I'd like to thank my very smart representatives, courts, lawyers and public prosecutors who made this happen. Apparently Google will be investing in solving the situation, otherwise those of us technologically not challenged will be doing what we can.
This week the online community managed to get the attention of the lawmakers in Argentina and paused the approval of a law that would instate a private copy levy on MP3 players, CDs, DVDs and even hard drives. This law would be similar to the ones already in place in Europe and that are being contested by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Those of us who got informed in time were able to watch the session of the Congress during which the proposed law was presented and different groups that represent copyright holders (record labels, filmmaking producers, etc) expressed their views about it. Many representatives of these groups were over 70 years old. By repeating phrases such as "artists have a right to make a living" they were continuously showing that they have no grasp of the current market. It was clear that most of them were there to be shown in camera and to be certain that their groups got included as recipients for the levy. There were no dissident voices, not one member of Congress or representative of technology groups that expressed arguments against the approval of the law. In fact, the only congressmen present were "ready to approve the law tomorrow" as one said.
Right, so they put a language designer (a theorist), a developers relations manager (a PR guy) and an infrastructure engineer (someone who talks wires and servers) to talk about front-end development. How about calling actual front-end engineers to talk about their craft? How about asking the guys behind the Aves game engine what can be done realistically with HTML5?
Personally, I'd rather use a slow dynamic scripting language to glue the fast compiled language code together, (see: Perl), not write the whole damn server in slow JS.
That is the whole idea. Write processor intensive tasks in a fast compiled language (C or whatever) and glue them with a server that is good at handling asynchronous requests. That's what Node.js is about and JavaScript is actually a good fit for it because of closures.
The floating URL in Firefox does need a little more work to avoid getting in your way, yes. Fortunately Mozilla changed its release cycle for Firefox, so we won't have to wait 2 years for the next update.
This is just an experiment by the community. It doesn't mean Mozilla is going in any direction. Mozilla Labs is a place for breaking the web and learning from the broken pieces. Sometimes, interesting ideas arise, like the Awesome Bar HD (which still needs a lot of work). Other times, they go too far (Home Dash).
Anyway, Mozilla's motto for Firefox is to keep it being completely customizable, so you'll still be able to have the browser look any way you want, even if they change the standard UI.
A much better way to implement this unnecessary cookie law would be to put the responsibility on browser vendors instead of website owners.
This needs modding up.
Of course, this has the problem that too many people don't update their browsers - but those people bring it on themselves and should therefore not be "protected" by this law.
It actually shouldn't matter but not because "they bring it on themselves", but because sooner or later everyone updates, at most when they change computers.
Yeah except if the situation had been reversed and Microsoft had done what Mozilla did. Then there would be pitchforks about how Microsoft was being evil. But, no, this time it was Mozilla and they can just do no wrong.
If Microsoft had been honest and reflected openly about its mistake, then there wouldn't have been any pitchforks. Although it is true that lots of developers are partial against Microsoft, it is also true that they have been welcoming when MS made good decisions. Take a look at the response from the community about IE9. It was critical in specific aspects, but overall very happy with the change in relationships (they started with very early previews) and product quality.
Yes, it has a lot of features. But no, it doesn't scale well when what you need is granular control of how javascript loads and executes, and it doesn't help multiple developers working on different modules. Lots of hardcoded references to global objects, long namespaces, HUGE file downloads. It just doesn't add up. Sencha needs to really step up if it wants to stay competitive with a paid product.
Way better alternatives are YUI3 and GWT. Even ideas such as Wijmo perform better.
Google Docs has partially implemented WAI-ARIA roles. Google Reader has full support for it. I'm not blind, but as a curious web developer I have tested them with JAWS. I don't see where the problem seems to be. Modern screen readers work really well with modern browsers and web apps developed with the ARIA specification.
Sorry for the error in line breaks. Here it is again.
I feel like I'm the only one who likes it. Very clean and non distracting. The comment control is AWESOME. Of course, there is lots of room for improvement. Here are some technical performance suggestions:
* Its YSlow grade is C. For a site with such huge traffic as/. has, it could be better. A good part is due to advertisement and A/B testing. A/B testing should be removed eventually so I will get better. However, there is still a couple of changes that could help: - Enable GZip compression for javascript files in a.fsdn.com - Combine comments_minified.js with all-minified.js. It's not worth it to have it separated into a different script. You can just delay the execution. Specially when gzipped it would weight around 6-7kb instead of 30kb. - Slashdot pages are rather big. I believe that's why you chose to put a lot of javascript in the head. You should consider at least moving it after the article/s. That way the article will be shown faster even if the rest of the page and the comments are delayed a bit. - It would help a lot to reduce the size of the page. Using the scroll event to show more comments as twitter does could be a good idea. Check out John Resig's latest post about it http://ejohn.org/blog/learning-from-twitter/ - Extend the life of the cached files. Use "access plus ten years" instead of a two week period. The correct strategy isn't to use the query string to manage versions but to use the filename for it. Rename the all-minified.js file to all-v1-minified.js and change it when needed. - Add the expires header for logo.png and favicon.ico - Remove E-tags - In the homepage, the RSS, facebook and twitter buttons are three different images. You should reuse the sprite from the add-this widget http://s7.addthis.com/static/r07/widget26_32x32.png and consider writing your own widget and adding it to your main script.
I feel like I'm the only one who likes it. Very clean and non distracting. The comment control is AWESOME.
Of course, there is lots of room for improvement. Here are some technical performance suggestions:
* Its YSlow grade is C. For a site with such huge traffic as/. has, it could be better. A good part is due to advertisement and A/B testing. A/B testing should be removed eventually so I will get better. However, there is still a couple of changes that could help:
- Enable GZip compression for javascript files in a.fsdn.com
- Combine comments_minified.js with all-minified.js. It's not worth it to have it separated into a different script. You can just delay the execution. Specially when gzipped it would weight around 6-7kb instead of 30kb.
- Slashdot pages are rather big. I believe that's why you chose to put a lot of javascript in the head. You should consider at least moving it after the article/s. That way the article will be shown faster even if the rest of the page and the comments are delayed a bit.
- It would help a lot to reduce the size of the page. Using the scroll event to show more comments as twitter does could be a good idea. Check out John Resig's latest post about it http://ejohn.org/blog/learning-from-twitter/
- Extend the life of the cached files. Use "access plus ten years" instead of a two week period. The correct strategy isn't to use the query string to manage versions but to use the filename for it. Rename the all-minified.js file to all-v1-minified.js and change it when needed.
- Add the expires header for logo.png and favicon.ico
- Remove E-tags
- In the homepage, the RSS, facebook and twitter buttons are three different images. You should reuse the sprite from the add-this widget http://s7.addthis.com/static/r07/widget26_32x32.png and consider writing your own widget and adding it to your main script.
There was good sci-fi. Flash Forward was seriously good science fiction. It broke the science once and applied internal rules to it. That's what defines good fantasy writing.
And as what happens with most good TV, it got cancelled after the first season.
Sokal's hoax has to do with the sociology of science. This book is about the philosophy of science. Of course, none should be ignored when making a complete analysis of the current state of science, but they are two very different approaches.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe I found out first on Slashdot.
I'd like to thank my very smart representatives, courts, lawyers and public prosecutors who made this happen. Apparently Google will be investing in solving the situation, otherwise those of us technologically not challenged will be doing what we can.
The functionality is awesome. But the API is too Java-like. Someone make it more JavaScript friendly please!
This week the online community managed to get the attention of the lawmakers in Argentina and paused the approval of a law that would instate a private copy levy on MP3 players, CDs, DVDs and even hard drives. This law would be similar to the ones already in place in Europe and that are being contested by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Those of us who got informed in time were able to watch the session of the Congress during which the proposed law was presented and different groups that represent copyright holders (record labels, filmmaking producers, etc) expressed their views about it. Many representatives of these groups were over 70 years old. By repeating phrases such as "artists have a right to make a living" they were continuously showing that they have no grasp of the current market. It was clear that most of them were there to be shown in camera and to be certain that their groups got included as recipients for the levy. There were no dissident voices, not one member of Congress or representative of technology groups that expressed arguments against the approval of the law. In fact, the only congressmen present were "ready to approve the law tomorrow" as one said.
Lobbying at its finest.
Right, so they put a language designer (a theorist), a developers relations manager (a PR guy) and an infrastructure engineer (someone who talks wires and servers) to talk about front-end development. How about calling actual front-end engineers to talk about their craft? How about asking the guys behind the Aves game engine what can be done realistically with HTML5?
Personally, I'd rather use a slow dynamic scripting language to glue the fast compiled language code together, (see: Perl), not write the whole damn server in slow JS.
That is the whole idea. Write processor intensive tasks in a fast compiled language (C or whatever) and glue them with a server that is good at handling asynchronous requests. That's what Node.js is about and JavaScript is actually a good fit for it because of closures.
The floating URL in Firefox does need a little more work to avoid getting in your way, yes. Fortunately Mozilla changed its release cycle for Firefox, so we won't have to wait 2 years for the next update.
This is just an experiment by the community. It doesn't mean Mozilla is going in any direction. Mozilla Labs is a place for breaking the web and learning from the broken pieces. Sometimes, interesting ideas arise, like the Awesome Bar HD (which still needs a lot of work). Other times, they go too far (Home Dash).
Anyway, Mozilla's motto for Firefox is to keep it being completely customizable, so you'll still be able to have the browser look any way you want, even if they change the standard UI.
A much better way to implement this unnecessary cookie law would be to put the responsibility on browser vendors instead of website owners.
This needs modding up.
Of course, this has the problem that too many people don't update their browsers - but those people bring it on themselves and should therefore not be "protected" by this law.
It actually shouldn't matter but not because "they bring it on themselves", but because sooner or later everyone updates, at most when they change computers.
Yup, further analysis is needed to confirm it is the Higgs or something completely new. The Resonaances blog has good speculation cover as usual.
JavaScript is fun. Embrace it! Get a book like Secret of the JavaScript Ninja instead.
Yeah except if the situation had been reversed and Microsoft had done what Mozilla did. Then there would be pitchforks about how Microsoft was being evil. But, no, this time it was Mozilla and they can just do no wrong.
If Microsoft had been honest and reflected openly about its mistake, then there wouldn't have been any pitchforks. Although it is true that lots of developers are partial against Microsoft, it is also true that they have been welcoming when MS made good decisions. Take a look at the response from the community about IE9. It was critical in specific aspects, but overall very happy with the change in relationships (they started with very early previews) and product quality.
ExtJS sucks.
Yes, it has a lot of features. But no, it doesn't scale well when what you need is granular control of how javascript loads and executes, and it doesn't help multiple developers working on different modules. Lots of hardcoded references to global objects, long namespaces, HUGE file downloads. It just doesn't add up. Sencha needs to really step up if it wants to stay competitive with a paid product.
Way better alternatives are YUI3 and GWT. Even ideas such as Wijmo perform better.
Google Docs has partially implemented WAI-ARIA roles. Google Reader has full support for it. I'm not blind, but as a curious web developer I have tested them with JAWS. I don't see where the problem seems to be. Modern screen readers work really well with modern browsers and web apps developed with the ARIA specification.
Yeah, it just happened to be the first paragraph of the article. So... Best written article?
Mozilla already has a Labs project that goes even further by hiding ALL the UI and showing it only on demand. It's called Home Dash.
Yeah, DMs aren't leaders. But let's face it, a party is pretty much a gang.
Sorry for the error in line breaks. Here it is again.
I feel like I'm the only one who likes it. Very clean and non distracting. The comment control is AWESOME.
Of course, there is lots of room for improvement. Here are some technical performance suggestions:
* Its YSlow grade is C. For a site with such huge traffic as /. has, it could be better. A good part is due to advertisement and A/B testing. A/B testing should be removed eventually so I will get better. However, there is still a couple of changes that could help:
- Enable GZip compression for javascript files in a.fsdn.com
- Combine comments_minified.js with all-minified.js. It's not worth it to have it separated into a different script. You can just delay the execution. Specially when gzipped it would weight around 6-7kb instead of 30kb.
- Slashdot pages are rather big. I believe that's why you chose to put a lot of javascript in the head. You should consider at least moving it after the article/s. That way the article will be shown faster even if the rest of the page and the comments are delayed a bit.
- It would help a lot to reduce the size of the page. Using the scroll event to show more comments as twitter does could be a good idea. Check out John Resig's latest post about it http://ejohn.org/blog/learning-from-twitter/
- Extend the life of the cached files. Use "access plus ten years" instead of a two week period. The correct strategy isn't to use the query string to manage versions but to use the filename for it. Rename the all-minified.js file to all-v1-minified.js and change it when needed.
- Add the expires header for logo.png and favicon.ico
- Remove E-tags
- In the homepage, the RSS, facebook and twitter buttons are three different images. You should reuse the sprite from the add-this widget http://s7.addthis.com/static/r07/widget26_32x32.png and consider writing your own widget and adding it to your main script.
I feel like I'm the only one who likes it. Very clean and non distracting. The comment control is AWESOME. Of course, there is lots of room for improvement. Here are some technical performance suggestions: * Its YSlow grade is C. For a site with such huge traffic as /. has, it could be better. A good part is due to advertisement and A/B testing. A/B testing should be removed eventually so I will get better. However, there is still a couple of changes that could help:
- Enable GZip compression for javascript files in a.fsdn.com
- Combine comments_minified.js with all-minified.js. It's not worth it to have it separated into a different script. You can just delay the execution. Specially when gzipped it would weight around 6-7kb instead of 30kb.
- Slashdot pages are rather big. I believe that's why you chose to put a lot of javascript in the head. You should consider at least moving it after the article/s. That way the article will be shown faster even if the rest of the page and the comments are delayed a bit.
- It would help a lot to reduce the size of the page. Using the scroll event to show more comments as twitter does could be a good idea. Check out John Resig's latest post about it http://ejohn.org/blog/learning-from-twitter/
- Extend the life of the cached files. Use "access plus ten years" instead of a two week period. The correct strategy isn't to use the query string to manage versions but to use the filename for it. Rename the all-minified.js file to all-v1-minified.js and change it when needed.
- Add the expires header for logo.png and favicon.ico
- Remove E-tags
- In the homepage, the RSS, facebook and twitter buttons are three different images. You should reuse the sprite from the add-this widget http://s7.addthis.com/static/r07/widget26_32x32.png and consider writing your own widget and adding it to your main script.
"Potentially buggy" version? Web developers everywhere are outraged
There was good sci-fi. Flash Forward was seriously good science fiction. It broke the science once and applied internal rules to it. That's what defines good fantasy writing. And as what happens with most good TV, it got cancelled after the first season.
Sokal's hoax has to do with the sociology of science. This book is about the philosophy of science. Of course, none should be ignored when making a complete analysis of the current state of science, but they are two very different approaches.
Lenovo has been playing with keyboard configurations for a while. And its VP of design commented on removing the caps lock key a long time ago.
I don't get it. Is this the supersymmetry equivalent of the Hubble constant?
However I don't see, how can a webserver know what fonts are installed
A website can even know what sites you visited through sleazy css sniffing. Fortunately browsers are catching up... http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2010/03/31/plugging-the-css-history-leak/