mshtml.dll still exists. It loads when Wndows boots because it's the core of IE and Windows Explorer.

It wouldn't even take a new crop of IE exploits in the wild to make MS stock drop in price. The first two weeks would be a constant flood of blog posts detailing how crappy the code is. Trident is 17 years old, and many of us have heard how much of an unmaintainable mess the codebase has become in their attempts to implement web standards. Even then, MS would have to release it under a fully open license otherwise no one will taint themselves.

The "new thing", Spartan, is just a rebrand of IE with a new skin. It'll still be built around Trident and Chakra, so web developers will have no reason to have a different opinion of it from IE.

MS needs a new rendering engine, but they'll never use an open source one. Their only real option is to write one from scratch, which they haven't done since IE1, and that engine was replaced with Trident (which they bought) in IE4. There was IE5 for Mac, but that was pretty much a one man crusade and its rendering engine was nothing like regular IE.

I was told that by a former employee in a store a couple months ago. I wouldn't put it past RS execs to be doing creative accounting to justify wasting half the floor space with products that don't belong there. They'll get their golden parachutes before anyone else gets anything from a buyout, we've seen it all before.

Why is it only now, three decades later, that they are finally going under?

The answer: Cell phones.

Upper management lost its vision long ago, but the coup de grace was when they started selling cell phones to cash in on an exploding market. Trouble is, RS buys the phones at retail cost and loses money on every unit.

In the last couple years someone in RS management sniffed out a bit of a clue, because they started stocking Arduino, RaspberryPi, and most recently LittleBits. A slight correction, but everyone knows RS should be the non-big-box side of Fry's.

PHP gets bashed because a) the language maintainers are rather bad at language design, and b) so much shitty code gets written in it. I'm in a similar boat as you, having done primarily PHP development since 4.0 was released.

Drupal 7 is ok (I haven't looked at 8 yet), but if you really want to see good PHP code, look at Laravel.

Yes, PHP is easy to write, therefore it is easy to write badly. WordPress is the poster child for PHP's bad reputation, because:

• It's written badly
• It's written badly even in the context of PHP4, from which it is a relic
• The project management refuses to break backwards compatibility

Granted, PHP is the only language where a result like WP is possible. Shitty code hyped by an army of self-described "developers" who proudly and incestuously pass around bad practices like STDs.

That being said, JavaScript outside the browser is a convenient, unnecessary solution looking for a problem.

It should be very clear by now that at least one party doesn't want more people to vote in general, only more of the people likely to vote in that party's favor. The establishment only accepted electronic voting so that they can game the outcome. They'll never take the next step to allow it to be widely exercized.

Unfortunately, Stephane Charbonnier is one of the people who were killed in this latest attack. I really hope you're right that Charlie Hebdo will keep going, but it's a lot easier to recover from physical damage to offices than it is from having the staff that make the magazine what it is killed. :(

It's garbage, and doesn't deserve any support. The universe would be a better place if all knowledge and memory of it were obliterated.

The infrastructure currrently exists to release all films for home rental immediately!

Yes and no. Hollywood wants same day DVD release, the only thing preventing that is Walmart. As efficient as their distribution system is, it still takes 45 days to get a product onto store shelves. Hollywood doesn't want to risk that leak window.

Nothing, except age. I still have my Epic 4G, and will until there is a new phone with a full QWERTY slider keyboard. I don't want a slim phone, that's why I put a bulky case on it.

If the JS and rendering engines are the same, then there's nothing new that matters to developers. Making it look like Chrome/FF is not necessarily a good thing, as those browsers have stripped the browser UI of many of the most important elements.

Trident is ancient hacked up garbage that MS needs to replace.

Companies don't want the exceptional 5%, they want the cheapest 5% that is slightly above average. They don't look past the per-head cost to find the hidden costs of bad code, poor design, and higher maintenance.

there are indeed no good technical histories of computer science, and little prospect of any.

I see the posthumous reactions to Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie as indicators that Knuth is absolutely right. Jobs, who was essentially just a marketing asshole, gets every manner of fanfare commemorating his "world-changing" achievements. Ritchie on the other hand is almost completely ignored in the media, even though he is one of the giants upon whose shoulders Jobs undeservingly stood.

I bet anyone here would agree that co-authoring UNIX is a far more important event than being the iPod/iPhone taskmaster.