And yet, if I remember correctly they still manage to be one of the top 10 or so countries in the world in terms of military spending. The people in power certainly have much to lose, even if most of the population does not.
Of course, that's not to say that sanctions would mean much to the people in power...
Yeah, this is pretty much a non-issue. This fork is debian specific, and pretty much anyone who uses Debian probably knows enough about Linux and F/OSS to either already know what's going on, or figure it out pretty trivially. I have a feeling that the vast majority of Debian users will either a) not care, or b) download an 'official' FireFox build.
If this ever spreads to other 'newbie-friendly' distro's (mainly I'm thinking of Ubuntu here) then I think there is more likely to be potential for confusion, although as far as I am aware, nobody knows how Ubuntu is planning on handling this yet. On one hand, I think they'd be smarter not to, but on the other hand, if more people started following Debian's route, maybe the Mozilla people will reconsider how ridiculous the situation is to begin with.
But, now that I think about it, having a 30" monitor wouldn't necessarily help - when you maximize a window, it fills the whole screen, which still puts you back to alt-tabbing.
So, ummm... don't maximize your windows when you want to see more than one of them at a time?
Take a look at the screenshots. The close button only appears on the currently active tab. So despite all of the problems that everyone else has complained about, the changes still don't solve your problem. (not that it's really that much of a problem currently- it's already possible to close a tab other than the current one with either the right or middle button).
I think I am going to take a pass on 2.0. I don't know of any new features that are particularly attractive to me, and the tab issues are among several that look like major downgrades to me.
(Now, if they would hurry up and implement inline-block already - i mean, hey, it's only been an open issue for over 7 years now - then that might actually be something worth cheering about.)
I believe Internet Explorer 6 and 7 both implement JavaScript 1.4.
Some of the new stuff in 1.7 does look interesting (although I'm not sure how useful), but it is completely useless to pretty much everyone except for extension developers. I'd be far more interested in finally being able to use some of the features in JavaScript 1.5 for regular web development, such as get and set values (properties, for the.Net folks). These features seem much more practical for most web development tasks, and even they are still not available to any serious web developer.
It's an insidious problem that just creeps up on you anytime you don't think about it sufficiently.
If SQL injection attacks are creeping up on you, than you are using the wrong tools. If you are using any halfway decent database access library (and suing it correctly) SQL injection is a non-issues. Example, using Perl:
my $sth = dbh->prepare("select * from users where user_id = ?"); my $rv = $sth->execute($dangerous_user_supplied_var);
I know the same thing is possible in PHP (via PEAR:DB), although I don't remember the syntax off the top of my head. Besides making you pretty much invulnerable to SQL injection vulnerabilities (assuming the underlying library is implemented properly), this can give you a number of other benefits, including easier to maintain code, and a decent performance increase on most sane database implementations. If you main method of executing database queries is this:
$foo = mysql_execute($dbh, "select * from users where user_id = '" . dear_god_save_me($scary_user_input)."'");
Yes, it's a given that you will get bitten sooner or later no matter how careful you are. If you are smart, you use tools that protect you from the problem at the root. Otherwise, you will inevitably screw it up and get screwed, no matter how careful you think you are being.
Well, that's exactly the problem. You see the plains here are so big that it takes about 20 hours to ride a train accross them. And as much as I despise flying lately, I'll still take a 3 hour plane flight over a 20 hour train ride accross empty plains.
Silly spelling correction aside, I've often wished that they would run something like the TGV from LA/San Francisco -> Denver -> Chicago -> New York
I was wondering about that. I hadn't looked at the Celcius numbers too closely, but I was pretty amazed that anyone would turn the air conditioning on when it's 65 degrees outside (that's a good way to seriously damage them, I've been told). I'd sure as heck have it on anytime the temperature is over 90, though.
Maybe Europeans just like sweating all over the place.
In fact, if you look at population density, our population density is less than average: 31 people per km compared to the world average of 48 km. That's less than 10% of the density in Japan or India. Some European countries are way up there as well. Germany and the UK both have more than 200 people per km. Even without Alaska, we're still only at about 37 people per km.
Well, yes, because no other country defines "The [Insert Nationality Here] Dream" as a 3,000 sq foot house on a half acre lot with one car per family member over 15 and an hour commute to a giant office park. Our population density is so low because we are about the only country in the world where moving out of the city is seen as a symbol of success. If we are going to keep growing at the rate that we are going, sooner or later we're either going to have to convince people that areas like Nebraska and the Dakotas are actually a really nice place to live, or people are going to have to seriously rethink the "American Dream". (Both of which would be a good thing in my opinion, but I'm not expecting either to happen soon.)
So when you really think about it, the Zune is a bigger threat to companies that have patterned with Microsoft by supporting Microsoft's DRM than it is to Apple.
Not necessarily. It sounds like the Zune will be using a new kind of DRM that is not compatible with "PlaysForSure", so it won't play any music files purchased from any existing online music store. This, of course has all of the people who have signed on to sell PlaysForSure hopping mad, but it may help them out, at least initially. All of the people who have already purchased PlaysForSure media may be hesitant to go out and buy a Zune, but it also limits them from selling to Zune users in the future if it catches on. The stores that primarily sell via the subscription model, (e.g. Rhapsody) are probably in the biggest trouble, because the barrier is much lower in switching from one subscription service to another- You have to re download your files again, but you won't 'lose' anything.
Yeah, I heard of it. Used it for years. To bad they got lazy and didn't feel like staying up to date with their competitors. By the time I first hearc of Excel, I had already long lost interest in Lotus.
Oh, and what about Stacker? Why, yes, Microsoft stole Stacker's technology, called it DoubleSpace, and drove Stacker out of business despite Stacker's winning their patent infringement lawsuit.
Seeing as Microsoft only offerend DoubleSpace as part of DOS for one revision (Added in 6.2 IIRC and removed shortly thereafter in 6.22 due to said lawsuit) and virtually no one ever used it even then, I'd say the larger cause that Stacker went belly up was because their product was farking awful. Anyone who complains about how much crappy AV software slows down their computer has never used a computer running Stacker.
I haven't heard much about GoBack lately, have you? Wildfile GoBack... I mean Adaptec GoBack... I mean Roxio GoBack... I mean Norton GoBack...
GoWhich?
Yes, Microsoft does have a long history of playing dirty and burying their competitors, but in most cases I think that it would be safe to say that the companies made plenty of their own mistakes that allowed Microsoft to supplant them, even with inferior technology. Even everyone's favorite example of Microsoft's monopoly abuse, Netscape, fell prey to this. Yes, Microsoft used illegal tactics to destroy Netscape's business model, but there are a lot of people, including many Netscape employees at the time, that would claim that Microsoft's actions only hastened Netscape's already approaching demise.
Norton and McAffee have gotten old, fat, and lazy. They feel too entitled to their recurring monthly revenue stream, and most of their marketing is pure FUD. If Microsoft is truly shutting them out the way they claim (although we are talking about two of the only companies that I am less willing to give the benefit of the doubt than Micrsoft) then, yes, Microsft is probably doing something illegal and should be prosecuted for it. Even so, I for one won't shed any tears for them if they wither and die because of it.
You would be perfectly right, except for the part where Microsoft is a recognized monopoly, and are now using their monopoly in one market to push out competitors in another market that up until now they had no presense in.
Last I checked, there were laws regarding that behavior. Not that anyone really expects anyone to do anything about it, after the little slap on the wrist that they got last time, but you never know.
Lock down every other way in all you like, it doesn't matter when you can infect people by sending them an e-mail that says "Hi I send you this file in order to have your advice."
For all that you got right in your post (leaving aside the fact that you lump together all malware as "virus", an incorrect but increasingly common usage) you really took two steps backwards with this statement. The whole problem with these emails is that it is trivially easy in Windows to make an executable file that looks like a document. If everyone could easily tell that these were executable files, a hell of a lot less people would blindly click on them, and the problem would be orders of magnitude smaller, because it would be very much harder to hit the critical mass of people necessary to cause widespread infection. Yes there's always going to be a few users who will fall for just about anything, and there's not a whole lot you can do for them, but Microsoft certainly hasn't set the bar very high to deceive the great majority of people- the moderately clueful users.
I think you need to check your calendar a little closer, or maybe your old pay stubs. 1999 was pretty much the peak of the dot com bubble. IIRC eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon all went public around late 98/early 99. By 2001 the industry was already in a tailspin. It may not have been apparent quite yet from the January employment figures, but it was certainly already obvious to anyone in the industry that was paying attention. I'd say that things had certainly already hit bottom a few months before Sept. 11, (at least where I was, maybe other parts of the country fared better) although that event certainly decimated any hopes of a speedy recovery.
AJAX is not a techology, or even a group of technologies- The only thing all AJAX 'implementations' have in common is JavaScript, and that has been around forever. AJAX is at best a loosely defined conceptual approach to building a web site. At least the guy writing this article gets that. The guy he is responding to has a bit of a clue (although not too much, or he might have realized how absurd the statement that "Java needs to be more like AJAX" sounds), but this line almost made me laugh out loud: "The only thing AJAX is are a set of extremely important best practices and patterns developers use to create compelling web clients." But too often it seems that people try to refer to AJAX as though it is a specific technology. Even these two, who generally get the point, seem to present their statements in that light at times. I think that the poster above summed it up well when he said "Comparing Java and AJAX is like comparing apples and blue." The more I see people talk about it, the more it confirms my long held belief that the AJAX name was both invented and promoted by consultants who needed a new buzzword to make selling websites "cool" again.
And while this guy seems to generally know what he's talking about, I have to take exception to several items in his list of AJAX shortcomings.
- AJAX is hard. Yes and no. Any new technology is hard when you are coming from a different background. How long does it take people to become proficient in working with a relational database (obviously a long time, as Java developers seem to have been working for years to try and sweep that particular detail further and further under the rug) How long does it take a client-server C++ developer to be good at even fairly basic web development tasks. If you have been working with AJAX for long enough that you have the right mindset, it's not that much harder than any other kind of software development. If you take a roomful of experienced web developers and expect them to be good at AJAX overnight, you're going to be about as disappointed as you would be if you took a room full of experienced VB developers and expect them to learn J2EE overnight.
- fragmented browser support Again, yes and no. While the situation was really bad several years ago, when IE 6 was new, Mozilla was floundering, and JavaScript/DOM support in Opera was still in it's infancy, these days it is not so much of a problem any more. While there are a few differences in the event models between browsers, those are rather trivially surmounted (if you are willing to pretend that there is no such thing as event capturing, which depresses me slightly). For the last 2 years, almost every one of my browser specific issues has been CSS related, and while that is definitely a big problem, it is certainly not limited to AJAX.
- The difficulty of finding and hiring Ajax developers He cites two different engineers as saying that about one in 40 engineers is qualified to learn AJAX. That in itself is not so much of a surprise to me as the expectation that it would be substantially higher. What percentage of engineers would be qualified to learn VHDL synthesis? Multithreaded client-server application design? Database administration? I suppose that if you are in the habit of hiring OOP programmer monkeys to fill in the blanks in your UML diagrams that number might seem absurdly low to you (I don't know if that's what the majority of Java programming jobs are, but that's certainly the impression that I've gotten from some of the places I've interviewed at) but I'd say that to find any 'engineer' in the computer field that's qualified to do any more than basic monkey work you're already looking at about one in ten. It's only going to get lower from there when you start adding specific skill sets.
- businesses can not afford it. They can not hire a team of experts to find workaround for dozens of serious problems browsers/JavaScript introduce My business can. We have about 35 web
Since I'm so dependent on contacts I tend to be meticulous. Rinsing in the sink ? Go ahead if you're keen on getting an eye infection that precludes you from wearing contacts forever. I won't.
Heh. I wasn't advocating that for anyone. I was merely acknowledging that what I consider to be sufficient care of my contact lenses doesn't cut it for most people, hence why I left that part of my post as a side note.
Not entirely true. gzip is substantially faster and less processor intensive than bzip2, and is still commonly used where speed is as important as size. gzip is also more suitable for compressing streams than bzip2, which operates on large blocks, if I remember correctly. For those reasons, gzip is still heavily if not exclusively used for on the wire compresson, for example in transparent compression of http pages or cvs downloads.
Complaints about the current state of affairs in this country aside, we're really in a bad state if the police are gonna come after this guy for one of the more insightful posts I've seen on Slashdot all week.
How many people work at your company? At my last company, there were 8 people, and the one meeting that we had every week seemed like it was totally pointless and went on forever (because it was, and it did...)
The company I work at now has about 200 people, and I would say that the roughly three meetings a week sounds about right. It works out to: - 1 bi-weekly design and development team meeting. This usually consists of introducing new people, and a quick overview of ongoing projects and upcoming launches. - 1 weekly status meeting for any project that I am working on at a given time. If everything is going smoothly on a project these are pretty fast. If not, this is when we can iron things out rather than trying to track down the one person you need to fix your problem during the week. The number of these varies, because at any given time I may be working on anywhere from one to three projects. - 1 (optional) weekly development meeting, where we talk about strategies for addressing common problems, updates or feature requests in our standard libraries, or whatever anybody feels like discussing. - and various random conference calls with clients or meetings with other teams to work out integration issues, as needed.
If you work in a small enough company that everyone is working on the same thing (or at least familiar with all the ongoing projects) and you can see whether any given person is at their desk and go talk to them if you have a question, then sure, meetings tend to be a waste of time. When the guy sitting next to you is working on a project for a client that you didn't even know was a client, and the person who can answer you question sits on the other end of a 40,000 sq ft office and may be working on 4 other projects as well, it helps to have some scheduled face to face time every now and then.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I've never heard of any eye condition that could be treated with contacts but not glasses. I've also never known anyone who wears contacts, especially expensive ones, that doesn't have a pair of glasses as a backup, either in case they lose or damage one of the lenses, or just to keep next to the bed for when they wake up in the middle of the night.
So, just wear your glasses on the plane and pack your precious bottles in your checked baggage. Wow, that was difficult, wasn't it? (I would also be tempted to suggest that sterilization isn't exactly rocket science and that transfering a little bit of solution into a smaller bottle just for the flight shouldn't be that big of a deal, but then, I just rinsed one of my contacts out in the sink at work because I don't have any saline solution handy, so what do I know...)
Anyways, maybe you don't consider the UK to be part of 'enlightened Europe', but last I heard, they were just starting to allow people to carry anything at all on to the planes with them up there.
I think the reason that the US hasn't done anything in North Korea has less to do with their very limited nuclear capability, and more to do with the facts that: 1) there is absolutely squat in North Korea worth fighting about 2) they have (and have had for years) enough conventional weapons lined up along the DMZ to kill hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people in South Korea and Japan on a few moments notice, including several important US military bases.
Screw MSFT or any of the investors that SCO lined up for this parade. The chance of getting anything meaningful out of them regarding this case would be zero. Even if they could win, the kind of money that they would actually be awarded would be far to small to serve as any kind of deterrent in the future. IBM needs to go after SCO's officers and board. If they nail them to the wall for their role in this farce, no corporation would ever again be willing to sacrifice itself the way SCO has. Even if Microsoft really was behind all of this, they'll never be able to pull it off again if we dry up their supply of sock puppets.
If I recall correctly, one of the first rules of being a lawyer is "Don't sue people with no money". (Actually, I read that in Bloom County, but it's still probably true). If SCO tried to sue me (I'm not going to make any assumptions on your financial status, but based on the way you stated the question, I'm going to assume the same is true for you), they'd have a hard time making enough money to cover their legal expenses. And all they'd have to do is accidentally sue one person with the resources to fight it out and it would be all over. When they filed suit against IBM, SCO was an all but dead company. If they sued 1000 people like you and me that might have gotten them an extra six months of life. They went for IBM because they needed a big payout. It's almost as if one day I decided that I was so far in debt that the only way to get out would be to start playing the lottery. Sure, I'd have better odds at making money by holding up the convenience stores where they sell lottery tickets instead, but I'd probably never be able to make enough money before I got caught.
So no, this case will probably do nothing for the little guy, because this is a completely different kind of lawsuit. This is a last minute hail mary pass for a big payout, and that only works if the person you are suing has far, far more money than you do.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course not...
Then it wouldn't be a fad.
And yet, if I remember correctly they still manage to be one of the top 10 or so countries in the world in terms of military spending. The people in power certainly have much to lose, even if most of the population does not.
Of course, that's not to say that sanctions would mean much to the people in power...
Yeah, this is pretty much a non-issue. This fork is debian specific, and pretty much anyone who uses Debian probably knows enough about Linux and F/OSS to either already know what's going on, or figure it out pretty trivially. I have a feeling that the vast majority of Debian users will either a) not care, or b) download an 'official' FireFox build.
If this ever spreads to other 'newbie-friendly' distro's (mainly I'm thinking of Ubuntu here) then I think there is more likely to be potential for confusion, although as far as I am aware, nobody knows how Ubuntu is planning on handling this yet. On one hand, I think they'd be smarter not to, but on the other hand, if more people started following Debian's route, maybe the Mozilla people will reconsider how ridiculous the situation is to begin with.
So, ummm... don't maximize your windows when you want to see more than one of them at a time?
Actually, since it was a 100% stock transaction, they didn't even need cash. What they needed (and have, in spades) is highly valued stock...
Take a look at the screenshots. The close button only appears on the currently active tab. So despite all of the problems that everyone else has complained about, the changes still don't solve your problem. (not that it's really that much of a problem currently- it's already possible to close a tab other than the current one with either the right or middle button).
I think I am going to take a pass on 2.0. I don't know of any new features that are particularly attractive to me, and the tab issues are among several that look like major downgrades to me.
(Now, if they would hurry up and implement inline-block already - i mean, hey, it's only been an open issue for over 7 years now - then that might actually be something worth cheering about.)
I believe Internet Explorer 6 and 7 both implement JavaScript 1.4.
.Net folks). These features seem much more practical for most web development tasks, and even they are still not available to any serious web developer.
Some of the new stuff in 1.7 does look interesting (although I'm not sure how useful), but it is completely useless to pretty much everyone except for extension developers. I'd be far more interested in finally being able to use some of the features in JavaScript 1.5 for regular web development, such as get and set values (properties, for the
If SQL injection attacks are creeping up on you, than you are using the wrong tools. If you are using any halfway decent database access library (and suing it correctly) SQL injection is a non-issues. Example, using Perl:I know the same thing is possible in PHP (via PEAR:DB), although I don't remember the syntax off the top of my head. Besides making you pretty much invulnerable to SQL injection vulnerabilities (assuming the underlying library is implemented properly), this can give you a number of other benefits, including easier to maintain code, and a decent performance increase on most sane database implementations. If you main method of executing database queries is this:Yes, it's a given that you will get bitten sooner or later no matter how careful you are. If you are smart, you use tools that protect you from the problem at the root. Otherwise, you will inevitably screw it up and get screwed, no matter how careful you think you are being.
Well, that's exactly the problem. You see the plains here are so big that it takes about 20 hours to ride a train accross them. And as much as I despise flying lately, I'll still take a 3 hour plane flight over a 20 hour train ride accross empty plains.
Silly spelling correction aside, I've often wished that they would run something like the TGV from LA/San Francisco -> Denver -> Chicago -> New York
I was wondering about that. I hadn't looked at the Celcius numbers too closely, but I was pretty amazed that anyone would turn the air conditioning on when it's 65 degrees outside (that's a good way to seriously damage them, I've been told). I'd sure as heck have it on anytime the temperature is over 90, though.
Maybe Europeans just like sweating all over the place.
Well, yes, because no other country defines "The [Insert Nationality Here] Dream" as a 3,000 sq foot house on a half acre lot with one car per family member over 15 and an hour commute to a giant office park. Our population density is so low because we are about the only country in the world where moving out of the city is seen as a symbol of success. If we are going to keep growing at the rate that we are going, sooner or later we're either going to have to convince people that areas like Nebraska and the Dakotas are actually a really nice place to live, or people are going to have to seriously rethink the "American Dream". (Both of which would be a good thing in my opinion, but I'm not expecting either to happen soon.)
Not necessarily. It sounds like the Zune will be using a new kind of DRM that is not compatible with "PlaysForSure", so it won't play any music files purchased from any existing online music store. This, of course has all of the people who have signed on to sell PlaysForSure hopping mad, but it may help them out, at least initially. All of the people who have already purchased PlaysForSure media may be hesitant to go out and buy a Zune, but it also limits them from selling to Zune users in the future if it catches on. The stores that primarily sell via the subscription model, (e.g. Rhapsody) are probably in the biggest trouble, because the barrier is much lower in switching from one subscription service to another- You have to re download your files again, but you won't 'lose' anything.
Yeah, I heard of it. Used it for years. To bad they got lazy and didn't feel like staying up to date with their competitors. By the time I first hearc of Excel, I had already long lost interest in Lotus.
Seeing as Microsoft only offerend DoubleSpace as part of DOS for one revision (Added in 6.2 IIRC and removed shortly thereafter in 6.22 due to said lawsuit) and virtually no one ever used it even then, I'd say the larger cause that Stacker went belly up was because their product was farking awful. Anyone who complains about how much crappy AV software slows down their computer has never used a computer running Stacker.
GoWhich?
Yes, Microsoft does have a long history of playing dirty and burying their competitors, but in most cases I think that it would be safe to say that the companies made plenty of their own mistakes that allowed Microsoft to supplant them, even with inferior technology. Even everyone's favorite example of Microsoft's monopoly abuse, Netscape, fell prey to this. Yes, Microsoft used illegal tactics to destroy Netscape's business model, but there are a lot of people, including many Netscape employees at the time, that would claim that Microsoft's actions only hastened Netscape's already approaching demise.
Norton and McAffee have gotten old, fat, and lazy. They feel too entitled to their recurring monthly revenue stream, and most of their marketing is pure FUD. If Microsoft is truly shutting them out the way they claim (although we are talking about two of the only companies that I am less willing to give the benefit of the doubt than Micrsoft) then, yes, Microsft is probably doing something illegal and should be prosecuted for it. Even so, I for one won't shed any tears for them if they wither and die because of it.
You would be perfectly right, except for the part where Microsoft is a recognized monopoly, and are now using their monopoly in one market to push out competitors in another market that up until now they had no presense in.
Last I checked, there were laws regarding that behavior. Not that anyone really expects anyone to do anything about it, after the little slap on the wrist that they got last time, but you never know.
For all that you got right in your post (leaving aside the fact that you lump together all malware as "virus", an incorrect but increasingly common usage) you really took two steps backwards with this statement. The whole problem with these emails is that it is trivially easy in Windows to make an executable file that looks like a document. If everyone could easily tell that these were executable files, a hell of a lot less people would blindly click on them, and the problem would be orders of magnitude smaller, because it would be very much harder to hit the critical mass of people necessary to cause widespread infection. Yes there's always going to be a few users who will fall for just about anything, and there's not a whole lot you can do for them, but Microsoft certainly hasn't set the bar very high to deceive the great majority of people- the moderately clueful users.
I think you need to check your calendar a little closer, or maybe your old pay stubs. 1999 was pretty much the peak of the dot com bubble. IIRC eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon all went public around late 98/early 99. By 2001 the industry was already in a tailspin. It may not have been apparent quite yet from the January employment figures, but it was certainly already obvious to anyone in the industry that was paying attention. I'd say that things had certainly already hit bottom a few months before Sept. 11, (at least where I was, maybe other parts of the country fared better) although that event certainly decimated any hopes of a speedy recovery.
AJAX is not a techology, or even a group of technologies- The only thing all AJAX 'implementations' have in common is JavaScript, and that has been around forever. AJAX is at best a loosely defined conceptual approach to building a web site. At least the guy writing this article gets that. The guy he is responding to has a bit of a clue (although not too much, or he might have realized how absurd the statement that "Java needs to be more like AJAX" sounds), but this line almost made me laugh out loud: "The only thing AJAX is are a set of extremely important best practices and patterns developers use to create compelling web clients." But too often it seems that people try to refer to AJAX as though it is a specific technology. Even these two, who generally get the point, seem to present their statements in that light at times. I think that the poster above summed it up well when he said "Comparing Java and AJAX is like comparing apples and blue." The more I see people talk about it, the more it confirms my long held belief that the AJAX name was both invented and promoted by consultants who needed a new buzzword to make selling websites "cool" again.
And while this guy seems to generally know what he's talking about, I have to take exception to several items in his list of AJAX shortcomings.
- AJAX is hard.
Yes and no. Any new technology is hard when you are coming from a different background. How long does it take people to become proficient in working with a relational database (obviously a long time, as Java developers seem to have been working for years to try and sweep that particular detail further and further under the rug) How long does it take a client-server C++ developer to be good at even fairly basic web development tasks. If you have been working with AJAX for long enough that you have the right mindset, it's not that much harder than any other kind of software development. If you take a roomful of experienced web developers and expect them to be good at AJAX overnight, you're going to be about as disappointed as you would be if you took a room full of experienced VB developers and expect them to learn J2EE overnight.
- fragmented browser support
Again, yes and no. While the situation was really bad several years ago, when IE 6 was new, Mozilla was floundering, and JavaScript/DOM support in Opera was still in it's infancy, these days it is not so much of a problem any more. While there are a few differences in the event models between browsers, those are rather trivially surmounted (if you are willing to pretend that there is no such thing as event capturing, which depresses me slightly). For the last 2 years, almost every one of my browser specific issues has been CSS related, and while that is definitely a big problem, it is certainly not limited to AJAX.
- The difficulty of finding and hiring Ajax developers
He cites two different engineers as saying that about one in 40 engineers is qualified to learn AJAX. That in itself is not so much of a surprise to me as the expectation that it would be substantially higher. What percentage of engineers would be qualified to learn VHDL synthesis? Multithreaded client-server application design? Database administration? I suppose that if you are in the habit of hiring OOP programmer monkeys to fill in the blanks in your UML diagrams that number might seem absurdly low to you (I don't know if that's what the majority of Java programming jobs are, but that's certainly the impression that I've gotten from some of the places I've interviewed at) but I'd say that to find any 'engineer' in the computer field that's qualified to do any more than basic monkey work you're already looking at about one in ten. It's only going to get lower from there when you start adding specific skill sets.
- businesses can not afford it. They can not hire a team of experts to find workaround for dozens of serious problems browsers/JavaScript introduce
My business can. We have about 35 web
Heh. I wasn't advocating that for anyone. I was merely acknowledging that what I consider to be sufficient care of my contact lenses doesn't cut it for most people, hence why I left that part of my post as a side note.
Not entirely true. gzip is substantially faster and less processor intensive than bzip2, and is still commonly used where speed is as important as size. gzip is also more suitable for compressing streams than bzip2, which operates on large blocks, if I remember correctly. For those reasons, gzip is still heavily if not exclusively used for on the wire compresson, for example in transparent compression of http pages or cvs downloads.
Complaints about the current state of affairs in this country aside, we're really in a bad state if the police are gonna come after this guy for one of the more insightful posts I've seen on Slashdot all week.
How many people work at your company? At my last company, there were 8 people, and the one meeting that we had every week seemed like it was totally pointless and went on forever (because it was, and it did...)
The company I work at now has about 200 people, and I would say that the roughly three meetings a week sounds about right. It works out to:
- 1 bi-weekly design and development team meeting. This usually consists of introducing new people, and a quick overview of ongoing projects and upcoming launches.
- 1 weekly status meeting for any project that I am working on at a given time. If everything is going smoothly on a project these are pretty fast. If not, this is when we can iron things out rather than trying to track down the one person you need to fix your problem during the week. The number of these varies, because at any given time I may be working on anywhere from one to three projects.
- 1 (optional) weekly development meeting, where we talk about strategies for addressing common problems, updates or feature requests in our standard libraries, or whatever anybody feels like discussing.
- and various random conference calls with clients or meetings with other teams to work out integration issues, as needed.
If you work in a small enough company that everyone is working on the same thing (or at least familiar with all the ongoing projects) and you can see whether any given person is at their desk and go talk to them if you have a question, then sure, meetings tend to be a waste of time. When the guy sitting next to you is working on a project for a client that you didn't even know was a client, and the person who can answer you question sits on the other end of a 40,000 sq ft office and may be working on 4 other projects as well, it helps to have some scheduled face to face time every now and then.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I've never heard of any eye condition that could be treated with contacts but not glasses. I've also never known anyone who wears contacts, especially expensive ones, that doesn't have a pair of glasses as a backup, either in case they lose or damage one of the lenses, or just to keep next to the bed for when they wake up in the middle of the night.
So, just wear your glasses on the plane and pack your precious bottles in your checked baggage. Wow, that was difficult, wasn't it? (I would also be tempted to suggest that sterilization isn't exactly rocket science and that transfering a little bit of solution into a smaller bottle just for the flight shouldn't be that big of a deal, but then, I just rinsed one of my contacts out in the sink at work because I don't have any saline solution handy, so what do I know...)
Anyways, maybe you don't consider the UK to be part of 'enlightened Europe', but last I heard, they were just starting to allow people to carry anything at all on to the planes with them up there.
I think the reason that the US hasn't done anything in North Korea has less to do with their very limited nuclear capability, and more to do with the facts that:
1) there is absolutely squat in North Korea worth fighting about
2) they have (and have had for years) enough conventional weapons lined up along the DMZ to kill hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people in South Korea and Japan on a few moments notice, including several important US military bases.
Screw MSFT or any of the investors that SCO lined up for this parade. The chance of getting anything meaningful out of them regarding this case would be zero. Even if they could win, the kind of money that they would actually be awarded would be far to small to serve as any kind of deterrent in the future. IBM needs to go after SCO's officers and board. If they nail them to the wall for their role in this farce, no corporation would ever again be willing to sacrifice itself the way SCO has. Even if Microsoft really was behind all of this, they'll never be able to pull it off again if we dry up their supply of sock puppets.
If I recall correctly, one of the first rules of being a lawyer is "Don't sue people with no money". (Actually, I read that in Bloom County, but it's still probably true). If SCO tried to sue me (I'm not going to make any assumptions on your financial status, but based on the way you stated the question, I'm going to assume the same is true for you), they'd have a hard time making enough money to cover their legal expenses. And all they'd have to do is accidentally sue one person with the resources to fight it out and it would be all over. When they filed suit against IBM, SCO was an all but dead company. If they sued 1000 people like you and me that might have gotten them an extra six months of life. They went for IBM because they needed a big payout. It's almost as if one day I decided that I was so far in debt that the only way to get out would be to start playing the lottery. Sure, I'd have better odds at making money by holding up the convenience stores where they sell lottery tickets instead, but I'd probably never be able to make enough money before I got caught.
So no, this case will probably do nothing for the little guy, because this is a completely different kind of lawsuit. This is a last minute hail mary pass for a big payout, and that only works if the person you are suing has far, far more money than you do.