Sure, unless you're trying to make XSLT work in javascript or get Ajax to work easily without having to write your own cross browser implementation. Then you want to use IE because their implementation of XSLT works a lot better. I like firefox, but it's not making my job any easier when I want to do hard core cross browser XSLT/Ajax. As a designer/developer, you pretty much have to create your own toolset to make things work the same way with both.
Firefox is a nice alternative unless you have to develop rich thin client apps for it...and then its ideosyncracies become a little grating. (Anyone else LOVE the #text nodes?)
Now if they can get the XSL transformation object to work in javascript, my life will be complete.
I really have to applaud Firefox for stepping up their game on Ajax though. It's really beginning to compete with IE in the XML/JS implementation.
"There might be a period of mayhem..."
Yes, but for how long and how many millions or billions of Dollars/pesos/Euros/Pounds would be at stake? The average person doesn't give a shit who runs DNS, but if things went wrong, especially for a for days or more, it would erode consumer confidence in Internet for a lot longer. How many non-tech oriented people are going to get behind the idea of potentially screwing up the routing of their purchase/bank information for such a negligble political gain?
Yes, WWW does equal World Wide Web and it was created by Tim Berners-Lee, an English guy. The WWW runs on the Internet and the Internet was created by the US government. It's a little like someone creating a road and then someone starting a cool bus service on it.
The road owner (RO)is telling the bus service owner's (BSO's) that it is going to continue owning the road and the BSO's are getting pissed because they're afraid the RO is going to put in some traffic signals and road signs they don't like. So now the BSO's are threatening to create their own side roads with their own signs and signals.
This kind of stuff happens whenever you create something that becomes a standard upon which people build other standards. People freak out when they think the infrastructure upon which their livlihoods are based is being messed with, especially by someone can't pronounce the word nuclear.:)
I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this, but Ruby on Rails looks like a rehash of ASP using a VBScript knockoff. If this is the cutting edge, I feel like I'm in a time warp back to 1998.
Does anyone know the benefits of using RoR as opposed to say...PHP...or Chilisoft ASP?
Isn't this just an excuse to decouple iTunes from iPod so that the RIAA can charge more money? I read somewhere (here?) that Apple signed a fixed price deal with the RIAA back in the days before the iPod went Windows. This seems like a ploy to me to try to get out of that deal so that the music industry can charge more for music through other vendors...a practice made harder when Apple either prevents non-iTunes sold AAC files from working (through "upgrades") or charge a cost-prohibitive license fee.
Who is she kidding? She doesn't want our music to be free, she just wants it to be managed by someone who can charge more.
One thing we did when I was working at helpdesk was to work on our "own" projects in the company that supported undocument company needs. As a phone support guy, I had times where I wasn't really doing anything (I'll call that time "slashdot time"). During that time, I'd approach other business units (say, the mailroom because they tend to regard you with awe and humility) and see if any of their processes could be automated through some simple programmatic way. As it turned out, they were hand-parsing outgoing mail addresses for capitalization and formatting errors that were fairly uniform in their imported excel documents. By writing a macro for them to insert into their docs on import, I was able to parse and fix the file in 30 seconds where it had taken them 4 days of 3 people working on it all day. Someone calculated that the company would save something like 280,000 a year in overtime and allow those overworked people some time with their families.
If your company recognized this as a gain they could capitalize into your department, you could afford to hire a couple more guys and take some of the work off the dudes who are overworked...or give them bonuses or raises (as happened in my case).
A lot of the time, people don't even know they can be helped unless you ask them and by helping out other people, you end up helping yourself....PLUS the mailroom reacted with hyperspeed next time I needed a little something mailed out.
I'm all for higher quality, but not if it means that I have to go back to rewinding tapes and fast-forwarding to special features (if there are any).
I guess if I won the lottery and just had to have perfect HDTV quality, I'd get one as a companion to my dvd so I could have the best of both worlds, but it'll never replace scene selection or special features or easter eggs for me.
It's the same reason I'll never own a DAT player when I can use a CD. The convenience really outweighs the slightly (and I mean from the perspective of the fact that DVD is already GREAT digital) better quality.
File format compatability extends WAY beyond just being able to open old excel documents. Excel, in many ways, plays host to it's own vba applications as well as being an output format for ASP and an import format for every other program in the ms office suite. So if you're going to replace Excel, you're going to have to create a scriptable file format that has is interoperable and importable with other related document formats (like dragging stuff from excel into word), scriptable enough to create applications that can interface with other excel documents or other database types entirely, flexible enough to either act as a data source for an application or use another data source for, access, combination, massage or whatever. This mysterious office suite must also be able to open legacy formats and make a decent attempt to import other formats.
The problem isn't just that MS Office file formats are closed, but that they interface with with each other and are very programmable to a point where they can become application unto themselves. Maybe it's a huge security concern, but I contract for a State organization and moving away from MS applications would cost way more than you would expect because applications have been written in and around these apps and file formats. If you had to replicate all of that again, you're basically investing the last 5 years in budgets into Linux developers to RE-Code all of these things.
The only way this kind of major transition is going to happen is if you can make it transparent to the user in a web based application. That way you can make it look any way you want and people won't be able to tell the difference.
Still, to think that we could put MS Office out and not spend MORE money redeveloping all of these applications (assuming a better office application DOES exist), is ridiculous.
While I would agree that the whole licensing scheme is lame as hell, MOST companies don't just give away their source code when you buy an application from them if the software is available at the retail level. I'd personally LOVE the source code for photoshop, but I don't think Adobe is going to send it to me if I shell out the big cash to buy the application (or the 149 bucks for the upgrade).
If you don't live in the world of open source, giving away the source of an application you're trying to sell seems like an alien concept.
I remember a few months ago that Oracle was going to release some db oriented mail server that was supposed to revolutionize enterprise level email. Anyone know anything about this?
Bill Keane, the writer/artist of Family Circus simply wants all of our children to wear these watches so that he can hack in, use a specially modified tracking program that follows the path of your children with a dotted line and then use that dotted line in his next "what did Billy do on his way home from school" strip.
Boycott this device...the pseudo-hilarity must end.
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Sure, unless you're trying to make XSLT work in javascript or get Ajax to work easily without having to write your own cross browser implementation. Then you want to use IE because their implementation of XSLT works a lot better. I like firefox, but it's not making my job any easier when I want to do hard core cross browser XSLT/Ajax. As a designer/developer, you pretty much have to create your own toolset to make things work the same way with both.
Firefox is a nice alternative unless you have to develop rich thin client apps for it...and then its ideosyncracies become a little grating. (Anyone else LOVE the #text nodes?)
Now if they can get the XSL transformation object to work in javascript, my life will be complete. I really have to applaud Firefox for stepping up their game on Ajax though. It's really beginning to compete with IE in the XML/JS implementation.
"There might be a period of mayhem..."
Yes, but for how long and how many millions or billions of Dollars/pesos/Euros/Pounds would be at stake? The average person doesn't give a shit who runs DNS, but if things went wrong, especially for a for days or more, it would erode consumer confidence in Internet for a lot longer. How many non-tech oriented people are going to get behind the idea of potentially screwing up the routing of their purchase/bank information for such a negligble political gain?
Yes, WWW does equal World Wide Web and it was created by Tim Berners-Lee, an English guy. The WWW runs on the Internet and the Internet was created by the US government. It's a little like someone creating a road and then someone starting a cool bus service on it.
:)
The road owner (RO)is telling the bus service owner's (BSO's) that it is going to continue owning the road and the BSO's are getting pissed because they're afraid the RO is going to put in some traffic signals and road signs they don't like. So now the BSO's are threatening to create their own side roads with their own signs and signals.
This kind of stuff happens whenever you create something that becomes a standard upon which people build other standards. People freak out when they think the infrastructure upon which their livlihoods are based is being messed with, especially by someone can't pronounce the word nuclear.
I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this, but Ruby on Rails looks like a rehash of ASP using a VBScript knockoff. If this is the cutting edge, I feel like I'm in a time warp back to 1998.
Does anyone know the benefits of using RoR as opposed to say...PHP...or Chilisoft ASP?
It'll cost me some productivity, but only because I'll be half awake the next day.
:)
Oh wait! Caffeine!
Nevermind.
Isn't this just an excuse to decouple iTunes from iPod so that the RIAA can charge more money? I read somewhere (here?) that Apple signed a fixed price deal with the RIAA back in the days before the iPod went Windows. This seems like a ploy to me to try to get out of that deal so that the music industry can charge more for music through other vendors...a practice made harder when Apple either prevents non-iTunes sold AAC files from working (through "upgrades") or charge a cost-prohibitive license fee.
Who is she kidding? She doesn't want our music to be free, she just wants it to be managed by someone who can charge more.
One thing we did when I was working at helpdesk was to work on our "own" projects in the company that supported undocument company needs. As a phone support guy, I had times where I wasn't really doing anything (I'll call that time "slashdot time"). During that time, I'd approach other business units (say, the mailroom because they tend to regard you with awe and humility) and see if any of their processes could be automated through some simple programmatic way. As it turned out, they were hand-parsing outgoing mail addresses for capitalization and formatting errors that were fairly uniform in their imported excel documents. By writing a macro for them to insert into their docs on import, I was able to parse and fix the file in 30 seconds where it had taken them 4 days of 3 people working on it all day. Someone calculated that the company would save something like 280,000 a year in overtime and allow those overworked people some time with their families. If your company recognized this as a gain they could capitalize into your department, you could afford to hire a couple more guys and take some of the work off the dudes who are overworked...or give them bonuses or raises (as happened in my case). A lot of the time, people don't even know they can be helped unless you ask them and by helping out other people, you end up helping yourself....PLUS the mailroom reacted with hyperspeed next time I needed a little something mailed out.
I'm all for higher quality, but not if it means that I have to go back to rewinding tapes and fast-forwarding to special features (if there are any). I guess if I won the lottery and just had to have perfect HDTV quality, I'd get one as a companion to my dvd so I could have the best of both worlds, but it'll never replace scene selection or special features or easter eggs for me. It's the same reason I'll never own a DAT player when I can use a CD. The convenience really outweighs the slightly (and I mean from the perspective of the fact that DVD is already GREAT digital) better quality.
File format compatability extends WAY beyond just being able to open old excel documents. Excel, in many ways, plays host to it's own vba applications as well as being an output format for ASP and an import format for every other program in the ms office suite. So if you're going to replace Excel, you're going to have to create a scriptable file format that has is interoperable and importable with other related document formats (like dragging stuff from excel into word), scriptable enough to create applications that can interface with other excel documents or other database types entirely, flexible enough to either act as a data source for an application or use another data source for, access, combination, massage or whatever. This mysterious office suite must also be able to open legacy formats and make a decent attempt to import other formats. The problem isn't just that MS Office file formats are closed, but that they interface with with each other and are very programmable to a point where they can become application unto themselves. Maybe it's a huge security concern, but I contract for a State organization and moving away from MS applications would cost way more than you would expect because applications have been written in and around these apps and file formats. If you had to replicate all of that again, you're basically investing the last 5 years in budgets into Linux developers to RE-Code all of these things. The only way this kind of major transition is going to happen is if you can make it transparent to the user in a web based application. That way you can make it look any way you want and people won't be able to tell the difference. Still, to think that we could put MS Office out and not spend MORE money redeveloping all of these applications (assuming a better office application DOES exist), is ridiculous.
While I would agree that the whole licensing scheme is lame as hell, MOST companies don't just give away their source code when you buy an application from them if the software is available at the retail level. I'd personally LOVE the source code for photoshop, but I don't think Adobe is going to send it to me if I shell out the big cash to buy the application (or the 149 bucks for the upgrade). If you don't live in the world of open source, giving away the source of an application you're trying to sell seems like an alien concept.
I remember a few months ago that Oracle was going to release some db oriented mail server that was supposed to revolutionize enterprise level email. Anyone know anything about this?
Bill Keane, the writer/artist of Family Circus simply wants all of our children to wear these watches so that he can hack in, use a specially modified tracking program that follows the path of your children with a dotted line and then use that dotted line in his next "what did Billy do on his way home from school" strip. Boycott this device...the pseudo-hilarity must end.