It was once used by nearly 1bn people, making it one of the world’s best-known technology brands. But even Microsoft, its maker, has been forced to admit that it is deeply unloved.
Internet Explorer — the software that launched the browser wars of the 1990s and became a symbol of the Seattle company’s former stranglehold on the tech world — is about to be ushered into retirement.
The group confirmed this week that it would not use the IE name for the new browser that it plans to ship with the next version of its Windows operating system, due later this year. The revised software, codenamed Project Spartan, is intended to catapult Microsoft beyond the Web 1.0 world for which IE was designed.
Nearly a decade ago, Dean Hachamovitch, the then-head of the IE business, confessed at an industry conference: “We messed up.”
With Spartan, Microsoft hopes to vault past IE’s weaknesses to produce a browser that is more suited to a digital life lived on multiple devices — part of the strategy of new chief executive Satya Nadella to break the company’s reliance on its old PC monopoly.
Tom Bedecarre, chairman of Akqa, a digital advertising agency owned by WPP, said the 20-year old brand was long past its sell-by date. “In the war of the future, which is mobile, they’re losing,” he said. “Nobody’s going to download Internet Explorer as their mobile browser.”
Microsoft has admitted that it failed to make IE a more loved part of daily life over the years. It even resorted to self-mockery in some of its advertising, referring to it as “The Browser You Loved To Hate”.
“It’s been a product problem for a long time,” said Dan Brewster, a senior interactive designer with Wolff Olins, the marketing agency. “People don’t like it,” he added, but used it only because it came pre-installed on their computers or because they were required to by their employers.
IE’s historic significance was sealed in the late-1990s. Designed to counter the rise of browser pioneer Netscape at the dawn of the internet, it was shipped free with the pervasive Windows operating system — a tactic that later made Microsoft the target of an antitrust investigation.
It overtook Netscape within three years and went on to dominate access to the online world, accounting for an estimated 95 per cent of browser usage soon after the turn of the millennium. But a combination of complacency and the failure to anticipate the shift to mobile sealed IE’s fate.
First the open-source Firefox browser and, more recently, Google’s Chrome ate into IE’s market share, using faster technology and slicker design to win users. Microsoft’s share of browser usage has fallen to around 20 per cent, similar to Firefox, while Chrome has risen to nearly 50 per cent, based on online activity.
Although being pushed into retirement, the IE name will live on, if only for a short time. A new version of IE will be included in the next Windows launch as well as the Spartan browser, to make life easier for companies that have developed software to work with the browser.
That is not the same paper. The preprint you linked was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, and discusses a different quasar (SDSS J013127.34-032100.1, at a redshift of z=2.5). The Nature paper is about SDSS J010013.02+280225.8, at redshift z = 6.30. The author list is similar, so it is likely the same team. But the arxiv link is a different discovery.
"Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but ‘safe spaces’ where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, ‘gender fluidity’ and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.
As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.
As American universities, British playwrights and Australian judges once understood, the ‘safe space’ is where cultures go to die."
I remember Tim Russ ("Tuvok") describing his encounter with Avery Brooks ("Sisko"); Tim said Avery was "physically intimidating"; Tim is no skinny-fairy, either - but one can easily see that, besides cultural hangups, a physically imposing body plus a certain assertive attitude generates the same reaction around you.
That being said, cultures on the asian subcontinent seem to have a certain way of avoiding the word "no".
So while they will charge the $20 per hour, they will assure you that their work will be completely up to par with the $200 per hour work of experienced developers.
Usually there will also be a problem with quality/time estimation. I've seen a few "will this be done in two weeks?" questions result in a "Yes, certainly answer" although no engineer I knew would have said this was possible.
At least that was my experience in a few larger projects that had to outsource some of the programming.
I know that agencies in the US/EU tend to market themselves pretty aggressively too, but not QUITE as aggressively :)
Yeah, I've been on the other side of this, working in the trenches. Granted, I wasn't a developer but the situation wasn't any different. The problem is no one asks us how much time it will take.
As an (exaggerated) example, the conversation usually goes like this:
Project Manager: Guys, we just landed a huge project from Acme Inc. Guess what, you guys are gonna be paid a bonus this month!! YAY!
Developer: Great!
PM: There's a tiny caveat though: The bonus was promised only if we had delivered it yesterday.
D: FML.
PM: But don't worry, we still have a week to finish it!
D: WTF? But this will take at least three weeks!
PM: Ah, don't worry. I know you can do it in one week. In fact, I am so sure, I promised them you would! Isn't that great?
D: Well, what if I can't?
PM: Oh well, we won't get paid and it will certainly reflect in your appraisal and you won't get that promotion that you have been due for the last three years. But I'm sure you won't let that happen, amirite?
IMHO, if someone is aware of the quality of $200 per hour work, they would deliver the same quality. After all the prices might be different but the hours are same. In my experience most programmers don't even know how bad they are. And when they do become aware of that the quality improves.
Oddly enough, I've worked with an Indian programmer who asked for less than $20/hour (he was making $10/hour after fees from the outsourcing site) who was very competent and who got the job done well. There may have been some funny business with billing a few extra hours, but the total cost for the project was still extremely low.
I've also worked with an outsourced programmer from another region who asked for $45/hour (closer to a $150/hour equivalent in local cost of living) who was completely incompetent. (He didn't last a week; it was obvious that quickly.)
$10/hour isn't bad at all as far as living in India goes[1]. I worked as a salaried employee for about 3 years with a reputable software consultancy in India and made about $4/hour writing good quality ruby code. Let's say I lived a comfortable life with a decent apartment and a new car.
[1] It equates to about 80,000 INR per month. Compare to salaries ranging from 30,000 INR to 60,000 INR for a programmer with 3-5 years of experience.
No, you don't. It's like that bottle of two-buck chuck from TJ's that can be better than the $20 bottle of Napa's finest…
Cost is not a complete indicator of quality unless you're willing to look at it probabilistically. Low cost means you're more likely to get mediocre talent.
Ultimately though, even a good programmer can only do so much without a good client/driver. Some of the folks hiring the best out of India and still getting bad results need to look at their process and see if it's adapted to the outsourced model. It could be the process is poor or the onshore team members are poorly adapted to the offshoring model.
Outsourcing itself isn't easy. It takes skill to be able to make projects work, even with great resources.
We can't completely blame the customer. The competition is quite high and it is easy for anyone not familiar with programming (most of the clients) to get attracted towards cheapest option.
Not to forget that such companies/people often market themselves as jack of all trades and it is hard for customer to see any real difference developers asking for $200/hour and $20/hour when $20 guy is promising everything!
I much prefer LibreOffice. OpenOffice fell behind during the hiatus when a majority of their development team quit to form LibreOffice. LibreOffice has a big headstart on OO and a more active development team. Plus, they can pull features and bug fixes from OpenOffice while the OpenOffice team can't pull from LibreOffice due to licensing.
As you can see from the earlier child posts, opinions differ!
Using yum localinstall, I installed LO4.1 and oOo4.0 on a CentOS based desktop last night along with the native LO3.4 install. At present, I'm finding oOo has scrolling issues (nvidia graphics, proprietary drivers) and the 'use hardware acceleration' option is un-ticked and greyed out on installation. LO4.1 has the option ticked and editable on installation.
LibreOffice works on multiple versions at the same time. So 4.1.0 is just out, that'll be advertised as "potentially buggy" (forgot what name they gave it). Then they will still continue to release new updates for 4.0.x and IIRC also the version before that.
So suggest LibreOffice, as you can choose what kind of stability guarantee is good for you.
I've used both, but I stuck with Apache Openoffice because it's usually given me less grief than Libreoffice, it also integrates better with OSX than Libreoffice does.
It was once used by nearly 1bn people, making it one of the world’s best-known technology brands. But even Microsoft, its maker, has been forced to admit that it is deeply unloved.
Internet Explorer — the software that launched the browser wars of the 1990s and became a symbol of the Seattle company’s former stranglehold on the tech world — is about to be ushered into retirement.
The group confirmed this week that it would not use the IE name for the new browser that it plans to ship with the next version of its Windows operating system, due later this year. The revised software, codenamed Project Spartan, is intended to catapult Microsoft beyond the Web 1.0 world for which IE was designed.
Nearly a decade ago, Dean Hachamovitch, the then-head of the IE business, confessed at an industry conference: “We messed up.”
With Spartan, Microsoft hopes to vault past IE’s weaknesses to produce a browser that is more suited to a digital life lived on multiple devices — part of the strategy of new chief executive Satya Nadella to break the company’s reliance on its old PC monopoly.
Tom Bedecarre, chairman of Akqa, a digital advertising agency owned by WPP, said the 20-year old brand was long past its sell-by date. “In the war of the future, which is mobile, they’re losing,” he said. “Nobody’s going to download Internet Explorer as their mobile browser.”
Microsoft has admitted that it failed to make IE a more loved part of daily life over the years. It even resorted to self-mockery in some of its advertising, referring to it as “The Browser You Loved To Hate”.
“It’s been a product problem for a long time,” said Dan Brewster, a senior interactive designer with Wolff Olins, the marketing agency. “People don’t like it,” he added, but used it only because it came pre-installed on their computers or because they were required to by their employers.
IE’s historic significance was sealed in the late-1990s. Designed to counter the rise of browser pioneer Netscape at the dawn of the internet, it was shipped free with the pervasive Windows operating system — a tactic that later made Microsoft the target of an antitrust investigation.
It overtook Netscape within three years and went on to dominate access to the online world, accounting for an estimated 95 per cent of browser usage soon after the turn of the millennium. But a combination of complacency and the failure to anticipate the shift to mobile sealed IE’s fate.
First the open-source Firefox browser and, more recently, Google’s Chrome ate into IE’s market share, using faster technology and slicker design to win users. Microsoft’s share of browser usage has fallen to around 20 per cent, similar to Firefox, while Chrome has risen to nearly 50 per cent, based on online activity.
Although being pushed into retirement, the IE name will live on, if only for a short time. A new version of IE will be included in the next Windows launch as well as the Spartan browser, to make life easier for companies that have developed software to work with the browser.