nice to see that there are at least a few people around here who know what they're talking about on this subject. kind of hard to find a sane voice around here once somebody mentions javascript.
what i don't understand is how many people act like they've never seen or heard of this before, and how it's some amazing new paradigm. IE 6.0 is 4 years old. all of the major mechanisms that are commonly used to perform asynchronous IO in webpages have been around more or less unchanged since before then. so why this big burst of interest now? what caused the web development world at large to suddenly wake up to this now? was it really gmail? sure it was probably the most popular use of 'ajax' technology, but it was hardly the first or the most impressive.
There was "one programming language" for web scripting back when MS had 95+% of the browser market share, and FF and Moz decided to go on a jihad instead of realizing that the specifics of the standard aren't that important and a de-facto standard is good enough for most people.
ahhh... right. so should they have followed the de facto standard as implemented in IE 5.0, IE 5.5 or IE 6.0? And how do they verify that they are compatible with whichever defacto standard they chose without visiting every site that uses the de facto standard in some way?
To me "7th edition" says two things. Purposeful re-write and "sloppy editors".
From what I remember of my college textbooks, later editions of textbooks in fields that are relatively static (e.g. calculus) mostly involved updating problems, particularly word problems. after all it probably makes the material a little more accessible if the examples in the book are talking about the difference in read speed at the edge of a cd versus the center, as opposed to talking about the start and the end of an eight track tape.
Typically nth editions don't contain much substantial difference from (n-1)th editions. if the book really were a purposeful rewrite, it would probably start over at the 1st edition.
Of course that is not to say constant minor revisions of the textbook aren't a pain- if nothing else, it significantly depresses the value of used book sales...
library officials discovered that many patrons logged onto library computers using library cards and passwords of friends or relatives. solution: don't require a library card to acess the computers.
That realization, coupled with a new library policy that allows parents to install automatic Internet filters on their children's accounts, prompted the search for better computer security. solution: start expecting parents to raise their own children instead of making it (in this case) the library's responsibiliy.
Finally, anyone who is really interested in doing something criminal will just subvert the system. It's not like it's particularly difficult to spoof a fingerprint scanner. Remember the stories about doing it with Jello? Also, remember the fingerprint scanner that could be defeated by blowing on it?
More likely, rather than try to do funky tricks to fool a system that is being supervised by a librarian, they'll just go to one of the thousands of libraries in this country that just lets you walk right in and start using a computer, no questions asked.
If someone goes to my library, they can just walk up to the computer and start using without ever telling anyone who they are. to me, using your fingerprint to prove you are who you say you are isn't so much of an issue as why in the world they care who you are in the first place. it doesn't matter what measures they go through to try and protect peoples fingerprints, the best way to insure security in privacy related matters is to not ever store data that you don't need.
If my car stalls on the highway and I lose power steering and/or brakes, there's a big problem.
how is this a problem? there is still a mechanical system there that will still work just fine, although with a little more effort. just about any car will lost at least some if not all of it's power steering/braking capability when the engine stalls...
if nothing else, virtualization allows people who don't need a full server a cheaper option. I have s virtual server through the site mentioned in the gp, which serves as a web server, name server, mail server among other things. if i ran all of the services i run on that virtual server on a regular colocation provider, i would pay three times as much money or more, and would use only a fraction of the hardware resources i was paying for. by getting an account on a virtual server, i can save money by sharing the cost of the server with others.
sure it is, depending on your definition of "withstand". if you write your code to gracefully handle cases where the elements it is looking for aren't found and don't rely too heavily on the ordering of elements within the page, then it should continue to work in all but the most extreme modifications.
now, obviously if they've removed or sufficiently mangled the object you are trying to manipulate, the affect your code is attempting to achieve will no longer be possible. Now, if by "withstand" you mean that the intended affect happens no matter what arbitrary modifications have been made, then you are correct- after all, you can't animate an object that is no longer present on the page. but you can still gracefully handle that case by checking for the error, and informing the user that external javascripts are causing the page to not work properly, which will notify the user that it is greasemonkey (or something similar) and not your web page that is causing the problem, and it will do so without having to go through strange contortions to try and disable all custom client scripts.
interesting, i hadn't seen any "CP Trolls" at all until i got to your comment. Which makes it look to me like you were "trolling for trolls", so to speak...
Technology in industry has come to a point (heck, a while ago) that can produce never-dull razors, lifetime long light bulbs and lifetime appliances (has anyone had a refridgerator/washer/drier last more than 5, 10 years nowadays?) but we see none of these. Why?
i would say it's because there's not much demand for them. there are lightbulbs available that last, while not a lifetime, at least 5 years or more, but most people still buy 30-50 cent incandescent lightbulbs. likewise, while a razor that never dulls would be neat, most people (including me) would never buy it because it would cost as much as a several years supply of regular razors.
in the cases where there is demand for long lasting products, they do exist. in fact, in my experience home applicances is a good example of where this is true. my parents are still using a refrigerator that is over 10 years old and a washer and drier that are about 15 years old. my wife and i just bought a house which came with the washer and drier that the previous owner bought when he moved in here in the early eighties. in fact, i can't think of a person i know who has had a major home appliance fail with less than 10-15 years under its belt.
home electronics, on the other hand, seems to be a good example of where the opposite is true. while you can buy long lasting equipment, you have to be willing to put in a little research, and spend a little extra money. most people aren't, though. many people have decided that technology moves too fast, and they buy their home electronics as a sort of fashion accessory rather than as a utility item. hence, there is little demand for durable, high quality eletronics anymore, and most manufacturers now focus on fancy looking but cheaply made systems. my parents vcr is about as ugly as you could imagine, but they've had it for almost 20 years. i would be surprised if the dvd player i just bought, which my wife refered to as sexy (compared to most of my other big bulky stereo equipment), lasts for three years.
computer software manufacturers have successfully lowered the expectations of most users to the point that there is no demand for quality software. most users believe that computers are by nature unpredictable, and therefore unstable and virus prone. it's become something that is assumed, just like the blinking 12:00 on vcr's of the past. and because this is just the way computers are, there is little demand from the general public for quality software, and high demand for tools that should never have been needed in the first place (e.g. antivirus, anti-spyware)
A lot of web sites use Javascript that makes assumptions about the structure of the page. By changing the structure of the page, you're going to potentially break pages that dynamically change themselves.
then blame the person who wrote poor javascript code, rather than the people who have found this to be a useful extension.
i just leave the num lock off. i find that the number of times i actually use the numeric keypad is so small that i don't mind hitting numlock to turn it on for the rare occasions that i need it.
it has the added bonus or really confusing people who try to use my computer, because they think the keypad is broken.
As a Java developer for the past 7 years, can someone remind me as to how Java will benefit from being open source?
As I've never been a Java developer and most likely never will be, I don't much care what license sun distributes the java development tools under. However, as a person who occasionally uses applications developed in java, it would be nice if there was at least a freely redistrbutable if not open source runtime, so that it wouldn't be such a pain as an end user.
Re:I was under the impression...
on
Open source Java?
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· Score: 4, Informative
blackdown is a community project, but it is not open source, and never has been. blackdown is the original port of the sun jdk source code to linux (and *BSD?), and the source code and binaries are licenced under exactly the same terms as sun's jdk, (which, iirc, essentially *is* blackdown.) in short, binaries are not freely redistributable, and you are severely limited in what you can do with the source code.
Even with one, why use it? Why use a copy if you can have the original? Oh, because it is OSS?
I don't care that much if it's oss, but it would be nice to at least have a jdk/jre that is freely redistributable, so that i could install it on freebsd without having to jump through so many hoops. while i prefer open source to proprietary software when possible, i don't have an issue with using proprietary software when it gets the job done better. java in it's current state is a pain to use on most non-linux open source operating systems and that in itself is enough for me to wish for a more open java implementation.
Firefox has managed to take ~7% of the market in a short period of time from a massively well-funded competitor on an ultra, ultra, ultra shoestring budget.
not really, if you think of IE as the competition and not microsoft. IE hasn't received any meaningful updates in over 4 years. when IE 6.0 was released, mozilla hadn't even reached 1.0 yet, much less firefox (which, if it even existed at the time, was still known as phoenix and was barely usable) if microsoft had bothered to put any money at all into IE development in the last 4 years FireFox wouldn't have been able to make even the barely noticeable dent that it has made.
of course microsoft has woken up to the fact that they have been getting (relatively speaking) clobbered on the browser front lately, and i suspect that the next version of ie will slow firefox's growth to near 0, if not regaining some of the ground that it has lost lately.
Of course, in order for any of this progress to happen, you're going to have to get people comfy with having a radioactive source a few inches away from their crotch. It might have all the shielding in the world, but it's still going to make a lot of people nervous.
Then don't call it a nuclear power source. When most people think nuclear, they are thinking nuclear fission, a la chernobyl and three mile island. Just call it a "betavoltaic power source". Tell people it's similar to solar cell technology, just skip the 'N' word. If they still ask where the power is from, tell them it comes from natural decay of hydrogen atoms, the same thing that makes the hands on their watch glow.
Besides, if I remember corrctly, beta particles can be stopped by a sheet of aluminum foil. When most people think of radiation shielding, they are thinking af gamma rays, which require much more effort to stop.
Of course, Apple hasn't really gotten into any significant agreement with the KDE people either. People who have been paying attention may have noticed the KDE developers saying that although Apple hasn't cooperated with them as much as the might have liked, they are within their rights to do that.
For all that has been said about a feud between KDE and Apple, the real feud is between the KDE developers and the users and slashbots who think that any new features in Safari should be in KDE too, and if they aren't it's because the KDE developers are slow, lazy, whatever.
It's worth noting that (from what I've heard, at least) the other open source projects that apple has used code from haven't gotten back much more in the way of useful contributions than the KDE team has.
i installed windows xp on my dad's p3 450 last fall. you had to wait a little while for it to boot up, but with enough memory, it ran fine once it was up. unfortunately, he uses voice recognition software that wouldn't run on less than a 500MHz CPU, so he upgraded it to a p3 700. (and i'm still amazed he was able to do that on his own...)
If you write software that's better than any of you rcompetitors, you don't have to lock in your customers- they'll stay with you gladly. of course, that means spending your money on engineers and developers, rather than marketers and sales people, but apparently that's not popular among VC's either.
And really, since you bring it up, if you're venture funded, the only "end" is sale of the company or ipo. if you make a profit, they ask you why you didn't use the money you made to grow your business. it's pretty much expected by vc's that you'll carry a big line of credit and run your business at a loss (or if not, as close to zero as possible) because that's how you grow quickly.
Wouldn't your Driver's Ed teacher (aka the basketball coach) be much happier if he could verify your skills in one of these, rather than from the passenger seat with nothing but a second brake pedal between him and being pwnx0rd by a bridge abutment?
The driver's ed teacher at my high school didn't even have a second brake pedal- he used an ordinary car. I can't imagine the balls it must have taken to do that. Fortunately, I took driver's ed elsewhere.
I expected a bit better. The Prius only gets about 6mpg more than my Corolla, which cost about $5000 less.
My wife and I looked at buying a Prius a year ago, but foud out thaat there was a year or more waiting list at pretty mcuh every dealer within driving distance. A few places offered us used ('91 or '92) Priuses for at or near their original sticker prices, which we thought was just insane...
We couldn't afford to wait, so we bought the Corolla instead. We've put 16,000 miles on it in the year we've had it, and between the gas that we could have saved by buying the Prius and the rapidly vanishing tax deduction for buying an alternative fuel vehicle, I still don't think we will make back the money any time soon that we saved by going with a car that was $5000 cheaper for similar options.
the bugs *are* fixed in a much shorter timeframe because the coders DO care about their product.
I'd like to believe this, but as much as i like firefox and appreciate the work that the mozilla foundation has done, the simple fact is that there are significant bugs that have been open for years because no one has cared enough to fix them.
see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9458 for a major CSS 2.1 conformance isue that has been open since 1999. there are plenty of others too. it seems that whenever the mozilla guys decide they have to put out a release, they just grab all of the bugs marked as lockers and reassign them to the next release. i've seen bugs that have been marked as "blockers" for 3 or four consecutive releases, and sometimes they just close them silenty after a few releases without ever really fixing them...
Slashdot Mirror
nice to see that there are at least a few people around here who know what they're talking about on this subject. kind of hard to find a sane voice around here once somebody mentions javascript.
what i don't understand is how many people act like they've never seen or heard of this before, and how it's some amazing new paradigm. IE 6.0 is 4 years old. all of the major mechanisms that are commonly used to perform asynchronous IO in webpages have been around more or less unchanged since before then. so why this big burst of interest now? what caused the web development world at large to suddenly wake up to this now? was it really gmail? sure it was probably the most popular use of 'ajax' technology, but it was hardly the first or the most impressive.
There was "one programming language" for web scripting back when MS had 95+% of the browser market share, and FF and Moz decided to go on a jihad instead of realizing that the specifics of the standard aren't that important and a de-facto standard is good enough for most people.
ahhh... right. so should they have followed the de facto standard as implemented in IE 5.0, IE 5.5 or IE 6.0? And how do they verify that they are compatible with whichever defacto standard they chose without visiting every site that uses the de facto standard in some way?
To me "7th edition" says two things. Purposeful re-write and "sloppy editors".
From what I remember of my college textbooks, later editions of textbooks in fields that are relatively static (e.g. calculus) mostly involved updating problems, particularly word problems. after all it probably makes the material a little more accessible if the examples in the book are talking about the difference in read speed at the edge of a cd versus the center, as opposed to talking about the start and the end of an eight track tape.
Typically nth editions don't contain much substantial difference from (n-1)th editions. if the book really were a purposeful rewrite, it would probably start over at the 1st edition.
Of course that is not to say constant minor revisions of the textbook aren't a pain- if nothing else, it significantly depresses the value of used book sales...
library officials discovered that many patrons logged onto library computers using library cards and passwords of friends or relatives.
solution:
don't require a library card to acess the computers.
That realization, coupled with a new library policy that allows parents to install automatic Internet filters on their children's accounts, prompted the search for better computer security.
solution:
start expecting parents to raise their own children instead of making it (in this case) the library's responsibiliy.
Finally, anyone who is really interested in doing something criminal will just subvert the system. It's not like it's particularly difficult to spoof a fingerprint scanner. Remember the stories about doing it with Jello? Also, remember the fingerprint scanner that could be defeated by blowing on it?
More likely, rather than try to do funky tricks to fool a system that is being supervised by a librarian, they'll just go to one of the thousands of libraries in this country that just lets you walk right in and start using a computer, no questions asked.
If someone goes to my library, they can just walk up to the computer and start using without ever telling anyone who they are. to me, using your fingerprint to prove you are who you say you are isn't so much of an issue as why in the world they care who you are in the first place. it doesn't matter what measures they go through to try and protect peoples fingerprints, the best way to insure security in privacy related matters is to not ever store data that you don't need.
Tabbed browsing is irritating because it throws off window management.
If you don't like them, you're not forced to use them. in it's default configuration, neither mozilla or firefox will ever open a window in a new tab.
meanwhile those of us who like them can go ahead and get our work done.
If my car stalls on the highway and I lose power steering and/or brakes, there's a big problem.
how is this a problem? there is still a mechanical system there that will still work just fine, although with a little more effort. just about any car will lost at least some if not all of it's power steering/braking capability when the engine stalls...
if nothing else, virtualization allows people who don't need a full server a cheaper option. I have s virtual server through the site mentioned in the gp, which serves as a web server, name server, mail server among other things. if i ran all of the services i run on that virtual server on a regular colocation provider, i would pay three times as much money or more, and would use only a fraction of the hardware resources i was paying for. by getting an account on a virtual server, i can save money by sharing the cost of the server with others.
sure it is, depending on your definition of "withstand". if you write your code to gracefully handle cases where the elements it is looking for aren't found and don't rely too heavily on the ordering of elements within the page, then it should continue to work in all but the most extreme modifications.
now, obviously if they've removed or sufficiently mangled the object you are trying to manipulate, the affect your code is attempting to achieve will no longer be possible. Now, if by "withstand" you mean that the intended affect happens no matter what arbitrary modifications have been made, then you are correct- after all, you can't animate an object that is no longer present on the page. but you can still gracefully handle that case by checking for the error, and informing the user that external javascripts are causing the page to not work properly, which will notify the user that it is greasemonkey (or something similar) and not your web page that is causing the problem, and it will do so without having to go through strange contortions to try and disable all custom client scripts.
interesting, i hadn't seen any "CP Trolls" at all until i got to your comment. Which makes it look to me like you were "trolling for trolls", so to speak...
Technology in industry has come to a point (heck, a while ago) that can produce never-dull razors, lifetime long light bulbs and lifetime appliances (has anyone had a refridgerator/washer/drier last more than 5, 10 years nowadays?) but we see none of these. Why?
i would say it's because there's not much demand for them. there are lightbulbs available that last, while not a lifetime, at least 5 years or more, but most people still buy 30-50 cent incandescent lightbulbs. likewise, while a razor that never dulls would be neat, most people (including me) would never buy it because it would cost as much as a several years supply of regular razors.
in the cases where there is demand for long lasting products, they do exist. in fact, in my experience home applicances is a good example of where this is true. my parents are still using a refrigerator that is over 10 years old and a washer and drier that are about 15 years old. my wife and i just bought a house which came with the washer and drier that the previous owner bought when he moved in here in the early eighties. in fact, i can't think of a person i know who has had a major home appliance fail with less than 10-15 years under its belt.
home electronics, on the other hand, seems to be a good example of where the opposite is true. while you can buy long lasting equipment, you have to be willing to put in a little research, and spend a little extra money. most people aren't, though. many people have decided that technology moves too fast, and they buy their home electronics as a sort of fashion accessory rather than as a utility item. hence, there is little demand for durable, high quality eletronics anymore, and most manufacturers now focus on fancy looking but cheaply made systems. my parents vcr is about as ugly as you could imagine, but they've had it for almost 20 years. i would be surprised if the dvd player i just bought, which my wife refered to as sexy (compared to most of my other big bulky stereo equipment), lasts for three years.
computer software manufacturers have successfully lowered the expectations of most users to the point that there is no demand for quality software. most users believe that computers are by nature unpredictable, and therefore unstable and virus prone. it's become something that is assumed, just like the blinking 12:00 on vcr's of the past. and because this is just the way computers are, there is little demand from the general public for quality software, and high demand for tools that should never have been needed in the first place (e.g. antivirus, anti-spyware)
A lot of web sites use Javascript that makes assumptions about the structure of the page. By changing the structure of the page, you're going to potentially break pages that dynamically change themselves.
then blame the person who wrote poor javascript code, rather than the people who have found this to be a useful extension.
i just leave the num lock off. i find that the number of times i actually use the numeric keypad is so small that i don't mind hitting numlock to turn it on for the rare occasions that i need it.
it has the added bonus or really confusing people who try to use my computer, because they think the keypad is broken.
As a Java developer for the past 7 years, can someone remind me as to how Java will benefit from being open source?
As I've never been a Java developer and most likely never will be, I don't much care what license sun distributes the java development tools under. However, as a person who occasionally uses applications developed in java, it would be nice if there was at least a freely redistrbutable if not open source runtime, so that it wouldn't be such a pain as an end user.
blackdown is a community project, but it is not open source, and never has been. blackdown is the original port of the sun jdk source code to linux (and *BSD?), and the source code and binaries are licenced under exactly the same terms as sun's jdk, (which, iirc, essentially *is* blackdown.) in short, binaries are not freely redistributable, and you are severely limited in what you can do with the source code.
Even with one, why use it? Why use a copy if you can have the original? Oh, because it is OSS?
I don't care that much if it's oss, but it would be nice to at least have a jdk/jre that is freely redistributable, so that i could install it on freebsd without having to jump through so many hoops. while i prefer open source to proprietary software when possible, i don't have an issue with using proprietary software when it gets the job done better. java in it's current state is a pain to use on most non-linux open source operating systems and that in itself is enough for me to wish for a more open java implementation.
Firefox has managed to take ~7% of the market in a short period of time from a massively well-funded competitor on an ultra, ultra, ultra shoestring budget.
not really, if you think of IE as the competition and not microsoft. IE hasn't received any meaningful updates in over 4 years. when IE 6.0 was released, mozilla hadn't even reached 1.0 yet, much less firefox (which, if it even existed at the time, was still known as phoenix and was barely usable) if microsoft had bothered to put any money at all into IE development in the last 4 years FireFox wouldn't have been able to make even the barely noticeable dent that it has made.
of course microsoft has woken up to the fact that they have been getting (relatively speaking) clobbered on the browser front lately, and i suspect that the next version of ie will slow firefox's growth to near 0, if not regaining some of the ground that it has lost lately.
Of course, in order for any of this progress to happen, you're going to have to get people comfy with having a radioactive source a few inches away from their crotch. It might have all the shielding in the world, but it's still going to make a lot of people nervous.
Then don't call it a nuclear power source. When most people think nuclear, they are thinking nuclear fission, a la chernobyl and three mile island. Just call it a "betavoltaic power source". Tell people it's similar to solar cell technology, just skip the 'N' word. If they still ask where the power is from, tell them it comes from natural decay of hydrogen atoms, the same thing that makes the hands on their watch glow.
Besides, if I remember corrctly, beta particles can be stopped by a sheet of aluminum foil. When most people think of radiation shielding, they are thinking af gamma rays, which require much more effort to stop.
Of course, Apple hasn't really gotten into any significant agreement with the KDE people either. People who have been paying attention may have noticed the KDE developers saying that although Apple hasn't cooperated with them as much as the might have liked, they are within their rights to do that.
For all that has been said about a feud between KDE and Apple, the real feud is between the KDE developers and the users and slashbots who think that any new features in Safari should be in KDE too, and if they aren't it's because the KDE developers are slow, lazy, whatever.
It's worth noting that (from what I've heard, at least) the other open source projects that apple has used code from haven't gotten back much more in the way of useful contributions than the KDE team has.
i installed windows xp on my dad's p3 450 last fall. you had to wait a little while for it to boot up, but with enough memory, it ran fine once it was up. unfortunately, he uses voice recognition software that wouldn't run on less than a 500MHz CPU, so he upgraded it to a p3 700. (and i'm still amazed he was able to do that on his own...)
If you write software that's better than any of you rcompetitors, you don't have to lock in your customers- they'll stay with you gladly. of course, that means spending your money on engineers and developers, rather than marketers and sales people, but apparently that's not popular among VC's either.
And really, since you bring it up, if you're venture funded, the only "end" is sale of the company or ipo. if you make a profit, they ask you why you didn't use the money you made to grow your business. it's pretty much expected by vc's that you'll carry a big line of credit and run your business at a loss (or if not, as close to zero as possible) because that's how you grow quickly.
Wouldn't your Driver's Ed teacher (aka the basketball coach) be much happier if he could verify your skills in one of these, rather than from the passenger seat with nothing but a second brake pedal between him and being pwnx0rd by a bridge abutment?
The driver's ed teacher at my high school didn't even have a second brake pedal- he used an ordinary car. I can't imagine the balls it must have taken to do that. Fortunately, I took driver's ed elsewhere.
I expected a bit better. The Prius only gets about 6mpg more than my Corolla, which cost about $5000 less.
My wife and I looked at buying a Prius a year ago, but foud out thaat there was a year or more waiting list at pretty mcuh every dealer within driving distance. A few places offered us used ('91 or '92) Priuses for at or near their original sticker prices, which we thought was just insane...
We couldn't afford to wait, so we bought the Corolla instead. We've put 16,000 miles on it in the year we've had it, and between the gas that we could have saved by buying the Prius and the rapidly vanishing tax deduction for buying an alternative fuel vehicle, I still don't think we will make back the money any time soon that we saved by going with a car that was $5000 cheaper for similar options.
the bugs *are* fixed in a much shorter timeframe because the coders DO care about their product.
I'd like to believe this, but as much as i like firefox and appreciate the work that the mozilla foundation has done, the simple fact is that there are significant bugs that have been open for years because no one has cared enough to fix them.
see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9458 for a major CSS 2.1 conformance isue that has been open since 1999. there are plenty of others too. it seems that whenever the mozilla guys decide they have to put out a release, they just grab all of the bugs marked as lockers and reassign them to the next release. i've seen bugs that have been marked as "blockers" for 3 or four consecutive releases, and sometimes they just close them silenty after a few releases without ever really fixing them...