Software developers are assembly line workers. They do the same proven thing over and over and over and over again, there is nothing new invented anywhere in software development.
Is there anything "proven" yet in software? Most "proven" rules have detractors saying some other way is better, faster, easier, cheaper, etc...
You can attempt to trivialize the developments in the past few years as "just the same as some obscure thing 30 years ago". But I doubt most assembly workers would try pulling some obscure method proposed 30 years ago and make it mainstream.
No one forced you to do that, you could always serve HTML4. Just because some nutters online thought it would nice to go ultra-semantic didn't mean you had to join in the fun.
Hah. Everyone seems to think I'm against XML.
I'm not against XML. I'm against the GGP's attitude of "forcing everybody to abandon HTML and use XHTML/XML".
If your stance is that I shouldn't have fed the troll, then sorry, I was bored.
I see it differently. Your example shows how complex XML can be.
Forcing it down the throats of everyone (as my original parent seems to advocate) seems a bit drastic. Particularly as a lot of people writing (X)HTML don't work on "big complex projects".
It depends. Sure it might take you an extra 5 minutes today, but that's 5 hours saved tommorrow when you have to come back and fix things. Separating off semantics means that for larger software teams you can even have people dedicated to looking after just that, so the developers can focus on developing, without getting in each other's way.
The problem with your argument is that there really are many instances where that 5 hours tomorrow never come. Adopting "XHTML6" in your interpretation would mean that nobody could save those 5 minutes, even if I'm just writing a hello world page.
By adopting universal standards that are so strict and unforgiving to "sloppy" code, you're raising the overhead of development without necessarily gaining back the benefits. In fact, nobody's stopping you from using your own XHTML6 -- if the XML tools are really so easy to use as you say, then surely it is trivial to write a "XHTML6" to HTML5 compiler?
You seem to think I spit out bad, hackish, sloppy code on a daily basis -- I don't. There are projects where I allow myself to be quick and sloppy because they are one off small things. There are projects where I handle your precious "separation of concerns", "future proof" things with care. But I've always been very skeptical of grandiose projects where it tries to be everything to everyone at the same time, boosting great architecture and proclaiming to be the savior of the world, best thing since sliced bread etc.
The truly worst code I've seen are the ones that try to be "future proof", "encapsulate functions", "pluggable", "modular", whatever. They make code that perform trivial functions look like a huge mess of spaghetti code. Sometimes over-engineering is as bad as none.
I never assumed quantity over quality is universal. I just wanted to stress that quality is relative to the requirements. Requirements of perfection (i.e. "separation of concerns", "lack of duplicate features", etc) is *not* universal, and you seem to be demanding it in one of the most widely used standards in the world.
Solutions only need to be as complicated as the problem itself. One thing that XML failed miserably is keeping simple things simple. SGML is simple. XML (particularly the latter versions) is anything but that.
Re:Holding off using it for other reasons
on
Hard Truths About HTML5
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Another sad case of a XML brainwashed believer....
XSLT, trivial? Have you ever tried doing anything useful with it?
XML/XHTML was written for the parsers. HTML5 was written for web developers. You may say the standard is "shit", the practices are "amateurish" (when benchmarked against what they teach you in the textbooks), but all that counts is what people are able to do with the stuff.
Theoretical aesthetic purity is not an ends in itself. The "separation of concerns", "removal of arbitrary tags/duplicate functionality", "future proof" stuffs actually make the XML/XHTML spec more useless, harder to work with, and decreases productivity. You may marvel at its aesthetic beauty, but for people like us who actually need to do things on a schedule, those restrictions hinder our productivity when there's no way to opt out of it.
For example, if people use bold text all the time, then why shouldn't we be able to <b>bold-text</b>? Why should we have to <span style="text-weight: bold">, or worse, write up a crazy "semantic" document and then add the XLST? Isn't that overkill?
The HTML spec people took 10 years to realize the mistake of going the XML way. It seems that you still have yet to make that realization.
Google would be lucky just to keep their new division in the black. Particularly as Google doesn't seem to have much experience in making hardware. As for getting back that 12billion.... well, they won't sell enough handsets to do that, but they probably will be able to sell off the hardware divisions of Motorola -- but I'm betting that they won't be worth 12B.
Well, it's funny that you compare the US with those military dictatorships, and then pull other countries into the mix.
Sure, anybody with a few men and a few guns could do whatever they want to unarmed civilians -- but without the law on their side they'll eventually suffer the consequences -- if they're in a place with rule of law.
Be cynical of the world you're in if you will. Not every part of the world has abandoned the pretense of maintaining the rule of law, don't speak as if the world follows eagerly the footsteps of the Great American Empire and the great dictatorships that you mention.
Note: I'm not a Candian nor do I have particular sympathies towards Canada.
--- And by the way, if I'm not mistaken, Canadian precedents aren't followed in the US nor the EU. It probably doesn't have much persuasive force either.
Google's main failure is that they haven't had a real big success after their search business.
For 10 years, they've recruited the best minds in the industry, and still they haven't got much to show for except their large profits in search -- something that they developed when the company only had a few dozen people (what is the army of CS PhDs doing there?). Their search business is booming, largely because the business of selling online advertising has expanded at a crazy rate -- and that's where most of their revenue comes from.
Remember Google Wave? You have any idea what Google Buzz is? Where did all the stuff in Google Labs go to?
Yeah right. Andy Rubin and his team are actually monks who live on spiritual food than physical bread. They're celibate, so there's no family to feed, and live in the forests thus avoiding rent. They develop Android by ssh-over-telepathic links.
With such a zero cost team, who can compete with the 1337ness of Android?
So, while Google is complaining that their competitors are using "evil" patents against them, you're saying that they themselves decided to patent PageRank, even at the cost of reducing the quality of their product?
What a great company with strong moral principles.
Bad analogy time: An excessive insistence on access to "justice" is a stalling tactic by criminals to tie up prosecutors in meaningless paperwork. People like yourself are useful idiots for those criminals.
Seriously, world changing policies are based on these research, and requests to publish data that's fundamental to these policies is "excessive paperwork"? Would somebody think of those poor, poor scientists?
Billions of public dollars, worldwide, are involved, and no you just can't be allowed to see the data because that's too excessive. You idiots won't know what to do with them anyway.
Even if we accept that the climate change proponents are methodically correct in using an "argument from authority", it does *not* automatically follow that any skepticism is invalid.
Even the legitimate experts can be wrong, and if there is a reason to believe that, then such skepticism is indeed warranted.
I think it is true that the "wallet" consequences of climate change does affect the levels of skepticism a bit -- but it is for good reason: you're asking us to shell out big $$$ and all you have to say is "just trust us"?
If Warrent Buffet tells me to invest a million in Company X because "I'm the expert, just trust me", and refuses to give further reasons, I will be skeptical about it too.
but it begs the question: why didn't they bother to publish the data? Why resist until they were served FOI requests?
what it looks like to me is that they were trying to make the verification of their published results as painful as possible in an attempt to distract and slow down people who really want to do science and verify their global warming claims.
I normally don't respond to posts in such a flippant manner, but seriously that's what I think Jones, Mann, etc are doing. Their results may be correct, or their conclusions may be correct, but if you're going to make a point of how pesky the "deniers" were, then they were just returning the favor.
Seriously, if everybody stopped categorizing iPhones as "smartphones", and instead calls them "foobar phones", will you be happy?
Because most consumers don't really care whether they can run arbitrary code on their phones, and most consumers don't care whether their phones are "smart phones" or not as long as they can play Angry Birds on them.
Frankly, sucks to be you. You really can't change the purchasing preferences of people around you just by arguing online about the proper definition of a smartphone -- people won't buy something else instead of their iPhone or locked-down-android just because you redefined the "smartphone" term.
Well to be fair there was a naked scene where the main characters were showering naked and making (not so subtle) sexual flirtations.
That would be a rather offensive to some, I suppose. But then still it would be taking offense at somebody using the name of a character who had a kinky sex scene somewhere in a movie.
This is simply a crazy misinformed post by an idiot.
Smit re-named Pantyshot/Upskirt after a Japanese name. Not just any name, but popularly belonging to an Anime (adult comics) character
Anime is NOT adult comics. Anime is simply Japanese animation. Anime are moving pictures. Comics are the things that don't normally move and often printed on dead trees.
There's nothing "adult" to anime just like there's nothing "adult" to videos.
There's nothing "adult" to the character either. The character certainly does have strong "upskirt" and "pantyshot" references, but honestly it's not much of a "pantyshot" than a "boxershot", a running gag when the character's friend(s?) pull a prank on her by an upskirt and disappointingly realizes she wears "boxers" instead of sexy panties.
You may say this is offensive, I understand people get offended over many things. But it's simply wrong and FUD to claim that this character has any "adult" connotations.
Like Momoko, who could be Momoko the Japanese porn star (AV Idol)
I do watch Japanese porn regularly (sorry) , and I've never heard of anybody half famous that goes with the name Momoko. A quick google indicates that a "Momoko Tani" is a "Japanese Idol" that wears suggestive clothings (usually scanty swimsuits/bikinis), but not anything that you could call "porn".
Search for Misaka and upskirt, and you'll get a Chilling Effects message from Google about the removal of alleged child porn from their search results.
Just donâ(TM)t âoeinterpretâ Momoko along with the term upskirt on Google or you'll get the same Chilling Effects child pornography warning.
Perhaps it's not the weird Japanese names that's causing Google to give you all those Chilling Effects, but maybe "upskirt"? I've turned off any "safe filters" in Google, and probably my jurisdiction is less anal about child porn (but I haven't seen any of child porn in those searches), so I can't check whether "Jessica upskirt" (or whatever) gives you the same warning, but I suspect it would.
--- I don't disagree that there are better choices of names than "upskirt" and "pantyshot", but seriously there's really no need to spread FUD and lies.
The misinformation above may be lies, or they may be misunderstandings by the author of TFA. If really the latter, she really has no standing writing this piece of misinformed piece of crap.
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Software developers are assembly line workers. They do the same proven thing over and over and over and over again, there is nothing new invented anywhere in software development.
Is there anything "proven" yet in software? Most "proven" rules have detractors saying some other way is better, faster, easier, cheaper, etc...
You can attempt to trivialize the developments in the past few years as "just the same as some obscure thing 30 years ago". But I doubt most assembly workers would try pulling some obscure method proposed 30 years ago and make it mainstream.
No one forced you to do that, you could always serve HTML4. Just because some nutters online thought it would nice to go ultra-semantic didn't mean you had to join in the fun.
Hah. Everyone seems to think I'm against XML.
I'm not against XML. I'm against the GGP's attitude of "forcing everybody to abandon HTML and use XHTML/XML".
If your stance is that I shouldn't have fed the troll, then sorry, I was bored.
I see it differently. Your example shows how complex XML can be.
Forcing it down the throats of everyone (as my original parent seems to advocate) seems a bit drastic. Particularly as a lot of people writing (X)HTML don't work on "big complex projects".
It depends. Sure it might take you an extra 5 minutes today, but that's 5 hours saved tommorrow when you have to come back and fix things. Separating off semantics means that for larger software teams you can even have people dedicated to looking after just that, so the developers can focus on developing, without getting in each other's way.
The problem with your argument is that there really are many instances where that 5 hours tomorrow never come. Adopting "XHTML6" in your interpretation would mean that nobody could save those 5 minutes, even if I'm just writing a hello world page.
By adopting universal standards that are so strict and unforgiving to "sloppy" code, you're raising the overhead of development without necessarily gaining back the benefits. In fact, nobody's stopping you from using your own XHTML6 -- if the XML tools are really so easy to use as you say, then surely it is trivial to write a "XHTML6" to HTML5 compiler?
You seem to think I spit out bad, hackish, sloppy code on a daily basis -- I don't. There are projects where I allow myself to be quick and sloppy because they are one off small things. There are projects where I handle your precious "separation of concerns", "future proof" things with care. But I've always been very skeptical of grandiose projects where it tries to be everything to everyone at the same time, boosting great architecture and proclaiming to be the savior of the world, best thing since sliced bread etc.
The truly worst code I've seen are the ones that try to be "future proof", "encapsulate functions", "pluggable", "modular", whatever. They make code that perform trivial functions look like a huge mess of spaghetti code. Sometimes over-engineering is as bad as none.
I never assumed quantity over quality is universal. I just wanted to stress that quality is relative to the requirements. Requirements of perfection (i.e. "separation of concerns", "lack of duplicate features", etc) is *not* universal, and you seem to be demanding it in one of the most widely used standards in the world.
Solutions only need to be as complicated as the problem itself. One thing that XML failed miserably is keeping simple things simple. SGML is simple. XML (particularly the latter versions) is anything but that.
Another sad case of a XML brainwashed believer....
XSLT, trivial? Have you ever tried doing anything useful with it?
XML/XHTML was written for the parsers. HTML5 was written for web developers. You may say the standard is "shit", the practices are "amateurish" (when benchmarked against what they teach you in the textbooks), but all that counts is what people are able to do with the stuff.
Theoretical aesthetic purity is not an ends in itself. The "separation of concerns", "removal of arbitrary tags/duplicate functionality", "future proof" stuffs actually make the XML/XHTML spec more useless, harder to work with, and decreases productivity. You may marvel at its aesthetic beauty, but for people like us who actually need to do things on a schedule, those restrictions hinder our productivity when there's no way to opt out of it.
For example, if people use bold text all the time, then why shouldn't we be able to <b>bold-text</b>? Why should we have to <span style="text-weight: bold">, or worse, write up a crazy "semantic" document and then add the XLST? Isn't that overkill?
The HTML spec people took 10 years to realize the mistake of going the XML way. It seems that you still have yet to make that realization.
Name a few?
You're saying all the stock traders of MMI are wrong, and Google is right, by paying a huge premium to buyout the whole company.
MMI have posting mostly losses for the past few quarters and years: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MMI&fstype=ii
Google would be lucky just to keep their new division in the black. Particularly as Google doesn't seem to have much experience in making hardware. As for getting back that 12billion.... well, they won't sell enough handsets to do that, but they probably will be able to sell off the hardware divisions of Motorola -- but I'm betting that they won't be worth 12B.
I don't know what lies you're talking about, but patents don't work that way.
There can't be a <hash> version in progress because the hash is generated by all the contents (and history) of the commit.
Unless you're actually hardcore enough to modify code without changing the hash......
Well, it's funny that you compare the US with those military dictatorships, and then pull other countries into the mix.
Sure, anybody with a few men and a few guns could do whatever they want to unarmed civilians -- but without the law on their side they'll eventually suffer the consequences -- if they're in a place with rule of law.
Be cynical of the world you're in if you will. Not every part of the world has abandoned the pretense of maintaining the rule of law, don't speak as if the world follows eagerly the footsteps of the Great American Empire and the great dictatorships that you mention.
Note: I'm not a Candian nor do I have particular sympathies towards Canada.
---
And by the way, if I'm not mistaken, Canadian precedents aren't followed in the US nor the EU. It probably doesn't have much persuasive force either.
Google's main failure is that they haven't had a real big success after their search business.
For 10 years, they've recruited the best minds in the industry, and still they haven't got much to show for except their large profits in search -- something that they developed when the company only had a few dozen people (what is the army of CS PhDs doing there?). Their search business is booming, largely because the business of selling online advertising has expanded at a crazy rate -- and that's where most of their revenue comes from.
Remember Google Wave? You have any idea what Google Buzz is? Where did all the stuff in Google Labs go to?
Yeah right. Andy Rubin and his team are actually monks who live on spiritual food than physical bread. They're celibate, so there's no family to feed, and live in the forests thus avoiding rent. They develop Android by ssh-over-telepathic links.
With such a zero cost team, who can compete with the 1337ness of Android?
Sorry I was bad this time. I will be Good next time. Really, I promise!
the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"
Andy Rubin 19 Oct 2010
I sometimes can't imagine how somebody can flip flop so hard and maintain a straight face.
You're a pathetic Google apologist.
Patents are required to be documented in public records. This is the patent file for PageRank
So, while Google is complaining that their competitors are using "evil" patents against them, you're saying that they themselves decided to patent PageRank, even at the cost of reducing the quality of their product?
What a great company with strong moral principles.
Bidding with famous mathematical constants is a principled stance of what?
Of being against patents?
Of being nerdy?
Of trying to make a big fuss about losing the bid?
environments that are more suitable to entertainment than actual work
If "entertainment" means "playing with the desktop environment", then I fully agree.
Bad analogy time: An excessive insistence on access to "justice" is a stalling tactic by criminals to tie up prosecutors in meaningless paperwork. People like yourself are useful idiots for those criminals.
Seriously, world changing policies are based on these research, and requests to publish data that's fundamental to these policies is "excessive paperwork"? Would somebody think of those poor, poor scientists?
Billions of public dollars, worldwide, are involved, and no you just can't be allowed to see the data because that's too excessive. You idiots won't know what to do with them anyway.
Even if we accept that the climate change proponents are methodically correct in using an "argument from authority", it does *not* automatically follow that any skepticism is invalid.
Even the legitimate experts can be wrong, and if there is a reason to believe that, then such skepticism is indeed warranted.
I think it is true that the "wallet" consequences of climate change does affect the levels of skepticism a bit -- but it is for good reason: you're asking us to shell out big $$$ and all you have to say is "just trust us"?
If Warrent Buffet tells me to invest a million in Company X because "I'm the expert, just trust me", and refuses to give further reasons, I will be skeptical about it too.
It was a relief to read your posts.
At least you show that not *everybody* (on both sides) has become irrational and crazy when it comes to "climategate".
Thanks.
but it begs the question: why didn't they bother to publish the data? Why resist until they were served FOI requests?
what it looks like to me is that they were trying to make the verification of their published results as painful as possible in an attempt to distract and slow down people who really want to do science and verify their global warming claims.
I normally don't respond to posts in such a flippant manner, but seriously that's what I think Jones, Mann, etc are doing. Their results may be correct, or their conclusions may be correct, but if you're going to make a point of how pesky the "deniers" were, then they were just returning the favor.
You must have been living under a rock for the past two years.
Sure you can choose to "not see" any emails suggesting questionable motives and practices, but you're just sticking your head in the sand.
From the GP:
That's okay.
Seriously, if everybody stopped categorizing iPhones as "smartphones", and instead calls them "foobar phones", will you be happy?
Because most consumers don't really care whether they can run arbitrary code on their phones, and most consumers don't care whether their phones are "smart phones" or not as long as they can play Angry Birds on them.
Frankly, sucks to be you. You really can't change the purchasing preferences of people around you just by arguing online about the proper definition of a smartphone -- people won't buy something else instead of their iPhone or locked-down-android just because you redefined the "smartphone" term.
The world doesn't work that way.
Well to be fair there was a naked scene where the main characters were showering naked and making (not so subtle) sexual flirtations.
That would be a rather offensive to some, I suppose. But then still it would be taking offense at somebody using the name of a character who had a kinky sex scene somewhere in a movie.
This is simply a crazy misinformed post by an idiot.
Smit re-named Pantyshot/Upskirt after a Japanese name. Not just any name, but popularly belonging to an Anime (adult comics) character
Anime is NOT adult comics. Anime is simply Japanese animation. Anime are moving pictures. Comics are the things that don't normally move and often printed on dead trees.
There's nothing "adult" to anime just like there's nothing "adult" to videos.
There's nothing "adult" to the character either. The character certainly does have strong "upskirt" and "pantyshot" references, but honestly it's not much of a "pantyshot" than a "boxershot", a running gag when the character's friend(s?) pull a prank on her by an upskirt and disappointingly realizes she wears "boxers" instead of sexy panties.
FYI, this is the typical "upskirt" in that "adult anime" we're talking about: http://25.media.tumblr.com/eO5rDDFIRmiprfxkBtraxpq6o1_500.jpg
You may say this is offensive, I understand people get offended over many things. But it's simply wrong and FUD to claim that this character has any "adult" connotations.
Like Momoko, who could be Momoko the Japanese porn star (AV Idol)
I do watch Japanese porn regularly (sorry) , and I've never heard of anybody half famous that goes with the name Momoko. A quick google indicates that a "Momoko Tani" is a "Japanese Idol" that wears suggestive clothings (usually scanty swimsuits/bikinis), but not anything that you could call "porn".
Search for Misaka and upskirt, and you'll get a Chilling Effects message from Google about the removal of alleged child porn from their search results.
Just donâ(TM)t âoeinterpretâ Momoko along with the term upskirt on Google or you'll get the same Chilling Effects child pornography warning.
Perhaps it's not the weird Japanese names that's causing Google to give you all those Chilling Effects, but maybe "upskirt"? I've turned off any "safe filters" in Google, and probably my jurisdiction is less anal about child porn (but I haven't seen any of child porn in those searches), so I can't check whether "Jessica upskirt" (or whatever) gives you the same warning, but I suspect it would.
---
I don't disagree that there are better choices of names than "upskirt" and "pantyshot", but seriously there's really no need to spread FUD and lies.
The misinformation above may be lies, or they may be misunderstandings by the author of TFA. If really the latter, she really has no standing writing this piece of misinformed piece of crap.