It's because web apps are (1) good enough and getting better, (2) available and compatible *now*. Once upon a time every platform had a basic (HTML3) web browser. Suddenly you could access functionality of an app without needing to install it, without local privileges, without worrying about what it was written in, on every platform with a basic web browser. Improvements on top of that have been slow and incremental. Attempting to deliver a replacement at this point is difficult and would likely need to follow a similar model. The need for replacement would need to be great and compelling. To do it for no other reason than providing apps written in 'better' languages like C++ or having 'better' UIs is not sufficient! There would have to be some serious benefits. Even so, adoption would be slow at best.
And I don't think iphone support makes any difference as to why flash as a platform has not taken off. The iphone is too recent to have mattered.
All I can say is "security nightmare." ActiveX had the same problem.
And again, why has this not taken off? You say it could be done, but... it has been years and I don't see adoption. Why not? When you can answer that you will either believe me or will be able to convince me of the merits of doing things the way you describe.
Netbooks will only accelerate the trend toward web based apps. Smaller disks, slow CPUs... people will optimize the browser, they wont add on additional local components which it will be difficult to guarantee everyone has.
Question: Why isn't flash the network-centric app platform of choice?
No. I am saying the left was recently reluctant to do it. The president elect, during his campaign, was in a period after the time during which I observed the left being reluctant. He seems perhaps less reluctant, but only time will tell.
Do we care what brand tooth paste Obama uses? Do we care what kind of perfume, if any, his wife buys?
Enough with this meaningless celebrity worship! We don't need to obsess over every minute detail of someone just because he's famous or powerful. Focus on things that/matter/!
Package management wasn't invented yesterday, RPMs/DEBs are as effortless as ever to install and so are the countless common ways of installing stuff on Windows. Why do you think so many people use Firefox already despite it being so terribly hard to install, code for (cross-plattform) and even though MSIE is already preinstalled on all Windows systems? It's not too hard, look at all the spyware crap people can install all by themselves on Windows.
You miss the point. "Installing" gmail is *always* easier even than using a package manager. I am not dealing in theory, here, I'm talking real world usage. Things can get installed without the user's notice, but the ease of setup for a download-and-install application, even when using a package manager, is greater than that of the ease of setup of a web-based application, to say *nothing* of the time required. The fact that people *can* do install apps and that some things are preinstalled is *irrelevant*. The fact that some software installs itself automatically is irrelevant! Not all software will, so you're back to square one: Dumb, time-constrained users who don't know how to do anything, don't want to spend any time and refuse to learn or remember anything. Web based apps are very nice for those people.
Gmail is a fine Web application, yes. But it's not an example that can be generalized.
It *is* generalizable! That's the entire point: The only reasons *so far* that more apps aren't web-based are: (1) developing web apps is really hard on the developer, and (2) performance sucks ass. These problems are slowly being solved and as it is the web app becomes practical for more things.
Why isn't Winamp a web application?
Do you know how many people don't use Winamp but instead connect to sites with an embedded flash web radio stream? You may scoff, but I've seen it many times. This may not be ideal for everyone but it *does* happen *even though it sucks*. Imagine if one day it didn't suck? It will only get worse.
How about Irfanview or other image viewers? Heck, even Google Picasa is an.exe... Gmail only exists because it's hosted where you *want your data to be kept*
Local apps for viewing local files makes sense, yes, plus there's that (2) performance thing. I never said web apps were perfect for everything! I'm just trying to answer the question "Why would you ever do a web app instead of writing it in C++?" Web apps are good for the reasons I described before, and will become good enough for more things over time. I doubt they'll ever become the best choice for all things.
It's a straightforward, unsafe way of managing your email that gets away with it because people don't really care. Ideally, we'd want to have our data in a safe place, accessible from anywhere with a proper UI (why did Google add IMAP to gmail?).
I have my mail data in a safe place accessible from anywhere with a proper UI: I use gmail! If you are biased against the "bad" UI of a web based app, as you say gmail can be accessed via a standard client. As to safety... everyone will NOT be able to house his own data at his own house, not even in the miraculous future. Too many practical considerations prevent this. What we'll do is buy access to a service which provides it to us from anywhere, keeps it redundant, makes backups, etc.. GMail effectively does this, the only problems being privacy issues, storage format issues and a few things like that. I choose to trust google as one day we will each choose to trust some company to keep our data. I'd prefer it if it were all public key encrypted and accessible only to me, but for now (for email) I choose to not care.
The web, as a delivery mechanism and operating paradigm, along with the web browser as the engine for interaction, is the immediate future. If you think this sucks
Not at all. I said the left has recently been reluctant to do it. I said Obama plays the same game. I did not say the left never did it during that period, I did not say exactly when the recent period I referred to begins and ends. Obama might possibly represent an end to it, though it's too early to tell.
You describe an amusing fantasy that is entirely at odds with human behavior.
Today anyone can, with no real effort, put up a web page with the same information and give out the URL, which could easily just be a domain. Any company could put up a service exactly like this. It is completely unnecessary to have a new TLD to get this done.
So what, exactly, is the point? If a service like this were useful it would have been done already and have been successful.
Ever tried getting a user to install something? Web pages are/effortless/ for the end user. They're painful on the order of pulling teeth for the developer, but they're so/easy/ to use for the end user that nothing else matters.
Do you think gmail would be popular if it required you to download a client to use it? Do you think it would be as popular if it 'allowed' you to use any standard MUA, but required you to pick one? The user who wants to use it in such a scenario has to/configure his application/, which he hasn't the first clue how to do, which he isn't inclined to spend the time to do. Further, he has to do this on every computer he visits!
Now, you could describe a/hypothetical/ world in which the user's MUA and settings migrate with him to wherever he goes, or a world in which google provides a one-click link which auto-configures whatever local MUA the user has. The problem with such answers is that those things/don't exist/ and are really/difficult/ to create and keep going. The web-based gmail might have been a nightmare to write initially and it might have a crappy UI and it might be orders of magnitude slower than a local desktop equivalent, but these things just do not matter. Web developer time and effort is meaningless against the effort saved for users.
I could give countless examples like this. Maybe you're down on javascript, or php, or other 'web' languages. That's fine, I'm not much of a PHP fan myself. Maybe you think that there's a better way to write network-centric apps. You're probably right! The/reality/ that we live under today, however, does not give us any adequate alternatives: Web-based apps are too valuable to/not/ use, the more apps that are made available this way the more valuable it becomes and, in case you didn't notice,/the tools are improving/. Ten years ago web 'apps' were a joke, today they're just a pain.
The browser makes a terrible platform: it's not designed to be one, though the design is evolving, plus incompatibilities between implementations (and even versions) make doing complex things really hard, it's a dumb canvas with dumber knobs and switches you can sometimes get to do the right thing if the stars align just right. As a UI it's awful; everything is async, none of it can be trusted, clients might not behave the way you expect and you usually can't tell when that happens... I'm not saying there aren't bad things that could be better! I'm just saying that a web based app will be "better" than a C++ app in many, many cases, even though the C++ app is much nicer to code. The web, as a delivery mechanism and operating paradigm, along with the web browser as the engine for interaction, is the immediate future. If you think this sucks, get busy replacing it now! In a couple of years it may be too late to replace it soon.
Alternative interfaces via plugins are no answer, either, before you say "Just write it in java," or some such nonsense. If that were going to be the way we do things we would have it by now. I don't know for sure why it didn't take off, but I think it's some combination of the need to meet the lowest common denominator and the bugginess involved in running a buggy browser + a buggy plugin + a buggy applet, vs. just a buggy browser. These days add in buggy JS which, even when it fails, usually does not crash the browser (unless you're running IE6).
tl;dr the web sucks but it's here, now and it's evolving to suck less
Not well. This is beside the point! Those things largely don't get used. Web developers stick with what works everywhere, or serve different things to different browsers.
He means not "convince the stupid" but "lie to the stupid" and tell them whatever it is you think will get them to act according to your desires.
It is the very readiness of the right to do this and the reluctance of the left, in recent years, which has lead to the supposedly "right leaning" political landscape we have all been told we have in the USA. Reagan, for example, told comforting lies about economics. No matter how well or poorly you think he performed he did what good politicians do: Tell the lie that gets the most votes. Obama isn't as good at it but he played the same game and got the same result.
Some of us don't like lying to people, even if doing so gives us the power to reshape the world as we would like.
They call it "networking" but I dislike this term as it has a well defined technical meaning.
I got my first job because I knew a guy who recommended it to me and mentioned me to those who later interviewed me.
I got my next job because a co-worker from my first job told me about a position, handed over my resume and gave me a nice talking-up to the people doing the hiring.
He got his job there because someone he knew in school recommended him.
Do you see a pattern here? In an uncertain world it's hard to know what to believe. I've seen people with great resumes, claiming experience AND education, who couldn't do the jobs they were hired to do. I've seen people with no degrees and no experience excel. How do you tell the difference between the two when you're doing the hiring? You rely on the advice and recommendations of people you trust, i.e. people you've already worked with. In this down economy the tendency to go with the safe bet will be even higher.
Knowing people helps you get a job. It's not absolutely essential but it really, really helps.
Are you serious? You do realize that the world wide web is just one thing that runs *on top of* the internet? It refers only to things happening on the HTTP protocol, which is a large but nor majority amount of internet traffic.
Stop equating "the world wide web" and "the internet." I get enough of that from the clueless masses, on Slashdot I expect a slightly higher level of education.
It might take a lot to get someone up to material contributions, but many coding errors are noticeable without knowing much about what the software is doing. Although I guess static analyzers could catch most of those just as well.
I think the real question here is... what's the harm? Worst case you get some emails you ignore, best case you find some genius who can help you. Just allowing the space enthusiasts who are also programmers to get some idea of what's involved, or to see progress go forward day-by-day... I'd be fascinated, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested.
In English by convention, tradition and in some cases prescription the male pronoun is used when the gender is unknown. You can say this is sexist if you like, but to me it is simple: "him" is male or unknown, "her" is female.
If someone says her when the gender is unknown this is *usually* because the speaker believes that saying him is sexist, or that it doesn't matter, or thinks that this somehow promotes feminism, or helps women, or something of that nature. The use of "her" for gender unknown is a deliberate choice with an agenda.
If someone say "him" when the gender is unknown it usually does not indicate that person's views, except to say that he (notice: not she) is not an extremist engaged in a personal campaign using questionable tactics. You can say the structure of our society and language is transparently, subconsciously sexist, but I don't really care.
I, personally, would favor the introduction of gender neutral singular pronouns. Simply replacing him with her for the sake of promoting feminism is not advantageous. The only problem is that it's hard to direct the evolution of English in any serious way.
Until such time as a genuine neutral word enters the language using he/him will be correct.
This is crazy. It's like saying "Third party software shouldn't use a.msi" on Windows.
For the record,/opt is brain dead. Its only advantage over/usr is that all files related to a program go under one directory. Except, of course, that sometimes some files don't: some go in/etc, in/var, sometimes programs installed in/opt pollute/usr/lib.../opt is a bastard child that should die in a fire. There are many advantages to splitting an installed program out over several directories. At this point in history/opt is solely for people who can't be bothered to write and package software correctly. And yes, that means it's for "third party" or "commercial" software, because it seems accepted that those people wont be able to do things right. Why set expectations so low?
*All* software installation should be managed, one way or another. Use SMS or ZENworks, use.msi's. On Windows most programs will register themselves in Add/Remove programs and provide an uninstall mechanism. It's a hack and would not work the same way in Linux, but it's an indication that what I say is true: All software installation should be managed. Under Linux we have a variety of quite sophisticated means for doing the managing. One thing that's missing is cross-distribution compatibility, which supposedly LSB is working on. I am not a big believer in the LSB, but if they're trying to solve real problems more power to them.
Actually come to think of it, pretty much all websites use fancy date pickers now for dates when you're thinking about time from the perspective of the present, that is, not things like your birthday.
This isn't done because it's a good UI for choosing dates. As the parent said, letting you type it in is a good UI. The date pickers are used because they drastically reduce the probability that the user will type in something which is not a recognizable date or (worse!) is recognized as a date but interpreted different than intended by the user.
Is it DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY? You can't know which way your users will be thinking with certainty and you can't trust that they'll pay attention to a notice concerning the expected input format. Date pickers make getting date input quick and easy for the developer.
Some people do swear by the series of dropdown list boxes, but they do take up a lot of space and are more difficult to use than date pickers. The date picker ultimately posts back a single field with a machine-parseable string in a predictable format. The series-of-lists approach requires at some point the consolidation of several values into a date, either in client javascript or after hitting the server (which is safer). I am still of two minds about whether the extra hassle is worth the javascript-safety.
tl;dr, date pickers are not good ui, just pragmatic design decisions
Slashdot Mirror
It's because web apps are (1) good enough and getting better, (2) available and compatible *now*. Once upon a time every platform had a basic (HTML3) web browser. Suddenly you could access functionality of an app without needing to install it, without local privileges, without worrying about what it was written in, on every platform with a basic web browser. Improvements on top of that have been slow and incremental. Attempting to deliver a replacement at this point is difficult and would likely need to follow a similar model. The need for replacement would need to be great and compelling. To do it for no other reason than providing apps written in 'better' languages like C++ or having 'better' UIs is not sufficient! There would have to be some serious benefits. Even so, adoption would be slow at best.
And I don't think iphone support makes any difference as to why flash as a platform has not taken off. The iphone is too recent to have mattered.
All I can say is "security nightmare." ActiveX had the same problem.
And again, why has this not taken off? You say it could be done, but... it has been years and I don't see adoption. Why not? When you can answer that you will either believe me or will be able to convince me of the merits of doing things the way you describe.
Netbooks will only accelerate the trend toward web based apps. Smaller disks, slow CPUs... people will optimize the browser, they wont add on additional local components which it will be difficult to guarantee everyone has.
Question: Why isn't flash the network-centric app platform of choice?
No. I am saying the left was recently reluctant to do it. The president elect, during his campaign, was in a period after the time during which I observed the left being reluctant. He seems perhaps less reluctant, but only time will tell.
Do we care what brand tooth paste Obama uses? Do we care what kind of perfume, if any, his wife buys?
Enough with this meaningless celebrity worship! We don't need to obsess over every minute detail of someone just because he's famous or powerful. Focus on things that /matter/!
Package management wasn't invented yesterday, RPMs/DEBs are as effortless as ever to install and so are the countless common ways of installing stuff on Windows. Why do you think so many people use Firefox already despite it being so terribly hard to install, code for (cross-plattform) and even though MSIE is already preinstalled on all Windows systems? It's not too hard, look at all the spyware crap people can install all by themselves on Windows.
You miss the point. "Installing" gmail is *always* easier even than using a package manager. I am not dealing in theory, here, I'm talking real world usage. Things can get installed without the user's notice, but the ease of setup for a download-and-install application, even when using a package manager, is greater than that of the ease of setup of a web-based application, to say *nothing* of the time required. The fact that people *can* do install apps and that some things are preinstalled is *irrelevant*. The fact that some software installs itself automatically is irrelevant! Not all software will, so you're back to square one: Dumb, time-constrained users who don't know how to do anything, don't want to spend any time and refuse to learn or remember anything. Web based apps are very nice for those people.
Gmail is a fine Web application, yes. But it's not an example that can be generalized.
It *is* generalizable! That's the entire point: The only reasons *so far* that more apps aren't web-based are: (1) developing web apps is really hard on the developer, and (2) performance sucks ass. These problems are slowly being solved and as it is the web app becomes practical for more things.
Why isn't Winamp a web application?
Do you know how many people don't use Winamp but instead connect to sites with an embedded flash web radio stream? You may scoff, but I've seen it many times. This may not be ideal for everyone but it *does* happen *even though it sucks*. Imagine if one day it didn't suck? It will only get worse.
How about Irfanview or other image viewers? Heck, even Google Picasa is an .exe ... Gmail only exists because it's hosted where you *want your data to be kept*
Local apps for viewing local files makes sense, yes, plus there's that (2) performance thing. I never said web apps were perfect for everything! I'm just trying to answer the question "Why would you ever do a web app instead of writing it in C++?" Web apps are good for the reasons I described before, and will become good enough for more things over time. I doubt they'll ever become the best choice for all things.
It's a straightforward, unsafe way of managing your email that gets away with it because people don't really care. Ideally, we'd want to have our data in a safe place, accessible from anywhere with a proper UI (why did Google add IMAP to gmail?).
I have my mail data in a safe place accessible from anywhere with a proper UI: I use gmail! If you are biased against the "bad" UI of a web based app, as you say gmail can be accessed via a standard client. As to safety... everyone will NOT be able to house his own data at his own house, not even in the miraculous future. Too many practical considerations prevent this. What we'll do is buy access to a service which provides it to us from anywhere, keeps it redundant, makes backups, etc.. GMail effectively does this, the only problems being privacy issues, storage format issues and a few things like that. I choose to trust google as one day we will each choose to trust some company to keep our data. I'd prefer it if it were all public key encrypted and accessible only to me, but for now (for email) I choose to not care.
The web, as a delivery mechanism and operating paradigm, along with the web browser as the engine for interaction, is the immediate future. If you think this sucks
Not at all. I said the left has recently been reluctant to do it. I said Obama plays the same game. I did not say the left never did it during that period, I did not say exactly when the recent period I referred to begins and ends. Obama might possibly represent an end to it, though it's too early to tell.
You describe an amusing fantasy that is entirely at odds with human behavior.
Today anyone can, with no real effort, put up a web page with the same information and give out the URL, which could easily just be a domain. Any company could put up a service exactly like this. It is completely unnecessary to have a new TLD to get this done.
So what, exactly, is the point? If a service like this were useful it would have been done already and have been successful.
Ever tried getting a user to install something? Web pages are /effortless/ for the end user. They're painful on the order of pulling teeth for the developer, but they're so /easy/ to use for the end user that nothing else matters.
Do you think gmail would be popular if it required you to download a client to use it? Do you think it would be as popular if it 'allowed' you to use any standard MUA, but required you to pick one? The user who wants to use it in such a scenario has to /configure his application/, which he hasn't the first clue how to do, which he isn't inclined to spend the time to do. Further, he has to do this on every computer he visits!
Now, you could describe a /hypothetical/ world in which the user's MUA and settings migrate with him to wherever he goes, or a world in which google provides a one-click link which auto-configures whatever local MUA the user has. The problem with such answers is that those things /don't exist/ and are really /difficult/ to create and keep going. The web-based gmail might have been a nightmare to write initially and it might have a crappy UI and it might be orders of magnitude slower than a local desktop equivalent, but these things just do not matter. Web developer time and effort is meaningless against the effort saved for users.
I could give countless examples like this. Maybe you're down on javascript, or php, or other 'web' languages. That's fine, I'm not much of a PHP fan myself. Maybe you think that there's a better way to write network-centric apps. You're probably right! The /reality/ that we live under today, however, does not give us any adequate alternatives: Web-based apps are too valuable to /not/ use, the more apps that are made available this way the more valuable it becomes and, in case you didn't notice, /the tools are improving/. Ten years ago web 'apps' were a joke, today they're just a pain.
The browser makes a terrible platform: it's not designed to be one, though the design is evolving, plus incompatibilities between implementations (and even versions) make doing complex things really hard, it's a dumb canvas with dumber knobs and switches you can sometimes get to do the right thing if the stars align just right. As a UI it's awful; everything is async, none of it can be trusted, clients might not behave the way you expect and you usually can't tell when that happens... I'm not saying there aren't bad things that could be better! I'm just saying that a web based app will be "better" than a C++ app in many, many cases, even though the C++ app is much nicer to code. The web, as a delivery mechanism and operating paradigm, along with the web browser as the engine for interaction, is the immediate future. If you think this sucks, get busy replacing it now! In a couple of years it may be too late to replace it soon.
Alternative interfaces via plugins are no answer, either, before you say "Just write it in java," or some such nonsense. If that were going to be the way we do things we would have it by now. I don't know for sure why it didn't take off, but I think it's some combination of the need to meet the lowest common denominator and the bugginess involved in running a buggy browser + a buggy plugin + a buggy applet, vs. just a buggy browser. These days add in buggy JS which, even when it fails, usually does not crash the browser (unless you're running IE6).
tl;dr the web sucks but it's here, now and it's evolving to suck less
Not well. This is beside the point! Those things largely don't get used. Web developers stick with what works everywhere, or serve different things to different browsers.
He means not "convince the stupid" but "lie to the stupid" and tell them whatever it is you think will get them to act according to your desires.
It is the very readiness of the right to do this and the reluctance of the left, in recent years, which has lead to the supposedly "right leaning" political landscape we have all been told we have in the USA. Reagan, for example, told comforting lies about economics. No matter how well or poorly you think he performed he did what good politicians do: Tell the lie that gets the most votes. Obama isn't as good at it but he played the same game and got the same result.
Some of us don't like lying to people, even if doing so gives us the power to reshape the world as we would like.
You're right, but when talking IT jobs if you're talking about "networking" it means something else.
It's all about who you know.
They call it "networking" but I dislike this term as it has a well defined technical meaning.
I got my first job because I knew a guy who recommended it to me and mentioned me to those who later interviewed me.
I got my next job because a co-worker from my first job told me about a position, handed over my resume and gave me a nice talking-up to the people doing the hiring.
He got his job there because someone he knew in school recommended him.
Do you see a pattern here? In an uncertain world it's hard to know what to believe. I've seen people with great resumes, claiming experience AND education, who couldn't do the jobs they were hired to do. I've seen people with no degrees and no experience excel. How do you tell the difference between the two when you're doing the hiring? You rely on the advice and recommendations of people you trust, i.e. people you've already worked with. In this down economy the tendency to go with the safe bet will be even higher.
Knowing people helps you get a job. It's not absolutely essential but it really, really helps.
Headline: Microsoft invents what the open source world has had for years.
Great innovation, Microsoft!
Are you serious? You do realize that the world wide web is just one thing that runs *on top of* the internet? It refers only to things happening on the HTTP protocol, which is a large but nor majority amount of internet traffic.
I hope you were joking.
Stop equating "the world wide web" and "the internet." I get enough of that from the clueless masses, on Slashdot I expect a slightly higher level of education.
It might take a lot to get someone up to material contributions, but many coding errors are noticeable without knowing much about what the software is doing. Although I guess static analyzers could catch most of those just as well.
I think the real question here is... what's the harm? Worst case you get some emails you ignore, best case you find some genius who can help you. Just allowing the space enthusiasts who are also programmers to get some idea of what's involved, or to see progress go forward day-by-day... I'd be fascinated, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested.
I just love scanning for lire forms!
Life forms!
You tiny little life forms!
You precious little life forms!
Where are you?
The choice of the pronoun is not arbitrary.
In English by convention, tradition and in some cases prescription the male pronoun is used when the gender is unknown. You can say this is sexist if you like, but to me it is simple: "him" is male or unknown, "her" is female.
If someone says her when the gender is unknown this is *usually* because the speaker believes that saying him is sexist, or that it doesn't matter, or thinks that this somehow promotes feminism, or helps women, or something of that nature. The use of "her" for gender unknown is a deliberate choice with an agenda.
If someone say "him" when the gender is unknown it usually does not indicate that person's views, except to say that he (notice: not she) is not an extremist engaged in a personal campaign using questionable tactics. You can say the structure of our society and language is transparently, subconsciously sexist, but I don't really care.
I, personally, would favor the introduction of gender neutral singular pronouns. Simply replacing him with her for the sake of promoting feminism is not advantageous. The only problem is that it's hard to direct the evolution of English in any serious way.
Until such time as a genuine neutral word enters the language using he/him will be correct.
Unless it's moderated +5 Quoting 5th Element
I'm sure you mean 790, not 709.
But thanks for the Lexx reference. When this LHC business started getting press this may I was at a loss to explain to my friends why I was laughing.
I'm keeping an eye out for those carrots...
I like your signature, but it would be better to say "$(($(date +%Y)+1)) is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!"
Just for accuracy and all that, right? or perhaps "expr `date +%Y` + 1", for broader compatibility.
This seems like a rather old project. Am I wrong? http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/aurora.html
This is crazy. It's like saying "Third party software shouldn't use a .msi" on Windows.
For the record, /opt is brain dead. Its only advantage over /usr is that all files related to a program go under one directory. Except, of course, that sometimes some files don't: some go in /etc, in /var, sometimes programs installed in /opt pollute /usr/lib... /opt is a bastard child that should die in a fire. There are many advantages to splitting an installed program out over several directories. At this point in history /opt is solely for people who can't be bothered to write and package software correctly. And yes, that means it's for "third party" or "commercial" software, because it seems accepted that those people wont be able to do things right. Why set expectations so low?
*All* software installation should be managed, one way or another. Use SMS or ZENworks, use .msi's. On Windows most programs will register themselves in Add/Remove programs and provide an uninstall mechanism. It's a hack and would not work the same way in Linux, but it's an indication that what I say is true: All software installation should be managed. Under Linux we have a variety of quite sophisticated means for doing the managing. One thing that's missing is cross-distribution compatibility, which supposedly LSB is working on. I am not a big believer in the LSB, but if they're trying to solve real problems more power to them.
Actually come to think of it, pretty much all websites use fancy date pickers now for dates when you're thinking about time from the perspective of the present, that is, not things like your birthday.
This isn't done because it's a good UI for choosing dates. As the parent said, letting you type it in is a good UI. The date pickers are used because they drastically reduce the probability that the user will type in something which is not a recognizable date or (worse!) is recognized as a date but interpreted different than intended by the user.
Is it DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY? You can't know which way your users will be thinking with certainty and you can't trust that they'll pay attention to a notice concerning the expected input format. Date pickers make getting date input quick and easy for the developer.
Some people do swear by the series of dropdown list boxes, but they do take up a lot of space and are more difficult to use than date pickers. The date picker ultimately posts back a single field with a machine-parseable string in a predictable format. The series-of-lists approach requires at some point the consolidation of several values into a date, either in client javascript or after hitting the server (which is safer). I am still of two minds about whether the extra hassle is worth the javascript-safety.
tl;dr, date pickers are not good ui, just pragmatic design decisions
For me it takes three ^w to delete "web 2.0"
start: "web 2.0"
^w: "web 2."
^w: "web "
^w: ""
Accomplished this way:
(defadvice kill-region (before unix-werase activate compile)
(interactive
(if mark-active (list (region-beginning) (region-end))
(list (save-excursion (backward-word 1) (point)) (point)))))
So, for me, when no region is set, emacs behaves much like bash, but proper ^w behavior is preserved for regions.
I'd like to say I invented it, but I lifted the code from an example somewhere a few years ago. Makes things easier.