To be honest, I've run into so many quirks in all 4 major browsers alike (IE/FF/Opera/Safari) that I'd almost say I hate them all. As someone on IRC said a few days ago: I hate IE 1 MS, and I hate all the others several milliMS, but I don't love any of them.
Exactly. Having been involved in a high end Ajax application once we found out that even though we had awesome code, the issues with deployment were so bad that the whole site had to be scrapped and rewritten in more generic html plus a little bit of Ajax. The issues of browser performance, roundtrip delays, dom issues, css issues, bwwggh I hate them.
Having never programmed Flash, I just have this question: since Flash is pretty much everywhere, wouldn't just programming your site in Flash be a better option? Can you really build a functional site in Flash (as opposed to useless eyecandy)? Flash is a virtual machine isn't it? Could one build a "compiler" to convert ones favorite language to Flash virtual machine code?
If Java applets were quick loading (instead of taking ages to start up) would we use java applets for web apps?
If everyone would do that, it be easier to find the pro-ID comments, they'd be limited to the ones starting with USA.
Man this kind of bullshit is the reason I'm going to ditch my Scientific American subscription. The fact that they even have to waste editorial space for this kind of nonsense is pathetic: it's the 21st century for f***s sake!! The last straw for Scientific American by the way was an article about choosing sexual abstention over birth control. bwwwggh:-(
It often strikes me that the U.S. religious zealots have more in common with the Iranian ayatollahs than with any group in the western world.
I've been using OS-X 10.2 til 10.4, and have never had it crash on me. Never!
I'm glad I read the article, because I'm now not going to upgrade any of my Macs for a while. I like my Macs because they just work, and like to keep them that way.
Well I don't. I don't care about Windows, and don't need earn money using Windows so I really don't. I've got my Macs for shiny stuff, and my Linux boxes for programming and looking intelligent, so why should I care about Windows?
In a very interesting lecture by a University of Amsterdam professor (Dr. Bas van Geel), he showed very clearly, and to my (being a physicist) eyes conclusively, that the current warm period is directly related to high levels of solar activity. He showed conclusively that such periods have existed in the past (the medieval optimum, and for instance an 80 year period just b.c.) The record is based on Be-10 isotopes in treerings (which accurately record solar activity), and all kinds of climate records such as tree growths, ice rafted debris, lake depths, harvest results, desert migrations and more. CO2 plays very little role in the climate, and its rise of atmospheric concentration occurs historically because centuries after the climate has gotten hotter (because of the sun), the oceans heat up, and release more CO2, the equilibrium ocean/athmosphere shifts.
From statistical extrapolation of solar activity, it is likely that the sun will lower its output in the next 5 years (his words), so the end of the warm 20th century is near. I'm curious to see if he's right.
I have never been fingerprinted, and I have had a security clearance several times (Dutch, French and US), because I've worked as a civilian at space centers (Marshall and Kennedy), and military aviation (in France). They just did a background check and verified my identity with my passport. The U.S. clearance was in the early nineties, maybe its different now.
So the fact that the U.S. is now not so slowly turning into a surveillance state does not imply that the rest of the world is going to do the same.
Volgens de Jerusalem Post zou minister Verhagen zo boos zijn dat hij overweegt de hele excursie af te blazen en een formele klacht in te dienen bij de Israëli's.
Een woordvoerder van het ministerie spreekt dat tegen. "We zijn helemaal niet boos of beledigd, zulke dingen kunnen gebeuren", aldus de zegsman tegen DePers.nl. "De Jerusalem Post meldt ook dat we een 'formal complaint' willen indienen, maar ik zou niet eens weten bij wie."
A spokesperson of the ministry denies this. We're not mad or insulted at all, these things happen according to the spokesman to depers.nl. The Jerursalem Post also says we want to post a formal complaint, but I wouldn't even know with who.
Bezoek afgeblazen
Visit cancelled
De woordvoerder bevestigt wel dat het bezoek van de journalisten niet doorgaat. "Maar dat is om een heel andere reden, namelijk omdat de journalisten onvoldoende Engels spreken. Het doel van de reis is om een breed beeld van Nederland te schetsen, waarbij de Tweede Kamer en universiteiten worden bezocht. We hebben in het verleden gemerkt dat als je met tolken werkt, dat het de spontaniteit en interactiviteit eruit haalt."
The spokesperson confirms the visit is cancelled. "But for a very different reason, that the journalists don't speak enough English. The purpose of the trip is to show a broad image of the Netherlands, where we visit the parliament and universities. We found in the past that when one works via interpreters, this removes spontaneity and interactivity.
Nobody before 1980 had a cellphone! Some! doctors had a pager. Life went on, the U.S sent people to the moon, and life expectancy was as high as it is now in the West. Oh no, now all the cellphone addict overweights have a lower life expectancy than those poor cellphone less shmucks from the past.
SpreadsheetML was clearly written by the Excel team, whereas the ODF spreadsheet functionality frequently feels like it was written by XML document people.
Which is exactly the point!!!!!!!! An open document format has different requirements than a spreadsheet application. Going from a document format to an application is often hard, so deal with it. Letting a document format be dictated by an application is exactly what one avoids!
Thanks for clarifying your position, I now understand it, and disagree with it totally.
I recently went to this local store to get a new pc. I don't use Windows, and was expecting to have to haggle about not paying for it, but... We configured my pc, tallied up the components, and then the guy says: "that price is without Windows, which Windows do you want on it?" Awesome!! So I tell him it's fine like it is. I'm very happy with the pc, and the price is great too.
I think people should go to those stores that sell bare pc's, instead of just complaining about the companies that won't give you a pc without Windoze.
The installed base of older Office versions is so gigantic, that the new docx format is being refused. People will return mails with docx attachments saying "I can't read this, just send it as.doc will you!".
This forces the Office2007 users to learn how to "Save As".
I predict the "doc" format will stay with us for a very long time, and that as governments start using odt, the docx format will slowly fade away.
Did you know that there is german research that clearly shows that elite rockclimbers are very much above average intelligence? My wife had a look at that, when she was studying psychology. This is quite unique to rockclimbing, and not found in other sports.
>>> (who needs to? a five year old Pentium IV does everything anyone needs a computer to do!).
Ok. I just moved a Pentium-4 2GHz to the garbage, and bought a Core2 duo 2.6GHz with 4GB ram. It is fast, and I'd like it to be even faster. It actually now lets me do my fpga designs in 1 minute per edit-build cycle instead of 5. Some people really do need speed, you're obviously not one of them.
I've been a Mac developer since OS 7, and I have these comments:
all these crashes you're talking about: not for me. I had very well working setups on OS 7, and OS 9. 8 didn't last very long I recall. The fact that Apple has switched platforms several times, and provided backwards compatibility via emulation is great. That managed to clear the crap out of an O.S. without disabling all the currently running apps. These apps would run slower on the new hardware; well so what? Don't buy new hardware if you don't like it. If you do, wait a little for the app vendor to port to the new platform
As far as developers are concerned: the current Carbon api is substantially the same as that of OS 7, so what are you whining about?
You may be unaware of the fact that the very large embedded market still has large numbers of brand new design 8 and 16 bit micros. Predictable latency is very often a main requirement for embedded work. A lot of this stuff runs without any kind of operating system at all.
Having just finished a project for the Space Station http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7190 I appreciate the need for structure documentation. We've used the following methods, for different parts of the documentation.
Word: pros: everyone has it, except when you're using Linux. Cons: buggy. Master documents are awful, document navigation inserts unwanted and often wrong formatting in the document. Styles are inconsistent, and whenever someone with automatic styles even touches the document, all the careful formatting is broken.
OOo: pros: really xplatform. documents stay intact. Styles pretty good, Document navigator works well, master documents work well. Xml format allows scripting (for instance putting cvs numbers inside the document:-) Cons: problems with outline numbering. can be worked around but are easy to trigger.
Docbook: pros: very well structured. You can use your favorite texteditor cons: easy to mess up the xml structure. Very hard to structurally edit, you have no overview when wading through pages of xml.
Rst: (from python doc) pros: simple, structured, easy on the eyes, favorite texteditor cons: too simple for large documents.
After all these years of doc writing and programming, I think my favorite setup would be as yet non-existing:
Stripped down OOo: Impossible to (re)define styles: you live with the styles that are in a custom template No manual formatting. Italic, Bold, fonts, all that stuff is gone No frames, Images go inline!
A database with ODF blobs, that can be xreffed from your document, and shows live in your document.
I'd love to build something like that actually, but don't have the time at the moment.
This one made me smile, good one, proves that fat people can be funny: "I've never sat on a person while getting on the bus but I might make and exception in your case." Unless you're not fat ofcourse, in which case it just proves that you can be funny.
As for your arguments; maybe my body craves less food than that of an overweight person, that still does mean one HAS to put the food in. I know my wife eats less than she would like to, and doesn't eat some of the things she'd want to, because she likes to be slender more than she likes the food. She used to be chubby by the way, and proves that being overweight can be fixed by lifestyle changes. Same for my father in law by the way.
The other thing: the obesity epidemic is worse in the U.S than anywhere else. This country at the same time has: a very sedentary carloving lifestyle; little free time; lots of eating out at fastfood places; not enough sleep for most of the population! There is obviously no genetics involved since the Americans were not overweight only 50 years ago. The connection seems obvious. Add to this the fact "low fat yoghurt" in the U.S. supermarket would be called normal yoghurt here in Holland shows that supermarkets food labelling doesn't help. Oh one more thing: have you ever considered the meaning of the "Health Food" section in the supermarket? What are they selling in the rest of the place???
As for me personally: I eat no meat, I eat no fried food, I eat no butter or margarine. I eat no candy. No fast food. If there is a low-fat variety of something, I eat that. I exercise, a lot. I sleep enough. Ofcourse I'm at a healthy weight. You won't find anyone with my lifestyle that's overweight. Simple.
Greeting and no hard feelings
Oh, I made 75kEuro last year by the way:-) I once earned some dollars, but that was in the nineties somewhere. I mostly earn guilders and euros:-)
Well maybe I'm just irritated by all these people that seem to think that its inevitable that you get fat when you get older, or that tell me that with my metabolism I can eat anything.
If I look at the amount of food that those commentators stuff into their body, they always out-eat me by a large amount. Also, the kind of stuff, the deepfried foodoid they seem to prefer is definitely not part of my diet. The funny thing; I am generally taller, and probably more muscular also, so I would need more food to keep those muscles, no ?
I don't brag, I have no reason to brag, this is my life, my body, and I like it this way. Just stop whining when you're overweight, and do something about it.
And lastly, don't sit on top of me in the bus, when you're attempting to sit NEXT to me.
I'm slim, strong, BMI of 21, and an accomplished rockclimber.
Guess what, I'm 44 years old!
Grandparent is absolutely right!
I've been asked several times if I'm on a diet. Well bullshit, It's just that I don't overeat. I don't count calories, but am aware of what I eat, and don't stuff myself. Oh by the way, apart from the climbing, I also use an exercise bike about 30 minutes every day.
I will not allow myself to become like most of my age group, flabby, unhealthy whiners. I'd rather be dead!
Well now you can go back to the fridge and the couch.
The thing is, it's a piece of crap standard, in that it shows nothing of structure, it only shows formatting. It's pretty much.doc in xml format, without any structure in it.
If you'd like to have an xml format for more than just word processing, i.e. you'd like to get content out of and into the file format, choosing ODF over MSOXML is a no brainer.
Bart
P.S. i refuse to call it Open Office XML, the proper name should be Microsoft Office XML
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Having been involved in a high end Ajax application once we found out that even though we had awesome code, the issues with deployment were so bad that the whole site had to be scrapped and rewritten in more generic html plus a little bit of Ajax. The issues of browser performance, roundtrip delays, dom issues, css issues, bwwggh I hate them.
Having never programmed Flash, I just have this question: since Flash is pretty much everywhere, wouldn't just programming your site in Flash be a better option? Can you really build a functional site in Flash (as opposed to useless eyecandy)? Flash is a virtual machine isn't it? Could one build a "compiler" to convert ones favorite language to Flash virtual machine code?
If Java applets were quick loading (instead of taking ages to start up) would we use java applets for web apps?
Just some random thoughts.
If everyone would do that, it be easier to find the pro-ID comments, they'd be limited to the ones starting with USA.
:-(
Man this kind of bullshit is the reason I'm going to ditch my Scientific American subscription. The fact that they even have to waste editorial space for this kind of nonsense is pathetic: it's the 21st century for f***s sake!! The last straw for Scientific American by the way was an article about choosing sexual abstention over birth control. bwwwggh
It often strikes me that the U.S. religious zealots have more in common with the Iranian ayatollahs than with any group in the western world.
Is "New Scientist" any better by the way?
I've been noticing Safari crashing way more often than about a year ago. That application (2.0.4) definitely has not improved over time :-(
Bart
I've been using OS-X 10.2 til 10.4, and have never had it crash on me. Never!
I'm glad I read the article, because I'm now not going to upgrade any of my Macs for a while. I like my Macs because they just work, and like to keep them that way.
Bart
Well I don't. I don't care about Windows, and don't need earn money using Windows so I really don't.
I've got my Macs for shiny stuff, and my Linux boxes for programming and looking intelligent, so why should I care about Windows?
which product/company?
Just curious.
Bart
In a very interesting lecture by a University of Amsterdam professor (Dr. Bas van Geel), he showed very clearly, and to my (being a physicist) eyes conclusively, that the current warm period is directly related to high levels of solar activity.
He showed conclusively that such periods have existed in the past (the medieval optimum, and for instance an 80 year period just b.c.)
The record is based on Be-10 isotopes in treerings (which accurately record solar activity), and all kinds of climate records such as tree growths, ice rafted debris, lake depths, harvest results, desert migrations and more. CO2 plays very little role in the climate, and its rise of atmospheric concentration occurs historically because centuries after the climate has gotten hotter (because of the sun), the oceans heat up, and release more CO2, the equilibrium ocean/athmosphere shifts.
From statistical extrapolation of solar activity, it is likely that the sun will lower its output in the next 5 years (his words), so the end of the warm 20th century is near. I'm curious to see if he's right.
Bart
I have never been fingerprinted, and I have had a security clearance several times (Dutch, French and US), because I've worked as a civilian at space centers (Marshall and Kennedy), and military aviation (in France). They just did a background check and verified my identity with my passport. The U.S. clearance was in the early nineties, maybe its different now.
So the fact that the U.S. is now not so slowly turning into a surveillance state does not imply that the rest of the world is going to do the same.
Bart
As much as you like to bash the U.S If you had even glanced at TFA, you'd seen it was on the other side of the pond, the U.K.
http://www.depers.nl/binnenland/120757/E-mail-Israël-schokt-Verhagen.html
Translated by hand;
Klacht
Complaint
Volgens de Jerusalem Post zou minister Verhagen zo boos zijn dat hij overweegt de hele excursie af te blazen en een formele klacht in te dienen bij de Israëli's.
Een woordvoerder van het ministerie spreekt dat tegen. "We zijn helemaal niet boos of beledigd, zulke dingen kunnen gebeuren", aldus de zegsman tegen DePers.nl. "De Jerusalem Post meldt ook dat we een 'formal complaint' willen indienen, maar ik zou niet eens weten bij wie."
A spokesperson of the ministry denies this. We're not mad or insulted at all, these things happen according to the spokesman to depers.nl. The Jerursalem Post also says we want to post a formal complaint, but I wouldn't even know with who.
Bezoek afgeblazen
Visit cancelled
De woordvoerder bevestigt wel dat het bezoek van de journalisten niet doorgaat. "Maar dat is om een heel andere reden, namelijk omdat de journalisten onvoldoende Engels spreken. Het doel van de reis is om een breed beeld van Nederland te schetsen, waarbij de Tweede Kamer en universiteiten worden bezocht. We hebben in het verleden gemerkt dat als je met tolken werkt, dat het de spontaniteit en interactiviteit eruit haalt."
The spokesperson confirms the visit is cancelled. "But for a very different reason, that the journalists don't speak enough English. The purpose of the trip is to show a broad image of the Netherlands, where we visit the parliament and universities. We found in the past that when one works via interpreters, this removes spontaneity and interactivity.
End of story.
Really
:-)
Thank god I've always been an engineer
Get real!
Nobody before 1980 had a cellphone! Some! doctors had a pager. Life went on, the U.S sent people to the moon, and life expectancy was as high as it is now in the West. Oh no, now all the cellphone addict overweights have a lower life expectancy than those poor cellphone less shmucks from the past.
Which is exactly the point!!!!!!!! An open document format has different requirements than a spreadsheet application. Going from a document format to an application is often hard, so deal with it. Letting a document format be dictated by an application is exactly what one avoids!
Thanks for clarifying your position, I now understand it, and disagree with it totally.
Bart
I think people should go to those stores that sell bare pc's, instead of just complaining about the companies that won't give you a pc without Windoze.
RU-486 is accepted in Europe, not in the US.
The installed base of older Office versions is so gigantic, that the new docx format is being refused. People will return mails with docx attachments saying "I can't read this, just send it as .doc will you!".
:-)
This forces the Office2007 users to learn how to "Save As".
I predict the "doc" format will stay with us for a very long time, and that as governments start using odt, the docx format will slowly fade away.
Bart
Hope my Cassandra skills are up to it today
Lots of rockclimbing nerds out there :-)
Me too!
Did you know that there is german research that clearly shows that elite rockclimbers are very much above average intelligence? My wife had a look at that, when she was studying psychology. This is quite unique to rockclimbing, and not found in other sports.
Bart
>>> (who needs to? a five year old Pentium IV does everything anyone needs a computer to do!).
Ok. I just moved a Pentium-4 2GHz to the garbage, and bought a Core2 duo 2.6GHz with 4GB ram. It is fast, and I'd like it to be even faster. It actually now lets me do my fpga designs in 1 minute per edit-build cycle instead of 5. Some people really do need speed, you're obviously not one of them.
Bart
I've been a Mac developer since OS 7, and I have these comments:
all these crashes you're talking about: not for me. I had very well working setups on OS 7, and OS 9. 8 didn't last very long I recall. The fact that Apple has switched platforms several times, and provided backwards compatibility via emulation is great. That managed to clear the crap out of an O.S. without disabling all the currently running apps. These apps would run slower on the new hardware; well so what? Don't buy new hardware if you don't like it. If you do, wait a little for the app vendor to port to the new platform
As far as developers are concerned: the current Carbon api is substantially the same as that of OS 7, so what are you whining about?
Bye
You may be unaware of the fact that the very large embedded market still has large numbers of brand new design 8 and 16 bit micros. Predictable latency is very often a main requirement for embedded work. A lot of this stuff runs without any kind of operating system at all.
Having just finished a project for the Space Station http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7190 I appreciate the need for structure documentation. We've used the following methods, for different parts of the documentation.
:-)
Word:
pros: everyone has it, except when you're using Linux.
Cons: buggy. Master documents are awful, document navigation inserts unwanted and often wrong formatting in the document. Styles are inconsistent, and whenever someone with automatic styles even touches the document, all the careful formatting is broken.
OOo:
pros: really xplatform. documents stay intact. Styles pretty good, Document navigator works well, master documents work well. Xml format allows scripting (for instance putting cvs numbers inside the document
Cons: problems with outline numbering. can be worked around but are easy to trigger.
Docbook:
pros: very well structured. You can use your favorite texteditor
cons: easy to mess up the xml structure. Very hard to structurally edit, you have no overview when wading through pages of xml.
Rst: (from python doc)
pros: simple, structured, easy on the eyes, favorite texteditor
cons: too simple for large documents.
After all these years of doc writing and programming, I think my favorite setup would be as yet non-existing:
Stripped down OOo:
Impossible to (re)define styles: you live with the styles that are in a custom template
No manual formatting. Italic, Bold, fonts, all that stuff is gone
No frames, Images go inline!
A database with ODF blobs, that can be xreffed from your document, and shows live in your document.
I'd love to build something like that actually, but don't have the time at the moment.
Bart
This one made me smile, good one, proves that fat people can be funny: "I've never sat on a person while getting on the bus but I might make and exception in your case." Unless you're not fat ofcourse, in which case it just proves that you can be funny.
:-) I once earned some dollars, but that was in the nineties somewhere. I mostly earn guilders and euros :-)
As for your arguments; maybe my body craves less food than that of an overweight person, that still does mean one HAS to put the food in. I know my wife eats less than she would like to, and doesn't eat some of the things she'd want to, because she likes to be slender more than she likes the food. She used to be chubby by the way, and proves that being overweight can be fixed by lifestyle changes. Same for my father in law by the way.
The other thing: the obesity epidemic is worse in the U.S than anywhere else. This country at the same time has: a very sedentary carloving lifestyle; little free time; lots of eating out at fastfood places; not enough sleep for most of the population! There is obviously no genetics involved since the Americans were not overweight only 50 years ago. The connection seems obvious. Add to this the fact "low fat yoghurt" in the U.S. supermarket would be called normal yoghurt here in Holland shows that supermarkets food labelling doesn't help. Oh one more thing: have you ever considered the meaning of the "Health Food" section in the supermarket? What are they selling in the rest of the place???
As for me personally: I eat no meat, I eat no fried food, I eat no butter or margarine. I eat no candy. No fast food. If there is a low-fat variety of something, I eat that. I exercise, a lot. I sleep enough. Ofcourse I'm at a healthy weight. You won't find anyone with my lifestyle that's overweight. Simple.
Greeting and no hard feelings
Oh, I made 75kEuro last year by the way
Well maybe I'm just irritated by all these people that seem to think that its inevitable that you get fat when you get older, or that tell me that with my metabolism I can eat anything.
If I look at the amount of food that those commentators stuff into their body, they always out-eat me by a large amount. Also, the kind of stuff, the deepfried foodoid they seem to prefer is definitely not part of my diet. The funny thing; I am generally taller, and probably more muscular also, so I would need more food to keep those muscles, no ?
I don't brag, I have no reason to brag, this is my life, my body, and I like it this way. Just stop whining when you're overweight, and do something about it.
And lastly, don't sit on top of me in the bus, when you're attempting to sit NEXT to me.
I'm slim, strong, BMI of 21, and an accomplished rockclimber.
Guess what, I'm 44 years old!
Grandparent is absolutely right!
I've been asked several times if I'm on a diet. Well bullshit, It's just that I don't overeat. I don't count calories, but am aware of what I eat, and don't stuff myself. Oh by the way, apart from the climbing, I also use an exercise bike about 30 minutes every day.
I will not allow myself to become like most of my age group, flabby, unhealthy whiners. I'd rather be dead!
Well now you can go back to the fridge and the couch.
Bart
The thing is, it's a piece of crap standard, in that it shows nothing of structure, it only shows formatting. It's pretty much .doc in xml format, without any structure in it.
If you'd like to have an xml format for more than just word processing, i.e. you'd like to get content out of and into the file format, choosing ODF over MSOXML is a no brainer.
Bart
P.S. i refuse to call it Open Office XML, the proper name should be Microsoft Office XML