Is this really what is going on at Microsoft? Their staff has so much free time that they can sit around sorting out whether or not to rename a browser?

Are we going to get an educational campaign to go along with it? After all they will have to explain to people that, "Internet Explorer is not really gone. It is now called..." What is the life span of a bad idea in the minds of computer users? We still make fun of Clippy after all....

What an epic waste of time.

They need to suck up the fact that their product was sub-par for years. Focus on the improvements. Continue moving forward.

The exact audience who cares about the differences between IE, Chrome, WebKit, Trident and all of the cross roads of the various technologies is not going to be "fooled" by a re-branding. Those are the people who matter. Those are the people who are developing web technologies. Give them the features that they want. At the same time, give the end users a stable, secure application.

The truth is that the war is over. HTML5 is here. Everything that used to require ActiveX can now be done in HTML5. I am already seeing large vendors make the switch. One of our larger LOB application, a web app with hundreds of internal users, recently went HTML5. The vendor did a great job. The UI looks exactly the same. The only difference that the end users see is that the site now "magically works in Chrome".

I agree. Short term it is not going to happen. It goes against their marketing of people being free to create for/with Apple products.

But "never" is a very long time.

At the same time, companies pay premiums for shelf placement. I have never been into a Wal-Mart and are not familiar with their operations, but I know for certain that this is how it works in large chain grocery stores. The shelves higher or lower than eye level cost less than the ones right at eye level. Similarly, in the cereal eye the companies pay more to have their sugar laden cereals on the lower shelves so that they are at eye level for children.

It would be interesting to see if Apple eventually allows developers to pay for preferential placement. I do not see why they would not. Everyone else pays for eyeballs, whether it is on Facebook or CNN.com

Because working for Apple is an intense spiritual discipline.

This should not be an either or discussion. As new features are being developed, there should be a resource tasked with leading the documentation team and ensuring that they stay up to date with the feature changes. The resource needs to be technical enough to listen, take good notes, and most importantly, understand what the developers are talking about during the change meetings. Conversely, the developers need to be available to that person and their team when additional clarification is needed. That will slow the developers down a little bit, and we all know how much developers hate having to explain what they do... but in the long run, the product will be better for it and the team will be better for it.

Microsoft gets no pass! I generally give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, but there are too many instances of this. I am going to go off on a bit of a tangent here, but the fail to eat their own dog food. They come up with Best Practices, and they do not even follow them internally. There is not an internal body at Microsoft that enforces uniform standards. They have it setup that way to mitigate risk to the company. If they had a single body responsible for maintaining order, they open themselves up to the risks associated with the failure of that body. So instead, they just compartmentalize and each team ends up doing their own thing. Therefore the inevitable fallout is contained.

That organization strategy causes problems like this. They restrict their ability to test patches across the groups. They have damned themselves. And they have done it to cover their own asses. Therefore, they get zero sympathy.

It is never going to happen, but they need to modify their business model. Instead of forcing people onto the upgrade treadmill, they should move over to a maintenance subscription model. Doing that would allow them to continue to improve the products, and stop focusing on pushing out new features all the time. For the most part, Windows, Office, Exchange and SQL server are "good enough" in terms of feature set. Now they just need to focus on making them stable, and improving the tooling that is already there.

The internet is the ultimate gladiator arena for thoughts. If an idea cannot stand up to the harsh scrutiny of a bunch of anonymous trolls, it probably does not deserve to thrive permanently in the public realm. The reality of internet trolling is that people are free to say what they actually think, without the tethers of society keeping their ego in check. It does get ugly and unproductive at times, but let's face it, ideas are stronger for running the gauntlet.

I especially think that news sites need to support comments. The primary reason for that is so that that informed members of the public can provide counter points and make persuasive arguments to influence people who might be on the fence about the subject. Every site, from a mainstream site like CNN to the darkest fringes of the internet, is biased. As a society, we need to be able to counter the bias and the best way to do that is with discourse.

Where do those who determine what is and is not ethical come down on the issue ISPs who introduce artificial scarcity by refusing to re-invest the revenue that they generate from their customers into infrastructure upgrades that would allow them to support the internet usage habits of ALL of their users?

The difference is that the private sector has competition. If Company A is billing a certain amount of hours to get a job done, and Company B is billing less to get the same job done, then Company A will eventually start losing work to Company B. Similarly if Company A is turning out half assed work, or doing the professional equivalent of finishing their homework right before class, they will lose business to other organizations who deliver better results.

The company I work for is facing the first challenge of spending too much time on projects. A good portion of our engagements are spent re-inventing the wheel on basic project setup and management activities. It looks good for the Directors in charge of the projects because their people are 100%+ utilized. It kills us in the marketplace because our competitors have good processes in place that allow them to execute projects in less time and for less cost. The company has no choice but to become more efficient.

The patent office has no such competition. Nobody else can grant patents. Therefore they can half ass their way through it and there will not be any consequences for them.

Sounds about right for most "enterprise IT 'talent'" these days. Heaven forbid anyone should have even a passing familiarity with any systems beyond the small handful that they work with.

That is why the time to fight this is now.

I see this all the time. Fighting without a goal in mind is futile. Right now there are a small handful of people who are upset about some issues, but nobody is proposing an alternatives. Not only that, but nobody has come up with a concrete example of how their much better alternative reality is being hindered by censorship.

I agree with you that the timing is suspicious. It is also coming out at the same time as the story about the FBI infecting Tor users with malware and using that as a means to bring child porn charges against a number of people. (http://gizmodo.com/the-fbi-is-infecting-tor-users-with-malware-to-catch-ki-1616363114). Obviously the message is that Tor is evil and is only used to facilitate child porn, drugs and murder for hire.

I have no idea how large the child porn community is, but I have the sense that it is not really as big and far reaching as the authorities want to make it out to be. On the other hand, maybe the child porn kink is as common as women who like having their hair pulled. Like you said though, it is a convenient boogey man to trot out from time to time to use as cover for much wider ranging programs. "Ignore the fact that we are eavesdropping on EVERYONE because look, we caught a dozen people looking at kiddie porn." Nobody is going to come out and say, "But kiddie porn is a-okay!" And the government also gets to tar anyone against dragnet surveillance. "You mean you DON'T want us to catch perverts into kiddie porn? What are you, a kiddie porn consuming terrorist?!?!"

Can you produce some evidence of some non-objectionable content that is being censored? That is what I am waiting for. I see this slippery slope argument all the time, but I do not see the censorship.

It can be argued that the media is controlled via centralization and therefore heavy handed censorship is not even necessary. It is not necessary because the major media outlets can choose to ignore anything that goes against the status quo.

The MH17 shoot down in the Ukraine is a good example. There is plenty of material out there that calls into question the narrative being put out by the White House and the State Department. But that information is not being pulled off of the internet. It is not being filtered by the ISPs. They do not need to filter it. The average American does not care. You can put the information in front of them. You can show them that we are being herded into World War 3. Unless the message comes from CNN or Time Magazine or the Washington Post, they will not believe it.

I agree. And this is why I posed the question to the OP. He is against "any" censorship. I was curious if that also applies to censorship of negative things that happen to someone close to him who he presumably loves and cares for.

It is one thing to try to portray kiddie porn as "just pictures". It is another thing entirely when they are "just pictures" of your child, or your niece.

This is going to be a bit too metaphysical for this audience, but there truly is "good" and "evil" energy in the world. I do not mean in the Christian sense of heaven and hell. I mean real evil. Real, emotional and mental sickness that should have no place in a civilized society. Yet at the same time, an evil that is inevitable given the reality that the universe must be balanced, and that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction. Evil that is the polar opposite of love and compassion and caring.

Let's use an extreme example here. Someone rapes your mom and takes pictures and posts them on the internet. Would you be opposed to allowing your mother to issue a DMCA take down notice? That is censorship.

Following your logic as I think you are laying it out, you would have to be opposed to that too. After all, rape is bad and we are not necessarily condoning rape. We are simply looking at images of something that has already happened. We are not profiting from them. The rapist is not profiting from them. The victim is already victimized and will not be un-victimized. So censorship is abhorrent and therefore raped mom on the internet is okay. Right?

I am willing to agree that blanket censorship is a bad thing.

How can you be opposed to the censorship of child pornography? Please avoid the slippery slope argument. That one has been played out.