The technical term is that GETs are idempotent - "acting as if only used once, even when used multiple times" (from the jargon file http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/I/idempotent.html - although I disagree with the comment about C header files, I've never heard the term used in connection with them...).
GETs (according to the spec) aren't supposed to change anything (significant) on the server, just retrieve information, and so are safe to bookmark, refresh, etc.
POSTs on the other hand are potentially more "dangerous", which is why your browser warns you about resubmitting them - they're designed to be used for things that cause changes, and so should only be repeated with care. Examples being submitting orders in ecommerce sites, deleting content or changing its live/visible status in a content management system, etc.
You'd be surprised how many people I come across in the web industry who don't know the difference. It's one of the interview questions I use; if you get it wrong, you're not likely to get the job (I forgive not knowing the word "idempotent" though).
JavaScript has so many functional work-arounds for each browser
Such as? I'm aware of plenty of workarounds for the DOM, but that's nothing to do with Javascript. I'm also aware of the different ways to create an XMLHttpRequest object, but again that's nothing to do with Javascript (hint: it's an API you're calling, and just as the differences between KDE's libs and gnome's libs are nothing to do with C, so the different APIs the browsers implement are nothing to do with Javascript).
So when you write Ajax applications that need to work on Internet Explorer, you need to create the object in a particular way.
As others have already pointed out, that boils down to an if... then... else... construct. Big deal; if you can't handle that, then you shouldn't be coding in the first place. No, it's not ideal, but c'mon, it's not exactly rocket science either.
When JavaScript became popular and well-enough supported, the webpage itself could check data before sending it to the server - although the checks couldn't be that complicated.
And then the user switches off Javascript and sends all sorts of illegal crap to the application.
Performing form validation on the client is nice, but cannot replace server-side validation even in the simplest case. You can still do it, sure, but it doesn't mean you can stop doing server-side validation. The application has to protect itself, and certainly can't trust clients.
AJAX is a tool to be used when necessary.
Agreed. I see so many comments here either lauding AJAX as though it were the second coming, or trashing it like it was the Anti-Christ. Guys, it's a tool, and like any other it has strengths and weaknesses. Use it when it's appropriate, don't when it isn't.
Thank you, that's exactly the point I was going to make. I'm not aware of any incompatibilities between javascript implementations, other than level of standard implemented (and I'm not aware of that actually being an issue in any of the major browsers).
As you say, the problem is with the implementation of the DOM. In my experience, though, that boils down to using a liberal sprinkling of strategically-placed if statements; kind of like the cross-platform C guys use their ifdef statements.
Sure, it'd be nice if we didn't have to, but that's why people get paid the big bucks. If it was too easy...;-)
Ok, so it's probably not him, but I did get a rather nasty surprise when I clicked the submitter's name. Yes, it opened george-harrison.info, but almost immediately my browser was redirected to http://www.winfixer.com/pages/scanner/index.php?ai d=gb_ed2&lid=in&ex=1&p=&ax=1, which was most insistent that my PC had errors due to spyware and that I should download and install their product.
Good job I browse using Firefox...
Funny thing is, it's not doing it to me now (despite a Firefox restart, killing the site's cookie, etc) and I don't see anything in the page that could have caused it to happen (unless it's a random chance thing, or a once-a-day thing based on IP address, etc). Still, people using less secure browsers might want to be careful of clicking on the guy's username.
if you are looking for reviews of a product, add review to your search terms.
Unfortunately then you'll get hits for ecommerce sites, price comparison sites, etc that feature user reviews, and in my experience, you won't find any that actually *have* reviews of what you're looking for. That's fine if that's what you want, but no use if you actually want a review...
I've pretty-much stopped using google to search for product reviews too.
I've given up trying to find reviews of products by searching on google. Even performing searches of the form that you suggest, you end up with pages full of useless results. So many online retail sites have user reviews now that most of them will turn up, yet it's rare that there will be any reviews (you'll get a hit on links such as "user reviews (0)" or "add review").
On top of that, you'll get all the price comparison and user review sites that list every product they come across, regardless of whether they have any useful information or not. Again, they almost all have facilities to allow readers to add reviews, but in my experience such reviews are extremely few and far between when I've been searching for things.
You want a specific type of search result? Then all you have to so is include another more specific search term, or two.:)
No, what you really need in this instance is to either be able to supply an arbitrarily long list of sites to exclude, or the ability to exclude sites according to classification *and* a meaningful classification system *and* for the majority of sites to be classified correctly. Neither is going to happen any time soon.
Re:A news article with a press release cool
on
Webhost Sues Google
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· Score: 1
That always happens though. News stories generally try to give a bit of background on the main subject of the story; in this case, it's AIT.
Now that's not to say that AIT didn't time the suit to coincide with the expansion, of course, or that when asked for a little background on themselves, that they didn't emphasise their current plans...
once India realizes that, they don't have to beg at the teat of large mega corps and start their own firms and stop being an outsourcing bitch.
The more outsourcing jobs Indian companies win, the more money is flowing in to the country. The more money going in, the better the economy. The better the economy, the more opportunities there are for firms to start up and be successful.
Eventually you'll get your wish, and those pesky Indians will stop taking your money, your jobs and your wives (oops, sorry, one xenophobic stereotype too far).
the technically non-savy and generally lesser educated
How stunningly arrogant. A lack of technical knowledge means that the person is "lesser educated"? News flash for you - an awful lot of highly educated people (doctors, lawyers, etc) are clueless about technology. Conversely, a lot of people who are very, very knowledgable about technology know very little about any other subject.
If foo and bar are competing theories, it's entirely possible to be anti-foo without being pro-bar. It doesn't necessarily reveal any kind of bias, it may well have been the guy's actual stance. "I don't know about bar, but foo is right out."
That's pretty much what I was going to say. I used Linux for about 6 years, installing and using everything form slackware 3 (on floppies) to Mandrake 10.
KDE's ioslaves was an innovative idea; being able to slot in a CD, browse to a virtual mp3 folder and drag 'n' drop the mp3s to the hard drive, thus triggering the ripping of them? Inspired.
I can't think of anything else that was truly innovative. Lots of good stuff, sure, but nothing that wasn't an incremental improvement on the status quo.
Two *whole* weeks? Wow, you poor sod. No really, I feel for you - honest, I'm not being bitterly sarcastic, the fact that I have a three month notice period has nothing to do with this, or that here in the UK I've never heard of any permanent employee on less than a month's notice, oh no.
On the other hand, if we are fired, unless there are extraordinary circumstances (e.g. criminal activities, etc) we can't just be marched out of the building there and then; the notice period cuts both ways. (Of course people can come to agreements, and we're generally not held to our three months, but still)
First off, there is a lot of work that goes into turning medicinal plants into actual medicine... there is a lot of work that goes into turning bark into little white capsules you keep in a bottle in your cabinet.
Fine, so grant a patent on the process of turning the bark into the little white pills. Do not grant patents on chewing the bark, or on growing the damn trees the bark comes from. (If someone else figures out a different way of going from bark to pills, that should be fair game too)
This article seems to ignore that work in chemistry and biology and instead argue for the people who figured out that chewing bark worked in the first place.
No bark-chewers, no little white pills. Sure, figuring out how to make little white pills out of bark takes time and effort, but without the people chewing the bark in the first place, no-one would have even thought to try. So let the corporations own the rights to making the pills, but don't try to take away the right to use the bark in other ways to help ease a person's symptons.
Do you recall what the internet was like after 9/11?
Here in the UK, everything was fine. Sure, the news sites were dog slow in the immediate aftermath, because they were having trouble handling all the traffic. Other than that, it was fine.
Localised strikes can only do localised damage. The rest of us will barely notice, unless we happen to be trying to send traffic into/through the affected area. Unsurprisingly, most of my London-based traffic never gets routed through New York.
The software companies got greedy, so they pushed the end users around with absurd EULA's. The users got ticked off and pushed back copying and distributing protected materials on P2P networks.
I've been buying software since 1982, and believe me, people were copying software long before there were EULAs. In fact, copy prevention measures were being put in place before there were any EULAs too.
Don't try to make out that this is all the fault of the eevil software companies - the copying came first. Perhaps not enough to require copy prevention measures as a means of staying profitable, and I'm not arguing that some of them aren't going too far, but nevertheless people started copying software before companies tried to implement technical measures to stop them.
We have a similar sort of measure in place in a secure room where I work. They didn't disable access to the USB ports in Windows, or in the BIOS. They didn't open the case and disconnect the leads from the motherboard.
When IT workers unite, the employers take the work offshore and workers' rights go right into the toilet with their jobs.
No, they're taking the work offshore anyway, regardless of whether IT workers unionise. At least with a union, there'd be an organised, vocal opposition that could take the fight as far as was needed. There's a dispute involving ferry workers in Ireland at the moment - short story is that the company wants to fire them all and bring in Cypriots at below minimum wage, and they're being utter bastards about it too. It's escalated to the point where there's talk of related unions all across Europe getting involved.
Now you may not approve of that sort of thing, but that's the sort of power that unions can wield when necessary. It's not about screwing the employers, it's about making sure the employers don't screw the employees.
I don't mean things like checking email while on the clock, but rather installing their favorite IM program
Almost every programmer I know uses an IM client as part of their job, communicating with the rest of the team; some of them use them to communicate with clients. The only exception I can think of to this is my boss, who didn't use one even when he was a programmer and isn't about to start now that he's Head of Development.
Kazaa, etc I agree with - but I think you're being a little short-sighted railing against IM.
Slashdot Mirror
The technical term is that GETs are idempotent - "acting as if only used once, even when used multiple times" (from the jargon file http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/I/idempotent.html - although I disagree with the comment about C header files, I've never heard the term used in connection with them...).
GETs (according to the spec) aren't supposed to change anything (significant) on the server, just retrieve information, and so are safe to bookmark, refresh, etc.
POSTs on the other hand are potentially more "dangerous", which is why your browser warns you about resubmitting them - they're designed to be used for things that cause changes, and so should only be repeated with care. Examples being submitting orders in ecommerce sites, deleting content or changing its live/visible status in a content management system, etc.
You'd be surprised how many people I come across in the web industry who don't know the difference. It's one of the interview questions I use; if you get it wrong, you're not likely to get the job (I forgive not knowing the word "idempotent" though).
JavaScript has so many functional work-arounds for each browser
Such as? I'm aware of plenty of workarounds for the DOM, but that's nothing to do with Javascript. I'm also aware of the different ways to create an XMLHttpRequest object, but again that's nothing to do with Javascript (hint: it's an API you're calling, and just as the differences between KDE's libs and gnome's libs are nothing to do with C, so the different APIs the browsers implement are nothing to do with Javascript).
So when you write Ajax applications that need to work on Internet Explorer, you need to create the object in a particular way.
As others have already pointed out, that boils down to an if... then... else... construct. Big deal; if you can't handle that, then you shouldn't be coding in the first place. No, it's not ideal, but c'mon, it's not exactly rocket science either.
When JavaScript became popular and well-enough supported, the webpage itself could check data before sending it to the server - although the checks couldn't be that complicated.
And then the user switches off Javascript and sends all sorts of illegal crap to the application.
Performing form validation on the client is nice, but cannot replace server-side validation even in the simplest case. You can still do it, sure, but it doesn't mean you can stop doing server-side validation. The application has to protect itself, and certainly can't trust clients.
AJAX is a tool to be used when necessary.
Agreed. I see so many comments here either lauding AJAX as though it were the second coming, or trashing it like it was the Anti-Christ. Guys, it's a tool, and like any other it has strengths and weaknesses. Use it when it's appropriate, don't when it isn't.
Thank you, that's exactly the point I was going to make. I'm not aware of any incompatibilities between javascript implementations, other than level of standard implemented (and I'm not aware of that actually being an issue in any of the major browsers).
;-)
As you say, the problem is with the implementation of the DOM. In my experience, though, that boils down to using a liberal sprinkling of strategically-placed if statements; kind of like the cross-platform C guys use their ifdef statements.
Sure, it'd be nice if we didn't have to, but that's why people get paid the big bucks. If it was too easy...
Ok, so it's probably not him, but I did get a rather nasty surprise when I clicked the submitter's name. Yes, it opened george-harrison.info, but almost immediately my browser was redirected to http://www.winfixer.com/pages/scanner/index.php?ai d=gb_ed2&lid=in&ex=1&p=&ax=1, which was most insistent that my PC had errors due to spyware and that I should download and install their product.
Good job I browse using Firefox...
Funny thing is, it's not doing it to me now (despite a Firefox restart, killing the site's cookie, etc) and I don't see anything in the page that could have caused it to happen (unless it's a random chance thing, or a once-a-day thing based on IP address, etc). Still, people using less secure browsers might want to be careful of clicking on the guy's username.
Top tip: capacitance is measured in farads, not volts; a borg really ought to know that.
if you are looking for reviews of a product, add review to your search terms.
Unfortunately then you'll get hits for ecommerce sites, price comparison sites, etc that feature user reviews, and in my experience, you won't find any that actually *have* reviews of what you're looking for. That's fine if that's what you want, but no use if you actually want a review...
I've pretty-much stopped using google to search for product reviews too.
I've given up trying to find reviews of products by searching on google. Even performing searches of the form that you suggest, you end up with pages full of useless results. So many online retail sites have user reviews now that most of them will turn up, yet it's rare that there will be any reviews (you'll get a hit on links such as "user reviews (0)" or "add review").
:)
On top of that, you'll get all the price comparison and user review sites that list every product they come across, regardless of whether they have any useful information or not. Again, they almost all have facilities to allow readers to add reviews, but in my experience such reviews are extremely few and far between when I've been searching for things.
You want a specific type of search result? Then all you have to so is include another more specific search term, or two.
No, what you really need in this instance is to either be able to supply an arbitrarily long list of sites to exclude, or the ability to exclude sites according to classification *and* a meaningful classification system *and* for the majority of sites to be classified correctly. Neither is going to happen any time soon.
That always happens though. News stories generally try to give a bit of background on the main subject of the story; in this case, it's AIT.
Now that's not to say that AIT didn't time the suit to coincide with the expansion, of course, or that when asked for a little background on themselves, that they didn't emphasise their current plans...
once India realizes that, they don't have to beg at the teat of large mega corps and start their own firms and stop being an outsourcing bitch.
The more outsourcing jobs Indian companies win, the more money is flowing in to the country. The more money going in, the better the economy. The better the economy, the more opportunities there are for firms to start up and be successful.
Eventually you'll get your wish, and those pesky Indians will stop taking your money, your jobs and your wives (oops, sorry, one xenophobic stereotype too far).
the technically non-savy and generally lesser educated
How stunningly arrogant. A lack of technical knowledge means that the person is "lesser educated"? News flash for you - an awful lot of highly educated people (doctors, lawyers, etc) are clueless about technology. Conversely, a lot of people who are very, very knowledgable about technology know very little about any other subject.
If foo and bar are competing theories, it's entirely possible to be anti-foo without being pro-bar. It doesn't necessarily reveal any kind of bias, it may well have been the guy's actual stance. "I don't know about bar, but foo is right out."
That's pretty much what I was going to say. I used Linux for about 6 years, installing and using everything form slackware 3 (on floppies) to Mandrake 10.
KDE's ioslaves was an innovative idea; being able to slot in a CD, browse to a virtual mp3 folder and drag 'n' drop the mp3s to the hard drive, thus triggering the ripping of them? Inspired.
I can't think of anything else that was truly innovative. Lots of good stuff, sure, but nothing that wasn't an incremental improvement on the status quo.
Cute, but he said 50 years, not 500.
Two *whole* weeks? Wow, you poor sod. No really, I feel for you - honest, I'm not being bitterly sarcastic, the fact that I have a three month notice period has nothing to do with this, or that here in the UK I've never heard of any permanent employee on less than a month's notice, oh no.
On the other hand, if we are fired, unless there are extraordinary circumstances (e.g. criminal activities, etc) we can't just be marched out of the building there and then; the notice period cuts both ways. (Of course people can come to agreements, and we're generally not held to our three months, but still)
Whooosh.
Incidentally, they're considering taking the word gullible out of the dictionary, as too few people use it these days.
First off, there is a lot of work that goes into turning medicinal plants into actual medicine... there is a lot of work that goes into turning bark into little white capsules you keep in a bottle in your cabinet.
Fine, so grant a patent on the process of turning the bark into the little white pills. Do not grant patents on chewing the bark, or on growing the damn trees the bark comes from. (If someone else figures out a different way of going from bark to pills, that should be fair game too)
This article seems to ignore that work in chemistry and biology and instead argue for the people who figured out that chewing bark worked in the first place.
No bark-chewers, no little white pills. Sure, figuring out how to make little white pills out of bark takes time and effort, but without the people chewing the bark in the first place, no-one would have even thought to try. So let the corporations own the rights to making the pills, but don't try to take away the right to use the bark in other ways to help ease a person's symptons.
Do you recall what the internet was like after 9/11?
Here in the UK, everything was fine. Sure, the news sites were dog slow in the immediate aftermath, because they were having trouble handling all the traffic. Other than that, it was fine.
Localised strikes can only do localised damage. The rest of us will barely notice, unless we happen to be trying to send traffic into/through the affected area. Unsurprisingly, most of my London-based traffic never gets routed through New York.
The software companies got greedy, so they pushed the end users around with absurd EULA's. The users got ticked off and pushed back copying and distributing protected materials on P2P networks.
I've been buying software since 1982, and believe me, people were copying software long before there were EULAs. In fact, copy prevention measures were being put in place before there were any EULAs too.
Don't try to make out that this is all the fault of the eevil software companies - the copying came first. Perhaps not enough to require copy prevention measures as a means of staying profitable, and I'm not arguing that some of them aren't going too far, but nevertheless people started copying software before companies tried to implement technical measures to stop them.
We have a similar sort of measure in place in a secure room where I work. They didn't disable access to the USB ports in Windows, or in the BIOS. They didn't open the case and disconnect the leads from the motherboard.
They filled the ports with glue.
Some people take security seriously.
Woudl you prefer it if they made extensions to the specification and didn't tell anyone else about them?
Hhhmmmm... Terry Pratchett, Night Watch?
posted right as the geeks of the world are getting home from work
No, just the geeks of your time zone - some of us were already asleep...
When IT workers unite, the employers take the work offshore and workers' rights go right into the toilet with their jobs.
No, they're taking the work offshore anyway, regardless of whether IT workers unionise. At least with a union, there'd be an organised, vocal opposition that could take the fight as far as was needed. There's a dispute involving ferry workers in Ireland at the moment - short story is that the company wants to fire them all and bring in Cypriots at below minimum wage, and they're being utter bastards about it too. It's escalated to the point where there's talk of related unions all across Europe getting involved.
Now you may not approve of that sort of thing, but that's the sort of power that unions can wield when necessary. It's not about screwing the employers, it's about making sure the employers don't screw the employees.
I don't mean things like checking email while on the clock, but rather installing their favorite IM program
Almost every programmer I know uses an IM client as part of their job, communicating with the rest of the team; some of them use them to communicate with clients. The only exception I can think of to this is my boss, who didn't use one even when he was a programmer and isn't about to start now that he's Head of Development.
Kazaa, etc I agree with - but I think you're being a little short-sighted railing against IM.