A list with a little display and some controls at the top? Color me impressed!
You blew your argument right at the beginning. I stopped reading because this is mind numbingly retarded. I see two possibilities here:
A) You really do think this is all iTunes has, in which case you are incapable of actually evaluating software and your opinion is not valid.
B) You measure quality of software by quantity of shiny controls exposed directly in the visual interface. If that's the case, then you should see no reason for Apple to exist at all, as both Windows and LInux deliver considerably more features at every turn. Fortunately for Apple, most people prefer simple usable software to having every feature under the sun.
Oh there is some further stupidity I need to respond to:
Most of us have some sort of music or mp3 directories, potentially with any number of subdirectories under it for organization. Personally I have mp3/[Genre]/[Artist] and potentially/[Album] if I ripped the whole thing rather than downloaded particular songs. I'm going to put these files into this structure regardless of how it gets into my music player. To claim I should have just dropped it into iTunes itself is disengenuous fanboi rationalization. I don't want my music strewn all over my system, I want it in one place of my choosing.
This right here is pure strawman. Look, if you want to organize your music by hand be my guest. I let iTunes organize mine. I have no desire to manually sort my music. I'd rather have it sorted by the meta-data and iTunes has a perfectly capable id3 editor. It's not strewn about my hard drive because it's all in my iTunes library folder which is easy to navigate and I never have to touch it.
If that doesn't work for you, then more power to you rolling your own system. But it's completely non-sensical on one hand to say iTunes is feature-weak and then on other hand bashing it for promoting a workflow where you do less manual file organization.
I don't know if you've spent too much time at singles bars or what, but you're stacking up the generalizations. First I don't know what you mean by asshole, and I don't know what you mean by most women. The main reason I responded was because you sound very bitter and more than a little entitled. Not a good attitude for your mental health, and it certainly won't help your case with women, no matter how objectively justified that attitude may or may not be.
First of all, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Girls do not prefer assholes, they just don't like sniveling self-loathing weaklings. Get some real self esteem and make something of yourself and the girls will come.
Something else I should point out too. A lot of "nerds" like to think they're smarter than other people and constantly set up all kinds of straw man logic in their head to maintain this illusion. It may take intelligence to be a good nerd, but it doesn't take a nerd to be intelligent. Basing your self-worth on your intelligence is a good way to come off as an asshole yourself as you subconsciously attempt to demonstrate it to everyone. The truly smart know how to use it to their advantage and don't care if anyone knows it.
As for world leadership, well, of course you are right there, but it can not be any different. Only the power hungry and greedy have the drive to get there, so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Even if the physicist "saves" humanity 99 times out of 100, the other 1% of the time he destroys us all. I think the cage fighter is the lower risk investment.
Aside from just being trendy, the web is the default network platform. It's easy to get started in, and the simplicity of the platform lent itself to becoming the defacto standard.
The web has deep flaws as an application platform, and indeed we are throwing out decades of UI and development experience, but none of that matters since it is the market choice.
10 years from now there will be a ton of this vanilla web development and maintenance going on, but people probably won't talk about it as much. All the buzz will be about some new technology, which no doubt will be interesting, but also vastly overrated and receiving disproportionate attention.
GP sounds like he's 16 with no real world experience.
Programming jobs are not hard to come by at all. Yes you should be able to pick up some administrator or other tangential skills along the way but it's rarely a core requirement to getting hired.
Game development has nothing to do with graphic design. Illustrators, animators, modelers, yes, but not graphic designers. Also, it's a pretty niche type of programming. You need to know more about physics and other common game algorithms. Pretty hard to get into without specific training.
Starcraft suffers from the classic "tank rush" problem that the turn-based strategy predecessors said that all real-time strategy games would suffer from.
That's what made Myth such an amazing game. Take the production element completely out, add a real 3d physics model, excellent play control, and a dozen different game types. Suddenly you have both deep strategy and hard-core tactical elements. It's funny, because when it was in development back in 1996, the graphics and what they were doing with 3d landscape and blood was really grabbing gamers attention. Now 12 years later, the graphics look quaint, but the depth of gameplay (particularly Myth II) and emergent strategies that have evolved in the community over the last decade show what a truly great game it is.
I think the reason it never got really popular was because it required too much precise motor control for the RTS crowd, but it required too much strategy for the FPS crowd.
Another thing that is somewhat unique to music is the fact that until someone hears a song a few times, it's very very unlikely they will like it. This is why so much music is derivative, and why true creative genius is often under-appreciated (see Frank Zappa).
This is what makes media consolidation and payola so nefarious, and also why you find playlists getting ever shorter, with so much focus on a few big hits.
Its much easier to think in abstract terms if you have multiple languages in your belt
Too true, but some languages are much more valuable than others. For instance, how would learning Java help the abstract thinking of a Lisp expert? They might have a few ah-ha moments about interfacing with the OS, but that's about it:)
Name anything and Java probably already has a library for it.
Probably the GP should have said architectures rather than abstractions. Sure Java probably has more libraries than anything else, and as a result you can get a lot done quickly. But the core language itself is limiting in how you design your solutions. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does atrophy your mind if you never do anything else. If the only alternatives out there were PHP and C++ that might not be such a loss. But the fact is that in many cases languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, OCaml, or Python allow for much more elegant solutions. If your only goal is to produce value for a large corporation somewhere then the benefits of Java probably far outweigh the negatives (today). However if you are interested in the craft of software engineering, and want to be a part of the evolution of the field of computation, then expertise in these other languages will give you a much higher level view of the state of the art.
The article only says that INTRANET pages are not shown in standards-compliant mode by default.
Yeah the article is too harsh on this point, but...
Furthermore, web standards are discriminated against in IE8 by the icon that appears next to standards-compliant web pages
This is just terrible. This sounds like Ballmer came down there personally and mandated this. On the other hand...
First, I suggest that IE8 not introduce version targeting which only perpetuates the problem of non-compliant pages. Instead, IE8 should respect the established conventions which don't need manual switching between modes.
One of the things Microsoft does very well is maintain backwards compatibility. This is of tremendous value to enterprise customers. The least evil way to do this is with rendering modes. You can argue that standards should be the default, but to suggest that Microsoft should stab its most profitable userbase in the back and completely break backwards compatibility just to altruistically further the state of web standards compatibility is ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, I wish it would happen, but it would be a pretty stupid move.
The discussion here sucks. It's driven by design-luddite trolls setting up straw man arguments about why we're better off without font embeddability. Then it's followed up by the standard anti-DRM rhetoric.
Meanwhile nobody is talking about font piracy, which is actually a much huger problem than software, music or movie piracy. Because of the size of the market, size of the files, and the amount of work that goes into creating quality fonts, piracy can have a real detrimental effect on the industry, directly leading to a drastic reduction in new font production.
At/. everyone sees DRM through the lens of some of the terribly crippled and illegal schemes that have come in the past, and the RIAA's hostility towards its customers, running roughshod over fair-use, and disregard for quality in their own products.
But the font industry is another story. One that shows the effects of casual piracy to be very damaging. The idea of some lightweight DRM to prevent casual piracy at least merits consideration (not of the brittle phone-home variety). If copying fonts becomes a simple matter of save as... in any browser, we could enter a world where the font design industry shrivels up and can only come back with a more heavy-handed DRM format just to survive.
I don't challenge your thesis, but your example stinks. First of all, the biggest problem as far as privacy is concerned is the database being sold to other companies. The next biggest problem is the database being outright stolen by crackers. Sniffing your POST as it goes across the wire is the least of your worries.
Second, it's just not reasonable to call https standard privacy practice in this case. Standard security practice is to use SSL for "sensitive" information. But it's not standard to consider name, birthdate and address sensitive. You can argue that it should be, but don't try to redefine reality by calling something standard that's not.
I don't see how YouTube's traffic is relevant at all. If you slice the stats as views per video then do the Olympics have the most awesome video site ever?
Assuming the behavior would be an improvement, which doesn't seem likely unless we breed a new class of super-developer and fire everyone who bullshitted their way through HR
Afraid you're describing a very natural behavior that's unlikely to disappear. Developers (not just software) tend to work until each constraint is just met and then stop to work on the next constraint.
And let's hope it never does disappear or we can kiss new software goodbye.
Very well put. But beyond that I think it's dangerous for science to get into bold claims that are the realm of philosophy. To me, a deterministic universe is already a silly thing for science to try to prove. I mean yes, it's a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it's pure hubris to believe we'd ever have enough evidence to actually prove it.
Science should be focused on observing and explaining actual phenomena--not validating philosophical viewpoints.
It's truly a poor scientist who is so unsatisfied with the limitations of knowledge that he takes on certain premises as a matter of faith and then misuses the name of science to defend those beliefs. This is actually a much greater threat to the future of science than those wacky fundamentalists.
No doubt! With marketshare above 5% Apple is lamer than the Seattle music scene. But Linux has been trendy for years too. The best bet to ensure a feeling of superiority for years to come is Plan 9 baby!
You fail. My issue is not with compiled code in general, and it's not in any way reasonable to assume that compiled javascript would be as reliable as compiled assembly for a variety of reasons.
The difference in reliability between assembly and javascript is the issue I'm concerned about. That doesn't mean Google isn't on top of those issues, but they're still scary.
I'm a long time web developer but I've never even cracked open the box on GWT, so take this with a grain of salt.
The idea of depending on generated javascript scares me. I'm against writing Javascript in Java, Ruby, Python or anything else. Javascript is just too much of a beast to debug to leave everything up to an opaque framework, and I want to be able to get my hands dirty. I like the smaller and more traditional open-source style frameworks. Prototype, jQuery, MooTools, even Dojo just scare me a lot less.
It could be totally irrational, and it also could be the fact that I tend to build web applications that need minimal state and pretty basic AJAX interactions. Nothing anywhere near as dense as, say, Gmail. If the right project came along I'd definitely give it a more serious look.
Slashdot Mirror
A list with a little display and some controls at the top? Color me impressed!
You blew your argument right at the beginning. I stopped reading because this is mind numbingly retarded. I see two possibilities here:
A) You really do think this is all iTunes has, in which case you are incapable of actually evaluating software and your opinion is not valid.
B) You measure quality of software by quantity of shiny controls exposed directly in the visual interface. If that's the case, then you should see no reason for Apple to exist at all, as both Windows and LInux deliver considerably more features at every turn. Fortunately for Apple, most people prefer simple usable software to having every feature under the sun.
Oh there is some further stupidity I need to respond to:
Most of us have some sort of music or mp3 directories, potentially with any number of subdirectories under it for organization. Personally I have mp3/[Genre]/[Artist] and potentially /[Album] if I ripped the whole thing rather than downloaded particular songs. I'm going to put these files into this structure regardless of how it gets into my music player. To claim I should have just dropped it into iTunes itself is disengenuous fanboi rationalization. I don't want my music strewn all over my system, I want it in one place of my choosing.
This right here is pure strawman. Look, if you want to organize your music by hand be my guest. I let iTunes organize mine. I have no desire to manually sort my music. I'd rather have it sorted by the meta-data and iTunes has a perfectly capable id3 editor. It's not strewn about my hard drive because it's all in my iTunes library folder which is easy to navigate and I never have to touch it.
If that doesn't work for you, then more power to you rolling your own system. But it's completely non-sensical on one hand to say iTunes is feature-weak and then on other hand bashing it for promoting a workflow where you do less manual file organization.
I don't know if you've spent too much time at singles bars or what, but you're stacking up the generalizations. First I don't know what you mean by asshole, and I don't know what you mean by most women. The main reason I responded was because you sound very bitter and more than a little entitled. Not a good attitude for your mental health, and it certainly won't help your case with women, no matter how objectively justified that attitude may or may not be.
First of all, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Girls do not prefer assholes, they just don't like sniveling self-loathing weaklings. Get some real self esteem and make something of yourself and the girls will come.
Something else I should point out too. A lot of "nerds" like to think they're smarter than other people and constantly set up all kinds of straw man logic in their head to maintain this illusion. It may take intelligence to be a good nerd, but it doesn't take a nerd to be intelligent. Basing your self-worth on your intelligence is a good way to come off as an asshole yourself as you subconsciously attempt to demonstrate it to everyone. The truly smart know how to use it to their advantage and don't care if anyone knows it.
As for world leadership, well, of course you are right there, but it can not be any different. Only the power hungry and greedy have the drive to get there, so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Even if the physicist "saves" humanity 99 times out of 100, the other 1% of the time he destroys us all. I think the cage fighter is the lower risk investment.
Aside from just being trendy, the web is the default network platform. It's easy to get started in, and the simplicity of the platform lent itself to becoming the defacto standard.
The web has deep flaws as an application platform, and indeed we are throwing out decades of UI and development experience, but none of that matters since it is the market choice.
10 years from now there will be a ton of this vanilla web development and maintenance going on, but people probably won't talk about it as much. All the buzz will be about some new technology, which no doubt will be interesting, but also vastly overrated and receiving disproportionate attention.
GP sounds like he's 16 with no real world experience.
Programming jobs are not hard to come by at all. Yes you should be able to pick up some administrator or other tangential skills along the way but it's rarely a core requirement to getting hired.
Game development has nothing to do with graphic design. Illustrators, animators, modelers, yes, but not graphic designers. Also, it's a pretty niche type of programming. You need to know more about physics and other common game algorithms. Pretty hard to get into without specific training.
Starcraft suffers from the classic "tank rush" problem that the turn-based strategy predecessors said that all real-time strategy games would suffer from.
That's what made Myth such an amazing game. Take the production element completely out, add a real 3d physics model, excellent play control, and a dozen different game types. Suddenly you have both deep strategy and hard-core tactical elements. It's funny, because when it was in development back in 1996, the graphics and what they were doing with 3d landscape and blood was really grabbing gamers attention. Now 12 years later, the graphics look quaint, but the depth of gameplay (particularly Myth II) and emergent strategies that have evolved in the community over the last decade show what a truly great game it is.
I think the reason it never got really popular was because it required too much precise motor control for the RTS crowd, but it required too much strategy for the FPS crowd.
Another thing that is somewhat unique to music is the fact that until someone hears a song a few times, it's very very unlikely they will like it. This is why so much music is derivative, and why true creative genius is often under-appreciated (see Frank Zappa).
This is what makes media consolidation and payola so nefarious, and also why you find playlists getting ever shorter, with so much focus on a few big hits.
Free to pay $50 for 2 ounces of ink is more like it.
Its much easier to think in abstract terms if you have multiple languages in your belt
Too true, but some languages are much more valuable than others. For instance, how would learning Java help the abstract thinking of a Lisp expert? They might have a few ah-ha moments about interfacing with the OS, but that's about it :)
Name anything and Java probably already has a library for it.
Probably the GP should have said architectures rather than abstractions. Sure Java probably has more libraries than anything else, and as a result you can get a lot done quickly. But the core language itself is limiting in how you design your solutions. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does atrophy your mind if you never do anything else. If the only alternatives out there were PHP and C++ that might not be such a loss. But the fact is that in many cases languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell, OCaml, or Python allow for much more elegant solutions. If your only goal is to produce value for a large corporation somewhere then the benefits of Java probably far outweigh the negatives (today). However if you are interested in the craft of software engineering, and want to be a part of the evolution of the field of computation, then expertise in these other languages will give you a much higher level view of the state of the art.
The article only says that INTRANET pages are not shown in standards-compliant mode by default.
Yeah the article is too harsh on this point, but...
Furthermore, web standards are discriminated against in IE8 by the icon that appears next to standards-compliant web pages
This is just terrible. This sounds like Ballmer came down there personally and mandated this. On the other hand...
First, I suggest that IE8 not introduce version targeting which only perpetuates the problem of non-compliant pages. Instead, IE8 should respect the established conventions which don't need manual switching between modes.
One of the things Microsoft does very well is maintain backwards compatibility. This is of tremendous value to enterprise customers. The least evil way to do this is with rendering modes. You can argue that standards should be the default, but to suggest that Microsoft should stab its most profitable userbase in the back and completely break backwards compatibility just to altruistically further the state of web standards compatibility is ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, I wish it would happen, but it would be a pretty stupid move.
The discussion here sucks. It's driven by design-luddite trolls setting up straw man arguments about why we're better off without font embeddability. Then it's followed up by the standard anti-DRM rhetoric.
Meanwhile nobody is talking about font piracy, which is actually a much huger problem than software, music or movie piracy. Because of the size of the market, size of the files, and the amount of work that goes into creating quality fonts, piracy can have a real detrimental effect on the industry, directly leading to a drastic reduction in new font production.
At /. everyone sees DRM through the lens of some of the terribly crippled and illegal schemes that have come in the past, and the RIAA's hostility towards its customers, running roughshod over fair-use, and disregard for quality in their own products.
But the font industry is another story. One that shows the effects of casual piracy to be very damaging. The idea of some lightweight DRM to prevent casual piracy at least merits consideration (not of the brittle phone-home variety). If copying fonts becomes a simple matter of save as... in any browser, we could enter a world where the font design industry shrivels up and can only come back with a more heavy-handed DRM format just to survive.
I don't challenge your thesis, but your example stinks. First of all, the biggest problem as far as privacy is concerned is the database being sold to other companies. The next biggest problem is the database being outright stolen by crackers. Sniffing your POST as it goes across the wire is the least of your worries.
Second, it's just not reasonable to call https standard privacy practice in this case. Standard security practice is to use SSL for "sensitive" information. But it's not standard to consider name, birthdate and address sensitive. You can argue that it should be, but don't try to redefine reality by calling something standard that's not.
I don't see how YouTube's traffic is relevant at all. If you slice the stats as views per video then do the Olympics have the most awesome video site ever?
Assuming the behavior would be an improvement, which doesn't seem likely unless we breed a new class of super-developer and fire everyone who bullshitted their way through HR
And let's hope it never does disappear or we can kiss new software goodbye.
Very well put. But beyond that I think it's dangerous for science to get into bold claims that are the realm of philosophy. To me, a deterministic universe is already a silly thing for science to try to prove. I mean yes, it's a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it's pure hubris to believe we'd ever have enough evidence to actually prove it.
Science should be focused on observing and explaining actual phenomena--not validating philosophical viewpoints.
It's truly a poor scientist who is so unsatisfied with the limitations of knowledge that he takes on certain premises as a matter of faith and then misuses the name of science to defend those beliefs. This is actually a much greater threat to the future of science than those wacky fundamentalists.
Do you care about online video? Does quality mean anything to you?
If the answer is yes to either question, you oughta check out Vimeo, because in a sea of competition the quality of their product really stands out.
Are you kidding? What hipster doesn't love moody?
No doubt! With marketshare above 5% Apple is lamer than the Seattle music scene. But Linux has been trendy for years too. The best bet to ensure a feeling of superiority for years to come is Plan 9 baby!
You fail. My issue is not with compiled code in general, and it's not in any way reasonable to assume that compiled javascript would be as reliable as compiled assembly for a variety of reasons.
The difference in reliability between assembly and javascript is the issue I'm concerned about. That doesn't mean Google isn't on top of those issues, but they're still scary.
Thanks for the info.
I'm a long time web developer but I've never even cracked open the box on GWT, so take this with a grain of salt.
The idea of depending on generated javascript scares me. I'm against writing Javascript in Java, Ruby, Python or anything else. Javascript is just too much of a beast to debug to leave everything up to an opaque framework, and I want to be able to get my hands dirty. I like the smaller and more traditional open-source style frameworks. Prototype, jQuery, MooTools, even Dojo just scare me a lot less.
It could be totally irrational, and it also could be the fact that I tend to build web applications that need minimal state and pretty basic AJAX interactions. Nothing anywhere near as dense as, say, Gmail. If the right project came along I'd definitely give it a more serious look.