DISQUS

I think we should have a whip round on twitter and see if we can round up enough cash to help 'em out :) poor guys, must be hard to ship with no budget

There are SO many people who think that unless your sign is showing a ticker as well as an RSS feed, video/flash/ppt all at the same time then it has no value - but having worked on building systems like that I think I've come around to your way of thinking. Not only is there the "crap' don't look" aspect to it, even if you do it either takes you far too long to decide what information on the screen you should be looking at, or just get information overload and watch the flashing lights (video) instead, which makes the rest sort of pointless.

Trying to advertise with video seems such a bad/bizarre idea - most people are going to catch the video half way through, if that is the case then they're unlikely to hang around for the rest of it unless they are static and not moving (that some people call this a captive audience, I think, explains a lot). If people are walking past then they're seeing even less of the video and seeing so little of the message that it is pointless. At least with a 'poster' system all of the information is there in one glance, I can (probably subconciously) decide whether the information has value to me without getting information out of context - my only worry about all of these sort of things is that if the information is really interesting to me and it moves on to the next item in the playlist before I have a chance to read it fully - some way of going back to the previous item because I was reading it would be great.

Anyway, more posts from the soap-box please ... :)

I don't know if it reflects whether people would actually target signs with their SMS, but the usage rates in Europe are exceptionally high - above 80%. Maybe feeling more comfortable with SMS might have an effect on whether people would do it, but over here we SMS our votes to TV shows, radio shows, to find our nearest hotspot and a host of other services.

There is a little info on European SMS usage with advertising at http://telephonyonline.com/wireless/news/teleco... The wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging#Europe ) also gives a few figures and sources on worldwide usage.

" networking is built-in (for free!) to every PC"

Well sort of, except not on Windows. They're software may be free but if you're using Windows you can use the IP stack for free, but if you are accessing a CIFS share or a Windows server, then you have to pay a client access license (yes, ridiculous I know). You can of course pay for one of the schemes that essentially gives you unlimited CALS, but it isn't cheap. It gets worse if they use Sql Server, suddenly your free software is far from free.

Looks like I was once again in such a rush I didn't check the obvious. Sigh.
Thanks for the pointer ;)

I like Sign/Post but maybe the Redpost/ is now a prerequisite. Shame because Sign/Post is nice.

How about just Redpost/Box? That way usage is 'let's just install a redpost box.'

I can't see this being about PDF. Why would Apple rely on a third party for something that is so core to their OS?

Wow. Glad you're okay.

I have to say though considering what it has been through it is impressive how well the car held up - alongside wearing a seatbelt it must have had some impact on your survival. You're a lucky guy, but I guess you know that.

Good luck in 2008 :)

Wow - that is some change since the first pictures when you first found the spave- the ones that looked like something out of an old black and white thriller, you know the ones with the detectives th.. nevermind.

Is it the same building?

@CC - "New Media is the same as Old Media, just minus the writers and talent"

I recently saw this quote about Robert (not very flattering, but follows your line about talent)

The writings of Robert Scoble are like a thousand monkeys typing, short about 999 monkeys.

Not that I am justifying the failure of the software to update properly, but it does seem rather like you are extrapolating from a very small vocal minority and giving the impression that this is exceptionally widespread.

Quick question though - how many people having problems are using APE (the cause of the Leopard failures) either directly or because Logictech (in their not so infinite wisdom) decided to ship it with their drivers?

ordinal erased and restored? Why did he not archive and install - which would have cost him an hour at most?

I am guessing, and it is a guess, that you didn't bother watching the architecture videos, or the HOWTO video? If you had you would have seen the potential of the platform and what you can do with the frameworks.

In fact I know you didn't watch the arch videos, because you didn't mention one of the most relevant and interesting points - you might write code in Java, but it runs on Google's own in-house VM and NOT on J2ME.

Maybe you should get your developer friends to watch more than the demos?

Sorry, my bad. I used your point about it being mothballed as the basis for drawing conclusions about Microsoft's intentions. In retrospect that was probably wrong :(

Yup - understood, but I am harsh sometimes with my friends too, especially when I believe they may be doing the wrong thing .I think it is fairly widely understood that Chris isn't responsible for every decision made by the IE team. It is just unfortunate that he is currently the public face. Sorry if I gave the impression that I either thought it was personal or that it should be - it's business it should *never* be personal.

And given the fairly widespread reaction to the post, I guess we can all understand why they don't post more information on IE8 as no matter what they post you can be fairly confident they'll get slammed by someone. I'd still like to know though so I can make decisions, or start to, for the future - at the moment I have to consider decisions based on IE7 even thought it won't be the targetted platform :(

Chris, if the JScript team are working on the next release, and you are trying to slow the ES process down - can we assume correctly that the JScript team are fixing all of the bugs in JScript that have been present since IE4, which makes them what? a decade old? I am sure those fixes would be appreciated by those that have had to suffer them.

Yes, I saw the NDA comment - sounds like a diversion to get you to keep quiet, :(

Fair comment about the codebase, and I don't think anyone would be surprised by internal bug metrics given the public ones :)

Thank you for your attempts to get the IE team to discuss IE8 more widely - something even Dave Massy seems to have trouble doing .. unfortunately my confidence in IE8 is already shattered so it will always be 'that other browser that we'll fix last'.

"Oh, by the way, we’re shipping a Firefox 3 Beta soon. Can you comment on when an IE 8 (or IE 7.5) Beta will be released?"

$5 says we get IE8 announcements and/or info within 2 days of the FF3 beta.

Is the IE codebase really as messy as I've heard (unsubstantiated rumour from a friend of a friend at the moment)? And if so why don't Microsoft just use Gecko and add their own Chrome (NiH withstanding)?

Given Al Billings comments about the JScript team being broken up 18 months ago (if not longer) - as a comment in the original post from the IEBlog -why should anyone trust the IE team's intentions as being positive and not self-serving?

After the IE 6/7 fiasco, why would anyone not continue to assume that the IE team is following their own agenda, rather than provide their users what they want?

Sorry, Pablo "Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y" Picasso has got you beat. Nice try Kelly.

"hell with IT folks who try to keep you from doing what you want to do."

If he is at school, shouldn't he be learning and spending his own time on facebook instead of his teachers'? Just a thought.

What'd make it really useful, is if you could choose some of the keywords that Dave is using to cluster stuff and say that you are not interested in that. At least I could get just relevant interesting (to me) news in a single place quickly.

I don't suppose Dave has done this for any other sites like the BBC?

Lolcatz@6

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