Just the same, I've never run a real world, long-running application, which was actually faster than C or C++. Never. Not once.
Have you ever once had the ability to properly compare these things?
It seems to me that the differences between applications are far greater than the differences between platforms. Show people a fast Java app, and the response is "It would've been faster in C!" Show them a slow C/C++ app, and of course it's the programmer who gets blamed. It's really not feasible to implement exactly the same app twice, once in C++ and once in Java -- for one, the implementation would have to diverge to take advantage of the features of each language -- and even if it was feasible, it seems like it'd be a truly massive waste of resources.
And if they do diverge significantly... Suppose Java is half the speed of C, which is what I hear lately. That means "all" I need to do is find an optimization which gives me more than a 200% speedup -- but for many applications, there are all sorts of places where you can do that. Add a little caching here, pick a different algorithm there, maybe this entire data structure is poorly designed. That kind of thing is much easier to do in Java.
The question really is just whether Java is fast enough for your application, and if not, which pieces are really suffering. I actually take this to the other extreme -- start in Ruby, and when I find something that really needs speed, rewrite just that part in C. Then I get the best of both worlds -- faster development, a much smaller, more reliable, more maintainable program, and the raw speed when I absolutely need it.
The Java world needs to simply accept that Java is frequently "fast enough" and move on. Stop with the lying. Stop with the hype.
It isn't lying or hype that Java is sometimes, under certain edge cases, faster than C. Whether it is over the scope of an entire program is a different question.
...there are really, really, really good reasons why people still use C, C++, and asm.
I think this again falls into the realm of edge cases. In fact, I don't really see a good use for C++. The pieces of your program which really need that speed should be in C or asm, because you're going to be optimizing tons of shit by hand that the JVM (or your VM of choice) would otherwise try to do for you. The pieces which don't are now a liability -- there's really no reason I should ever segfault in the GUI portion of my code.
Why shouldn't I say Eclipse? I mean, yes, there are other torrent clients which do what Azureus did, and better, but I don't really see much of a competitor to Eclipse besides, say, Netbeans, if you want a portable IDE.
If you don't care about portability, or if you don't care about IDEs, then sure, use vim, Visual Studio, emacs, or Xcode. But I do care about these things, so what else should I be looking at? (I use Kate for most of my day-to-day stuff, for what that's worth.)
do not let yourself be controlled by negative emotions. Positive ones are okay.
So it's okay to be controlled by a positive emotion?
Out of curiosity, would you consider lust to be a positive emotion? What about love? Even letting love control you has consequences. Feeling them is ok, letting them control you isn't necessarily better than letting anger or fear control you.
Actually, getting angry or sad doesn't help any situation.
I disagree, and I can provide two examples:
Sadness can lead to compassion. For example, recently, I volunteered for a few hours at a shelter for victims of sexual abuse. Just looking at the place it was is sad. So was the work -- sorting through donations. What kind of things do they actually need? Clothing that's whole, especially underwear. Soap, shampoo, deodorant. Food. Movies to pass the time while you're effectively locked away from everything you care about, for your own safety.
Now, bawling wouldn't help, certainly. But getting sad means I care what happens there. It means I'm going to go back there from time to time -- and it means when I see an opportunity to help prevent this sort of thing, like, say, help teach a self-defense seminar, I'm going to do that. Without the sadness, I'm not sure I'd be motivated to do these things.
Next, anger can be channeled into energy. For example, I've been in a few scenarios where my computer -- or worse, some server I'm responsible for -- isn't working. Now, smashing it in a fit of rage wouldn't help, and I want to make sure I stay cool enough to work, but the anger means I'm going to go at this full-speed until it's done.
I suppose you're right in this sense: There's a difference between feeling emotion and becoming that emotion. I don't get angry, I feel angry, but I'm still myself, I'm still in control.
But drawing a strict dichotomy between a logical response and an emotional one is artificial. Even if we disregard the fact that most of us are likely to make snap decisions based on emotion before we're even aware of them, and rationalize them after the fact most of the time, what are your logical premises for how you live your life, and how are they not ultimately based on at least your own personal preference, if not an actual emotional reaction?
I've heard people say this, and it sounds like good logic, but it's good in theory and not in face.
Speaking from experience, it definitely helps.
The phrase "I love you" is just words. The Constitution is just words. Hitler's speeches that riled up so many people is just words.
Yes, yes, and yes. What's your point?
Now, in addition, "I love you" can have significant emotional impact if I care that the person loves me. The Constitution is in fact just a sequence of words -- it's how we interpret it that matters. Hitler's speeches were words, but designed for a deliberate impact (so he shouldn't have said them) -- yet it was entirely up to those listening whether they would be moved by those speeches, so they share the blame.
Consider the case of a teacher insulting a student. In high school, kids might not have built up these skills yet, but it's never too early to start. It's not the words that hurt, it's what they mean -- which in this case may be that the teacher doesn't like you. In that case, you have to decide whether you care, and one essential skill is to recognized when you shouldn't. For instance, a teacher who hates you, but never really bothered to get to know you, isn't really someone you need to care about.
But the "just words" part is important, too. Do the words really mean the teacher hates you? In this case, maybe, but quite often, it's not what you think. This runs the full range from a teacher being hard on you because they like you, to misinterpreting the intent behind some words, to actually mishearing them, and everything in between -- like the difference between "Don't stop!" and "Stop! Don't!" If you immediately react emotionally to everything, you could be missing things like that.
So you're on to something here:
But words are how we communicate, they are how we express our thoughts and feelings. They are how we transmit facts and opinions, so the "Just words" argument really doesn't work.
But that's just it -- it's our thoughts and feelings, our facts and opinions, which actually matter.
And again, that's assuming that this opinion does matter. Without knowing more about the situation, I really can't say, but if you're emotionally devastated because one high-school teacher doesn't like you, you're not going to survive college. Not everyone is going to like you, certainly not everyone with authority or training, and if you are to participate in our society at all, you have to come to terms with that, and with the fact that it's not always your fault.
None of this excuses the teacher, but I have to agree that it is almost certainly the student's own problem if one bad teacher screws them up emotionally for decades -- not because it's fair, but because they're the ones who can fix it.
Even for people that will just "shrug it off," there's still damage that hits in ways we don't always see for a long time.
Why are you assuming there's damage? A lot of people are truly driven by a desire to prove someone wrong, someone who said something like "You'll never amount to anything!" That's not damage, that's healthy.
And I agree with cheekyjohnson in this respect -- the slower you are to emotion, or at least to being controlled by emotion, the more of a chance you have to see something like this for what it is -- in this case, a sad, bitter old woman whose opinion isn't worth the bits it's written on. Being able to see that means it's not a matter of "shrugging it off", it's a matter of not getting hit with the emotional payload at all.
People really need to RTFA before they make bold claims like this.
It's not "what-you-know" twice. It's what you know (password) and what you have -- either your phone (for it to send a text to) or the data on your phone.
Or, if we take the "data on the phone" to be "something you know", why wouldn't we conclude the same thing about those little RSA devices?
Granted, the what-you-have is somewhat weak in this case, but it's still a significant improvement over "twice what-you-know", which is what banks tend to use -- where they ask for a password, and then they ask for one of your "security questions".
RTFA. I know, the summary makes it look that way, but it actually relies on either sending you a text message with a one-time code, or having you generate it yourself on a portable device. So it's something you know (password) + something you have (your phone, or the data for the app on your phone.)
What happens if your phone is out of power? The same thing that happens if your laptop battery is out of power.
Or lost? The same thing that happens if your laptop is lost.
Or you just plain don't carry the damned thing everywhere? Honestly, where don't you carry it? I certainly carry my phone a lot more places than I carry my laptop.
And why on earth would this ever be mandatory?
Really, your post has the tone of "OMG how dare they add a feature I don't like!"
I'm certainly not going to set any sort of records for running the mile. Nor should I be allowed to drive the mile and have that count -- that would be cheating, and I shouldn't get a medal for it.
If your a plumber whose job it was to fix the leaky faucet at the job site a mile away, you'd be fired for not driving there and getting the work done as fast as possible.
Still faster would be to tell the customer you fixed it without ever actually going out there. Or if you're a roofer, go out there with a bucket, place bucket under leak, call it good.
Yes, I understand that shortcuts are sometimes necessary. I certainly understand the difference between doing something just to prove you can and getting the job done. The key difference here is a little thing called honesty.
The secondary difference is that if I'm going to claim I can run a mile, and I get recruited into the military, there are situations where I'll be expected to actually run that mile. If my claim is that I'm a pretty awesome driver, and I'm practical enough to know when to drive rather than run, then I should say that -- I shouldn't say I can run a mile if I can't.
That pretty much boils down to, don't lie on your resume -- which is exactly what you're doing if you cheat in a college class.
If you really don't think the task is useful, the way to avoid it is to go to a more technical school, and then see how people feel about hiring you.
Lehigh is pretty damned technical thank you very much. Engineering since 1865.
Sorry, by "technical", I meant "vocational", as opposed to an actual four-year school which aims at a somewhat well-rounded education.
Damn that's a fast strawman neck jerk!
Nope, it's a slippery slope:
I have stated that for tasks unrelated to the job at hand, using existing resources is reasonable.
No, what you specifically stated, unless I'm missing something, is:
And if I could have gotten pre-written papers in college I certainly would have.
In the context of this discussion, I read that as "If I could've paid for a paper and gotten away with it, I would have." If that's not what you intended, I apologize, but then what were you trying to say here?
I can see your point that calc might provide a good working knowledge of problem solving, but I'd suggest a good many topics do that as well.
Not many provide quite the same amount of practice with solving abstract problems. I used to think philosophy was another valid route, though the more I learn about it, the more it seems that philosophy has its foundations in formal logic, which is very closely related to math.
There's also the part about "well-rounded" -- even if you haven't done any calc in decades, you've proven that you are capable of it. If I showed you a difficult integral, even if you couldn't solve it right away, you'd at least know what it was asking and where you needed to go to find out, and you'd probably have it done fairly quickly given access to, say, Wikipedia. Try the same experiment again with someone who's barely finished high school geometry, and I bet you'd get a very different result.
I think that's related to what you said here:
Am I limiting what I could possibly do in the future? sure. I accept that.
But see, having a broad base means you are much more flexible, even if you don't have a working knowledge right now.
And you mentioned you're a programmer -- you're going to need that, if you haven't already. The industry moves too quickly for people who aren't always learning. At the end of the day, either you'll be maintaining COBOL applications on mainframes for the job security (a route I considered, for awhile), or you'll be out of a job. Particularly if you're an American, it
What do those "theories" predict? What testable claims do they make?
Just because it involves natural laws doesn't make it science, any more than putting the word "quantum" on the name of your "alternative medicine" makes it scientific.
Well, for one, this is already happening -- in the journals. It doesn't belong in the schools. You'll also notice that there has yet to be a credible, peer-reviewed publication regarding creationism, while there have been hundreds of thousands regarding evolution.
But think about this.
To be a valid scientific hypothesis, an idea has to at least be falsifiable -- it must, at an absolute minimum, be something that has implications which we can test. Occasionally, evolution proponents will, for fun, create (and then refute) a testable claim of Creationism, like the fact that if the fossils were placed by a global flood, we'd expect them to be randomly distributed, and we'd expect a smooth gradation of rock material, rather than the sharp strata we see today. Creationists themselves seem reluctant to create any testable claim.
There are two other relevant definitions: A fact is a set of repeatable observations. Evolution is a fact in that sense -- we know that things evolve, we've even seen it in our own limited history with the evolution of dogs from wolves, or the selective breeding of the more manageable cows over aurochs, etc. The fossil record clearly bears this out as well.
There's a fact of gravity, also. It reads: "Stuff falls."
Then there's the theory of evolution, which is our hypothesis -- our explanation for why it happens. The best theory we currently have involves natural selection and genetic heredity. This is analogous to the current theories of gravity -- in particular, Einstein's theory is roughly that stuff falls because mass warps the space around it, so it's not actually falling, it's going in a straight line through curved space.
Furthermore, science generally reserves the word "theory" for our currently best hypothesis -- our best explanation for what we observe. Generally, when we talk about scientific theories, we're talking about ideas which are backed with such a mountain of evidence that they can reasonably be accepted as truth, or as at least very nearly true.
Can the same be said of creationism? To even qualify as a hypothesis, it has to first make a testable claim, and every single testable claim about creation, made by creationists or others, has been thoroughly refuted.
But that would just get you to the point where creationism is a hypothesis. It still wouldn't belong in a classroom until you've published dozens of research papers. It's not enough to just show that evolution is wrong (or that "Darwin was wrong" -- classical Darwinian evolution has been significantly refined since Origin of Species), you also need to show that creationism is right.
Then, and only then, do we even start to talk about whether we should be teaching it in classrooms. To teach it before then is at best irresponsible, and the groups which keep bringing this up have been repeatedly shown to be deliberately attempting to undermine science, and even church-state separation, in an effort to push their religious dogma, with the end goal of getting prayer back into schools.
If that's not you, please educate yourself a bit on evolution and "intelligent design" so that the next time someone brings it up, you can see it for what it is.
And if that is you, please stop fucking with our education and political systems. They're doing badly enough without your "help."
I apologize, it wasn't my intent to equate them, but to draw an analogy.
I simply don't know enough about global warming, or whatever people want to call it, to make an informed argument about its validity -- I know far more about evolution. However, what I again notice in both cases is that very few in the scientific community dispute that either is happening, and of those who do, they are almost entirely people with zero experience in the field in question. I agree that the question of what is causing global warming is different than the question of whether it is happening at all, though I again see that even the arguments against it being 'man-made' are from many of the same people, and follow much the same pattern, as the arguments against evolution.
That said, if we turned out to be fantastically wrong about global warming, I wouldn't be nearly as surprised as I would be by a fossil bunny in the Cambrian.
It is a bit troubling. I'm not sure if it's the case for climate change, but I know that with evolution, the problem is that by the time you actually understand enough about the evolution/ID "debate" to make an intelligent comment, you also know enough to see ID for what it is, and you probably know enough about evolution to find it very hard to deny.
Essentially, it's difficult to get close to something without also becoming biased in some way.
I think about the biggest difference is how a particular community goes about evaluating its own claims. Astrologers tend to pat each other on the back. Evolutionists tend to look for new and interesting places where the theory of evolution fails, because that's a sure way to get a paper published. So the question is, how much scrutiny, peer-review, and outright challenge has the research on climate change had to face? What are the methods used, etc?
As a techie, I know my 'writing' skills generally are below par.
As a techie, I know my writing skills are actually useful every single day. Commenting my code, writing specs, or just plain communication skills during a meeting as we try to figure out how we're going to implement... well, anything that's a big enough job it requires more than one person. I suppose it's possible you managed to go 15 years without having to do that, but I certainly wouldn't want to work with, let alone hire, anyone who couldn't communicate.
If the task is that menial, why not find an easier way?
If that "easier way" is cheating, you don't deserve the degree. It's that simple.
Look, I'm not much of an athlete. I'm certainly not going to set any sort of records for running the mile. Nor should I be allowed to drive the mile and have that count -- that would be cheating, and I shouldn't get a medal for it.
If you really don't think the task is useful, the way to avoid it is to go to a more technical school, and then see how people feel about hiring you.
Incidentally, I certainly wouldn't hire you at this point, knowing you're the sort of person who would cheat to get out of some work. If you're that easy to buy off, what happens when actual money is involved? How could I trust you with any corporate secrets, knowing you'd sell them to make a buck?
And if not, what's the difference? Why is it ok to cheat to get a degree, but not to make a quick buck?
Ditto for other things like physics, chemistry and calc. I'm a programmer, if I need to know those equations, I'll look them up.
And the physics tests I've taken, I get plenty of equations to work with. Equations are useless if you don't know the concepts, and you won't know the concepts if you don't get at least some experience dealing with those equations.
Calc is especially interesting, because you aren't really going to get at all good at it by working with equation sheets or tables. It's not enough to know that [sin(x)]^2 can be written as [1-cos(2x)]/2, or that the integral of 1/x is ln(x). If you think you're going to do well in calculus just because you have the formulas, that's as delusional as thinking a syntax reference makes you a good programmer. You need to have enough experience working with these things to see how to actually apply them.
You could argue that calc isn't directly useful in your job, and that's fair. I strongly suspect the biggest reason they teach it is because of the way of thinking it cultivates -- if you're the kind of person who can solve calc problems, you're probably the kind of person who can solve programming or engineering problems.
My favorite example was freshman physics. A hall mate got a copy of the previous years test through his fraternity. We studied every concept on that test.
As another poster pointed out, that's fine, if you actually got the concepts rather than just memorizing the answers. It isn't as if the physics has changed significantly since last year, especially at the freshman level.
The point is whether you actually cheated -- for example, if you bring in an answer sheet to the exam and just copy answers, or if you turn them in for homework.
If professors aren't going to work to create tests for their students, it doesn't exactly set a good example for the students.
I'd much rather have my professors work on helping students who don't get it, or on their other responsibilities besides teaching -- like actually doing new research -- than creating dozens of sample problems to cover the exact same material.
What's more, I don't see how it's the professor's responsibility to set any sort of example to you, especially if you don't intend to become a professor.
Have exams and tests that make you think rather than just reg
One thing that makes me an A student is that I don't cheat -- that I spend the 10+ hours and actually learn the material, so I'm ready for the next class that builds on it.
Another thing that makes me an A student is that I don't take on too many courses, and I manage my time well enough, that I don't end up 10+ hours short on study time for any class.
Notice how your parent post was modded to +5, and this one was modded to -1.
I'm really, really sick of this meme of "I'm going to say something blasphemous to Slashdot, so of course I'm about to get modded down." I tend to see plenty of intelligent comments that go against whatever you think the groupthink is, and they tend to be modded up, although there are some cases where bitching about mods causes an otherwise intelligent comment to get modded down in a twisted sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
And can you "keep the flow going while resources are still loading" more easily with a synchronous model? Especially with some sort of threading model? That's where I'm confused -- I don't mean that async is easy, but it certainly seems easier than the alternatives.
C is becoming less and less relevant. Not only are mobile subscriptions prevalent, but we have wifi everywhere. It's on airplanes.
I find myself wondering what the overlap is between those who are using a laptop on a bus and those who know how to spider a web-based help system with 'wget -r'.
Ah, sorry. I was using "they" to be a gender-neutral singular pronoun, which English doesn't really have. I meant specifically that far7 doesn't support Chrome.
You've also gained the multiple points of failure of web services with their variable ethics...
How is this different than software developers with variable ethics? The only difference is where the data is stored, and since a web application can operate entirely offline, including offline storage, that's a design detail.
bigger target for data sellouts/hacking(facebook),
I'm not really sure what Facebook has to do with this, especially as there are plenty of non-web applications for talking to Facebook -- so again we see that taking it off the web doesn't necessarily help. In this case, it's not that Facebook is web-based, but the fundamental nature of this sort of social network -- Facebook could be implemented with entirely non-Web clients, and it'd still have the same problems. Blaming the Web for Facebook is about as logical as blaming PHP, because Facebook happens to be written in PHP.
When it's your machine you control what's going on.
I don't see how this changes anything. You'll have to be way more precise about what I'm supposedly controlling here. If what you mean is this:
You can always switch OSes,
Yes, I can -- and the more of my programs are OS-independent, the easier it is. When the majority of what I do with a computer is on the Web, it's inherently OS-independent.
change programs,
If I ignore the issue of data, I can change web applications much more easily than native applications. There's no installing/uninstalling, I just open another URL.
If I consider data, then I can only change native applications when they've put some effort into being interoperable -- in particular, they have to share formats, etc. I don't see how this is different than web applications cooperating through APIs and common protocols. Right now, I have some (though far from all) of my emails in Gmail, and some of my schedule data in Google Calendar, and a vanishingly smaller fraction of my documents stored in Google Docs. In the case of Gmail and Google Calendar, both support open standard protocols (iCalendar, IMAP), so any other service could import my data that way. Google Docs publishes an API which would make it similarly easy.
control where your data is stored,
I control exactly how much data I put in each web service.
backup to your own media,
As mentioned above, if standard protocols are supported, it should be similarly easy to backup to my own media as it is to import my data wholesale to another service. Of course, this assumes I'm better at backup than, say, Google. For most people, it's a safe assumption that the web service can't possibly be worse at backup than the user.
verify your own security,
While the exposure is going to be a bit different, unless I'm sandboxing stuff to an absurd extent, a local proprietary app doesn't allow me to "verify my own security" any more than a web app does. A local open source app is significantly better, and I would argue that it's likely more secure, but I doubt I would ever be tempted to verify it myself by doing a code review.
You see, just because it's physically on your machine doesn't mean you have control. You may theoretically have control, but ultimately, the only way you have control is by not installing software you don't trust. The fundamental principle is the same here -- you don't use web services you don't trust. The only real difference is that open source might have had a bit more peer-review.
China hacking Google, big one...
Same problem happens if China hacks Microsoft and delivers an unwanted Windows Update, giving them full access to your machine. Or are you going to disable updates, and thus be vulnerable to China gaining access through an unpatched vulnerability? All this means is they hav
...while replying to a post which said it's easier than the alternative -- which was replying to a post which said we should go back to desktop apps for everything.
indeed it is with it's mishmash of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, server-side languages, asynchronicity, multiple browsers to support.
Contrast that with your options with a desktop app. Any little quirk in what versions of software the user has installed, or how they're configured, or how they talk to each other. As mcrbids said:
...combination of an antivirus package and MS Office (no, I'm NOT KIDDING) causes your application to mysteriously stop working.
And that's assuming you're only doing Windows. Now imagine you want to do other OSes -- Mac, Linux, etc. Now you've finally got all that handled, maybe you used some decent cross-platform toolkit like qt or wxwindows, and suddenly your boss goes OMG IPAD, so you've now got a brand-new platform with its own UI toolkit and its own rules -- oh, and Android, just to be sure.
Multiple browsers is a bitch, but it is much easier than the alternative.
As for the blend of technologies you have to use, I'd say much the same thing. HTML isn't the best GUI toolkit, but it does have some advantages. If multiple languages is really an issue, you can find options to run JavaScript on the server. On the desktop, you're likely stuck with either async or threads, and as far as stability goes, I'll take async every time.
It's not easy, but it's easier than desktop development.
If they are without JavaScript, you are stuck within the "power of expression" of HTML.
If they are without JavaScript, they're probably not the target market anyway. But suggesting that this limits you to HTML... really? I guess server side code doesn't exist?
Lapse of mouth, my apologies (the server side logic is implicitly understood as present)
Then what's your point? If the problem is that raw HTML isn't fun to write, I always work with at least a tool like Haml, and often plenty of server-side libraries which handle HTML generation.
If they are "powered" by JavaScript, the cross-browser compatibility and debugging/tracing on "what the hell is wrong" becomes quickly a nightmare...
Having done web development, frankly, no it doesn't, not if you know what you're doing.
Yeap, this is why many Web2.0 interfaces look different enough in different browsers?
I wouldn't say "looking different" is necessarily a problem for all apps, and there certainly is significant work needed to support multiple browsers -- though certainly no more than it takes to deal with multiple OSes, or even just multiple weird setups on a single OS, if you really want to go back to desktop apps. (Remember, the original claim is that web development is easier than desktop development.)
But that's also not the point. You were complaining about debugging/tracing and figuring out "what the hell is wrong", and that was never the hard part. It wasn't that we couldn't figure out what IE was doing wrong, it's what we'd have to do to work around it so it'd run in IE.
Yes. yes, I believe you... you are a very accurate typer and never mis-type a variable name when using it.
Never mis-typed a variable name and had it turn up as something other than, say, "undefined" -- and there are tools which check for poor style, like implicit use of globals.
Method overriding is awkward and method overloading is missing.
I disagree with the former, and don't really care about the latter. That might be a matter of taste, though.
No, indeed no deadlock, they simply suffer from race-conditions. Awfully. For instance, loading the/. and pressing the "LogIn" link too soon (before the necessary scripts are fully initialized) results in nothing. Need to reload the entire page and wait a bit (2-3 seconds) until the adverts (requested via JS) ran completely before the script on the "LogIn" link is initialized (by a JS that runs later)....
While a race condition is possible, I don't see how what you suggested could possibly be a race condition. Poor design, maybe -- there's no reason why the ads need to load completely, they should be using the DOMContentLoaded event -- but having a UI control not work until it's initialized makes perfect sense.
A race condition would be more like, you click the login link and this somehow screws up the page state so nothing works until you reload the page.
almost everything is asynchronous,
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Yes, it is. It does mean extensive workarounds when you need a synchronous behavior.
While I prefer a saner concurrency model than either, I think the issues with threading are a bit more difficult to deal with than the issues with async. At least with an async model, I know my data isn't going to change out from under me within a given block, whereas with a thread, I have to guard against that data changing at any time, no matter what else I'm doing.
it's OK if we agree to disagree.
I don't think that's really needed, but I get the point -- I disagree with you, but I don't hate you.
...aside from the fact that they do server-side user-agent detection and require specific versions of Firefox. Cool concept, but that's neither a web game or an HTML5 game, it's a Firefox game. They might as well have used XUL.
Power is down, you, your business is down. No thanks, we'll stick to paper.
Really? That's the best you can come up with? They have internet on airplanes now. It's getting harder and harder to find a place without Internet. Internet's down at work? Grab some laptops and head over to your local Starbucks.
Oh, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but much as I wish they'd die, mainframes are still going strong, and IBM is even selling new ones. If you want job security, become a mainframe programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
Just the same, I've never run a real world, long-running application, which was actually faster than C or C++. Never. Not once.
Have you ever once had the ability to properly compare these things?
It seems to me that the differences between applications are far greater than the differences between platforms. Show people a fast Java app, and the response is "It would've been faster in C!" Show them a slow C/C++ app, and of course it's the programmer who gets blamed. It's really not feasible to implement exactly the same app twice, once in C++ and once in Java -- for one, the implementation would have to diverge to take advantage of the features of each language -- and even if it was feasible, it seems like it'd be a truly massive waste of resources.
And if they do diverge significantly... Suppose Java is half the speed of C, which is what I hear lately. That means "all" I need to do is find an optimization which gives me more than a 200% speedup -- but for many applications, there are all sorts of places where you can do that. Add a little caching here, pick a different algorithm there, maybe this entire data structure is poorly designed. That kind of thing is much easier to do in Java.
The question really is just whether Java is fast enough for your application, and if not, which pieces are really suffering. I actually take this to the other extreme -- start in Ruby, and when I find something that really needs speed, rewrite just that part in C. Then I get the best of both worlds -- faster development, a much smaller, more reliable, more maintainable program, and the raw speed when I absolutely need it.
The Java world needs to simply accept that Java is frequently "fast enough" and move on. Stop with the lying. Stop with the hype.
It isn't lying or hype that Java is sometimes, under certain edge cases, faster than C. Whether it is over the scope of an entire program is a different question.
...there are really, really, really good reasons why people still use C, C++, and asm.
I think this again falls into the realm of edge cases. In fact, I don't really see a good use for C++. The pieces of your program which really need that speed should be in C or asm, because you're going to be optimizing tons of shit by hand that the JVM (or your VM of choice) would otherwise try to do for you. The pieces which don't are now a liability -- there's really no reason I should ever segfault in the GUI portion of my code.
Why shouldn't I say Eclipse? I mean, yes, there are other torrent clients which do what Azureus did, and better, but I don't really see much of a competitor to Eclipse besides, say, Netbeans, if you want a portable IDE.
If you don't care about portability, or if you don't care about IDEs, then sure, use vim, Visual Studio, emacs, or Xcode. But I do care about these things, so what else should I be looking at? (I use Kate for most of my day-to-day stuff, for what that's worth.)
do not let yourself be controlled by negative emotions. Positive ones are okay.
So it's okay to be controlled by a positive emotion?
Out of curiosity, would you consider lust to be a positive emotion? What about love? Even letting love control you has consequences. Feeling them is ok, letting them control you isn't necessarily better than letting anger or fear control you.
Actually, getting angry or sad doesn't help any situation.
I disagree, and I can provide two examples:
Sadness can lead to compassion. For example, recently, I volunteered for a few hours at a shelter for victims of sexual abuse. Just looking at the place it was is sad. So was the work -- sorting through donations. What kind of things do they actually need? Clothing that's whole, especially underwear. Soap, shampoo, deodorant. Food. Movies to pass the time while you're effectively locked away from everything you care about, for your own safety.
Now, bawling wouldn't help, certainly. But getting sad means I care what happens there. It means I'm going to go back there from time to time -- and it means when I see an opportunity to help prevent this sort of thing, like, say, help teach a self-defense seminar, I'm going to do that. Without the sadness, I'm not sure I'd be motivated to do these things.
Next, anger can be channeled into energy. For example, I've been in a few scenarios where my computer -- or worse, some server I'm responsible for -- isn't working. Now, smashing it in a fit of rage wouldn't help, and I want to make sure I stay cool enough to work, but the anger means I'm going to go at this full-speed until it's done.
I suppose you're right in this sense: There's a difference between feeling emotion and becoming that emotion. I don't get angry, I feel angry, but I'm still myself, I'm still in control.
But drawing a strict dichotomy between a logical response and an emotional one is artificial. Even if we disregard the fact that most of us are likely to make snap decisions based on emotion before we're even aware of them, and rationalize them after the fact most of the time, what are your logical premises for how you live your life, and how are they not ultimately based on at least your own personal preference, if not an actual emotional reaction?
I've heard people say this, and it sounds like good logic, but it's good in theory and not in face.
Speaking from experience, it definitely helps.
The phrase "I love you" is just words. The Constitution is just words. Hitler's speeches that riled up so many people is just words.
Yes, yes, and yes. What's your point?
Now, in addition, "I love you" can have significant emotional impact if I care that the person loves me. The Constitution is in fact just a sequence of words -- it's how we interpret it that matters. Hitler's speeches were words, but designed for a deliberate impact (so he shouldn't have said them) -- yet it was entirely up to those listening whether they would be moved by those speeches, so they share the blame.
Consider the case of a teacher insulting a student. In high school, kids might not have built up these skills yet, but it's never too early to start. It's not the words that hurt, it's what they mean -- which in this case may be that the teacher doesn't like you. In that case, you have to decide whether you care, and one essential skill is to recognized when you shouldn't. For instance, a teacher who hates you, but never really bothered to get to know you, isn't really someone you need to care about.
But the "just words" part is important, too. Do the words really mean the teacher hates you? In this case, maybe, but quite often, it's not what you think. This runs the full range from a teacher being hard on you because they like you, to misinterpreting the intent behind some words, to actually mishearing them, and everything in between -- like the difference between "Don't stop!" and "Stop! Don't!" If you immediately react emotionally to everything, you could be missing things like that.
So you're on to something here:
But words are how we communicate, they are how we express our thoughts and feelings. They are how we transmit facts and opinions, so the "Just words" argument really doesn't work.
But that's just it -- it's our thoughts and feelings, our facts and opinions, which actually matter.
And again, that's assuming that this opinion does matter. Without knowing more about the situation, I really can't say, but if you're emotionally devastated because one high-school teacher doesn't like you, you're not going to survive college. Not everyone is going to like you, certainly not everyone with authority or training, and if you are to participate in our society at all, you have to come to terms with that, and with the fact that it's not always your fault.
None of this excuses the teacher, but I have to agree that it is almost certainly the student's own problem if one bad teacher screws them up emotionally for decades -- not because it's fair, but because they're the ones who can fix it.
Even for people that will just "shrug it off," there's still damage that hits in ways we don't always see for a long time.
Why are you assuming there's damage? A lot of people are truly driven by a desire to prove someone wrong, someone who said something like "You'll never amount to anything!" That's not damage, that's healthy.
And I agree with cheekyjohnson in this respect -- the slower you are to emotion, or at least to being controlled by emotion, the more of a chance you have to see something like this for what it is -- in this case, a sad, bitter old woman whose opinion isn't worth the bits it's written on. Being able to see that means it's not a matter of "shrugging it off", it's a matter of not getting hit with the emotional payload at all.
People really need to RTFA before they make bold claims like this.
It's not "what-you-know" twice. It's what you know (password) and what you have -- either your phone (for it to send a text to) or the data on your phone.
Or, if we take the "data on the phone" to be "something you know", why wouldn't we conclude the same thing about those little RSA devices?
Granted, the what-you-have is somewhat weak in this case, but it's still a significant improvement over "twice what-you-know", which is what banks tend to use -- where they ask for a password, and then they ask for one of your "security questions".
RTFA. I know, the summary makes it look that way, but it actually relies on either sending you a text message with a one-time code, or having you generate it yourself on a portable device. So it's something you know (password) + something you have (your phone, or the data for the app on your phone.)
Mod parent -1 Get Off My Lawn.
Seriously.
What happens if your phone is out of power? The same thing that happens if your laptop battery is out of power.
Or lost? The same thing that happens if your laptop is lost.
Or you just plain don't carry the damned thing everywhere? Honestly, where don't you carry it? I certainly carry my phone a lot more places than I carry my laptop.
And why on earth would this ever be mandatory?
Really, your post has the tone of "OMG how dare they add a feature I don't like!"
I'm certainly not going to set any sort of records for running the mile. Nor should I be allowed to drive the mile and have that count -- that would be cheating, and I shouldn't get a medal for it.
If your a plumber whose job it was to fix the leaky faucet at the job site a mile away, you'd be fired for not driving there and getting the work done as fast as possible.
Still faster would be to tell the customer you fixed it without ever actually going out there. Or if you're a roofer, go out there with a bucket, place bucket under leak, call it good.
Yes, I understand that shortcuts are sometimes necessary. I certainly understand the difference between doing something just to prove you can and getting the job done. The key difference here is a little thing called honesty.
The secondary difference is that if I'm going to claim I can run a mile, and I get recruited into the military, there are situations where I'll be expected to actually run that mile. If my claim is that I'm a pretty awesome driver, and I'm practical enough to know when to drive rather than run, then I should say that -- I shouldn't say I can run a mile if I can't.
That pretty much boils down to, don't lie on your resume -- which is exactly what you're doing if you cheat in a college class.
If you really don't think the task is useful, the way to avoid it is to go to a more technical school, and then see how people feel about hiring you.
Lehigh is pretty damned technical thank you very much. Engineering since 1865.
Sorry, by "technical", I meant "vocational", as opposed to an actual four-year school which aims at a somewhat well-rounded education.
Damn that's a fast strawman neck jerk!
Nope, it's a slippery slope:
I have stated that for tasks unrelated to the job at hand, using existing resources is reasonable.
No, what you specifically stated, unless I'm missing something, is:
And if I could have gotten pre-written papers in college I certainly would have.
In the context of this discussion, I read that as "If I could've paid for a paper and gotten away with it, I would have." If that's not what you intended, I apologize, but then what were you trying to say here?
I can see your point that calc might provide a good working knowledge of problem solving, but I'd suggest a good many topics do that as well.
Not many provide quite the same amount of practice with solving abstract problems. I used to think philosophy was another valid route, though the more I learn about it, the more it seems that philosophy has its foundations in formal logic, which is very closely related to math.
There's also the part about "well-rounded" -- even if you haven't done any calc in decades, you've proven that you are capable of it. If I showed you a difficult integral, even if you couldn't solve it right away, you'd at least know what it was asking and where you needed to go to find out, and you'd probably have it done fairly quickly given access to, say, Wikipedia. Try the same experiment again with someone who's barely finished high school geometry, and I bet you'd get a very different result.
I think that's related to what you said here:
Am I limiting what I could possibly do in the future? sure. I accept that.
But see, having a broad base means you are much more flexible, even if you don't have a working knowledge right now.
And you mentioned you're a programmer -- you're going to need that, if you haven't already. The industry moves too quickly for people who aren't always learning. At the end of the day, either you'll be maintaining COBOL applications on mainframes for the job security (a route I considered, for awhile), or you'll be out of a job. Particularly if you're an American, it
What do those "theories" predict? What testable claims do they make?
Just because it involves natural laws doesn't make it science, any more than putting the word "quantum" on the name of your "alternative medicine" makes it scientific.
Well, for one, this is already happening -- in the journals. It doesn't belong in the schools. You'll also notice that there has yet to be a credible, peer-reviewed publication regarding creationism, while there have been hundreds of thousands regarding evolution.
But think about this.
To be a valid scientific hypothesis, an idea has to at least be falsifiable -- it must, at an absolute minimum, be something that has implications which we can test. Occasionally, evolution proponents will, for fun, create (and then refute) a testable claim of Creationism, like the fact that if the fossils were placed by a global flood, we'd expect them to be randomly distributed, and we'd expect a smooth gradation of rock material, rather than the sharp strata we see today. Creationists themselves seem reluctant to create any testable claim.
There are two other relevant definitions: A fact is a set of repeatable observations. Evolution is a fact in that sense -- we know that things evolve, we've even seen it in our own limited history with the evolution of dogs from wolves, or the selective breeding of the more manageable cows over aurochs, etc. The fossil record clearly bears this out as well.
There's a fact of gravity, also. It reads: "Stuff falls."
Then there's the theory of evolution, which is our hypothesis -- our explanation for why it happens. The best theory we currently have involves natural selection and genetic heredity. This is analogous to the current theories of gravity -- in particular, Einstein's theory is roughly that stuff falls because mass warps the space around it, so it's not actually falling, it's going in a straight line through curved space.
Furthermore, science generally reserves the word "theory" for our currently best hypothesis -- our best explanation for what we observe. Generally, when we talk about scientific theories, we're talking about ideas which are backed with such a mountain of evidence that they can reasonably be accepted as truth, or as at least very nearly true.
Can the same be said of creationism? To even qualify as a hypothesis, it has to first make a testable claim, and every single testable claim about creation, made by creationists or others, has been thoroughly refuted.
But that would just get you to the point where creationism is a hypothesis. It still wouldn't belong in a classroom until you've published dozens of research papers. It's not enough to just show that evolution is wrong (or that "Darwin was wrong" -- classical Darwinian evolution has been significantly refined since Origin of Species), you also need to show that creationism is right.
Then, and only then, do we even start to talk about whether we should be teaching it in classrooms. To teach it before then is at best irresponsible, and the groups which keep bringing this up have been repeatedly shown to be deliberately attempting to undermine science, and even church-state separation, in an effort to push their religious dogma, with the end goal of getting prayer back into schools.
If that's not you, please educate yourself a bit on evolution and "intelligent design" so that the next time someone brings it up, you can see it for what it is.
And if that is you, please stop fucking with our education and political systems. They're doing badly enough without your "help."
I apologize, it wasn't my intent to equate them, but to draw an analogy.
I simply don't know enough about global warming, or whatever people want to call it, to make an informed argument about its validity -- I know far more about evolution. However, what I again notice in both cases is that very few in the scientific community dispute that either is happening, and of those who do, they are almost entirely people with zero experience in the field in question. I agree that the question of what is causing global warming is different than the question of whether it is happening at all, though I again see that even the arguments against it being 'man-made' are from many of the same people, and follow much the same pattern, as the arguments against evolution.
That said, if we turned out to be fantastically wrong about global warming, I wouldn't be nearly as surprised as I would be by a fossil bunny in the Cambrian.
It is a bit troubling. I'm not sure if it's the case for climate change, but I know that with evolution, the problem is that by the time you actually understand enough about the evolution/ID "debate" to make an intelligent comment, you also know enough to see ID for what it is, and you probably know enough about evolution to find it very hard to deny.
Essentially, it's difficult to get close to something without also becoming biased in some way.
I think about the biggest difference is how a particular community goes about evaluating its own claims. Astrologers tend to pat each other on the back. Evolutionists tend to look for new and interesting places where the theory of evolution fails, because that's a sure way to get a paper published. So the question is, how much scrutiny, peer-review, and outright challenge has the research on climate change had to face? What are the methods used, etc?
...Wow. I couldn't possibly disagree more.
As a techie, I know my 'writing' skills generally are below par.
As a techie, I know my writing skills are actually useful every single day. Commenting my code, writing specs, or just plain communication skills during a meeting as we try to figure out how we're going to implement... well, anything that's a big enough job it requires more than one person. I suppose it's possible you managed to go 15 years without having to do that, but I certainly wouldn't want to work with, let alone hire, anyone who couldn't communicate.
If the task is that menial, why not find an easier way?
If that "easier way" is cheating, you don't deserve the degree. It's that simple.
Look, I'm not much of an athlete. I'm certainly not going to set any sort of records for running the mile. Nor should I be allowed to drive the mile and have that count -- that would be cheating, and I shouldn't get a medal for it.
If you really don't think the task is useful, the way to avoid it is to go to a more technical school, and then see how people feel about hiring you.
Incidentally, I certainly wouldn't hire you at this point, knowing you're the sort of person who would cheat to get out of some work. If you're that easy to buy off, what happens when actual money is involved? How could I trust you with any corporate secrets, knowing you'd sell them to make a buck?
And if not, what's the difference? Why is it ok to cheat to get a degree, but not to make a quick buck?
Ditto for other things like physics, chemistry and calc. I'm a programmer, if I need to know those equations, I'll look them up.
And the physics tests I've taken, I get plenty of equations to work with. Equations are useless if you don't know the concepts, and you won't know the concepts if you don't get at least some experience dealing with those equations.
Calc is especially interesting, because you aren't really going to get at all good at it by working with equation sheets or tables. It's not enough to know that [sin(x)]^2 can be written as [1-cos(2x)]/2, or that the integral of 1/x is ln(x). If you think you're going to do well in calculus just because you have the formulas, that's as delusional as thinking a syntax reference makes you a good programmer. You need to have enough experience working with these things to see how to actually apply them.
You could argue that calc isn't directly useful in your job, and that's fair. I strongly suspect the biggest reason they teach it is because of the way of thinking it cultivates -- if you're the kind of person who can solve calc problems, you're probably the kind of person who can solve programming or engineering problems.
My favorite example was freshman physics. A hall mate got a copy of the previous years test through his fraternity. We studied every concept on that test.
As another poster pointed out, that's fine, if you actually got the concepts rather than just memorizing the answers. It isn't as if the physics has changed significantly since last year, especially at the freshman level.
The point is whether you actually cheated -- for example, if you bring in an answer sheet to the exam and just copy answers, or if you turn them in for homework.
If professors aren't going to work to create tests for their students, it doesn't exactly set a good example for the students.
I'd much rather have my professors work on helping students who don't get it, or on their other responsibilities besides teaching -- like actually doing new research -- than creating dozens of sample problems to cover the exact same material.
What's more, I don't see how it's the professor's responsibility to set any sort of example to you, especially if you don't intend to become a professor.
Have exams and tests that make you think rather than just reg
One thing that makes me an A student is that I don't cheat -- that I spend the 10+ hours and actually learn the material, so I'm ready for the next class that builds on it.
Another thing that makes me an A student is that I don't take on too many courses, and I manage my time well enough, that I don't end up 10+ hours short on study time for any class.
Notice how your parent post was modded to +5, and this one was modded to -1.
I'm really, really sick of this meme of "I'm going to say something blasphemous to Slashdot, so of course I'm about to get modded down." I tend to see plenty of intelligent comments that go against whatever you think the groupthink is, and they tend to be modded up, although there are some cases where bitching about mods causes an otherwise intelligent comment to get modded down in a twisted sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
As with climate change, the few real scientists who are skeptical seem to be from fields which have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand.
Even so, I would like to point out Project Steve to anyone who wants to claim there's a scientific controversy surrounding evolution.
And can you "keep the flow going while resources are still loading" more easily with a synchronous model? Especially with some sort of threading model? That's where I'm confused -- I don't mean that async is easy, but it certainly seems easier than the alternatives.
...whoops, I fail English today. I meant it to be a gender-neutral plural pronoun, and one which applies to humans, not things.
C is becoming less and less relevant. Not only are mobile subscriptions prevalent, but we have wifi everywhere. It's on airplanes.
I find myself wondering what the overlap is between those who are using a laptop on a bus and those who know how to spider a web-based help system with 'wget -r'.
Ah, sorry. I was using "they" to be a gender-neutral singular pronoun, which English doesn't really have. I meant specifically that far7 doesn't support Chrome.
You've also gained the multiple points of failure of web services with their variable ethics...
How is this different than software developers with variable ethics? The only difference is where the data is stored, and since a web application can operate entirely offline, including offline storage, that's a design detail.
bigger target for data sellouts/hacking(facebook),
I'm not really sure what Facebook has to do with this, especially as there are plenty of non-web applications for talking to Facebook -- so again we see that taking it off the web doesn't necessarily help. In this case, it's not that Facebook is web-based, but the fundamental nature of this sort of social network -- Facebook could be implemented with entirely non-Web clients, and it'd still have the same problems. Blaming the Web for Facebook is about as logical as blaming PHP, because Facebook happens to be written in PHP.
When it's your machine you control what's going on.
I don't see how this changes anything. You'll have to be way more precise about what I'm supposedly controlling here. If what you mean is this:
You can always switch OSes,
Yes, I can -- and the more of my programs are OS-independent, the easier it is. When the majority of what I do with a computer is on the Web, it's inherently OS-independent.
change programs,
If I ignore the issue of data, I can change web applications much more easily than native applications. There's no installing/uninstalling, I just open another URL.
If I consider data, then I can only change native applications when they've put some effort into being interoperable -- in particular, they have to share formats, etc. I don't see how this is different than web applications cooperating through APIs and common protocols. Right now, I have some (though far from all) of my emails in Gmail, and some of my schedule data in Google Calendar, and a vanishingly smaller fraction of my documents stored in Google Docs. In the case of Gmail and Google Calendar, both support open standard protocols (iCalendar, IMAP), so any other service could import my data that way. Google Docs publishes an API which would make it similarly easy.
control where your data is stored,
I control exactly how much data I put in each web service.
backup to your own media,
As mentioned above, if standard protocols are supported, it should be similarly easy to backup to my own media as it is to import my data wholesale to another service. Of course, this assumes I'm better at backup than, say, Google. For most people, it's a safe assumption that the web service can't possibly be worse at backup than the user.
verify your own security,
While the exposure is going to be a bit different, unless I'm sandboxing stuff to an absurd extent, a local proprietary app doesn't allow me to "verify my own security" any more than a web app does. A local open source app is significantly better, and I would argue that it's likely more secure, but I doubt I would ever be tempted to verify it myself by doing a code review.
You see, just because it's physically on your machine doesn't mean you have control. You may theoretically have control, but ultimately, the only way you have control is by not installing software you don't trust. The fundamental principle is the same here -- you don't use web services you don't trust. The only real difference is that open source might have had a bit more peer-review.
China hacking Google, big one...
Same problem happens if China hacks Microsoft and delivers an unwanted Windows Update, giving them full access to your machine. Or are you going to disable updates, and thus be vulnerable to China gaining access through an unpatched vulnerability? All this means is they hav
He was just saying that web development is hard,
...while replying to a post which said it's easier than the alternative -- which was replying to a post which said we should go back to desktop apps for everything.
indeed it is with it's mishmash of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, server-side languages, asynchronicity, multiple browsers to support.
Contrast that with your options with a desktop app. Any little quirk in what versions of software the user has installed, or how they're configured, or how they talk to each other. As mcrbids said:
...combination of an antivirus package and MS Office (no, I'm NOT KIDDING) causes your application to mysteriously stop working.
And that's assuming you're only doing Windows. Now imagine you want to do other OSes -- Mac, Linux, etc. Now you've finally got all that handled, maybe you used some decent cross-platform toolkit like qt or wxwindows, and suddenly your boss goes OMG IPAD, so you've now got a brand-new platform with its own UI toolkit and its own rules -- oh, and Android, just to be sure.
Multiple browsers is a bitch, but it is much easier than the alternative.
As for the blend of technologies you have to use, I'd say much the same thing. HTML isn't the best GUI toolkit, but it does have some advantages. If multiple languages is really an issue, you can find options to run JavaScript on the server. On the desktop, you're likely stuck with either async or threads, and as far as stability goes, I'll take async every time.
It's not easy, but it's easier than desktop development.
If they are without JavaScript, you are stuck within the "power of expression" of HTML.
If they are without JavaScript, they're probably not the target market anyway. But suggesting that this limits you to HTML... really? I guess server side code doesn't exist?
Lapse of mouth, my apologies (the server side logic is implicitly understood as present)
Then what's your point? If the problem is that raw HTML isn't fun to write, I always work with at least a tool like Haml, and often plenty of server-side libraries which handle HTML generation.
If they are "powered" by JavaScript, the cross-browser compatibility and debugging/tracing on "what the hell is wrong" becomes quickly a nightmare...
Having done web development, frankly, no it doesn't, not if you know what you're doing.
Yeap, this is why many Web2.0 interfaces look different enough in different browsers?
I wouldn't say "looking different" is necessarily a problem for all apps, and there certainly is significant work needed to support multiple browsers -- though certainly no more than it takes to deal with multiple OSes, or even just multiple weird setups on a single OS, if you really want to go back to desktop apps. (Remember, the original claim is that web development is easier than desktop development.)
But that's also not the point. You were complaining about debugging/tracing and figuring out "what the hell is wrong", and that was never the hard part. It wasn't that we couldn't figure out what IE was doing wrong, it's what we'd have to do to work around it so it'd run in IE.
Yes. yes, I believe you... you are a very accurate typer and never mis-type a variable name when using it.
Never mis-typed a variable name and had it turn up as something other than, say, "undefined" -- and there are tools which check for poor style, like implicit use of globals.
Method overriding is awkward and method overloading is missing.
I disagree with the former, and don't really care about the latter. That might be a matter of taste, though.
No, indeed no deadlock, they simply suffer from race-conditions. Awfully. /. and pressing the "LogIn" link too soon (before the necessary scripts are fully initialized) results in nothing. Need to reload the entire page and wait a bit (2-3 seconds) until the adverts (requested via JS) ran completely before the script on the "LogIn" link is initialized (by a JS that runs later)....
For instance, loading the
While a race condition is possible, I don't see how what you suggested could possibly be a race condition. Poor design, maybe -- there's no reason why the ads need to load completely, they should be using the DOMContentLoaded event -- but having a UI control not work until it's initialized makes perfect sense.
A race condition would be more like, you click the login link and this somehow screws up the page state so nothing works until you reload the page.
almost everything is asynchronous,
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Yes, it is. It does mean extensive workarounds when you need a synchronous behavior.
While I prefer a saner concurrency model than either, I think the issues with threading are a bit more difficult to deal with than the issues with async. At least with an async model, I know my data isn't going to change out from under me within a given block, whereas with a thread, I have to guard against that data changing at any time, no matter what else I'm doing.
it's OK if we agree to disagree.
I don't think that's really needed, but I get the point -- I disagree with you, but I don't hate you.
...aside from the fact that they do server-side user-agent detection and require specific versions of Firefox. Cool concept, but that's neither a web game or an HTML5 game, it's a Firefox game. They might as well have used XUL.
Power is down, you, your business is down. No thanks, we'll stick to paper.
Really? That's the best you can come up with? They have internet on airplanes now. It's getting harder and harder to find a place without Internet. Internet's down at work? Grab some laptops and head over to your local Starbucks.
Oh, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but much as I wish they'd die, mainframes are still going strong, and IBM is even selling new ones. If you want job security, become a mainframe programmer.