Justin Silverton's Blog:  5 reasons why oscommerce is a nightmare
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On the High Performance PHP blog today, Justin Silverton has posted a few thoughts on why he thinks "oscommerce is a nightmare".   He quotes from the oscommerce.com site about what their goal for the software is and the methods they're working at to achieve those goals. Then comes his reasons for not wanting to use their software - five of them on differing subjects:  no separation of logic and presentation difficult to integrate into an existing design security cannot have multiple sizes of image previews admin navigation issues  He offers a bit of explaination for each of these, backing up his opinion with a few facts.
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Though digital music has come a long way, today's online music stores still have significant problems. Here's my fix-it wish list.
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Frustrated by sub-par, outsourced customer service and technical support? Would you be willing to pay a premium for onshore service?
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Q: I recently installed Service Pack 2 on my Windows XP machine, and now the system&#39;s gone all screwy: Internet Explorer won&#39;t display animations right, I can&#39;t play WarCraft III, and Yahoo Instant Messenger is toast.
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First a little background. I stopped using a Mac in 1997, as Apple was transitioning to the new operating system. I started using the Mac again as my primary OS in late 2005, a little more than two years ago. This is the first new version of the OS to come out since I switched back. Based on a tour of the new features, pretty late at the end of a long week, it's safe to say an OS is still just an OS, the purpose of the OS is to stay out of your way until you need it. Leopard may be prettier than the last version, I'm not sure it is or isn't. Not sure I'll use many of the new features. For people who hadn't used VNC before, "screen sharing" would certainly be a big new feature if they're working in a networked enviroment. And maybe the new backup code will fit into my routine. I have some ideas about that. (Maybe I'll just have one computer on my LAN that is backed up and copy things there if I want them backed up.) File sharing is more convenient in Leopard, the shared computers are listed in every Finder window, and this is good. FInding the disks that are available on each of these computers is one step easier too.  The Preferences applicaiton appears largely unchanged, except the Networking section where a lot of functionality seems to be missing. I have to look at this more closely. The Download stack is lost on me since I don't use Safari or Apple's mail app. I would find it useful if Firefox had a similar feature (but they kind of do, I can direct all downloads to a specific folder). All in all, changes to an OS aren't that important. The action is in the apps, and for me, just a couple of primary ones, the web browser and my integrated writing and programming environment. It's been quite a while since there have been meaningful improvements to either, and those improvements would end up meaning a lot more to me than improvements to the OS. There isn't much you can do, after the Mac has been around for 23 years, that hasn't already been done.  Net-net, my first impression of Leopard is that it isn't a big deal one way or the other.  PS: I wonder if the next version of the OS will be called Leonard, to honor Leonard Rosenthal, a famous Mac developer in the 80s and 90s.
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In 1980, I signed a deal with a company to market a product I was developing. The contract required me to turn over the source code, which I did. One day I went to a meeting at the office of the company, and there on the product manager's desk, right next to a door that opened to the outside, was a floppy labeled "Dave Winer's source code" in big letters.  If you own a Mac you may soon find out what that felt like. It's amazing to me that the tech blogosphere doesn't treat Apple's policy re broken hard disks as the huge gaping security hole that it is.  Think about it. We worry about bad people getting their hands on little pieces of data that, when added together, give them the power to be you in banking and credit transactions.  Think about what you would do if your laptop was stolen. Well, if you own a Mac and its hard disk goes bad, and you make the mistake of bringing it to Apple for service, you will turn over all that data to Apple. Not "may" or "might" but "will." What Apple in turn does with that data is none of your affair. They don't sign anything or offer any guarantees that they won't sell the disk to a data miner. Think it can't happen or that it's unlikely? I don't gain much comfort from your feeling of security. I've been writing about this issue since December 22. Usually when I write something critical of Apple, the results are mixed. Some people are supportive, but far more people attack. This time the ratio is very different. Almost everyone who has commented gets that there's a huge problem here. Can we solve this problem? Of course we can.  Some say that other vendors do this too. That gives me less comfort, not more. That means there's no escaping this crazy way of treating user's confidentiality. Ultimately it hurts the vendors because people can't use their computers for things the manufacturers say we can.  Further, it's got to be an issue for the banks, brokerage firms, credit agencies. If you are a newspaper and you employ reporters and they use a computer, how exactly are you guarding the confidentiality of your sources? If you're a confidential source, don't you have an interest when the reporter gives their computer manufacturer all their data to do with as they please? Imagine what you would do if it turned out there was a bug in a Netgear or Linksys router that allowed, under special circumstances, a mailicous person to gain access to the full content of your hard disk at any time. Would you have a problem with that? This is worse than Microsoft's neglect of malware that got me to stop using their computers. In that case it was Microsoft being neglegent. This time Apple itself is the cause of the problem. It's as if they planted a virus in their operating system that entitled them, under special circumstances, completely out of the user's control, to gain access to everything on your disk, with as much time as they want, with no way for you to prevent or even detect the intrusion.  See also: My letter to Steve Jobs.
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Blog: Roy Russo argues that open source vendors are monopolies waiting to happen.  Here's why he's wrong.
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Russ asks: Where's the OpenSocial container API? I love Russ because he cuts through all the BS and gets right to the core, most basic question, and he doesn't care who he pisses off. That's my kind of developer. You can't lie to the compiler, when the bits hit the road, you gotta know what garbage goes in and what garbage comes out.  (Ahh programmer's humor!) In other words, suppose I wanted to compete with Google, MySpace, Plaxo and LinkedIn, well, where's the spec that shows me how to do that? Well, of course I don't know, they aren't communicating with riffraff like me, but I have some experience with this kind of stuff, so I can hazard a guess. If they publish a spec,all kinds of projects will likely get started to enable the API in (just for the sake of argument): Drupal, WordPress, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Scripting News (why not add widgets to a random blog), CNN, The New York Times, well you get the idea. There might be lots of implementations very quickly. And that would be it for changes. It would be frozen de facto, they'd have to live with what they have, which given how quickly it was thrown together, probably isn't very good. Not the kind of stuff you'd like to support for the next decade or two. Or maybe they would break everyone, something guaranteed to make them a lot of enemies, much the way Microsoft did, and they were good at migration of APIs.  Google is good at doing AJAXy web UIs, they make users happy, but they're not very good at APIs. This one is a loser, for sure. That's the answer to Russ's question. It's probably not malice that keeps them from releasing details to everyone outside their club, it's pragmatism. They have to try to hold on to it to keep it from becoming even more of a mess than it already is. Just my opinion, for what it's worth. I've been wrong many times before.
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Tycho:  After seeing Chore Wars mentioned yesterday, the opportunities for manipulating people seemed...  rich.  The possibilities for mashups based on this data are also rich - I wonder if it could be exposed, somehow.  When my charge is old enough to manipulate in this way, my crib is going to fucking sparkle.
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"And there I stood: alone in the dark, unknown terrors approaching, armed only with a bucket of water."  "Which is, curiously enough, almost exactly the position that Windows users find themselves in today: alone in the dark, unknown terrors approaching, but in their case, having a bucket of water would be an improvement."  "MS04-028 is, perhaps, the epitome of bad technical writing - the literary equivalent of spaghetti code. I've read through it far too many times, and I still understand far too little."  And who is at fault here?  You or Microsoft?  Microsoft has for years demonstrated that they hate their customers.  Yet its people like Tom Liston that keep coming back for more abuse.  T ...
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A corporation is not the person the legal fiction makes it so much as a collection of different interests. I was reminded of this fact a couple of weeks ago when I went shopping for a laptop. Remembering that Hewlett-Packard almost singlehandedly solved the basic problem of laser printer support for GNU/Linux, I ended up buying one of the company's laptops. Consumer reports, price, and HP's listing as one of the greener hardware manufacturers according to Greenpeace also affected my decision, but my impression of HP as a free software friendly company was a large criteria.
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Restrictive hardware and convoluted rights management crimp consumer choices.
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The Story: Look in the mirror, Mr. or Ms. IT buyer. You?ve got more muscle than ever ? and you did it without steroids.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Despite the wave of consolidation sweeping the industry, buyers have actually gained more leverage than ever when it comes to making deals with their vendors, notes a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis. ?Software buyers need to realize that the pendulum is beginning to swing in their favor and that there are an increasing number of alternatives in today?s software market,? concurs Gartner analyst William Snyder (no relation to this writer).There are a lot of reasons for the swing, but one certainly stands out: The shift to SaaS (software as a service). The poster child for this phenomenon is Salesforce.com. "Both its development and delivery models are having a disruptive effect on the entire CRM market,? notes Forrester Research analyst Bill Band. But it?s not just Salesforce: By 2011, Snyder says, fully 25 percent of all new business software will be delivered as a service as Salesforce and other vendors push upstream from the small-business market. Already, SaaS providers make up the majority of sales for several segments of human resources applications, and is well-established for supply-chain management.[ InfoClipzflash video primer: Software as a Service ]SaaS is just the first wave of services that are pushing pricing power over to buyers: The more recent move to Web services and the beginnings of SOA (service-oriented architecture) deployment are encouraging the use of modular software, which in turn cuts development costs, makes it harder for vendors to sell expensive suites, and lessens the need for expensive consulting services.And yet another factor is upping buyer?s power, notes Gartner?s Snyder: the emergence of third-party support options that are reducing software?s TCO (total cost of ownership). ?Maintenance services have been a quasi-monopoly for software vendors,? he said. ?For many years, only the software vendor had rights to the source code of the critical components of the system. This made it impossible to go to an open, competitive market to obtain upgrades, services and support, which in turn made it impossible to negotiate maintenance fees.?Interestingly another software trend ? the growth of virtualization ? is beginning to affect pricing for hardware, particularly servers. A report by Infiniti Research suggests that server shipments will start declining in 2008: ?The server market of tomorrow will be a value game and not a volume game.? And that means better pricing for hardware, too.Don?t let your head swell too much, but Gartner vice president Mark McDonald credits ?savvy CIOs? for containing costs that were once out of control. ?They?re saying, ?I want you to implement in a way that gives me the advantage over my competition? ? and they?re not accepting the traditional vendor model, which favors homogeneity and the economics of scale.?The Bottom Line: Chances are that you?re looking at SaaS, Web services, SOA, virtualization, open source, and other technology-delivery methods for a variety of specific reasons, without realizing the cumulative effect is to give you more pricing power. Now that you?ve got the power, use it.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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You rarely hear about a new OS causing people to panic. But IT consultant Scott Pam says that's exactly what his small-business clients are doing when they install Windows Vista on new PCs and run smack into compatibility or usability roadblocks.                                                    Pam's clients are not alone: Since InfoWorld launched its petition drive on Jan. 14 to ask Microsoft to continue selling new XP licenses indefinitely alongside its Vista licenses, more than 75,000 people have signed on. And hundreds of people have commented ? many with ferocious, sometimes unprintable passion. "Right now I have a laptop with crap Vista and I'm going to downgrade to XP because Vista sucks," reads one such comment.Where does all the vitriol come from?[ Get the big picture on  Windows XP's impending demise, from user reactions to licensing implications ? and sign InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition ]IT managers and analysts suggest a range of reasons, some based on irrational fears and others based on rational reactions to disruptive changes.Emotional effects "When we first deployed Vista, people told us it sucks, that it's not as good as XP," recalled Sumeeth Evans, IT director at Collegiate Housing Services, an 80-person college facilities management firm. A month later, he surveyed the staff to see if their views had changed, and they had: "They said it was very good, that they were getting used to it. We asked what was different, and they said they originally didn't like Vista because it was a change. That's human nature."Microsoft's overzealous schedule in replacing XP with Vista has exacerbated resistance to change, said Michael Silver, a research vice president at Gartner. The company had originally planned to discontinue XP sales on Dec. 31, 2007, just 11 months after Vista was made available to consumers and 14 months after it was made available to enterprises. The date for new license sales to end is now June 30.In practice, XP's consumer availability ended for many users even sooner ? just six months after Vista's release ? since storefront retailers  Best Buy and Circuit City and most computer manufacturers' Web sites stopped selling XP-equipped computers in July 2007. Typically, Microsoft has given customers two years to make such a transition, Silver noted.Burton Group executive strategist Ken Anderson suggested that the strong emotional identification with XP represented a fundamental shift in how people, including IT staff, now think of operating systems. They have become a familiar extension of what we do and how we work, thus not something  want to change often. "When technology becomes part of you, you don't want people to mess with it," he said.Anderson likened the reaction to XP's impending demise to what happened in the 1980s when Coca-Cola replaced its classic Coke formula with New Coke, causing massive protests by customers who had no reason to change what they drank. The protests forced the company to bring back what we now call Coke Classic. "XP has come to the point of being Coke Classic," he said, with Vista playing the role of New Coke.The further the better The Englewood (N.J.) Hospital Medical Center switched to Vista shortly after its enterprise release, since it had been in Microsoft's early adopter program. Most users ? mainly nurses and other medical staff ? didn't really notice the upgrade and had few complaints, noted Gary Wilhelm, the business and systems financial manager (a combination of CTO and CFO) at the 2,500-employee facility. That's because they don't really use the OS, but instead work directly in familiar applications that load when they sign in using their ID.Capacitor manufacturer Kemet saw a similar ho-hum reaction from most of its staff, says Jeff Padgett, the global infrastructure manager. And for the same reason: Users have little direct interaction with the OS. But the staff did push back on Office 2007, whose ribbon interface is a departure from the previous versions. They rebelled to the degree that Padgett has delayed Office 2007 deployment and may not install it at all.Back at the Englewood hospital, Wilhelm did hear anti-Vista grumbling from people in the administration department, who work more closely with the OS itself for file management and so on. And at Kemet, another group of hands-on users complained about the switch to Vista, noted Padgett: "The people who suffered the most were engineers and IT people."The phenomenon of hands-on users being the most resistant explains why so many small-business users and consultants have reacted so strongly against Vista, noted Gartner's Silver.Conversely, those enamored of the latest technology tend to be Vista enthusiasts, said David Fritzke, IT director at the YMCA Milwaukee, which has been adding Vista to its workforce as it buys new computers. "Some users bought Vista for home and then wanted it more quickly at work than we had initially planned to deploy it," he said. Fritzke also found that younger users adapted to Vista more easily.In search of ROI Users' personal reactions, positive or negative, ultimately impact the bottom line and help drive the business decision of whether to roll out Vista across an organization.It's all about basic cost-benefit analysis, says Gartner's Silver. In most businesses, Vista offers few compelling advantages for users while introducing challenges. The cost of change is too high for the perceived benefit. For example, users often complain about Vista's constant nagging about possible system threats, about applications that no longer run, or about files that appear to be "lost" because they've been moved to new places by the OS, Silver said."It's really hard to convince someone to go to a product that's not quite as stable or as capable as what they're already using," Silver noted ? and so they get frustrated and angry. While IT managers and analysts appreciate some under-the-hood changes in Vista, these improvements don't have an immediate, obvious benefit for users. "Vista's benefits are not about the users," concurred Collegiate Housing Services' Evans.Upgrades from Microsoft's past have also colored expectations, Silver said. Users tend to remember the straightforward transition from Windows 2000 to XP, even though technically it was a "minor" upgrade, he said. (Silver also noted that until XP Service Pack 2, XP had its own share of compatibility and security flaws that annoyed users, something that most forgot with SP2's release.)And while the path from Windows 95 and 98 to Windows XP was rockier, the benefits were clear enough at each stage for most customers to make the upgrade investment gladly, Silver said.Some users have decided to skip Vista altogether and instead wait for Windows 7, whose release date has been reported as anywhere between 2009 and 2011 "Why shoot yourself in the foot twice? Windows 7 will be out next year; I'll wait till then," said one InfoWorld reader. If Windows 7 arrives sooner rather than later ? or if a miraculous Vista service pack addresses all the major objections in one swoop ? then the uproar over upgrading to Vista will quickly fade into the hazy past of other Windows upgrade snafus.
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Blog: For too long, technology companies have been living large by making the rest of us pay for their shoddy workmanship. Worst of all, we consumers keep playing along.
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At Fry's this afternoon, where I bought two 500GB Firewire drives. Which it turns out I needed because after I got home all three external drives attached to my desktop were reported as damaged beyond repair by the new Mac OS. Coincidence? Lucky that I had exactly the hardware I needed to dig out of the mess? Who knows!
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Another take on some of the issues faced when purchasing a new computer.