Funniest thing I have seen in a while...[geek alert]

[airshipjones]

Seen on /.

"IE lite? You mean less features than IE already has? I think that's called telnet isn't it?"

I just can't wait for FF to fix their support for roaming profiles so I can use it at home. Tho' I am interested in what M$ IE7 will look like (It will have tabbed browsing).

Comments

[airshipjones.livejournal.com]

Yes, and gopher. And a screaming fast 1200 baud modem. Those were the days....

[lokipup.livejournal.com]

Luxury...

I was helping run my dad's BBS with my 300bps. :)

[airshipjones.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember logging into a mainframe with a 300baud, the kind where the phone handset plungs into the cradle. I think we crashed the system once playing Life. Heh.

[crankles.livejournal.com]

I have a cranky laptop that I've been reformatting and reformatting (needs a new drive) and I've been trying to use it with the default software. I thought I was going to KILL someone for lack of Firefox and having to use that stupid non-tabbed IE browser. NOW MS wants IE to have tabbed browsing? Well of course they do! But I'll stick with Firefox, thanks.

[lokipup.livejournal.com]

I have been thoroughly UNimpressed with FireFox.

I'll stick with IE, thank you very much.

[airshipjones.livejournal.com]

There are many things I like about FF, the tabbed browsing being just one of them. The extensions are my favorites. Many of them are very useful, and very easy to use. The skins are also nice, and the range of them is pretty decent. I am disappointed that it isn't compatible with roaming profiles tho', which is the only thing I have seen that is a problem, and that is just because of how I have my network set-up. But it seems that Maxthon (the IE add-on for tabbed browsing for IE6) also has problems with roaming profiles, so it isn't just Mozilla.

I really think MS has fallen behind on development because they have been working so hard on security. And while I applaude their work in improving the security of their products, the fact that FF has become so popular so fast is a good indicator that it does have the features that users want. And so MS once again has to play catch-up.

I do use both IE and FF, because OWA and most things at microsoft.com looks like cr@p on any other browser but IE. But I use FF for most general browsing.

[lokipup.livejournal.com]

I was on Linux until 1998, and a NS maven until 1999, when it started crashing my system every hour or so. At that point, I switched to IE and have loved it since.

Tabbed browsing's a non-feature for me -- I don't actually use windows that way.

From what I've seen, the primary reason for FF gaining popularity is political bandwagonning. In much of the open sores community, life is "How much can I deride 'M$' today?", which of course is a stupid reason for doing anything regardless of whether you have a factual basis for such.

I've been programming for almost 23 years. When I come home, I want my computer to already have my mail waiting, and be ready to provide entertainment. I don't want to have to program just to get it, unless said programming *is* the entertainment.

So while I'll respect FF's prettiness, I neither trust its security, nor have I actually seen any real improvement in behavior. And unless it starts embedding the .NET CLR (choice thereof -- currently two viable ones) as well as supporting Windows Update, etc, there's simply no cause for me to switch. It's simply Yet Another Web Browser out there, with its own set of incompatibilities, still in the vast minority, with a sizeable percentage of religious web politicos that have yet to garner any respect from me.

Of course, I'm eagerly awaiting IE7. The beta tester in me is really liking MS these days.

(You've already been welcomed in my house, so that tells you what group I don't lump you in.)

[airshipjones.livejournal.com]

I don't have an issue with MS products in general. I don't see them as great innovators, and I don't really like their business practices. But I dislike the /. attitude even less. I recently watched Revolution OS, and I was so underwhelmed. For the most part, the Open Source model ends up being just a different business model, and not really about the principles that formed the GNU GPL. While the idea is nice, nobody works for free in America (at least not for long).

[lokipup.livejournal.com]

Re Innovation: you should browse around Microsoft Research. They've got some of the best in the industry, and some of it does end up in MS products.

In particular, check out C-omega. While Cw itself will never be released as a product, it's exploring ideas that are going to be a focus of C#3 (C#2 will be released in November, to give you a sense of scale). Specifically, bridging the evil abyss between object oriented languages (C#, Java) and data query languages (SQL, XML+XPath+XQuery). It's one of the few times programming gave me that warm, happy feeling inside. It was like making love to a database, and having it cook you breakfast the next morning.

In my not-entirely-humble opinion, MS has innovated at a slower rate, but with more certainty and better execution than anyone else out there. This hasn't necessarily always been the case, but certainly in the last 5 years since .NET became a going concern they've been consistent. They may not have what everyone wants tomorrow, but the day after, they'll have the thing everyone else tries to copy.

Re Slashdot: Posers. Kinda like the ones in the T-Mobile commercials of late, spoofing Boost.

Re Free Software: Never existed. Someone always pays for it. And those that try to make a living selling their software for free spend the rest of their lives living in their parents' basements.

Most people with computers tend to whine a lot when they don't get the free ride. You can see this on Yahoo Groups a lot. People seem to think it's unconstitutional censorship when Yahoo actually enforces its TOS, or some terrible greediness for a company to charge a minimal usage fee.

[airshipjones.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I don't see that as innovation so much as integration. Now while I think innovation is nifty and all, I think integration is really where it is at. All the big money is there (think SAP, Siebel, Peoplesoft, Websphere) and the DBs they run on. And I think integration, at all levels is where the greatest gains in productivity and user fulfillment are to be made. For some time I thought Mac had the best integration of any platform. I'm not so sure that is true any more. And given that they are such a small segment of the market, and seem to be content to be that, I tend to work with the platforms that 1) I like working with and 2) are easy to work with and 3) pay me to do that work.

[lokipup.livejournal.com]

Actually, it is innovation. Integration -- that'd be making it easier to talk to a database or an XML file. What Cw is about isn't a way to talk to databases -- it's a way to treat a collection of objects as if it were a database.

Something like this:

class City { int zip; string name; }
class Person { int homeZip; int workZip; string name }

List cities = GetListOfCities();
List people = GetListOfPeople();

personCityStream = select people.name as personName, cities.name as cityName from cities inner join people on people.workZip = cities.zip;

foreach (foo in personCityStream)
{ Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Person = {0}; City = {1}", foo.personName, foo.cityName); }

.. approximately. Notice that I didn't do anything that actually implied MSSQL, Oracle, or whatnot. I simply used syntax based on SQL to join and query objects I'd generated on my own. I could also have written XQuery to retrieve a stream of objects from a graph.

Now, of course, it so happens that Cw happens to come with a code generator that will create a database class by reflecting on an existing MSSQL database, which can stream out data for use in Cw's query structures, but the resemblance to SQL is only sugar. It's not taking what you type and passing it to a database instance, but instead taking in-memory objects and allowing you to query them in sophisticated ways. That's a very powerful and relatively unexplored realm of programming.