On this topic, Google attempt to convert all the bloated web pages out there into lightweight HTML, when you search via your mobile. This was quite handy... although it was probably over conservative in splitting pages up, so you constantly had to click to new pages.
Unfortunately, this functionality stopped working a while back - even the feature to "show me the real HTML" - instead it just shows one tiny fraction of the page with various broken links. As a result Google search is now totally useless on my mobile (Nokia 6234), and I had to go use MSN (even though the results aren't quite as good).
Um, yes. Very few mobile devices will support frames.
To make a decent mobile website, it's probably best to think in terms of Netscape 1.0 or even Mosaic. Linear text with a few small images, no styles, no frames, no objects (flash, etc), no background image or colors, and no tables.
I'm kind of surprised to see you laughing at this. People who access your site by mobile are quite likely to be tech-aware business people and influential engineers... you know.. those people who spend lots of money?
To be fair: IE is only using a feature of the OS that "should" be working already.
Of course, this goes to the basic problem with making web browsers more and more like client applications (cf ActiveX): all those millions of lines of code were never designed or coded or tested to survive malicious attacks.
Lesson: any network facing application (including EVERY feature of a web browser) MUST be held to a much HIGHER standard than operating system code that runs locally.
The concept of "dangerous" websites is pretty useless, IMO.
A very large number of otherwise healthy websites present banner ads on their pages. Surely all that someone wanting to distribute malicious code has to do is buy a few dollars worth of advertising and include their exploit in that advertising. Presumably the recent JPG exploits could be easily distributed that way. Not so sure about this one, but the point is that all sites have to be viewed as suspicious because they are often made up of code and media from many different sources.
Yes, they would have to present a credit card to buy their advertising, but there is no shortage of stolen credit cards out there.
these stores like best buy and circuit city really don't add any value over purchasing online
Good point there. I do still browse retail stores (and buy from them if I feel they've helped me) but the actual value is minimal. On the net there will often be more details, good reviews (for some things, fantastic reviews, e.g. dpreview.net for cameras), and user comments. The only thing retail does it physically let you handle things, which is sometimes useful (e.g. to check usability) but often minor. You often can't actually use the product properly.
So is there really value in retail?
Only for certain things, like books, because books have always naturally had a browsing model. But wait - we can do this on the net too! But publishers fiercely resist that...
You could presumably switch it to speakerphone, or you might be using a bluetooth earpiece. Or you can just say "wait a sec"... It's not like you can use a normal smartphone while talking on it.
I don't want to pay money every month or year to support them to avoid ads.
Why not?
If you say "it's not worth it" - how long do you spend reading or posting on slashdot?
Slashdot does actually have a quite good system to pay to remove ads, with good options. And it's cheap. Some other sites assume that there are only "freeloaders" and "premium professionals" and therefore offer only overpriced subscriptions (like IMDB) that are not worthwhile to casual users, but slashdot is not one of those sites.
Voting doesn't do anything either. You can tell this, not just by developer comments, but by the fact there is no report in Bugzilla to show the top N voted bugs. (It's possible to make a custom report that kind of gets the result, but if voting were important for decision making it would presumably be a default report).
Many highly voted bugs have been open for years. This is very dissappointing to me as it's these ones (when in core parts of the browser) that I believe the Mozilla developers should be working on. But they show more interest in shiny new features - fine when you're a volunteer, not so great when you're getting paid.
Speak for yourself. Ads piss me off a lot, and are a MAJOR differentiator between WP and the ad-bloated alternatives like How Stuff Works. While we all learn to ignore ads, that is quite a lot of unconscious effort to do and I would guess it makes reading such sites much less pleasant: like working in a mall all the time. In contrast Wikipedia is like a quiet pleasant lake, you just focus on what you are interested in.
I went a little futher and bought some tracks (about 10). I thought the iTunes process was pretty good and almost reminiscent of the good old audio galaxy days - nice fast downloads, good search.
Then I realised that actually I don't like iTunes much as a player (wrote my own:), that I want to use them on my iRiver player, and that I can't be bothered mucking around with transferring licenses to my work PC. It's just a bunch of hassle that defeats the point of having a nice store.
I also realised that iTunes still doesn't have a fair amount of the stuff I would like to be able to get (and have got from P2P). I'm talking about bands that are not so famous in the English-speaking world like Finnish progressive metal etc.
Very good point. Arguably the more neutral position the state should be taking is to give NO benefits to marriage (maybe just a title for the records, or something).
Unlike Programmer Bob's reimplemented malloc, which contains 12 new security holes, degrades to O(n) performance and fragments memory badly.
The point is: system libraries are ALMOST always better than anything you will be able to write yourself, unless you already specialise in writing such libraries.
How can code by "evolving" if you're throwing it away and doing it again?
Perhaps you mean that people can look at existing code and take the good ideas and do it better.
But that's not evolution. And the problem is that thinking you can do it better, doesn't actually mean you can. At most, it will probably be "more suitable for the way I think and the constraints I do/don't care about".
Newsflash to the author of the article: operating in a memory and CPU constrained environment requires sacrificies.
Things like exceptions have heavy runtime requirements (by comparison Windows CE only got them partially in V3).
Of course, if you're prepared to require a hefty CPU and lots of RAM, which is possible though costly now, then you can just run a full-size monolithic OS like OSX. But that's not comparable to all the tiny underpowered devices Symbian (or CE) can run on.
Amazing how this completely untrue idea has somehow taken hold in the geek mindset. Perhaps everyone EXPECTED Microsoft to do something dumb like port the whole of NT to embedded, but for once they didn't:)
Perhaps you're thinking of the XBox, which uses a stripped-down Win2K kernal.
But Windows CE is a brand new kernal, optimised for embedded. Read wikipedia or any number of other articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_CE "Windows CE is a distinctly different kernel, rather than a "trimmed down" version of desktop Windows."
They have ported across some of the traditional windows stuff on top of it, but the kernal and probably GUI are new.
I think the person who lost mail was a bit silly and complains too hard, but; Looking at it another way.
Given that many people now value email strongly, and the new large spaces allowances (like 1GB) that free email systems offer; perhaps it is just a stupid and deceptive service to offer. Effectively, it's "unreasonable" that an online mail service doesn't have long term retention.
It's a bit like someone offering to sell a very cheap car that "may explode if it turns left too often. Please remember to turn right at least once every 10 corners to avoid this". Basically, they would not be allowed to sell it because a basic expectation of a car is that it shouldn't explode, and likewise, perhaps a basic expectation of email is that it WILL NOT be spontaneously deleted.
To put it more bluntly: maybe there should be minimum standards for anyone offering a large scale public email system.
The definition of being "conservative" is not wanting things to change.
Global warming, if true, forces us to face changing most of our current way of life.
Personally, I think this traditional conservatism is just wrong. It's not a useful way to approach life, struggling against everything new that happens. But it is very human.
Interesting point about email layout. Every time I send a newsletter (confirmed opt-in yes:) which only happens once every few weeks or months, one or a few out of the hundred or so subscribers will apparently: 1. Click the unsubscribe link 2. Then resubscribe. I can't think of any explanation for this except that, they go to the bottom of the mail expecting to click on a link to our site for more info, which until recently was missing. Instead there was the unsubscribe link.
All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to answer questions every once in a while
That's all they have to do now, basically - any modestly popular piece of hardware will probably get a driver if specs are available. But that's the same big "if" that has always been a problem.
Like a modern equivalent of usenet - because most questions will have been asked before, you can usually find the answer. Web forums should in theory have the same result, but I still find Google Groups ten times more focussed, because web forums are buried in ads, banners, spammers and kids chattering.
Many people use this throwaway concept of "dropping it from space". Unfortunately, you can't "drop" anything from something in orbit, like a satellite. Try letting go of an object and it will just hang there beside you, with the same orbital momentum as you.
You have to do a full re-entry with precision rocket burns, taking account turbulence and air resistance on the way down, since your launch platform is going to be in orbit and travelling therefore at some large number of kilometres per second.
This is a very good point. The admins of email systems and ISPs know that the majority of their users want spam filtering as good as possible. A few users are the dummies who keep on buying from spam, but there is no way for the admins to tell who they are and they aren't clueful enough to turn off spam filtering (if it's even an option).
If we could figure out some way to hook up the dummies who buy directly with the spammers, then they could go play with each other without bothering the rest of us.
Of course, spammers are too stupid and stubborn now to bother using reason.
Slashdot Mirror
But you can't use Medusa to take off from the surface...
On this topic, Google attempt to convert all the bloated web pages out there into lightweight HTML, when you search via your mobile. This was quite handy... although it was probably over conservative in splitting pages up, so you constantly had to click to new pages.
Unfortunately, this functionality stopped working a while back - even the feature to "show me the real HTML" - instead it just shows one tiny fraction of the page with various broken links. As a result Google search is now totally useless on my mobile (Nokia 6234), and I had to go use MSN (even though the results aren't quite as good).
Anyone know anything more about this?
Um, yes. Very few mobile devices will support frames.
... you know.. those people who spend lots of money?
To make a decent mobile website, it's probably best to think in terms of Netscape 1.0 or even Mosaic. Linear text with a few small images, no styles, no frames, no objects (flash, etc), no background image or colors, and no tables.
I'm kind of surprised to see you laughing at this. People who access your site by mobile are quite likely to be tech-aware business people and influential engineers
To be fair: IE is only using a feature of the OS that "should" be working already.
Of course, this goes to the basic problem with making web browsers more and more like client applications (cf ActiveX): all those millions of lines of code were never designed or coded or tested to survive malicious attacks.
Lesson: any network facing application (including EVERY feature of a web browser) MUST be held to a much HIGHER standard than operating system code that runs locally.
The concept of "dangerous" websites is pretty useless, IMO.
A very large number of otherwise healthy websites present banner ads on their pages. Surely all that someone wanting to distribute malicious code has to do is buy a few dollars worth of advertising and include their exploit in that advertising. Presumably the recent JPG exploits could be easily distributed that way. Not so sure about this one, but the point is that all sites have to be viewed as suspicious because they are often made up of code and media from many different sources.
Yes, they would have to present a credit card to buy their advertising, but there is no shortage of stolen credit cards out there.
these stores like best buy and circuit city really don't add any value over purchasing online
...
Good point there. I do still browse retail stores (and buy from them if I feel they've helped me) but the actual value is minimal. On the net there will often be more details, good reviews (for some things, fantastic reviews, e.g. dpreview.net for cameras), and user comments.
The only thing retail does it physically let you handle things, which is sometimes useful (e.g. to check usability) but often minor. You often can't actually use the product properly.
So is there really value in retail?
Only for certain things, like books, because books have always naturally had a browsing model. But wait - we can do this on the net too! But publishers fiercely resist that
You could presumably switch it to speakerphone, or you might be using a bluetooth earpiece. Or you can just say "wait a sec"...
It's not like you can use a normal smartphone while talking on it.
I don't want to pay money every month or year to support them to avoid ads.
Why not?
If you say "it's not worth it" - how long do you spend reading or posting on slashdot?
Slashdot does actually have a quite good system to pay to remove ads, with good options. And it's cheap. Some other sites assume that there are only "freeloaders" and "premium professionals" and therefore offer only overpriced subscriptions (like IMDB) that are not worthwhile to casual users, but slashdot is not one of those sites.
Voting doesn't do anything either. You can tell this, not just by developer comments, but by the fact there is no report in Bugzilla to show the top N voted bugs. (It's possible to make a custom report that kind of gets the result, but if voting were important for decision making it would presumably be a default report).
Many highly voted bugs have been open for years. This is very dissappointing to me as it's these ones (when in core parts of the browser) that I believe the Mozilla developers should be working on. But they show more interest in shiny new features - fine when you're a volunteer, not so great when you're getting paid.
Ads in themselves don't piss off the users
Speak for yourself. Ads piss me off a lot, and are a MAJOR differentiator between WP and the ad-bloated alternatives like How Stuff Works. While we all learn to ignore ads, that is quite a lot of unconscious effort to do and I would guess it makes reading such sites much less pleasant: like working in a mall all the time. In contrast Wikipedia is like a quiet pleasant lake, you just focus on what you are interested in.
I went a little futher and bought some tracks (about 10). I thought the iTunes process was pretty good and almost reminiscent of the good old audio galaxy days - nice fast downloads, good search.
:), that I want to use them on my iRiver player, and that I can't be bothered mucking around with transferring licenses to my work PC. It's just a bunch of hassle that defeats the point of having a nice store.
Then I realised that actually I don't like iTunes much as a player (wrote my own
I also realised that iTunes still doesn't have a fair amount of the stuff I would like to be able to get (and have got from P2P). I'm talking about bands that are not so famous in the English-speaking world like Finnish progressive metal etc.
The Economist on removing DRMc fm?story_id=8660389
http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.
Very good point. Arguably the more neutral position the state should be taking is to give NO benefits to marriage (maybe just a title for the records, or something).
Unlike Programmer Bob's reimplemented malloc, which contains 12 new security holes, degrades to O(n) performance and fragments memory badly.
The point is: system libraries are ALMOST always better than anything you will be able to write yourself, unless you already specialise in writing such libraries.
How can code by "evolving" if you're throwing it away and doing it again?
Perhaps you mean that people can look at existing code and take the good ideas and do it better.
But that's not evolution. And the problem is that thinking you can do it better, doesn't actually mean you can. At most, it will probably be "more suitable for the way I think and the constraints I do/don't care about".
Newsflash to the author of the article: operating in a memory and CPU constrained environment requires sacrificies.
Things like exceptions have heavy runtime requirements (by comparison Windows CE only got them partially in V3).
Of course, if you're prepared to require a hefty CPU and lots of RAM, which is possible though costly now, then you can just run a full-size monolithic OS like OSX. But that's not comparable to all the tiny underpowered devices Symbian (or CE) can run on.
Amazing how this completely untrue idea has somehow taken hold in the geek mindset. Perhaps everyone EXPECTED Microsoft to do something dumb like port the whole of NT to embedded, but for once they didn't :)
Perhaps you're thinking of the XBox, which uses a stripped-down Win2K kernal.
But Windows CE is a brand new kernal, optimised for embedded. Read wikipedia or any number of other articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_CE "Windows CE is a distinctly different kernel, rather than a "trimmed down" version of desktop Windows."
They have ported across some of the traditional windows stuff on top of it, but the kernal and probably GUI are new.
I think the person who lost mail was a bit silly and complains too hard, but;
Looking at it another way.
Given that many people now value email strongly, and the new large spaces allowances (like 1GB) that free email systems offer; perhaps it is just a stupid and deceptive service to offer. Effectively, it's "unreasonable" that an online mail service doesn't have long term retention.
It's a bit like someone offering to sell a very cheap car that "may explode if it turns left too often. Please remember to turn right at least once every 10 corners to avoid this". Basically, they would not be allowed to sell it because a basic expectation of a car is that it shouldn't explode, and likewise, perhaps a basic expectation of email is that it WILL NOT be spontaneously deleted.
To put it more bluntly: maybe there should be minimum standards for anyone offering a large scale public email system.
The definition of being "conservative" is not wanting things to change.
Global warming, if true, forces us to face changing most of our current way of life.
Personally, I think this traditional conservatism is just wrong. It's not a useful way to approach life, struggling against everything new that happens. But it is very human.
Interesting point about email layout. :) which only happens once every few weeks or months, one or a few out of the hundred or so subscribers will apparently:
Every time I send a newsletter (confirmed opt-in yes
1. Click the unsubscribe link
2. Then resubscribe.
I can't think of any explanation for this except that, they go to the bottom of the mail expecting to click on a link to our site for more info, which until recently was missing. Instead there was the unsubscribe link.
All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to answer questions every once in a while
That's all they have to do now, basically - any modestly popular piece of hardware will probably get a driver if specs are available. But that's the same big "if" that has always been a problem.
Like a modern equivalent of usenet - because most questions will have been asked before, you can usually find the answer.
Web forums should in theory have the same result, but I still find Google Groups ten times more focussed, because web forums are buried in ads, banners, spammers and kids chattering.
Many people use this throwaway concept of "dropping it from space". Unfortunately, you can't "drop" anything from something in orbit, like a satellite. Try letting go of an object and it will just hang there beside you, with the same orbital momentum as you.
You have to do a full re-entry with precision rocket burns, taking account turbulence and air resistance on the way down, since your launch platform is going to be in orbit and travelling therefore at some large number of kilometres per second.
This is a very good point. The admins of email systems and ISPs know that the majority of their users want spam filtering as good as possible. A few users are the dummies who keep on buying from spam, but there is no way for the admins to tell who they are and they aren't clueful enough to turn off spam filtering (if it's even an option).
If we could figure out some way to hook up the dummies who buy directly with the spammers, then they could go play with each other without bothering the rest of us.
Of course, spammers are too stupid and stubborn now to bother using reason.