However, you're simplifying the relationship between GIF and PNG
Yes, I did simplify the relationship. There is quite a history behind both formats. I will not get into preferences though since I use both and think they are both great.
This is completely incorrect, as many binary drivers, patent-encumbered applications, and even closed applications are distributed with Linux.
There is no patent-encumbered technology in Linux since that would contradict the purpose of the GPL license. Are you talking about Linux distros? I am aware of patented technology in these. NVidia and ATI drivers are good examples of binary installs. I have yet to see these incorporated into any distro though. Do you know of one?
PNG was developed not because it was impossible to put GIF support in Linux, but because it was feared that Compuserve (which discovered it held a patent on one of the processes used in GIF compression / decompression) would abuse it's power on all platforms.
Actually it was the LZW algorithm in GIF that was the problem. Unisys owned the patent on this technology and in 1994 started demanding royalities. And I don't believe its an abuse of one's power to require payment of royalities. I'm sure others will see differently though and software patents are sometimes rather stupid.
Nice try. ActiveX is nothing more than simple COM. It is not very difficult to use Java or XPCOM to communicate to ActiveX controls, and vice versa. Try again.
Okay, I will make it easy for you. Why does Firefox and OpenOffice not use ActiveX? Heres why:
(1) It does not work cross-platform. Both Firefox and OpenOffice work on platforms other than Windows. Both platforms keep this compatibility by not introducin technology that could possibly limit this capability.
(2) It is proprietary. You may be confused on what this means. Basically, the technology is owned by Microsoft. This very same reason is why PNG exists despite the existance of GIFs. GIF technology was proprietary and, thus, could not be placed into a product that had a open source license (Linux).
(3) Firefox has no need for ActiveX since it has, in my opinion, a better technology with XPCOM. OpenOffice, if I remember, can be extended with Java plugins. Java has built-in security unlike ActiveX. Both XPCOM and Java are cross-platform which goes back to my point #1.
(4) Active X is not very secure. You will hear this time and time again. Microsoft even knows this and turned them off by default in SP2!
Make all the excuses you want, at the end of the day what matters is if the product does what it needs to or not.
As stated in point #3 above both Firefox and OpenOffice support technologies that give them quite a bit of power to get any job done.
I have a pretty good memory and I remember correcting you on these issues before:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144131&thres ho ld=0&commentsort=0&tid=109&mode=thread&cid=1207754 3
Before you go spouting about some guy who would have no job if it werent for ActiveX or some other non-sense drivel, answer this:
What does ActiveX do that XPCOM and Java are incapable of performing?
If you are not able to answer that question, you have no base to stand on.
The speed to parse the XML configuration file is irrelevant. That parsing happens once per servlet context. Only things which happen once per request make a noticeable speed difference.
There is nothing in my post about servlet contexts, when xml is parsed, or how often this is done. The point I was giving was that Xerces is not the quickest parser if speed is a concern. Both Hibernate and Spring both, at some point, read from a XML file or files.
This isn't a language performance comparison.
No, its not. Thats why if you fully read my post you would have read this:
I know this was not your intent (doing language performance comparisons), but that is how your article is being viewed by others.
There are hordes of Slashdotters who viewed the article that way, even though that was not the intent of the author.
He stated that he could have optimized the Java code further, had he cared.
Why even do a comparison than? I can write really crappy C code that can be beaten by optimized Python script. Posting results of a comparison would not be fair and thus shouldnt be done in the first place.
A true performance comparison between languages should not be done with web applications. There is too much code that could be optimized better, frameworks used instead, in various parts that make true comparisons impossible.
Again, language performance comparison was not the intent of the author. Its just being viewed by others as such.
Wow. You can enter "java -version". Nice. Where does it say "Sun JVM"?
Apple ships Java with the machine and updates it via software update
Actually we can go round and round about who created wrote the code for the JVM for Apple computers. It still does not dispell the original argument that the Apple JVM is not the latest (1.5) or that it is slower, which is the point I mentioned in the post. Unless you can find proof on this otherwise.
and I have only one XML config file that tells my software what/where the database is
I am not very familiar with Spring. That is why I stated that I was only guessing that it used XML heavily. I know Hibernate enough to now that it, on the otherhand, uses XML quite a bit. Thanks for the information on Spring.
In this case, a sort of non-trivial web app, RoR seemed to be the best fit.
There are people who see the reverse being true, where Spring+Hibernate are better suited for the non-trivial apps and Ruby on Rails is best for simple CRUD apps. Heres a quote from a comparison recently done between Hibernate and Rails:
If you stick to the simple cases like single tables with a few associations, and you name your tables and columns right, Rails will likely do just fine, but for more complicated object models, Hibernate will be a better choice.
Apple uses Sun's Java class library (1.4.2). The actual virtual machine (JVM) is completely done by Apple and is optimized for OSX. Apple does not (and is not required to) return any modifications to Sun as their virtual machine contains proprietary code owned by Apple. This is why you can not go to Sun's site to download a version of Java that runs on the Mac. You have to go to Apple (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/java/).
From my experience, and those of others, the Mac JVM is one of the slower implementations (I am only comparing IBM's, Sun's, and Apple's here). Much of this, in my opinion, is due to the fact that Apple offers Java more as a feature and probably does not dedicate the same level of commitment to the language as Sun. This is not a bad mark against Apple, since despite being slightly slower it seems to run perfectly on Apple's products.
I was able to read the site but unable to post comments back to the author. I'll drop them here instead to follow up on my prior posting comments:
-----
A few problems with your testing that I could see:
"So, for the sake of total specificity, the following numbers were generated on a 1.5GhZ Mac OSX (10.3.7) PowerBook with a 4200rpm hard drive and 1GB of RAM."
The Java Virtual Machine running on Macs has always been questionable. Its not Sun's implementation and has not been as heavily updated by Apple. First I would start by running your tests on a Windows or Linux box using the Sun JRE 1.5.
"The Java app is running on Jakarta Tomcat v 5.0.28, while the Rails app is running in Lighttp with FastCGI. The setups are standard for each application stack."
As mentioned by a prior poster, Tomcat is only a reference implementation. Its not built for speed. The Ruby setup you used, on the other hand, is. This alone is a major oversight in your testing.
"Number of Methods: Rails: 126 Java: 549"
Having to write 4 times as many methods is a clear indicator that you are using the wrong framworks to get the job done. There are hundreds of frameworks for building web applications between the languages. Spring with Hibernate must not be the right mix.
"Configuration Lines Rails: 113 Java: 1161"
I am guessing you used Xerces for parsing on the Java side. This is bad since Xerces is not a very quick parser and there are plenty of Java XML parsers that are much better suited when speed is concerned. Look at using XPP or Lightning instead. With JAXP (if Hibernate and Spring support it) you will not have to change code to use these in place of Xerces. Also, any time you are comparing a XML parsed document versus and non-XML parsed document the latter will always win. Try using frameworks that do not depend on XML configuration files.
True language performance comparisons should never be done with web applications. There are simply too many variables. I know this was not your intent (doing language performance comparisons), but that is how your article is being viewed by others. People are always itching for a battle between the languages.
Different languages are suited for different tasks better than others. For example, I once had to translate a Perl application to Java for my work. Due to what that Perl code was doing, the finished Java application was several times larger and slower. Perl was better due to the task at hand.
True. Hibernate uses xml heavily. I believe Spring does too. I couldn't get to the site mentioned to check out what he did with these, but I would guess the turtle-speed Xerces xml parser was used with the application launched from the Tomcat (which is only a reference server).
These arguments against Java performance have been used before. Some programmer builds a Java web application with bundled, titan sized frameworks and wonders why their pure code based application in some other language dusted it and has a smaller size. Microsoft did this by comparing a pure.NET Petshop against the Java pet shop which was using Java Beans, several other frameworks, and a questionable setup.
There are better ways of doing programming language comparisons. Web applications with bloated frameworks is not the way.
We didn't have security problems either, but we did have a badly needed ActiveX control.
ActiveX is a nightmare in security terms. Either embedded in a browser or an Office document, it is just bad to use. There are hundreds of sites on the internet that will agree with that view. There are much better ways of getting work done without the worry.
"the only way for OpenOffice to work 100% of the time is if your customers to all use OpenOffice."
Red flag.
Red flag? Hello! You can't get 100% in Microsoft Office using company even if all the employees are using Microsoft Office. The incompatibilities between the versions of Word, Excel, etc is amazing. And even if you get everyone in your office using the same version you still have your customers to deal with who probably are not at the same version. Unlike Microsoft document formats, OpenOffice was smart and went with using XML. I'm not a big fan of XML, but it really makes sense here.
I couldn't imagine holding a company up to shoehorn the wrong software into the workflow.
You have never really gave a valid reason why OpenOffice is the "wrong" software unless you believe that its lack in support of ActiveX is an issue to businesses.
I was really clear that the problems we had with OO were not the point of my post.
What really was the point of your post? That it didnt work at a company you worked at several years ago since that company was using an ActiveX control in Office documents?
Despite that, somebody has to sweep on in and tell me about how my company deserved what it got or whatever.
Im curious: what did your company get?
I just hope the development community isn't as detached from business reality.
Its not. We are listening. Is it your business need that you believe OO needs to support ActiveX?
Otherwise forget about MS's monopoly getting broken.
The real magic behind OSS is that if you don't like something: change it. The codes all there. If your not a programmer you can participate by helping write documents, post bugs, and submit your ideas to the mailing lists. Those are just as important as writing the code, in my view anyways.
For our particular purposes, we needed ActiveX support.
For office documents thats just plain scary. Our company installed a email filter that would prevent documents from being communicated if they included these. Security has been none the better.
We had customers that would send us docs that, surprise surprise, weren't properly opened.
OpenOffice does an okay job at converting MS Office documents to its format. Not perfect though. The only way for OpenOffice to work 100% of the time is if your customers to all use OpenOffice. Thats some times hard to do depending on the companies position with its customers.
One employee had gotten rather good at using VB with Excel. He wasn't thrilled when he got OO. Etc.
Thats too bad for him. Guess he will have to learn new skills. I couldn't imagine holding a company up because of a single employee's limited skill set.
Instead, my point is that at the end of the day, productivity is king.
But as a manager you would know that money comes first. Productivity can be purchased with money saved.
I had to read in to this and make sure it wasnt a joke. I double checked the date to make sure it wasnt April Fools Day. Apparently, its only Fools Day. Some girl/guy named Tom Coyote posted some non-browser-biased comments as such:
[ 09:48:50 ] [ @Coyote` ] I am not saying anything about moz, I am saying it is a possibility that an alternate browser can let things bypass to IE and therefore cause problems [ 09:49:44 ] [ @Coyote` ] and by them bypassing to IE, IE's protections can be bypassed that normally wouldn't if IE was in use instead of the alternate
Can you tell how non-browser-biased this guy is? Coyote's an idiot twerp who has his own "Theory" that some how conflicts with reason, logic, and the definition of what a theory is all at the same time.
Tom, theres like a hundred different ways to infect some ones computer if they never read the warning messages on the screen. If you want, I'll write one for you to try out on your computer. You can call it a Proof Of Concept That Your a Tard For Clicking Yes.
Of course, this means that in the eyes of the financial analysts, India is not as lucrative as China. But, I am proud of the progress that my country is making. At least, we don't have to sweep unpleasant facts under the carpet.
India needs to be more like China. If you have something that is unpleasant, shoot it or run it down with a tank. Keeps it from spreading.
Seriously, glad India is progressing BUT I have a sad feeling China will crush the growing Indian market when they push their wealth limited, unwashed masses of highly educated workers to the world scene.
I think that Jack Thompson does this for his own personal fame rather than for the best interests of his client. If I were that teen, I would dump Jack Thompson NOW.
Worse than that. What if Microsoft bundles this in to the next version of Windows or IE7? I think Lavasoft, SpyBot, and the rest should get their lawyers ready for another round of "When Monopolies Attack".
You can also bet that Microsoft will claim that removing it will make the OS stop functioning, etc.
And, one this note: anti-virus companies are next. Microsoft will probably wrap this in to Longhorn also.
You have three items. You decide to remove one. When you hit submit you go to a page that tells you that you removed the item from your cart. You hit the back button.
Oh no! The item is still in the cart! But you just deleted it a second ago didnt you? Sure you did, its just that the page, which contained the item you removed, was cached by Opera so you are seeing the OLD shopping cart.
When you really think of it, thats most shopping sites on the internet.
If you look at the hopeful featureset for Firefox 2, you'll notice they want to add caching just like Opera.
No, its not. Firefox has always had page caching. Hell, Internet Exploder has had it for years. Firefox is based on a community effort to follow the standards when it comes to page caching. But to not check if the page has been updated is a bug in Opera. Period. You can say "Ive saved like 10 trillion hours using Opera" all you want (I have no idea why Opera users advertise they keep active records of the time they are saving using a web browser... wierd). Its non-standard way of doing things is making Opera just more obscure and less supported.
My work (an anonymous fortune 100) received 1 solitary call from a user on our portal about problems they were having with Opera. After doing statistics last year we knew this was the only person amongst the unamed masses who visit the site regularly who was not using IE, Gecko renderer, or Safari. Our web designer just smiled, talked to the person kindly, and told them to use a different browser. IMHO, thats just sound advice.
With Opera, the fat lady is singing....loudly. Start listening.
The best best best part about Opera is that it doesn't check with the server when you hit the back button!!!
This is good and really bad at the same time. Sure, generally the prior page is the same. But what if its not? Most of today's web technology is based on dynamic page content. This means that the prior page may be different than what it was a second ago. With web applications, Opera's functionality you describe it flawed. IE, Firefox, and the rest of the browsers know this and force the browsers to recheck. That is not a "bug" in their design but rather a required feature. Opera's special "feature" is more of a bug actually and causes hardship on web pages designers to handle its non-standard way of performing such a simple function.
Um, did you watch a different Battlestar Galatica? I watched all the episodes and Im left wondering where you came up with that. To be fair for those who havent watched the show I will excuse myself from devulging on the true ending to the season.
I was actually quite hopefully that Microsoft would open the format. As a developer, a completely open format would have been wonderful. This is sad news. Not surprised, just upset.
You can't even buy their hardware without their OS on it.
Thats true. But whats your point? Who is arguing that you need to have computer sans an OS? I think the apple heads are just pointing out that XP costs approx $180 and the new, and I dare say pretty cool, Mac-mini is going for $500. For not much more you get an OS AND a computer.
Is Apple paying all you Slashdotters who post your little "time to switch" spam
Ive read quite a bit of Linux zealots in these posts claiming its time to switch to Linux. Is Linus paying for them to post those messages? Come on. Fans of Apple do not have to be paid to try to convert people to what they feel is the best OS out there.
That is true. This appears to be covered under the DMCA. Unencrypting that last part of a proprietary work will wind you up in jail. Leave it alone for gods sake!!!
EU is not for the benefit of citizens, but for the benefit of corporations.
EU is not for the benefit of corporations. EU allows for trade and business between and outside of member states. A cattle rancher in the UK could be hurt or assisted by trade regulation enforced by the EU with the United States. That cattle rancher is not a corporation, but an individual doing business within trade laws enforced by the EU that his/her country is a member there of.
It is a market, not a democracy.
Actually, it is a democracy. All member states have equal representation and vote. It has a presidency that is regularly rotated.
Slashdot Mirror
However, you're simplifying the relationship between GIF and PNG
Yes, I did simplify the relationship. There is quite a history behind both formats. I will not get into preferences though since I use both and think they are both great.
This is completely incorrect, as many binary drivers, patent-encumbered applications, and even closed applications are distributed with Linux.
There is no patent-encumbered technology in Linux since that would contradict the purpose of the GPL license. Are you talking about Linux distros? I am aware of patented technology in these. NVidia and ATI drivers are good examples of binary installs. I have yet to see these incorporated into any distro though. Do you know of one?
PNG was developed not because it was impossible to put GIF support in Linux, but because it was feared that Compuserve (which discovered it held a patent on one of the processes used in GIF compression / decompression) would abuse it's power on all platforms.
Actually it was the LZW algorithm in GIF that was the problem. Unisys owned the patent on this technology and in 1994 started demanding royalities. And I don't believe its an abuse of one's power to require payment of royalities. I'm sure others will see differently though and software patents are sometimes rather stupid.
Nice try. ActiveX is nothing more than simple COM. It is not very difficult to use Java or XPCOM to communicate to ActiveX controls, and vice versa. Try again.
It can run ActiveX applications that have already been designed and implemented.
ActiveX is nothing more than simple COM. It is not very difficult to use Java or XPCOM to communicate to ActiveX controls, and vice versa.
Okay, I will make it easy for you. Why does Firefox and OpenOffice not use ActiveX? Heres why:
s ho ld=0&commentsort=0&tid=109&mode=thread&cid=1207754 3
(1) It does not work cross-platform. Both Firefox and OpenOffice work on platforms other than Windows. Both platforms keep this compatibility by not introducin technology that could possibly limit this capability.
(2) It is proprietary. You may be confused on what this means. Basically, the technology is owned by Microsoft. This very same reason is why PNG exists despite the existance of GIFs. GIF technology was proprietary and, thus, could not be placed into a product that had a open source license (Linux).
(3) Firefox has no need for ActiveX since it has, in my opinion, a better technology with XPCOM. OpenOffice, if I remember, can be extended with Java plugins. Java has built-in security unlike ActiveX. Both XPCOM and Java are cross-platform which goes back to my point #1.
(4) Active X is not very secure. You will hear this time and time again. Microsoft even knows this and turned them off by default in SP2!
Make all the excuses you want, at the end of the day what matters is if the product does what it needs to or not.
As stated in point #3 above both Firefox and OpenOffice support technologies that give them quite a bit of power to get any job done.
I have a pretty good memory and I remember correcting you on these issues before:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144131&thre
Before you go spouting about some guy who would have no job if it werent for ActiveX or some other non-sense drivel, answer this:
What does ActiveX do that XPCOM and Java are incapable of performing?
If you are not able to answer that question, you have no base to stand on.
The speed to parse the XML configuration file is irrelevant. That parsing happens once per servlet context. Only things which happen once per request make a noticeable speed difference.
There is nothing in my post about servlet contexts, when xml is parsed, or how often this is done. The point I was giving was that Xerces is not the quickest parser if speed is a concern. Both Hibernate and Spring both, at some point, read from a XML file or files.
This isn't a language performance comparison.
No, its not. Thats why if you fully read my post you would have read this:
I know this was not your intent (doing language performance comparisons), but that is how your article is being viewed by others.
There are hordes of Slashdotters who viewed the article that way, even though that was not the intent of the author.
He stated that he could have optimized the Java code further, had he cared.
Why even do a comparison than? I can write really crappy C code that can be beaten by optimized Python script. Posting results of a comparison would not be fair and thus shouldnt be done in the first place.
A true performance comparison between languages should not be done with web applications. There is too much code that could be optimized better, frameworks used instead, in various parts that make true comparisons impossible.
Again, language performance comparison was not the intent of the author. Its just being viewed by others as such.
from my OS X box:
Wow. You can enter "java -version". Nice. Where does it say "Sun JVM"?
Apple ships Java with the machine and updates it via software update
Actually we can go round and round about who created wrote the code for the JVM for Apple computers. It still does not dispell the original argument that the Apple JVM is not the latest (1.5) or that it is slower, which is the point I mentioned in the post. Unless you can find proof on this otherwise.
and I have only one XML config file that tells my software what/where the database is
I am not very familiar with Spring. That is why I stated that I was only guessing that it used XML heavily. I know Hibernate enough to now that it, on the otherhand, uses XML quite a bit. Thanks for the information on Spring.
In this case, a sort of non-trivial web app, RoR seemed to be the best fit.
? l=RailsHibernate
There are people who see the reverse being true, where Spring+Hibernate are better suited for the non-trivial apps and Ruby on Rails is best for simple CRUD apps. Heres a quote from a comparison recently done between Hibernate and Rails:
If you stick to the simple cases like single tables with a few associations, and you name your tables and columns right, Rails will likely do just fine, but for more complicated object models, Hibernate will be a better choice.
http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss
OS X uses Sun's JVM code
Apple uses Sun's Java class library (1.4.2). The actual virtual machine (JVM) is completely done by Apple and is optimized for OSX. Apple does not (and is not required to) return any modifications to Sun as their virtual machine contains proprietary code owned by Apple. This is why you can not go to Sun's site to download a version of Java that runs on the Mac. You have to go to Apple (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/java/).
From my experience, and those of others, the Mac JVM is one of the slower implementations (I am only comparing IBM's, Sun's, and Apple's here). Much of this, in my opinion, is due to the fact that Apple offers Java more as a feature and probably does not dedicate the same level of commitment to the language as Sun. This is not a bad mark against Apple, since despite being slightly slower it seems to run perfectly on Apple's products.
I was able to read the site but unable to post comments back to the author. I'll drop them here instead to follow up on my prior posting comments:
-----
A few problems with your testing that I could see:
"So, for the sake of total specificity, the following numbers were generated on a 1.5GhZ Mac OSX (10.3.7) PowerBook with a 4200rpm hard drive and 1GB of RAM."
The Java Virtual Machine running on Macs has always been questionable. Its not Sun's implementation and has not been as heavily updated by Apple. First I would start by running your tests on a Windows or Linux box using the Sun JRE 1.5.
"The Java app is running on Jakarta Tomcat v 5.0.28, while the Rails app is running in Lighttp with FastCGI. The setups are standard for each application stack."
As mentioned by a prior poster, Tomcat is only a reference implementation. Its not built for speed. The Ruby setup you used, on the other hand, is. This alone is a major oversight in your testing.
"Number of Methods:
Rails: 126
Java: 549"
Having to write 4 times as many methods is a clear indicator that you are using the wrong framworks to get the job done. There are hundreds of frameworks for building web applications between the languages. Spring with Hibernate must not be the right mix.
"Configuration Lines
Rails: 113
Java: 1161"
I am guessing you used Xerces for parsing on the Java side. This is bad since Xerces is not a very quick parser and there are plenty of Java XML parsers that are much better suited when speed is concerned. Look at using XPP or Lightning instead. With JAXP (if Hibernate and Spring support it) you will not have to change code to use these in place of Xerces. Also, any time you are comparing a XML parsed document versus and non-XML parsed document the latter will always win. Try using frameworks that do not depend on XML configuration files.
True language performance comparisons should never be done with web applications. There are simply too many variables. I know this was not your intent (doing language performance comparisons), but that is how your article is being viewed by others. People are always itching for a battle between the languages.
Different languages are suited for different tasks better than others. For example, I once had to translate a Perl application to Java for my work. Due to what that Perl code was doing, the finished Java application was several times larger and slower. Perl was better due to the task at hand.
True. Hibernate uses xml heavily. I believe Spring does too. I couldn't get to the site mentioned to check out what he did with these, but I would guess the turtle-speed Xerces xml parser was used with the application launched from the Tomcat (which is only a reference server).
.NET Petshop against the Java pet shop which was using Java Beans, several other frameworks, and a questionable setup.
These arguments against Java performance have been used before. Some programmer builds a Java web application with bundled, titan sized frameworks and wonders why their pure code based application in some other language dusted it and has a smaller size. Microsoft did this by comparing a pure
There are better ways of doing programming language comparisons. Web applications with bloated frameworks is not the way.
We didn't have security problems either, but we did have a badly needed ActiveX control.
ActiveX is a nightmare in security terms. Either embedded in a browser or an Office document, it is just bad to use. There are hundreds of sites on the internet that will agree with that view. There are much better ways of getting work done without the worry.
"the only way for OpenOffice to work 100% of the time is if your customers to all use OpenOffice."
Red flag.
Red flag? Hello! You can't get 100% in Microsoft Office using company even if all the employees are using Microsoft Office. The incompatibilities between the versions of Word, Excel, etc is amazing. And even if you get everyone in your office using the same version you still have your customers to deal with who probably are not at the same version. Unlike Microsoft document formats, OpenOffice was smart and went with using XML. I'm not a big fan of XML, but it really makes sense here.
I couldn't imagine holding a company up to shoehorn the wrong software into the workflow.
You have never really gave a valid reason why OpenOffice is the "wrong" software unless you believe that its lack in support of ActiveX is an issue to businesses.
I was really clear that the problems we had with OO were not the point of my post.
What really was the point of your post? That it didnt work at a company you worked at several years ago since that company was using an ActiveX control in Office documents?
Despite that, somebody has to sweep on in and tell me about how my company deserved what it got or whatever.
Im curious: what did your company get?
I just hope the development community isn't as detached from business reality.
Its not. We are listening. Is it your business need that you believe OO needs to support ActiveX?
Otherwise forget about MS's monopoly getting broken.
The real magic behind OSS is that if you don't like something: change it. The codes all there. If your not a programmer you can participate by helping write documents, post bugs, and submit your ideas to the mailing lists. Those are just as important as writing the code, in my view anyways.
For our particular purposes, we needed ActiveX support.
For office documents thats just plain scary. Our company installed a email filter that would prevent documents from being communicated if they included these. Security has been none the better.
We had customers that would send us docs that, surprise surprise, weren't properly opened.
OpenOffice does an okay job at converting MS Office documents to its format. Not perfect though. The only way for OpenOffice to work 100% of the time is if your customers to all use OpenOffice. Thats some times hard to do depending on the companies position with its customers.
One employee had gotten rather good at using VB with Excel. He wasn't thrilled when he got OO. Etc.
Thats too bad for him. Guess he will have to learn new skills. I couldn't imagine holding a company up because of a single employee's limited skill set.
Instead, my point is that at the end of the day, productivity is king.
But as a manager you would know that money comes first. Productivity can be purchased with money saved.
I had to read in to this and make sure it wasnt a joke. I double checked the date to make sure it wasnt April Fools Day. Apparently, its only Fools Day. Some girl/guy named Tom Coyote posted some non-browser-biased comments as such:
[ 09:48:50 ] [ @Coyote` ] I am not saying anything about moz, I am saying it is a possibility that an alternate browser can let things bypass to IE and therefore cause problems
[ 09:49:44 ] [ @Coyote` ] and by them bypassing to IE, IE's protections can be bypassed that normally wouldn't if IE was in use instead of the alternate
Can you tell how non-browser-biased this guy is? Coyote's an idiot twerp who has his own "Theory" that some how conflicts with reason, logic, and the definition of what a theory is all at the same time.
Tom, theres like a hundred different ways to infect some ones computer if they never read the warning messages on the screen. If you want, I'll write one for you to try out on your computer. You can call it a Proof Of Concept That Your a Tard For Clicking Yes.
Of course, this means that in the eyes of the financial analysts, India is not as lucrative as China. But, I am proud of the progress that my country is making. At least, we don't have to sweep unpleasant facts under the carpet.
India needs to be more like China. If you have something that is unpleasant, shoot it or run it down with a tank. Keeps it from spreading.
Seriously, glad India is progressing BUT I have a sad feeling China will crush the growing Indian market when they push their wealth limited, unwashed masses of highly educated workers to the world scene.
I think that Jack Thompson does this for his own personal fame rather than for the best interests of his client. If I were that teen, I would dump Jack Thompson NOW.
Worse than that. What if Microsoft bundles this in to the next version of Windows or IE7? I think Lavasoft, SpyBot, and the rest should get their lawyers ready for another round of "When Monopolies Attack".
You can also bet that Microsoft will claim that removing it will make the OS stop functioning, etc.
And, one this note: anti-virus companies are next. Microsoft will probably wrap this in to Longhorn also.
Okay, make you a simple example.
Shopping cart.
You have three items. You decide to remove one. When you hit submit you go to a page that tells you that you removed the item from your cart. You hit the back button.
Oh no! The item is still in the cart! But you just deleted it a second ago didnt you? Sure you did, its just that the page, which contained the item you removed, was cached by Opera so you are seeing the OLD shopping cart.
When you really think of it, thats most shopping sites on the internet.
If you look at the hopeful featureset for Firefox 2, you'll notice they want to add caching just like Opera.
... wierd). Its non-standard way of doing things is making Opera just more obscure and less supported.
No, its not. Firefox has always had page caching. Hell, Internet Exploder has had it for years. Firefox is based on a community effort to follow the standards when it comes to page caching. But to not check if the page has been updated is a bug in Opera. Period. You can say "Ive saved like 10 trillion hours using Opera" all you want (I have no idea why Opera users advertise they keep active records of the time they are saving using a web browser
My work (an anonymous fortune 100) received 1 solitary call from a user on our portal about problems they were having with Opera. After doing statistics last year we knew this was the only person amongst the unamed masses who visit the site regularly who was not using IE, Gecko renderer, or Safari. Our web designer just smiled, talked to the person kindly, and told them to use a different browser. IMHO, thats just sound advice.
With Opera, the fat lady is singing....loudly. Start listening.
The best best best part about Opera is that it doesn't check with the server when you hit the back button!!!
This is good and really bad at the same time. Sure, generally the prior page is the same. But what if its not? Most of today's web technology is based on dynamic page content. This means that the prior page may be different than what it was a second ago. With web applications, Opera's functionality you describe it flawed. IE, Firefox, and the rest of the browsers know this and force the browsers to recheck. That is not a "bug" in their design but rather a required feature. Opera's special "feature" is more of a bug actually and causes hardship on web pages designers to handle its non-standard way of performing such a simple function.
Um, did you watch a different Battlestar Galatica? I watched all the episodes and Im left wondering where you came up with that. To be fair for those who havent watched the show I will excuse myself from devulging on the true ending to the season.
I was actually quite hopefully that Microsoft would open the format. As a developer, a completely open format would have been wonderful. This is sad news. Not surprised, just upset.
You can't even buy their hardware without their OS on it.
Thats true. But whats your point? Who is arguing that you need to have computer sans an OS? I think the apple heads are just pointing out that XP costs approx $180 and the new, and I dare say pretty cool, Mac-mini is going for $500. For not much more you get an OS AND a computer.
Is Apple paying all you Slashdotters who post your little "time to switch" spam
Ive read quite a bit of Linux zealots in these posts claiming its time to switch to Linux. Is Linus paying for them to post those messages? Come on. Fans of Apple do not have to be paid to try to convert people to what they feel is the best OS out there.
That is true. This appears to be covered under the DMCA. Unencrypting that last part of a proprietary work will wind you up in jail. Leave it alone for gods sake!!!
EU is not for the benefit of citizens, but for the benefit of corporations.
EU is not for the benefit of corporations. EU allows for trade and business between and outside of member states. A cattle rancher in the UK could be hurt or assisted by trade regulation enforced by the EU with the United States. That cattle rancher is not a corporation, but an individual doing business within trade laws enforced by the EU that his/her country is a member there of.
It is a market, not a democracy.
Actually, it is a democracy. All member states have equal representation and vote. It has a presidency that is regularly rotated.