Or maybe he just has a good memory and uses the Search Engine.
Don't be so cynical.
(Side Note: What's with all the TMM hate around here, anyway? Like his posts, don't like his posts, whatever. All this trolling of him goes way beyond retribution for whatever he might have done. Was there some sort of pre-slashdot forumn that he pissed everyone off on, or is everyone just overreacting?)
But westinghouse did believe in it.. who then gave Tesla a job.
Westinghouse didn't give Tesla a job, he contracted with Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing for R&D and licensed the AC patents. Eventually Tesla released Westinghouse from paying royalties to prevent the company from going under. (The AC/DC wars nearly bankrupt both Edison and Westinghouse.)
Though admittedly, Nikola was not much of a businessman
Indeed. He was always a little too paranoid. Instead of learning how to properly use the laws and courts to protect his work, he felt that the only option was to keep his work super-secret. The sad part about this is that we still don't fully understand some of his inventions. For example, take his electric car. How did he manage to power that thing at such high velocities given the technology of the day? The answer is still a mystery even today. (And a favorite of the free energy quacks, I might add.)
which is why while he was perhaps the most brilliant scientist to ever exist on this planet, he died virtually pennyless.
At least in part, that had to do with all the equipment he was purchasing to perform his grounded power experiments. He had this idea that he could run power through the Earth itself, allowing anything that touched the surface of the Earth to tap into the grid. Such a concept would have been a boon for electric vehicles. Sadly, his theories on the subject were later proven incorrect, meaning that he wasted his money and time on a dead end.
No, I corrected myself correctly. I was aiming for "You are correct" but ended up with "Your sentiment is correct" (item being possessed in bold). Thus the use of "you're" vs. "your" got a little mixed up.
What we really need are pluggable racks. i.e. Move all the hardware necessary to support the blades (power supply, network switch, cooling, KVM interface, etc.) right into the rack case, then design a common interface to plug the blades into. Then an admin only needs to plug in the new server and run with it. No need to mess with tonnes of wires.
Wait. Did I just reinvent a 64 way Sun server? Imagine that.
They're probably just ticked off that the OSS community didn't jump on their wonderful SAP DB database! So what if it's the crappiest amalgamation of computer languages ever seen to mankind? It's open source, man! You were all supposed to fix it for them!
Dude, they're just TIFFs. You need to repair your windows install if you can't view them in the Image/Fax Viewer. Regardless, the image format wouldn't be helped by an AJAX interface.
Go Google "graceful degradation" and do some reading. You can build all kinds of fancy interfaces without sacrificing the foundation.
You mean like creating an online order form that has no submit button, automatically saves the values across forms, and works on browsers going all the way back to Netscape 3.0? Did that back in 1998. I think I know a thing or two about graceful degredation. The real problem is your next statements.
If your application requires it, then an unenhanced version would be impossible to build in the first place.
Yes, and no. You can build an interface to do the same task in both a static fashion or an AJAX fashion. The tools will still do the same thing, but their usefulness will be worlds apart. A perfect example of this is MapQuest vs. Google Maps. Interface-wise, Google Maps is far more useful. Yet there's no real way to degrade the Google Maps interface without having two versions. (The second being like MapQuest.) Google does this for GMail, but I feel kind of sorry for them. Maintenence must be a pain.
But these types of application are a tiny minority.
You severely underestimate the market. Partly because a lot of AJAX applications are not visible to the average user. i.e. They're hidden behind usernames and passwords. My company, for example, has a specific subset of clients. You couldn't get access to our site even if you wanted to. How many companies are banks, financial institutes, data analysis, ASP providers, etc. that all require you to become a customer to log in?
Part of the reason for this is that such applications have real value. While your business model may not require charging for the use of the software, that software is somehow making your company money through its features. This is something that a lot of sites want to protect.
Another point is that public sites tend to be mostly informational. e.g. It would be an overkill to make the US Patent Search feature-rich with AJAX. It's a simple search and retrieval app that wouldn't gain much at all from a fancy interface. As a result, it presents something to users that is easy to use, yet not technologically sophisticated.
The event model is painful to work with cross browser. That is why we have to have our own code abstracting things away, or using the good frameworks out there that do this (Dojo, Zimbra,...).
You're better off with addEventListener. Pretty much every browser except IE supports it at this point. If you use this patch, you can bring IE up to code until Microsoft fixes it.
Not that event frameworks are a bad idea, mind you. It's just good to know that all the code is future proof.:-)
There are lots of features such as offline capabilities, browser side caches, etc... but the most bang for the buck is just getting the browsers to actually implement all of the standards correctly. This is in DOM, CSS, HTML, JavaScript.
If this gap can keep closing (it is a lot better now than a few years ago) then I will be happy.
Indeed. The offline capability is sort of already there with MHT and HTA files. The moment we can get other browsers to support these (or develop a similar standard) is the day we can stop developing Desktop Applciations all together.
Thankfully, the cross browser gap is minor. IE still has problems with PNG files, but that should be resolved soon. There's not too much else I can think of that can't be avoided by simply following the DOM and JavaScript 1.3 standards.
And a nice JavaScript VM (HotSpot-able), that doesn't leak memory would be great too.
Mozilla has already got a great engine. I think we'll be seeing Microsoft overhaul theirs as FireFox steals more market share.:-)
. The way to approach problems like that is to start with the basic version and add the enhancements afterwards. It results in much simpler and more robust code, and you can maintain the older browser functionality pretty much indefinitely.
Which basically mean, kick the enhanced version out and just add a few tweaks to the non-enhanced version depending on the browser.
Which is nice. But sometimes you absolutely MUST have more. If your application requires it, I say to hell with the unenhanced version. Go for the gold, and get the features done right the first time. Not all websites can do this, but not all websites need the functionality, either.
AJAX for games is a bad idea, makes cheating too easy.
1) It depends on the game. Not all games are fully networked. For example, Space Invaders is just for fun.
2) For non-action games, it is possible to write a server that can prevent cheating. i.e. If the user can only perform specific actions anyway, there's nothing they can do to change that. Take battleship for example. You can't get any more data than the server gives you, and you can only fire when the server lets you. No real problems.:-)
Maintaining two versions isn't really the issue. [...] You get AJAX enhancements for most of your users, and the ones that are using Netscape 4 fall back to the traditional way seamlessly. How does that hold you back?
Simple. It's just too much work, and the interface is extremely clunky. A specific case that comes to mind is a webpage that allowed users to chose up to three dates from a calendar via checkboxes. Manangement wanted the dates sumarized at the bottom of the page, and didn't want to hear any lip about technology issues.
In IE this was easy. Create a visible IFrame with space for up to three lines, submit the chosen answers to the server, and get back a textual representation of those dates. Simplicity itself! (Even if it was kind of primitive compared to what I can do now.)
But then I had to support Netscape. Ok, so we'll not use the IFrame and refresh the page on every click, right? Well, now I have to add tons of code to track those dates, that IE will never use. Then the users complain that their scrollbar isn't at the same spot, so I have to detect the scroll location before submit, add it to the list of variables, then submit the page back to the server, get back a new page with extra Javascript to auto-scroll down to the right location.
By the time I was done, I had two very different applications stuffed into the same codefile. It was annoying, and coders regularly broke one interface or the other depending on which browser they were developing in. (We had a good QA staff, though, so it pretty much never made it to production that way.) It was a nice attempt, but it was just too much pain and anguish for the pathetic return. (Summarizing a few dates.)
Precisely. Thank you for putting it so eloquently.
It is causing browsers to give us APIs that we have wanted for a long time, and can take the web to the next level, along with other technologies.
I'm curious, what's on the top of your list for new technologies that you wish were ubiquitous? I know the top 2 on my list are:
1) Get Microsoft to properly support DOM Events. (Then I can stop patching their browser for them.)
2) Make SVG a core part of web browsers. This is especially important to me because textual images can be modified in most browsers. To date that has only meant cutesy tricks with XPMs. (Such as Wolf5K) But with SVG, we can take things to a whole new level of interactive and multimedia applications! For example, it would be extremely cool to be able to show a graph or pie chart that changes as you enter data. (You can fake it today by updating the image from the server, but it just isn't as smooth.) Not to mention the ability to finally rotate images. I can't even count how many times I would have loved to have that ability.:-)
It's perfectly reasonable to write web applications that use AJAX when the user has the necessary technology available, and fall back to traditional operation when the user doesn't havethe necessary technology available.
No offsense, but we all hated maintaining two versions of code. Depending on your business, it's often perfectly reasonable to only target browsers that meet the W3C standards for JavaScript and AJAX. I know that my company hugely simplified some complex data entry forms by using AJAX technology. Instant feedback can be nice.:-)
No, at least for me Netscape 4 was always what was holding things back. I can't even count how many times I had to have pages refresh just because Netscape couldn't add a stupid field, change some text, or use an IFrame to talk to the server.
Actually, there's a huge market of "casual gamers" (a new term used to describe people who like to play web games and the like) that companies are having the hardest time reaching. One of the major obstacles in their way is the fact that these gamers are uninterested in installing Flash, Java, or any other plugin. If they don't get instant gratification, many of them simply leave. This means that all those super-APIs that companies like WildTangent and Unity were producing were completely off track.
AJAX (being 100% browser code) can change that, and give casual players an instant experience. Google could have created a Google Games to compete with Yahoo! Games, but they didn't seem interested.
And there's really very little here that couldn't have been done 3-5 years ago - browsers had the same javascript support, SOAP existed, and people knew you could make a request from within Javascript.
Precisely. As I said in another post, the XMLHttpRequest is just icing on the cake.
I've always thought that was part of why people didn't do this before - amount of coding needed to implement a simple app is vastly more than with something like.NET or QT. Is that not true?
It is true. However, the real reason why it hasn't been done before is that Netscape 4 held onto enough market share to really gum up the works. As long as you needed to support these people, you could use full DOM technologies in your web pages.
Are there AJAX development kits
There are several out there, though most are immature. I have two in my library. (One for games, one for Desktop widgets.) BlueShoes has some nice stuff, for example.
And what about the problems of implementing cross-browser Java-script? Has that been simplified?
Yes! No! Sort of!
If you follow the DOM standard, you're 95% of the way there. The last part that can really frustrate you is that Microsoft doesn't support addEventListener() from the DOM Events Standard. However, if you're smart you can patch objects system-wide to have this method under IE. The implementation merely calls IE's custom "attachEvent()" call. The two are similar enough to interoperate.
It certainly matters. However, it doesn't matter quite as much as the hype suggests. AJAX is a very valuable technology, but the only reason why it's catching on now is that we've finally rid the web of early browsers like Netscape 4. Now that everyone has full JavaScript and DOM, we can finally build complex interfaces. XMLHttpRequest is just icing on the cake. (Hidden IFrames did the job just fine in the past, and are still more useful for some interfaces.)
Man, are they ever hyping this stuff. This story doesn't seem to actually cover anything new, it just hypes AJAX more!
The truth is that the stuff we've seen in AJAX so far is nothing. I don't know about anyone else, but I've used it in regular webapps as nothing more than an interface enhancement. People don't even really notice the fact that the web pages work much smoother.
That being said, there's a massive untapped potential in this technology. I've got demos of Video Games in AJAX, as well as a full Desktop. I tried to get Google interested in the video games concept, but I'm afraid they ignored my communication.:-(
Is it just me, or is Slashdot reporting on an increasing number of musicals? Combined with Taco's urging to do something illegal, I have to wonder if the editors are really getting into this stuff.
Then again, a lot of musicals are targetting more "geekish" plays such as "The Last Starfighter", so maybe it's just a cooincidence. Then again...
When do get to go see Slashdot: The Musical? Make sure there are plenty of trolls attacking insightful posters, guys with horns and flamethrowers, and let's not forget the ever important stage plateaus of being modded up!
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe he just has a good memory and uses the Search Engine.
Don't be so cynical.
(Side Note: What's with all the TMM hate around here, anyway? Like his posts, don't like his posts, whatever. All this trolling of him goes way beyond retribution for whatever he might have done. Was there some sort of pre-slashdot forumn that he pissed everyone off on, or is everyone just overreacting?)
But westinghouse did believe in it .. who then gave Tesla a job.
Westinghouse didn't give Tesla a job, he contracted with Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing for R&D and licensed the AC patents. Eventually Tesla released Westinghouse from paying royalties to prevent the company from going under. (The AC/DC wars nearly bankrupt both Edison and Westinghouse.)
Though admittedly, Nikola was not much of a businessman
Indeed. He was always a little too paranoid. Instead of learning how to properly use the laws and courts to protect his work, he felt that the only option was to keep his work super-secret. The sad part about this is that we still don't fully understand some of his inventions. For example, take his electric car. How did he manage to power that thing at such high velocities given the technology of the day? The answer is still a mystery even today. (And a favorite of the free energy quacks, I might add.)
which is why while he was perhaps the most brilliant scientist to ever exist on this planet, he died virtually pennyless.
At least in part, that had to do with all the equipment he was purchasing to perform his grounded power experiments. He had this idea that he could run power through the Earth itself, allowing anything that touched the surface of the Earth to tap into the grid. Such a concept would have been a boon for electric vehicles. Sadly, his theories on the subject were later proven incorrect, meaning that he wasted his money and time on a dead end.
No, I corrected myself correctly. I was aiming for "You are correct" but ended up with "Your sentiment is correct" (item being possessed in bold). Thus the use of "you're" vs. "your" got a little mixed up.
s/you're/your/g
To be pedantic for a moment, Tesla quit after Edison screwed him over on a $50,000 bonus he was promised.
But you're sentiment is correct. Edison never really believed in AC power.
What we really need are pluggable racks. i.e. Move all the hardware necessary to support the blades (power supply, network switch, cooling, KVM interface, etc.) right into the rack case, then design a common interface to plug the blades into. Then an admin only needs to plug in the new server and run with it. No need to mess with tonnes of wires.
Wait. Did I just reinvent a 64 way Sun server? Imagine that.
They're probably just ticked off that the OSS community didn't jump on their wonderful SAP DB database! So what if it's the crappiest amalgamation of computer languages ever seen to mankind? It's open source, man! You were all supposed to fix it for them!
Dude, they're just TIFFs. You need to repair your windows install if you can't view them in the Image/Fax Viewer. Regardless, the image format wouldn't be helped by an AJAX interface.
Shhh! Now you're giving away the inspiration for my library. ;-)
Go Google "graceful degradation" and do some reading. You can build all kinds of fancy interfaces without sacrificing the foundation.
You mean like creating an online order form that has no submit button, automatically saves the values across forms, and works on browsers going all the way back to Netscape 3.0? Did that back in 1998. I think I know a thing or two about graceful degredation. The real problem is your next statements.
If your application requires it, then an unenhanced version would be impossible to build in the first place.
Yes, and no. You can build an interface to do the same task in both a static fashion or an AJAX fashion. The tools will still do the same thing, but their usefulness will be worlds apart. A perfect example of this is MapQuest vs. Google Maps. Interface-wise, Google Maps is far more useful. Yet there's no real way to degrade the Google Maps interface without having two versions. (The second being like MapQuest.) Google does this for GMail, but I feel kind of sorry for them. Maintenence must be a pain.
But these types of application are a tiny minority.
You severely underestimate the market. Partly because a lot of AJAX applications are not visible to the average user. i.e. They're hidden behind usernames and passwords. My company, for example, has a specific subset of clients. You couldn't get access to our site even if you wanted to. How many companies are banks, financial institutes, data analysis, ASP providers, etc. that all require you to become a customer to log in?
Part of the reason for this is that such applications have real value. While your business model may not require charging for the use of the software, that software is somehow making your company money through its features. This is something that a lot of sites want to protect.
Another point is that public sites tend to be mostly informational. e.g. It would be an overkill to make the US Patent Search feature-rich with AJAX. It's a simple search and retrieval app that wouldn't gain much at all from a fancy interface. As a result, it presents something to users that is easy to use, yet not technologically sophisticated.
The event model is painful to work with cross browser. That is why we have to have our own code abstracting things away, or using the good frameworks out there that do this (Dojo, Zimbra, ...).
:-)
:-)
You're better off with addEventListener. Pretty much every browser except IE supports it at this point. If you use this patch, you can bring IE up to code until Microsoft fixes it.
Not that event frameworks are a bad idea, mind you. It's just good to know that all the code is future proof.
There are lots of features such as offline capabilities, browser side caches, etc... but the most bang for the buck is just getting the browsers to actually implement all of the standards correctly. This is in DOM, CSS, HTML, JavaScript.
If this gap can keep closing (it is a lot better now than a few years ago) then I will be happy.
Indeed. The offline capability is sort of already there with MHT and HTA files. The moment we can get other browsers to support these (or develop a similar standard) is the day we can stop developing Desktop Applciations all together.
Thankfully, the cross browser gap is minor. IE still has problems with PNG files, but that should be resolved soon. There's not too much else I can think of that can't be avoided by simply following the DOM and JavaScript 1.3 standards.
And a nice JavaScript VM (HotSpot-able), that doesn't leak memory would be great too.
Mozilla has already got a great engine. I think we'll be seeing Microsoft overhaul theirs as FireFox steals more market share.
. The way to approach problems like that is to start with the basic version and add the enhancements afterwards. It results in much simpler and more robust code, and you can maintain the older browser functionality pretty much indefinitely.
Which basically mean, kick the enhanced version out and just add a few tweaks to the non-enhanced version depending on the browser.
Which is nice. But sometimes you absolutely MUST have more. If your application requires it, I say to hell with the unenhanced version. Go for the gold, and get the features done right the first time. Not all websites can do this, but not all websites need the functionality, either.
AJAX for games is a bad idea, makes cheating too easy.
:-)
1) It depends on the game. Not all games are fully networked. For example, Space Invaders is just for fun.
2) For non-action games, it is possible to write a server that can prevent cheating. i.e. If the user can only perform specific actions anyway, there's nothing they can do to change that. Take battleship for example. You can't get any more data than the server gives you, and you can only fire when the server lets you. No real problems.
Good example. This one is better. My demos are better yet. ;-)
Maintaining two versions isn't really the issue. [...] You get AJAX enhancements for most of your users, and the ones that are using Netscape 4 fall back to the traditional way seamlessly. How does that hold you back?
Simple. It's just too much work, and the interface is extremely clunky. A specific case that comes to mind is a webpage that allowed users to chose up to three dates from a calendar via checkboxes. Manangement wanted the dates sumarized at the bottom of the page, and didn't want to hear any lip about technology issues.
In IE this was easy. Create a visible IFrame with space for up to three lines, submit the chosen answers to the server, and get back a textual representation of those dates. Simplicity itself! (Even if it was kind of primitive compared to what I can do now.)
But then I had to support Netscape. Ok, so we'll not use the IFrame and refresh the page on every click, right? Well, now I have to add tons of code to track those dates, that IE will never use. Then the users complain that their scrollbar isn't at the same spot, so I have to detect the scroll location before submit, add it to the list of variables, then submit the page back to the server, get back a new page with extra Javascript to auto-scroll down to the right location.
By the time I was done, I had two very different applications stuffed into the same codefile. It was annoying, and coders regularly broke one interface or the other depending on which browser they were developing in. (We had a good QA staff, though, so it pretty much never made it to production that way.) It was a nice attempt, but it was just too much pain and anguish for the pathetic return. (Summarizing a few dates.)
Well then, I guess I better beat them to it. Anyone out there have capital but need a good technology to start a business with? ;-)
(And just in case you take me seriously, my email is right next to my nick at the top of this post.)
Precisely. Thank you for putting it so eloquently.
:-)
It is causing browsers to give us APIs that we have wanted for a long time, and can take the web to the next level, along with other technologies.
I'm curious, what's on the top of your list for new technologies that you wish were ubiquitous? I know the top 2 on my list are:
1) Get Microsoft to properly support DOM Events. (Then I can stop patching their browser for them.)
2) Make SVG a core part of web browsers. This is especially important to me because textual images can be modified in most browsers. To date that has only meant cutesy tricks with XPMs. (Such as Wolf5K) But with SVG, we can take things to a whole new level of interactive and multimedia applications! For example, it would be extremely cool to be able to show a graph or pie chart that changes as you enter data. (You can fake it today by updating the image from the server, but it just isn't as smooth.) Not to mention the ability to finally rotate images. I can't even count how many times I would have loved to have that ability.
It's perfectly reasonable to write web applications that use AJAX when the user has the necessary technology available, and fall back to traditional operation when the user doesn't havethe necessary technology available.
:-)
No offsense, but we all hated maintaining two versions of code. Depending on your business, it's often perfectly reasonable to only target browsers that meet the W3C standards for JavaScript and AJAX. I know that my company hugely simplified some complex data entry forms by using AJAX technology. Instant feedback can be nice.
No, at least for me Netscape 4 was always what was holding things back. I can't even count how many times I had to have pages refresh just because Netscape couldn't add a stupid field, change some text, or use an IFrame to talk to the server.
Video games? Nope, got'em and they're better too.
Actually, there's a huge market of "casual gamers" (a new term used to describe people who like to play web games and the like) that companies are having the hardest time reaching. One of the major obstacles in their way is the fact that these gamers are uninterested in installing Flash, Java, or any other plugin. If they don't get instant gratification, many of them simply leave. This means that all those super-APIs that companies like WildTangent and Unity were producing were completely off track.
AJAX (being 100% browser code) can change that, and give casual players an instant experience. Google could have created a Google Games to compete with Yahoo! Games, but they didn't seem interested.
And there's really very little here that couldn't have been done 3-5 years ago - browsers had the same javascript support, SOAP existed, and people knew you could make a request from within Javascript.
.NET or QT. Is that not true?
Precisely. As I said in another post, the XMLHttpRequest is just icing on the cake.
I've always thought that was part of why people didn't do this before - amount of coding needed to implement a simple app is vastly more than with something like
It is true. However, the real reason why it hasn't been done before is that Netscape 4 held onto enough market share to really gum up the works. As long as you needed to support these people, you could use full DOM technologies in your web pages.
Are there AJAX development kits
There are several out there, though most are immature. I have two in my library. (One for games, one for Desktop widgets.) BlueShoes has some nice stuff, for example.
And what about the problems of implementing cross-browser Java-script? Has that been simplified?
Yes! No! Sort of!
If you follow the DOM standard, you're 95% of the way there. The last part that can really frustrate you is that Microsoft doesn't support addEventListener() from the DOM Events Standard. However, if you're smart you can patch objects system-wide to have this method under IE. The implementation merely calls IE's custom "attachEvent()" call. The two are similar enough to interoperate.
It certainly matters. However, it doesn't matter quite as much as the hype suggests. AJAX is a very valuable technology, but the only reason why it's catching on now is that we've finally rid the web of early browsers like Netscape 4. Now that everyone has full JavaScript and DOM, we can finally build complex interfaces. XMLHttpRequest is just icing on the cake. (Hidden IFrames did the job just fine in the past, and are still more useful for some interfaces.)
Man, are they ever hyping this stuff. This story doesn't seem to actually cover anything new, it just hypes AJAX more!
:-(
The truth is that the stuff we've seen in AJAX so far is nothing. I don't know about anyone else, but I've used it in regular webapps as nothing more than an interface enhancement. People don't even really notice the fact that the web pages work much smoother.
That being said, there's a massive untapped potential in this technology. I've got demos of Video Games in AJAX, as well as a full Desktop. I tried to get Google interested in the video games concept, but I'm afraid they ignored my communication.
* At the end of the number, a man jumps out on stage.
"Why, you must be new here!"
What, is he going to sing Rocket Man during space scenes or something?
:-P
Don't be silly. He's planning to sing, "The Circle of Force" (...and it moves us aaaaaalllllll).
Is it just me, or is Slashdot reporting on an increasing number of musicals? Combined with Taco's urging to do something illegal, I have to wonder if the editors are really getting into this stuff.
Then again, a lot of musicals are targetting more "geekish" plays such as "The Last Starfighter", so maybe it's just a cooincidence. Then again...
When do get to go see Slashdot: The Musical? Make sure there are plenty of trolls attacking insightful posters, guys with horns and flamethrowers, and let's not forget the ever important stage plateaus of being modded up!