You have good points in your post, but as a fellow web developer, I just needed to comment on the rollovers headache. Modern browsers don't need any type of script for rollovers; a tiny bit of CSS will do. You can simply surround your rollover areas with <a class="Rollover"> elements and type
saving code reuse, portability, and those of us who keep JavaScript disabled when we're forced to use IE.
Then again, if you're maintaining any type of website beyond a couple of pages, you're undoubtedly doing structure through server-side scripting. I just thought I'd throw the basic rollover concept out there for you though.
Well, now that the XP GUI has become more cartoony and takes up more space than most of us geeks would like it to for simple items, I'm expecting BSoDs to have a nice big stop sign logo, a blue gradient background, and anti-aliased HTML text in several fonts.
If you're going to crash, you might as well do it in style!
That's actually exactly what I was thinking of when I was looking at the picture as well. It would be horrible trying to hold a device of this shape to your ears or in a single hand like the Palm Pilots, but it seems ideal for games and multimedia. The 640x320 resolution would be great for small media files, and as much as I dislike Flash, being able to browse Flash-enabled sites could be good at certain times.
This isn't something that I would purchase myself since I like the combination of my cell phone and my laptop too much (not to mention that I type so much faster on a regular keyboard), but for people who don't have the space to carry a laptop around all the time, I can see it being very useful for them.
Despite the funny moderation, that's actually exactly the same thing that I was thinking about when I read this headline. As the fixed costs of creating music decreases, more and more people will able to jump into the bandwagon, saturating the market. It's great for people who just want to make and distribute songs for fun, but for musicians who want to make money, they're going to have a harder time selling music since there are so many other alternatives out there. As with Usenet or web hosting in the past, the signal to noise ratio is just going to grow.
Looks like it's time to get Google to do musician rankings for us so we can concentrate on little-known, talented songs that other people only blog about.;-) Something like Amazon's referrals and similarities system would be great.
Judging by the volunteer efforts to restore BeOS and to port applications over to it that we have seen since its demise, even if there isn't much of an initial market, there is still a developed niche of people who will purchase this, and as you know from the gaming and Linux communities, they can be quite vocal about it.
If I remember correctly, the original BeOS was suppose to be a highly multithreaded OS designed to excel in multimedia applications. It actually didn't do too poorly considering the stranglehold Microsoft has over most of the computer builders in the industry. The most important thing is that there are people out there who believe in the concept and the vision. As long as there is, you never know what might happen with a piece of software.
Re:What does this have to do with spam?
on
Building Better Spam
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I definitely second your comment there. This process looks like it's built for efficiency and a good design process, and could be applied to almost any field of engineering or problem solving.
Marketing here in the U.S. has definitely become an evil, throat-cutting industry, but if someone can prevail with simple, effective ads that get to the point and don't leave consumers confused and disgusted, I think that would be a win for us all.
Of course, as human nature would have it, the disgusting, false ads will probably be the ones who generate the most revenue... most consumers don't bother taking the time to research, and thus they are left as sheep to the slaughter of their money.
Re:Threat to Athlon64: Prescott (not Pentium 4)
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Your argument that AMD is not the market leader and has to follow Intel's lead has been true in the past, but this particular situation is a bit different. Intel has sunk all of their resources into the Itanium project for 64-bit computing, and although the rumored Yamhill project may still yet come to pass now that Athlon 64's performance leadership is unquestionable, I haven't heard a single mention of anything other than the EPIC architecture for Intel, while AMD has been push x86-64 for years now and letting compiler writers and programmers become used to the instruction set. It takes a good amount of time for programmers to utilize a new instruction set effectively after it comes out (look at MMX when it was first introduced), and even if Intel reveals Yamhill extensions, if they're not x86-64 compatible, it's going to take a while for non-Intel programmers to catch up.
Personally, if Intel does reveal Yamhill, it'll be all the better for the industry. More competition will just mean lower prices for us - the consumers.
Competition by itself isn't a bad thing, as humanity as a whole would never have progressed as much as we have if we didn't have competition. Just look at the space race between Russia and the United States, or the CPU wars between Intel and AMD to see how competition has benefited society as a whole. For what you said about humanity being stuck on earth, we might have never landed a man on the moon by now if there wasn't such a motivation between the two superpowers at the time. NASA has been just struggling to maintain any appearance of a major inspirational event since the 70s and the Challenger explosion.
What throws competition off though, are actions which go beyond simple, honest competitive motives... mainly false marketing and greedy corporations in the tech industry today. If this was a sport, there would be a referee around to call fouls and return play to normal. Unfortunately, there's no such referee in our society, especially in international circles where one country doesn't even like another country, and won't bother implementing the same laws or restrictions. Until there's someone or something to enforce fair play, this is going to be the norm.
The Java class library, the language standard, and even the bytecode itself has been pretty well documented in many sources across the web. There's nothing preventing you from making your own version should you wish to - it's just that most people have decided that one of the existing implementations are "good enough" for their uses, just like many people decided that Windows 98 was "good enough."
I personally still don't buy this "Java is an SUV" argument. A programming language is a tool, and a bad programmer can write horrible code in any language or environment. I've said this before on./, but knowing which tool to use and why you're using it is the most important thing to realize when you're programming.
I know that you're somewhat joking, but I would have liked the market share questions from InterAKT to have included not just.NET, J2EE, or ColdFusion, but have also included other languages like Perl and Python (although Python is indeed the base language for Zope). There are still a very large amount of websites built in Perl these days, with Slashdot being one of the most famous. Zend's survey does a bit more to explore the languages that programmers "are familiar with," but does little to see how the competition for PHP is doing.
PHP's great to use for me because it's simple, powerful, and readily available in cheap hosting environments. If Zope, ColdFusion, or J2EE had more availability or less cost, then I would try those as well, but there's something to be said for being able to sign up for a $9/month account and downloading Apache, PHP, and MySQL all without paying for anything other than bandwidth costs. You still can't really compare PHP to the enterprise level of.NET or JSP at this point though, since many features like persistent objects in shared memory really can't be done well in PHP, and I haven't heard anything else about PHP 5 other than further enhancements to the objects and reference systems. PHP-Accelerator gives a great boost to the speed, but I'd really like to see native compilation built into the distribution rather than downloaded separatedly.
All in all though, PHP's a great language for quick development of small to medium sized websites. As the old caveat reads though, use the right tool for the job.
If it's anything like what Microsoft did during the browser wars, it will be standards-compliant, but with helpful proprietary extensions which only work on Microsoft platforms.
This is really nothing new since everyone else (Netscape, Sun, even gcc) does the same thing, but it might be one path he will take. Despite the usual cries of outrage against Microsoft that many Slashdotters make without a thought, they are right that Bill wouldn't be doing this without some other devious, profitable plan involved. He's done it far too often in the past.
The problem with using referer headers is that not all clients provide them. Some people may be using an archaic browser which doesn't send the field, some people may have just typed the URL straight in to the address bar rather than being referred from another website, and some people just plainly disable them for privacy reasons.
Of course, most lawyers won't understand these principles, but for us web development geeks, there's no sense in blocking legimate users just by one single HTTP header which may or may not be there. If you really want to protect your pages, just require registration before reading.
If you know how to point the dish and where the satellites are, I recommend just purchasing one of those trial kits from Radioshack or other places and installing the dish yourself. All you really need is a good place to mount it, a RG6 cable to run into the house, and any switches that you might need for multiple receivers. The receiver will allow you to test the signal strength when you point the dish. Just make sure that there's a 15/30 day money back guarantee on the deal, and you'll be set.
This is actually one of the main advantages that cable has over satellite though; no trees, storms, or other natural phenomenon will disrupt your viewing. It's horrible to be in the middle of a football game and then to have "Searching for signal" as the only thing showing up on your screen. Satellite is cheaper for more content, but it may not be for everyone.
Just a friendly warning from someone who used to do tech support for them...
You're right in that it is possible to have the same MD5 sum for multiple files, but the chances of it happening is extremely small for two reasons.
The first reason is that MD5 has 128 bits to describe the file, meaning that there is a 1 in 2^128 chance that any given random bitstream will have the same MD5 sum (Of course, MP3s aren't all that random in portions of the file format, but the basic argument still stands).
The second reason is the very process of verification. In order to verify a file, you must already have a checksum of the original file to compare it to, and you have a file which you think could be the same file, meaning file names and file sizes are already identical. If those files differ by as much as one bit, then they will produce different checksums. If you're willing to try to match a file named "ISO of Windows XP" with a file size of 650.1MB versus a file named "ISO of Mandrake" with a file size of 643.8MB then you're already sure that they're not the same file by the filesize alone.
SVG is really much, much more than a vector based image format though; it's an entire animation/effects plugin which will work seamlessly with current standards such as XHTML, MathML, CSS, and JavaScript (ECMAScript if you wish to be technical).
Adobe has already placed some very nice demos of embedding SVG within standard web pages. Take a look at some of the things that can be done with it, and you'll quickly see how the SVG standard can
Replace large graphics with smaller XML code and custom effects
Replace most of what Flash is: a proprietary language for interactive vector animation. The newer versions of Flash have some very nice extras, but for the most part, SVG can really dig into Macromedia's space if it's adopted by people other than just geeks, and being backed by Adobe is a very good sign.
Allow accessibility within stylized content. Very few Flash animations on the web nowadays have any type of accessible content.
As far as the extra size in download goes, most people have to download Acrobat Reader to read PDF files, which are very common on the web. If SVG ever achieves the same status, I will be very encouraged as a web designer.
To further explain the behavior of computers, I feel that I need to post the reason why many computers crash when used by women:
Woman: How are you today, honey!
Computer: [pauses to think about why he's being talked to and how he should best respond without
being turned off.]
Good.
Woman: Do you like the new colors that I painted you last night?
Computer: [grumbles over stupid women and their incessant need to color and give everything a
fragrance]
Sure.
Woman: Well, that's great. I thought that you would like them. I'll get you some more tomorrow.
I think we should make the top of you raspberry and the sides vanilla cream.
Computer: [Are those colors or fruits?]
Woman: How do you feel about taking me on-line and checking my e-mail?
Computer: [Do I really have to? I was busy calculating quantum positioning of accelerated electrons
within a Uranium 238 atom. But if I don't, she'll yell at me, so I better do what she says.]
Sure.
[begins connecting]
Woman: That's great. Did you hear about my Aunt Sarah's new baby?
Computer: [bangs self on head with giant printer repeatedly]
Woman: [continues] It's a brand new girl named Stacy, and she is the most...
Computer: [begins heats up]
Woman: [continues] But I don't know what they're going to do, because they don't have room...
Computer: [desperately tries to short-circuit microphone to stop noise]
Woman: [continues] You know, I really think that they should get a new house...
Woman: [continues] But I wonder if they'll need more dishes, or we should just get them new
silverware...
Computer: [crashes]
Woman: [continues] because you know that Aunt Sarah is scared of cockroaches, and...
Hey, what happened to you, honey? You're not responding to my typing anymore, and I
can't move my mouse. Honey? Honey?
Slashdot Mirror
You have good points in your post, but as a fellow web developer, I just needed to comment on the rollovers headache. Modern browsers don't need any type of script for rollovers; a tiny bit of CSS will do. You can simply surround your rollover areas with <a class="Rollover"> elements and type
saving code reuse, portability, and those of us who keep JavaScript disabled when we're forced to use IE.
Then again, if you're maintaining any type of website beyond a couple of pages, you're undoubtedly doing structure through server-side scripting. I just thought I'd throw the basic rollover concept out there for you though.
Well, now that the XP GUI has become more cartoony and takes up more space than most of us geeks would like it to for simple items, I'm expecting BSoDs to have a nice big stop sign logo, a blue gradient background, and anti-aliased HTML text in several fonts.
If you're going to crash, you might as well do it in style!
That's actually exactly what I was thinking of when I was looking at the picture as well. It would be horrible trying to hold a device of this shape to your ears or in a single hand like the Palm Pilots, but it seems ideal for games and multimedia. The 640x320 resolution would be great for small media files, and as much as I dislike Flash, being able to browse Flash-enabled sites could be good at certain times.
This isn't something that I would purchase myself since I like the combination of my cell phone and my laptop too much (not to mention that I type so much faster on a regular keyboard), but for people who don't have the space to carry a laptop around all the time, I can see it being very useful for them.
Despite the funny moderation, that's actually exactly the same thing that I was thinking about when I read this headline. As the fixed costs of creating music decreases, more and more people will able to jump into the bandwagon, saturating the market. It's great for people who just want to make and distribute songs for fun, but for musicians who want to make money, they're going to have a harder time selling music since there are so many other alternatives out there. As with Usenet or web hosting in the past, the signal to noise ratio is just going to grow.
Looks like it's time to get Google to do musician rankings for us so we can concentrate on little-known, talented songs that other people only blog about. ;-) Something like Amazon's referrals and similarities system would be great.
Judging by the volunteer efforts to restore BeOS and to port applications over to it that we have seen since its demise, even if there isn't much of an initial market, there is still a developed niche of people who will purchase this, and as you know from the gaming and Linux communities, they can be quite vocal about it.
If I remember correctly, the original BeOS was suppose to be a highly multithreaded OS designed to excel in multimedia applications. It actually didn't do too poorly considering the stranglehold Microsoft has over most of the computer builders in the industry. The most important thing is that there are people out there who believe in the concept and the vision. As long as there is, you never know what might happen with a piece of software.
I definitely second your comment there. This process looks like it's built for efficiency and a good design process, and could be applied to almost any field of engineering or problem solving.
Marketing here in the U.S. has definitely become an evil, throat-cutting industry, but if someone can prevail with simple, effective ads that get to the point and don't leave consumers confused and disgusted, I think that would be a win for us all.
Of course, as human nature would have it, the disgusting, false ads will probably be the ones who generate the most revenue... most consumers don't bother taking the time to research, and thus they are left as sheep to the slaughter of their money.
Your argument that AMD is not the market leader and has to follow Intel's lead has been true in the past, but this particular situation is a bit different. Intel has sunk all of their resources into the Itanium project for 64-bit computing, and although the rumored Yamhill project may still yet come to pass now that Athlon 64's performance leadership is unquestionable, I haven't heard a single mention of anything other than the EPIC architecture for Intel, while AMD has been push x86-64 for years now and letting compiler writers and programmers become used to the instruction set. It takes a good amount of time for programmers to utilize a new instruction set effectively after it comes out (look at MMX when it was first introduced), and even if Intel reveals Yamhill extensions, if they're not x86-64 compatible, it's going to take a while for non-Intel programmers to catch up.
Personally, if Intel does reveal Yamhill, it'll be all the better for the industry. More competition will just mean lower prices for us - the consumers.
Competition by itself isn't a bad thing, as humanity as a whole would never have progressed as much as we have if we didn't have competition. Just look at the space race between Russia and the United States, or the CPU wars between Intel and AMD to see how competition has benefited society as a whole. For what you said about humanity being stuck on earth, we might have never landed a man on the moon by now if there wasn't such a motivation between the two superpowers at the time. NASA has been just struggling to maintain any appearance of a major inspirational event since the 70s and the Challenger explosion.
What throws competition off though, are actions which go beyond simple, honest competitive motives... mainly false marketing and greedy corporations in the tech industry today. If this was a sport, there would be a referee around to call fouls and return play to normal. Unfortunately, there's no such referee in our society, especially in international circles where one country doesn't even like another country, and won't bother implementing the same laws or restrictions. Until there's someone or something to enforce fair play, this is going to be the norm.
You mean like Kaffe?
The Java class library, the language standard, and even the bytecode itself has been pretty well documented in many sources across the web. There's nothing preventing you from making your own version should you wish to - it's just that most people have decided that one of the existing implementations are "good enough" for their uses, just like many people decided that Windows 98 was "good enough."
I personally still don't buy this "Java is an SUV" argument. A programming language is a tool, and a bad programmer can write horrible code in any language or environment. I've said this before on ./, but knowing which tool to use and why you're using it is the most important thing to realize when you're programming.
I know that you're somewhat joking, but I would have liked the market share questions from InterAKT to have included not just .NET, J2EE, or ColdFusion, but have also included other languages like Perl and Python (although Python is indeed the base language for Zope). There are still a very large amount of websites built in Perl these days, with Slashdot being one of the most famous. Zend's survey does a bit more to explore the languages that programmers "are familiar with," but does little to see how the competition for PHP is doing.
PHP's great to use for me because it's simple, powerful, and readily available in cheap hosting environments. If Zope, ColdFusion, or J2EE had more availability or less cost, then I would try those as well, but there's something to be said for being able to sign up for a $9/month account and downloading Apache, PHP, and MySQL all without paying for anything other than bandwidth costs. You still can't really compare PHP to the enterprise level of .NET or JSP at this point though, since many features like persistent objects in shared memory really can't be done well in PHP, and I haven't heard anything else about PHP 5 other than further enhancements to the objects and reference systems. PHP-Accelerator gives a great boost to the speed, but I'd really like to see native compilation built into the distribution rather than downloaded separatedly.
All in all though, PHP's a great language for quick development of small to medium sized websites. As the old caveat reads though, use the right tool for the job.
If it's anything like what Microsoft did during the browser wars, it will be standards-compliant, but with helpful proprietary extensions which only work on Microsoft platforms.
This is really nothing new since everyone else (Netscape, Sun, even gcc) does the same thing, but it might be one path he will take. Despite the usual cries of outrage against Microsoft that many Slashdotters make without a thought, they are right that Bill wouldn't be doing this without some other devious, profitable plan involved. He's done it far too often in the past.
The problem with using referer headers is that not all clients provide them. Some people may be using an archaic browser which doesn't send the field, some people may have just typed the URL straight in to the address bar rather than being referred from another website, and some people just plainly disable them for privacy reasons.
Of course, most lawyers won't understand these principles, but for us web development geeks, there's no sense in blocking legimate users just by one single HTTP header which may or may not be there. If you really want to protect your pages, just require registration before reading.
If you know how to point the dish and where the satellites are, I recommend just purchasing one of those trial kits from Radioshack or other places and installing the dish yourself. All you really need is a good place to mount it, a RG6 cable to run into the house, and any switches that you might need for multiple receivers. The receiver will allow you to test the signal strength when you point the dish. Just make sure that there's a 15/30 day money back guarantee on the deal, and you'll be set.
This is actually one of the main advantages that cable has over satellite though; no trees, storms, or other natural phenomenon will disrupt your viewing. It's horrible to be in the middle of a football game and then to have "Searching for signal" as the only thing showing up on your screen. Satellite is cheaper for more content, but it may not be for everyone.
Just a friendly warning from someone who used to do tech support for them...
You know, a few thousand crickets discussing profit schemes, first posts, and Soviet Russia jokes would make quite a lot of noise!
You're right in that it is possible to have the same MD5 sum for multiple files, but the chances of it happening is extremely small for two reasons.
The first reason is that MD5 has 128 bits to describe the file, meaning that there is a 1 in 2^128 chance that any given random bitstream will have the same MD5 sum (Of course, MP3s aren't all that random in portions of the file format, but the basic argument still stands).
The second reason is the very process of verification. In order to verify a file, you must already have a checksum of the original file to compare it to, and you have a file which you think could be the same file, meaning file names and file sizes are already identical. If those files differ by as much as one bit, then they will produce different checksums. If you're willing to try to match a file named "ISO of Windows XP" with a file size of 650.1MB versus a file named "ISO of Mandrake" with a file size of 643.8MB then you're already sure that they're not the same file by the filesize alone.
In short, possible, but extremely unlikely.
SVG is really much, much more than a vector based image format though; it's an entire animation/effects plugin which will work seamlessly with current standards such as XHTML, MathML, CSS, and JavaScript (ECMAScript if you wish to be technical).
Adobe has already placed some very nice demos of embedding SVG within standard web pages. Take a look at some of the things that can be done with it, and you'll quickly see how the SVG standard can
As far as the extra size in download goes, most people have to download Acrobat Reader to read PDF files, which are very common on the web. If SVG ever achieves the same status, I will be very encouraged as a web designer.
Now, if they would only get X3D in order...
To further explain the behavior of computers, I feel that I need to post the reason why many computers crash when used by women: