Yeah but except for the "slate" designs, tablets are just too large, too hot, and too much of a pain in the ass to really be a viable option right now (and the slate PC designs are often either underpowered, over priced, or both)
Anything that's not a slate is not a tablet to my mind - stuff with a keyboard and some sort of rotating screen forgoes all the advantages of a tablet without giving you anything extra over a normal laptop. Apple would never produce a tablet which has a keyboard attached - it's just too ugly and bulky. So when I say tablet, I mean what you might think of as a slate in PC terms.
I imagine they'll go with ARM to solve the power/heat/cost issues seen in PC tablets; that will let them produce something pretty thin and light, but with sufficient power for media viewing. It is after all a device for viewing, not really for creating content - so huge CPU power is not required. It would not run desktop apps (which leads to disasters from both a UI and a power point of view). You don't need lots of power for a book/media reader - the chip in the iphone would be fine for example, running a mobile OS. Keyboard would be a software one as with the iPhone or nook - perfectly good for light use. Possibly they could use OLED for better power consumption, but that might be too expensive right now.
All the pieces are in place, the OS is ready, the chips are ready, battery tech has made some advances, and I think now is the time for an LCD reader to really make a splash - it would feel like a huge step up from the chunky, low-res, low-refresh rate, monochrome ones we currently see, and added functionality like watching videos or browsing the web in mobile safari would certainly attract a lot of consumers, and make an attractive platform for publishers/advertisers/content producers.
This nook model is a step in the right direction, but really does make you wonder what it'd be like if the entire thing was a colour touchscreen rather than just a thin layer at the bottom.
I suspect Apple's tablet will be full colour, and it'll blow away all these e-ink one-function book readers - the only thing holding back devices like the iphone/ipod is the screen size
That's why the iPhone, for me, is a useless device for reading e-books.
Couldn't agree more, that's why an LCD tablet would work well.
I get serious eyestrain after about 30 minutes, I can't imagine sitting there with that light shining directly into my eyes for hours at a time.
Millions of people stare at an LCD screen all day long for their work without issues - you're probably staring at one right now to read this page - we're really quite inured to it by now. Think for a second how long you spend reading each day, and how much of that time is spent reading an LCD screen as compared to paper - for many people the proportion is already over half their reading time being spent with a computer monitor.
E-ink, and devices which try to use part eink part lcd as does the nook, will not survive comparison with a flexible device which can function as a book reader *and* a mini computer. If it means you get decent response time, colour for media like photos and video, the ability to even play videos, and a decent web browser, plus the bonus of running whatever other apps you like on the device (think email, web based apps, games etc), I think you'll find most people go for the more flexible option.
I suspect Apple's tablet will be full colour, and it'll blow away all these e-ink one-function book readers - the only thing holding back devices like the iphone/ipod is the screen size, otherwise with the touch screen they're a perfect reading device.
Great to see competition hotting up in this space though - this one looks far more elegant than the kindle, and is a definite step up - also it runs Android, definitely a bonus.
Before his response has been hijacked by the grammar police, I understood him to be reffering to a situation where you get asked the question
The examples which the grandparent is agreeing with as terribly flawed statements were of grammatical errors or ambiguities, not incorrect assumptions (as in your example with the value of an irrational number). They weren't talking about maths, but about normal human speech, which is neither logical nor accurate. Amusingly, the assertions of geeky superiority to those pesky normal people also contained numerous grammatical errors amidst the pedantry : )
Yeah, I've gotten to the level know [sic] when someone asks me the 'wrong' question I now answer "You're not asking me the right question".
Allow me to introduce you to the next level - at this level you ignore minor failings of spelling or syntax (as you see them) if it is still clear what meaning was intended. If correcting mistakes, you take care not to make some of your own in the answer (bonus points for finding some error in this reply, but to harp on it *would* mean you're missing the point somewhat). Many people, who programmers might otherwise consider normal or even stupid, reach this level by age 18 or so.
The structure of human languages are not very close to logical, and attempting to parse all statements as if they were intended as logical constructs is not going to work - this might be seen as a failing, or it might be seen as something adding texture and colour to the language. There are good reasons we use programming language for computers, and human language for humans.
Consider the following phrases, which subtly change the emphasis while still having roughly the same logical meaning:
Is this it? Is this not it? Is this the one? It's not this one? It's not this one, is it? Is this not the one? This must be it, surely? Perhaps this is the one?
All would be understood, and seen as closer or farther from the accepted normal usage by different speakers of English in different parts of the world. Most contain redundancies or are technically incorrect in some way.
And because of that nearly all of the tools available exclude the mobile web.
I don't know, some open source frameworks do have support for mobile websites built in - you can just customise a few layouts on Rails for example (as in 1 or 2 layouts), or just change the CSS if you like and you can add mobile support pretty easily. I've done it on a few sites and it wasn't difficult.
I understand some of the larger CMS frameworks will make this difficult, but then they make most stuff difficult if it wasn't originally considered when they wrote the framework - that's the compromise you make as you get a lot of stuff for free with them, but adapting them is more difficult and liable to break stuff. So it's a trade-off. That said it might be worth stepping outside your comfort zone and evaluating a few other tools as mobile websites start to be requested more and more. They're not going to go away, and you may find that clients start demanding sites that can be adapted for both. I think Drupal has decent support too.
So not all open source solutions ignore the mobile web completely or make it difficult - with some it's really quite simple. Avoid flash, make sure javascript degrades, and simplify layouts.
Is that really the case if the website was specifically designed for IE? Don't most of the problems occur when you've designed the site without regard to IE and then try to tweak it to make it compatible for IE?
No, if there are problems, usually it's because someone designs only for IE, because that's all they know or consider important - adjusting their site till it looks ok on the version of Internet Explorer on their machine. Unfortunately what they've been doing with that process is working around bugs or broken behaviour in IE, and perhaps not noticing some bugs they have in their site, because IE silently ignores them and tries to do what it thinks they mean if the html/js is broken.
If you then try the site in a normal browser (i.e. something other than Internet Explorer), or even another version of IE, it will look terrible, and js will perhaps be broken if they didn't use a library, as accessors etc are different in IE from everyone else. Thus we end up with sites that only work in IE or even IE6.
Optimised is definitely the wrong word for this process.
You can create HTML quite easily which works in Opera, Webkit, Firefox, Chrome, and then adapt it for IE - that's typically the best way to do things as it isolates the workarounds for IE, typically in IE only stylesheets, and typically doesn't take too long if you're used to buggy IE behaviour.
Already, Nokia, the largest pusher of Symbian is looking to move into Linux (Maemo). Looks like Symbian will be dropped somewhere along the way.
Yes, although they're also pushing QT everywhere (now that they bought Trolltech), which I think is their way of papering over gaps between their Linux based smartphones (which are still a tiny minority of sales), and Symbian based cheaper, normal phones (which have a huge install base and will continue to do so).
All the money in the future (certainly in apps) looks like it'll be on smartphones though.
They might find long term it's easier to move everything to Linux, but Symbian will probably be with us for a while yet, even though it does seem a bit of a dead end, and is probably an albatross around Nokia's neck at this point given the horror stories you hear about development on it.
You're half right, the other part of the shine equation is eventually, the air of exclusivity will wear off and apple will become the next burberry and chavs will have them and then no one will want one.
Don't assume that everyone picks a phone based on who else uses it or whether it is trendy.
Many people pick phones based on how it works and what it does - I certainly chose an iPhone on that basis, because the UI was the first one which felt like it was actually designed with a user in mind. The UI on the iPhone is good in my opinion, much better than what came before. It's quite a good phone (*if* your telephone service is good), the software is updated regularly, and in spite of Apple's control freak tendencies on their store, and the crapflood which is the app store listings, it has a lot of games and a lot of interesting other apps.
Either this little bit is about religion like all of the rest of it, or it's rape humor. And don't try to say "nobody brought up rape".
Perhaps every mention of sex means rape to you. It doesn't bring up that image for me. Stop trying to put words in my mouth and polarise positions. I'm sure some people have found this was about rape, perhaps even you - I'm not among them. I admit this then gives you a convenient straw man to attack, but really.
And "silly sexist remark"? Discrimination against half of humanity is hardly "silly". You seem to think "sexist" means "offends women with thin skin". It doesn't.
Like most things in life, sexism comes in degrees ranging from silly to tragic.
You're wrong with your idea of the facts about, well, everything here
I note you haven't addressed the factual report of what he actually said, which I find telling.
I don't think he makes a good example of sexism because that one incident is just a tiny part of his weirdness. It's like including somebody with a bad case of autism in a list of very shy people. Not only that's not even half of his problems, but the root issue is probably something entirely different.
Sure, I don't think he should be burned at the stake for it, though he could own up and say sorry if he offended people. RMS probably didn't even mean to be sexist, it just exposed some of his strange ideas on the relationship (apparently amusing and informative to him) of having sex and using text editors.
It was really just an example that came to mind of being sexist without a particular target or addressing it at anyone of a certain gender (since the grandparent claimed this was impossible).
Really? Are you aware of what he said exactly? It is in that article you linked to, but I have to assume for some reason you discount direct quotes of him and instead rely on his after the fact interpretation of his bizarre statements?
So what really happened is Stallman made a (admittedly unfunny) joke about religion, and even after he calmly and maturely explained their error to them, whiny 'feminist' idiots continued to take it out of context and act like it was evidence that the leader of the free software movement is some evil rape advocate, when he is, at most, sorely lacking in social skills.
I'll ignore the petulant tone of your riposte and bizarre references to rape - no one except you brought up rape, and it's kind of inappropriate frankly. Let's contrast his dissembling after the fact with what he actually said, as quoted by multiple people who were there:
'"EMACS virgins" are "women who have never used EMACS" and said that it was a sacred duty to "relieve them of their virginity".
The joke was not about religion, but about having sex with women who have not used his favourite text editor - he's comparing initiation into the rites of EMACS to having sex; RMS is simply trying to misdirect talking about religion because he's embarrassed about what he said. It was a silly sexist remark, but apparently he can't find it in himself to admit fault. It's not big deal really, but I'd find it annoying if it was directed at me, and understand why others would too.
However, he is kind of bizarre generally, so I guess that sort of weird remark is just par for the course with him.
You mean like the pathetically ridiculous claim I saw upthread about RMS being a "leader of the FOSS movement" and "if the leader of the movement is a sexist then the movement is sexist"? You mean "implausible post-hoc excuses" like that?
That does sound ridiculous doesn't it, however it's not post-hoc, and it has nothing to do with my statement, or the one I was responding to. I didn't make that comment, but you are welcome to reply to the comment you wish to respond to, rather than ranting on a completely separate thread about entirely unrelated things.
The FOSS "movement" has nothing to do with sex, so the "leaders" views on sex have nothing to do with it.
This I'd agree with, and note that I don't really agree with the submitter of the article (bit of a troll this article), however I can't agree with someone saying that the sex of people talking is unknown therefore sexism cannot exist, that is patent nonsense (see the actual comment I responded to, and my response).
Welcome to the Internet, where no stereotype is not mocked.
Well, I've certainly noticed that on the internet people will make up implausible post-hoc excuses up for anything if it means they don't have to accept they were wrong!
Perhaps you can think of one for RMS too while you're here.
which are quite annoying if you happen to be female and don't care to have your sexuality linked to whether you use a text editor in the minds of the men sitting around you in the audience. Or, as another example, this story is tagged 'sendthemtothekitchen'. This sort of juvenile joke contributes to an atmosphere in which women do not feel welcome.
I suspect there's more going on than sexism, given the huge gender imbalance in people even starting to study IT, but the sexism rife in the IT industry certainly doesn't help.
If it were possible to send more data over telephone
It was, and is, possible to send more data over physical copper telephone lines to a nearby exchange, by changing the technology used to broadcast and receive. That's what DSL does, at least here in the UK. The telephone line has remained exactly the same all the way to the exchange:
As I'm sure you're aware, the DSL uses the frequencies unused by the audio telephone signal, which as you note is capped at 4000Hz. Perhaps the setup is different where you live, and DSL required rewiring in street-side cabinets too?
If you redefine telephone line to mean 'copper twisted pair line limited to 4000Hz and extending for at least several miles', then you are correct. I don't accept that definition of telephone line - neither does most of the rest of the world, because that is not the sort of line their telephone plugs in to.
They can't because the universe places restrictions, just as surely as you can not exceed 186,000 miles per second. Good God people! Have you never taken Physics 101???
Forcing yourself to actually address the issues raised by people you're arguing with (see question in my last post, or the definition of telephone line, which I acknowledged you see differently), might mean arguments feel less frustrating for you. It might also have the fortunate side-effect of reminding you that you are not always more intelligent than your interlocutors, and misunderstandings are not always due to their ignorance.
There's some interesting background leaks on the takeover of Danger in this article which seem to imply they cut a lot of staff, and gutted the company, which is now running on a skeleton staff. So I guess it's not too surprising when this sort of mistake is made. Not the most reliable source, but they did definitely cut a lot of danger staff after the acquisition.
As I downloaded the picture and just opened it in Photoshop CS4 and it has clearly been "heavily edited".
Photoshop is used for adjusting contrast and levels as well as retouching images - almost every image you see published will have gone through photoshop (save on sites like flickr.com). That the image passed through photoshop on the way to being published on wired is really no surprise. There are certainly heavy jpeg artefacts on the image, but that's not surprising either, could have been introduced by the camera or wired resaving as lower-res.
What do you mean by 'heavily edited', and why is that in quotes - did someone tell you this and you're repeating it to us?
You missed out on the production costs, not of the book actually purchased, but for the 90%+ of the books published which don't sell well enough to cover the author fees and editorial salaries, marketing, etc.
Please reread my post. Origination is the term used in the publishing industry for production costs (author,editorial, design). All books have this cost of course, so those that don't sell can make a loss - much like any other business.
I agree book publishing is a gamble, but publishing ebooks is actually far less of a gamble, because as I pointed out, there are significant differences in costs between printing paper books and selling them to bookstores, and selling ebooks online. Bookstores take a significant portion of publishers' income right now.
We are talking about what they are doing NOW not what they could do.
iPhones currently multitask (mail, maps, safari, ipod). They just restrict 3rd party apps from doing so. It is not a technical limitation, as the grandparent implied, and they do in fact multitask right now. Sorry to disappoint you.
I want to also state in this post to other people who are fervently defending Apple
I am not fervently defending Apple, frankly I think many of their actions on iPhone suck (though they got the important stuff that end users care about right). I think you're fighting with shadows of your own imagining here.
The publisher puts the books into boxes and ships the box full of books (maybe 25 of them) for $10. That works out to be around $0.40 per book, delivered to the store.
You missed out the bit where the book store typically takes 30-40% of the cover price from the publisher, often on a sale or return basis. *That's* where all the money goes, and that's something that could change dramatically with digital distribution. Publishers who start selling ebooks can make money with dramatically lower prices. Those who can't, simply wont' survive - they are competing with other publishers, but also with all the self-publishers on the internet. You'll notice that the publishers who are selling lots of their own books as ebooks are able to price the ebook dramatically lower (PragProg, Oreilly, etc).
Guess what? Physical books aren't that expensive to distribute, and eBooks have almost identical costs.
The costs for ebooks are not the same as those for physical copies - it costs pennies (if that) in download/storage costs per copy per ebook, and reproduction/printing/distribution/storage of physical copies of a book costs a lot more than that. Where did you get your figure of $10 a box? You realise most books are printed in China (because it's cheaper) don't you? Storage and priority shipping also costs a lot of money if there are timing issues before a big launch. Even taking your figures at face value, 40c is far more than say 2c for a digital download of a 100Kb book. Over a lot of copies, that adds up to a lot of money saved - at a certain point an ebook is a pure money making vehicle, even if the price is rock bottom, as the download costs are negligible due to the small size, whereas physical books require reprints, restock, storage, etc. every time a new set of copies is made, which all costs money.
What does still cost money for ebooks, as you point out, is origination, and that's not going to change, though you might be surprised at how little of the cost of publishing is in production of the content - say half at the most.
More worrying for many big publishers, the equivalent of $1 popular classics are $0 already - available from project gutenberg - that market is already on the way out (repackaging older books), and where a few years ago we would have bought an Atlas for a road trip, a DIY book for a simple DIY task, and a cookery book for cooking - how many of us would first consult the internet now?
I suspect the internet will make large illustrated books completely redundant soon enough, and eventually a new artform will emerge which supersedes novels, based on the forms available today for written expression; just as novels were born from pamphlets and letters in the 18C.
You might find the following link more informative than the vitriol of the parent as I think it explains the bafflement that some developers with experience of a few other, saner, languages feel when they encounter PHP:
The trouble with PHP is really that it has outgrown its origins (a very simple templating language, for simple web pages), and yet has not been adapting fast enough to the new uses it is being put to. It still has a lot of legacy cruft which makes it unsuited to complex tasks like application development (IMHO), and some feel the design philosophy (exemplified by their use of three separate naming conventions for functions (under_score,jamtogether, and camelCase) and over 3000 functions in the main namespace) means it will never catch up with other scripting languages in terms of elegance or efficiency.
Here's an example of that cruft from the article:
PHP’s approach is rather different. Instead of making sure that database queries are valid, PHP chooses to ensure that the input can’t be invalid. When you enable the magic_quotes_gpc setting, PHP alters its handling of the CGI parameters, and actually inserts backslashes before ‘dangerous’ characters in the incoming data. (An astute reader might stop to wonder why this feature isn’t called magic_backslashes_gpc, but that’s rather a side issue.)
If you weren’t expecting this behaviour, the symptom is that PHP randomly throws backslashes into perfectly valid data — all in the name of not corrupting data! Lerdorf attempted to justify this in a recent interview as follows: “the worst that would happen is that someone would see an extra \ on the screen when they output the data directly instead of sticking it into the database.” I for one get rather concerned when I encounter such flagrant disregard for data integrity.
Can you cite an actual example of something wrong with it?
Sure. I've used it, and it gets the job done, but I didn't much like it compared to the many other options - trying to force development of a GUI application into PHP is my idea of a nightmare, and comparing it to C and saying that it has far more libraries is laughable, considering that most PHP additions (image manipulation for example) are just wrappers around C based tools. My object to PHP is not that it is impossible to use, it's that it's messy and not very well thought out in many regards. It's quick and dirty, with the emphasis on the dirty.
A few problems with PHP off the top of my head:
There is no clean separation of logic and view (or MVC if you prefer that split) - the language itself encourages mixing code and presentation, often with horrendous results. You can work against this, but you're always going against the flow - see the many examples of PHP CMS etc for great examples of this kind of mistake in action. They work, but only just, and the internals are often very messy.
The naming conventions for the API are all over the map - any language that has functions named stuff like mysql_real_escape_string, as opposed to the still extant mysql_escape_string, has obvious problems with design philosophy. Maybe next year they'll come out with mysql_really_escape_the_string_this_time? It is very difficult to guess function names because there are no clear conventions, and the whole thing has grown organically to a huge bundle of disparate functions, some of which definitely do not belong in a language and should be broken out into modules or put into objects like strings. Stuff like eregi_replace, str_ireplace and str_replace is needlessly confusing because the naming conventions are inconsistent and cryptic.
Strings and arrays are not proper objects, so you have to use a mix of procedural and oo code everywhere - it'd be nice to be able to call methods on strings and chain stuff like Ruby. The object model was also weirdly broken till PHP5 and is really bolted on.
Doesn't have closures (just added to C/Obj-C by Apple).
Unicode strings are still not properly supported.
The syntax inherits everything which is bad about perl (it's quite possible to write very difficult to read code), and doesn't improve on it one iota.
I'm sure I could do a search and turn up a few more issues, but it generally just feels ungainly compared to any other language I've used (Ruby, Objective-C, C, Python). I think the author of the above comment saying everything could be done better in PHP really should explore other languages before dismissing them as somehow lacking, and understand that different languages have different strengths, and learning to use other languages could teach them something about how to write good code in PHP.
Having worked with it, PHP doesn't strike me as a very good language by most metrics, and it certainly is not more complete than the many other options in any arena. There is simply no comparison in my opinion with a properly structured API like cocoa for GUI apps.
So, you might want to tell me why would I be joking?
Because PHP is an awful, awful, mess of a language, in fact it's more like a framework + language, but anyway. Just because you could use it to make a GUI application, doesn't make it close to the right tool for the job.
Do yourself a favour and look into other scripting languages, like perl, ruby or python - you would at least learn why people complain about PHP.
I always wish other languages would have such by default
Taking the iPhone as an example, C, Obj-C and C++ all have extensive libraries, and many actual application frameworks available for free, which cover everything PHP does and a whole lot more. The default Obj-C for example has a huge number of built in libraries available. The fact you don't know this rings alarm bells and says to me you should try using something other than PHP just to give you a sense of perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but except for the "slate" designs, tablets are just too large, too hot, and too much of a pain in the ass to really be a viable option right now (and the slate PC designs are often either underpowered, over priced, or both)
Anything that's not a slate is not a tablet to my mind - stuff with a keyboard and some sort of rotating screen forgoes all the advantages of a tablet without giving you anything extra over a normal laptop. Apple would never produce a tablet which has a keyboard attached - it's just too ugly and bulky. So when I say tablet, I mean what you might think of as a slate in PC terms.
I imagine they'll go with ARM to solve the power/heat/cost issues seen in PC tablets; that will let them produce something pretty thin and light, but with sufficient power for media viewing. It is after all a device for viewing, not really for creating content - so huge CPU power is not required. It would not run desktop apps (which leads to disasters from both a UI and a power point of view). You don't need lots of power for a book/media reader - the chip in the iphone would be fine for example, running a mobile OS. Keyboard would be a software one as with the iPhone or nook - perfectly good for light use. Possibly they could use OLED for better power consumption, but that might be too expensive right now.
All the pieces are in place, the OS is ready, the chips are ready, battery tech has made some advances, and I think now is the time for an LCD reader to really make a splash - it would feel like a huge step up from the chunky, low-res, low-refresh rate, monochrome ones we currently see, and added functionality like watching videos or browsing the web in mobile safari would certainly attract a lot of consumers, and make an attractive platform for publishers/advertisers/content producers.
This nook model is a step in the right direction, but really does make you wonder what it'd be like if the entire thing was a colour touchscreen rather than just a thin layer at the bottom.
I suspect Apple's tablet will be full colour, and it'll blow away all these e-ink one-function book readers - the only thing holding back devices like the iphone/ipod is the screen size
That's why the iPhone, for me, is a useless device for reading e-books.
Couldn't agree more, that's why an LCD tablet would work well.
I get serious eyestrain after about 30 minutes, I can't imagine sitting there with that light shining directly into my eyes for hours at a time.
Millions of people stare at an LCD screen all day long for their work without issues - you're probably staring at one right now to read this page - we're really quite inured to it by now. Think for a second how long you spend reading each day, and how much of that time is spent reading an LCD screen as compared to paper - for many people the proportion is already over half their reading time being spent with a computer monitor.
E-ink, and devices which try to use part eink part lcd as does the nook, will not survive comparison with a flexible device which can function as a book reader *and* a mini computer. If it means you get decent response time, colour for media like photos and video, the ability to even play videos, and a decent web browser, plus the bonus of running whatever other apps you like on the device (think email, web based apps, games etc), I think you'll find most people go for the more flexible option.
I suspect Apple's tablet will be full colour, and it'll blow away all these e-ink one-function book readers - the only thing holding back devices like the iphone/ipod is the screen size, otherwise with the touch screen they're a perfect reading device.
Great to see competition hotting up in this space though - this one looks far more elegant than the kindle, and is a definite step up - also it runs Android, definitely a bonus.
Before his response has been hijacked by the grammar police, I understood him to be reffering to a situation where you get asked the question
The examples which the grandparent is agreeing with as terribly flawed statements were of grammatical errors or ambiguities, not incorrect assumptions (as in your example with the value of an irrational number). They weren't talking about maths, but about normal human speech, which is neither logical nor accurate. Amusingly, the assertions of geeky superiority to those pesky normal people also contained numerous grammatical errors amidst the pedantry : )
Yeah, I've gotten to the level know [sic] when someone asks me the 'wrong' question I now answer "You're not asking me the right question".
Allow me to introduce you to the next level - at this level you ignore minor failings of spelling or syntax (as you see them) if it is still clear what meaning was intended. If correcting mistakes, you take care not to make some of your own in the answer (bonus points for finding some error in this reply, but to harp on it *would* mean you're missing the point somewhat). Many people, who programmers might otherwise consider normal or even stupid, reach this level by age 18 or so.
The structure of human languages are not very close to logical, and attempting to parse all statements as if they were intended as logical constructs is not going to work - this might be seen as a failing, or it might be seen as something adding texture and colour to the language. There are good reasons we use programming language for computers, and human language for humans.
Consider the following phrases, which subtly change the emphasis while still having roughly the same logical meaning:
Is this it?
Is this not it?
Is this the one?
It's not this one?
It's not this one, is it?
Is this not the one?
This must be it, surely?
Perhaps this is the one?
All would be understood, and seen as closer or farther from the accepted normal usage by different speakers of English in different parts of the world. Most contain redundancies or are technically incorrect in some way.
And because of that nearly all of the tools available exclude the mobile web.
I don't know, some open source frameworks do have support for mobile websites built in - you can just customise a few layouts on Rails for example (as in 1 or 2 layouts), or just change the CSS if you like and you can add mobile support pretty easily. I've done it on a few sites and it wasn't difficult.
I understand some of the larger CMS frameworks will make this difficult, but then they make most stuff difficult if it wasn't originally considered when they wrote the framework - that's the compromise you make as you get a lot of stuff for free with them, but adapting them is more difficult and liable to break stuff. So it's a trade-off. That said it might be worth stepping outside your comfort zone and evaluating a few other tools as mobile websites start to be requested more and more. They're not going to go away, and you may find that clients start demanding sites that can be adapted for both. I think Drupal has decent support too.
So not all open source solutions ignore the mobile web completely or make it difficult - with some it's really quite simple. Avoid flash, make sure javascript degrades, and simplify layouts.
Is that really the case if the website was specifically designed for IE? Don't most of the problems occur when you've designed the site without regard to IE and then try to tweak it to make it compatible for IE?
No, if there are problems, usually it's because someone designs only for IE, because that's all they know or consider important - adjusting their site till it looks ok on the version of Internet Explorer on their machine. Unfortunately what they've been doing with that process is working around bugs or broken behaviour in IE, and perhaps not noticing some bugs they have in their site, because IE silently ignores them and tries to do what it thinks they mean if the html/js is broken.
If you then try the site in a normal browser (i.e. something other than Internet Explorer), or even another version of IE, it will look terrible, and js will perhaps be broken if they didn't use a library, as accessors etc are different in IE from everyone else. Thus we end up with sites that only work in IE or even IE6.
Optimised is definitely the wrong word for this process.
You can create HTML quite easily which works in Opera, Webkit, Firefox, Chrome, and then adapt it for IE - that's typically the best way to do things as it isolates the workarounds for IE, typically in IE only stylesheets, and typically doesn't take too long if you're used to buggy IE behaviour.
Already, Nokia, the largest pusher of Symbian is looking to move into Linux (Maemo). Looks like Symbian will be dropped somewhere along the way.
Yes, although they're also pushing QT everywhere (now that they bought Trolltech), which I think is their way of papering over gaps between their Linux based smartphones (which are still a tiny minority of sales), and Symbian based cheaper, normal phones (which have a huge install base and will continue to do so).
All the money in the future (certainly in apps) looks like it'll be on smartphones though.
They might find long term it's easier to move everything to Linux, but Symbian will probably be with us for a while yet, even though it does seem a bit of a dead end, and is probably an albatross around Nokia's neck at this point given the horror stories you hear about development on it.
You're half right, the other part of the shine equation is eventually, the air of exclusivity will wear off and apple will become the next burberry and chavs will have them and then no one will want one.
Don't assume that everyone picks a phone based on who else uses it or whether it is trendy.
Many people pick phones based on how it works and what it does - I certainly chose an iPhone on that basis, because the UI was the first one which felt like it was actually designed with a user in mind. The UI on the iPhone is good in my opinion, much better than what came before. It's quite a good phone (*if* your telephone service is good), the software is updated regularly, and in spite of Apple's control freak tendencies on their store, and the crapflood which is the app store listings, it has a lot of games and a lot of interesting other apps.
Either this little bit is about religion like all of the rest of it, or it's rape humor. And don't try to say "nobody brought up rape".
Perhaps every mention of sex means rape to you. It doesn't bring up that image for me. Stop trying to put words in my mouth and polarise positions. I'm sure some people have found this was about rape, perhaps even you - I'm not among them. I admit this then gives you a convenient straw man to attack, but really.
And "silly sexist remark"? Discrimination against half of humanity is hardly "silly". You seem to think "sexist" means "offends women with thin skin". It doesn't.
Like most things in life, sexism comes in degrees ranging from silly to tragic.
You're wrong with your idea of the facts about, well, everything here
I note you haven't addressed the factual report of what he actually said, which I find telling.
I don't think he makes a good example of sexism because that one incident is just a tiny part of his weirdness. It's like including somebody with a bad case of autism in a list of very shy people. Not only that's not even half of his problems, but the root issue is probably something entirely different.
Sure, I don't think he should be burned at the stake for it, though he could own up and say sorry if he offended people. RMS probably didn't even mean to be sexist, it just exposed some of his strange ideas on the relationship (apparently amusing and informative to him) of having sex and using text editors.
It was really just an example that came to mind of being sexist without a particular target or addressing it at anyone of a certain gender (since the grandparent claimed this was impossible).
Really? Are you aware of what he said exactly? It is in that article you linked to, but I have to assume for some reason you discount direct quotes of him and instead rely on his after the fact interpretation of his bizarre statements?
So what really happened is Stallman made a (admittedly unfunny) joke about religion, and even after he calmly and maturely explained their error to them, whiny 'feminist' idiots continued to take it out of context and act like it was evidence that the leader of the free software movement is some evil rape advocate, when he is, at most, sorely lacking in social skills.
I'll ignore the petulant tone of your riposte and bizarre references to rape - no one except you brought up rape, and it's kind of inappropriate frankly. Let's contrast his dissembling after the fact with what he actually said, as quoted by multiple people who were there:
'"EMACS virgins" are "women who have never used EMACS" and said that it was a sacred duty to "relieve them of their virginity".
The joke was not about religion, but about having sex with women who have not used his favourite text editor - he's comparing initiation into the rites of EMACS to having sex; RMS is simply trying to misdirect talking about religion because he's embarrassed about what he said. It was a silly sexist remark, but apparently he can't find it in himself to admit fault. It's not big deal really, but I'd find it annoying if it was directed at me, and understand why others would too.
However, he is kind of bizarre generally, so I guess that sort of weird remark is just par for the course with him.
You mean like the pathetically ridiculous claim I saw upthread about RMS being a "leader of the FOSS movement" and "if the leader of the movement is a sexist then the movement is sexist"? You mean "implausible post-hoc excuses" like that?
That does sound ridiculous doesn't it, however it's not post-hoc, and it has nothing to do with my statement, or the one I was responding to. I didn't make that comment, but you are welcome to reply to the comment you wish to respond to, rather than ranting on a completely separate thread about entirely unrelated things.
The FOSS "movement" has nothing to do with sex, so the "leaders" views on sex have nothing to do with it.
This I'd agree with, and note that I don't really agree with the submitter of the article (bit of a troll this article), however I can't agree with someone saying that the sex of people talking is unknown therefore sexism cannot exist, that is patent nonsense (see the actual comment I responded to, and my response).
Have a nice day.
Welcome to the Internet, where no stereotype is not mocked.
Well, I've certainly noticed that on the internet people will make up implausible post-hoc excuses up for anything if it means they don't have to accept they were wrong!
Perhaps you can think of one for RMS too while you're here.
....when the sex of the contributor is more often than not completely unknown?
Sexism does not have to be directed at a particular person. For example RMS makes silly jokes about female emacs virgins:
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/EMACS_virgins_joke
which are quite annoying if you happen to be female and don't care to have your sexuality linked to whether you use a text editor in the minds of the men sitting around you in the audience. Or, as another example, this story is tagged 'sendthemtothekitchen'. This sort of juvenile joke contributes to an atmosphere in which women do not feel welcome.
I suspect there's more going on than sexism, given the huge gender imbalance in people even starting to study IT, but the sexism rife in the IT industry certainly doesn't help.
If it were possible to send more data over telephone
It was, and is, possible to send more data over physical copper telephone lines to a nearby exchange, by changing the technology used to broadcast and receive. That's what DSL does, at least here in the UK. The telephone line has remained exactly the same all the way to the exchange:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3660-what-broadband-speeds-could-the-uk-copper-loop-manage.html
As I'm sure you're aware, the DSL uses the frequencies unused by the audio telephone signal, which as you note is capped at 4000Hz. Perhaps the setup is different where you live, and DSL required rewiring in street-side cabinets too?
If you redefine telephone line to mean 'copper twisted pair line limited to 4000Hz and extending for at least several miles', then you are correct. I don't accept that definition of telephone line - neither does most of the rest of the world, because that is not the sort of line their telephone plugs in to.
They can't because the universe places restrictions, just as surely as you can not exceed 186,000 miles per second. Good God people! Have you never taken Physics 101???
Forcing yourself to actually address the issues raised by people you're arguing with (see question in my last post, or the definition of telephone line, which I acknowledged you see differently), might mean arguments feel less frustrating for you. It might also have the fortunate side-effect of reminding you that you are not always more intelligent than your interlocutors, and misunderstandings are not always due to their ignorance.
There's some interesting background leaks on the takeover of Danger in this article which seem to imply they cut a lot of staff, and gutted the company, which is now running on a skeleton staff. So I guess it's not too surprising when this sort of mistake is made. Not the most reliable source, but they did definitely cut a lot of danger staff after the acquisition.
As I downloaded the picture and just opened it in Photoshop CS4 and it has clearly been "heavily edited".
Photoshop is used for adjusting contrast and levels as well as retouching images - almost every image you see published will have gone through photoshop (save on sites like flickr.com). That the image passed through photoshop on the way to being published on wired is really no surprise. There are certainly heavy jpeg artefacts on the image, but that's not surprising either, could have been introduced by the camera or wired resaving as lower-res.
What do you mean by 'heavily edited', and why is that in quotes - did someone tell you this and you're repeating it to us?
You missed out on the production costs, not of the book actually purchased, but for the 90%+ of the books published which don't sell well enough to cover the author fees and editorial salaries, marketing, etc.
Please reread my post. Origination is the term used in the publishing industry for production costs (author,editorial, design). All books have this cost of course, so those that don't sell can make a loss - much like any other business.
I agree book publishing is a gamble, but publishing ebooks is actually far less of a gamble, because as I pointed out, there are significant differences in costs between printing paper books and selling them to bookstores, and selling ebooks online. Bookstores take a significant portion of publishers' income right now.
We are talking about what they are doing NOW not what they could do.
iPhones currently multitask (mail, maps, safari, ipod). They just restrict 3rd party apps from doing so. It is not a technical limitation, as the grandparent implied, and they do in fact multitask right now. Sorry to disappoint you.
I want to also state in this post to other people who are fervently defending Apple
I am not fervently defending Apple, frankly I think many of their actions on iPhone suck (though they got the important stuff that end users care about right). I think you're fighting with shadows of your own imagining here.
The publisher puts the books into boxes and ships the box full of books (maybe 25 of them) for $10. That works out to be around $0.40 per book, delivered to the store.
You missed out the bit where the book store typically takes 30-40% of the cover price from the publisher, often on a sale or return basis. *That's* where all the money goes, and that's something that could change dramatically with digital distribution. Publishers who start selling ebooks can make money with dramatically lower prices. Those who can't, simply wont' survive - they are competing with other publishers, but also with all the self-publishers on the internet. You'll notice that the publishers who are selling lots of their own books as ebooks are able to price the ebook dramatically lower (PragProg, Oreilly, etc).
Guess what? Physical books aren't that expensive to distribute, and eBooks have almost identical costs.
The costs for ebooks are not the same as those for physical copies - it costs pennies (if that) in download/storage costs per copy per ebook, and reproduction/printing/distribution/storage of physical copies of a book costs a lot more than that. Where did you get your figure of $10 a box? You realise most books are printed in China (because it's cheaper) don't you? Storage and priority shipping also costs a lot of money if there are timing issues before a big launch. Even taking your figures at face value, 40c is far more than say 2c for a digital download of a 100Kb book. Over a lot of copies, that adds up to a lot of money saved - at a certain point an ebook is a pure money making vehicle, even if the price is rock bottom, as the download costs are negligible due to the small size, whereas physical books require reprints, restock, storage, etc. every time a new set of copies is made, which all costs money.
What does still cost money for ebooks, as you point out, is origination, and that's not going to change, though you might be surprised at how little of the cost of publishing is in production of the content - say half at the most.
More worrying for many big publishers, the equivalent of $1 popular classics are $0 already - available from project gutenberg - that market is already on the way out (repackaging older books), and where a few years ago we would have bought an Atlas for a road trip, a DIY book for a simple DIY task, and a cookery book for cooking - how many of us would first consult the internet now?
I suspect the internet will make large illustrated books completely redundant soon enough, and eventually a new artform will emerge which supersedes novels, based on the forms available today for written expression; just as novels were born from pamphlets and letters in the 18C.
No actually, I don't. I've never had occasion to use it.
Ah, that explains your question. If you had used it, and have used other languages, I honestly don't think you would have to ask.
It's worth a look just to see what happens when a language grows rather than being designed.
You might find the following link more informative than the vitriol of the parent as I think it explains the bafflement that some developers with experience of a few other, saner, languages feel when they encounter PHP:
http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/index.html
The trouble with PHP is really that it has outgrown its origins (a very simple templating language, for simple web pages), and yet has not been adapting fast enough to the new uses it is being put to. It still has a lot of legacy cruft which makes it unsuited to complex tasks like application development (IMHO), and some feel the design philosophy (exemplified by their use of three separate naming conventions for functions (under_score,jamtogether, and camelCase) and over 3000 functions in the main namespace) means it will never catch up with other scripting languages in terms of elegance or efficiency.
Here's an example of that cruft from the article:
PHP’s approach is rather different. Instead of making sure that database queries are valid, PHP chooses to ensure that the input can’t be invalid. When you enable the magic_quotes_gpc setting, PHP alters its handling of the CGI parameters, and actually inserts backslashes before ‘dangerous’ characters in the incoming data. (An astute reader might stop to wonder why this feature isn’t called magic_backslashes_gpc, but that’s rather a side issue.)
If you weren’t expecting this behaviour, the symptom is that PHP randomly throws backslashes into perfectly valid data — all in the name of not corrupting data! Lerdorf attempted to justify this in a recent interview as follows: “the worst that would happen is that someone would see an extra \ on the screen when they output the data directly instead of sticking it into the database.” I for one get rather concerned when I encounter such flagrant disregard for data integrity.
Can you cite an actual example of something wrong with it?
Sure. I've used it, and it gets the job done, but I didn't much like it compared to the many other options - trying to force development of a GUI application into PHP is my idea of a nightmare, and comparing it to C and saying that it has far more libraries is laughable, considering that most PHP additions (image manipulation for example) are just wrappers around C based tools. My object to PHP is not that it is impossible to use, it's that it's messy and not very well thought out in many regards. It's quick and dirty, with the emphasis on the dirty.
A few problems with PHP off the top of my head:
There is no clean separation of logic and view (or MVC if you prefer that split) - the language itself encourages mixing code and presentation, often with horrendous results. You can work against this, but you're always going against the flow - see the many examples of PHP CMS etc for great examples of this kind of mistake in action. They work, but only just, and the internals are often very messy.
The naming conventions for the API are all over the map - any language that has functions named stuff like mysql_real_escape_string, as opposed to the still extant mysql_escape_string, has obvious problems with design philosophy. Maybe next year they'll come out with mysql_really_escape_the_string_this_time? It is very difficult to guess function names because there are no clear conventions, and the whole thing has grown organically to a huge bundle of disparate functions, some of which definitely do not belong in a language and should be broken out into modules or put into objects like strings. Stuff like eregi_replace, str_ireplace and str_replace is needlessly confusing because the naming conventions are inconsistent and cryptic.
Strings and arrays are not proper objects, so you have to use a mix of procedural and oo code everywhere - it'd be nice to be able to call methods on strings and chain stuff like Ruby. The object model was also weirdly broken till PHP5 and is really bolted on.
Doesn't have closures (just added to C/Obj-C by Apple).
Unicode strings are still not properly supported.
The syntax inherits everything which is bad about perl (it's quite possible to write very difficult to read code), and doesn't improve on it one iota.
I'm sure I could do a search and turn up a few more issues, but it generally just feels ungainly compared to any other language I've used (Ruby, Objective-C, C, Python). I think the author of the above comment saying everything could be done better in PHP really should explore other languages before dismissing them as somehow lacking, and understand that different languages have different strengths, and learning to use other languages could teach them something about how to write good code in PHP.
Having worked with it, PHP doesn't strike me as a very good language by most metrics, and it certainly is not more complete than the many other options in any arena. There is simply no comparison in my opinion with a properly structured API like cocoa for GUI apps.
So, you might want to tell me why would I be joking?
Because PHP is an awful, awful, mess of a language, in fact it's more like a framework + language, but anyway. Just because you could use it to make a GUI application, doesn't make it close to the right tool for the job.
Do yourself a favour and look into other scripting languages, like perl, ruby or python - you would at least learn why people complain about PHP.
I always wish other languages would have such by default
Taking the iPhone as an example, C, Obj-C and C++ all have extensive libraries, and many actual application frameworks available for free, which cover everything PHP does and a whole lot more. The default Obj-C for example has a huge number of built in libraries available. The fact you don't know this rings alarm bells and says to me you should try using something other than PHP just to give you a sense of perspective.