I'm not really sure there's any debate about the accuracy of math and physics articles in Wikipedia, because there's really not much motivation to edit those articles unless you know what you're doing. I've had similar experiences with the computer science and computer engineering areas in wikipedia. They're all very accurate and for the most part well-written, too. The ones everyone keeps complaining about are the ones that constantly get vandalized or are trolled frequently by bored teenagers.
What's the developer to do if most of his target customer base is already on IE7 because they simply don't know any better than to implicitly trust Microsoft and install IE7?
Just try to recover, I guess. The point that I've been trying to make this whole time is that the web development world is a house divided upon itself, and IE7 really didn't fix anything. All of my library of cheap IE6 kludges break in IE7 (well, not all of them, but enough to annoy me). Yet it's not as if IE7 is sufficiently compatible for me to have the majority of my code stay the same from Firefox to IE7. Instead, I have to precariously balance the needs and bugs of three browsers where previously I had to only worry about two.
I don't think it's fair of all these other people who seem to think that I'm kvetching about nothing. It's a serious problem in that I could spend the time I spend working around IE's bugs doing other things, like making prettier websites. Instead, I can think of a handful of circumstances where I've had to tell a client that there just wasn't enough room in their budget to pay me for the time necessary to get everything exactly right. That's a pretty crappy feeling.
Ooooh. Yes that is pretty good news. I can recall many times debating on/. the pointlessness of the ACID 2 test with a lot of IE apologists rallying against its validity. It's good to know that Firefox is rocking it. Now, if only they can stop it from taking up so much damn memory whenever I use it, that'd be pretty nice.
Thanks for the correction. It's been a while since I've been heard on either of those, code or no. I can typically be found on the 2m and 70cm bands, and usually then only when I'm on long car trips or stranded somewhere. It's come in handy sometimes.
You think I don't test in all browsers? I test in Internet Explorer 7 and also in 6, since I do check my logs and I know that IE6 continues to be the majority. Having a mac does not preclude running IE in either Parallels (really nice VM for mac) or, if I'm pressed for time, Wine. Of course I test in all of these except in rare cases where I am developing something that I know will only be used internally and thus I have much more control over the user's choice of browser. That is the only case in which I feel it's okay to say "best viewed in Firefox" or even sometimes "best viewed in Safari".
It sounds to me like you're just jealous of my 30" cinema display;-P
I'm in Chicago. Also, pretty much the only places I've worked haven't been programming shops per se. They've all been design shops. Design, in particular print design, just doesn't happen so great on the PC for a large number of reasons (for me, personally, it's colour representation and mouse precsion, which I'm still not entirely sure what exactly is different but it just feels different when I'm drawing). As for the development aspect of things... I really don't know. It's just extremely difficult for me to imagine doing my web dev thing on any machine that doesn't have a UNIX-like foundation, because I'm in and out of the command line constantly while I work.
Where is it you are? Do your designers also work on PC? Are you in... bizarro world?
Absolutely. Morse code also has the advantage of being usable on a wider range of frequencies, which cannot always be modulated effectively to voice, but can exist as a carrier and travel great distances. This is why bands like the 80 and 160m bands are morse code only. Also, you can scrape together enough parts from broken electronics or from junk (really) to make a radio transmitter capable of generating a carrier wave with no modulation, but even though an FM transmitter is also pretty simple to build, it is not nearly as simple. Any switch becomes a morse code key whereas for voice you need a microphone.
Well met, but I still think that as much as you just demolished most of my talking points there, as a web developer with a typical (read: mac) set up, that's still not particularly helpful. My point remains that I waste a lot of time that I shouldn't have to making things work in IE. Even if systems exist as you're saying to debug my scripts and my DOM issues, that's still two systems that I have to use for doing the same thing, and adds unnecessary complexity to my work.
I understand the XMLHttpRequest thing, but if they were the ones who invented it why'd they do it wrong? And by "wrong" I mean "in such a way as to make compatibility with other browsers difficult".
You probably already know this, but you can install IE6 as a standalone app and just run it out of a folder with all its DLLs in it. I do this constantly for testing.
Frankly, we have a long ways to go and this idle bitching isn't helping.
We're not bitching idly. We're all working three times as hard as we would have to without IE messing everything up.
While I agree that Firefox has its many flaws (it still fails to render ACID properly, for instance, and still doesn't support a lot of the newer, more interesting CSS selectors and attributes), I have to disagree.
Developing for Firefox is an experience of wishing I could use such-and-such CSS attribute, or wishing it didn't automatically slip padding in such-and-such location. It's quirky. It's definitely NOT buggy the way that IE is, though. IE's layout and rendering are so attrocious that they break things that look just fine in other browsers--something that happens only very rarely in Firefox.
As for javascript, it's like a whole different universe. Firefox has a great, if sluggish, javascript interpreter. It gives me access to a debugging console, too, that is far more functional than that in IE. In addition, I can install extensions like Firebug that make the experience almost as easy as profiling code in an application. Meanwhile, IE provides me with no means whatsoever to inspect how it is operating, no way to determine what the problem is if something goes wrong. This is unbelievably frustrating when I make my living writing web *applications*, not just web sites.
The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem; it cannot be said that it improves anything. It raises the bar for frustration tolerance among web developers but that's pretty much it. The only original idea that has come to HTML from Microsoft, sadly, has been the marquee tag, and I'm actually not really sure that it's still supported in IE.
That's why I read the wall street journal still as well as the Chicago Tribune and the New York times. Its important to keep those critical thinking skills going.
I'm actually surprised at myself for not noticing that connection! The viewership of the two are fundamentally different, although believe it or not I have met people who actively view both (not sure how...). Also, since the Daily Show and especially the Colbert Report exist mostly to lampoon our state-sponsored news service (Fox), you can absorb the best of content from the one by viewing the more hilarious alternative.
On a somewhat related note, I am constantly surprised by people dense enough to think that Colbert is sincere. The irreverence of the whole show is completely lost on some, and it's actually fairly brilliant. The two both are, actually, quite brilliant. To all the people who criticize them for liberal bias... wtf is wrong with you? Of course it's liberal biased. The same way that The Wall Street Journal tends to skew conservative and the New York Times tends not to. It's news. Watch it if you want to; watch something else if you don't. People tend to watch or read news that already agrees with their view of the world, though, so whatever.
No. No I'm sorry it's just not. At all. Ever. This isn't a case of Slashthink, it's not a case of your opinion being buried beneath those of countless others (after all, someone modded you insightful just before I hit "reply"). The cold, hard fact of the matter is that your viewpoint is erroneous and others who share it are slowly tearing apart our nice, friendly, secular educational system.
I'm not really sure how you make the jump from ID to forensics, but for something to be a science it must have testable hypotheses (as many others no doubt have pointed out at this point). ID cannot be, simply because even if it is the study of the design of life on this planet, that's kind of like saying art history is a science for much the same reason. It's not. Also, if you're going to claim that you're studying the design, there is no meaningful way of doing so without at least addressing the identity of the designer.
The religious right is not fooling anyone—at least not anyone with two brain cells to rub together—with this story. It is painfully obvious that intelligent design is nothing more than an attempt to subvert science, education, and common sense, replacing each with religious dogma, and forcing this upon children who deserve a balanced and unbiased education.
the Daily Show (never heard of it, actually, and possibly not as much an export as SP is)
The Daily Show is a parody news program shown on Comedy Central here in the US. Ironically enough, studies have shown that viewers of The Daily Show are more informed about world events than viewers of Fox News.
You know... the more I speculate about that, the more creeped out I feel by this.... Let's just kinda leave that up to everyone's imagination shall we?
we'll be long dead before humanity finally understands the universe
Says who? I recall reading that many notable scientists in 1961 said that man would never reach the moon. Didn't take long for them to eat those words. I really hope—and I promise I mean you no offense when I say this—that we'll make it far enough in the next few years for you to eat yours, too. I know it's hard, but optimism just feels great sometimes when you can scare some up.
I guess the only way to find out is to wait and see. Just, you know, try not to die too soon;-P
I kinda see it as a case of 'protect it or lose it'. Just like with certain other industries or businesses, sometimes a company needs to make a (sometimes) unpopular move to attempt to prevent unlicensed use of their trademark or copyrighted images
IANAL, but I believe this practice only applies to trademarks. Also, the unauthorized use has to be sufficiently open and notorious that it could conceivably reach your company's attention. It's actually sufficient, I think, to address the trademark infringement, sorta like Linden Labs a while back with that First Life website. That, of course, wasn't a website making a profit off the trademark and it was fairly obvious that it was satirical in nature. Copyrights can be protected much more selectively because they are always protected.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't aware that he had ever recorded that. It's pretty meaningless except as a performance piece.
I'm not really sure there's any debate about the accuracy of math and physics articles in Wikipedia, because there's really not much motivation to edit those articles unless you know what you're doing. I've had similar experiences with the computer science and computer engineering areas in wikipedia. They're all very accurate and for the most part well-written, too. The ones everyone keeps complaining about are the ones that constantly get vandalized or are trolled frequently by bored teenagers.
Just try to recover, I guess. The point that I've been trying to make this whole time is that the web development world is a house divided upon itself, and IE7 really didn't fix anything. All of my library of cheap IE6 kludges break in IE7 (well, not all of them, but enough to annoy me). Yet it's not as if IE7 is sufficiently compatible for me to have the majority of my code stay the same from Firefox to IE7. Instead, I have to precariously balance the needs and bugs of three browsers where previously I had to only worry about two.
I don't think it's fair of all these other people who seem to think that I'm kvetching about nothing. It's a serious problem in that I could spend the time I spend working around IE's bugs doing other things, like making prettier websites. Instead, I can think of a handful of circumstances where I've had to tell a client that there just wasn't enough room in their budget to pay me for the time necessary to get everything exactly right. That's a pretty crappy feeling.
Ooooh. Yes that is pretty good news. I can recall many times debating on /. the pointlessness of the ACID 2 test with a lot of IE apologists rallying against its validity. It's good to know that Firefox is rocking it. Now, if only they can stop it from taking up so much damn memory whenever I use it, that'd be pretty nice.
Thanks for the correction. It's been a while since I've been heard on either of those, code or no. I can typically be found on the 2m and 70cm bands, and usually then only when I'm on long car trips or stranded somewhere. It's come in handy sometimes.
You think I don't test in all browsers? I test in Internet Explorer 7 and also in 6, since I do check my logs and I know that IE6 continues to be the majority. Having a mac does not preclude running IE in either Parallels (really nice VM for mac) or, if I'm pressed for time, Wine. Of course I test in all of these except in rare cases where I am developing something that I know will only be used internally and thus I have much more control over the user's choice of browser. That is the only case in which I feel it's okay to say "best viewed in Firefox" or even sometimes "best viewed in Safari".
It sounds to me like you're just jealous of my 30" cinema display ;-P
I'm in Chicago. Also, pretty much the only places I've worked haven't been programming shops per se. They've all been design shops. Design, in particular print design, just doesn't happen so great on the PC for a large number of reasons (for me, personally, it's colour representation and mouse precsion, which I'm still not entirely sure what exactly is different but it just feels different when I'm drawing). As for the development aspect of things... I really don't know. It's just extremely difficult for me to imagine doing my web dev thing on any machine that doesn't have a UNIX-like foundation, because I'm in and out of the command line constantly while I work.
Where is it you are? Do your designers also work on PC? Are you in ... bizarro world?
Absolutely. Morse code also has the advantage of being usable on a wider range of frequencies, which cannot always be modulated effectively to voice, but can exist as a carrier and travel great distances. This is why bands like the 80 and 160m bands are morse code only. Also, you can scrape together enough parts from broken electronics or from junk (really) to make a radio transmitter capable of generating a carrier wave with no modulation, but even though an FM transmitter is also pretty simple to build, it is not nearly as simple. Any switch becomes a morse code key whereas for voice you need a microphone.
Ham operator since '96: KF4SOO.
Well met, but I still think that as much as you just demolished most of my talking points there, as a web developer with a typical (read: mac) set up, that's still not particularly helpful. My point remains that I waste a lot of time that I shouldn't have to making things work in IE. Even if systems exist as you're saying to debug my scripts and my DOM issues, that's still two systems that I have to use for doing the same thing, and adds unnecessary complexity to my work.
I understand the XMLHttpRequest thing, but if they were the ones who invented it why'd they do it wrong? And by "wrong" I mean "in such a way as to make compatibility with other browsers difficult".
You probably already know this, but you can install IE6 as a standalone app and just run it out of a folder with all its DLLs in it. I do this constantly for testing.
We're not bitching idly. We're all working three times as hard as we would have to without IE messing everything up.
While I agree that Firefox has its many flaws (it still fails to render ACID properly, for instance, and still doesn't support a lot of the newer, more interesting CSS selectors and attributes), I have to disagree.
Developing for Firefox is an experience of wishing I could use such-and-such CSS attribute, or wishing it didn't automatically slip padding in such-and-such location. It's quirky. It's definitely NOT buggy the way that IE is, though. IE's layout and rendering are so attrocious that they break things that look just fine in other browsers--something that happens only very rarely in Firefox.
As for javascript, it's like a whole different universe. Firefox has a great, if sluggish, javascript interpreter. It gives me access to a debugging console, too, that is far more functional than that in IE. In addition, I can install extensions like Firebug that make the experience almost as easy as profiling code in an application. Meanwhile, IE provides me with no means whatsoever to inspect how it is operating, no way to determine what the problem is if something goes wrong. This is unbelievably frustrating when I make my living writing web *applications*, not just web sites.
The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem; it cannot be said that it improves anything. It raises the bar for frustration tolerance among web developers but that's pretty much it. The only original idea that has come to HTML from Microsoft, sadly, has been the marquee tag, and I'm actually not really sure that it's still supported in IE.
Let all the Slashdotters out there know . . . if it turns out the young-earth creationists actually are right, I will run naked through the streets.
Yes that would be what I was referring to. It makes me sad no one does that anymore.
Can you imagine? "Hey everybody. We found a Higgs boson. LET'S GO STREAKING!!!"
Nobody runs naked in the streets when they do discover something awesome....
Thanks. You just broke Slashdot.
That's the thing. Linden dollars are supposed to equate to real money. You buy them. Why you'd want to do that is beyond me but there it is.
That's why I read the wall street journal still as well as the Chicago Tribune and the New York times. Its important to keep those critical thinking skills going.
I'm actually surprised at myself for not noticing that connection! The viewership of the two are fundamentally different, although believe it or not I have met people who actively view both (not sure how...). Also, since the Daily Show and especially the Colbert Report exist mostly to lampoon our state-sponsored news service (Fox), you can absorb the best of content from the one by viewing the more hilarious alternative.
On a somewhat related note, I am constantly surprised by people dense enough to think that Colbert is sincere. The irreverence of the whole show is completely lost on some, and it's actually fairly brilliant. The two both are, actually, quite brilliant. To all the people who criticize them for liberal bias... wtf is wrong with you? Of course it's liberal biased. The same way that The Wall Street Journal tends to skew conservative and the New York Times tends not to. It's news. Watch it if you want to; watch something else if you don't. People tend to watch or read news that already agrees with their view of the world, though, so whatever.
Eh... so... in short, I agree.
Did the tsunami happen on a Sunday then? I don't remember....
It's good to know that we CS people aren't the only flavour of geek represented on Slashdot. Way to represent the biology folks! *applauds*
No. No I'm sorry it's just not. At all. Ever. This isn't a case of Slashthink, it's not a case of your opinion being buried beneath those of countless others (after all, someone modded you insightful just before I hit "reply"). The cold, hard fact of the matter is that your viewpoint is erroneous and others who share it are slowly tearing apart our nice, friendly, secular educational system.
I'm not really sure how you make the jump from ID to forensics, but for something to be a science it must have testable hypotheses (as many others no doubt have pointed out at this point). ID cannot be, simply because even if it is the study of the design of life on this planet, that's kind of like saying art history is a science for much the same reason. It's not. Also, if you're going to claim that you're studying the design, there is no meaningful way of doing so without at least addressing the identity of the designer.
The religious right is not fooling anyone—at least not anyone with two brain cells to rub together—with this story. It is painfully obvious that intelligent design is nothing more than an attempt to subvert science, education, and common sense, replacing each with religious dogma, and forcing this upon children who deserve a balanced and unbiased education.
So... seriously... just drop it.
The Daily Show is a parody news program shown on Comedy Central here in the US. Ironically enough, studies have shown that viewers of The Daily Show are more informed about world events than viewers of Fox News.
You know... the more I speculate about that, the more creeped out I feel by this.... Let's just kinda leave that up to everyone's imagination shall we?
Says who? I recall reading that many notable scientists in 1961 said that man would never reach the moon. Didn't take long for them to eat those words. I really hope—and I promise I mean you no offense when I say this—that we'll make it far enough in the next few years for you to eat yours, too. I know it's hard, but optimism just feels great sometimes when you can scare some up.
I guess the only way to find out is to wait and see. Just, you know, try not to die too soon ;-P
IANAL, but I believe this practice only applies to trademarks. Also, the unauthorized use has to be sufficiently open and notorious that it could conceivably reach your company's attention. It's actually sufficient, I think, to address the trademark infringement, sorta like Linden Labs a while back with that First Life website. That, of course, wasn't a website making a profit off the trademark and it was fairly obvious that it was satirical in nature. Copyrights can be protected much more selectively because they are always protected.