OK, I couldn't meaningfully say I "hate" Java, because I've never coded in it.
However, this article / blog post does a great job of explaining why I sincerely hope it stays that way.
To (VERY POORLY) summarise the article (long, but well worth a full read) - both the actual necessary syntax, and more broadly, the "cultural conventions" of how you write real-world systems with it, strike me as verbose, ugly, inexpressive, unhuman even, and unnecessarily dogmatic in terms of sticking to OOP / patterns...
Now, I can already here the counter-arguments brewing. "But... all that OOP dogma stuff makes it more consistent, so better to maintain, debug, split a project across a large team of multiple coders, scale or extend, etc, etc".
Yup. Well, I dare say that's fair enough. But I'm not writing large Enterprisey systems. I'm not coding in even a small team of people, let alone a large one. Really, none of that applies to me. If you're a big business and Java makes sense for you then fair enough - I'm not arguing - I'm not a guy who pops up on Slashdot and disses it for the sake it. I'm just saying I'm personally glad I don't have to code in it, nor would I chose to for fun, mostly for the reasons well described in the above article.
For example, it asked me the date on which we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... I knew it was 1945, but don't know the particular date. I wasn't even born until thirty years later.
I know that one off pat, and I wasn't born until thirty-six years later: it's August 6th. Well, maybe the fact I was born exactly thirty-six years later helps me somewhat;-)
The test is an absolute joke though. Asking me questions about pub quiz trivia about ancient greek history and the meaning of the word "xenophobia", this has less than nothing to do with IQ. Apparently I'm the 19th smartest person in London, to which I can only say: LOL.
:shrug: Speak for yourself, I buy almost all my music on CD.
Frankly I fail to see why I would want to spend the same or more, to get considerably less (no artwork / liner notes / lyrics, no physical backup, lossy not lossless audio, nothing I can meaningfully expect to resell... Come to that I've also never ended up in bed with the cute girl who works at ITMS, unlike a physical local record store).
Of course, every time I raise this on slashdot, the only answer I get is "albums only have 1 good track on them, all modern music is rubbish anyway", which says a lot about slashdotters not caring to explore music properly, and essentially nothing about the relative merits of MP3 vs CD in the current consumer marketplace.
Also, the concept that P2P allows Joe Basement to produce the next Britney- or LOTR-beater, whilst an enduringly popular slashdot belief, rather fails to tally with reality. I grant you that in the case of music, technology has near-flattened barriers to entry in terms of production and distribution; in film, perhaps not so much yet, although it's only a matter of (not very much) time IMHO. However, we're yet to see a solution to the third, critical aspect required: promotion/marketing.
Or to put it another way: go make some stunning music, share it on P2P, post it on the web, do not pay for exposure and hype on radio, MTV, tv chat shows, magazine interviews etc, and watch the downloads spectactularly fail to accrue. As yet, sadly, people do not tend to flock to artistic products lacking in marketing clout, and the famous examples supposedly to the contrary (Arctic Monkeys, Sandi Thom etc) only go to prove the point. They were signed before Myspace, and the "OMG, unheard-of band explodes due to the interwebs!" column inches were merely the latest manifestation of good old industry-driven marketing.
Not really. Once I could grant you, but the second time around all serious historians would agree it was the Eastern front which overall defeated the Germans.
You're not really addressing my point there at all.
AFAICS, the only way you are, is (implicitly) saying "(the OpenSSL folks arent at fault because) the Debian guys are REALLY BADLY at fault".
Inasmuch as I want to be chucking around blame (I don't: I don't code C, don't use Debian, haven't got a leg to stand on), I would not treat that blame as zero-sum. By suggesting some may lay with the OpenSSL team, I'm not suggesting Debian didn't screw up at all. Furthermore, what I'm really doing is suggesting "2 grams" of blame may lay with the OpenSSL team, as opposed to the undenied 1 kg with Debian.
Let me put it this way: when I find myself using easily misread voodoo in my code at work, I put in a bloody big comment explaining what and why, even though in practice I'm the only person who ever maintains that code. This is because one day, I will leave that job, and the poor sod who picks up my hackery isn't going to have the option of submitting a patch or even a query "upstream" (ie, to me).
Also, to be honest, if I come back to an obscure part of the codebase after a year, I'm not necessarily going to remember the subtle gotchas in my code.
So basically, any time I find myself doing something which is a potential "gotcha", something "naughty", or unconventional, or hacky, or ambiguous, or magic-number-y, but thinking "this is voodoo, but I have a good reason for it...", I unmissably comment both what the voodoo is, and what the reason for it was. You can't assume other users/maintainers of the code will always have the luxury of conversing with you or gaining your approval.
Anyway - like I said - not trying to flame on OpenSSL, for all I know the relevant code does have such comments, just makin' conversation:)
Sorry, bad form to reply to myself, but I forgot an important qualifier necessary to make my SMTP paragraph even remotely credible in a devil's advocate kind of way;)
I meant to say, the exception is at work, where of course I still use email heavily. BUT, this is Exchange; now, I'm not an Exchange admin so I have no idea if it's SMTP, but knowing MS I suspect the answer is "not really", and conceptually, there's no reason why it would have to be. Within a 'sealed' workplace, nobody cares if you use a different protocol. One more secure / spam proof, which can afford to merrily trample the "need to get emails to/from random unknown addresses" checkbox on the "You have proposed..." list.
Of course for external emails it does get a bit trickier, but I still don't quite believe SMTP is invulnerable - I mean, a huge number of businesses, govt agencies etc do not publish email addresses publically anymore, instead routing you to pseudo-email "contact us" webforms. For (eg) ongoing client/agency relationships, it would not be inconceviable to see businesses start to require people to whitelist each other from within their non-SMTP-Exchange/Outlook world.
Well, like I say, I know that saying SMTP is dead is not just pushing the boat out but sinking it, but for the sake of argument, it's pretty crippled and as such (at risk of) getting widely abandoned...
Why do we have to continue developing the web and forceing it do things way outside is problem domain. USENET did not have to evolve, ftp did not have to evolve, smtp did not, gopher did not, etc etc.
<flamebait>Yeah, and they're all dead.</flamebait>
USENET:
Effectively dead. Now, before all the geeks pop up and say, no, comp.lang.* is great, or alt.binaries* is where it's at, YOU (we) ARE GEEKS. Normal people have never heard of it. Normal ISPs no longer offer NNTP servers, or not full ones, or if they do you only find out about it if you ask the guy behind the "Beware of the leopard" door. The last and only time I saw an ISP welcome pack mention USENET was about '97, and even that was a JANET-affiliated provider working the academic demographic. As for full, free & public NNTP servers...
FTP:
Well, I admit, still in massive use, but I thought all the cutting-edge slashdot kids used SCP instead these days? I remember recently there was a story about an FTP exploit and the overall tone was "archaic, obsolete, why do they still even have it..."
SMTP:
Also dead, IMHO. Killed by spam, RIP. I realise this is my most contentious claim, and rest assured I realise exactly how ludricious, unsubstantiable and trollish it is - but at the same time it's fundamentally true. As the Korean meme goes, "Email is for old people". Well, not just in Korea, in my experience. My parents' are the only social emails I get. Everyone and everything else has moved onto a social network like Facebook (yes, I know/. is full of sneering get-off-my-lawn refuseniks), IM (yes, ditto), web forums, etc. (An example of the "etc" might be Twitter, but you can count me as the sneering refusenik on that one!)
Gopher
Seriously, what? (Note to the inevitable sarcasm-impaired indignant poster brandishing a Wikipedia link: don't bother, I know what it is really...)
So in a nutshell, the reason it has to evolve is: "evolve or die".
Which, like I say, is an answer you reach yourself:
Why can't we leave the web alone, use it for what we use it for now and develop a new rich application protocol if that is what people want. It might end up replacing the web like the web replaced gopher,
Which in turn leads to the real "why" underlying all this - which is why evolve something, instead of starting with a nice clean slate? Well, answering that would turn this post into a novel, but I think that's just the way the real world tends to work, a world of deadlines, budgets, compromises, pragmatism, and where people often don't know what they want until they stumble onto it... Sure, you often end up with a right old mess and it's contrary to the sensibilities of the good design/architecture/algorhythm-conceptualising Geek, but hey...
(PS. Hey, slashdot! You know, when you use a CSS reset stylesheet to zero all margins and padding, you're supposed to recreate your own sensible, good-looking format for things like our friend the <dl> definition list...)
However, I can't help wondering if some fault may arguably lie with the OpenSSL coders. I mean... by his own admission:
Usually it is bad to have any kind of dependency on uninitialised memory, but OpenSSL happens to include a rare case when its OK...
(Emphasis mine)
So, since it's unusually doing something that looks an awful lot like a Cardinal Sin, did this block of code include a prominent:
/*
NB: Yes, we are reading unitialised memory
This is deliberate, NOT A BUG!
<explanation here>
*/
I mean, if you're going to write code that basically looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and which you know is going to head downstream toward a huge bunch of duck-hunters, it's really a good idea to add a big visible note saying THIS IS NOT A DUCK.
You are absolutely right, of course. Likewise the other poster who mentioned a rival firm cutting prices as a result of the new saving, will provide the pressure to likewise pass on savings to remain competitive.
I did not mean to literally suggest that everything ends up pocketed by cartoon greedy bosses, and no savings filter outside the CEO class, but rather imply that this depiction is no less ridiculous than assuming "of course" all the savings will always automatically be passed on to the customer.
Saving businesses $60b a year which, of course, is passed on to consumers
Of course it is. In slashdot-libertarian fantasy land, that is.
Back in reality, which of these conversations seems more plausible?
Hey boss, I figured out how to reduce our cost per widget from £50 to £40.
Great! Those are retailing at, what, £100?
Yup.
Marvellous. Send out the order - new price, £90!
Or
Hey boss, I figured out how to reduce our cost per widget from £50 to £40.
Great! Those are retailing at, what, £100?
Yup.
Marvellous. An extra £10 profit per unit! Tell my secretary bring in that sports car brochure on your way out, my poor Ferrari is looking a little lonely in my luxury mansion's garage.
But you still miss the whole point of the web standards Right Way. Which is that, although it almost always takes a bit more effort, it's almost always possible to have your cake and eat it. Progressive Enhancement.
Your case is a good example of many cases, in fact. The Right Way would be to serve a 'vanilla' (x)html document where links are normal links, ie <a> elements, (or not links at all, if you REALLY know someone without javascript can't use what it links to anyway), which are assigned suitable IDs/classes, and then you have an "init" javascript routine which, assuming javascript is available and enabled in that user-agent, will run through those links in the DOM and rewrite them to your souped-up scripted alternative.
With a library like JQuery it's not even difficult: $('.rewritelink').your_transform_func() for the link rewriting itself, plus it gives you a robust method of attaching your init routine. So you don't even need to worry about browser javascript compatibility, the library abstracts that away from you.
Yes, it increases bandwidth (~53KB for Jquery) and CPU use, you could argue "unnecessarily", but it is a method of you, and everybody (blind and sighted users alike), having their cake and eating it. Hate javascript? Turn it off, get normal links. Resent even downloading the extra.js bytes? Well, at least this way it's a separate document, a distinct layer in the "onion skin", so the end-user still has the control to absolutely prevent that (eg, at HTTP or DOM level, Adblock, Greasemonkey, firewall/proxies, etc). Whereas if you leap into, say, Flash or Silverlight instead, you're leaving people an all-or-nothing choice.
Just some food for thought. Although my post is seemingly "disagreeing", thanks for your post, it was refreshing to read a cogent argument in favour of added web dev whiz-bang, which is rare on slashdot.
Private healthcare is absolutely not illegal over here. See http://bupa.co.uk/ for the best known company in the field. I think the general idea (leaving aside debate as to whether or not it works in practice) is that you don't / shouldn't "need" private healthcare, but if you want to pay for it in order to receive quicker treatment, more luxurious accomodation/food/etc, perform "unnecessary" surgery, etc, you're welcome to.
I work in Canary Wharf as a java devloper and earn about 65K per year and it's quite difficult to afford to rent OR buy in a place that you don't feel like you're taking part in a Crimewatch reconstruction.
I work as a web developer earning 26K and I'm affordably renting a pretty nice semi-detatched house with patio/garden/shed, conservatory, opposite a big park / playground and primary school, in London's third safest borough.
True, if I worked at Canary Wharf my commute would be an hour each way on a good day, but even that's not undoable, and in practice, if I worked at Canary Wharf I'd be fairly confident I could pull a similar trick to what I've pulled now (ie, the above reasonably nice property and location, and a reasonably painless commute).
So, I think you exaggerate a bit. Still, in terms of buying a place, I feel like I can't see any way it'll ever happen, frankly.
you also can tell you have NEVER Been with Be, the only user name you have is get into the member center. the touter doesn't require one.
This doesn't show I have never been with Be, it shows you lack basic English comprehension abilities.
I said we received a router and a username. Not a router and a username for the router. By your own statement, you have a username, for the member center.
Re: the notice. Yes. But you miss the point since pretty much everywhere else is a fixed term contract, and my rental of this property is likewise fixed, by the time I'm 2-3 months into my rental contract and ascertain we're stuck with our crappy speed, plus the 2 months cancellation period (I seem to remember it was 3, but whatever), it's no longer possible to switch to someone else unless I wish to bequeath free broadband to the next tenants of the house.
Wild annacuracy of my statements? Eh? Oh sorry, I forgot this is slashdot, where some random troll magically knows the DSL performance I get better than I do.
Why on earth would I pretend to be with an ISP I'm not? Seriously? Even by geek standards I can't imagine anybody thinking, "I know what would be fun, posting completely fictional consumer experiences to slashdot, on the offchance I wind up annoying some CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK who either WORKS FOR THE COMPANY or has GOD KNOWS WHAT other bizarre reason for being mortally offended that anybody should dare say anything less than ultimately flattering about them.
Also, why on earth do you pull me up on swearing and then stick in your own twice-as-childish personal attacks?
Google isn't a company based around software. It's a company which uses standards instead.... most of their service are web applications built around pretty plain standard-compliant HTML.
(Emphasis mine)
My experience is that less than 5% of C++ programmers can write code that does not have memory leaks and buffer overruns. So even though I can write code that [is] memory leak free...
I don't mean to pick on you personally, since I obviously don't know you from Adam, but...
It must be said, EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. C / C++ vs Java etc, pointers / manual MM vs GC comes up on slashdot, I see comments like this. "The problem is that the vast majority of C developers are crap, present company excepted of course..."
I can't help feeling this is... uh... telling. Everybody thinks they're A-OK, and the problem is with everybody else. 5% can do perfect code, 95% can't?
:shrug: well I never even got hello world to compile in C, so what do I know, but I can't help suspecting these numbers are more illuminating about issues of self-perception than issues of actual error rate...
No, I wouldn't class that as a forum to be honest, I've only been there once or twice but it looked like a news aggregator with story comments. Whereas when I say forum I mean like a phpBB / vBB install with users starting topics, not commenting on posted stories, although with them being user-submitted posted stories I can see where the boundaries blur. Anyway, I was talking about a couple of small music-related communities not worth a slashdotting:)
That blog post wasn't alarming. Or at least, maybe that one was, but try this one, which says a similar sort of thing, but makes its case at greater length, and, well, generally better.
In fact, if you compare and contrast this quote:
... virtually none of the issues on the Acid 3 list are important enough for us to take at this stage. We don't want to be rushing fixes in, or rushing out a release, only to find that we've broken important sites or regressed previous standards support, or worse introduced a security problem. Every API that's exposed to content needs to be tested for compliance and security and reliability...
With this story from the same day, then you get a sense that maybe the Mozilla guys aren't so clueless on this topic as you suggest...
Of course, don't get me wrong, I'm not literally suggesting that the Safari guys were so busy getting to 100/100 they directly introduced that security bug as a result of one of the acid3 fixes. (I know the dates don't work out, for starters).
What I am saying, is that were Mozilla saying "fuck acid3", that's alarming. But when they're actually saying things more like the "only add these fixes with thorough QA", above, or
[acid3 tests] should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform...
We will fix standards compliance bugs; it's what we do. But we won't fix them all with the same priority, and I hope that we won't prioritize Acid 3 fixes artificially highly, because I think that would be a disservice to web developers and users.
Then it's not exactly random attention-seeking as much as carefully and broadly considered development strategy.
All that said, I still completely agree that this new address bar and "blurring the edges" talk is hovering somewhere between stark raving bonkers and epic fail.
That way out doesn't look like it would be any use to me. From the comments:
Would it be possible to add an option to give the same search behaviour that the old address bar gave? i.e. Just search based on the beginning of the URL, not searching against sub-strings within the entire URL and title.
This is what bothers me, not the presentation.
The current autocomplete matching behaviour suits me perfectly. I press "l", I get "last.fm/user/myusername" suggested. Which is what I want. Because it's the most common site I visit beginning with "l". Which is why I frickin' pressed "l", goddamnit! Not because four weeks ago I once visited a page with <title>Little random thing I have no intention of visiting again</title> !! Ditto "f" for facebook, "e" for "en.wikipedia.org", and of course "s" for slashdot... etc etc.
With almost every single one of the short list of daily / most-visited URLs (not even just sites, but specific URLs), "initial letter, down arrow, enter" gets me straight there.
Of course, sometimes this isn't enough. My two most visited forums both begin with "d". Big deal. It's not a chore to type two letters, down arrow, enter.
It is a chore to have the autocomplete search space vastly increased with a bunch of crap, whereby simple mathematics dictates the S/N ratio will be worse and the matching will get worse. I mean, ffs - it's been standard SEO policy to have lengthy <title> tags and lengthy URLs, containing the maximum possible number of keywords and keyphrases, for years. One or two letter autocomplete terms will be guaranteed to match almost every page in my history.
Now, people will say, "great, you're a geeky power user who remembers wikipedia will autocomplete from "e" for "en.", but a normal person would type "wiki"..." In that regard I don't really mind that they're monkeying about with this. I am not wanting to be that stereotypical slashdotter who presumes his own habits are the be-all and end-all, if something works perfectly for him then god forbid millions of people should dare to differ, etc.
In that spirit, whilst I can see what this post is getting at, I wouldn't give a damn if changing this back was in about:config. In my experience, every time I've needed to delve into about:config it was something where I felt, "fine, fair enough, that's the sort of geekism where anyone caring enough to change it will be cool with googling the about:config tweak".
But from what I gather, it's not even possible to change this with about:config. Which makes me want to reach for the:mad: smilies I would have available on the more frivolous boards I frequent.
The Business is the Banks I've most recently finished. I was massively disappointed to be honest. I found the characters unsympathetic, the plot poorly explained, and the ending completely unconvincing. IMHO:)
Espedair St I agree is great. Although when I first picked it up, it annoyed me, I gave up a few chapters in. But I tried again, and I'm glad I did, it was only another few chapters before the narrative tone sank into the background and I really enjoyed it.
My favourite of his would probably be Walking On Glass.
GP knows that:
most of his fiction is fairly readily available in the States; his scifi is a bit harder to come by I think his point was one well worth making, I'm quite into sci-fi but to be honest I find Iain Banks' books more enjoyable than Iain M. Banks'.
Re:but this goes for any stream of information
on
The Geometry of Music
·
· Score: 1
This obviously wasn't the first, and I dare say not the most famous telling of that idea, but I first came across it in Murakami's wonderful Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Which is sort of just about sci-fi, I suppose.
Hmm. Actually, on reflection, I'm not sure - maybe it was the even more wonderful Wind Up Bird. Can't remember. Read both of them anyway;-)
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I couldn't meaningfully say I "hate" Java, because I've never coded in it.
However, this article / blog post does a great job of explaining why I sincerely hope it stays that way.
To (VERY POORLY) summarise the article (long, but well worth a full read) - both the actual necessary syntax, and more broadly, the "cultural conventions" of how you write real-world systems with it, strike me as verbose, ugly, inexpressive, unhuman even, and unnecessarily dogmatic in terms of sticking to OOP / patterns...
Now, I can already here the counter-arguments brewing. "But... all that OOP dogma stuff makes it more consistent, so better to maintain, debug, split a project across a large team of multiple coders, scale or extend, etc, etc".
Yup. Well, I dare say that's fair enough. But I'm not writing large Enterprisey systems. I'm not coding in even a small team of people, let alone a large one. Really, none of that applies to me. If you're a big business and Java makes sense for you then fair enough - I'm not arguing - I'm not a guy who pops up on Slashdot and disses it for the sake it. I'm just saying I'm personally glad I don't have to code in it, nor would I chose to for fun, mostly for the reasons well described in the above article.
I know that one off pat, and I wasn't born until thirty-six years later: it's August 6th. Well, maybe the fact I was born exactly thirty-six years later helps me somewhat ;-)
The test is an absolute joke though. Asking me questions about pub quiz trivia about ancient greek history and the meaning of the word "xenophobia", this has less than nothing to do with IQ. Apparently I'm the 19th smartest person in London, to which I can only say: LOL.
:shrug: Speak for yourself, I buy almost all my music on CD.
Frankly I fail to see why I would want to spend the same or more, to get considerably less (no artwork / liner notes / lyrics, no physical backup, lossy not lossless audio, nothing I can meaningfully expect to resell ... Come to that I've also never ended up in bed with the cute girl who works at ITMS, unlike a physical local record store).
Of course, every time I raise this on slashdot, the only answer I get is "albums only have 1 good track on them, all modern music is rubbish anyway", which says a lot about slashdotters not caring to explore music properly, and essentially nothing about the relative merits of MP3 vs CD in the current consumer marketplace.
Also, the concept that P2P allows Joe Basement to produce the next Britney- or LOTR-beater, whilst an enduringly popular slashdot belief, rather fails to tally with reality. I grant you that in the case of music, technology has near-flattened barriers to entry in terms of production and distribution; in film, perhaps not so much yet, although it's only a matter of (not very much) time IMHO. However, we're yet to see a solution to the third, critical aspect required: promotion/marketing.
Or to put it another way: go make some stunning music, share it on P2P, post it on the web, do not pay for exposure and hype on radio, MTV, tv chat shows, magazine interviews etc, and watch the downloads spectactularly fail to accrue. As yet, sadly, people do not tend to flock to artistic products lacking in marketing clout, and the famous examples supposedly to the contrary (Arctic Monkeys, Sandi Thom etc) only go to prove the point. They were signed before Myspace, and the "OMG, unheard-of band explodes due to the interwebs!" column inches were merely the latest manifestation of good old industry-driven marketing.
LOL, now you're just getting desperate.
Not really. Once I could grant you, but the second time around all serious historians would agree it was the Eastern front which overall defeated the Germans.
You're not really addressing my point there at all.
AFAICS, the only way you are, is (implicitly) saying "(the OpenSSL folks arent at fault because) the Debian guys are REALLY BADLY at fault".
Inasmuch as I want to be chucking around blame (I don't: I don't code C, don't use Debian, haven't got a leg to stand on), I would not treat that blame as zero-sum. By suggesting some may lay with the OpenSSL team, I'm not suggesting Debian didn't screw up at all. Furthermore, what I'm really doing is suggesting "2 grams" of blame may lay with the OpenSSL team, as opposed to the undenied 1 kg with Debian.
Let me put it this way: when I find myself using easily misread voodoo in my code at work, I put in a bloody big comment explaining what and why, even though in practice I'm the only person who ever maintains that code. This is because one day, I will leave that job, and the poor sod who picks up my hackery isn't going to have the option of submitting a patch or even a query "upstream" (ie, to me).
Also, to be honest, if I come back to an obscure part of the codebase after a year, I'm not necessarily going to remember the subtle gotchas in my code.
So basically, any time I find myself doing something which is a potential "gotcha", something "naughty", or unconventional, or hacky, or ambiguous, or magic-number-y, but thinking "this is voodoo, but I have a good reason for it...", I unmissably comment both what the voodoo is, and what the reason for it was. You can't assume other users/maintainers of the code will always have the luxury of conversing with you or gaining your approval.
Anyway - like I said - not trying to flame on OpenSSL, for all I know the relevant code does have such comments, just makin' conversation :)
Sorry, bad form to reply to myself, but I forgot an important qualifier necessary to make my SMTP paragraph even remotely credible in a devil's advocate kind of way ;)
I meant to say, the exception is at work, where of course I still use email heavily. BUT, this is Exchange; now, I'm not an Exchange admin so I have no idea if it's SMTP, but knowing MS I suspect the answer is "not really", and conceptually, there's no reason why it would have to be. Within a 'sealed' workplace, nobody cares if you use a different protocol. One more secure / spam proof, which can afford to merrily trample the "need to get emails to/from random unknown addresses" checkbox on the "You have proposed..." list.
Of course for external emails it does get a bit trickier, but I still don't quite believe SMTP is invulnerable - I mean, a huge number of businesses, govt agencies etc do not publish email addresses publically anymore, instead routing you to pseudo-email "contact us" webforms. For (eg) ongoing client/agency relationships, it would not be inconceviable to see businesses start to require people to whitelist each other from within their non-SMTP-Exchange/Outlook world.
Well, like I say, I know that saying SMTP is dead is not just pushing the boat out but sinking it, but for the sake of argument, it's pretty crippled and as such (at risk of) getting widely abandoned...
<flamebait>Yeah, and they're all dead.</flamebait>
USENET: Effectively dead. Now, before all the geeks pop up and say, no, comp.lang.* is great, or alt.binaries* is where it's at, YOU (we) ARE GEEKS. Normal people have never heard of it. Normal ISPs no longer offer NNTP servers, or not full ones, or if they do you only find out about it if you ask the guy behind the "Beware of the leopard" door. The last and only time I saw an ISP welcome pack mention USENET was about '97, and even that was a JANET-affiliated provider working the academic demographic. As for full, free & public NNTP servers...FTP: Well, I admit, still in massive use, but I thought all the cutting-edge slashdot kids used SCP instead these days? I remember recently there was a story about an FTP exploit and the overall tone was "archaic, obsolete, why do they still even have it..."
SMTP: Also dead, IMHO. Killed by spam, RIP. I realise this is my most contentious claim, and rest assured I realise exactly how ludricious, unsubstantiable and trollish it is - but at the same time it's fundamentally true. As the Korean meme goes, "Email is for old people". Well, not just in Korea, in my experience. My parents' are the only social emails I get. Everyone and everything else has moved onto a social network like Facebook (yes, I know
Gopher Seriously, what? (Note to the inevitable sarcasm-impaired indignant poster brandishing a Wikipedia link: don't bother, I know what it is really...)
So in a nutshell, the reason it has to evolve is: "evolve or die".
Which, like I say, is an answer you reach yourself:
Why can't we leave the web alone, use it for what we use it for now and develop a new rich application protocol if that is what people want. It might end up replacing the web like the web replaced gopher,Which in turn leads to the real "why" underlying all this - which is why evolve something, instead of starting with a nice clean slate? Well, answering that would turn this post into a novel, but I think that's just the way the real world tends to work, a world of deadlines, budgets, compromises, pragmatism, and where people often don't know what they want until they stumble onto it... Sure, you often end up with a right old mess and it's contrary to the sensibilities of the good design/architecture/algorhythm-conceptualising Geek, but hey...
(PS. Hey, slashdot! You know, when you use a CSS reset stylesheet to zero all margins and padding, you're supposed to recreate your own sensible, good-looking format for things like our friend the <dl> definition list...)
One of the OpenSSL developers (or at least, that's what I infer) puts it in even more general terms:
never fix a bug you don't understand.However, I can't help wondering if some fault may arguably lie with the OpenSSL coders. I mean... by his own admission:
Usually it is bad to have any kind of dependency on uninitialised memory, but OpenSSL happens to include a rare case when its OK...(Emphasis mine)
So, since it's unusually doing something that looks an awful lot like a Cardinal Sin, did this block of code include a prominent:
/*NB: Yes, we are reading unitialised memory
This is deliberate, NOT A BUG!
<explanation here>
*/
I mean, if you're going to write code that basically looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and which you know is going to head downstream toward a huge bunch of duck-hunters, it's really a good idea to add a big visible note saying THIS IS NOT A DUCK.
George Best:
"I spent 90% of my money on women, drink and fast cars. The rest I wasted," he was often quoted as saying.You are absolutely right, of course. Likewise the other poster who mentioned a rival firm cutting prices as a result of the new saving, will provide the pressure to likewise pass on savings to remain competitive.
I did not mean to literally suggest that everything ends up pocketed by cartoon greedy bosses, and no savings filter outside the CEO class, but rather imply that this depiction is no less ridiculous than assuming "of course" all the savings will always automatically be passed on to the customer.
Of course it is. In slashdot-libertarian fantasy land, that is.
Back in reality, which of these conversations seems more plausible?
Hey boss, I figured out how to reduce our cost per widget from £50 to £40.
Great! Those are retailing at, what, £100?
Yup.
Marvellous. Send out the order - new price, £90!
OrHey boss, I figured out how to reduce our cost per widget from £50 to £40.
Great! Those are retailing at, what, £100?
Yup.
Marvellous. An extra £10 profit per unit! Tell my secretary bring in that sports car brochure on your way out, my poor Ferrari is looking a little lonely in my luxury mansion's garage.
Yeah, exactly.
But you still miss the whole point of the web standards Right Way. Which is that, although it almost always takes a bit more effort, it's almost always possible to have your cake and eat it. Progressive Enhancement.
Your case is a good example of many cases, in fact. The Right Way would be to serve a 'vanilla' (x)html document where links are normal links, ie <a> elements, (or not links at all, if you REALLY know someone without javascript can't use what it links to anyway), which are assigned suitable IDs/classes, and then you have an "init" javascript routine which, assuming javascript is available and enabled in that user-agent, will run through those links in the DOM and rewrite them to your souped-up scripted alternative.
With a library like JQuery it's not even difficult: $('.rewritelink').your_transform_func() for the link rewriting itself, plus it gives you a robust method of attaching your init routine. So you don't even need to worry about browser javascript compatibility, the library abstracts that away from you.
Yes, it increases bandwidth (~53KB for Jquery) and CPU use, you could argue "unnecessarily", but it is a method of you, and everybody (blind and sighted users alike), having their cake and eating it. Hate javascript? Turn it off, get normal links. Resent even downloading the extra .js bytes? Well, at least this way it's a separate document, a distinct layer in the "onion skin", so the end-user still has the control to absolutely prevent that (eg, at HTTP or DOM level, Adblock, Greasemonkey, firewall/proxies, etc). Whereas if you leap into, say, Flash or Silverlight instead, you're leaving people an all-or-nothing choice.
Just some food for thought. Although my post is seemingly "disagreeing", thanks for your post, it was refreshing to read a cogent argument in favour of added web dev whiz-bang, which is rare on slashdot.
Private healthcare is absolutely not illegal over here. See http://bupa.co.uk/ for the best known company in the field. I think the general idea (leaving aside debate as to whether or not it works in practice) is that you don't / shouldn't "need" private healthcare, but if you want to pay for it in order to receive quicker treatment, more luxurious accomodation/food/etc, perform "unnecessary" surgery, etc, you're welcome to.
I work as a web developer earning 26K and I'm affordably renting a pretty nice semi-detatched house with patio/garden/shed, conservatory, opposite a big park / playground and primary school, in London's third safest borough.
True, if I worked at Canary Wharf my commute would be an hour each way on a good day, but even that's not undoable, and in practice, if I worked at Canary Wharf I'd be fairly confident I could pull a similar trick to what I've pulled now (ie, the above reasonably nice property and location, and a reasonably painless commute).
So, I think you exaggerate a bit. Still, in terms of buying a place, I feel like I can't see any way it'll ever happen, frankly.
This doesn't show I have never been with Be, it shows you lack basic English comprehension abilities.
I said we received a router and a username. Not a router and a username for the router. By your own statement, you have a username, for the member center.
Re: the notice. Yes. But you miss the point since pretty much everywhere else is a fixed term contract, and my rental of this property is likewise fixed, by the time I'm 2-3 months into my rental contract and ascertain we're stuck with our crappy speed, plus the 2 months cancellation period (I seem to remember it was 3, but whatever), it's no longer possible to switch to someone else unless I wish to bequeath free broadband to the next tenants of the house.
Wild annacuracy of my statements? Eh? Oh sorry, I forgot this is slashdot, where some random troll magically knows the DSL performance I get better than I do.
Why on earth would I pretend to be with an ISP I'm not? Seriously? Even by geek standards I can't imagine anybody thinking, "I know what would be fun, posting completely fictional consumer experiences to slashdot, on the offchance I wind up annoying some CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK who either WORKS FOR THE COMPANY or has GOD KNOWS WHAT other bizarre reason for being mortally offended that anybody should dare say anything less than ultimately flattering about them.
Also, why on earth do you pull me up on swearing and then stick in your own twice-as-childish personal attacks?
Conclusion: go away, troll.
Fuck Be.
Really?
Where are these "most" of their applications which are standards-compliant?
I don't mean to pick on you personally, since I obviously don't know you from Adam, but...
It must be said, EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. C / C++ vs Java etc, pointers / manual MM vs GC comes up on slashdot, I see comments like this. "The problem is that the vast majority of C developers are crap, present company excepted of course..."
I can't help feeling this is ... uh ... telling. Everybody thinks they're A-OK, and the problem is with everybody else. 5% can do perfect code, 95% can't?
:shrug: well I never even got hello world to compile in C, so what do I know, but I can't help suspecting these numbers are more illuminating about issues of self-perception than issues of actual error rate...
No, I wouldn't class that as a forum to be honest, I've only been there once or twice but it looked like a news aggregator with story comments. Whereas when I say forum I mean like a phpBB / vBB install with users starting topics, not commenting on posted stories, although with them being user-submitted posted stories I can see where the boundaries blur. Anyway, I was talking about a couple of small music-related communities not worth a slashdotting :)
That blog post wasn't alarming. Or at least, maybe that one was, but try this one, which says a similar sort of thing, but makes its case at greater length, and, well, generally better.
In fact, if you compare and contrast this quote:
... virtually none of the issues on the Acid 3 list are important enough for us to take at this stage. We don't want to be rushing fixes in, or rushing out a release, only to find that we've broken important sites or regressed previous standards support, or worse introduced a security problem. Every API that's exposed to content needs to be tested for compliance and security and reliability...With this story from the same day, then you get a sense that maybe the Mozilla guys aren't so clueless on this topic as you suggest...
Of course, don't get me wrong, I'm not literally suggesting that the Safari guys were so busy getting to 100/100 they directly introduced that security bug as a result of one of the acid3 fixes. (I know the dates don't work out, for starters).
What I am saying, is that were Mozilla saying "fuck acid3", that's alarming. But when they're actually saying things more like the "only add these fixes with thorough QA", above, or
[acid3 tests] should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform...
We will fix standards compliance bugs; it's what we do. But we won't fix them all with the same priority, and I hope that we won't prioritize Acid 3 fixes artificially highly, because I think that would be a disservice to web developers and users.
Then it's not exactly random attention-seeking as much as carefully and broadly considered development strategy.
All that said, I still completely agree that this new address bar and "blurring the edges" talk is hovering somewhere between stark raving bonkers and epic fail.
That way out doesn't look like it would be any use to me. From the comments:
Would it be possible to add an option to give the same search behaviour that the old address bar gave? i.e. Just search based on the beginning of the URL, not searching against sub-strings within the entire URL and title.This is what bothers me, not the presentation.
The current autocomplete matching behaviour suits me perfectly. I press "l", I get "last.fm/user/myusername" suggested. Which is what I want. Because it's the most common site I visit beginning with "l". Which is why I frickin' pressed "l", goddamnit! Not because four weeks ago I once visited a page with <title>Little random thing I have no intention of visiting again</title> !! Ditto "f" for facebook, "e" for "en.wikipedia.org", and of course "s" for slashdot... etc etc.
With almost every single one of the short list of daily / most-visited URLs (not even just sites, but specific URLs), "initial letter, down arrow, enter" gets me straight there.
Of course, sometimes this isn't enough. My two most visited forums both begin with "d". Big deal. It's not a chore to type two letters, down arrow, enter.
It is a chore to have the autocomplete search space vastly increased with a bunch of crap, whereby simple mathematics dictates the S/N ratio will be worse and the matching will get worse. I mean, ffs - it's been standard SEO policy to have lengthy <title> tags and lengthy URLs, containing the maximum possible number of keywords and keyphrases, for years. One or two letter autocomplete terms will be guaranteed to match almost every page in my history.
Now, people will say, "great, you're a geeky power user who remembers wikipedia will autocomplete from "e" for "en.", but a normal person would type "wiki"..." In that regard I don't really mind that they're monkeying about with this. I am not wanting to be that stereotypical slashdotter who presumes his own habits are the be-all and end-all, if something works perfectly for him then god forbid millions of people should dare to differ, etc.
In that spirit, whilst I can see what this post is getting at, I wouldn't give a damn if changing this back was in about:config. In my experience, every time I've needed to delve into about:config it was something where I felt, "fine, fair enough, that's the sort of geekism where anyone caring enough to change it will be cool with googling the about:config tweak".
But from what I gather, it's not even possible to change this with about:config. Which makes me want to reach for the :mad: smilies I would have available on the more frivolous boards I frequent.
The Business is the Banks I've most recently finished. I was massively disappointed to be honest. I found the characters unsympathetic, the plot poorly explained, and the ending completely unconvincing. IMHO :)
Espedair St I agree is great. Although when I first picked it up, it annoyed me, I gave up a few chapters in. But I tried again, and I'm glad I did, it was only another few chapters before the narrative tone sank into the background and I really enjoyed it.
My favourite of his would probably be Walking On Glass.
This obviously wasn't the first, and I dare say not the most famous telling of that idea, but I first came across it in Murakami's wonderful Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World . Which is sort of just about sci-fi, I suppose.
;-)
Hmm. Actually, on reflection, I'm not sure - maybe it was the even more wonderful Wind Up Bird . Can't remember. Read both of them anyway