having their religious beliefs being equaled with science. But as an indirect input to your question (I know it's not a direct answer to the question as you phrased it), you might find the Russel's teapot discussion of interest:
Well, all users that don't care or don't understand are going to pick one of the first 5 browsers. The other 7 are going to be initially hidden and no one who doesn't care is going to bother scrolling down. (Ok, "no one" is a little strong. I'm sure there are some people who will do it).
ok, so the random order presentation agreed on is not for all 12? There is an A-list and a B-list, and random order just within each group?
Actually, I have a feeling most of the users who don't know what they're doing will look for "Internet" and find "Microsoft INTERNET Explorer".
Either that, or pick Google as the new synonym for Internet, or pick whatever sounds cool. Perhaps we will see a Lynx comeback, deal with that web 'designers':)
Which IE8 can't do, I think. Can you even install IE6 on Windows 7?
Only in VirtualXP mode. I believe Win7 is the best bet to get rid of most of the remaining IE6 users, because many corporation and governments that skipped the Vista upgrade cycle, and didn't want to update/certify intranet applications between cycles, will upgrade to Win7 (for many reasons). Let's hope they do it quickly. At least IE8 is a huge step in right direction.
This is great! Now all the users that really wanted a different browser finally will be able to get one!
(And all users that don't care or don't understand will pick something at random, from a list of up to 12 (!) different browsers, is going to make life interesting for developers again now that we finally were seeing IE6 starting to disappear:)
Is Google now in the business of trying to save the world ? "We're not hiring this guy for the good of the ecosystem", oh come on, this is ridiculous ! Who do they think they are ?
It sounds to me they are doing it more for the good of the Google ecosystem. I think this is a very important part of his quote: "They're very Google people". Google actually need others out there contributing to building and innovating within their ecosystem. And this helps Google.
what is preventing those sites from implementing whatever access control scheme they feel like? (This should have nothing at all to do with robots.txt or ACAP which is about whether the *Google spider* can see the content, not whether users linking from Google can.) Am I missing some technical point?
TFA says
well, users could easily change their useragent to Googlebot, and so be able to see anything the site want Google to see? (though I currently don't see the majority of web users doing that..)
Ah, but you can dump your Excel for something cloud-based that will likely look nearly exactly like Excel, function nearly the same way, and read Excel files. Add that to the boot and app launch times, and you have a serious competitor for the specific segment of hardware that Google is aiming for.
The problem with Excel is that people who are not familiar with how many corporations use Excel tend to understimate what people do with it. These days it's a platform as much as a spreadsheet application. I routinely need to use Excel sheets that do complex scripting and live data lookups and inputs to other sources. I've tried some of these in the so called compatible alternatives, and they fail so miserably it isn't even funny.
And no, such use is not limited to a handful of people in the finance department, a very significant number of normal business roles in the org use them as part of running the business.
There's a difference between DRM and locking content to the phone..
Is it, really? "locking content" doesn't ring a bell? DRM an be implemented in many ways, for different purposes, doesn't have to be built into the music files themselves if the system still controls what you can do with them.
well if their goal was to differentiate from google, i guess "don't be evil" is a good place to stand apart.
Google also censors in China. I can't tell which of the two solutions I think is worse, so giving Google a free pass and only going after Bing the way this journalist does seems unsubstantiated. It is an easier target though.
Jeebus. I remember when my 1200 baud modem felt whizzo fast compared to my old 300 baud modem.
And, yes, I can already see the "get off of my lawn" posts below you, and I'm dating myself.:-P
Cheers
Cheers mate, I remember working on the 'magic' USR AT command sequence string to optimize the connection, and listen to the sound. Think there was an AT&K1 in there, plus a lot more. Wouldn't want to go back, as with good old PC days I think we are seriously romanticizing the speed we remember, but glad I was there.
Exactly. They were the first ones to actually design an intuitive search interface. All of the other "intuitive" search interfaces afterwards were heavily based on this concept (remember when Yahoo attempted the same thing?)
This actually deserves some IP protection.
Could you elaborate on what you see as the major intuitive differences between Googles interface and what AltaVista had as the leading search engine for many years before them: http://web.archive.org/web/19971222163629/altavista.digital.com/? (remember this is very early web design time, Google didn't look so hot either)
"This new Google thing assumes that people will use anything other than AltaVista/Webcrawler/Yahoo."
Not saying that Bing/Yahoo will take over, but Google hasn't always been #1.
I remember when AltaVista for quite a while _was_ Internet search, the same way Google is today, and seemed just as impossible to dethrone.
AltaVista gave Google an opening by straying from their core dedicated web search strategy, going for a broader portal and services oriented strategy. Sounds familiar?;)
It so much more difficult to get a juicy conspiracy theory going around boring science. I was looking forward to the "we didn't really go to Mars" entertainment.
Conficker is interesting, because Microsoft actually had it patched pretty early (Oct 08), months before the spreading really became as massive as it became (Jan-Apr 09 and onwards). Meaning it's main vector and success factor was people who'd disabled automatic Windows Update. You could say that this lays the blame more with users than Microsoft (we usually do that when the same happens to Linux, Mac or Firefox or similar - "but they have patched that, quickly/long ago"). But more interestingly (or humorous); who disables Windows Update? Us nerds with a long memory and strong opinion of Microsoft updates creating problems? We who want to control our machine ourselves? Meaning this was actually a nerd disease?;-> Hitting and spreading among the people "who know what they are doing" more than the "unwashed masses"? Don't know, probably more factors, I just love the delicious irony of this one:)
Can someone tell me how this higher click-through is some sort of a discovery? Bing integrates the ads into the search results. That is why it is smarter to use google - at least with google you can opt not to click on the ad.
What are you talking about? The ads and distinction made (background colour, "sponsored links", top and right) is damn near identical to similar search on Google.
Are you talking about the "shop for" extra feature? That is not ads, but a (very useful) integrated shopping search result (similar to going to Google Product Search). Having additional levels of search functionality integrated in the answers like this for some verticals (shopping, travel, etc.) is one of the ways Bing try to differentiate from Google (together with the left column drill-down functionality, which I'm starting to like more and more after trying it).
Amazon launched fully DRM-free September 25th 2008. iTunes Plus was launched a few months before, but only for one label, everything else was DRMed. According to Apple they had complete iTunes Plus DRM-free catalogue by end of March 2009, but this intention wasn't announced before January 2009.
In Internet time, and if DRM was such an important factor, that is a lot of time to change which store you buy from.
The first thing - this is one of the reasons why DRM-protected media is doing bad in online sales.
People are aware of the limitations and problems.
I used to believe so, but why then did extremely few people switch from DRMed iTunes to non-DRMed Amazon in the markets it were available (when Amazon had full catalogue DRM free, iTunes had most DRMed, and Amazon had great iPod/iTunes integration)? It apparently didn't matter enough to users to switch to a DRM-free service (which I thought they would).
Slashdot Mirror
We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.” -- Apple
Is Apple actually calling iTunes for Windows for a sub-standard app? That perhaps should be banned from the platform? Apple themselves are using non-native API intermediate layers such as CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics in their implementation of iTunes for Windows.
Until you can buy one at the store, it's another piece of vaporware from Microsoft.
Exactly. I liked how we never talked about the iPad before you could buy it for instance.
Except one company (Apple) has a history of delivering what they promise, and another (Microsoft) does not. It's not about a general rule of "we don't discuss product announcements", it's a general rule of "Microsoft announces things, then only occasionally delivers them"
But it becomes a bit ironic when the big example of recent MS vaporware used by other posters right here in this thread is how MS dropped WinFS from Vista. Which is exactly matched by how Apple dropped ZFS from OSX ;) http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=584
It doesn't matter which browser you're using ...
If you're logged in as Administrator or a user with administrative user rights/access, while surfing the web, checking your email, etc. --> you're vulnerable.
I don't disagree with it being better not running as admin, but a lot of malware will live quite happily in your userspace. And if a user privileged account is compromised there are privilege escalation exploits to get admin level, for fx rootkit if that is what they are after. MS is on to something with the IE8 protected mode sandbox in Vista/W7, running with lover privileges than even normal user. But it's just one part of this puzzle.
Personally, I see it the other way around, as an effective way of weeding out the managers you really don’t want to work for.
I’m a competent and experienced IT professional that have been using Hotmail for a long time, and I’m quite happy with it for the purpose it serves. Tried Gmail, didn’t see the reason to switch. I could say more about why I prefer Hotmail, but that’s not really the point here.
If I apply for a job and someone calling themselves a manager is so “clever” that s/he is actually judging people based on such inane criteria as the choice of email provider, not the CV or references, then I will be very, very, very happy that I don’t have to work for such a close-minded, judgmental manager that is not able to prioritize what’s important. Very happy, thank you!
Why is belief in God anti-logical or anti-reason?
I wouldn't question peoples personal faith as long as they leave me alone and don't make claim to having their religious beliefs being equaled with science. But as an indirect input to your question (I know it's not a direct answer to the question as you phrased it), you might find the Russel's teapot discussion of interest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
Well, all users that don't care or don't understand are going to pick one of the first 5 browsers. The other 7 are going to be initially hidden and no one who doesn't care is going to bother scrolling down. (Ok, "no one" is a little strong. I'm sure there are some people who will do it).
ok, so the random order presentation agreed on is not for all 12? There is an A-list and a B-list, and random order just within each group?
Actually, I have a feeling most of the users who don't know what they're doing will look for "Internet" and find "Microsoft INTERNET Explorer".
Either that, or pick Google as the new synonym for Internet, or pick whatever sounds cool. Perhaps we will see a Lynx comeback, deal with that web 'designers' :)
Which IE8 can't do, I think. Can you even install IE6 on Windows 7?
Only in VirtualXP mode. I believe Win7 is the best bet to get rid of most of the remaining IE6 users, because many corporation and governments that skipped the Vista upgrade cycle, and didn't want to update/certify intranet applications between cycles, will upgrade to Win7 (for many reasons). Let's hope they do it quickly. At least IE8 is a huge step in right direction.
This is great! Now all the users that really wanted a different browser finally will be able to get one!
:)
(And all users that don't care or don't understand will pick something at random, from a list of up to 12 (!) different browsers, is going to make life interesting for developers again now that we finally were seeing IE6 starting to disappear
Is Google now in the business of trying to save the world ? "We're not hiring this guy for the good of the ecosystem", oh come on, this is ridiculous ! Who do they think they are ?
It sounds to me they are doing it more for the good of the Google ecosystem. I think this is a very important part of his quote: "They're very Google people". Google actually need others out there contributing to building and innovating within their ecosystem. And this helps Google.
what is preventing those sites from implementing whatever access control scheme they feel like? (This should have nothing at all to do with robots.txt or ACAP which is about whether the *Google spider* can see the content, not whether users linking from Google can.) Am I missing some technical point?
TFA says
well, users could easily change their useragent to Googlebot, and so be able to see anything the site want Google to see? (though I currently don't see the majority of web users doing that..)
Ah, but you can dump your Excel for something cloud-based that will likely look nearly exactly like Excel, function nearly the same way, and read Excel files. Add that to the boot and app launch times, and you have a serious competitor for the specific segment of hardware that Google is aiming for.
The problem with Excel is that people who are not familiar with how many corporations use Excel tend to understimate what people do with it. These days it's a platform as much as a spreadsheet application. I routinely need to use Excel sheets that do complex scripting and live data lookups and inputs to other sources. I've tried some of these in the so called compatible alternatives, and they fail so miserably it isn't even funny.
And no, such use is not limited to a handful of people in the finance department, a very significant number of normal business roles in the org use them as part of running the business.
There's a difference between DRM and locking content to the phone. .
Is it, really? "locking content" doesn't ring a bell? DRM an be implemented in many ways, for different purposes, doesn't have to be built into the music files themselves if the system still controls what you can do with them.
well if their goal was to differentiate from google, i guess "don't be evil" is a good place to stand apart.
Google also censors in China. I can't tell which of the two solutions I think is worse, so giving Google a free pass and only going after Bing the way this journalist does seems unsubstantiated. It is an easier target though.
What surprising is they don't use it for Bing.
http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/announcing-the-bing-maps-silverlight-control/
Jeebus. I remember when my 1200 baud modem felt whizzo fast compared to my old 300 baud modem.
And, yes, I can already see the "get off of my lawn" posts below you, and I'm dating myself. :-P
Cheers
Cheers mate, I remember working on the 'magic' USR AT command sequence string to optimize the connection, and listen to the sound. Think there was an AT&K1 in there, plus a lot more. Wouldn't want to go back, as with good old PC days I think we are seriously romanticizing the speed we remember, but glad I was there.
1.An AI may not injure a terran being or, through inaction, allow a terran being to come to harm. Only Zerg, Protoss and Xel'Naga..
Chris Mooney interviewed earlier on The Colbert Report about the importance of science. Funny, tragic, effective.
Exactly. They were the first ones to actually design an intuitive search interface. All of the other "intuitive" search interfaces afterwards were heavily based on this concept (remember when Yahoo attempted the same thing?)
This actually deserves some IP protection.
Could you elaborate on what you see as the major intuitive differences between Googles interface and what AltaVista had as the leading search engine for many years before them: http://web.archive.org/web/19971222163629/altavista.digital.com/? (remember this is very early web design time, Google didn't look so hot either)
"This new Google thing assumes that people will use anything other than AltaVista/Webcrawler/Yahoo." Not saying that Bing/Yahoo will take over, but Google hasn't always been #1.
I remember when AltaVista for quite a while _was_ Internet search, the same way Google is today, and seemed just as impossible to dethrone. AltaVista gave Google an opening by straying from their core dedicated web search strategy, going for a broader portal and services oriented strategy. Sounds familiar? ;)
It so much more difficult to get a juicy conspiracy theory going around boring science. I was looking forward to the "we didn't really go to Mars" entertainment.
That called "overhyped" the bug that enabled Conflicker to do the biggest massive infection of PCs since 2003?.
Conficker is interesting, because Microsoft actually had it patched pretty early (Oct 08), months before the spreading really became as massive as it became (Jan-Apr 09 and onwards). Meaning it's main vector and success factor was people who'd disabled automatic Windows Update. You could say that this lays the blame more with users than Microsoft (we usually do that when the same happens to Linux, Mac or Firefox or similar - "but they have patched that, quickly/long ago"). But more interestingly (or humorous); who disables Windows Update? Us nerds with a long memory and strong opinion of Microsoft updates creating problems? We who want to control our machine ourselves? Meaning this was actually a nerd disease? ;-> Hitting and spreading among the people "who know what they are doing" more than the "unwashed masses"? Don't know, probably more factors, I just love the delicious irony of this one :)
Can someone tell me how this higher click-through is some sort of a discovery? Bing integrates the ads into the search results. That is why it is smarter to use google - at least with google you can opt not to click on the ad.
Show me where the ad is. What? You can't tell? Me either - so don't use Bing.
What are you talking about? The ads and distinction made (background colour, "sponsored links", top and right) is damn near identical to similar search on Google. Are you talking about the "shop for" extra feature? That is not ads, but a (very useful) integrated shopping search result (similar to going to Google Product Search). Having additional levels of search functionality integrated in the answers like this for some verticals (shopping, travel, etc.) is one of the ways Bing try to differentiate from Google (together with the left column drill-down functionality, which I'm starting to like more and more after trying it).
Amazon launched fully DRM-free September 25th 2008. iTunes Plus was launched a few months before, but only for one label, everything else was DRMed. According to Apple they had complete iTunes Plus DRM-free catalogue by end of March 2009, but this intention wasn't announced before January 2009.
In Internet time, and if DRM was such an important factor, that is a lot of time to change which store you buy from.
I used to believe so, but why then did extremely few people switch from DRMed iTunes to non-DRMed Amazon in the markets it were available (when Amazon had full catalogue DRM free, iTunes had most DRMed, and Amazon had great iPod/iTunes integration)? It apparently didn't matter enough to users to switch to a DRM-free service (which I thought they would).
You can find the answer to most of your questions from the people who have tested the thing: Living with the limits of Windows 7 Starter Edition