Talk about Goliath versus Goliath. The successful monopolist versus... the slightly less successful monopolist who can rewrite its own legal system. Time to invest in popcorn.

We as geeks really need to stop underestimating people. It reflects poorly on us.

I have worked in tech support, so I have seen the way that many people use their computers. While a few people do surf the web as you describe, their numbers are small. While it is true that most people do not see the benefit of changing browsers and therefore stick with the default, most of them can and do change their home page, most of them know what a bookmark, address bar and search box are, and most of them use google.

By the way, I have seen very few computers for the home that have a microsoft home page. In my experience the manufacturer sets it to their own page. It is only the corporate boxes that have MSN, as far as I have seen.

Funny side note, the time I told somebody to go to slashdot.org, he typed /..org in the address bar. After that I used google.

Bullshit. I would gladly pay google for higher placement in their results, and I have the money to do it. Show me the form where I can sign up, please.

Yup, but if the content is the same as somebody else's, then google uses the domain name to tell the difference. For people who sell real products and services, there often just is not that much content to put on the site. Then, things like the domain name make a difference.

Those are all sites that are successful because they have regular readers/frequently repeating customers. If you sell widgets, and people only buy widgets once a year, people will go to your site once a year. Nobody links to widgets on their blogs. A lot of companies sell things that you buy once or twice in your life. Unless you want to get billions of dollars of capital together to build a company that immediately dominates your sector (it is spurious to claim that you could repeat google or amazon on a startup budget today) good SEO is really the only path.

This is my point. In the case of the OP, the trademarked name is already registered. This is a serious problem.

When was the last time you purchased something from a company on the fifth page of Google? A small company I worked for paid thousands of euros to an SEO get first page google ranking. Our business (which was already pretty good) doubled immediately. Our main competitor had a position called Vice President of Search Engine Optimization, that is how important this is in a sector that has real, physical products (cheap consumer goods don't count).

Of course, the name does enormous things for your placement in google. Just do a google search for "buy flowers": at least half the results have the search the search terms right in the domain name. This is not a coincidence. If the name describes what you do and is also your branded name, your success in google is almost guaranteed.

Having a domain name that describes your company is tremendously important for a variety of reasons, not least of which is google ranking. Further, with modern browsers, the address bar searches your history. If you have your name or your product in the domain, this helps people find you a second time. Google Chrome is even better: search and address bar are the same. While I despise these people who park pages, their price is usually worth it if you are a company and the name is good.

So, in the cyber-world, picking the name actually does make a big difference in the amount of traffic you get. Having "widgets.com" really is the equivalent of being off of the highway, while "example.com/widgets" is really miles down the road.

Also, giving up domain names means completely abdicating your surfing to search engines and people who know SEO. Not a good idea.

I was going to reply and say the same thing, but then I saw the parent. Just to expand (for the benefit of the GP):

The concept is called opportunity cost. Basically, the if you do A, but B would have made more money, B-A= the amount of money you lost doing A = opportunity cost.

This is, incidentally, the reason that competition in free market economies pounds out inefficiencies. If a person is efficient at programming computers but inefficient at fixing cars, then he can fix his car in less time by trading his programming for car fixing. For the mechanic, it is the other way around: he can easily earn enough in a couple of hours to pay the programmer to do what would take him days. Money is, in this sense, just a medium to facilitate this kind of exchange.

Companies work the same way. If Cisco were to open a business supplying flying cars, they could probably scratch a profit. But they lack the experience, knowledge and brand to do that efficiently. However, they are very good at networking equipment, and for the same money that it would take to make cars, they could just branch off of what they now into, say, subspace communication. Meanwhile, toyota, who already understands the fundamentals of how to build nice vehicles that people want to drive, can build the flying cars.

You seem to have a different definition of usable than I do.

1. (s)ftp is broken in kde file browsers (dolphin, konqueror). I can load the root directory listing, but not download any files or change directories. Have to use filezilla or something.
2. Similarly, the integrated text editors will not save over an ftp connection. Very annoying.
3. SMB shares: when you refresh on a passwordless windows share in Konqueror or Dolphin, you get an authentication failure that lasts for the session.
4. The fish plugin for ssh in konqueror seems broken, although I did not take the time to investigate so it might be a simple config error.
5. Network configuration does not work for wifi connections secured with WPA-EAP/TTLS encryption. You have to edit the config by hand.
6. This is more of a gripe: klipper is truly black magic that I cannot for the life of me figure out. Copy-Paste should not be this complicated.

Except for number 3, this all works fine in KDE 3.5. It all works fine in Gnome (same machine).

I like KDE4.2, it has a lot of really promising concepts. I am a big fan of the plasma widget desktop. I use it whenever possible, which is why I can actually tell you some of the bugs. But interesting concepts are not enough. For a lot of my work, I simply have to log out and log into KDE 3.5 or Gnome. I am using KDE on two machines, one is debian and the other is kubuntu, so the problem might be in debian's packages.

I can't reproduce your border error. I bet it has to do with your iframe having width set in a way that causes it to run under another element that does not take the extra 2 pixel width of the iframe+margin into account.

You really should not be attaching events that way. This is bad for a number of reasons, the biggest of which is that you only get one event per element. Personally, I really like the observe method from prototype.js, but with what you are talking about MooTools might be better.

It is really pretty rare that you should have to pass variables that way. Just use objects and store your variables in that object.

Yes, but a lot of them make life harder, and a lot of IE's quirks are just plain buggy. The point is that the web should be cross-platform: you have a standard and you code to it. Vendors should not have to implement features invented by a third party that may or may not be properly documented (ooxml anyone?). This is why we have the W3C to develop and innovate standards. Hell, MS helped write a lot of the standards that they don't implement.

A browser is not a platform. It should implement the standard so that we can code to it... "write once, run anywhere" should not be a paradigm reserved for Java.

It is not subjective. There is a standard. While no browser implements it fully, IE is (still) the worst.

Well, this thread is off topic, but I'll bite.

This polemic is not about the user. The trouble is not in using another browser, the trouble is writing websites for IE. It is a frustrating fucking nightmare. It is such a mess that anybody who has written a website in the last 5 or 6 years can not believe that people would choose IE of their own free will. Of course, the mess is transparent to the user who will blame the website if it does not look right in IE.

Now, I know that the IE situation has gotten better (but is still pretty bad) since IE7, but IE6 just won't die because its quirkiness caused a kind of lock in: corporate intranet sites are written for it and they are too expensive to correct. For these people, using another browser really has become impossible. Whether this corporate lock in was deliberate is debatable, but that is the reason the EU gets involved.

And just how do you know what my diet is like? I literally have not had fast food in years. As a vegetarian, those places have very little to offer me.

And what is this mythical "Mediterranean diet" that you are referring to? I have lived in Italy, and Spain and Morocco. I have spent significant time in Greece, Croatia, Israel, southern France and Algeria. They all border the Med and the all have very different cuisine. Of them all, Italian is probably the worst for your health, despite what you seem to think (one big meal per day instead of several small ones, lots of cheese, high in sugar, etc). Oh, and they all have more overweight people and shorter lifespans than my current home, Belgium.

So how about instead of being an arrogant stereotyping prig, you go learn a little bit?

What do you want, The Fat Duck? You can get decent food in any of the dozen or so airports that I go to regularly, though apparently YMMV. You just have to look around a bit to find the places that are selling fresh food, and there always are some. I am a vegetarian and pretty picky even within that already limited range of food, yet I always find a place that caters to what I like.

If you pick the franchises like MacDonalds or just go to the first place you see, that is your own fault; realize that you are voting with your money.

Of course, the gp is absolutely right that airport food costs way too much. This has more to do with the airports than the restaurants, though, since they charge an arm and a leg for retail space. The exception in my experience is Barcelona: food costs the same in town as at the airport.

I disagree. Airport food is usually pretty good, although it is way too expensive. Also, trying to get a nice meal (which, for me, usually includes drinks and sauces or yogurt) through security is not that easy.

I think this has more to do with a pyramid of needs. Once you have enough sleep, you think about water. Once you have enough water, you think about nutrition. Once you have enough nutrition, you think about the food tasting good, and so on.

What this survey means is that airports are meeting those basic needs well enough that people can think about things that are higher up on the pyramid but not adequately provided, not that those things lower on the pyramid are actually that important.

Imagine for a moment that airports suddenly removed all of the bathrooms. Where do you think Wifi would rank on the next survey?

Click the links and you will understand.

Well, you are obviously not the norm. Research has shown that people play games just for the violence, which is the motivator behind the latest blockbuster.

Of course, if you ask me, no violence is too much.