In order to develop my own opinion, I've been running a little experiment for the past week in which I switched the search box to Bing.
Basically, I have found very little difference in Google and Bing's search. They are both equally functional and fast. If anything, I've found that I have no reason to switch back to Google - Bing's daily rethemeing adds a little spark to my day.
I encourage everyone to try this for a week. You'll be amazed at how undifferentiated the two major search players truly are at search. These little user delighters are going to be a huge component in the battle for search revenue in the near future.
It's to be expected, with the public papers written on search and employees moving between them over time I'd imagine there algorithms would be quiet similar.
I disagree, every new server or desktop I setup has bing as the default search engine, before switching them to google, I'll sometimes try my search in bing and be horribly dissatisfied. I may have learned how to search on google (in a way to get better google results) but I can't figure out how to get Bing to give me what I'm looking for.
You have to click the 'assumptions' on the upper left. It seems that vast figure is generated by comparing to Microsoft Exchange, including sysadmin time.
Also, it appears that in various 'assumptions' on this site, it is ignoring the total number of people working for the company. When you edit assumptions in one part, it reads...
How many people work at <company>? 1
[...]
Think of the last time you worked on a group project. How many people were on that team? 10
[...]
What percentage of <company> employees use laptops? 60%
So, apparently 10 times as many people worked on the last project as were employed by the company in total, and .6 of one employee uses a laptop.
It depends what you're up to, I suppose. If you were seeking to install keyloggers to record financial authentication details, why not target people whose choice of computer hardware indicates they have more money than average?
Because Windows vs. Mac is an exceedingly weak financial signal, and because no matter what the signal is, having 20-30 accounts is better than having just 1 account?
Sure, but there are several other factors to take into consideration.
1> Very few Macs are running anti virus/spyware software, as the users generally believe their systems to be immune to malware
2> The malware authors are probably already targeting Windows, why not do Macs as well? The sites I work with are up to 25% Mac usage now. That is significant.
3> As Mac browsers have not been attacked as often and scrutinized as carefully by attackers, it appears Apple and other browser vendors have not taken as much care to harden the Mac browsers and OS.
4> Is having a Mac a weak financial signal? I wonder what data is there is out there about the affluence of the Mac-owning audience. Apple isn't targeting the low end of the market, that's for sure.
So, in summary: it might be relatively easy, plus, why not.
I assume malware authors would be targeting Mac OS in addition to, not instead of, Windows.
The same logic works out for normal ('voluntary') software applications, doesn't it? Most companies decide to focus their efforts on producing software for Windows, based on the idea that the market is much larger. Companies nevertheless do decide to produce software for Macs, for various reasons.
For me, Firefox takes about 1 second to open on my Mac, 2 seconds in Linux, and 3 seconds in Windows. No idea how you see it as similar to IE 8 in any way.
I agree they have a long way to go to be as slick as Chrome, but sorry, it has nothing to do with Opera - Opera never had even 1/10 of the market share that FF has now.
Are you using a Mac, by chance? The Mac version of Firefox isn't the best.
Linux is not Firefox only by any means - Google Chrome for Linux is very good, and the development tools are identical to the Windows and Mac versions of Chrome (which are the same Safari's tools). Opera for Linux is also top-notch.
Have you tried IE 8's dev tools? Firebug beats the pants off of IE 8's tool in usability and features, for me. Like most of IE, the dev tools are adequate, but lack a decent interface and are not updated or improved often, if ever.
I like Chrome and Safari's tools, but my personal assessment is that Firebug is more comfortable. It has all of the featured you mentioned except possibly the local database inspector.
For the site I work on the most, twice as much of our audience uses Firefox as Safari and Chrome combined, and FF even exceeds IE usage. So not only does it have my preferred dev tools, but is the most important browser for our audience.
"He noted there have been no discussions with Microsoft to license Windows CE, the operating system designed for handheld devices, settop boxes, and other non-PC products."
Vague bug reports and scope creep are definitely up there.
One of my least favorite situations is dealing with other people's minor plugins or libraries...
If it's in Python, usually it's good as-is.
If it's in PHP, usually the structure is so disturbing that if we have to use it, I simply try not to look. The code ranges from naive to over-engineered, the latter of which is especially pointless in PHP.
For other people's JavaScript, usually I'm horrified by all of the 'for' and 'if' blocks that are lacking braces. Argh! Half the time I end up rewriting and removing portions of various plug-ins, and I often feel the compulsion to go fix all of the lazy bracing at the same time.
I'm not in the 'all links should be a hideous default RGB blue' camp, but we may as well note that the readers of this site are not similar to the target audience of the average website in terms of technological sophistication.
I'm interested in visualizing the data, not graphing the prose. A line graph would work great, with the y axis representing dollars and the x axis representing time labeled with each President's name.
