Re:Suspicious until...
on
Ajax On Rails
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· Score: 1
>And when was the last time you found a site that just had plain HTML - no JavaScript, no Flash...
The point is not whether the sites have these elements. The point is whether the sites are coded to degrade gracefully, in other words, to still provide a usable user interface even to clients that cannot support such elements.
>Face it, the world is not going to change for your PDA or cellphone.
Actually the world is changing for PDAs and cellphones, and the story isn't over yet.
It's best to be suspicious of this framework until it has a nicely integrated mechanism for graceful degradation of the user experience in clients that don't support Javascript.
I used to think, like the tadalist folks, if you aren't willing to upgrade your browser, screw you. But that was before my mobile web client began being an ever-more-important part of my systems for managing my personal data on the web. Most mobile devices just don't support Javascript, and even if you find one that does, it isn't that quick or easy to switch devices, with many such devices being cell phones that have contracts. These days if a site doesn't support plain HTML, it's as if it doesn't work at all, unless you are tied to a desktop.
There certainly are AJAX apps out there that do gracefully degrade the UI on HTML-only clients. But the rails stuff I've seen so far are not among those.
>What's to stop employees from just logging into a private webmail account over HTTPS and sending information out that way?
Keystroke logging.
So if you're an employee who values privacy and wants to send a bit of private personal email once in a while on your personal web mail account (say, gmail), the only way to retain that privacy is to either do all that mail through a cell phone, or install an OS that the IT people don't have a keystroke logger for. Where I work all our computers have the corporate spyware installed from day one. To have privacy, you have to find some obscure Unix distro (Red Hat isn't obscure enough; they have that covered too) and use it.
I always read about how (insert foo event here) happened N microseconds after the big bang. What I wonder is how can N microseconds even have any meaning, when time is relative. I mean, did time even mean the same thing back then? What is a post-big-bang microsecond, anyway? Is there some cosmic constant this is measured against? Color me clueless.
I would put the arguments against evolution as one of the more interesting things that have evolved over the years. Well, maybe not interesting enough to be top ten. But the arguments against evolution have evolved in amazing ways. The latest, so called intelligent design, is a clever set of memes that try to deal (though poorly) with some of the intellectual slap-downs that have been dealt to creationism.
I wonder what his strategy for physical security is. Now that he's announced the location where the vehicle is going to be parked every weekend while he himself is strapped to the side of a mountain at some altitude, I hope he's got all this stuff well secured against theft, fire, and vandalism, or better yet, attended by a gearsitter.
There's always insurance, but after the second hit or so the insurance companies get somewhat less enthusiastic about renewing the policy.
If you're comparing your project to del.icio.us, keep in mind their value comes from their critical mass of data and their community that keeps adding new data. The source code is not adding much value here imho.
I used NT 4.0 forever because it just had such a workmanlike user interface.
Actually, ObOnTopic, the most interesting thing to me about this topic is how easily Microsoft killed NT 4.0 by simply witholding support for USB. NT4 actually was, ah, very workable, if not workmanlike, except for that crucial missing USB connectivity in the later years.
No, in the breakdown I was making, editing was in the remaining 20%. By production I meant production of the physical artifact, but I can see what you mean, I didn't state it clearly enough.
>I am willing to cough up $10-20 bucks for access to a single IEEE publication.
To me, there is a big difference between $10 and $20 for a publication. One is cheap; the other is something I would have to think about.
Why?
Because there are about a bazillion IEEE publications. You have to multiply your $20 times however many interests you have. That is part of their problem. People aren't interested in only specific areas like, say, low-temperature applications of nanotechnology on organic substrates in transitional gravity environments with ionizing radiation. They have other interests, too. The IEEE publications get so specific and narrow it would take all your time just to decide which subscriptions to buy for the year, even assuming you did have a budget to do so.
I'm a IEEE member and they send me so much paper it's downright embarassing. For an organization that should be leading the way into the future, I don't know why they insist on littering my mailbox with so much newsprint and so many envelopes stuffed with important notices about the myriad of ways to spend hundreds of dollars on different stingily selected slices of content.
I worked on a project once where we cooperated with a science journal. They told us that 80% of their costs were in production and distribution of paper. If they could do everything electronically, they could have eliminated that 80%. So my suggestion would be that IEEE do exactly that. Eliminate the paper. It's not like they are going to have to spend more to ramp up a web site with electronic versions of the content, because they already have that entire framework in place. If anything, their current web site is too complicated, and could be simplified (and made cheaper to operate) by eliminating a lot of the built-in toll booths.
Just ask to work from home two days a week, with no reduction. Depending on your home environment, you might even be more productive working at home, with fewer distractions from coworkers. Maybe they'll say no to two days, and give you one day. That would be a good start.
I tried and failed to become a Firefox developer. You have to know several people who are already on the inside, so they can vouch for you. It's an exclusive club by design, not encouraging for newcomers.
Microsoft effectively killed Windows NT 4.0 by withholding USB support. Anyone shopping for a digital camera, webcam, printer, PDA synching solution, flash storage device, mp3 player, skype headset, etc. would find their choices severely limited to nil if they wanted to continue running their perfectly good installation of NT 4.0.
Of course the difference with Linux is it should be easier to integrate new drivers, once they are, um, written.
"...and the complete database at the end of 2001 occupies approximately 3 gigabytes of storage in a highly compressed form."
I'd love to get my hands on the compression algorithm they use to highly compress those random numbers.
Why aren't competitors beating Google to market?
on
Mapping Google Maps
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Google is hitting a lot of the obvious sweetspots for improving the user experience. Some of them are obvious only in retrospect. But we know their competitors have smart people, and they do UI research, and they have resources. Why does Google come out with innovation after innovation?
I have three answers. I wonder which ones are valid:
1. Laziness 2. Encumberance with legacy political and business issues (is feature x threatening to partner Fooinc, how can we hang ads on this, etc.) 3. Focus on fancy-pants analysis of numbers (data mining to try to optimise, rather than revolutionize), leading them to be blind to simple measures like using Javascript and caching lots of content in the client.
>My point, again, is that it is simply not correct to view the content without the ads. I'm not saying it's illegal, I'm saying it's wrong.
You're entitled to your view. However, the thing is:
I don't have erection problems. I don't need a mortgage refinance. I don't need a University of Phoenix degree. I'm not looking for a match. I'm not interested in the latest launch of the latest psychopath rapper. I don't need hair loss tonic. I don't have a pet, and I don't need pet food. I don't buy holiday package deals. I'm nowhere near New York, and can't take advantage of a special deal at a cafe there.
So how do websites get support from me? They generally don't. But the value (to the website owner) of having a website comes not just from the ad revenue. The website owners are getting other, sometimes intangible rewards. For example, with Slashdot, the owners have a lot of power to influence the thinking of a leading group of web users, just by their selection (or non-selection) of stories.
It's different. With OCR these rays of light scan the original, translate each scanpoint to discrete RGB values, and do pattern recognition.
With this system, they just read the discrete RGB values directly from pixels of documents scanned in with rays of light, then they do recognition of patterns. See, it's totally different.
Slashdot Mirror
>And when was the last time you found a site that just had plain HTML - no JavaScript, no Flash...
The point is not whether the sites have these elements. The point is whether the sites are coded to degrade gracefully, in other words, to still provide a usable user interface even to clients that cannot support such elements.
>Face it, the world is not going to change for your PDA or cellphone.
Actually the world is changing for PDAs and cellphones, and the story isn't over yet.
It's best to be suspicious of this framework until it has a nicely integrated mechanism for graceful degradation of the user experience in clients that don't support Javascript.
I used to think, like the tadalist folks, if you aren't willing to upgrade your browser, screw you. But that was before my mobile web client began being an ever-more-important part of my systems for managing my personal data on the web. Most mobile devices just don't support Javascript, and even if you find one that does, it isn't that quick or easy to switch devices, with many such devices being cell phones that have contracts. These days if a site doesn't support plain HTML, it's as if it doesn't work at all, unless you are tied to a desktop.
There certainly are AJAX apps out there that do gracefully degrade the UI on HTML-only clients. But the rails stuff I've seen so far are not among those.
>What's to stop employees from just logging into a private webmail account over HTTPS and sending information out that way?
Keystroke logging.
So if you're an employee who values privacy and wants to send a bit of private personal email once in a while on your personal web mail account (say, gmail), the only way to retain that privacy is to either do all that mail through a cell phone, or install an OS that the IT people don't have a keystroke logger for. Where I work all our computers have the corporate spyware installed from day one. To have privacy, you have to find some obscure Unix distro (Red Hat isn't obscure enough; they have that covered too) and use it.
I always read about how (insert foo event here) happened N microseconds after the big bang. What I wonder is how can N microseconds even have any meaning, when time is relative. I mean, did time even mean the same thing back then? What is a post-big-bang microsecond, anyway? Is there some cosmic constant this is measured against? Color me clueless.
Maybe they are against having public libraries, also? And streetlights? What about public roads, are those manifestations of communism too?
The map is tiny on my Treo. It's surrounded by a huge amount of white space. I wish there was an option to have a larger map. Zooming in doesn't help.
I would put the arguments against evolution as one of the more interesting things that have evolved over the years. Well, maybe not interesting enough to be top ten. But the arguments against evolution have evolved in amazing ways. The latest, so called intelligent design, is a clever set of memes that try to deal (though poorly) with some of the intellectual slap-downs that have been dealt to creationism.
Keyhole.com
I wonder what his strategy for physical security is. Now that he's announced the location where the vehicle is going to be parked every weekend while he himself is strapped to the side of a mountain at some altitude, I hope he's got all this stuff well secured against theft, fire, and vandalism, or better yet, attended by a gearsitter.
There's always insurance, but after the second hit or so the insurance companies get somewhat less enthusiastic about renewing the policy.
If you're comparing your project to del.icio.us, keep in mind their value comes from their critical mass of data and their community that keeps adding new data. The source code is not adding much value here imho.
All this talk about forking is well and good. But what inquiring minds want to know, is will the GPL3 be written in a workmanlike writing style.
I used NT 4.0 forever because it just had such a workmanlike user interface.
Actually, ObOnTopic, the most interesting thing to me about this topic is how easily Microsoft killed NT 4.0 by simply witholding support for USB. NT4 actually was, ah, very workable, if not workmanlike, except for that crucial missing USB connectivity in the later years.
The good thing is that, while it is indeed true that the search engines are manipulable, at least they do have workmanlike user interfaces.
No, in the breakdown I was making, editing was in the remaining 20%. By production I meant production of the physical artifact, but I can see what you mean, I didn't state it clearly enough.
>I am willing to cough up $10-20 bucks for access to a single IEEE publication.
To me, there is a big difference between $10 and $20 for a publication. One is cheap; the other is something I would have to think about.
Why?
Because there are about a bazillion IEEE publications. You have to multiply your $20 times however many interests you have. That is part of their problem. People aren't interested in only specific areas like, say, low-temperature applications of nanotechnology on organic substrates in transitional gravity environments with ionizing radiation. They have other interests, too. The IEEE publications get so specific and narrow it would take all your time just to decide which subscriptions to buy for the year, even assuming you did have a budget to do so.
I'm a IEEE member and they send me so much paper it's downright embarassing. For an organization that should be leading the way into the future, I don't know why they insist on littering my mailbox with so much newsprint and so many envelopes stuffed with important notices about the myriad of ways to spend hundreds of dollars on different stingily selected slices of content.
I worked on a project once where we cooperated with a science journal. They told us that 80% of their costs were in production and distribution of paper. If they could do everything electronically, they could have eliminated that 80%. So my suggestion would be that IEEE do exactly that. Eliminate the paper. It's not like they are going to have to spend more to ramp up a web site with electronic versions of the content, because they already have that entire framework in place. If anything, their current web site is too complicated, and could be simplified (and made cheaper to operate) by eliminating a lot of the built-in toll booths.
Just ask to work from home two days a week, with no reduction. Depending on your home environment, you might even be more productive working at home, with fewer distractions from coworkers. Maybe they'll say no to two days, and give you one day. That would be a good start.
I tried and failed to become a Firefox developer. You have to know several people who are already on the inside, so they can vouch for you. It's an exclusive club by design, not encouraging for newcomers.
Microsoft effectively killed Windows NT 4.0 by withholding USB support. Anyone shopping for a digital camera, webcam, printer, PDA synching solution, flash storage device, mp3 player, skype headset, etc. would find their choices severely limited to nil if they wanted to continue running their perfectly good installation of NT 4.0.
Of course the difference with Linux is it should be easier to integrate new drivers, once they are, um, written.
One of their pages says:
"...and the complete database at the end of 2001 occupies approximately 3 gigabytes of storage in a highly compressed form."
I'd love to get my hands on the compression algorithm they use to highly compress those random numbers.
Google is hitting a lot of the obvious sweetspots for improving the user experience. Some of them are obvious only in retrospect. But we know their competitors have smart people, and they do UI research, and they have resources. Why does Google come out with innovation after innovation?
I have three answers. I wonder which ones are valid:
1. Laziness
2. Encumberance with legacy political and business issues (is feature x threatening to partner Fooinc, how can we hang ads on this, etc.)
3. Focus on fancy-pants analysis of numbers (data mining to try to optimise, rather than revolutionize), leading them to be blind to simple measures like using Javascript and caching lots of content in the client.
What other reasons are there?
>My point, again, is that it is simply not correct to view the content without the ads. I'm not saying it's illegal, I'm saying it's wrong.
You're entitled to your view. However, the thing is:
I don't have erection problems.
I don't need a mortgage refinance.
I don't need a University of Phoenix degree.
I'm not looking for a match.
I'm not interested in the latest launch of the latest psychopath rapper.
I don't need hair loss tonic.
I don't have a pet, and I don't need pet food.
I don't buy holiday package deals.
I'm nowhere near New York, and can't take advantage of a special deal at a cafe there.
So how do websites get support from me? They generally don't. But the value (to the website owner) of having a website comes not just from the ad revenue. The website owners are getting other, sometimes intangible rewards. For example, with Slashdot, the owners have a lot of power to influence the thinking of a leading group of web users, just by their selection (or non-selection) of stories.
Heh, yeah, I was just noticing that. Wow! Tears in my eyes!
It's "Pixelative Text Cognizance."
It's different. With OCR these rays of light scan the original, translate each scanpoint to discrete RGB values, and do pattern recognition.
With this system, they just read the discrete RGB values directly from pixels of documents scanned in with rays of light, then they do recognition of patterns. See, it's totally different.
The reporter says the press was not allowed, but then forgets to even mention who hosted the event.
Or did I miss it? Can anyone, after reading the article, figure out what and where "the event" was to which the article refers?