As a non-hardware engineer, I am not sure I understood the article, but would this make it possible to literally hard-code software to improve performance? I.e. a logic board having some standard components and a "changable" chip that could improve performance of much-used software?
Actually... Everyone in Denmark, thanks to the national authentication system called "EasyID" (translation). It forces people to have Java enabled. Nobody likes it, but we're forced to use it.
The bug requires Text Replacements to be enabled. It is enabled by default (but I disabled it because it's annoying).
When enabled, I was able to reproduce the bug in iCal and Chrome but not TextEdit (where my default mode is plain text).
TFA basically claims that Microsoft is winning ground in the popularity contest which makes the price tag seem more appealing.
I personally don't agree, as many others point out in here, (the majority of) people look at the price tag first and don't understand the difference from Windows 7 to 8. They just need something that works, and all they know is that others buy PCs.
QuickTime Player is sandboxed in 10.8 (and possibly earlier), so it should have the same issues as MPlayerX... And I havn't experienced any difficulties as a power user.
(...) Does this mean fewer commercials for viewers? Not likely, but one can hope.
Quite possibly not. It would mean more relevant commercials and less annoying flashing and screaming ads. Before Google entered, advertising on the internet with mere text was unheard of. By using very relevant ads both viewers/users and companies benefit.
The issue with todays TV ads is that they are highly irrelevant. It's up to the company to make sure the ad gets displayed at the right time of day. Perhaps Google could improve upon this, so some of us can be freed of vacuum cleaner ads, unless they are robots.
From the Slashdot post: > (...) latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera - recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face
From the linked page viewed in IE7: > "This demo appears as intended only in Firefox 3.5"
The demo page shows the issue so clearly: You forgot IE. IE8 still doesn't have font-face support for TTF which is possibly the only format people will like to use.
I work with CSS most of my day but I doubt that I will have the pleasure of setting up sites with custom fonts for several years to come with the release cycles and popularity of IE as we have it today. For now we can be happy that IE8 can actually pass the acid2 test.
Actually our company recently dropped IE6 support unless specifically asked for.
The reason? All statistics from monitored sites and campaigns are showing roughly a 1% drop per month of IE6 and we are currently raging from 12% to 18% (with a single one at 23%). Most users seem to be upgrading to IE7 which is fine. The general Firefox share is consistently larger than the IE6 share which only makes sense if you are comparing "the lowest common denominator"... which we are.
How do we deal with our clients? We advice them. If the client specifically asks for IE6 we will explain the budget implications (which is the truth of IE6). Actually we've had several clients who are positive of the way we handle it since they can suddenly ask for much more without being told "well, it won't perform/look good/work in ie6". We've had no complaints yet and the current trend tells us there is no need to worry.
According to my experience I find reason to doubt the conclusion that IE6 will not die. It may sound optimistic but I project that IE6 will be irrelevant to most developers within 12 months.
In fact, I had a short talk with a collegue today about this. Never hire someone on the basis that they "do HTML" - you don't know what you're getting. If you want a Frontend developer (the term that we use for CSS+HTML+JS) you should search for the in-depth experience with CSS.
Agreed on HTML is not developed, it's just written. However, the amount of work a true frontend developer uses on setting up a semi-complex design usually requires programming skills, which is why a good frontend developer usually has some sort backend experience. Even if it's just PHP.
It takes a lot of skill to work with IE76 without loosing your mind. Skilled/frontend developers/ are hard to come by. I know a couple of companies who are looking for skilled people in this area but many of them can't find people that are good enough.
Actually, there are a lot of campaigns that are doing just that. A quick search for "stop ie" will give you a handful of results.
I started one as well on www.mijav.dk under Projects. However mine is targeted on IE6. I suggest, if you really care about your idea, that you join one of these campaigns.
The same can be said for humans. What you are describing is just confusion. In it's simplest form it just requires someone to experience two incompatible thoughts. The dictionary definition may be slighty different. In any case we daily see game shows like "deal/no-deal" where people are in distress because they it all, but don't want to loose it all.
- Chuck chuck, sir.
It's actually an interesting topic on how the firmware of the brain works. The key difference between humans and animals in this matter is that humans can learn many different behaviors with less effort thus enabling us to switch around different actions in any given situation.
Well anyway.. Those are the things I would focus on in my book. I find writing a beginners guide or just a reference is redundant. CSS is practial - most developers usually learn it on a need-to-know basis.
I wouldn't say the article is wrong by your words but you are very spot-on with your description of the problem. I've been working as a programmer and web-developer for years but two years ago my job took an unwanted turn at the time which turned out to my liking later on - I was forced to work with CSS and HTML and had to develop the skills for taking decisions about GUI. Now, for anyone in the web development industry, they would know that most developers are not concerned with the looks, portability or usability - nothing new here.
Open-source or not: It's still an issue and I would agree that we are stepping towards a paradigm where industries are realizing that they need to combine design and simplicity (indirectly usability) to be successful.
To my experience the most effective way of pursuading the developers that if they let me handle the frontend-work *they* could save the time cursing over frontend decisions. I found that I got hired time after time because the developers were afraid they would break something or fear they would at all spend time meddling with uninteresting frontend.
I've personally gotten involved with a couple of OSS projects to help out and make them more attractive to newcommers. One of these is jEdit (www.jedit.org) where I found that they were quite open to suggestions.
Pursuation is always needed when working with humans. Developers are no different. My secret to others: Be consistent in your claims. Make sure that you have something to offer them - appealing design is an obvious treat for many, but other values such as "consistency" (which is a core focus in usability), "simplicity" and familiarity I find are good values to offer developers since it appeals to good code design as well.
For those who think the Selectors API is a nice addition: It's already possible, cross browser, with the jQuery javascript library available at: http://www.jquery.com/
Besides combining XPath with JS it allows for chaining commands, various typical DOM actions such as.remove(),.after()/.before() (insert HTML before and after),.attr(),.html(),.hide(),.show() and others. The frontpage of the site quite nicely demonstrates how to use it.
I have yet to see a project where I don't find jQuery useful. It's small it's lean and it gets the job done.
I tried replacing PS with the Gimp, but came to the conclusion that the GIMP cannot replace Photoshop for one very sad reason: - Lacking PSD Support.
Effects, masks and layers aren't loaded correctly, so I have to ask the designer to rasterize all effects and drop the layer groups. This is not a viable solution for a professional.
Besides that, the GIMP is an excellent tool for having fun and doing most operations.
Dreams are mostly subconscious activity, usually not governed by any "deliberate" conscious thinking. Due to this fact you will most likely experience things in a dream that passes through your mind at that time. That's often why you'll experience your alarm clock's ringing being a part of the dream the second before you wake up. The same applies to thinking "Oh I hope X doesn't happen!" in a dream and at the same instant... it does.
All this is nice and well, but the relation to the topic is that dreams are very fragile and easily recalled incorrectly. Subconscious activity is by nature not conscious which means that conscious attempts to recreate a dream may often lead to "filling in the gaps" with newly created imagery. Dream interpretation is a good example of such an event depending on the way the interpretation is done.
But then again... it's art - who are we are not to interpret it - we might get it wrong...
Well It's A Good Thing(tm) that we have TV to tell us what's right and wrong instead of misguiding internet sites...
Joke aside, the internet is a media like TV and newspapers and should be treated equally: With sceptism.
The only thing that keeps us away from being puppets of the media is our ability to judge and do a reality check. If you see something "stunning" or amazing - be sure that the first thing you do is disregard it for a moment and don't start telling it to others, since that's when speculation and lies become "the uofficial truth".
But then again.. if we were all able to tell when the media was lying... I guess there wouldn't be tabloids;-)
"Vaporising" garbage... Like many other burning processes (if it really is such a one), wouldn't that require large amounts of oxygent and expell obscene amounts of CO2? In which case we are shooting the environment in the foot...
But then again... maybe Coal plants are just as bad as this...
Slashdot Mirror
As a non-hardware engineer, I am not sure I understood the article, but would this make it possible to literally hard-code software to improve performance? I.e. a logic board having some standard components and a "changable" chip that could improve performance of much-used software?
Actually... Everyone in Denmark, thanks to the national authentication system called "EasyID" (translation). It forces people to have Java enabled. Nobody likes it, but we're forced to use it.
The bug requires Text Replacements to be enabled. It is enabled by default (but I disabled it because it's annoying). When enabled, I was able to reproduce the bug in iCal and Chrome but not TextEdit (where my default mode is plain text).
What's the point of this article, and why the comparison with Apple?
The answer is quite simply: http://adage.com/article/digital/mac-pc-battle-microsoft-winning-perception/136731/ (as linked in the summary) Title being: "In Mac vs. PC Battle, Microsoft Winning in Value Perception" which pretty much sums up the comparison to Apple.
TFA basically claims that Microsoft is winning ground in the popularity contest which makes the price tag seem more appealing.
I personally don't agree, as many others point out in here, (the majority of) people look at the price tag first and don't understand the difference from Windows 7 to 8. They just need something that works, and all they know is that others buy PCs.
Groupies? Do under-paid employees count?
QuickTime Player is sandboxed in 10.8 (and possibly earlier), so it should have the same issues as MPlayerX... And I havn't experienced any difficulties as a power user.
I've read TFA several times, looked at the diagram and read every single comment in here.
I still don't get it...
How is this technique any better/faster than the current optical fibre method we currently use?
(...) Does this mean fewer commercials for viewers? Not likely, but one can hope.
Quite possibly not. It would mean more relevant commercials and less annoying flashing and screaming ads. Before Google entered, advertising on the internet with mere text was unheard of. By using very relevant ads both viewers/users and companies benefit. The issue with todays TV ads is that they are highly irrelevant. It's up to the company to make sure the ad gets displayed at the right time of day. Perhaps Google could improve upon this, so some of us can be freed of vacuum cleaner ads, unless they are robots.
But does it come in hotrod red?
I'm looking for something that will go with my exoskeleton...
The Mushroom King... someone should call the plumbers.
From the Slashdot post:
> (...) latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera - recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face
From the linked page viewed in IE7:
> "This demo appears as intended only in Firefox 3.5"
The demo page shows the issue so clearly: You forgot IE. IE8 still doesn't have font-face support for TTF which is possibly the only format people will like to use.
I work with CSS most of my day but I doubt that I will have the pleasure of setting up sites with custom fonts for several years to come with the release cycles and popularity of IE as we have it today. For now we can be happy that IE8 can actually pass the acid2 test.
Regards
Seph
Actually our company recently dropped IE6 support unless specifically asked for.
The reason?
All statistics from monitored sites and campaigns are showing roughly a 1% drop per month of IE6 and we are currently raging from 12% to 18% (with a single one at 23%). Most users seem to be upgrading to IE7 which is fine. The general Firefox share is consistently larger than the IE6 share which only makes sense if you are comparing "the lowest common denominator"... which we are.
How do we deal with our clients?
We advice them. If the client specifically asks for IE6 we will explain the budget implications (which is the truth of IE6). Actually we've had several clients who are positive of the way we handle it since they can suddenly ask for much more without being told "well, it won't perform/look good/work in ie6". We've had no complaints yet and the current trend tells us there is no need to worry.
According to my experience I find reason to doubt the conclusion that IE6 will not die. It may sound optimistic but I project that IE6 will be irrelevant to most developers within 12 months.
Seph
... an episode of South Park (Night of the living homeless). Maybe they should try playing "California Love" and see where the darn critters go?
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/104429/
Spot on, Simon.
In fact, I had a short talk with a collegue today about this. Never hire someone on the basis that they "do HTML" - you don't know what you're getting. If you want a Frontend developer (the term that we use for CSS+HTML+JS) you should search for the in-depth experience with CSS.
Agreed on HTML is not developed, it's just written. However, the amount of work a true frontend developer uses on setting up a semi-complex design usually requires programming skills, which is why a good frontend developer usually has some sort backend experience.
Even if it's just PHP.
It takes a lot of skill to work with IE76 without loosing your mind. Skilled /frontend developers/ are hard to come by. I know a couple of companies who are looking for skilled people in this area but many of them can't find people that are good enough.
Actually, there are a lot of campaigns that are doing just that. A quick search for "stop ie" will give you a handful of results.
I started one as well on www.mijav.dk under Projects. However mine is targeted on IE6. I suggest, if you really care about your idea, that you join one of these campaigns.
The same can be said for humans. What you are describing is just confusion. In it's simplest form it just requires someone to experience two incompatible thoughts. The dictionary definition may be slighty different.
In any case we daily see game shows like "deal/no-deal" where people are in distress because they it all, but don't want to loose it all.
- Chuck chuck, sir.
It's actually an interesting topic on how the firmware of the brain works. The key difference between humans and animals in this matter is that humans can learn many different behaviors with less effort thus enabling us to switch around different actions in any given situation.
Writing a comprehensive book on CSS is not an issue, and really... W3C has a nice homepage that is actually quite well indexed on Google.
Having a few years of experience I feel that any *practical* CSS book will focus on how a few key aspects with the web as it is today:
* What should be possible by todays accepted standards (css = 2.1)
* What is actually possible (things like text-shadow is only supported by safari (and some other more niché browsers))
* How your CSS can degrade beatifully in order to support IE 6 and still take advantage of the new features
* A couple of "watch out" to avoid common IE6/7 CSS issues such as "don't use both padding and width/height due to ie's box model", "float + margin = double margin" and other common guidelines.
* Common techniques like "sliding doors" for round corners and other nice tips to make effective use of the actual commands.
Well anyway.. Those are the things I would focus on in my book. I find writing a beginners guide or just a reference is redundant. CSS is practial - most developers usually learn it on a need-to-know basis.
I wouldn't say the article is wrong by your words but you are very spot-on with your description of the problem.
I've been working as a programmer and web-developer for years but two years ago my job took an unwanted turn at the time which turned out to my liking later on - I was forced to work with CSS and HTML and had to develop the skills for taking decisions about GUI.
Now, for anyone in the web development industry, they would know that most developers are not concerned with the looks, portability or usability - nothing new here.
Open-source or not: It's still an issue and I would agree that we are stepping towards a paradigm where industries are realizing that they need to combine design and simplicity (indirectly usability) to be successful.
To my experience the most effective way of pursuading the developers that if they let me handle the frontend-work *they* could save the time cursing over frontend decisions. I found that I got hired time after time because the developers were afraid they would break something or fear they would at all spend time meddling with uninteresting frontend.
I've personally gotten involved with a couple of OSS projects to help out and make them more attractive to newcommers. One of these is jEdit (www.jedit.org) where I found that they were quite open to suggestions.
Pursuation is always needed when working with humans. Developers are no different. My secret to others: Be consistent in your claims. Make sure that you have something to offer them - appealing design is an obvious treat for many, but other values such as "consistency" (which is a core focus in usability), "simplicity" and familiarity I find are good values to offer developers since it appeals to good code design as well.
For those who think the Selectors API is a nice addition: It's already possible, cross browser, with the jQuery javascript library available at:
http://www.jquery.com/
Besides combining XPath with JS it allows for chaining commands, various typical DOM actions such as .remove(), .after()/.before() (insert HTML before and after), .attr(), .html(), .hide(), .show() and others. The frontpage of the site quite nicely demonstrates how to use it.
I have yet to see a project where I don't find jQuery useful. It's small it's lean and it gets the job done.
I tried replacing PS with the Gimp, but came to the conclusion that the GIMP cannot replace Photoshop for one very sad reason:
- Lacking PSD Support.
Effects, masks and layers aren't loaded correctly, so I have to ask the designer to rasterize all effects and drop the layer groups. This is not a viable solution for a professional.
Besides that, the GIMP is an excellent tool for having fun and doing most operations.
Dreams are mostly subconscious activity, usually not governed by any "deliberate" conscious thinking. Due to this fact you will most likely experience things in a dream that passes through your mind at that time. That's often why you'll experience your alarm clock's ringing being a part of the dream the second before you wake up. The same applies to thinking "Oh I hope X doesn't happen!" in a dream and at the same instant... it does.
All this is nice and well, but the relation to the topic is that dreams are very fragile and easily recalled incorrectly. Subconscious activity is by nature not conscious which means that conscious attempts to recreate a dream may often lead to "filling in the gaps" with newly created imagery. Dream interpretation is a good example of such an event depending on the way the interpretation is done.
But then again... it's art - who are we are not to interpret it - we might get it wrong...
Well It's A Good Thing(tm) that we have TV to tell us what's right and wrong instead of misguiding internet sites...
;-)
Joke aside, the internet is a media like TV and newspapers and should be treated equally: With sceptism.
The only thing that keeps us away from being puppets of the media is our ability to judge and do a reality check. If you see something "stunning" or amazing - be sure that the first thing you do is disregard it for a moment and don't start telling it to others, since that's when speculation and lies become "the uofficial truth".
But then again.. if we were all able to tell when the media was lying... I guess there wouldn't be tabloids
"Vaporising" garbage... Like many other burning processes (if it really is such a one), wouldn't that require large amounts of oxygent and expell obscene amounts of CO2? In which case we are shooting the environment in the foot...
But then again... maybe Coal plants are just as bad as this...
The lasers are created in US, shipped to Iraq and mounted on the goldfishes who are then used to kill US troops...
You know. The usual.
I for one welcome our new Goldfish Overlords