Saying that you have to mix logic with display is like saying you have to build your VisualC++ program as one huge.exe rather than having it broken out into DLLs and such. It's the way you program, not the limitation of the language.
You're missing the point. I'm not saying you must mix logic with presentation; I'm saying that it is dangerous that you can mix logic with presentation. In many organisations, certainly, the people who design the presentation of web sites are not to be trusted with anything technical - although they think they are!
Separating out those files which it is safe for the soi-disant 'web designers' to mess with from those that it isn't is a good thing, in my opinion.
Last time I was in this situation, back in 1997, I rolled my own. It's served me very well for nine years, but increasingly design commitments I made early have started to seem wrong in terms of subsequent developments. Now I'm thinking of where I go from here; I've been thinking about the features a modern software system should have. And I've got a proof of concept which generates all the elements of a Web application from a single source file.
I haven't yet decided which way I'm going to jump. But I have already ruled out a lot of approaches. Firstly, anything which mixes logic with presentation is clearly wrong. That rules out all the taglib based systems, including PHP, Cold Fusion, JSP, BRL and all the others. Ruby on Rails is sort-of OKish, since the presentation layer ('views') is separateish from the logic. But in practice it seems you can put any logic into the Rails templates. Having the templates in a different, standard language - ideally XSL - seems to me a better solution.
As to the underlying language, after ten years Java is stale for me. I spend too much of my time struggling round its limitations, and primarily, around static typing and baroque libraries. Ten years ago Java had a lot of promise, particularly in strong portability and platform independence. But everything else has caught up, and Java now looks increasingly like the wrong language for general purpose programming. So what's the right language?
Back in the 1980s everyone gave up on LISP because it needed machines which were too expensive. But the sort of horsepower LISP needs is now cheap, and, indeed, LISP is economic of machine resource compared to many modern language systems. The downside of LISP as an implementation language is that while Web hosting companies these days often provide PHP and are reasonably comfortable with Java and Ruby, a toolkit which uses a LISP foundation can only really take off with people who control their own servers. But, that apart, LISP currently looks like the best bet to me.
I'm tired of people who use the words "stupid" and "evil" for anything that they don't agree with. I'm tired of people who arrogantly use people who use one word sentences.
I was going to post a response to this, but then I noticed your username and realised I didn't need to.
Yes, in case you can't work it out, I am being offensive. Deliberately.
They saw someone surfing porn at the library. How many of you would think that's acceptable? They obviously didn't know that local policy allowed it. So they decided to step in before some kid walked past or something similar happened.
RTFA, for heaven's sake!
Local policy forbade it. However, the constitution of the United States, which overrides local policy, allows it.
...which is complete nonsense. Britain is not willing to pull out of the ECHR, nor do they export people to any countries where they may be tortured. They won't even allow extradition to the US for murder cases, if it's a state that has the death penalty.
And the reason the CIA's 'rendition' planes drop in at Preswick so often is just refuelling, is it? Actually, probably, yes it is; but it doesn't seem to me we're less complicit if we just let our airports be used for refuelling. We should at the very least have withdrawn our ambassador from Washington.
British constitutional arrangements have always been moderately hard for outsiders to understand, and are now even more difficult. The Union parliament (in Westminster) happens to be the same institution as one of the National parliaments (for England). It isn't the same as the parliament for Scotland or Wales, and it doesn't (in general) make laws for Scotland or Wales, except with regard to things like foreign policy.
In principle Northern Ireland also has its own parliament. In practice it doesn't, because the Loyalists won't co-operate with the Republicans so the province is governed from Westminster - but nevertheless has its own laws.
So while it is true that 'UK MPs approve compulsory ID cards', this only applies in England, because 'UK MPs' don't have legislative authority over the rest of the UK. Of course, England is by far the largest of the nations of the United Kingdom. It's also by far the most authoritarian and right-wing nation of the United Kingdom.
The Scottish Executive have already said that Scotland will not have compulsory ID cards; I don't know what the position is for Wales and Northern Ireland, but in any case this law won't apply there. What will happen if someone from Scotland (who does not have to have an ID card) is stopped by police in England (where people will have to have ID cards) isn't clear, but doubtless this will get sorted out by the courts.
So this is a bit like the Texas legislature introducing compulsory ID cards, and the headlines saying 'US introduces compulsory ID cards'. It is true, sort of, but... only in Texas.
Google has more to lose by the Bell's blocking them, than the Bell's have to lose by blocking google.
The commentators all say that Google has been buying shedloads of dark fibre. If this is so, does Google have anything to lose in this fight? By this time next year, could we see Google as the main backbone supplier in the US, and the Bells all whimpering a corner, saying 'please, sir, we didn't mean it'?
Actually, a JVM is even less stable than Windows. It was not designed as a real OS. The garbage-collection, for example, will freeze the entire VM for as long as it needs to run -- and sometimes it goes out of whack and hangs permanently...
The JVM serving this page currently has an uptime of 32 days. But in the past it's had uptimes of over 200 days. Neither it, nor any of the other Tomcat servers I run, has ever gone out of whack. Java (Tomcat, Weblogic and others) powers the web servers of many of the world's biggest websites, serving millions of pages of dynamic content every day. If it was unreliable, that wouldn't be happening.
A typical C/C++ based app uses just as much memory, it's just shared between processes. And for that matter, startup time of the first thing using kde/gnome isn't all that great either. Isn't it about time some effort was put into making Java or Mono part of the system, so it can be shared like C apps do?
A virtual machine is a virtual machine. There's nothing whatever to stop you running multiple Java threads running different applications in the same virtual machine - this is, after all, exactly what application servers like Tomcat do. Each Web-app in Tomcat does not by default run in a separate virtual machine, instead they all share the same one, and consequently share the same copy of the Java class library. This is like many C programs running on the same real machine.
Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th
on
Google Delists BMW-Germany
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Now, if I want to design my site in such a way as to be friendly to my users (say, a flash based site... please, no comments about how friendly flash is.. lots of usres like it), but not friendly to google, why should a competitor with a crappier site get a higher rank?
Because they used open standards and you used proprietary crap? If you want to be accessible to users, follow the standards. If you don't give a shit about your users but just want to show off what a clever web designer you are, don't complain of Google doesn't give a shit about you.
Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th
on
Google Delists BMW-Germany
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm talking about sites having to conform to google's whims in order to appear anywhere near the top of a google search. I'm talking about legitimate sites, not even sites selling anything. Sites that simply choose to design their sites in one way or another can have their google rank turned to crap.
The 'whims' of Google's that you're complaining about are just common sense. Google says, make your page clear and informative. If your page is clear and informative, guess what? Google ranks it higher. If your page is clear and informative and has something interesting to say, other people will find it interesting and link to it. If other people link to it, guess what? Google ranks it higher. Google says, don't change your URLs too often. That's common sense, too. If you ceaselessly redesign your site, leaving old URLs dangling as 404 errors, you're hurting people who link to you, and you're hurting people who've bookmarked you. That's common sense, too. All my bookmarks to my bank's site no longer work, because every time they do a redesign they change their URLs, and leave the old ones dangling. Sooner or later, that's going to annoy me enough to make me change banks.
If you do a Google search for 'Simon Brooke', you'll find me at the top although my home page is just that, a personal home page, and has no 'optimisation'. Simon Brooke the Insurance Broker, with an expensive, professionally designed site, comes second. Then there's Simon Brooke the professional actor on IMDB, then a guy who's into aeroplanes, then Simon Brooke the author.
So with all those people with something to sell in the list, how come I and the aeroplane geek make the first page? My site is simple and has been there a long time (more than ten years now, and on the same URL for eight). In that time a lot of people have linked to it, and it doesn't suffer link rot. The plane geek's page gets ranked well because he has good pictures which presumably get linked to.
And that's the lesson for all you soi disant web designers out there. Users aren't impressed with your fancy, flash 'splash pages', and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with text as graphics, and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with vacuous marketing puff, and guess what? Google isn't either.
If you've got something interesting and different to say, and you say it clearly, and you say it consistently in the same place, Google will find you. Tricks and cheats aren't needed.
What I did say was that google has an imperfect algorithm, and along with punishment for trying to get around that imperfect algorithm, creates a situation where they dictate the rules, and the punishment for not following them.
If you think you can write a better page-ranking algorithm than Google, do it. It will make you very, very rich.
In BMW's case the doorway page contained the word "gebrauchtwagen" - meaning "used car" in German - over 40 times. The real home page, to which searchers were seamless redirected, only contained the word twice.
No, it is NOT fraud to display different kinds of content to different site visitors, and I hope it never will be. And if it were fraud, it would be a matter for the police, not Google's page rank algorithm.
No, sorry, this is fraud pure and simple: deliberately deceiving someone (in this case Google, about the content of a page) in order to achieve financial gain (in this case, more customers). I agree that it is OK to show differently tailored pages to different users, but only if this is not done in order to deceive.
BMW should be very grateful that Google just delisted them and didn't report them to the German prosecutors and financial authorities. Because you're right, this is criminal behaviour, and therefore is a matter for the police.
You do need to worry about memory leaks in perl, as it uses refcounting instead of garbage collection.
Reference counting isn't instead of garbage collection, it is garbage collection. It has some problems, I admit - it can't reclaim circular structures - but all garbage collecting algorithms have problems. I very much like reference counting as a garbage collection algorithm, because garbage collection rarely if ever halts execution for perceptable time.
I've been doing technical sifting of CVs for a recruitment agency while I've been recovering from a broken back. One of the positions I've been sifting for is QA team leader for an new development unit of a bit Web retailer. Good QA people are really thin on the ground - most of the people going for this post are not at all well qualified for it, and those who are well qualified and experienced seem to change jobs on average more frequently than once a year.
So if you're a good bug-hunter with team leadership experience, the ability to write a coherent test plan, and familiarity with two or three well known automated test tools and a bug/issue tracker or two, there is gold in them that situations vacant adverts.
Just wish I was systematic enough to be good at bug hunting!
The natural order of life seems to be that species that are not well adapted die off. Now that we are able to monitor such things, is it really necessary to hit the freeze frame button and make sure that nothing that's alive today doesn't die off?
I think the point you're missing is which species it is that is not well adapted to the impending change. Yup, it is natural that we will die off, but some people don't want us to.
Seriously, though, we're at serious risk of making most of the planet uninhabitable for humans. We can't all move too far towards the poles, even if it does grow warmer there, because there isn't enough land there to farm and even if there were the daylength isn't long enough for the photosynthesis of our food plants. Most of our existing cities are at or close to sea level; we're going to lose all those. A large percentage of our arable land is close to sea level too, and even more is between 45 degrees south and 45 degrees north where it's liable to become too arid for agriculture. Some populations of humans will hang on in the 50-65 degrees northern and southern latitudes bands, but six billion? Forget it. Much fewer than one.
Of course, this will take decades to happen, so it won't affect those of us living now that much. Just don't plan to have children. And get your Canadian citizenship now, while there's still time.
Please list all scientific facts (or accepted theories) that have been censored by the government. If you can't list a single one, then I can only assume that they are 'censoring' this scientist from making policy statements as head scientist of NASA.
I suspect actually that what is being angled for here is either UK or European legislation that would prohibit equipment from having a standby button, and mandates hard on/off switches. Personally, I am sufficiently concerned by global warming to support such a move though I'm a a pretty big offender when it comes to leaving the TV on standby.
AOL
To turn off my TV installation would mean separately switching off the television itself, the video recorder, the DVD player and the digital TV decoder. Neither the video recorder nor the digibox start cleanly - the video recorder wants it's time set (surely that could be stored in non-volatile) and the digibox gets petulant about the EuroSport card being reinserted. And consequently I don't do it - although in an average week I watch less than one hour's television. If my next TV integrates at least the digital receiver and a DVD-RW drive, and starts cleanly with no faff I'd be more than happy to do without a standby mode.
Same applies to everything else in the house, actually. Don't need standby; do need reasonably fast, reliable startup.
Sadly, no. If you write standards-based code (like my home page, for example), the 80+% of the market that's using Internet Explorer will not see the page as you designed it. The really frustrating thing is at least five years ago there was a beta of Internet Explorer 6 which got my home page right. Microsoft know how to do the standards thing, they choose not to.
So run IE in strict mode
If you'd bothered to view source, you would see that I do do exactly what Microsoft document to switch on their 'strict mode'. It doesn't (surprise, surprise) work, because Microsoft choose for it not to.
More to the point, if you write standards-based code and don't try to do anything too insane, then you'll get most of that for free, and Opera as well.
Sadly, no. If you write standards-based code (like my home page, for example), the 80+% of the market that's using Internet Explorer will not see the page as you designed it. The really frustrating thing is at least five years ago there was a beta of Internet Explorer 6 which got my home page right. Microsoft know how to do the standards thing, they choose not to.
What to do about it? My solution, at least for my private stuff, is to write standards based stuff and not bother with the 80% of the web population who are insufficiently competent to use a standards based browser. When working for customers, I try to write things which look good on standards-compliant browsers and also look good on IE6, but that's hard because Microsoft deliberately misinterpret so much.
But the sooner Internet Explorer, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7, is dead and buried and forgotten except in nightmares, the better for everyone. It is a crock of shite.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this some sort of lame pun?
Let's see:
No, thought not.
You're missing the point. I'm not saying you must mix logic with presentation; I'm saying that it is dangerous that you can mix logic with presentation. In many organisations, certainly, the people who design the presentation of web sites are not to be trusted with anything technical - although they think they are!
Separating out those files which it is safe for the soi-disant 'web designers' to mess with from those that it isn't is a good thing, in my opinion.
Last time I was in this situation, back in 1997, I rolled my own. It's served me very well for nine years, but increasingly design commitments I made early have started to seem wrong in terms of subsequent developments. Now I'm thinking of where I go from here; I've been thinking about the features a modern software system should have. And I've got a proof of concept which generates all the elements of a Web application from a single source file.
I haven't yet decided which way I'm going to jump. But I have already ruled out a lot of approaches. Firstly, anything which mixes logic with presentation is clearly wrong. That rules out all the taglib based systems, including PHP, Cold Fusion, JSP, BRL and all the others. Ruby on Rails is sort-of OKish, since the presentation layer ('views') is separateish from the logic. But in practice it seems you can put any logic into the Rails templates. Having the templates in a different, standard language - ideally XSL - seems to me a better solution.
As to the underlying language, after ten years Java is stale for me. I spend too much of my time struggling round its limitations, and primarily, around static typing and baroque libraries. Ten years ago Java had a lot of promise, particularly in strong portability and platform independence. But everything else has caught up, and Java now looks increasingly like the wrong language for general purpose programming. So what's the right language?
Back in the 1980s everyone gave up on LISP because it needed machines which were too expensive. But the sort of horsepower LISP needs is now cheap, and, indeed, LISP is economic of machine resource compared to many modern language systems. The downside of LISP as an implementation language is that while Web hosting companies these days often provide PHP and are reasonably comfortable with Java and Ruby, a toolkit which uses a LISP foundation can only really take off with people who control their own servers. But, that apart, LISP currently looks like the best bet to me.
I was going to post a response to this, but then I noticed your username and realised I didn't need to.
Yes, in case you can't work it out, I am being offensive. Deliberately.
RTFA, for heaven's sake!
Local policy forbade it. However, the constitution of the United States, which overrides local policy, allows it.
And the reason the CIA's 'rendition' planes drop in at Preswick so often is just refuelling, is it? Actually, probably, yes it is; but it doesn't seem to me we're less complicit if we just let our airports be used for refuelling. We should at the very least have withdrawn our ambassador from Washington.
British constitutional arrangements have always been moderately hard for outsiders to understand, and are now even more difficult. The Union parliament (in Westminster) happens to be the same institution as one of the National parliaments (for England). It isn't the same as the parliament for Scotland or Wales, and it doesn't (in general) make laws for Scotland or Wales, except with regard to things like foreign policy.
In principle Northern Ireland also has its own parliament. In practice it doesn't, because the Loyalists won't co-operate with the Republicans so the province is governed from Westminster - but nevertheless has its own laws.
So while it is true that 'UK MPs approve compulsory ID cards', this only applies in England, because 'UK MPs' don't have legislative authority over the rest of the UK. Of course, England is by far the largest of the nations of the United Kingdom. It's also by far the most authoritarian and right-wing nation of the United Kingdom.
The Scottish Executive have already said that Scotland will not have compulsory ID cards; I don't know what the position is for Wales and Northern Ireland, but in any case this law won't apply there. What will happen if someone from Scotland (who does not have to have an ID card) is stopped by police in England (where people will have to have ID cards) isn't clear, but doubtless this will get sorted out by the courts.
So this is a bit like the Texas legislature introducing compulsory ID cards, and the headlines saying 'US introduces compulsory ID cards'. It is true, sort of, but... only in Texas.
The commentators all say that Google has been buying shedloads of dark fibre. If this is so, does Google have anything to lose in this fight? By this time next year, could we see Google as the main backbone supplier in the US, and the Bells all whimpering a corner, saying 'please, sir, we didn't mean it'?
For the benefit of those of us who are not in US military intelligence, could someone explain the acronyms:
The JVM serving this page currently has an uptime of 32 days. But in the past it's had uptimes of over 200 days. Neither it, nor any of the other Tomcat servers I run, has ever gone out of whack. Java (Tomcat, Weblogic and others) powers the web servers of many of the world's biggest websites, serving millions of pages of dynamic content every day. If it was unreliable, that wouldn't be happening.
A virtual machine is a virtual machine. There's nothing whatever to stop you running multiple Java threads running different applications in the same virtual machine - this is, after all, exactly what application servers like Tomcat do. Each Web-app in Tomcat does not by default run in a separate virtual machine, instead they all share the same one, and consequently share the same copy of the Java class library. This is like many C programs running on the same real machine.
Because they used open standards and you used proprietary crap? If you want to be accessible to users, follow the standards. If you don't give a shit about your users but just want to show off what a clever web designer you are, don't complain of Google doesn't give a shit about you.
The 'whims' of Google's that you're complaining about are just common sense. Google says, make your page clear and informative. If your page is clear and informative, guess what? Google ranks it higher. If your page is clear and informative and has something interesting to say, other people will find it interesting and link to it. If other people link to it, guess what? Google ranks it higher. Google says, don't change your URLs too often. That's common sense, too. If you ceaselessly redesign your site, leaving old URLs dangling as 404 errors, you're hurting people who link to you, and you're hurting people who've bookmarked you. That's common sense, too. All my bookmarks to my bank's site no longer work, because every time they do a redesign they change their URLs, and leave the old ones dangling. Sooner or later, that's going to annoy me enough to make me change banks.
If you do a Google search for 'Simon Brooke', you'll find me at the top although my home page is just that, a personal home page, and has no 'optimisation'. Simon Brooke the Insurance Broker, with an expensive, professionally designed site, comes second. Then there's Simon Brooke the professional actor on IMDB, then a guy who's into aeroplanes, then Simon Brooke the author.
So with all those people with something to sell in the list, how come I and the aeroplane geek make the first page? My site is simple and has been there a long time (more than ten years now, and on the same URL for eight). In that time a lot of people have linked to it, and it doesn't suffer link rot. The plane geek's page gets ranked well because he has good pictures which presumably get linked to.
And that's the lesson for all you soi disant web designers out there. Users aren't impressed with your fancy, flash 'splash pages', and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with text as graphics, and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with vacuous marketing puff, and guess what? Google isn't either.
If you've got something interesting and different to say, and you say it clearly, and you say it consistently in the same place, Google will find you. Tricks and cheats aren't needed.
If you think you can write a better page-ranking algorithm than Google, do it. It will make you very, very rich.
Interestingly the page Matt Cutts complained about in this post is now 404.
No, sorry, this is fraud pure and simple: deliberately deceiving someone (in this case Google, about the content of a page) in order to achieve financial gain (in this case, more customers). I agree that it is OK to show differently tailored pages to different users, but only if this is not done in order to deceive.
BMW should be very grateful that Google just delisted them and didn't report them to the German prosecutors and financial authorities. Because you're right, this is criminal behaviour, and therefore is a matter for the police.
Reference counting isn't instead of garbage collection, it is garbage collection. It has some problems, I admit - it can't reclaim circular structures - but all garbage collecting algorithms have problems. I very much like reference counting as a garbage collection algorithm, because garbage collection rarely if ever halts execution for perceptable time.
I've been doing technical sifting of CVs for a recruitment agency while I've been recovering from a broken back. One of the positions I've been sifting for is QA team leader for an new development unit of a bit Web retailer. Good QA people are really thin on the ground - most of the people going for this post are not at all well qualified for it, and those who are well qualified and experienced seem to change jobs on average more frequently than once a year.
So if you're a good bug-hunter with team leadership experience, the ability to write a coherent test plan, and familiarity with two or three well known automated test tools and a bug/issue tracker or two, there is gold in them that situations vacant adverts.
Just wish I was systematic enough to be good at bug hunting!
I think the point you're missing is which species it is that is not well adapted to the impending change. Yup, it is natural that we will die off, but some people don't want us to.
Seriously, though, we're at serious risk of making most of the planet uninhabitable for humans. We can't all move too far towards the poles, even if it does grow warmer there, because there isn't enough land there to farm and even if there were the daylength isn't long enough for the photosynthesis of our food plants. Most of our existing cities are at or close to sea level; we're going to lose all those. A large percentage of our arable land is close to sea level too, and even more is between 45 degrees south and 45 degrees north where it's liable to become too arid for agriculture. Some populations of humans will hang on in the 50-65 degrees northern and southern latitudes bands, but six billion? Forget it. Much fewer than one.
Of course, this will take decades to happen, so it won't affect those of us living now that much. Just don't plan to have children. And get your Canadian citizenship now, while there's still time.
Over to you.
I'm working up a design proposal for exactly this sort of functionality for news sites.
AOL
To turn off my TV installation would mean separately switching off the television itself, the video recorder, the DVD player and the digital TV decoder. Neither the video recorder nor the digibox start cleanly - the video recorder wants it's time set (surely that could be stored in non-volatile) and the digibox gets petulant about the EuroSport card being reinserted. And consequently I don't do it - although in an average week I watch less than one hour's television. If my next TV integrates at least the digital receiver and a DVD-RW drive, and starts cleanly with no faff I'd be more than happy to do without a standby mode.
Same applies to everything else in the house, actually. Don't need standby; do need reasonably fast, reliable startup.
If you'd bothered to view source, you would see that I do do exactly what Microsoft document to switch on their 'strict mode'. It doesn't (surprise, surprise) work, because Microsoft choose for it not to.
Sadly, no. If you write standards-based code (like my home page, for example), the 80+% of the market that's using Internet Explorer will not see the page as you designed it. The really frustrating thing is at least five years ago there was a beta of Internet Explorer 6 which got my home page right. Microsoft know how to do the standards thing, they choose not to.
What to do about it? My solution, at least for my private stuff, is to write standards based stuff and not bother with the 80% of the web population who are insufficiently competent to use a standards based browser. When working for customers, I try to write things which look good on standards-compliant browsers and also look good on IE6, but that's hard because Microsoft deliberately misinterpret so much.
But the sooner Internet Explorer, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7, is dead and buried and forgotten except in nightmares, the better for everyone. It is a crock of shite.