Microsoft Drops the Ball with IE

Any Microsoft employees that are supposedly working on IE these days should be ashamed of themselves: As I noted yesterday, Microsoft hasn't demonstrably improved the product, from an end-user application perspective, since 1998. Reader Terje Sten Bjerkseth (and subsequently, several other readers) sent me a link yesterday (see the URL below) that presents Microsoft's take on the future of IE, and the news just went from bad to worse. When asked in a recent online chat about the next release of IE, Brian Countryman, an IE program manager, said, "As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 [Service Pack 1] SP1 is the final standalone installation." The reason? "Legacy OSs have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," he said. "Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS." Sadly, this perspective is skewed and suggests that Microsoft believes IE is somehow at the "zenith" of the Web browser heap. But as I also mentioned yesterday, IE lacks basic--yet important--features, especially automatic pop-up ad removal, that virtually all its competitors have, and adding any of these features wouldn't require changes to the base OS. The problem, in my opinion, is that Microsoft believes that the browser is functionally complete and can only be improved by adding eye candy made possible by the next underlying platform (Longhorn, in this case). That's baloney, and as several readers mentioned, suggests that IE development is important only when Microsoft can use the product to steal market share from other browsers.

WinInfo is a good list to be on if you're interested in Windows developments and Apple putdowns but it is a bit too frequent for some people (weekday-ly). It is available here.

That link he mentioned.

UPDATE: The website is back, the irony remains.

UPDATE: An article in the Australian by Tim Blair. The war against the ABC is on!

UPDATE: A friend of ours found the Life Turing machine.

[Shot of Semi going off to his spreadsheet]

[Shot of Semi returning]

16 bits/sample * 44,100 samples/sec * 8 channels = 5,644,800 bits/second and USB 1.1 does up to 12 Mbits/second so I guess it could work after all. I don't think I'd be wanting to be sync'ing my PDA on the same bus during a performance, though.

UPDATE: I just found that Audiotrak have something similar. Theirs seems to be aimed more at the DVD viewing user rather than the audio engineering market. It has a software DVD player included but does not have ASIO support and doesn't claim Mac-compatibility.

I have to say that in my experience a buyout like this is for the technology not for the product's revenue stream. I suspect we will have to consider this the end of the line for CoolEdit. Though I use ProTools and Sonar for tracking and mixing, CoolEdit is my first stop for simple and quick editing.

I found out about this stuff from the PCDAW mailing list. Very useful if this stuff interests you.

Tram Stuff on TramTown.

IT IS a truism that you can tell a lot about people by the cars they drive. So why have I always resisted the idea? Maybe it’s because my first car was a doggy doo-doo brown 1972 Ford Pinto – the model US consumer advocate Ralph Nader infamously dubbed “unsafe at any speed”.

After several years of lawyering in Hartford and footloose world travelling as a freelance writer, Nader arrived in Washington and began work on a book elaborating on the themes of his Nation article. His rendezvous with history was nearly derailed when he left part of his completed manuscript in a New York City taxicab. With customary determination, however, he rewrote the book in breakneck speed and published Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (Grossman) in November 1965.

The chief target of the book was General Motors' "sporty" Corvair, whose faulty rear suspension system made it possible to skid violently and roll over. The corporate negligence that had produced the various Corvair defects, said Nader, was "one of the greatest acts of industrial irresponsibility in the present century." More generally, Nader's book documented how Detroit habitually subordinated safety to style and marketing concerns. The main cause of car injuries, Nader demonstrated, was not the "nut behind the wheel" so often blamed by the auto industry, but the inherent engineering and design deficiencies of the motor vehicle that was woefully uncrashworthy. Solutions must focus, accordingly, on the vehicle itself.”.

Okay, Ford did recall the Pinto in 1978 following a campaign by Nader's Center for Auto Safety, but surely that doesn't justify a silly unresearched lie, does it? Am I just being a pedant?

UPDATE: I've just read that Susan M. claims to have "a genetic predisposition for intellectual nitpicking". She'll just have to take my punch on the chin, I suppose.

Characterising environmentalist ideology as unscientific, irrational and anti-humanist, this acerbic and polemical three-part series turns 'Green' ideas on their head.