And we have people picking out one or two details they don't like, focusing on those, and declaring that the cripples should just go elsewhere.
Apparently there are lot of people that hate the ADA. They don't want it applied anywhere. They are arguing against it here, not because it's a bad idea to apply a law evenly across different areas of life, but because they don't like the ADA in the first place
I've read the entire discussion up to this point and I can say without fear of error that you are full of shit. No one has expressed undue hatred of the ADA, just the impossibility of strictly conforming given current technologies and the ridiculousness of requiring conformance across the board.
I'm a web developer and I can tell you precisely how insanely difficult it is to make web apps that do anything non-trivial function *at all* across browsers even when you don't think twice about the blind. We all try to conform to standards but at the end of the day business interests win. I would dearly like to publish only strictly-conforming and standards-compliant web sites, but to do so would be business insanity since my requirements include being friendly, easy and attractive. Doing those three things in all major browsers often requires odious practices I would rather not do, but these things are necessary to be commercially successful. It is a complete fallacy to suggest, as TFA does, that supporting the blind is mostly easy and not costly. In fact supporting the blind in an initial design is difficult and shoe-horning support in at a later time without a rewrite would be even more so, bordering on "complete rewrite required" - and these things are costly. It would literally cost hundreds of millions of dollars of labor to require all non-personal web pages to be re-done, more so if you start classifying "personal" very narrowly.
and then turn around and pick one detail from a non-existent regulation and declare it bad because of that seems silly.
It's a bit of an overreaction, sure, but reacting to news is what Slashdot is for. Declaring this detail to be bad is easy: It is a bad idea to require the majority of web sites to be rewritten on a government-mandated deadline in the name of accommodation of theoretical visitors.
and all that but then declare that shopping online isn't protected under the ADA and shouldn't be seems backwards.
Ah, but nobody said "Online stores must be ADA compliant" what they said was "ALL sites, but we may make some few exceptions for some personal sites." Not every site is "personal" or "online store"; in fact, those two together don't amount to a fraction of the web.
But to like the ADA and want to block the ADA from applying online seems very inconsistent. Especially when ADA compliance should be default on all web pages (if the rules and the pages are both written sanely).
The fact that you can say this with a straight face is a clear indication that you are misunderstanding what's at stake here. In the first place it's laughable to suggest that the government will require web developers to write sane pages, though I for one would be amused to see such legislation passed. In the second place I will reiterate: Sane web pages are not sufficient. If that were all there was to it all right-thinking web developers everywhere would be cheering that their embarrassingly-awful brethren are going to be required to shape up or stop publishing.
MySQL is crap if you are trying to run big databases that usually run on Oracle, DB2. Otherwise it's fine for its intended purpose. Personally I would switch to Postgres as I still worry of MySQL's future.
Funny. I'd switch to Postgres because I worry about data integrity. Who cares what MySQL's future looks like?
I agree with this and this was more or less the gist of my comment. Even though it's degrading over time Google still makes finding what I want fast, easy and, in some cases, possible, where its competitors do not.
That's why they're competing on glitz. Their product is not as superior as it once was.
Google search is still not even close to being matched by any other service. Who actually competes with them? Name one search engine which is as good and allow me to disabuse you of that notion.
The instant search results are a pain for me. They violate my back button expectations and they interfere with my web searching workflow: I may alter my query in preperation for the next iteration while still scanning the page for links to open in new tabs.
It also uses excessive bandwidth by searching for me--and causing the page scrollbar to jump around jarringly--when I am not done typing.
One thing I always liked about Google right from the first is that they're *lightweight* and fast. Clutter free and minimal to the greatest extent possible. I understand with things like the never-ending-image-search and instant results from queries they're trying to compete with the glitz of bing and other so-called competitors, but this seriously hurts the experience for users like me. Please, Google! You don't have to compete on glitz when you have a hands-down superior product!
I'll go first: My father, a Mac fan since the mid 80s, has recently switched back to Firefox on the Mac after a three-month flirtation with Safari. Therefore, I conclude, it is clear that there is a trend of people ditching Safari on the Mac in favor of Firefox, Firefox is superior to Safari on the Mac in the opinion of die-hard Apple fans, and Safari Is Dying, just to be traditional.
Okay, AC, now it's YOUR turn. Go go gadget anecdotal evidence! Real facts would be nice, too.
From the point of view of a commercial vendor there are only three: RHEL, SLES and (maybe) Ubuntu. Depending on the app some few may provide Fedora and Debian support, but after that it peters out pretty quick.
What mods for civ5? I hadn't thought of fixing the game with mods but I surely have been annoyed by fucking-huge space consuming menu elements. What happened to letting me see the map? I'd also love it if the unit icons could be fixed to be clearer. Please share your mod list! What does it take to make civ5 nice to play?
I don't doubt for a moment that Seamonkey does not load the bits you don't use, which is why I think splitting off Firefox as a separate product was crazy to begin with even though at the time everyone was saying "Hooray, finally Mozilla without all those apps I don't use that must be slowing it down!"
I think the operative questions are "What is it Seamonkey does differently than Firefox that causes reduced memory usage for you?" and "Is it just some settings anyone could tweak in Firefox?"
No, it hasn't. If you were to re-bundle Firefox and Thunderbird, for example, it would be more bloated than it is now, if anything, not less, and it would not make the browser component any better to use. If you want a less 'bloated' Firefox you must answer this question: Which features do you sacrifice? It's not purely a matter of inefficient code or useless additions. Be prepared to defend your idea of what should and should not be installed by default.
I, for one, would throw out the awesomebar and everything sqlite.
The Mozilla project was started as a from-scratch rewrite of Netscape Communicator (Netscape Browser, Netscape Mail & News, Netscape Composer) in an open source fashion. Actually that's not entirely accurate: When the project started they started with the Netscape 4.x source code and only decided to throw it out and start over a few months later, probably after the project leaders had been drinking, but this is incidental.
As the project progressed Mozilla-the-project added all of the Communicator apps on top of a common core. Eventually Netscape the company took a pre-1.0 version of this and released it as "Netscape Communicator 6", which was commonly understood to be "As slow as molasses," meanwhile Mozilla continued to release Mozilla-the-suite (Mozilla Browser, Mozilla Mail & News, Mozilla Composer, and the new kid on the block: Chatzilla). Eventually some developers in Mozilla started up a guerrilla project to make "Just a browser" and released Mozilla Browser with a few UI tweaks as Phoenix, which was too bad because Phoenix-the-bios-vendor had a browser in some of their product and didn't like that, so they renamed it to Firebird, which was too bad because the Firebird database guys were there first, so they renamed it to Firefox, which made no sense to anybody but at least wasn't trademarked yet. Netscape-the-company, in a last gasp of breath, released a Netscape browser based on Firefox, called Netscape 8, which contained a brand new sidebar! But nobody cared. Once Firefox had stolen enough thunder and press Mozilla-the-project refocused its efforts on that and formally discontinued Mozilla-the-Suite, which pissed off a lot of people who said "But we like the all-in-one suite!" These people went on to rebrand Mozilla Suite as Seamonkey, after an old code name that somebody liked. Meanwhile Mozilla Mail & News was spun off of the Suite as Thunderbird and (eventually) the calendar component, which had never quite made it in to the suite, was spun off as Sunbird (after a few false starts) and then kind of re-integrated into Thunderbird with the catchy name "Lightning" when somebody realized that few people actually used a standalone calendar and sometimes bundling makes sense after all (which just proves the point us Seamonkey fans have been making).
Chatzilla, meanwhile, got more or less forgotten, languishing as a Firefox extension, and Composer saw some life as Nvu, stagnated, then became KompoZer (because Z makes everything better).
I think the point here is that Firefox is the bloat-free version of Mozilla Browser, in that you didn't have to get the rest of the communicator suite with it. Since that suite *is* Seamonkey and still shares a large majority of code with Firefox (common core and the Browser component) it's a bit ridiculous to say that Seamonkey is Firefox without the bloat, since (historically) it's the other way around and in terms of code-base there's a lot more 'bloat' in Seamonkey!
Mozilla didn't reinvent the browser, they just reimplemented Netscape Communicator, then later split off the navigator piece into phoenix/firebird/firefox. It was never a revolution it was just what people actually wanted: a browser that's (1) free to use, (2) doesn't crash all the time, (3) supports standards and (4) runs on every platform anybody cares about. At the time 1 beat out Opera, 2 and 3 beat classic navigator and IE, 4 beat IE and some others. Mozilla and Firefox were never revolutionary, just (finally) a good, solid browser. The fact that this has become relatively ordinary since then is very nice, but still not a revolution.
Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features
Let me stop you right there so we can all laugh long and hard at this one.
Between OpenOffice and koffice and gnumeric all my 'office suite' needs are well met. I don't need or want something new, and since libreoffice spun off I think openoffice has a chance of becoming more useful over time, so I don't worry about its future. On a day to day, week to week basis I do not use an office suite. A browser, that I use every single day--every single hour!--and better performance and more features in my browser is something I'll get excited about.
It's not an RTS at all. It's an electronic team sport. I've also recently heard people calling this type of game "Multiplayer online battle arena" or MOBA, which is a bit of a mouthful. It's a little like a third-person shooter, in that it's not first-person and you have two teams on a map running around killing each other, but players are not interchangeable, nor are weapons and there really isn't any "shooting"
Clearly Icefrog was hired for something he knew that not everyone in the community knew, which tends to suggest that it was his own expertise which was being sold, thus his own ideas. Since dota was developed in a fairly open manner almost anyone from the community could have been hired to help with LoL or HoN, but not just anyone was and this implies to me that they hired icefrog for icefrog's ideas, not for the stuff everyone knows about dota.
Dota is pretty well known, in and out, by most players. There can't be trade secrets when there are no secrets. To the extent that any exist they are icefrogs secrets. Anything unique added by eul or guinsoo, if it still exists in the map, is by now no longer unique and would be known to at least the LoL people.
"Trade secrets"?! What nonsense. DotA has been developed "in the open" as it were since the beginning. If Icefrog agreed to sell whatever rights he has to dota to one party, and then simultaneously sold them to another, then that would be a problem... but otherwise I don't see how there could be an issue. You can't steal your own ideas.
The correct reaction is to ignore the loudmouth idiots. I assure you that 90% of dota players get yelled at for one thing or another by random players with no respect. You develop thick skin and filter it out, after a while. The rewards when things are going nicely outweigh the negatives, IMO.
Learning how not to feed is pretty basic. Learning how to not make someone mad at you.... that's hard.
HoN is like the child of DotA where LoL is the snotty cousin nobody likes. HoN is definitely *NOT* a perfect clone, there are many things that are too different. It's different enough that I can't switch back and forth seamlessly and retain my edge in both. The engine is just very different. They tried to make it close, but close behavior-wise does not cut it. Even though it's not a great engine for dota warcraft 3 does have some rather good things going for it which are difficult to replicate.
What are you talking about? Let me recap the story so far:
Person A: "Don't trust IceFrog! He's a jerk and was dishonest about his past history and intentions." Me: "As long as he protects DotA I don't care if he's a jerk." You: "So the ends justify the means?!"
I guess if the "ends" are "A good dota experience" and the "means" are "he makes some people dislike him" then I agree...
Slashdot Mirror
And we have people picking out one or two details they don't like, focusing on those, and declaring that the cripples should just go elsewhere.
Apparently there are lot of people that hate the ADA. They don't want it applied anywhere. They are arguing against it here, not because it's a bad idea to apply a law evenly across different areas of life, but because they don't like the ADA in the first place
I've read the entire discussion up to this point and I can say without fear of error that you are full of shit. No one has expressed undue hatred of the ADA, just the impossibility of strictly conforming given current technologies and the ridiculousness of requiring conformance across the board.
I'm a web developer and I can tell you precisely how insanely difficult it is to make web apps that do anything non-trivial function *at all* across browsers even when you don't think twice about the blind. We all try to conform to standards but at the end of the day business interests win. I would dearly like to publish only strictly-conforming and standards-compliant web sites, but to do so would be business insanity since my requirements include being friendly, easy and attractive. Doing those three things in all major browsers often requires odious practices I would rather not do, but these things are necessary to be commercially successful. It is a complete fallacy to suggest, as TFA does, that supporting the blind is mostly easy and not costly. In fact supporting the blind in an initial design is difficult and shoe-horning support in at a later time without a rewrite would be even more so, bordering on "complete rewrite required" - and these things are costly. It would literally cost hundreds of millions of dollars of labor to require all non-personal web pages to be re-done, more so if you start classifying "personal" very narrowly.
and then turn around and pick one detail from a non-existent regulation and declare it bad because of that seems silly.
It's a bit of an overreaction, sure, but reacting to news is what Slashdot is for. Declaring this detail to be bad is easy: It is a bad idea to require the majority of web sites to be rewritten on a government-mandated deadline in the name of accommodation of theoretical visitors.
and all that but then declare that shopping online isn't protected under the ADA and shouldn't be seems backwards.
Ah, but nobody said "Online stores must be ADA compliant" what they said was "ALL sites, but we may make some few exceptions for some personal sites." Not every site is "personal" or "online store"; in fact, those two together don't amount to a fraction of the web.
But to like the ADA and want to block the ADA from applying online seems very inconsistent. Especially when ADA compliance should be default on all web pages (if the rules and the pages are both written sanely).
The fact that you can say this with a straight face is a clear indication that you are misunderstanding what's at stake here. In the first place it's laughable to suggest that the government will require web developers to write sane pages, though I for one would be amused to see such legislation passed. In the second place I will reiterate: Sane web pages are not sufficient. If that were all there was to it all right-thinking web developers everywhere would be cheering that their embarrassingly-awful brethren are going to be required to shape up or stop publishing.
MySQL is crap if you are trying to run big databases that usually run on Oracle, DB2. Otherwise it's fine for its intended purpose. Personally I would switch to Postgres as I still worry of MySQL's future.
Funny. I'd switch to Postgres because I worry about data integrity. Who cares what MySQL's future looks like?
I agree with this and this was more or less the gist of my comment. Even though it's degrading over time Google still makes finding what I want fast, easy and, in some cases, possible, where its competitors do not.
That's why they're competing on glitz. Their product is not as superior as it once was.
Google search is still not even close to being matched by any other service. Who actually competes with them? Name one search engine which is as good and allow me to disabuse you of that notion.
NoScript has google.com whitelisted because a lot of things I do make this necessary.
The instant search results are a pain for me. They violate my back button expectations and they interfere with my web searching workflow: I may alter my query in preperation for the next iteration while still scanning the page for links to open in new tabs.
It also uses excessive bandwidth by searching for me--and causing the page scrollbar to jump around jarringly--when I am not done typing.
One thing I always liked about Google right from the first is that they're *lightweight* and fast. Clutter free and minimal to the greatest extent possible. I understand with things like the never-ending-image-search and instant results from queries they're trying to compete with the glitz of bing and other so-called competitors, but this seriously hurts the experience for users like me. Please, Google! You don't have to compete on glitz when you have a hands-down superior product!
Care to cite any kind of evidence at all?
I'll go first: My father, a Mac fan since the mid 80s, has recently switched back to Firefox on the Mac after a three-month flirtation with Safari. Therefore, I conclude, it is clear that there is a trend of people ditching Safari on the Mac in favor of Firefox, Firefox is superior to Safari on the Mac in the opinion of die-hard Apple fans, and Safari Is Dying, just to be traditional.
Okay, AC, now it's YOUR turn. Go go gadget anecdotal evidence! Real facts would be nice, too.
From the point of view of a commercial vendor there are only three: RHEL, SLES and (maybe) Ubuntu. Depending on the app some few may provide Fedora and Debian support, but after that it peters out pretty quick.
Lotus was entrenched in a market where there were only a few million consumers. Today the exact same market share would be tiny.
It's easier to switch 100,000 people to a new software package than 10,000,000.
That said, I agree: No amount of entrenched means you're unbeatable unless no one wants to try to beat you.
What mods for civ5? I hadn't thought of fixing the game with mods but I surely have been annoyed by fucking-huge space consuming menu elements. What happened to letting me see the map? I'd also love it if the unit icons could be fixed to be clearer. Please share your mod list! What does it take to make civ5 nice to play?
I don't doubt for a moment that Seamonkey does not load the bits you don't use, which is why I think splitting off Firefox as a separate product was crazy to begin with even though at the time everyone was saying "Hooray, finally Mozilla without all those apps I don't use that must be slowing it down!"
I think the operative questions are "What is it Seamonkey does differently than Firefox that causes reduced memory usage for you?" and "Is it just some settings anyone could tweak in Firefox?"
No, it hasn't. If you were to re-bundle Firefox and Thunderbird, for example, it would be more bloated than it is now, if anything, not less, and it would not make the browser component any better to use. If you want a less 'bloated' Firefox you must answer this question: Which features do you sacrifice? It's not purely a matter of inefficient code or useless additions. Be prepared to defend your idea of what should and should not be installed by default.
I, for one, would throw out the awesomebar and everything sqlite.
I can see it now: wardriving for picture frames and uploading goatse to each one.
I, for one, welcome our new WiFi Direct overlords.
The Mozilla project was started as a from-scratch rewrite of Netscape Communicator (Netscape Browser, Netscape Mail & News, Netscape Composer) in an open source fashion. Actually that's not entirely accurate: When the project started they started with the Netscape 4.x source code and only decided to throw it out and start over a few months later, probably after the project leaders had been drinking, but this is incidental.
As the project progressed Mozilla-the-project added all of the Communicator apps on top of a common core. Eventually Netscape the company took a pre-1.0 version of this and released it as "Netscape Communicator 6", which was commonly understood to be "As slow as molasses," meanwhile Mozilla continued to release Mozilla-the-suite (Mozilla Browser, Mozilla Mail & News, Mozilla Composer, and the new kid on the block: Chatzilla). Eventually some developers in Mozilla started up a guerrilla project to make "Just a browser" and released Mozilla Browser with a few UI tweaks as Phoenix, which was too bad because Phoenix-the-bios-vendor had a browser in some of their product and didn't like that, so they renamed it to Firebird, which was too bad because the Firebird database guys were there first, so they renamed it to Firefox, which made no sense to anybody but at least wasn't trademarked yet. Netscape-the-company, in a last gasp of breath, released a Netscape browser based on Firefox, called Netscape 8, which contained a brand new sidebar! But nobody cared. Once Firefox had stolen enough thunder and press Mozilla-the-project refocused its efforts on that and formally discontinued Mozilla-the-Suite, which pissed off a lot of people who said "But we like the all-in-one suite!" These people went on to rebrand Mozilla Suite as Seamonkey, after an old code name that somebody liked. Meanwhile Mozilla Mail & News was spun off of the Suite as Thunderbird and (eventually) the calendar component, which had never quite made it in to the suite, was spun off as Sunbird (after a few false starts) and then kind of re-integrated into Thunderbird with the catchy name "Lightning" when somebody realized that few people actually used a standalone calendar and sometimes bundling makes sense after all (which just proves the point us Seamonkey fans have been making).
Chatzilla, meanwhile, got more or less forgotten, languishing as a Firefox extension, and Composer saw some life as Nvu, stagnated, then became KompoZer (because Z makes everything better).
I think the point here is that Firefox is the bloat-free version of Mozilla Browser, in that you didn't have to get the rest of the communicator suite with it. Since that suite *is* Seamonkey and still shares a large majority of code with Firefox (common core and the Browser component) it's a bit ridiculous to say that Seamonkey is Firefox without the bloat, since (historically) it's the other way around and in terms of code-base there's a lot more 'bloat' in Seamonkey!
Mozilla didn't reinvent the browser, they just reimplemented Netscape Communicator, then later split off the navigator piece into phoenix/firebird/firefox. It was never a revolution it was just what people actually wanted: a browser that's (1) free to use, (2) doesn't crash all the time, (3) supports standards and (4) runs on every platform anybody cares about. At the time 1 beat out Opera, 2 and 3 beat classic navigator and IE, 4 beat IE and some others. Mozilla and Firefox were never revolutionary, just (finally) a good, solid browser. The fact that this has become relatively ordinary since then is very nice, but still not a revolution.
Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features
Let me stop you right there so we can all laugh long and hard at this one.
Between OpenOffice and koffice and gnumeric all my 'office suite' needs are well met. I don't need or want something new, and since libreoffice spun off I think openoffice has a chance of becoming more useful over time, so I don't worry about its future. On a day to day, week to week basis I do not use an office suite. A browser, that I use every single day--every single hour!--and better performance and more features in my browser is something I'll get excited about.
You mean that dumb bastard Doc Brown screwed it up--after all, he was the one who keyed in 1955.
Slashdot likes to strip out begin-tag characters like <, unless you are careful to use HTML entities.
It's not an RTS at all. It's an electronic team sport. I've also recently heard people calling this type of game "Multiplayer online battle arena" or MOBA, which is a bit of a mouthful. It's a little like a third-person shooter, in that it's not first-person and you have two teams on a map running around killing each other, but players are not interchangeable, nor are weapons and there really isn't any "shooting"
English adopted that 30% of French, including liberty, long before anyone colonized America from Europe. You can thank William of Normandy for that.
Clearly Icefrog was hired for something he knew that not everyone in the community knew, which tends to suggest that it was his own expertise which was being sold, thus his own ideas. Since dota was developed in a fairly open manner almost anyone from the community could have been hired to help with LoL or HoN, but not just anyone was and this implies to me that they hired icefrog for icefrog's ideas, not for the stuff everyone knows about dota.
Dota is pretty well known, in and out, by most players. There can't be trade secrets when there are no secrets. To the extent that any exist they are icefrogs secrets. Anything unique added by eul or guinsoo, if it still exists in the map, is by now no longer unique and would be known to at least the LoL people.
"Trade secrets"?! What nonsense. DotA has been developed "in the open" as it were since the beginning. If Icefrog agreed to sell whatever rights he has to dota to one party, and then simultaneously sold them to another, then that would be a problem... but otherwise I don't see how there could be an issue. You can't steal your own ideas.
The correct reaction is to ignore the loudmouth idiots. I assure you that 90% of dota players get yelled at for one thing or another by random players with no respect. You develop thick skin and filter it out, after a while. The rewards when things are going nicely outweigh the negatives, IMO.
Learning how not to feed is pretty basic. Learning how to not make someone mad at you.... that's hard.
HoN is like the child of DotA where LoL is the snotty cousin nobody likes. HoN is definitely *NOT* a perfect clone, there are many things that are too different. It's different enough that I can't switch back and forth seamlessly and retain my edge in both. The engine is just very different. They tried to make it close, but close behavior-wise does not cut it. Even though it's not a great engine for dota warcraft 3 does have some rather good things going for it which are difficult to replicate.
What are you talking about? Let me recap the story so far:
Person A: "Don't trust IceFrog! He's a jerk and was dishonest about his past history and intentions."
Me: "As long as he protects DotA I don't care if he's a jerk."
You: "So the ends justify the means?!"
I guess if the "ends" are "A good dota experience" and the "means" are "he makes some people dislike him" then I agree...