No - only Google search just about works on every device. Gmail, for example, degrades ungracefully and doesn't work on my old Nokia. Their Apps degrade pretty much not at all.
Google know that they'll not be able to deliver their products to all devices, and this is why they very publicly denounced IE6. Indeed, it'd fly in the face of rampant progress for its own sake to worry about compatibility with something too small or too old (MS and various Unixes are stuck with that pesky and necessary job).
Their business goal is to get as many people as possible to hand control over to them: they'll pay precisely as much lip service to universal availability as convinces the guy who might be foolish enough to move from MS Office to Google Apps, but there is neither philosophical nor deployment proof that they're aiming for it.
There's a very sensitive infrared camera and microphone outside your house right now, and we're disturbed by your interactions with your plushie. In the spirit of blind justice, I'm going to upload to/b/ and let the People decide.
If you broadcast your movements via radio (and air movements), why on earth would you expect anyone to consider it private?
Although some people are suspicious of their explanation, Google is almost certainly telling the truth when it claims it was an accident.
No. You can say that there's reasonable doubt to the allegation that they were doing it intentionally, but you can't asser that they're "almost certainly telling the truth".
The technology for Wi-Fi scanning means it's easy to inadvertently capture too much information, and be unaware of it.
Yeah, the technology for biological viruses means it's easy to inadvertently give someone HIV, and be unaware of it. But if you have competent doctors/engineers they will have made you (as a corporate person) of the effects of certain actions with particular tools, and if you choose to ignore that advice then you're demonstrating fantastic negligence.
... It's really easy to protect your data: simply turn on WPA.
Irrelevant. How easy it is to stop someone committing a crime does not figure into whether they're guilty of some crime.
This completely stops Google (or anybody else) from spying on your private data.
False. It just makes one particular avenue harder. Serious weaknesses were found in WEP fairly quickly, and certain problems have been found in WPA+TKIP. Given time, I'm sure we'll find some problems in WPA2+AES - more likely in the implementation than AES itself.
Laws against this won't stop the bad guys (hackers). They will only unfairly punish good guys (like Google) whenever they make a mistake.
There's a model for Google defence articles which involves calling them "the good guys" then talking of anything which hinders them as "punishing the good guys". And they beg the question. Google are the good guys therefore what they do is good therefore hindering them is bad? No. Google are not the good guys because what they have done is not good. You're demonstrating the same fallacy which leads to positive discrimination: "well, these are the salt of the earth so if you apply to the law to them you're just ruining social progress".
[A]nybody who has experience in Wi-Fi mapping would believe Google.
Wow, gratuitous emotive informal fallacy alert.
Data packets help Google find more access-points and triangulate them,
Yes, among other things.
yet the payload of the packets do nothing useful for Google because they are only fragments.
Yes, what can possibly be done with fragments of data? I threw away my tatty Origin of Species yesterday because it was missing most of the pages. Not insightful at all like that.
I could be a smartass and just link you to a page with a Java applet. What's that? not everyone has downloaded a JRE? Well, the majority of the world haven't downloaded a decent browser either - and at least the Sun JRE has official MSI support for enterprise deployment.
If you're looking for app installation via the web, the Sun packaging system is Java Web Start, and has been since 2001. Oh, which automatically installs a JVM if you don't have one...
App1 requires your system's Java be version 2.5, no higher or lower.
...and supports multiple JVMs, for those cases where - like the article submitter with Opera - later versions of the platform don't work. You do realise that "your system's Java" just means a few environment variables to point to the default JVM, yes? You can have every JVM version ever built installed simultaneously on your machine if you want.
2) Java apps look a lot less advanced and less mature than what's on the Web these days.
You don't know what you're talking about, sorry. Java can use native UI widgets via SWT (or AWT, but that's old) or be skinned in a couple of lines with Swing to appear as whatever widget set you enjoy. So, unless you're claiming that the web somehow deploys a richer set of UI widgets than native mainstream clients - are you? - no.
Hardware-accelerated 3D on top of OpenGL or DirectX has also been a feature of Java for a good decade now. Nice to see that's just appearing in experimental nightly builds of web browsers over the last few months!
1) My native environment is not the native environment of my entire customer base,
Why does it matter what your native environment is? Is this the same argument Microsoft used to get people to switch to NT in the '90s? "Oh all your lazy developers/IT staff will already know it. No need for expensive Unix guys etc."
and I do not feel like porting apps between Win32, Cocoa, and GTK.
Well, we wouldn't want to hurt your feelings. Writing a presentation layer which fits in nicely with the user's environment is surely something for liberal-arts types. What was Kay even thinking?
2) I do not want to write 2,000 lines of code in an API I'm not familiar with to only start up the program.
I'm almost wondering whether you've ever written a single GUI program for a modern platform at this point;-).
No, that's analogous to answering, "Because I live on a farm," to the question, "Why do you need a tractor to drive to the office?" So you've invested in farming equipment already; this doesn't mean you need to use farm equipment for everything.
The submitter is complaining that he can't get printing working as expected, or even uniformly, across browsers. Yet his request includes unexplained constraints which severely limit possible solutions: IOW, he's asked, "best browser?" rather than asking, "best solution?" Moreover, since he's omitted the information which explains why nothing can be changed but the browser we would be foolish to think we have a sufficient picture to recommend a particular browser.
Maybe there's no budget to re-architect your whole system, but perhaps the correct solution is to stop making yourself a slave to the limitations of HTML/Javascript and HTML/Javascript clients? PDF has been suggested, as have various other plugin techs which may interact better with the printing environment.
If you're going to be a slave to religion, at least let it be based on morality rather than tech marketing. Or maybe this sort of devotion is more benign;-).
I'd rather take 10,000 times longer to make sure it works on every computing platform back to the hypothetical machines in Leibniz's 1666 De arte combinatorica. And don't get me started about difference engines! My team are working on porting and testing a cogs-and-gears implementation of Firefox right now - it'll take longer than just implementing the damn writeln('Welcome to the future!') natively but think of all the development time I'll save on future code.
Yeah if you have a small set of well-known laptops of good build quality - so good, in fact, that the same predictable problems recur and you can usually identify what needs "repair" in under 15 minutes - then that sort of production line fixing is achievable.
Meanwhile, almost all desktops can be opened in 20 seconds and have any part swapped out within a couple of minutes. The exception is CPU replacement operations where you're hopefully taking more care to put the thermal interface material on correctly - something the OEM oftten fails to do well because of a "quota to fill" (this is way more fiddly when it needs to be corrected on laptops, thank you Apple).
So HTML/Javascript is a good way of subverting "don't run your software on my computer without my permission" policy?
Or is there some argument here that a browserenvironment is safe but any other virtual machine sandbox and the local user permissions system for restricting binaries are horribly insecure?
So for your web app it's necessary to deploy with a customised configuration of a particular browser, eliminating one of the few advantages of web app development?
Also, "30 people [making a simple purchase transaction] every 10 minutes" is not busy by computer or UI standards. People were interfacing their 2MHz BBC Bs (or substitute local 8-bit computer as appropriate) to tills and barcode readers in the '80s for this sort of thing.
I'm not knocking your implementation, which might be very much fit for purpose, but I don't think it's an argument for web apps.
If an engineer is asked, "What is the best tractor for me to commute to my office every day in?" one of the first questions should be, "Why do you need a tractor?"
Even if you find out that the man really needs a tractor and isn't just lacking knowledge of alternative automotive technologies, you'll have learnt more about his specific requirements in the process.
System requirements! Browser-based computing eliminates most of this problem.
When degraded interface, latency of processing and (depending on who's deploying the servers) privacy aren't important... still often no. See the fine article for a counterexample.
Even if the programming language supports cross platform development, does that "cross platform" part include Linux? What about QNX? What about the iPad?
Linux - usually.
QNX - with this RTOS built for embedded apps you clutch at straws. But there's a desktop environment and QNX 6.4 included an albeit non-current Firefox 3, you'll say, then 6.4.1 decided to include a Webkit port last year, you'll point out. Well, yes - tell me, have you tested a modern web app on QNX? Now what about a Java app, or an OpenGL app?
iPad - Steve's a clever bastard, and has intentionally crippled this platform so you have the choice of either providing a degraded HTML/Javascript experience or developing for Apple's proprietary Cocoa framework. In this specific case, there's little developers can do except stop jumping on the shiny bandwagons Apple are driving toward the firing range.
Amiga - I'm including this one because I think you forgot it. A recently released Timberwolf alpha (Firefox port) for AmigaOS surely has to be an argument for web apps.
Environmental differences! Software that works well on computer A might not run at all on computer B despite them being very similar because B installed a shareware program that updated some DLL.
Oh Christ, the horror of checking a DLL/so version and/or providing my own in the app directory! You're thinking of problems with DLL sharing and system DLL overwriting which were largely eliminated by Windows 2000. FUD is bad, ok?
the browser discrepancies that exist when you don't write an app with a decent abstraction API (EG: Prototype)
This? It's a combined utility and occasional kludge layer, like padding for a kick in the balls. Compiling 160k of fixup source to visit a web page - that's what I want my CPU to waste time doing!
Data locality! So you are at work, you save your file, and then you leave.
Yeah, you'll have that file stored on a company network server somewhere which you can access securely from a remote location. You'll also have a locally cached copy. This will all be set up in a few minutes as part of the equipment deployment process in any competent IT department.
You might have trouble with Internet connectivity, but even in very rural areas this problem is disappearing rapidly.
Argh. Most of the world is a very rural area, and it's not disappearing rapidly because there is no profit in providing cheap connectivity to very rural areas. It's not as if you have to go to a third world country - just the most densely populated country in Europe. I'm not buying a satellite phone for your stupid web app, thanks.
Meanwhile, in the cities, (1) an business ISP can and will go down for a few hours (and routing be dodgy, and app servers have problems), and it'd be commercial suicide if your workforce suddenly couldn't do anything but twiddle its thumbs; (2) in general, disaster planning means you don't rely on global infrastructure and political stability except when you need to.
4) Cheap development! Web developers are easy to come by! The standards are open, the needs are many, and the work is easily commoditizable and thus hiring help isn't so difficult.
Ah, the "why choose Windows" argument. This isn't 1995. There are plenty of programmers available and proficient with common APIs beyond HTML/Javascript.
Yes, privacy implications are another great reason to avoid web apps.
Google Apps - YouTube
QED. All of these are pale imitations of native apps when it comes to feature sets, responsiveness and UI.
There has to be huge reasons to abandon web for native development.
Other way round, dude.
Java lost the applet battle about 5 years ago.
What does that even mean? Google Apps are mostly written in Java and translated, so clearly the largest web app producer on the planet likes the language (just not the level of control a client could maintain if Google actually deployed Java). Java is still going to execute faster than HTML/Javascript - hell, we're only just starting to see hardware 3D acceleration, something Java's had since 2001. If you're about to bitch that Swing is ugly, it can be skinned, or you can use SWT which builds on top of native widgets.
Of course, this is just an argument that Java is better than HTML/Javascript for client/server apps; the best solution is whatever gives the user the richest client experience, employing a domain-specific remoting protocol (e.g. IMAP for e-mail) for transferring information between client and server at the business rather than presentation level.
Java lost the applet battle about 5 years ago. JavaScript is now a powerful full fledged language that is FAST!!!
Your definition of "fast" is a comparison with last year's Javascript interpreter/compiler. My definition of "fast" is comparing responsiveness of a whole native app vs a whole HTML/CSS/Javascript app.
Html5 + CSS 3 is an incredibly powerful, flexible
Compared to what? HTML4 + CSS2? Yes, in theory - pity it's not actually implemented fully or stably by any browser yet, just like all recent W3C standards (whence the OP's problem).
Compared to native Windows / Cocoa / Java UI? No.
and extremely easy to use
You need to try Xcode. Or its older (and wiser) sibling, Smalltalk. That is easy to use.
Don't insult the mac like that. There were Mac apps back in 1984 that you can still only badly mimic via a web "application."
You're right. I'm forgetting the beauty, simplicity and consistency of the 1984 Mac. I've been using the comparative UI mess that is OS X for too long.
There used to be some very nice client/server GUI form and reporting tools back in the 90s
The whole display / presentation / business client / business server / database multi-tier thing seems to have been broken horribly, so now presentation, business client and business server are merged on some cloud and delivered to a dumb graphical display. Why? Well, to take away control, of course.
Maturity isn't defined by the number of years since conception, but by its origins and the development and engineering which has gone into it since. HTML/Javascript has only comparatively recently been considered as a serious app development platform to contend with native apps, still building on the hypertext + scripting language paradigm. Even Google knows what a pain it is to work with HTML/Javascript directly and has developed a translator from Java to implement their web apps.
What's more, there are very few use cases where an offline application (I assume by that you mean "not HTML/Javascript" - I'm not sure what's "offline" about Java) isn't an option. The basic selling point with HTML apps is that you don't have to spend 30 seconds downloading and installing a small binary. When you're writing for a corporation, that's reduced to insignificance because it'd be installed as part of the deployment procedure.
Hahaha, I kid, I kid. If your interface is complex, why are you using HTML/CSS/Javascript/etc? Why not take advantage of a more advanced and mature UI widget set, such as that provided by Java or *shock* the native environment?
The web is about where MacOS was 20 years ago in terms of ability to deliver a rich application UI experience. Google are excellent at marketing it as some sort of advance, but it really isn't. Don't shoehorn.
...my problem is with a government organisation, the Sussex police, contemplating the production of proprietary software for a locked-down platform in order to facilitate some licensing process (*). No, I do not want my tax money to go toward funding the proliferation of Apple toys, thanks!
OTOH, this could just be someone over-buzzwording what turns out to be a web site.
(*) This will, of course, save no money whatever, and means either Apple or - more likely - some local development firm has good chums/an uncle in the police service, but we all knew that. Sussex is full of toffs, City commuters, mutual back-scratchers (but I repeat myself) and - increasingly over the last decade - a swathe of immigrants who work hard... and fight hard.
God bless insurgents for killing fag-enabling American troops! God bless AIDS! God bless laws against stem cell research - if sufferers die because of hampered research, it's God's will! God bless Anne Coulter and Michelle Malkin for singing the praises of Guantanamo and calling for fair and just treatment of Muslims who have committed no crime! God bless the brave soldiers who have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians - for God spoke to Bush and told him he was doing God's will! God bless our representatives for having the good sense to take away the freedom of 17-year-old sexters, and 20-year-old drinkers, and Satanic cannabis-smokers of any age! God bless the greatest prison population on the planet - being locked up is much better than death! Except the under-age retards - God bless Texas for releasing them to heaven early!
God bless the Christian unicorn, so much braver and more righteous than the Muslim unicorn!
tl;dr We all suck, but the US is currently having a field-day pointing out how much the other side sucks.
Because my DNA is better and positively contributes to the gene pool.
(1) Define "positively" in the sentence fragment "positively contributes to the gene pool" without begging the question;
(2) You haven't explained why this means you should be rewarded. If breeding some genetically superior race is your aim, then the healthiest male specimens should probably be interned, fed and given a mandatory exercise regime to ensure their testicles remain in premium condition, then forced to produce sperm for shipping (no sex for you! that'd introduce extra risk) to the fittest females.
Most royalty are known to have crappy DNA because of centuries of in-breeding.
Except for all the DNA which gives them the sense to know how to maintain their positions. Contrary to popular belief, while there are a few conditions which certainly will be brought out by interbreeding of extended family, you're mostly just going to emphasise existing phenotypes.
Barring insanity or genetic problems, your IQ reflects your effort.
It doesn't matter how often people say it, it doesn't make it true. Sorry!
There is no evidence that you can significantly improve your IQ with effort. There is a small amount of evidence that very early education can affect IQ, where the effort comes from the parents rather than the child (just like under monarchy!). There is substantial evidence that IQ has a genetic component, regardless of the mental effort made by the kid once he's born. IQ is a reflection of the ability of the brain when trained to develop in a particular way in order to facilitate later practice; it's not a measure of the amount of training performed.
I was born with a complicated Spanish name. One first name. Two second names. One hyphenated, accented surname from my father. One simpler surname from my mother.
One of the first things I've done since reaching majority is to give a precise, simple, standard name to everyone who asks for it:
Xxxxx Xxxxxxx where X is in A-Z and x is in a-z. Xxxxx is my first name, and Xxxxxxx is a shortened, accent-and-hyphen-free version of my father's surname.
You know why?
Because, in life, there are lots of things one must be "unreasonable" about in order to effect progress, but accommodation of one's name is not of them. It's a tedious, selfish expression of nothing more than ego which ultimately will land you in more trouble than others: some day you will be denied access to something thanks to some computer system not being designed to handle your name, and "computer says no" gets priority over the angry demands to the immigration officer of "Joe\0\rBlogg$ 3'); DROP TABLE citizens; -- [insert spinning cube here] Jr."
If you and your friends/colleagues have some other name by which they call you, sure why not? But, as any cat will tell you, the world is best when you have three names:
(i) one for communicating formally; (ii) one for more intimate discourse (there's no reason why this can't be the same as (i), though many people end up with peculiar nicknames); and (iii) one personal identification which you can keep to yourself and you can't express in words.
If you want the sum of all your history, culture and personality as expressed in (iii) to be embodied in (i), you're both expecting others to be burdened with your ego and bad at understanding human communication. All I asked for was a couple of words I can use in a reasonably uniform way to easily pick/call you out from a small crowd - that's what (i) is for, after all.
tl;dr The naming of cats is both a delightful poem and an insightful account of the multiple namespaces for kitty/human names and their different purposes. Don't confuse them.
When I was young, I used to find the whole British Monarchy obsession ridiculous. Who would wait on the street in long lines for another human, no matter what she symbolises? On one typical day twenty five years later, I saw people winding long queues outside an Apple store for the latest ephemeral plastic toy, and walked home past three nationalised banks, a row of high street shops converted into charity outlets because no-one can afford the rent, and one bursting Jobcentre. My only comfort that evening was hearing that the House of Lords had sent another piece of New Labour orwellian legislation back to Parliament. That evening the papers vilified Prince Charles for an anti-egalitarian speech implying that lowering university standards so everyone gets a place helps neither the academically bright nor those with other talents.
Then I recalled what a system of Constitutional Monarchy (including the Lords system) excels at doing: cutting through bullshit without feeling threatened that they'd lose their position of power. "But why should they get privilege because of the hole they came out of?" I hear you cry. Well, yes, and why should you be better rewardeed because you were born more healthy, or with greater IQ, than your neighbour? Life's not fair, but when you get on your hobby horse just because one particular aspect of society gets your goat, you might just make it less fair.
Shhhh. The former Soviet states are now shining examples of capitalism. Pointing out that internal passports are still required (and that pro-Western governments are so hated that governments which implements these sorts of laws are voted in democratically) ruins the dream.
Most pragmatists are pragmatists; some communists live in a commune; a few Christian conservatives aren't repressed homosexuals. No libertarians live by libertarian principles. It's reassuring because I've always believed libertarianism to be the least realisable of all the well-known political ideals.
Perhaps if I wasn't privately educated and decided to drive a car I would understand where these libertarians are coming from. I can only guess that they're trying to say that their lack of success can be blamed on their reliance on the State?
If you read, oh, about a 20 words on from that then you'll see I noted the screen resolution exception. But consider the addendum addendum: it's irrelevant on such a small screen where
Small DPI increases aren't going to be noticed (but increase from the previous poor iPhone DPI will be noticed, so Apple adherents will think this is a significant advance in the state of the art);
No real work can be done anyway.
Let's pick a random example... the HTC Touch Pro, since this month is its two year birthday. 2.8" screen, 4:3 aspect ratio, 640x480. If my middle school mathematics serves me correctly, that's 2.24" x 1.68" at 285 square DPI. Your extra 40 DPI mean in otherwise identical conditions you may observe pixelation slightly earlier as you bring your phone in an ideal environment of visual concentration increasingly close to your face. In both cases, a normal human eye has better resolution than the hardware can provide when held in front of your face with an elbow joint making a right angle.
If you still want to play the irrelevant numbers game which Apple users have sometimes rightly chastised the PC clone world for, we can bring up another consumer 2008 device: the Sony X1. This, IIRC, has around 312 DPI. If you think a 4% DPI increase makes any noticeable difference or that a dozen DPI increase in 2 years is a tech breakthrough, you are bad, mad or Jobs.
communism will always fail, all on its own, all by itself -- intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it
k.
Although maybe you missed that we're discussing command economies, for you've engaged another tired Cold War us-vs-them tactic.
School recap: (1) Capitalism is an economic system with a fairly clear definition. Communism is a sociopolitical system with a more nebulous definition. (2) A is not B. Even if A may imply B, it does not follow that B implies A. Even if you have a problem with A, this cannot be used to argue against B. (3) A sound argument requires you to state your premises.
Talking of US vs NK (or indeed US vs USSR) as "capitalism vs communism" is to engage in battle rhetoric, not rational discussion. At least the article was comparing apples with apples - capitalist vs command economy - despite the specious evidence and reasoning.
I'm out. Elementary logic was too many years ago to be worth debating!
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Google pretty much does it.
No - only Google search just about works on every device. Gmail, for example, degrades ungracefully and doesn't work on my old Nokia. Their Apps degrade pretty much not at all.
Google know that they'll not be able to deliver their products to all devices, and this is why they very publicly denounced IE6. Indeed, it'd fly in the face of rampant progress for its own sake to worry about compatibility with something too small or too old (MS and various Unixes are stuck with that pesky and necessary job).
Their business goal is to get as many people as possible to hand control over to them: they'll pay precisely as much lip service to universal availability as convinces the guy who might be foolish enough to move from MS Office to Google Apps, but there is neither philosophical nor deployment proof that they're aiming for it.
There's a very sensitive infrared camera and microphone outside your house right now, and we're disturbed by your interactions with your plushie. In the spirit of blind justice, I'm going to upload to /b/ and let the People decide.
If you broadcast your movements via radio (and air movements), why on earth would you expect anyone to consider it private?
A thick Faraday cage. If you need it, use it.
Who can forget the work of great American computer scientists from Leibniz (Combinatorica) to Berners-Lee?
Celebrate the fact that work leading up to today's Internet was a damn good cooperative effort.
Although some people are suspicious of their explanation, Google is almost certainly telling the truth when it claims it was an accident.
No. You can say that there's reasonable doubt to the allegation that they were doing it intentionally, but you can't asser that they're "almost certainly telling the truth".
The technology for Wi-Fi scanning means it's easy to inadvertently capture too much information, and be unaware of it.
Yeah, the technology for biological viruses means it's easy to inadvertently give someone HIV, and be unaware of it. But if you have competent doctors/engineers they will have made you (as a corporate person) of the effects of certain actions with particular tools, and if you choose to ignore that advice then you're demonstrating fantastic negligence.
Irrelevant. How easy it is to stop someone committing a crime does not figure into whether they're guilty of some crime.
This completely stops Google (or anybody else) from spying on your private data.
False. It just makes one particular avenue harder. Serious weaknesses were found in WEP fairly quickly, and certain problems have been found in WPA+TKIP. Given time, I'm sure we'll find some problems in WPA2+AES - more likely in the implementation than AES itself.
Laws against this won't stop the bad guys (hackers). They will only unfairly punish good guys (like Google) whenever they make a mistake.
There's a model for Google defence articles which involves calling them "the good guys" then talking of anything which hinders them as "punishing the good guys". And they beg the question. Google are the good guys therefore what they do is good therefore hindering them is bad? No. Google are not the good guys because what they have done is not good. You're demonstrating the same fallacy which leads to positive discrimination: "well, these are the salt of the earth so if you apply to the law to them you're just ruining social progress".
[A]nybody who has experience in Wi-Fi mapping would believe Google.
Wow, gratuitous emotive informal fallacy alert.
Data packets help Google find more access-points and triangulate them,
Yes, among other things.
yet the payload of the packets do nothing useful for Google because they are only fragments.
Yes, what can possibly be done with fragments of data? I threw away my tatty Origin of Species yesterday because it was missing most of the pages. Not insightful at all like that.
Ever tried to get a user to use Java apps?
I could be a smartass and just link you to a page with a Java applet. What's that? not everyone has downloaded a JRE? Well, the majority of the world haven't downloaded a decent browser either - and at least the Sun JRE has official MSI support for enterprise deployment.
If you're looking for app installation via the web, the Sun packaging system is Java Web Start, and has been since 2001. Oh, which automatically installs a JVM if you don't have one...
App1 requires your system's Java be version 2.5, no higher or lower.
...and supports multiple JVMs, for those cases where - like the article submitter with Opera - later versions of the platform don't work. You do realise that "your system's Java" just means a few environment variables to point to the default JVM, yes? You can have every JVM version ever built installed simultaneously on your machine if you want.
2) Java apps look a lot less advanced and less mature than what's on the Web these days.
You don't know what you're talking about, sorry. Java can use native UI widgets via SWT (or AWT, but that's old) or be skinned in a couple of lines with Swing to appear as whatever widget set you enjoy. So, unless you're claiming that the web somehow deploys a richer set of UI widgets than native mainstream clients - are you? - no.
Hardware-accelerated 3D on top of OpenGL or DirectX has also been a feature of Java for a good decade now. Nice to see that's just appearing in experimental nightly builds of web browsers over the last few months!
1) My native environment is not the native environment of my entire customer base,
Why does it matter what your native environment is? Is this the same argument Microsoft used to get people to switch to NT in the '90s? "Oh all your lazy developers/IT staff will already know it. No need for expensive Unix guys etc."
and I do not feel like porting apps between Win32, Cocoa, and GTK.
Well, we wouldn't want to hurt your feelings. Writing a presentation layer which fits in nicely with the user's environment is surely something for liberal-arts types. What was Kay even thinking?
2) I do not want to write 2,000 lines of code in an API I'm not familiar with to only start up the program.
I'm almost wondering whether you've ever written a single GUI program for a modern platform at this point ;-).
No, that's analogous to answering, "Because I live on a farm," to the question, "Why do you need a tractor to drive to the office?" So you've invested in farming equipment already; this doesn't mean you need to use farm equipment for everything.
The submitter is complaining that he can't get printing working as expected, or even uniformly, across browsers. Yet his request includes unexplained constraints which severely limit possible solutions: IOW, he's asked, "best browser?" rather than asking, "best solution?" Moreover, since he's omitted the information which explains why nothing can be changed but the browser we would be foolish to think we have a sufficient picture to recommend a particular browser.
Maybe there's no budget to re-architect your whole system, but perhaps the correct solution is to stop making yourself a slave to the limitations of HTML/Javascript and HTML/Javascript clients? PDF has been suggested, as have various other plugin techs which may interact better with the printing environment.
If you're going to be a slave to religion, at least let it be based on morality rather than tech marketing. Or maybe this sort of devotion is more benign ;-).
I'd rather take 10,000 times longer to make sure it works on every computing platform back to the hypothetical machines in Leibniz's 1666 De arte combinatorica. And don't get me started about difference engines! My team are working on porting and testing a cogs-and-gears implementation of Firefox right now - it'll take longer than just implementing the damn writeln('Welcome to the future!') natively but think of all the development time I'll save on future code.
Yeah if you have a small set of well-known laptops of good build quality - so good, in fact, that the same predictable problems recur and you can usually identify what needs "repair" in under 15 minutes - then that sort of production line fixing is achievable.
Meanwhile, almost all desktops can be opened in 20 seconds and have any part swapped out within a couple of minutes. The exception is CPU replacement operations where you're hopefully taking more care to put the thermal interface material on correctly - something the OEM oftten fails to do well because of a "quota to fill" (this is way more fiddly when it needs to be corrected on laptops, thank you Apple).
So HTML/Javascript is a good way of subverting "don't run your software on my computer without my permission" policy?
Or is there some argument here that a browser environment is safe but any other virtual machine sandbox and the local user permissions system for restricting binaries are horribly insecure?
So for your web app it's necessary to deploy with a customised configuration of a particular browser, eliminating one of the few advantages of web app development?
Also, "30 people [making a simple purchase transaction] every 10 minutes" is not busy by computer or UI standards. People were interfacing their 2MHz BBC Bs (or substitute local 8-bit computer as appropriate) to tills and barcode readers in the '80s for this sort of thing.
I'm not knocking your implementation, which might be very much fit for purpose, but I don't think it's an argument for web apps.
If an engineer is asked, "What is the best tractor for me to commute to my office every day in?" one of the first questions should be, "Why do you need a tractor?"
Even if you find out that the man really needs a tractor and isn't just lacking knowledge of alternative automotive technologies, you'll have learnt more about his specific requirements in the process.
System requirements! Browser-based computing eliminates most of this problem.
When degraded interface, latency of processing and (depending on who's deploying the servers) privacy aren't important... still often no. See the fine article for a counterexample.
Even if the programming language supports cross platform development, does that "cross platform" part include Linux? What about QNX? What about the iPad?
Linux - usually.
QNX - with this RTOS built for embedded apps you clutch at straws. But there's a desktop environment and QNX 6.4 included an albeit non-current Firefox 3, you'll say, then 6.4.1 decided to include a Webkit port last year, you'll point out. Well, yes - tell me, have you tested a modern web app on QNX? Now what about a Java app, or an OpenGL app?
iPad - Steve's a clever bastard, and has intentionally crippled this platform so you have the choice of either providing a degraded HTML/Javascript experience or developing for Apple's proprietary Cocoa framework. In this specific case, there's little developers can do except stop jumping on the shiny bandwagons Apple are driving toward the firing range.
Amiga - I'm including this one because I think you forgot it. A recently released Timberwolf alpha (Firefox port) for AmigaOS surely has to be an argument for web apps.
Environmental differences! Software that works well on computer A might not run at all on computer B despite them being very similar because B installed a shareware program that updated some DLL.
Oh Christ, the horror of checking a DLL/so version and/or providing my own in the app directory! You're thinking of problems with DLL sharing and system DLL overwriting which were largely eliminated by Windows 2000. FUD is bad, ok?
the browser discrepancies that exist when you don't write an app with a decent abstraction API (EG: Prototype)
This? It's a combined utility and occasional kludge layer, like padding for a kick in the balls. Compiling 160k of fixup source to visit a web page - that's what I want my CPU to waste time doing!
Data locality! So you are at work, you save your file, and then you leave.
Yeah, you'll have that file stored on a company network server somewhere which you can access securely from a remote location. You'll also have a locally cached copy. This will all be set up in a few minutes as part of the equipment deployment process in any competent IT department.
You might have trouble with Internet connectivity, but even in very rural areas this problem is disappearing rapidly.
Argh. Most of the world is a very rural area, and it's not disappearing rapidly because there is no profit in providing cheap connectivity to very rural areas. It's not as if you have to go to a third world country - just the most densely populated country in Europe. I'm not buying a satellite phone for your stupid web app, thanks.
Meanwhile, in the cities, (1) an business ISP can and will go down for a few hours (and routing be dodgy, and app servers have problems), and it'd be commercial suicide if your workforce suddenly couldn't do anything but twiddle its thumbs; (2) in general, disaster planning means you don't rely on global infrastructure and political stability except when you need to.
4) Cheap development! Web developers are easy to come by! The standards are open, the needs are many, and the work is easily commoditizable and thus hiring help isn't so difficult.
Ah, the "why choose Windows" argument. This isn't 1995. There are plenty of programmers available and proficient with common APIs beyond HTML/Javascript.
Apps like MET (link)
Yes, privacy implications are another great reason to avoid web apps.
Google Apps - YouTube
QED. All of these are pale imitations of native apps when it comes to feature sets, responsiveness and UI.
There has to be huge reasons to abandon web for native development.
Other way round, dude.
Java lost the applet battle about 5 years ago.
What does that even mean? Google Apps are mostly written in Java and translated, so clearly the largest web app producer on the planet likes the language (just not the level of control a client could maintain if Google actually deployed Java). Java is still going to execute faster than HTML/Javascript - hell, we're only just starting to see hardware 3D acceleration, something Java's had since 2001. If you're about to bitch that Swing is ugly, it can be skinned, or you can use SWT which builds on top of native widgets.
Of course, this is just an argument that Java is better than HTML/Javascript for client/server apps; the best solution is whatever gives the user the richest client experience, employing a domain-specific remoting protocol (e.g. IMAP for e-mail) for transferring information between client and server at the business rather than presentation level.
Java lost the applet battle about 5 years ago. JavaScript is now a powerful full fledged language that is FAST!!!
Your definition of "fast" is a comparison with last year's Javascript interpreter/compiler. My definition of "fast" is comparing responsiveness of a whole native app vs a whole HTML/CSS/Javascript app.
Html5 + CSS 3 is an incredibly powerful, flexible
Compared to what? HTML4 + CSS2? Yes, in theory - pity it's not actually implemented fully or stably by any browser yet, just like all recent W3C standards (whence the OP's problem).
Compared to native Windows / Cocoa / Java UI? No.
and extremely easy to use
You need to try Xcode. Or its older (and wiser) sibling, Smalltalk. That is easy to use.
So Ignore what idiot poster posted above
If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning...
Don't insult the mac like that. There were Mac apps back in 1984 that you can still only badly mimic via a web "application."
You're right. I'm forgetting the beauty, simplicity and consistency of the 1984 Mac. I've been using the comparative UI mess that is OS X for too long.
There used to be some very nice client/server GUI form and reporting tools back in the 90s
The whole display / presentation / business client / business server / database multi-tier thing seems to have been broken horribly, so now presentation, business client and business server are merged on some cloud and delivered to a dumb graphical display. Why? Well, to take away control, of course.
Maturity isn't defined by the number of years since conception, but by its origins and the development and engineering which has gone into it since. HTML/Javascript has only comparatively recently been considered as a serious app development platform to contend with native apps, still building on the hypertext + scripting language paradigm. Even Google knows what a pain it is to work with HTML/Javascript directly and has developed a translator from Java to implement their web apps.
What's more, there are very few use cases where an offline application (I assume by that you mean "not HTML/Javascript" - I'm not sure what's "offline" about Java) isn't an option. The basic selling point with HTML apps is that you don't have to spend 30 seconds downloading and installing a small binary. When you're writing for a corporation, that's reduced to insignificance because it'd be installed as part of the deployment procedure.
Hahaha, I kid, I kid. If your interface is complex, why are you using HTML/CSS/Javascript/etc? Why not take advantage of a more advanced and mature UI widget set, such as that provided by Java or *shock* the native environment?
The web is about where MacOS was 20 years ago in terms of ability to deliver a rich application UI experience. Google are excellent at marketing it as some sort of advance, but it really isn't. Don't shoehorn.
...my problem is with a government organisation, the Sussex police, contemplating the production of proprietary software for a locked-down platform in order to facilitate some licensing process (*). No, I do not want my tax money to go toward funding the proliferation of Apple toys, thanks!
OTOH, this could just be someone over-buzzwording what turns out to be a web site.
(*) This will, of course, save no money whatever, and means either Apple or - more likely - some local development firm has good chums/an uncle in the police service, but we all knew that. Sussex is full of toffs, City commuters, mutual back-scratchers (but I repeat myself) and - increasingly over the last decade - a swathe of immigrants who work hard... and fight hard.
God bless insurgents for killing fag-enabling American troops! God bless AIDS!
God bless laws against stem cell research - if sufferers die because of hampered research, it's God's will!
God bless Anne Coulter and Michelle Malkin for singing the praises of Guantanamo and calling for fair and just treatment of Muslims who have committed no crime!
God bless the brave soldiers who have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians - for God spoke to Bush and told him he was doing God's will!
God bless our representatives for having the good sense to take away the freedom of 17-year-old sexters, and 20-year-old drinkers, and Satanic cannabis-smokers of any age! God bless the greatest prison population on the planet - being locked up is much better than death!
Except the under-age retards - God bless Texas for releasing them to heaven early!
God bless the Christian unicorn, so much braver and more righteous than the Muslim unicorn!
tl;dr We all suck, but the US is currently having a field-day pointing out how much the other side sucks.
Because my DNA is better and positively contributes to the gene pool.
(1) Define "positively" in the sentence fragment "positively contributes to the gene pool" without begging the question;
(2) You haven't explained why this means you should be rewarded. If breeding some genetically superior race is your aim, then the healthiest male specimens should probably be interned, fed and given a mandatory exercise regime to ensure their testicles remain in premium condition, then forced to produce sperm for shipping (no sex for you! that'd introduce extra risk) to the fittest females.
Most royalty are known to have crappy DNA because of centuries of in-breeding.
Except for all the DNA which gives them the sense to know how to maintain their positions. Contrary to popular belief, while there are a few conditions which certainly will be brought out by interbreeding of extended family, you're mostly just going to emphasise existing phenotypes.
Barring insanity or genetic problems, your IQ reflects your effort.
It doesn't matter how often people say it, it doesn't make it true. Sorry!
There is no evidence that you can significantly improve your IQ with effort. There is a small amount of evidence that very early education can affect IQ, where the effort comes from the parents rather than the child (just like under monarchy!). There is substantial evidence that IQ has a genetic component, regardless of the mental effort made by the kid once he's born. IQ is a reflection of the ability of the brain when trained to develop in a particular way in order to facilitate later practice; it's not a measure of the amount of training performed.
I was born with a complicated Spanish name.
One first name.
Two second names.
One hyphenated, accented surname from my father.
One simpler surname from my mother.
One of the first things I've done since reaching majority is to give a precise, simple, standard name to everyone who asks for it:
Xxxxx Xxxxxxx
where X is in A-Z and x is in a-z. Xxxxx is my first name, and Xxxxxxx is a shortened, accent-and-hyphen-free version of my father's surname.
You know why?
Because, in life, there are lots of things one must be "unreasonable" about in order to effect progress, but accommodation of one's name is not of them. It's a tedious, selfish expression of nothing more than ego which ultimately will land you in more trouble than others: some day you will be denied access to something thanks to some computer system not being designed to handle your name, and "computer says no" gets priority over the angry demands to the immigration officer of "Joe\0\rBlogg$ 3'); DROP TABLE citizens; -- [insert spinning cube here] Jr."
If you and your friends/colleagues have some other name by which they call you, sure why not? But, as any cat will tell you, the world is best when you have three names:
(i) one for communicating formally;
(ii) one for more intimate discourse (there's no reason why this can't be the same as (i), though many people end up with peculiar nicknames); and
(iii) one personal identification which you can keep to yourself and you can't express in words.
If you want the sum of all your history, culture and personality as expressed in (iii) to be embodied in (i), you're both expecting others to be burdened with your ego and bad at understanding human communication. All I asked for was a couple of words I can use in a reasonably uniform way to easily pick/call you out from a small crowd - that's what (i) is for, after all.
tl;dr The naming of cats is both a delightful poem and an insightful account of the multiple namespaces for kitty/human names and their different purposes. Don't confuse them.
When I was young, I used to find the whole British Monarchy obsession ridiculous. Who would wait on the street in long lines for another human, no matter what she symbolises? On one typical day twenty five years later, I saw people winding long queues outside an Apple store for the latest ephemeral plastic toy, and walked home past three nationalised banks, a row of high street shops converted into charity outlets because no-one can afford the rent, and one bursting Jobcentre. My only comfort that evening was hearing that the House of Lords had sent another piece of New Labour orwellian legislation back to Parliament. That evening the papers vilified Prince Charles for an anti-egalitarian speech implying that lowering university standards so everyone gets a place helps neither the academically bright nor those with other talents.
Then I recalled what a system of Constitutional Monarchy (including the Lords system) excels at doing: cutting through bullshit without feeling threatened that they'd lose their position of power. "But why should they get privilege because of the hole they came out of?" I hear you cry. Well, yes, and why should you be better rewardeed because you were born more healthy, or with greater IQ, than your neighbour? Life's not fair, but when you get on your hobby horse just because one particular aspect of society gets your goat, you might just make it less fair.
Shhhh. The former Soviet states are now shining examples of capitalism. Pointing out that internal passports are still required (and that pro-Western governments are so hated that governments which implements these sorts of laws are voted in democratically) ruins the dream.
Most pragmatists are pragmatists; some communists live in a commune; a few Christian conservatives aren't repressed homosexuals. No libertarians live by libertarian principles. It's reassuring because I've always believed libertarianism to be the least realisable of all the well-known political ideals.
Perhaps if I wasn't privately educated and decided to drive a car I would understand where these libertarians are coming from. I can only guess that they're trying to say that their lack of success can be blamed on their reliance on the State?
Who had a 325 DPI display before this?
If you read, oh, about a 20 words on from that then you'll see I noted the screen resolution exception. But consider the addendum addendum: it's irrelevant on such a small screen where
Let's pick a random example... the HTC Touch Pro, since this month is its two year birthday. 2.8" screen, 4:3 aspect ratio, 640x480. If my middle school mathematics serves me correctly, that's 2.24" x 1.68" at 285 square DPI. Your extra 40 DPI mean in otherwise identical conditions you may observe pixelation slightly earlier as you bring your phone in an ideal environment of visual concentration increasingly close to your face. In both cases, a normal human eye has better resolution than the hardware can provide when held in front of your face with an elbow joint making a right angle.
If you still want to play the irrelevant numbers game which Apple users have sometimes rightly chastised the PC clone world for, we can bring up another consumer 2008 device: the Sony X1. This, IIRC, has around 312 DPI. If you think a 4% DPI increase makes any noticeable difference or that a dozen DPI increase in 2 years is a tech breakthrough, you are bad, mad or Jobs.
communism will always fail, all on its own, all by itself
--
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it
k.
Although maybe you missed that we're discussing command economies, for you've engaged another tired Cold War us-vs-them tactic.
School recap:
(1) Capitalism is an economic system with a fairly clear definition. Communism is a sociopolitical system with a more nebulous definition.
(2) A is not B. Even if A may imply B, it does not follow that B implies A. Even if you have a problem with A, this cannot be used to argue against B.
(3) A sound argument requires you to state your premises.
Talking of US vs NK (or indeed US vs USSR) as "capitalism vs communism" is to engage in battle rhetoric, not rational discussion. At least the article was comparing apples with apples - capitalist vs command economy - despite the specious evidence and reasoning.
I'm out. Elementary logic was too many years ago to be worth debating!