The only real way to write HTML is the print out the HTML standard and black-line all poorly supported tags and attributes. This would be a tremendous amount of work. The same would need to be done for CSS, etc.
I wish each browser company would publish the true subset of HTML, CSS, etc. that they implement in a particular browser version. Then a third party could publish the intersection of these subsets. Currently, it seems that the so-called compatibility guides are derived from brute-force testing to see what works, which means the guide authors are always playing catch-up.
Extensions to HTML, CSS, etc. should be a separate document, so it can be evaluated separately. I would probably print this document out just to throw it away.
If the browser companies are responsible in their development efforts, publishing such documents should be little more than regurgitating some of their internal documentaion.
One advantage the UNIX community has is that diversity over the years has forced developers to plan for portability from the ground up. Portability does create more work for the developers, but the software is better for it. It's one of those things that people can look back on and be thankful for as they now can use maintainable and widely useful software.
If Windows software developers are forced to rethink their designs to keep things working after a split in MS, so be it. It will be tough, undoubtedly, but the benefits will be: less reliance on the Registry, fewer files installed under C:/Windows, less code depending on specific "features" (bugs) in the OS, and on and on.
Windows really has an in-bred quality to it. The monopoly has allowed really bad software features to survive and become dominant as would occur with genes in an inbred human family. It just isn't in the best intrest of our future (who wants kids with 11 toes and blue skin? Unfortunately, Windows already has 15 toes, goat fur, and two heads!).
I'm not so sure I'd want my OS of choice to be dependent on a bunch of foreigners.
There are real reasons for not wanting the OS to be developed in the USA. One is the way the US wants to control technology, such as encryption and, now, copyright. OpenBSD, for example, is based in Canada for the specific purpose of avoiding constraining US export laws.
I don't care who develops my OS. The only foreigners that bother me are the ones that have "Kill Americans" on today's list of things to do. Additionally, California isn't necessarily going to keep up in a crisis, especially if their UPSs are draining during a blackout.
If MS writes good documentation then they can't charge you $$$$ for training seminars.
This is why the tradition of UNIX man pages is so important. With little more than the K&R C manual (free over the Internet) and sections 2 and 3 of the man pages (free with your favorite UNIX or non-UNIX distribution), an average programmer can do a hell of a lot (and this is an understatement). I remember writing a small but non-trivial Curses application once knowing nothing about Curses going into it, yet I finished it in one evening (debugged and all). Can M$ and VB offer such a productive and thoroughly enjoyable programming experience?
If Java eclipses C, then who will be left to develop Linux or *BSD? I hope there are enough of you who won't give up C for anything, so the good OSs can continue to thrive.
One thing I hunger for is the continuing development of native Java compilers, such as GCJ. Perhaps, then, Sun can use them to optimize the new-fangled Java applications being shipped with Solaris (SMC, Audiotool, etc.). I don't know if Sun supports GCJ, but it would be truly great if they did.
The native Java compilers have great potential. Imagine distributing.class files as always (write once), but your customers have the option to pass them through a one-time native compilation (run quickly anywhere). The thought of the JIT compiling code every time I run an application makes me nervous, anyway.
The reason we have effective encryption (when it is implemented right) available to use is because of the large amount of research that has gone into breaking encryption.
...until such research becomes illegal. I'm looking forward to when a large company uses pig-latin to encode an electronic music or book format, and someone gets sent to federal prison for decoding it.
I'm sure Dartmouth isn't alone among universities in this respect. Universities tend to pay people poorly, except, of course, the university president, his/her direct lackeys, and the occasional professor who has really hit it big.
I wish I understood where all of the money goes from the gross tuition increases, multimillion dollar alumni fundraisers, and federal grants. I bet much of it just goes down the proverbial toilet of bureaucracy.
Basically, I'm arguing that "import package.*" is sloppy in itself, because it is so vague. Using wildcards forces a person to search the full source code to determine dependencies. This trouble can be saved if wildcards are not used. In the long run, I feel that wildcards can actually make code harder to maintain.
Name clashes can occur even if my own code isn't sloppy. Consider java.util.Date vs. java.sql.Date. One is a subclass of the other, but they behave differently causing potentially subtle bugs. It isn't obvious that "import java.util.*" and "import java.sql.*" can import a class with the same name, unless a person has good experience with both packages. Without the wildcards, it is obvious--even to an inexperienced person--thus making a bug less likely to occur in the first place.
Very few people--even those outside of the USA--really know how microwaves work. People think, "Thing goes in cold. Thing comes out hot." By analogy, "Cat goes in cold. Cat come out hot and dry" (flaw in logic noted; remember, these people are illogical, too).
Where is a person supposed to learn that microwave energy can boil a pet's blood and cook its brain probably causing excruciating pain for the last few moments of its life? How does a person come to understand the interaction between microwave energy and the water throughout an object?
Stupidity is a global issue. It's not just the Americans who have reached "the lowest of all intellectual standards."
Additionally, the real issue is not whether or not a person can type but whether or not losing the ability to type crushes a person's career. How would you feel if you suddenly are forced to give up a programmer's comfortable salary? Is it possible to find a similar salary in some other career (that doesn't require typing)? More seriously, what if your hands are amputated, and you can no longer support your family? What then? Should you be forced to live in an alley finding dinner in someone else's trash?
I agree. For example, if one avoids the temptation of using "*" in Java "import" statments, one can look at the code and immediately see a class' dependencies. All of them. Additionally, well laid out declarations in the methods, etc., can give an immediate idea of what sort of data is present and can give insight into what sort of algorithms to expect.
Declarations are good. Wildcards in declarations are bad, and no declarations are even worse.
So why does Microsoft encourage the installation of unneccessary software on it's systems, and why doesn't it make it easier to not install those services in the first place?
Artificially generated market share and market domination (why install "Brand X" if something similar is already installed?).
Whereas Microsoft prizes a DWIM (Do What I Mean) approach,...
I prefer to think that Microsoft has a WKWYWBTYD (We Know What You Want Better Than You Do) approach.
OSS projects probably could produce something similar to Oracle or DB2, in time, but is there a Open Source market for the features that make Oracle and DB2 special?
For example, how many users of PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. are planning on setting up a database that can stay available through nuclear attack or power grid failures? Generally, these super-duper robust databases get set up on several "big iron" servers, which means the licensing and administration for Oracle or DB2 just isn't that big of a deal relative to hardware costs, site construction costs, and staff salaries.
For certain projects, paying for Oracle or DB2 can actually save a heap of trouble, since they are so damn capable. This can make them more than worth their price.
On the other hand, I cannot advocate these super databases for small projects. That's where the current OSS databases fit in quite well. Therefore, would OSS really benefit from trying to compete with Oracle and DB2?
Re:Moderators!
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Oh come on, now. I think there must be full-time M$ people modding down anything anti-M$ on Slashdot. My karma is so low that I am being de-incarnated. Oh no, I think I just turned into your great-grandmother!
What's that word.....oh yea, "astroturfing"...
Re:You know...
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Just write a new version that infects IIS, shuts it off, installs a better web server, and voilà, the world is a better place! It would be even better to uninstall IIS, but we all know it's impossible to uninstall Windows software.
Microsoft continues its efforts to paint [Linux] as a "toy" operating system.
They can try all they want, but it is a moot effort. The recent Linux GUI desktops are gorgeous. Take away the GUI and you have a hard-core workhorse. Either way these "toy" OSs are pretty damn serious.
What scientists and engineers appreciate about Linux and always have about UNIX in general is the sheer flexibility and modularity offered. I have never felt Windows offers such flexibility.
Unless e-books can satisfy everything we expect from paper, they will not be popular. For example:
1) How do I highlight important passages with e-books?
2) How do I make margin notes to record questions and thoughts as I read an e-book?
3) Can I write anywhere on the page using any color? Can I write at an angle or upside-down if I wish?
4) Can I lock the e-book away so no one else can read my margin notes if I don't want them to?
5) Can I look on my bookshelf/harddrive 15, 25, or 35 years later and still be able to read the e-book complete with highlights and margin notes?
One problem with e-books is that they don't give me the impression of timelessness. A truly classic book is timeless--its ideas are valid and valuable for eternity. A physical low-tech object--a book--is independent of and transcends trendy storage media or encoding techniques.
The only technologies that address the timelessness issue are the lowest-tech formats I know of: ASCII or UNICODE. I can write an ASCII viewer, if all else fails, because the format is trivial. I will always be able to read ASCII.
Unfortunately, ASCII and UNICODE do not satisfy the other requirements above, especially highlighting and margin notes. What now?
find already does too much; adding all of these commands to make it more convenient would make it a yucky beast. find needs to be small and flexible to make it more convenient not more integrated.
This is why MS Windows is the anti-OS to UNIX. Windows has spoiled people to think that thought isn't required when using a computer. Not only does MS have a monopoly on the desktop, it goes further to capture the (whiny voice) "but thinking makes my head hurt" market. I wince when I hear "system administrator" or "software development" in the same sentence as "Windows."
I agree with this analogy. I also feel the same way about genuine UNIX workstations. The hardware is better--to a point of beauty.
The satisfaction of working with well designed and well supported hardware is worth the higher price, in my opinion. And now that Mac OS = UNIX, too, is just getting me more excited, since the older Mac OSs were arguably no better than MS Windows for overall stability.
Many people cite price/performance as justification of PCs over Macs and UNIX workstations, which is somewhat valid for people who do lots of computation and/or need the ego-trip of keeping up with the latest hardware. But, looking at the flat line of my CPU meter, I don't think this argument is very strong. Having everything just work is much more important.
1) I have a Word document that substantially increases in size each time I save it (even after trivial changes).
2) Once, I added a few megabytes of graphics to a 10 page Word document, and the resulting document was close to 40 megabytes in size!
These are two reasons why incomprehensible and undocumented file formats are so bad. There is no acceptable reason why these things happen--they just do. If my coworkers weren't so enslaven to MS Word, I would love to go back to LaTeX. With text source files, such as LaTeX documents, what you see is truly what you get (no fluff).
Splitting Micro$oft up really does help. Cutting Office loose puts it out among other companies producing office suites: Corel, Lotus, Claris, Sun, Applix, etc. In this wider field, there is real competition. Competion that used to produce truly superior products relative to Office.
I remember when I was still using Lotus Ami Pro. It was really an excellent program--better than Word for my purposes. But somehow, Office became the only thing taken seriously by everyone else. I felt shut out. The injustice, here, is that Word really was inferior to Ami Pro in ease of use and relevant features. Word was so damn clunky! Word would never have won out on merit alone--it is like the proverbial boss' son getting promoted ahead of you.
It isn't just Ami Pro: I bet many thousands of you have similar "I remember when...before Office" stories. The fact that all of these stores are in the past tense is pretty good proof of the current monopoly.
Well, in Latin, it really is "virii" or something better (my Latin is quite rusty). "es" is the English plural suffix.
So, the dilemma is: do English speaking people honor the grammar of the language from which the word was taken or do they just apply English rules? Someone must know the real answer to this. For once and for all, the language experts out there should take a stand and set us straight!
Slashdot Mirror
The only real way to write HTML is the print out the HTML standard and black-line all poorly supported tags and attributes. This would be a tremendous amount of work. The same would need to be done for CSS, etc.
I wish each browser company would publish the true subset of HTML, CSS, etc. that they implement in a particular browser version. Then a third party could publish the intersection of these subsets. Currently, it seems that the so-called compatibility guides are derived from brute-force testing to see what works, which means the guide authors are always playing catch-up.
Extensions to HTML, CSS, etc. should be a separate document, so it can be evaluated separately. I would probably print this document out just to throw it away.
If the browser companies are responsible in their development efforts, publishing such documents should be little more than regurgitating some of their internal documentaion.
Is this too much to ask?
One advantage the UNIX community has is that diversity over the years has forced developers to plan for portability from the ground up. Portability does create more work for the developers, but the software is better for it. It's one of those things that people can look back on and be thankful for as they now can use maintainable and widely useful software.
If Windows software developers are forced to rethink their designs to keep things working after a split in MS, so be it. It will be tough, undoubtedly, but the benefits will be: less reliance on the Registry, fewer files installed under C:/Windows, less code depending on specific "features" (bugs) in the OS, and on and on.
Windows really has an in-bred quality to it. The monopoly has allowed really bad software features to survive and become dominant as would occur with genes in an inbred human family. It just isn't in the best intrest of our future (who wants kids with 11 toes and blue skin? Unfortunately, Windows already has 15 toes, goat fur, and two heads!).
There are real reasons for not wanting the OS to be developed in the USA. One is the way the US wants to control technology, such as encryption and, now, copyright. OpenBSD, for example, is based in Canada for the specific purpose of avoiding constraining US export laws.
I don't care who develops my OS. The only foreigners that bother me are the ones that have "Kill Americans" on today's list of things to do. Additionally, California isn't necessarily going to keep up in a crisis, especially if their UPSs are draining during a blackout.
Thus, in short, proving the absurdity of the DMCA.
This is why the tradition of UNIX man pages is so important. With little more than the K&R C manual (free over the Internet) and sections 2 and 3 of the man pages (free with your favorite UNIX or non-UNIX distribution), an average programmer can do a hell of a lot (and this is an understatement). I remember writing a small but non-trivial Curses application once knowing nothing about Curses going into it, yet I finished it in one evening (debugged and all). Can M$ and VB offer such a productive and thoroughly enjoyable programming experience?
One thing I hunger for is the continuing development of native Java compilers, such as GCJ. Perhaps, then, Sun can use them to optimize the new-fangled Java applications being shipped with Solaris (SMC, Audiotool, etc.). I don't know if Sun supports GCJ, but it would be truly great if they did.
The native Java compilers have great potential. Imagine distributing .class files as always (write once), but your customers have the option to pass them through a one-time native compilation (run quickly anywhere). The thought of the JIT compiling code every time I run an application makes me nervous, anyway.
...until such research becomes illegal. I'm looking forward to when a large company uses pig-latin to encode an electronic music or book format, and someone gets sent to federal prison for decoding it.
I wish I understood where all of the money goes from the gross tuition increases, multimillion dollar alumni fundraisers, and federal grants. I bet much of it just goes down the proverbial toilet of bureaucracy.
Name clashes can occur even if my own code isn't sloppy. Consider java.util.Date vs. java.sql.Date. One is a subclass of the other, but they behave differently causing potentially subtle bugs. It isn't obvious that "import java.util.*" and "import java.sql.*" can import a class with the same name, unless a person has good experience with both packages. Without the wildcards, it is obvious--even to an inexperienced person--thus making a bug less likely to occur in the first place.
Where is a person supposed to learn that microwave energy can boil a pet's blood and cook its brain probably causing excruciating pain for the last few moments of its life? How does a person come to understand the interaction between microwave energy and the water throughout an object?
Stupidity is a global issue. It's not just the Americans who have reached "the lowest of all intellectual standards."
Additionally, the real issue is not whether or not a person can type but whether or not losing the ability to type crushes a person's career. How would you feel if you suddenly are forced to give up a programmer's comfortable salary? Is it possible to find a similar salary in some other career (that doesn't require typing)? More seriously, what if your hands are amputated, and you can no longer support your family? What then? Should you be forced to live in an alley finding dinner in someone else's trash?
I agree. For example, if one avoids the temptation of using "*" in Java "import" statments, one can look at the code and immediately see a class' dependencies. All of them. Additionally, well laid out declarations in the methods, etc., can give an immediate idea of what sort of data is present and can give insight into what sort of algorithms to expect.
Declarations are good. Wildcards in declarations are bad, and no declarations are even worse.
So why does Microsoft encourage the installation of unneccessary software on it's systems, and why doesn't it make it easier to not install those services in the first place?
Artificially generated market share and market domination (why install "Brand X" if something similar is already installed?).
Whereas Microsoft prizes a DWIM (Do What I Mean) approach,...
I prefer to think that Microsoft has a WKWYWBTYD (We Know What You Want Better Than You Do) approach.
OSS projects probably could produce something similar to Oracle or DB2, in time, but is there a Open Source market for the features that make Oracle and DB2 special?
For example, how many users of PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. are planning on setting up a database that can stay available through nuclear attack or power grid failures? Generally, these super-duper robust databases get set up on several "big iron" servers, which means the licensing and administration for Oracle or DB2 just isn't that big of a deal relative to hardware costs, site construction costs, and staff salaries.
For certain projects, paying for Oracle or DB2 can actually save a heap of trouble, since they are so damn capable. This can make them more than worth their price.
On the other hand, I cannot advocate these super databases for small projects. That's where the current OSS databases fit in quite well. Therefore, would OSS really benefit from trying to compete with Oracle and DB2?
What's that word.....oh yea, "astroturfing"...
Just write a new version that infects IIS, shuts it off, installs a better web server, and voilà, the world is a better place! It would be even better to uninstall IIS, but we all know it's impossible to uninstall Windows software.
They can try all they want, but it is a moot effort. The recent Linux GUI desktops are gorgeous. Take away the GUI and you have a hard-core workhorse. Either way these "toy" OSs are pretty damn serious.
What scientists and engineers appreciate about Linux and always have about UNIX in general is the sheer flexibility and modularity offered. I have never felt Windows offers such flexibility.
Unless e-books can satisfy everything we expect from paper, they will not be popular. For example:
1) How do I highlight important passages with e-books?
2) How do I make margin notes to record questions and thoughts as I read an e-book?
3) Can I write anywhere on the page using any color? Can I write at an angle or upside-down if I wish?
4) Can I lock the e-book away so no one else can read my margin notes if I don't want them to?
5) Can I look on my bookshelf/harddrive 15, 25, or 35 years later and still be able to read the e-book complete with highlights and margin notes?
One problem with e-books is that they don't give me the impression of timelessness. A truly classic book is timeless--its ideas are valid and valuable for eternity. A physical low-tech object--a book--is independent of and transcends trendy storage media or encoding techniques.
The only technologies that address the timelessness issue are the lowest-tech formats I know of: ASCII or UNICODE. I can write an ASCII viewer, if all else fails, because the format is trivial. I will always be able to read ASCII.
Unfortunately, ASCII and UNICODE do not satisfy the other requirements above, especially highlighting and margin notes. What now?
Okay, what about egrep, fgrep, sed, awk, tr, chmod, chown, gzip, rm, dos2unix, cp, mv, perl, ispell, sort, cat, cut, bash, ...ad nauseum...
find already does too much; adding all of these commands to make it more convenient would make it a yucky beast. find needs to be small and flexible to make it more convenient not more integrated.
This is why MS Windows is the anti-OS to UNIX. Windows has spoiled people to think that thought isn't required when using a computer. Not only does MS have a monopoly on the desktop, it goes further to capture the (whiny voice) "but thinking makes my head hurt" market. I wince when I hear "system administrator" or "software development" in the same sentence as "Windows."
The satisfaction of working with well designed and well supported hardware is worth the higher price, in my opinion. And now that Mac OS = UNIX, too, is just getting me more excited, since the older Mac OSs were arguably no better than MS Windows for overall stability.
Many people cite price/performance as justification of PCs over Macs and UNIX workstations, which is somewhat valid for people who do lots of computation and/or need the ego-trip of keeping up with the latest hardware. But, looking at the flat line of my CPU meter, I don't think this argument is very strong. Having everything just work is much more important.
There isn't a Latin plural form of "virus", so "viruses" it is!
Follow the link in the parent post. This is really true!
1) I have a Word document that substantially increases in size each time I save it (even after trivial changes).
2) Once, I added a few megabytes of graphics to a 10 page Word document, and the resulting document was close to 40 megabytes in size!
These are two reasons why incomprehensible and undocumented file formats are so bad. There is no acceptable reason why these things happen--they just do. If my coworkers weren't so enslaven to MS Word, I would love to go back to LaTeX. With text source files, such as LaTeX documents, what you see is truly what you get (no fluff).
Since the price of Windows is $99 + your eternal soul, I'd say Linux and its free cousins are definitely cheaper.
There isn't a Latin plural form of "virus", so "viruses" it is!
I remember when I was still using Lotus Ami Pro. It was really an excellent program--better than Word for my purposes. But somehow, Office became the only thing taken seriously by everyone else. I felt shut out. The injustice, here, is that Word really was inferior to Ami Pro in ease of use and relevant features. Word was so damn clunky! Word would never have won out on merit alone--it is like the proverbial boss' son getting promoted ahead of you.
It isn't just Ami Pro: I bet many thousands of you have similar "I remember when...before Office" stories. The fact that all of these stores are in the past tense is pretty good proof of the current monopoly.
So, the dilemma is: do English speaking people honor the grammar of the language from which the word was taken or do they just apply English rules? Someone must know the real answer to this. For once and for all, the language experts out there should take a stand and set us straight!