The w3c could have avoided millions of man-years of developer pain by simply getting a little backbone and bullying browser providers that aren't supporting the standards (oh, yeah, they call them recommendations).
That, and perhaps some reference renderings of CSS, (X)HTML, etc. So that alternate interpretations of the standards are snuffed out well before web-developers have to code for them individually.
Many of you don't understand the point of the article. Of course, somethings are going to hard.
The question is whether or not the user is wasting effort getting past YOUR (the developer's) CRUFT-- or whether they are spending effort efficiently focusing on THEIR PROBLEMS.
For example...
If installing a piece of software means having to edit a ridiculous xml config file, many people just aren't going to do it, and for good reason.
Note to developer's: xml was NOT meant to be editted by hand. You have great tools at your disposal to automate the manipulation of xml for your users. USE THEM! Don't make people guess and struggle with config files because you are are not willing to either make SANE "out of the box" default configs or are too lazy to provide a basic wizard to make things easy.
For an instant I thought it was "redesign cascading style sheets" themselves. That would be nice.
But yeah, it could use some freshening up. Make it more web-2.0-ish, and put some more javascript on there while you're at it....and please don't forget to alienate all the squares who are still using lynx out there, too.
I find it sad that some of the comments presuppose that intellectually curious people would, of course, be well-versed in the computers as we know them today.
The world is much bigger than your pathetic tech-support landscape, fools. There are many other things to be interested in, no one can follow it all-- let alone the one particular sliver that slashdot computer-wankers live in.
Part of the problem is that "RTFM-ing" is becoming more and more intractable. There is way too much bad information out there on the web. If you want to find out how to do something, you google it and come up with 90% bullshit, then much of the remaining stuff that looks promising is incomplete, or assumes some unstated context.
Man pages don't help either. In much the same way that you can't learn a language by reading a dictionary, you can't always learn how to do something in linux by reading the man pages for the involved commands-- especially if you might not even know which commands apply.
In many cases, it makes sense to ask on a newsgroup/forum. In fact, I think the really good distros got that way because they have active and friendly forums where people can ask questions-- yes, even questions that have been already asked.
We really need to thank the European orgs that have propelled RoHS. The euro market is large enough that electronics manufacturers will/are re-tooling to comply.
I would say that the losers that can't deal with it when there is a practical cap on their "unlimited" rentals per month are the ones who are imposing their belief system on others by launching a frivolous lawsuit.
I really should make a pledge to support NPR because of shows like "This American Life".
Every once in a while I scan over some AM radio stations and come across Limbaugh or some other wack-job... All I can say is that I am very very glad to be able to listen to Ira Glass rather than some ham-fisted fathead like Limbaugh.
This reminds me of when "all you can eat" salad bars where waitresses complain about the few annoying slobs that try to push things to the limit.
Netflix has a good business model. The people who are complaining are the ones who get three DVD's, watch them or rip them, and send them back first thing in the morning only to repeat the cycle over and over again.
Those people should get a life and stop watching so much television. How many DVD's can a normal household watch in a week, anyway?
...Any way I look at it, all objections to Freenet seem to boil down to one of two things: 1. "By golly, we have to do something about all of this child pr0n!" 2. "I don't want to get in trouble with the authorities."
Basically, yes. so what?.
I tried freenet for a while a few years ago. When it was operational, the _VAST_ majority of content on there consisted of porn (including the creepy illegal kind) and a bunch of dowdy boring libertarian ranting from wack-jobs. Basically it was slightly faster than a dial-up BBS from the old days and with about as much content.
Perhaps if we lived in a country like China, it would be useful to have something like the freenet, but even so, it would be a simple matter for an oppressive government to simply "pull the plug" on such IP traffic-- or "pull the plug" on _all_ IP traffic when it _really_ matters.
I don't think it really is about any particular technology-- nor should it be.
Web 2.0, as far as I can tell, is a nexus of collaboration-focused and location-less activities. The concept of storing your personal data (for example, email, photos and documents) "in the sky" rather than on some particular computer that you own and the concept of sharing your data as though it were a document that everyone could edit has been theorized since the early days of "hyper-text".
Only now is it becoming a reality. Why? Because enough people are now on the net and the technology is cheap and accessible. In the 80's and most of the 90's we did not have that.
Why should it be the responsiblity of corporations, who's only concern is to it's shareholders, and the almighty dollar, to pay for health insurance?
It shouldn't be.
It is the repsonsibility of our government to pay for health care so that it is free and universally available. Then we don't need to think about health insurance.
The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of web-apps are actually in-house apps that have a fairly small number of concurrent users.
Sadly, thousands of dev groups all over the world are slaving away very hard at j2ee simply because, well, its a good thing to have on one's resume or because consultants can bill mega-hours by building a "scalable enterprise application".
If people were honest about their motivations and real scalability requirements, it would be clear that j2ee fits a niche market and that more rapid, easier-to-use dev frameworks like RoR fill mainstream needs.
Yes, of course, it would be nice if only competent people were "in charge". Sadly, however, not every org has the resources to hire a firm to do their IT for them.
Instead of making fun of the Tuttle-guy, we should be talking about ways to diffuse people like that.
From what I could tell, the CentOS developer only inflammed issues by writing "I feel sorry for your city" to preface his email. Instead of exchanging hot emails to each other, perhaps everyone would have saved a lot of time by exchanging a couple of friendly phone calls.
People were saying the same thing about 200MHz PC's in 1997-- you know, "that the average computer user has no need for a machine with more than 64Megs of RAM and a 166MHz Pentium processor".
The OS's, interfaces, media players, and application needs are constantly evolving.
I really disagree with the article. Computer interfaces should look good and be efficient. GUI's will always push the envelop of whatever technologies come around. If OS and software vendors aren't pushing the envelope, then they aren't working hard enough at improvement. Who cares about your lame 486's, anyway?
The author then makes the claim that nice interfaces rob the computer of processing power. I disagree. Most of the time the computer (especially desktop) is doing nothing. In anycase, if what I understand is true, upcoming MS windows and some future X implememntations will use hardware acceleration for rendering window graphics-- so, the CPU won't be under any "strain" at all.
Anyways, I paid my dues with the vt100 era. It is now a pleasure to use a nice interface. I would not have it any other way.
The Strand bookstore in NYC has 8 miles of books (I know, I have the T-shirt). Anyways, they categorize meticulously by subject and author. It works great, and it is a vast collection.
The only thing you need after the initial labor of categorizing, is discipline-- to put things back where they belong.
If you want to get fancy, make stickers for the inside front cover saying "Library of... ". This way, if you lend out the book, people won't forget who they borrowed it from.
I do the barcode thing for work (bio-samples in -80C freezers). Its not worth the hassle to scan stuff in and out of your system (let alone register it in) unless you absolutely have to do that. For a personal library, it would be a drag, and your wife and kids probably wouldn't cooperate anyway.
I don't know, but why manage something as utilitarian as a calendaring system when you can have someone else do it for you and 200 million of your closest friends in a permanent, accessible, secure and scalable way?
The old way of calendaring is to have calendar on your PC/laptop that you then "sync" with your PDA. Nice, but it is possible to do much better.
Any real calendar app must store your data on the web, allow you to share events with selected other's calendars, and provide multiple easy ways of hooking up (adding events, seeing, and being notified) by the calendar.
So far, 30boxes and some others have come close to that.
I can share share my calendar with my wife so that we can add stuff to each other's calendars as needed. There are bookmarklets that allow me to easily add an event without actually navigating to the calendar, I get an rss feed for my public events, tagging capabilities, and sms notification of events if I want. It's pretty much near ideal.
So if mozilla wants to be a player in this department, they had better be ready to provide a lot a features and hit the ground running to compete with other calendar providers and, soon, Google Calendar.
Slashdot Mirror
The w3c could have avoided millions of man-years of developer pain by simply getting a little backbone and bullying browser providers that aren't supporting the standards (oh, yeah, they call them recommendations).
That, and perhaps some reference renderings of CSS, (X)HTML, etc. So that alternate interpretations of the standards are snuffed out well before web-developers have to code for them individually.
Many of you don't understand the point of the article. Of course, somethings are going to hard.
The question is whether or not the user is wasting effort getting past YOUR (the developer's) CRUFT-- or whether they are spending effort efficiently focusing on THEIR PROBLEMS.
For example...
If installing a piece of software means having to edit a ridiculous xml config file, many people just aren't going to do it, and for good reason.
Note to developer's: xml was NOT meant to be editted by hand. You have great tools at your disposal to automate the manipulation of xml for your users. USE THEM! Don't make people guess and struggle with config files because you are are not willing to either make SANE "out of the box" default configs or are too lazy to provide a basic wizard to make things easy.
For an instant I thought it was "redesign cascading style sheets" themselves. That would be nice.
But yeah, it could use some freshening up. Make it more web-2.0-ish, and put some more javascript on there while you're at it.
A "real" company accepts that their workers may need to make personal calls, look up info on the internet and do some reading.
As long as employees get their work done and don't blow company resources, there is no harm in it. In fact, it probably helps keep morale up.
I find it sad that some of the comments presuppose that intellectually curious people would, of course, be well-versed in the computers as we know them today.
The world is much bigger than your pathetic tech-support landscape, fools. There are many other things to be interested in, no one can follow it all-- let alone the one particular sliver that slashdot computer-wankers live in.
Part of the problem is that "RTFM-ing" is becoming more and more intractable. There is way too much bad information out there on the web. If you want to find out how to do something, you google it and come up with 90% bullshit, then much of the remaining stuff that looks promising is incomplete, or assumes some unstated context.
Man pages don't help either. In much the same way that you can't learn a language by reading a dictionary, you can't always learn how to do something in linux by reading the man pages for the involved commands-- especially if you might not even know which commands apply.
In many cases, it makes sense to ask on a newsgroup/forum. In fact, I think the really good distros got that way because they have active and friendly forums where people can ask questions-- yes, even questions that have been already asked.
The future of the PDA is bright as long as it is also a phone and mp3 player.
oh yeah, on my desk, I happen to have a spool of standard 60/40 tin-lead solder-- it is quite heavy.
Guess what the 60/40 stand for.
The amounts of lead on a circuit board are NOT at all miniscule
We really need to thank the European orgs that have propelled RoHS. The euro market is large enough that electronics manufacturers will/are re-tooling to comply.
I would say that the losers that can't deal with it when there is a practical cap on their "unlimited" rentals per month are the ones who are imposing their belief system on others by launching a frivolous lawsuit.
I really should make a pledge to support NPR because of shows like "This American Life".
Every once in a while I scan over some AM radio stations and come across Limbaugh or some other wack-job... All I can say is that I am very very glad to be able to listen to Ira Glass rather than some ham-fisted fathead like Limbaugh.
This reminds me of when "all you can eat" salad bars where waitresses complain about the few annoying slobs that try to push things to the limit.
Netflix has a good business model. The people who are complaining are the ones who get three DVD's, watch them or rip them, and send them back first thing in the morning only to repeat the cycle over and over again.
Those people should get a life and stop watching so much television. How many DVD's can a normal household watch in a week, anyway?
1. "By golly, we have to do something about all of this child pr0n!"
2. "I don't want to get in trouble with the authorities."
Basically, yes. so what?.
I tried freenet for a while a few years ago. When it was operational, the _VAST_ majority of content on there consisted of porn (including the creepy illegal kind) and a bunch of dowdy boring libertarian ranting from wack-jobs. Basically it was slightly faster than a dial-up BBS from the old days and with about as much content.
Perhaps if we lived in a country like China, it would be useful to have something like the freenet, but even so, it would be a simple matter for an oppressive government to simply "pull the plug" on such IP traffic-- or "pull the plug" on _all_ IP traffic when it _really_ matters.
I don't think it really is about any particular technology-- nor should it be.
Web 2.0, as far as I can tell, is a nexus of collaboration-focused and location-less activities. The concept of storing your personal data (for example, email, photos and documents) "in the sky" rather than on some particular computer that you own and the concept of sharing your data as though it were a document that everyone could edit has been theorized since the early days of "hyper-text".
Only now is it becoming a reality. Why? Because enough people are now on the net and the technology is cheap and accessible. In the 80's and most of the 90's we did not have that.
Why should it be the responsiblity of corporations, who's only concern is to it's shareholders, and the almighty dollar, to pay for health insurance?
It shouldn't be.
It is the repsonsibility of our government to pay for health care so that it is free and universally available. Then we don't need to think about health insurance.
The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of web-apps are actually in-house apps that have a fairly small number of concurrent users.
Sadly, thousands of dev groups all over the world are slaving away very hard at j2ee simply because, well, its a good thing to have on one's resume or because consultants can bill mega-hours by building a "scalable enterprise application".
If people were honest about their motivations and real scalability requirements, it would be clear that j2ee fits a niche market and that more rapid, easier-to-use dev frameworks like RoR fill mainstream needs.
My conclusion is that the compute-intensive performance of java versus ruby does not really make much difference for the vast majority web apps.
It is not about performance. It is about developer productivity.
... May this be yet another nail in the coffin of the life-sucking tedium that is J2EE.
Yes, of course, it would be nice if only competent people were "in charge". Sadly, however, not every org has the resources to hire a firm to do their IT for them.
Instead of making fun of the Tuttle-guy, we should be talking about ways to diffuse people like that.
From what I could tell, the CentOS developer only inflammed issues by writing "I feel sorry for your city" to preface his email. Instead of exchanging hot emails to each other, perhaps everyone would have saved a lot of time by exchanging a couple of friendly phone calls.
Enough already.
People were saying the same thing about 200MHz PC's in 1997-- you know, "that the average computer user has no need for a machine with more than 64Megs of RAM and a 166MHz Pentium processor".
The OS's, interfaces, media players, and application needs are constantly evolving.
Shut up, fools, 99+% of you are going to end up using Vista anyway.
I really disagree with the article. Computer interfaces should look good and be efficient. GUI's will always push the envelop of whatever technologies come around. If OS and software vendors aren't pushing the envelope, then they aren't working hard enough at improvement. Who cares about your lame 486's, anyway?
The author then makes the claim that nice interfaces rob the computer of processing power. I disagree. Most of the time the computer (especially desktop) is doing nothing. In anycase, if what I understand is true, upcoming MS windows and some future X implememntations will use hardware acceleration for rendering window graphics-- so, the CPU won't be under any "strain" at all.
Anyways, I paid my dues with the vt100 era. It is now a pleasure to use a nice interface. I would not have it any other way.
The Strand bookstore in NYC has 8 miles of books (I know, I have the T-shirt). Anyways, they categorize meticulously by subject and author. It works great, and it is a vast collection.
The only thing you need after the initial labor of categorizing, is discipline-- to put things back where they belong.
If you want to get fancy, make stickers for the inside front cover saying "Library of
I do the barcode thing for work (bio-samples in -80C freezers). Its not worth the hassle to scan stuff in and out of your system (let alone register it in) unless you absolutely have to do that. For a personal library, it would be a drag, and your wife and kids probably wouldn't cooperate anyway.
I don't know, but why manage something as utilitarian as a calendaring system when you can have someone else do it for you and 200 million of your closest friends in a permanent, accessible, secure and scalable way?
The old way of calendaring is to have calendar on your PC/laptop that you then "sync" with your PDA. Nice, but it is possible to do much better.
Any real calendar app must store your data on the web, allow you to share events with selected other's calendars, and provide multiple easy ways of hooking up (adding events, seeing, and being notified) by the calendar.
So far, 30boxes and some others have come close to that.
I can share share my calendar with my wife so that we can add stuff to each other's calendars as needed. There are bookmarklets that allow me to easily add an event without actually navigating to the calendar, I get an rss feed for my public events, tagging capabilities, and sms notification of events if I want. It's pretty much near ideal.
So if mozilla wants to be a player in this department, they had better be ready to provide a lot a features and hit the ground running to compete with other calendar providers and, soon, Google Calendar.