Does that site actually *work* on Firefox ? This is not meant as an insult but as a real question, I've seen firefox drop like a stone once a while ago in our browserstats (on a single day) and it turned out that I had messed up the closure on a div tag which IE handled without so much as a hickup but FF literally 'reorganized' the page in such a way that the whole site became unusable. It took only a day for the stats to be back to normal, so no permanent harm done but it definitely was a good wakeup call. No matter how small the change test it in all relevant browsers.
The point is that the article pretends that there is a lot of 'evidence' to back up their claims but none of those claims are by people other than the group of people writing the article. It's like citing yourself.
My logfiles are not 'written' by me but by the hundreds of thousands of users that visit the sites every month.
Of course they're not open to your inspection so you'll have to take my word for it but I don't have any incentive for lying (such as having either people backing firefox or microsoft as paying advertisers).
Of course, my stats are skewed a bit and so are everybody else's, but if you want to have as independent a view of the situation as possible then I suggest you look here:
This article is wishful thinking at best. FireFox is still rising steadily in popularity and IE is steadily sliding.
Most of the so called evidence that this article points to are articles on computerworld.com too...
I'm seeing about 27% Firefox/Mozilla on my sites (about 60k uniques / day) and there has not been a month in the last year that that number was lower or equal to the month before it. IE has gone down to about 66%, if the current rate of FF/Mozilla/Iceape/name your flavour continues then within 2 years IE will be at parity with the rest of the pack.
Sure there are lots of businesses that still run IE, but there are plenty of them that have switched to FF, and once switched it seems they stay switched. When IT departments switch they usually do a bit of research before they 'go for it', and it can take time to make sure that all the web-applications that the users need in order to be able to get through their working day.
What is more surprising is that given the fact that IE is a default installed piece of software that *SO MANY* it departments decide to make the switch anyway.
It's not like firefox's outrageous marketing budgets* are in any way capable of offsetting that default installation.
Amazingly, as a software developer I don't see any reason to further help billyboys empire along any further than they already are.
Also I have a bad feeling about ratting out people, if gates-et-al want to make more money licensing they'll either have to lower their prices or increase the quality of their anti piracy measures. These right now have the amazing side effect of locking out legitimate customers which costs those legitimate customers probably a multiple of what the BSA rakes in annually.
I can see your point, if you live from developing software it makes sense in principle but I feel that software licenses have had their longest time in the sun, and the sooner licensed software for basic functionality dies off the better.
There will always be a market for quality software sold under license by professionals willing to maintain that software past the point of sale but the windows-word-excel-powerpoint lemon has been squeezed enough I think. It's just customer lock-in and more or less forced upgrades that are driving that now, nothing to do with real software development.
What do you mean with 'lacks any real world power' ? I have one sitting on my desk here that will power a small alternator just fine and Philips has built a load of vehicles including one boat and a very large bus that were stirling powered. Commercial viability/longevity are weak points but inefficiency and lack of power are not the downsides of the Stirling engine.
the total cost of an electric car is a lot larger than just the motor, if they can save on other bits & pieces (drivetrain for instance) then it may still work. You really have to look at the total picture, not just the one component that is expensive. And last I checked a 40 Hp electric motor was a lot cheaper (about $800) than a comparable gasoline engine anyway, simply because of the much simpler construction.
Anybody that converts real world assets to virtual ones deserves what they get. Seriously, what's on your mind when you convert your hard earned cold cash into bits in some virtual world ?
Don't you have a better way of spending your money ? Most fads on the internet I can sort of understand what they're about and what their 'pull' is but second life is one step too many for me to follow.
> You can buy two camera units and make a stereoscopic camera. If you include the accelerometer, you'd get enough > information to create 3D object files by swiping the camera across a scene.
Imagine the confusion when you then take them off and everything is inverted ! I don't think it would pay to see how many of those cycles you can go through before you develop appreciable lag, I think that such 'reroutings' work by additions only, never by deletions.
you are missing one thing I think. Websites and businesses are not the same thing. If google wants to improve the quality of the content they could do a very simple thing, stop linking to *any* commercial webpage. It would be pretty drastic, but I guarantee you that without ad revenues, off-site links to be sold and commerce to be conducted on the pages that google links to SEO spam would drop to 0 overnight. After all, the only people that are willing to invest in SEO are the people that expect it to make them a profit in one way or another.
yeah... and as every true believer knows nobody ever got sentenced to death that didn't deserve it... You do realize there is no 'undo' button on the electric chair do you ? Of course by your reasoning it's all gods will anyway, even when somebody is sentenced to death when he/she shouldn't have been.
I guess for every asshole action there is an apologist somewhere...
it does make good business sense but only in the same way that stealing someones care makes better sense than buying one, after all you save the $. That doesn't make it honest though.
fair enough, but it doesn't really matter does it ? In 'C' the run time environment is the standard library, that's what you were pointing at earlier, in java the runtime environment is the JVM + all supporting classes and libraries. The end result of either is a complex environment with lots of potential for bugs. And not just bugs by the programmer of the application, all the supporting code has to be counted as well. Whether the insecurity stems from mis-use of a library routine or from a bug in the JVM is not really relevant. It is probably true that over time the bugs in the JVM itself are being ironed out so long term this should be an issue that occurs less and less.
It is probably true (I simply don't know enough about java) that the JVM makes it a lot harder to do bad stuff, but any programming language that is versatile enough to get real work done usually gives you enough rope to hang yourself with and java is most likely not an exception in this respect.
The number of times I've had java stuff crash on me with very cryptic error messages and not a clue as to what you could do to fix that sort of problem are countless (commercial software, no less), my experience with 'C' and 'C++' based stuff has not been much better in that respect so I don't favor the one over the other based on perceived stability.
I just think that it is shortsighted to prefer java over C or any other language because of a single (debatable) advantage.
Strongly typed languages will have certain advantages over weakly typed languages such as C and asm, but invariably that comes at some price, there is always a trade-off.
Which tool is proper for the job is a complex question that has a lot of factors, and the inability to corrupt local memory (easily) is just one such factor. In C that is mostly a matter of training yourself to stay away from risky constructs and to test your code rigorously. I'd even go so far as to argue that the awareness of the effects of your code in C sets you up for being an excellent programmer because there are no training wheels. You're literally on your own when things die, if you're lucky you have a core dump but most of the time you don't and you'll have to use your wits to figure out what went wrong. The only thing less forgiving than that would be embedded programming without access to an emulator. With 'java' the training wheels literally never come off, they can't.
And for many people that's probably a good thing. Interrupt handlers, kernels and other code like that will *never* be written in something like java, there simply is no room for 'side effects', the code has to be completely deterministic. The same goes for real time stuff, machine control and so on.
And as for you attacking the original poster a long long thread ago about his 'prick waving' (in your words), now you are actually arguing that there are different levels of programmers ('quality' coders and 'applications programmers'), which was one of the original posters main points...
To me C is like a powerful tool, it is great for certain jobs, but lots of code is much easier and simpler written in a less powerful language. Just like sometimes you need the soldering iron and sometimes you need the stickwelder:)
"Has anyone in the board room ever considered that for 50 cents a track, minimum download of say 20 tracks just to make it worthwhile for the CC people to process the resultant charge card transaction, might do for overall sales? Particularly if they were made available in the format of our choice, which for me is sonicly very clear, ogg at Q7 or above."
That would boost music sales to the point where we wouldn't even be discussing piracy any more. Also it would make the moral discussion a moot one, right now people feel (rightly or not is another issue) ripped off.
Slashdot Mirror
so he's a 14 year old with great insights :)
Interesting!
Does that site actually *work* on Firefox ? This is not meant as an insult but as a real question, I've seen firefox drop like a stone once a while ago in our browserstats (on a single day) and it turned out that I had messed up the closure on a div tag which IE handled without so much as a hickup but FF literally 'reorganized' the page in such a way that the whole site became unusable. It took only a day for the stats to be back to normal, so no permanent harm done but it definitely was a good wakeup call. No matter how small the change test it in all relevant browsers.
The point is that the article pretends that there is a lot of 'evidence' to back up their claims but none of those claims are by people other than the group of people writing the article. It's like citing yourself.
My logfiles are not 'written' by me but by the hundreds of thousands of users that visit the sites every month.
Of course they're not open to your inspection so you'll have to take my word for it but I don't have any incentive for lying (such as having either people backing firefox or microsoft as paying advertisers).
Of course, my stats are skewed a bit and so are everybody else's, but if you want to have as independent a view of the situation as possible then I suggest you look here:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Which seems to lend some credence to my figures (in fact, it would seem that IE usage is actually a bit higher than the norm on my websites).
This article is wishful thinking at best. FireFox is still rising steadily in popularity and IE is steadily sliding.
Most of the so called evidence that this article points to are articles on computerworld.com too...
I'm seeing about 27% Firefox/Mozilla on my sites (about 60k uniques / day) and there has not been a month in the last year that that number was lower or equal to the month before it. IE has gone down to about 66%, if the current rate of FF/Mozilla/Iceape/name your flavour continues then within 2 years IE will be at parity with the rest of the pack.
Sure there are lots of businesses that still run IE, but there are plenty of them that have switched to FF, and once switched it seems they stay switched. When IT departments switch they usually do a bit of research before they 'go for it', and it can take time to make sure that all the web-applications that the users need in order to be able to get through their working day.
What is more surprising is that given the fact that IE is a default installed piece of software that *SO MANY* it departments decide to make the switch anyway.
It's not like firefox's outrageous marketing budgets* are in any way capable of offsetting that default installation.
* attempt at humor.
somebody with mod points please mod parent very far up, thank you.
Amazingly, as a software developer I don't see any reason to further help billyboys empire along any further than they already are.
Also I have a bad feeling about ratting out people, if gates-et-al want to make more money licensing they'll either have to lower their prices or increase the quality of their anti piracy measures. These right now have the amazing side effect of locking out legitimate customers which costs those legitimate customers probably a multiple of what the BSA rakes in annually.
I can see your point, if you live from developing software it makes sense in principle but I feel that software licenses have had their longest time in the sun, and the sooner licensed software for basic functionality dies off the better.
There will always be a market for quality software sold under license by professionals willing to maintain that software past the point of sale but the windows-word-excel-powerpoint lemon has been squeezed enough I think. It's just customer lock-in and more or less forced upgrades that are driving that now, nothing to do with real software development.
second that.
;)
and whenever Roland Piquewhatever gets another one of his stories posted I wonder what he's got that I haven't
They also are one of the worlds largest producers of steel.
> They might know they will die at high speed, but it doesn't seem to stop a lot of motorcyclists driving like they want to die young!
most of them do, that's why you don't see any old risky motorcycle riders.
They don't call them donor bikes for nothing.
What do you mean with 'lacks any real world power' ? I have one sitting on my desk here that will power a small alternator just fine and Philips has built a load of vehicles including one boat and a very large bus that were stirling powered. Commercial viability/longevity are weak points but inefficiency and lack of power are not the downsides of the Stirling engine.
the total cost of an electric car is a lot larger than just the motor, if they can save on other bits & pieces (drivetrain for instance) then it may still work. You really have to look at the total picture, not just the one component that is expensive. And last I checked a 40 Hp electric motor was a lot cheaper (about $800) than a comparable gasoline engine anyway, simply because of the much simpler construction.
I don't see the federal reserve bailing out linden labs if they should go bust...
Anybody that converts real world assets to virtual ones deserves what they get. Seriously, what's on your mind when you convert your hard earned cold cash into bits in some virtual world ?
Don't you have a better way of spending your money ? Most fads on the internet I can sort of understand what they're about and what their 'pull' is but second life is one step too many for me to follow.
> You can buy two camera units and make a stereoscopic camera. If you include the accelerometer, you'd get enough
> information to create 3D object files by swiping the camera across a scene.
you make that sound so easy!
ah yes, spot on, they're in the plane discussing that. I should go watch it again one of these days, it's an awesome movie.
what's that movie called again ? If the profits outweigh the cost of the lawsuit...
It's quite sick but companies routinely make decisions like this.
they're so interested because it gives them the possibility to become a toll booth. For a small fee of course.
Imagine the confusion when you then take them off and everything is inverted !
I don't think it would pay to see how many of those cycles you can go through before you develop appreciable lag, I think that such 'reroutings' work by additions only, never by deletions.
been a while since I laughed out loud on a slashdot post :)
thank you !
you are missing one thing I think. Websites and businesses are not the same thing.
If google wants to improve the quality of the content they could do a very simple thing, stop linking to *any* commercial webpage. It would be pretty drastic, but I guarantee you that without ad revenues, off-site links to be sold and commerce to be conducted on the pages that google links to SEO spam would drop to 0 overnight. After all, the only people that are willing to invest in SEO are the people that expect it to make them a profit in one way or another.
Second that. If the google code jockeys would be doing their jobs Matt Cutts would be out of one.
Correlation != causation.
yeah... and as every true believer knows nobody ever got sentenced to death that didn't deserve it...
You do realize there is no 'undo' button on the electric chair do you ? Of course by your reasoning it's all gods will anyway, even when somebody is sentenced to death when he/she shouldn't have been.
I guess for every asshole action there is an apologist somewhere...
it does make good business sense but only in the same way that stealing someones care makes better sense than buying one, after all you save the $. That doesn't make it honest though.
fair enough, but it doesn't really matter does it ? In 'C' the run time environment is the standard library, that's what you were pointing at earlier, in java the runtime environment is the JVM + all supporting classes and libraries. The end result of either is a complex environment with lots of potential for bugs. And not just bugs by the programmer of the application, all the supporting code has to be counted as well. Whether the insecurity stems from mis-use of a library routine or from a bug in the JVM is not really relevant. It is probably true that over time the bugs in the JVM itself are being ironed out so long term this should be an issue that occurs less and less.
:)
It is probably true (I simply don't know enough about java) that the JVM makes it a lot harder to do bad stuff, but any programming language that is versatile enough to get real work done usually gives you enough rope to hang yourself with and java is most likely not an exception in this respect.
The number of times I've had java stuff crash on me with very cryptic error messages and not a clue as to what you could do to fix that sort of problem are countless (commercial software, no less), my experience with 'C' and 'C++' based stuff has not been much better in that respect so I don't favor the one over the other based on perceived stability.
I just think that it is shortsighted to prefer java over C or any other language because of a single (debatable) advantage.
Strongly typed languages will have certain advantages over weakly typed languages such as C and asm, but invariably that comes at some price, there is always a trade-off.
Which tool is proper for the job is a complex question that has a lot of factors, and the inability to corrupt local memory (easily) is just one such factor. In C that is mostly a matter of training yourself to stay away from risky constructs and to test your code rigorously. I'd even go so far as to argue that the awareness of the effects of your code in C sets you up for being an excellent programmer because there are no training wheels. You're literally on your own when things die, if you're lucky you have a core dump but most of the time you don't and you'll have to use your wits to figure out what went wrong. The only thing less forgiving than that would be embedded programming without access to an emulator. With 'java' the training wheels literally never come off, they can't.
And for many people that's probably a good thing. Interrupt handlers, kernels and other code like that will *never* be written in something like java, there simply is no room for 'side effects', the code has to be completely deterministic. The same goes for real time stuff, machine control and so on.
And as for you attacking the original poster a long long thread ago about his 'prick waving' (in your words), now you are actually arguing that there are different levels of programmers ('quality' coders and 'applications programmers'), which was one of the original posters main points...
To me C is like a powerful tool, it is great for certain jobs, but lots of code is much easier and simpler written in a less powerful language. Just like sometimes you need the soldering iron and sometimes you need the stickwelder
"Has anyone in the board room ever considered that for 50 cents a track, minimum download of say 20 tracks just to make it worthwhile for the CC people to process the resultant charge card transaction, might do for overall sales? Particularly if they were made available in the format of our choice, which for me is sonicly very clear, ogg at Q7 or above."
That would boost music sales to the point where we wouldn't even be discussing piracy any more. Also it would make the moral discussion a moot one, right now people feel (rightly or not is another issue) ripped off.
Put all that back catalog out there as well...