Every attempt of Microsoft to find a new and profitable business has relied upon leveraging Microsoft's desktop monopoly.
Oh yeah, that explains the success of Microsoft Games and Microsoft Hardware in a nutshell. Oh wait no it doesn't... I seem to have no problems at all playing my Xbox 360 or using my Microsoft-branded keyboard on my Apple G5 computer.
(Christ, do you people engage your brains for even a fraction of a second before modding BS like this up?)
OpenOffice is great if you work alone, but unfortunately it's not even remotely close to competing with Microsoft Office in an workplace environment. Outlook alone puts MS Office far ahead of the game, and programs like Sharepoint and Infopath. If you're a student, or absorb a lot of presentations, MS Office has OneNote. Hell, I usually do work alone, and MS Office's far superior outlining features is enough for me to dumb OpenOffice and switch.
I'm tired of hearing how OpenOffice is going to save the world when it can't even compete with the dominent market player. Let's see OpenOffice get something even remotely close to feature-parity, *then* we can talk about taking over the world, ok?
I don't see why it's such a big deal, unless you never backup you data (in which case you have bigger problems.) Just set up your backup software and dive in. Who knows, you might like it, huh? And sky is actually falling, you just put on XP and restore your backup.
"Battle scars" sounds like an excuse to be "afraid of change." Although I would say that if you ever lost data to technology, and you didn't have a backup, it's your own damned fault-- every OS/computer maker/software program has been screaming out "back up your data!" for decades now.
I'm not THAT upset with it. Javascript + DOM is a good tool, but I feel the real problem is that the designers of these technology don't listen to previous solutions to the problems encountered on the web.
Why did it take until CSS 3.0 to get easy-to-use columns? The New York Times has been using columns for 150+ years; why did the CSS implementers feel they should just dump all that publishing experience in the toilet and do things their own way?
Likewise, CSS which is supposed to free us from table-based layouts is really terrible at reproducing some effects which are trivial with tables. For example, centering content vertically on the page. (It can be done with CSS, but it's a hack.) If you're going to sell CSS as a replacement to table-based layouts, you need to first make sure that CSS is capable of doing all the things table-based layouts can do easily. (Columns, another great example; awkward in CSS, almost trivial with tables.)
Javascript + DOM has "getElementById", "getElementsByTagName", "getElementsByName"... but for some headache-inducing reason it doesn't have "getElementsByClassName". Why not? WHY NOT!? GAH!
Why doesn't the spec define one of the fundamental differences between Mozilla and IE in the DOM: should non-displaying text in the original HTML document appear as text nodes in the DOM? IE says no; Mozilla says yes; web developers say make up your damned mind, I keep having to write workarounds for this crap! (Personally I like IE's implementation better. If it doesn't display on screen, it doesn't need to be in the DOM.)
So just show a little patience, I sure given a few more years they will eventually manage to kill off the majority of un-like minded humans and poison the rest of the planet for the next few thousand generations, all to feed unlimited greed.
Oh please, people have been saying that since Roman times, and we're still all right here. Are there wars? Yes. Is the human race at risk? No.
I just ran Safari on Windows, and if it fails it fails in an incredibly subtle way. The images look identical to me. It's more likely the website is out-of-date, considering Safari on Windows is still beta and definitely a moving target.
The thing people seem to forget is that IE was developed before these standards were even finished. It's not that Microsoft is specifically trying to break every standard they can find, it's that when they added in rudimentary CSS support originally, the CSS box model *was not defined* the way it is now. Netscape had fundamentally the same problem, which is why Netscape 4 had such abysmal CSS support and had to be rewritten from scratch to work to the specs.
Given that, the only places where they differ from the standards significantly for for adding new functionality from scratch that there are no specs for, for example ActiveX support. ActiveX turned out to be a terrible idea, of course, but at least it was implemented in IE in a compatible fashion. (So that browsers that don't understand it will just filter it out using the default HTML rules.)
That's not to say Microsoft is entirely guilt-free in any sense, but I don't think they're nearly the malicious monster Slashdot makes them out to be. And, damnit, I think IE's interpretation of how the box model works makes a *hell* of a lot more sense than the CSS standard one. (If I say I want the box to be 40 pixels wide, make it 40 pixels wide damnit!!)
I just tried Safari "3.0.4 (523.12.9)" (I have no idea what those version numbers mean) on Windows XP SP2, and it rendered the ACID2 page exactly like the reference says it's supposed to look. Opera passes as well, Firefox and IE both fail in different ways.
BTW, the Safari for Windows beta is free. If you can download software on your computer, give it a try.
Using an SR-71 to look for smoke signals would definitely be a waste of resources, but there's no reason it wouldn't work; they can fly low enough and they have as much glass as any other aircraft.
What I'm basically saying, is that "peace" is a prerequisite for achieving "space age",
I've always thought this was BS.
because "space age" comes only far later after "big weapons" in the technological development, and without "peace", a civilisation may blow it's entire planet at the "big weapons" stage, long before being able to achieve "space age".
To quote Brain Guy in MST3K: "Our race is pacifist. We kill only out of personal spite."
Not using big weapons doesn't imply peaceful, it only implies not using big weapons. After all, we have nukes right now, and we're in a war right now, and we're not using nukes to fight the war. But that doesn't change the fact that we're killing people, it just means we're doing it in a more targeted manner than using big weapons allows.
Apple bundle Safari, but it's trivial to remove in it's entirety (or simply not install), different linux distributions bundle different browsers and they can always be removed/replaced easily... What windows distributors (ie OEMs) really need is the ability to remove ie completely and replace it with a third party browser, instead of being forced to install the third party browser alongside the buggy outdated one that's built in.
But when you remove Safari from an Apple computer, WebKit remains. The Help system relies on it, and probably tons of other OS components. In the same manner, the Help system in Windows and Linux distributions relies on the HTML renderer, whichever one is used.
Since all modern OSes need an HTML renderer anyway, what's the harm in shoving a GUI around it and calling it "Internet Explorer?" (Or Safari, or Konquerer, or whatever.) If Opera's arguing that Microsoft should ship their OS with no HTML renderer by default, well, that's a ridiculous demand.
Ever since Adobe sued Microsoft for bundling a PDF writer in with Office 2007, Microsoft has been pushing out a series of patches that breaks Flash Player content in IE.
Can you cite something?
Microsoft was sued by Eolas over a software plug-in patent they owned, and they altered (not broke) the way Flash content behaves in IE. (Basically, they made it so you have to focus the Flash by clicking on it before you could interact with the Flash.) But that was: 1) Not their idea, it was the result of a lawsuit, and 2) Long before Adobe sued Microsoft.
In any case, if your accusation is true, good for MS! Adobe's lawsuit about PDF is the most idiotic thing I've ever seen. You can't say PDF is an open standard and then sue a company that implements it, WTF.
More relevant, I think, is that the OS needs the HTML viewer component anyway, so why not include a free browser with it? Windows uses the IE "engine" code in tons of places, everywhere from control panels, to folder listings, to help files... it *has* to ship with that component. IE is just a nice little GUI to go with it.
Apple publishes WebKit in the exact same way, and Safari is just a nice little GUI to webkit.
Ditto with... whatever HTML viewer component Linux distributions use.
The guy works for Microsoft, what do you expect? If your intent was truly to point out it was written by someone with a vested interest in Microsoft, then, well, DUH!!!
But don't question the facts unless you can back them up. IIS is reliable and secure, and has been since Windows Server 2003 came out.
All of eBay is (or at least was a year ago) run on Microsoft servers, and while they have problems with scammers, they don't have any availability problems to speak of. And they're still running some ancient (relatively-speaking) code. Of course, they're also big enough that if they did have problems with the latest Windows, Microsoft would definitely step in on their behalf and get it fixed.
This guy is brainwashed. There should be no unused services turned on by default! Admins shouldn't have to shutoff unused services -- they shouldn't be enabled unless necessary.
Windows Server 2003 (and presumably 2008) already ship this way.
Uh, didn't I read an article not too long ago about how the update.microsoft.com site was broken into?
No, it was "windowsupdate.com" which is owned by MS, but not the actual Windows Update site (that site is located at windowsupdate.microsoft.com.) Also, it wasn't "broken into" it was the subject of a DDoS attack my a virus/trojan, in a futile attempt to prevent infected users from installing the update that removed the virus. (The hacker must have been a little stupid to DDoS the wrong domain though!)
Those radioisotopes are *guaranteed* to save lives, imagine how many potentially dangerous medical conditions are discovered by imaging equipment every year.
The plant is missing backup equipment that were originally considered optional, and it's been operating just fine (and perfectly safely) without them for many years.
Why are you bothering to respond? He's obviously just come to his computer after watching Jurassic Park too many times, and he's not going to listen to reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Every attempt of Microsoft to find a new and profitable business has relied upon leveraging Microsoft's desktop monopoly.
Oh yeah, that explains the success of Microsoft Games and Microsoft Hardware in a nutshell. Oh wait no it doesn't... I seem to have no problems at all playing my Xbox 360 or using my Microsoft-branded keyboard on my Apple G5 computer.
(Christ, do you people engage your brains for even a fraction of a second before modding BS like this up?)
OpenOffice is great if you work alone, but unfortunately it's not even remotely close to competing with Microsoft Office in an workplace environment. Outlook alone puts MS Office far ahead of the game, and programs like Sharepoint and Infopath. If you're a student, or absorb a lot of presentations, MS Office has OneNote. Hell, I usually do work alone, and MS Office's far superior outlining features is enough for me to dumb OpenOffice and switch.
I'm tired of hearing how OpenOffice is going to save the world when it can't even compete with the dominent market player. Let's see OpenOffice get something even remotely close to feature-parity, *then* we can talk about taking over the world, ok?
I don't see why it's such a big deal, unless you never backup you data (in which case you have bigger problems.) Just set up your backup software and dive in. Who knows, you might like it, huh? And sky is actually falling, you just put on XP and restore your backup.
"Battle scars" sounds like an excuse to be "afraid of change." Although I would say that if you ever lost data to technology, and you didn't have a backup, it's your own damned fault-- every OS/computer maker/software program has been screaming out "back up your data!" for decades now.
I'm not THAT upset with it. Javascript + DOM is a good tool, but I feel the real problem is that the designers of these technology don't listen to previous solutions to the problems encountered on the web.
Why did it take until CSS 3.0 to get easy-to-use columns? The New York Times has been using columns for 150+ years; why did the CSS implementers feel they should just dump all that publishing experience in the toilet and do things their own way?
Likewise, CSS which is supposed to free us from table-based layouts is really terrible at reproducing some effects which are trivial with tables. For example, centering content vertically on the page. (It can be done with CSS, but it's a hack.) If you're going to sell CSS as a replacement to table-based layouts, you need to first make sure that CSS is capable of doing all the things table-based layouts can do easily. (Columns, another great example; awkward in CSS, almost trivial with tables.)
Javascript + DOM has "getElementById", "getElementsByTagName", "getElementsByName"... but for some headache-inducing reason it doesn't have "getElementsByClassName". Why not? WHY NOT!? GAH!
Why doesn't the spec define one of the fundamental differences between Mozilla and IE in the DOM: should non-displaying text in the original HTML document appear as text nodes in the DOM? IE says no; Mozilla says yes; web developers say make up your damned mind, I keep having to write workarounds for this crap! (Personally I like IE's implementation better. If it doesn't display on screen, it doesn't need to be in the DOM.)
In short, I think there's far too much theory and not enough practice in these technologies. What we need is *practical* development. Which is why I'm all behind HTML 5, BTW, it focuses on the practical realities of the web and not some pie-in-the-sky idea you'll never get anybody to follow. Do you seriously think a webpage like, say, this: http://www2.jcpenney.com/jcp/ProductList.aspx?deptid=25439&pcatid=25864&catid=27010&cattyp=DEP&dep=Housewares&pcat=COOKWARE&cat=Stainless+Steel&refpagename=WindowSolutionHOM%252Easpx&refdeptid=25439&refcatid=25864&cmAMS_T=H9&cmAMS_C=C5&CmCatId=25439|25864 will ever meet the XHTML ideals?
I haven't tossed vista in the trashbin. I'm merely delaying my adoption of it until it's more stable.
How do you know it's not stable if you haven't tried it?
Seriously, for being a "tech site" Slashdot is full of so many people who are so afraid of new technology, it just always blows me away.
Did you even bother to try? Or did you just toss Vista in the trashbin because you swallowed the Slashdot groupthink?
Vista might not be the second-coming of operating systems, but it's pretty damned good. To normal, non-Slashdotters.
Protip: Don't bother to say "not to be rude" if the last part of the sentence is extremely rude. That makes you rude *and* a liar.
So just show a little patience, I sure given a few more years they will eventually manage to kill off the majority of un-like minded humans and poison the rest of the planet for the next few thousand generations, all to feed unlimited greed.
Oh please, people have been saying that since Roman times, and we're still all right here. Are there wars? Yes. Is the human race at risk? No.
Stop being so goddamned pessimistic.
I just ran Safari on Windows, and if it fails it fails in an incredibly subtle way. The images look identical to me. It's more likely the website is out-of-date, considering Safari on Windows is still beta and definitely a moving target.
The thing people seem to forget is that IE was developed before these standards were even finished. It's not that Microsoft is specifically trying to break every standard they can find, it's that when they added in rudimentary CSS support originally, the CSS box model *was not defined* the way it is now. Netscape had fundamentally the same problem, which is why Netscape 4 had such abysmal CSS support and had to be rewritten from scratch to work to the specs.
Given that, the only places where they differ from the standards significantly for for adding new functionality from scratch that there are no specs for, for example ActiveX support. ActiveX turned out to be a terrible idea, of course, but at least it was implemented in IE in a compatible fashion. (So that browsers that don't understand it will just filter it out using the default HTML rules.)
That's not to say Microsoft is entirely guilt-free in any sense, but I don't think they're nearly the malicious monster Slashdot makes them out to be. And, damnit, I think IE's interpretation of how the box model works makes a *hell* of a lot more sense than the CSS standard one. (If I say I want the box to be 40 pixels wide, make it 40 pixels wide damnit!!)
I just tried Safari "3.0.4 (523.12.9)" (I have no idea what those version numbers mean) on Windows XP SP2, and it rendered the ACID2 page exactly like the reference says it's supposed to look. Opera passes as well, Firefox and IE both fail in different ways.
BTW, the Safari for Windows beta is free. If you can download software on your computer, give it a try.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!
Using an SR-71 to look for smoke signals would definitely be a waste of resources, but there's no reason it wouldn't work; they can fly low enough and they have as much glass as any other aircraft.
Look-- if I gave in to every little special interest group...
http://xenon.xe.net/inthumor/ih_038.htm
What I'm basically saying, is that "peace" is a prerequisite for achieving "space age",
I've always thought this was BS.
because "space age" comes only far later after "big weapons" in the technological development,
and without "peace", a civilisation may blow it's entire planet at the "big weapons" stage, long before being able to achieve "space age".
To quote Brain Guy in MST3K: "Our race is pacifist. We kill only out of personal spite."
Not using big weapons doesn't imply peaceful, it only implies not using big weapons. After all, we have nukes right now, and we're in a war right now, and we're not using nukes to fight the war. But that doesn't change the fact that we're killing people, it just means we're doing it in a more targeted manner than using big weapons allows.
Apple bundle Safari, but it's trivial to remove in it's entirety (or simply not install), different linux distributions bundle different browsers and they can always be removed/replaced easily... What windows distributors (ie OEMs) really need is the ability to remove ie completely and replace it with a third party browser, instead of being forced to install the third party browser alongside the buggy outdated one that's built in.
But when you remove Safari from an Apple computer, WebKit remains. The Help system relies on it, and probably tons of other OS components. In the same manner, the Help system in Windows and Linux distributions relies on the HTML renderer, whichever one is used.
Since all modern OSes need an HTML renderer anyway, what's the harm in shoving a GUI around it and calling it "Internet Explorer?" (Or Safari, or Konquerer, or whatever.) If Opera's arguing that Microsoft should ship their OS with no HTML renderer by default, well, that's a ridiculous demand.
Ever since Adobe sued Microsoft for bundling a PDF writer in with Office 2007, Microsoft has been pushing out a series of patches that breaks Flash Player content in IE.
Can you cite something?
Microsoft was sued by Eolas over a software plug-in patent they owned, and they altered (not broke) the way Flash content behaves in IE. (Basically, they made it so you have to focus the Flash by clicking on it before you could interact with the Flash.) But that was:
1) Not their idea, it was the result of a lawsuit, and
2) Long before Adobe sued Microsoft.
In any case, if your accusation is true, good for MS! Adobe's lawsuit about PDF is the most idiotic thing I've ever seen. You can't say PDF is an open standard and then sue a company that implements it, WTF.
More relevant, I think, is that the OS needs the HTML viewer component anyway, so why not include a free browser with it? Windows uses the IE "engine" code in tons of places, everywhere from control panels, to folder listings, to help files... it *has* to ship with that component. IE is just a nice little GUI to go with it.
... whatever HTML viewer component Linux distributions use.
Apple publishes WebKit in the exact same way, and Safari is just a nice little GUI to webkit.
Ditto with
The guy works for Microsoft, what do you expect? If your intent was truly to point out it was written by someone with a vested interest in Microsoft, then, well, DUH!!!
But don't question the facts unless you can back them up. IIS is reliable and secure, and has been since Windows Server 2003 came out.
All of eBay is (or at least was a year ago) run on Microsoft servers, and while they have problems with scammers, they don't have any availability problems to speak of. And they're still running some ancient (relatively-speaking) code. Of course, they're also big enough that if they did have problems with the latest Windows, Microsoft would definitely step in on their behalf and get it fixed.
This guy is brainwashed. There should be no unused services turned on by default! Admins shouldn't have to shutoff unused services -- they shouldn't be enabled unless necessary.
Windows Server 2003 (and presumably 2008) already ship this way.
Uh, didn't I read an article not too long ago about how the update.microsoft.com site was broken into?
No, it was "windowsupdate.com" which is owned by MS, but not the actual Windows Update site (that site is located at windowsupdate.microsoft.com.) Also, it wasn't "broken into" it was the subject of a DDoS attack my a virus/trojan, in a futile attempt to prevent infected users from installing the update that removed the virus. (The hacker must have been a little stupid to DDoS the wrong domain though!)
Those radioisotopes are *guaranteed* to save lives, imagine how many potentially dangerous medical conditions are discovered by imaging equipment every year.
The plant is missing backup equipment that were originally considered optional, and it's been operating just fine (and perfectly safely) without them for many years.
This was the right decision.
In fact, I'd rather have a cat that emits powerful gamma ray bursts or something so it could at least take out the neighbors cat.
We'll make it 8' tall and call it Q. T. McWhiskers!
(And wait until you see the new 16' model!)
Why are you bothering to respond? He's obviously just come to his computer after watching Jurassic Park too many times, and he's not going to listen to reason.
You don't like ANY of the games on that list? I find that kind of hard to believe. What if the list included the more casual titles, like Viva Pinata?