Instead of wasting the time of gifted students in order push the herd through a longer school year, we should spend money on more programs to help the high achievers. We don't need to waste more time on the many who amount to nothing, but we do need to nurture the intelligent and motivated, for it is they who move society forward.
If they're so intelligent and motivated, why is it they need more nurturing? So much more that you'd apparently recommend a focus which would yield more effort out of, what, a rough 5%-30% of the population (depending on whether your definition of "the herd" includes 1 standard deviation from the mean or 2)?
An educational program which results in a 20% increase in productivity out of the "intelligent and motivated" (let's say around 30% of the population) is actually likely to not even reach break-even yields of a program that results in 5% increase in productivity out of "the herd" (let's say around 70% of the population).
Some investment in gifted kids is definitely a good idea. I certainly benefited even small efforts that the public school system made to keep my education interesting and challenging. But the idea that the bulk of the resources should be refocused on people who already have a lot going for them is a formula for lower yield.
We also need more school choice legislation so people can rescue their kids from the public school system and the thug trash that often infests it.
I'm fairly familiar with the problems with the school system and with primary/secondary education profession. In fact, I probably have more experienced and detailed perspective as someone who stepped inside the threshold of a career as a Math Teacher and left because I didn't find it germane to the personal philosophy I wanted to pursue as an educator and the lifestyle I wanted.
But based on my experience, the ratio of committed and thoughtful people who were there because they wanted to do their job well to coasters who are there to get through the day and collect a paycheck is pretty much in line with my experience in the private sector. And I can't say I've had many encounters with "thug trash."
And really, when I'm honest with myself, *my* public education, at least, offered me a lot more than I took advantage of. If I have any regrets, I wish I'd had some smarter and more involved counseling, but from an academic standpoint, even with all the weaknesses the system had, I was the throttle on my own achievement. I could have learned a lot more about C and Unix if I'd wasted less time my senior year, I could have actually reached a conversational level of Spanish instead of just going through the motions, I could have had experience with broadcasting on the school radio station, I could have done any number of things. All from a state school system that's historically in the bottom five nationally in terms of spending-per-student.
I recognize some public school systems are afflicted with problems mine didn't have, and I don't think there's anything wrong with efforts to improve them, and perhaps even a well-balanced voucher system would have real merits. I also think there's always room for continual efforts at incremental pedagogical improvements for both gifted and "herd" students. But a lot of blanket negative generalizations about the public system don't match up with my experience.
1) McMansions have been genuinely pretty cheap in some places. Even during the real estate bubble in 2006, you could get into a pretty nice house in Houston for less than $150k. Some places in the country you could probably push down $100k. In fact, I almost picked up a 3 bedroom in one of Utah's more expensive markets for $120k. Nobody knows exactly where Springfield is, but it seems to have an apparent barely-urban-island-in-an-ocean-of-countryside setting that'd make those comparable markets. And that's before you consider the modern accepted way of gaining the American Dream: credit. Which is, admittedly, a bit tight after the last year, but has been pretty accessible for much of the run of the Simpson's.
2) Work ethic isn't strictly correlated with financial success. In fact, that's an explicit point at times in the Simpson's social commentary. "Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way." Part of our national mythos is that we're a meritocracy, but the truth is considerably murkier.
Darkness404 made an argument defending Apple. It's apparently not a correct argument, but in the course of that argument, nowhere did they say "Apple is infallible." In fact, almost nobody says or believes anything like that. As a rule, even people with a high degree of enthusiasm for Apple's products generally have some gripes. But the post I replied to essentially asked why the person who made the argument persisted in believing in Apple's infallibility. That's attribution of a position there's no apparent evidence for. This is pretty much what constructing a straw man is.
Really too bad. eldavojohn's response was otherwise fairly useful as an anecdote.
And that's where we start seeing the problems of the nanny state. If we are going to take care of the people, with our taxes and income, who have damaged themselves - those who consume too much food, resulting in extensive health care costs, etc. - then we have to manage those costs.
While what you've said is true, the gp's point was that death and illness have economic and social costs whether or not there's any form of state care. Costs in the most real sense, not just lost valuation, money moved from one account to another, but lost productive capacity.
That may or may not mean the best thing to do is impose taxes on problematic behaviors, but it's important to understand this issue exists independent of any kind of welfare program.
Except that it isn't. Sure, it starts, runs for a few seconds, and then exits due to typing error.
Most of the time when I have an error, it's not a typing one. Sometimes it's something else the compiler would catch -- misspelled identifier, function or method name I misremembered (or forgot to implement), whatever -- but more often than not, I don't spend a lot of time hitting my face with my palm over a typing error.
No, most of the time, I find that it's my logic: I only *think* I've given the computer instructions that will accomplish what I want it to do. But I've overlooked something, left out a step, forgotten a corner case, whatever.
Having a compiler make sure my types are right doesn't generally contribute much to solving this kind of problem, at least for the common meaning of typing we're usually invoking when we're discussing this issue (e.g., typing as it's supported by languages like Java). You could argue that unit testing is kindof like a big type test (do these modules exhibit certain specified behaviors for their "type"?), and maybe there's a language that treats typing like that, which would be intriguing. But having a compiler tell me something like "class x doesn't have method y"? Not generally germane to most of the issues I have while developing, really, and even when it is, I don't really care if I discover this at run time, particularly since feedback is at least as immediate as what you'd get from a compiler if not more.
And meanwhile, as others have pointed out, I'm spending less time writing convertors/adaptors.
There are problem domains where I probably wouldn't use an interpreted/duck-typed language, but I find I'm more productive when I can use them.
... doesn't even particularly speak to whether or not there can also be anthropogenic climate change on Earth. Natural mechanisms don't preclude human influence.
I don't see how canvas is relevant right now. It will be when it is finished, perhaps. For now, target Flash if you need that functionality.
The general idea is relevant in the same way that having native drawing capabilities in any environment where you're doing development is relevant. The specific tool, it's relevant for anyone using a browser that supports it.
Flash: it's not a bad technology, and it's pretty nice that the level of penetration it has made it reliable -- and even a layer on top of which people could implement Canvas, for vendors who are lagging behind (and whose careful "enterprise development cycle" causes them to break implementations based on VML with new releases). But it's vendor dependent, it's actually limited in some ways if you want to do programmatic drawing without having to create the symbols/clips inside another tool first, and it's not as nicely integrated with the rest of the environment it lives in as Canvas is.
Web trash = Web developers; not really designers, not really software engineers. Trendy, braindead, and useless in any real industry. They're responsible for such brilliant technologies as "ruby on rails" and other poorly designed frameworks that blow away collective millions of dollars of investor cash on energy and hardware in order to save them tiny amounts of time and make their code trendier.
Hmm. I'd thought we were talking about client-side web development. Perhaps some kind of uncommonly broad brush is being applied here.
They're the sort of people who would complain that their job is too difficult because they have to target a conservative feature set based on the real-world deployment of unstandardized technologies.
The gestalt's never been "this is too hard for us to do." In fact, I don't think it's hard to find examples of a kind of near-perverse glee in figuring out how to work around various browser deficiencies. And it's pretty clear as a group, web developers figured out not only how to target the conservative feature set you would have apparently espoused but how to do a lot more beyond that. The complaints have almost always centered around how much less time would be wasted and how much more could get done if browsers that supported certain features were more widely deployed.
And really, it's not particularly unreasonable. I mean, if brain-dead worthless trash of the web development world could hack together a mess of Javascript to make Internet Explorer comply more closely with the CSS 2/2.1 specs... why exactly couldn't the professional real engineers who I'm sure you'd argue work for Microsoft offer the same?
Yeah, I was correct. Get over it.
You're technically correct for IE8, but obviously only barely, and you're apparently not interested in tuning in on why your link arguably fails as a practical measure, and conveniently forgetting that your statement is wrong for a large chunk of the last decade by even the measure you've offered up.
Popular doesn't mean standard. These are separate concepts. If it did, then every browser except for IE could be considered non-standard. Canvas is only popular within the enthusiast web developer clique, or "circle jerk" if you will.
Yes, what would those narcissistic onanist web developers know about the relevance of the canvas tag to creating... web applications?
Wow, since some snarky webtrash said it, it must be true.
I haven't gotten snarky yet, but perhaps I will when you explain what "webtrash" means. I certainly hope it's not your term for someone who actually has a working understanding of the issues we've been discussing.
I tend to use the test suites when referencing this:
That's *awesome*. With IE 8, we can now say that after 8 years of lagging behind, the browser created by the world's richest software company marginally edges out Firefox 3 in a feature-by-feature comparison CSS 2.1 features! Gives you a surge of pride, right? Why, if it constituted the most commonly used version of the product, that'd almost be the same thing as giving the world back all the man-hours spent trying to work around the support that wasn't there until this year!
On a different topic, I'd be interested in your take on the relative importance in day-to-day terms of, say @page:left and reliable absolute positioning.
That's not implying all of them are. IE is only supporting finished standards.
This might be a credible statement if Microsoft actually had a reasonable track record of supporting finished standards.
And if so many other organizations with notably smaller pools of resources hadn't managed to run circles around them over the last 5-7 years, not only supporting "unfinished" standards but doing a better job at implementing the finished ones.
Whatever is going on with IE can't be reasonably explained by stating that they're sticking with finished standards.
Between that and Microsoft's well-known history, one has to wonder why any intelligent person would actually even be able to forward that as an explanation of choice.
(And the first public working draft was published Jan 2008).
Microsoft isn't necessarily behind so much as they are not working off the Mozilla and Apple webkit mailing lists when they implement features to their browser.
I don't work off these lists either, but I'm aware of a numer of high profile parts of it, say, the Canvas element. I'm sure Microsoft is too.
IE still has a very enterprise-oriented development cycle
Is this what we call their six year hiatus from actually working on their product?
In the late 1990s they showed they were quite capable of aggressively expanding IE's features, including new if raggedly incomplete support for emerging standards, when they decided it was in their interest to do it.
the bleeding edge feature explosion we see in most open source browsers.
A lot of the features discussed for HTML 5 have had visible implementations for 3-4 years. You could call them bleeding edge in 2006, maybe 2007. 2009? Not without looking pretty silly.
I don't think IE needs to catch up so much as Microsoft simply needs to release an unstable browser in addition to their platform browser if they want to compete with the rest of the non-standard "standards" cult.
The competing products seem to do just fine at keeping a comparable level of stability along with the pushing the envelope. In fact, given how much Opera, Mozilla, and Safari, have been able to do with resources that are orders of magnitude smaller, there's really no excuse.
Except of course if you're talking about CSS 2.1, where it is the best.
Can you defend this claim? Because based on my experiences *using* CSS over the last 7 years, there hasn't been a time when any version of IE could even claim they weren't maddeningly, brokenly worse.
Google are taking the matter into their own hands and actually putting resources towards improving IE, because they know that MS will not do it in any reasonable way.
Yeah, in other words, pretty much what everybody else has been doing over the last decade with their collection of hacks, their CSS reset sheets, and their javascript libraries.
One wonders what the cost of the lost productivity involved in working with the deliberately broken portions of Microsoft's software is... or how much more productive the industry as a whole would be if IE faded away...
Javascript is not object-oriented in any of the traditional senses of the word.
It's quite object-oriented, just not class oriented, and easy enough to use as if it's class-oriented if that's what you want, even without libraries. The prototype-based object system features add object orientation beyond what's offered via closures.
It's great that JavaScript can be used from within a web browser. However, doing anything meaningful using JavaScript with a web browser requires at least a working knowledge of HTML and the DOM. I'd rather focus on the basics of programming separate from that first.
Not necessarily. You can get a instant simple read-eval-print loop by pointing your browser here: http://www.squarefree.com/shell/
Or, if you've got a JRE (and there's not many machines that can't have one), you can download Rhino (http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/ ) and have an interpreter (with access to all the Java libraries) that you can run interactively or on files.
(You can also build Mozilla's SpiderMonkey or Google's V8 standalone to similar effect, but it's a bit more involved.)
You mean the way that the Obama Administration prosecuted the members of the New Black Panther Party who were carrying weapons in front of a voting location and yelling racial slurs at whites who approached to vote (oversimplifying for brevity, if you are familiar with the case, you know what happened. If you aren't familiar with the case, why not?)?
I must be missing something. How is this connected to the question of whether or not the Democratic Party is interested in silencing the opposition?
... and whiny martyrdom among certain conservatives that sometimes make me wish that Democrats were in fact exactly as dirty-handed, ruthless, and out to get the GOP would-be victims seem to think it was.
So, yeah. The Fairness Doctrine meant that you could be "harrassed" to provide alternate points of view if you dedicated a broadcast outlet to partisan purposes.
Here's some interesting questions:
If the article of faith on the right that The Media(TM) is a veritable fifth column of liberal political support is true, why wouldn't this state of affairs benefit conservatives *far* more than it would liberals?
For the obviously very few and utterly beleaguered bastions of conservative broadcasting, why would it be "silencing" them media outlet to require them to broadcast expressions of other views? Do conservatives consider themselves silenced when they are encounter opposing views? Is freedom of speech for conservatives the right to avoid this?
Far-left-wing talk shows simply couldn't turn a profit on radio (and were thus dumped) so they figured they could legislate themselves onto the radio waves.
Yeah. Apparently the prospective audience was less interested in transparent polemics and more interested in reality than their conservative counterparts.
Maybe part of the issue is an insular religious culture or something like that. Maybe. But I'm pretty certain that's not the whole story.
Even a lot of bright people with serious aptitudes for science show they know the score when they head for Wall Street. It doesn't take long for the socially aware to observe which kinds of knowledge and professional positions are respected and rewarded by society at large.
Sure, there's a literacy dimension to the problem: If you tell people you study math, 90% of them won't even know what that means. The educated ones will ask you: "What is there to study beyond calculus, really?" The rest (except the smart ones who went into business) will ask you: "What are you going to do with that -- accounting?" So, yeah, a literacy and cultural campaign might help... but the thing is, lots of people use social heuristics to decide what's important among the many things they hear about and investigate further. And for those who do, they're going to quickly see a lot of things yield better social and economic returns than math and science. You can have a lot of scientists doing public outreach, but until the societal cues change, I doubt it's going to make much of a dent. In order to solve the literacy/cultural issue, you're first going to have to solve a literacy/cultural issue. You're going to have to demonstrate rewards that matter to people.
... that not only did something similar, it one-up'd one-click with voice recognition. I don't know if you've watched Freakazoid!, but there's a guy on that show named Candleja
Why invest in infrastructure that will attract $40/month customers when you can build infrastructure that will attract customers willing to pay almost anything monthly for the latest technofashion device.
Every iPhone thread. There's always someone who thinks they have to share the oh-so-perceptive insight that the iPhone is largely a fashion accessory.
Meanwhile, back in reality, the reason AT&T is apparently having these problems? They brought onboard a device with a featureset which (despite apparent inferiority to half a dozen other devices I'm sure you can find slashdotters to tell you about) has essentially resulted in a huge explosion of actual mobile data usage.
AT&T's problems have nothing to do with the fashionability of the phone. They have everything to do with its features and the typical telco avoidance of actually building out service whenever they can get away with it.
So much for handing your email over to Google because it's more reliable than hosting locally...
Yeah. As my subject heading says...
Seriously, though: it probably depends on who's doing the hosting. I'm sure there's slashdot readers for whom setting up (and maintaining) their own mail server is a short task done before breakfast without breaking a mental sweat. I'm further sure I could learn to be one of those people, but I'm betting the time I'd invest in doing that is less than the amount I've time I've spent waiting for google to come up.
Oh, silly me. I was referring to the actual present. I keep forgetting that it's OK for the dictatorial head of a murderous socialist regimes to name himself president for life, shut down not-propogandizing-for-him media, "disappear" elected officials that disagree with him, and all of that cool stuff now, because in the past, something else happened.
Would it be OK if he were declaring himself the dictatorial head of a non-socialist fascist regime?
Seemed like a good question to ask, given that the "socialist" part is pretty much entirely orthogonal to the rest, to the extent that the term has any particular meaning at all these days.
But that's really not the GP's point, which is that given the U.S.'s recordof interventions in Latin America during recent history (including support for Murderous Thugs(TM)), we don't exactly have a clear moral high ground or unquestioned credibility on the local street.
It may still be that it's against the interest of either the U.S. or Venezuelan citizens to have Chavez in charge, but the point that our record there is arguably pretty blemished itself is germane to the discussion.
I think a lot of the lack of R&D goes back to decisions made many years ago by the government. At one point all employee salaries regardless of how outrageous they were were a deductible expense.
This sounds fishy to me. Can you cite the change in the tax code? I am not a tax accountant, but it's my understanding salaries are in fact still "deductible" in the sense that they count as an expense against profits. Are you saying they used to be deductible against gross revenue? And how does this fit in with the large "bonuses" that are essentially high salary compensation?
I'd agree that regardless of the tax structure, though, the principal-agent problem and short-term thinking is... well, a problem.
I remember when HP meant test equipment and awesome calculators, not lousy consumer based computers (Thanks Carly).
(Now, of course, she's going into politics. For some reason McCain took her on as an economic adviser for a while, despite her track record. Which she appears to think qualifies her as a brilliant candidate for the U.S. Senate.)
Maybe. Maybe not. You, with your sporting good store, may have suppliers in other countries. You may go to their site. You may go on a trip elsewhere....If you were locked out of the account while you were overseas, you'd probably call and bitch the bank out (at $5/min for the phone charges). Not all businesses have the luxury of being mom & pop shops, and only ever doing business from their office line. Geo-locating the IP isn't exactly fool proof either.
All of these problems can more or less be managed by opt-out/opt-in of geographically limited logins. Done in person at the bank.
Of course, this doesn't address the larger problem that the bank would have to build support for this, and they don't really have motivation to do it. They're doing what they do best with their announcement: pushing responsibility for problems in a system onto the backs of their customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of wasting the time of gifted students in order push the herd through a longer school year, we should spend money on more programs to help the high achievers. We don't need to waste more time on the many who amount to nothing, but we do need to nurture the intelligent and motivated, for it is they who move society forward.
If they're so intelligent and motivated, why is it they need more nurturing? So much more that you'd apparently recommend a focus which would yield more effort out of, what, a rough 5%-30% of the population (depending on whether your definition of "the herd" includes 1 standard deviation from the mean or 2)?
An educational program which results in a 20% increase in productivity out of the "intelligent and motivated" (let's say around 30% of the population) is actually likely to not even reach break-even yields of a program that results in 5% increase in productivity out of "the herd" (let's say around 70% of the population).
Some investment in gifted kids is definitely a good idea. I certainly benefited even small efforts that the public school system made to keep my education interesting and challenging. But the idea that the bulk of the resources should be refocused on people who already have a lot going for them is a formula for lower yield.
We also need more school choice legislation so people can rescue their kids from the public school system and the thug trash that often infests it.
I'm fairly familiar with the problems with the school system and with primary/secondary education profession. In fact, I probably have more experienced and detailed perspective as someone who stepped inside the threshold of a career as a Math Teacher and left because I didn't find it germane to the personal philosophy I wanted to pursue as an educator and the lifestyle I wanted.
But based on my experience, the ratio of committed and thoughtful people who were there because they wanted to do their job well to coasters who are there to get through the day and collect a paycheck is pretty much in line with my experience in the private sector. And I can't say I've had many encounters with "thug trash."
And really, when I'm honest with myself, *my* public education, at least, offered me a lot more than I took advantage of. If I have any regrets, I wish I'd had some smarter and more involved counseling, but from an academic standpoint, even with all the weaknesses the system had, I was the throttle on my own achievement. I could have learned a lot more about C and Unix if I'd wasted less time my senior year, I could have actually reached a conversational level of Spanish instead of just going through the motions, I could have had experience with broadcasting on the school radio station, I could have done any number of things. All from a state school system that's historically in the bottom five nationally in terms of spending-per-student.
I recognize some public school systems are afflicted with problems mine didn't have, and I don't think there's anything wrong with efforts to improve them, and perhaps even a well-balanced voucher system would have real merits. I also think there's always room for continual efforts at incremental pedagogical improvements for both gifted and "herd" students. But a lot of blanket negative generalizations about the public system don't match up with my experience.
Two points:
1) McMansions have been genuinely pretty cheap in some places. Even during the real estate bubble in 2006, you could get into a pretty nice house in Houston for less than $150k. Some places in the country you could probably push down $100k. In fact, I almost picked up a 3 bedroom in one of Utah's more expensive markets for $120k. Nobody knows exactly where Springfield is, but it seems to have an apparent barely-urban-island-in-an-ocean-of-countryside setting that'd make those comparable markets. And that's before you consider the modern accepted way of gaining the American Dream: credit. Which is, admittedly, a bit tight after the last year, but has been pretty accessible for much of the run of the Simpson's.
2) Work ethic isn't strictly correlated with financial success. In fact, that's an explicit point at times in the Simpson's social commentary. "Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way." Part of our national mythos is that we're a meritocracy, but the truth is considerably murkier.
How the fuck was the GP post a strawman?
Darkness404 made an argument defending Apple. It's apparently not a correct argument, but in the course of that argument, nowhere did they say "Apple is infallible." In fact, almost nobody says or believes anything like that. As a rule, even people with a high degree of enthusiasm for Apple's products generally have some gripes. But the post I replied to essentially asked why the person who made the argument persisted in believing in Apple's infallibility. That's attribution of a position there's no apparent evidence for. This is pretty much what constructing a straw man is.
Really too bad. eldavojohn's response was otherwise fairly useful as an anecdote.
How many free passes does Apple get before you start to question their infallibility?
Probably about as many as there are strawman constructions of people's conceptions of Apple as a company.
And that's where we start seeing the problems of the nanny state. If we are going to take care of the people, with our taxes and income, who have damaged themselves - those who consume too much food, resulting in extensive health care costs, etc. - then we have to manage those costs.
While what you've said is true, the gp's point was that death and illness have economic and social costs whether or not there's any form of state care. Costs in the most real sense, not just lost valuation, money moved from one account to another, but lost productive capacity.
That may or may not mean the best thing to do is impose taxes on problematic behaviors, but it's important to understand this issue exists independent of any kind of welfare program.
Except that it isn't. Sure, it starts, runs for a few seconds, and then exits due to typing error.
Most of the time when I have an error, it's not a typing one. Sometimes it's something else the compiler would catch -- misspelled identifier, function or method name I misremembered (or forgot to implement), whatever -- but more often than not, I don't spend a lot of time hitting my face with my palm over a typing error.
No, most of the time, I find that it's my logic: I only *think* I've given the computer instructions that will accomplish what I want it to do. But I've overlooked something, left out a step, forgotten a corner case, whatever.
Having a compiler make sure my types are right doesn't generally contribute much to solving this kind of problem, at least for the common meaning of typing we're usually invoking when we're discussing this issue (e.g., typing as it's supported by languages like Java). You could argue that unit testing is kindof like a big type test (do these modules exhibit certain specified behaviors for their "type"?), and maybe there's a language that treats typing like that, which would be intriguing. But having a compiler tell me something like "class x doesn't have method y"? Not generally germane to most of the issues I have while developing, really, and even when it is, I don't really care if I discover this at run time, particularly since feedback is at least as immediate as what you'd get from a compiler if not more.
And meanwhile, as others have pointed out, I'm spending less time writing convertors/adaptors.
There are problem domains where I probably wouldn't use an interpreted/duck-typed language, but I find I'm more productive when I can use them.
... doesn't even particularly speak to whether or not there can also be anthropogenic climate change on Earth. Natural mechanisms don't preclude human influence.
I don't see how canvas is relevant right now. It will be when it is finished, perhaps. For now, target Flash if you need that functionality.
The general idea is relevant in the same way that having native drawing capabilities in any environment where you're doing development is relevant. The specific tool, it's relevant for anyone using a browser that supports it.
Flash: it's not a bad technology, and it's pretty nice that the level of penetration it has made it reliable -- and even a layer on top of which people could implement Canvas, for vendors who are lagging behind (and whose careful "enterprise development cycle" causes them to break implementations based on VML with new releases). But it's vendor dependent, it's actually limited in some ways if you want to do programmatic drawing without having to create the symbols/clips inside another tool first, and it's not as nicely integrated with the rest of the environment it lives in as Canvas is.
Web trash = Web developers; not really designers, not really software engineers. Trendy, braindead, and useless in any real industry. They're responsible for such brilliant technologies as "ruby on rails" and other poorly designed frameworks that blow away collective millions of dollars of investor cash on energy and hardware in order to save them tiny amounts of time and make their code trendier.
Hmm. I'd thought we were talking about client-side web development. Perhaps some kind of uncommonly broad brush is being applied here.
They're the sort of people who would complain that their job is too difficult because they have to target a conservative feature set based on the real-world deployment of unstandardized technologies.
The gestalt's never been "this is too hard for us to do." In fact, I don't think it's hard to find examples of a kind of near-perverse glee in figuring out how to work around various browser deficiencies. And it's pretty clear as a group, web developers figured out not only how to target the conservative feature set you would have apparently espoused but how to do a lot more beyond that. The complaints have almost always centered around how much less time would be wasted and how much more could get done if browsers that supported certain features were more widely deployed.
And really, it's not particularly unreasonable. I mean, if brain-dead worthless trash of the web development world could hack together a mess of Javascript to make Internet Explorer comply more closely with the CSS 2/2.1 specs... why exactly couldn't the professional real engineers who I'm sure you'd argue work for Microsoft offer the same?
Yeah, I was correct. Get over it.
You're technically correct for IE8, but obviously only barely, and you're apparently not interested in tuning in on why your link arguably fails as a practical measure, and conveniently forgetting that your statement is wrong for a large chunk of the last decade by even the measure you've offered up.
Popular doesn't mean standard. These are separate concepts. If it did, then every browser except for IE could be considered non-standard. Canvas is only popular within the enthusiast web developer clique, or "circle jerk" if you will.
Yes, what would those narcissistic onanist web developers know about the relevance of the canvas tag to creating... web applications?
Wow, since some snarky webtrash said it, it must be true.
I haven't gotten snarky yet, but perhaps I will when you explain what "webtrash" means. I certainly hope it's not your term for someone who actually has a working understanding of the issues we've been discussing.
I tend to use the test suites when referencing this:
http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-css?uas=IE7-IE8-FX3-OP9
That's *awesome*. With IE 8, we can now say that after 8 years of lagging behind, the browser created by the world's richest software company marginally edges out Firefox 3 in a feature-by-feature comparison CSS 2.1 features! Gives you a surge of pride, right? Why, if it constituted the most commonly used version of the product, that'd almost be the same thing as giving the world back all the man-hours spent trying to work around the support that wasn't there until this year!
On a different topic, I'd be interested in your take on the relative importance in day-to-day terms of, say @page:left and reliable absolute positioning.
That's not implying all of them are. IE is only supporting finished standards.
This might be a credible statement if Microsoft actually had a reasonable track record of supporting finished standards.
And if so many other organizations with notably smaller pools of resources hadn't managed to run circles around them over the last 5-7 years, not only supporting "unfinished" standards but doing a better job at implementing the finished ones.
Whatever is going on with IE can't be reasonably explained by stating that they're sticking with finished standards.
Between that and Microsoft's well-known history, one has to wonder why any intelligent person would actually even be able to forward that as an explanation of choice.
HTML 5 is not done yet by any means. I wouldn't even say they have what you might call a working draft.
"The publication of this document by the W3C as a W3C Working Draft ...".
(And the first public working draft was published Jan 2008).
Microsoft isn't necessarily behind so much as they are not working off the Mozilla and Apple webkit mailing lists when they implement features to their browser.
I don't work off these lists either, but I'm aware of a numer of high profile parts of it, say, the Canvas element. I'm sure Microsoft is too.
IE still has a very enterprise-oriented development cycle
Is this what we call their six year hiatus from actually working on their product?
In the late 1990s they showed they were quite capable of aggressively expanding IE's features, including new if raggedly incomplete support for emerging standards, when they decided it was in their interest to do it.
the bleeding edge feature explosion we see in most open source browsers.
A lot of the features discussed for HTML 5 have had visible implementations for 3-4 years. You could call them bleeding edge in 2006, maybe 2007. 2009? Not without looking pretty silly.
I don't think IE needs to catch up so much as Microsoft simply needs to release an unstable browser in addition to their platform browser if they want to compete with the rest of the non-standard "standards" cult.
The competing products seem to do just fine at keeping a comparable level of stability along with the pushing the envelope. In fact, given how much Opera, Mozilla, and Safari, have been able to do with resources that are orders of magnitude smaller, there's really no excuse.
Except of course if you're talking about CSS 2.1, where it is the best.
Can you defend this claim? Because based on my experiences *using* CSS over the last 7 years, there hasn't been a time when any version of IE could even claim they weren't maddeningly, brokenly worse.
Google are taking the matter into their own hands and actually putting resources towards improving IE, because they know that MS will not do it in any reasonable way.
Yeah, in other words, pretty much what everybody else has been doing over the last decade with their collection of hacks, their CSS reset sheets, and their javascript libraries.
One wonders what the cost of the lost productivity involved in working with the deliberately broken portions of Microsoft's software is... or how much more productive the industry as a whole would be if IE faded away...
Silo Lullabye.
Either that, or Tom Lehrer's We'll All Go Together When We Go.
Javascript is not object-oriented in any of the traditional senses of the word.
It's quite object-oriented, just not class oriented, and easy enough to use as if it's class-oriented if that's what you want, even without libraries. The prototype-based object system features add object orientation beyond what's offered via closures.
It's great that JavaScript can be used from within a web browser. However, doing anything meaningful using JavaScript with a web browser requires at least a working knowledge of HTML and the DOM. I'd rather focus on the basics of programming separate from that first.
Not necessarily. You can get a instant simple read-eval-print loop by pointing your browser here: http://www.squarefree.com/shell/
Or, if you've got a JRE (and there's not many machines that can't have one), you can download Rhino (http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/ ) and have an interpreter (with access to all the Java libraries) that you can run interactively or on files.
(You can also build Mozilla's SpiderMonkey or Google's V8 standalone to similar effect, but it's a bit more involved.)
You mean the way that the Obama Administration prosecuted the members of the New Black Panther Party who were carrying weapons in front of a voting location and yelling racial slurs at whites who approached to vote (oversimplifying for brevity, if you are familiar with the case, you know what happened. If you aren't familiar with the case, why not?)?
I must be missing something. How is this connected to the question of whether or not the Democratic Party is interested in silencing the opposition?
... and whiny martyrdom among certain conservatives that sometimes make me wish that Democrats were in fact exactly as dirty-handed, ruthless, and out to get the GOP would-be victims seem to think it was.
So, yeah. The Fairness Doctrine meant that you could be "harrassed" to provide alternate points of view if you dedicated a broadcast outlet to partisan purposes.
Here's some interesting questions:
If the article of faith on the right that The Media(TM) is a veritable fifth column of liberal political support is true, why wouldn't this state of affairs benefit conservatives *far* more than it would liberals?
For the obviously very few and utterly beleaguered bastions of conservative broadcasting, why would it be "silencing" them media outlet to require them to broadcast expressions of other views? Do conservatives consider themselves silenced when they are encounter opposing views? Is freedom of speech for conservatives the right to avoid this?
Far-left-wing talk shows simply couldn't turn a profit on radio (and were thus dumped) so they figured they could legislate themselves onto the radio waves.
Yeah. Apparently the prospective audience was less interested in transparent polemics and more interested in reality than their conservative counterparts.
Maybe part of the issue is an insular religious culture or something like that. Maybe. But I'm pretty certain that's not the whole story.
Even a lot of bright people with serious aptitudes for science show they know the score when they head for Wall Street. It doesn't take long for the socially aware to observe which kinds of knowledge and professional positions are respected and rewarded by society at large.
Sure, there's a literacy dimension to the problem: If you tell people you study math, 90% of them won't even know what that means. The educated ones will ask you: "What is there to study beyond calculus, really?" The rest (except the smart ones who went into business) will ask you: "What are you going to do with that -- accounting?" So, yeah, a literacy and cultural campaign might help... but the thing is, lots of people use social heuristics to decide what's important among the many things they hear about and investigate further. And for those who do, they're going to quickly see a lot of things yield better social and economic returns than math and science. You can have a lot of scientists doing public outreach, but until the societal cues change, I doubt it's going to make much of a dent. In order to solve the literacy/cultural issue, you're first going to have to solve a literacy/cultural issue. You're going to have to demonstrate rewards that matter to people.
... that not only did something similar, it one-up'd one-click with voice recognition. I don't know if you've watched Freakazoid!, but there's a guy on that show named Candleja
Why invest in infrastructure that will attract $40/month customers when you can build infrastructure that will attract customers willing to pay almost anything monthly for the latest technofashion device.
Every iPhone thread. There's always someone who thinks they have to share the oh-so-perceptive insight that the iPhone is largely a fashion accessory.
Meanwhile, back in reality, the reason AT&T is apparently having these problems? They brought onboard a device with a featureset which (despite apparent inferiority to half a dozen other devices I'm sure you can find slashdotters to tell you about) has essentially resulted in a huge explosion of actual mobile data usage.
AT&T's problems have nothing to do with the fashionability of the phone. They have everything to do with its features and the typical telco avoidance of actually building out service whenever they can get away with it.
So much for handing your email over to Google because it's more reliable than hosting locally...
Yeah. As my subject heading says...
Seriously, though: it probably depends on who's doing the hosting. I'm sure there's slashdot readers for whom setting up (and maintaining) their own mail server is a short task done before breakfast without breaking a mental sweat. I'm further sure I could learn to be one of those people, but I'm betting the time I'd invest in doing that is less than the amount I've time I've spent waiting for google to come up.
Oh, silly me. I was referring to the actual present. I keep forgetting that it's OK for the dictatorial head of a murderous socialist regimes to name himself president for life, shut down not-propogandizing-for-him media, "disappear" elected officials that disagree with him, and all of that cool stuff now, because in the past, something else happened.
Would it be OK if he were declaring himself the dictatorial head of a non-socialist fascist regime?
Seemed like a good question to ask, given that the "socialist" part is pretty much entirely orthogonal to the rest, to the extent that the term has any particular meaning at all these days.
But that's really not the GP's point, which is that given the U.S.'s record of interventions in Latin America during recent history (including support for Murderous Thugs(TM)), we don't exactly have a clear moral high ground or unquestioned credibility on the local street.
It may still be that it's against the interest of either the U.S. or Venezuelan citizens to have Chavez in charge, but the point that our record there is arguably pretty blemished itself is germane to the discussion.
I think a lot of the lack of R&D goes back to decisions made many years ago by the government. At one point all employee salaries regardless of how outrageous they were were a deductible expense.
This sounds fishy to me. Can you cite the change in the tax code? I am not a tax accountant, but it's my understanding salaries are in fact still "deductible" in the sense that they count as an expense against profits. Are you saying they used to be deductible against gross revenue? And how does this fit in with the large "bonuses" that are essentially high salary compensation?
I'd agree that regardless of the tax structure, though, the principal-agent problem and short-term thinking is... well, a problem.
I remember when HP meant test equipment and awesome calculators, not lousy consumer based computers (Thanks Carly).
The interesting thing is about Carly's reign is that even by short-sighted Wall Street analyst standards, it should serve as a pretty bright warning sign for suits looking to dismantle an engineering company. HP's value dropped "down two-thirds from its peak" while she was running the company and jumped up over 10% at one point the day the news of her ousting broke.
(Now, of course, she's going into politics. For some reason McCain took her on as an economic adviser for a while, despite her track record. Which she appears to think qualifies her as a brilliant candidate for the U.S. Senate.)
Technically, it is configurable (about:config has a property that disables the bookmark searching), just not with a neat radio button.
Sure. In fact, I've done this myself and it wasn't that hard.
It's still annoying as hell that they made a totally major UI change... and they didn't also make an easy way to turn it off along with it.
Maybe. Maybe not. You, with your sporting good store, may have suppliers in other countries. You may go to their site. You may go on a trip elsewhere....If you were locked out of the account while you were overseas, you'd probably call and bitch the bank out (at $5/min for the phone charges). Not all businesses have the luxury of being mom & pop shops, and only ever doing business from their office line. Geo-locating the IP isn't exactly fool proof either.
All of these problems can more or less be managed by opt-out/opt-in of geographically limited logins. Done in person at the bank.
Of course, this doesn't address the larger problem that the bank would have to build support for this, and they don't really have motivation to do it. They're doing what they do best with their announcement: pushing responsibility for problems in a system onto the backs of their customers.