So, I'm going to use a clunky piece of shit web app when I could be using a real binary, because there's this 1% of time that I need email from somewhere other than my own machines...
Who said it was going to be a "clunky piece of shit?" People are working hard to make webapps better, and they're succeeding. Visual effects are evolving rapidly, and you can already try a very good first gen webapp.
Allow me to propose an alternate theory: I'll use a real binary until the corporations decide that they don't Trust my machine to run them, and use web based applications only when I'm actually away from machines that can support a real application.
Obviously, I didn't say that binaries were going to be phased out. That makes no sense. I think more and more applications well go webified.
It's not about trust though. It's about convenience for both user and developer. Anyone who uses gmail as their primary email will give you a laundry list of reasons why they like it more, and one of them that's always near the top of the list is that they have one email box and interface even when they're traveling. Plus, you never need to worry about updates or learning a new interface for the "(win|mac|linux) port" again. The idea of a machine specific binary goes away entirely, which means more people can use the app under more conditions. And, it means that developers can spend more time making their software great instead of wasting time porting.
I think that the future for things like email and other applications that are pretty unique per user (as in, I get no use from your email client) is portable applications, like portable thunderbird. USB keys are becoming cheaper, faster, and support more ubiquitous.
Mozilla derivatives is that they use XUL, which is essentially XML. Your pet choice is already a web application replayed locally. If everyone adopted XUL today (which I'm not saying they should), we could all make Thunderbird as a online-distributed webapp.
There's no need to deal with the slowness of a text dissemination system shoehorned to other duties when you really want an application that does something completely different.
What do you think webapps are? They're text. Nothing is shoehorning anything here. And, funny that you mention something "completely different0" from email. I was under the impression that email was just text, images, and savable attachments. Maps to the web pretty darn well.
Just because many webapps suck doesn't mean that they have to suck. Cross platform rich-client behavior is already becoming a reality on web browsers. There are still holdups, but at the rate their being surmounted, it's only a matter of time.
One thing that TFA does mention is the web-ification of everything. I think this is extremely likely. Web apps are the wave of the future for several reasons, some of which are not immediately obvious.
The most obvious reason is, of course, easy (perhaps "easier" is appropriate) cross-platform deployment. Another is more convenience for the user. Sure, it may be harder to use webmail compared to conventional mail apps, but it follows me where I go.
From the software publisher side, webapps are inhernetly better than desktop apps. You don't get my code (the code that matters, anyways), you have to agree to my terms, it is inherently subscription based, updates are global and unified, and tech support is easier.
We have all these elaborate and evil copyright laws to give us what webapps inherently give us. While webapps currently suffer from technical limitiations, these will eventually be solved. It is not unimaginable to see something like Photoshop as a webapp in 5-10 years.
Let's talk about this. I think some of yoru criticisms are unfair, they are already problems with Apple's offerings.
1. I buy an x86 Mac, and my favorite PPC Mac software does not run well under emulation, and the vendor has gone out of business.
Don't blame Apple for that one, buddy. Apple's been telling people not to use raw altivec instruction codes for years. Since 10.1, they've had hand tuned vector and LAPACK libraries, along with a bunch of other stuff, in Accelerate.framework. They even have a fast C structure over BLAS (called cblas).
The only reason the app wouldn't run passably under the dynamic translation is because they chose to use Altivec codes directly, which they were told not to do.
2. . . . or, the vendor supplies an x86 version, but only as a new version, with a disagreeable feature-set.
That's suicide for the vendor. Apple is moving away from PPC, not straddling the line. Besides, 90% of the time, the feature sets will be identical. Maybe you haven't noticed, but the fat binary is just a checkbox click away.
3. ... or, the new version requires significant customization development effort to implement on your system.
Crappy software is crappy software. Apple's software community really prides itself on quality releases (outside of the wonderful world of RB, of course). While this is possible, I doubt the mac developer community will allow it.
4. . . . or, the new version has an onerous licensing scheme.
That's a problem even if you don't switch. Does being on PPC or Intel really change this potential gotcha in all software licensing? Even libraries currently under the GPL can suffer this fate.
5. . . or, the new version does not work with old third-party plugins, triggering upgrade purchases from them as well, (wash, rinse, repeat all of these scenarios for each independent vendor).
Except for altivec stuff, the mixed plugin scheme works. Rosetta does the translation transparently. But upgrade purchases are the bread and butter of the mac software community. How exactly is this any worse than normal?
I'm certainly not confident that either:
1) I'll be able to continue using up to date software on my recently purchased dual G5, 5-7 years from now. Which was my intention, when I purchased it, given that my last two Macintoshes lasted over similar timespans (though my Beige was forced into retirement due to lack of full OS X support).
That is regrettable. My dual G4 has lasted 5 years now, and I still don't feel terribly outdated using it. But, we're spoiled. Look at it this way... your next mac is likely to be more upgradeable, because you can use more mainstream hardware. Intel and the PC hardware world are way more into incremental enhancement than IBM/Motorolla ever was.
2) If I update my hardware to an x86 Mac, I'll be able to run all of my current software, or find suitable ported replacements at no cost.
You should. It is really That Easy(tm) for most developers. If they Broke The Rules, when they come back into Following The Rules, they naturally embrace PPC compatibility along with Intel compatibility.
Three things I *am* certain of:
1) CD ripping will not be as fast on the new hardware.
2) DVD encoding will not be anywhere near as fast on the new hardware.
Could we please wait and see more about the rumored SIMD enhancements in Yonah before we ring the bell on this one? The Altivec is fast, man, but it's murderous to work with. If Intel can get close to the same speed with their existing setup, I'd actually like it more than the altivec. Some of intels floating point and SIMD features are really neat, they just suffer on speed when compared.
The INFAMOUS Apple mouse is NOT part of OSX, it is not included with OSX, it is not necessary to use OSX, and it is not necessary to use a Mac. If you don't like having just one button then, GASP, buy a mouse with two, or three, or even five!
I suggest the 5 button mouse. Expose becomes incredibly useful when you start mapping frequently used expose runs to the mouse. I keep this-apps-windows and dashboard on my mouse on buttons 4 and 5, and use corners for all-apps and desktop.
While OSX may not be sold with any assumptions about your mouse, some of its features really get better when using a many-buttoned mouse. I think this is as it should be.
Okay, people. Part of the point here is that this issue is still being decided.
With that in mind, please support Atom in your future projects. Atom really is a better user experience for end users, and it's better specified and easier to work with as a developer.
The RSS folks are great, and they've put in a ton of hard work, but the Atom spec is Just Better right now, and offers at lot more bang for the developmental buck, not to mention it handles feed aggregations much better.
IE, Firefox/Sage and Safari all support Atom 1.0. So there is no reason not to use it!
For one, exposure is higher for media-related issues on the mac platform. Apple has been courted by video editors, graphic designers and artists for a long time.
Many of these folks may not know an USB hub from a torque converter, but they are surprisingly aware of media-related issues. Plus, the apple community is currently far more tight-knit than the windows community (how many casual mac users still read mac rumor sites, for example? Many!). Word of this sort of thing would spread quickly.
This might change in the future, but it wouldn't fly today, nor in the immediate future.
Apple won't do something like this because they can't afford to. Even minor issues that are only tangentially under their control, like a manufacturing defect that takes some time to appear, get them killed within their own userbase. People talk about the fanaticism of mac users, but said people should go look on the Apple support forums or users groups sometimes. People are very passionate about their macs, and that sword cuts both ways. When something is wrong, Apple gets reamed over it.
That doesn't mean it won't eventually happen. Maybe the MPAA will love this so much that they refuse to listen to anyone else and they demand that all vendors do it. Then Apple might be forced to. But it won't happen unless push comes to shove.
AMD doesn't need to certify anything. They usually provide some sort of reference chipset when they release a new platform, but for the most part it's the vendors that do the testing.
See, therein lies the problem. Intel provides a service that AMD doesn't. Not everyone wants this service, which is why AMD continues. But it's a pretty nice service when you want to sell certain kinds of devices.
You can get high performance AMD boxes from Sun, HP, and IBM, among lots of others. I guarantee that these servers are just as stable as any Intel server.
I know. At work, we have one in the lab. It's an awesome machine. But the vendors spent money to build and test it. More money than an intel-based solution. This isn't just because of Intel's insane discounts.
Intel doesn't sell their processors because of their chipsets. They sell them because of their name.
I'd be a fool if I suggested that Intel didn't sell a ton of units based on brand recognition. The original subject was why Apple didn't go AMD to start, and the answer to that is that Apple's business plants seem to care a lot about portable devices and laptops, which Intel is a better supplier for right now. They can deliver an entire laptop setup sans drives and cards, with a low power chip. AMD doesn't really compete well in this space yet.
I still am hoping that we see Opteron macs myself, I'd take an opteron as a nearly-fair trade for a G5. We'll see how things go. I'd like nothing more than to see AMD succeed.
If IT more IT management was willing to buy on technical merit instead of brand names, there'd be a lot more Opteron servers out there right now.
Amen to that. I'm still trying to convince our customer to buy AMD for our clustered linux systems.
And what desktop is that? It sure as hell can't be Windows.
Mac OS X. Couldn't you guess?
The XMLHttpRequest isn't a web standard. To quote w3c: "The XMLHttpRequest object is not a W3C standard."
XMLHttpRequest is a de facto standard. Opera, Firefox/Mozilla, Internet Explorer and Safari support it. It can safely degrade to non-enabled browsers as regular GETs. Google is backing it. It will be a standard soon, since many people consider it to be superior to the Load And Save stuff that the W3C drafted.
I'm not talking about google
Then why did you mention them? Because you did... mention them.
I'm talking about those sites who have a product to sell but which require specific browsers. I don't have this problem with Amazon or any of the other major retailers. But I find it every so often with the same guys. Like yesterday trying to buy a piece of software from this guy, where the "checkout now" button wasn't even a link. Did I need flash loaded? Was he trying to do something too fancy in javascript? I have no idea, and I wasn't about to read through the page source to find out. I simply left instead.
Finding one people, or even a lot of people, who suck doesn't mean you have a rational basis in condemning the whole group. You were better off approaching the technical tack instead of showing off your own spite and prejudice.
His site sucked and he didn't get your money. What more do you want? That is economics at its best. Hopefully he'll get the message and shape up or ship out of the industry.
I know I pay a price for it. If I didn't want to pay the price then I would be just another good little sheep with Windows and Internet Explorer eating McDonalds hamburgers and laughing at Friends episodes and listening to Britney Spears. The price to be a clone is oh so small...
I fail to see how this supports your claim that Web Developers suck. If anything, it makes me believe that you have issues.
Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, you are not more deserving of oxygen, sex, or money just because you don't use Windows. Your choice of OS doesn't make you any less a follower.
First, I use FreeBSD instead of Linux. Second, I have no problems playing movies, either off of DVDs, or as quicktime/mpg/rp/etc files. Even within Konqueror if I wish.
Yay for you? Times change. Your platform choice gives you certain criteria for what you can and can't do. You also give up most games for Windows on that setup. If you decide to pay the price, it's considered in poor taste to bitch about it. When I was using Linux as my primary, the movie and P2P music scene was just blossoming and I couldn't participate. Accept it. You made the decision.
Let's sum things up here:
If your browser can't keep up with the de-facto standard, use a different browser. If you refuse to, then don't bitch because yours can't keep up.
Just because some web developers suck doesn't mean you get to condemn the whole lot. There are some talented people out there amongst the chaff. This is no different from the software industry.
Your OS does not make you a better or worse person. What you do with it is what counts.
When Firefox is fully and completely integrated into my desktop, I'll upgrade to it. Until then using it is a downgrade.
Funny. My desktop environment integrates with any browser. You seem to have a collection of me-too feature-poor software. Which is not to say that KDE isn't getting there, but it's telling that you still have to use Konqueror.
but it's a huge stretch to say the same about GMail or Blogger. Sheesh, if you can make it work in ancient Internet Exploders, you can make it work in Konqueror and Safari!
It does work in Safari. That's the sad part. XMLHttpRequest() is important, and Konqueror's implementation is different enough that it doesn't work. Sorry, that's where the buck stops.
Google has rejected me as a customer, so I feel justified in rejecting them as a vendor. I won't apologize about it either. Make a chipset that won't work on the number two Linux distro and you'll never hear the end of it, but write website that won't display on the number two Linux browser and you get praised for your business acumen. Go figure.
Difference being, you can change to a compliant browser for free!. You claim it'd be a downgrade, but obvious the marginally better desktop integration with your feature-poor desktop environment is worth more to you than compatibility with these products.
Google hasn't rejected you as a customer. They never gave you a bill to begin with. For you to have the nerve that they come beat down your door to give you a free product is telling about your personality.
You are in the fringe of the desktop world, and it's not the leading edge. It is the Free Edge, and you're going to pay a price for it. When I ran Linux as my primary, I had to give up things too, like playing movies.
I got fed up. Maybe you'll come to the same conclusion, eventually.
I didn't say AMD sucked. I said that all the extra crap you have to buy from companies like VIA sucked. Please disengage your rabid AMD fanboy module.
Ethical concerns aside, for many companies Intel is such a desirable choice because they do the testing with components and certify a complete package for you. That's expensive work, but Intel does it because they know that people will pay for it.
Sure, I'd love to see AMD in macs. I have fond memories of my last AMD machine. But, only if AMD can give us a good, inexpensive motherboard that they certify and test. If AMD wants to compete on this front, they're going to need to offer a package deal.
Back to ethics, it's entirely possible that Intel has crossed a major line and is due for a DOJ-powered slap, but I'm going to reserve judgement on that until I see more evidence. Just because AMD says they are being anti-competitive doesn't prove it. We'll know soon enough.
Not very many. And STILL Google Maps and GMail don't support my browser!
It's not like someone is forcing you to not upgrade. It's not even like they could reasonably downgrade to make Konqueror work, it just doesn't support everything that they require to work at a basic level. This is tantamount to complaining that Doom3 doesn't run on your Amiga. Duh! It's not like upgrading costs any money.
How does your choice of minority browser make Web Developers any less programmers? It's not their fault they have a quadzillion target platforms. Something has to give, and targets like the Zaurus or Konqueror are first to go.
In other words, if you're experiencing pain migrating from 2.95 to 3.x, you're doing something wrong.
My original analogy, which I expressed poorly, was that it's like going back and forth between the two. But the "wrong thing" in our case was having a legacy codebase written by a crappy subcontractor (yay politics!).
Making websites layout properly is harder than unit testing many kinds of conventional software in most cases. It cannot be automated, it tends to be very sketchy, targets change frequently, and the fixes for some tools breaks others. The "proper subset" of features that you mentioned earlier is a massive step backwards for the web, back to old HTML4. I don't think anyone wants that.
There are no excuses for not testing under IE, FF, NS, Safari, Opera and Konqueror.
Many people you're calling 'programmers' don't even unit test. I think that it's unethical to try and even sell a product written in C++ that doesn't have at least a minimal-requirement checking unit test suite. Hell, I won't even publish open source work without one!
If your argument is, "People who don't test don't deserve to be called programmers." then I'm with you, sure. Testing is important. But that's not what you said. You said "Web Developers" are not programmers. It's an uninformed, biased, incorrect stereotype that harkens back to the old "scripting language" silliness.
Actually, most perl hackers back in the early nineties weren't "real" programmers. Back then perl was treated as just a fancy awk.
I said mid-ninties. By 1996, people were catching on to what Perl was and how important it was.
As a Konqueror user, every day I encounter several sites that have the moral equivalent of "fuck you for not using internet explorer.".
Actually it's more like, "Fuck you for not using Firefox. It's free, it's fine. What the fuck is your problem?"
No one is forcing you to use Konqueror. You can sit here and praise it to the skies, but the simple truth is that it's feature poor, and you know it. If Google could support Konqueror, you know they would, and they'd crow about it. It'd score big points with the Slashdot crowd. But they can't.
If you want me to drop the attitude, stop calling those people "developers".If I did as a software developer what they did as web developers, I would be fired.
You realize that carpenters say something similar about software developers too, right?
Our job is easy. Support a few platforms. You're probably only writing with one GUI toolkit. Maybe a few font rendering errors or layout errors with the GUI. One two three binary targets for most projects. Maybe 5 if you're really streching for legacy hardware.
Application & System Development is older, and has more refined tools. We also have to worry less about how things "look" under the covers. A good webapp not only has to be fast, scalable, multi-platform and bug-free... it has to be pretty as well.
They're developers. Some of them suck, some of them are good. Like our field, it's chok full of people who suck. We have Java-Wageslaves, they have PHP-teens. We have Alan Cox, they have Eric Meyer. It all works out.
In case you were meaning "javascript", then it's possible you may be correct. But that's still irrelevant to a webpage, because the javascript there is 90% snippets stuck in the middle of markup. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a complete real world application written in javascript.
Google Maps, GMail and many Rails sites beg to differ.
Actually, that migration took me all of thirty seconds. If you have correct code for 2.95 it will build without problem on 3.x. The hard part is migrating 3.x code to 2.95. But even there if you use a subset of C++ you're still not going to run into problems.
Err, uh.. GCC2.95 let you get away with a lot of stuff that GCC3 called you on. Same with GCC3->4. Anyone with a large legacy codebase felt what our shop felt.
... That's because you're not writing with a proper subset of the standard. You can't use the full standard, because not everyone supports it, but you can write to a subset of the standard and have everyone support it.
Err... umm... how does this relate to your point that web developers are not real developers? If anything, you're defending them. Who decided what "proper subset" is correct? How do you even know? Many bugs only appear when combined with others. And the worst part is the muderously inconsisten rendering of IE. I've seen people with nearly identical XP machines, but script.aculo.us crashed IE on one, but worked fine on the other.
You might not be able to do flash-happy pages this way, but that won't stop you from delivering actual usable content.
Since when has "content" been the primary goal of modern web development? It cracks me up when people talk this way. Look, we all can deliver content. It's easy. The hard part is delivering web applications. If you want to buy and sell things online, you're in for a whole new ballgame.
No, I mean testing as in "it's been tested on the browser I use". All too many of you web developers think that if you've tested on Internet Explorer then you're done.
First, I develop C++ apps for Linux by day. Web Development is a sidejob. And second, since most web work is done by consultants, we give our clients what they paid for. I'd strenuously object when someone says, "We only want IE support." It's just bad practice. But at the end of the day, it's their money to spend.
A few of your more enlightened peers will even test on Firefox. But hardly any of you test on Opera, Safari, Konqueror, any of the various PDA/phone browers, Lynx, Links, etc.
Firefox, IE6 and Safari are the base targets these days. Most everyone tests on these (IE or Safari may be left out depending on the machine bias of the shop or consultant). Heck, I even snuck in a check with Konqueror.
But no one is going to test for PDA and phones unless they're an important target. That cruft accumulates and washes away with the regularity of the tides. Everyone has different firmware versions. Clients don't care about them.
Why should they? Why should I test on a PDA or Cellphone that won't even react the same way in 3 months? Or that will be old news and replaced in 6? My fallback plan is plain-jane HTML, no frills. If you don't like the look of it, get on a real web browser and stop complaining.
Or if you want to bitch at someone, bitch at your firmware vendor for making a browser that deviates so far from the standard that it's impossible to target reasonably.
To me, your stance is every bit as stupid and smallminded as the stance of folks who ridiculed perl hackers back in the mid-ninties for "not being real programmers." Those folks built the foundation of IT and the Web as we know it, all the while being made fun of by smug, self-satisfied people with your attitude.
Maybe it's because they're not really developers? They like to pretend they are, but they're not.
Some of the most talented developers I know work heavily with web applications. Are they any less programmers because you're suffering from reverse domain envy?
Writing javascript no more makes them developers than writing shell scripts would. And of course, HTML and CSS are *NOT* programming languages!
Would it shock you to know that, on the spectrum of languages, Javascript is actually much closer to Smalltalk, Ruby, Lisp and OCaml than Java is? Javascript is a fully Object Oriented language, complete with anonymous functions and a prototype-based class system that is extremely powerful?
And XHTML is just XML by another name. Get over yourself.
Would it hurt you if I told you that it's probably a better language design than C++ and Java? Imagine what a developer like you and I has to go through migrating a C++ project from GCC2.95 to GCC3. Now do that every day just to make things work.
Some of them may be graphic design weefles, but not all. Web engineers deserve respect, be they EJB Machines or Rails Honchos.
Real developers test their code. Web "developers" do not. At best they'll make sure their pages work with Internet Explorer and Firefox. As if those are the only two browsers in the world. Test on last years Firefox? Hah! Don't make me laugh!
I assume you mean the HTML, CSS and JavaScript? Because the backends are usually tested very well. Java stacks and Rails have great unit test support.
It's unfair to compare the two. How exactly do you test a page layout? It's easy when I work on C++. I unit test things that have easily controllable inputs, easily recognizable outputs, and work in only one environment.
How the hell are you supposed to automate testing of HTML layouts? What heuristic makes a 1px border okay in some places, but not others? And if you can't automate the testing, then it costs A Lot of Money. When I do web consulting, I ask the customer what They Want To Pay for, and adhere to that.
The people working on the back end database and CGI interfaces might be developers, but those who write the HTML/CSS are not. Yes, there are some exception, but that only validates the rule.
Who can afford to have a separate web designer anymore?
But thanks for making arbitrary decisions on who and who is not a programmer. I'm sure loads of people appreciate it. Like the people who worked in Python in the 90s who weren't "real" programmers because they worked in a "scripting language."
You do not want to service people using the services you've described with a solution like this.
Moble devices have such a varied degree of fidelity to even the most basic HTML that all beautification is a waste of time (unless, of course, you have a specific device in mind). This also stands for Text-To-Speech. You're better off having plain HTML for these scenarios. Case in point, his solution doesn't render on my phone at all.
Why?
Because my phone gets really confused by CSS, except for a very small subset that the vendor chose to support so they could prettify their website.
If CSS delivers the style, and the HTML still delivers the content, then those will continue to work.
Web developers wish this was true, but the sad story is that it's not. There are lots of people with broken or partial implementations of CSS, to which approaches like this are actually more destructive.
Quite frankly, Javascript has better downgrade characteristics than CSS, which is sad because CSS is a wonderful standard. But people tend to feel gung ho about implementing parts of CSS, but back off from Javascript.
You can. Just don't distribute it without permission. Don't like it? Tough. That's the law.
Not to interject the topic into this discussion, but, the plaintiffs in the case are doing this because they want to hide information that is potentially damaging to their current revenue stream in a court of law.
Not exactly the kind of people you want to be defending. The fact that copyright law can be used this way suggests it is broken. The fact that it was created before our modern information economy was formed also suggests it is broken and in need of revision.
Does right of first sale apply websites? If so copyright on the internet is meaningless. Which I'm sure would make many people here very happy (although I wonder how many of them make a living from their website).
Credibility is not something you can easily steal, and the people who "get there first" tend to get the lion's share of credibility, even when competing against companies much larger than themselves.
So your cheap shot about how people on Slashdot have nothing to lose is just that, a cheap shot with no substance or truth. We're not saying that copyright laws need to be entirely abolished, but they do need to be updated to reflect our modern society and information infrastructure. The fact that we're compelled to lay unenforceable law after unenforceable law down on top of copyright law in a vain attempt to keep it afloat in its current state should be evidence enough that things need to change.
AFAIK, press releases are made by the author to be redistributed. Websites aren't.
Excuse me? What? A public website is by its very nature meant to be redistributed. It is replicated on millions of machines per day for many different purposes. If you do not agree to at least some redistribution for your website, then take it offline because it doesn't work without redistribution.
Sue the caching proxy servers! Sue people who use internet cache! Sue Proximitron users! Sue link-of-the-day sites because they helped people replicate the data. Wait, why not just sue everyone online, because they were party to the crime by using the same routers!
Does that mean I can abuse your copyright and write my own book and have your characters in it?
Nice, avoiding his point entirely. Part of copyright law is the intent with which you distribute it. This helps prevent entrapment scenarios. If you place a public site on the internet, your intent is to have it treated like a public site. This means it will be crawled by search engines, cached by proxies, linked to by interested users, downloaded for personal offline browsing, pre-cached by Earthlink and AOL services, and archived by the wayback machine.
This is the cost of doing business on the internet. This is how it works, and how it's going to continue to work. If you are not willing to express this intent with your website, take it down now.
Copyright owners have many rights. One of those rights is the ability to say what happens with their work. That work does stop at what someone does in their private home, but it does cover redistribution. Just because YOU don't want it to, doesn't mean it copyright doesn't cover it.
Bear in mind that the article is about a large insurance corporation trying to deny benefits to a group of people, using copyright law as a club to beat evidence into inadmissibility. We're not talking about chinese knockoffs ruining a poor independent artist. We're talking about Yet Another Way Out for corporate America's scumbags.
If copyright law allows this, then we need to tear it down and fix it, because I'm not willing to pay such a stiff price for a basic kind of protection that I probably can't afford to fight in court anyways.
I figured someone would politely tell me if that was one of the things that got fixed in 10.3. Well, I got that half right, I guess.
I don't think I was terribly rude to you with my post.
I believe that statement to be true, regardless of whether they fixed it later. (c.f. the usual comments about MS copying Apple but screwing it up)
Software has bugs and mistakes. User interface is not an exact science (yet). The fact that it is improved in 10.3 means that Apple was listening. Microsoft's Alt-Tab is still just as horribly broken as it's ever been. It is not "geeky", it is "broken."
And that's why there is a semi-annual "tax." Apple's OS gets better, faster, and gains breadth, and fixes both bugs and UI issues. Microsoft's service packs break things and frantically try and plug up security issues that have costed millions of dollars, and nothing else. SP2 damn well better be free.
When I say screwed up, I mean it uses the order of icons in the dock, not the Z-order of windows.
Please refer to the poster who suggested you examine a 10.3 or above mac. When making complaints about an operating system, it's helpful to try it out once every two years or so to see if they actually address your complaints.
Apple has one-upped the geekiness because of Exposé. It now keeps the list not by Z-order, but by which application was recently used (storing the last used window). This is way better in actual use. The Windows method gets confused when windows leap to the front, and also makes it easy to lose dialog boxes on a cluttered screen (they don't show up in the taskbar, so they are unreachable by Alt-tab).
If you want to tab through windows, use Command-` (backtick), which cycles through the current application's windows. Or... preferably use Exposé for your window switching. I have my 5th mouse button set to application-local expose. Very handy.
The question is - is it worth it on a server that could be using the resources on something else and is rarely accessed by people?
How much of your VRAM is your server doing? Apple has it right, and MS better pony up. The eye candy is done mostly in the GPU now. While there is of course a nonzero amount of physical memory and some small amount of processor power devoted to this, I've yet to see serious penalties.
We use Exposé on the XServe all the time, and we've tried watching the CPU and RAM usage when it spikes. Practically unnoticeable. So unless your server is at extremely high load, you won't notice it.
But then, when you get into super-reliable and powerful servers, why aren't you running Linux or a BSD in the first place? Very few mac fans will argue that OS X Server is ready to compete with those worthies in terms of raw performance.
Well, sometimes eye candy doesn't directly contribute to productivity, but helps reduce overall strain. For example, people used to think that shadowed window edges were "just" eye candy, but as you spend time in WMs that do shadowing, you realize it's a useful visual cue that keeps from obstructing other data on the screen.
Is it leaps and bounds better than a thin window border? No. Is it a small step in the right direction? Definitely.
Personally, I'll encourage all the iCandy that I can, because it drives people to make powerful display architectures. Without all the focus on visual glamour, Mac OS X wouldn't have Exposé, which I use nearly constantly and find to be superior to multiple desktops for many scenarios.
Okay, ignore the business aspect for a second, look at it from my (a developer's) point of view.
Before I got involved in OSS, I was yearning to get into consulting, but I couldn't seem to find a breakthrough job to establish a reputation. People just didn't want to believe I could do the work. I'm in the magical "recently graduated college" zone where I'm not expereinced enough to be senior but not young enough to be an undergrad consultant.
After I got involved and contributed to an open source project as one of the primary developers, suddenly I had exposure. Sure, I didn't get paid for the work (and we did a lot of work in just 2 months). But that investment has helped me to get a very good consulting job, and I've gotten a lot more exposure because people talk to me about the library and what it does.
It's the best thing to happen to my career since graduating college.
No one will work for free, but who said that we're working for free? I consider my OSS work to be an investment in my repuation and my future career. It certainly has paid off in a very short amount of time.
Don't you think that with the exception of GUI design, OOP is a little OVERRATED?
Not for data types. The fact that I can ask my integers what precision they are, or define new string routines, or conveniently redefine how my IO sockets is a good idea.
Besides, who says OO excludes functional paradigms? Not OCaml or Common Lisp, that's for sure.
Besides, Ruby isn't about pure object modeling. Because of all its very functional features (Did you know Ruby has no "statements", only expressions? Everything returns a value!) it gets the best of both worlds frequently. In this, it resembles the very functional Common Lisp, which was very OO.
The fact you can even make such a statement about Ruby shows how little you know about the language. Do you really think you're qualified, even on/., to talk about it like you know what the hell you're going on about? Have you actually tried using it? Tried using Rails? Face it, we're past the flavor-of-the-month hype stage here. It's now a real deal and it's not going anywhere except towards "better."
Ruby? Half-baked? Ruby hasn't been around as long as Python, but it's not exactly the flavor of the month. And have you seen the people backing Ruby? The authors of those books are not amateurs.
And since when is a language wich such an excellent spread of features a "masturbation language"? Closures, a powerful standard library, continuations, open classes, everything-is-an-object... I could go on. These aren't "bleeding edge" features. These are features found in languages like Lisp, Scheme and Smalltalk that big players like Java ignored because it was "too complex" for the "average coder."
In other words, languages like Ruby and Python are state of the art. It's Java and PHP that are behind.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about trust though. It's about convenience for both user and developer. Anyone who uses gmail as their primary email will give you a laundry list of reasons why they like it more, and one of them that's always near the top of the list is that they have one email box and interface even when they're traveling. Plus, you never need to worry about updates or learning a new interface for the "(win|mac|linux) port" again. The idea of a machine specific binary goes away entirely, which means more people can use the app under more conditions. And, it means that developers can spend more time making their software great instead of wasting time porting.
Mozilla derivatives is that they use XUL, which is essentially XML. Your pet choice is already a web application replayed locally. If everyone adopted XUL today (which I'm not saying they should), we could all make Thunderbird as a online-distributed webapp. What do you think webapps are? They're text. Nothing is shoehorning anything here. And, funny that you mention something "completely different0" from email. I was under the impression that email was just text, images, and savable attachments. Maps to the web pretty darn well.Just because many webapps suck doesn't mean that they have to suck. Cross platform rich-client behavior is already becoming a reality on web browsers. There are still holdups, but at the rate their being surmounted, it's only a matter of time.
The most obvious reason is, of course, easy (perhaps "easier" is appropriate) cross-platform deployment. Another is more convenience for the user. Sure, it may be harder to use webmail compared to conventional mail apps, but it follows me where I go.
From the software publisher side, webapps are inhernetly better than desktop apps. You don't get my code (the code that matters, anyways), you have to agree to my terms, it is inherently subscription based, updates are global and unified, and tech support is easier.
We have all these elaborate and evil copyright laws to give us what webapps inherently give us. While webapps currently suffer from technical limitiations, these will eventually be solved. It is not unimaginable to see something like Photoshop as a webapp in 5-10 years.
Don't blame Apple for that one, buddy. Apple's been telling people not to use raw altivec instruction codes for years. Since 10.1, they've had hand tuned vector and LAPACK libraries, along with a bunch of other stuff, in Accelerate.framework. They even have a fast C structure over BLAS (called cblas).
The only reason the app wouldn't run passably under the dynamic translation is because they chose to use Altivec codes directly, which they were told not to do.
That's suicide for the vendor. Apple is moving away from PPC, not straddling the line. Besides, 90% of the time, the feature sets will be identical. Maybe you haven't noticed, but the fat binary is just a checkbox click away.
Crappy software is crappy software. Apple's software community really prides itself on quality releases (outside of the wonderful world of RB, of course). While this is possible, I doubt the mac developer community will allow it.
That's a problem even if you don't switch. Does being on PPC or Intel really change this potential gotcha in all software licensing? Even libraries currently under the GPL can suffer this fate.
Except for altivec stuff, the mixed plugin scheme works. Rosetta does the translation transparently. But upgrade purchases are the bread and butter of the mac software community. How exactly is this any worse than normal?
That is regrettable. My dual G4 has lasted 5 years now, and I still don't feel terribly outdated using it. But, we're spoiled. Look at it this way... your next mac is likely to be more upgradeable, because you can use more mainstream hardware. Intel and the PC hardware world are way more into incremental enhancement than IBM/Motorolla ever was.
You should. It is really That Easy(tm) for most developers. If they Broke The Rules, when they come back into Following The Rules, they naturally embrace PPC compatibility along with Intel compatibility.
Could we please wait and see more about the rumored SIMD enhancements in Yonah before we ring the bell on this one? The Altivec is fast, man, but it's murderous to work with. If Intel can get close to the same speed with their existing setup, I'd actually like it more than the altivec. Some of intels floating point and SIMD features are really neat, they just suffer on speed when compared.
I suggest the 5 button mouse. Expose becomes incredibly useful when you start mapping frequently used expose runs to the mouse. I keep this-apps-windows and dashboard on my mouse on buttons 4 and 5, and use corners for all-apps and desktop.
While OSX may not be sold with any assumptions about your mouse, some of its features really get better when using a many-buttoned mouse. I think this is as it should be.
Okay, people. Part of the point here is that this issue is still being decided.
With that in mind, please support Atom in your future projects. Atom really is a better user experience for end users, and it's better specified and easier to work with as a developer.
The RSS folks are great, and they've put in a ton of hard work, but the Atom spec is Just Better right now, and offers at lot more bang for the developmental buck, not to mention it handles feed aggregations much better.
IE, Firefox/Sage and Safari all support Atom 1.0. So there is no reason not to use it!
I just explained to you that this is untrue. Please go check the Apple support forums if you want to see an example.
For one, exposure is higher for media-related issues on the mac platform. Apple has been courted by video editors, graphic designers and artists for a long time.
Many of these folks may not know an USB hub from a torque converter, but they are surprisingly aware of media-related issues. Plus, the apple community is currently far more tight-knit than the windows community (how many casual mac users still read mac rumor sites, for example? Many!). Word of this sort of thing would spread quickly.
This might change in the future, but it wouldn't fly today, nor in the immediate future.
That doesn't mean it won't eventually happen. Maybe the MPAA will love this so much that they refuse to listen to anyone else and they demand that all vendors do it. Then Apple might be forced to. But it won't happen unless push comes to shove.
See, therein lies the problem. Intel provides a service that AMD doesn't. Not everyone wants this service, which is why AMD continues. But it's a pretty nice service when you want to sell certain kinds of devices.
I know. At work, we have one in the lab. It's an awesome machine. But the vendors spent money to build and test it. More money than an intel-based solution. This isn't just because of Intel's insane discounts.
I'd be a fool if I suggested that Intel didn't sell a ton of units based on brand recognition. The original subject was why Apple didn't go AMD to start, and the answer to that is that Apple's business plants seem to care a lot about portable devices and laptops, which Intel is a better supplier for right now. They can deliver an entire laptop setup sans drives and cards, with a low power chip. AMD doesn't really compete well in this space yet.
I still am hoping that we see Opteron macs myself, I'd take an opteron as a nearly-fair trade for a G5. We'll see how things go. I'd like nothing more than to see AMD succeed.
Amen to that. I'm still trying to convince our customer to buy AMD for our clustered linux systems.
His site sucked and he didn't get your money. What more do you want? That is economics at its best. Hopefully he'll get the message and shape up or ship out of the industry.
I fail to see how this supports your claim that Web Developers suck. If anything, it makes me believe that you have issues.Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, you are not more deserving of oxygen, sex, or money just because you don't use Windows. Your choice of OS doesn't make you any less a follower.
Yay for you? Times change. Your platform choice gives you certain criteria for what you can and can't do. You also give up most games for Windows on that setup. If you decide to pay the price, it's considered in poor taste to bitch about it. When I was using Linux as my primary, the movie and P2P music scene was just blossoming and I couldn't participate. Accept it. You made the decision.Let's sum things up here:
Google hasn't rejected you as a customer. They never gave you a bill to begin with. For you to have the nerve that they come beat down your door to give you a free product is telling about your personality.
You are in the fringe of the desktop world, and it's not the leading edge. It is the Free Edge, and you're going to pay a price for it. When I ran Linux as my primary, I had to give up things too, like playing movies.
I got fed up. Maybe you'll come to the same conclusion, eventually.
Ethical concerns aside, for many companies Intel is such a desirable choice because they do the testing with components and certify a complete package for you. That's expensive work, but Intel does it because they know that people will pay for it.
Sure, I'd love to see AMD in macs. I have fond memories of my last AMD machine. But, only if AMD can give us a good, inexpensive motherboard that they certify and test. If AMD wants to compete on this front, they're going to need to offer a package deal.
Back to ethics, it's entirely possible that Intel has crossed a major line and is due for a DOJ-powered slap, but I'm going to reserve judgement on that until I see more evidence. Just because AMD says they are being anti-competitive doesn't prove it. We'll know soon enough.
How does your choice of minority browser make Web Developers any less programmers? It's not their fault they have a quadzillion target platforms. Something has to give, and targets like the Zaurus or Konqueror are first to go.
My original analogy, which I expressed poorly, was that it's like going back and forth between the two. But the "wrong thing" in our case was having a legacy codebase written by a crappy subcontractor (yay politics!).Making websites layout properly is harder than unit testing many kinds of conventional software in most cases. It cannot be automated, it tends to be very sketchy, targets change frequently, and the fixes for some tools breaks others. The "proper subset" of features that you mentioned earlier is a massive step backwards for the web, back to old HTML4. I don't think anyone wants that.
Many people you're calling 'programmers' don't even unit test. I think that it's unethical to try and even sell a product written in C++ that doesn't have at least a minimal-requirement checking unit test suite. Hell, I won't even publish open source work without one!If your argument is, "People who don't test don't deserve to be called programmers." then I'm with you, sure. Testing is important. But that's not what you said. You said "Web Developers" are not programmers. It's an uninformed, biased, incorrect stereotype that harkens back to the old "scripting language" silliness.
I said mid-ninties. By 1996, people were catching on to what Perl was and how important it was. Actually it's more like, "Fuck you for not using Firefox. It's free, it's fine. What the fuck is your problem?"No one is forcing you to use Konqueror. You can sit here and praise it to the skies, but the simple truth is that it's feature poor, and you know it. If Google could support Konqueror, you know they would, and they'd crow about it. It'd score big points with the Slashdot crowd. But they can't.
You realize that carpenters say something similar about software developers too, right?Our job is easy. Support a few platforms. You're probably only writing with one GUI toolkit. Maybe a few font rendering errors or layout errors with the GUI. One two three binary targets for most projects. Maybe 5 if you're really streching for legacy hardware.
Application & System Development is older, and has more refined tools. We also have to worry less about how things "look" under the covers. A good webapp not only has to be fast, scalable, multi-platform and bug-free... it has to be pretty as well.
They're developers. Some of them suck, some of them are good. Like our field, it's chok full of people who suck. We have Java-Wageslaves, they have PHP-teens. We have Alan Cox, they have Eric Meyer. It all works out.
To turn a popular meme:
But no one is going to test for PDA and phones unless they're an important target. That cruft accumulates and washes away with the regularity of the tides. Everyone has different firmware versions. Clients don't care about them. Why should they? Why should I test on a PDA or Cellphone that won't even react the same way in 3 months? Or that will be old news and replaced in 6? My fallback plan is plain-jane HTML, no frills. If you don't like the look of it, get on a real web browser and stop complaining.
Or if you want to bitch at someone, bitch at your firmware vendor for making a browser that deviates so far from the standard that it's impossible to target reasonably.
To me, your stance is every bit as stupid and smallminded as the stance of folks who ridiculed perl hackers back in the mid-ninties for "not being real programmers." Those folks built the foundation of IT and the Web as we know it, all the while being made fun of by smug, self-satisfied people with your attitude.
And XHTML is just XML by another name. Get over yourself.
Would it hurt you if I told you that it's probably a better language design than C++ and Java? Imagine what a developer like you and I has to go through migrating a C++ project from GCC2.95 to GCC3. Now do that every day just to make things work.
Some of them may be graphic design weefles, but not all. Web engineers deserve respect, be they EJB Machines or Rails Honchos.
I assume you mean the HTML, CSS and JavaScript? Because the backends are usually tested very well. Java stacks and Rails have great unit test support.It's unfair to compare the two. How exactly do you test a page layout? It's easy when I work on C++. I unit test things that have easily controllable inputs, easily recognizable outputs, and work in only one environment.
How the hell are you supposed to automate testing of HTML layouts? What heuristic makes a 1px border okay in some places, but not others? And if you can't automate the testing, then it costs A Lot of Money. When I do web consulting, I ask the customer what They Want To Pay for, and adhere to that.
Who can afford to have a separate web designer anymore?But thanks for making arbitrary decisions on who and who is not a programmer. I'm sure loads of people appreciate it. Like the people who worked in Python in the 90s who weren't "real" programmers because they worked in a "scripting language."
Moble devices have such a varied degree of fidelity to even the most basic HTML that all beautification is a waste of time (unless, of course, you have a specific device in mind). This also stands for Text-To-Speech. You're better off having plain HTML for these scenarios. Case in point, his solution doesn't render on my phone at all.
Why?
Because my phone gets really confused by CSS, except for a very small subset that the vendor chose to support so they could prettify their website.
Web developers wish this was true, but the sad story is that it's not. There are lots of people with broken or partial implementations of CSS, to which approaches like this are actually more destructive.
Quite frankly, Javascript has better downgrade characteristics than CSS, which is sad because CSS is a wonderful standard. But people tend to feel gung ho about implementing parts of CSS, but back off from Javascript.
Not exactly the kind of people you want to be defending. The fact that copyright law can be used this way suggests it is broken. The fact that it was created before our modern information economy was formed also suggests it is broken and in need of revision.
Credibility is not something you can easily steal, and the people who "get there first" tend to get the lion's share of credibility, even when competing against companies much larger than themselves.So your cheap shot about how people on Slashdot have nothing to lose is just that, a cheap shot with no substance or truth. We're not saying that copyright laws need to be entirely abolished, but they do need to be updated to reflect our modern society and information infrastructure. The fact that we're compelled to lay unenforceable law after unenforceable law down on top of copyright law in a vain attempt to keep it afloat in its current state should be evidence enough that things need to change.
Excuse me? What? A public website is by its very nature meant to be redistributed. It is replicated on millions of machines per day for many different purposes. If you do not agree to at least some redistribution for your website, then take it offline because it doesn't work without redistribution.Sue the caching proxy servers! Sue people who use internet cache! Sue Proximitron users! Sue link-of-the-day sites because they helped people replicate the data. Wait, why not just sue everyone online, because they were party to the crime by using the same routers!
Nice, avoiding his point entirely. Part of copyright law is the intent with which you distribute it. This helps prevent entrapment scenarios. If you place a public site on the internet, your intent is to have it treated like a public site. This means it will be crawled by search engines, cached by proxies, linked to by interested users, downloaded for personal offline browsing, pre-cached by Earthlink and AOL services, and archived by the wayback machine.This is the cost of doing business on the internet. This is how it works, and how it's going to continue to work. If you are not willing to express this intent with your website, take it down now.
Bear in mind that the article is about a large insurance corporation trying to deny benefits to a group of people, using copyright law as a club to beat evidence into inadmissibility. We're not talking about chinese knockoffs ruining a poor independent artist. We're talking about Yet Another Way Out for corporate America's scumbags.If copyright law allows this, then we need to tear it down and fix it, because I'm not willing to pay such a stiff price for a basic kind of protection that I probably can't afford to fight in court anyways.
And that's why there is a semi-annual "tax." Apple's OS gets better, faster, and gains breadth, and fixes both bugs and UI issues. Microsoft's service packs break things and frantically try and plug up security issues that have costed millions of dollars, and nothing else. SP2 damn well better be free.
Apple has one-upped the geekiness because of Exposé. It now keeps the list not by Z-order, but by which application was recently used (storing the last used window). This is way better in actual use. The Windows method gets confused when windows leap to the front, and also makes it easy to lose dialog boxes on a cluttered screen (they don't show up in the taskbar, so they are unreachable by Alt-tab).
If you want to tab through windows, use Command-` (backtick), which cycles through the current application's windows. Or... preferably use Exposé for your window switching. I have my 5th mouse button set to application-local expose. Very handy.
We use Exposé on the XServe all the time, and we've tried watching the CPU and RAM usage when it spikes. Practically unnoticeable. So unless your server is at extremely high load, you won't notice it.
But then, when you get into super-reliable and powerful servers, why aren't you running Linux or a BSD in the first place? Very few mac fans will argue that OS X Server is ready to compete with those worthies in terms of raw performance.
Well, sometimes eye candy doesn't directly contribute to productivity, but helps reduce overall strain. For example, people used to think that shadowed window edges were "just" eye candy, but as you spend time in WMs that do shadowing, you realize it's a useful visual cue that keeps from obstructing other data on the screen.
Is it leaps and bounds better than a thin window border? No. Is it a small step in the right direction? Definitely.
Personally, I'll encourage all the iCandy that I can, because it drives people to make powerful display architectures. Without all the focus on visual glamour, Mac OS X wouldn't have Exposé, which I use nearly constantly and find to be superior to multiple desktops for many scenarios.
Okay, ignore the business aspect for a second, look at it from my (a developer's) point of view.
Before I got involved in OSS, I was yearning to get into consulting, but I couldn't seem to find a breakthrough job to establish a reputation. People just didn't want to believe I could do the work. I'm in the magical "recently graduated college" zone where I'm not expereinced enough to be senior but not young enough to be an undergrad consultant.
After I got involved and contributed to an open source project as one of the primary developers, suddenly I had exposure. Sure, I didn't get paid for the work (and we did a lot of work in just 2 months). But that investment has helped me to get a very good consulting job, and I've gotten a lot more exposure because people talk to me about the library and what it does.
It's the best thing to happen to my career since graduating college.
No one will work for free, but who said that we're working for free? I consider my OSS work to be an investment in my repuation and my future career. It certainly has paid off in a very short amount of time.
Besides, who says OO excludes functional paradigms? Not OCaml or Common Lisp, that's for sure.
Besides, Ruby isn't about pure object modeling. Because of all its very functional features (Did you know Ruby has no "statements", only expressions? Everything returns a value!) it gets the best of both worlds frequently. In this, it resembles the very functional Common Lisp, which was very OO.
The fact you can even make such a statement about Ruby shows how little you know about the language. Do you really think you're qualified, even on /., to talk about it like you know what the hell you're going on about? Have you actually tried using it? Tried using Rails? Face it, we're past the flavor-of-the-month hype stage here. It's now a real deal and it's not going anywhere except towards "better."
And since when is a language wich such an excellent spread of features a "masturbation language"? Closures, a powerful standard library, continuations, open classes, everything-is-an-object... I could go on. These aren't "bleeding edge" features. These are features found in languages like Lisp, Scheme and Smalltalk that big players like Java ignored because it was "too complex" for the "average coder."
In other words, languages like Ruby and Python are state of the art. It's Java and PHP that are behind.