this doesn't even link to getfirefox.com...
on
Explorer Destroyer
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The button they advocate putting on your site links to the Google Toolbar page. From there, it is not clear at all how to download Firefox, although they make it very clear how you can download the Google Toolbar.
If I were going to direct people to download Firefox, I would send them directly to getfirefox.com.
Um, no, you're wrong about the interface. Azureus is one of the few large projects (besides Eclipse) using SWT, IBM's take on cross-platform GUIs. SWT is similar to wxWindows in that it uses native widgets whereever possible, which means Azureus and Eclipse look like native applications.
It is not easy to tell that Azureus is a Java app...it even comes in a standard executable package for Windows.
The way he put it was that running XP under OSX would not depend on 3rd-party middleware, but would run directly under OSX.
So Apple develops their fancy new software to run XP binaries "directly" on OSX. Presumably, it's an implementation of the Windows API. Presumably, it's not an emulation. How is that code which provides the API not "3rd party middleware?" Just because Apple wrote it and includes it in the base OSX distribution, suddenly its not middleware?
How is this thing that Apple might develop any different from Wine?
I've been whining for a DirectX9 porting framework in OS X for a long time now, perhaps they'll do the entire Win32 API?
Why use a Windows specific API like DirectX when we have the cross-platform OpenGL? If Apple were to make its own version of Wine, it would have the same problems as Wine does with fully implementing the API. There is no authorative and complete API doc for Windows or for DirectX that is accessible to the public.
You're not seriously thinking about using a platform that is based on a poorly understood and reverse-engineered API, are you? Why write Windows API code if you're developing for the Mac?
The lack of something doesn't prove non-existence.
Given a large enough sample space, a reasonable assumption would be that a certain percent of prayers are answered. The researchers found that prayer had no effect (either good or bad) on the patients' recovery, ergo prayer has no effect on heart patients.
Now, you could argue that the sample size was not large enough, but beyond that, you can't argue with this study.
In my case, the MVC components are, respectively, PostgreSQL, HTML templates and PHP.
If you wanted to, you could turn your HTML templates into RHTML (Ruby HTML). If you PHP really was just acting as a controller, it should be easy to re-write that in Rails, as it uses the same design pattern. As far as custom SQL, it's easy to keep that in Rails (although it's not really the "Rails way"); you can execute arbitrary SQL statements just like in PHP.
Ultimately, I think we all code in what we're comfortable with. To many programmers, Rails fits their mind well because of the MVC pattern used, and in general the way Rails handles everything.
However, I still think custom frameworks are the root of all evil for anything but the smallest projects. Do you, a single developer, really have the guts to say that your framework is better than something that has been developed by a core team of 15 over about 2 years? Do you really think that your framework is that great, that you're willing to have to train someone else to use it, when you could just leverage the work of the community? Creating a custom framework is, in all but the most obscure cases, a supreme act of selfishness.
Next think you know...you'll be rewriting everying. You, the uber code, know best! Heck, we can write it all in C! Just rewrite all the good stuff that you take for granted in PHP. Why use PHP's session handling when you can roll your own? Oh, right, there's a whole slew of security issues there and you're likely to fuck up some small detail and open up some nasty hole where one user can get to another's session. Etc, ad nauseam.
An object-relation mapping (ORM) that "just works" and uses reflection on the database to produce business objects without the developer writing more than 3 lines of code is anything but a minor improvement. ActiveRecord is also more than an ORM. It allows developers to declare that an object "acts as a list," which then allows the object to be sorted in an array. There are many other such "meta-programming" constructs in ActiveRecord.
It also gives you a lot of stuff for free; migrations from one database schema to another, for example, are wrapped in ActiveRecord calls and are thus database-agnostic. You don't have to worry about packaging one SQL update file for MySQL and another for Postgres and another for MS SQL. The console is really cool too...it allows you to interactively play with your objects. You can even run it in 'sandbox' mode, so that all of your changes are rolled back when you're done playing.
Can you elaborate on this? What is so poor about using FastCGI? It works really well on my server. Just because it's different than standard Perl or PHP CGI does not make it "poor" integration.
Um...sorry, I have to disagree. Using a well-known framework makes a project anything but unmainatainable. Let's say a project is written with a framework, and the original developers no longer supports it, or he leaves your company, or whatever. At the very least there are many people out there with a basic understanding of the framework, and thus a basic understanding of the code. You can hire a Rails consultant and be fairly confident that he will be able to pick up where the old developer(s) left off. Try doing that with some custom framework (or, even worse with no framework at all). I know from personal exerience that it is very difficult to pick up a new framework; it can take weeks, and even after that it's not totally intuitive.
Furthermore, Rails promotes good coding and design habits. While you may not agree with Model-View-Controller (not sure why, but that's a personal choice I guess), at least Rails imposes some design pattern on the developer. Without this, an inexperienced developer will be able to write completely unmaintainable code.
lifeisgreat wrote: I already created the database schema, wrote all the SQL to get the information I want, have a lot of HTML written for the general template, and was looking at abandoning much of it for controllers, models, automagic foreign key relationships, automagic methods popping out of thin air.. I wanted more control I guess.
It sounds like you come from a background where you mix business logic, business objects, and presentation into the same file. I suggest that you take a step back and re-examine your design choices. Controllers, modules, and views aren't exclusive to Rails; you'll find them wherever a goood, sane, well-designed code lives. If your original system was designed with MVC in mind, moving it to Rails should have been easy.
lifeisgreat wrote: just start each page with sanity checking, authorization, the SQL the page needs and nothing more
What if you forget a single function call at the beginning of one of those pages? Do you suddenly allow objects to be populated with rogue data? Rails has things like filters that make sure certain methods get executed before all actions in a given controller.
If you look on Apple's site, the video iPod has a maximum resolution of
MPEG-4 video: up to 2.5 mbps, 480 x 480, 30 frames per sec., Simple Profile with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in.m4v,.mp4 and.mov file formats
So, it's standard broadcast TV quality. Which is pretty bad. I for one would not want to watch this on a high def TV.
4G iPods have a touch-sensitive wheel area, _not_ a mechanical click wheel. Unless I'm totally incorrect. Wtf are they talking about here? iPods haven't had a mechanical click wheel for many years.
XviD is licensed under the GPL. If they link with it at runtime they must provide the code not only for the version of XviD they used, but also for any parts of their application that link with XviD.
I do believe that Firefox is a safer program to view web pages through because, unlike IE, it is completely separate from the OS.
IE developers, because they work with Windows OS developers and can access private OS functions, link the IE web browser to important system components in the name of usability and features, and even in the name of browser/OS integration (as if it's a good thing?). Firefox developers cannot and would not do any such thing.
I call FUD. The IE rendering engine is no more integrated into the OS than the Gecko rendering engine that powers Firefox.
Just because IE is distributed with the OS doesn't mean that it is _part_ of the OS. It does _not_ run in the kernel, it is _not_ linked to device drivers, it is _not_ part of the OS. If IE is part of the system, then the C runtime DLL is part of the OS. By your metric, Notepad is also part of the OS. Does that make any sense at all?
What are these "private OS functions" you speak of? The whole Windows API is documented and open to anyone, for free! If you don't want to fork over the cash for a copy of the MSDN, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com Anything that IE can do, a third party application can do.
You talk about linking IE to "important system components." I assume you're talking about how IE is used to render the HTML help files provided with the OS...would you rather each application implement its own HTML renderer? Do you know how much of a mess that would be? What if those applications that use IE to render HTML used Gecko instead? Would you be saying the same thing?
The only thing IE should be faulted for is failure to comply with standards. I agree that it is a HUGE issue that IE doesn't support standards...it's the reason I don't use it and why I advocate that people use Firefox. But IE is _not_ part of the OS, and its security issues have been patched since SP2. Please get your facts straight and stop spreading FUD.
> but I fail to see how a direct transcoder is going to do anything different.
Encoding twice causes the MP3 you create to be _much_ lower quality. AAC and MP3 both work by removing information from the sound stream that you can't hear; if that information has already been removed by an AAC encoder, the MP3 encoder's job becomes much harder, and so to fit the song into the desired bitrate it has to take more information away from the song. You will hear a lot more compression artifacts on songs that have been compressed twice.
This is why Apple needs to offer losslessly compressed songs. I personally would be willing to pay up to a quarter more (to cover the extra bandwidth that it would take to transfer them), because AAC is useless to me.
DRM can always be cracked, the real question is: are you willing to live with the horrible quality of the songs downloaded from any of these stores? You can't recover the quality that is lost in the conversion to AAC (or whatever Real uses). I refuse to pay for music that has been run through a lossy compression algorithm. Maybe if iTunes or Real started selling uncompressed (or losslessly compressed music) I might start buying online (regardless of the DRM, because that can and will be cracked.)
A cert from a CA tells you _for certain_ that "joeskillerdeals.com" is really the website for Joe's Killer Deals. Whether you trust Joe is up to you, but the cert ensures that Joe is getting your information, and not some random third party. Without the "web of trust" that the CA helps create, it is impossible to verify the identity of anyone on the Internet.
Yay for the corruption and pollution of DNS! Couldn't they just have used a subdomain off of tomshardware.com? If this site really is a subsite of tomshardware.com, it would make sense (and be more considerate to the Internet community) to use something like "networking.tomshardware.com" instead of registering a new domain name.
Don't you realized that you're losing a LOT of quality by doing this? The original file is of mediocre quality to begin with, then you burn it to a CD, then you transcode it back to an MP3 file. Going between AAC and MP3 (or even MP3 and MP3) introduces a lot of compression artifacts that you'll definitely be able to hear next time you try to transcode the music (say, from MP3 to Ogg or WMA).
Slashdot Mirror
The button they advocate putting on your site links to the Google Toolbar page. From there, it is not clear at all how to download Firefox, although they make it very clear how you can download the Google Toolbar.
If I were going to direct people to download Firefox, I would send them directly to getfirefox.com.
Mozilla presumably needs all the funding they can get. Where are they getting the money to pay for a site like this?
Um, no, you're wrong about the interface. Azureus is one of the few large projects (besides Eclipse) using SWT, IBM's take on cross-platform GUIs. SWT is similar to wxWindows in that it uses native widgets whereever possible, which means Azureus and Eclipse look like native applications.
It is not easy to tell that Azureus is a Java app...it even comes in a standard executable package for Windows.
So Apple develops their fancy new software to run XP binaries "directly" on OSX. Presumably, it's an implementation of the Windows API. Presumably, it's not an emulation. How is that code which provides the API not "3rd party middleware?" Just because Apple wrote it and includes it in the base OSX distribution, suddenly its not middleware?
How is this thing that Apple might develop any different from Wine?
Why use a Windows specific API like DirectX when we have the cross-platform OpenGL? If Apple were to make its own version of Wine, it would have the same problems as Wine does with fully implementing the API. There is no authorative and complete API doc for Windows or for DirectX that is accessible to the public.
You're not seriously thinking about using a platform that is based on a poorly understood and reverse-engineered API, are you? Why write Windows API code if you're developing for the Mac?
Can you explain what Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, has to do with Firefox, a web browser? Your statment about GNOME and Firefox is nonsensical.
Given a large enough sample space, a reasonable assumption would be that a certain percent of prayers are answered. The researchers found that prayer had no effect (either good or bad) on the patients' recovery, ergo prayer has no effect on heart patients.
Now, you could argue that the sample size was not large enough, but beyond that, you can't argue with this study.
If you wanted to, you could turn your HTML templates into RHTML (Ruby HTML). If you PHP really was just acting as a controller, it should be easy to re-write that in Rails, as it uses the same design pattern. As far as custom SQL, it's easy to keep that in Rails (although it's not really the "Rails way"); you can execute arbitrary SQL statements just like in PHP.
Ultimately, I think we all code in what we're comfortable with. To many programmers, Rails fits their mind well because of the MVC pattern used, and in general the way Rails handles everything.
However, I still think custom frameworks are the root of all evil for anything but the smallest projects. Do you, a single developer, really have the guts to say that your framework is better than something that has been developed by a core team of 15 over about 2 years? Do you really think that your framework is that great, that you're willing to have to train someone else to use it, when you could just leverage the work of the community? Creating a custom framework is, in all but the most obscure cases, a supreme act of selfishness.
Next think you know...you'll be rewriting everying. You, the uber code, know best! Heck, we can write it all in C! Just rewrite all the good stuff that you take for granted in PHP. Why use PHP's session handling when you can roll your own? Oh, right, there's a whole slew of security issues there and you're likely to fuck up some small detail and open up some nasty hole where one user can get to another's session. Etc, ad nauseam.
An object-relation mapping (ORM) that "just works" and uses reflection on the database to produce business objects without the developer writing more than 3 lines of code is anything but a minor improvement. ActiveRecord is also more than an ORM. It allows developers to declare that an object "acts as a list," which then allows the object to be sorted in an array. There are many other such "meta-programming" constructs in ActiveRecord.
It also gives you a lot of stuff for free; migrations from one database schema to another, for example, are wrapped in ActiveRecord calls and are thus database-agnostic. You don't have to worry about packaging one SQL update file for MySQL and another for Postgres and another for MS SQL. The console is really cool too...it allows you to interactively play with your objects. You can even run it in 'sandbox' mode, so that all of your changes are rolled back when you're done playing.
Can you elaborate on this? What is so poor about using FastCGI? It works really well on my server. Just because it's different than standard Perl or PHP CGI does not make it "poor" integration.
Um...sorry, I have to disagree. Using a well-known framework makes a project anything but unmainatainable. Let's say a project is written with a framework, and the original developers no longer supports it, or he leaves your company, or whatever. At the very least there are many people out there with a basic understanding of the framework, and thus a basic understanding of the code. You can hire a Rails consultant and be fairly confident that he will be able to pick up where the old developer(s) left off. Try doing that with some custom framework (or, even worse with no framework at all). I know from personal exerience that it is very difficult to pick up a new framework; it can take weeks, and even after that it's not totally intuitive.
Furthermore, Rails promotes good coding and design habits. While you may not agree with Model-View-Controller (not sure why, but that's a personal choice I guess), at least Rails imposes some design pattern on the developer. Without this, an inexperienced developer will be able to write completely unmaintainable code.
It sounds like you come from a background where you mix business logic, business objects, and presentation into the same file. I suggest that you take a step back and re-examine your design choices. Controllers, modules, and views aren't exclusive to Rails; you'll find them wherever a goood, sane, well-designed code lives. If your original system was designed with MVC in mind, moving it to Rails should have been easy.
What if you forget a single function call at the beginning of one of those pages? Do you suddenly allow objects to be populated with rogue data? Rails has things like filters that make sure certain methods get executed before all actions in a given controller.
So, it's standard broadcast TV quality. Which is pretty bad. I for one would not want to watch this on a high def TV.
4G iPods have a touch-sensitive wheel area, _not_ a mechanical click wheel. Unless I'm totally incorrect. Wtf are they talking about here? iPods haven't had a mechanical click wheel for many years.
Someone is, and it's called Subway: http://subway.python-hosting.com/
XviD is licensed under the GPL. If they link with it at runtime they must provide the code not only for the version of XviD they used, but also for any parts of their application that link with XviD.
I call FUD. The IE rendering engine is no more integrated into the OS than the Gecko rendering engine that powers Firefox.
Just because IE is distributed with the OS doesn't mean that it is _part_ of the OS. It does _not_ run in the kernel, it is _not_ linked to device drivers, it is _not_ part of the OS. If IE is part of the system, then the C runtime DLL is part of the OS. By your metric, Notepad is also part of the OS. Does that make any sense at all?
What are these "private OS functions" you speak of? The whole Windows API is documented and open to anyone, for free! If you don't want to fork over the cash for a copy of the MSDN, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com Anything that IE can do, a third party application can do.
You talk about linking IE to "important system components." I assume you're talking about how IE is used to render the HTML help files provided with the OS...would you rather each application implement its own HTML renderer? Do you know how much of a mess that would be? What if those applications that use IE to render HTML used Gecko instead? Would you be saying the same thing?
The only thing IE should be faulted for is failure to comply with standards. I agree that it is a HUGE issue that IE doesn't support standards...it's the reason I don't use it and why I advocate that people use Firefox. But IE is _not_ part of the OS, and its security issues have been patched since SP2. Please get your facts straight and stop spreading FUD.
What about sites hosted on virtual servers? You _need_ DNS for those sites to work, otherwise the server doesn't know what site you want.
> but I fail to see how a direct transcoder is going to do anything different.
Encoding twice causes the MP3 you create to be _much_ lower quality. AAC and MP3 both work by removing information from the sound stream that you can't hear; if that information has already been removed by an AAC encoder, the MP3 encoder's job becomes much harder, and so to fit the song into the desired bitrate it has to take more information away from the song. You will hear a lot more compression artifacts on songs that have been compressed twice.
This is why Apple needs to offer losslessly compressed songs. I personally would be willing to pay up to a quarter more (to cover the extra bandwidth that it would take to transfer them), because AAC is useless to me.
Bad caps have nothing to do with x86, they were a manufacturing defect that actually found their way into more than just PC motherboards.
DRM can always be cracked, the real question is: are you willing to live with the horrible quality of the songs downloaded from any of these stores? You can't recover the quality that is lost in the conversion to AAC (or whatever Real uses). I refuse to pay for music that has been run through a lossy compression algorithm. Maybe if iTunes or Real started selling uncompressed (or losslessly compressed music) I might start buying online (regardless of the DRM, because that can and will be cracked.)
Naw, they're both crap. Get a copy of Nero, or better yet, the Free CDRTools.
A cert from a CA tells you _for certain_ that "joeskillerdeals.com" is really the website for Joe's Killer Deals. Whether you trust Joe is up to you, but the cert ensures that Joe is getting your information, and not some random third party. Without the "web of trust" that the CA helps create, it is impossible to verify the identity of anyone on the Internet.
Yay for the corruption and pollution of DNS! Couldn't they just have used a subdomain off of tomshardware.com? If this site really is a subsite of tomshardware.com, it would make sense (and be more considerate to the Internet community) to use something like "networking.tomshardware.com" instead of registering a new domain name.
Don't you realized that you're losing a LOT of quality by doing this? The original file is of mediocre quality to begin with, then you burn it to a CD, then you transcode it back to an MP3 file. Going between AAC and MP3 (or even MP3 and MP3) introduces a lot of compression artifacts that you'll definitely be able to hear next time you try to transcode the music (say, from MP3 to Ogg or WMA).