You're griping about "HTTP", which is a *protocol*, reguarding menus and DHTML, which is a *FORMAT*.
I think what he means is BXXP may provide easy to use persistant connections, as opposed to HTTP which does not keep state between connections (keeping state is at best simulated with the use of cookies, and of course people can turn off or filter out cookies at their discretion... YAY!). His dependant-list problem may be eased by a better underlying protocol, since his DHTML apparantly needs to be in communication with the server. In order to communicate with the server, which protocol do you propose he should use? You guessed it...
Now as a software engineer I can tell you that writing JSP apps and Servlets become tedious at times because of HTTP. It was a decent thought at the time, and now is reaching critical mass. You know that there are spelling errors in various parts of the protocol that cannot be corrected? What kind of software has spelling errors? Not something that I could say was put through a fine-toothed comb.
Maybe the data format of the future will be GZipped XML files, as compression works fairly well on text.
The GNOME desktop environment uses XML files for various things already, and these files are indeed GZIPped due to their large size.
XML was meant to fill a void that existed in the markup language world. When processing HTML, nothing can be said about it's content. HTML only describes the formatting of the content.
XML was designed (for example) to allow intelligent searching of documents, among other things. Given the availability of parsers in almost any language (including Java of course) this does make universal data exchange a possibility.
It fun to watch the "only (our defintion of) Free Software" folks paint themselves into a corner.
It's boring and horrible torture reading posts from people who cannot read the story the discussion is referring to.
I quote:
"Miguel of GNOME fame and Rikkus of KDE/KParts fame have been talking about collaborating to build a common object component architecture for use in both KDE and GNOME."
They have been talking about building a common object component architecture. Nowhere does it say KDE and GNOME are merging.
And keep your ignorant Free Software comments to yourself.
Now, what *would* be helpful is for certain practical info to be made available in realtime. What lap is being run? What was the top speed of the last lap? What are the positions of the drivers? If this kind of info was typically available on the net, I'd probably watch races on the tv along with following it on the net.
Nascar provides all the information in your wishlist and then some. I do exactly what you describe on Sundays when football isn't on. Check out Nascar Online while a race is going on.
I get annoyed whenever a person blames something on the President. The President is a symbolic figurehead with no real power, not totally unlike a King.
The President is told what to do, what to say, who to vist and where to visit them by the "american people", which really translates into "the upper 1% of the american people".
This kind of solution is not feasable due to the bandwidth requirements. It also does not allow any form of dynamic content i.e. server side scripting to pull the contents of the shopping cart from a database.
I'm hoping that XML/XSL will address the issues of HTML being used for tasks it was not meant for.
Your rant isn't incorrect, but rather naive. Since you work for a hardware company and not a web shop (like myself and the author of the prior post) let me explain the situation:
The web has become yet another medium for advertising. Major corporations are all feeling the rush to be the best "advertisement" on the web. The corporations I speak of are not restricted to the technical sector; as a matter of fact, I work mostly on websites that have absolutely nothing to do with the Internet, let alone the web. Bicycles, party goods, whiskey, etc.
These corporations see the web as just another brocure, and dictate how they want their site built accordingly. Attempts to alter their thinking usually (not always) prompts responses like, "It's what the corporate offices want", and other negative answers.
In a nutshell, programmers and site builders tend to be slaves to what the ignorant perceive to be the perfect site. If we disagree, then we're fired. Simple as that.
Thats one thing many "web authors" still don't get... The WWW is a text-oriented medium. It's a page of text that has links to other pages of text. Everything else is just cruft.
Is this flamebait? A web author is a web author.. why is that quoted? Artists are not as intelligent as "hardware monkeys"? Incidentally, I am not an artist; I've been programming since I was 12 years old and have since learned over 15 languages.
Your comment that the web is text oriented is based on your individual perception. In reality, everything is ones and zeroes (you know this already since you work for a hardware company). Take for example this C snippet:
int foo(void) { int i = 65; printf("If i is an integer: %d\n", i); printf("If i is a character: %c\n", i); }
This will produce two different values for i: '65' and 'A'; one is decimal, one is text. So what is 'i'? 'i' is whatever the application perceives it to be. Lynx and winamp are very different from a functional perspective, but the underlying data is still of the same nature.
HTML doesn't define how a web site should look to the pixel, and this is one of it's strong points. It's up to the user to decide how to view a site. If the user doesn't want images, your site should look just fine without them.
Your right about a site looking correct without images. Unfortunately, since these corporations I am referring to do not care, they simply pay us not to care as well. As far as the strength of HTML as you describe; this has become the major weakness of HTML. Websites are more sophisticated than they were back in the early 90's, and HTML has not been able to keep up so easily. Just view the source to M$'s homepage and try and navigate the billions of table tags. The increase in the average user's bandwidth has given way to prettier graphics and digital sound.
The minute you start checking to make sure your site looks the same on all browsers, you should re-think your entire site. Why do you want it to look the same on all browsers (it won't by the way...)? This usually indicates that you are focusing too much on presentation and not enough on content.
Like I said earlier, the people who are paying to have their crap on the web are paying for presentation and not content. Since when do corporations and advertisers care about content?
So.... Did the engineers do this on purpose? It seems that Intel is really hell-bent on killing RAMBUS.
RAMBUS is Intel's baby. They do not want it killed, I guarantee that.
I think the real problem is how shitty RAMBUS as a technology really is. There's an excellent article on Tom's Hardware for those interested in discovering the truth behind RAMBUS.
Shouldn't Linus and gang be involved heavily in this?
I corrected your post for you:)
Actually, Linus (and Linux in general) should have nothing to do with these kinds of standards. They are usually distribution specific; all distributions already use the same GNU/Linux kernel, so therefore all distributions are already adhering to the (only) kernel standard.
Things like file locations drive me insane when moving from one distribution to the other, especially the/etc/rc* crap. I've mastered Debian's only to find it (slightly) different on other distros.
The problem here is that so many incompetant (and obviously love-starved) people use Outlook and just run whatever attachments are sent to them.
The problem is not "incompetent users". I know of no UNIX program that automatically executes scripts when an email is opened.
I got hit with the Melissa Virus quite easily because I opened the email. I am not a veteran Windows Outlook user (thank G-d) and didn't think that opening a file would cause the execution of an unknown script.
The problem is the same as it's always been: M$ and it's business plan to capitalize on it's stock price, with little respect to the quality of work they produce.
Agreed, no registry key for Linux. But how do Red Hat and Debian determine how a particular piece of software needs to be updated.
I know nothing about Red Hat. Debian stores the list of currently available packages in var/lib/dpkg/available. To update this list (it tends to go out of date almost daily if you're running the unstable (read, "Development") version, you execute/usr/bin/apt-get update.
You could cron a 2 line script that upgrades every installed package on your system automatically.
I certainly wouldn't put it past MS to argue that apt invalidates their patent.
I'm not sure about this. You would think someone owns the patent to spreadsheets, yet M$ and GNOME both have a spreadsheet program. Gnumeric even writes XLS files.
I can't believe the general consensus is positive on this. Since when does free software require that the author is given credit in a syslog?
I'm sorry, but I don't like this. I don't hack GNOME applications so that I can be famous. I do it because it's a challenge; nothing more. I obviously don't do it for the money either. That's why I work with M$ during the day.
The beauty of open source lies in the fact that ALL CONTRIBUTORS GET CREDIT!
This is not what open source is for. Yet another misinterpretaion of open source and free software. Open source exists to give developers certain rights; the right to use other code, and at the same time ensuring that the original author's code is not used to make money unknowingly to them.
I'm going to puke if someone else makes another blanket generalization about open source and how it's changing the way I do my laundry, etc. If you want credit for your work, make a damn web page.
I personally used the AlphaWorks XML java parser; at the time it was stable, reliable, and was not subject to a ridiculous bug that Microsoft's non-DOM compliant parser was.
I have never used QNX, but from the advertisements I have seen in various magazines you can do pretty much anything without requiring a reboot. This includes kernel level functions; Linux cannot make this claim AFAIK.
Whoa... my experience with server side java has been completely different. I've found JSP/Servlets to be an excellent tool.
Java is notoriously slow
Java is slower than compiled languages (C, assembler) but nobody writes C code to do CGI much anymore. The risk of buffer overflows and pointer chaos is too great. Perl became a great tool for CGI development because it does things that C doesn't do, like bounds checking an so on, minimizing the risk of remote exploits via buffer overflows.
It's bad enough on the client side in an applet but it seems like a tremendous waste of cycles to use it on the server side
I agree that client side Java (I'm referring mainly to applets) is a total disaster. We can blame Nutscrape for a lot of this.
However, Java is not a total waste on the server.
There are various things a developer must keep in mind when writing any kind of software; performance is one of them. Other things that are always on my mind: memory requirements, simplicity/readability, time to completion,...
My point is Java may not be the absolute fastest thing on the market, but for web development it is ideal. Perhaps Python has advantages over Java that I am not aware; many Python programmers I know on efNet encourage me to ditch Java in favor of it. When running a JVM on Solaris, I have been impressed with the results.
Actual story: I wrote a Servlet/JSP application that took a poll, tallied the results, and allowed administrators to view the results of. It's used by Texaco on their intranet.
The first day it was live it recorded 13,000 completed surveys, each survey about 50 questions in length. I made careful usage of threads and shared resources. In the end, I had a stable program that never crashed throughout it's usage on their intranet.
I thought the movie sucked. For an independant movie, there were a lot of marketing plugs, the biggest being that idiot Jar Jar Binx.
Every kid in America cried to Mommy and Daddy, "I want a Jar Jar Binx doll". The merchandising for his movies far outweighs the earnings he makes from the box office.
I've been seeing a lot of stories about whether or not EP1 will be on DVD. Quite frankly, I could care less. I'll never own it on anything other than a downloaded MPEG.
More specifically, I would call this a masculine issue.
Masculinity isn't necessarily specific to males, the same way that Femininity isn't specific to women. I am a man, but I have good feminine qualities.
Likewise, I have seen women play very agressive Ice Hockey, and of course Basketball; I would say these women have masculine qualities, but are nonetheless no less womanly than the next.
Junk mail shows me how freely my information is being shared with other without my expressed consent.
The way marketing folk gather data disturbs me. If you took this practice to it's extreme, what could companies do with your personal information then? Monitoring my phone calls, my computer use... hey, some of these are already happening.
Oh yeah, Orwell had some things to say about this over 50 years ago. I'm afraid I already know the end result.
I don't trust my government. How can anyone trust something so large and ambiguous like the government?
I trust the people that are close to me. I trust my parents and my little brother. When I have kids I want my kids to trust me; I don't need the government to raise my kid for me, nor do I need the television either.
The problem I have with the current trend is that it takes away power from the individual to manage his/her life as well as the lives of their children. We don't need laws to "protect" children from "offensive" material on the Internet. We need parents to get off their fat ass and be a friend to their children.
Slashdot Mirror
You're griping about "HTTP", which is a *protocol*, reguarding menus and DHTML, which is a *FORMAT*.
I think what he means is BXXP may provide easy to use persistant connections, as opposed to HTTP which does not keep state between connections (keeping state is at best simulated with the use of cookies, and of course people can turn off or filter out cookies at their discretion... YAY!). His dependant-list problem may be eased by a better underlying protocol, since his DHTML apparantly needs to be in communication with the server. In order to communicate with the server, which protocol do you propose he should use? You guessed it...
Now as a software engineer I can tell you that writing JSP apps and Servlets become tedious at times because of HTTP. It was a decent thought at the time, and now is reaching critical mass. You know that there are spelling errors in various parts of the protocol that cannot be corrected? What kind of software has spelling errors? Not something that I could say was put through a fine-toothed comb.
Maybe the data format of the future will be GZipped XML files, as compression works fairly well on text.
The GNOME desktop environment uses XML files for various things already, and these files are indeed GZIPped due to their large size.
XML was meant to fill a void that existed in the markup language world. When processing HTML, nothing can be said about it's content. HTML only describes the formatting of the content.
XML was designed (for example) to allow intelligent searching of documents, among other things. Given the availability of parsers in almost any language (including Java of course) this does make universal data exchange a possibility.
But us veterans know something will fuck it up.
It fun to watch the "only (our defintion of) Free Software" folks paint themselves into a corner.
It's boring and horrible torture reading posts from people who cannot read the story the discussion is referring to.
I quote:
"Miguel of GNOME fame and Rikkus of KDE/KParts fame have been talking about collaborating to build a common object component architecture for use in both KDE and GNOME."
They have been talking about building a common object component architecture. Nowhere does it say KDE and GNOME are merging.
And keep your ignorant Free Software comments to yourself.
Now, what *would* be helpful is for certain practical info to be made available in realtime. What lap is being run? What was the top speed of the last lap? What are the positions of the drivers? If this kind of info was typically available on the net, I'd probably watch races on the tv along with following it on the net.
Nascar provides all the information in your wishlist and then some. I do exactly what you describe on Sundays when football isn't on. Check out Nascar Online while a race is going on.
I get annoyed whenever a person blames something on the President. The President is a symbolic figurehead with no real power, not totally unlike a King.
The President is told what to do, what to say, who to vist and where to visit them by the "american people", which really translates into "the upper 1% of the american people".
This kind of solution is not feasable due to the bandwidth requirements. It also does not allow any form of dynamic content i.e. server side scripting to pull the contents of the shopping cart from a database.
I'm hoping that XML/XSL will address the issues of HTML being used for tasks it was not meant for.
Your rant isn't incorrect, but rather naive. Since you work for a hardware company and not a web shop (like myself and the author of the prior post) let me explain the situation:
The web has become yet another medium for advertising. Major corporations are all feeling the rush to be the best "advertisement" on the web. The corporations I speak of are not restricted to the technical sector; as a matter of fact, I work mostly on websites that have absolutely nothing to do with the Internet, let alone the web. Bicycles, party goods, whiskey, etc.
These corporations see the web as just another brocure, and dictate how they want their site built accordingly. Attempts to alter their thinking usually (not always) prompts responses like, "It's what the corporate offices want", and other negative answers.
In a nutshell, programmers and site builders tend to be slaves to what the ignorant perceive to be the perfect site. If we disagree, then we're fired. Simple as that.
Thats one thing many "web authors" still don't get... The WWW is a text-oriented medium. It's a page of text that has links to other pages of text. Everything else is just cruft.
Is this flamebait? A web author is a web author.. why is that quoted? Artists are not as intelligent as "hardware monkeys"? Incidentally, I am not an artist; I've been programming since I was 12 years old and have since learned over 15 languages.
Your comment that the web is text oriented is based on your individual perception. In reality, everything is ones and zeroes (you know this already since you work for a hardware company). Take for example this C snippet:
int foo(void)
{
int i = 65;
printf("If i is an integer: %d\n", i);
printf("If i is a character: %c\n", i);
}
This will produce two different values for i: '65' and 'A'; one is decimal, one is text. So what is 'i'? 'i' is whatever the application perceives it to be. Lynx and winamp are very different from a functional perspective, but the underlying data is still of the same nature.
HTML doesn't define how a web site should look to the pixel, and this is one of it's strong points. It's up to the user to decide how to view a site. If the user doesn't want images, your site should look just fine without them.
Your right about a site looking correct without images. Unfortunately, since these corporations I am referring to do not care, they simply pay us not to care as well. As far as the strength of HTML as you describe; this has become the major weakness of HTML. Websites are more sophisticated than they were back in the early 90's, and HTML has not been able to keep up so easily. Just view the source to M$'s homepage and try and navigate the billions of table tags. The increase in the average user's bandwidth has given way to prettier graphics and digital sound.
The minute you start checking to make sure your site looks the same on all browsers, you should re-think your entire site. Why do you want it to look the same on all browsers (it won't by the way...)? This usually indicates that you are focusing too much on presentation and not enough on content.
Like I said earlier, the people who are paying to have their crap on the web are paying for presentation and not content. Since when do corporations and advertisers care about content?
So.... Did the engineers do this on purpose? It seems that Intel is really hell-bent on killing RAMBUS.
RAMBUS is Intel's baby. They do not want it killed, I guarantee that.
I think the real problem is how shitty RAMBUS as a technology really is. There's an excellent article on Tom's Hardware for those interested in discovering the truth behind RAMBUS.
Oh.. nevermind ;)
Shouldn't Linus and gang be involved heavily in this?
I corrected your post for you :)
Actually, Linus (and Linux in general) should have nothing to do with these kinds of standards. They are usually distribution specific; all distributions already use the same GNU/Linux kernel, so therefore all distributions are already adhering to the (only) kernel standard.
Things like file locations drive me insane when moving from one distribution to the other, especially the /etc/rc* crap. I've mastered Debian's only to find it (slightly) different on other distros.
p|ng steps off the soapbox.
The problem here is that so many incompetant (and obviously love-starved) people use Outlook and just run whatever attachments are sent to them.
The problem is not "incompetent users". I know of no UNIX program that automatically executes scripts when an email is opened.
I got hit with the Melissa Virus quite easily because I opened the email. I am not a veteran Windows Outlook user (thank G-d) and didn't think that opening a file would cause the execution of an unknown script.
The problem is the same as it's always been: M$ and it's business plan to capitalize on it's stock price, with little respect to the quality of work they produce.
Furthermore, just because it happens under Solaris and NT does not mean I want to see it happen under Linux and it's various distributions.
Agreed, no registry key for Linux. But how do Red Hat and Debian determine how a particular piece of software needs to be updated.
I know nothing about Red Hat. Debian stores the list of currently available packages in var/lib/dpkg/available. To update this list (it tends to go out of date almost daily if you're running the unstable (read, "Development") version, you execute /usr/bin/apt-get update.
You could cron a 2 line script that upgrades every installed package on your system automatically.
I certainly wouldn't put it past MS to argue that apt invalidates their patent.
I'm not sure about this. You would think someone owns the patent to spreadsheets, yet M$ and GNOME both have a spreadsheet program. Gnumeric even writes XLS files.
I'm far from an expert in this area.
I can't believe the general consensus is positive on this. Since when does free software require that the author is given credit in a syslog?
I'm sorry, but I don't like this. I don't hack GNOME applications so that I can be famous. I do it because it's a challenge; nothing more. I obviously don't do it for the money either. That's why I work with M$ during the day.
The beauty of open source lies in the fact that ALL CONTRIBUTORS GET CREDIT!
This is not what open source is for. Yet another misinterpretaion of open source and free software. Open source exists to give developers certain rights; the right to use other code, and at the same time ensuring that the original author's code is not used to make money unknowingly to them.
I'm going to puke if someone else makes another blanket generalization about open source and how it's changing the way I do my laundry, etc. If you want credit for your work, make a damn web page.
All in all, an excellent piece of software.
I have never used QNX, but from the advertisements I have seen in various magazines you can do pretty much anything without requiring a reboot. This includes kernel level functions; Linux cannot make this claim AFAIK.
Java is notoriously slow
Java is slower than compiled languages (C, assembler) but nobody writes C code to do CGI much anymore. The risk of buffer overflows and pointer chaos is too great. Perl became a great tool for CGI development because it does things that C doesn't do, like bounds checking an so on, minimizing the risk of remote exploits via buffer overflows.
It's bad enough on the client side in an applet but it seems like a tremendous waste of cycles to use it on the server side
I agree that client side Java (I'm referring mainly to applets) is a total disaster. We can blame Nutscrape for a lot of this.
However, Java is not a total waste on the server.
There are various things a developer must keep in mind when writing any kind of software; performance is one of them. Other things that are always on my mind: memory requirements, simplicity/readability, time to completion, ...
My point is Java may not be the absolute fastest thing on the market, but for web development it is ideal. Perhaps Python has advantages over Java that I am not aware; many Python programmers I know on efNet encourage me to ditch Java in favor of it. When running a JVM on Solaris, I have been impressed with the results.
Actual story: I wrote a Servlet/JSP application that took a poll, tallied the results, and allowed administrators to view the results of. It's used by Texaco on their intranet.
The first day it was live it recorded 13,000 completed surveys, each survey about 50 questions in length. I made careful usage of threads and shared resources. In the end, I had a stable program that never crashed throughout it's usage on their intranet.
-- Happy Java Man
Every kid in America cried to Mommy and Daddy, "I want a Jar Jar Binx doll". The merchandising for his movies far outweighs the earnings he makes from the box office.
I've been seeing a lot of stories about whether or not EP1 will be on DVD. Quite frankly, I could care less. I'll never own it on anything other than a downloaded MPEG.
Masculinity isn't necessarily specific to males, the same way that Femininity isn't specific to women. I am a man, but I have good feminine qualities.
Likewise, I have seen women play very agressive Ice Hockey, and of course Basketball; I would say these women have masculine qualities, but are nonetheless no less womanly than the next.
The way marketing folk gather data disturbs me. If you took this practice to it's extreme, what could companies do with your personal information then? Monitoring my phone calls, my computer use... hey, some of these are already happening.
Oh yeah, Orwell had some things to say about this over 50 years ago. I'm afraid I already know the end result.
I trust the people that are close to me. I trust my parents and my little brother. When I have kids I want my kids to trust me; I don't need the government to raise my kid for me, nor do I need the television either.
The problem I have with the current trend is that it takes away power from the individual to manage his/her life as well as the lives of their children. We don't need laws to "protect" children from "offensive" material on the Internet. We need parents to get off their fat ass and be a friend to their children.