How is it that...

I just tried to make my kids' computer usable by one, M. Wife.

She needed primopdf, so I installed it for her. Then it didn't work. Nothing would print, no errors, nothing.
After playing with it a bit, taking the "push all the buttons" approach, I finally managed to get an actual error message in place of the nothingness:
The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135)

Copy/paste in Google. Voila. It shows up a zillion times in almost any app you can think of, and the explanation - the dot-Net framework is missing. OK, so now I'm downloading the thing, and we'll be back up and running in no time. I guess my kids never needed the .Net framework.

Now I gotta ask a series of how is it questions :
1) How is it that M$ expects the .Net framework to be so mighty popular, and they still haven't implemented a decent error message of "please install the .Net framework" if it's not found ?
2) How is it that MS themselves did not use the .Net framework for Office 2007 ? (I have office on this machine, and it worked without it). Not good enough for them ?
3) How is it that when I write "download .Net framework" in any search engine including Bing, I get v2.0 as the first result, whereas v3.5 only comes second, and v3.5sp1, which is the newest one may or may not show up depending on which search engine I use?

So many stupid questions, so little time...

Google pulling the plug on IE6...

Hip Hip ! (if you didn't hooray, you must have been asleep in the last couple of years. Or maybe you're not a web developer)

I just got the email below. Finally someone picking up the check, if not Microsoft, then at least their rivals ;)

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team


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