Here's an idea. How about not breaking add-ons with every new version? That would be great!
I'm in the Firefox beta program, so they FORCE me to upgrade over and over and over again (really obnoxiously). And every single time, Firebug and Greasemonkey stop working. Problem is, I need Firebug, in particular, to do my job, so it's inconsiderate at the very least, a horrible way to treat your beta testers. And yet, much of my coding is in preparation for HTML5, so I need to use what's in the beta too.
So that's my suggestion for 64-bit. Use some of the extra address space to track add-ons better and not refuse to load them just because they haven't yet been certified to work in your tiny little frickin' point release.
Yes, if enough people say something wrong often enough, it starts to become accepted as correct. But it's not yet a lost cause, like Frankenstein's Monster or pronouncing kudos "coo-doss" when used as the Greek word for praise. There's still time to rescue founder. Please don't say flounder.
P.S.: I also sent Macmillan an e-mail pleading with them not list "ax" as an alternate spelling for "ask".
The element that makes an individual's actions the actions of government is duty. If you have a duty to take a governmental action, and you're in good faith performance of that duty, your actions are the actions of government. So you don't have to be a government employee to be an agent of government. You could be a government contractor (duty incurred by contract), a volunteer with the consent of government (duty incurred by less formal agreement) or even a conscript, forced to take a government action against your will, as in this case.
If ISPs are forced to retain these logs, that force would impose a duty to take a government action. They'd get in trouble if they didn't do it. That makes their actions the actions of government. And that means that the action has to obey the Constitution. In other words, it becomes a government search without probable cause that a crime has been committed. And that makes it subject to the Exclusionary Rule and the Doctrine of the Fruits of the Poisoned Tree.
The government cannot force you to do something that the government itself is not constitutionally allowed to do. Any attempt to do so by legislation would be unconstitutional, not a law, never was, IMVHO.
It's only as far fetched as the government classifying contact lenses as a drug. Certainly no more far fetched than declaring by law that some drugs have no medical uses.
But seriously, if there were Nobel Prizes for computing, a lot of luminaries before us would form a life-long backlog of folks who should be honored first. The best you can hope for is to get honored posthumously.
(1) Tooltips - no such thing as a "mouseover". No (built-in) way to show them.
(2) Scrollable regions (frames, divs with overflow:auto) - if you don't show scroll bars, the user has no way to know that there's more content in the region that they can scroll to. Not so bad if the edge of the region visibly truncates something. Then you know that there's some more content there. But what if the edge of the region occurs between 2 paragraphs?
I'm not saying that these problems can't be solved. I have my own (site-unique) mechanism for tooltips and am in the process of coming up with some (site-unique) CSS to clearly highlight scrollable regions. I'm just agreeing with the authors that it's a big step back not to have any automatic feedback at all about the existence of extra content.
Word 5.1 for Mac had a ton of awesome features that never found their way back, once Word 6.0 came along to make it as awful as the Windows version.
It had the ability to do "formulas", which was essentially a markup/layout feature allowing mathematical formulae of arbitrary complexity, like TeX or MathML. It was truly amazing. I used it in contract deliverables to explain how adding more data entry folks wasn't going to help my customer's queuing-related slowness.
Configuring your own menus! It had a "Commands command" that allowed you to assign any command to any menu (and optionally assign keyboard shortcuts at the same time). I used it to add "Open... " to the Window menu. Even though it was already available in the File menu, if I had closed a file, I would go to the Window menu expecting to see a file there, and it wouldn't be there. So having "Open..." available there allowed me to reopen it immediately. (That was before there was such a thing as an "Open Recent" menu item. Nowadays I would add "Open Recent" there too.)
You could also export your Commands command settings to a configuration file, upgrade your version of Word and then reimport your Commands command configuration file for the new version of Word.
The list goes on and on, but I've forgotten most of the lost features. I remember that there were more, but I've repressed what they were. It's as if a good friend had died, and you had to move on. It just hurts to remember how great things used to be.
The catastrophic loss of features in the 5.1 to 6.0 downgrade was the beginning of the Mac community's unabashed hatred of Microsoft. Until that happened, Mac users who had Word and Excel considered themselves an elite within the elite (the best software on the best OS). But once Microsoft perpetrated 6.0 upon us, the Mac community started to hate their arrogant guts. How DARE they call it an upgrade! How DARE they act like they were doing us a favor by making it the same as Windows!
It would be hard to imagine a company more thoroughly trashing all of a market's goodwill than that one event (Word 6.0 for Mac).
It matters if you have to provide simple instructions to your users in online help pages. Not having a consensus about what to call things results in needlessly complicated instructions that no one wants to read. Reload/Refresh, Location/Address, JavaScript/JScript, Cache/Internet Temporary Files, suffix/extension, Bookmarks/Favorites, Preferences/Internet Options, sheesh!!!
Robin Williams used to say "Oh those French, they have a different word for everything". Nowadays it should begin "Oh those Microsoft products,..."
... as in window.location.href. MS just had to be different, so they (and only they) call it the Address Bar. But please, not a third name.
As for the change, I don't care as long as Control-L (Windows) or Command-L (Mac) * unhides it and selects all of the current page's URL, so that typing replaces it. That's the way power users type a new URL using only the keyboard anyway.
* That's L, as in "Location Bar". Works in MSIE too, but without the current page's URL.
In the first 6 books of the Aeneid (often read in 4th year Latin in high school), it's foretold that Aeneas and his followers would someday be so hungry, they would eat their plates. Then later, in the second 6 books (more likely to be read in college Latin courses), their plates were all smashed, so they hit on the idea of cooking their food on dough and eating everything that way. Aeneas' son Julus, who was too young to know of the prophecy, remarked "Hey look everyone! We're eating our plates!" But everyone older didn't laugh. They remembered the prophecy and were amazed at the innocent wisdom of Divus Julus.
Don't let anyone tell you that the pizza was invented in this town or that, or at this pizzaria or that one. They're just claiming credit for what was actually a traditional dish (literally) that had been around since antiquity.
If there's a minimum resolution that (by policy) your site must support (say, 1024 x 768), then every page must be viewed at that resolution. On a Mac, you can write an AppleScript to toggle screen resolution and trigger it with a voice command. But on Windows, you have to right-click on the desktop, switch the resolution manually, confirm the change of resolution, maximize your page to the new resolution, right-click on the desktop, switch the resolution back and confirm the change. A bit much, which discourages resolution testing.
But with a second monitor that's always set to the minimum resolution you must support, you can un-maximize, drag to the second monitor, maximize, un-maximize, drag back to the good monitor, re-maximize. I do this on my work Windows machine's second monitor all the time. Much easier.
It seems that most of the posts above focus on whether or not it's cost-effective to give developers monitors, cost of monitor versus cost of developer. But if the question is whether or not developers actually need monitors, shouldn't we be coming up with a list of needs? This is a legitimate business need. Management may disagree with it, but without a list of specific reasons why you think you need one, it will always seem to be just a vague want.
Well, he did say "the automation required for a test system". So it doesn't seem like cheating at all. It seems like using the Developer Edition for exactly its intended purpose.
As for overkill, that's a matter of personal preference, isn't it? Ask yourself, do you really WANT to learn POI/Java? External manipulation of Office products doesn't get any easier than CFML. Maybe a cross-platform, easy solution is exactly what Zubinix wants, worth the memory and CPU usage of running another server. And he'd also have it available for other automation uses, such as [also easy] DirectoryWatchers.
You can pick up a free copy ("Developer Edition") of ColdFusion from Adobe. Then code CF pages that call cfspreadsheet or cfsharepoint. (If you're careful to avoid coding directly to Windows (drive letters, backslashes, etc), the spreadsheet code you write will also work with Unix equivalents via POI.) Then use ColdFusion Administrator > Debugging & Logging > Scheduled Tasks to schedule those pages. (That's the CF equivalent of cron.)
Slashdot Mirror
The World Wide Web has been very, very good to me. Thank you, TBL.
My understanding is that the original hi-bit encoding scheme of UTF-8 was on a napkin.
Here's an idea. How about not breaking add-ons with every new version? That would be great!
I'm in the Firefox beta program, so they FORCE me to upgrade over and over and over again (really obnoxiously). And every single time, Firebug and Greasemonkey stop working. Problem is, I need Firebug, in particular, to do my job, so it's inconsiderate at the very least, a horrible way to treat your beta testers. And yet, much of my coding is in preparation for HTML5, so I need to use what's in the beta too.
So that's my suggestion for 64-bit. Use some of the extra address space to track add-ons better and not refuse to load them just because they haven't yet been certified to work in your tiny little frickin' point release.
Thanks a bunch!
Yes, if enough people say something wrong often enough, it starts to become accepted as correct. But it's not yet a lost cause, like Frankenstein's Monster or pronouncing kudos "coo-doss" when used as the Greek word for praise. There's still time to rescue founder. Please don't say flounder.
P.S.: I also sent Macmillan an e-mail pleading with them not list "ax" as an alternate spelling for "ask".
When a ship sinks, it founders. Please.
The fact that the government did something doesn't mean that they're allowed to do it. The biggest problem is that people simply except BS.
The element that makes an individual's actions the actions of government is duty. If you have a duty to take a governmental action, and you're in good faith performance of that duty, your actions are the actions of government. So you don't have to be a government employee to be an agent of government. You could be a government contractor (duty incurred by contract), a volunteer with the consent of government (duty incurred by less formal agreement) or even a conscript, forced to take a government action against your will, as in this case.
If ISPs are forced to retain these logs, that force would impose a duty to take a government action. They'd get in trouble if they didn't do it. That makes their actions the actions of government. And that means that the action has to obey the Constitution. In other words, it becomes a government search without probable cause that a crime has been committed. And that makes it subject to the Exclusionary Rule and the Doctrine of the Fruits of the Poisoned Tree.
The government cannot force you to do something that the government itself is not constitutionally allowed to do. Any attempt to do so by legislation would be unconstitutional, not a law, never was, IMVHO.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ralph_langner_cracking_stuxnet_a_21st_century_cyberweapon.html
Transplants come from someone else.
Weaponizing radio-controlled toy vehicles? Life imitates art.
Link to the specific cartoon, in case you're reading this later in the week: http://www.xkcd.com/911/
... maybe the Nobel Prize for Chemistry?
It's only as far fetched as the government classifying contact lenses as a drug. Certainly no more far fetched than declaring by law that some drugs have no medical uses.
But seriously, if there were Nobel Prizes for computing, a lot of luminaries before us would form a life-long backlog of folks who should be honored first. The best you can hope for is to get honored posthumously.
getting out of a pool, ...
I foresee having difficulty gluing 4 iPod Touches into a cube (x 8 x 8).
I would definitely need to get my gluon.
I don't know what I would do with 250 iPod Touches anyway.
... so that we'll never actually get rich.
(1) Tooltips - no such thing as a "mouseover". No (built-in) way to show them.
(2) Scrollable regions (frames, divs with overflow:auto) - if you don't show scroll bars, the user has no way to know that there's more content in the region that they can scroll to. Not so bad if the edge of the region visibly truncates something. Then you know that there's some more content there. But what if the edge of the region occurs between 2 paragraphs?
I'm not saying that these problems can't be solved. I have my own (site-unique) mechanism for tooltips and am in the process of coming up with some (site-unique) CSS to clearly highlight scrollable regions. I'm just agreeing with the authors that it's a big step back not to have any automatic feedback at all about the existence of extra content.
Word 5.1 for Mac had a ton of awesome features that never found their way back, once Word 6.0 came along to make it as awful as the Windows version.
It had the ability to do "formulas", which was essentially a markup/layout feature allowing mathematical formulae of arbitrary complexity, like TeX or MathML. It was truly amazing. I used it in contract deliverables to explain how adding more data entry folks wasn't going to help my customer's queuing-related slowness.
Configuring your own menus! It had a "Commands command" that allowed you to assign any command to any menu (and optionally assign keyboard shortcuts at the same time). I used it to add "Open... " to the Window menu. Even though it was already available in the File menu, if I had closed a file, I would go to the Window menu expecting to see a file there, and it wouldn't be there. So having "Open..." available there allowed me to reopen it immediately. (That was before there was such a thing as an "Open Recent" menu item. Nowadays I would add "Open Recent" there too.)
You could also export your Commands command settings to a configuration file, upgrade your version of Word and then reimport your Commands command configuration file for the new version of Word.
The list goes on and on, but I've forgotten most of the lost features. I remember that there were more, but I've repressed what they were. It's as if a good friend had died, and you had to move on. It just hurts to remember how great things used to be.
The catastrophic loss of features in the 5.1 to 6.0 downgrade was the beginning of the Mac community's unabashed hatred of Microsoft. Until that happened, Mac users who had Word and Excel considered themselves an elite within the elite (the best software on the best OS). But once Microsoft perpetrated 6.0 upon us, the Mac community started to hate their arrogant guts. How DARE they call it an upgrade! How DARE they act like they were doing us a favor by making it the same as Windows!
It would be hard to imagine a company more thoroughly trashing all of a market's goodwill than that one event (Word 6.0 for Mac).
It matters if you have to provide simple instructions to your users in online help pages. Not having a consensus about what to call things results in needlessly complicated instructions that no one wants to read. Reload/Refresh, Location/Address, JavaScript/JScript, Cache/Internet Temporary Files, suffix/extension, Bookmarks/Favorites, Preferences/Internet Options, sheesh!!!
..."
Robin Williams used to say "Oh those French, they have a different word for everything". Nowadays it should begin "Oh those Microsoft products,
... as in window.location.href. MS just had to be different, so they (and only they) call it the Address Bar. But please, not a third name.
As for the change, I don't care as long as Control-L (Windows) or Command-L (Mac) * unhides it and selects all of the current page's URL, so that typing replaces it. That's the way power users type a new URL using only the keyboard anyway.
* That's L, as in "Location Bar". Works in MSIE too, but without the current page's URL.
In the first 6 books of the Aeneid (often read in 4th year Latin in high school), it's foretold that Aeneas and his followers would someday be so hungry, they would eat their plates. Then later, in the second 6 books (more likely to be read in college Latin courses), their plates were all smashed, so they hit on the idea of cooking their food on dough and eating everything that way. Aeneas' son Julus, who was too young to know of the prophecy, remarked "Hey look everyone! We're eating our plates!" But everyone older didn't laugh. They remembered the prophecy and were amazed at the innocent wisdom of Divus Julus.
Don't let anyone tell you that the pizza was invented in this town or that, or at this pizzaria or that one. They're just claiming credit for what was actually a traditional dish (literally) that had been around since antiquity.
If there's a minimum resolution that (by policy) your site must support (say, 1024 x 768), then every page must be viewed at that resolution. On a Mac, you can write an AppleScript to toggle screen resolution and trigger it with a voice command. But on Windows, you have to right-click on the desktop, switch the resolution manually, confirm the change of resolution, maximize your page to the new resolution, right-click on the desktop, switch the resolution back and confirm the change. A bit much, which discourages resolution testing.
But with a second monitor that's always set to the minimum resolution you must support, you can un-maximize, drag to the second monitor, maximize, un-maximize, drag back to the good monitor, re-maximize. I do this on my work Windows machine's second monitor all the time. Much easier.
It seems that most of the posts above focus on whether or not it's cost-effective to give developers monitors, cost of monitor versus cost of developer. But if the question is whether or not developers actually need monitors, shouldn't we be coming up with a list of needs? This is a legitimate business need. Management may disagree with it, but without a list of specific reasons why you think you need one, it will always seem to be just a vague want.
Well, he did say "the automation required for a test system". So it doesn't seem like cheating at all. It seems like using the Developer Edition for exactly its intended purpose.
As for overkill, that's a matter of personal preference, isn't it? Ask yourself, do you really WANT to learn POI/Java? External manipulation of Office products doesn't get any easier than CFML. Maybe a cross-platform, easy solution is exactly what Zubinix wants, worth the memory and CPU usage of running another server. And he'd also have it available for other automation uses, such as [also easy] DirectoryWatchers.
You can pick up a free copy ("Developer Edition") of ColdFusion from Adobe. Then code CF pages that call cfspreadsheet or cfsharepoint. (If you're careful to avoid coding directly to Windows (drive letters, backslashes, etc), the spreadsheet code you write will also work with Unix equivalents via POI.) Then use ColdFusion Administrator > Debugging & Logging > Scheduled Tasks to schedule those pages. (That's the CF equivalent of cron.)
Can't beat the price.
We are Devo.
There's probably a point in there somewhere.