You already had to download the browser, or install it from a CD. That's the point.
In addition to a browser, if people had downloaded something other then a web browser (like a java JVM) they wouldn't need to go through the trouble of downloading somethine else.
That's the point I'm trying to make. AJAX does require a download, it's just that it's the largest installed base out there.
But web browsers wern't designed to do this type of thing, and the hacks that have been added are still lightyears from what could be done in a DOS program, ferchrissakes!
Was Microsoft's incompatible IE version. If you work hard, you can write a great UI in anything. The point is, there's no intrinsic benefit to AJAX other then that it works everywhere, but that's just a coincidence, and says nothing about the technology itself.
They're the main benefits - and they're not as trivial as you make out. In addition, interfaces don't need to refresh the entire page when updating things, which makes for a much better user experience.
I'm not saying they're trivial, but it just drives me nuts that people are running around saying that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. From a programmer/UI perspective, it's a step backwards.
The oft-cited Google Maps really is a fantastic demo of how this really does change the usability of websites.
Yeah, but come on, you could write Google maps as an AMIGA or DOS app. There's absolutely nothing new (other then the server-side GIS stuff). Try adding hundreds or thousands of points to a Google Maps page. The page slows to a crawl, yet, this could be done so simply in a client application.
Or try zooming all the way out, the map is extremely distorted due to the projection, but in a client program, you could map the map to a sphere, so it would look correct. This could be done in Java, or flash (I think flash has 3d stuff now)
I just don't get the hype. What can you do with an AJAX interface that you can't do better with a native client application?
Sure, browsers work on every platform, and AJAX apps don't need a download, that's great. But the same thing could be done with java if everyone had a JVM, or anything else.
AJAXs means reinventing the GUI, only with a more difficult to use, hacked together API
Assuming the eye's lense is about 1-cm, the angular resolution of the human eye would give you about 54,212 x 54,212 pixels. assuming a 180x180 degree feild of view (with blue light). So we've still got a ways to go!
Actualy, this isn't that big of a deal, probably just a research project. OS's are not that hard to get started on
Now, to bring it up to the level of OSX or Linux, that would be impresive.
RNA is thought to be able to do this.
on
The Los Alamos Bug
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Some people think that before DNA evolved, everything was done with RNA. Both hereditary information and the physical catalysts. Like proteins, RNA molecules can fold up into odd shapes and perform catalytic reactions. The only difference is that Protein based system work faster. The Ribosome, which converts RNA into Proteins is actually made from RNA, rather then proteins, and is almost exactly the same in all life.
Lots of D&D players may have bad social skills, but I don't think there is much of a correlation (negative or otherwise) between "analytical thinking" and "performance in social situations"
Geeks on slashdot tend to band together, but to claim a monopoly on Intelegence betrays a lack analytical thinking skills more then anything.
Plus, most slashdot types aren't even that smart. Being able to whip up a Perl script isn't the same thing as being smart.
XML documents are SGML documents, and SGML has been around a lot longer then 1997. In fact, SGML was the model for HTML (and, I think the original HTML spec was a subset of SGML as well)
He wanted to make a video game about a father who's son does something violent after playing video games. The father would go nuts and kill video game developers. He offered to donate $10k to the charity of the developers choice if the game was made.
A game (actually, a GTA mod) was made, and Thompson reneged on the offer
Ugh, I only have a hotmail account in order use MSN.. They changed their policies so that if you didn't log in for 45 days all your old mail got deleted. Wonderful. And being so stingy over two megabytes of disk space. Heh.
When I ran Autopr0n, hooo... that code was awful. But there really was never any kind of economic incentive to fix it, I could just keep restarting my JVM (the thing was coded in java).
Or, look at metafilter.com. That site goes down like a $2 hooker, yet it's so successful that the maintainer was able to quit his day job and support himself based on the site. People don't care.
Even when you get to a desktop OS back in the '90s, quality just wasn't that important. Would you rather pay $10,000 for an OS, or $90 and loose work once in a while.
If the cost of the lost work due to software errors is less then the cost of writing the code so that it works perfectly, then it's not worth doing. Sure, for some programmers there's not a tradeoff, but those programmers probably cost a lot more to pay then 90% of the coders out there (who are idiots, IMO, just look at the existence and popularity of Visual Basic).
When the cost of the error increases, you'll find much more stable software (like on medical equipment, airplanes, and so on).
The secretaries spreadsheet just ain't mission critical.
Of course, now that all computers are connected together, they need to be at least secure and not targets for worms and trogens, etc. I predict that we move towards web services, the software quality will get worse and worse, but people will just pay a sysadmin to sit there and reboot the machine whenever it goes down, so people won't notice everything...
Did it ever occour to any of these people that we might not ever see a singularity? Perhaps rather then an ever increasing rate of progress, we get like a sigmoid function. Things get better faster and faster, then we hit an inflection point and things get better more slowly and progress finaly halts.
He wasn't bashing the implementers, he was bashing the people who decide what to implement.
For the record he said:
We have all this technology but it's implemented by idiots.
How is "implemented by idiots" not implying, er, directly stating that the implementors are idiots.
I'm not denying that TTTech might be cheating, but there are plenty of reasons why this guy might make up the story too. Boeing could be paying this guy millions to talk shit about this chip...
He's an American (as am I, just for the record) so people might think that he's a Boeing spy. If this guy can spread even a little doubt about the safety of the A380's safety, it could end up making hundreds of millions of dollars for Boeing. There is a lot of espionage in the Aerospace industry.
This isn't just a disagreement, someone is lying here, and with geopolitical stakes what they are, who knows...
Re:But are the problems only limited to the one ch
on
Airbus A380 Under Fire
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You can't. It's impossible to prove a negative.
Why do people think this? It's idiotic. When you prove a positive, you also disprove it's opposite. If I prove I am a man, I also prove I am not a woman.
I think what people mean is that they cannot prove an existentially qualified negative (i.e. there does not exist), or a universal positive (i.e. everything in the universe is blue).
But anyway, proving and disproving those types of statements is why we have second-order logic.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows performed better then Free BSD on all the micro-tests but one, and better then Linux on half of them.
Oh well, this is slashdot, can't expect editors to, you know, edit anything or even bother to read what they post.
Are these guys non-native speakers or what? Dependance is a bad thing, dependability is good.
sheesh.
You already had to download the browser, or install it from a CD. That's the point.
In addition to a browser, if people had downloaded something other then a web browser (like a java JVM) they wouldn't need to go through the trouble of downloading somethine else.
That's the point I'm trying to make. AJAX does require a download, it's just that it's the largest installed base out there.
But web browsers wern't designed to do this type of thing, and the hacks that have been added are still lightyears from what could be done in a DOS program, ferchrissakes!
Was Microsoft's incompatible IE version. If you work hard, you can write a great UI in anything. The point is, there's no intrinsic benefit to AJAX other then that it works everywhere, but that's just a coincidence, and says nothing about the technology itself.
They're the main benefits - and they're not as trivial as you make out. In addition, interfaces don't need to refresh the entire page when updating things, which makes for a much better user experience.
I'm not saying they're trivial, but it just drives me nuts that people are running around saying that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. From a programmer/UI perspective, it's a step backwards.
The oft-cited Google Maps really is a fantastic demo of how this really does change the usability of websites.
Yeah, but come on, you could write Google maps as an AMIGA or DOS app. There's absolutely nothing new (other then the server-side GIS stuff). Try adding hundreds or thousands of points to a Google Maps page. The page slows to a crawl, yet, this could be done so simply in a client application.
Or try zooming all the way out, the map is extremely distorted due to the projection, but in a client program, you could map the map to a sphere, so it would look correct. This could be done in Java, or flash (I think flash has 3d stuff now)
I just don't get the hype. What can you do with an AJAX interface that you can't do better with a native client application?
Sure, browsers work on every platform, and AJAX apps don't need a download, that's great. But the same thing could be done with java if everyone had a JVM, or anything else.
AJAXs means reinventing the GUI, only with a more difficult to use, hacked together API
Assuming the eye's lense is about 1-cm, the angular resolution of the human eye would give you about 54,212 x 54,212 pixels. assuming a 180x180 degree feild of view (with blue light). So we've still got a ways to go!
As I remember it, apple was losing $700 million dollars a quarter. A 6.5% profit margin isn't very bad.
It'll be slow as fuck.
Actualy, this isn't that big of a deal, probably just a research project. OS's are not that hard to get started on
Now, to bring it up to the level of OSX or Linux, that would be impresive.
Some people think that before DNA evolved, everything was done with RNA. Both hereditary information and the physical catalysts. Like proteins, RNA molecules can fold up into odd shapes and perform catalytic reactions. The only difference is that Protein based system work faster. The Ribosome, which converts RNA into Proteins is actually made from RNA, rather then proteins, and is almost exactly the same in all life.
Lots of D&D players may have bad social skills, but I don't think there is much of a correlation (negative or otherwise) between "analytical thinking" and "performance in social situations"
Geeks on slashdot tend to band together, but to claim a monopoly on Intelegence betrays a lack analytical thinking skills more then anything.
Plus, most slashdot types aren't even that smart. Being able to whip up a Perl script isn't the same thing as being smart.
And I think those kinds of games (non-computer RPGs) are a ridicules waste of time.
So there's that.
Beyond flash games on the web, the only video game I've played in the last year has been Grand Tourismo 4
XML documents are SGML documents, and SGML has been around a lot longer then 1997. In fact, SGML was the model for HTML (and, I think the original HTML spec was a subset of SGML as well)
I was under the impressiont that skype could not be blocked, since the packets are all encrypted and contain no identifying information.
He wanted to make a video game about a father who's son does something violent after playing video games. The father would go nuts and kill video game developers. He offered to donate $10k to the charity of the developers choice if the game was made. A game (actually, a GTA mod) was made, and Thompson reneged on the offer
Since when were DVDs not proprietary?
Ugh, I only have a hotmail account in order use MSN.. They changed their policies so that if you didn't log in for 45 days all your old mail got deleted. Wonderful. And being so stingy over two megabytes of disk space. Heh.
When I ran Autopr0n, hooo... that code was awful. But there really was never any kind of economic incentive to fix it, I could just keep restarting my JVM (the thing was coded in java).
Or, look at metafilter.com. That site goes down like a $2 hooker, yet it's so successful that the maintainer was able to quit his day job and support himself based on the site. People don't care.
Even when you get to a desktop OS back in the '90s, quality just wasn't that important. Would you rather pay $10,000 for an OS, or $90 and loose work once in a while.
If the cost of the lost work due to software errors is less then the cost of writing the code so that it works perfectly, then it's not worth doing. Sure, for some programmers there's not a tradeoff, but those programmers probably cost a lot more to pay then 90% of the coders out there (who are idiots, IMO, just look at the existence and popularity of Visual Basic).
When the cost of the error increases, you'll find much more stable software (like on medical equipment, airplanes, and so on).
The secretaries spreadsheet just ain't mission critical.
Of course, now that all computers are connected together, they need to be at least secure and not targets for worms and trogens, etc. I predict that we move towards web services, the software quality will get worse and worse, but people will just pay a sysadmin to sit there and reboot the machine whenever it goes down, so people won't notice everything...
Sorry, I just can't take Marc Andressen seriously.
Did it ever occour to any of these people that we might not ever see a singularity? Perhaps rather then an ever increasing rate of progress, we get like a sigmoid function. Things get better faster and faster, then we hit an inflection point and things get better more slowly and progress finaly halts.
Isn't it just straight up fraud right now? I'm guessing this law lets you sue without actualy needing to give up your information?
He wasn't bashing the implementers, he was bashing the people who decide what to implement. For the record he said: We have all this technology but it's implemented by idiots. How is "implemented by idiots" not implying, er, directly stating that the implementors are idiots.
I'm not denying that TTTech might be cheating, but there are plenty of reasons why this guy might make up the story too. Boeing could be paying this guy millions to talk shit about this chip...
He's an American (as am I, just for the record) so people might think that he's a Boeing spy. If this guy can spread even a little doubt about the safety of the A380's safety, it could end up making hundreds of millions of dollars for Boeing. There is a lot of espionage in the Aerospace industry.
This isn't just a disagreement, someone is lying here, and with geopolitical stakes what they are, who knows...
You can't. It's impossible to prove a negative.
Why do people think this? It's idiotic. When you prove a positive, you also disprove it's opposite. If I prove I am a man, I also prove I am not a woman.
I think what people mean is that they cannot prove an existentially qualified negative (i.e. there does not exist), or a universal positive (i.e. everything in the universe is blue).
But anyway, proving and disproving those types of statements is why we have second-order logic.