This reply isn't interesting, its ignorant, as I stated in my first post.
Here's a very common must-have requirement, not on meaningless $50k consumer websites, but on multi-million dollar enterprise applications, the kind of applications built using the Oracle technology the original article was talking about: cut and paste any artibtrarily formatted content from Word, maintain it in that formatting, and display it inline in the web pages.
What the legions of high school and college kids on/. don't understand, and what my original point was trying to make is that things like this get handed to you as an *absolute* requirement in the real world. You do it, or you don't sell the product. You can't do that in Mozilla.
Customers want modal dialog boxes. Try making anything modal in Mozilla.
Try taking any advanced user interface and with ZERO increase in cost, make it work on IE (since 99.9% of users use it in a commercial setting) and make it work in Mozilla. Without dropping a single feature the users are expecting. Again, ZERO incremental cost to the project.
It won't happen. You either run overbudget, or get creamed in the marketplace by a competitor who built a better product for less money.
THAT is how the real world works. A few poseurs on here flinging mod points in an attempt to pretend thats not the reality can't change that.
I'm sure some over-righteous jackass will mod this post down, too. Because thats what/. does. Some of us do this for a living on industry-leading products that sell for seven figure prices, and others just pretend the understand how the industry works.
Anyone who believes web applications should adhere to standards is someone who clearly doesn't live in the same world as the rest of us.
Its a great ideal to have, its great to strive for it, but the difference between an application using 100% of the capability of the existing web standards, and 100% of the capability thats available in IE6, in particular, is enormous. Users want that functionality, because they've seen it in other applications. Customers want that functionality because users want it.
Engineers need to use it because if they don't their competitors will. This isn't 1999 any more... you can't come up with an idea for an application and spend years burning through your cash because you believe you're doing the right thing.
Supporting Mozilla *isn't* obvious. Its got a virtually nonexistent user base, a user base that looked for a while to have a potential of growing if AOL rolled it out into their client, but they're not. Netscape isn't. Its a niche browser for a niche set of operating systems.
Any reasonable professional product manager would drop Mozilla support in a heartbeat if it meant selling more applications because of the capabilities they can get using IE-specific technology. The market just isn't there otherwise.
And I'm saying this as someone who used Linux as a desktop OS from 1993-2003 when I got a Mac. Never owned a Windows box, and never used Windows outside of work. But I've been writing real web applications -- not consumer toy website applications -- for ten years, and the situation in that regard has been getting steadily worse.
I put a higher priority these days on ensuring Safari works than Mozilla. Substantially higher priority.
Or maybe its that virtually all computer users have heard of WMV, and virtually none of OGG.
Within the realm of statistical error, its safe to say no one anywhere cares one bit about OGG. OGG isn't considered a threat, its considered a total non-issue.
Now, I know most of/.'s readers are highschool kids and 3733t g3eks, but in the real world of real business, which some of us actually live and work in, the fact that something is free doesn't matter in the slightest. Do you think the cost of licensing MP3 patents is significant enough to even warrant a meeting about the costs, to a company that is paying for product design, fabrication, marketing, shipping, etc? Nope. Its not even worth the time of the people who would have to make that decision.
Considering 99% of the 70+ million people out there with digital copies of their songs in WMV, or MP3 have never heard of OGG, I'd bet the loss of you, or the rest of that one percent doesn't concern anyone at Apple in the slightest.
I had almost all my CDs ripped as OGG files five years ago. It was a moral thing, a statement by myself to the world that frankly didn't give a crap. I eventually took the time and re-ripped everything to MP3. Sure the files were bigger, but storage was a lot cheaper. And I can listen to them everywhere, on my Linux box, iTunes, my iPod, or I can burn them to a CDR and listen to them on my DVD player.
There's only one real reason these bit players in the MP3/digital music player market announce OGG support -- because it gets them attention, without which they wouldn't have a prayer of making a dent in the market. Add OGG support and a half million people on Slashdot read a review of you, linked to a site that probably has more readers, still. Of course, most of those readers could care less about OGG support, too... but its media exposure through simply adding a fairly easy to add feature, regardless of whether or not people want it. In one way or another, most companies do that.
This is a great use for RFID tags. Watch all the chips, watch where the move, and track which ones I have.
I love to go to the casino and play card games like Blackjack or more importantly Craps. Accurate tracking of chips tagged to me would mean two things: accurate comping and the ability to have a technical solution to ensuring payouts are correct.
Those of you who have played craps at a busy table will know what I mean -- the accuracy of your payouts when you win is always in the hands of the "dealer" working your half of the table. I've been payed wrong many times, sometimes in my favor, sometimes not. Sometimes money comes in from bets I forgot I had on the table, sometimes I wonder if I got missed on a payout.
If this means that questioning a missed payout can be more accurate or means at a minimum the casino can see in aggregate when they have someone working the table who consistently makes payout errors, more power to them.
This isn't a privacy issue. If you think you have one spec of anonymity or privacy in a casino, you're nuckin futs.
For the 10,000th time, Apple has been and always will be a hardware company, not a software company. They write innovative software so people buy their hardware. Period.
Given that fact, why exactly is not licensing MacOS obviously one of the major causes of Apple nearly falling off the face of the planet?
Seems to be based on their very successful business model (you start a company and be profitable for 30 years!), not licensing MacOS is exactly the right thing for them to have done.
I generally find Gimp very easy to use, even easier in some ways than Photoshop (although I think the difference between which you're comfortable with largely comes from whether or not you find top menus or context menus more convenient).
The actual methodologies you use between the two are very similar, although newer Photoshops have some interesting capabilities that Gimp doesn't have. For even very advanced graphic design, Gimp can certainly do it. Its got more features than people were using to do any imaging work a few years ago with things like Photoshop.
Courses that cover techniques could certainly be useful, with the understanding that the actual steps may be different in Gimp. Knowing what to do is more important than how to do it.
I'm not sure why your post was moderated insightful. Hopeful, perhaps. Not insightful.
What are your credentials for making that sort of a statement? What research have you done? What analysis have you done? What tracking of costs of existing deployments in, say, latter 2003 have you looked at?
While you may be right, your statement is as utterly rediculous as theirs, because its equally irrelavant. At least they have real research credentials behind them, and they do specify the data they used to reach that conclusion.
But/. isn't really known for its readers/posters being unbiased, now, is it?
Actually one my cars does have a cage, and is quite a bit too loud to interact with the passenger.
With a lot of things, I'd agree with you, but driving is one of the most dangerous things an average person does every day, and people are not properly trained at it. If the government isn't going to step up and require proper training, severely limiting what they can do while driving is an acceptable alternative, because someone who is properly trained and understands what they are doing wouldn't be doing those things in the first place.
A passenger using a computer can be terribly distracting.
When you're driving a car, thats your focus -- driving. Touch screen video nagivation and vehicle controls are dangerous, too. It still amazes me they're allowed. I've watched my parents swerving all over the road trying to change radio stations in their Lexus because they retardedly put the radio controls in the GPS navigation system.
Personally, I hate having any distractions in a car when I'm driving. One of my cars is a fairly new Audi, and the dash is very nicely reserved, nothing jumping out at me. My other car is a vintage 911, and it doesn't even have a radio or a clock. I can give driving 100% of my attention in both cars.
How the government thinks its a good idea to put someone behind the wheel of a 6000lbs SUV with screaming kids and a DVD playing in the back, a touch screen navigation system, and their spouse using a laptop in the passenger seat all with 15 hours of required drivers training is totally beyond me. They'll spend billions preventing terrorism, but they could save 100x the number of people if they mandated real drivers training and taught people common sense.
Laws like this should be encouraged. Make driving more inconvenient for people who are going to be dangers on the road anyway.
Or just buy a car thats old enough to run on carbs.
My 911 has two wires going to the engine -- 12v power, and 12v to the starter. The car runs fine with the other two wires (oil pressure, oil temp) disconnected.
The problem with most modern cars where aftermarket EFI is concerned is that dash components often work via the ECU not direct sensor input. Ie, replace your engine ECU, lose your dash.
This is real simple, for the 10,000th time its been stated on here.
Apple writes an OS to put on its hardware. It makes its money on the hardware. There's no reason for it to run its OS on anything else, because its not in business to sell software.
Its identical to Apple selling music to get people to buy iPods. Apple isn't in business to sell music, they're business to sell hardware.
They always have, and very likely they always will.
To be fair, thats so far out the league of the Big Dig, its not really an example.
A lot of people like to bash the Big Dig, but when you get a feel for the true scope of the project, or the true problem traffic was in Boston (for example, that tunnel opening southbound may take 30+ minutes off my commute to work!), it makes a lot more sense.
Imagine bulding ten of thise high-five projects in the middle of one of the most cramped cities in the country (Boston is so small you can very easily walk from one side to the other in an hour, which ironically is faster than you could drive in rush hour). They had to do this construction without impacting existing services too much (although they failed miserably in terms of avoiding impacting traffic in the city). They also had to do in on reclaimed land that 200 years ago was under water. Most of the Boston land in that area is 200 year old reclaimed land made up of dirt, rocks, and garbage. Not a good place to get work done.
There were parts of the Big Dig that were badly mismanaged, but a 5 level interchange doesn't have high risk of discovering that you physically can't construct something where you want because the ground is too soft. Innovations like freezing the ground solid so they can dig through it without impacting existing infrastructure took time to develop, and was an unforseeable circumstance.
What a lot of non-MA people don't realize is there is another major construction project happening around Boston, the widening of Route 3, a primary commuter route from the northwest suburbs of Boston in towards Rt 128/Interstate 95. This project was started in summer of 2000, and involved adding a third lane and room for a fourth, and the reconstruction of 47 bridges, and two major interstate interchanges. Its damn near to completion, ahead of schedule, and is an example of how MA is actually capable of doing that sort of project when its just standard construction, not a 20-year research-and-developmente project like the Big Dig.
Thankfully when Rt 3 is done, it might take another half hour off my commute. Ah, to feel the wonderful glow of sanity once again...:)
Oh MAN it would make my day if I could call in aerial support, though, and drop a 500lbs smart bomb on the New Hampshire driver in front of me that thinks the left lane is for people who aren't getting off the highway for a long time...
Well my point is the industry will only support a certain number of senior people... and right now there are FAR more junior people than there will ever be senior positions, so a lot of people will either end up stuck in their position or will change careers out of frustration.
A smaller job market may help that, since most of the jobs these days seem to be those more junior positions. If you've got 50% fewer of those, the odds of ending up in a senior position for those who get them double. Another poster made a comment about walmart salaries. Salaries are still as high as ever for a lot of developers, but the massive overpopulation of entry level people have pushed salaries at the bottom way down.
Slashdot Mirror
They're blue in real life.
CBS made the same mistake with the elves in the Rudolph animated special from 40 years ago.
Green elves were really blue elves so green martians must really be blue martians, right?
This reply isn't interesting, its ignorant, as I stated in my first post.
/. don't understand, and what my original point was trying to make is that things like this get handed to you as an *absolute* requirement in the real world. You do it, or you don't sell the product. You can't do that in Mozilla.
/. does. Some of us do this for a living on industry-leading products that sell for seven figure prices, and others just pretend the understand how the industry works.
Here's a very common must-have requirement, not on meaningless $50k consumer websites, but on multi-million dollar enterprise applications, the kind of applications built using the Oracle technology the original article was talking about: cut and paste any artibtrarily formatted content from Word, maintain it in that formatting, and display it inline in the web pages.
What the legions of high school and college kids on
Customers want modal dialog boxes. Try making anything modal in Mozilla.
Try taking any advanced user interface and with ZERO increase in cost, make it work on IE (since 99.9% of users use it in a commercial setting) and make it work in Mozilla. Without dropping a single feature the users are expecting. Again, ZERO incremental cost to the project.
It won't happen. You either run overbudget, or get creamed in the marketplace by a competitor who built a better product for less money.
THAT is how the real world works. A few poseurs on here flinging mod points in an attempt to pretend thats not the reality can't change that.
I'm sure some over-righteous jackass will mod this post down, too. Because thats what
Anyone who believes web applications should adhere to standards is someone who clearly doesn't live in the same world as the rest of us.
Its a great ideal to have, its great to strive for it, but the difference between an application using 100% of the capability of the existing web standards, and 100% of the capability thats available in IE6, in particular, is enormous. Users want that functionality, because they've seen it in other applications. Customers want that functionality because users want it.
Engineers need to use it because if they don't their competitors will. This isn't 1999 any more... you can't come up with an idea for an application and spend years burning through your cash because you believe you're doing the right thing.
Supporting Mozilla *isn't* obvious. Its got a virtually nonexistent user base, a user base that looked for a while to have a potential of growing if AOL rolled it out into their client, but they're not. Netscape isn't. Its a niche browser for a niche set of operating systems.
Any reasonable professional product manager would drop Mozilla support in a heartbeat if it meant selling more applications because of the capabilities they can get using IE-specific technology. The market just isn't there otherwise.
And I'm saying this as someone who used Linux as a desktop OS from 1993-2003 when I got a Mac. Never owned a Windows box, and never used Windows outside of work. But I've been writing real web applications -- not consumer toy website applications -- for ten years, and the situation in that regard has been getting steadily worse.
I put a higher priority these days on ensuring Safari works than Mozilla. Substantially higher priority.
Or maybe its that virtually all computer users have heard of WMV, and virtually none of OGG.
/.'s readers are highschool kids and 3733t g3eks, but in the real world of real business, which some of us actually live and work in, the fact that something is free doesn't matter in the slightest. Do you think the cost of licensing MP3 patents is significant enough to even warrant a meeting about the costs, to a company that is paying for product design, fabrication, marketing, shipping, etc? Nope. Its not even worth the time of the people who would have to make that decision.
Within the realm of statistical error, its safe to say no one anywhere cares one bit about OGG. OGG isn't considered a threat, its considered a total non-issue.
Now, I know most of
I should mention I meant 70 million people in the US.
Considering 99% of the 70+ million people out there with digital copies of their songs in WMV, or MP3 have never heard of OGG, I'd bet the loss of you, or the rest of that one percent doesn't concern anyone at Apple in the slightest.
I had almost all my CDs ripped as OGG files five years ago. It was a moral thing, a statement by myself to the world that frankly didn't give a crap. I eventually took the time and re-ripped everything to MP3. Sure the files were bigger, but storage was a lot cheaper. And I can listen to them everywhere, on my Linux box, iTunes, my iPod, or I can burn them to a CDR and listen to them on my DVD player.
There's only one real reason these bit players in the MP3/digital music player market announce OGG support -- because it gets them attention, without which they wouldn't have a prayer of making a dent in the market. Add OGG support and a half million people on Slashdot read a review of you, linked to a site that probably has more readers, still. Of course, most of those readers could care less about OGG support, too... but its media exposure through simply adding a fairly easy to add feature, regardless of whether or not people want it. In one way or another, most companies do that.
This is a great use for RFID tags. Watch all the chips, watch where the move, and track which ones I have.
I love to go to the casino and play card games like Blackjack or more importantly Craps. Accurate tracking of chips tagged to me would mean two things: accurate comping and the ability to have a technical solution to ensuring payouts are correct.
Those of you who have played craps at a busy table will know what I mean -- the accuracy of your payouts when you win is always in the hands of the "dealer" working your half of the table. I've been payed wrong many times, sometimes in my favor, sometimes not. Sometimes money comes in from bets I forgot I had on the table, sometimes I wonder if I got missed on a payout.
If this means that questioning a missed payout can be more accurate or means at a minimum the casino can see in aggregate when they have someone working the table who consistently makes payout errors, more power to them.
This isn't a privacy issue. If you think you have one spec of anonymity or privacy in a casino, you're nuckin futs.
For the 10,000th time, Apple has been and always will be a hardware company, not a software company. They write innovative software so people buy their hardware. Period.
Given that fact, why exactly is not licensing MacOS obviously one of the major causes of Apple nearly falling off the face of the planet?
Seems to be based on their very successful business model (you start a company and be profitable for 30 years!), not licensing MacOS is exactly the right thing for them to have done.
I generally find Gimp very easy to use, even easier in some ways than Photoshop (although I think the difference between which you're comfortable with largely comes from whether or not you find top menus or context menus more convenient).
The actual methodologies you use between the two are very similar, although newer Photoshops have some interesting capabilities that Gimp doesn't have. For even very advanced graphic design, Gimp can certainly do it. Its got more features than people were using to do any imaging work a few years ago with things like Photoshop.
Courses that cover techniques could certainly be useful, with the understanding that the actual steps may be different in Gimp. Knowing what to do is more important than how to do it.
Um, minor point, but Mars is quite a bit smaller than the Earth. Venus is about Earth size.
I'm not sure why your post was moderated insightful. Hopeful, perhaps. Not insightful.
/. isn't really known for its readers/posters being unbiased, now, is it?
What are your credentials for making that sort of a statement? What research have you done? What analysis have you done? What tracking of costs of existing deployments in, say, latter 2003 have you looked at?
While you may be right, your statement is as utterly rediculous as theirs, because its equally irrelavant. At least they have real research credentials behind them, and they do specify the data they used to reach that conclusion.
But
Maybe you should work more on ensuring you actually are more than a potential graduate first. Upcoming graduate? Future graduate?
;-)
I was a potential graduate and the last few months of my senior year really really sucked.
Just nuke it early enough that I don't have to sit in the traffic jam THAT would cause on my way to work...
Actually one my cars does have a cage, and is quite a bit too loud to interact with the passenger.
With a lot of things, I'd agree with you, but driving is one of the most dangerous things an average person does every day, and people are not properly trained at it. If the government isn't going to step up and require proper training, severely limiting what they can do while driving is an acceptable alternative, because someone who is properly trained and understands what they are doing wouldn't be doing those things in the first place.
A passenger using a computer can be terribly distracting.
When you're driving a car, thats your focus -- driving. Touch screen video nagivation and vehicle controls are dangerous, too. It still amazes me they're allowed. I've watched my parents swerving all over the road trying to change radio stations in their Lexus because they retardedly put the radio controls in the GPS navigation system.
Personally, I hate having any distractions in a car when I'm driving. One of my cars is a fairly new Audi, and the dash is very nicely reserved, nothing jumping out at me. My other car is a vintage 911, and it doesn't even have a radio or a clock. I can give driving 100% of my attention in both cars.
How the government thinks its a good idea to put someone behind the wheel of a 6000lbs SUV with screaming kids and a DVD playing in the back, a touch screen navigation system, and their spouse using a laptop in the passenger seat all with 15 hours of required drivers training is totally beyond me. They'll spend billions preventing terrorism, but they could save 100x the number of people if they mandated real drivers training and taught people common sense.
Laws like this should be encouraged. Make driving more inconvenient for people who are going to be dangers on the road anyway.
Huh, never heard that before. Can you point to some resources on that? I'm curious to read more about it.
Or just buy a car thats old enough to run on carbs.
My 911 has two wires going to the engine -- 12v power, and 12v to the starter. The car runs fine with the other two wires (oil pressure, oil temp) disconnected.
The problem with most modern cars where aftermarket EFI is concerned is that dash components often work via the ECU not direct sensor input. Ie, replace your engine ECU, lose your dash.
This is real simple, for the 10,000th time its been stated on here.
Apple writes an OS to put on its hardware. It makes its money on the hardware. There's no reason for it to run its OS on anything else, because its not in business to sell software.
Its identical to Apple selling music to get people to buy iPods. Apple isn't in business to sell music, they're business to sell hardware.
They always have, and very likely they always will.
I'd happily abandon my dignity for ten bucks.
Smallpox scabs were used widely to provide immunity for hundreds of years outside of Europe before there was the concept of vaccination.
Um, thats not a plasma TV.
To be fair, thats so far out the league of the Big Dig, its not really an example.
:)
A lot of people like to bash the Big Dig, but when you get a feel for the true scope of the project, or the true problem traffic was in Boston (for example, that tunnel opening southbound may take 30+ minutes off my commute to work!), it makes a lot more sense.
Imagine bulding ten of thise high-five projects in the middle of one of the most cramped cities in the country (Boston is so small you can very easily walk from one side to the other in an hour, which ironically is faster than you could drive in rush hour). They had to do this construction without impacting existing services too much (although they failed miserably in terms of avoiding impacting traffic in the city). They also had to do in on reclaimed land that 200 years ago was under water. Most of the Boston land in that area is 200 year old reclaimed land made up of dirt, rocks, and garbage. Not a good place to get work done.
There were parts of the Big Dig that were badly mismanaged, but a 5 level interchange doesn't have high risk of discovering that you physically can't construct something where you want because the ground is too soft. Innovations like freezing the ground solid so they can dig through it without impacting existing infrastructure took time to develop, and was an unforseeable circumstance.
What a lot of non-MA people don't realize is there is another major construction project happening around Boston, the widening of Route 3, a primary commuter route from the northwest suburbs of Boston in towards Rt 128/Interstate 95. This project was started in summer of 2000, and involved adding a third lane and room for a fourth, and the reconstruction of 47 bridges, and two major interstate interchanges. Its damn near to completion, ahead of schedule, and is an example of how MA is actually capable of doing that sort of project when its just standard construction, not a 20-year research-and-developmente project like the Big Dig.
Thankfully when Rt 3 is done, it might take another half hour off my commute. Ah, to feel the wonderful glow of sanity once again...
Oh MAN it would make my day if I could call in aerial support, though, and drop a 500lbs smart bomb on the New Hampshire driver in front of me that thinks the left lane is for people who aren't getting off the highway for a long time...
Was that subconsciously or consciously intended to look like a penis with a smile on top? What are you saying about Microsoft, really?
Well my point is the industry will only support a certain number of senior people... and right now there are FAR more junior people than there will ever be senior positions, so a lot of people will either end up stuck in their position or will change careers out of frustration.
A smaller job market may help that, since most of the jobs these days seem to be those more junior positions. If you've got 50% fewer of those, the odds of ending up in a senior position for those who get them double. Another poster made a comment about walmart salaries. Salaries are still as high as ever for a lot of developers, but the massive overpopulation of entry level people have pushed salaries at the bottom way down.