So, you're not willing to consider software because it's not open source? Even when it might be (*gasp*)... better?
Not quite. For many of us, restrictive software can't be better than the Free equivalents - the very fact that it's closed imposes such an enormous penalty that it's nearly impossible to overcome it. Given a choice of Opera vs. Mosaic, I'd take the former. Short of that, though, I really can't imagine how much better Opera could be than Firefox for it to interest me.
I don't fault you for choosing convenience. Don't hold it against me for choosing pragmatism and freedom.
Now that if course is just me and maybe I'm bothered by people saying my site is obsolete.
Obsolete: maybe. Ugly: definitely. The basic design is fine, sure, but the page renders poorly for anyone with a screen layout slightly different than your own. It's built around the tiny-column-with-wide-borders template that you see splattered around the web. If I change my window size, your content column stays the same width (only the size of the vertical borders changes). If I use a larger font size than you do, parts of the page expand to the point that I have to use the horizontal scrollbars to see the whole page.
So, yeah, your page is bad because it doesn't look good everywhere. Your use of old fashioned fixed layout means that it can never gracefully cope with changing environments. That ability is what you gave up by going HTML instead of XHTML+CSS. If you and your visitors are content with the tradeoffs, then more power to you. Most webmasters would not be.
when it stops being just information and becomes data
Nitpick: those terms are typically reversed. That is, data is the raw set of measurements and observations about something. After proper distillation, it becomes information.
Look around the web, and see all the complicated PHP scripts and ASP pages serving as frontends to database of choice, to serve up what's essentially static information.
Plain HTML is quite often the most efficient solution, to produce, host and maintain.
Am I the only one so far who noticed that those two paragraphs have absolutely nothing in common? You can write dynamic HTML or static XHTML+CSS - the underlying technology has exactly zero to do with the resulting page description.
You might as well claim to hate PDFs because some are made on PowerPCs but Jeeps are more purple.
By making it tough for any group/organization to spread their malware from washington state, means they'll go elsewhere to host their stuff.
Sigh. Here we go again.
If you are a resident of Washington, then Washington's laws apply to you. Host in Seattle, Tampa, London, or Kiev if you want - you're still subject to the law. Now, spyware companies could relocate their entire business to a scum-friendly state, but that's a little more expensive than the fantasy scenario where just changing their ISP would make them safe.
I had begged and whined and whined and begged for my parents to buy that for me, a 9 year old would-be 1337 h4xx04. So marks the first step in my disillusionment.
By definition, no company in their right mind would do such a thing.
I applied for a system administration job at a local hospital. During the interview, my would-be boss showed me their network diagram which looked something like:
Internet | patient data
After I picked my jaw back up off the floor, I asked what the vertical line represented. "That's our firewall!," he beamed. And what kind? "It's Gauntlet running on Windows NT."
I didn't get the job, fortunately. I really don't wanna be around when HIPAA decides to claim IT department heads (as in "decapitated craniums", not as in "leaders").
I notice that Richard Stallman is calling for volunteers instead of just doing it. Typical.
That's because he's thought to be afflicted with RSI, most likely as a result of the sheer volume of free code he gave you. Basically, the man crippled himself by writing Free Software pursuant to his stated goals, but now you reject him as a slacker because his productivity's fallen off.
Either you're ignorant of the subject at hand or you're a world-class jerk. Regardless, kindly dismiss yourself from the conversation until you have a clue of what you're talking about.
Because you work in a doctor's office and use the tablet to access drug databases by tapping on dropdown lists. You also use it to answer a lot of boolean questions to fill in a patient's history ("Does patient smoke? Yes/No") so that it's automatically registered in your paperless records system, rather than paying someone to manually enter the information from the paper notes you're trying to migrate away from. You also want access to the patient's X-ray and other lab results from the clinic's network while you're still in the room with the patient.
That's why you need a tablet, where "you" == "a doctor" for sufficiently in-debt and stressed-out values of "you".
My favorite bit of PHP idiocy is
mysql_query() versus pg_query(). Given that the functions are basically identical except for the databases they access:
Why is "mysql" spelled out, but "postgresql" or even "pgsql" abbreviated to just "pg"?
I hate the language for its utter lack of consistency. People talk about how great the php.net documentation is but I think they have the causality reversed: those docs have to be excellent or the language would be unnavigable. I have no desire to remember 3500 core language functions with similar (but inconsistent) naming systems and a randomized argument list. Seriously, what were they thinking?
I don't think PHP is inherently bad, but the current implementation certainly is.
I got stuck watching "CSI: Miami" with the in-laws. I've never seen "24", but it can't be more inaccurate than "Miami": "Hey, we've got a X-ray machine's serial number - let's just type it into the Bat Crime Computer to see who bought it."
My wife kept looking at me to watch my reaction to the on-screen stupidity and eventually said that she'd never actually heard anyone roll their eyes before.
Agent USA was the original virus simulator. It was a game for the Atari 800 in 1985.
Are you sure about that? It seems like that claim could easily go to Agent USA or Corewars (or something else entirely - Lisp hackers are notorious for inventing clever amusements (like Emacs (which probably has a Corewars-mode (oh, it does)))).
What speech synthesizer did they use to narrate the video? The quality was pretty high, although it had enough telltale artifacts to make it reasonably obvious that it was non-human.
In the event I'm wrong: dude, you really need to spend more time in the same physical room as other living people.
If you want support for the latest hardware, you either need to run Linux, or FreeBSD 5.x, and FreeBSD 5.x is somewhat flaky.
For the record, BSD supported USB before Linux did. While you're correct in that Linux is likely to have at least partial support for new or odd hardware before FreeBSD, it's certainly not always the case.
The desktop apps just aren't maintained carefully enough (not surprising, since FreeBSD is not a major desktop OS).
Sorry, but I definitely can't agree with that point. I've been using FreeBSD as a desktop OS for years without significant differences from the equivalent Linux setup. It is, however, critically important to read the/usr/ports/UPDATING file and follow the directions in it before randomly upgrading stuff. The biggest problem with portupgrade seems to be that it works well enough that a lot of people expect it to perform miracles.
See, the difference is that any would-be programmer can pick up the Mozilla source code and pore over it. It's perfectly reasonable to imagine someone spotting a logic error, realizing it's important, and publishing a vulnerability report.
On the other hand, the only way to find an IE error is to directly attack it (unless you live in a particular Ivory Tower). Ergo, IE vulnerabilities are very likely to have exploits if they were initially discovered by anyone but Microsoft themselves.
My MythTV computer tends to overheat and crash, and MySQL is set to MyISAM, so index corruption is to be expected...I would change it to use durable transactional tables if the data was more important.
...because nothing says "MySQL is t3h r0xx0rz" like telnetting into your TV to fix a corrupted table.
Seriously, man, how much uber-1337 hypothetical MyISAM speed do you need to view a TV guide?
I have always found it disgusting that some of the taxes I pay for public services find their way into the pockets of private enterprise
In the US, public services buy off-the-shelf products (or specially packaged bulk equivalents) from thousands of different sources. I know that my school system doesn't manufacture the window cleaner they use, or that my county's road department doesn't process the oil used in making their asphalt, or that the maintenance division doesn't make their own paint.
I am extremely skeptical that your public services don't also contract out a huge amount of the goods they use. Given that they most assuredly do, whose pockets do you think all those taxes should go to?
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. For many of us, restrictive software can't be better than the Free equivalents - the very fact that it's closed imposes such an enormous penalty that it's nearly impossible to overcome it. Given a choice of Opera vs. Mosaic, I'd take the former. Short of that, though, I really can't imagine how much better Opera could be than Firefox for it to interest me.
I don't fault you for choosing convenience. Don't hold it against me for choosing pragmatism and freedom.
Obsolete: maybe. Ugly: definitely. The basic design is fine, sure, but the page renders poorly for anyone with a screen layout slightly different than your own. It's built around the tiny-column-with-wide-borders template that you see splattered around the web. If I change my window size, your content column stays the same width (only the size of the vertical borders changes). If I use a larger font size than you do, parts of the page expand to the point that I have to use the horizontal scrollbars to see the whole page.
So, yeah, your page is bad because it doesn't look good everywhere. Your use of old fashioned fixed layout means that it can never gracefully cope with changing environments. That ability is what you gave up by going HTML instead of XHTML+CSS. If you and your visitors are content with the tradeoffs, then more power to you. Most webmasters would not be.
Nitpick: those terms are typically reversed. That is, data is the raw set of measurements and observations about something. After proper distillation, it becomes information.
Plain HTML is quite often the most efficient solution, to produce, host and maintain.
Am I the only one so far who noticed that those two paragraphs have absolutely nothing in common? You can write dynamic HTML or static XHTML+CSS - the underlying technology has exactly zero to do with the resulting page description.
You might as well claim to hate PDFs because some are made on PowerPCs but Jeeps are more purple.
Sigh. Here we go again.
If you are a resident of Washington, then Washington's laws apply to you. Host in Seattle, Tampa, London, or Kiev if you want - you're still subject to the law. Now, spyware companies could relocate their entire business to a scum-friendly state, but that's a little more expensive than the fantasy scenario where just changing their ISP would make them safe.
You shot my pa!
I had begged and whined and whined and begged for my parents to buy that for me, a 9 year old would-be 1337 h4xx04. So marks the first step in my disillusionment.
"That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it."
Our IT department is stuck in 1999.
So is their HTML editor. ;-)
You got arrested while the teacher kept his job. I think your interpretation of who had the last laugh is a little backward.
By definition, no company in their right mind would do such a thing.
I applied for a system administration job at a local hospital. During the interview, my would-be boss showed me their network diagram which looked something like:
After I picked my jaw back up off the floor, I asked what the vertical line represented. "That's our firewall!," he beamed. And what kind? "It's Gauntlet running on Windows NT."
I didn't get the job, fortunately. I really don't wanna be around when HIPAA decides to claim IT department heads (as in "decapitated craniums", not as in "leaders").
On behalf of American Taxpayers: kiss my ass.
You. Rule. I was such a geek that I even had the sheet music for that song so I could play the game music on the battered piano in our basement.
That's because he's thought to be afflicted with RSI, most likely as a result of the sheer volume of free code he gave you. Basically, the man crippled himself by writing Free Software pursuant to his stated goals, but now you reject him as a slacker because his productivity's fallen off.
Either you're ignorant of the subject at hand or you're a world-class jerk. Regardless, kindly dismiss yourself from the conversation until you have a clue of what you're talking about.
Because you work in a doctor's office and use the tablet to access drug databases by tapping on dropdown lists. You also use it to answer a lot of boolean questions to fill in a patient's history ("Does patient smoke? Yes/No") so that it's automatically registered in your paperless records system, rather than paying someone to manually enter the information from the paper notes you're trying to migrate away from. You also want access to the patient's X-ray and other lab results from the clinic's network while you're still in the room with the patient.
That's why you need a tablet, where "you" == "a doctor" for sufficiently in-debt and stressed-out values of "you".
I hate the language for its utter lack of consistency. People talk about how great the php.net documentation is but I think they have the causality reversed: those docs have to be excellent or the language would be unnavigable. I have no desire to remember 3500 core language functions with similar (but inconsistent) naming systems and a randomized argument list. Seriously, what were they thinking?
I don't think PHP is inherently bad, but the current implementation certainly is.
My wife kept looking at me to watch my reaction to the on-screen stupidity and eventually said that she'd never actually heard anyone roll their eyes before.
Are you sure about that? It seems like that claim could easily go to Agent USA or Corewars (or something else entirely - Lisp hackers are notorious for inventing clever amusements (like Emacs (which probably has a Corewars-mode (oh, it does)))).
In the event I'm wrong: dude, you really need to spend more time in the same physical room as other living people.
For the record, BSD supported USB before Linux did. While you're correct in that Linux is likely to have at least partial support for new or odd hardware before FreeBSD, it's certainly not always the case.
The desktop apps just aren't maintained carefully enough (not surprising, since FreeBSD is not a major desktop OS).
Sorry, but I definitely can't agree with that point. I've been using FreeBSD as a desktop OS for years without significant differences from the equivalent Linux setup. It is, however, critically important to read the /usr/ports/UPDATING file and follow the directions in it before randomly upgrading stuff. The biggest problem with portupgrade seems to be that it works well enough that a lot of people expect it to perform miracles.
You're on crack. I know a lot of people who've shelled out a lot more than that on smaller CRTs (I dropped $700+ on a Sony Wega a couple years ago).
Especially when you consider for all intensive purposes
<grammar>Not even for the more relaxed purposes!</grammar>
Erm, it doesn't happen to end in .cx, does it?
Good; it's a useful statement.
See, the difference is that any would-be programmer can pick up the Mozilla source code and pore over it. It's perfectly reasonable to imagine someone spotting a logic error, realizing it's important, and publishing a vulnerability report.
On the other hand, the only way to find an IE error is to directly attack it (unless you live in a particular Ivory Tower). Ergo, IE vulnerabilities are very likely to have exploits if they were initially discovered by anyone but Microsoft themselves.
...because nothing says "MySQL is t3h r0xx0rz" like telnetting into your TV to fix a corrupted table.
Seriously, man, how much uber-1337 hypothetical MyISAM speed do you need to view a TV guide?
In the US, public services buy off-the-shelf products (or specially packaged bulk equivalents) from thousands of different sources. I know that my school system doesn't manufacture the window cleaner they use, or that my county's road department doesn't process the oil used in making their asphalt, or that the maintenance division doesn't make their own paint.
I am extremely skeptical that your public services don't also contract out a huge amount of the goods they use. Given that they most assuredly do, whose pockets do you think all those taxes should go to?