Funny, I worked on a system (ESRI's web mapping system) that did that fully 5 years ago! We used hidden frames & IFrames, not XMLHTTPRequest of course.
That conjured up an image of Grandpa Simpson, who would have finished that comment by saying "...and weeeeeeee liked it that way!".
There was no good reason to use it then either; it was not at all scalable. You AJAX dummies are like each new generation: they think they invented sex.
That explains why I went the LCD route. Also, I love the kick ass wall mount that lets me move my 46 inch LCD about two feet from the wall and swivel it so I can watch it from my kitchen while making dinner.
Not to say projectors don't kick ass, but hey, like OSes... different strokes for different folks...:-) And this isn't to say my TV has been flawless.. I have a Samsung LTP-468W (which took three tries for Samsung to get "right" with no dead pixels), but it meets my needs the best of all the options out there.
Also... projectors (and plasma displays) tend not to support the high resolutions like 1080p (yes, "p"), so using my Mac Mini with it at 1920x1080 makes it the bomb as a (big ass) computer monitor.
Going a step farther, I'd say that since we're talking about entertainment (games), objectivity is secondary to entertainment value, so why should we look to games to model a generic, objective view of the world?
Do game designers need to refute the idea that they are role models?
Two interesting points as we go (hopefully only slightly) off-topic:
Those who argue 'the good side' of religion are ALWAYS thinking through severe myopia. Look around you; World War III is currently igniting on a global scale entirely because of religion. Geek game designers, despite their own over-reactionary limiting biases, (against spirituality), are smart enough to recognize the tom-fool sham that religion is.
I think that is a pretty simplistic argument claiming religion is the root of a specific war (the war on terror), ignoring that the last three major conflicts the United States was involved in (Vietnamese War, Korean War and World War II) were not fought about religion.
Now, if we use your logic, one could say that facism, communism, democracy, or capitalism were the ideologies for which folks would wage war, and thus, anyone who subscribes to any of those views suffers from an ideologues myopia.
In essence, religion is a poor excuse for war, but just because some folks believe it is, does not mean that religion itself is a sham or inherently wrong.
I find it interesting that fiction writers, (that is, people who have learned how to think effectively enough to be able to write a book), are also generally aware that religion is for chumps.
I hope that doesn't sound too harsh, but honestly, religion takes a few good points from spiritual philosophy and warps them into mind-numbing brain poison designed to enslave and limit.
Ignoring the attempts to inflame passions by saying "religion is for chumps", let's consider this: you say that religion takes a few good points from spiritual philosophy and warps them.
I would say that what you're implying is that spirituality is "good" and (organized) religion is "bad".
The problem is not with religion, per se, but with what happens when groups become mobs, or when people abuse their power within a community to incite and inflame tensions to promote violence against others.
So yes, while I respect your view that religion is often misused as an excuse to be intolerant, assinine, and perform evil acts... but in this, it is no different than any other organized group of human beings.
I hear more and more Mac users I work with saying they are getting sick of Aqua and the Chrome DE, that the Benetton metro-sexualism of the iPod fad is making them ill, that the general ubiquity of the device is killing their interest in the device as a cultural signifier.
I think the idea of buying a device as a "cultural signifier" is not exactly the best way to spend your dollars.
But seriously... diluting your statment down, it sounds like the people you're talking to (assuming they exist) are buying Macs and iPods to make a statement and not because the products "just work"?
The only reason Java ended up dominant in enterprise web applications is that Sun pushed it in the Indian diploma mills at a time when it was fashionable among American corporate executives to stick it to American programmers who were getting close to being paid enough money to raise families in the ridiculous cost-of-living male-ghettos like Silicon Valley.
Wow, that's a revisionist history if I ever heard one.
Java was already popular by the time it began getting used for enterprise web applications. There was a big push to leverage Java on the server side circa 1998, and Java Servlets got a lot of positive attention because, when compared to the CGI model of forking a new process for each request, servlets were very efficient and outperformed CGI under load.
That is why Java took off on the web tier. It offered an alternative to CGI for those who were on non-Microsoft platforms (who couldn't use ASP).
Of course, if you just want to rant about outsourcing, you can just continue changing the story...
FortKnox seemed to clear up the confusion about "Sun closer to opening up Java", but on a more general note - I would find Java to be a much more attractive desktop solution if I could compile Java down to an.exe.
Let's set the wayback machine for 1995...
Java became popular because it was a lightweight programming langauge that allowed developers to create applications that could run on a variety of platforms.
That wasn't going to happen if the binaries were Windows executables...
The importance of the Java bytecode format for distributing binaries was a huge reason that Java was able to capture mindshare. Without that, it would have been "just a programming language" and not a new platform for developers.
Is that SGI, HP, Sun, IBM, or Apple you are talking about? Or one of the other ones?
I am old enough to remember them -- and to remember that whenever they show a pie chart of market share, none of them made enough progress to escape the ever-so-descriptive "Other" category.:-)
That said, I do remember the first I saw SGI's GUI and I thought it was Motif done right... but if you say that CDE on a Sun box was a "successful UNIX-based desktop", well.. I'd like to know the criteria that define success!
Let me break it down for you Nutscraper:
1) It's a scripting language
2) It leverages built-in components provided by the underlying system in the form of "scriptable components", of which only one, which will probably be deprecated (WMI) exists right now.
3) The features described in the article don't show me anything that can't be done with AppleScript (or any other scripting interface).
Now, maybe you mistake me for a Mac fanboy, but my dual-G5 sits next to an Opteron box with a giant Sun logo on it, so perhaps you just missed a dose of your meds and got too hyped up to respond logically. You obviously have a chip on your shoulder, but please... I'm only goign to feed your troll once.
IMHO, having a degree is not always necessary. Look at my family
There could be other factors in play... for example, your sisters may have different challenges as women than you do as a man.
Also, depending on your ages, you may have had the good fortune of timing your entrance in to the work force with the dot-com boom.
I don't think that college is necessarily a bad thing, debt and all... but I think that it is very difficult to reduce the factors that make each of you who you are now to the level fo education each of you received.
In Apple's favor, I will say that Automator is a cool "4GL" tool, but it has very little to do with AppleScript. (You could make the same thing on Windows or KDE.)
Keep in mind that the architecture for doing this sort of thing, system-wide, is someting that all of the major platforms have (in some shape or form). That said, despite the bizarre quirky syntax, AppleScript and Automator sound like they deliver the features this new Microsoft shell is hoping to provide.
They're trying to create an object-oriented shell, where all system components are accessible as objects. This is naturally much more complex than a shell and command-line tools based on manipulation of text streams, but includes a lot of theoretical advantages, if it works.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there anything Verizon does that is truly professional? :-)
Funny, I worked on a system (ESRI's web mapping system) that did that fully 5 years ago! We used hidden frames & IFrames, not XMLHTTPRequest of course.
That conjured up an image of Grandpa Simpson, who would have finished that comment by saying "...and weeeeeeee liked it that way!".
There was no good reason to use it then either; it was not at all scalable.
You AJAX dummies are like each new generation: they think they invented sex.
So tell me, Grandpa... why does it work so well for Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth?
Or maybe... just maybe... you didn't know how to do it right. Of course, you probably think you know how to have sex, too. :-)
</feed-troll>
That explains why I went the LCD route. Also, I love the kick ass wall mount that lets me move my 46 inch LCD about two feet from the wall and swivel it so I can watch it from my kitchen while making dinner.
Not to say projectors don't kick ass, but hey, like OSes... different strokes for different folks... :-) And this isn't to say my TV has been flawless.. I have a Samsung LTP-468W (which took three tries for Samsung to get "right" with no dead pixels), but it meets my needs the best of all the options out there.
Also... projectors (and plasma displays) tend not to support the high resolutions like 1080p (yes, "p"), so using my Mac Mini with it at 1920x1080 makes it the bomb as a (big ass) computer monitor.
Even just a year ago, I'd totally agree with you... but the big shift that makes JavaScript valuable is the AJAX paradigm for web applications, which is esssentially the strategy of using XmlHttpRequest objects to send requests that allow you to update snippets of the resident document.
Whoa. Dell uses HP boxes?
Do game designers need to refute the idea that they are role models?
Those who argue 'the good side' of religion are ALWAYS thinking through severe myopia. Look around you; World War III is currently igniting on a global scale entirely because of religion. Geek game designers, despite their own over-reactionary limiting biases, (against spirituality), are smart enough to recognize the tom-fool sham that religion is.
I think that is a pretty simplistic argument claiming religion is the root of a specific war (the war on terror), ignoring that the last three major conflicts the United States was involved in (Vietnamese War, Korean War and World War II) were not fought about religion.
Now, if we use your logic, one could say that facism, communism, democracy, or capitalism were the ideologies for which folks would wage war, and thus, anyone who subscribes to any of those views suffers from an ideologues myopia.
In essence, religion is a poor excuse for war, but just because some folks believe it is, does not mean that religion itself is a sham or inherently wrong.
I find it interesting that fiction writers, (that is, people who have learned how to think effectively enough to be able to write a book), are also generally aware that religion is for chumps.
I hope that doesn't sound too harsh, but honestly, religion takes a few good points from spiritual philosophy and warps them into mind-numbing brain poison designed to enslave and limit.
Ignoring the attempts to inflame passions by saying "religion is for chumps", let's consider this: you say that religion takes a few good points from spiritual philosophy and warps them.
I would say that what you're implying is that spirituality is "good" and (organized) religion is "bad".
The problem is... I don't think religion, when viewed as a communal expression of one's spiritual beliefs, is any more wrong than a group of people getting together to ride bicycles.
The problem is not with religion, per se, but with what happens when groups become mobs, or when people abuse their power within a community to incite and inflame tensions to promote violence against others.
So yes, while I respect your view that religion is often misused as an excuse to be intolerant, assinine, and perform evil acts... but in this, it is no different than any other organized group of human beings.
I agree. Especially since we're all getting so fat!
...until your post. Granted, I've always wondered if they ever found someone with the kahunas to ride that thing flat-out!
In fact, I'm not sure IBM cares about beating Windows on the desktop since they sold their PC manufacturing business.
And SGI? Well, they've been on supercomputers, but really don't seem to have a story when it comes to selling high-end UNIX servers.
I think the idea of buying a device as a "cultural signifier" is not exactly the best way to spend your dollars.
Well... unless it's on a really cool car. :-)
But seriously... diluting your statment down, it sounds like the people you're talking to (assuming they exist) are buying Macs and iPods to make a statement and not because the products "just work"?
Is this something to be proud of..?
Wow, that's a revisionist history if I ever heard one.
Java was already popular by the time it began getting used for enterprise web applications. There was a big push to leverage Java on the server side circa 1998, and Java Servlets got a lot of positive attention because, when compared to the CGI model of forking a new process for each request, servlets were very efficient and outperformed CGI under load.
That is why Java took off on the web tier. It offered an alternative to CGI for those who were on non-Microsoft platforms (who couldn't use ASP).
Of course, if you just want to rant about outsourcing, you can just continue changing the story...
Let's set the wayback machine for 1995...
Java became popular because it was a lightweight programming langauge that allowed developers to create applications that could run on a variety of platforms.
That wasn't going to happen if the binaries were Windows executables...
The importance of the Java bytecode format for distributing binaries was a huge reason that Java was able to capture mindshare. Without that, it would have been "just a programming language" and not a new platform for developers.
Okay, since you asked for it so nicely...
Oh, I wish I had mod points for you, AC... :-)
I am old enough to remember them -- and to remember that whenever they show a pie chart of market share, none of them made enough progress to escape the ever-so-descriptive "Other" category. :-)
That said, I do remember the first I saw SGI's GUI and I thought it was Motif done right... but if you say that CDE on a Sun box was a "successful UNIX-based desktop", well.. I'd like to know the criteria that define success!
Let me break it down for you Nutscraper: 1) It's a scripting language 2) It leverages built-in components provided by the underlying system in the form of "scriptable components", of which only one, which will probably be deprecated (WMI) exists right now. 3) The features described in the article don't show me anything that can't be done with AppleScript (or any other scripting interface). Now, maybe you mistake me for a Mac fanboy, but my dual-G5 sits next to an Opteron box with a giant Sun logo on it, so perhaps you just missed a dose of your meds and got too hyped up to respond logically. You obviously have a chip on your shoulder, but please... I'm only goign to feed your troll once.
There could be other factors in play... for example, your sisters may have different challenges as women than you do as a man.
Also, depending on your ages, you may have had the good fortune of timing your entrance in to the work force with the dot-com boom.
I don't think that college is necessarily a bad thing, debt and all... but I think that it is very difficult to reduce the factors that make each of you who you are now to the level fo education each of you received.
I think it has a whole lot to do with AppleScript. :-)
Keep in mind that the architecture for doing this sort of thing, system-wide, is someting that all of the major platforms have (in some shape or form). That said, despite the bizarre quirky syntax, AppleScript and Automator sound like they deliver the features this new Microsoft shell is hoping to provide.
This sounds a bit like AppleScript, doesn't it?
"Begun, the clone wars have..." -- Yoda :-)
(God, I'm such a nerd. But then again, this is /. )
That said, I think Apple fans tend to come in many flavors, but the common thread we all have a sense that "the man" is oppressing us.
(Granted we're oppressed but remain quite stylish and functional while we flip off "the man" and make faces at "the man" when he's not looking)
I actually began laughing hysterically just thinking of what, exactly, a cow-orker does. Of course, it is just a typo... but a very funny one to me.
(I'm twisted. I admit it)
Totally not politically correct, but that was really funny!