You better check your numbers, guy. The ENTIRE US is only 3.7 million square miles, and that's including Alaska which is freaking huge. Anyway, it's not a matter of space, it's that humans are pretty toxic creatures, especially given modern living habits.
As for "millions of years of evolution"... hell yes, it would wire us to do the opposite of what's beneficial. Humanity hasn't spent any meaningful amount of time on an evolutionary scale as a global organism. All our biological patterns are evolved in the setting of small hunter gatherer groups, as that's what we've been for the majority of our race's time on this planet. And since we have MANY examples of over-population and over-industrialization decimating a society, it's certainly not in question that it CAN happen, it's just at what point it would happen on a global scale, and whether we've crossed that point yet.
Okay, but isn't "natural" population control usually achieved through massive infant mortality rates? I wouldn't think animals would see a lack of resources and just stop having kids; humans sure as hell don't, anyway.
As for the how, there's a number of innocuous steps you could take right now. Education is an obvious first step. Then there's monetary incentives; perhaps we could remove the dependent tax credit after the second child, or at least decrease it. If it gets really bad, forced sterilization might be the answer (you're allowed two -- if you hit five or so, that's it, tubes tied). The key distinction, though, is that the laws apply to ALL citizens, not just the poor. It's really quite simple to make a program like that NOT discriminatory... just make the law apply to everyone, and make sure loopholes are very very difficult to come by. Hell, most well-off people end up with smaller families anyway, these days.
Asynchronous operations by definition involve a callback when the request has completed, for the code to resume processing. XmlHttpRequest meets this definition, but when you set an image source in JS, there is no callback. There's no asynchronous aspect to the client-side Javascript. And yes, Google Suggest does qualify, because the client-side code resumes processing once the request has completed. It IS a buzzword, and people tend to apply it to a bunch of stuff that it just doesn't actually describe.
I think our site would be really neat if it had a movie player in the corner showing sports highlights. We can use AJAX to make that happen, right?
They really aren't, though... using cookies lets a site set preferences for you without you having to take the trouble to register. Given the GPs statement that he also refuses to register for anything, it seems like he'd at least like the fact that they can provide SOME customisability without pissing him off even further.
Is Google downloading the image data with XmlHttpRequest and parsing it using xml? No? Well, then, it's DHTML, not AJAX. Changing the source of an image has been around since the early 90s. It's sort of asynchronous, although the client code doesn't actually do any processing on the result so even using the term is debatable. Not everything interactive on a web page is AJAX, and this is a perfect example of something highly interactive that is NOT.
You don't actually work anywhere near real web design, do you? Yeah, Javascript and cookies are overused, but there ARE places where they are quite useful. Cookies are more a style preference (keep it off the url, so that stays uncluttered), although that opens the way to user error and more hacking attempts than you'd get with a cookie. And yeah, you can do pretty much everything with postbacks instead of client side script, but why would you? 98% of people HAVE javascript, and using it can provide a more responsive experience while reducing server load on the host side. It's not that people are "too dumb" to make things work without Javascript, it's that the tradeoffs often are not WORTH making a non-scripted version of a site. Don't like it? Too bad, they're already counting on not getting your business when they make that choice, and the richer experience for the rest of the people that DO use web browser features invented after 1998 makes it more than worthwhile.
Since you still can't get a gmail account without an invite, advertising it on the front page doesn't seem like a great idea. As for their other stuff, you will get links to Google News/Newsgroups and Google Local if you enter relevant search terms, so they show you but only when it helps with your question. And they've been occasionally linking Google Desktop on the front page for months now. Many of us, me included, appreciate the fact that they keep their marketing crap out of our faces when we come back to use their best service.
Your second point is entirely correct. There's still a fair number of places you can go if you're talented, though. IBM isn't TOO harsh, although I believe they might still require a drug screen before you start. Of all places, apparently Microsoft has an amazingly relaxed policy: if you don't get arrested for it ON their property, they don't want to know what you put in your body. Not sure what Google's stance is, but I'd guess it's similar.
If they're at all interested in hiring good people (and your resume is that of a desirable employee) they WILL double check rather than letting some random google results turn them off of you. Hell, most places you would actually WANT to work, if you are a halfway competent programmer and have decent recommendations from previous jobs, they won't care if there's a picture of you smoking a joint out on the net, let alone one that just implies it. Decent companies care that you show up to work, and get your stuff done on time. As long as that happens, what you have done in the past or continue to do in your free time is your business, and they don't want to know.
For the record, SQL 2005 lets you run C# code across your DBs. Used in the right context (processing one entry at a time), it's light years faster than standard queries. So there are already some things that it's being used for, and quite well too.
What exactly are you saying? That because we have a cool computer game that lets you design creatures that would NEVER survive in the real world by dragging and dropping limbs and horns, this is somehow proof that God designed the flagella and neural structure and whatever other complex subsystem ID idiots try to use in their broken logic? THIS IS JUST A GAME. It does exactly nothing to promote the idea of intelligent design.
See, the thing is, in America we are already taxed at ridiculous levels, it's just we PRETEND that we aren't. And we don't get the benefits that countries usually do when they acknowledge their taxation levels. I made around 35k this year, and I was taxed at 30%. Why? Well, there's about 15% in federal income tax, and then theres 8% in social security and medicare taxes, and my employer pays a matching amount to that 8% -- and although that matching amount doesn't show up on my paycheck, you know they have to figure it into the cost of employing me, so it's quite literally money that I earned through my work. Taxes are really twice as high as people think, and we don't even get socialized health care out of it. How's that supposed to be "freedom" exactly?
Except Sony actually WAS promoting it for a while in that vein. Yeah, they kept saying "as powerful as a PS1" rather than PS2, but with a smaller screen to render for as well, which most gamers understand means less work for the GPU. The implication was, "this is a console shrunk down to hand-size, not another top-down tile-based zelda platform". The DS never promised THAT much more than you'd come to expect from the gameboy line.
No offense, but those companies are being really overly paranoid. Javascript is so badly crippled in the name of security that it requires hacks to get it to do USEFUL things, let alone seruptitious activity. Nobody's going to perform any serious security breaches using Javascript without having enough access to the system to cripple it in much less roundabout ways.
And I agree, usually animations and dropdowns are not totally necessary, but it also depends on what you're writing. If it's more of an application-style website, you might have to keep two completely independent implementations of every bit of functionality in order to let it degrade, and that's not cost-effective. And depending on your traffic profile, doing things client-side may be the difference between needing 20 web servers and needing 40. Four postbacks to navigate to a page when you could do the same with 2k of javascript and one postback is nothing to sneeze at.
Yeah, but Microsoft's search engine runs at basically the same speed as Google's. What everyone seems to love Google for is their interfaces, and THAT is helped tremendously by creating very simple, one-use applications. They already piss me off a little, in fact, by not offering some interaction options in GMail, and I predict that as they move into more complex offerings they will continue to falter.
Simple is difficult to do well, yes, but complicated programs aren't always complicated because the people who made them are good. Oftentimes they're complicated because the task you're trying to perform is itself complex. Yeah, you can do your best to simplify the interface, but there's only so much you can do before you start taking away options that the user sometimes NEEDS access to, and then you've become Apple. And that approach has its own set of problems.
Not sure what the professors comment is about, because A) I had very little respect for most of my profs, and B) I haven't been in college for a while now.
somewhere between 2 to 6 times more (I haven't checked our latest numbers). why's that make a difference, though? Whether it's one guy in a basement writing a site for 300 visitors, or a team of 40 writing a site for 2 million, you still have to spend a significant effort in proportion to the rest of the project to enable the system for the 3-5% of users who don't have javascript functionality. Either way, it's not cost effective unless you need low-end compatibility and maximum user coverage for some business reason, which a web portal+search doesn't seem to.
I tend to blame this on capitalism more than Microsoft in specific. You can't deny that a huge amount of work goes into releasing so many products that work for a pretty big chunk of the population, it's just that it's more cost effective to not do that last 3% of polishing, so the market rewards them for releasing almost-completely-finished-but-not-quite products. Google has only avoided this by releasing products that are ridiculously simple in their scope. Once they start trying to make things with more than 5 options in a single application, I bet you'll see them start doing the same thing. (not bashing Google here... I think it's really cool that they've been able to focus on such simple and direct applications, but not all products can work that way)
No offense, but I work in web development and people like you are a royal PITA:-)
I understand that you may not think javascript is completely necessary, but you're asking for access to interactive applications while at the same time demanding that you not be forced to use an up-to-date application runner. If a site is just about giving you information, then great, don't make javascript a requirement. But stuff like live.com with the gadgets and whatnot is not just about displaying text; it's meant to be an application-style experience. Depending what the page does, it's a huge amount of extra work to make it work scriptless, and only benefits a very small percentage of users.
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You better check your numbers, guy. The ENTIRE US is only 3.7 million square miles, and that's including Alaska which is freaking huge. Anyway, it's not a matter of space, it's that humans are pretty toxic creatures, especially given modern living habits.
As for "millions of years of evolution"... hell yes, it would wire us to do the opposite of what's beneficial. Humanity hasn't spent any meaningful amount of time on an evolutionary scale as a global organism. All our biological patterns are evolved in the setting of small hunter gatherer groups, as that's what we've been for the majority of our race's time on this planet. And since we have MANY examples of over-population and over-industrialization decimating a society, it's certainly not in question that it CAN happen, it's just at what point it would happen on a global scale, and whether we've crossed that point yet.
Okay, but isn't "natural" population control usually achieved through massive infant mortality rates? I wouldn't think animals would see a lack of resources and just stop having kids; humans sure as hell don't, anyway.
As for the how, there's a number of innocuous steps you could take right now. Education is an obvious first step. Then there's monetary incentives; perhaps we could remove the dependent tax credit after the second child, or at least decrease it. If it gets really bad, forced sterilization might be the answer (you're allowed two -- if you hit five or so, that's it, tubes tied). The key distinction, though, is that the laws apply to ALL citizens, not just the poor. It's really quite simple to make a program like that NOT discriminatory... just make the law apply to everyone, and make sure loopholes are very very difficult to come by. Hell, most well-off people end up with smaller families anyway, these days.
Asynchronous operations by definition involve a callback when the request has completed, for the code to resume processing. XmlHttpRequest meets this definition, but when you set an image source in JS, there is no callback. There's no asynchronous aspect to the client-side Javascript. And yes, Google Suggest does qualify, because the client-side code resumes processing once the request has completed. It IS a buzzword, and people tend to apply it to a bunch of stuff that it just doesn't actually describe.
I think our site would be really neat if it had a movie player in the corner showing sports highlights. We can use AJAX to make that happen, right?
They really aren't, though... using cookies lets a site set preferences for you without you having to take the trouble to register. Given the GPs statement that he also refuses to register for anything, it seems like he'd at least like the fact that they can provide SOME customisability without pissing him off even further.
Is Google downloading the image data with XmlHttpRequest and parsing it using xml? No? Well, then, it's DHTML, not AJAX. Changing the source of an image has been around since the early 90s. It's sort of asynchronous, although the client code doesn't actually do any processing on the result so even using the term is debatable. Not everything interactive on a web page is AJAX, and this is a perfect example of something highly interactive that is NOT.
For the record, most of what Google Maps does is NOT ajax. Setting image sources and dragging them around is just DHTML.
Well, there's always Javascript Object Notation Language...
uh... I meant "marketing crap" as in advertisements for THEIR other services.
As for their advertising on searches, at least it's very low-key and easy to ignore, unlike most places.
You don't actually work anywhere near real web design, do you? Yeah, Javascript and cookies are overused, but there ARE places where they are quite useful. Cookies are more a style preference (keep it off the url, so that stays uncluttered), although that opens the way to user error and more hacking attempts than you'd get with a cookie. And yeah, you can do pretty much everything with postbacks instead of client side script, but why would you? 98% of people HAVE javascript, and using it can provide a more responsive experience while reducing server load on the host side. It's not that people are "too dumb" to make things work without Javascript, it's that the tradeoffs often are not WORTH making a non-scripted version of a site. Don't like it? Too bad, they're already counting on not getting your business when they make that choice, and the richer experience for the rest of the people that DO use web browser features invented after 1998 makes it more than worthwhile.
Since you still can't get a gmail account without an invite, advertising it on the front page doesn't seem like a great idea. As for their other stuff, you will get links to Google News/Newsgroups and Google Local if you enter relevant search terms, so they show you but only when it helps with your question. And they've been occasionally linking Google Desktop on the front page for months now. Many of us, me included, appreciate the fact that they keep their marketing crap out of our faces when we come back to use their best service.
Your second point is entirely correct. There's still a fair number of places you can go if you're talented, though. IBM isn't TOO harsh, although I believe they might still require a drug screen before you start. Of all places, apparently Microsoft has an amazingly relaxed policy: if you don't get arrested for it ON their property, they don't want to know what you put in your body. Not sure what Google's stance is, but I'd guess it's similar.
If they're at all interested in hiring good people (and your resume is that of a desirable employee) they WILL double check rather than letting some random google results turn them off of you. Hell, most places you would actually WANT to work, if you are a halfway competent programmer and have decent recommendations from previous jobs, they won't care if there's a picture of you smoking a joint out on the net, let alone one that just implies it. Decent companies care that you show up to work, and get your stuff done on time. As long as that happens, what you have done in the past or continue to do in your free time is your business, and they don't want to know.
For the record, SQL 2005 lets you run C# code across your DBs. Used in the right context (processing one entry at a time), it's light years faster than standard queries. So there are already some things that it's being used for, and quite well too.
What exactly are you saying? That because we have a cool computer game that lets you design creatures that would NEVER survive in the real world by dragging and dropping limbs and horns, this is somehow proof that God designed the flagella and neural structure and whatever other complex subsystem ID idiots try to use in their broken logic? THIS IS JUST A GAME. It does exactly nothing to promote the idea of intelligent design.
See, the thing is, in America we are already taxed at ridiculous levels, it's just we PRETEND that we aren't. And we don't get the benefits that countries usually do when they acknowledge their taxation levels. I made around 35k this year, and I was taxed at 30%. Why? Well, there's about 15% in federal income tax, and then theres 8% in social security and medicare taxes, and my employer pays a matching amount to that 8% -- and although that matching amount doesn't show up on my paycheck, you know they have to figure it into the cost of employing me, so it's quite literally money that I earned through my work. Taxes are really twice as high as people think, and we don't even get socialized health care out of it. How's that supposed to be "freedom" exactly?
Except Sony actually WAS promoting it for a while in that vein. Yeah, they kept saying "as powerful as a PS1" rather than PS2, but with a smaller screen to render for as well, which most gamers understand means less work for the GPU. The implication was, "this is a console shrunk down to hand-size, not another top-down tile-based zelda platform". The DS never promised THAT much more than you'd come to expect from the gameboy line.
No offense, but those companies are being really overly paranoid. Javascript is so badly crippled in the name of security that it requires hacks to get it to do USEFUL things, let alone seruptitious activity. Nobody's going to perform any serious security breaches using Javascript without having enough access to the system to cripple it in much less roundabout ways.
And I agree, usually animations and dropdowns are not totally necessary, but it also depends on what you're writing. If it's more of an application-style website, you might have to keep two completely independent implementations of every bit of functionality in order to let it degrade, and that's not cost-effective. And depending on your traffic profile, doing things client-side may be the difference between needing 20 web servers and needing 40. Four postbacks to navigate to a page when you could do the same with 2k of javascript and one postback is nothing to sneeze at.
Yeah, but Microsoft's search engine runs at basically the same speed as Google's. What everyone seems to love Google for is their interfaces, and THAT is helped tremendously by creating very simple, one-use applications. They already piss me off a little, in fact, by not offering some interaction options in GMail, and I predict that as they move into more complex offerings they will continue to falter.
Simple is difficult to do well, yes, but complicated programs aren't always complicated because the people who made them are good. Oftentimes they're complicated because the task you're trying to perform is itself complex. Yeah, you can do your best to simplify the interface, but there's only so much you can do before you start taking away options that the user sometimes NEEDS access to, and then you've become Apple. And that approach has its own set of problems.
Not sure what the professors comment is about, because A) I had very little respect for most of my profs, and B) I haven't been in college for a while now.
What... the... fuck?
In an ideal situation, yes. But again, sometimes the cost of designing for degradation is more than it's worth.
somewhere between 2 to 6 times more (I haven't checked our latest numbers). why's that make a difference, though? Whether it's one guy in a basement writing a site for 300 visitors, or a team of 40 writing a site for 2 million, you still have to spend a significant effort in proportion to the rest of the project to enable the system for the 3-5% of users who don't have javascript functionality. Either way, it's not cost effective unless you need low-end compatibility and maximum user coverage for some business reason, which a web portal+search doesn't seem to.
I tend to blame this on capitalism more than Microsoft in specific. You can't deny that a huge amount of work goes into releasing so many products that work for a pretty big chunk of the population, it's just that it's more cost effective to not do that last 3% of polishing, so the market rewards them for releasing almost-completely-finished-but-not-quite products. Google has only avoided this by releasing products that are ridiculously simple in their scope. Once they start trying to make things with more than 5 options in a single application, I bet you'll see them start doing the same thing. (not bashing Google here... I think it's really cool that they've been able to focus on such simple and direct applications, but not all products can work that way)
The site works fine on Firefox for me... the "ajax everything" and non-standard interface elements are definitely kinda stupid, though.
How's Firefox a victim of this? Opera had tabs first, IE had XmlHttpRequest first... and IE 7 still pales in comparison to Firefox.
No offense, but I work in web development and people like you are a royal PITA :-)
I understand that you may not think javascript is completely necessary, but you're asking for access to interactive applications while at the same time demanding that you not be forced to use an up-to-date application runner. If a site is just about giving you information, then great, don't make javascript a requirement. But stuff like live.com with the gadgets and whatnot is not just about displaying text; it's meant to be an application-style experience. Depending what the page does, it's a huge amount of extra work to make it work scriptless, and only benefits a very small percentage of users.