In this twitterific RSS-enabled environment feeding an entire generation of instant-gratification kids (uh, talking about 12 - 24 year-olds), who also seem to be "suffering" from ADD/ADHD, just how long do you think the type of reader profile YOU speak of is going to be around?
I don't know the exact length, but I'm pretty sure it's only few decades short of the end of society as we know it.
I honestly think that if a concerted effort was made, a nation could function fine with a complete set of laws that fit on less than 50 pages that any citizen could read and clearly understand.
"For every problem, there exists a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."
Perhaps inkscape is the GPL'd vector image editor you seek.
Inkscape is great. I'm still happier to pay to use Fireworks for a variety of other reasons, but if Inkscape suddenly became the weapon of choice for web mockups instead of Photoshop, I'd be delighted.
The funny thing about these emails that allegedly prove the data was cooked? The climate scientists can offer defenses as to why the "cooking" was actually data scrubbing / normalization. By contrast, I've noticed that nearly to a person, critics merely pick a phrase that sounds vaguely alarming and point to it as solid evidence of fraud... while they can't even explain why they think such processing would lead to an outcome in error, let alone rebut the climate scientist's defenses.
2. Pachauri admits to major goof-up but yet takes it coolly.
Which is to say, he's confident in his position. May still be a political goof-up, but it may not: his behavior is not the kind that someone who knows they've been caught flat-out red-handed on major fraud makes. You don't bluff when you know other people know you're holding a 2-7 offsuit.
3. All data leads to conclusion of AGW.
Not so. Please see the post you responded to, where I address the question of whether or not GW and AGW can be falsified.
Harsher winters, bigger hurricanes, more snow, less snow.
These are all predicted as a consequence of GW, A or not. They're evidence of a kind, and they're important phenomena to examine, but they don't have a lot to do with the question of whether GW or AGW is happening, nor are they generally used as such by non-laypeople (and when they're employed, it's generally to underscore the relevancy of the issue, not as evidence behind it).
And while we're at it, I have to say: Can we please be done with the idea that web mockups should be done in Photoshop? It never was a good tool for designing web layouts. The idea that it ever was is an artifact of its market position and the popularity of certain raster effects at the time the web rose. Illustrator has been a better tool for web layouts for a while, and Fireworks (with a fantastic blend of vector and raster capabilities) is even better, and there are probably half a dozen other vector capable layout tools I'm not aware of that are better...
(Please do not suggest Gimp or PSP. They're bad choices for web layouts for the same reasons Photoshop is.)/soapbox
If it gets hotter it is because of Global Warming.
The consistent and scientific standard you're looking for is if mean surface temperature decreases over time. Global Warming, by contrast, is indicated by a rising mean surface temperature over time.
AGW is more complicated, probably a topic to wait on for people who haven't digested the above, but essentially comes down to trying to doing accounting for different warming contributions based on related measurements. The closer the accounting is to adding up, the more credible AGW looks. The farther, less.
what would it take for one of you True Believers to reconsider your theory?
A complete investigation on the part of each individual is a rather time-consuming proposition, so a lot of us use heuristics. One of mine tends to be that opponents of AGW are often doing things like:
(a) making no distinction between individual weather events and climate (b) confusing the term "Global Warming" with " monotonic temperature/ice thickness increase across every point of the globe (c) asserting there exists some input or dynamic that accounts for most of the warming and implying that climate scientists supposedly have ignored it, when in fact it turns out that there exist climate scientists who have considered and done the accounting on said input or dynamic (see increased solar output)
Now, I'm not a true believer, so maybe my bar is lower than some others, but I'd say that if I can go 2-3 years where less than 10-20% of the AGW criticism I read has one of these features (or similar ones: the list I gave is hardly exhaustive), I might start to give the opposition as much credibility as the proponents.
Your larger point that the evangelical Christian agenda isn't the only one out there and that the wording example was probably in the service of a specific viewpoint is a good one, and because of that, we're probably better off teaching a bit of healthy skepticism about textbooks rather than trying to agree on universally acceptable content for them.:) But...
Most mortgages are different from the constitution in that they don't contain specific provisions for their own modification and reinterpretation (though I'll bet there are mortgages out there somewhere with such provisions). And really, the idea of reinterpretation is pretty much built into any legal system run by people. Lawyers and judges *can* be mechanistic in their application of the law, but it's certainly not their only known mode of operation or even the ideal one: a good number of those WTF legal decisions that leave laymen outraged happen this way. Not surprising, really. It's only inside of the context of certain formal systems where rigid operation works (and even there, as Godel noted, you're going to have an inconsistency problem or an incompleteness problem).
That isn't to say you can't have problems when people get a bit too creative, but the answer to the idea of a document cast in butter isn't the idea of a document cast in steel. There's a tension between the two, and a balance to be found, and in fact, you can find this in the thinking of the people who wrote it.
we aren't exactly allowed to have any weapons that would be effective at fighting the US military
Individuals might not be allowed to have such weapons, but state National Guards are. You still have the problem of citizen balance against state power, but at least that's one potential check against federal power.
That and the geographic distribution of actually national forces...
So no, I don't think it's correct to call LDS people "creationists" by any means, because that lumps them in with all the 6000-year-old-Earth fundie Christians...
I think the distinction you're looking for is Young Earth Creationism. There's also Old Earth Creationists, who may or may not believe in theistic evolution.
To be fair, LDS have their own wacky beliefs (that God/Jehovah is but one god of many, and lives on the planet Kolob,
*shrug* Once you believe in a supernatural, one set of beliefs isn't particularly more wacky than the next, just more or less familiar.
but let's not criticize them for things they don't actually believe in. At least they have the good sense to acknowledge that the Earth really is billions of years old as far as we can determine by physical evidence, and that evolution is a real thing by all available evidence (and they don't try to make up some "microevolution vs macroevolution" BS like that Creationist apologists).
The GP is correct that many Mormons and in particular those who pursue academic/scientific studies tend to believe in a kind of theistic evolution, but it's not accurate to say this is true of the whole. Mormon opinions run the span of the spectrum I described above. As far as I can tell there's never been an official position on the matter, but there have been authority figures who read Genesis and other creation-related canon literally, so you see Mormons arguing with each other on the topic fairly regularly if you know enough well enough.:)
This isn't the standard usage. You have a set of "person" tuples - one person, one tuple, the set of person tuples forms a relation, singular.
That's interesting. Different from the way I had it explained, but I wouldn't be surprised if I or they had gotten the terminology for tuple and relation confused, and the distinction you've mentioned does sound promising from a formal perspective.
Not sure whether mathematicians would call it a 'people relation' or a 'person relation'
To invoke my earlier statement in the language you've given, I think the question is whether or not the plural belongs on the tuples rather than on the name of the relation. And while I'm not sure what mathematicians would do, I am pretty confident about what logic programmers would do in, say, Prolog, given the choice between a people predicate and a person predicate: they'd choose the former.
A case in point: Rails likes to give your database tables plural names...One of the reasons to prefer singular table names is that it improves Rails's interoperability with the applications that either want to supply data to or consume data created by Rails..
Another reason is that it gets you closer to relational thinking. Plural names come about because some think of tables as collections of records and it follows that said collection should get a plural name. So, your "person" record becomes your "people" table.
However, the table isn't really and formally a collection of rows. What you really have is a set of "person" relations; the plural on the end of relations there is where the plural belongs.
And I don't know how big of a performance hit pluralize yields, but it's doing something that doesn't have to be done: the convention could just as well be singular (and arguably would more properly be singular).
I am a php developer that does a lot of small to medium sized apps using zend framework. I don't plan on doing anything enterprise scale, my niche is what it is. Do you see any advantage to zend framework over ROR?
I don't know Ruby or Rails well yet. But I do know PHP pretty well. And my answer is: no. Not as a framework.
Zend Framework isn't a web application skeleton / development system. It's an over-objectified library of barely related pieces. Yeah, there's a controller and a recommended directory layout, and you can pull it together with the rest of the library and a project or two elsewhere (say, Doctrine and Smarty), but it's not a thought-out whole. The job of creating an overall architecture for your app and getting the components to work together becomes yours.
Maybe that's what you want, and if so, then Zend Framework or doing things by pieces in Ruby (say, Sinatra + Sequel + HAML/SASS) could be for you. But if you want an actual web application framework, then I'd look at something like Code Igniter or Symfony (for PHP) or Rails or Merb (for Ruby) instead.
VC's hard to get. But it should be equally hard to get. Right now it doesn't seem like it is.
Does it? I mean, do we really have data that says that it is?
Because this isn't it:
"Additionally, it is harder for women to obtain funding than for men.... historically, women-led companies have received less than 9% of venture capital investments; in 2007, the proportion of funded female CEOs dropped to 3%."
What you'd want to know isn't the gender breakdown of companies that receive funding -- that number isn't going to give you any meaningful picture of potential VC bias. Rather, you'd want to know what fraction of female-led companies get funding vs a similar fraction male-led companies.
"This book is much more than you may think it is"
on
The Art of Scalability
·
· Score: 1
"This book is much more than you may think it is. Scale is not just about designing Web sites that don't crash when lots of users show up. It is about designing your company so that it doesn't crash when your business needs to grow. These guys have been there on the front lines of some of the most successful Internet companies of our time, and they share the good, the bad, and the ugly about how to not just survive, but thrive." -- Marty Cagan, Founder, Silicon Valley Product Group
(Also... is there some kind of Martin conspiracy going on here? The author is named Martin, the reviewer is named Martijn, the guy I just quoted is presumably a Martin...)
I wasn't aware that Congress could order the White House to do anything. What part of the Constitution gives it this power? What about "separation of powers"?
In theory, we have rule of law in this country, and the executive branch is bound by law, which congress writes, except the Constitution. The theoretical separation of power lies in the fact that the executive is generally part of the legislative process via the veto/signing power.
In practice, the executive branch has even further freedom pretty broad latitude, arising partly from being the executor of the law, and partly from human sociology (most people have some natural aversion to adversarial actions against high-status individuals) and politics (sure, maybe Bush and Cheney are guilty of war crimes, but you open that can of worms and you're going to start a big fight and potentially find yourself staring down the barrel of similar accusations in the future).
If anything, the executive branch is stronger in practice than it should be.
And no, tables are not even a viable alternative. There are numerous reasons for why the enterprise level websites need to be coded semantically.
This is false, if popular.
The first clue should be the existence of screen readers and the widespread effectiveness of Google even before going way back before CSS (much less CSS positioning) was in common use. Heck, even Lynx had some surprisingly effective ability to filter out layout tables and still display tabular data as early as 1999. If layout-repurposed table markup made those things truly difficult, then 90% of the web would have been opaque to those things until around 2005.
The thing is, it's really not that hard to tell the difference between table markup used for layout and used for data most of the time. A good HTML hand-coder could probably tell the difference nearly instantly. A piece of software could probably do it for the vast majority of cases with a set of heuristics a half a page long. And they do.
So what IS the alternative to a relatively scaled HTML table in CSS that works across all browsers?
There isn't one. Not really. Not yet.
A couple of people will show up and tell you that there is. I've spent five solid years implementing hundreds of arbitrary layouts mocked up in Illustrator. I worked hard to use CSS positioning and semantic markup whenever possible, probably know the craft better than most. And the conclusion I've come to is that even where the methodologies and hacks and workarounds can get the job done, CSS positioning still sometimes sucks. Partly because there are some semi-frequent cases where table cell behavior makes your life easier, partly because it's a pretty natural layout metaphor people have used for a long time before we even had liquid screen media.
display: table-cell and friends are just about ready for prime time, though. That'll probably take care of some of the hard cases, and work for a lot of people as a metaphor, largely because we'll essentially be writing table markup again.
You have to take some liberties to wedge Apple into the role traditionally known as operator in computing history, which the article is most likely referring to, and to the extent Apple fits here, Amazon does as well: they're not selling the Kindle as a general purpose device, and you have to jump through some hoops to get it to work like one.
That said, I agree the Kindle is a PC of sorts, albeit one with different strengths and weaknesses from the iPad.
interestingly it's claimed that OSX was originally going to behave that way at Job's request. there's a hidden mode switch (in the defaults.write ) that will change the interface so only one app is visible at a time. the others snap to the dock at each context switch. I activated that for my mother and here ability to use the computer skyrocketed. I've tried it myself
What's the switch? I just tried looking through defaults read, but that's an awful lot of text to sift through without knowing what I'm looking for...
The problem is, iPhone OS. Sure, an iPad might be able to do a lot of the things that a regular tablet can, but can it, say, play a YouTube video in the background while working on something in the foreground? Nope. What about Flash? Nope.
Missing Flash hasn't killed the iPhone, and while there are setups in which it's a pretty big plus to have multiple apps open at the same time, it's an open question whether it's important to have multiple applications open at the same time in the market netbooks are filling into right now. Modal use might well be fine for a good chunk of people. Heck, sometimes I wonder if modal use might not be better for me. Maybe I'd spend less time farting around on slashdot if I had to close the app I was working in to read and post here.:)
The iPad has been officially announced for all of two days, a vanishingly small portion of people have actually spent any time playing with one, and the world is already full of vociferous opinions about its prospects for (pick one) dismal failure/niche success/displacing netbooks/world domination. Like this one:
Because of its price and lack of perennial netbook features, such as a physical keyboard.
Looks to me like it doesn't lack for a physical keyboard, even if it's not permanently attached. Will that be a problem for literal laptop users? Maybe. If I were betting, though, I'd guess that it'll be good enough that Apple's sales will compare with the top 3 netbook manufacturers.
I'm not betting, however, because like most of the planet, I haven't had a chance to really play with one, and therefore don't have a very solid idea what I'm talking about.
That's interesting. I'd been given to understand that this was a proprietary processor. The only explanation I can think of is that you were actually part of the A4 or iPhone OS team.
And yet you correctly state that the iPhone OS (and the iPad version is the same) don't do multi-task/threading.
Okay, you weren't on the OS team, and you have some reading comprehension difficulties, otherwise, you wouldn't have said that, given that the GP actually went to some pains to point out the OS does do multitasking/multithreading, and he's correct. So, that leaves the A4 team.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but print is dying.
Sure, but mid- and long-form don't have to.
In this twitterific RSS-enabled environment feeding an entire generation of instant-gratification kids (uh, talking about 12 - 24 year-olds), who also seem to be "suffering" from ADD/ADHD, just how long do you think the type of reader profile YOU speak of is going to be around?
I don't know the exact length, but I'm pretty sure it's only few decades short of the end of society as we know it.
I'd explain, but that's probably a tl/dr.
I honestly think that if a concerted effort was made, a nation could function fine with a complete set of laws that fit on less than 50 pages that any citizen could read and clearly understand.
"For every problem, there exists a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."
Perhaps inkscape is the GPL'd vector image editor you seek.
Inkscape is great. I'm still happier to pay to use Fireworks for a variety of other reasons, but if Inkscape suddenly became the weapon of choice for web mockups instead of Photoshop, I'd be delighted.
1. Leaking emails about cooking data.
The funny thing about these emails that allegedly prove the data was cooked? The climate scientists can offer defenses as to why the "cooking" was actually data scrubbing / normalization. By contrast, I've noticed that nearly to a person, critics merely pick a phrase that sounds vaguely alarming and point to it as solid evidence of fraud... while they can't even explain why they think such processing would lead to an outcome in error, let alone rebut the climate scientist's defenses.
2. Pachauri admits to major goof-up but yet takes it coolly.
Which is to say, he's confident in his position. May still be a political goof-up, but it may not: his behavior is not the kind that someone who knows they've been caught flat-out red-handed on major fraud makes. You don't bluff when you know other people know you're holding a 2-7 offsuit.
3. All data leads to conclusion of AGW.
Not so. Please see the post you responded to, where I address the question of whether or not GW and AGW can be falsified.
Harsher winters, bigger hurricanes, more snow, less snow.
These are all predicted as a consequence of GW, A or not. They're evidence of a kind, and they're important phenomena to examine, but they don't have a lot to do with the question of whether GW or AGW is happening, nor are they generally used as such by non-laypeople (and when they're employed, it's generally to underscore the relevancy of the issue, not as evidence behind it).
"At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG..."
And while we're at it, I have to say: Can we please be done with the idea that web mockups should be done in Photoshop? It never was a good tool for designing web layouts. The idea that it ever was is an artifact of its market position and the popularity of certain raster effects at the time the web rose. Illustrator has been a better tool for web layouts for a while, and Fireworks (with a fantastic blend of vector and raster capabilities) is even better, and there are probably half a dozen other vector capable layout tools I'm not aware of that are better...
(Please do not suggest Gimp or PSP. They're bad choices for web layouts for the same reasons Photoshop is.) /soapbox
If it gets hotter it is because of Global Warming.
The consistent and scientific standard you're looking for is if mean surface temperature decreases over time. Global Warming, by contrast, is indicated by a rising mean surface temperature over time.
AGW is more complicated, probably a topic to wait on for people who haven't digested the above, but essentially comes down to trying to doing accounting for different warming contributions based on related measurements. The closer the accounting is to adding up, the more credible AGW looks. The farther, less.
what would it take for one of you True Believers to reconsider your theory?
A complete investigation on the part of each individual is a rather time-consuming proposition, so a lot of us use heuristics. One of mine tends to be that opponents of AGW are often doing things like:
(a) making no distinction between individual weather events and climate
(b) confusing the term "Global Warming" with " monotonic temperature/ice thickness increase across every point of the globe
(c) asserting there exists some input or dynamic that accounts for most of the warming and implying that climate scientists supposedly have ignored it, when in fact it turns out that there exist climate scientists who have considered and done the accounting on said input or dynamic (see increased solar output)
Now, I'm not a true believer, so maybe my bar is lower than some others, but I'd say that if I can go 2-3 years where less than 10-20% of the AGW criticism I read has one of these features (or similar ones: the list I gave is hardly exhaustive), I might start to give the opposition as much credibility as the proponents.
They are Hindu teams where it matters which cast you are from more than anything else.
So, Hindu programmers are strongly typed and there can be problems with the implicit casting system?
Sounds like these teams need some programmer duck typing!
Your larger point that the evangelical Christian agenda isn't the only one out there and that the wording example was probably in the service of a specific viewpoint is a good one, and because of that, we're probably better off teaching a bit of healthy skepticism about textbooks rather than trying to agree on universally acceptable content for them. :) But...
Most mortgages are different from the constitution in that they don't contain specific provisions for their own modification and reinterpretation (though I'll bet there are mortgages out there somewhere with such provisions). And really, the idea of reinterpretation is pretty much built into any legal system run by people. Lawyers and judges *can* be mechanistic in their application of the law, but it's certainly not their only known mode of operation or even the ideal one: a good number of those WTF legal decisions that leave laymen outraged happen this way. Not surprising, really. It's only inside of the context of certain formal systems where rigid operation works (and even there, as Godel noted, you're going to have an inconsistency problem or an incompleteness problem).
That isn't to say you can't have problems when people get a bit too creative, but the answer to the idea of a document cast in butter isn't the idea of a document cast in steel. There's a tension between the two, and a balance to be found, and in fact, you can find this in the thinking of the people who wrote it.
we aren't exactly allowed to have any weapons that would be effective at fighting the US military
Individuals might not be allowed to have such weapons, but state National Guards are. You still have the problem of citizen balance against state power, but at least that's one potential check against federal power.
That and the geographic distribution of actually national forces...
http://www.biblestudytools.com/bible/passage.aspx?q=Acts+7:54-60
Well, OK, it's not completely clear they hit him *before* he had the vision. They may have just bit him. ;)
So no, I don't think it's correct to call LDS people "creationists" by any means, because that lumps them in with all the 6000-year-old-Earth fundie Christians...
I think the distinction you're looking for is Young Earth Creationism. There's also Old Earth Creationists, who may or may not believe in theistic evolution.
To be fair, LDS have their own wacky beliefs (that God/Jehovah is but one god of many, and lives on the planet Kolob,
*shrug* Once you believe in a supernatural, one set of beliefs isn't particularly more wacky than the next, just more or less familiar.
but let's not criticize them for things they don't actually believe in. At least they have the good sense to acknowledge that the Earth really is billions of years old as far as we can determine by physical evidence, and that evolution is a real thing by all available evidence (and they don't try to make up some "microevolution vs macroevolution" BS like that Creationist apologists).
The GP is correct that many Mormons and in particular those who pursue academic/scientific studies tend to believe in a kind of theistic evolution, but it's not accurate to say this is true of the whole. Mormon opinions run the span of the spectrum I described above. As far as I can tell there's never been an official position on the matter, but there have been authority figures who read Genesis and other creation-related canon literally, so you see Mormons arguing with each other on the topic fairly regularly if you know enough well enough. :)
This isn't the standard usage. You have a set of "person" tuples - one person, one tuple, the set of person tuples forms a relation, singular.
That's interesting. Different from the way I had it explained, but I wouldn't be surprised if I or they had gotten the terminology for tuple and relation confused, and the distinction you've mentioned does sound promising from a formal perspective.
Not sure whether mathematicians would call it a 'people relation' or a 'person relation'
To invoke my earlier statement in the language you've given, I think the question is whether or not the plural belongs on the tuples rather than on the name of the relation. And while I'm not sure what mathematicians would do, I am pretty confident about what logic programmers would do in, say, Prolog, given the choice between a people predicate and a person predicate: they'd choose the former.
Or use one of the other options: Safari, Camino, iCab, or Omniweb. Probably some others that I've missed.
It's interesting these folks don't have any apparent problem with supporting 10.4.
A case in point: Rails likes to give your database tables plural names...One of the reasons to prefer singular table names is that it improves Rails's interoperability with the applications that either want to supply data to or consume data created by Rails..
Another reason is that it gets you closer to relational thinking. Plural names come about because some think of tables as collections of records and it follows that said collection should get a plural name. So, your "person" record becomes your "people" table.
However, the table isn't really and formally a collection of rows. What you really have is a set of "person" relations; the plural on the end of relations there is where the plural belongs.
And I don't know how big of a performance hit pluralize yields, but it's doing something that doesn't have to be done: the convention could just as well be singular (and arguably would more properly be singular).
I am a php developer that does a lot of small to medium sized apps using zend framework. I don't plan on doing anything enterprise scale, my niche is what it is. Do you see any advantage to zend framework over ROR?
I don't know Ruby or Rails well yet. But I do know PHP pretty well. And my answer is: no. Not as a framework.
Zend Framework isn't a web application skeleton / development system. It's an over-objectified library of barely related pieces. Yeah, there's a controller and a recommended directory layout, and you can pull it together with the rest of the library and a project or two elsewhere (say, Doctrine and Smarty), but it's not a thought-out whole. The job of creating an overall architecture for your app and getting the components to work together becomes yours.
Maybe that's what you want, and if so, then Zend Framework or doing things by pieces in Ruby (say, Sinatra + Sequel + HAML/SASS) could be for you. But if you want an actual web application framework, then I'd look at something like Code Igniter or Symfony (for PHP) or Rails or Merb (for Ruby) instead.
VC's hard to get. But it should be equally hard to get. Right now it doesn't seem like it is.
Does it? I mean, do we really have data that says that it is?
Because this isn't it:
"Additionally, it is harder for women to obtain funding than for men. ... historically, women-led companies have received less than 9% of venture capital investments; in 2007, the proportion of funded female CEOs dropped to 3%."
What you'd want to know isn't the gender breakdown of companies that receive funding -- that number isn't going to give you any meaningful picture of potential VC bias. Rather, you'd want to know what fraction of female-led companies get funding vs a similar fraction male-led companies.
"This book is much more than you may think it is. Scale is not just about designing Web sites that don't crash when lots of users show up. It is about designing your company so that it doesn't crash when your business needs to grow. These guys have been there on the front lines of some of the most successful Internet companies of our time, and they share the good, the bad, and the ugly about how to not just survive, but thrive." -- Marty Cagan, Founder, Silicon Valley Product Group
From the somehow omitted site for the book.
(Also... is there some kind of Martin conspiracy going on here? The author is named Martin, the reviewer is named Martijn, the guy I just quoted is presumably a Martin...)
I wasn't aware that Congress could order the White House to do anything. What part of the Constitution gives it this power? What about "separation of powers"?
In theory, we have rule of law in this country, and the executive branch is bound by law, which congress writes, except the Constitution. The theoretical separation of power lies in the fact that the executive is generally part of the legislative process via the veto/signing power.
In practice, the executive branch has even further freedom pretty broad latitude, arising partly from being the executor of the law, and partly from human sociology (most people have some natural aversion to adversarial actions against high-status individuals) and politics (sure, maybe Bush and Cheney are guilty of war crimes, but you open that can of worms and you're going to start a big fight and potentially find yourself staring down the barrel of similar accusations in the future).
If anything, the executive branch is stronger in practice than it should be.
And no, tables are not even a viable alternative. There are numerous reasons for why the enterprise level websites need to be coded semantically.
This is false, if popular.
The first clue should be the existence of screen readers and the widespread effectiveness of Google even before going way back before CSS (much less CSS positioning) was in common use. Heck, even Lynx had some surprisingly effective ability to filter out layout tables and still display tabular data as early as 1999. If layout-repurposed table markup made those things truly difficult, then 90% of the web would have been opaque to those things until around 2005.
The thing is, it's really not that hard to tell the difference between table markup used for layout and used for data most of the time. A good HTML hand-coder could probably tell the difference nearly instantly. A piece of software could probably do it for the vast majority of cases with a set of heuristics a half a page long. And they do.
So what IS the alternative to a relatively scaled HTML table in CSS that works across all browsers?
There isn't one. Not really. Not yet.
A couple of people will show up and tell you that there is. I've spent five solid years implementing hundreds of arbitrary layouts mocked up in Illustrator. I worked hard to use CSS positioning and semantic markup whenever possible, probably know the craft better than most. And the conclusion I've come to is that even where the methodologies and hacks and workarounds can get the job done, CSS positioning still sometimes sucks. Partly because there are some semi-frequent cases where table cell behavior makes your life easier, partly because it's a pretty natural layout metaphor people have used for a long time before we even had liquid screen media.
display: table-cell and friends are just about ready for prime time, though. That'll probably take care of some of the hard cases, and work for a lot of people as a metaphor, largely because we'll essentially be writing table markup again.
no intervening computer operator.
You have to take some liberties to wedge Apple into the role traditionally known as operator in computing history, which the article is most likely referring to, and to the extent Apple fits here, Amazon does as well: they're not selling the Kindle as a general purpose device, and you have to jump through some hoops to get it to work like one.
That said, I agree the Kindle is a PC of sorts, albeit one with different strengths and weaknesses from the iPad.
interestingly it's claimed that OSX was originally going to behave that way at Job's request. there's a hidden mode switch (in the defaults.write ) that will change the interface so only one app is visible at a time. the others snap to the dock at each context switch. I activated that for my mother and here ability to use the computer skyrocketed. I've tried it myself
What's the switch? I just tried looking through defaults read, but that's an awful lot of text to sift through without knowing what I'm looking for...
The problem is, iPhone OS. Sure, an iPad might be able to do a lot of the things that a regular tablet can, but can it, say, play a YouTube video in the background while working on something in the foreground? Nope. What about Flash? Nope.
Missing Flash hasn't killed the iPhone, and while there are setups in which it's a pretty big plus to have multiple apps open at the same time, it's an open question whether it's important to have multiple applications open at the same time in the market netbooks are filling into right now. Modal use might well be fine for a good chunk of people. Heck, sometimes I wonder if modal use might not be better for me. Maybe I'd spend less time farting around on slashdot if I had to close the app I was working in to read and post here. :)
On paper, the iPad is doomed to fail.
On paper. That's all anybody's got right now. :)
... the next 60 days, amirite?
The iPad has been officially announced for all of two days, a vanishingly small portion of people have actually spent any time playing with one, and the world is already full of vociferous opinions about its prospects for (pick one) dismal failure/niche success/displacing netbooks/world domination. Like this one:
Because of its price and lack of perennial netbook features, such as a physical keyboard.
Looks to me like it doesn't lack for a physical keyboard, even if it's not permanently attached. Will that be a problem for literal laptop users? Maybe. If I were betting, though, I'd guess that it'll be good enough that Apple's sales will compare with the top 3 netbook manufacturers.
I'm not betting, however, because like most of the planet, I haven't had a chance to really play with one, and therefore don't have a very solid idea what I'm talking about.
I know its processor capabilities well.
That's interesting. I'd been given to understand that this was a proprietary processor. The only explanation I can think of is that you were actually part of the A4 or iPhone OS team.
And yet you correctly state that the iPhone OS (and the iPad version is the same) don't do multi-task/threading.
Okay, you weren't on the OS team, and you have some reading comprehension difficulties, otherwise, you wouldn't have said that, given that the GP actually went to some pains to point out the OS does do multitasking/multithreading, and he's correct. So, that leaves the A4 team.
What can you tell us about the chip?