I mean geesh, just give designers a bit of help with a small FLOAT MIDDLE syntax.
Considering the current problems IE has with rendering standard left and right floats, and the slow pace of new feature implementation, writing float: middle into the syntax would probably mean that you couldn't use it in Mozilla until about 2010, and you couldn't use it for public websites until 2020.
Also, why do you want float: middle? Having text run around both sides of an block doesn't serve much practical design purpose (especially in a variable width/font-size environment). If you want to center something just use margin: auto;
A much cooler feature would be alpha channel floats to make text run around more complex shapes.
magic_quotes_gpc is totally broken. For those unfamiliar, it escapes all HTTP GET and POST strings MySQL-style. But this is stupid.
No, you are missing the point. magic_quotes_gpc is a handy safe-guard for newbies, most of whom will be using MySQL. The downside is some errant slashes that may be annoying, but are far less dangerous.
If you don't like it, THEN TURN IT OFF, but don't suggest that increasing PHP's out-of-the-box security for newbies makes the tool somehow 'broken'. This is hardly an inconvenience since PHP provides functions to do all the transformations you suggest in your list, and you can either turn off magic_quotes_gpc or just use stripslashes().
If you wanna talk broken, why not raise PHP4's object and reference issues; there's at least a decent argument there.
The comment I responded to implied that we shouldn't lead, basically by wording the idea negatively (if we create something original, MS will copy it - well, duh! That's what leading the industry is. You should worry if nobody's copying what you're doing, not if people are.)
This is just semantics. I agree that Microsoft products are better because of the many innovators that fly under the mainstream radar. My negative wording was because Microsoft will implement a feature only as well as it needs to maintain it's monopoly, which generally means only to a marketable level, not a technically robust level.
No, it isn't, and you don't get to pretend you've justified that claim by changing the subject, worse still when your change of subject has already been debunked.
Okay, I'll give you that. I didn't really explain myself well. Here's my thesis:
Copying Microsoft serves a valid purpose for the advancement of free software.
My reasoning? Interoperability is a big selling point for organizations looking to migrate. You could have the best Linux product in the world, but many companies need to have a clear roadmap of how to get from Windows to Linux before they can even consider it based on merit.
Why is migration important? Because the greater the marketshare we have relative to Microsoft, the more pressure they have to make a genuine effort to match the utility of Linux. As it stands now, Microsoft only needs a half-assed implementation of all our best ideas to look good on a PowerPoint. With the fear of migration issues, that's plenty to keep IT buyers firmly in the Microsoft boat. If Linux had 50% marketshare then IT buyers would give a deeper look at the merits of the product rather than what's the safe bet.
I agree that cloning Microsoft does not add much value in the long run, but you are totally ignoring the migration issue. If GNU/Linux was a fixed set of developers then I would agree with you wholeheartedly, but more marketshare means more developers and more market influence. How can you lead when no one is following?
I'm arguing that copying Microsoft is fundamentally damaging. The cloners are more interested in the idea that something called "GNU/Linux" will become popular and that "Microsoft" will not than producing something positive. They don't care what gets called GNU/Linux, as long as it "takes over the world". If it's a lousy, security hole ridden, irritating, poor clone of an operating system that was never any good to begin with, that's fine, as long as the name wins out.
This is totally false. People do not want Linux to be popular for popularity's sake. The real reason is because then anyone is free to modify it as they see fit. So what if Linux starts it's popularity with some buggy MS-like apps? The whole point is that we can then remedy the situation.
If you really want to argue that cloning MS products is 'fundamentally damaging' then you either have to argue that interoperability is less important than innovation for increasing marketshare from Windows migrants, or that marketshare itself is irrelevant.
The truth to the statement "The central point was that paying too much attention to Microsoft simply allows Microsoft to define the game. And when Microsoft gets to define the game, they ALWAYS win." is self-evident. You cannot both follow and lead.
That is specious reasoning; Microsoft gets to define the game regardless. No matter how much we innovate, the pain of migrating to another platform keeps companies on Windows. If we created the next killer app, Microsoft would have plenty of time to copy it before people started to migrate en masse.
The only way to ease the pain of migration is to make things work. Most companies' infrastructure is far too thick to be able to migrate to a whole new platform in one giant leap. So addressing Windows compatibility is critical before many people can even consider Linux.
That said, I agree largely that a single project can't lead and follow, but GNU/Linux is not one project. If you are arguing that resources spent copying Microsoft are wasted, then I think it is only your own time that is being wasted, since open source developers work on what they want and will never all agree to one ideology.
So long as the design and development of voting systems is left to the private sector, voters will be disenfranchised for the sake of profit. That's all there is to it.
Well, only in the case where the government is too trusting to draft a suitable contract to protect voters' rights.
All that's really needed is for government to stipulate that a single foul-up will result in zero payment. You can bet that would get Diebold's act together pretty quick. If they don't like that we can go back to paper ballots which have a pretty good track record; statistically reliable error is much better than the possibility of wholesale errors or even fraud.
Unfortunately, this whole electronic voting movement is just companies capitalizing on the mishaps of the 2000 election. If legislators knew anything about how computer systems actually worked, they wouldn't be so easily convinced that it's better than hanging chads.
If you have a modest computer, the lag of rendering complex HTML will outsrip the bandwidth requirements pretty quickly... especially if Javascript or Flash is involved.
There is never going to be one single year of linux, It will have to slowly and steadly erode in to M$ territory.
Funny that you never see articles about this, but it's the truth. I would go so far as to say that growing Linux marketshare is inevitable going down the line. Why? Because Linux is not subject to the same market forces that cause Microsoft to ignore bugs while building ridiculous and ill-advised features that simply look good in a power point. While Microsoft struggles to please shareholders, Linux is plodding along fixing bugs and steadily increasing the value of the platform.
Tech news is dominated by financials, and Linux has oodles of economic potential, but to look at Linux in those terms is so shortsighted. Linux is true progress in the sense that its advances can never be expunged as we have seen happen time and time again with proprietary software. Once Linux reaches a critical point, there will be no financial incentive to develop a separate OS. At most, companies will customize Linux, but in general commercial development will shift to the application layer where it belongs, and we can look forward to renewed competition in the software industry, only this time on a much more solid base.
Of course there's no telling how long all this could take...
It's really just another MMORPG, except it's centered around the concept of the real life social games that so many people dedicate their lives to.
I find it to be a waste of time, but no more so than Everquest, and possibly less because the core of the game is social and not based around formulaic statistics-based quests. Well maybe it's formulaic, but that is a flaw in the players and not the game.
The more I program, the more perfectionistic I get. When I was younger I would just start coding willy nilly because I didn't know what to avoid. I would just write and debug until something worked for me in the obvious cases. Nowadays I find myself thinking and thinking about every possible tangential issue I have ever encountered in an effort to avoid any possible future mistakes. Sure I write way better code, but it also takes me a lot longer.
I think XP is partially inspired by a desire to recapture that youthful productivity (ignorant though it may be). Sometimes overthinking a problem can become paralyzing, and it actually is more efficient just to code it the first way that comes to mind then fix it later. So even though I have no real interest in XP per se, I definitely see the justification for a lot of the concepts.
Please use a completely unambiguous word if you're going to be incorrectly pedantic.
Pedantic is an unambiguous, but I think your assessment of the poster is still a 'misnomer' in that it doesn't fully capture the essence of the post. I was thinking something along the lines of 'ignominious troll', but that's just me.
So the Mac zealots saw Marathon as an amazing example of originality, and the PC gamers saw it as one of many similar and forgettable games.
Sure it looks similar and forgettable if you never played it, but believe me, Marathon was not another crappy Doom clone.
The Marathon story was exceptional with lots of unpredictable twists (eg. the various alien races could be enemies or allies at any given point), but don't be so quick to dismiss the engine based on hearsay.
For one thing, the polygon-based mapping allowed for some pretty spectacular effects that can not be duplicated even in the most modern 3d game engines! Because you built maps with polygons rather than sectors, it allowed multiple polygons in the same space, in contrast to Doom where only one room can exist at any X,Y coord, or modern 3d engines where only one room can exist at any X,Y,Z coord. This allowed, for example, a room with a pillar in the middle where as you ran around the pillar you would go through several rooms (like a spiral-staircase compressed into the same physical space).
Also, the network play was far superior to Doom. It allowed 16 players, and had several game types. The ability to look up and down made the deathmatch action MUCH deeper. Not to mention the ability to rocket-jump, which was a brand-new concept at the time.
The mapping was also truly inspired, creating believable alien ships and planet environments.
The only downside was the cartoon-like sprites which I think turned a lot of people off compared to the visceral Doom sprites. Also, the pace of gameplay was not as intense as Doom, but it was still a fantastic game in its own right.
Why does everyone assume the top 10% of results on Google must be all the best information? Some people even said that in the same breath they complained about Google Spam. Ridiculous!
The fact is there is TONS of great indepently published stuff that will never be found through Google because the author doesn't take the time to play the SEO game and advertise their page all over the web. Google's algorithm is far from the final word in relevancy algorithms. The evolution will continue until we have search engines that are smarter then humans. Of course, the evolution will probably continue after that, just without our interaction.
Linux/Unix hardly runs a risk of becoming a monoculture, it's too easy to specialize. Regardless, talking about eliminating Microsoft is meaningless. If they get knocked back to 50% marketshare then their quality will improve and we won't need to hate them so much. The problem is the monopoly, the symptom is the software.
This article makes some good points in that OOP as we know it is not rich enough to successfully accomplish what it set out to do. The problem is that an OO language like Java forces everything into rigid tree structures. This works flawlessly for a system like your average GUI, but for so many problems you end up building objects that are really just collections of functions. Furthermore, if you want to optimally re-use your code, you may have to define some really unintuitive object hierarchies. And if anything changes in the design spec you may have to go back and change everything.
Why? Because code reuse in Java is only as good as the original object spec, which is likely to not be as good as the specs on the individual functions. A more flexible way to define objects would be to create sets of atomic functions and data. Forcing objects into a tree means that many times the final solution won't match the description of the problem intuitively.
But if you want the flexibility of object built from atomic functions then you suddenly fling the door open for misuse by novice programmers. That's why languages like Java really are the best solution available for the unwashed programming masses. They don't require the strict discipline that more flexible languages provide, but at the same time they prevent many efficiencies that could otherwise be had.
You can still appreciate someone's talents even if you despise their morals. It's only about technology because it's on Slashdot, but I would be equally impressed by a brilliant criminal who didn't use technology. Problem is they usually exist only in Hollywood movies.
I would think you would want the jack installed professionally, not as a DIY kit that comes with the computer. Imagine that metal hole in the side of your head. What do you do when it starts to itch?
Anyone else surprised that Master and Commander got so many nominations? I mean, the costumes and effects were great, and even the acting was decent, but all the characters felt like stereotypes. By the midpoint of the movie I was bored stiff and just waiting for more stuff to blow up (thank god he made us guys easily amused).
What if you need 20 out of 400 and understand 100? Or understand 18 needing 15 of 32, or even worse, need 12 out of 11 with understanding of 2. Or 13, 18, 4597, 129, 97...
Obviously picking the right web server can be a tough proposition.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean geesh, just give designers a bit of help with a small FLOAT MIDDLE syntax.
Considering the current problems IE has with rendering standard left and right floats, and the slow pace of new feature implementation, writing float: middle into the syntax would probably mean that you couldn't use it in Mozilla until about 2010, and you couldn't use it for public websites until 2020.
Also, why do you want float: middle? Having text run around both sides of an block doesn't serve much practical design purpose (especially in a variable width/font-size environment). If you want to center something just use margin: auto;
A much cooler feature would be alpha channel floats to make text run around more complex shapes.
FONT tags are everywhere
Meet my favorite regexp:
s!</?font[^>]*>!!ismg
Good for dealing with other types of annoying tags as well. I export HTML from Excel all the time, but you wouldn't know it from looking at my pages.
magic_quotes_gpc is totally broken. For those unfamiliar, it escapes all HTTP GET and POST strings MySQL-style. But this is stupid.
No, you are missing the point. magic_quotes_gpc is a handy safe-guard for newbies, most of whom will be using MySQL. The downside is some errant slashes that may be annoying, but are far less dangerous.
If you don't like it, THEN TURN IT OFF, but don't suggest that increasing PHP's out-of-the-box security for newbies makes the tool somehow 'broken'. This is hardly an inconvenience since PHP provides functions to do all the transformations you suggest in your list, and you can either turn off magic_quotes_gpc or just use stripslashes().
If you wanna talk broken, why not raise PHP4's object and reference issues; there's at least a decent argument there.
The comment I responded to implied that we shouldn't lead, basically by wording the idea negatively (if we create something original, MS will copy it - well, duh! That's what leading the industry is. You should worry if nobody's copying what you're doing, not if people are.)
This is just semantics. I agree that Microsoft products are better because of the many innovators that fly under the mainstream radar. My negative wording was because Microsoft will implement a feature only as well as it needs to maintain it's monopoly, which generally means only to a marketable level, not a technically robust level.
No, it isn't, and you don't get to pretend you've justified that claim by changing the subject, worse still when your change of subject has already been debunked.
Okay, I'll give you that. I didn't really explain myself well. Here's my thesis:
Copying Microsoft serves a valid purpose for the advancement of free software.
My reasoning? Interoperability is a big selling point for organizations looking to migrate. You could have the best Linux product in the world, but many companies need to have a clear roadmap of how to get from Windows to Linux before they can even consider it based on merit.
Why is migration important? Because the greater the marketshare we have relative to Microsoft, the more pressure they have to make a genuine effort to match the utility of Linux. As it stands now, Microsoft only needs a half-assed implementation of all our best ideas to look good on a PowerPoint. With the fear of migration issues, that's plenty to keep IT buyers firmly in the Microsoft boat. If Linux had 50% marketshare then IT buyers would give a deeper look at the merits of the product rather than what's the safe bet.
I agree that cloning Microsoft does not add much value in the long run, but you are totally ignoring the migration issue. If GNU/Linux was a fixed set of developers then I would agree with you wholeheartedly, but more marketshare means more developers and more market influence. How can you lead when no one is following?
I'm arguing that copying Microsoft is fundamentally damaging. The cloners are more interested in the idea that something called "GNU/Linux" will become popular and that "Microsoft" will not than producing something positive. They don't care what gets called GNU/Linux, as long as it "takes over the world". If it's a lousy, security hole ridden, irritating, poor clone of an operating system that was never any good to begin with, that's fine, as long as the name wins out.
This is totally false. People do not want Linux to be popular for popularity's sake. The real reason is because then anyone is free to modify it as they see fit. So what if Linux starts it's popularity with some buggy MS-like apps? The whole point is that we can then remedy the situation.
If you really want to argue that cloning MS products is 'fundamentally damaging' then you either have to argue that interoperability is less important than innovation for increasing marketshare from Windows migrants, or that marketshare itself is irrelevant.
The truth to the statement "The central point was that paying too much attention to Microsoft simply allows Microsoft to define the game. And when Microsoft gets to define the game, they ALWAYS win." is self-evident. You cannot both follow and lead.
That is specious reasoning; Microsoft gets to define the game regardless. No matter how much we innovate, the pain of migrating to another platform keeps companies on Windows. If we created the next killer app, Microsoft would have plenty of time to copy it before people started to migrate en masse.
The only way to ease the pain of migration is to make things work. Most companies' infrastructure is far too thick to be able to migrate to a whole new platform in one giant leap. So addressing Windows compatibility is critical before many people can even consider Linux.
That said, I agree largely that a single project can't lead and follow, but GNU/Linux is not one project. If you are arguing that resources spent copying Microsoft are wasted, then I think it is only your own time that is being wasted, since open source developers work on what they want and will never all agree to one ideology.
So long as the design and development of voting systems is left to the private sector, voters will be disenfranchised for the sake of profit. That's all there is to it.
Well, only in the case where the government is too trusting to draft a suitable contract to protect voters' rights.
All that's really needed is for government to stipulate that a single foul-up will result in zero payment. You can bet that would get Diebold's act together pretty quick. If they don't like that we can go back to paper ballots which have a pretty good track record; statistically reliable error is much better than the possibility of wholesale errors or even fraud.
Unfortunately, this whole electronic voting movement is just companies capitalizing on the mishaps of the 2000 election. If legislators knew anything about how computer systems actually worked, they wouldn't be so easily convinced that it's better than hanging chads.
We already know that relativity is wrong (in the same sense that classical mechanics is wrong).
I've never heard anything about relativity being proven wrong, please explain further.
If you have a modest computer, the lag of rendering complex HTML will outsrip the bandwidth requirements pretty quickly... especially if Javascript or Flash is involved.
There is never going to be one single year of linux, It will have to slowly and steadly erode in to M$ territory.
Funny that you never see articles about this, but it's the truth. I would go so far as to say that growing Linux marketshare is inevitable going down the line. Why? Because Linux is not subject to the same market forces that cause Microsoft to ignore bugs while building ridiculous and ill-advised features that simply look good in a power point. While Microsoft struggles to please shareholders, Linux is plodding along fixing bugs and steadily increasing the value of the platform.
Tech news is dominated by financials, and Linux has oodles of economic potential, but to look at Linux in those terms is so shortsighted. Linux is true progress in the sense that its advances can never be expunged as we have seen happen time and time again with proprietary software. Once Linux reaches a critical point, there will be no financial incentive to develop a separate OS. At most, companies will customize Linux, but in general commercial development will shift to the application layer where it belongs, and we can look forward to renewed competition in the software industry, only this time on a much more solid base.
Of course there's no telling how long all this could take...
Dammit, why isn't there a -1 Funny mod choice?
YOU wouldn't pay for this.
No, this is a game for celebrity culture geeks.
It's really just another MMORPG, except it's centered around the concept of the real life social games that so many people dedicate their lives to.
I find it to be a waste of time, but no more so than Everquest, and possibly less because the core of the game is social and not based around formulaic statistics-based quests. Well maybe it's formulaic, but that is a flaw in the players and not the game.
Kudos to whoever thought of this.
The more I program, the more perfectionistic I get. When I was younger I would just start coding willy nilly because I didn't know what to avoid. I would just write and debug until something worked for me in the obvious cases. Nowadays I find myself thinking and thinking about every possible tangential issue I have ever encountered in an effort to avoid any possible future mistakes. Sure I write way better code, but it also takes me a lot longer.
I think XP is partially inspired by a desire to recapture that youthful productivity (ignorant though it may be). Sometimes overthinking a problem can become paralyzing, and it actually is more efficient just to code it the first way that comes to mind then fix it later. So even though I have no real interest in XP per se, I definitely see the justification for a lot of the concepts.
Please use a completely unambiguous word if you're going to be incorrectly pedantic.
Pedantic is an unambiguous, but I think your assessment of the poster is still a 'misnomer' in that it doesn't fully capture the essence of the post. I was thinking something along the lines of 'ignominious troll', but that's just me.
So the Mac zealots saw Marathon as an amazing example of originality, and the PC gamers saw it as one of many similar and forgettable games.
Sure it looks similar and forgettable if you never played it, but believe me, Marathon was not another crappy Doom clone.
The Marathon story was exceptional with lots of unpredictable twists (eg. the various alien races could be enemies or allies at any given point), but don't be so quick to dismiss the engine based on hearsay.
For one thing, the polygon-based mapping allowed for some pretty spectacular effects that can not be duplicated even in the most modern 3d game engines! Because you built maps with polygons rather than sectors, it allowed multiple polygons in the same space, in contrast to Doom where only one room can exist at any X,Y coord, or modern 3d engines where only one room can exist at any X,Y,Z coord. This allowed, for example, a room with a pillar in the middle where as you ran around the pillar you would go through several rooms (like a spiral-staircase compressed into the same physical space).
Also, the network play was far superior to Doom. It allowed 16 players, and had several game types. The ability to look up and down made the deathmatch action MUCH deeper. Not to mention the ability to rocket-jump, which was a brand-new concept at the time.
The mapping was also truly inspired, creating believable alien ships and planet environments.
The only downside was the cartoon-like sprites which I think turned a lot of people off compared to the visceral Doom sprites. Also, the pace of gameplay was not as intense as Doom, but it was still a fantastic game in its own right.
Why does everyone assume the top 10% of results on Google must be all the best information? Some people even said that in the same breath they complained about Google Spam. Ridiculous!
The fact is there is TONS of great indepently published stuff that will never be found through Google because the author doesn't take the time to play the SEO game and advertise their page all over the web. Google's algorithm is far from the final word in relevancy algorithms. The evolution will continue until we have search engines that are smarter then humans. Of course, the evolution will probably continue after that, just without our interaction.
Of course, when that day comes you won't notice if you're still reading /.
Linux/Unix hardly runs a risk of becoming a monoculture, it's too easy to specialize. Regardless, talking about eliminating Microsoft is meaningless. If they get knocked back to 50% marketshare then their quality will improve and we won't need to hate them so much. The problem is the monopoly, the symptom is the software.
This article makes some good points in that OOP as we know it is not rich enough to successfully accomplish what it set out to do. The problem is that an OO language like Java forces everything into rigid tree structures. This works flawlessly for a system like your average GUI, but for so many problems you end up building objects that are really just collections of functions. Furthermore, if you want to optimally re-use your code, you may have to define some really unintuitive object hierarchies. And if anything changes in the design spec you may have to go back and change everything.
Why? Because code reuse in Java is only as good as the original object spec, which is likely to not be as good as the specs on the individual functions. A more flexible way to define objects would be to create sets of atomic functions and data. Forcing objects into a tree means that many times the final solution won't match the description of the problem intuitively.
But if you want the flexibility of object built from atomic functions then you suddenly fling the door open for misuse by novice programmers. That's why languages like Java really are the best solution available for the unwashed programming masses. They don't require the strict discipline that more flexible languages provide, but at the same time they prevent many efficiencies that could otherwise be had.
No, you're thinking of Mountain Dew dudes.
You can still appreciate someone's talents even if you despise their morals. It's only about technology because it's on Slashdot, but I would be equally impressed by a brilliant criminal who didn't use technology. Problem is they usually exist only in Hollywood movies.
I would think you would want the jack installed professionally, not as a DIY kit that comes with the computer. Imagine that metal hole in the side of your head. What do you do when it starts to itch?
Well wait a minute, how do you know it never will? All they need is a software upgrade...
Anyone else surprised that Master and Commander got so many nominations? I mean, the costumes and effects were great, and even the acting was decent, but all the characters felt like stereotypes. By the midpoint of the movie I was bored stiff and just waiting for more stuff to blow up (thank god he made us guys easily amused).
What if you need 20 out of 400 and understand 100? Or understand 18 needing 15 of 32, or even worse, need 12 out of 11 with understanding of 2. Or 13, 18, 4597, 129, 97...
Obviously picking the right web server can be a tough proposition.