Flash works cross-platform and cross-browser with minimal debugging/porting effort; JavaScript doesn't.
OTOH, that's not why people use Flash. They use it because the primary reason they have a web site is to shout "LOOK AT ME! I AM SO DAMN COOL!" at hapless users, rather than giving users what they actually want.
I looked at the DOM spec (levels 1 and 2) and there's no Window object; ECMAScript mentions that the Window object may exist but not what it does (since it's part of the runtime environment rather than the base language).
I did find this: Referring to windows and frames from the Netscape JavaScript handbook. It says nothing about window names being private.
So, pin this one on Netscape, and the lack of any formal open standard for what happens in a browser outside of the document.
>You could do this before through amazon.com and others but it was not as seamless.
This is what everybody except Apple seems to miss completely. Listening to audio clips from Amazon.com really sucks because you have to launch (perhaps after downloading and installing first) the shitty spyware helper app that slowwwwly buffers, then plays a really awful sounding audio clip. ITMS's interface is so much nicer - click and play, in high quality, no app juggling, no helper playlist files to download, and almost no latency between clicking and hearing music.
(OTOH I don't buy stuff from ITMS because of the DRM nonsense.)
Thank God the /. community knows about it now...
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Shortly we'll hear about how someone has attach phase change cooling nanobots to the dendrites to allow them to be overclocked, and reduce the viral load by 90% in six months.
Then the lucite dendrites with cold cathode illuminated ribosomes will hit the market.
Then someone will build a nano-lego dendrite.
Then someone will make a stop action film of dendrites performing the Camelot song from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Then someone will tell us all about how the Amiga had that same feature 20 years ago.
And finally, someone will announce an improved vaccine/therapy that eliminates HIV instantly, but it will link to goatse.
A better question is, why buy a Mac to run Linux? The reasons to buy a Mac (nice hardware that ALL WORKS, lots of complex hardware and software interactions that Just Work) go away when you use Linux. Just buy an AMD64 or x86 box if you're going to run Linux 100% of the time.
A warning about VirtualPC: you'll have problems if an important app that you use all the time or which is performance-intensive is only available for Windows. *nix apps are very commonly ported to Mac OS X, and are pretty easy to get via DarwinPorts or Fink.
If you need to run (for example) a time sheet app that only works on Windows once a week, VirtualPC is fine. If you need to run IE 6 for a few minutes to check for cross-browser compatibility, or to use some web site, that's fine. But if you think that you're going to be happy using Visual Studio.NET under VirtualPC day in and day out, forget it. If you couldn't stand to use VNC or Remote Desktop Client to get to a local PC server running that app, you'll hate having to deal with that moderate level of UI sluggishness in addition to the huge resource drain of running multiple OSs on the same hardware. Knoppix under VirtualPC shocked me by being really fast and responsive... Windows XP, notsomuch.
I used to work at a company that develops a Windows Server based web application. I did all my editing and previewing work on a Mac via SAMBA and HTTP, and only used Remote Desktop Client to restart services, run the SQL Server Enterprise Manager, etc. (Windows isn't that much of a pain if you set it up and LEAVE IT ALONE, as opposed to trying to hook up all your fun gadgets and favorite software.) Still, I definitely prefer my new (current) setup which is Java based and runs 100% locally on my PowerBook. (I do have VMWare installed on my Athlon64 Debian box so that I can run IE 6 for browser compatibility testing, though.)
CVS "works" on all platforms as much as it "works" on any platform, which is obviously what the poster meant.
Subversion is catching up fast, because it has crossed the line of "better than CVS" for direct use by developers, though CVS still wins in terms of IDE integration. SVN was designed to replace CVS, but not to revolutionize the theory of version control. Based on TFA, it sounds like Darcs isn't mature enough to adopt quite yet, but in a few months it may be. (I felt the same way about Subversion a couple of years ago and now my project is using it and we're very happy with it.)
Given that Mozilla renders/. correctly, but Firefox doesn't, unless you add a plugin, and Netscape 7 is some stuff piled on top of Mozilla, I would think you'd realize that not all Gecko based browsers would necessarily work exactly the same way... especially when they're based on different versions of Gecko or Mozilla.
When QAing you don't just say "let's test with Windows" and then assume that anything that works on Windows XP will work on Windows 3.1 and vice versa.
What bank do you use, that can approve, implement and roll out fixes like that over the weekend?
Presumably someone had a reason for locking out Mozilla and all Mozilla users - that sort of thing shouldn't be reversed over the weekend, unless it was just done on a whim by that same admin in the first place.
Banks tend to move verrry slowwwly on this sort of thing, with good reason.
Microsoft removed RMI from their JVM (available as a separate download) which is what Sun used against them specifically. Extensions are allowed. For example Apple's JVM has extensions, but they don't get sued b/c they also implement the entire J2SE specification. Sun's interest is in having 100% Pure Java apps work everywhere, and Microsoft broke that by implementing a subset of the Java platform.
Also, the GNU Java runtime is doomed because of Sun patents on technologies in the J2SE specification. Read about the GNU Classpath project and Kaffe and you'll find that although they have made great progress, keeping up in the future is hindered by patent encumbrances. J2SE is not free and cannot be free for this reason.
Sun used to espouse "open" meaning proprietary implementations of an open standard, competing on quality (and presumably, extensions beyond the standard). That's a decent approach, but not viable if the "open" standard really has patents attached that cause clean-room implementations to be subject to patent infringement lawsuits.
Yes, it is really annoying how when you try and create a "DLL hell"-like library situation under Linux, the package manager prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot like that.
If you want to target Red Hat 6.2, target Red Hat 6.2. If you want to have it both ways and depend on something that's much newer (and thus has lots of dependencies that have to be updated) that's your choice. You can't have it both ways - you want to target an old OS but you want to use the newest libraries to save yourself some effort, but you also don't want to have to update those libraries. Somehow they're supposed to magically appear.
I suspect that your IDE and/or installer maker on Windows make your dependencies magically appear on NT4, by figuring out what you need and bundling it with your executable. That doesn't make the API consistent, it just means that the development tools you're using are convenient in that respect.
Also, you picked a distro that doesn't come with an automatic package downloader (at least, as far as I know it doesn't). It has a local package manager (RPM) that stops you from shooting yourself in the foot, but it doesn't go get stuff for you.
I think you need to learn the difference between using developer tools that insulate you from dependency horrors, and a package manager that insulates you from dependency horrors. It sounds like on Windows you had the first, and on RH 6.2 you had neither.
$45K/yr take-home, $23K/yr rent. You do the math. Not homeless at all. $22K/yr to live on. Sucky, but not homeless.
>Which is about 80% overpriced. Based on what?
There's a difference between "I wish it cost this much" and overpriced. If it were overpriced, there would be some kind of indicator (like other rents in the area for similar places) to justify that claim.
Movie trailers tell you the whole shitty story, so we don't have to watch shitty movies. Then movie sales plummet so prices are raised and they compensate with stupid explosions in surround sound and digital video instead of film.
A screwdriver is a simple tool. Even so, Craftsman gives a lifetime warranty.
Software can get really complex, and support doesn't just mean that it's broken and you need to pay someone to fix bugs. It can also mean training, or customization, or tool development, or implementation planning. Businesses quite often have no interest in mastering every detail of software, even if that software is critical to their business. They'd rather pay someone who already knows the software to just look at their needs and tell them what should be done, and then to do it.
It's not possible to dumb down all software to the point where nobody wants this anymore. I've been doing business software development for years, and universally, the folks paying for the software aren't interested in thinking about the details of how the thing will work. They just want to wave their hands and have a perfect solution materialize. It's a big chore (but very necessary to a successful project) to try and find ways of making it less painful for them to answer questions about how the system will work at a detailed level, since these decisions can have a big impact on how useful the system is, and since these decisions often must be made by a domain expert rather than a programmer or analyst.
When confronted with the necessary complexity of a system that has to follow rules instead of just doing the decision making for them on an ad-hoc basis, they either want training, or they want to hire a subordinate to get trained and deal with the system. It's important to try and make the system as logical and usable as possible, but a totally intuitive system that even a child could figure out in 5 minutes is just not an attainable goal when the problem domain is inherently complicated and there are issues of security and workflow and large sums of money and domain-specific terminology and regulatory compliance...
Nevertheless, people are foolish enough to think that they can skip all these steps and just jump right into typing in source code, and that this same broken non-process can be optimized by just having cheaper people do it in a faraway country.
Even if the coding and debugging are FREE and the license is FREE, there's still the matter of figuring out how to get it to work. Tar is free, but it doesn't come with a universal backup strategy AI that you invoke with the push of a single button. Somebody still has to THINK about it and WRITE DOWN WHAT THEY WANT. Quite often that person is a specialist who doesn't work for the company, and is lumped in as Support.
I eagerly await the part where Marvin runs down the hall shouting DANGER WILL ROBINSON while Captain Joey Tribiani grasps his towel in a masculine fashion and tries not to panic.
of open source. It's not that you don't need a vendor / supplier / consultants / body-shop to help you get your stuff transtitioned over and set up correctly. You still need that, because internal IT people are just too close to / busy with mundane user needs to be kick-ass developers fixing obscure bugs in applications. Wietse Venema is probably not going to be worth keeping on staff at PayPal, and let's not even talk about the, uh, *indirect costs* of trying to hire djb:).
The value proposition comes from the fact that if IBM pisses you off, you can tell them to go away, and you can hire someone else to replace them. You might be screwed if you don't document anything and fail to keep a copy of any source code they wrote but you're screwed in that case no matter what.
Agreed! I only trust benchmarkers who are physically attractive.
Yes, Ms. Booth Babe, I can see your points... uh, point. Flops? What are you talking about, they're quite firm in fact. OH! Oh right, FLOPS. Gotcha. Right. Yes. What's that? Hey baby, you can swipe my badge anytime.
> The Department of [Whatever] marching in and "requesting" that someone do something or not do >something 'just in case' is itself a form terrorism, by definition.
Maybe by your overly broad definition, but not by the definition that others use. Your definition of terrorism is apparently "anything scary". 5 year old on your porch on Sunday says "boo gimmie candy"... terrorist. Cop pulls you over but gives you a warning... terrorist.
Look it up. Most definitions of terrorism include unlawful use of force or violence. Even in a free society (unless you've redefined that to mean anarchy), the people authorize certain governmental bodies to use force and/or violence. What's important is that we severely limit the legal authority that governments have, so that when they do knock down and cuff (or even shoot) a suspect, they have a damn good reason for it.
The problem starts when the limits on authority are relaxed, and suddenly nobody is even allowed to audit the use of force by government. That's the problem we have now - secrecy that makes it impossible to check for abuses of authority (and possibly to prove that recent expansions of authority are more trouble than they're worth).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but users are dumb, and will be fooled by stuff like:
. ph p
http://www.citibank.com:80@123.45.67.89/spoof_u
Hopefully if the browser's default behavior is to tell the user that they're leaving an https site for an http URL, the user will notice.
Also, banks tend to recommend quitting your browser after (and possibly before) a banking session, which isn't the worst idea in the world.
Flash works cross-platform and cross-browser with minimal debugging/porting effort; JavaScript doesn't.
OTOH, that's not why people use Flash. They use it because the primary reason they have a web site is to shout "LOOK AT ME! I AM SO DAMN COOL!" at hapless users, rather than giving users what they actually want.
I looked at the DOM spec (levels 1 and 2) and there's no Window object; ECMAScript mentions that the Window object may exist but not what it does (since it's part of the runtime environment rather than the base language).
I did find this:
Referring to windows and frames from the Netscape JavaScript handbook. It says nothing about window names being private.
So, pin this one on Netscape, and the lack of any formal open standard for what happens in a browser outside of the document.
>You could do this before through amazon.com and others but it was not as seamless.
This is what everybody except Apple seems to miss completely. Listening to audio clips from Amazon.com really sucks because you have to launch (perhaps after downloading and installing first) the shitty spyware helper app that slowwwwly buffers, then plays a really awful sounding audio clip. ITMS's interface is so much nicer - click and play, in high quality, no app juggling, no helper playlist files to download, and almost no latency between clicking and hearing music.
(OTOH I don't buy stuff from ITMS because of the DRM nonsense.)
Shortly we'll hear about how someone has attach phase change cooling nanobots to the dendrites to allow them to be overclocked, and reduce the viral load by 90% in six months.
Then the lucite dendrites with cold cathode illuminated ribosomes will hit the market.
Then someone will build a nano-lego dendrite.
Then someone will make a stop action film of dendrites performing the Camelot song from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Then someone will tell us all about how the Amiga had that same feature 20 years ago.
And finally, someone will announce an improved vaccine/therapy that eliminates HIV instantly, but it will link to goatse.
Might as well tattoo "PLEASE OUTSOURCE ME" on your forehead.
A better question is, why buy a Mac to run Linux? The reasons to buy a Mac (nice hardware that ALL WORKS, lots of complex hardware and software interactions that Just Work) go away when you use Linux. Just buy an AMD64 or x86 box if you're going to run Linux 100% of the time.
A warning about VirtualPC: you'll have problems if an important app that you use all the time or which is performance-intensive is only available for Windows. *nix apps are very commonly ported to Mac OS X, and are pretty easy to get via DarwinPorts or Fink.
.NET under VirtualPC day in and day out, forget it. If you couldn't stand to use VNC or Remote Desktop Client to get to a local PC server running that app, you'll hate having to deal with that moderate level of UI sluggishness in addition to the huge resource drain of running multiple OSs on the same hardware. Knoppix under VirtualPC shocked me by being really fast and responsive... Windows XP, notsomuch.
If you need to run (for example) a time sheet app that only works on Windows once a week, VirtualPC is fine. If you need to run IE 6 for a few minutes to check for cross-browser compatibility, or to use some web site, that's fine. But if you think that you're going to be happy using Visual Studio
I used to work at a company that develops a Windows Server based web application. I did all my editing and previewing work on a Mac via SAMBA and HTTP, and only used Remote Desktop Client to restart services, run the SQL Server Enterprise Manager, etc. (Windows isn't that much of a pain if you set it up and LEAVE IT ALONE, as opposed to trying to hook up all your fun gadgets and favorite software.) Still, I definitely prefer my new (current) setup which is Java based and runs 100% locally on my PowerBook. (I do have VMWare installed on my Athlon64 Debian box so that I can run IE 6 for browser compatibility testing, though.)
Har har har, thanks for trolling.
CVS "works" on all platforms as much as it "works" on any platform, which is obviously what the poster meant.
Subversion is catching up fast, because it has crossed the line of "better than CVS" for direct use by developers, though CVS still wins in terms of IDE integration. SVN was designed to replace CVS, but not to revolutionize the theory of version control. Based on TFA, it sounds like Darcs isn't mature enough to adopt quite yet, but in a few months it may be. (I felt the same way about Subversion a couple of years ago and now my project is using it and we're very happy with it.)
>Buy my copy of The Mythical Man Month
Maybe if you try to sell small chunks of it to multiple bidders, it'll sell faster.
Yeah but for a while she had a boyfriend who could morph himself, move super fast... putting any sex toy or porn star to shame. Not a bad deal.
Given that Mozilla renders /. correctly, but Firefox doesn't, unless you add a plugin, and Netscape 7 is some stuff piled on top of Mozilla, I would think you'd realize that not all Gecko based browsers would necessarily work exactly the same way... especially when they're based on different versions of Gecko or Mozilla.
When QAing you don't just say "let's test with Windows" and then assume that anything that works on Windows XP will work on Windows 3.1 and vice versa.
What bank do you use, that can approve, implement and roll out fixes like that over the weekend?
Presumably someone had a reason for locking out Mozilla and all Mozilla users - that sort of thing shouldn't be reversed over the weekend, unless it was just done on a whim by that same admin in the first place.
Banks tend to move verrry slowwwly on this sort of thing, with good reason.
Microsoft removed RMI from their JVM (available as a separate download) which is what Sun used against them specifically. Extensions are allowed. For example Apple's JVM has extensions, but they don't get sued b/c they also implement the entire J2SE specification. Sun's interest is in having 100% Pure Java apps work everywhere, and Microsoft broke that by implementing a subset of the Java platform.
Also, the GNU Java runtime is doomed because of Sun patents on technologies in the J2SE specification. Read about the GNU Classpath project and Kaffe and you'll find that although they have made great progress, keeping up in the future is hindered by patent encumbrances. J2SE is not free and cannot be free for this reason.
Sun used to espouse "open" meaning proprietary implementations of an open standard, competing on quality (and presumably, extensions beyond the standard). That's a decent approach, but not viable if the "open" standard really has patents attached that cause clean-room implementations to be subject to patent infringement lawsuits.
Yes, it is really annoying how when you try and create a "DLL hell"-like library situation under Linux, the package manager prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot like that.
If you want to target Red Hat 6.2, target Red Hat 6.2. If you want to have it both ways and depend on something that's much newer (and thus has lots of dependencies that have to be updated) that's your choice. You can't have it both ways - you want to target an old OS but you want to use the newest libraries to save yourself some effort, but you also don't want to have to update those libraries. Somehow they're supposed to magically appear.
I suspect that your IDE and/or installer maker on Windows make your dependencies magically appear on NT4, by figuring out what you need and bundling it with your executable. That doesn't make the API consistent, it just means that the development tools you're using are convenient in that respect.
Also, you picked a distro that doesn't come with an automatic package downloader (at least, as far as I know it doesn't). It has a local package manager (RPM) that stops you from shooting yourself in the foot, but it doesn't go get stuff for you.
I think you need to learn the difference between using developer tools that insulate you from dependency horrors, and a package manager that insulates you from dependency horrors. It sounds like on Windows you had the first, and on RH 6.2 you had neither.
Summary:
1) Hiring strangers is a pain in the ass for employers.
2) Being unemployed makes you look unemployable.
Having a job means you meet people who might become your hiring network, and you don't look like damaged goods to a prospective employer.
I wrote a longer version of this here.
$45K/yr take-home, $23K/yr rent. You do the math. Not homeless at all. $22K/yr to live on. Sucky, but not homeless.
>Which is about 80% overpriced.
Based on what?
There's a difference between "I wish it cost this much" and overpriced. If it were overpriced, there would be some kind of indicator (like other rents in the area for similar places) to justify that claim.
Bad analogy.
Movie trailers tell you the whole shitty story, so we don't have to watch shitty movies. Then movie sales plummet so prices are raised and they compensate with stupid explosions in surround sound and digital video instead of film.
A screwdriver is a simple tool. Even so, Craftsman gives a lifetime warranty.
Software can get really complex, and support doesn't just mean that it's broken and you need to pay someone to fix bugs. It can also mean training, or customization, or tool development, or implementation planning. Businesses quite often have no interest in mastering every detail of software, even if that software is critical to their business. They'd rather pay someone who already knows the software to just look at their needs and tell them what should be done, and then to do it.
It's not possible to dumb down all software to the point where nobody wants this anymore. I've been doing business software development for years, and universally, the folks paying for the software aren't interested in thinking about the details of how the thing will work. They just want to wave their hands and have a perfect solution materialize. It's a big chore (but very necessary to a successful project) to try and find ways of making it less painful for them to answer questions about how the system will work at a detailed level, since these decisions can have a big impact on how useful the system is, and since these decisions often must be made by a domain expert rather than a programmer or analyst.
When confronted with the necessary complexity of a system that has to follow rules instead of just doing the decision making for them on an ad-hoc basis, they either want training, or they want to hire a subordinate to get trained and deal with the system. It's important to try and make the system as logical and usable as possible, but a totally intuitive system that even a child could figure out in 5 minutes is just not an attainable goal when the problem domain is inherently complicated and there are issues of security and workflow and large sums of money and domain-specific terminology and regulatory compliance...
Nevertheless, people are foolish enough to think that they can skip all these steps and just jump right into typing in source code, and that this same broken non-process can be optimized by just having cheaper people do it in a faraway country.
Even if the coding and debugging are FREE and the license is FREE, there's still the matter of figuring out how to get it to work. Tar is free, but it doesn't come with a universal backup strategy AI that you invoke with the push of a single button. Somebody still has to THINK about it and WRITE DOWN WHAT THEY WANT. Quite often that person is a specialist who doesn't work for the company, and is lumped in as Support.
I eagerly await the part where Marvin runs down the hall shouting DANGER WILL ROBINSON while Captain Joey Tribiani grasps his towel in a masculine fashion and tries not to panic.
of open source. It's not that you don't need a vendor / supplier / consultants / body-shop to help you get your stuff transtitioned over and set up correctly. You still need that, because internal IT people are just too close to / busy with mundane user needs to be kick-ass developers fixing obscure bugs in applications. Wietse Venema is probably not going to be worth keeping on staff at PayPal, and let's not even talk about the, uh, *indirect costs* of trying to hire djb :).
The value proposition comes from the fact that if IBM pisses you off, you can tell them to go away, and you can hire someone else to replace them. You might be screwed if you don't document anything and fail to keep a copy of any source code they wrote but you're screwed in that case no matter what.
Somebody needs a hug.
Agreed! I only trust benchmarkers who are physically attractive.
Yes, Ms. Booth Babe, I can see your points... uh, point. Flops? What are you talking about, they're quite firm in fact. OH! Oh right, FLOPS. Gotcha. Right. Yes. What's that? Hey baby, you can swipe my badge anytime.
> The Department of [Whatever] marching in and "requesting" that someone do something or not do >something 'just in case' is itself a form terrorism, by definition.
Maybe by your overly broad definition, but not by the definition that others use. Your definition of terrorism is apparently "anything scary". 5 year old on your porch on Sunday says "boo gimmie candy"... terrorist. Cop pulls you over but gives you a warning... terrorist.
Look it up. Most definitions of terrorism include unlawful use of force or violence. Even in a free society (unless you've redefined that to mean anarchy), the people authorize certain governmental bodies to use force and/or violence. What's important is that we severely limit the legal authority that governments have, so that when they do knock down and cuff (or even shoot) a suspect, they have a damn good reason for it.
The problem starts when the limits on authority are relaxed, and suddenly nobody is even allowed to audit the use of force by government. That's the problem we have now - secrecy that makes it impossible to check for abuses of authority (and possibly to prove that recent expansions of authority are more trouble than they're worth).
>If you use Max OS X
You misspelled it. The correct slashdot-localized spelling is "MAC" (all caps).