That's not really an excuse, though. Cars are plot tools sometimes, but we don't see commuters driving around at 700MPH while fire belches from the 17 exhausts in an otherwise realistic scene.
Oh yes, because an easy to make typo (note the position of the extraneous "r" beside the previously typed "e" key, and the fact that the subject matter is computers and therefore the brain is likely to glance at this and assume it's correct) completely invalidates the article. It's not the greatest article in the world, by any means, but if you have such a low tolerance threshold, how the hell do you manage to read anything online? How does your head not explode reading Slashdot?
I also love it when terrorists are kind enough to color-code their wires to a standard and go to the trouble of attaching a big red countdown clock on their bombs. Very sportsmanlike of them.
It's understandable. It only takes one or two terrorists to sync the internal timer with the clock in their workshop without realising their watch is slightly slow and (assuming they escape relatively unscathed) you've suddenly got a safety-feature evangelist.
Obviously the doubled hosting costs, and the extra time and cost involved in encoding and supporting two different formats is nothing to worry about at all...
At least the license issues are shifted to whoever's serving the video rather than the browser vendor, and it's a lot easier to swap out the codec within a Flash container than it would be to use an alternative to h.264 video and risk turning away any browser that supports only that codec (i.e. IE, or to put it another way, probably the majority of your users). I hate Flash as much as anyone, but let's not be so hasty as to embrace something that might turn out to be even worse without thinking through all the consequences.
And this is a bad thing? Anything that convinces people to get off IE is good in my mind. Let's see. I can use IE and only most web sights will work or I can use Firefox or Chrome and they all will. Sounds like a good move on Microsoft's part to me. That is if you want to see Microsoft's control fall further.
The problem is, they all won't work. People will get sucked into using h.264 because they want to target their widest audience share - nobody running a serious commercial site would put principals before profit and support an open alternative at the expense of turning away IE users, and since Flash will be around for a while to support legacy-browser users, I can see the argument running that that alternative is already "good enough" for people using FF et al. Once we start down that road it will become much more difficult to suddenly open the door to these open source alternatives at a later date. The open source browsers will either have to get on board with h.264 or risk losing the majority of their users, and we'll see a return to the bad old days of IE dominating the web. In fact, that's not worked out too badly for them in the past, gain massive market share in the first years of a new web paradigm, put in a bunch of proprietary hooks that make it hard for people to move away later, then sit back and do no more development for the next five years.
There are plenty of plugins/addons for browsers that do dynamic DOM manipulation - I can't imagine it would be difficult to write a plugin that disabled the video element until/unless required.
I might share your enthusiasm about the iminent explosion of HTML5 development if I wasn't still supporting MS' decade old IE6. Flash isn't going anywhere until the vast, vast majority of users are using HTML5 capable browsers (and even then it'll still have a place for other uses - a lot of which could be done via HTML5, but when a company already has a bunch of Flash developers and HTML5 still supports the object element, why would they switch at great expense).
(Also, I'm one of those people who view the lack of Flash as a feature.)
On the desktop, I've started to use a plugin that blocks flash. This means that, for the most part, it doesn't spoil my experience of the web but when I do occasionally come across a site where I have to use it for whatever reason (I actually had to use it a couple of weeks ago because the site was serving a CAPTCHA with it) I'm not left without options. You might say, if enough people stopped using Flash the sites that relied on it would have to change, and that's a great goal for the future, but it won't help me if I need to use it today. To me, the plugin is a feature, if I couldn't access Flash at all, that would be a disadvantage, as much as I dislike Flash.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the vast majority of the market couldn't care less, and they've said so with their wallets. It's a perfectly legitimate point of view for you to take -- I don't take issue with the validity of it. But "ok, so don't buy it" is also a perfectly legitimate response. iPad doesn't fit your needs; that much is certain. That's ok.
While your comment is also perfectly valid for the market at large, do you think the general readership of this website reflects the market at large, or the niche "want to do more" group? Given the nature of this website it's perfectly natural for the users here to ask why it can't do more, saying "don't buy it" doesn't help at all, unless you think companies should never listen to the opinions of their potential customers.
To me, the second screen only makes sense if one of them uses e-ink. That way you get the best of both worlds, a nice screen for viewing rich media, web browsing, working, etc and a low energy screen with better readability for print which also doubles as extra space for the flashy screen to dump some menus and stuff.
It was probably canned because Microsoft didn't want to be publicly owned again by Apple, Google and the other competitors out there.
They've horribly failed at just about everything except their latest OS upgrade.
I wish I could be a horrible failure at just about everything I do and still be one of the most successful companies on the planet earning billions of dollars a year. Seriously, love or loathe them, they must be doing something right (or at least not as wrong as the competition).
You don't seem to understand how vaporware works. If you actually had a competing product, you wouldn't need vaporware, you'd just promote the real thing you have to offer. But MS has nothing to offer.
Even that would have worked in Apple's favour in this case - since they didn't have enough iPads ready at launch, being able to delay some of the customer demand and still have those customers come back in a couple of months (and have the customers blaming MS' vapourware and not Apple's lack of product for the delay) would only help Apple.
The action would still have to be against the end user rather than the ISP, though. The only question is whether the actions of the ISP are sufficient to provide the user with a defense.
I'm sure our politicians would never be so careless....
Then you must grow 'em smarter over there than we do over here.
Could we borrow some of your breeding stock?
You're assuming that smarter means less greedy. I'd rather have a greedy incompetent politician who screws us over a little than a greedy intelligent politician who screws us over a lot. Of course, what I'd really like is an intelligent politician who wasn't out to line his own pockets, but that's definitely straying into the realms of fantasy.
I can't imagine that happening - even if the Lib Dems get in, they're not going to win by the kind of landslide that lets them pass legislation without the help of at least one of the other major parties. Lab/Con will never vote for it, because they're the big winners in the non-proportional, non-democratic current system. Maybe if the country sees a long-term switch to a three part race, we might see changes along these lines in a few generations, but I won't hold my breath.
We officially support the last two versions of the main browsers by traffic (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome), which is generally great - but unfortunately have a major client whose internal systems are entirely on IE6 (and Citrix!, so we have fun whenever we have to do anything with video or dynamic interactive content). For us it wouldn't make sound financial sense to reject that client's business, but every time we build a new site for them it's the same struggle to get time for IE6 specific development built in on top of the regular budget.
If you have 50 webapps which rely on broken features in IE6 which are known to be security issues and have been fixed in later versions, then the cost to fix is probably nothing compared to the cost of the huge risk you are exposing yourself to by not fixing. I assume companies still do risk analysis of some form!
If only the end were that nigh - that's the end of official support, but security support is going to continue through to 2014 so I suspect IE6 will be around for a while, yet.
In other words, Microsoft stops issuing any patches for IE6 and warns everyone against using it for any reason.
Somehow, I doubt somebody who is still running IE6 will care (or maybe even know) what the recommended best practice is.
But I would hope his IT team know, and even if they're happy to live with the status quo for now, the second security updates stop I would hope they make it very clear why running IE6 is a bad idea. After that, hopefully the powers that be will see sense, but if not at least they're forwarned (and the IT guys should know enough to bail at that point before they get hung out to dry over the first big security SNAFU).
It is absurdly high, but having said that I worked for a bluechip (multinational travel company) two years ago and I think our total IE figures were around 96-97% - that site had as diverse a mix of everyday users as you're likely to see. Depending on his site's target audience (if all his users are corporate, for instance, with locked down browser choice) it's not inconceivable that he could be seeing those figures.
Unfortunately you don't know if you have a skilled administrator until it's too late and you've been infected. Surely it's better to have a skilled administratot and the best software solution for the job, rather than waste your highly paid administrator's time propping up an ancient browser which is notorious for it's security flaws? The third part site issue is a non-starter, it's trivial to give VM access to just that site in IE6, with the added bonus that you somewhat contain any threats that do bypass your scrutiny. The fact is, IE7 was officially released four years ago, so you're either using a web app developed prior to 2006 (are you sure there are no better alternatives around yet?) or you're using a web app developed by someone in the post IE6 days, in which case I would instantly worry about their sanity and the security of their app.
Maybe a better solution would be to give them 10 year old computer equipment to go with their 10 year old browser. Tell them if they're running such outdated software it would be wasteful to give them state of the art machines:)
Slashdot Mirror
That’s what they are.
Plot tools.
That's not really an excuse, though. Cars are plot tools sometimes, but we don't see commuters driving around at 700MPH while fire belches from the 17 exhausts in an otherwise realistic scene.
Oh yes, because an easy to make typo (note the position of the extraneous "r" beside the previously typed "e" key, and the fact that the subject matter is computers and therefore the brain is likely to glance at this and assume it's correct) completely invalidates the article. It's not the greatest article in the world, by any means, but if you have such a low tolerance threshold, how the hell do you manage to read anything online? How does your head not explode reading Slashdot?
I also love it when terrorists are kind enough to color-code their wires to a standard and go to the trouble of attaching a big red countdown clock on their bombs. Very sportsmanlike of them.
It's understandable. It only takes one or two terrorists to sync the internal timer with the clock in their workshop without realising their watch is slightly slow and (assuming they escape relatively unscathed) you've suddenly got a safety-feature evangelist.
Obviously the doubled hosting costs, and the extra time and cost involved in encoding and supporting two different formats is nothing to worry about at all...
At least the license issues are shifted to whoever's serving the video rather than the browser vendor, and it's a lot easier to swap out the codec within a Flash container than it would be to use an alternative to h.264 video and risk turning away any browser that supports only that codec (i.e. IE, or to put it another way, probably the majority of your users). I hate Flash as much as anyone, but let's not be so hasty as to embrace something that might turn out to be even worse without thinking through all the consequences.
And this is a bad thing? Anything that convinces people to get off IE is good in my mind. Let's see. I can use IE and only most web sights will work or I can use Firefox or Chrome and they all will. Sounds like a good move on Microsoft's part to me. That is if you want to see Microsoft's control fall further.
The problem is, they all won't work. People will get sucked into using h.264 because they want to target their widest audience share - nobody running a serious commercial site would put principals before profit and support an open alternative at the expense of turning away IE users, and since Flash will be around for a while to support legacy-browser users, I can see the argument running that that alternative is already "good enough" for people using FF et al. Once we start down that road it will become much more difficult to suddenly open the door to these open source alternatives at a later date. The open source browsers will either have to get on board with h.264 or risk losing the majority of their users, and we'll see a return to the bad old days of IE dominating the web. In fact, that's not worked out too badly for them in the past, gain massive market share in the first years of a new web paradigm, put in a bunch of proprietary hooks that make it hard for people to move away later, then sit back and do no more development for the next five years.
There are plenty of plugins/addons for browsers that do dynamic DOM manipulation - I can't imagine it would be difficult to write a plugin that disabled the video element until/unless required.
I might share your enthusiasm about the iminent explosion of HTML5 development if I wasn't still supporting MS' decade old IE6. Flash isn't going anywhere until the vast, vast majority of users are using HTML5 capable browsers (and even then it'll still have a place for other uses - a lot of which could be done via HTML5, but when a company already has a bunch of Flash developers and HTML5 still supports the object element, why would they switch at great expense).
for once microsoft do something that makes sense. Though it would be nice to have support for an open video standard...
Or, to look at it another way, Microsoft stay true to form and support proprietary standards which put open source competition at a disadvantage...
(Also, I'm one of those people who view the lack of Flash as a feature.)
On the desktop, I've started to use a plugin that blocks flash. This means that, for the most part, it doesn't spoil my experience of the web but when I do occasionally come across a site where I have to use it for whatever reason (I actually had to use it a couple of weeks ago because the site was serving a CAPTCHA with it) I'm not left without options. You might say, if enough people stopped using Flash the sites that relied on it would have to change, and that's a great goal for the future, but it won't help me if I need to use it today. To me, the plugin is a feature, if I couldn't access Flash at all, that would be a disadvantage, as much as I dislike Flash.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the vast majority of the market couldn't care less, and they've said so with their wallets. It's a perfectly legitimate point of view for you to take -- I don't take issue with the validity of it. But "ok, so don't buy it" is also a perfectly legitimate response. iPad doesn't fit your needs; that much is certain. That's ok.
While your comment is also perfectly valid for the market at large, do you think the general readership of this website reflects the market at large, or the niche "want to do more" group? Given the nature of this website it's perfectly natural for the users here to ask why it can't do more, saying "don't buy it" doesn't help at all, unless you think companies should never listen to the opinions of their potential customers.
If someone can come up with a UI that is at least as finger-friendly as iPhone OS I can get someone in China to come up with the hardware.
Android+SenseUI looks like it does the trick.
To me, the second screen only makes sense if one of them uses e-ink. That way you get the best of both worlds, a nice screen for viewing rich media, web browsing, working, etc and a low energy screen with better readability for print which also doubles as extra space for the flashy screen to dump some menus and stuff.
It was probably canned because Microsoft didn't want to be publicly owned again by Apple, Google and the other competitors out there.
They've horribly failed at just about everything except their latest OS upgrade.
I wish I could be a horrible failure at just about everything I do and still be one of the most successful companies on the planet earning billions of dollars a year. Seriously, love or loathe them, they must be doing something right (or at least not as wrong as the competition).
You don't seem to understand how vaporware works. If you actually had a competing product, you wouldn't need vaporware, you'd just promote the real thing you have to offer. But MS has nothing to offer.
Even that would have worked in Apple's favour in this case - since they didn't have enough iPads ready at launch, being able to delay some of the customer demand and still have those customers come back in a couple of months (and have the customers blaming MS' vapourware and not Apple's lack of product for the delay) would only help Apple.
The action would still have to be against the end user rather than the ISP, though. The only question is whether the actions of the ISP are sufficient to provide the user with a defense.
I'm sure our politicians would never be so careless....
Then you must grow 'em smarter over there than we do over here.
Could we borrow some of your breeding stock?
You're assuming that smarter means less greedy. I'd rather have a greedy incompetent politician who screws us over a little than a greedy intelligent politician who screws us over a lot. Of course, what I'd really like is an intelligent politician who wasn't out to line his own pockets, but that's definitely straying into the realms of fantasy.
I can't imagine that happening - even if the Lib Dems get in, they're not going to win by the kind of landslide that lets them pass legislation without the help of at least one of the other major parties. Lab/Con will never vote for it, because they're the big winners in the non-proportional, non-democratic current system. Maybe if the country sees a long-term switch to a three part race, we might see changes along these lines in a few generations, but I won't hold my breath.
We officially support the last two versions of the main browsers by traffic (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome), which is generally great - but unfortunately have a major client whose internal systems are entirely on IE6 (and Citrix!, so we have fun whenever we have to do anything with video or dynamic interactive content). For us it wouldn't make sound financial sense to reject that client's business, but every time we build a new site for them it's the same struggle to get time for IE6 specific development built in on top of the regular budget.
If you have 50 webapps which rely on broken features in IE6 which are known to be security issues and have been fixed in later versions, then the cost to fix is probably nothing compared to the cost of the huge risk you are exposing yourself to by not fixing. I assume companies still do risk analysis of some form!
If only the end were that nigh - that's the end of official support, but security support is going to continue through to 2014 so I suspect IE6 will be around for a while, yet.
In other words, Microsoft stops issuing any patches for IE6 and warns everyone against using it for any reason.
Somehow, I doubt somebody who is still running IE6 will care (or maybe even know) what the recommended best practice is.
But I would hope his IT team know, and even if they're happy to live with the status quo for now, the second security updates stop I would hope they make it very clear why running IE6 is a bad idea. After that, hopefully the powers that be will see sense, but if not at least they're forwarned (and the IT guys should know enough to bail at that point before they get hung out to dry over the first big security SNAFU).
It is absurdly high, but having said that I worked for a bluechip (multinational travel company) two years ago and I think our total IE figures were around 96-97% - that site had as diverse a mix of everyday users as you're likely to see. Depending on his site's target audience (if all his users are corporate, for instance, with locked down browser choice) it's not inconceivable that he could be seeing those figures.
Unfortunately you don't know if you have a skilled administrator until it's too late and you've been infected. Surely it's better to have a skilled administratot and the best software solution for the job, rather than waste your highly paid administrator's time propping up an ancient browser which is notorious for it's security flaws? The third part site issue is a non-starter, it's trivial to give VM access to just that site in IE6, with the added bonus that you somewhat contain any threats that do bypass your scrutiny. The fact is, IE7 was officially released four years ago, so you're either using a web app developed prior to 2006 (are you sure there are no better alternatives around yet?) or you're using a web app developed by someone in the post IE6 days, in which case I would instantly worry about their sanity and the security of their app.
Maybe a better solution would be to give them 10 year old computer equipment to go with their 10 year old browser. Tell them if they're running such outdated software it would be wasteful to give them state of the art machines :)