Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 18th Dec 2012 00:03 UTC
Microsoft has just responded to Google's move regarding Exchange ActiveSync. Sadly, instead of addressing the very real problems consumers are about to face, Microsoft starts talking about switching to Outlook.com.
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RE[7]: Comment by shmerl
by lucas_maximus on Tue 18th Dec 2012 18:16
in reply to "RE[6]: Comment by shmerl"
Member since:2009-08-18
so you've basically used one IDE and feel you're qualified to make sweeping statements about an entire company? Well done.
That is what people say about Microsoft. I simply said I didn't like one of their IDEs nothing more.
Clearly there was, but such standards never made it into MS products. However there's a whole industry outside of Microsoft.
That far fewer people use.
So, like with Borland, you're making a sweeping generalisation about a whole company based on one product.
No I pointed out that it just simply isn't true for the whole company and Shmerl was making sweeping statements by saying so.
Web developers weren't using advanced techniques because they'd lose a high percentage of Windows users (pretty much half the web). It wasn't a matter of choice, it was because MS forced their hand.
Simply no, I haven't seen a need to use a lot of the "advanced features" other than CSS 3.0, and the browser should be allowed to fall back. If a web developer isn't using CSS 3.0 now and having appropriate fallbacks and polyfills ... they should be.
However IE was an improvement and IE9 is actually a fairly decent browser. So web developers are now adding advanced techniques they couldn't risk before.
You talk as if the other browsers didn't support everyday features. That wasn't true. Instead they used browser specific extensions because, up until then, W3C dragged their heals in formalising said specifications. (and to be honest, I blame the w3c as much as I blame MS for the fiasco we had in the 90s / early 00s).
Out of the two competing browsers in the 90s it was IE which innovated.
It is a testament to how good IE6 was ahead of everything else that is can still render pages decently today if the page is built correctly. Every single BBC webpage I have tried renders from IE6 to Latest Chrome perfectly.
IE4 had a massive number of downloads considering the bandwidth commonly available at the time (which nobody ever mentions).
We're talking about support for open standards, not how well web developers got at writing IE-specific hacks to make your browsing experience tolerable.
IE7 and IE8 require almost no hacks to render a page the same as any of the modern browsers. Those that exist are well documented and easily avoided.
RE[8]: Comment by shmerl
by Laurence on Tue 18th Dec 2012 19:07
in reply to "RE[7]: Comment by shmerl"
Member since:2007-03-26
I simply said I didn't like one of their IDEs nothing more.
Except you didn't simply state "one of their IDEs", you make a generalisation about their entire product range.
That far fewer people use.
More people used ODF than OOXML, before the release of Office 2007. So your point is moot. MS had to switch to an open standard so they invented one that nobody used instead of switching to an established standard and the 2nd most popular format after the one they were forced into switching from.
Simply no, I haven't seen a need to use a lot of the "advanced features" other than CSS 3.0, and the browser should be allowed to fall back. If a web developer isn't using CSS 3.0 now and having appropriate fallbacks and polyfills ... they should be.
Except that IE8 didn't support CSS 3. So your whole defence about developers not having to work around IE8 is moot.
Out of the two competing browsers in the 90s it was IE which innovated.
Indeed, but you're talking two decades ago, and the moment MS killed Navigator, they gave up trying.
Plus MS only innovated because they were trying to drive Netscape out by making the web incompatible (though grated Netscape were doing the same - I have no sympathy for them either). That's not how open standards work.
It is a testament to how good IE6 was ahead of everything else that is can still render pages decently today if the page is built correctly. Every single BBC webpage I have tried renders from IE6 to Latest Chrome perfectly.
IE6 was garbage and once again, your attributing credit to a crappy browser when the real praise belongs to the web developers for writing IE6 hacks.
You talk almost as if you've never had to build a website in your life.
IE4 had a massive number of downloads considering the bandwidth commonly available at the time (which nobody ever mentions).
Nobody mentions because it's an irrelevant point. Ubuntu has had massive number of downloads and you likely consider that garbage.
IE7 and IE8 require almost no hacks to render a page the same as any of the modern browsers. Those that exist are well documented and easily avoided.
Maybe not if you're using popular web frameworks, but those frameworks will have IE7 hacks built into them.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."More News »
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2007-03-26
We're talking about open standards, not MS supporting something that nobody uses
Why would Microsoft support such as move, I don't know.
If I made my own popular file format and someone told me I should support it and it isn't nearly as widely used, I wouldn't bother to support it either.
that doesn't even make sense.
You said MS support open standards. If that were true, then there would be motivation to do so. Ergo, you've just disproved your earlier statement.
YES .NET 1.0 and 1.1 weren't great. C# != .NET.
Languages are neither open nor closed nor even copyrighted (as proved with the Oracle vs Google case). It's their framework the decides the open nature of a language. Thus I'm discussing the crux of the matter when arguing about open standards.
How can something be invented to break standards? It doesn't make sense.
It like saying I am inventing PHP to break Python.
Now you're just arguing semantics. Clearly the context is talking about MS breaking from established standards rather than literally breaking the standards themselves.
so you've basically used one IDE and feel you're qualified to make sweeping statements about an entire company? Well done.
There was nothing that was a dejure standard that everyone used.
Clearly there was, but such standards never made it into MS products. However there's a whole industry outside of Microsoft.
So, like with Borland, you're making a sweeping generalisation about a whole company based on one product.
Yeah. sad but true
IE8 for CSS and XHTML was fine, If you whine about SVG and other things ... these simply aren't used by web developers.
Web developers weren't using advanced techniques because they'd lose a high percentage of Windows users (pretty much half the web). It wasn't a matter of choice, it was because MS forced their hand.
However IE was an improvement and IE9 is actually a fairly decent browser. So web developers are now adding advanced techniques they couldn't risk before.
You talk as if the other browsers didn't support everyday features. That wasn't true. Instead they used browser specific extensions because, up until then, W3C dragged their heals in formalising said specifications. (and to be honest, I blame the w3c as much as I blame MS for the fiasco we had in the 90s / early 00s).
We're talking about support for open standards, not how well web developers got at writing IE-specific hacks to make your browsing experience tolerable.