I believe I'd be correct in saying that Jack lives in Florida? Well, purely from the information in the artical, he's broken state law by recording the conversation - you need both parties' consent. (According to wikipedia - look up telephone tapping.)
That the kid lives in Texas, where no such law is in place, might change matters, and the kid might also have got his answerphone. But I'd love to see Jack get a lawsuit slapped on him for this.
Re:Everything since HTML has been too complex
on
The Future of HTML
·
· Score: 1
Those are good points, but it's not just a matter of writing a parser. Otherwise, all you really catch is typos - everybody knows that it goes ... </name>. I don't think that's where the real errors come from. You also need rules to make sure it's valid - what happens if I use text or paragraphs in the HEAD tag, or place TDs and TRs outside of tables? What happens if you don't recognise a tag? Even if you do enforce well-formedness, you still get errors that have no one right solution.
For the browser writer, it's as easy to display the text as to ignore it, and easier than throwing an error. That would require a check for validity, which would introduce complexity, break forwards- and backwards-compatibility, and increase the likelihood of bugs.
For the writer of other software, what do they do? If a single browser throws an error, they'll have to validate, but what if it's invalid? Throw their own error? Attempt to fix it and cause the same problems that resulted in discussions like this in the first place? Hide it and obscure content?
Re:Everything since HTML has been too complex
on
The Future of HTML
·
· Score: 1
Why should HTML be treated differently? Because it is different. It's not a programming language. It doesn't have to do look exactly the same wherever it goes. If compilers guess as to what the code should do, you can introduce bugs that only show up years later in other people's code and result in millions of dollars lost productivity. It would be better to give nothing than to give the wrong thing, in that case. With HTML, the worst that the wrong thing can do is look a bit funny, or perhaps not show up at all. That means it's either better than, or the same as, doing nothing, at least from the user's perspective.
Unlike Perl and C, HTML is supposed to be easily written by computers. If browsers didn't attempt to fix the input, then everything else would have to fix its output. That's a lot more places for things to go wrong, and a lot more complexity, leading to a far greater likelihood that they will go wrong. And it would completely ruin any chances of writing a small program to do something to HTML pages, because you'd need to import an HTML library just to be sure you weren't messing everything up.
It would be nice if there was a testing mode that did enforce these things, and it would have helped me a couple of times (like when I forgot to close the title tag - Firefox fixed it and displayed fine, IE didn't show anything). But when the code is out of the user's control, it should be lenient. Otherwise, a single error anywhere down the line will kill everything.
Re:Everything since HTML has been too complex
on
The Future of HTML
·
· Score: 1
Yes, that's bad. At least when it comes to HTML. It sucks when people can't code properly and so make their pages look different according to the sanity checks used, but imagine what things would be like if there were no sanity checks, and you just got a blank screen whenever a page didn't validate.
Got an error in your browser? Too bad. There's an error in some other browser that the coder had to work around? Tough luck. Problem with the WYSIWYG editor? Nobody will ever know about it. Error in your forum's parsing routines? One wrong post knocks out the entire page.
And that's just if pages have to be well-formed. Enforcing validity like that would knock out any browser which doesn't understand the version of the spec that you use.
you also don't want to allow Microsoft et. al. to use GPLed software when their policy is to destroy it via software patents Why not? I'd rather they were trying to destroy free software with free software than without it, but I'm not particularly fussed either way, since they won't succeed.
Free software doesn't have to fight nonfree any more than neanderthals had to wage war on whatever their competition was. They turned out to be better suited and achieved dominance. They didn't mean for that to happen, it was just the natural order of things. Free software will win because it is inherantly better than nonfree software, so it doesn't have to try to kill the latter off - that will either just happen or, as is more likely, a few niche areas will remain propreitary while the rest become free. Trying to speed up the process is unnecessary and unsporting, and when all competition is gone, evolution slows effectively to a halt, so I'd prefer we don't try to speed up the inevitable.
You can't judge a language by how many companies use it. Companies don't have a clue what they're doing; they just think, "hey! PHP is popular right now, I bet it would be easy to find a lot of people who can program it." You judge it by how popular it is with good programmers. People who know multiple languages over the entire spectrum, can pick up new ones in a day or so, and could fairly easily write just about any tool they needed. I admit that I'm not one of these, but I can see that PHP's bathroom sink, if nothing else, has stiffer taps than Perl's. It's designed to be easy to learn, easy to read and easy to think, none of which are conducive to writing real apps in. It's a simple language, intended for simple things; it doesn't give you the micromanagement capabilities needed for some things or the abstractions that make others far easier.
That's not how it was in Super Metroid, IIRC. The Torizo statues were just shoot wildly until dead, Ridley was just shoot wildly until dead, the Mother Brain was just shoot wildly until dead. Kraid had to be hit in the unhighlighted mouth and there was that other one that needed to be pushed back far enough, but those were the exceptions rather than the rule, from what I can remember. Mother Brain was the only multiform boss. Compare the rock monster, fish-dragonfly thing, Metroid Prime, Emperor Ing, Caretaker. There were actually a lot of things that you did just blast at, so I wouldn't even say those games abused it, but it was definitely there.
I'm still in school, so I have a good view of what's going on. Of what's stopping me from learning.
In my French class, I learn loads. It's interesting, informative and sometimes even insightful and funny. That's a +5 right there. There are six people in it, including me - they almost didn't think it worth their while to run the course for just us. In German, I learn very little. It's partly just that I only started last (school) year, while I've been doing French for four years now. My knowledge hasn't yet reached critical mass, if that's a good term for it. However, the biggest problem is that I don't get the opportunity to learn much. See, everybody has to take one language for GCSE, and there are only two languages my school provides. So I take German with everybody who chose German over French[1]. Presumably, a lot of them switched because they didn't like French, which is often because they didn't like the teacher, which in turn is because the teacher doesn't like them, because they always disrupt the class, because they simply aren't interested. So I end up in a class with the disruptive louts, so my teacher has difficulty teaching and I can't learn. Sometimes, the lower achieving half of the class goes away with another teacher, and I can suddenly learn a lot more (oddly, the people who stop everybody else learning learn nothing themselves). I don't get that problem in French, because we all want to be there.
Disruptions appear to be the cause of bad learning, but they're just the symptoms. If people were interested, they wouldn't be disruptive. And to make people interested, they need to do what they find interesting Why do kids need to study English Literature? Is it really that useful in the real world that every child in England must study it until 16? More useful than, say Business Studies, which a fraction of children study for two years? How useful is it to be able to solve a quadrilateral equation or calculate the length of a chord? What percentage of people ever do market research like we're forced to in school - only with a purpose, rather than being for the appeasement of some faceless beaurocrat? How hard would these skills be to pick up (or delegate, as appropriate) if they were ever needed? Why are you making us do these things that are ultimately pointless?
It's not just that, either. If we're not interested in something, we naturally won't put our full effort in. You could try to beat it out of us by making us do things we don't give a damn about, but from what I can see, you can't do that without extreme hypocrisy. That's the whole reason open source works, remember? If you have to be payed, you aren't motivated enough? We won't necessarily make a conscious decision not to put full effort in, but that's what we'll do. So we'll get bad grades. And because we don't realise that we don't care enough to do something about it, we'll think it's us that's stupid rather than the system. It's not a nice thought. I even understand what's going on, and I'm falling for it. It's not a nice thought. I have to tell myself that I am in fact good at graphics - and I am. But I'm not interested in pretending to care for the whims of the averadge consumer when designing a product that will never even start crawling slowly towards market for a nonexistant company, and that's what I have to spend a lot of the time doing. I've fallen behind in that class because it doesn't interest me, and I have to convince myself that it's not because I'm crap.
So although the obvious solution is to just kick out the disruptive kids (and I certainly wouldn't complain), it would be better to give us more say in what we do. It's not the only problem[2], but it's the biggest one. I somehow get the feeling that enough people will be interested in any given subject to keep the economy going when what we can and can't do actually has an impact on the real world. Come to think of it, the fact that we don't have that kind of power doesn't help either - would you be motivated if your boss kept telling you to
I'm pretty sure Gamecube games will require the disk, although I guess they might be available for download if you don't mind losing the disk space. They almost certainly won't be free, and I'd guess N64 games won't be either, at least not to begin with.
I thought of that. What you say is true, but having a lot of patents would be good for the ego. Perhaps even replacing penis length as the one true indication of authority. And since nobody would really care, it wouldn't have to be privatised; just put it in the public sector and hope people will pay to keep it going.
Which is why people wouldn't be allowed to use their patents to restrict other people from using their methods and inventions, just like gun owners aren't allowed to shoot people offhand.
Patents are weapons. Just like guns. Gun control, like all other forms of prohibition, does more harm than good. The reasons for this apply to any weapon to a greater or lesser extent, so why do we not allow software patents?
Obviously you wouldn't be able to go around suing people just for doing something harmless like infringing upon them, but if somebody does it to you, or violates your copyright protection or demands that you fork over your customers' data or they'll DoS you or something, pull it on them and bam! If you're quick enough on the draw, they'll be forced into bankruptcy; if not, you have only yourself and them to blame.
Just like guns, the use of patents needs to be regulated, not the distribution of them.
Orafucked: Verb. When someone screws you over so bad that it feels like they raped your every orifice. Orafuck, as a verb, would mean to screw somebody over so bad that they feel like you raped their every orifice. Orafucked, as a verb, would be the past tense of that. What you described was the adjective, in the state of having been recently orafucked.
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Because the individual components haven't all been invented yet.
I believe I'd be correct in saying that Jack lives in Florida? Well, purely from the information in the artical, he's broken state law by recording the conversation - you need both parties' consent. (According to wikipedia - look up telephone tapping.)
That the kid lives in Texas, where no such law is in place, might change matters, and the kid might also have got his answerphone. But I'd love to see Jack get a lawsuit slapped on him for this.
Those are good points, but it's not just a matter of writing a parser. Otherwise, all you really catch is typos - everybody knows that it goes ... </name>. I don't think that's where the real errors come from. You also need rules to make sure it's valid - what happens if I use text or paragraphs in the HEAD tag, or place TDs and TRs outside of tables? What happens if you don't recognise a tag? Even if you do enforce well-formedness, you still get errors that have no one right solution.
For the browser writer, it's as easy to display the text as to ignore it, and easier than throwing an error. That would require a check for validity, which would introduce complexity, break forwards- and backwards-compatibility, and increase the likelihood of bugs.
For the writer of other software, what do they do? If a single browser throws an error, they'll have to validate, but what if it's invalid? Throw their own error? Attempt to fix it and cause the same problems that resulted in discussions like this in the first place? Hide it and obscure content?
Why should HTML be treated differently? Because it is different. It's not a programming language. It doesn't have to do look exactly the same wherever it goes. If compilers guess as to what the code should do, you can introduce bugs that only show up years later in other people's code and result in millions of dollars lost productivity. It would be better to give nothing than to give the wrong thing, in that case. With HTML, the worst that the wrong thing can do is look a bit funny, or perhaps not show up at all. That means it's either better than, or the same as, doing nothing, at least from the user's perspective.
Unlike Perl and C, HTML is supposed to be easily written by computers. If browsers didn't attempt to fix the input, then everything else would have to fix its output. That's a lot more places for things to go wrong, and a lot more complexity, leading to a far greater likelihood that they will go wrong. And it would completely ruin any chances of writing a small program to do something to HTML pages, because you'd need to import an HTML library just to be sure you weren't messing everything up.
It would be nice if there was a testing mode that did enforce these things, and it would have helped me a couple of times (like when I forgot to close the title tag - Firefox fixed it and displayed fine, IE didn't show anything). But when the code is out of the user's control, it should be lenient. Otherwise, a single error anywhere down the line will kill everything.
Yes, that's bad. At least when it comes to HTML. It sucks when people can't code properly and so make their pages look different according to the sanity checks used, but imagine what things would be like if there were no sanity checks, and you just got a blank screen whenever a page didn't validate.
Got an error in your browser? Too bad. There's an error in some other browser that the coder had to work around? Tough luck. Problem with the WYSIWYG editor? Nobody will ever know about it. Error in your forum's parsing routines? One wrong post knocks out the entire page.
And that's just if pages have to be well-formed. Enforcing validity like that would knock out any browser which doesn't understand the version of the spec that you use.
Pfft. It's obviously going to be "YHBT".
So get better at writing.
Sixty million high-school kids say that's all it's good for.
Yes, I pulled that number out of my ass. Now there's more room for literature.
Anti-MS sentiment was the reason -I- switched. That and all the cool kids were doing it.
I stayed because I realised what I'd been missing: good documentation.
It doesn't have to be a video game; I suggest Arc.
Speaking of buttons, didn't Nintendo say a while back that there'd be no d-pad or A/B buttons? Linky.
Does that mean that once every seven months the exploits are released before the patch?
In other words, you want an imaginary sum of money.
I think we can work something out.
you also don't want to allow Microsoft et. al. to use GPLed software when their policy is to destroy it via software patents
Why not? I'd rather they were trying to destroy free software with free software than without it, but I'm not particularly fussed either way, since they won't succeed.
Free software doesn't have to fight nonfree any more than neanderthals had to wage war on whatever their competition was. They turned out to be better suited and achieved dominance. They didn't mean for that to happen, it was just the natural order of things. Free software will win because it is inherantly better than nonfree software, so it doesn't have to try to kill the latter off - that will either just happen or, as is more likely, a few niche areas will remain propreitary while the rest become free. Trying to speed up the process is unnecessary and unsporting, and when all competition is gone, evolution slows effectively to a halt, so I'd prefer we don't try to speed up the inevitable.
Actually, he's right.
The internet is everybody's stump.
You can't judge a language by how many companies use it. Companies don't have a clue what they're doing; they just think, "hey! PHP is popular right now, I bet it would be easy to find a lot of people who can program it." You judge it by how popular it is with good programmers. People who know multiple languages over the entire spectrum, can pick up new ones in a day or so, and could fairly easily write just about any tool they needed. I admit that I'm not one of these, but I can see that PHP's bathroom sink, if nothing else, has stiffer taps than Perl's. It's designed to be easy to learn, easy to read and easy to think, none of which are conducive to writing real apps in. It's a simple language, intended for simple things; it doesn't give you the micromanagement capabilities needed for some things or the abstractions that make others far easier.
That's not how it was in Super Metroid, IIRC. The Torizo statues were just shoot wildly until dead, Ridley was just shoot wildly until dead, the Mother Brain was just shoot wildly until dead. Kraid had to be hit in the unhighlighted mouth and there was that other one that needed to be pushed back far enough, but those were the exceptions rather than the rule, from what I can remember. Mother Brain was the only multiform boss. Compare the rock monster, fish-dragonfly thing, Metroid Prime, Emperor Ing, Caretaker. There were actually a lot of things that you did just blast at, so I wouldn't even say those games abused it, but it was definitely there.
I could be mistaken, but I thought Sony had been saying for a while that the PS3 was a supercomputer*. Here we go, although the link's been eaten:/ 1758219&tid=233&tid=212
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/25
*for values of supercomputer made up on the spot
It doesn't qualify as a boycott if you don't want what they're selling anyway. Either give up your principles + $$$ to buy the game or don't.
I'm still in school, so I have a good view of what's going on. Of what's stopping me from learning.
In my French class, I learn loads. It's interesting, informative and sometimes even insightful and funny. That's a +5 right there. There are six people in it, including me - they almost didn't think it worth their while to run the course for just us.
In German, I learn very little. It's partly just that I only started last (school) year, while I've been doing French for four years now. My knowledge hasn't yet reached critical mass, if that's a good term for it. However, the biggest problem is that I don't get the opportunity to learn much. See, everybody has to take one language for GCSE, and there are only two languages my school provides. So I take German with everybody who chose German over French[1]. Presumably, a lot of them switched because they didn't like French, which is often because they didn't like the teacher, which in turn is because the teacher doesn't like them, because they always disrupt the class, because they simply aren't interested. So I end up in a class with the disruptive louts, so my teacher has difficulty teaching and I can't learn. Sometimes, the lower achieving half of the class goes away with another teacher, and I can suddenly learn a lot more (oddly, the people who stop everybody else learning learn nothing themselves). I don't get that problem in French, because we all want to be there.
Disruptions appear to be the cause of bad learning, but they're just the symptoms. If people were interested, they wouldn't be disruptive. And to make people interested, they need to do what they find interesting Why do kids need to study English Literature? Is it really that useful in the real world that every child in England must study it until 16? More useful than, say Business Studies, which a fraction of children study for two years? How useful is it to be able to solve a quadrilateral equation or calculate the length of a chord? What percentage of people ever do market research like we're forced to in school - only with a purpose, rather than being for the appeasement of some faceless beaurocrat? How hard would these skills be to pick up (or delegate, as appropriate) if they were ever needed? Why are you making us do these things that are ultimately pointless?
It's not just that, either. If we're not interested in something, we naturally won't put our full effort in. You could try to beat it out of us by making us do things we don't give a damn about, but from what I can see, you can't do that without extreme hypocrisy. That's the whole reason open source works, remember? If you have to be payed, you aren't motivated enough? We won't necessarily make a conscious decision not to put full effort in, but that's what we'll do. So we'll get bad grades. And because we don't realise that we don't care enough to do something about it, we'll think it's us that's stupid rather than the system. It's not a nice thought. I even understand what's going on, and I'm falling for it. It's not a nice thought. I have to tell myself that I am in fact good at graphics - and I am. But I'm not interested in pretending to care for the whims of the averadge consumer when designing a product that will never even start crawling slowly towards market for a nonexistant company, and that's what I have to spend a lot of the time doing. I've fallen behind in that class because it doesn't interest me, and I have to convince myself that it's not because I'm crap.
So although the obvious solution is to just kick out the disruptive kids (and I certainly wouldn't complain), it would be better to give us more say in what we do. It's not the only problem[2], but it's the biggest one. I somehow get the feeling that enough people will be interested in any given subject to keep the economy going when what we can and can't do actually has an impact on the real world. Come to think of it, the fact that we don't have that kind of power doesn't help either - would you be motivated if your boss kept telling you to
I'm pretty sure Gamecube games will require the disk, although I guess they might be available for download if you don't mind losing the disk space. They almost certainly won't be free, and I'd guess N64 games won't be either, at least not to begin with.
I thought of that. What you say is true, but having a lot of patents would be good for the ego. Perhaps even replacing penis length as the one true indication of authority. And since nobody would really care, it wouldn't have to be privatised; just put it in the public sector and hope people will pay to keep it going.
Which is why people wouldn't be allowed to use their patents to restrict other people from using their methods and inventions, just like gun owners aren't allowed to shoot people offhand.
What you said made me think.
Patents are weapons. Just like guns. Gun control, like all other forms of prohibition, does more harm than good. The reasons for this apply to any weapon to a greater or lesser extent, so why do we not allow software patents?
Obviously you wouldn't be able to go around suing people just for doing something harmless like infringing upon them, but if somebody does it to you, or violates your copyright protection or demands that you fork over your customers' data or they'll DoS you or something, pull it on them and bam! If you're quick enough on the draw, they'll be forced into bankruptcy; if not, you have only yourself and them to blame.
Just like guns, the use of patents needs to be regulated, not the distribution of them.
Orafucked: Verb. When someone screws you over so bad that it feels like they raped your every orifice.
Orafuck, as a verb, would mean to screw somebody over so bad that they feel like you raped their every orifice. Orafucked, as a verb, would be the past tense of that. What you described was the adjective, in the state of having been recently orafucked.