Which is just about any computer that has an OS installed and is turned on....
1. Why should I have to install software just to visit the records when there are free alternatives, available with no downloads, which will do just as well? 2. How long to you think the supposed cross-platform nature of Silverlight will last? 3. What's to stop MS making the Windows version better and leaving the others to rot, as they have done so many times in the past?
This is just another piece of software designed to lock in users to Windows long-term and subvert the web - that's the real answer to question 1 above, but one which MS doesn't want you to think through. Ask yourself why they are pushing this so hard right now, throwing money all over the place to get it installed, instead of AJAX, which they helped invent.
Thanks, but no thanks, I won't be installing it on any computer I own.
"All the time. Its not that hard. Also, if you're worried about such things as quoting, etc., you can always use fixed-width fields - makes indexing, looking up, and modifying values REAL FAST. Compare that to the mess of xml." I know, I use 255 chars al
Email should have been fixed ages ago to only let people send 'from' the actual account they're using for authentication. It would make a lot of the problems we see with abuse go away.
You don't believe we are at war, ok. And if you read what I wrote you will see that I acknowledge that if one doesn't believe we are at war then spending ANY blood or treasure is a bad idea. It isn't a position I agree with, but if one starts from the position that we aren't in fact in a clash of civilizations, that spending anything on a 'false war' is a bad idea is a quite logical conclusion based on it.
The parent didn't assert that the US is not at war, they merely questioned the justifications and framing for that war in Iraq - the one which is costing billions of dollars. While I'm sure you'd like to frame it as a war of good against evil, civilised world against backwards caliphate(!), life really isn't that simple. Wars since time immemorial have been justified on those grounds, and it's always been a lie. You have presented no evidence of this so called 'clash of civilisations' - the tenuous link you made to Iraq was refuted by the answers given in this thread. The war in Afghanistan is a very different one to the one in Iraq, started for different reasons, and attempting to portray them both (along with a possible attack on Iran) as some kind of never-ending global war on the same enemy is simply a rhetorical trick designed to deflect criticism. It's on the same level as 'You're either with us or against us'.
The best way to install tyranny is to instil widespread fear of an indefinable, ineffable enemy, ideally with a never-ending war to keep the fear real, and that's exactly what's happening in the US right now. It's time it stopped and real discussions started about what the various wars are actually for, and whether they could ever achieve those goals.
PS The silly taunts about 'lefties' and reading comprehension reveal more about you than your adversaries (imagined or real).
MS woke up late to the internet. Once they woke up, their attempts at gaining a foothold were more or less unsuccessful.
Indeed. However this move is possibly their most bone-headed reaction yet. I have no doubt it's straight from the brain of Steve I'm going to fucking kill Google Ballmer. Acquiring Yahoo is another attempt to tame the internet and tie it to Windows services, and it will fail as dismally as the last few attempts, because the internet (and Yahoo) is the antithesis of Microsoft.
Users on the web don't like being 'monetized' unless there's something in it for them, and they'll resist attempts by MS to change that balance of power. Those attempts by MS to exploit users are inevitable because it's just not in Ballmer's (or Microsoft's) DNA to let users get something for nothing.
For Microsoft as a company, swallowing Yahoo whole is going to create many more problems than it solves. It will drive the good engineers to Google (very few of Yahoo's people could thrive under the entirely different MS culture), it'll give Microsoft lots of new properties which directly compete with their own offerings, it'll make all the MS Live employees very nervous and trigger more internal turf wars, and finally, it will land MS with servicing lots of disgruntled users on services like Flickr who will desert in droves at the first attempt to corral them into an MS only internet (as MS is prone to do - see ActiveX, IE, Silverlight, etc). Their business model (lock in the users and milk them for profits) isn't under threat, it's past its sell by date; you can't continually abuse your users forever and expect them never to walk away, particularly not if you're trying to operate as a web services company, and I have my doubts that Ballmer et al will ever learn this lesson. They've done too well in the past by applying it to abandon it now.
Still, if you don't work at Yahoo, and you're not keen on Microsoft dominating yet another market, this foolish move is heartening news. Google must be celebrating the beginning of the end of the dark ages of the internet. This will tie up MS for years.
Learn Python (or another scripting language like ruby or smalltalk), then PHP. Then you'll understand why people say PHP is ill-considered. It won't take you long to learn the basics of a couple of languages, and it's worth doing that just so that you can compare them. If you only learn one, you'll never know what's good and bad about it.
Firstly, thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Your responses have seriously improved the quality of this discussion. This is posted from an iPod, so I'll be brief.
It's interesting to see that you don't feel the web needs versions - every other doc format I can think of has them. Perhaps that's part of the strength of the web, but it also seems to me to be a weakness. It means that no changes in behaviour can be introduced without breaking renderings of previous versions. Eventually all the added behaviour will accrete until things are just too complex. Prunning stuff like font from the spec for example will radically change renderings of older content unless UAs use some form of versioning to keep rendering those only in older docs - otherwise it's not really been removed.
I think on the web the unfortunate practice of coding to particular versions of UA has clouded the issue somewhat.
Anyway thanks for the response and HTML 5 - there's some great stuff in there.
So you may as well not bother with the !DOCTYPE, plus that means you have a different top level tag for each new revision of html, which is kind of ugly. A version attribute (as someone originally suggested) is neater than a doctype anyway IMHO, however, having had a quick google around, it seems Ian is of the opinion that there is no problem :
There's no versioning problem. We will never require UAs to do different things based on what version of HTML they find a page claiming to use. It's bad enough that UAs have been forced into quirks vs standards mode versioning. - Ian Hicks
While I sympathise with the attempt to release browsers from quirks mode hell, you still need a version of some kind for a document format, otherwise you can't ever break with the previous formats in any way at all. It also helps with validation, which would otherwise be impossible (how would an html 5 document be validated? By searching for the exact string '!DOCTYPE html' and hoping for the best? ? ?!? !?! ).
We can't put anything on the start tag, because that tag is optional
Don't do that then, you certainly aren't sticking slavishly to the conventions of html pre v.5, so why here?
Defining a standard for documents (i.e. html 5) without any sort of versioning for the standard seems like it would lead to loads of problems later on. When you get to html 6, how would a browser/validator know which version of html it's supposed to be looking at? Surely that would help with rendering if nothing else? Are browsers really supposed to have some kind of sucky 'guess-layout-intentions-by-doctype' routine, even though it'd be simple for a version number to go in there? Have no browser makers asked for this?? Otherwise when you get to version 6 and wish to revise the rendering/behaviour of an element, there will be no way to do it.
I'm aware you've thought about this a great deal more than most people here, so perhaps you could enlighten us. Sorry if this has been done to death elsewhere.
Then you should have a transition strategy to remove that ugly !DOCTYPE bit. Add a version="5.0" field as well, and then later you can drop the DOCTYPE part, once enough browsers support looking at the version.
Using the video output, your desktop was mirrored and did not span the two screens. (I don't know if the newest models still do this.
This has not been true for a long time. I've been using an imac with 2 monitors for years. So an imac is perfectly suitable for design work, unless you don't like LCDs.
Music is data Art is data Novels are data Games are data Source code is data
All these things can be owned, sold, borrowed and stolen under our current laws. The reason for the high valuation of Facebook is because they have aggregated a huge amount of data, and are looking to make money from it. They quite literally own the social lives of some of their customers, as set out in the terms of agreement which let those customers use their server. Call me old-fashioned, but I wouldn't trust a sleazy company like this with my data/stories/contacts/messages. If two years later a better social network comes along and I want to move, I'd be completely locked in, and even before that beacon gives a foretaste of their view of the users. That's why we need an open standard for social connections between people/websites/messages, and before that an open authentication standard like openid to ensure trust of the data shared. We've seen walled gardens before, and they are no better this time round.
You raise an interesting point though (or Scott McNealy does) in saying that privacy is dead - we will soon live in a very transparent society, and I believe most people will come to accept that their every move and utterance can be tracked, and live with the consequences. After all, better that everyone can be tracked always than only some people sometimes when the government decides to. More of our lives and data will be publicly available in the future than ever before, and the solid anonymity of the internet will melt into air as connections between posts and personas become ever more visible.
However something can easily be publicly available and also be data which is copyright (i.e. owned), and only licensed for certain uses. Having bought a book you may (legally and morally) read it or quote it, but not reprint it and try to sell it on multiple times (assuming it's still in copyright). So to jump from information being public to it being free and without ownership is illogical. It may seem that way because currently you can get away with copying music or software with little chance of punishment, but that will change over time as we move to an information economy, and new agreements/social norms will come into force. In the meantime the rules are in flux as society adjusts to the new status of everything in our lives as data. Hopefully copyright will be retained but drastically shortened so that after a certain short period of monopoly for the author everything becomes public domain. It's worth noting that things like the GPL rely on the notion of owning data which you so blithely dismiss.
What you refer to as 'social agreements, weak at best' are what keeps your life from being nasty, brutish and short. I'd say they bind very strongly in most societies, indeed, no society is possible without them.
As a designer, I'm really not interested in working with or supporting anything from Microsoft. My reasons? IE 6 & 7. IE6 doesn't even come close to supporting web standards. IE7 does a slightly better job. I hear IE8 is coming along better support-wise. Guess we'll see...
Why is this modded troll?
It's a reasonable judgement based on past behaviour - after cornering the market, Microsoft left IE in limbo for years, and then made do with lacklustre updates which still drag behind every other browser in CSS support. This speaks volumes about their commitment to the web as an open platform. Silverlight is their preferred alternative, because they own the standard, and can change it at any time (and get it rubber stamped by a standards committee afterwards) - if enough people adopt it they can nudge the web into being the Windows web*, and leave other platforms trailing behind just enough to make it painful. They're trying to kill the open web because it's a level playing field, and we shouldn't install stuff like Silverlight from them because of that. How many times can we fall for this same old trick?
*For best results, please use the latest version of windows
I'll add one more thing to the people reading this: I mean business when I say I'll take anyone on who wants to fight me. You think you can take me, I'll pay to rent a boxing ring and beat your fucking ass legally. Remember that I've studied enough martial arts to be deadly even though I'm old, and I don't give a fuck if I kick your mother fucking ass or you kick mine. You don't like what I've said, then write something in reply but fuck you if you think you're gonna talk to me like you can hurt me.
Over and over again I'd run into these morons who would offer me tiny jobs, no jobs, insult my intelligence, treat me like all I can do is code, and when I didn't fit that mold or wanted to charge them for the privilege they'd cheat me or laugh at me.
Google was a total riot. They offered me a job twice. I went with it, and they never responded. Probably because the job they were offering me--someone who's been coding for 21 years, 15 professionally--was as a junior system administrator. What the hell does a junior sysadmin do at google? That's probably like mopping the floor at a glory hole in Queens. I told them to review my resume and offer me a real position.
Perhaps Google read a few paragraphs of Zed's So Fucking Awesome and thought better of asking him to do anything at all. I feel sorry for this guy now because this one post will do more to ruin his career than any minor tantrum in front of a few people (a few of which he describes here). I hear dreamhost is hiring though; his weblog reminds me of theirs.
You sound like Fox News on a bad day - all false dichotomies, bad analogies, and personal attacks. Useful arguments are a dialogue, so stop treating this like a gladiatorial match. Your barbs about playing WoW etc really only reflect badly on you.
A customer is someone who buys your product, regardless of what they do with it afterward. Apple releasing an SDK does show us that they do indeed count the 'hackers, crackers and dummy followers' as customers - those people want to buy an iphone after all, and might buy upgrades if they're happy enough. What they don't want is to be locked in forever to whoever Apple thinks is the best carrier for them, and the best supplier of apps.
I'd consistently look at Apple products first when evaluating consumer electronics/computers, because they think through their choices, actually design their products, and they are not user-hostile; if they do something unpopular like remove serial ports, remove floppies, or discontinue classic, it's usually for a good reason, and makes it better for everyone in the long run. If they turn into the kind of company that tries to lock down its users so hard they can't even install stuff on their own device, I'd reconsider that stance, as would I think the majority of their current customers. So Apple should care because a lot of their customers rely on them to make the right choices, and will go elsewhere if those choices are solely made to maximise profit short-term, at the expense of the wishes of their users. Linux phones will soon be a big competitor to the iPhone, particularly with webkit installed.
There was no requirement to wipe apps with this update, and to do so is just going to encourage a lot of people not to bother with it (frankly it's not very compelling and in some cases copies what has already been done by those 'crackers' - (that's drug dealers and death racers to you)). So they'll end up with a fragmented user-base running all sorts of versions. They may well feel this is worth the pain just now to force everyone to go to their way for installing apps when they've released the SDK. Actively blocking unlocking is a stupid move in my opinion - they could make a lot more money by simply not condoning software unlocks and looking the other way.
We'll see far better when the SDK is released what Apple's plans are, and if they're going to try to continue with this ridiculous walled garden they've set up or get with the program and open up the phone to the users/developers. I imagine Apple thought they could milk certain customers for a while first with locked in plans and then open up the platform later, which is risky, but might work. Ultimately a walled garden approach will fail, so I'm not too worried about the future as if they don't choose to they'll be pushed to open up. The touch and the iphone are mini-computers, and even if Apple don't see them that way yet, they will have to recognise it at some point - I'll wait till they do before buying an iPhone.
Apple isn't trying to stifle 3rd party developers --they are trying to close potential security holes in the OS, such as the ones that are exploited to install 3rd party apps.
The vulnerability used to install apps is on 1.1.1, you have to downgrade to that and then upgrade again currently. So wiping apps would be purely malicious action by Apple - we'll see when the update comes out. Breaking a few, or even all, in some way is fair play - they're unsupported after all.
As someone has already pointed out, Apple is interested in serving the large majority of iPhone users who want to use the goddam phone, not replace the keypad icons with images of boobies and penguins. Or penguins with boobies.
Nice straw man - here's some real apps which Apple doesn't provide :
* Books.app - ebook reader with the potential to read anything on gutenberg * SSH - SSH into your phone * AFP Server - see your phone appear on your desktop with bonjour * Term vt100 - Terminal on your phone * Mobile Finder - see the files on your device * Customize - change the order of home screen icons (took Apple a while to get to that it seems) * TextEdit - simple text editor * Todo - Todo list, complete with email reminders
Maybe someone will come up with a browser without the limitations of MobileSafari (no download or upload) - wouldn't be that hard given that webkit is already on there.
Personally I can't wait for an SDK, and I'm not going to spend the time before it making excuses for Apple trying to create a walled garden. Let's see what they come up with when the SDK comes out.
For applications that are richer and more responsive than traditional, page refreshing apps. Webmail and calendaring, for example. Also, administrative interfaces for various hardware such as routers, network copiers, etc. These things don't work very well with document oriented interfaces, IMO.
I see where you're coming from. I agree AJAX can make a huge difference to the experience of those apps, and welcome it, but in conjunction with URI based addressing I think it works great - as a replacement, not so much. For example in a calendar app it's nice to be able to share the url of a particular event with others, bookmark, and navigate through your browser history. Having everything all on 'one page' implies you wouldn't be able to do that.
I don't use gmail a great deal (hadn't noticed that they've fixed this issue recently as another poster pointed out), however I'd like to be able to bookmark searches and messages, just to name two things. Plus it'd be nice if something like a contact was at a specific url, rather than just mail.google.com and some glob of session data that I don't care about. I use desktop mail too, but when using webmail prefer gmail, in spite of the shortcomings.
Rails makes it fairly straightforward to fall back to non-ajax behavior. But at the same time, it would be fairly difficult to implement a Gmail-like app if only because Rails provides few of the client side application controls beyond the basic HTML inputs.
Well, I don't think it's a binary choice, and there are very important concepts in the non-ajax world which should not be jettisoned when using AJAX- foremost among them the concept of URIs, resources and pages, Get, Post, Delete etc, which offer a whole load of functionality and interoperability for free, which you don't get if you create an app which has one page and only exposes its state to the user through changes to the HTML of that page, rather than changes to URIs. If you do what you're suggesting you end up with something very like a flash application.
The hard(ish) part is making an app that is completely AJAX.
Forgive my ignorance if this is obvious, but why would you want to do that? Surely using AJAX should be a complement to traditional web pages, not a replacement. I like seeing the URL change as I browse different resources on the web, and as a user am repelled by apps which break my back button, don't let me save state, and basically break the web. This really annoys me about gmail - though I understand there that they're dealing with info you're not generally going to make public, so the lack of bookmarking ability doesn't matter so much. The old Apple store was a good example of how this really breaks the user experience. They have even put in a whole load of nonsense in the address (1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa in every url !!!!) to try to hide the fact they're stuffing gobbledygook in there when there should be state info. Very bad design. I think now they've fixed it up a bit so that you can at least bookmark or share an URL with a product range, if not a specific product.
If your app loads only a single page, presumably it doesn't feature any resources that the user might want to refer to again with a URI, share with a URI, or otherwise come back to? The searches can't be saved except within your web app? It can't be cached by the web server/client? There are so many downsides to this and so few upsides. Interestingly, it seems Rails is moving more towards the opposite of this; exploring REST as a way of providing specific URIs for specific content, rather than trying to make web pages into a desktop application in a browser window.
The parent said C is no more cumbersome for strings than other languages, so comparing a verbose implementation of reverse in C (which is not built in) to the built in function in another language is salient; it doesn't matter how Ruby does it internally, Ruby (for example) is a far better language to work on strings in than pure C, because the standard library already includes many useful string functions you don't have to import libraries or write them yourself. I was addressing the specific claim : String manipulation isn't much more cumbersome in C than any other language.
String manipulation isn't much more cumbersome in C than any other language.
From the readme for the library that you just linked :
* Substantial mitigation of buffer overflow/overrun problems and other failures that result from erroneous usage of the common C string library functions * Significantly simplified string manipulation * High performance interoperability with other source/libraries which expect '\0' terminated char buffers * Improved overall performance of common string operations * Functional equivalency with other more modern languages
Why would this library even be necessary if string manipulation in C wasn't more cumbersome than other languages??!?!
To pick an example at random from that library
/* int bReverse (bstring b)
*
* Reverse the contents of b in place.
*/ int bReverse (bstring b) { int i, n, m; unsigned char t;
if (b == NULL || b->slen mlen < b->slen) return -__LINE__;
n = b->slen;
if (2 > 1;
n--;
for (i=0; i data[n - i];
b->data[n - i] = b->data[i];
b->data[i] = t;
}
}
return 0; }
Is "Reverse me".reverse in ruby (I didn't have to look it up, just tried it and it worked as expected). There are many other examples, and that's not even getting on to regular expressions. I'm sure most can agree that PHP isn't the best language for web apps, but C would come way down my list. String manipulation is one of its weakest areas. Ruby's weak native support for UTF-8 counts against it here though.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Why should I have to install software just to visit the records when there are free alternatives, available with no downloads, which will do just as well?
2. How long to you think the supposed cross-platform nature of Silverlight will last?
3. What's to stop MS making the Windows version better and leaving the others to rot, as they have done so many times in the past?
This is just another piece of software designed to lock in users to Windows long-term and subvert the web - that's the real answer to question 1 above, but one which MS doesn't want you to think through. Ask yourself why they are pushing this so hard right now, throwing money all over the place to get it installed, instead of AJAX, which they helped invent.
Thanks, but no thanks, I won't be installing it on any computer I own.
The point being that if you define a max size for a field, you're bound to meet some data larger than you expected which needs to be truncated to fit.
"All the time. Its not that hard. Also, if you're worried about such things as quoting, etc., you can always use fixed-width fields - makes indexing, looking up, and modifying values REAL FAST. Compare that to the mess of xml." I know, I use 255 chars al
Use Reply-To:
Email should have been fixed ages ago to only let people send 'from' the actual account they're using for authentication. It would make a lot of the problems we see with abuse go away.
As a large multinational, one doesn't wreak of desperation, one wreaks havok, though perhaps that does reek of desperation.
The parent didn't assert that the US is not at war, they merely questioned the justifications and framing for that war in Iraq - the one which is costing billions of dollars. While I'm sure you'd like to frame it as a war of good against evil, civilised world against backwards caliphate(!), life really isn't that simple. Wars since time immemorial have been justified on those grounds, and it's always been a lie. You have presented no evidence of this so called 'clash of civilisations' - the tenuous link you made to Iraq was refuted by the answers given in this thread. The war in Afghanistan is a very different one to the one in Iraq, started for different reasons, and attempting to portray them both (along with a possible attack on Iran) as some kind of never-ending global war on the same enemy is simply a rhetorical trick designed to deflect criticism. It's on the same level as 'You're either with us or against us'.
The best way to install tyranny is to instil widespread fear of an indefinable, ineffable enemy, ideally with a never-ending war to keep the fear real, and that's exactly what's happening in the US right now. It's time it stopped and real discussions started about what the various wars are actually for, and whether they could ever achieve those goals.
PS The silly taunts about 'lefties' and reading comprehension reveal more about you than your adversaries (imagined or real).
MS woke up late to the internet. Once they woke up, their attempts at gaining a foothold were more or less unsuccessful.
Indeed. However this move is possibly their most bone-headed reaction yet. I have no doubt it's straight from the brain of Steve I'm going to fucking kill Google Ballmer. Acquiring Yahoo is another attempt to tame the internet and tie it to Windows services, and it will fail as dismally as the last few attempts, because the internet (and Yahoo) is the antithesis of Microsoft.
Users on the web don't like being 'monetized' unless there's something in it for them, and they'll resist attempts by MS to change that balance of power. Those attempts by MS to exploit users are inevitable because it's just not in Ballmer's (or Microsoft's) DNA to let users get something for nothing.
For Microsoft as a company, swallowing Yahoo whole is going to create many more problems than it solves. It will drive the good engineers to Google (very few of Yahoo's people could thrive under the entirely different MS culture), it'll give Microsoft lots of new properties which directly compete with their own offerings, it'll make all the MS Live employees very nervous and trigger more internal turf wars, and finally, it will land MS with servicing lots of disgruntled users on services like Flickr who will desert in droves at the first attempt to corral them into an MS only internet (as MS is prone to do - see ActiveX, IE, Silverlight, etc). Their business model (lock in the users and milk them for profits) isn't under threat, it's past its sell by date; you can't continually abuse your users forever and expect them never to walk away, particularly not if you're trying to operate as a web services company, and I have my doubts that Ballmer et al will ever learn this lesson. They've done too well in the past by applying it to abandon it now.
Still, if you don't work at Yahoo, and you're not keen on Microsoft dominating yet another market, this foolish move is heartening news. Google must be celebrating the beginning of the end of the dark ages of the internet. This will tie up MS for years.
Learn Python (or another scripting language like ruby or smalltalk), then PHP. Then you'll understand why people say PHP is ill-considered. It won't take you long to learn the basics of a couple of languages, and it's worth doing that just so that you can compare them. If you only learn one, you'll never know what's good and bad about it.
Firstly, thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Your responses have seriously improved the quality of this discussion. This is posted from an iPod, so I'll be brief.
It's interesting to see that you don't feel the web needs versions - every other doc format I can think of has them. Perhaps that's part of the strength of the web, but it also seems to me to be a weakness. It means that no changes in behaviour can be introduced without breaking renderings of previous versions. Eventually all the added behaviour will accrete until things are just too complex. Prunning stuff like font from the spec for example will radically change renderings of older content unless UAs use some form of versioning to keep rendering those only in older docs - otherwise it's not really been removed.
I think on the web the unfortunate practice of coding to particular versions of UA has clouded the issue somewhat.
Anyway thanks for the response and HTML 5 - there's some great stuff in there.
No, you can't. It breaks the rendering in current Firefox builds, they'll go into quirks mode. See this test-case.
http://zcorpan.1go.dk/test/doctype-html5.html
So you may as well not bother with the !DOCTYPE, plus that means you have a different top level tag for each new revision of html, which is kind of ugly. A version attribute (as someone originally suggested) is neater than a doctype anyway IMHO, however, having had a quick google around, it seems Ian is of the opinion that there is no problem :
http://annevankesteren.nl/2005/07/html5-doctype#comment-4391
While I sympathise with the attempt to release browsers from quirks mode hell, you still need a version of some kind for a document format, otherwise you can't ever break with the previous formats in any way at all. It also helps with validation, which would otherwise be impossible (how would an html 5 document be validated? By searching for the exact string '!DOCTYPE html' and hoping for the best? ? ?!? !?! ).
Don't do that then, you certainly aren't sticking slavishly to the conventions of html pre v.5, so why here?
Defining a standard for documents (i.e. html 5) without any sort of versioning for the standard seems like it would lead to loads of problems later on. When you get to html 6, how would a browser/validator know which version of html it's supposed to be looking at? Surely that would help with rendering if nothing else? Are browsers really supposed to have some kind of sucky 'guess-layout-intentions-by-doctype' routine, even though it'd be simple for a version number to go in there? Have no browser makers asked for this?? Otherwise when you get to version 6 and wish to revise the rendering/behaviour of an element, there will be no way to do it.
I'm aware you've thought about this a great deal more than most people here, so perhaps you could enlighten us. Sorry if this has been done to death elsewhere.
Then you should have a transition strategy to remove that ugly !DOCTYPE bit. Add a version="5.0" field as well, and then later you can drop the DOCTYPE part, once enough browsers support looking at the version.
This has not been true for a long time. I've been using an imac with 2 monitors for years. So an imac is perfectly suitable for design work, unless you don't like LCDs.
You mean Britain of course.
Let me turn that around for you to the non-geek (i.e. majority) perspective -
Sure, phone x has loads of features, but what's the good in lots of features if the UI is so shoddy you can't use them?
Music is data
Art is data
Novels are data
Games are data
Source code is data
All these things can be owned, sold, borrowed and stolen under our current laws. The reason for the high valuation of Facebook is because they have aggregated a huge amount of data, and are looking to make money from it. They quite literally own the social lives of some of their customers, as set out in the terms of agreement which let those customers use their server. Call me old-fashioned, but I wouldn't trust a sleazy company like this with my data/stories/contacts/messages. If two years later a better social network comes along and I want to move, I'd be completely locked in, and even before that beacon gives a foretaste of their view of the users. That's why we need an open standard for social connections between people/websites/messages, and before that an open authentication standard like openid to ensure trust of the data shared. We've seen walled gardens before, and they are no better this time round.
You raise an interesting point though (or Scott McNealy does) in saying that privacy is dead - we will soon live in a very transparent society, and I believe most people will come to accept that their every move and utterance can be tracked, and live with the consequences. After all, better that everyone can be tracked always than only some people sometimes when the government decides to. More of our lives and data will be publicly available in the future than ever before, and the solid anonymity of the internet will melt into air as connections between posts and personas become ever more visible.
However something can easily be publicly available and also be data which is copyright (i.e. owned), and only licensed for certain uses. Having bought a book you may (legally and morally) read it or quote it, but not reprint it and try to sell it on multiple times (assuming it's still in copyright). So to jump from information being public to it being free and without ownership is illogical. It may seem that way because currently you can get away with copying music or software with little chance of punishment, but that will change over time as we move to an information economy, and new agreements/social norms will come into force. In the meantime the rules are in flux as society adjusts to the new status of everything in our lives as data. Hopefully copyright will be retained but drastically shortened so that after a certain short period of monopoly for the author everything becomes public domain. It's worth noting that things like the GPL rely on the notion of owning data which you so blithely dismiss.
What you refer to as 'social agreements, weak at best' are what keeps your life from being nasty, brutish and short. I'd say they bind very strongly in most societies, indeed, no society is possible without them.
Why is this modded troll?
It's a reasonable judgement based on past behaviour - after cornering the market, Microsoft left IE in limbo for years, and then made do with lacklustre updates which still drag behind every other browser in CSS support. This speaks volumes about their commitment to the web as an open platform. Silverlight is their preferred alternative, because they own the standard, and can change it at any time (and get it rubber stamped by a standards committee afterwards) - if enough people adopt it they can nudge the web into being the Windows web*, and leave other platforms trailing behind just enough to make it painful. They're trying to kill the open web because it's a level playing field, and we shouldn't install stuff like Silverlight from them because of that. How many times can we fall for this same old trick?
*For best results, please use the latest version of windows
Perhaps Google read a few paragraphs of Zed's So Fucking Awesome and thought better of asking him to do anything at all. I feel sorry for this guy now because this one post will do more to ruin his career than any minor tantrum in front of a few people (a few of which he describes here). I hear dreamhost is hiring though; his weblog reminds me of theirs.
You sound like Fox News on a bad day - all false dichotomies, bad analogies, and personal attacks. Useful arguments are a dialogue, so stop treating this like a gladiatorial match. Your barbs about playing WoW etc really only reflect badly on you.
A customer is someone who buys your product, regardless of what they do with it afterward. Apple releasing an SDK does show us that they do indeed count the 'hackers, crackers and dummy followers' as customers - those people want to buy an iphone after all, and might buy upgrades if they're happy enough. What they don't want is to be locked in forever to whoever Apple thinks is the best carrier for them, and the best supplier of apps.
I'd consistently look at Apple products first when evaluating consumer electronics/computers, because they think through their choices, actually design their products, and they are not user-hostile; if they do something unpopular like remove serial ports, remove floppies, or discontinue classic, it's usually for a good reason, and makes it better for everyone in the long run. If they turn into the kind of company that tries to lock down its users so hard they can't even install stuff on their own device, I'd reconsider that stance, as would I think the majority of their current customers. So Apple should care because a lot of their customers rely on them to make the right choices, and will go elsewhere if those choices are solely made to maximise profit short-term, at the expense of the wishes of their users. Linux phones will soon be a big competitor to the iPhone, particularly with webkit installed.
There was no requirement to wipe apps with this update, and to do so is just going to encourage a lot of people not to bother with it (frankly it's not very compelling and in some cases copies what has already been done by those 'crackers' - (that's drug dealers and death racers to you)). So they'll end up with a fragmented user-base running all sorts of versions. They may well feel this is worth the pain just now to force everyone to go to their way for installing apps when they've released the SDK. Actively blocking unlocking is a stupid move in my opinion - they could make a lot more money by simply not condoning software unlocks and looking the other way.
We'll see far better when the SDK is released what Apple's plans are, and if they're going to try to continue with this ridiculous walled garden they've set up or get with the program and open up the phone to the users/developers. I imagine Apple thought they could milk certain customers for a while first with locked in plans and then open up the platform later, which is risky, but might work. Ultimately a walled garden approach will fail, so I'm not too worried about the future as if they don't choose to they'll be pushed to open up. The touch and the iphone are mini-computers, and even if Apple don't see them that way yet, they will have to recognise it at some point - I'll wait till they do before buying an iPhone.
The vulnerability used to install apps is on 1.1.1, you have to downgrade to that and then upgrade again currently. So wiping apps would be purely malicious action by Apple - we'll see when the update comes out. Breaking a few, or even all, in some way is fair play - they're unsupported after all.
Nice straw man - here's some real apps which Apple doesn't provide :
* Books.app - ebook reader with the potential to read anything on gutenberg
* SSH - SSH into your phone
* AFP Server - see your phone appear on your desktop with bonjour
* Term vt100 - Terminal on your phone
* Mobile Finder - see the files on your device
* Customize - change the order of home screen icons (took Apple a while to get to that it seems)
* TextEdit - simple text editor
* Todo - Todo list, complete with email reminders
Maybe someone will come up with a browser without the limitations of MobileSafari (no download or upload) - wouldn't be that hard given that webkit is already on there.
Personally I can't wait for an SDK, and I'm not going to spend the time before it making excuses for Apple trying to create a walled garden. Let's see what they come up with when the SDK comes out.
I see where you're coming from. I agree AJAX can make a huge difference to the experience of those apps, and welcome it, but in conjunction with URI based addressing I think it works great - as a replacement, not so much. For example in a calendar app it's nice to be able to share the url of a particular event with others, bookmark, and navigate through your browser history. Having everything all on 'one page' implies you wouldn't be able to do that.
I don't use gmail a great deal (hadn't noticed that they've fixed this issue recently as another poster pointed out), however I'd like to be able to bookmark searches and messages, just to name two things. Plus it'd be nice if something like a contact was at a specific url, rather than just mail.google.com and some glob of session data that I don't care about. I use desktop mail too, but when using webmail prefer gmail, in spite of the shortcomings.
Well, I don't think it's a binary choice, and there are very important concepts in the non-ajax world which should not be jettisoned when using AJAX- foremost among them the concept of URIs, resources and pages, Get, Post, Delete etc, which offer a whole load of functionality and interoperability for free, which you don't get if you create an app which has one page and only exposes its state to the user through changes to the HTML of that page, rather than changes to URIs. If you do what you're suggesting you end up with something very like a flash application.
Forgive my ignorance if this is obvious, but why would you want to do that? Surely using AJAX should be a complement to traditional web pages, not a replacement. I like seeing the URL change as I browse different resources on the web, and as a user am repelled by apps which break my back button, don't let me save state, and basically break the web. This really annoys me about gmail - though I understand there that they're dealing with info you're not generally going to make public, so the lack of bookmarking ability doesn't matter so much. The old Apple store was a good example of how this really breaks the user experience. They have even put in a whole load of nonsense in the address (1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa in every url !!!!) to try to hide the fact they're stuffing gobbledygook in there when there should be state info. Very bad design. I think now they've fixed it up a bit so that you can at least bookmark or share an URL with a product range, if not a specific product.
If your app loads only a single page, presumably it doesn't feature any resources that the user might want to refer to again with a URI, share with a URI, or otherwise come back to? The searches can't be saved except within your web app? It can't be cached by the web server/client? There are so many downsides to this and so few upsides. Interestingly, it seems Rails is moving more towards the opposite of this; exploring REST as a way of providing specific URIs for specific content, rather than trying to make web pages into a desktop application in a browser window.
The parent said C is no more cumbersome for strings than other languages, so comparing a verbose implementation of reverse in C (which is not built in) to the built in function in another language is salient; it doesn't matter how Ruby does it internally, Ruby (for example) is a far better language to work on strings in than pure C, because the standard library already includes many useful string functions you don't have to import libraries or write them yourself. I was addressing the specific claim : String manipulation isn't much more cumbersome in C than any other language.
From the readme for the library that you just linked :
* Substantial mitigation of buffer overflow/overrun problems and other failures that result from erroneous usage of the common C string library functions
* Significantly simplified string manipulation
* High performance interoperability with other source/libraries which expect '\0' terminated char buffers
* Improved overall performance of common string operations
* Functional equivalency with other more modern languages
Why would this library even be necessary if string manipulation in C wasn't more cumbersome than other languages??!?!
To pick an example at random from that library
*
* Reverse the contents of b in place.
*/
int bReverse (bstring b) {
int i, n, m;
unsigned char t;
if (b == NULL || b->slen mlen < b->slen) return -__LINE__;
n = b->slen;
if (2 > 1;
n--;
for (i=0; i data[n - i];
b->data[n - i] = b->data[i];
b->data[i] = t;
}
}
return 0;
}
Is "Reverse me".reverse in ruby (I didn't have to look it up, just tried it and it worked as expected). There are many other examples, and that's not even getting on to regular expressions. I'm sure most can agree that PHP isn't the best language for web apps, but C would come way down my list. String manipulation is one of its weakest areas. Ruby's weak native support for UTF-8 counts against it here though.