Internet Explorer 6 is one of the buggiest pieces of software I have ever come across.
Then you must be a youngin' -- ask an old timer some time what it was like developing for Nutscrape 4.x. IE6 was a fucking wet dream in comparison. You don't know what buggy software is.
BTW, my experience with IE6 was not developing web pages to house flows of paragraphs of text, like a blog site. Instead it was mimicking a desktop app with resizable panes of controls and images. With a single table layout as the backbone (I'm a pragmatist, not a purist). And avoiding anything exotic in CSS. I stuck to the common denominator among the Trident and Gecko browsers. And I didn't hear about "hasLayout" until later on. Yet I did fine. Piece'o'cake.
(And by "strict mode" I mean HTML strict. I heard there were drawbacks with going with XHMTL, so I stayed away from that. So I guess you could say that IE6 was excessively buggy, if you define "buggy" as not working according to a spec it was, as you said, never intended to conform to. Then I guess if MS Word doesn't wash my dog, it's "buggy". Whatever. But for someone who bothered to read up on what it was designed to do, it was not a problem. I can imagine it being a huge problem for someone approaching it with naivety and ignorance, tho. For that, see also C++, for example.)
many places already do [basically put ads between pages]. It tends to cause a drop in readership.
Only because they ignored their print media model when they went to the Web. If everyone did it, and had always done it, it would be perceived by the public as about as offensive as having to turn a couple of pages in a magazine. If the current model for web advertising does fail, I don't want a bunch of web sites to close down, nor do I want to have to have set up a paid subscription to each one. Ad-supported media is a fine choice as long as it doesn't try to beat me over the head. I'm already used to mostly ignoring the ads that I see.
Not to be rude, but this is because you don't understand the driver for advertising. Advertisers are trying to get and keep your attention, especially after the ad is finished, sticking to what the audience is accustomed to is the antithesis of this.
No rudeness inferred -- you make a reasoned point. But I think the obtrusiveness and the escalating "arms race" characteristic is only because on the web they don't stick to what the audience is accustomed to. It's a free-for-all, with crappy little dancing things all over the place. It's a no-holds-barred atmosphere that web site operators allow. Do magazines accept advertising placement that makes their articles unreadable? Hell no. Do they allow adverts that when you open the magazine something pops out at you and a sound chip embedded in the page starts screaming at you. No way. They impose an orderly delivery of a relatively limited number of ads in finite space. Buy a page and make your case on it. A little more for the inside or back flap. Serious contenders only, who are willing to pony up for units of a full page. So what do they do on their web sites, allow a ton of fly-by-night joe schmo operations to put tacky little buzzing rectangles all over their content. Why in hard-copy only sell yourself out to high-priced johns, but in soft-copy let any low-life with five bucks line up to have their way with you? It's schizo.
He did not attach his name, unless his parents actually named him "Dire Pickle". There is precious little accountability with, and therefore authority behind, a pseudonym.
Also, you could interpret posts coming from a created account as the more likely to be lies, since many here read at a level that filters out AC's, and voluntary lying implies a propagation motive. That is, one posting an honest opinion about something is typically much less concerned about it being read by as many people as possible than the liar is.
But you also may be right. Therefore, observing the posting method and using that as a criterion is probably also pointless.
We've had a few hundred years to learn to monetize print, over 75 years to monetize TV,...
And yet they apply little to none of that knowledge to the WWW. Take TV, first off: You tune to the beginning of a show you want to watch, and periodically it's interrupted by a string of several commercials. Yet web adverting only uses interstitial ads at the beginning when you first go there. It does technically get an ad hit, but you immediately leave and see no others there. (Just like if you tuned in for something a minute after 8pm, and they were still running ads -- you expect some of the content first before seeing them having to pay some bills.) If marketing people actually owned dictionaries and ever looked up what "interstitial" means, they'd put a flash animation of several ads in sequence between each page of an article. That way like TV ads, we could just browse (surf) to another site (channel) while the ads were playing.
Or how about print ads: You're reading an article and turn to the next page and there's a full-page ad, you mentally skip it and resume reading on the next page. So instead of ruining the content by littering the article space with tons of crappy little things, break the content into sections that can fit on most peoples' screens in one screenfull without scrolling, and then randomly place between pages 0-3 ad pages to be clicked thru. (Random to discourage development of automated ad-skipping schemes.) Web site operators look too whorish allowing all kinds of tacky, vibrating and jumping shit to be placed all over their sites. As if they don't care about what kind of image they maintain. And neither do the advertisers. I don't know why they didn't just stick to what they know works, and what the public is already accustomed to.
Precisely what about IE6 work the way it's supposed to? The plethora of rendering issues aside,...
As an aside, put IE6 in "standards mode" with a doctype declaration of "strict", and that "plethora" abruptly collapses to "a few". As I recall from doing some web programming a little over a year ago, for a web app with lots of client-side logic, the only time I had to do anything different between IE6 and Firefox 1.5/2.0 was a few lines of JavaScript (encapsulated neatly into one, small function) due to differences in their event handling models. Otherwise the same HTML, CSS, and js, for the same rendering and actions.
..., it is by far one of the most unstable pieces of software I've ever used.
I've been using IE6 on this, my home, W2K system, every day since 2002. It's hard to imagine that I'd have been using it for at least 6 years like I've been, as my sole, daily browser, if it was really as you describe. Or anything even close to as you say.
I have a FF1.5.something on this system, but rarely used it, because I've never needed it. Not sure how that could be, if IE6 is "unstable", let alone "the most unstable piece of software you've ever used".
And unless you dig very deep into the Windows processes and force it to run in its own process, it crashes your desktop when it goes down.
"Dig very deep into the Windows processes"? WTF does that mean? Maybe I'm not digging deep enough, but it looks like if you open a new IE window from an existing one, they share an IEXPLORE.EXE process according to the task manager, and as such if you "end task" on one of those windows, you're killing that process and hence all windows of that process go away with it. But just launching iexplore.exe multiple times gives you multiple processes. No digging required.
My IE6 did crash recently. It surprised the hell out of me because I couldn't remember the last time it did. I had left it in the morning, open to a site with Flash content loaded/running, and when I came back to it that evening, the next place I tried to go it exited out. But I'm using absolutely ancient versions of Adobe's plugins. And not a peep out of my desktop. I just shrugged and went on using the IE6 windows from another process that had been left open to other sites.
That's one novel way of looking at it, as Windows being basically a pre-distributed, kick-ass runtime. Basically a set of DLL's that abstract various things for programmers and provide them a C API (Win32), oh yeah plus a few utilities for users.
If one is not unbiased, then one is not a journalist, one is merely a writer.
And that's what everyone is nowadays. Some have degrees in journalism. But having knowledge != having discipline. When blogging came onto the scene, "journalists" could've differentiated themselves by upping their standards and increasing the distance between opinion and reporting. But they reacted by doing the opposite -- they stupidly joined in doing what those who threatened their existence were doing -- interjecting personal opinion, uncloaked promotion of particular causes and world views, not checking or knowingly going with unreliable sources, reporting rumors as news, speculation as news, etc. Journalists, like open source software developers, curiously are professionally suicidal.
I've talked to reporters, socially - a LOT of them. They have one thing in common and that's a general "I'm going to trick you" or "I'm smarter than you" attitude.
My sister works in the biotech field and admits unapologetically that she and her peers there share a similar view. So I would say it's not just an industry phenomenom, but one of world view, and then it's which industries are dominated by members of a particular world view.
Excellent point. And there's also a lot more teachers who molest their students than just a few pretty, white women. But you'd never know that from the news. So while much of the level of coverage of these kinds of things ought to be drastically reduced, it also should be made less myopic, as you allude to. The non-telegenic/less-sensational need to be included in the numbers, and then just reported as a current happening and then moving on. And this indeed requires less armies of reporters and talking heads. (Especially lawyers-turned-journalist, in whose numbers and whose work output I find to be an undesirable trend.)
That must've been an expensive mofo. I bought the cheapest one that still had the rotating controls on the front (the only kind in the store that could have its timer set without having to turn on the TV), an HS-U580, and it was quite pricey, $350 I think. (I also remember initially marveling at being able to see freeze frames, being the first time I could afford a 4-head model! Whooppee!:)
And we go full circle. Think about the joking about millions of homes with VCR's flashing "12:00" because they don't know how to set the clock. Old people don't know how to record something on a VCR, and now neither do young people!
But what has been unique to Java and its kind is for the language platform to duplicate (I'm not sure how much "abstracting", i.e. in the sense of really being made "higher-level", is being done for you) almost everything of native platforms. And in that sense it's a good choice if you don't want to mess natively with the platform(s) you're targeting.
With languages like Java you're meant to stay within the platform the language runs in. So the platform duplicates almost every OS service one typically would need. Languages like C are chiefly bindings to a native platform. For example Win32 is a C API, so C on that platform essentially serves to give you access to the API and declarative, iterative, and conditional statements in support of using that API. C's standard library is not large enough and full-featured enough to call a "platform". It's a "library" -- you code to your chosen platform's API, and like language constructs, the library routines support you in that endeavor.
Java is not cross-platform, Java is a platform. Take threading as an example. If you know Java threading and only Java threading, then you don't know Win32 threading, or POSIX threading. I think that's what GP meant by Java avoiding the "nastiness" of Linux -- if you opt to use the Java platform on Linux, you can avoid having to learn the system calls or whatever that comprise the "Linux (programmer) platform".
I see they've drawn a map of the new Reconstituted United States which will emerge after federal destruction of rights prompts the coming revolution.
I think it's the other way around -- the coming revolution (on Nov 4) will prompt the federal destruction of whatever rights we have left (what the Bush admininstration under the War on Terror, and what Left-wing judges in thinking that the Judiciary is a 3rd leg of the Legislative, haven't already stripped us of).
Coming soon an updated map of the Constitution-Free Zone: The entire United States.
Thanks for the link, that was a much better article. But most Slashdotters will prefer the less informative, more biased original chosen for featuring here. In fact, you can find way better articles just googling "programming language m oslo quadrant" than the blog post featured here. But his blog does have a neat look.
>> But the problem with that is that the main reason companies/people/organizations use Windows is that it's familiar to them and compatible with all their stuff, so making it not backwards compatible would be stupid.
> Apple pulled it off. Twice.
Apple effectively had no marketshare. So they had little to lose. See also for example how SLR camera makers changed their lens mounts when they went to auto-focus lenses (making their line of manual focus lenses incompatible), all except Nikon. The littler players can afford to piss off their smaller customer bases, but the leaders cannot.
Really, if you want to bash MS, go for it, there's lots of things you can bash them on that are entirely legitimate, but you aren't bashing these things, you're just throwing garbage around.
You've just summed up the Slashdot experience about as well as I've ever heard.
Ya, I didn't buy his story either. First, why is he "forced" to upgrade? If Win2K is still working for them, why upgrade? I'm typing this on a Win2K system right now -- works fine for what I do (I got off the gaming/constant upgrading merry go round many years ago). And it doesn't seem like an organization large enough to have "many thousnds of PCs" are not going to have anyone in their IT dept. tuned into the ongoing saga of ever-changing end of availability dates for XP. They surely would've known when their XP upgrade window was closing, so being "forced" to Vista sounds like a made-up story.
Every time there's another breakthrough that makes the need for stem cells of the embryonic variety seem like its days are numbered, an atheist cries. Seriously tho, they'll miss having it as a tool to tweak Christians with. A large part of the attraction to it.
Slashdot Mirror
1800 dollar Dell Studio XPS's? (I'm more interested in their "workstation" class PC's, but who knows how long til they're using Nehalem.)
Then you must be a youngin' -- ask an old timer some time what it was like developing for Nutscrape 4.x. IE6 was a fucking wet dream in comparison. You don't know what buggy software is.
BTW, my experience with IE6 was not developing web pages to house flows of paragraphs of text, like a blog site. Instead it was mimicking a desktop app with resizable panes of controls and images. With a single table layout as the backbone (I'm a pragmatist, not a purist). And avoiding anything exotic in CSS. I stuck to the common denominator among the Trident and Gecko browsers. And I didn't hear about "hasLayout" until later on. Yet I did fine. Piece'o'cake.
(And by "strict mode" I mean HTML strict. I heard there were drawbacks with going with XHMTL, so I stayed away from that. So I guess you could say that IE6 was excessively buggy, if you define "buggy" as not working according to a spec it was, as you said, never intended to conform to. Then I guess if MS Word doesn't wash my dog, it's "buggy". Whatever. But for someone who bothered to read up on what it was designed to do, it was not a problem. I can imagine it being a huge problem for someone approaching it with naivety and ignorance, tho. For that, see also C++, for example.)
Only because they ignored their print media model when they went to the Web. If everyone did it, and had always done it, it would be perceived by the public as about as offensive as having to turn a couple of pages in a magazine. If the current model for web advertising does fail, I don't want a bunch of web sites to close down, nor do I want to have to have set up a paid subscription to each one. Ad-supported media is a fine choice as long as it doesn't try to beat me over the head. I'm already used to mostly ignoring the ads that I see.
No rudeness inferred -- you make a reasoned point. But I think the obtrusiveness and the escalating "arms race" characteristic is only because on the web they don't stick to what the audience is accustomed to. It's a free-for-all, with crappy little dancing things all over the place. It's a no-holds-barred atmosphere that web site operators allow. Do magazines accept advertising placement that makes their articles unreadable? Hell no. Do they allow adverts that when you open the magazine something pops out at you and a sound chip embedded in the page starts screaming at you. No way. They impose an orderly delivery of a relatively limited number of ads in finite space. Buy a page and make your case on it. A little more for the inside or back flap. Serious contenders only, who are willing to pony up for units of a full page. So what do they do on their web sites, allow a ton of fly-by-night joe schmo operations to put tacky little buzzing rectangles all over their content. Why in hard-copy only sell yourself out to high-priced johns, but in soft-copy let any low-life with five bucks line up to have their way with you? It's schizo.
He did not attach his name, unless his parents actually named him "Dire Pickle". There is precious little accountability with, and therefore authority behind, a pseudonym.
Also, you could interpret posts coming from a created account as the more likely to be lies, since many here read at a level that filters out AC's, and voluntary lying implies a propagation motive. That is, one posting an honest opinion about something is typically much less concerned about it being read by as many people as possible than the liar is.
But you also may be right. Therefore, observing the posting method and using that as a criterion is probably also pointless.
And yet they apply little to none of that knowledge to the WWW. Take TV, first off: You tune to the beginning of a show you want to watch, and periodically it's interrupted by a string of several commercials. Yet web adverting only uses interstitial ads at the beginning when you first go there. It does technically get an ad hit, but you immediately leave and see no others there. (Just like if you tuned in for something a minute after 8pm, and they were still running ads -- you expect some of the content first before seeing them having to pay some bills.) If marketing people actually owned dictionaries and ever looked up what "interstitial" means, they'd put a flash animation of several ads in sequence between each page of an article. That way like TV ads, we could just browse (surf) to another site (channel) while the ads were playing.
Or how about print ads: You're reading an article and turn to the next page and there's a full-page ad, you mentally skip it and resume reading on the next page. So instead of ruining the content by littering the article space with tons of crappy little things, break the content into sections that can fit on most peoples' screens in one screenfull without scrolling, and then randomly place between pages 0-3 ad pages to be clicked thru. (Random to discourage development of automated ad-skipping schemes.) Web site operators look too whorish allowing all kinds of tacky, vibrating and jumping shit to be placed all over their sites. As if they don't care about what kind of image they maintain. And neither do the advertisers. I don't know why they didn't just stick to what they know works, and what the public is already accustomed to.
If Lorena Bobbitt was his wife, she'd simply cut off his "credit".
As an aside, put IE6 in "standards mode" with a doctype declaration of "strict", and that "plethora" abruptly collapses to "a few". As I recall from doing some web programming a little over a year ago, for a web app with lots of client-side logic, the only time I had to do anything different between IE6 and Firefox 1.5/2.0 was a few lines of JavaScript (encapsulated neatly into one, small function) due to differences in their event handling models. Otherwise the same HTML, CSS, and js, for the same rendering and actions.
I've been using IE6 on this, my home, W2K system, every day since 2002. It's hard to imagine that I'd have been using it for at least 6 years like I've been, as my sole, daily browser, if it was really as you describe. Or anything even close to as you say.
I have a FF1.5.something on this system, but rarely used it, because I've never needed it. Not sure how that could be, if IE6 is "unstable", let alone "the most unstable piece of software you've ever used".
"Dig very deep into the Windows processes"? WTF does that mean? Maybe I'm not digging deep enough, but it looks like if you open a new IE window from an existing one, they share an IEXPLORE.EXE process according to the task manager, and as such if you "end task" on one of those windows, you're killing that process and hence all windows of that process go away with it. But just launching iexplore.exe multiple times gives you multiple processes. No digging required.
My IE6 did crash recently. It surprised the hell out of me because I couldn't remember the last time it did. I had left it in the morning, open to a site with Flash content loaded/running, and when I came back to it that evening, the next place I tried to go it exited out. But I'm using absolutely ancient versions of Adobe's plugins. And not a peep out of my desktop. I just shrugged and went on using the IE6 windows from another process that had been left open to other sites.
Barbie says "Programming is hard!".
That's one novel way of looking at it, as Windows being basically a pre-distributed, kick-ass runtime. Basically a set of DLL's that abstract various things for programmers and provide them a C API (Win32), oh yeah plus a few utilities for users.
And that's what everyone is nowadays. Some have degrees in journalism. But having knowledge != having discipline. When blogging came onto the scene, "journalists" could've differentiated themselves by upping their standards and increasing the distance between opinion and reporting. But they reacted by doing the opposite -- they stupidly joined in doing what those who threatened their existence were doing -- interjecting personal opinion, uncloaked promotion of particular causes and world views, not checking or knowingly going with unreliable sources, reporting rumors as news, speculation as news, etc. Journalists, like open source software developers, curiously are professionally suicidal.
My sister works in the biotech field and admits unapologetically that she and her peers there share a similar view. So I would say it's not just an industry phenomenom, but one of world view, and then it's which industries are dominated by members of a particular world view.
Excellent point. And there's also a lot more teachers who molest their students than just a few pretty, white women. But you'd never know that from the news. So while much of the level of coverage of these kinds of things ought to be drastically reduced, it also should be made less myopic, as you allude to. The non-telegenic/less-sensational need to be included in the numbers, and then just reported as a current happening and then moving on. And this indeed requires less armies of reporters and talking heads. (Especially lawyers-turned-journalist, in whose numbers and whose work output I find to be an undesirable trend.)
That must've been an expensive mofo. I bought the cheapest one that still had the rotating controls on the front (the only kind in the store that could have its timer set without having to turn on the TV), an HS-U580, and it was quite pricey, $350 I think. (I also remember initially marveling at being able to see freeze frames, being the first time I could afford a 4-head model! Whooppee! :)
And we go full circle. Think about the joking about millions of homes with VCR's flashing "12:00" because they don't know how to set the clock. Old people don't know how to record something on a VCR, and now neither do young people!
But what has been unique to Java and its kind is for the language platform to duplicate (I'm not sure how much "abstracting", i.e. in the sense of really being made "higher-level", is being done for you) almost everything of native platforms. And in that sense it's a good choice if you don't want to mess natively with the platform(s) you're targeting.
With languages like Java you're meant to stay within the platform the language runs in. So the platform duplicates almost every OS service one typically would need. Languages like C are chiefly bindings to a native platform. For example Win32 is a C API, so C on that platform essentially serves to give you access to the API and declarative, iterative, and conditional statements in support of using that API. C's standard library is not large enough and full-featured enough to call a "platform". It's a "library" -- you code to your chosen platform's API, and like language constructs, the library routines support you in that endeavor.
That said, Java is cross-platform,...
Java is not cross-platform, Java is a platform. Take threading as an example. If you know Java threading and only Java threading, then you don't know Win32 threading, or POSIX threading. I think that's what GP meant by Java avoiding the "nastiness" of Linux -- if you opt to use the Java platform on Linux, you can avoid having to learn the system calls or whatever that comprise the "Linux (programmer) platform".
I see they've drawn a map of the new Reconstituted United States which will emerge after federal destruction of rights prompts the coming revolution.
I think it's the other way around -- the coming revolution (on Nov 4) will prompt the federal destruction of whatever rights we have left (what the Bush admininstration under the War on Terror, and what Left-wing judges in thinking that the Judiciary is a 3rd leg of the Legislative, haven't already stripped us of).
Coming soon an updated map of the Constitution-Free Zone: The entire United States.
So, M is for Microsoft.
No, M is for Modeling.
And Google is your friend:
Microsoft details Oslo's modeling language, tools
Microsoft To Release Oslo Modeling Software Preview
Thanks for the link, that was a much better article. But most Slashdotters will prefer the less informative, more biased original chosen for featuring here. In fact, you can find way better articles just googling "programming language m oslo quadrant" than the blog post featured here. But his blog does have a neat look.
For 'tis the very essence of Slashdot.
>> But the problem with that is that the main reason companies/people/organizations use Windows is that it's familiar to them and compatible with all their stuff, so making it not backwards compatible would be stupid.
> Apple pulled it off. Twice.
Apple effectively had no marketshare. So they had little to lose. See also for example how SLR camera makers changed their lens mounts when they went to auto-focus lenses (making their line of manual focus lenses incompatible), all except Nikon. The littler players can afford to piss off their smaller customer bases, but the leaders cannot.
You've just summed up the Slashdot experience about as well as I've ever heard.
Ya, I didn't buy his story either. First, why is he "forced" to upgrade? If Win2K is still working for them, why upgrade? I'm typing this on a Win2K system right now -- works fine for what I do (I got off the gaming/constant upgrading merry go round many years ago). And it doesn't seem like an organization large enough to have "many thousnds of PCs" are not going to have anyone in their IT dept. tuned into the ongoing saga of ever-changing end of availability dates for XP. They surely would've known when their XP upgrade window was closing, so being "forced" to Vista sounds like a made-up story.
Gimme a break.
Every time there's another breakthrough that makes the need for stem cells of the embryonic variety seem like its days are numbered, an atheist cries. Seriously tho, they'll miss having it as a tool to tweak Christians with. A large part of the attraction to it.