"WHo's to say IE is correct in their implementation?"
The market. They'd be more or less right, too. IE's not only good at rendering HTML, but it's also very fault resistant. I've had HTML in both Netscape and Opera cause the scrollbars to never appear. Can't say I've ever had that with IE.
"No browser follows the specs exactly (last I heard, Mozilla was closest), and that is a damn shame."
That's debatable. Who says the spec was correct in the first place? As people use the HTML, ideas about how it should be used evolve. For example, tables have a border feature. In Netscape (4 I think, it's been a while since I've done HTML) you can't set the color of the borders. You always get that ugly gray embossed table. Ie was quite happy to accept a hex code to draw the table with that color. The result? Instead of assigning a color value to the border, you had to set the table background color to what you want the border to be, and then set each cell to have a bg color that you want the foreground to be. That's pretty convoluted. It's possible that either Netscape was pretty dumb about it, or they were following WC3s flawed spec. To be honest, I don't know. The point is I don't think that following the spec is necessarily the holy grail of browser rendering. The code just plain needs to be usable. (I do agree, though, that a standard should evolve and everybody should follow it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's WC3's.)
"I wish I could earn a living as a lazy web designer, toying with Photoshop and Dreamweaver all day and not even lifting a finger as to do some actual work, like checking cross-platform or at least cross-browser compatability."
1.) Who says it's laziness? When you're a web-develoiper, you have unreasonable deadlines to get things done. My company in particular thought it took a week to design, build, and publish an entire website. The idea of spending time to test it on various platforms was ludicrous. "Just make it work in Netscape and IE, don't worry about anything else." Don't fault me for my boss's pointy-haired decisions.
2.) I can't speak for Dreamweaver, but FrontPage made it real easy to test your pages in various browsers. It had a 'preview in browser' mode that would give you a dropdown of all the browsers you had installed or setup on your machine, then it'd send the page to it. Then, it'd even ask you what window size you wanted to try it at. Want to test your site at 800 by 600? No problemo. I would assume that Dreamweaver did all that as well.
I probably wouldn't ordinarily have responded to that comment, but I've had that Photoshop/FrontPage 'lazy job'. And it's anything but lazy. You try coming up with an artistic design for a site and then hacking HTML to make it work. HTML is a lousy markup standard for doing artsy sites. You'd be surprised at the pixel-magic we've had to do.
"I know it's silly but I always love when IBM uses the phrase "FUD" in corporate announcements"
"NanoGator, I think they modded you down because my post quoted the phrase "fear uncertainty and doubt" directly from the IBM press release before I used the acronym FUD."
To be fair, it's not like you said "FUD = Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". Your post sort of sounds like IBM said 'FUD' (the acronymn, not the phrase). I can understand NG's confusion. The dude with the mod points could have just explained that instead of leaving NG in ignorance.
" 15 workers for a jackhammer? How do they do that?"
Don't you pay attention? Whenever you have contstruction work going on, you always need 3 or 4 guys on a break. If you don't have 15 workers, you can't keep that many people on the break. It's called rotation!
What I want to know is where the other 11 guys are hiding whenever those 4 guys are on a break.
"How many emulators has Nintendo/Sony/M$ shut down? That's right - zero!!"
Ultra HLE immediately comes to mind. I don't think his scope was limited to emulators, but tools that can be used to play copyrighted stuff. The Flash Linker comes to mind.
"I can see how this is confusing, since Nintendo/Sony?M$ has shut down many stores for selling mod chips and such."
Ah, so you are sort of aware of the backstory there.
"Which they won't. And he doesn't support his point, therefore it is not valid nor established. "
I imagined he didn't reinforce his point because of the way you responded to him. It reads more like you were ready to argue as oppose to discuss. Granted, I think he should have explained himself anyway, but he probably was testing you with the "You'll notice I didn't say legal" bit to find out if you'd actually have a reasonable conversation with him or not. I think he was being an ass for that, but on the other hand, you could have been a little more tactful in your response. Really, I think you two could have had a pleasant insightful conversation if each of you were to grow a little thicker of skin. But hey, what do I know?
Could Nintendo sue them out of existence? Well that's probably an exaggeration. However, I can see what he's thinking. Mp3.com was running a legit business, yet the RIAA got it shut down anyway. I imagine that Napster tainted the perception of what MP3.com was doing. Guilt by association? Well, if the emulator was being promoted as a way to 'pirate' (man I hate using that term here, seeing as how a pirated GBA game won't be mobile...) games and play them sans paying for them, then Nintendo could potentially twist the courts arms just like the RIAA did with MP3.com. Follow?
It's all speculation, but I've had a similar discussion with NG about this before. I think you're thinking in terms of what's right and he's thinking in terms of what's happened.
"And lastly, I apologize to you for attacking his character, b/c we all now that attacking someones character is never justified in an argument!!!"
Why are you apologizing to me and not him? I bet you two could have an interesting conversation if all can be forgiven. Extend the olive branch to him and I'll back you up. Interesting?
"May I suggest not saying anything when you sound like a fucking moron?"
He's saying that Nintendo will do what they've done before and get it shut down like they (as well as Sony and Microsoft) has done in the past, regardless of the legality of emulation. Granted, he was a bit of an ass by not explaining himself when you argued with him, but he does have a point that the legality of emulation is not at issue here.
His point was quite valid, and well established. Maybe he shouldn't have taken for granted that you'd be aware of the history of this type of thing. I don't know. Calling him a moron over it is moronic. You showed no more class than he did.
"Evidently he has hacked into the network, so he can issue commands in the Matrix command language, but he can't make arbitrary changes to the simulation."
He didn't hack the network. He's another program in it. He's supposed to have those powers. It's like having a god code in Quake.
" hate to sound like a troll, but do we really need this ammount of press time about it? "
Actually, I'm enjoying this break from the endless "MS is an awful company, let's redundantly prove it!" sensationalism this place suffers chronically from.
"Ah so you think a newbie is likely to assume that case sensitivity in a programming language is really a fight between the Unix and Microsoft camps? "
Ask the person who said that. I never said anything about it being 'MS-style'.
"Stupid things like declaring variables? Declaring variables is one of the most fundamental concepts of modern programming languages!"
Throw variable declarations at somebody to early in the learning curve leads to confusion.
"Uh.. what's a string? Oh.. what's a byte? Oh.. what's a boolean? Oh.. what's an array? Uhh what's a two-dimensional array? Oh..." What's a string again?"
The reason I said that was not to bash variable declaration, but to point out how silly it is to somebody who has no idea why it's there. If they want to write a program that adds two variables together, why put them through defining integers until after they've written code that actually works?
That's the nice thing about QBasic and related languages. The learning curve is more productive. My first 'Hello World' program in C didn't work because I had no idea that case sensitivity was a problem. I gave up on C because I couldn't get the simplest program to work, and at the age of 12 I didn't exactly have the resources to go to the bookstore and buy a C for Dummies book.
Pity really. I understand it all today, after developing a relatively deep understanding of how computers work. Back then, though, I didn't even know that in a binary sense, a and A were entirely different to the computer.
So yes, you're right. Variable declarations are important etc, but we're talking about getting somebody interested in programming to begin with. You don't teach a kid to swim by throwing him floation device-less into the water.
"The debate over case sensitivity predates Unix or Microsoft. But thanks for demonstrating an astounding lack of knowledge."
Actually I was referring to the appraisal a newb would give it. Thanks for assuming that I meant it in a global sense and calling me stupid for it.
The fact is that understanding why case sensitivity is an issue requires a deeper knowledge of what goes on inside a computer than somebody who wants to start programming is going to understand.
"If your in visual C++ you will then be magically brought straight to line 32 to fix the problem. my argument is that this is much easier to figure out and fix."
ONLY with the proper orientation.
I think you make a good point here, but you're making the assumption that people are going to figure this out quickly, and that simply isn't going to be the case. Humans don't read var and Var as two different variables. They need to be introduced to that. It's a lot easier to do that once they've written some code and have a basic understanding of what's going on. It's a lot easier to tell a basic user "oh yeah, make sure to match the case of the variables" than it is to tell a newb "var is different from Var. That's why your extremely simple Hello World program doesn't work."
"If I were to reccomend a language to a newbie it would be something with both variable declaration and case sensitivity, I would basically want the strictest compiler settings possible just to enforce the basics of good programming."
That might be advisable for somebody who has an idea of how programming works. However, it'd be foolish to present somebody who's just sitting down to write 'hello world' for the first time with a scenario where they could break the program by using the shift-key once.
"So you think that *nix is stupid and should switch to the MS model where case does not matter?"
Yes, I do. Case sensitivity should never affect an end-user. It's called bad-UI design. Let the programmers have it, don't let my grandmother have to deal with it.
2) You bought a DUMMIES book for QBASIC. It's like buying a Dummies book for cooking Kraft Macaroni.
1.) So? He's trying to understand what programming is, he's not trying to run out and get a job as a software engineer.
2.) Can't say that comment was particularly insightful. QBasic is programming, like it or not. It may not be as efficient or structured as the competitors of its day, but it's still something that requires study to learn.
So I guess what I'm really saying is STFU you close minded dolt.
"if it's in a corporate world, flee while it's time else, why not use python as a first language ? or, Java ?"
Programming is a rather abstract concept. Best to start with something where you don't have to trip over stupid things like case sensitivity or declaring variables.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's just easier to get modded up on /. if you bash MS once or twice, regardless of what you're talking about."
Though you're right, in this particular case, Microsoft was involved.
I feel sorry for the consumers who buy USB 2.0 peripherals (like DVD Burners) and discover they don't work.
"WHo's to say IE is correct in their implementation?"
The market. They'd be more or less right, too. IE's not only good at rendering HTML, but it's also very fault resistant. I've had HTML in both Netscape and Opera cause the scrollbars to never appear. Can't say I've ever had that with IE.
"No browser follows the specs exactly (last I heard, Mozilla was closest), and that is a damn shame."
That's debatable. Who says the spec was correct in the first place? As people use the HTML, ideas about how it should be used evolve. For example, tables have a border feature. In Netscape (4 I think, it's been a while since I've done HTML) you can't set the color of the borders. You always get that ugly gray embossed table. Ie was quite happy to accept a hex code to draw the table with that color. The result? Instead of assigning a color value to the border, you had to set the table background color to what you want the border to be, and then set each cell to have a bg color that you want the foreground to be. That's pretty convoluted. It's possible that either Netscape was pretty dumb about it, or they were following WC3s flawed spec. To be honest, I don't know. The point is I don't think that following the spec is necessarily the holy grail of browser rendering. The code just plain needs to be usable. (I do agree, though, that a standard should evolve and everybody should follow it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's WC3's.)
"I wish I could earn a living as a lazy web designer, toying with Photoshop and Dreamweaver all day and not even lifting a finger as to do some actual work, like checking cross-platform or at least cross-browser compatability."
1.) Who says it's laziness? When you're a web-develoiper, you have unreasonable deadlines to get things done. My company in particular thought it took a week to design, build, and publish an entire website. The idea of spending time to test it on various platforms was ludicrous. "Just make it work in Netscape and IE, don't worry about anything else." Don't fault me for my boss's pointy-haired decisions.
2.) I can't speak for Dreamweaver, but FrontPage made it real easy to test your pages in various browsers. It had a 'preview in browser' mode that would give you a dropdown of all the browsers you had installed or setup on your machine, then it'd send the page to it. Then, it'd even ask you what window size you wanted to try it at. Want to test your site at 800 by 600? No problemo. I would assume that Dreamweaver did all that as well.
I probably wouldn't ordinarily have responded to that comment, but I've had that Photoshop/FrontPage 'lazy job'. And it's anything but lazy. You try coming up with an artistic design for a site and then hacking HTML to make it work. HTML is a lousy markup standard for doing artsy sites. You'd be surprised at the pixel-magic we've had to do.
"Mozilla Blows-illa!"
Ha! Watch it or you'll be modded down by a warrior evangelist!
"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."
You don't have a PDA that travels around in your pocket every single business day of your life.
Overrated? Yeesh. I wouldn't be bothered by it if I wasn't pointing out why current GameCube owners have a reason to be excited.
I just might buy another one. My apartment's already networked and my GF loves Mario Kart.
"Yes he was."
Doubt it. Unless you're overly sensitive to people asking questions about what FUD means.
"I know it's silly but I always love when IBM uses the phrase "FUD" in corporate announcements"
"NanoGator, I think they modded you down because my post quoted the phrase "fear uncertainty and doubt" directly from the IBM press release before I used the acronym FUD."
To be fair, it's not like you said "FUD = Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". Your post sort of sounds like IBM said 'FUD' (the acronymn, not the phrase). I can understand NG's confusion. The dude with the mod points could have just explained that instead of leaving NG in ignorance.
It's not like he was trolling.
" 15 workers for a jackhammer? How do they do that?"
Don't you pay attention? Whenever you have contstruction work going on, you always need 3 or 4 guys on a break. If you don't have 15 workers, you can't keep that many people on the break. It's called rotation!
What I want to know is where the other 11 guys are hiding whenever those 4 guys are on a break.
"How many emulators has Nintendo/Sony/M$ shut down? That's right - zero!!"
Ultra HLE immediately comes to mind. I don't think his scope was limited to emulators, but tools that can be used to play copyrighted stuff. The Flash Linker comes to mind.
"I can see how this is confusing, since Nintendo/Sony?M$ has shut down many stores for selling mod chips and such."
Ah, so you are sort of aware of the backstory there.
"Which they won't. And he doesn't support his point, therefore it is not valid nor established. "
I imagined he didn't reinforce his point because of the way you responded to him. It reads more like you were ready to argue as oppose to discuss. Granted, I think he should have explained himself anyway, but he probably was testing you with the "You'll notice I didn't say legal" bit to find out if you'd actually have a reasonable conversation with him or not. I think he was being an ass for that, but on the other hand, you could have been a little more tactful in your response. Really, I think you two could have had a pleasant insightful conversation if each of you were to grow a little thicker of skin. But hey, what do I know?
Could Nintendo sue them out of existence? Well that's probably an exaggeration. However, I can see what he's thinking. Mp3.com was running a legit business, yet the RIAA got it shut down anyway. I imagine that Napster tainted the perception of what MP3.com was doing. Guilt by association? Well, if the emulator was being promoted as a way to 'pirate' (man I hate using that term here, seeing as how a pirated GBA game won't be mobile...) games and play them sans paying for them, then Nintendo could potentially twist the courts arms just like the RIAA did with MP3.com. Follow?
It's all speculation, but I've had a similar discussion with NG about this before. I think you're thinking in terms of what's right and he's thinking in terms of what's happened.
"And lastly, I apologize to you for attacking his character, b/c we all now that attacking someones character is never justified in an argument!!!"
Why are you apologizing to me and not him? I bet you two could have an interesting conversation if all can be forgiven. Extend the olive branch to him and I'll back you up. Interesting?
"..have been disgusted that such a game exists, and judgmental, as in 'that's the kind of game only an American would like'"
That smells more like somebody who heard all about the game on CNN as opposed to actually playing it.
"May I suggest not saying anything when you sound like a fucking moron?"
He's saying that Nintendo will do what they've done before and get it shut down like they (as well as Sony and Microsoft) has done in the past, regardless of the legality of emulation. Granted, he was a bit of an ass by not explaining himself when you argued with him, but he does have a point that the legality of emulation is not at issue here.
His point was quite valid, and well established. Maybe he shouldn't have taken for granted that you'd be aware of the history of this type of thing. I don't know. Calling him a moron over it is moronic. You showed no more class than he did.
"Evidently he has hacked into the network, so he can issue commands in the Matrix command language, but he can't make arbitrary changes to the simulation."
He didn't hack the network. He's another program in it. He's supposed to have those powers. It's like having a god code in Quake.
"I think this summs it up better"
Damn. That was clever. Heheh. Now if we can just get a Knight Rider parody like that.
" hate to sound like a troll, but do we really need this ammount of press time about it? "
Actually, I'm enjoying this break from the endless "MS is an awful company, let's redundantly prove it!" sensationalism this place suffers chronically from.
Please, let SCO draw their fire!
"Ah so you think a newbie is likely to assume that case sensitivity in a programming language is really a fight between the Unix and Microsoft camps? "
Ask the person who said that. I never said anything about it being 'MS-style'.
"Stupid things like declaring variables? Declaring variables is one of the most fundamental concepts of modern programming languages!"
Throw variable declarations at somebody to early in the learning curve leads to confusion.
"Uh.. what's a string? Oh.. what's a byte? Oh.. what's a boolean? Oh.. what's an array? Uhh what's a two-dimensional array? Oh..." What's a string again?"
The reason I said that was not to bash variable declaration, but to point out how silly it is to somebody who has no idea why it's there. If they want to write a program that adds two variables together, why put them through defining integers until after they've written code that actually works?
That's the nice thing about QBasic and related languages. The learning curve is more productive. My first 'Hello World' program in C didn't work because I had no idea that case sensitivity was a problem. I gave up on C because I couldn't get the simplest program to work, and at the age of 12 I didn't exactly have the resources to go to the bookstore and buy a C for Dummies book.
Pity really. I understand it all today, after developing a relatively deep understanding of how computers work. Back then, though, I didn't even know that in a binary sense, a and A were entirely different to the computer.
So yes, you're right. Variable declarations are important etc, but we're talking about getting somebody interested in programming to begin with. You don't teach a kid to swim by throwing him floation device-less into the water.
"The debate over case sensitivity predates Unix or Microsoft. But thanks for demonstrating an astounding lack of knowledge."
Actually I was referring to the appraisal a newb would give it. Thanks for assuming that I meant it in a global sense and calling me stupid for it.
The fact is that understanding why case sensitivity is an issue requires a deeper knowledge of what goes on inside a computer than somebody who wants to start programming is going to understand.
"If your in visual C++ you will then be magically brought straight to line 32 to fix the problem. my argument is that this is much easier to figure out and fix."
ONLY with the proper orientation.
I think you make a good point here, but you're making the assumption that people are going to figure this out quickly, and that simply isn't going to be the case. Humans don't read var and Var as two different variables. They need to be introduced to that. It's a lot easier to do that once they've written some code and have a basic understanding of what's going on. It's a lot easier to tell a basic user "oh yeah, make sure to match the case of the variables" than it is to tell a newb "var is different from Var. That's why your extremely simple Hello World program doesn't work."
"You must not be a programmer or else you are just incredibly stupid."
Well, I could be stupid, but at least I was capable of communicating my reasoning.
"If I were to reccomend a language to a newbie it would be something with both variable declaration and case sensitivity, I would basically want the strictest compiler settings possible just to enforce the basics of good programming."
That might be advisable for somebody who has an idea of how programming works. However, it'd be foolish to present somebody who's just sitting down to write 'hello world' for the first time with a scenario where they could break the program by using the shift-key once.
Frustrate them early!
"So you think that *nix is stupid and should switch to the MS model where case does not matter?"
Yes, I do. Case sensitivity should never affect an end-user. It's called bad-UI design. Let the programmers have it, don't let my grandmother have to deal with it.
"It's not how crappy the computer you had to work with, it's how much you learned while overcoming its iniquities."
Figures. That little blast of insight gets modded as 'off-topic'. Wonderful.
It's a strong point. Limitations are where innovations thrive. That's why we should appreciate what we had in the past.
Oh well, I guess I'll get off-topic too.
"1) QBASIC? That's so 1992...
2) You bought a DUMMIES book for QBASIC. It's like buying a Dummies book for cooking Kraft Macaroni.
1.) So? He's trying to understand what programming is, he's not trying to run out and get a job as a software engineer.
2.) Can't say that comment was particularly insightful. QBasic is programming, like it or not. It may not be as efficient or structured as the competitors of its day, but it's still something that requires study to learn.
So I guess what I'm really saying is STFU you close minded dolt.
"if it's in a corporate world, flee while it's time else, why not use python as a first language ? or, Java ?"
Programming is a rather abstract concept. Best to start with something where you don't have to trip over stupid things like case sensitivity or declaring variables.
Nothing wrong with starting with Basic.