washingtondc

While a mobile app can certainly deliver a rich user experience, the availability of a standard, universally supported platform (read: a browser) is a more sustainable approach to application deployment.

We've been down this road before. In the pre-browser era, desktop application were king, but at a high cost to IT departments as well as end-users. The same game is being played out on mobile platforms now.

From a business perspective, do you really want to support multiple development efforts for each and every mobile platform? Will it be worth it in the long run?

The advantages of the mobile app platform must be balanced with the cost and maintenance overhead as well. Give me a great browser platform, and I'll gladly take its shortcomings over the long-term sustainment costs of a dedicated mobile app.

That doesn't invalidate my point. Supporting SSL is certainly more costly when you're serving content on the scale of FB.

The costs must be weighed against the benefits. Calling FB out as a "fail" is failing to understand all of the issues.

Perhaps supporting ssl and/or tls across their infrastructure isn't a priority. Why is that a "fail", as you so succinctly put it?

In addition, I'd like to ask the entire world to stop using 'fail' as a noun. It's lazy and incorrect.

I'd hire her!

Thanks for the Rush reference in the example (I'm not talking about the name of the framework either).

Take it from a 38 year old with a mortgage and two kids: take time off from your current job/venture and see the world.

I travelled a bit, but not enough. My wife tried to convince me to backpack with her, but I thought my job at "CyberCash" (ever heard of them?) was just too important - turns out that it wasn't so important after all. I had the freedom, but didn't fully appreciate it.

I generally agree with the weak points that the OP pointed out regarding cron. That being said, throwing out cron, or any other built-in system tool, isn't always a great idea.

When you adopt a new scheduler, you're inevitably creating work for your enterprise. It's yet another thing that must be learned and documented. There may be a new syntax to learn, which will mean you're incurring training costs (and the cost of errors) down the line.

Programmers love to improve things, but there's a real world cost to change that can't be ignored. cron may be archaic and lacking power, but it's well understood.

As for enterprise schedulers, they've been around for years. Off the top of my head, I've worked with 'Autosys', and 'Appworx'. These were robust, enterprise-ready schedulers that supported conditional execution, locks, as well as their own scripting language.

I like it, but my site didn't come out correctly (www.convertyourcds.com). Perhaps my html is screwed up?

It's not hard to generate a certificate request. While Firefox and IE may use different routines to do a local key generation, it's certainly not difficult.

The scary warnings you're talking about come up if you're connecting to an "untrusted" site - who's SSL server certificate isn't signed by a known, trusted root CA.

It's certainly the best solution to this problem.

The Atlantic

It's a very good magazine.

It's extremely long? Maybe I'm a bit older than most readers here (I'm 38), but has the average readers attention span shrunk that much?

Nuance cannot always come in bite-sized chunks. BTW, I read the article (on a plane - the print edition, no less) - it's worth the time.

Garmin and TomTom are hallowed brands?

This article was written ten years ago, about Microsoft. At that time, the hallowed brands were the likes of Borland and Corel. Sure, Google is dominant in search and advertising, but things have a way of changing in this industry. It seems that the when a company comes to dominate a category, the category begins to lose relevance.

Microsoft's dominance of desktop computing comes to mind. They controlled the platform. Then, the applications and development tools. Eventually, no one entered the desktop application market without dealing directly with Redmond.

Google's not going anywhere soon, but rest assured - the next Google is being developed (or thought about) right now.