In fact, this was an internal web based app for our office, which dealt with hotel reservations.
When setting up a new hotel on the system, the users (our staff), had to find and supply the telephone number as part of the standard contact details we needed for every hotel.
Do you know of any hotel that DOESN'T have a telephone, and if so, how would we call them to make a reservation ?
There are sometimes instances where some fields MUST be filled in, otherwise the whole record becomes worthless.
We had a simple field on a form to "Supply a Telephone Number". The users didn't, so we used JS to validate they had filled it in.
Then they filled in garbage, so we enforced numerals only. The users entered "1111111" everywhere.
Then we enforced standard number formats based on a Country selector, with correct International Dialling Codes and pattern / format matching. The users entered "0044 (1)1111111" everywhere.
Finally we checked that the numbers didn't look like "0044 (1)1111111" i.e. too many repeated characters, after extensive testing to avoid false-positives. The users now enter "0044 (1)2121212" everywhere.
The more you Idiot-Proof a system, the smarter the Idiots become. Not smarter at actually entering the correct data, just smarter at bypassing the protections you put in place.
<matrix-parody> I'd like to share a revelation I've had with you, it came to me when I tried to classify your programmers. Every programmer on this planet forms a natural equilibrium with the software project, but you PHP programmers do not. You multiply and multiply script snippets until every semblance of readability and logic is removed. And then you simply spread to another project. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is, Morpheus ?.NET </matrix-parody>
Well the US Government (actually the next 60 years of US taxpayers) paid $125 billion for the rights to a bunch of defaulted mortgages and worthless hedge funds...
Personally, I think AJAX (or at least the asynchronous transfer of data in whather protocol takes your fancy), is what the web was crying out for from the beginning.
As far back as 1995, they started with FRAMES, THEN I(nline)FRAMES, then finally the XMLHTTP objects. All these were in response to changing nature of the webs, and the realization that it was something seriously missing from the request / response an dpage refresh cycle (i.e that all or nothing was not the best way to do it).
There is absolutely no need to clog up the pipes resending the entire N bytes of page data on every submission just because some small proportion of the content changed. AJAX is the perfect modular design for data transmission - send only what you need and update the bits of the page on the fly.
Not to mention the reduced load on the server side, mindlessly consuming bandwith just to send out the same page meta-structure over and over again.
As for the "Web 2.0" and "AJAX" monikers, they're just buzzwords for the sake of it, but the underlying functionality should have been there from the start.
Again, this is probably a result of the "mass-produced" crap that gets churned out these days.
Back in the early 80's, I'd head up to the record shop with my savings, buy an album that I knew already had 2 or 3 good songs on it, and be fairly certain that the other 7 or 8 would also be good. I was rarely disappointed and usually felt like I'd got my money's worth.
Nowadays, albums consist of the 1 hit wonder that made the artist famous, 2 or 3 "remixes" that cost nothing extra in studio recording time, (or worse still the same 1 hit wonder "featuring Beyonce" singing the backing vocals - she does this a lot), and 7 covers of other peoples songs ?
Albums today have no originality past the 1st song, that you probably already own on single anyway.
Why in God's name would anyone *want* to buy an album these days ?
Re:I disagree, it's about open standards
on
Microsoft's Lost Decade
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Ok...name one fully proprietary standard or protocol that is absolutely critical to, in the broad sense, the functioning of the internet at large... I'm waiting.
Hmm, let's see... how's Flash for one ? For sure in terms of video streaming, it's been adopted worldwide and will never change even when HTML5 is widely supported... too many corporates have invested too much time and money in Flash to convert everything to an open source format just for some OSS ethic that gives them zero added benefit. There, no waiting required.
Ajax is DOM based, lots of sites use Ajax. Including/. That tells me DOM isn't the widely spurned standard you portray
Not the *entire* DOM model, I didn't say that now did I ? I was referring to the insertNode, appendNode, deleteNode methods that allow manipulation of a node within the tree and can all be avoide by use of.innerHTML. And while we're on the subject of AJAX...
In 1996, Internet Explorer introduced the IFrame element to HTML, which also enables this (asynchronous loading of content) to be achieved.
In 1999, Microsoft created the XMLHTTP ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, which is now supported by Mozilla, Safari and other browsers as the native XMLHttpRequest object.
On April 5, 2006 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first draft specification for the object in an attempt to create an official web standard.
Maybe you get my point about "standards", trying to quantify (first draft only) some technique that has already been available and working fine FOR 7 BLOODY YEARS ! (10 if you count iframe as an older mtheod of achieving the same thing).
As to the rest of your post, having obviously run out of coherent things to say, you resort to a spelling Nazi attack on "Aceepting" ?
It's called a typo, ffs. As there seems to be nothing in the W3C spec (yet) regarding the mandatory use of an inbuilt spell-checker before posting a comment to Slashdot, I'll carry on posting my thoughts as is, typos be damned.
Really, if that is the best you can do, then there's nothing more to say.
Re:I disagree, it's about open standards
on
Microsoft's Lost Decade
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's indeed correct and the way it should be... what annoys me is when OSS do something, it's "innovative and wonderful", but when MS do the same thing, it's "non standard and bad"... regardless of whether it's later adopted as "de-facto" or not.
They'll just blow up the tractor and use a photo-spectrometer to measure the emissions.
If it can't be blown up, then it don't belong on Mythbusters.
Re:I disagree, it's about open standards
on
Microsoft's Lost Decade
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
the internet relies on open standards to function
Oh I'm so tired of this tired old mantra. If everyone relied so much on standards, why do all the major browsers support.innerHTML, which is not part of W3C ?
Because Microsoft did it first (right or wrong, it works, and is a lot cleaner than all that messing with DOM nodes), and the competition had to make a choice between:-
1) Aceepting that standards are out-of-date before they are ever finalised (because anything decided by a committee of 1000's is doomed to failure)
or
2) Risk having the world saying "Firefox / Safari / Opera sucks because the DHTML don't work like is does in IE".
So what it really boils down to is a case of the other browsers playing a game of "you should follow standards like we do, unless MS or someone else do something better, in which we'll ignore the principles we were founded on and simply follow the leader instead".
Or perhaps would you have all browser development forbidden until the HTML5 spec is finalized when ? 2025 ?
Which begs the question, did the person holding the document intentionally create a.torrent file of it, and where exactly did he submit it to, seeing as how piratebay.org seems to be down more than up these days ?
As you say, it'll be one of those scumware BearShare type things that not only installs all kinds of spyware on your machine, but opens up your entire C: drive to the world unless you stop it.
I think the government needs an internal IT policy that if you must work on confidential documents and home, AND download the latest pr0n movies at the same time, at least use a more "secure" protocol (in terms of what you are actually sharing), like BitTorrent for example.
Human life expectancy is the longest it has ever been, despite all this "trash" we apparently stuff ourselves with.
It only took a matter of minutes to pull this data off Wikipedia, criticise my source if you will, or find a better one... nethertheless, here is the average life expectancy during periods of human development.
Upper Paleolithic 33 Neolithic 20 Bronze Age 18 Bronze age, Sweden 40-60 Classical Greece 20-30 Classical Rome 20-30 Pre-Columbian North America 25-30 Medieval Islamic Caliphate 35+ Medieval Britain 20-30 Early 20th Century 30-40 Current world average 65
So unless you are living in Bronze Age Sweden (which seems to have been a particularly good period of history... perhaps it's all the herring they ate ?), we've never had it so good.
Before spouting off your new-age grass-eating hippy bullshit, please try and check a few facts first.
Yes, but the OP's point was that using Mathematica, any number can be stored 100% accuracy... while that may be tru, my point was regarding irrational numbers that while *can* be stored accurately, will always involve some form of rounding / precision when it comes to displaying it.
Fine, using Mathematica, I challenge you to accurately represent and display 1/3rd as a decimal number.
Any number that is irrational to a certain base can never be stored accurately using that base.
There will always be some form of rounding, perhaps not in the internal representation (i.e. using numerator, denominator stored as two arbitrary size integers, 1/3 is easy), then at least when you come to display it back to the user.
Another interesting on is Pi. How exactly do you store accurately a number that has no known exact formula to generate it, and can only be generated using successive approximations which are "closer" than the last, but can never be 100% accurate ?
If it *only* made an icon in the systray, I'd be happy.
For some reason most of them feel the need to autostart half a dozen services also... HP, I'm looking at you, but it's also true of just about all CD / DVD burning software.
Why a printer driver should be 89 MB is beyond logic or reason. And when I want to burn a CD, I'll start it manually.
I don't need 100+ services all running in the background monitoring hardware and sucking up memory and processor slices so I get a popup "logo / splash screen / helper" saying "it looks like you inserted a piece of A4, do you want to print something" ?
it's crashed once -- but only once -- in several hours of use
As "several" could (potentially) refer to any number more than two, then it could (potentially) "only" crash 8 times a day, or 56 times a week, or 2912 times a year.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, this was an internal web based app for our office, which dealt with hotel reservations.
When setting up a new hotel on the system, the users (our staff), had to find and supply the telephone number as part of the standard contact details we needed for every hotel.
Do you know of any hotel that DOESN'T have a telephone, and if so, how would we call them to make a reservation ?
There are sometimes instances where some fields MUST be filled in, otherwise the whole record becomes worthless.
In Soviet Russia, all "are eggs" belong to you !
I'm still getting therapy.
We had a simple field on a form to "Supply a Telephone Number". The users didn't, so we used JS to validate they had filled it in.
Then they filled in garbage, so we enforced numerals only. The users entered "1111111" everywhere.
Then we enforced standard number formats based on a Country selector, with correct International Dialling Codes and pattern / format matching. The users entered "0044 (1)1111111" everywhere.
Finally we checked that the numbers didn't look like "0044 (1)1111111" i.e. too many repeated characters, after extensive testing to avoid false-positives. The users now enter "0044 (1)2121212" everywhere.
The more you Idiot-Proof a system, the smarter the Idiots become. Not smarter at actually entering the correct data, just smarter at bypassing the protections you put in place.
Since when are PHP programmers human ?
<matrix-parody> .NET
I'd like to share a revelation I've had with you, it came to me when I tried to classify your programmers. Every programmer on this planet forms a natural equilibrium with the software project, but you PHP programmers do not. You multiply and multiply script snippets until every semblance of readability and logic is removed. And then you simply spread to another project. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is, Morpheus ?
</matrix-parody>
Well the US Government (actually the next 60 years of US taxpayers) paid $125 billion for the rights to a bunch of defaulted mortgages and worthless hedge funds ...
Thank you for your cooperation.
Absolutely no problem.
Personally, I think AJAX (or at least the asynchronous transfer of data in whather protocol takes your fancy), is what the web was crying out for from the beginning.
As far back as 1995, they started with FRAMES, THEN I(nline)FRAMES, then finally the XMLHTTP objects. All these were in response to changing nature of the webs, and the realization that it was something seriously missing from the request / response an dpage refresh cycle (i.e that all or nothing was not the best way to do it).
There is absolutely no need to clog up the pipes resending the entire N bytes of page data on every submission just because some small proportion of the content changed. AJAX is the perfect modular design for data transmission - send only what you need and update the bits of the page on the fly.
Not to mention the reduced load on the server side, mindlessly consuming bandwith just to send out the same page meta-structure over and over again.
As for the "Web 2.0" and "AJAX" monikers, they're just buzzwords for the sake of it, but the underlying functionality should have been there from the start.
Ice displaces water, which will just make the sea level even higher, you bloody fool !
Does free access to libraries make society better? Does (free) radio educate listener's ears? Do free books at school make better students?
It perhaps gives the whole of society the same opportunity, instead of limiting it to the select few with money or privilege ?
Oh, I think I just realized why the RIAA don't like it !
Again, this is probably a result of the "mass-produced" crap that gets churned out these days.
Back in the early 80's, I'd head up to the record shop with my savings, buy an album that I knew already had 2 or 3 good songs on it, and be fairly certain that the other 7 or 8 would also be good. I was rarely disappointed and usually felt like I'd got my money's worth.
Nowadays, albums consist of the 1 hit wonder that made the artist famous, 2 or 3 "remixes" that cost nothing extra in studio recording time, (or worse still the same 1 hit wonder "featuring Beyonce" singing the backing vocals - she does this a lot), and 7 covers of other peoples songs ?
Albums today have no originality past the 1st song, that you probably already own on single anyway.
Why in God's name would anyone *want* to buy an album these days ?
Ok...name one fully proprietary standard or protocol that is absolutely critical to, in the broad sense, the functioning of the internet at large... I'm waiting.
Hmm, let's see ... how's Flash for one ? For sure in terms of video streaming, it's been adopted worldwide and will never change even when HTML5 is widely supported ... too many corporates have invested too much time and money in Flash to convert everything to an open source format just for some OSS ethic that gives them zero added benefit. There, no waiting required.
Ajax is DOM based, lots of sites use Ajax. Including /. That tells me DOM isn't the widely spurned standard you portray
Not the *entire* DOM model, I didn't say that now did I ? I was referring to the insertNode, appendNode, deleteNode methods that allow manipulation of a node within the tree and can all be avoide by use of .innerHTML. And while we're on the subject of AJAX ...
In 1996, Internet Explorer introduced the IFrame element to HTML, which also enables this (asynchronous loading of content) to be achieved.
In 1999, Microsoft created the XMLHTTP ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, which is now supported by Mozilla, Safari and other browsers as the native XMLHttpRequest object.
On April 5, 2006 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first draft specification for the object in an attempt to create an official web standard.
Maybe you get my point about "standards", trying to quantify (first draft only) some technique that has already been available and working fine FOR 7 BLOODY YEARS ! (10 if you count iframe as an older mtheod of achieving the same thing).
As to the rest of your post, having obviously run out of coherent things to say, you resort to a spelling Nazi attack on "Aceepting" ?
It's called a typo, ffs. As there seems to be nothing in the W3C spec (yet) regarding the mandatory use of an inbuilt spell-checker before posting a comment to Slashdot, I'll carry on posting my thoughts as is, typos be damned.
Really, if that is the best you can do, then there's nothing more to say.
That's indeed correct and the way it should be ... what annoys me is when OSS do something, it's "innovative and wonderful", but when MS do the same thing, it's "non standard and bad" ... regardless of whether it's later adopted as "de-facto" or not.
They'll just blow up the tractor and use a photo-spectrometer to measure the emissions.
If it can't be blown up, then it don't belong on Mythbusters.
the internet relies on open standards to function
Oh I'm so tired of this tired old mantra. If everyone relied so much on standards, why do all the major browsers support .innerHTML, which is not part of W3C ?
Because Microsoft did it first (right or wrong, it works, and is a lot cleaner than all that messing with DOM nodes), and the competition had to make a choice between :-
1) Aceepting that standards are out-of-date before they are ever finalised (because anything decided by a committee of 1000's is doomed to failure)
or
2) Risk having the world saying "Firefox / Safari / Opera sucks because the DHTML don't work like is does in IE".
So what it really boils down to is a case of the other browsers playing a game of "you should follow standards like we do, unless MS or someone else do something better, in which we'll ignore the principles we were founded on and simply follow the leader instead".
Or perhaps would you have all browser development forbidden until the HTML5 spec is finalized when ? 2025 ?
Which begs the question, did the person holding the document intentionally create a .torrent file of it, and where exactly did he submit it to, seeing as how piratebay.org seems to be down more than up these days ?
As you say, it'll be one of those scumware BearShare type things that not only installs all kinds of spyware on your machine, but opens up your entire C: drive to the world unless you stop it.
I think the government needs an internal IT policy that if you must work on confidential documents and home, AND download the latest pr0n movies at the same time, at least use a more "secure" protocol (in terms of what you are actually sharing), like BitTorrent for example.
Can I be the first to say, what utter bollocks.
Human life expectancy is the longest it has ever been, despite all this "trash" we apparently stuff ourselves with.
It only took a matter of minutes to pull this data off Wikipedia, criticise my source if you will, or find a better one ... nethertheless, here is the average life expectancy during periods of human development.
Upper Paleolithic 33
Neolithic 20
Bronze Age 18
Bronze age, Sweden 40-60
Classical Greece 20-30
Classical Rome 20-30
Pre-Columbian North America 25-30
Medieval Islamic Caliphate 35+
Medieval Britain 20-30
Early 20th Century 30-40
Current world average 65
So unless you are living in Bronze Age Sweden (which seems to have been a particularly good period of history ... perhaps it's all the herring they ate ?), we've never had it so good.
Before spouting off your new-age grass-eating hippy bullshit, please try and check a few facts first.
Yes, but the OP's point was that using Mathematica, any number can be stored 100% accuracy ... while that may be tru, my point was regarding irrational numbers that while *can* be stored accurately, will always involve some form of rounding / precision when it comes to displaying it.
Fine, using Mathematica, I challenge you to accurately represent and display 1/3rd as a decimal number.
Any number that is irrational to a certain base can never be stored accurately using that base.
There will always be some form of rounding, perhaps not in the internal representation (i.e. using numerator, denominator stored as two arbitrary size integers, 1/3 is easy), then at least when you come to display it back to the user.
Another interesting on is Pi. How exactly do you store accurately a number that has no known exact formula to generate it, and can only be generated using successive approximations which are "closer" than the last, but can never be 100% accurate ?
If it *only* made an icon in the systray, I'd be happy.
For some reason most of them feel the need to autostart half a dozen services also ... HP, I'm looking at you, but it's also true of just about all CD / DVD burning software.
Why a printer driver should be 89 MB is beyond logic or reason. And when I want to burn a CD, I'll start it manually.
I don't need 100+ services all running in the background monitoring hardware and sucking up memory and processor slices so I get a popup "logo / splash screen / helper" saying "it looks like you inserted a piece of A4, do you want to print something" ?
it's crashed once -- but only once -- in several hours of use
As "several" could (potentially) refer to any number more than two, then it could (potentially) "only" crash 8 times a day, or 56 times a week, or 2912 times a year.
Not a terribly positive endorsement to be honest.
So the aluminium foil helmets ARE a good idea after all ?
It links to old stories from elsewhere.
FTFY
Baked beans are off !
Circumcision Clinic, operations performed according to Jewish Tradition ?
I think you'll find that is both single-gender and single-religion specific ?
Actually, ANY rules can be tolerated IF they are set by a minority ... it's only majorities that get into trouble with these kind of things.
It's kind of difficult for a minority to oppress a majority, and still remain a minority, if you see what I mean.
Hmm let's see ... exploding boats, taxis, cars, buses, bikes etc still leave the potential victims a chance to survive.
Exploding planes still leave you 37,000 feet in the fucking air, with a snowball-in-hell's chance of surviving.