IE7, IE8 and web standards

Came across the following on David Alison's Blog regarding the up and coming ie8 release. Great article to help understand what's going on. 

For me the IE7/8 and web standards debate is part of the reason I think its time to move away from HTML/CSS/Web browsers/domain names/Google etc and to look at building client side personal internet information managers - i.e. personalized environment for connecting, managing and accessing information on the internet.

This could be a client based tool that would would offer a consistent display/manage rich content/use binary transfer protocols to allow interactivity and QOS management, it could be based on using webservice style data servers (binary not http) as well as location and personal identification/authentication management services etc.

Time to retool and change the way we work, we are currently building on a swamp of standards and for me its holding the development of the internet up.

Gosh I'm using a MAC!

Its over a year now since I switched the company and all the home systems to MAC - I now use a MAC Book Pro, MAC Pro (10gb of RAM and 8 3ghz Zeons, 30 inch monitor) an iMAC, a Mac Book and amazingly a Mini MAC (with 2Tb of disk and 3gb of RAM!!) oh yes and an iPhone! 

Was the switch worth it? Yes absolutely; after 20 years of trying to get family and friends PC's to work  and spending my time apologising for poor reliability/performance I have at last hung up my screwdrivers and said thats it either switch to MAC or fix yourself!

Don't get me wrong I'm using Windows XP (via VMWare) more than ever, mostly for development VS2005/8) and MS One note (which I use constantly every day) as well as MS Office 2008. Each client now gets their own set of VM's, I often run 5 or more VM's at any one time. MS development tools are still many years ahead of anything else - I have not written one app for OS X and looking at the poor quality of tools and documentation I doubt if I ever will.

What MAC gives me is a reliable VM manager, hardware that just works, lots of RAM/CPU's and a touch of style.

Will I switch back? Possible if PC's ever move out of 80's but for now I'm a convert.