I'm sorry, but I think you're overstating the actual use of word processors by most people.
Think what you like.
And Netscape 4 had if I recall correctly 3 entire programs that IE didn't - mail/newsgroup clients, web page creation software, and some other thing I forget (push screensavers?).
Yeah, or as I like to call them: "Crash", "Hang", and "WTF is This Doing in My Browser?" Also, are you posting from some parallel universe where Outlook Express and Frontpage didn't exist?
Now, you might point to outlook express, but back in the IE4 days, I don't recall it being obvious that was related to IE... It certainly wasn't integrated like the mail client was to Communicator.
Oh, it doesn't count that every computer with IE also had an email client because Outlook Express wasn't "obviously related" to IE... of course! That makes perfect sense and you are truly a genius!
The last version of Netscape you could get as *just* a browser was 4.0.8. The last version in the 4.x series, IIRC, was Communicator 4.7.something. Since I didn't need all that other bullshit Netscape crammed into their browser, just in case it wasn't buggy enough on its own, I was stuck using an ancient version until I finally just bit the bullet and moved to IE.
In short, Outlook Express not being obviously related (or related at all, really) to IE was a BOON. That was the best reason to use it instead of that crashy, unstable Netscape Communicator.
And for the education of people like me, what the heck is "normal view" or a split scrollbar, and why the heck would I want it?
Normal View is a display mode which gets rid of stuff extraneous to writing-- for example, embedded media or page breaks-- so you can simply concentrate on the process of getting words from your brain to the page.
A split scrollbar is exactly what it says on the tin. You can grab a little handle on the scrollbar to see (and edit) two parts of the document at once, very handy when you're writing text that refers to another piece of text you've already written, but are too far apart to see at once.
Oddly enough, OpenOffice Calc has a split scrollbar, but Writer does not. They don't even give a crap if their features are internally-consistent or not.
As in, how is this a feature I'm going to use for writing up a letter or report?
You might also be interested in Word's vastly superior Outline pane if you're writing a report. It lets you change the structure of your document in seconds without having to copy and paste huge chunks of text around.
I'm not sure I buy this argument... I mean, Microsoft isn't currently really threatened by OpenOffice, even though it's free and generally equivalent to Office as far as I can tell. At least as similar as Netscape vs IE were...
OpenOffice isn't even close to equivalent to Office. I mean, it is for Slashdot-posting geeks who don't use a word processor or presentation software at all, but for those who do? Night and day. OpenOffice is still missing features that were perfected in MS Office in 1997, like "Normal View" or a split scrollbar. Far bigger gap than that between, say, Netscape 4 and IE4.
It's not an indication they can't stick to their principles, we're talking about gamers here, they just wanted to draw attention to the fact that they wanted dedicated servers. Sure it says boycott but like immature gamers really meant it, anyone who is not retarded could have predicted the outcome.
So they're not hypocrites because you're expectations of the group are so low, you didn't expect them to follow-through anyway?
Fact is gaming companies are increasingly douchebags who on hit titles can get away with it because lets face it , most people have not played the last 15 or so years of FPS games from doom on.
The more relevant fact in this case is that MW2's sales on consoles far, far, far outstripped their sales on PC. Frankly, even if the boycott had worked, Activision wouldn't be out much-- heck, if they do the math, they might actually come out ahead if they don't bother with a PC port in the first place for the next version! (Once you add in support costs, bad press from the server thing, etc.)
MW2 is a good game but that's not saying much, it's not hard to make a good FPS today since game developers have got the FPS down to a science.
Yah, that's why Shadowrun was so great. Oh wait, it sucked balls.
If Opera is so great, then why didn't it gain any marketshare even when it was the *only* browser competing with IE6? You can be blind to the usability issues it had at the time if you like, but the simple fact is that the web-using public obviously agreed that the browser sucked... otherwise, it might have gained a little bit of marketshare.
Opera's usability is much, much better now. But we're not talking about now.
You're ignoring the fucking POINT of the post and focusing on some PIDDLY LITTLE DETAIL of the example so you can show off your huge brain and all it's stored bullshit about the history of Toyota.
Ok, WE GET IT, Toyota is an old company and Grishnakh is the SMARTEST HUMAN BEING ALIVE. Happy?
Now either respond to the POINT of my post, or shut the fuck up and stop filling this forum will bullshit. If you're like this in real life, I can't imagine how you avoid getting strangled every fucking day.
If it had really been a superior product, nobody would have been making a fuss. It wasn't.
I'm sorry, do you *remember* Netscape 4? IE was a far superior product, on both Windows and Macintosh. (And on Macintosh it won the market fair and square, there being no "stranglehold.")
What part of "was building cars" did you not understand?
WTF. You said in YOUR OWN VERY UNSOLICITED HISTORY LESSON that Pontiac was building cars 7 years before Toyota was. Which makes you wonder why the holy fuck you posted it.
How can you be so fucking pedantic about history, and so clueless about grammar at the same time?
Yes, I am. Let's see some examples of tasks a professional sysadmin is asked to do every day: "what was the name of that Java file Fred used about five years ago which called the zeepto function?", "how much disk space is used by all the src directories?", "where is the most recently read file that uses the xxrk library?", ando so on.
I was a sysadmin and I was never asked to do any tasks like that. Of course, our shop used Lotus Notes, so most of my requests were like: "How come my out of office isn't working?" "My PDA won't sync with my email or calendar." "I'm a remote user, and now Notes says my ID file is invalid? What does that mean?"
So right there, your entire premise here is on shaky ground.
Despite that, I move that a skilled Windows admin could answer all of those questions just as well as a skilled Unix admin.
This is the kind of work that Unix has been doing very easily for four decades by now.
Ok, but that doesn't say anything at all about the relative merits of both OSes right now.
I mean, Pontiac was building cars much earlier than Toyota was. Which would you rather drive now, though?
Yeah, Emacs had that in the eighties. By the time IE5 came out it could also transparently access remote directories and files via a number of other protocols, including ssh.
What do you want, a cookie? How is this relevant? Who gives a shit?
ITYM which nobody used *on purpose*.
I used it on purpose. It was a quick and easy way to get a different background image on each desktop if you had multiple monitors. (Something which is virtually impossible now that it's been removed, I might add.) Also, putting goofy Flash movies on your desktop was a hoot.
I'm not saying it's useless, I'm saying in retrospect it's not useful *enough* to justify IE-Explorer integration.
Hell, arguably the "widgets" craze of the last 5 years was just a rehash of Active Desktop, just presented in a slightly different way. What's the difference between a "widget" and a piece of Active Desktop content? Nada.
Then when random weird stuff started happening (e.g., all their icons disappeared), they didn't know why.
I don't know why, either. What are you talking about?
If it had only been plain old HTML content that it rendered (not also plugins and ActiveX and who only knows what else), it wouldn't have been as much of a problem.
Not AS much, but still one. A ton of exploits were/are in the code that renders images, which you need even if you're "just" parsing HTML. If you expand that to CSS also, you open up a new vector again.
And anyway, applications like Steam would be impossible of MSHTML.DLL didn't run plug-ins.
I consider IE8 to be a great success in that regard. And yeah, from a security standpoint, it's not perfect, but it's MUCH better than IE6.
Now if only people would upgrade their 9 year old computers.
And how about filesystems? The simple fact that the directory separator is the backslash, which is used as the escape sequence initiator in C-like languages, is a PITA.
Possibly, but considering that it's been backwards-compatible with DOS since day one, I don't know why you would expect otherwise. Back when DOS chose it in the first place, systems didn't inter-operate, so nobody was thinking "wait, in 20 years this is going to be a pain in the ass!"
What character would you prefer? One that's less of a "pain in the ass?" Old Mac Classic used colon (:) and I can assure you that it was a complete pain in the ass. Forward-slash is used in RegEx and argument switches and for dozens of other things.
Plus you are limited to 26 different filesystems, one for each alphabet letter. And you cannot use a name for mount points, just one letter.
If you've used Windows 2000, you know that's been complete bunk for a decade now. Windows 2000 has mount points, welcome to 1999!
I could go on and on, for any professional systems administrator, Unix is far superior to Windows, there is no doubt about that.
Are you claiming you're one? I'd expect a professional systems administrator to know a teeny bit more about Windows.
It's only for home computers that familiarity is a convenience, professionals can be readily trained to use a system that's intrinsically easier to use.
And now are you claiming that Bash is intrinsically easier to use than Windows? Because there's decades of evidence to the contrary.
Microsoft didn't driver browsers out of the market, Opera was "in the market" the entire time you're referring to.
Microsoft's (serious) competitors gave up, once that happened, Microsoft had no incentive to work on improving IE whatsoever. If Netscape had continued to put out products instead of doing their bullshit rewrite crap, none of this would have happened in the first place.
That's not to say Microsoft has no blame, but on the other hand if Netscape had stopped releasing products *regardless of the reason*, we would have ended up with the same problem.
I think the big issue is "people are not upgrading."
There should be zero copies of IE6 in the wild right now. I don't care how big your corporation is, how shitty the "enterprise" software you purchased back in '99 is, but figure it the fuck out and get your people off IE6 right now. And then? There's no excuse for this bullshit, and I don't want to hear any sob stories.
IE7 has been out now for over 3 years, if you can't figure out how to move to it by now, you should be fired.
That being said, this is largely Microsoft's fault. By integrating the browser so closely to the OS, they've managed to create this complexity. A clean(er) separation of web browser from OS internals would, while not making things simple, would surely reduce the current clusterfuck.
But they'd *still* have to update the MSHTML.DLL library (the integrated part) as well as the browser itself... otherwise the exploit would just move from web sites to compiled help files. I mean, if your exploit won't work in IE proper, maybe it works fine if you view the same page through, say, Steam's browser.
The only real thing you can blame Microsoft for, IMO, is encouraging applications to use IE's rendering library to render HTML. But... what's the alternative? Every HTML-using application on your computer has its own browser core? How many security vulnerabilities would we have now?
I agree entirely that integrating Windows Explorer with MSHTML.DLL was a bad idea, especially since the benefits were so nebulous. (Ability to natively open FTP sites as if they were folders, and Active Desktop which nobody used. And the former was easy to implement without MSHTML.DLL.)
But personally I think this is more of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. There's nothing wrong with the OS providing a service as universal as "viewing HTML content", and every non-Windows OS does that as well.
And obviously it's IE's fault and not the GIANT SECURITY HOLE MASCARADING AS UTILITY Adobe Reader?
What version if IE are you running, anyway? If you're in Vista or newer, or using IE7 or newer, even Adobe Reader shouldn't be able to do jack to you-- it runs in a sandbox. (And you wouldn't be logging in as admin.)
Also, it never occurred to you that Firefox's crashing was probably due to this site trying to execute code?
I mean, I'm not pretending that IE is the most secure browser ever. (Although I do believe that security in IE 8 + Windows 7 is on-par with all other browsers). But if I had the choice between IE and Adobe Reader, I'd pick IE in a heartbeat.
They pay for the current disaster from their general fund, and donations go into the fund for the *next* disaster. That way, when something like this happens they don't have to wait for people to begin contributing before they can spring into action.
I mean, I can understand your concern, but on the other hand-- if Red Cross had that money in-hand right now, would they be able to do more than they are already doing? I'd wager they're more limited by the inaccessibility of the country than anything relating to cashflow.
You'll never get hired full-time at Microsoft from Volt. Possibly another contract agency, but as long as you're with Volt you might as well learn to love that orange badge.
Well, you do have a point that judging "Google Search the product" is a really different experience from judging "Google Search the tool."
but dont seem to understand my 'but the actual search experience on bing is nearly unbearable to me' response.
Well, with all due respect:
1) That's because it's irrelevant to how Google and Bing do business. I mean, I can't stand Lotus Notes as a product, but it doesn't influence how I'd look at IBM if I were thinking about investing in them. (For example.)
2) With all due respect, you're probably knee-jerking anyway. From my experience working in usability, when people say phrases like "nearly unbearable" without any solid reasons to dislike it, they're just reacting out of habit. People hate change. But that says nothing about the quality of the product.
I rarely if ever click on a paid link, and cannot think of any instance off the top of my head where a paid link looked more appropriate than one of the top organic search results.
Yes, but millions of people do. Billions, perhaps.
Really, it strikes me that Search is itself a sleazy business, insofar as it necessarily can only make money by enticing the user to click not on the result it deems to be the most relevant to the user's search criteria, but rather to the result that has paid to be displayed in conjunction with the user's search criteria.
Is this google's business model, or is the the general public being stupid with browsers, and in what way is this unique to Google?
As far as user behavior, nothing.
But as far as ad attribution, Microsoft uses an attribution model that doesn't give all conversion credit to the last interaction. (Which is typically a "user uses search engine as URL bar"-type interaction.) In other words, they already correct for this.
Note that if you're an Atlas (Microsoft's advertising technology) customer, you can get this attribution correction with Google as well, and you can independently verify whether Google's rates are fair. (Hint: they're inflated.)
Microsoft is excluding the best technical talent from their search group. Google isn't.
Are you seriously suggesting that, if I'm the greatest worldwide expert on Internet search, and I ask Microsoft for a job, they're going to say "fuck off, we'd rather hire idiots that don't know what they're doing"? Is that what you honestly think is happening?
The brain of the average Slashdotter is a scary place. I can't even imagine what strange mis-wiring makes you believe Microsoft would purposefully only use amateurs for a flagship product.
The *generous* explanation is that you're making shit up, and hoped nobody would call you on it.
This is Slashdot, so I'll assume you're a bit technical.
If you take a look at Bing's Javascript, you'll see that the background image and mouseovers only get loaded *after* the rest of the site is fully loaded and functional. It's not affecting load time at all, in a practical sense.
That said, you might have highlighted a usability flaw: because of the way the background image is loaded, people might *think* that the page isn't fully loaded until it appears. I'm not sure if that's the case with your experience-- and I doubt there's anything Bing could do to fix it, short of *actually* slowing down load times by adding some kind of placeholder image.
That also said, most people are going to use Bing from a toolbar or search box and it's a moot point for them anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but I think you're overstating the actual use of word processors by most people.
Think what you like.
And Netscape 4 had if I recall correctly 3 entire programs that IE didn't - mail/newsgroup clients, web page creation software, and some other thing I forget (push screensavers?).
Yeah, or as I like to call them: "Crash", "Hang", and "WTF is This Doing in My Browser?" Also, are you posting from some parallel universe where Outlook Express and Frontpage didn't exist?
Now, you might point to outlook express, but back in the IE4 days, I don't recall it being obvious that was related to IE... It certainly wasn't integrated like the mail client was to Communicator.
Oh, it doesn't count that every computer with IE also had an email client because Outlook Express wasn't "obviously related" to IE... of course! That makes perfect sense and you are truly a genius!
The last version of Netscape you could get as *just* a browser was 4.0.8. The last version in the 4.x series, IIRC, was Communicator 4.7.something. Since I didn't need all that other bullshit Netscape crammed into their browser, just in case it wasn't buggy enough on its own, I was stuck using an ancient version until I finally just bit the bullet and moved to IE.
In short, Outlook Express not being obviously related (or related at all, really) to IE was a BOON. That was the best reason to use it instead of that crashy, unstable Netscape Communicator.
And for the education of people like me, what the heck is "normal view" or a split scrollbar, and why the heck would I want it?
Normal View is a display mode which gets rid of stuff extraneous to writing-- for example, embedded media or page breaks-- so you can simply concentrate on the process of getting words from your brain to the page.
A split scrollbar is exactly what it says on the tin. You can grab a little handle on the scrollbar to see (and edit) two parts of the document at once, very handy when you're writing text that refers to another piece of text you've already written, but are too far apart to see at once.
Oddly enough, OpenOffice Calc has a split scrollbar, but Writer does not. They don't even give a crap if their features are internally-consistent or not.
As in, how is this a feature I'm going to use for writing up a letter or report?
You might also be interested in Word's vastly superior Outline pane if you're writing a report. It lets you change the structure of your document in seconds without having to copy and paste huge chunks of text around.
I'm not sure I buy this argument... I mean, Microsoft isn't currently really threatened by OpenOffice, even though it's free and generally equivalent to Office as far as I can tell. At least as similar as Netscape vs IE were...
OpenOffice isn't even close to equivalent to Office. I mean, it is for Slashdot-posting geeks who don't use a word processor or presentation software at all, but for those who do? Night and day. OpenOffice is still missing features that were perfected in MS Office in 1997, like "Normal View" or a split scrollbar. Far bigger gap than that between, say, Netscape 4 and IE4.
It's not an indication they can't stick to their principles, we're talking about gamers here, they just wanted to draw attention to the fact that they wanted dedicated servers. Sure it says boycott but like immature gamers really meant it, anyone who is not retarded could have predicted the outcome.
So they're not hypocrites because you're expectations of the group are so low, you didn't expect them to follow-through anyway?
Fact is gaming companies are increasingly douchebags who on hit titles can get away with it because lets face it , most people have not played the last 15 or so years of FPS games from doom on.
The more relevant fact in this case is that MW2's sales on consoles far, far, far outstripped their sales on PC. Frankly, even if the boycott had worked, Activision wouldn't be out much-- heck, if they do the math, they might actually come out ahead if they don't bother with a PC port in the first place for the next version! (Once you add in support costs, bad press from the server thing, etc.)
MW2 is a good game but that's not saying much, it's not hard to make a good FPS today since game developers have got the FPS down to a science.
Yah, that's why Shadowrun was so great. Oh wait, it sucked balls.
Opera had a free version.
Not when Netscape 4 was current.
If Opera is so great, then why didn't it gain any marketshare even when it was the *only* browser competing with IE6? You can be blind to the usability issues it had at the time if you like, but the simple fact is that the web-using public obviously agreed that the browser sucked... otherwise, it might have gained a little bit of marketshare.
Opera's usability is much, much better now. But we're not talking about now.
Opera wasn't superior at the time because it wasn't free, also it had terrible usability.
Now it just has terrible usability.
You're ignoring the fucking POINT of the post and focusing on some PIDDLY LITTLE DETAIL of the example so you can show off your huge brain and all it's stored bullshit about the history of Toyota.
Ok, WE GET IT, Toyota is an old company and Grishnakh is the SMARTEST HUMAN BEING ALIVE. Happy?
Now either respond to the POINT of my post, or shut the fuck up and stop filling this forum will bullshit. If you're like this in real life, I can't imagine how you avoid getting strangled every fucking day.
If it had really been a superior product, nobody would have been making a fuss. It wasn't.
I'm sorry, do you *remember* Netscape 4? IE was a far superior product, on both Windows and Macintosh. (And on Macintosh it won the market fair and square, there being no "stranglehold.")
What part of "was building cars" did you not understand?
WTF. You said in YOUR OWN VERY UNSOLICITED HISTORY LESSON that Pontiac was building cars 7 years before Toyota was. Which makes you wonder why the holy fuck you posted it.
How can you be so fucking pedantic about history, and so clueless about grammar at the same time?
Yes, I am. Let's see some examples of tasks a professional sysadmin is asked to do every day: "what was the name of that Java file Fred used about five years ago which called the zeepto function?", "how much disk space is used by all the src directories?", "where is the most recently read file that uses the xxrk library?", ando so on.
I was a sysadmin and I was never asked to do any tasks like that. Of course, our shop used Lotus Notes, so most of my requests were like: "How come my out of office isn't working?" "My PDA won't sync with my email or calendar." "I'm a remote user, and now Notes says my ID file is invalid? What does that mean?"
So right there, your entire premise here is on shaky ground.
Despite that, I move that a skilled Windows admin could answer all of those questions just as well as a skilled Unix admin.
This is the kind of work that Unix has been doing very easily for four decades by now.
Ok, but that doesn't say anything at all about the relative merits of both OSes right now.
I mean, Pontiac was building cars much earlier than Toyota was. Which would you rather drive now, though?
Yeah, Emacs had that in the eighties. By the time IE5 came out it could also transparently access remote directories and files via a number of other protocols, including ssh.
What do you want, a cookie? How is this relevant? Who gives a shit?
ITYM which nobody used *on purpose*.
I used it on purpose. It was a quick and easy way to get a different background image on each desktop if you had multiple monitors. (Something which is virtually impossible now that it's been removed, I might add.) Also, putting goofy Flash movies on your desktop was a hoot.
I'm not saying it's useless, I'm saying in retrospect it's not useful *enough* to justify IE-Explorer integration.
Hell, arguably the "widgets" craze of the last 5 years was just a rehash of Active Desktop, just presented in a slightly different way. What's the difference between a "widget" and a piece of Active Desktop content? Nada.
Then when random weird stuff started happening (e.g., all their icons disappeared), they didn't know why.
I don't know why, either. What are you talking about?
If it had only been plain old HTML content that it rendered (not also plugins and ActiveX and who only knows what else), it wouldn't have been as much of a problem.
Not AS much, but still one. A ton of exploits were/are in the code that renders images, which you need even if you're "just" parsing HTML. If you expand that to CSS also, you open up a new vector again.
And anyway, applications like Steam would be impossible of MSHTML.DLL didn't run plug-ins.
I consider IE8 to be a great success in that regard. And yeah, from a security standpoint, it's not perfect, but it's MUCH better than IE6.
Now if only people would upgrade their 9 year old computers.
And how about filesystems? The simple fact that the directory separator is the backslash, which is used as the escape sequence initiator in C-like languages, is a PITA.
Possibly, but considering that it's been backwards-compatible with DOS since day one, I don't know why you would expect otherwise. Back when DOS chose it in the first place, systems didn't inter-operate, so nobody was thinking "wait, in 20 years this is going to be a pain in the ass!"
What character would you prefer? One that's less of a "pain in the ass?" Old Mac Classic used colon (:) and I can assure you that it was a complete pain in the ass. Forward-slash is used in RegEx and argument switches and for dozens of other things.
Plus you are limited to 26 different filesystems, one for each alphabet letter. And you cannot use a name for mount points, just one letter.
If you've used Windows 2000, you know that's been complete bunk for a decade now. Windows 2000 has mount points, welcome to 1999!
I could go on and on, for any professional systems administrator, Unix is far superior to Windows, there is no doubt about that.
Are you claiming you're one? I'd expect a professional systems administrator to know a teeny bit more about Windows.
It's only for home computers that familiarity is a convenience, professionals can be readily trained to use a system that's intrinsically easier to use.
And now are you claiming that Bash is intrinsically easier to use than Windows? Because there's decades of evidence to the contrary.
Microsoft didn't driver browsers out of the market, Opera was "in the market" the entire time you're referring to.
Microsoft's (serious) competitors gave up, once that happened, Microsoft had no incentive to work on improving IE whatsoever. If Netscape had continued to put out products instead of doing their bullshit rewrite crap, none of this would have happened in the first place.
That's not to say Microsoft has no blame, but on the other hand if Netscape had stopped releasing products *regardless of the reason*, we would have ended up with the same problem.
I think the big issue is "people are not upgrading."
There should be zero copies of IE6 in the wild right now. I don't care how big your corporation is, how shitty the "enterprise" software you purchased back in '99 is, but figure it the fuck out and get your people off IE6 right now. And then? There's no excuse for this bullshit, and I don't want to hear any sob stories.
IE7 has been out now for over 3 years, if you can't figure out how to move to it by now, you should be fired.
That being said, this is largely Microsoft's fault. By integrating the browser so closely to the OS, they've managed to create this complexity. A clean(er) separation of web browser from OS internals would, while not making things simple, would surely reduce the current clusterfuck.
But they'd *still* have to update the MSHTML.DLL library (the integrated part) as well as the browser itself... otherwise the exploit would just move from web sites to compiled help files. I mean, if your exploit won't work in IE proper, maybe it works fine if you view the same page through, say, Steam's browser.
The only real thing you can blame Microsoft for, IMO, is encouraging applications to use IE's rendering library to render HTML. But... what's the alternative? Every HTML-using application on your computer has its own browser core? How many security vulnerabilities would we have now?
I agree entirely that integrating Windows Explorer with MSHTML.DLL was a bad idea, especially since the benefits were so nebulous. (Ability to natively open FTP sites as if they were folders, and Active Desktop which nobody used. And the former was easy to implement without MSHTML.DLL.)
But personally I think this is more of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. There's nothing wrong with the OS providing a service as universal as "viewing HTML content", and every non-Windows OS does that as well.
If you don't like it, just don't buy it...
That's not an ellipsis, I just wanted to follow the parent's example with punctuation...
So wait. You honestly believe that, for example, NT6 (Windows Vista) is a *complete rewrite* of NT5 (Windows XP)? Seriously?
Where do you people get stuff like this? That's never been true.
It could happen to any browser to have the same security flaw in 3 different versions DESPITE claimed complete rewrites of the code.
Claimed by my crazy uncle Ted who hears Jupiterians in his head?
Microsoft's certainly never claimed it. But good job spreading that bullshit around! You're a valuable soldier in the fight against facts.
And obviously it's IE's fault and not the GIANT SECURITY HOLE MASCARADING AS UTILITY Adobe Reader?
What version if IE are you running, anyway? If you're in Vista or newer, or using IE7 or newer, even Adobe Reader shouldn't be able to do jack to you-- it runs in a sandbox. (And you wouldn't be logging in as admin.)
Also, it never occurred to you that Firefox's crashing was probably due to this site trying to execute code?
I mean, I'm not pretending that IE is the most secure browser ever. (Although I do believe that security in IE 8 + Windows 7 is on-par with all other browsers). But if I had the choice between IE and Adobe Reader, I'd pick IE in a heartbeat.
Union jobs generally still have pensions. In this day and age and economic climate, I wouldn't bet your life on them paying off...
Other jobs usually just do 401k matching instead. Personally, I much prefer this.
Isn't this the way the Red Cross typically works?
They pay for the current disaster from their general fund, and donations go into the fund for the *next* disaster. That way, when something like this happens they don't have to wait for people to begin contributing before they can spring into action.
I mean, I can understand your concern, but on the other hand-- if Red Cross had that money in-hand right now, would they be able to do more than they are already doing? I'd wager they're more limited by the inaccessibility of the country than anything relating to cashflow.
You'll never get hired full-time at Microsoft from Volt. Possibly another contract agency, but as long as you're with Volt you might as well learn to love that orange badge.
Well, you do have a point that judging "Google Search the product" is a really different experience from judging "Google Search the tool."
but dont seem to understand my 'but the actual search experience on bing is nearly unbearable to me' response.
Well, with all due respect:
1) That's because it's irrelevant to how Google and Bing do business. I mean, I can't stand Lotus Notes as a product, but it doesn't influence how I'd look at IBM if I were thinking about investing in them. (For example.)
2) With all due respect, you're probably knee-jerking anyway. From my experience working in usability, when people say phrases like "nearly unbearable" without any solid reasons to dislike it, they're just reacting out of habit. People hate change. But that says nothing about the quality of the product.
I rarely if ever click on a paid link, and cannot think of any instance off the top of my head where a paid link looked more appropriate than one of the top organic search results.
Yes, but millions of people do. Billions, perhaps.
Really, it strikes me that Search is itself a sleazy business, insofar as it necessarily can only make money by enticing the user to click not on the result it deems to be the most relevant to the user's search criteria, but rather to the result that has paid to be displayed in conjunction with the user's search criteria.
True dat.
Is this google's business model, or is the the general public being stupid with browsers, and in what way is this unique to Google?
As far as user behavior, nothing.
But as far as ad attribution, Microsoft uses an attribution model that doesn't give all conversion credit to the last interaction. (Which is typically a "user uses search engine as URL bar"-type interaction.) In other words, they already correct for this.
Note that if you're an Atlas (Microsoft's advertising technology) customer, you can get this attribution correction with Google as well, and you can independently verify whether Google's rates are fair. (Hint: they're inflated.)
Microsoft is excluding the best technical talent from their search group. Google isn't.
Are you seriously suggesting that, if I'm the greatest worldwide expert on Internet search, and I ask Microsoft for a job, they're going to say "fuck off, we'd rather hire idiots that don't know what they're doing"? Is that what you honestly think is happening?
The brain of the average Slashdotter is a scary place. I can't even imagine what strange mis-wiring makes you believe Microsoft would purposefully only use amateurs for a flagship product.
The *generous* explanation is that you're making shit up, and hoped nobody would call you on it.
This is Slashdot, so I'll assume you're a bit technical.
If you take a look at Bing's Javascript, you'll see that the background image and mouseovers only get loaded *after* the rest of the site is fully loaded and functional. It's not affecting load time at all, in a practical sense.
That said, you might have highlighted a usability flaw: because of the way the background image is loaded, people might *think* that the page isn't fully loaded until it appears. I'm not sure if that's the case with your experience-- and I doubt there's anything Bing could do to fix it, short of *actually* slowing down load times by adding some kind of placeholder image.
That also said, most people are going to use Bing from a toolbar or search box and it's a moot point for them anyway.