I can do iPhone and Android but I can't see bothering with any of those other underpowered devices. I've written apps for WinCE and BREW and a few other platforms and they just sucked to develop for and the resulting apps were less than exciting.
I would have liked to write apps for the underappreciated N-Gage QD but Nokia wasn't smart enough to make that a very good option. Next to iPhone/Android though that is still my favorite phone ever. Sure it runs similar software to other phones but it was really optimized for games better. A little ahead of it's time.
Yeah but netbooks suck. You're running cheap crappy hardware with a clunky badly designed dinosaur of an OS. Why the heck would you want to do that when you can have a slick well made product with well designed software actually made for the device for a couple hundred dollars more?
A netbook might be fine for a kid if you don't mind worrying about it getting broken, infected, or just plain hard to use but it isn't a product for anybody that wants to get anything done. The iPhone was usable by my daughter when she was six months old (and she is an expert at 20 months) and is usable by my non-geek parents and enjoyed by uber-geek me. I can't say the same for any netbook or even PC I've seen. I even tried a XO which IMO is a cute device but has one of the worst interfaces ever seen. I actually like netbooks but seriously they don't even compete on usability or durability.
The one real fault I've had with the iPhone/iTouch was the screen being to small to effectively use for some tasks such as web browsing, reading large books/documents, and VNC. I think the iPad is going to solve that issue pretty well. It's a lot handier for most people to watch Netflix on than a netbook and is far more likely to dock to your tv. The only device I'd say is likely to compare, thus far, would be the Archos. If Apple can throw in nice features like parental controls and network printing and file sharing they'll be a solid option as a family and school device.
Of course I'll hold out for the 3D movies that'll come out with the iPad 3D that uses a built-in holographic projector. The company that puts out a consumer computer that has such a display and the ability to take input from my hands waving around in the air will fulfill my childhood fantasies.;)
IE8 does. IE6 has about 10% of my traffic. IE7 has almost none - seems that people on top of things enough to upgrade keep doing it. It isn't worth >50% of my time for 1/3. The other browsers barely show up.
The worst thing is that IE keeps us from doing anything really interesting and helpful because it is so limiting and we want equal support across supported browsers.
I'll probably remove all the styles for IE6 as the sites will look better without than with broken styles. I wouldn't recommend browsing that way but whatever people want.
I had better browsers than IE when I had a PowerMac way back when. I'd be shocked if you can't get something way better now. But then if you're okay with waiting a week for a crappy modern webpage to load on a PowerMac you might not mind using IE with styles removed. At least it should speed up load time.
Why not upgrade? You can install Mac OS X on a cheap PC for less than $400 or a Dell Mini 10v Netbook for about $250.
For that matter IE8 sucks too. I wish Microsoft would just get it together and use webkit or gecko as their rendering engine. They could keep the familiar IE interface and whatever extras they wanted without forcing this load of crap on all us poor developers that just want standards support.
I think I'll cut IE6 support from all my websites on March 13 too. People that haven't upgraded will no longer be pampered but will simply see a screen telling them they need to upgrade. We waste a huge amount of time trying to keep everything working on IE6, IE7, and IE8. More than we spend on Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome combined.
A lot of the bad code I've seen was from CS majors. They take a lot of classes but don't spend enough time writing code. They don't learn their history and keep recreating the same thing. Overall I'd rate CS majors as about the same as anyone with an equivalent hands on experience.
Any craft needs years of study and practical experience before you can be a master. Even then it's as much art as anything. You have to have a feel for it.
Good books on how to actually program are few and far between. You get syntax, libraries, design patterns, and project management but how to sit down and really write this kind of program or that kind of program is rare. It's a lot more complicated to write a fully functional game or enterprise management system than anything you learn in school and often learning takes place as trial and error and by looking at other programmers trial and error code. Learning the right overall structure is very domain dependent and can be tricky. Writing code is a good start but it's a slow way to learn.
I just want them to stop cramming more stuff in the space (2+TB is plenty for most people) and instead split the disk into two smaller disks that fit inside, leaving the form factor unchanged, and are RAID-1. If one fails the drive should become read only and alert the user to go get a new drive and copy their files over. Many a heartache and headache would have been avoided if this small amount of redundancy had existed.
I use software RAID5 in my servers. It's hardly an issue with systems running multi-core processors. With two 6-core Xeon CPU's in the box they aren't worrying about the small amount of work involved. I've seen to many hardware RAIDs that got toasted because someone wasn't familiar with what button x did in the configuration manager for that particular system. Also know for sure I can take my drives and shove them into any other Linux box I have and they'll work again. If the hardware controller goes down the question is can you can get a compatible controller and how fast can you get it and is it really 100% compatible.
I agree. I've had exactly the same experience. It's the people who manage to delete all their system dll's trying to do something they don't understand that fight the hardest. They know just enough to be dangerous and don't want to learn a new system for the same reason they haven't mastered Windows. They usually know just enough to get World of Warcraft working on their grandma's 386 but once having achieved that they never went further because they would rather play games than write a custom driver.
I use a Mac as my primary desktop and own four iPods (two touches) but even I can't buy that bullshit you just spouted. It isn't especially hard to make apps that work with most distros. There are free and commercially available tools to do just that without even needing to make any source code available. There aren't really a lot of major differences between distros from a programming point of view anyway. If it's really an issue they could support a single distro and let Linux users figure out how to adapt to become compatible.
Or just stop blocking third party apps that do the work for them. There is no logical reason not to let people access their own iPod and why isn't there an API for the iTunes Store? Security really shouldn't be an issue since it'd be stupid to rely on the client.
Developers might be arrogant but I think it is as much from Apple's end as from the opensource community.
I'd agree if they are happy with Windows then leave them with Windows. The annoying part is most people aren't happy with Windows. They get infected, things break, etc but they just accept it because it's what they know and they expect it to suck.
If you switch to a new product it has to be better than the original product to justify the effort. That means it not only has to not have the problems Windows does but it has to not have it's own issues. Linux isn't there and it isn't even going in the right direction. I used Linux as my primary desktop for more than a decade. Today I use OS X. OS X still has problems but they aren't nearly as annoying problems. I mostly use Windows in a virtual machine for the few apps that require Windows which is luckily not many (one really) since I'm not a gamer.
I know a lot of geeks think the iPad sucks because it's more sandboxed than they like (which I don't see why they care since they can jailbreak it if they want to hack around) but I think it's exactly what the majority of users need in an OS. It's reasonable secure and easy to use and has a limited number of options to worry about. There are no directories full of thousands of mysterious files to get lost in. Only one app is visible at a time so no digging through a stack of windows for the right one. Mo pop unders. There is a single place to find and install apps. No dependency hell and no viruses. It's damn hard to get yourself in serious trouble. Complain if you like but that is the way the desktop experience needs to go and is going to go.
When Linux desktop follows the example of the iPhone OS it will see more success. Android does to some extent, and is seeing success, but still offers to many choices and is somewhat awkward to use due to poor UI design. I'm curious to see when they fix these issues. Chrome OS might be interesting as it sounds like it is learning some of these lessons.
Ubuntu Netbook Remix is probably the closest major distro I've seen to getting it right. Some apps don't work well with the design, it still feels like a beta, the UI needs some work, and some other Linux issues wiggle in but it's a step forward. The hard part is deciding to scrap existing apps and start from a new, more iPhone/Android sandboxed task oriented design. Enforce good policies with all new, or adapted, apps and clean up a bit and they could be on to something.
I'm a retailer in the US and this is the kind of anti-competitive bullshit we have to deal with daily. We need our own rules against forcing brick and mortar stores, MAP prices, sale regions, and restrictions against online sales. If customers want the 'luxury' of a brick and mortar store let them pay a bit extra. Personally I like buying everything online and having it show up at my door at a fraction of the hassle and price. How are these restrictions from manufacturers benefiting consumers and the economy as a whole?
One of my favorite was FuelMaker. They were going bankrupt and they kept sending us cease and desist letters for selling to many of their products to people that lived where there was no authorized dealer and they refused to ship us products in a timely manner. And yes we paid a small fortune to become an authorized dealer. They kept going on about consumer safety but it's total bullshit because their products can easily be installed by anyone that can install a gas water heater or dryer. Now they've been in limbo for about a year. They supposedly aren't dead but we can't get any product. Not that they refunded our dealership fees.
Things go quicker if all the data you are moving around is stored on RAM disks so you never have to wait for physical disks. I don't manage all but I do keep a lot of it cached which helps.
I like to experiment with interesting ways of indexing, searching, and doing novel things with data so my answer to your list is YES. Add in some AI, VoIP, media servers, etc and I kill computers and network alike. I'm sure if everyone had gigabit I could invent some interesting toys that might be useful and different than anything people use now.
One toy would be something like Bit Torrent for AI in that it indexes all the files available on the host and then caches all of them to other clients on the network. Also each node analyzes the data from it's own unique point of view and the nodes can work together to come to new conclusions. It forms a feedback loop, or really a mesh, where data is continually collected, analyzed, discussed, and reanalyzed. For a while I had a free file sharing site, OpenMouth, where people could post their files and while they were connected to the site would (semi-unwittingly) become nodes. Unfortunately my bandwidth charges went through the roof quickly and I had to pull it. Given the bandwidth I'd offer a powerful file backup/sharing/searching service and create a giant computer brain.
In the case of XSS I'd say fix (X)HTML and the browsers. By default scripting should not work in the body of a page. Force a meta tag to enable it in the head part of the page or by end-user override if they really must have it. There is really no reason scripting needs to be included in the body of a web page. Trying to completely block scripting, especially in IE which just executes damn near anything, is a real pain and often ends up excluding valid data such as comments including source code.
If someone uses an unsafe browser it's their problem.
You lack imagination. I bet if you plugged me into gigabit Internet tomorrow morning that I'd have it saturated before nightfall. Gigabit LAN isn't fast enough and it's doing essentially the same things but less of them than gigabit Internet would be.
Of course I'd want a static IP address too so they better include IPv6 everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I can do iPhone and Android but I can't see bothering with any of those other underpowered devices. I've written apps for WinCE and BREW and a few other platforms and they just sucked to develop for and the resulting apps were less than exciting. I would have liked to write apps for the underappreciated N-Gage QD but Nokia wasn't smart enough to make that a very good option. Next to iPhone/Android though that is still my favorite phone ever. Sure it runs similar software to other phones but it was really optimized for games better. A little ahead of it's time.
Yeah but netbooks suck. You're running cheap crappy hardware with a clunky badly designed dinosaur of an OS. Why the heck would you want to do that when you can have a slick well made product with well designed software actually made for the device for a couple hundred dollars more? A netbook might be fine for a kid if you don't mind worrying about it getting broken, infected, or just plain hard to use but it isn't a product for anybody that wants to get anything done. The iPhone was usable by my daughter when she was six months old (and she is an expert at 20 months) and is usable by my non-geek parents and enjoyed by uber-geek me. I can't say the same for any netbook or even PC I've seen. I even tried a XO which IMO is a cute device but has one of the worst interfaces ever seen. I actually like netbooks but seriously they don't even compete on usability or durability. The one real fault I've had with the iPhone/iTouch was the screen being to small to effectively use for some tasks such as web browsing, reading large books/documents, and VNC. I think the iPad is going to solve that issue pretty well. It's a lot handier for most people to watch Netflix on than a netbook and is far more likely to dock to your tv. The only device I'd say is likely to compare, thus far, would be the Archos. If Apple can throw in nice features like parental controls and network printing and file sharing they'll be a solid option as a family and school device. Of course I'll hold out for the 3D movies that'll come out with the iPad 3D that uses a built-in holographic projector. The company that puts out a consumer computer that has such a display and the ability to take input from my hands waving around in the air will fulfill my childhood fantasies. ;)
Or you can just avoid using Microsoft OSes and products and you'll be more secure. I say lets go for a tax. $100/yr per Windows machine.
IE8 does. IE6 has about 10% of my traffic. IE7 has almost none - seems that people on top of things enough to upgrade keep doing it. It isn't worth >50% of my time for 1/3. The other browsers barely show up. The worst thing is that IE keeps us from doing anything really interesting and helpful because it is so limiting and we want equal support across supported browsers.
I'll probably remove all the styles for IE6 as the sites will look better without than with broken styles. I wouldn't recommend browsing that way but whatever people want. I had better browsers than IE when I had a PowerMac way back when. I'd be shocked if you can't get something way better now. But then if you're okay with waiting a week for a crappy modern webpage to load on a PowerMac you might not mind using IE with styles removed. At least it should speed up load time. Why not upgrade? You can install Mac OS X on a cheap PC for less than $400 or a Dell Mini 10v Netbook for about $250.
For that matter IE8 sucks too. I wish Microsoft would just get it together and use webkit or gecko as their rendering engine. They could keep the familiar IE interface and whatever extras they wanted without forcing this load of crap on all us poor developers that just want standards support.
I think I'll cut IE6 support from all my websites on March 13 too. People that haven't upgraded will no longer be pampered but will simply see a screen telling them they need to upgrade. We waste a huge amount of time trying to keep everything working on IE6, IE7, and IE8. More than we spend on Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome combined.
A lot of the bad code I've seen was from CS majors. They take a lot of classes but don't spend enough time writing code. They don't learn their history and keep recreating the same thing. Overall I'd rate CS majors as about the same as anyone with an equivalent hands on experience. Any craft needs years of study and practical experience before you can be a master. Even then it's as much art as anything. You have to have a feel for it.
Good books on how to actually program are few and far between. You get syntax, libraries, design patterns, and project management but how to sit down and really write this kind of program or that kind of program is rare. It's a lot more complicated to write a fully functional game or enterprise management system than anything you learn in school and often learning takes place as trial and error and by looking at other programmers trial and error code. Learning the right overall structure is very domain dependent and can be tricky. Writing code is a good start but it's a slow way to learn.
I just want them to stop cramming more stuff in the space (2+TB is plenty for most people) and instead split the disk into two smaller disks that fit inside, leaving the form factor unchanged, and are RAID-1. If one fails the drive should become read only and alert the user to go get a new drive and copy their files over. Many a heartache and headache would have been avoided if this small amount of redundancy had existed.
I use software RAID5 in my servers. It's hardly an issue with systems running multi-core processors. With two 6-core Xeon CPU's in the box they aren't worrying about the small amount of work involved. I've seen to many hardware RAIDs that got toasted because someone wasn't familiar with what button x did in the configuration manager for that particular system. Also know for sure I can take my drives and shove them into any other Linux box I have and they'll work again. If the hardware controller goes down the question is can you can get a compatible controller and how fast can you get it and is it really 100% compatible.
I agree. I've had exactly the same experience. It's the people who manage to delete all their system dll's trying to do something they don't understand that fight the hardest. They know just enough to be dangerous and don't want to learn a new system for the same reason they haven't mastered Windows. They usually know just enough to get World of Warcraft working on their grandma's 386 but once having achieved that they never went further because they would rather play games than write a custom driver.
I use a Mac as my primary desktop and own four iPods (two touches) but even I can't buy that bullshit you just spouted. It isn't especially hard to make apps that work with most distros. There are free and commercially available tools to do just that without even needing to make any source code available. There aren't really a lot of major differences between distros from a programming point of view anyway. If it's really an issue they could support a single distro and let Linux users figure out how to adapt to become compatible. Or just stop blocking third party apps that do the work for them. There is no logical reason not to let people access their own iPod and why isn't there an API for the iTunes Store? Security really shouldn't be an issue since it'd be stupid to rely on the client. Developers might be arrogant but I think it is as much from Apple's end as from the opensource community.
Do a fresh install. Install DeepFreeze. Install a network attached automatic backup drive. Many problems will go away.
I'd agree if they are happy with Windows then leave them with Windows. The annoying part is most people aren't happy with Windows. They get infected, things break, etc but they just accept it because it's what they know and they expect it to suck. If you switch to a new product it has to be better than the original product to justify the effort. That means it not only has to not have the problems Windows does but it has to not have it's own issues. Linux isn't there and it isn't even going in the right direction. I used Linux as my primary desktop for more than a decade. Today I use OS X. OS X still has problems but they aren't nearly as annoying problems. I mostly use Windows in a virtual machine for the few apps that require Windows which is luckily not many (one really) since I'm not a gamer. I know a lot of geeks think the iPad sucks because it's more sandboxed than they like (which I don't see why they care since they can jailbreak it if they want to hack around) but I think it's exactly what the majority of users need in an OS. It's reasonable secure and easy to use and has a limited number of options to worry about. There are no directories full of thousands of mysterious files to get lost in. Only one app is visible at a time so no digging through a stack of windows for the right one. Mo pop unders. There is a single place to find and install apps. No dependency hell and no viruses. It's damn hard to get yourself in serious trouble. Complain if you like but that is the way the desktop experience needs to go and is going to go. When Linux desktop follows the example of the iPhone OS it will see more success. Android does to some extent, and is seeing success, but still offers to many choices and is somewhat awkward to use due to poor UI design. I'm curious to see when they fix these issues. Chrome OS might be interesting as it sounds like it is learning some of these lessons. Ubuntu Netbook Remix is probably the closest major distro I've seen to getting it right. Some apps don't work well with the design, it still feels like a beta, the UI needs some work, and some other Linux issues wiggle in but it's a step forward. The hard part is deciding to scrap existing apps and start from a new, more iPhone/Android sandboxed task oriented design. Enforce good policies with all new, or adapted, apps and clean up a bit and they could be on to something.
One of my favorite was FuelMaker. They were going bankrupt and they kept sending us cease and desist letters for selling to many of their products to people that lived where there was no authorized dealer and they refused to ship us products in a timely manner. And yes we paid a small fortune to become an authorized dealer. They kept going on about consumer safety but it's total bullshit because their products can easily be installed by anyone that can install a gas water heater or dryer. Now they've been in limbo for about a year. They supposedly aren't dead but we can't get any product. Not that they refunded our dealership fees.
Thanks for that trip back to 1997. It was funny.
Things go quicker if all the data you are moving around is stored on RAM disks so you never have to wait for physical disks. I don't manage all but I do keep a lot of it cached which helps. I like to experiment with interesting ways of indexing, searching, and doing novel things with data so my answer to your list is YES. Add in some AI, VoIP, media servers, etc and I kill computers and network alike. I'm sure if everyone had gigabit I could invent some interesting toys that might be useful and different than anything people use now. One toy would be something like Bit Torrent for AI in that it indexes all the files available on the host and then caches all of them to other clients on the network. Also each node analyzes the data from it's own unique point of view and the nodes can work together to come to new conclusions. It forms a feedback loop, or really a mesh, where data is continually collected, analyzed, discussed, and reanalyzed. For a while I had a free file sharing site, OpenMouth, where people could post their files and while they were connected to the site would (semi-unwittingly) become nodes. Unfortunately my bandwidth charges went through the roof quickly and I had to pull it. Given the bandwidth I'd offer a powerful file backup/sharing/searching service and create a giant computer brain.
They can pick it. Didn't say they'd get it. But sometimes clients/employers like to feel they've set a goal.
You don't think $7/hr is enough to write good code? Oh and you want it fast? Sure. Good, cheap, quick. Pick one.
In the case of XSS I'd say fix (X)HTML and the browsers. By default scripting should not work in the body of a page. Force a meta tag to enable it in the head part of the page or by end-user override if they really must have it. There is really no reason scripting needs to be included in the body of a web page. Trying to completely block scripting, especially in IE which just executes damn near anything, is a real pain and often ends up excluding valid data such as comments including source code. If someone uses an unsafe browser it's their problem.
I can do it with zero lines of code. My zero lines of code will remain perfectly safe.
You lack imagination. I bet if you plugged me into gigabit Internet tomorrow morning that I'd have it saturated before nightfall. Gigabit LAN isn't fast enough and it's doing essentially the same things but less of them than gigabit Internet would be. Of course I'd want a static IP address too so they better include IPv6 everywhere.
In the US I'm paying $1000+ a month for 7Mb fiber.
Amen. Already paid for.