True, but you're also a Slashdot user. Many people will be much more inclined to trust a site relayed to them offline, especially when it comes from a source that appears authoritative (such as mimicking a parking ticket, as TFS describes). You and I might call up City Hall and ask WTF is going on, but I'd bet that 95% or more of people that receive these fliers and hit the URL would get rooted.
UAC, believe it or not, can't be controlled by scripts or other software-based inputs - it only accepts input from physical hardware. Which is a good thing (assuming this bug is fixed which would get around the need to do so, anyways). I don't know the tech that's causing that to happen (a sibling poster explains it better), but I can say that it DOES work.
Or, at least, this was the case using a Vista admin account. Found it out the hard way when trying to click OK in a UAC prompt via peripherals being shared with Synergy. Can't speak for Windows 7, but I can't imagine they've intentionally made it less secure. It confused the hell out of me for a while, but when I finally figured out what was happening I was in fact glad that they'd done it that way (even if it still meant that I had to find a spare mouse to click OK in the prompt with actual hardware).
See- this is why we have betas. Stupid but non-obvious bug that somehow slipped through can now be fixed before it affects millions. I hate to give MS credit (especially as a Mac user), but they really seem to be getting a lot right with 7. Not to the point of switching back, but hopefully to the point where the whiny fanboys from both sides may take a couple moments to STFU.
Most businesspeople in that position are smart enough to make that call on their own. I am much more concerned about soccer moms trying to stalk their children from behind the wheel of their minivans.
What's the reasoning there? My calls are flaky enough voice-only, and it's not like adding video adds to the experience. 3G has a lot of benefits, but video-calls from a cell phone seems like features just for the sake of features (which, generally, is avoided by Apple).
The last thing I want is a requirement to wear pants while working in my home office, thank you very much.
VCs want a revenue model before you start. That has never changed. That quote is merely suggesting that if you've got a damn good idea, you'll need to figure out a good way to monetize it before you bankrupt yourself. It said "young", not "in the womb".
All what sites? Aside from internal corporate web apps, has this been a real problem in the last five or so years? I remember having some issues back when Firefox was still having issues picking a proper name (pre-1.0 days), but I honestly don't think I've seen a public site with serious issues since around Firefox 1.0.
There's still some stuff out there with wonky stylesheets, of course, but that almost never is SO bad that it causes a site to be unusable.
Code for standards, and then write fixes for IE6 an IE7. Aside from some almost imperceptible differences* between Gecko and Webkit (which power almost every browser that's not IE or Opera), that will get you either there or remarkably close. And as Opera adheres to the HTML and CSS standards just as well as current versions of Webkit and Gecko, that's a non-issue. Use any of the dozen or so cross-browser javascript libraries and all you'll need to do is write a couple of conditional stylesheets to deal with IE7 (not too painful) and IE6 (oh, fuck it, just do a *{display:none !important;} and be done) and suddenly anyone with an internet connection can use your New Awesome Web App.
*The rarely-used button element is an ass, the even more rarely-used dl/dt/dd trio can be a tiny bit unpredictable but at least seem consistently so. Net effect: practically zero.
Minimal advantage 1: If your app is net-based it can be safely presumed that downloading of a JAR (for example - it could be a Qt executable just as well) is not a problem. If the bandwidth is limited then you are actually far better off with a custom app because it can talk to the user on its own, and can buffer net packets. Then cost of one-time download of the app itself is dwarfed by savings on traffic and latency.
Will your JAR package run on my iPhone? No? Because any decently-written web app out there will. Slowly, mind you, but it runs nonetheless.
Minimal advantage 2: prepackaged UI controls. That is really laughable. There are tens of UI libraries out there, and each of them is better than those pathetic forms that HTML offers. You also will be using a real language, not JS. Your application can be highly interactive, use widgets that browsers don't have, can do tons of local processing... in other words, it would be better, and it would be the same on every computer, since the browser is out of the picture.
Define "real" language. One that's pre-compiled? One where you have to allocate memory on your own? One where you're sending raw machine code to the processor? As far as I'm concerned, either your code causes the desired effect to happen by some means or it doesn't. The fact that I don't have to fuck around with all of the low-level stuff by writing a few lines of JS instead of a few hundred lines of $realLanguageOfChoice is a plus for me. No, I wouldn't want to try applying Photoshop filters with JS, but the 99% of things that I might want to do are often much faster to write in some sort of scripting language because I don't have to re-invent the wheel every time.
The best scenario I can think of when use of a browser makes sense is when your app is so simple, and your needs are so basic, that you benefit from the infrastructure that is already present in the browser. Google Mail, though, is outgrowing the browser very quickly; I could implement the whole UI in Qt within a week, easily - and how many people worked, and still work, and *will* work on hacking AJAX to make GMail work on 33 browsers?
And I could re-write the Gmail interface from scratch in a week too, provided I had nothing better to do with my time (maybe without an IE6 stylesheet, but even Google forces IE6 users to go into an outdated interface). It's a matter of playing to your own strengths. Google's so damn big that they overcomplicate a lot of things, Gmail included. I won't hold that against them as I live in Gmail.
A lot of the additional things you mention would work perfectly fine in the browser with not a tremendous amount of additional effort - it would mostly be a matter of updating the behind-the-scenes API to support the new functionality. Once you have a good design and a solid API to work with, hooking the two together (your AJAX calls, the dynamically-generated HTML, etc. in web apps) is pretty damn simple if you know what you're doing. The only thing you mention that wouldn't be easily solvable cross-browser is local caching and archival of messages; this is already done partially through Google Gears (just enabled in Gmail a few days ago), and client-side databases and related storage are part of the HTML5 spec (Webkit tends to be on the bleeding edge of this, and a LOT of browsers are powered by Webkit - there's a good chance that it will eventually become The rendering engine for the web, including in IE).
Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of places where web apps aren't at all the right approach. Games, as you mention, in addition to other 3d-heavy apps and very animation-heavy things in general. That constitutes a very small portion of my CPU cycles, but everyone is different of course.
Safari has been picking up a not insignificant amount of market share as Mac sales have been increasing, and even if it was only 1-3% of all traffic (which sounds extremely low), you're missing an important point: if it renders as desired in Safari, it will render the same way in Firefox, or VERY damn close. Numerous cross-browser, easy-to-use JS libraries exist that nullify any scripting differences between the major browsers.
If you're working around a solid JS library (I use jQuery constantly, but there are many others), there's no reason that you can't be fully cross-browser at least from a client-side scripting perspective. Dealing with CSS issues is a different story, but all of the recent Webkit and Gecko-based browsers (Safari and Firefox being the most well-known) plus whatever Opera uses tend to render identically*, and even IE7 usually gets fairly close to the mark unless you're doing some weird hacks or using certain newer (pseudo-)selectors or properties. In my very limited testing, IE8 renders just fine too, and I'm pretty sure that Ballmer had considered the idea of using Webkit for a future version of IE (9?) when it was suggested to him. IE6, as usual, is a complete mess - but even some bigger sites are really starting to tell any remaining IE6 users to suck a fat one.
*Except the button element, which flatly refuses to follow the box model in any browser. Easy enough to deal with by simply styling associated label tags and hide the buttons themselves.
The entire room may be better and more evenly lit with the big tubes, but when you need a lot of light in a small area, bringing a lower-output source closer to where you need it will give you the same or better illumination at the target surface. By your own numbers, the tubes are putting out somewhere around 16x the light of a 100w tungsten bulb. Meaning that your 4-lamp T5HO rig four feet from a subject will light it about as well as the 100w bulb at one foot, which are realistic numbers for comparing say a hanging shop-light to a desk lamp. (Inverse square law - 4x distance = 1/16th the intensity)
You can't call bullshit without knowing a lot of variables that were never discussed.
And since when has a bare incandescent (which also operates at lower efficiency in the cold, though certainly not as poorly as a CFL) been a directional light source either? Stick a piece of tinfoil behind it to act as a crude reflector.
I've had two of the "dimmable" CFLs (also from HD) die within 48 hours of being installed in a dimmer socket - not even dimmed, mind you. Suffice to say, I'm not continuing to spend 3x as much for a defective product. If yours work properly, it sounds like you're in the lucky minority.
If the only thing that came into play when the designers are doing their thing is usability, laptops would look quite different than they do today. The most comfortable laptop in the world isn't doing much good if it's being outsold 1000:1 because it looks like ass. And like it or not, how it looks is a major factor in how something sells. Look at the $1500 keyboard with a hundred OLED screens in the thing - it types just like a $20 keyboard, but some people are willing to pay for the novelty and looks. It's on a completely different distribution curve of course, but that's to be expected.
While I agree that's an absurdly high margin, Apple isn't a charity - nor is any other computer manufacturer, for that matter. Regardless of what it costs, you're either willing or not willing to pay the premium that they're asking (welcome to the free market, enjoy your stay).
What does this being winter have to do with anything? Yes, it's fucking cold out, but you'll still have haul yourself down to the nearest Best Buy to pick up the converter box in the summer (IF you're using rabbit-ears right now, and IF you're using an older TV that doesn't have a digital tuner built in) if you were to postpone this another four months.
Like you say, there will be some people caught by surprise regardless. All four of the people who have managed to miss the DTV transition notice commercials aired continually on broadcast stations (even if you're watching on cable/sat).
It's better to get it done with in the winter, if you're going to argue that people are sitting around watching more TV this time of year, because there will be (already are) more channels available for your lazing pleasure when using a DTV tuner, thanks to the lower per-channel bandwidth requirement.
Rolling over and playing dead? I think this move would equate more closely with the ISP execs flying down to RIAA HQ in their private jets (paid for with your outrageously high subscription fees, mind you) to fellate Mitch Bainwol and his friends.
I know I shouldn't feed the troll here, but RAID is most definitely a backup when you're using it to store all of your backups. Or are you suggesting that Mozy, Carbonite, Amazon S3/JungleDisk, et al are all running JBOD?
That said, you still want something offsite, which "Build your own Damn Ubuntu RAUD sever, damnit!" doesn't usually address.
How is saying that you like your employer's product fraud? Used in this context it's certainly an undisclosed conflict of interests, but that's not illegal and certainly not fraud - just being an asshat.
It's not like they're going around and one-starring their competitors products, which could be perceived as libel depending on the context and contents of the review. Unless they made false positive claims about the company ("not only did they restore my data, but they bought me a new computer and gave me a kitten for the inconvenience" kind of stuff), there's no legal wrongdoing here.
FBDIMMs aren't that bad these days either. Sure, it's more than standard desktop memory, but I paid $300 for 4x2GB sticks for my Mac Pro about six months back, and that same amount has already dropped to a hundred bucks for a 2x2GB kit (about $300 for the higher-density 2x4GB kit). No, it's not the $8/GB I'm seeing at some standard DDR2 sticks at Newegg, but it's hardly crazy-expensive either.
Hell, at that price, I'm almost tempted to get that 8GB kit just because I still have two RAM slots free in the thing, not that my current 10GB isn't cutting it (almost... I'd rather get more storage, or even a nice fast SSD for a boot drive)
Hardly. Microsoft makes probably 1% of its revenue from boxed copies. Most people will have no clue what version of a half dozen options their Dell came with.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but you're also a Slashdot user. Many people will be much more inclined to trust a site relayed to them offline, especially when it comes from a source that appears authoritative (such as mimicking a parking ticket, as TFS describes). You and I might call up City Hall and ask WTF is going on, but I'd bet that 95% or more of people that receive these fliers and hit the URL would get rooted.
Yes, there are probably more important things to be discussing right now.
Why yes- a measurement in either Snickers or Reese's Cups would be greatly appreciated.
UAC, believe it or not, can't be controlled by scripts or other software-based inputs - it only accepts input from physical hardware. Which is a good thing (assuming this bug is fixed which would get around the need to do so, anyways). I don't know the tech that's causing that to happen (a sibling poster explains it better), but I can say that it DOES work.
Or, at least, this was the case using a Vista admin account. Found it out the hard way when trying to click OK in a UAC prompt via peripherals being shared with Synergy. Can't speak for Windows 7, but I can't imagine they've intentionally made it less secure. It confused the hell out of me for a while, but when I finally figured out what was happening I was in fact glad that they'd done it that way (even if it still meant that I had to find a spare mouse to click OK in the prompt with actual hardware).
See- this is why we have betas. Stupid but non-obvious bug that somehow slipped through can now be fixed before it affects millions. I hate to give MS credit (especially as a Mac user), but they really seem to be getting a lot right with 7. Not to the point of switching back, but hopefully to the point where the whiny fanboys from both sides may take a couple moments to STFU.
Most businesspeople in that position are smart enough to make that call on their own. I am much more concerned about soccer moms trying to stalk their children from behind the wheel of their minivans.
What's the reasoning there? My calls are flaky enough voice-only, and it's not like adding video adds to the experience. 3G has a lot of benefits, but video-calls from a cell phone seems like features just for the sake of features (which, generally, is avoided by Apple).
The last thing I want is a requirement to wear pants while working in my home office, thank you very much.
VCs want a revenue model before you start. That has never changed. That quote is merely suggesting that if you've got a damn good idea, you'll need to figure out a good way to monetize it before you bankrupt yourself. It said "young", not "in the womb".
All what sites? Aside from internal corporate web apps, has this been a real problem in the last five or so years? I remember having some issues back when Firefox was still having issues picking a proper name (pre-1.0 days), but I honestly don't think I've seen a public site with serious issues since around Firefox 1.0.
There's still some stuff out there with wonky stylesheets, of course, but that almost never is SO bad that it causes a site to be unusable.
Code for standards, and then write fixes for IE6 an IE7. Aside from some almost imperceptible differences* between Gecko and Webkit (which power almost every browser that's not IE or Opera), that will get you either there or remarkably close. And as Opera adheres to the HTML and CSS standards just as well as current versions of Webkit and Gecko, that's a non-issue. Use any of the dozen or so cross-browser javascript libraries and all you'll need to do is write a couple of conditional stylesheets to deal with IE7 (not too painful) and IE6 (oh, fuck it, just do a *{display:none !important;} and be done) and suddenly anyone with an internet connection can use your New Awesome Web App.
*The rarely-used button element is an ass, the even more rarely-used dl/dt/dd trio can be a tiny bit unpredictable but at least seem consistently so. Net effect: practically zero.
Minimal advantage 1: If your app is net-based it can be safely presumed that downloading of a JAR (for example - it could be a Qt executable just as well) is not a problem. If the bandwidth is limited then you are actually far better off with a custom app because it can talk to the user on its own, and can buffer net packets. Then cost of one-time download of the app itself is dwarfed by savings on traffic and latency.
Will your JAR package run on my iPhone? No? Because any decently-written web app out there will. Slowly, mind you, but it runs nonetheless.
Minimal advantage 2: prepackaged UI controls. That is really laughable. There are tens of UI libraries out there, and each of them is better than those pathetic forms that HTML offers. You also will be using a real language, not JS. Your application can be highly interactive, use widgets that browsers don't have, can do tons of local processing... in other words, it would be better, and it would be the same on every computer, since the browser is out of the picture.
Define "real" language. One that's pre-compiled? One where you have to allocate memory on your own? One where you're sending raw machine code to the processor? As far as I'm concerned, either your code causes the desired effect to happen by some means or it doesn't. The fact that I don't have to fuck around with all of the low-level stuff by writing a few lines of JS instead of a few hundred lines of $realLanguageOfChoice is a plus for me. No, I wouldn't want to try applying Photoshop filters with JS, but the 99% of things that I might want to do are often much faster to write in some sort of scripting language because I don't have to re-invent the wheel every time.
The best scenario I can think of when use of a browser makes sense is when your app is so simple, and your needs are so basic, that you benefit from the infrastructure that is already present in the browser. Google Mail, though, is outgrowing the browser very quickly; I could implement the whole UI in Qt within a week, easily - and how many people worked, and still work, and *will* work on hacking AJAX to make GMail work on 33 browsers?
And I could re-write the Gmail interface from scratch in a week too, provided I had nothing better to do with my time (maybe without an IE6 stylesheet, but even Google forces IE6 users to go into an outdated interface). It's a matter of playing to your own strengths. Google's so damn big that they overcomplicate a lot of things, Gmail included. I won't hold that against them as I live in Gmail.
A lot of the additional things you mention would work perfectly fine in the browser with not a tremendous amount of additional effort - it would mostly be a matter of updating the behind-the-scenes API to support the new functionality. Once you have a good design and a solid API to work with, hooking the two together (your AJAX calls, the dynamically-generated HTML, etc. in web apps) is pretty damn simple if you know what you're doing. The only thing you mention that wouldn't be easily solvable cross-browser is local caching and archival of messages; this is already done partially through Google Gears (just enabled in Gmail a few days ago), and client-side databases and related storage are part of the HTML5 spec (Webkit tends to be on the bleeding edge of this, and a LOT of browsers are powered by Webkit - there's a good chance that it will eventually become The rendering engine for the web, including in IE).
Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of places where web apps aren't at all the right approach. Games, as you mention, in addition to other 3d-heavy apps and very animation-heavy things in general. That constitutes a very small portion of my CPU cycles, but everyone is different of course.
Safari has been picking up a not insignificant amount of market share as Mac sales have been increasing, and even if it was only 1-3% of all traffic (which sounds extremely low), you're missing an important point: if it renders as desired in Safari, it will render the same way in Firefox, or VERY damn close. Numerous cross-browser, easy-to-use JS libraries exist that nullify any scripting differences between the major browsers.
If you're working around a solid JS library (I use jQuery constantly, but there are many others), there's no reason that you can't be fully cross-browser at least from a client-side scripting perspective. Dealing with CSS issues is a different story, but all of the recent Webkit and Gecko-based browsers (Safari and Firefox being the most well-known) plus whatever Opera uses tend to render identically*, and even IE7 usually gets fairly close to the mark unless you're doing some weird hacks or using certain newer (pseudo-)selectors or properties. In my very limited testing, IE8 renders just fine too, and I'm pretty sure that Ballmer had considered the idea of using Webkit for a future version of IE (9?) when it was suggested to him. IE6, as usual, is a complete mess - but even some bigger sites are really starting to tell any remaining IE6 users to suck a fat one.
*Except the button element, which flatly refuses to follow the box model in any browser. Easy enough to deal with by simply styling associated label tags and hide the buttons themselves.
Easy there.
The entire room may be better and more evenly lit with the big tubes, but when you need a lot of light in a small area, bringing a lower-output source closer to where you need it will give you the same or better illumination at the target surface. By your own numbers, the tubes are putting out somewhere around 16x the light of a 100w tungsten bulb. Meaning that your 4-lamp T5HO rig four feet from a subject will light it about as well as the 100w bulb at one foot, which are realistic numbers for comparing say a hanging shop-light to a desk lamp. (Inverse square law - 4x distance = 1/16th the intensity)
You can't call bullshit without knowing a lot of variables that were never discussed.
And since when has a bare incandescent (which also operates at lower efficiency in the cold, though certainly not as poorly as a CFL) been a directional light source either? Stick a piece of tinfoil behind it to act as a crude reflector.
I've had two of the "dimmable" CFLs (also from HD) die within 48 hours of being installed in a dimmer socket - not even dimmed, mind you. Suffice to say, I'm not continuing to spend 3x as much for a defective product. If yours work properly, it sounds like you're in the lucky minority.
If the only thing that came into play when the designers are doing their thing is usability, laptops would look quite different than they do today. The most comfortable laptop in the world isn't doing much good if it's being outsold 1000:1 because it looks like ass. And like it or not, how it looks is a major factor in how something sells. Look at the $1500 keyboard with a hundred OLED screens in the thing - it types just like a $20 keyboard, but some people are willing to pay for the novelty and looks. It's on a completely different distribution curve of course, but that's to be expected.
While I agree that's an absurdly high margin, Apple isn't a charity - nor is any other computer manufacturer, for that matter. Regardless of what it costs, you're either willing or not willing to pay the premium that they're asking (welcome to the free market, enjoy your stay).
Asshole! You almost gave me a new monitor's worth of debt from projectile laughter.
What does this being winter have to do with anything? Yes, it's fucking cold out, but you'll still have haul yourself down to the nearest Best Buy to pick up the converter box in the summer (IF you're using rabbit-ears right now, and IF you're using an older TV that doesn't have a digital tuner built in) if you were to postpone this another four months.
Like you say, there will be some people caught by surprise regardless. All four of the people who have managed to miss the DTV transition notice commercials aired continually on broadcast stations (even if you're watching on cable/sat).
It's better to get it done with in the winter, if you're going to argue that people are sitting around watching more TV this time of year, because there will be (already are) more channels available for your lazing pleasure when using a DTV tuner, thanks to the lower per-channel bandwidth requirement.
They'd probably be sued for defamation or libel.
Rolling over and playing dead? I think this move would equate more closely with the ISP execs flying down to RIAA HQ in their private jets (paid for with your outrageously high subscription fees, mind you) to fellate Mitch Bainwol and his friends.
I know I shouldn't feed the troll here, but RAID is most definitely a backup when you're using it to store all of your backups. Or are you suggesting that Mozy, Carbonite, Amazon S3/JungleDisk, et al are all running JBOD?
That said, you still want something offsite, which "Build your own Damn Ubuntu RAUD sever, damnit!" doesn't usually address.
How is saying that you like your employer's product fraud? Used in this context it's certainly an undisclosed conflict of interests, but that's not illegal and certainly not fraud - just being an asshat.
It's not like they're going around and one-starring their competitors products, which could be perceived as libel depending on the context and contents of the review. Unless they made false positive claims about the company ("not only did they restore my data, but they bought me a new computer and gave me a kitten for the inconvenience" kind of stuff), there's no legal wrongdoing here.
If we're going to make political statements out of software, then is it safe to equate republicans with spyware?
FBDIMMs aren't that bad these days either. Sure, it's more than standard desktop memory, but I paid $300 for 4x2GB sticks for my Mac Pro about six months back, and that same amount has already dropped to a hundred bucks for a 2x2GB kit (about $300 for the higher-density 2x4GB kit). No, it's not the $8/GB I'm seeing at some standard DDR2 sticks at Newegg, but it's hardly crazy-expensive either.
Hell, at that price, I'm almost tempted to get that 8GB kit just because I still have two RAM slots free in the thing, not that my current 10GB isn't cutting it (almost... I'd rather get more storage, or even a nice fast SSD for a boot drive)
Hardly. Microsoft makes probably 1% of its revenue from boxed copies. Most people will have no clue what version of a half dozen options their Dell came with.