Getting feedback to the IE 8 team
Getting feedback to the IE 8 team
The following email was sent out to Microsoft MVPs (read: friendly people :), but we should give them our honest feedback too: Microsoft has recently released a public beta of IE8. Standards and security are of top importance in this release. To that end, the IE team is planning on releasing IE8 in full standards mode. […]
The following email was sent out to Microsoft MVPs (read: friendly people :), but we should give them our honest feedback too:
Microsoft has recently released a public beta of IE8. Standards and security are of top importance in this release. To that end, the IE team is planning on releasing IE8 in full standards mode. Releasing in Full Standards Mode offers many benefits in the long term, but short term, could cause some end-user and developer issues. We would love to understand your thoughts around the impact of this specific issue and invite your suggestions on how we can best communicate it.
If you have thoughts and feedback on IE 8 releasing in full standards mode, please respond to the questions below and send your reply to jasontil@microsoft.com with “[IE8 Community Feedback]” in the subject line by this Friday, April 11th at Noon, PDT.
1) IE8 releasing in expected to release in “standards mode”.
(a) What do people in your communities space think about this decision?
(b) What do you predict the impact to be on the customer and/or Developer experience?
(c) Do you have a recommendations on how best to share this information?
2) Our current plan is to communicate this heavily with web site owners and developers. We will be contacting top sites directly, distributing developer FAQs, and writing Knowledge Base articles on authoring to these standards.
(a) Do you think that will be effective at improving the customer experience?
(b) Are there other suggestions do you could offer to transition web sites to be standards-based or to improve the experience for users?
3) Is there anything else you or those in your communities wish to tell us about this issue to improve how we react and respond as Internet Explorer advances to release?
Google Adsense Trialed on Yahoo!
Yahoo! is currently running a two week trial of Google’s Adsense on 3% of its US search results. The trial is seen as an investigation into the prospects of a long term partnership between the two companies. The core idea, (according to Yahoo!) is to exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value, but is […]
Yahoo! is currently running a two week trial of Google’s Adsense on 3% of its US search results. The trial is seen as an investigation into the prospects of a long term partnership between the two companies. The core idea, (according to Yahoo!) is to exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value
, but is it really?
Or is this just game playing with Microsoft? Perhaps to boost perceived company value or to allude at the creation of an advertising monopoly with Google. What ever the aim — Microsoft’s General Councel, Brad Smith has responded by posting this comment:
Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo! We will assess closely all of our options. Our proposal remains the only alternative put forward that offers Yahoo! shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.
Interestingly — Microsoft are complaining about the market becoming less competitive. Surely that’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black?
TTFN
This article provided by sitepoint.com.
10 Ways History’s Finest Kept Their Focus at Work
Post written by Albert van Zyl from the blog HeadSpace. The lives of great people give us interesting clues about how to organise our days. All of them attached great value to their daily routines. This is because they saw it as being part of ‘becoming who they are’, as Nietzsche puts it. For the same reason […]
Post written by Albert van Zyl from the blog HeadSpace.
The lives of great people give us interesting clues about how to organise our days.
All of them attached great value to their daily routines. This is because they saw it as being part of ‘becoming who they are’, as Nietzsche puts it.
For the same reason they were also highly individual in their routines. They had the courage to go against popular opinion and work out often strange daily plans that suited them.
This is perhaps the first lesson that we can learn – that it takes courage and resolve to design and stick to a routine that suits you. But as Emerson reassures us: ‘The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going’.
There are at least 10 other lessons that the daily routines of the great can teach us:
1. Don’t work long hours
Despite the modern obsession with physical presence at offices (also known as ‘presenteeism’), very few of the great worked long hours.
Philosopher Michel Foucault would only work from 9am to 3pm. Beethoven only worked from sunrise until the early afternoon. No 12 hour days here. Author Tom Robbins schedules only 3 hours of writing at his desk per day.
2. Take breaks
Even during these short days, the great took plenty of breaks.
Socrates would sometimes simply stop and hold completely still for several minutes. Beethoven was known to punctuate his mornings by running outside and walking around – he called it ‘working while walking’.
3. Take even longer breaks
The great all spent a single long period away from their desks every day to give their minds time to recover and regain its creative poise.
Beethoven started work at daybreak, but wrapped up by two or three in the afternoon which left him a good 14 hours away from work. Victor Hugo wrote in the mornings and took afternoons off entirely. Churchill would do nothing work-related between noon and around 11 at night.
4. Stop work and sit down for meals
Churchill would even have a bath and dress for meals. For us mere mortals, this injunction could simply mean sitting down with your sandwich away from you desk, on a bench in the park or somewhere else. Or resolving to chew and taste your food properly.
5. Don’t work in the afternoons
There are some exceptions, but very few of our heroes did any serious work in the afternoon.
After writing in the morning, Victor Hugo spent his afternoons riding around Paris in double decker busses, watching his brethren about their work. For us this might mean blocking off afternoons for long tea breaks and non-essential tasks.
6. Mix it up
The days of the great contain a surprising variety of activities. It seems that we don’t have to focus on a small range of things to succeed.
Even the grim German philosopher, Immanuel Kant went for afternoon walks and sat down for lunch with friends each day. Gandhi walked, spun, had a long bath and massage.
Churchill painted, fed his fish, played card games and constructed buildings all over Chartwell farm. He famously claimed that our minds don’t need rest as much as they need variety.
7. Aim low
Don’t schedule every minute of your day. Leo at Zenhabits suggests that we have morning and evening routines, and leave the middle of the day open for completing key tasks and other things that come up.
Daily routines are supposed to make things easier, not more complicated. Micro managing every minute of your day does not work.
8. Take time to relax
The great all reserved time to relax. And this doesn’t mean engaging in some semi-productive activity like reading a book or washing the dishes. No, they blocked out time to do nothing at all.
Gandhi would often spend time just staring at the horizon. Churchill would sit down to smoke a cigar after lunch and Beethoven would stop off for a few beers after his afternoon walk. In his recent autobiography, Alan Greenspan mentions that he too makes time to reflect each day.
9. Get up early(?)
This one is the subject of hot debate. Samuel Johnson, Churchill and Dylan Thomas got up late. Gandhi, Franklin and Mandela all got up early.
But whether they were early birds or night owls, the great all make sure that they had long periods of uninterrupted quiet time; whether late at night or early in the morning.
10. Exercise!
Al Gore interrupts his work day at 3pm to go for a run. Emerson, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Victor Hugo and Gandhi all went for walks. Nietzsche said that he ’scribbled’ notes while he took his walk and claims that some of his best thoughts came in this way.
Mandela’s 5 am walks are legendary. The story goes that he once invited a persistent journalist to interview him during this morning walk - but she ended up being too out of breath to ask any questions.
Albert’s blog provides weird, insightful and funny bits that allow you to protect and enhance your Headspace. Check it out or subscribe to his feed.
Mandela 
image credit: rchoephoto
Beethoven photo credit: TaranRampersad
Churchill photo credit: monkeyc.net
Ghandi photo credit: nilexuk
Greenspan photo credit: trackrecord
.NET on the ‘NET April 2 - 8 : All your Yahoo are belong to us!
The continuing story of Yahoo and Microsoft opened another chapter this week. Microsoft set forth an ultimatum regarding their acquisition offer [WARNING: Humorous Ballmer Photo] and Yahoo issued a response. I personally hope that this all gets resolved in a nice civilized manner. It’s become pretty clear that the acquisition will probably happen; at this […]
The continuing story of Yahoo and Microsoft opened another chapter this week. Microsoft set forth an ultimatum regarding their acquisition offer [WARNING: Humorous Ballmer Photo] and Yahoo issued a response. I personally hope that this all gets resolved in a nice civilized manner. It’s become pretty clear that the acquisition will probably happen; at this point it’s in Yahoo’s court to decide how it goes down. On the MSDN blogs, Ashish Thapliyal laid out a roadmap for SilverLight 2.0. It looks like your SilverLight 2 Beta 1 apps won’t necessarily work in Beta 2, which should be out in the next few months, and we can expect a release of SilverLight 2 this summer. Finally, How Software is Built posted an interview with Brad Wilson regarding Codeplex and some general discussion about Open-source and Microsoft.
As for tutorials, Bob Familiar posted a good overview of some of the best SilverLight 2.0 tutorials around. Your Websites, Our Passion posted some resources for setting up IIS7 to cooperate with Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, which is key for those of us working on Vista. Custom server control developers can also get some help from Bipin Joshi, who provides a tutorial for creating custom type editors.
In news completely unrelated to the web, Microsoft will be working with Alpine and other manufacturers to bring Sync to the masses. My wife’s car has Sync and I’m personally pretty excited to see it in something a bit faster than a Ford Focus, though I am disappointed that you can’t configure it to use the HAL 9000 voice from 2001.
This article provided by sitepoint.com.
Pi.Debugger: Cross browser debugging
Azer Koçulu has added to pi.comet with a new cross browser debugger pi.debugger. The look is inspired by Firebug: Check out the open source project.
Azer Koçulu has added to pi.comet with a new cross browser debugger pi.debugger.
The look is inspired by Firebug:
Check out the open source project.
Utilizing “Binge” Productivity
photo credit: Irina Souiki This week I’ve been trying something new. Instead of making a todo list for the day and hammering out as many items as I can before the 5 ‘o clock whistle, I’m participating in what I like to call “Binge Productivity”. In a nutshell, Binge Productivity is working productively on whatever […]
photo credit: Irina Souiki
This week I’ve been trying something new. Instead of making a todo list for the day and hammering out as many items as I can before the 5 ‘o clock whistle, I’m participating in what I like to call “Binge Productivity”. In a nutshell, Binge Productivity is working productively on whatever I want for as long as I want. And I have to say, it’s working out pretty well for me.
There will always be things that have to be done every day (aka Stephen Covey’s “big rocks“). You should never miss these. Once you’re done doing the time sensitive things though, your time is totally free to work on any project that needs to be done sometime soon, but not immediately. So here’s what my last few days have looked like so far.
Tuesday- Personal Project. Worked solely on a uber-cool yet secret project. It’s one of my own, and once I started working on it, I totally got sucked in and worked for about 6 hours straight on it.
Today- Focused on LifeDev. Wrote one blog post and found myself among a bed of fresh ideas for other posts. Instead of moving on to another task in the todo list, I started writing two more blog posts. I also worked on sending emails to future guest posters and set up a guest post for myself on another great blog.
So as you can see, it’s a much more flexible approach to working. It gives me the ability to work on what tickles my fancy each day, yet things are still getting done. But there are some soft spots to this approach. I’ve outlined some pros and cons to Binge Productivity below.
Pros
- Do what you want. There’s much less focus on only doing what’s on the list, and more on what’s on your heart. The choice is yours.
- More flow. It’s easier to get in the flow of a project when you don’t have to worry about checking something off of a list.
- Lighter work experience. There’s no buzzkill like starting the day knowing that you’ll be doing a task you hate for three hours. Binge Productivity allows for a much lighter work atmosphere.
Cons
- Deadlines. Even though the mood is much lighter, every now and again I find myself worrying about whether or not I’m getting everything done I should. It’s almost a guilty feeling due to the fact that I’m enjoying work so much.
- Too Free. Sometimes it’s easier to want to just stop working and do whatever the heart desires with Binge Productivity. Because there is a lot of flexibility associated in the workflow, it almost seems natural to just want to stop working altogether.
- No Real Quittin’ Time. Because of the freedom, it’s harder to stop working at a static time. But that could just be my experience.
While there are definitely still some kinks to be worked out, I really enjoy the Binge Productivity system. It’s a much more palatable workday, if you’re the type of person who doesn’t always like a lot of structure.
What are your thoughts? Am I off my rocker suggesting this type of system? Or do you think it could be a viable option for web workers? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.
Bits of Here and There: LifeDev on Alltop and Leo’s New Ebook
Just wanted to take a short post on some happenings. First off, Guy Kawaski notified me that LifeDev has been added to the lifehacks.alltop.com page. Very, very cool. You can also find many of the LifeRemix cronies taking part as well. If you haven’t checked out AllTop, a PopUrls on crack, if you will, take […]
Just wanted to take a short post on some happenings. First off, Guy Kawaski notified me that LifeDev has been added to the lifehacks.alltop.com page. Very, very cool. You can also find many of the LifeRemix cronies taking part as well. If you haven’t checked out AllTop, a PopUrls on crack, if you will, take a second to do it. It’s quite handy.
Secondly, good buddy Leo has released the Zen Habits Handbook for Life, a 76-page piece of zen goodness. It’s some of his best articles over the past year at Zen Habits, and it doesn’t disappoint. Seriously, check it out. You won’t be sorry.