You don't remember back in the day we all used to do this. You just kept Mozilla on a CD and installed it when you setup a system. It sure wasn't hard and people are a lot more likely to have multiple systems now than then.
I still remember the days when I would keep BASIC on a cassette and both listen to it loading on my stereo and see the process as colored dots on the TV screen. It was not that hard and didn't take much more time than booting Vista. Nevertheless I find it very convenient to be able to search for information using contemporary standards immediately after installing the OS.
It is significantly different in the overall effect. You have to consider how it affects developers. If they can't target it, then they have to change the way they develop Web pages and Web applications. This in turn changes the choices users have.
I find it hard to blame Microsoft for actions of third parties.
You might as well argue that it is fair to fine Union Carbide and for them to pay for cleanup for poisoning a huge area in India and killing a bunch of people, but that Cytec and KMG should be forced to pay fines and clean up other areas of India as well, since those companies also manufacture chemicals.
It makes sense to me that Union Carbide, Cytec and KMG should have the same regulations imposed on them regarding future pollution. Furthermore, it makes more sense to get them to pay a sum of money to all injured parties rather than requiring them to run hospitals, tree planting operations and so on. They are not likely to either have expertise in these areas or take the tasks to heart.
The remaining 10% who install their own OS know enough to grab one using another system or FTP.
You got to be kidding. I hope you are not working on increasing the market share of desktop Linux.
This is not good enough. If OEMs cannot easily remove IE entirely and replace it, then the economics of the situation will still favor keeping IE. Worse, since IE will still be on every system, while a standards compliant browser may or may not be, developers will still target the broken version of the standards.
How is removing IE from the Start Menu not removing it from the perspective of those 90% of users? As I mentioned in the other post, you can also remove iexplorer.exe at will.
You can freely remove Internet Explorer from the Start Menu and install Firefox. This will prevent 90% of users from launching IE and the remaining ones presumably wanted it anyway. For the most part, removing iexplorer.exe has no effect either. Explorer does not depend on the executable. The only problem is that some Java programs (oh the irony!) launch IE using an explicit path since they have no way to determine system's default browser. I guess you can come up with a replacement launcher that does the right thing.
If you mean that you can not remove MSHTML DLL used for features like HTML help, the situation is the same as on Mac or Linux. MacOSX loads WebKit whenever you work with rich text to possibly import it from HTML. In Redhat, rpm -e firefox does not magically make thunderbird or any other application utilizing mozilla's HTML engine use Opera instead.
But also require Apple to unbundle Safari from MacOSX and Redhat to unbundle Firefox from Fedora (I don't think Opera would mind either development at all). Once upon a time Microsoft killed the market for alternative commercial browsers by bundling free IE. But times have changed. These days a browser is a requirement rather than an optional add on. Unbundling it would mean that users will not be able to use their newly installed operating system at all, even to find out where to buy/download a browser.
However, OEMs should be permitted to bundle an alternative browser and de-emphasize IE by removing it from Start menu.
If cable ISPs charged by time online like dialup providers and computers came with a cradle to "hang up" network access, this would be a much more reasonable request for users. As it is, web pages and other applications do not always report just how much bandwidth they have used so far. Even then, you have to remember that back when international phone rates were around $2/minute most people would have to call customer support at least around once per year to dispute charges when the connection was not clear or both phones were accidentally left off hook.
Can't he just jump with hands as "wings" and land on an oversized airbag? Terminal velocity for a human with outstretched limbs is around 120mph. People are known to occasionally survive head on collisions at highway speeds which would amount to about the same. A stationary airbag can be designed to provide much more gradual deceleration than one in a car. All we need is a stuntmen willing to risk their life with ridiculous odds. I don't think such people are in short supply.
I am kind of curious about your understanding of standards. Microsoft implemented Javascript with full DOM access at the time Netscape Navigator had rather limited and tedious Javascript support. Now a bunch of folks came together and declared that Microsoft got it all wrong and has to re-implement its browser with 80% market share to conform to minority's opinion of how a web browser should behave. I say punish Microsoft for illegal use of its monopoly power, but otherwise let critics develop their own software and let the best program win.
I don't think the last part will be easy for standard XHTML+CSS+Javascript. The thing is, IE's implementation is enough to add some animations to a home page or add some form validation for a shopping site. On the other hand, even the standard is a lousy platform for writing apps that actually do something significant on the client side. Java+SWT+a security manager could be a step forward for that, but a really solution should support a free choice of languages and UI toolkits. Perhaps instantly created virtual machines that provide native performance but still maintain security is the answer.
An understatement
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The landing, as one might expect, poses the biggest challenge,
I would say it's the only challenge actually. Gliding around in any winged suit is fun and safe as long as you still open the chute at the end.
You have an interesting life. Personally, I am just annoyed by listening to personal bankers and insurance agents who profess inordinate interest in my finances or financial security of my family.
You should visit another coffee shop then maybe? Here, Safeway starbucks gives you a free drink after you got eight others from them over time. The point here is not the transaction fee, it's that you have committed to spending lots of money in one place.
...in Internet Explorer. GlobalStorage works fine in FireFox. It's even a standard to boot.
The whole/only purpose of AJAX is to have your app work in IE6/IE7 without installing any plugins not bundled with the OS. If you require an extra download of Firefox, you might as well ask people to download Java or a regular native app which much better UI and performance.
Javascript is more than fast enough to implement a stream cipher like RC4. Meebo, for example, encrypts your password rather than using SSL to connect.
Oh, I have no doubt you can encrypt your password. Just try to encrypt the whole online word processing document with many images before saving it to hosted storage space. Oh, and RC4 is not a pinnacle of security.
On the other hand, I've seen webapps that are amazingly zippy when the server has low latency and fast response times.
Perhaps more people can invest in zippy servers if clients do 90% of the processing, cache all received data and changes and just connect to synchronize once an hour.
So DVD players violate content owner's rights by displaying menus on top of the video? This would fall well within fair use. More so than numerous adblocking plug ins for various web browsers anyway.
It seems that the customer would be less unhappy about a warning that he is about to reach a bandwidth cap, page modifications and all, than just get a thousand dollar bill out of the blue. There is no set mechanism for the ISP to communicate with the customer over Internet, so creating one might be justifiable in this case. Write again when a (non-free) ISP injects ads or blocks competitor's websites.
What's the use to encrypt your hard drive just to make a nice decrypted backup later? Conversely, this particular problem can be probably solved cheaper, since I doubt that they have 60000 tape drives in the office. Any decent backup software should already support encryption anyway.
I am not saying workstation security is not important, but here it sounds like someone doesn't even understand the problem that they had.
The image tag is in a div with dimensions set in points. CSS standard is quite clear on the meaning of the styles in this context and I tried various combinations of position:absolute and position:relative on div and the image to no avail. IE's actual behavior is to either not scale the image or sometimes to not display it at all. The result depends on container hierarchy and other styles of the image. I think in cases where browser's behavior is so flaky and not easily documentable or worked around, it's better to use an automated code translator like GWT than try to memorize all the counterintuitive cases. It would be even better not to use the defective product at all, but that is hard when the vendor has a monopoly status.
It's no different, and that is the problem. Plain web applications require all the processing to be done on the server by definition. AJAX apps are still not allowed to save data locally and Javascript is not fast/powerful/scalable enough to implement significant local logic (for example to encrypt most of the data that it stores on the server). Even wrappers like GWT can not fundamentally solve poor performance, non-configurable security restrictions or lack of threading in the underlying Javascript VM.
Even if users are comfortable with hosted data, they can not be thrilled over the fact that buying a top-of-the-line quad core computer does nothing to speed up their applications. Eventually there will be a backlash and people will once again start using downloadable thick clients that communicate to the server when needed.
Java applets should have been AJAX. It's too bad that Sun had crappy UI and browser integration and Microsoft quite possibly leveraged their monopoly position to prevent Java from being widely bundled by OEMs at the critical stage in web app evolution.
Yeah, I know what you mean. It's like when I had to write that application years ago and release it for MS-DOS, MacOS, Amiga and C64. Normally, I would have to write separate assembler code for each platform. But some dudes wrote a C compiler and graphics library that worked on all the platforms and released it for free. The trouble was that my fingers and brain wanted to write C++, but when in that compiler you could only use a sub-set of C. The lack of templates (which have become second-nature; I can't write "struct KeyAndVal" without instinctively putting "" after it) was very difficult to get over. For me it was harder than working in Cobol, where I expected things to be different.
Maybe if that library was re-released for Prolog (or some other language that I'd learn at the same time as the library), I might have had an easier time working with it.
As it is, we just released our application for MS-DOS and went out of business when DOS 4.0 broke all the hacks that we have been using.
I am sorry for the abuse you went through. I dabbled a bit with JavaScript and gave up when I found out that does not work in IE, even the latest version of IE7. So I installed http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/>gwt and gwt-ext and had the first page of my application running in a couple of days using nothing but the plain Java code. I create a tree of serializable Java objects on the server and get the same tree on the client and then use it to update my UI.
My only complaint is crappy documentation. To understand gwt-ext I actually have to read the documentation of ext itself, with is Javascript based. I wish they copied the comments to javadoc. Then also to have a standalone text box on your page you need to put it inside a form and then set a bunch of options to make sure the form does not try to decorate the space around the text box in any manner.
According to this article, which sites multiple studies recidivism rate of sex offenders have been estimated between 5.7% and 13.4%. Mind you, many more were rearrested for some non-sex crime (such as drug use or theft I would guess). Also other criminals with no prior history of sex convictions were about as 1/4th as likely as sex offenders to commit a sex crime.
So here we have an individual who is 86-94% likely not to reoffend. Do you think his chances to stay out of trouble and not cause harm to your child are improved by living under the bridge, not having a decent job, only having other sex offenders as friends and having reasons to hate potential victims (us)? Do you think Jonny's son is likely to grow up an upstanding citizen if his family is hated and he is shunned by everyone in school?
Police tries to protect society overall by reducing crime rate. By taking justice into your own hands, you are only thinking about yourself at the expense of the rest of your community. Even if your actions are technically legal, you may be actually hurting your and your family's safety due to your lack of experience. Showing hate to someone is sure likely to make you a preferred target of their potential future crimes.
I just popped a CD into my drive and iTunes asked me if I want to add it to my music library. Upon clicking yes, the application created mp3 files on my hard drive and shared them with all my coworkers without warning me about making unauthorized copies. I hear that's also the main source of music in most people's iPods. So why not sue Apple rather than going after the small fish?
Ah... you mean Steve Jobs will make a 15 minute reality distortion field speech to the jury and the lawsuit will be over? And one more thing - the precedent will be set that not only format shifting music or anything is fair use but also so is streaming the files to your family or your coworkers. We certainly wouldn't want THAT.
So, should we tremble and fear the end of civilization whenever people gather and discuss opinions contrary to modern science? I think this has been tried in Galileo Galilei's times. People will always hold absurd, irrational, uninformed believes and try to spread them to others. Just the other day I had a work mailing list argument with a firm believer in homeopathy. After hearing how 30C onion extract repeatedly cured his cold, I offered to rid the humanity of this disease once and for all by dropping a bag of onions into the ocean to achieve a rather more concentrated dilution. He actually retorted that I do not have the knowledge to use magic that homeopathic doctors add to the bottles!
But if we silence or ridicule all crackpot-sounding talk, we will also miss many cases where apparently outrageous stuff turns out to be true. Like prisoner torture in Iraq, global warming, or the news that the Earth rotates around the Sun. Just recently scientific studies confirmed that acupuncture works a bit better than homeopathy.
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You don't remember back in the day we all used to do this. You just kept Mozilla on a CD and installed it when you setup a system. It sure wasn't hard and people are a lot more likely to have multiple systems now than then.
I still remember the days when I would keep BASIC on a cassette and both listen to it loading on my stereo and see the process as colored dots on the TV screen. It was not that hard and didn't take much more time than booting Vista. Nevertheless I find it very convenient to be able to search for information using contemporary standards immediately after installing the OS.
It is significantly different in the overall effect. You have to consider how it affects developers. If they can't target it, then they have to change the way they develop Web pages and Web applications. This in turn changes the choices users have.
I find it hard to blame Microsoft for actions of third parties.
You might as well argue that it is fair to fine Union Carbide and for them to pay for cleanup for poisoning a huge area in India and killing a bunch of people, but that Cytec and KMG should be forced to pay fines and clean up other areas of India as well, since those companies also manufacture chemicals.
It makes sense to me that Union Carbide, Cytec and KMG should have the same regulations imposed on them regarding future pollution. Furthermore, it makes more sense to get them to pay a sum of money to all injured parties rather than requiring them to run hospitals, tree planting operations and so on. They are not likely to either have expertise in these areas or take the tasks to heart.
The remaining 10% who install their own OS know enough to grab one using another system or FTP.
You got to be kidding. I hope you are not working on increasing the market share of desktop Linux.
This is not good enough. If OEMs cannot easily remove IE entirely and replace it, then the economics of the situation will still favor keeping IE. Worse, since IE will still be on every system, while a standards compliant browser may or may not be, developers will still target the broken version of the standards.
How is removing IE from the Start Menu not removing it from the perspective of those 90% of users? As I mentioned in the other post, you can also remove iexplorer.exe at will.
You can freely remove Internet Explorer from the Start Menu and install Firefox. This will prevent 90% of users from launching IE and the remaining ones presumably wanted it anyway. For the most part, removing iexplorer.exe has no effect either. Explorer does not depend on the executable. The only problem is that some Java programs (oh the irony!) launch IE using an explicit path since they have no way to determine system's default browser. I guess you can come up with a replacement launcher that does the right thing.
If you mean that you can not remove MSHTML DLL used for features like HTML help, the situation is the same as on Mac or Linux. MacOSX loads WebKit whenever you work with rich text to possibly import it from HTML. In Redhat, rpm -e firefox does not magically make thunderbird or any other application utilizing mozilla's HTML engine use Opera instead.
But also require Apple to unbundle Safari from MacOSX and Redhat to unbundle Firefox from Fedora (I don't think Opera would mind either development at all). Once upon a time Microsoft killed the market for alternative commercial browsers by bundling free IE. But times have changed. These days a browser is a requirement rather than an optional add on. Unbundling it would mean that users will not be able to use their newly installed operating system at all, even to find out where to buy/download a browser.
However, OEMs should be permitted to bundle an alternative browser and de-emphasize IE by removing it from Start menu.
By not jumping from trees so high as to achieve their terminal velocity?
Can't you think of any other ways my coworkers can obtain a copy of my mp3 files without hacking into iTunes sharing?
If cable ISPs charged by time online like dialup providers and computers came with a cradle to "hang up" network access, this would be a much more reasonable request for users. As it is, web pages and other applications do not always report just how much bandwidth they have used so far. Even then, you have to remember that back when international phone rates were around $2/minute most people would have to call customer support at least around once per year to dispute charges when the connection was not clear or both phones were accidentally left off hook.
Can't he just jump with hands as "wings" and land on an oversized airbag? Terminal velocity for a human with outstretched limbs is around 120mph. People are known to occasionally survive head on collisions at highway speeds which would amount to about the same. A stationary airbag can be designed to provide much more gradual deceleration than one in a car. All we need is a stuntmen willing to risk their life with ridiculous odds. I don't think such people are in short supply.
I am kind of curious about your understanding of standards. Microsoft implemented Javascript with full DOM access at the time Netscape Navigator had rather limited and tedious Javascript support. Now a bunch of folks came together and declared that Microsoft got it all wrong and has to re-implement its browser with 80% market share to conform to minority's opinion of how a web browser should behave. I say punish Microsoft for illegal use of its monopoly power, but otherwise let critics develop their own software and let the best program win.
I don't think the last part will be easy for standard XHTML+CSS+Javascript. The thing is, IE's implementation is enough to add some animations to a home page or add some form validation for a shopping site. On the other hand, even the standard is a lousy platform for writing apps that actually do something significant on the client side. Java+SWT+a security manager could be a step forward for that, but a really solution should support a free choice of languages and UI toolkits. Perhaps instantly created virtual machines that provide native performance but still maintain security is the answer.
The landing, as one might expect, poses the biggest challenge,
I would say it's the only challenge actually. Gliding around in any winged suit is fun and safe as long as you still open the chute at the end.
You have an interesting life. Personally, I am just annoyed by listening to personal bankers and insurance agents who profess inordinate interest in my finances or financial security of my family.
You should visit another coffee shop then maybe? Here, Safeway starbucks gives you a free drink after you got eight others from them over time.
The point here is not the transaction fee, it's that you have committed to spending lots of money in one place.
When was the last time you picked up a call with unknown Caller ID?
...in Internet Explorer. GlobalStorage works fine in FireFox. It's even a standard to boot.
The whole/only purpose of AJAX is to have your app work in IE6/IE7 without installing any plugins not bundled with the OS. If you require an extra download of Firefox, you might as well ask people to download Java or a regular native app which much better UI and performance.
Javascript is more than fast enough to implement a stream cipher like RC4. Meebo, for example, encrypts your password rather than using SSL to connect.
Oh, I have no doubt you can encrypt your password. Just try to encrypt the whole online word processing document with many images before saving it to hosted storage space. Oh, and RC4 is not a pinnacle of security.
On the other hand, I've seen webapps that are amazingly zippy when the server has low latency and fast response times.
Perhaps more people can invest in zippy servers if clients do 90% of the processing, cache all received data and changes and just connect to synchronize once an hour.
Agreed, but even that is more aggressive behavior/assertion of fair use rights than making mp3 files from CDs for your own use only.
So DVD players violate content owner's rights by displaying menus on top of the video? This would fall well within fair use. More so than numerous adblocking plug ins for various web browsers anyway.
It seems that the customer would be less unhappy about a warning that he is about to reach a bandwidth cap, page modifications and all, than just get a thousand dollar bill out of the blue. There is no set mechanism for the ISP to communicate with the customer over Internet, so creating one might be justifiable in this case. Write again when a (non-free) ISP injects ads or blocks competitor's websites.
What's the use to encrypt your hard drive just to make a nice decrypted backup later? Conversely, this particular problem can be probably solved cheaper, since I doubt that they have 60000 tape drives in the office. Any decent backup software should already support encryption anyway.
I am not saying workstation security is not important, but here it sounds like someone doesn't even understand the problem that they had.
The image tag is in a div with dimensions set in points. CSS standard is quite clear on the meaning of the styles in this context and I tried various combinations of position:absolute and position:relative on div and the image to no avail. IE's actual behavior is to either not scale the image or sometimes to not display it at all. The result depends on container hierarchy and other styles of the image. I think in cases where browser's behavior is so flaky and not easily documentable or worked around, it's better to use an automated code translator like GWT than try to memorize all the counterintuitive cases. It would be even better not to use the defective product at all, but that is hard when the vendor has a monopoly status.
It's no different, and that is the problem. Plain web applications require all the processing to be done on the server by definition. AJAX apps are still not allowed to save data locally and Javascript is not fast/powerful/scalable enough to implement significant local logic (for example to encrypt most of the data that it stores on the server). Even wrappers like GWT can not fundamentally solve poor performance, non-configurable security restrictions or lack of threading in the underlying Javascript VM.
Even if users are comfortable with hosted data, they can not be thrilled over the fact that buying a top-of-the-line quad core computer does nothing to speed up their applications. Eventually there will be a backlash and people will once again start using downloadable thick clients that communicate to the server when needed.
Java applets should have been AJAX. It's too bad that Sun had crappy UI and browser integration and Microsoft quite possibly leveraged their monopoly position to prevent Java from being widely bundled by OEMs at the critical stage in web app evolution.
Yeah, I know what you mean. It's like when I had to write that application years ago and release it for MS-DOS, MacOS, Amiga and C64. Normally, I would have to write separate assembler code for each platform. But some dudes wrote a C compiler and graphics library that worked on all the platforms and released it for free. The trouble was that my fingers and brain wanted to write C++, but when in that compiler you could only use a sub-set of C. The lack of templates (which have become second-nature; I can't write "struct KeyAndVal" without instinctively putting "" after it) was very difficult to get over. For me it was harder than working in Cobol, where I expected things to be different.
Maybe if that library was re-released for Prolog (or some other language that I'd learn at the same time as the library), I might have had an easier time working with it.
As it is, we just released our application for MS-DOS and went out of business when DOS 4.0 broke all the hacks that we have been using.
I am sorry for the abuse you went through. I dabbled a bit with JavaScript and gave up when I found out that does not work in IE, even the latest version of IE7. So I installed http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/>gwt and gwt-ext and had the first page of my application running in a couple of days using nothing but the plain Java code. I create a tree of serializable Java objects on the server and get the same tree on the client and then use it to update my UI.
My only complaint is crappy documentation. To understand gwt-ext I actually have to read the documentation of ext itself, with is Javascript based. I wish they copied the comments to javadoc. Then also to have a standalone text box on your page you need to put it inside a form and then set a bunch of options to make sure the form does not try to decorate the space around the text box in any manner.
According to this article, which sites multiple studies recidivism rate of sex offenders have been estimated between 5.7% and 13.4%. Mind you, many more were rearrested for some non-sex crime (such as drug use or theft I would guess). Also other criminals with no prior history of sex convictions were about as 1/4th as likely as sex offenders to commit a sex crime.
So here we have an individual who is 86-94% likely not to reoffend. Do you think his chances to stay out of trouble and not cause harm to your child are improved by living under the bridge, not having a decent job, only having other sex offenders as friends and having reasons to hate potential victims (us)? Do you think Jonny's son is likely to grow up an upstanding citizen if his family is hated and he is shunned by everyone in school?
Police tries to protect society overall by reducing crime rate. By taking justice into your own hands, you are only thinking about yourself at the expense of the rest of your community. Even if your actions are technically legal, you may be actually hurting your and your family's safety due to your lack of experience. Showing hate to someone is sure likely to make you a preferred target of their potential future crimes.
I just popped a CD into my drive and iTunes asked me if I want to add it to my music library. Upon clicking yes, the application created mp3 files on my hard drive and shared them with all my coworkers without warning me about making unauthorized copies. I hear that's also the main source of music in most people's iPods. So why not sue Apple rather than going after the small fish?
Ah... you mean Steve Jobs will make a 15 minute reality distortion field speech to the jury and the lawsuit will be over? And one more thing - the precedent will be set that not only format shifting music or anything is fair use but also so is streaming the files to your family or your coworkers. We certainly wouldn't want THAT.
So, should we tremble and fear the end of civilization whenever people gather and discuss opinions contrary to modern science? I think this has been tried in Galileo Galilei's times. People will always hold absurd, irrational, uninformed believes and try to spread them to others. Just the other day I had a work mailing list argument with a firm believer in homeopathy. After hearing how 30C onion extract repeatedly cured his cold, I offered to rid the humanity of this disease once and for all by dropping a bag of onions into the ocean to achieve a rather more concentrated dilution. He actually retorted that I do not have the knowledge to use magic that homeopathic doctors add to the bottles!
But if we silence or ridicule all crackpot-sounding talk, we will also miss many cases where apparently outrageous stuff turns out to be true. Like prisoner torture in Iraq, global warming, or the news that the Earth rotates around the Sun. Just recently scientific studies confirmed that acupuncture works a bit better than homeopathy.