If that bottled water you're drinking is so pure, why does it have an expiration date?
Because over time the water will leech the PCB's out of the plastic bottle, which is almost certainly more unhealthy than just about anything you will find in the tap water anywhere in this country...
The importance of this cannot be overstated in my opinion. I have heard stories of companies that only keep the page with the signatures on file as "the rest of the contract is identical from one employee to another", and when asked to produce the contract two years later would just print up a new copy and throw the page with the signature on at the end.
They also probably have several windows, glass patio doors, and the like at easy-access level around their home. Most don't have bars on them.
Even those that do have bars probably live in framed out housing, where going through a wall is a trivial feat for a determened intruder with a simple sledgehammer.
Most of the time you wouldn't even have to break anything. Twice in my life (that I can think of off the top of my head) I've locked myself out of my house and let myself in through a window in under 5 minutes. The first time, back in high school, I had to borrow a screwdriver from a neighbor. In my first house of my own, it didn't even take that much. My wife was not very amused...
You're looking at it all wrong. They want IE to be a horrible broken web browser. If the majority of browsers in the world today followed web standards properly, it would have to potential to make a significant blow to windows stranglehold on the desktop. A standards compliant web has the potential to become a powerful application distribution platform, and Microsoft hates that. The entore point of IE is to suck just barely as much as possible without end users migrating away from it en masse. Think about it. Five years will have passed between the releases of IE 6 and IE 7. In all that time, what do we get? A half-assed tab implementation and a fix for bugs that web developers have documented forever. Do you really think MS couldn't have done a better job than that if they really had their heart in it? They will pour money into IE until judgement day as long as they can use it to hold back web standards by 5 years or so by making them inaccessible to 80-90% of the web browsing world.
Ok, that's a total crackpot tinfoil hat theory. I admit it. But you have to wonder. What have they been doing all that time? I know they stopped development on IE for a long time, but it's not like they didn't know about the glaring problems in IE 6 when they dropped it...
While I agree with most of your post, you do realize that creative sells more than just portable music players, don't you? For ages now they've been the only game in town for non-integrated computer sound systems. Regardless of whether their music player division is successful, I would be surprised if they just up and disappeared after all this time...
If that computer programmer is the guy that I am thinking of, I don't remember the results of any formal investigation, but it was pretty clear about 10 seconds into reading his initial claims that:
a) he had a serious axe to grind against his former employer. b) he was mostly talking out of his ass with regards to the actual programming work that he had done.
Personally, I agree that the electronic voting systems we have now are ridiculous and that we need a lot more oversight and transparency in the process, but guys like him (ironically, even if he really was telling the truth) hurt the cause rather than helping it, by making us all look like crackpots and tinfoil hatters.
You mean that it's not significant in Microsoft's collective consciousness. By this guy's logic, somebody using Office 95 might have thought it would be a great idea to name a new discovery an "internet".
Seriously, he could have at least checked Google. That's probably a better guide to the "collective consciousness of society" than a word database maintained by one company.
...then whatever downside to biofuels you find to throw at me doesn't even begin to tip the scales.
I can think of one downside that might tip the scales. Perhaps the fact that many people think that the most commonly used biofuel, and the one that is easiest to produce in this country, requires more energy input from existing petrol fuel sources than it replaces?
Not that I think biofuels are a bad idea, but we're definitely going about it all wrong. If ethanol were really a viable fuel source, it's producers wouldn't need the billions of dollars of government subsidies that we are throwing at them.
The whole thing is ridiculous. Did anybody else notice the other day when DHS flat out admitted that running your shoes through the X-Ray machines won't help detect explosives hidden inside of them. (well, duh!) It shouldn't really be a big shock to anyone who had actually thought about it, but then why have security officials been making everyone run their shoes through the X-Ray machines for the last three years?
They have to at least look like they're doing something...
I could counter by saying that the writers of JavaScript didn't include the "for... in" syntax because they liked the way it sounded, they intended it to be used to iterate over the members of an Object. (I agree with you that you should be using array.length whenever appropriate, but there are many cases where "for... in" is still useful, or even necessary.) I'm not saying that they shouldn't have used the prototype property to extend objects, but they could have gotten the same benefits by making their own objects (say, ProtoObject and ProtoArray) and extending those instead of the built in ones. Dean Edwards did something like that to simplify the syntax for object inheritance inheritance works without affecting the built-in Object (http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2006/03/base/). We've done the same thing at my work to create a 'SortableArray' object with a "sortByField" method that inherits from the built in Array, but doesn't affect its behavior in any way.
It's always been basic good coding practice to make sure your code doesn't affect code outside of the file/library/etc. that you are working on. Obviously this is not entirely possible in JavaScript because of the lack of namespaces, but you can (and, IMO at least, should) avoid any side affects outside of the Objects that you declare in your file/library/etc.
five years ago all my server-side processing was in Perl. Now, the vast majority of it is in PHP.
That's a different story. In the time that I'v been doing web development, I've used perl, pl/sql (as a server side programming language), mod_perl, php, cold_fusion, asp, and now am starting to use asp.net. But in all that time, it has always been on JavaScript on the client side, and probably will continue to be for the forseeable future. Obviously the libraries evolve with time- the code I use (and write) today looks significantly different than 3 years ago, or even 1 year ago. Not all of it is that valuable- I'm sure all of these frameworks probably include some sort of serialization routines, and there's nothing special about ours(*)- but some of it is. As I said, I would gladly use any of these frameworks if they could peacefully exist along side other code, but so far I haven't found one.
I realize that Prototype is about more than just AJAX. And no, I haven't looked at it that closely. I looked at it long enough to determine that it would not play nicely with our existing code, and didn't replace enough of our existing functionality to seriously consider. I have looked a little more closely at ATLAS, and I found a 57kB runtime library that basically included an XmlHttpRequest wrapper, a serializer, and a lot of syntactic sugar to make JavaScript look more like C#. No thanks. For just just under 30k, I can get the XmlHttpRequest wrapper, serializer and a whole lot of other code that actually makes my job easier, instead of just making my code a little prettier.
But please, don't assume your intransigence is indicative of some flaw in the framework. The flaw in the framework is that in the course of making their improvements, they broke some fundamental parts of the language. Obviously many people are willing to overlook that flaw, but it is a flaw, nonetheless.
(*) Well, it doesn't require any external libraries, and it doesn't interfere with any other code. To me that certainly doesn't seem like anything special, but apparently it's not...
The only flash sites I have seen that are not totally annoying and worthless are from car manufacturers, they have huge budgets to spend on design and development of their sites...
You're kidding, right? Car manufacturers are the worst. If you're going to require flash for a site, the least you can do is put the whole thing in one flash applet so i only have to hit the "Click to play" button once, instead of scattering a half dozen of them all over the page. Half the time I end up getting sick of it by the third page and decide to try and find the information elsewhere.
Prototype may be stable, but it is also unusable, at least where I work. It appears to be a great library, and they've implemented a lot of things definitely lacking in the JavaScript language, but unfortunately they did it by mangling the language's base objects, so a lot of our existing code will break if we try to use Prototype. ATLAS is even worse. And while they've both implemented a lot of neat things, neither offers anything remotely compelling enough to consider giving up our existing collection of libraries. I haven't looked at any of the others yet- Google is definitely out because it's not even JavaScript. It would be nice to evaluate some of the others sometime, but I'm not in a hurry- my experience thus far has led me to believe that I am unlikely to find anything that would provide significant benefits without breaking an unacceptable amount of existing code.
My impression so far is that these frameworks are great stuff for people who are just jumping onto the AJAX bandwagon, and can do everything from the ground up using the conventions of these toolkits, but I would think that anyone who's been doing non-trivial JavaScript for at least the last three years probably already has a codebase that they are not going to want to give up.
I was referring to ATLAS specifically, not AJAX in general. Almost all of my work is AJAX-style development, (although with libraries that my company has been developing in-house over the last 3+ years) so I know that it is certainly possible to create lightweight JavaScript libraries.
ATLAS however, seems to offer very little to justify it's hefty download size. I misspoke in my original post- it's more like 55kB, but that's still ridiculously heavy for what seems to be mainly a wrapper for using xmlHttpRequest to make SOAP requests to a web service and hand the result to a JavaScript callback function, and breaks a whole lot of things in the process.
A sysadmin I worked with long ago used to be fond of using the phrase "a solution in search of a problem", which seems to me to sum up ATLAS quite nicely.
6. Gasp at your bandwidth bills when you realize that you had to include an 84k JS file for a simple "hello world" application. 7. Spend hours trying to figure out why any custom script files you want to include in your head element once you try to do something non-trivial mysteriously aren't working.
The real problem is that they're under the wrong fingers. Why so many games default to WASD instead of ESDF is beyond me. At least most of them are configurable. The few I've found that aren't are incredibly annoying.
That said, I do need to get a better desk chair and a footrest under my desk at home so that i can kick back and play games properly, or maybe scare up a copy of windows that will work on my laptop.
Um, technically, every site built these days using XHTML 1.1 and CSS2 won't work at all in IE6 (or IE7 for that matter) because neither recognizes the (required) application/xml+xhtml content-type.
MySQL 5 is out aswell. It's a full blown DB and comes with tons of free x-platform admin and design tools that make building the outline of a large webapp a walk in the park and thus scares the living daylights out of Oracle and IBM.
That may be, but when they release MySQL 12, I still won't be using it if it's still written by the same developers that claimed for years that adding referential integrity to a database just slows it down and programmers should be handling that in their application code, implemented "transactions without atomicity", insert statements that return the value of the "inserted" ID whether the insert succeeeded or not, and have otherwise generally demonstrated for at least the last 8 years that they know nothing at all about designing a reliable relational database. (Or maybe I'm just scarred for life from having to truncate corrupted tables once a week the last time I was responsible for maintaining a MySQL database.)
PHP is a decent platform on the other hand (when combined with a competent database), although I find the language itsef to be rather quirky. Maybe they've improved this in PHP5, which I haven't used very much. Personally, I prefer JavaScript as a server side scripting language, but the only platform I know that has that as an option is ASP. It would be nice if PHP would go the ASP route as far as separating out the scripting language from the rest of the platform. Then you could still use PHP's strengths but not be tied to one language. For example, people who like Ruby but just don't get the hype behind Ruby on Rails could still have a really great web development platform.
And why not? I know people who pay their mortgage payment on a credit card (and I probably would if my bank allowed it), and my wife paid most of her college tuition on her Discover card. 1% cash back goes a long ways when you're turning over $1000 on the card every month.
The more important lesson is to make sure you pay it off every month.
Slashdot Mirror
Because over time the water will leech the PCB's out of the plastic bottle, which is almost certainly more unhealthy than just about anything you will find in the tap water anywhere in this country...
The importance of this cannot be overstated in my opinion. I have heard stories of companies that only keep the page with the signatures on file as "the rest of the contract is identical from one employee to another", and when asked to produce the contract two years later would just print up a new copy and throw the page with the signature on at the end.
Most of the time you wouldn't even have to break anything. Twice in my life (that I can think of off the top of my head) I've locked myself out of my house and let myself in through a window in under 5 minutes. The first time, back in high school, I had to borrow a screwdriver from a neighbor. In my first house of my own, it didn't even take that much. My wife was not very amused...
You're looking at it all wrong. They want IE to be a horrible broken web browser. If the majority of browsers in the world today followed web standards properly, it would have to potential to make a significant blow to windows stranglehold on the desktop. A standards compliant web has the potential to become a powerful application distribution platform, and Microsoft hates that. The entore point of IE is to suck just barely as much as possible without end users migrating away from it en masse. Think about it. Five years will have passed between the releases of IE 6 and IE 7. In all that time, what do we get? A half-assed tab implementation and a fix for bugs that web developers have documented forever. Do you really think MS couldn't have done a better job than that if they really had their heart in it? They will pour money into IE until judgement day as long as they can use it to hold back web standards by 5 years or so by making them inaccessible to 80-90% of the web browsing world.
Ok, that's a total crackpot tinfoil hat theory. I admit it. But you have to wonder. What have they been doing all that time? I know they stopped development on IE for a long time, but it's not like they didn't know about the glaring problems in IE 6 when they dropped it...
While I agree with most of your post, you do realize that creative sells more than just portable music players, don't you? For ages now they've been the only game in town for non-integrated computer sound systems. Regardless of whether their music player division is successful, I would be surprised if they just up and disappeared after all this time...
If that computer programmer is the guy that I am thinking of, I don't remember the results of any formal investigation, but it was pretty clear about 10 seconds into reading his initial claims that:
a) he had a serious axe to grind against his former employer.
b) he was mostly talking out of his ass with regards to the actual programming work that he had done.
Personally, I agree that the electronic voting systems we have now are ridiculous and that we need a lot more oversight and transparency in the process, but guys like him (ironically, even if he really was telling the truth) hurt the cause rather than helping it, by making us all look like crackpots and tinfoil hatters.
You mean that it's not significant in Microsoft's collective consciousness. By this guy's logic, somebody using Office 95 might have thought it would be a great idea to name a new discovery an "internet".
Seriously, he could have at least checked Google. That's probably a better guide to the "collective consciousness of society" than a word database maintained by one company.
last i checked funny mods don't actually affect your karma.
...then whatever downside to biofuels you find to throw at me doesn't even begin to tip the scales.
I can think of one downside that might tip the scales. Perhaps the fact that many people think that the most commonly used biofuel, and the one that is easiest to produce in this country, requires more energy input from existing petrol fuel sources than it replaces?
Not that I think biofuels are a bad idea, but we're definitely going about it all wrong. If ethanol were really a viable fuel source, it's producers wouldn't need the billions of dollars of government subsidies that we are throwing at them.
The whole thing is ridiculous. Did anybody else notice the other day when DHS flat out admitted that running your shoes through the X-Ray machines won't help detect explosives hidden inside of them. (well, duh!) It shouldn't really be a big shock to anyone who had actually thought about it, but then why have security officials been making everyone run their shoes through the X-Ray machines for the last three years?
They have to at least look like they're doing something...
According to my sister-in-law, who is a first grade teacher, the pronunciation that they are teaching now is closer to urine-us.
Of course, no one would ever make any jokes about THAT name...
I could counter by saying that the writers of JavaScript didn't include the "for ... in" syntax because they liked the way it sounded, they intended it to be used to iterate over the members of an Object. (I agree with you that you should be using array.length whenever appropriate, but there are many cases where "for ... in" is still useful, or even necessary.) I'm not saying that they shouldn't have used the prototype property to extend objects, but they could have gotten the same benefits by making their own objects (say, ProtoObject and ProtoArray) and extending those instead of the built in ones. Dean Edwards did something like that to simplify the syntax for object inheritance inheritance works without affecting the built-in Object (http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2006/03/base/). We've done the same thing at my work to create a 'SortableArray' object with a "sortByField" method that inherits from the built in Array, but doesn't affect its behavior in any way.
It's always been basic good coding practice to make sure your code doesn't affect code outside of the file/library/etc. that you are working on. Obviously this is not entirely possible in JavaScript because of the lack of namespaces, but you can (and, IMO at least, should) avoid any side affects outside of the Objects that you declare in your file/library/etc.
five years ago all my server-side processing was in Perl. Now, the vast majority of it is in PHP.
That's a different story. In the time that I'v been doing web development, I've used perl, pl/sql (as a server side programming language), mod_perl, php, cold_fusion, asp, and now am starting to use asp.net. But in all that time, it has always been on JavaScript on the client side, and probably will continue to be for the forseeable future. Obviously the libraries evolve with time- the code I use (and write) today looks significantly different than 3 years ago, or even 1 year ago. Not all of it is that valuable- I'm sure all of these frameworks probably include some sort of serialization routines, and there's nothing special about ours(*)- but some of it is. As I said, I would gladly use any of these frameworks if they could peacefully exist along side other code, but so far I haven't found one.
I realize that Prototype is about more than just AJAX. And no, I haven't looked at it that closely. I looked at it long enough to determine that it would not play nicely with our existing code, and didn't replace enough of our existing functionality to seriously consider. I have looked a little more closely at ATLAS, and I found a 57kB runtime library that basically included an XmlHttpRequest wrapper, a serializer, and a lot of syntactic sugar to make JavaScript look more like C#. No thanks. For just just under 30k, I can get the XmlHttpRequest wrapper, serializer and a whole lot of other code that actually makes my job easier, instead of just making my code a little prettier.
But please, don't assume your intransigence is indicative of some flaw in the framework.
The flaw in the framework is that in the course of making their improvements, they broke some fundamental parts of the language. Obviously many people are willing to overlook that flaw, but it is a flaw, nonetheless.
(*) Well, it doesn't require any external libraries, and it doesn't interfere with any other code. To me that certainly doesn't seem like anything special, but apparently it's not...
The only flash sites I have seen that are not totally annoying and worthless are from car manufacturers, they have huge budgets to spend on design and development of their sites...
You're kidding, right? Car manufacturers are the worst. If you're going to require flash for a site, the least you can do is put the whole thing in one flash applet so i only have to hit the "Click to play" button once, instead of scattering a half dozen of them all over the page. Half the time I end up getting sick of it by the third page and decide to try and find the information elsewhere.
Prototype may be stable, but it is also unusable, at least where I work. It appears to be a great library, and they've implemented a lot of things definitely lacking in the JavaScript language, but unfortunately they did it by mangling the language's base objects, so a lot of our existing code will break if we try to use Prototype. ATLAS is even worse. And while they've both implemented a lot of neat things, neither offers anything remotely compelling enough to consider giving up our existing collection of libraries. I haven't looked at any of the others yet- Google is definitely out because it's not even JavaScript. It would be nice to evaluate some of the others sometime, but I'm not in a hurry- my experience thus far has led me to believe that I am unlikely to find anything that would provide significant benefits without breaking an unacceptable amount of existing code.
My impression so far is that these frameworks are great stuff for people who are just jumping onto the AJAX bandwagon, and can do everything from the ground up using the conventions of these toolkits, but I would think that anyone who's been doing non-trivial JavaScript for at least the last three years probably already has a codebase that they are not going to want to give up.
Who wants to code Javascript when you can use Swing?
Isn't that a bit like saying "Who wants to get hit by a bicycle when you can get run over by an SUV?"
I was referring to ATLAS specifically, not AJAX in general. Almost all of my work is AJAX-style development, (although with libraries that my company has been developing in-house over the last 3+ years) so I know that it is certainly possible to create lightweight JavaScript libraries.
ATLAS however, seems to offer very little to justify it's hefty download size. I misspoke in my original post- it's more like 55kB, but that's still ridiculously heavy for what seems to be mainly a wrapper for using xmlHttpRequest to make SOAP requests to a web service and hand the result to a JavaScript callback function, and breaks a whole lot of things in the process.
A sysadmin I worked with long ago used to be fond of using the phrase "a solution in search of a problem", which seems to me to sum up ATLAS quite nicely.
6. Gasp at your bandwidth bills when you realize that you had to include an 84k JS file for a simple "hello world" application.
7. Spend hours trying to figure out why any custom script files you want to include in your head element once you try to do something non-trivial mysteriously aren't working.
WASD? The keys aren't even lined up properly!
The real problem is that they're under the wrong fingers. Why so many games default to WASD instead of ESDF is beyond me. At least most of them are configurable. The few I've found that aren't are incredibly annoying.
That said, I do need to get a better desk chair and a footrest under my desk at home so that i can kick back and play games properly, or maybe scare up a copy of windows that will work on my laptop.
Um, technically, every site built these days using XHTML 1.1 and CSS2 won't work at all in IE6 (or IE7 for that matter) because neither recognizes the (required) application/xml+xhtml content-type.
MySQL 5 is out aswell. It's a full blown DB and comes with tons of free x-platform admin and design tools that make building the outline of a large webapp a walk in the park and thus scares the living daylights out of Oracle and IBM.
That may be, but when they release MySQL 12, I still won't be using it if it's still written by the same developers that claimed for years that adding referential integrity to a database just slows it down and programmers should be handling that in their application code, implemented "transactions without atomicity", insert statements that return the value of the "inserted" ID whether the insert succeeeded or not, and have otherwise generally demonstrated for at least the last 8 years that they know nothing at all about designing a reliable relational database. (Or maybe I'm just scarred for life from having to truncate corrupted tables once a week the last time I was responsible for maintaining a MySQL database.)
PHP is a decent platform on the other hand (when combined with a competent database), although I find the language itsef to be rather quirky. Maybe they've improved this in PHP5, which I haven't used very much. Personally, I prefer JavaScript as a server side scripting language, but the only platform I know that has that as an option is ASP. It would be nice if PHP would go the ASP route as far as separating out the scripting language from the rest of the platform. Then you could still use PHP's strengths but not be tied to one language. For example, people who like Ruby but just don't get the hype behind Ruby on Rails could still have a really great web development platform.
Who doesn't charge their rent on a credit card?
And why not? I know people who pay their mortgage payment on a credit card (and I probably would if my bank allowed it), and my wife paid most of her college tuition on her Discover card. 1% cash back goes a long ways when you're turning over $1000 on the card every month.
The more important lesson is to make sure you pay it off every month.
If you had a decent bank, you woudn't be paying ATM fees...
I'm more curious how he managed to load six tabs in IE 6.
That equation only has any meaning because of the meaning that man has chosen to assign to pi and e (and for that matter 1).