"I am deeply offended by your implication that I am some kind of slacker. I am a professional and expect to be treated as such, so when I say I am busy, I mean I am busy. You have gavely insulted me. Please leave until you're prepared to speak to me more civilly." (Point to the door.) Then fire off an email to their boss about how deeply they insulted your professionalism and how terribly hurt you are by people saying such things, especially coming from someone you've really gone the extra mile to help despite their having taken up abnormally more of your time than the average user.
Other members of my family are *much* more irritating and would think nothing of calling me up at 3am because they have a paper due in at 9am that they left to the last minute and couldn't figure out why their printer wouldn't work (for reference: because the dizzy bint had unplugged it to charge up her MP3 player).
When family calls for computer help, I tell them that I charge $200 an hour for consulting with a 3 hour minimum charge because I hate doing that sort of stuff outside the office. If they called me at 3am, I'd then tell them that they can call me about it no earlier than noon if they're interested in actually hiring me for the job, and hang up on them.
Except for my father, who is a professional sysadmin, so if he calls me for computer help there's a darn good reason and the conversation will be short because he'll actually understand what I'm saying and I won't have to waste a lot of time trying to explain how to click a button on the screen.
Yes, I get along fine with my family. Perhaps you should try standing up to yours.
I find that most of the problem users are also finger pointers. It's rare that I encounter one of the other problem users who isn't also a finger pointer. Usually they'll call my boss, whoever that is, and try to get me fired. This is why I won't even consider an IT job unless I've discussed it thoroughly with my potential new boss and they've made it plain that they will back me up. The finger pointer then usually tries calling my boss's boss. I therefore insist on having enough of a relationship with *that* person that they know me enough to call me and have a friendly discussion about what really happened, rather than flying into a rage as the finger pointer wants them to.
I've found that attempting to mollify finger pointers is generally a bad idea: they'll get pissed off anyway, either now or later, and go to management and tell whatever kind of outrageous stories they think are necessary to get rid of me (or my staff), even if it means lying outright. (And I don't mean the kind of "they're too ignorant of computers to tell the difference" lies, I mean things like claiming I said a bunch of sexist stuff that I would never say.)
So, my new method of dealing with finger pointers is "take no prisoners." If something goes wrong and they say "what did you do?" they get a detailed lecture about not jumping to conclusions before analysis. They try to blame something on me and it's their fault, and they get a lecture about exactly what they did wrong and they get told that if they insist on blaming me or my staff for their errors we will withdraw service from them, including their network connection, and they can figure out how to do their job without a computer. (And I mean it - I've done it.) If they claim that they're suffering because me or my staff is slow in responding to them, all work for that user halts while I contact the help desk and get them to retrieve the records to demonstrate our reasonable response times for that user, and then I insist on receiving an apology before I can continue work.
I then go back to my desk and fire off a very polite email to their boss and mine about their poor behavior and its negative effect on my staff's morale. Since my boss always knows from experience that I am a professional and would never make shit up, when my email and the inevitable one from the finger pointer come in, I am the one who is believed.
The other consequence of this is that I insist that my staff have no more contact with finger pointers than absolutely necessary. If a finger pointer calls the help desk, the help desk notes what they have to say, tells them they'll get a call back, and then routes the complaint to me, and I handle it personally, calling in other IT people to assist me (not them) as necessary. This means that sometimes they have to wait for me to become available to work on their problem for them. If they complain to me about it, or my staff, they are told that because they've had difficulties in the past they have been placed in a special service category in which they are always taken care of by the top IT people (the managers) to ensure that they receive the best possible quality of service. If they complain to upper management about it, upper management will ask me, and I'll tell them the real reason - that they're not allowed to deal with lower level IT people because they can't be trusted not to tell lies and try to get my people fired, while I have the clout to stand up to them.
It has happened that management has decided to fire a finger pointer after they told nasty lies about me came to light. (The specific user accused me of making a pass at her and then discriminating against her for being a lesbian. HR called me about this, and I merely informed them that I'm gay. The discussion was over and I was off the hook.) And yes, management did back me when I withdrew all services from a user because of their nasty behavior - the user was fired, on the basis that they had such behavior problems they couldn't get along w
As opposed to the "Mr. Know-It-All" who thinks he's an engineer, there are those of us who actually are engineers who are hobbled by Mr. Know-Nothing IT guys who operate blindly.
I find it pretty effective to bribe them with a pan of homemade fudge to give me the administrative passwords to my workstation.
Or tries the exact same operation four times, thinking it will work the fourth time!
Sometimes when I seem to be doing that, I'm actually retrying so I can observe my steps more carefully to make sure I didn't screw up the steps and fail to notice my own error.
One of my professors in college (Hi Prof Pierroule, if you read this!) called that sort "voodoo users": they have no idea whatsoever what they're doing, no amount of training actually gets them to understand the computer, and they have merely memorized (or written down) a series of exact steps and they know that if they perform the magical steps, the magical process occurs and they get the desired output... but if anything goes even the slightest bit wrong with any of those steps, they fail completely.
My experience with many such people leads me to believe that voodoo users have a mindset that effectively prevents them from learning how computers work: I think in some cases they're so convinced that they can't learn it that they prevent themselves from doing so even if they otherwise could, and in some cases they don't have the sort of brain processes that allow a person to systematize knowledge about how one part of one thing works to understand how other parts or other things work, so memorizing instructions is all they can do.
I usually make them lavish documentation with lots and lots of color screenshots. (Yes, I've had users that failed because the document was b&w and the screen was color and they couldn't match the two in their heads. This also means the document has to be created with the default system colors, and I have to ensure that their workstation is set to the default system colors.) And over-simplistic language. (You can't say "click 'ok'" and expect them to figure out that there's an on-screen button labeled 'ok' that they're supposed to click with the mouse: you have to say "using the mouse, move the pointer so that it is on the on-screen 'button' labeled 'ok'. [picture of it here] Press the left mouse button and release it.")
>>'On what timeline will AJAX skills become commoditized like HTML skills became?'" >Easy: when a WYSIWYG editor, a la Dreamweaver, can accomplish all basic AJAX functionality without having to mess with much, >if any, code.
Why does it have to be that difficult?
Here's a complete AJAX app in Water (waterlanguage.org), with an object that represents a boat, and you can use AJAX to change the name of the boat: <class biz.boat name=req=string>
<method change_name new_name=req=string>.<set name=new_name/>.<refresh/>
</>
<method htm_inst>
<span>
<h1.name/>
<do.change_name.<htm_inst _subject/>/>
</>
</> </>
Do you see the AJAX? No? But it's there. The language takes care of it for you. So why does it have to be difficult?
A dog's ability to tell one person from another might be largely scent related and says little about how their visual sense works.
That said, I agree with you that this is obvious; it should be obvious to anyone who has ever owned a smart dog, like a border collie or maybe a german shepherd. I used to have a border collie, and his responses to most things were so incredibly human-like that it was very, very clear that he thought like a human in many ways. (Indeed, I think he thought he was human in many ways, but that's another story.) Also recently I've interacted a lot with my friend's german shepherd, a breed which is perhaps less human-like than the border collie but still very smart. We got me on iChat video conferencing once while the dog was in the room, and she clearly looked at me, understood it was me, obeyed commands from me and was pleased by praise from me.
Heck, I've had pet rabbits, and they could look in the mirror and it was obvious that they realized it was a reflection. We don't give animals enough credit for their intelligence.
If IE was standard compliant, then soon Web apps would be standard compliant, and then why the hell would big companies stick with IE and an expensive OS, when they can just run Linux for free?
Microsoft is also a developer tools company. They could make superior development tools for use with IE (believe me, it wouldn't be hard, the competition sucks) and then developers would want to use it because they'd actually like it for a change. Also, users would use it for the same reason they always have: because it comes pre installed.
Tmobile has a policy of allowing you to use the GSM phone of your choice on their network. (And yes, I found it in writing on their web site.) And they don't make any effort to prevent you from installing stuff on the phones they sell. This has been true since way back when I signed up with Omnipoint 8 years ago, and then Voicestream, now Tmobile.
I've been surprised that these announcements by Verizon and AT&T have been getting any attention, since this is seriously old news to me.
Having worked almost all of the 19 years of my professional career in Boston, only once have I ever been asked to sign a noncompete agreement. Before signing it, I checked with a few professionals (including, informally, a lawyer) and was told that it could only apply if I voluntarily left the employer with whom I had the agreement to go to a competitor, and it only applied for 3 months anyway.
But at least you *can* muck about with firefox's internals, so you can do things which ie's api doesnt cater to.
So it's 10 times the work, but I should be grateful I can do it at all?
On the other hand, why would you want to replace the scripting language?
Maybe I have a better implementation of Javascript. Maybe I have a better language. (Actually it's the latter, but that's not the point.)
And the reason ie has such an api, is because microsoft were trying to push their proprietary vbscript to replace javascript, not because they actually wanted to make it easy for other people to add new scripting languages.
Sure. we both know that... but it remains true that rather than just putting in their proprietary garbage and leaving it closed, they left an API for others to use to add more languages. And the other major browsers have failed to compete with that.
Let me point you at a good serious competitor to Flash: Dynamic HTML. Use (or write) a good compatibility library, and you can write DHTML that does all sorts of zippy stuff, easily, with no plugin. Indeed, my DHTML is often mistaken for flash.
Flash is a great way for an artist to make a cartoon... but they could put that in a quicktime video too.
the majority will either go through the countless extra hours of work basically writing two versions of a good chunk of their web apps or going to compatibility libraries (which is insane considering we're dealing usually with interpreted languages at both ends of the connection, so adding yet another layer seems nuts)
Speaking as the author of a compatibility library, I resent being called "insane".
So, I have a compatibility library. Yes, it adds another layer... but that layer *works*, and I don't have to rewrite the code every time I want to know where the scrollbar is or how big a div is. And it's fast enough for anything I've needed to do with it, which has included making calls to it every 100 milliseconds in some instances. And because I have my compatibility library, I can do things in minutes that take other people hours or days or weeks... if they can do them at all.
I've been doing extensive Dynamic HTML work since 1999, so I have to deal frequently with the various browsers' implementations of Javascript and the DOM. And yes, IE sucks. Bad. But you know what? All browsers suck, bad. I have constant problems with Firefox too, and with Safari. Do I have more of them with IE? Yup. If I had a nickel for every time IE made me swear, I could buy Microsoft. But that doesn't make Firefox or Webkit good. They're just less bad.
And, let me point out one case in which IE is the winner, in the hope of embarrassing Firefox (and Webkit?) into doing something useful to me... IE is the only browser with a built in API for replacing the scripting language. You want to replace Javascript with, say, Ruby? IE has the API, you can write a plugin and do it. Firefox doesn't: to write a plugin for it you'd have to extensively muck about in Firefox's internals.
Why not? One of the domains on that list was privately owned. *Somebody* who wasn't a corporation was forward thinking enough to have registered one of the first 100 domains.
Right now, when making a web app, I have to create PHP scripts that generate SQL queries, crunch the data, and then output HTML and possibly client-side Javascript. What a pain in the ass - there's at least 3 languages involved and really the whole thing is a mother to debug.
This is another problem we've dealt with in Water. It provides an XML compatible syntax (ConciseXML, but Water can also be expressed as pure XML) that lets you unify XHTML with the functionality of CSS, plus your program logic and data storage (in various storage formats including using a relational database), all with nice MVC pattern.
Please pardon my plugging this language, but it bothers me that people are talking about 20 year standards processes to re-invent the wheel so I'd like to point out that this particular wheel exists.
However, there is a huge difference between "documents" which can be read in various different monitor/browser sizes, fonts, and languages and what a majority of paid developers do with HTML within corporations. That being creating pixel perfect applications that work in one particular browser (IE or Firefox).
I've been doing consulting to corporations to develop web applications since 1998, including a number of Fortune 500 corporations. Every single client I've had, except for one idiot at a university, has required that I support (at minimum) IE and the Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox line (whatever it was called at the time), and lately you can also add Safari to the list.
To that end, what we need isn't yet another HTML specification which will make the browsers even that much more bloated and incompatible with each other... it is an application framework for the web. In fact, this is what Adobe and Microsoft are creating with Flex/AIR and Silverlight, respectively.
They're ultimately both doomed because they're proprietary, and anybody who cares about ensuring that their work will be useable in the future and in a cross-browser cross-platform environment will reject them.
Ultimately, the "markup language" of the future will be dynamically created and compiled on the server and sent to the browser in a binary format which is run by a plug-in.
I think it would be foolish to assume that it necessarily happens on the server, because there are significant advantages in being able to create local applications which use the browser as a front-end.
I say bring on HTML 5, and bring on the strict. Make it look good in both browsers.
What makes you think Microsoft is interested in supporting a strict new standard that would make IE work like every other browser? I'd bet they want IE to be marginally incompatible with standards, and permissive about what it will render.
Developing any new standard is a big waste of time unless you can either get Microsoft to commit (in some way they can't get out of) to supporting it in IE, or you can come up with a way to make IE (as is) support it through translation or a plugin.
An alternative would be to freeze HTMLv4 now, throw out XHTML, go with browsers that use "pure" XML and a styling/formatting system, and define a style/format for XHTML.
Personally, I work with a language called Water, and I could build that XML styling/formatting system in Water and let it convert those styles and formats to HTML that would render in today's browsers for me, and have instant compatibility.
That said, there's significant investment in learning HTML and its variants in the world today, and if we go forward in a manner that enables existing HTML/XHTML programmers to transition their HTML/XHTML skills forward, then we will significantly increase adoption speed of the new standard because people will be able to start using it immediately and then learn the nuances of what else they can do with it later. That's why Water allows you to use XHTML directly in Water: valid XHTML code executes natively in Water, so if you can program in XHTML, you have an instant start with Water. However, it's easy to define (and style/format) your own "tags" in Water (they're actually object classes), so you can extend (or replace) XHTML as desired.
Ultimately, defining a new standard like HTMLv5 is all well and good, but meaningless until the browsers all implement it... and let's face it, they don't even have completely compatible implementations of any of the old standards yet, and here we are talking about a new one. On the other hand, by using a system like Water which can take a standard format and convert it into the browser-specific nonsense, we could create cross-browser compatibility for a new standard practically as quickly as we could spec it in Water.
But, you know, it's always nice to karma-whore by ripping IE. Sure, IE development may make extra work for you -- but then again, you're being paid for that work. Why not be happy that "that cowboy Internet Explorer" helped you find gainful employment?
Because some of us actually are trying to accomplish stuff, rather than trying to run up our hours to make more money.
Does it really matter so much if we'll use DOCTYPE or version="5" attribute to specify the document type?
Yes, it matters a great deal in terms of how to parse the document, and anyone working on a standard should recognize that immediately. (And why DOCTYPE is evil.)
It comes with a leather hard surfaced cover: you install the "book" in its cover and just hold it like a book. There's a nice big button along one edge that turns the "pages" - just tap the bar on the edge and the page turns. It's as ergonomic as a book.
We complain a lot on Slashdot about parents who want to turn the whole world into a nanny state with censored everything so their precious snowflake will never see anything they don't approve of, but it's time we start exercising our own prescription for them ourselves: If you don't like it or don't approve of it, don't watch it. Conversely, if you do like it, enjoy... and you can pick and choose which movies you like and don't.
The newer Star Wars trilogy managed to put me off so badly with "episode 1" that I never watched 2 and 3, and it left me with distaste for the whole franchise. I was also put off by Lucas meddling with the original 3 movies, and didn't like his new versions... I refused to even see how he massacred Revenge of the Jedi.
Years went by, and I didn't watch any Star Wars. Then, a year or so ago, I got out an old set of Star Wars laserdiscs and watched them... They felt fresh and new, like when I was a kid, because I hadn't seen them in years. They were exciting, moving, thrilling, and joyous. They felt huge and epic. Yes, here were the movies I was so excited about as a child, here they still were, as wonderful as I remembered thinking they were. And you know what? Nobody, not even Lucas or Jarjar, can ever take that away from us.
My neighbor got one, and has had it for almost two days now. He let me play with it a few times.
The display is very crisp and clear and easy to read. It has a clear surface over the e-ink display... the effect is like reading a really, really flat piece of glossy paper. Yes, if you have very good vision you can see the pixels, but it's so very very high contrast that that's not a problem.
The unit is much more attractive in person than its photos make it look on the web. It's not beige, it's very white. It's slim, and the angularness of it is less obvious in person than on the web, unless you look at it from the end. It has a nice leather case that it goes in which makes it rather book-like in many respects. When you turn it off, it puts something interesting on the screen (remember, e-ink takes no power to display, only to change, so you can leave something on an "off" e-ink screen) and my friends quite like that. The UI is easy enough to use - a minute or two of poking at it and I'd figured it out more or less. The wireless connection works very well. He downloaded a sample chapter (yes, you can get free sample chapters) in mere seconds after he'd typed in the title.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with it, and immediately recommended it to my aunt, who has been searching for a good e-book reader for a few years.
Ok. So, I've been an IT manager, so let me look at this from that perspective.
1) You're telling me I can make somebody else deal with owning, maintaining, and administering all those servers? Woo hoo! Now, you're going to sign off in writing that I'm no longer responsible for any of that, right?
2) So, if you're going to make the organization totally reliant on these outsourced services, that means that you're going to pay up for a huge connection to the Internet so we all have nice fast service from all those outsourced servers all the time, right?
3) You won't mind when that connection occasionally goes down and our entire outsourced infrastructure is inaccessible and the entire organization grinds to a halt because none of our computers can do anything, right?
4) You're going to pay for this on top of the existing IT budget, because we were understaffed all along and we were doing server maintenance in overtime just to keep things running, so now we can all go to 40 hour weeks and just do the infrastructure stuff we were hired for, right?
The thing is, to know if serious IT outsourcing is a good idea, you have to have been willing to pay for decent IT in the first place. I've never seen a place that was. Every IT department I've seen (or worked in, or managed) has either had some stellar people but been seriously understaffed and struggling to keep up, or had crummy people because the organization hired the cheapest workers instead of the best qualified.
Slashdot Mirror
Make it their problem, not yours.
Except for my father, who is a professional sysadmin, so if he calls me for computer help there's a darn good reason and the conversation will be short because he'll actually understand what I'm saying and I won't have to waste a lot of time trying to explain how to click a button on the screen.
Yes, I get along fine with my family. Perhaps you should try standing up to yours.
I am sometimes an IT manager.
I find that most of the problem users are also finger pointers. It's rare that I encounter one of the other problem users who isn't also a finger pointer. Usually they'll call my boss, whoever that is, and try to get me fired. This is why I won't even consider an IT job unless I've discussed it thoroughly with my potential new boss and they've made it plain that they will back me up. The finger pointer then usually tries calling my boss's boss. I therefore insist on having enough of a relationship with *that* person that they know me enough to call me and have a friendly discussion about what really happened, rather than flying into a rage as the finger pointer wants them to.
I've found that attempting to mollify finger pointers is generally a bad idea: they'll get pissed off anyway, either now or later, and go to management and tell whatever kind of outrageous stories they think are necessary to get rid of me (or my staff), even if it means lying outright. (And I don't mean the kind of "they're too ignorant of computers to tell the difference" lies, I mean things like claiming I said a bunch of sexist stuff that I would never say.)
So, my new method of dealing with finger pointers is "take no prisoners." If something goes wrong and they say "what did you do?" they get a detailed lecture about not jumping to conclusions before analysis. They try to blame something on me and it's their fault, and they get a lecture about exactly what they did wrong and they get told that if they insist on blaming me or my staff for their errors we will withdraw service from them, including their network connection, and they can figure out how to do their job without a computer. (And I mean it - I've done it.) If they claim that they're suffering because me or my staff is slow in responding to them, all work for that user halts while I contact the help desk and get them to retrieve the records to demonstrate our reasonable response times for that user, and then I insist on receiving an apology before I can continue work.
I then go back to my desk and fire off a very polite email to their boss and mine about their poor behavior and its negative effect on my staff's morale. Since my boss always knows from experience that I am a professional and would never make shit up, when my email and the inevitable one from the finger pointer come in, I am the one who is believed.
The other consequence of this is that I insist that my staff have no more contact with finger pointers than absolutely necessary. If a finger pointer calls the help desk, the help desk notes what they have to say, tells them they'll get a call back, and then routes the complaint to me, and I handle it personally, calling in other IT people to assist me (not them) as necessary. This means that sometimes they have to wait for me to become available to work on their problem for them. If they complain to me about it, or my staff, they are told that because they've had difficulties in the past they have been placed in a special service category in which they are always taken care of by the top IT people (the managers) to ensure that they receive the best possible quality of service. If they complain to upper management about it, upper management will ask me, and I'll tell them the real reason - that they're not allowed to deal with lower level IT people because they can't be trusted not to tell lies and try to get my people fired, while I have the clout to stand up to them.
It has happened that management has decided to fire a finger pointer after they told nasty lies about me came to light. (The specific user accused me of making a pass at her and then discriminating against her for being a lesbian. HR called me about this, and I merely informed them that I'm gay. The discussion was over and I was off the hook.) And yes, management did back me when I withdrew all services from a user because of their nasty behavior - the user was fired, on the basis that they had such behavior problems they couldn't get along w
One of my professors in college (Hi Prof Pierroule, if you read this!) called that sort "voodoo users": they have no idea whatsoever what they're doing, no amount of training actually gets them to understand the computer, and they have merely memorized (or written down) a series of exact steps and they know that if they perform the magical steps, the magical process occurs and they get the desired output... but if anything goes even the slightest bit wrong with any of those steps, they fail completely.
My experience with many such people leads me to believe that voodoo users have a mindset that effectively prevents them from learning how computers work: I think in some cases they're so convinced that they can't learn it that they prevent themselves from doing so even if they otherwise could, and in some cases they don't have the sort of brain processes that allow a person to systematize knowledge about how one part of one thing works to understand how other parts or other things work, so memorizing instructions is all they can do.
I usually make them lavish documentation with lots and lots of color screenshots. (Yes, I've had users that failed because the document was b&w and the screen was color and they couldn't match the two in their heads. This also means the document has to be created with the default system colors, and I have to ensure that their workstation is set to the default system colors.) And over-simplistic language. (You can't say "click 'ok'" and expect them to figure out that there's an on-screen button labeled 'ok' that they're supposed to click with the mouse: you have to say "using the mouse, move the pointer so that it is on the on-screen 'button' labeled 'ok'. [picture of it here] Press the left mouse button and release it.")
>>'On what timeline will AJAX skills become commoditized like HTML skills became?'"
.<set name=new_name/> .<refresh/> .name/> .change_name.<htm_inst _subject/> />
>Easy: when a WYSIWYG editor, a la Dreamweaver, can accomplish all basic AJAX functionality without having to mess with much,
>if any, code.
Why does it have to be that difficult?
Here's a complete AJAX app in Water (waterlanguage.org), with an object that represents a boat, and you can use AJAX to change the name of the boat:
<class biz.boat name=req=string>
<method change_name new_name=req=string>
</>
<method htm_inst>
<span>
<h1
<do
</>
</>
</>
Do you see the AJAX? No? But it's there. The language takes care of it for you. So why does it have to be difficult?
A dog's ability to tell one person from another might be largely scent related and says little about how their visual sense works.
That said, I agree with you that this is obvious; it should be obvious to anyone who has ever owned a smart dog, like a border collie or maybe a german shepherd. I used to have a border collie, and his responses to most things were so incredibly human-like that it was very, very clear that he thought like a human in many ways. (Indeed, I think he thought he was human in many ways, but that's another story.) Also recently I've interacted a lot with my friend's german shepherd, a breed which is perhaps less human-like than the border collie but still very smart. We got me on iChat video conferencing once while the dog was in the room, and she clearly looked at me, understood it was me, obeyed commands from me and was pleased by praise from me.
Heck, I've had pet rabbits, and they could look in the mirror and it was obvious that they realized it was a reflection. We don't give animals enough credit for their intelligence.
Tmobile has a policy of allowing you to use the GSM phone of your choice on their network. (And yes, I found it in writing on their web site.) And they don't make any effort to prevent you from installing stuff on the phones they sell. This has been true since way back when I signed up with Omnipoint 8 years ago, and then Voicestream, now Tmobile.
I've been surprised that these announcements by Verizon and AT&T have been getting any attention, since this is seriously old news to me.
Having worked almost all of the 19 years of my professional career in Boston, only once have I ever been asked to sign a noncompete agreement. Before signing it, I checked with a few professionals (including, informally, a lawyer) and was told that it could only apply if I voluntarily left the employer with whom I had the agreement to go to a competitor, and it only applied for 3 months anyway.
Noncompetes just aren't common in Boston.
Let me point you at a good serious competitor to Flash: Dynamic HTML. Use (or write) a good compatibility library, and you can write DHTML that does all sorts of zippy stuff, easily, with no plugin. Indeed, my DHTML is often mistaken for flash.
Flash is a great way for an artist to make a cartoon... but they could put that in a quicktime video too.
So, I have a compatibility library. Yes, it adds another layer... but that layer *works*, and I don't have to rewrite the code every time I want to know where the scrollbar is or how big a div is. And it's fast enough for anything I've needed to do with it, which has included making calls to it every 100 milliseconds in some instances. And because I have my compatibility library, I can do things in minutes that take other people hours or days or weeks... if they can do them at all.
I've been doing extensive Dynamic HTML work since 1999, so I have to deal frequently with the various browsers' implementations of Javascript and the DOM. And yes, IE sucks. Bad. But you know what? All browsers suck, bad. I have constant problems with Firefox too, and with Safari. Do I have more of them with IE? Yup. If I had a nickel for every time IE made me swear, I could buy Microsoft. But that doesn't make Firefox or Webkit good. They're just less bad.
And, let me point out one case in which IE is the winner, in the hope of embarrassing Firefox (and Webkit?) into doing something useful to me... IE is the only browser with a built in API for replacing the scripting language. You want to replace Javascript with, say, Ruby? IE has the API, you can write a plugin and do it. Firefox doesn't: to write a plugin for it you'd have to extensively muck about in Firefox's internals.
Why not? One of the domains on that list was privately owned. *Somebody* who wasn't a corporation was forward thinking enough to have registered one of the first 100 domains.
Please pardon my plugging this language, but it bothers me that people are talking about 20 year standards processes to re-invent the wheel so I'd like to point out that this particular wheel exists.
Developing any new standard is a big waste of time unless you can either get Microsoft to commit (in some way they can't get out of) to supporting it in IE, or you can come up with a way to make IE (as is) support it through translation or a plugin.
An alternative would be to freeze HTMLv4 now, throw out XHTML, go with browsers that use "pure" XML and a styling/formatting system, and define a style/format for XHTML.
Personally, I work with a language called Water, and I could build that XML styling/formatting system in Water and let it convert those styles and formats to HTML that would render in today's browsers for me, and have instant compatibility.
That said, there's significant investment in learning HTML and its variants in the world today, and if we go forward in a manner that enables existing HTML/XHTML programmers to transition their HTML/XHTML skills forward, then we will significantly increase adoption speed of the new standard because people will be able to start using it immediately and then learn the nuances of what else they can do with it later. That's why Water allows you to use XHTML directly in Water: valid XHTML code executes natively in Water, so if you can program in XHTML, you have an instant start with Water. However, it's easy to define (and style/format) your own "tags" in Water (they're actually object classes), so you can extend (or replace) XHTML as desired.
Ultimately, defining a new standard like HTMLv5 is all well and good, but meaningless until the browsers all implement it... and let's face it, they don't even have completely compatible implementations of any of the old standards yet, and here we are talking about a new one. On the other hand, by using a system like Water which can take a standard format and convert it into the browser-specific nonsense, we could create cross-browser compatibility for a new standard practically as quickly as we could spec it in Water.
Yes, it matters a great deal in terms of how to parse the document, and anyone working on a standard should recognize that immediately. (And why DOCTYPE is evil.)
It comes with a leather hard surfaced cover: you install the "book" in its cover and just hold it like a book. There's a nice big button along one edge that turns the "pages" - just tap the bar on the edge and the page turns. It's as ergonomic as a book.
We complain a lot on Slashdot about parents who want to turn the whole world into a nanny state with censored everything so their precious snowflake will never see anything they don't approve of, but it's time we start exercising our own prescription for them ourselves: If you don't like it or don't approve of it, don't watch it. Conversely, if you do like it, enjoy... and you can pick and choose which movies you like and don't.
The newer Star Wars trilogy managed to put me off so badly with "episode 1" that I never watched 2 and 3, and it left me with distaste for the whole franchise. I was also put off by Lucas meddling with the original 3 movies, and didn't like his new versions... I refused to even see how he massacred Revenge of the Jedi.
Years went by, and I didn't watch any Star Wars. Then, a year or so ago, I got out an old set of Star Wars laserdiscs and watched them... They felt fresh and new, like when I was a kid, because I hadn't seen them in years. They were exciting, moving, thrilling, and joyous. They felt huge and epic. Yes, here were the movies I was so excited about as a child, here they still were, as wonderful as I remembered thinking they were. And you know what? Nobody, not even Lucas or Jarjar, can ever take that away from us.
My neighbor got one, and has had it for almost two days now. He let me play with it a few times.
The display is very crisp and clear and easy to read. It has a clear surface over the e-ink display... the effect is like reading a really, really flat piece of glossy paper. Yes, if you have very good vision you can see the pixels, but it's so very very high contrast that that's not a problem.
The unit is much more attractive in person than its photos make it look on the web. It's not beige, it's very white. It's slim, and the angularness of it is less obvious in person than on the web, unless you look at it from the end. It has a nice leather case that it goes in which makes it rather book-like in many respects. When you turn it off, it puts something interesting on the screen (remember, e-ink takes no power to display, only to change, so you can leave something on an "off" e-ink screen) and my friends quite like that. The UI is easy enough to use - a minute or two of poking at it and I'd figured it out more or less. The wireless connection works very well. He downloaded a sample chapter (yes, you can get free sample chapters) in mere seconds after he'd typed in the title.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with it, and immediately recommended it to my aunt, who has been searching for a good e-book reader for a few years.
Ok. So, I've been an IT manager, so let me look at this from that perspective.
1) You're telling me I can make somebody else deal with owning, maintaining, and administering all those servers? Woo hoo! Now, you're going to sign off in writing that I'm no longer responsible for any of that, right?
2) So, if you're going to make the organization totally reliant on these outsourced services, that means that you're going to pay up for a huge connection to the Internet so we all have nice fast service from all those outsourced servers all the time, right?
3) You won't mind when that connection occasionally goes down and our entire outsourced infrastructure is inaccessible and the entire organization grinds to a halt because none of our computers can do anything, right?
4) You're going to pay for this on top of the existing IT budget, because we were understaffed all along and we were doing server maintenance in overtime just to keep things running, so now we can all go to 40 hour weeks and just do the infrastructure stuff we were hired for, right?
The thing is, to know if serious IT outsourcing is a good idea, you have to have been willing to pay for decent IT in the first place. I've never seen a place that was. Every IT department I've seen (or worked in, or managed) has either had some stellar people but been seriously understaffed and struggling to keep up, or had crummy people because the organization hired the cheapest workers instead of the best qualified.