Joe, I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for your work with FireBug. It has saved me hundreds of hours of debugging time! I work with a Java-based development team who were giving me a ton of shit for our last project, a webapp that used quite a bit of Ajax. They derided JavaScript for a number of reasons (many well-founded), but their biggest problem was that it was nearly impossible to debug without tons of alert boxes. With the first release of FireBug I was finally able to shut them up! "Look, object inspection! Breakpoints! Huzzah!"
When we finished the app and started unit testing, they again gave me grief over the fact that you couldn't properly test for coding inefficiencies. With FireBug 1.0's built-in profiler, I again have an answer to them.
FireBug is THE killer-extension for web developers. Your work is extremely appreciated.
This has been one of the weakest winters on record. Simultaneously, last Spring was one of the wettest on record. Don't know if there's any correlation between the two of those, but I do know that it's been in the 50s (F) for a few days this week, which is simply insane. We've had perhaps two miserly snowfalls (less than a couple of inches accumulated). The average temperature for December was up 10 degrees from the average.
From the National Weather Service:
The average temperature of 34.5 degrees tied 1996 as the second warmest December on record. The warmest December was 34.8 degrees in 2001. In contrast, the coldest December was in 1989 with an average temperature of 14.1 degrees. Normally December has as average of 27.6 degrees. [...] The average high temperature for the month was a record 43.3 degrees. The old record was 42.8 degrees in 1953. The coldest high temperature was 24.7 degrees in 1989 and the normal December average high temperature is 36.4 degrees. [...] The average low temperature for the month was 25.6 degrees, warm enough to be the 3rd warmest on record. The warmest average low temperature was 27.8 degrees in 1996 followed by 26.8 degrees in 2001. The coldest average low temperature was 3.4 degrees in 1989 and the normal December average low temperature is 18.7 degrees. [...] The temperature never got below zero degrees in December. In fact, the coldest reading was only 9 degrees and that didn't occur until the last day of the month. [...] The warmest temperature for the month was 61 degrees on the 1st. I'm going to have to move to Canada if I ever want to see a white Christmas again.
There are tens of thousands of people working in this area and none of the usual amenities you would find in an area with tens of thousands of people.
That's what happens with skyrocketing real estate prices and high-paying jobs. People convince themselves that it all evens out... "Oh sure, the rents are higher, but the pay is higher, too!" Fine and dandy, except Joe the Science Teacher can't afford to live in the city any more. And Bob the Convenience Store Clerk doesn't feel like commuting three hours in each direction just to give you cigarettes and lotto tickets.
When you price out the people who run the guts of a city—the teachers, the firemen, the street sweepers and convenience store clerks—the city turns into the Office Park Wasteland you so aptly describe.
The "Ribbon" looks remarkably similar to the "Palettes" method Adobe has been using for the past decade or so. Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator... and Macromedia (now Adobe) used a similar structure: large blocks of item methods, grouped by context. Just about the only difference is that the palettes are arranged horizontally instead of vertically (by default) - though, you could always arrange them horizontally if you wished.
if it takes me about half an hour to go to Blockbuster and back (ten minute drive there and back, another ten minutes to find the movie and rent it), it would require about a 28Mbit connection.
That's one way to do it.
Another way I hear is fairly popular is this company called NetFlix, where they actually snail-mail your movies to you. That's at least a day of waiting, yet their business model doesn't appear to be in jeopardy. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations:
That's the equivalent of a slow-ass ISDN connection to compete with NetFlix. And since you're d/ling precompressed material, it's not 6 gigs... more like 1.5 for a good rip.
I know how you feel, but remember when your parents kept telling you when you were a kid about how cool the 60s were, and it felt like they were talking about a different geological era? Well, that's what these kids today think about the 80s. And much like our parents told us, we can tell today's youth that their music sux0rs compared to the stuff we had back in our day.
Yeah, but smug self-satisfaction knocks about 10% off the lifespan, provided you're not punched by an offended meat-eater beforehand. So it's basically a wash.
What dealership do I go to buy my electric car, for which there is considerable demand?
The demand is there, sure. For an electric car that gets 400 miles per recharge, recharges in 5 minutes, goes 0-60mph in 8 seconds or less, is the size of an SUV, and is built using materials that are just as strong (and thus, safe in an accident) as its gas-cousins.
For the same price.
Right.
If you just want an electric car, there are plenty of people who can either build you a new car or retrofit your current gastrocity to happy-friendly electric. Just please don't think too long or hard about where the electricity to recharge your car comes from.
The single, solitary, lone reason I own an XBOX is for XBOX Media Center. Nothing else comes close to the TiVo-like integration and Firefox-like expandability.
Unfortunately, the built-in 733Mhz. processor is the limiting factor. Friendtech used to sell a 1.4Ghz. Celeron upgrade, but they don't offer it any longer (if anyone has one of these systems, by the way, I'd be happy to buy it off you). At this point, the XBMC developers are looking at ways to use the onboard GPU to do some of the calculations and take all the heat off the CPU, but this is like looking for breadcrumbs when right next door is a fully stocked kitchen pantry (XBOX 360 or PS3). Instead of wasting time developing for a platform that's basically a dead-end, they could be working on a system that will be able to handle HD content by design.
Would developers have to port MPLAYER to C# in order for this to work? It sounds like the PS3 is a lost cause until someone can whip up some Linux drivers for the graphics system. Does Microsoft have similar restrictions to the hardware?
Yep. And when you want to try and put some distance between you and your "troubled" past and make a fresh, new start, then finally get a job by having to resort to lying about your past (so it's not used against you), then go on to be a model employee who's never broken the trust of your employer, who's "found out" after more than a year of good work, what happens? This happens. (comment upthread)
Almost seems like you just can't win. I'd bet this make a lot of previous criminals decide to say "Hell with this" and go back to their lives of crime. If you're going to be treated like a criminal either way...
Turns out we hired a guy who used a fake name and someone else's social security number, and he worked as one of our main sysadmins for over a year, with privileges on probably 100 servers and full privileges on the email servers, before he was caught.
Caught doing what, exactly?
If he was performing his job well for over a year without problems, what did you "catch" him doing?
a pill to solve every problem, even ones that weren't a real problem before they came up with a pill
Spoken like someone who doesn't suffer from narcolepsy. Sure, there are probably going to be people who abuse this. Just like with any drug. But to dismiss this out-of-hand because you don't personally have to deal with any of the problems it's designed to address is pure ignorant selfishness.
couldn't someone use Ajax to just grab the values and send them to the server before you even hit submit
Yes, someone could. You could even set a watch on the field's value so that it doesn't have to poll the server. In a nutshell, you attach a trigger to the value property of an input field. When the value changes (say, when it's auto-populated by FireFox's all-too-friendly password completion mechanism), the trigger then sends the values via AJAX request.
(apologies if this has already been answered elsewhere)
Because Microsoft has made commitments to the OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers--Dell, Gateway, etc.) to have it ready before the end of the year. Basically, Microsoft told all the big hardware players, "Look, you're all going to have to offer new tricked-out systems to support Vista, and they'd better be ready by Christmas!" The hardware guys kept their end of the bargain. Microsoft, in typical fashion, is running late. The entire (5 year+) Vista debacle should have provided enough warning to the hardware guys that there was no way in hell they'd be ready in time, but you can't turn your nose up at the only game in town.
But the hardware people aren't dumb. They know that once a consumer makes a two grand investment in a computer, they're not going to be upgrading for another couple of years. So it was vitally important that these new machines have Microsoft's "latest and greatest" OS on them. If Vista weren't on the systems that get sold for Christmas this year, the hardware manufacturers would be up shit creek without a paddle. The Best Buy's and Circuit City's of this world would be in a heap of trouble, too--all those parents coming back on December 26th complaining that their computer is "broken" because it doesn't have Vista? No way. So they structured the deal with MS that they basically have to give them Vista before the Christmas season, ready or not.
But why two release dates, then? Because Microsoft knows there's no way in hell Vista is going to be turn-key ready until next year. They give their Release Candidate to the OEM's, then spend another couple of months working out the bugs from their unwitting Beta Testers (a.k.a., Dell, Gateway, etc.)
The three methods of Comet involve using "slow close" (aka server push) style, piggybacking on a response from the last request, or polling.
Yes to the first part, no to the second. They use a keep-alive so the connection isn't closed, so you're right if you count the initial request for a page (which is initiated by the client). But that's not polling, which is repeated requests from the client. Once the connection is instantiated, you only need to keep the connection alive, but you don't have to keep asking the server, "Have you got anything new for me?"
This used to be a problem (at least for Java servers) because that meant you had to keep a thread open for each connection--thus the max number of threads that your server is configured to handle equals the max number of concurrent connections, which is no good for a heavily-trafficed site. But with non-blocking IO you can get around all of this.
There is still http requests coming and going but now instead of the server simply spitting out html, the server has to spit out and parse gigantic XML datasets to update a simple table (assuming you were refering to an html table).
Actually, we made a couple of compromises to traditional MVC design because we wanted to be able to control the contents of the cell (i.e., instead of just displaying simple text, it could be a link, or an image, or a javascript control, etc.). This necessitated implementing a template system that allowed for java expressions inside the table definition, which is tied to Java objects that are then tied to database tables (via Hibernate). Long story short: the server generates the table, so straight HTML is sent back to the client, already rendered properly. All the client has to do is replace the table body with the new table body via innerHTML.
Originally we were sending XML back to the client, which then had to be parsed, but this was a real headache because we couldn't use any logic in the template, only properties. So, for example, let's say a column is designed to display a list of company names, but some of those names will be links to a Company Information page, depending on whether they exist in our system. If they don't, just display the text. I have yet to see a system that allows for this kind of absolute control over the contents of a table at the object-level. Yes, it does violate MVC, but the tradeoffs were well worth it.
Since clicking on the "next page" for a table would require the contents to be rendered all over again anyway, this saves the overhead of all the other stuff on a page that doesn't change. That includes scripts, css definitions, etc. Sure a lot of that is cached, but no way is a whole page render going to be less than 1K, which is (seat-of-the-pants calculation) how much your average table is going to need.
Everyone is out rushing to build AJAX apps into even the simplest applications, and the result is slow loading time and greatly increased server loads.
While this no doubt happens all the time, the main advantage of AJAX-enabled web applications is reduced load on the server. For instance, our intranet application uses the Tapestry framework, and the built-in tables component (at least for the 4.0 version) was useless because it required constant, complete page refreshing when all you really wanted to update was the contents of a table. We rolled our own table component that's fully ajaxificated and it's been nothing but positive for our end users and our servers.
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The Navy isn't estimating a price tag at this point, with actual use still about 13 years away.
I think they mean deployment, unless the Navy knows something Congress doesn't. Which wouldn't surprise me.
Is there something I am missing that will make this new standard magically find its way into computers in the next few months?
Multi-channel RAID adapters like those made by 3ware could benefit from the larger bandwidth.
But I would think for SWAT-style military deployments into occupied buildings, this would be brilliant.
Would probably be pretty useful in riots and other domestic crowd-control situations as well.
That was a very comprehensive response, and much appreciated.
From Word (or any Office product, most likely):
TOOLS -> CUSTOMIZE -> OPTIONS -> "Always show full menus" (check!)
Joe, I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for your work with FireBug. It has saved me hundreds of hours of debugging time! I work with a Java-based development team who were giving me a ton of shit for our last project, a webapp that used quite a bit of Ajax. They derided JavaScript for a number of reasons (many well-founded), but their biggest problem was that it was nearly impossible to debug without tons of alert boxes. With the first release of FireBug I was finally able to shut them up! "Look, object inspection! Breakpoints! Huzzah!"
When we finished the app and started unit testing, they again gave me grief over the fact that you couldn't properly test for coding inefficiencies. With FireBug 1.0's built-in profiler, I again have an answer to them.
FireBug is THE killer-extension for web developers. Your work is extremely appreciated.
From the National Weather Service: The average temperature of 34.5 degrees tied 1996 as the second warmest December on record. The warmest December was 34.8 degrees in 2001. In contrast, the coldest December was in 1989 with an average temperature of 14.1 degrees. Normally December has as average of 27.6 degrees.
[...]
The average high temperature for the month was a record 43.3 degrees. The old record was 42.8 degrees in 1953. The coldest high temperature was 24.7 degrees in 1989 and the normal December average high temperature is 36.4 degrees.
[...]
The average low temperature for the month was 25.6 degrees, warm enough to be the 3rd warmest on record. The warmest average low temperature was 27.8 degrees in 1996 followed by 26.8 degrees in 2001. The coldest average low temperature was 3.4 degrees in 1989 and the normal December average low temperature is 18.7 degrees.
[...]
The temperature never got below zero degrees in December. In fact, the coldest reading was only 9 degrees and that didn't occur until the last day of the month.
[...]
The warmest temperature for the month was 61 degrees on the 1st. I'm going to have to move to Canada if I ever want to see a white Christmas again.
Used XBOX: $80
XBOX Mod Chip: $50
XBOX high-def AV pack: $5
XBOX Media Center: Free.
Besting Apple's brand-spankin'-new media center on 5 year-old technology:
Priceless.
There are tens of thousands of people working in this area and none of the usual amenities you would find in an area with tens of thousands of people.
That's what happens with skyrocketing real estate prices and high-paying jobs. People convince themselves that it all evens out... "Oh sure, the rents are higher, but the pay is higher, too!" Fine and dandy, except Joe the Science Teacher can't afford to live in the city any more. And Bob the Convenience Store Clerk doesn't feel like commuting three hours in each direction just to give you cigarettes and lotto tickets.
When you price out the people who run the guts of a city—the teachers, the firemen, the street sweepers and convenience store clerks—the city turns into the Office Park Wasteland you so aptly describe.
The "Ribbon" looks remarkably similar to the "Palettes" method Adobe has been using for the past decade or so. Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator... and Macromedia (now Adobe) used a similar structure: large blocks of item methods, grouped by context. Just about the only difference is that the palettes are arranged horizontally instead of vertically (by default) - though, you could always arrange them horizontally if you wished.
Enjoy Microsoft's new "look and steal."
if it takes me about half an hour to go to Blockbuster and back (ten minute drive there and back, another ten minutes to find the movie and rent it), it would require about a 28Mbit connection.
That's one way to do it.
Another way I hear is fairly popular is this company called NetFlix, where they actually snail-mail your movies to you. That's at least a day of waiting, yet their business model doesn't appear to be in jeopardy. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations:
( 1.5 GB * (1024 MB / GB) * (1024 KB / GB) * (1024 B / KB) * (8 b / B) ) / ( (24 hours) * 60 min / hour) * (60 sec / min) ) = 139130.8 b/sec
That's the equivalent of a slow-ass ISDN connection to compete with NetFlix. And since you're d/ling precompressed material, it's not 6 gigs... more like 1.5 for a good rip.
The 80's were NOT that long ago. Sheesh!
I know how you feel, but remember when your parents kept telling you when you were a kid about how cool the 60s were, and it felt like they were talking about a different geological era? Well, that's what these kids today think about the 80s. And much like our parents told us, we can tell today's youth that their music sux0rs compared to the stuff we had back in our day.
Of course, they were right.
showing vegetarians lived 10-15% longer
Yeah, but smug self-satisfaction knocks about 10% off the lifespan, provided you're not punched by an offended meat-eater beforehand. So it's basically a wash.
What dealership do I go to buy my electric car, for which there is considerable demand?
The demand is there, sure. For an electric car that gets 400 miles per recharge, recharges in 5 minutes, goes 0-60mph in 8 seconds or less, is the size of an SUV, and is built using materials that are just as strong (and thus, safe in an accident) as its gas-cousins.
For the same price.
Right.
If you just want an electric car, there are plenty of people who can either build you a new car or retrofit your current gastrocity to happy-friendly electric. Just please don't think too long or hard about where the electricity to recharge your car comes from.
The single, solitary, lone reason I own an XBOX is for XBOX Media Center. Nothing else comes close to the TiVo-like integration and Firefox-like expandability.
Unfortunately, the built-in 733Mhz. processor is the limiting factor. Friendtech used to sell a 1.4Ghz. Celeron upgrade, but they don't offer it any longer (if anyone has one of these systems, by the way, I'd be happy to buy it off you). At this point, the XBMC developers are looking at ways to use the onboard GPU to do some of the calculations and take all the heat off the CPU, but this is like looking for breadcrumbs when right next door is a fully stocked kitchen pantry (XBOX 360 or PS3). Instead of wasting time developing for a platform that's basically a dead-end, they could be working on a system that will be able to handle HD content by design.
Would developers have to port MPLAYER to C# in order for this to work? It sounds like the PS3 is a lost cause until someone can whip up some Linux drivers for the graphics system. Does Microsoft have similar restrictions to the hardware?
This is fucking bullshit.
Yep. And when you want to try and put some distance between you and your "troubled" past and make a fresh, new start, then finally get a job by having to resort to lying about your past (so it's not used against you), then go on to be a model employee who's never broken the trust of your employer, who's "found out" after more than a year of good work, what happens? This happens. (comment upthread)
Almost seems like you just can't win. I'd bet this make a lot of previous criminals decide to say "Hell with this" and go back to their lives of crime. If you're going to be treated like a criminal either way...
Turns out we hired a guy who used a fake name and someone else's social security number, and he worked as one of our main sysadmins for over a year, with privileges on probably 100 servers and full privileges on the email servers, before he was caught.
Caught doing what, exactly?
If he was performing his job well for over a year without problems, what did you "catch" him doing?
a pill to solve every problem, even ones that weren't a real problem before they came up with a pill
Spoken like someone who doesn't suffer from narcolepsy. Sure, there are probably going to be people who abuse this. Just like with any drug. But to dismiss this out-of-hand because you don't personally have to deal with any of the problems it's designed to address is pure ignorant selfishness.
couldn't someone use Ajax to just grab the values and send them to the server before you even hit submit
Yes, someone could. You could even set a watch on the field's value so that it doesn't have to poll the server. In a nutshell, you attach a trigger to the value property of an input field. When the value changes (say, when it's auto-populated by FireFox's all-too-friendly password completion mechanism), the trigger then sends the values via AJAX request.
why the wait between businesses and consumers?
(apologies if this has already been answered elsewhere)
Because Microsoft has made commitments to the OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers--Dell, Gateway, etc.) to have it ready before the end of the year. Basically, Microsoft told all the big hardware players, "Look, you're all going to have to offer new tricked-out systems to support Vista, and they'd better be ready by Christmas!" The hardware guys kept their end of the bargain. Microsoft, in typical fashion, is running late. The entire (5 year+) Vista debacle should have provided enough warning to the hardware guys that there was no way in hell they'd be ready in time, but you can't turn your nose up at the only game in town.
But the hardware people aren't dumb. They know that once a consumer makes a two grand investment in a computer, they're not going to be upgrading for another couple of years. So it was vitally important that these new machines have Microsoft's "latest and greatest" OS on them. If Vista weren't on the systems that get sold for Christmas this year, the hardware manufacturers would be up shit creek without a paddle. The Best Buy's and Circuit City's of this world would be in a heap of trouble, too--all those parents coming back on December 26th complaining that their computer is "broken" because it doesn't have Vista? No way. So they structured the deal with MS that they basically have to give them Vista before the Christmas season, ready or not.
But why two release dates, then? Because Microsoft knows there's no way in hell Vista is going to be turn-key ready until next year. They give their Release Candidate to the OEM's, then spend another couple of months working out the bugs from their unwitting Beta Testers (a.k.a., Dell, Gateway, etc.)
The three methods of Comet involve using "slow close" (aka server push) style, piggybacking on a response from the last request, or polling.
Yes to the first part, no to the second. They use a keep-alive so the connection isn't closed, so you're right if you count the initial request for a page (which is initiated by the client). But that's not polling, which is repeated requests from the client. Once the connection is instantiated, you only need to keep the connection alive, but you don't have to keep asking the server, "Have you got anything new for me?"
This used to be a problem (at least for Java servers) because that meant you had to keep a thread open for each connection--thus the max number of threads that your server is configured to handle equals the max number of concurrent connections, which is no good for a heavily-trafficed site. But with non-blocking IO you can get around all of this.
There is still http requests coming and going but now instead of the server simply spitting out html, the server has to spit out and parse gigantic XML datasets to update a simple table (assuming you were refering to an html table).
Actually, we made a couple of compromises to traditional MVC design because we wanted to be able to control the contents of the cell (i.e., instead of just displaying simple text, it could be a link, or an image, or a javascript control, etc.). This necessitated implementing a template system that allowed for java expressions inside the table definition, which is tied to Java objects that are then tied to database tables (via Hibernate). Long story short: the server generates the table, so straight HTML is sent back to the client, already rendered properly. All the client has to do is replace the table body with the new table body via innerHTML.
Originally we were sending XML back to the client, which then had to be parsed, but this was a real headache because we couldn't use any logic in the template, only properties. So, for example, let's say a column is designed to display a list of company names, but some of those names will be links to a Company Information page, depending on whether they exist in our system. If they don't, just display the text. I have yet to see a system that allows for this kind of absolute control over the contents of a table at the object-level. Yes, it does violate MVC, but the tradeoffs were well worth it.
Since clicking on the "next page" for a table would require the contents to be rendered all over again anyway, this saves the overhead of all the other stuff on a page that doesn't change. That includes scripts, css definitions, etc. Sure a lot of that is cached, but no way is a whole page render going to be less than 1K, which is (seat-of-the-pants calculation) how much your average table is going to need.
There is no way to allow the server to initiate a connection to a client.
Wrong. Read up on Comet request processing. For Jetty, for Tomcat, and for Glassfish.
Everyone is out rushing to build AJAX apps into even the simplest applications, and the result is slow loading time and greatly increased server loads.
While this no doubt happens all the time, the main advantage of AJAX-enabled web applications is reduced load on the server. For instance, our intranet application uses the Tapestry framework, and the built-in tables component (at least for the 4.0 version) was useless because it required constant, complete page refreshing when all you really wanted to update was the contents of a table. We rolled our own table component that's fully ajaxificated and it's been nothing but positive for our end users and our servers.