Is it still true that in Go, computers play with a 14-move advantage and still lose to people who aren't even world-champion?
Oh, yes. Computers go programs are not serious opposition for anyone other than a weak to mid-level amateur. Here's a quick run-down of the go handicap system, for those not in the know: for each point of rank, or strength, difference in the players one stone of the weaker player's is placed on the board in a a predetermined position. Rank goes from 50 kyu (can't spell "go") through 1 kyu to 1 dan, then to 9 dan, then 1 dan to 9 dan professional. Thus a 5 kyu would give a 15 kyu a 10-stone handicap, and in theory, a 9 dan professional could give 68 (20% of the board) stones to someone who'd never played the game - and still win.
So when the poster says "14-move advantage" he means "14-stone handicap," which is huge. It's worse than that, though. A couple years ago, a dan-level player (a woman, not that it matters) beat the current computer go champion after giving it 27 stones. I can't find a bloody link right now, so you'll have to take my word for it.
Go is a game in which, because at each point in the game, it is unclear what groups of stones are alive and what are dead, pattern-based thinking is much more important.
Go is all about pattern recognition. The game is huge - easily the most complex game that people have created (where "life" is not defined as a game:). The board is 19x19 - 361 places to play - and all the stones have equal value. It's not possible for a computer to look 1% as far ahead in go as in chess.
Would Karpov (and perhaps Kramnik) have made a better Go player than chess player?
Who can say? They're very, very different games. I've played go for years, and every now and then I play chess with my brother. It feels very cramped, legalized, and formal. Go flows like a river.
Tell me, Sean, can Perl execute a program faster than you can write it? Of course the answer's yes, and in most cases that's all the speed you need. Perl is often slower than compiled C, but so are many languages. Perl explicitly trades run-time efficiency for write-time efficiency.
Perl is esoteric...
Do you even know what esoteric means? Can you give me a definition of it that applies to Perl but not, for instance, C? Very few people on this planet can program, so the activity is by definition esoteric.
Now, I bet you mean that Perl is idiosyncratic, which is another thing entirely. It certainly is, especially compared with say Python, which is very structured. But here we get back to programmer efficiency. Perl's motto is, "There's more than one way to do it." If you can't handle the complexity, you're free to do it your own way. Even if your own way is using another language. Many Perl programmers swear by the language's flexibility and power; those people who prefer more restricted languages are free to use them.
... and (in some cases) unmaintainable
I hope you realize, in retrospect, what a silly statement that is. Yes, poorly-written Perl is hard to maintain. Reply and give me a list of languages that make shitty code easy to maintain, eh?
Your comment about bugs is just as silly. Good programmers write good code; poor programmers write poor code and then blame their tools.
GAs and Perl are a great fit; it's precisely because they're both so alive that they work well together. A highly structured language would make it more difficult to do all sorts of wierd shit that you're not "supposed" to do. GAs are developing faster than the languages we use to describe them. It only makes sense to use the most expressive, idiomatic languages we have to manipulate them.
Before I start this rant - thank you for sharing the idea and getting a debate going. Using technology to empower citizens is a laudable goal; perhaps we disagree on method, though.
Quoth the anonymous one:
It's effective. Digital demonstrations get noticed -
they may actually cause enough inconvenience to target addresses that they
can't help but notice them. They also cannot effectively be blocked by the
police, so they last longer and can accomplish their objectives with fewer
obstacles.
You have exactly zero proof that this will be effective, and I have a few points you don't appear to have considered.
Protests and civil disobedience depend largely on appeals to the "good side" of human nature. GandhiThe Mahatma and his followers were successful by-and-large because the Brits couldn't justify their actions to the rest of the world. Modern mass media played a huge role in Gandhi's success. There was tremendous pressure from home and the rest of the world to stop the brutality of British colonial rule.
Now, some of this brutality was carefully provoked by Gandhi & Co. specifically to discredit the Brits in the eyes of their own citizens and the rest of the world. Much like the war in Vietnam, once the public saw what was happening they had little stomach for it.
So what am I ranting about? What we need to learn about this is that the problem with protest is how you spin it in the media. Gandhi knew this, and you should learn it. Unarmed young men getting beaten is a sympathetic image, and impossible to deny. The excuse of, "They walked into my club" (while true), doesn't work as well when the blood is on their faces, but your hands and uniforms.
Digitally, however, no one gets hurt. Great. But no-risk protests don't work because you only win if the public sympathizes with you, and who's going to sympathize with a bunch of P2P geeks mailbombing Congress? No one - you'll be called a group of anarchist, terrorist hackers trying to interfere with the duties of the government.
If you were getting the shit kicked out of you on the Capitol steps it wouldn't matter what they called you - you're the one doing the bleeding, so you're going to get the sympathy.
But your plan entails no bleeding. No risk at all, you say. If Gandhi's followers had all stayed home and written polite letters, even in great volume, they would have gotten nowhere. No risk, no reward.
Sadly, RadioShack's site is IE-only. Every page I try to hit with Mozilla, including the bloody home page, generates a "The page cannot be displayed" error, with no other information. The query string contains this gem:
ErrSource=Microsoft+VBScript+runtime+error
Dumb fucks. I would have ordered a handful of these - they look pretty cool.
James Morrow wrote a beautiful novel called The Wine of Violence partly about the cathartic effects of violent fantasy. Morrow is probably the best satirical writer in English, and one of the best since Jonathan Swift.
Briefly, a spaceship returning to Earth stumbles upon a planet where people live in harmony inside a walled city. There's no violence, physical or psychological, at all. Periodically these people go to special temples and live out their most violent fantasies in virtual reality; the ecto-plasmic by-product of this fantasy is called "noctus" and it pours out to surround the walls of the city.
See, the wastelands around the city are populated by the brain-eaters, humanoids who indulge their violent tendancies to the extreme. Problematically, the crew of the ship must convince the peaceful city-folk to wage war on the brain-eaters so they can return to their ship and escape.
This plot is mostly a hanger for Morrow's explorations of the nature of humanity and violence. Morrow's other writings are also fascinating. He's one of three or four SF authors I'll buy in hardback 'cause I can't wait for paper.:)
For rendering speed, let me point you to a little test I just ran and posted elsewhere in this thread. I'm not a zealot one way or the other, and I've use Mozilla exclusively for over a year, but IE spanks Mozilla at rendering. If you think I'm confusing rendering speed with start speed, read the post.
I timed it, too, and the difference in rendering speed alone is incredible - IE kicks Moz's ass. Now, I've used Moz as my primary browser for over a year, and I don't intend to go back, but let's call a spade a spade shall we?
In the most recent versions of both browsers I just opened the most recent MySQL manual - over 2MB of HTML in one file. My machine's a Duron 750 with 512MB, running Win2k. I timed rendering speed only - the file is served locally, and the browsers already started - I navigated to the file from a link on an otherwise blank (local) page. I timed from when I clicked the link:
IE: 1.5 seconds
Mozilla: 8 seconds
In short, Mozilla has a long way to go before it renders pages faster than IE.
Tell me, is it too much trouble for the editors to make sure the interview is actually readable? That the questions are correctly broken out as such, and not mixed with the previous answers? Can't Slashdot even proof its own content?
My 72yo mother uses a reel mower, and she loves it. It's easy to push, does a great job with the grass, and is quiet. You have to mow a little more often, since it mulches the clippings and doesn't work as well in long grass. Great solution, though.
You'd have a point except for context - we're clearly talking about user-land tools here, not servers. Besides, Apache's interface is perfect for its intended audience.
It's a common misconception that these kinds of programs are all about the UI. In truth, they're all about being really great tools.
Show me a great tool with a shitty UI and I'll show you a shitty tool. For all intents and purposes (unless you're hacking the source - and even if Photoshop's source were freely available, what tiny percentage of its users would ever care?), a tool is its UI. Photoshop rules because it's production-oriented - everything keyboard-accessible and highly customizable (e.g. good UI). It rules because all its little bits work this way, all the different sub-tools work as expected (e.g. good polish).
OSS doesn't generally produce really great tools.
I think and hope that you meant to insert "artistic" in there somewhere. OSS has produced some of the greatest tools ever (like Vi and Emacs). But the interface of those tools is appropriate for the audience.
I love competition. Look at graphics cards: ATI has just overtaken nVidia, who overtook 3dfx, who overtook Matrox, who overtook ATI... The big winner is the citizen with her wallet, getting an order of magnitude performance increase, for similar cost, every couple years.
I started doing desktop publishing with PageMaker 4, which was right before Quark started to really kick their butts in PC-land. Adobe bought PageMaker from Aldus, who'd invested a lot of effort in working with designers and creating a great product. Adobe got complacent and sat on their ass, with the result that Quark crossed platforms and ate their lunch. Now they're coming back with InDesign, which has some great features and usability enhancements that Quark can't touch (OS X support aside).
Another thing helping Adobe is their frankly brilliant positioning of PDF. The network effect of PDF is huge - many print shops are taking files in PDF for complex jobs, and our local paper (The Oregonian - not high class, but not little) asks for ads in PDF. PS is still the standard, but PDF is a nice intermediary. Adobe's turning it into the XML of page layout and design.
Random thought: Artistic and design tools is the one of the hardest areas for OSS to compete, because these programs (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, etc.) are all about interface and polish. I'm not saying that OSS can't do this, just that it takes a strong vision and committed management to pull off this type of software.
Anyone want to lay odds on Adobe porting it's suite to Linux? OS X support could pull that argument in either direction.
All communication is selective. In a finite amount of time there's only so much you can say, and what you say is determined by your own personality and viewpoints. Against this backdrop, all communication is by necessity part propoganda, and it's dishonest not to acknowledge that. You say "truth," and I read "truth as you perceive it." You likely end up communicating the same thing, but it's a different internal approach.
I'm not saying we should lie to anyone. You're right that disapointed expectations harm your case in both the short and long terms, and perhaps I could have phrased that sentence better. Tell someone how perfect OpenOffice is and at the first hint of trouble you'll look like a liar. Under-promise and over-deliver.
And in gods name, stop with the "microsoft owns your soul" rants.
Microsoft is moving as fast as they think they can afford to a subscription model. If this is implemented, then people will literally be paying a monthly vig to Microsoft just to access their own data. So no, they don't own your soul, but they will own your letters to grandma (in the sense that one of the rights of ownership is the ability to deny access).
If OSS is going to 'empower' people, it won't be through a bunch of FUD and politics. Let it sink or swim on its own virtues.
Those virtues still have to be touted by someone. I used to run the network for a large architecture firm, and people asked me for software all the time. After a while you get to know people, and many of them just aren't ready to futz around with (e.g.) OpenOffice. But those who are will still need a little encouragement.
What it boils down to is that the number one thing preventing most people from learning more about software is fear, and the conviction that it's all very difficult and arcane. Before they can learning anything they need to be in a receptive state of mind.
Microsoft suggests users view hidden codes in every document they open. In Word 2002, the latest version, that can be done by selecting tools, options, then checking the "field codes" box.
Fucking Jesus. The only justification for paying hundreds of dollars a year to a software behemoth is the expectation that your software is secure and usable. What they're admitting is that their software is so insecure that you have to become an expert in (what are for most people) arcane configuration options just to make sure your software doesn't bite you in the ass.
Satirizing this stuff is almost obsolete. Your word processor can send confidential files without you knowing it? What's next, your email client and movie player? Oh... wait...
See? That's hardly even funny anymore - people expect it. Timothy's right, though - the rubber meets the road with the IT manager. When users come to you asking for an office suite for home, play up what a nightmare Microsoft malware is, and how easy and free OS software is. People are starting to get this, and OS software is going to empower them.
I've had ivies for years, and they do very well. I have a pretty bushy one at work now, with many stalks (fronds? tendrils? shoots?) over 10 feet long. It's cool to drape them over stuff.
Ivy spends a lot of time growing in the shade anyway, as it climbs trees and whatnot, so it's fairly natural for it. I've often gone more than a week without watering mine and it's been fine.
Lastly, I call the ivy "George" after the ivy from which it was cut, 10 or so years ago. That ivy came from a plant mom had in Australia in the 60s - the stuff lives forever!
Re:Dear Larry: Are you crazy?
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yowza. Blockquothe the Scareduck:
The regexp changes you're talking about in Apocalypse 5 [perl.com] will make Perl 6 deeply incompatible with existing scripts and practice....Something this radical and wrong will hurt Perl 6 adoption and will retard the acceptance of some very nifty features.
First of all, in case you missed it, one of the explicit design goals of Perl 6 is to run Perl 5 code perfectly and with no changes. If you don't want to use Perl 6 features - don't. End of story.
This makes your pithy Issawi quote pointless. Larry's not pushing the Perl mule, he's giving riders a choice of a new, different mule that many of them will like better. If you feel pushed - again, keep writing Perl 5.
Larry's said several times that he's going to break everything that needs to be broken, mercilessly, in the design of Perl 6. Only those to whom this appeals need come along for the ride. I think your hysteria is misplaced.
Thanks for the tip. I'd thought about setting up my own style sheet, but I kind of like seeing s. I've only seen one in about a year browsing with Mozilla, and now it's cool to see how little the tag is actually used. Maybe if people start using it again I'll have to disable it; right now it's like a window into a forgotten world.
Yeah, I just noticed a couple days ago. There was some blinking text on a NOAA page, and I thought, "Java? JavaScript?" I felt the icy hand of death on my spine when I checked the source and found a blink tag. Man, that's evil.
You have a point, but perhaps it's not the point you think you have:)
Two methods:
Code to standards.
Test on the platforms your audience uses.
This is very, very different from:
Code to Platform X (e.g. IE6, Mozilla, whatever).
Test on all the other platforms.
To paraphrase Agent Smith, "One of those development paths has a future. One does not." The difference is that the second method is chasing a moving target controlled by a profit- and market-share-driven enterprise for its own benefit. Your skills are tied to that company, and to the next version of that company's product. If Platform X has a whiz-bang feature you think you need, then you have to (a) create a nasty work-around for all the other platforms, or (b) ignore all the other platforms and put a "I'm a slave to^W^W^W^WBest viewed with Platform X" on your site.
Another Matrix paraphrase: "We've been down that road and we know exactly where it leads." It leads straight to the fucking <BLINK> tag and another 200% workload increase for web developers. The first method Just Works, and it works for the right reasons.
No one company controls the Web, and no sensible developer codes first to a product rather than a standard.
Cool - thanks for replying. If your words were taken out of context, then my "idiot" label was directed at your words, not you.
The point I was trying to get across was that non-MS browser developers should co-opt Microsoft's proprietary extensions strategy and use it against them!
We've already tried this, and all I got was a lousy <BLINK> tag. This would end up, again, with the industry being led around by Microsoft. Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Konqueror - none of these organizations can (heck, all of them combined can't) throw the money and manpower at a browser that Microsoft can. If these poor companies keep trying to play catch-up, Microsoft will out-embrace-and-extend^W^W^Winnovate them. It's the Cold War all over again - build as many nukes as you can and try to bankrupt the other guy. What a fucking waste.
Thanks in large part to the WaSP & friends, we've reached a bit of a cease-fire. Everyone's writing browsers to standards, and some people are adding their own little features. As long as Microsoft supports the standards, I don't care how many new features they add. This means that I can markup a page to standards and it works, period. I get goose-bumps just thinking about it.
If a web site uses new proprietory Microsoft features, then they can catch hell from the community. We don't have to get Microsoft to stop making the Kool-Aid, we can settle for getting individual web developers to kick the habit.
Playing follow-the-leader with the richest software company on the planet is a Bad, Bad business model. It's not competing, it's not "turning the tide" - it's a sure-fire recipe for getting buried.
Have you tried writing advanced web code for multiple browsers?
Yes, actually. I've been doing it for a living for 6 years. I'm as aware as anyone of the browser quirks and incompatibilities. I know that you can't just code to standards and upload. But my point is still true - now, more than ever before, a 100% standards-compliant web page has more chance of appearing and working correctly in every modern browser.
We'll never have 100% compliance across all browsers, and we'll always have to test browsers before we ship markup. But marking up to standards is The Right Way, and thanks to browser makers following standards I'm spending less and less time hacking workarounds and more time designing and producing.
I do capability-sniffing in some code, and I hate it - but that's progress over browser-sniffing. I developed an intranet many years back and flat-out told the company, "You have to use IE4+ or it won't work." With a standard desktop, the company and I agreed this was ok because it saved a lot of development and debugging. Today I could create the same functionality faster and have it work cross-browser.
The nature of this beast (browser development and upgrades) is that it's slow, but there is noticeable progress in the right direction. Can't ask for more than that in the real world.
"But ultimately, [Monte] Hurd [with Starphire Technologies] concluded, Opera and other Microsoft competitors would do better to support the technologies that the market-leading Internet Explorer browser made available, rather than focusing on industry standards.
"What these other browser makers should do is stop complaining about what Microsoft is doing and start supporting what Microsoft is supporting," Hurd said. "People out there aren't reading these specs; they're using IE."
Translation: "I'm too stupid to be part of the solution; I'd rather be part of the problem."
They talk to one web developer and this is the schmuck they get? My lord, is it any wonder the web is such a mess when professionals who should know better spout tripe like that? For the first time ever web developers can actually markup their documents to the specs and have a reasonable expectation that they'll display correctly in all the leading browsers.
Look, dammit, specs are good because they don't change with every minor revision of the program. Do you really want a web that Microsoft can lead around by the nose? News flash - IE has bugs. Should developers make their markup bug-compatible with IE, then change all their sites every time Microsoft releases a new version or bug fix?
Besides, he's contradicting himself. He complains that Opera doesn't support all of the DOM - why not instead complain that Opera doesn't support VBScript? That's a Microsoft "standard."
Slashdot Mirror
So when the poster says "14-move advantage" he means "14-stone handicap," which is huge. It's worse than that, though. A couple years ago, a dan-level player (a woman, not that it matters) beat the current computer go champion after giving it 27 stones. I can't find a bloody link right now, so you'll have to take my word for it. Go is all about pattern recognition. The game is huge - easily the most complex game that people have created (where "life" is not defined as a game
Do you even know what esoteric means? Can you give me a definition of it that applies to Perl but not, for instance, C? Very few people on this planet can program, so the activity is by definition esoteric.
Now, I bet you mean that Perl is idiosyncratic, which is another thing entirely. It certainly is, especially compared with say Python, which is very structured. But here we get back to programmer efficiency. Perl's motto is, "There's more than one way to do it." If you can't handle the complexity, you're free to do it your own way. Even if your own way is using another language. Many Perl programmers swear by the language's flexibility and power; those people who prefer more restricted languages are free to use them.
I hope you realize, in retrospect, what a silly statement that is. Yes, poorly-written Perl is hard to maintain. Reply and give me a list of languages that make shitty code easy to maintain, eh?
Your comment about bugs is just as silly. Good programmers write good code; poor programmers write poor code and then blame their tools.
GAs and Perl are a great fit; it's precisely because they're both so alive that they work well together. A highly structured language would make it more difficult to do all sorts of wierd shit that you're not "supposed" to do. GAs are developing faster than the languages we use to describe them. It only makes sense to use the most expressive, idiomatic languages we have to manipulate them.
Quoth the anonymous one: You have exactly zero proof that this will be effective, and I have a few points you don't appear to have considered.
Protests and civil disobedience depend largely on appeals to the "good side" of human nature. GandhiThe Mahatma and his followers were successful by-and-large because the Brits couldn't justify their actions to the rest of the world. Modern mass media played a huge role in Gandhi's success. There was tremendous pressure from home and the rest of the world to stop the brutality of British colonial rule.
Now, some of this brutality was carefully provoked by Gandhi & Co. specifically to discredit the Brits in the eyes of their own citizens and the rest of the world. Much like the war in Vietnam, once the public saw what was happening they had little stomach for it.
So what am I ranting about? What we need to learn about this is that the problem with protest is how you spin it in the media. Gandhi knew this, and you should learn it. Unarmed young men getting beaten is a sympathetic image, and impossible to deny. The excuse of, "They walked into my club" (while true), doesn't work as well when the blood is on their faces, but your hands and uniforms.
Digitally, however, no one gets hurt. Great. But no-risk protests don't work because you only win if the public sympathizes with you, and who's going to sympathize with a bunch of P2P geeks mailbombing Congress? No one - you'll be called a group of anarchist, terrorist hackers trying to interfere with the duties of the government.
If you were getting the shit kicked out of you on the Capitol steps it wouldn't matter what they called you - you're the one doing the bleeding, so you're going to get the sympathy.
But your plan entails no bleeding. No risk at all, you say. If Gandhi's followers had all stayed home and written polite letters, even in great volume, they would have gotten nowhere. No risk, no reward.
Knock-knock
:)
Who's there?
Knock-knock
Who's there?
Knock-knock
Who's there?
Knock-knock
Who's there?
Philip Glass
Glass-bashing aside, yes, these are some of the most beautiful movies ever made. With the "mute" on
James Morrow wrote a beautiful novel called The Wine of Violence partly about the cathartic effects of violent fantasy. Morrow is probably the best satirical writer in English, and one of the best since Jonathan Swift.
:)
Briefly, a spaceship returning to Earth stumbles upon a planet where people live in harmony inside a walled city. There's no violence, physical or psychological, at all. Periodically these people go to special temples and live out their most violent fantasies in virtual reality; the ecto-plasmic by-product of this fantasy is called "noctus" and it pours out to surround the walls of the city.
See, the wastelands around the city are populated by the brain-eaters, humanoids who indulge their violent tendancies to the extreme. Problematically, the crew of the ship must convince the peaceful city-folk to wage war on the brain-eaters so they can return to their ship and escape.
This plot is mostly a hanger for Morrow's explorations of the nature of humanity and violence. Morrow's other writings are also fascinating. He's one of three or four SF authors I'll buy in hardback 'cause I can't wait for paper.
Heh - high-five, dude. Science marches on :)
For rendering speed, let me point you to a little test I just ran and posted elsewhere in this thread. I'm not a zealot one way or the other, and I've use Mozilla exclusively for over a year, but IE spanks Mozilla at rendering. If you think I'm confusing rendering speed with start speed, read the post.
In the most recent versions of both browsers I just opened the most recent MySQL manual - over 2MB of HTML in one file. My machine's a Duron 750 with 512MB, running Win2k. I timed rendering speed only - the file is served locally, and the browsers already started - I navigated to the file from a link on an otherwise blank (local) page. I timed from when I clicked the link:
- IE: 1.5 seconds
- Mozilla: 8 seconds
In short, Mozilla has a long way to go before it renders pages faster than IE.Tell me, is it too much trouble for the editors to make sure the interview is actually readable? That the questions are correctly broken out as such, and not mixed with the previous answers? Can't Slashdot even proof its own content?
[ Pause for laughter ]
My 72yo mother uses a reel mower, and she loves it. It's easy to push, does a great job with the grass, and is quiet. You have to mow a little more often, since it mulches the clippings and doesn't work as well in long grass. Great solution, though.
You'd have a point except for context - we're clearly talking about user-land tools here, not servers. Besides, Apache's interface is perfect for its intended audience.
I love competition. Look at graphics cards: ATI has just overtaken nVidia, who overtook 3dfx, who overtook Matrox, who overtook ATI ... The big winner is the citizen with her wallet, getting an order of magnitude performance increase, for similar cost, every couple years.
I started doing desktop publishing with PageMaker 4, which was right before Quark started to really kick their butts in PC-land. Adobe bought PageMaker from Aldus, who'd invested a lot of effort in working with designers and creating a great product. Adobe got complacent and sat on their ass, with the result that Quark crossed platforms and ate their lunch. Now they're coming back with InDesign, which has some great features and usability enhancements that Quark can't touch (OS X support aside).
Another thing helping Adobe is their frankly brilliant positioning of PDF. The network effect of PDF is huge - many print shops are taking files in PDF for complex jobs, and our local paper (The Oregonian - not high class, but not little) asks for ads in PDF. PS is still the standard, but PDF is a nice intermediary. Adobe's turning it into the XML of page layout and design.
Random thought: Artistic and design tools is the one of the hardest areas for OSS to compete, because these programs (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, etc.) are all about interface and polish. I'm not saying that OSS can't do this, just that it takes a strong vision and committed management to pull off this type of software.
Anyone want to lay odds on Adobe porting it's suite to Linux? OS X support could pull that argument in either direction.
I'm not saying we should lie to anyone. You're right that disapointed expectations harm your case in both the short and long terms, and perhaps I could have phrased that sentence better. Tell someone how perfect OpenOffice is and at the first hint of trouble you'll look like a liar. Under-promise and over-deliver.
Microsoft is moving as fast as they think they can afford to a subscription model. If this is implemented, then people will literally be paying a monthly vig to Microsoft just to access their own data. So no, they don't own your soul, but they will own your letters to grandma (in the sense that one of the rights of ownership is the ability to deny access).
Those virtues still have to be touted by someone. I used to run the network for a large architecture firm, and people asked me for software all the time. After a while you get to know people, and many of them just aren't ready to futz around with (e.g.) OpenOffice. But those who are will still need a little encouragement.
What it boils down to is that the number one thing preventing most people from learning more about software is fear, and the conviction that it's all very difficult and arcane. Before they can learning anything they need to be in a receptive state of mind.
Satirizing this stuff is almost obsolete. Your word processor can send confidential files without you knowing it? What's next, your email client and movie player? Oh
See? That's hardly even funny anymore - people expect it. Timothy's right, though - the rubber meets the road with the IT manager. When users come to you asking for an office suite for home, play up what a nightmare Microsoft malware is, and how easy and free OS software is. People are starting to get this, and OS software is going to empower them.
I've had ivies for years, and they do very well. I have a pretty bushy one at work now, with many stalks (fronds? tendrils? shoots?) over 10 feet long. It's cool to drape them over stuff.
Ivy spends a lot of time growing in the shade anyway, as it climbs trees and whatnot, so it's fairly natural for it. I've often gone more than a week without watering mine and it's been fine.
Lastly, I call the ivy "George" after the ivy from which it was cut, 10 or so years ago. That ivy came from a plant mom had in Australia in the 60s - the stuff lives forever!
This makes your pithy Issawi quote pointless. Larry's not pushing the Perl mule, he's giving riders a choice of a new, different mule that many of them will like better. If you feel pushed - again, keep writing Perl 5.
Larry's said several times that he's going to break everything that needs to be broken, mercilessly, in the design of Perl 6. Only those to whom this appeals need come along for the ride. I think your hysteria is misplaced.
It's so good, it gets two reviews!
Thanks for the tip. I'd thought about setting up my own style sheet, but I kind of like seeing s. I've only seen one in about a year browsing with Mozilla, and now it's cool to see how little the tag is actually used. Maybe if people start using it again I'll have to disable it; right now it's like a window into a forgotten world.
Yeah, I just noticed a couple days ago. There was some blinking text on a NOAA page, and I thought, "Java? JavaScript?" I felt the icy hand of death on my spine when I checked the source and found a blink tag. Man, that's evil.
Two methods:
- Code to standards.
- Test on the platforms your audience uses.
This is very, very different from:- Code to Platform X (e.g. IE6, Mozilla, whatever).
- Test on all the other platforms.
To paraphrase Agent Smith, "One of those development paths has a future. One does not." The difference is that the second method is chasing a moving target controlled by a profit- and market-share-driven enterprise for its own benefit. Your skills are tied to that company, and to the next version of that company's product. If Platform X has a whiz-bang feature you think you need, then you have to (a) create a nasty work-around for all the other platforms, or (b) ignore all the other platforms and put a "I'm a slave to^W^W^W^WBest viewed with Platform X" on your site.Another Matrix paraphrase: "We've been down that road and we know exactly where it leads." It leads straight to the fucking <BLINK> tag and another 200% workload increase for web developers. The first method Just Works, and it works for the right reasons.
No one company controls the Web, and no sensible developer codes first to a product rather than a standard.
Thanks in large part to the WaSP & friends, we've reached a bit of a cease-fire. Everyone's writing browsers to standards, and some people are adding their own little features. As long as Microsoft supports the standards, I don't care how many new features they add. This means that I can markup a page to standards and it works, period. I get goose-bumps just thinking about it.
If a web site uses new proprietory Microsoft features, then they can catch hell from the community. We don't have to get Microsoft to stop making the Kool-Aid, we can settle for getting individual web developers to kick the habit.
Playing follow-the-leader with the richest software company on the planet is a Bad, Bad business model. It's not competing, it's not "turning the tide" - it's a sure-fire recipe for getting buried.
We'll never have 100% compliance across all browsers, and we'll always have to test browsers before we ship markup. But marking up to standards is The Right Way, and thanks to browser makers following standards I'm spending less and less time hacking workarounds and more time designing and producing.
I do capability-sniffing in some code, and I hate it - but that's progress over browser-sniffing. I developed an intranet many years back and flat-out told the company, "You have to use IE4+ or it won't work." With a standard desktop, the company and I agreed this was ok because it saved a lot of development and debugging. Today I could create the same functionality faster and have it work cross-browser.
The nature of this beast (browser development and upgrades) is that it's slow, but there is noticeable progress in the right direction. Can't ask for more than that in the real world.
They talk to one web developer and this is the schmuck they get? My lord, is it any wonder the web is such a mess when professionals who should know better spout tripe like that? For the first time ever web developers can actually markup their documents to the specs and have a reasonable expectation that they'll display correctly in all the leading browsers.
Look, dammit, specs are good because they don't change with every minor revision of the program. Do you really want a web that Microsoft can lead around by the nose? News flash - IE has bugs. Should developers make their markup bug-compatible with IE, then change all their sites every time Microsoft releases a new version or bug fix?
Besides, he's contradicting himself. He complains that Opera doesn't support all of the DOM - why not instead complain that Opera doesn't support VBScript? That's a Microsoft "standard."