By animating the -webkit-transform CSS property in your code, you can enable hardware-accelerated animations and deliver a top-notch experience in web pages on iPad and iPhone.
* Photos are positioned with -webkit-transform.
* The spotlight effect is drawn with -webkit-gradient.
Those aren't standards. Those are propietary CSS extensions.
Javascript has taken hints from lots of other languages. In many ways it provides a C-style syntax, yet it's == operator is not an equality operator in the way that == is an equality operator in C (or, really, C++).
It's a poorly designed mishmash of technologies with lousy tool support. Sure there are lot of cross-platform libraries around if you can afford the code bloat.
And, sure, you could say that well it's a great language that suffers from a poor standard library and poor implementations. But if no decent standard library exists, at what point do you stop making excuses? If no decent implementations exist, at what point do you stop speaking in hypotheticals?
As someone who's done enough javascript wrangling to last a lifetime, lemmie point out that the cross-platform stuff is great for your simple sites. But for anything slightly complex, you're still going to have to deal with browser differences (beyond their inability to render HTML the same way). Plenty of people have made plenty of applications with VB, but that doesn't make VB decent.
Hold on, you're telling me that a prototype-based language with strong emphasis on events and closures is bad for UI?
No. It's not that it's directly bad for the UI, it's bad for maintainable code. Closures are a great idea (and work very well with Ruby), but with Javascript nearly everything turns into a closure.
No, it's really not. The development tools are ass and the language itself fails with its non-intuitive comparison operators. Being prototype based leads to really nasty code and "creative" ways of scoping variables. But that's if you want to be pedantic. If you are willing to lump the standard library in with the language, then you've got even bigger problems. What's actually cross-platform is a pretty small subset of anything useful, leaving people to roll their own hacks.
Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
If PDF/A is being used, I'd say your chances are pretty darn good that the files will be accessible in twenty-five years. From the wiki page: audio, video, javascript, and encryption are not allowed in PDF/A files. Use of standardized metadata is mandated, and *all* fonts used must be embedded. IOW it's a simplified, well defined file format.
I'm gonna go with: my experience does not mirror yours. I spent a few years driving cars with "old fashioned" fully mechanical automatic transmissions, I got used to having all manner of control without needing to coordinate hand and feet. The newfangled electronically controlled automatic transmissions are a pain. The worst as far as shifting up to early was a Toyota Matrix which shifted into its top gear well before redline while I was trying to accelerate uphill on a freeway. Of the handful of other cars with 'modern automatics' I've driven, they've all been far more unpleasant and unpredictable than the older transmissions. The best, and most predictable by far, was a Nissan Sentra with a CVT. All in all I'd be hard pressed to come up with a situation in which modern autos are "better".
Perhaps. Flash seems to be the only thing giving me much grief, however. If I use the YouTube HTML5 player, I can play videos without any problems whatsoever. Flash isn't so much basic internet usage as it is basic internet abuse.
1.) Why? Because Flash can't even bother to provide a decent experience on desktop apps. Desktop Flash doesn't blend in with the native widgets at all. They don't look the same, they don't respond in the same way. The useful internationalization features that native widgets have... non-native Flash widgets lack. They don't respond to mouse input in the same way (often rendering scroll-wheels useless). Now move all of those complaints to a mobile platform where the mobile OS maker has spent some time trying to create a usable interface (and Adobe has not). By using non-native widgets, lazy "application" developers are creating lowest common denominator pseudo-applications. No thanks. Even Java can do better than this.
2.) Nobody cares is a terrible argument. The Flash cookie model bypasses the browser's security architecture. So, yeah, this is bad from a privacy standpoint. However, this is also bad as it creates yet another attack vector (and it's not as if Flash has been without its absurd security problems).
I've managed to find two ways to crash Safari. The first is XCode (which while obnoxious is tolerable because that's quite an edge case), the second is Flash (which is far less tolerable because it happens regularly). Of course, Flash also manages to kill my battery life... and utterly fail at playing even low-res video on my Core2 Duo laptop. My workaround? Downloading all of the flash videos and playing them in VLC, which, of course, means no Hulu for me. From a user experience perspective I care not whether Flash and all of its gunk is open source. I care if it works. Simply put, Flash does not.
Really? The hierarchy of finger count seemed to be one of the primary improvements over Apple's multi-touch implementation. The more fingers you use the more general the result.
That depends entirely upon where you look. The San Francisco Municipal Railway runs all of its electric vehicles (streetcars and trolley coaches) on power from the Hetch Hetchy dam. BART buys most of its electricity from hydro plants.
Besides, cleaning up a handful of power plants is far easier than cleaning up millions of cars.
I agree completely that people live too far away from their jobs. I live less than seven from mine, and I still have a painfully long commute. However, the California HSR was sold to people in part by providing for significant upgrades of one of the Bay Area's commuter rail systems (Caltrain) because they would share right of way and some tracks.
Caltrain currently runs from San Jose to the middle of San Francisco (4th and King streets) using diesel trains along (not just a right of way, but...) tracks shared with freight service at grade the entire way (with one or two exceptions IIRC). 4th and King is still about 20-50 minutes away from the downtown area of San Francisco where most of the jobs are. The time it takes depends entirely upon how lucky you get in catching a bus or train.
Among the promises were: grade separation along the entire right of way, electrification, and bringing Caltrain to the current transit hub in San Francisco (1st & Mission -- stumbling distance from the downtown area, and 1-2 blocks from the subway ). The so-called Transbay Terminal at 1st and Mission is a gathering place for Greyhound, SF Municipal public transit, Golden Gate Transit from Marin, AC Transit from across the bay, and SamTrans from the peninsula. The intersection where Caltrain currently terminates at 4th and King is one giant clusterfuck to put it kindly (and worthy of a whole other post if you're interested). So while I have significant doubts of the utility of HSR, it was sold on promises that, if kept, would greatly improve commuting options in the Bay Area.
Of course, now, one of the key architects of the HSR gimmick, Quentin Kopp, is now pushing to have the HSR end at 4th and King or at Beale St (about a block away from the Transbay Terminal, thus making sure that any Caltrain extension will need to be a separate project) conveniently right around where the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge anchors.
Compared to the rail blingfrastructure (cribbed that one from Tom Radulovich) that's currently being proposed/rammed down our throats, HSR could provide real benefits. Read up on BART's $500 million Oakland airport connector fiasco, then think about what $500 million might be able to do elsewhere in the BART system (like an infill station and some extra tracks to go with it). Read up on San Francisco's atrocious central subway, and then read up on any number of other sane proposals for the city and county of San Francisco.
And then there's the scalability problem. I-95 started as a four lane road, and now in some parts it's 12 lanes wide, so it's increased its capacity by three. You can't do the same with railways - people could kill themselves tripping over the rails when trying to board the train.
Man, if I had mod points, I'd mod you -1, Wrong.
You can't have more than two sets of rails side by side because someone could trip over them? Look, I live in San Francisco, an area not known for its well developed rail system. I can easily point out instances where you see more than two sets of tracks. The most well known is the Market St subway setup with two sets of two tracks on top of each other. Another would be BART's Oakland City Center / 12th Street station with god knows how many tracks. Or even smaller stations like their Daly City station with three tracks side by side (and nobody tripping to their death that I know of).
Or you could even go completely crazy and simply look at how other countries do this sort of thing. London's Liverpool St. Station is a great example. They've got, what, 12? 15? sets of tracks for their National Rail system there. Plus however many sets of tracks for the Underground. And nobody tripping to their deaths there either. Go figure.
Woosh.
Fenders are usually bolt on affairs that have nothing to do with structural integrity. How about a more valid comparison like doors? Your 1930s door would be mostly empty, and not particularly strong. Compare a 1997 or newer door, which will likely have a giant metal tube or two running through it (what? more metal in a newer car? nooooo) for side impact protection.
Actually, no. Most companies that incorporate in Delaware do so not because of tax breaks. Delaware has some of the most extensive case law in the United States regarding corporations. That last couple companies I worked for were incorporated in Delaware for this very reasons. Lawyers don't like surprises, and neither do people trying to get a company running.
Likewise people who bitch about the high taxes in California are mostly full of shit. The Chicken Littles who proclaim that the sky is falling and most companies are leaving California en-masse forget two or three things. First, there simply isn't a max exodus. Second, there are a sizable number of new companies (transplants or home grown). Third, because of Prop. 13, California municipalities are encouraged to chase low-paying retail jobs. Traditional middle-class jobs like manufacturing simply don't provide the sales tax revenue that cities and counties in California crave. Sad that billy bob's knife company left? Well, you should be upset. The county it was located in will see more benefit from a McDonalds or WalMart built on that location.
Further, the tax burden in California simply isn't that great. While we tax any number of things that our neighbors might not, there are pretty strict limits on the amount that these taxes can be raised. Adjusted for inflation, your property tax is pretty much guaranteed to never go up in California.
Slashdot Mirror
Woosh.
http://theendoftheuniverse.ca/node/518
Since when? I think Natalie Portman's grits stained pants would prove otherwise.
Woosh. Vendor prefixes are all good and well, but they're *not standard*.
From http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/gallery.php
By animating the -webkit-transform CSS property in your code, you can enable hardware-accelerated animations and deliver a top-notch experience in web pages on iPad and iPhone.
* Photos are positioned with -webkit-transform.
* The spotlight effect is drawn with -webkit-gradient.
Those aren't standards. Those are propietary CSS extensions.
Javascript has taken hints from lots of other languages. In many ways it provides a C-style syntax, yet it's == operator is not an equality operator in the way that == is an equality operator in C (or, really, C++).
It's a poorly designed mishmash of technologies with lousy tool support. Sure there are lot of cross-platform libraries around if you can afford the code bloat.
And, sure, you could say that well it's a great language that suffers from a poor standard library and poor implementations. But if no decent standard library exists, at what point do you stop making excuses? If no decent implementations exist, at what point do you stop speaking in hypotheticals?
As someone who's done enough javascript wrangling to last a lifetime, lemmie point out that the cross-platform stuff is great for your simple sites. But for anything slightly complex, you're still going to have to deal with browser differences (beyond their inability to render HTML the same way). Plenty of people have made plenty of applications with VB, but that doesn't make VB decent.
Hold on, you're telling me that a prototype-based language with strong emphasis on events and closures is bad for UI?
No. It's not that it's directly bad for the UI, it's bad for maintainable code. Closures are a great idea (and work very well with Ruby), but with Javascript nearly everything turns into a closure.
No, it's really not. The development tools are ass and the language itself fails with its non-intuitive comparison operators. Being prototype based leads to really nasty code and "creative" ways of scoping variables. But that's if you want to be pedantic. If you are willing to lump the standard library in with the language, then you've got even bigger problems. What's actually cross-platform is a pretty small subset of anything useful, leaving people to roll their own hacks.
Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
If PDF/A is being used, I'd say your chances are pretty darn good that the files will be accessible in twenty-five years. From the wiki page: audio, video, javascript, and encryption are not allowed in PDF/A files. Use of standardized metadata is mandated, and *all* fonts used must be embedded. IOW it's a simplified, well defined file format.
Unfortunately the mayor was not fired. :(
Pretty sure the businesses of Arizona support the politicians who enacted this law.
You're confusing customers with end users.
I'm gonna go with: my experience does not mirror yours. I spent a few years driving cars with "old fashioned" fully mechanical automatic transmissions, I got used to having all manner of control without needing to coordinate hand and feet. The newfangled electronically controlled automatic transmissions are a pain. The worst as far as shifting up to early was a Toyota Matrix which shifted into its top gear well before redline while I was trying to accelerate uphill on a freeway. Of the handful of other cars with 'modern automatics' I've driven, they've all been far more unpleasant and unpredictable than the older transmissions. The best, and most predictable by far, was a Nissan Sentra with a CVT. All in all I'd be hard pressed to come up with a situation in which modern autos are "better".
Perhaps. Flash seems to be the only thing giving me much grief, however. If I use the YouTube HTML5 player, I can play videos without any problems whatsoever. Flash isn't so much basic internet usage as it is basic internet abuse.
1.) Why? Because Flash can't even bother to provide a decent experience on desktop apps. Desktop Flash doesn't blend in with the native widgets at all. They don't look the same, they don't respond in the same way. The useful internationalization features that native widgets have... non-native Flash widgets lack. They don't respond to mouse input in the same way (often rendering scroll-wheels useless). Now move all of those complaints to a mobile platform where the mobile OS maker has spent some time trying to create a usable interface (and Adobe has not). By using non-native widgets, lazy "application" developers are creating lowest common denominator pseudo-applications. No thanks. Even Java can do better than this.
2.) Nobody cares is a terrible argument. The Flash cookie model bypasses the browser's security architecture. So, yeah, this is bad from a privacy standpoint. However, this is also bad as it creates yet another attack vector (and it's not as if Flash has been without its absurd security problems).
I've managed to find two ways to crash Safari. The first is XCode (which while obnoxious is tolerable because that's quite an edge case), the second is Flash (which is far less tolerable because it happens regularly). Of course, Flash also manages to kill my battery life... and utterly fail at playing even low-res video on my Core2 Duo laptop. My workaround? Downloading all of the flash videos and playing them in VLC, which, of course, means no Hulu for me. From a user experience perspective I care not whether Flash and all of its gunk is open source. I care if it works. Simply put, Flash does not.
Bullshiplus!
You're a few decades too late. Does Bhopal (Union Carbide) ring a bell? Pepsi? CocaCola?
The failed part was fabricated in Arizona.
Really? The hierarchy of finger count seemed to be one of the primary improvements over Apple's multi-touch implementation. The more fingers you use the more general the result.
That depends entirely upon where you look. The San Francisco Municipal Railway runs all of its electric vehicles (streetcars and trolley coaches) on power from the Hetch Hetchy dam. BART buys most of its electricity from hydro plants. Besides, cleaning up a handful of power plants is far easier than cleaning up millions of cars.
I agree completely that people live too far away from their jobs. I live less than seven from mine, and I still have a painfully long commute. However, the California HSR was sold to people in part by providing for significant upgrades of one of the Bay Area's commuter rail systems (Caltrain) because they would share right of way and some tracks.
Caltrain currently runs from San Jose to the middle of San Francisco (4th and King streets) using diesel trains along (not just a right of way, but...) tracks shared with freight service at grade the entire way (with one or two exceptions IIRC). 4th and King is still about 20-50 minutes away from the downtown area of San Francisco where most of the jobs are. The time it takes depends entirely upon how lucky you get in catching a bus or train.
Among the promises were: grade separation along the entire right of way, electrification, and bringing Caltrain to the current transit hub in San Francisco (1st & Mission -- stumbling distance from the downtown area, and 1-2 blocks from the subway ). The so-called Transbay Terminal at 1st and Mission is a gathering place for Greyhound, SF Municipal public transit, Golden Gate Transit from Marin, AC Transit from across the bay, and SamTrans from the peninsula. The intersection where Caltrain currently terminates at 4th and King is one giant clusterfuck to put it kindly (and worthy of a whole other post if you're interested). So while I have significant doubts of the utility of HSR, it was sold on promises that, if kept, would greatly improve commuting options in the Bay Area.
Of course, now, one of the key architects of the HSR gimmick, Quentin Kopp, is now pushing to have the HSR end at 4th and King or at Beale St (about a block away from the Transbay Terminal, thus making sure that any Caltrain extension will need to be a separate project) conveniently right around where the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge anchors.
Compared to the rail blingfrastructure (cribbed that one from Tom Radulovich) that's currently being proposed/rammed down our throats, HSR could provide real benefits. Read up on BART's $500 million Oakland airport connector fiasco, then think about what $500 million might be able to do elsewhere in the BART system (like an infill station and some extra tracks to go with it). Read up on San Francisco's atrocious central subway, and then read up on any number of other sane proposals for the city and county of San Francisco.
Ya but how many airports do you have in the London area? I count at least five (Heathrow, Stansted, London City, Gatwick, Luton).
And then there's the scalability problem. I-95 started as a four lane road, and now in some parts it's 12 lanes wide, so it's increased its capacity by three. You can't do the same with railways - people could kill themselves tripping over the rails when trying to board the train.
Man, if I had mod points, I'd mod you -1, Wrong.
You can't have more than two sets of rails side by side because someone could trip over them? Look, I live in San Francisco, an area not known for its well developed rail system. I can easily point out instances where you see more than two sets of tracks. The most well known is the Market St subway setup with two sets of two tracks on top of each other. Another would be BART's Oakland City Center / 12th Street station with god knows how many tracks. Or even smaller stations like their Daly City station with three tracks side by side (and nobody tripping to their death that I know of).
Or you could even go completely crazy and simply look at how other countries do this sort of thing. London's Liverpool St. Station is a great example. They've got, what, 12? 15? sets of tracks for their National Rail system there. Plus however many sets of tracks for the Underground. And nobody tripping to their deaths there either. Go figure.
Wait. What? You got fed up with anti-consumer tactics and you bought a Lexmark? A Lexmark??
Woosh. Fenders are usually bolt on affairs that have nothing to do with structural integrity. How about a more valid comparison like doors? Your 1930s door would be mostly empty, and not particularly strong. Compare a 1997 or newer door, which will likely have a giant metal tube or two running through it (what? more metal in a newer car? nooooo) for side impact protection.
Actually, no. Most companies that incorporate in Delaware do so not because of tax breaks. Delaware has some of the most extensive case law in the United States regarding corporations. That last couple companies I worked for were incorporated in Delaware for this very reasons. Lawyers don't like surprises, and neither do people trying to get a company running. Likewise people who bitch about the high taxes in California are mostly full of shit. The Chicken Littles who proclaim that the sky is falling and most companies are leaving California en-masse forget two or three things. First, there simply isn't a max exodus. Second, there are a sizable number of new companies (transplants or home grown). Third, because of Prop. 13, California municipalities are encouraged to chase low-paying retail jobs. Traditional middle-class jobs like manufacturing simply don't provide the sales tax revenue that cities and counties in California crave. Sad that billy bob's knife company left? Well, you should be upset. The county it was located in will see more benefit from a McDonalds or WalMart built on that location. Further, the tax burden in California simply isn't that great. While we tax any number of things that our neighbors might not, there are pretty strict limits on the amount that these taxes can be raised. Adjusted for inflation, your property tax is pretty much guaranteed to never go up in California.