Speaking of China, here's a shoe on the other foot question for you--how would China react if UNESCO offered a seat to Taiwan?
They're a little more pre-emptive than that. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year making sure that this never happens.
That's actually one of the most significant distinctions between Chinese and US foreign policy these days. The US spends most of its time defending its present status, whereas China spends most of its time (bot NOT most of its money) building and buttressing its future status.
There are obvious, compelling reasons for this, but it's interesting nonetheless to see how much easier it is to be the insurgent rather than the incumbent....
China loans money. They do not give it away. They are smarter than the US in this.
Well their loans are often what are called 'soft loans'. China will effectively give developing countries a lot of money in exchange for their UN vote on the Taiwan issue, and for as long as that nation maintains its 'One China' policy, they won't ask for repayment. But on the day that country's diplomats say the words 'Republic of China', all those loans become due in full.
In practice, therefore, their policy doesn't look a lot different from what the US is doing here. The main distinction is that China enacts these policies in pursuit of its own interests, whereas the US is enacting this policy in defence of the current Israeli government's interests.
How might the Web — and the world — have looked today if that had happened?
There would have been someone else that would have filled Netscape's shoes. Someone would have built the better mousetrap to compete.
Actually, the biggest benefit of Netscape turning down Microsoft's offer was its subsequent demise, which marked the turning point toward open web standards and the prevalence of FOSS on the Internet-enabled desktop.
It was only after Microsoft crushed Netscape by 'cutting off its air supply' (Gates' words) that the Mozilla project came into its own. Say what you like about the software, its popularity was one of the main drivers toward open standards on the Internet.
As someone who's been developing software for the Web since about 1995, I lived through nearly a decade of suffering from the arrogance of both Netscape (the corporate entity) and Microsoft as they attempted to close off the Web and to dictate arbitrary terms to the rest of the world. If this ugly and ultimately fruitless process of commercialisation had continued much longer, I'd likely have given up the game completely.
So I, for one, am grateful for Netscape's hubris. Their actions, however wrongly motivated, precipitated a series of events that ultimately loosened the shackles of a generation of web developers.
"Its syntax is very forgiving, and there are lots of ways to do most things"
That's probably why it's so commonly known as a write-only language. "Forgiving syntax" in particular usually leads to someone sitting around later trying to figure out WTF is going on.
One could - quite validly - say the same about the English Language.
Now, I'll grant programming and spoken/written languages don't overlap perfectly with one another. That's why languages like LISP have such elegance; what they're designed to express is something far more abstracted and formalised in nature. It's possible to conceive of a complex structure and accompanying set of behaviours and properties simply by scanning a screenful of LISP, but English is narrative in nature. You don't scan across; you scan from top to bottom.
It's possible to write bad unreadable code in anything, but it's just so much easier in Perl that I shudder anytime I get asked to look at someone elses Perl code. That has NEVER been a good experience.
Perl can be difficult to grok, but it can be elegant as well. I've experienced revulsion looking at Perl code before, but never so consistently as with ASP and PHP. These are languages (and I use that term loosely) that simply cannot be made pretty.
In the right hands, Perl can be as elegant and expressive (and opaque, and efficient) as Shakespearean English. Argue however you like, the same is not true of many other languages. Python has clarity and simplicity. It's truly an engineer's language. LISP, as I've said, is beautiful in the same way architecture can be beautiful: taken as a whole, rather than a story. I didn't understand the appeal of Ruby until I learned that its inventor is Japanese. Then it all became clear. What seemed like awkward, nearly backward syntactical constructions suddenly made sense.
In other words, horses for courses. But arguing that Perl is not readable in its very nature is like arguing that English in incomprehensible based entirely on watching Jersey Shore.
He was probably the only person they could find who spoke Welsh.
Actually, it's Dylan Thomas. If anyone actually spoke Welsh, they'd realise that he's saying, 'I sing to you now of the pretty milk town down the dingle where a milk maid coos to her swain. By the time we arrive her heart will have lofted like a swan, leaving the lost little lad consumed and forgotten as the lilac by the goat. Mind the gap.'
Don't say 'fake' - that's a misrepresentation. I've used a pseudonym online since 1997. It's no more fake than the names Mark Twain, George Orwell or George Eliot. It's simply a Japanese wall (I.e. paper thin) that allows people to judge the merits of what I write without judging the person who wrote them.
I won't. say you're wrong, but I will say that building asynchronous apps using CRUD and the like is remarkably easy. I have friends who swear by Django, so I'm not blind to its appeal. Mojolicious has different areas of emphasis and the things it does, it does exceptionally well. URL handling in Mojo is simple and elegant, but I simply don't know enough about Django's input validation to comment.
I won't defend Perl's syntactical constructs; either you like the fluidity of the language or you don't. But Mojolicious is a modern, useable framework, far superior in important ways to Django.
For my part, I find it remarkably easy to implement RPC calls, CRUD especially, using this framework. Go to CPAN, read the Mojolicious::Lite exampes and decide for yourself whether it's worth your while.
Because clearly what we need is _yet another_ way to develop web applications.
Frankly, yes. As long as we're advancing and improving, yeah, it always makes sense to keep trying new approaches. I'm using Mojolicious for two apps currently in development. One of them was already in progress using other modules, bit with the Mojolicious::Lite module, I was able to cut my code base nearly in half.
I'll tell you what - why don't.you try it first, then complain about it if you still don't like it.
I've spent the last few weeks meeting with numerous judges and magistrates. The very first rule of Talking To Judges is that you DO NOT challenge the judge. You present your evidence and hope that you've got one that knows how to reason (most do) . When the lawyer replied "not at this distance..." he was doing the right thing.
The UI is pretty damn clear, but it won't stop users from making stupid mistakes.
The UI may be clear, clean and simple. But that doesn't mean it's not shit.
Yegge's point about a default font size is dear to my heart. While I had perfect vision a decade ago, I've been growing progressively farther-sighted over the last five years. Being unable to change the default font size in a browser is a deal-breaker to me. It angers me because someone had to decide to take the feature OUT. I mean, setting a default font size is one of the first things you configure into a browser, and exposing the value to make it user-changeable is trivially easy. But no, some eagle-eyed boy scout decided that it wasn't necessary.
The same goes for the G+ Android app. The number of things missing from it frustrate me virtually every single time I want to use it. I've been reduced to treating it as a glorified RSS feed for the half-dozen half-interesting Silicon Valley bloggingheads that still use it.
These same criticisms can be made about dozens of other products and companies. But I'm with Yegge - Google is one company that can and SHOULD do better.
Oh for fuck's sake, you know why the photographers laugh and joke with the protesters? It's so they don't get their heads kicked in when people start to panic, and so the protesters don't think they're undercover cops recording the events. Yes, photography is subjective - that's kind of the point. But try to bear in mind that the camera recording the photographers is subjective, too.
What else would you expect a publisher to put on the cover?
One of the things I liked about my copy of 'The Wasp Factory' was that about half the reviews said it was the best first novel in years while the other half said it was the most appalling novel they'd ever seen. I've often wondered how many of them were actually real.
Given that it actually is one of the best - and most appalling[*] - novels in a generation, I'd say all of them were real.
[*] Appalling in the older sense of 'so ghastly it induced a pallor on my face' (i.e. terrifying).
I was one of the '10' the last time this happened.
I was living in Iqaluit at the time, but was actually in flight to Pond Inlet at the northern tip of Baffin Island when the outage occurred. It was a very bizarre feeling to arrive in one of the most remote communities in the world and find I'd stepped back in time by a century.
Telephone, TV, and most other means of communications simply stopped. But people in the Arctic are adaptable. They don't last long if they aren't. Emergency communications were hopped from airport-to-pilot-to-ground from the hamlet (It's a LONG way from any other habitation). We hunkered down, and yes, politely waited for news.
As the wikipedia link indicates, we waited for days while the local telco flew technicians across the territory to reposition their dishes and get services running.
It was the experience of living in a remote location - close to the technological edge, as it were - that led me to drop what I was doing a few years later and leave for the South Pacific, where I live today. (Also: When I left Iqaluit, I promised myself I'd never be cold again.) I live in a country with only satellite service, and have worked for the last 8 years helping to improve communications here.
(Not so) amusingly, about a year and a half after I arrived, the satellite providing service to our region suffered catastrophic failure. I was able to use my experience in the Arctic to help convince people here of the dangers of relying on a single source of data communications. We should be getting a submarine cable in 2012-13, and once that happens, I just might be able to rely on Internet again.
Okay, okay, I missed the bit about expanding 3G networks in developing countries.
But it's still Captain Obviousness, and I'm still pissed that I got suckered into wasting my time reading this.
Tragically, it's not as obvious as it might seem to us geeks. In Papua New Guinea there are 55 thousand Facebook subscribers. 50 thousand of them access the Internet exclusively through their phones. But government is so blind to the incipient demand that they actively promote some of the highest Internet prices in the world. Reports like this are quite useful to those of us trying to make people realise that Internet + smart phone actually means something to the development of a nation.
When the heck did this expectation creep into peoples brains that any new social network must be the ultimate vehicle for social justice for all the oppressed people of the world
When people started to get the idea that our collective online behaviour should resemble our real-life behaviour.
In the past, bars and taverns, public parks, private halls and countless other meeting places were commonly used to organise groups for all kinds of purposes from politics to sports. Now, it's true that the landlord had the right to object to what you talked about, but the vast majority didn't. More to the point, if they recorded everything each person said, stored it in perpetuity and shared with with the authorities... well, we had names for people like that.
Now Google is saying one and all are welcome, that they'll make it easier to stay in touch with all of your friends, but if you're from Iran, or if you've been stalked, or if you are just a little drunk and careless, then caveat scriptor.
Yes, that's their right. Nobody is denying that. But just because they can do something doesn't mean they should, or that they're right to do it. Google keeps trying to tell people that what they're doing is uncontroversial, but that's simply not true. Google isn't keeping to 'real life' standards concerning names, they're creating an entirely unprecedented level of exposure for everyone who uses their service:
There is a continuum of publicness and persistence and anonymity. But in real life, we expect very few statements to be public, persistent, and attached to your real identity. Basically, only people talking on television or to the media can expect such treatment. And even then, the vast majority of their statements don't become part of the searchable Internet.
Online, Google and Facebook require an inversion of this assumed norm. Every statement you make on Google Plus or Facebook is persistent and strongly attached to your real identity through your name. Both services allow you to change settings to make your statements more or less public, which solves some problems. However, participating in public life on the services requires attaching your name to your statements. On the boulevards and town squares of Facebook, you can't just say, "Down with the government," with the knowledge that only a small percentage of the people who hear you could connect your statement to you. But the information is still being recorded, presumably in perpetuity.
So can we please stop pretending there's nothing unusual happening here? You're welcome to ridicule those who object, but at least have the courtesy to accept that this is not just empty whinging. People have legitimate concerns and criticisms here.
It's a game of chicken, where Google says, ok, lay off my pals that are making Android phones, or you have to sue, us, too-- and you don't REALLY want to do that, do you?
Why on earth would anyone be forced to sue Google if they didn't want to?
Well, it's a question of position. If $LITIGANT sues all the other Android makers but not Googorola, then Google wins market share because its costs are lower (no patent license fees / litigation costs / etc.). Android is diminished, but survives, and worse, Google profits more, not less. If the goal is to make Google suffer by making Android more expensive to use, then eventually, you'll have to go after them.
And the longer they wait, the more Google can learn from $LITIGANT's prior suits and gear up to defend itself -or attack $LITIGANT- more effectively.
But the real benefit comes from Motorola's own patent portfolio. If Google chooses, it can sign a NATO-style alliance with other Android makers, stating in effect that an attack on one is an attack on all of them. With patents covering some of the most basic aspects of mobile technology in its possession, Google can make it very attractive for $LITIGANT to not only leave Google alone, but to leave all the other Android makers alone, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of China, here's a shoe on the other foot question for you--how would China react if UNESCO offered a seat to Taiwan?
They're a little more pre-emptive than that. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year making sure that this never happens.
That's actually one of the most significant distinctions between Chinese and US foreign policy these days. The US spends most of its time defending its present status, whereas China spends most of its time (bot NOT most of its money) building and buttressing its future status.
There are obvious, compelling reasons for this, but it's interesting nonetheless to see how much easier it is to be the insurgent rather than the incumbent....
China loans money. They do not give it away. They are smarter than the US in this.
Well their loans are often what are called 'soft loans'. China will effectively give developing countries a lot of money in exchange for their UN vote on the Taiwan issue, and for as long as that nation maintains its 'One China' policy, they won't ask for repayment. But on the day that country's diplomats say the words 'Republic of China', all those loans become due in full.
In practice, therefore, their policy doesn't look a lot different from what the US is doing here. The main distinction is that China enacts these policies in pursuit of its own interests, whereas the US is enacting this policy in defence of the current Israeli government's interests.
Ho Hum, Corps lying, then they admit it, and no one has any energy left to care.
Oh ye of little faith. Get thee to Wall Street and start Occupying.
How might the Web — and the world — have looked today if that had happened?
There would have been someone else that would have filled Netscape's shoes. Someone would have built the better mousetrap to compete.
Actually, the biggest benefit of Netscape turning down Microsoft's offer was its subsequent demise, which marked the turning point toward open web standards and the prevalence of FOSS on the Internet-enabled desktop.
It was only after Microsoft crushed Netscape by 'cutting off its air supply' (Gates' words) that the Mozilla project came into its own. Say what you like about the software, its popularity was one of the main drivers toward open standards on the Internet.
As someone who's been developing software for the Web since about 1995, I lived through nearly a decade of suffering from the arrogance of both Netscape (the corporate entity) and Microsoft as they attempted to close off the Web and to dictate arbitrary terms to the rest of the world. If this ugly and ultimately fruitless process of commercialisation had continued much longer, I'd likely have given up the game completely.
So I, for one, am grateful for Netscape's hubris. Their actions, however wrongly motivated, precipitated a series of events that ultimately loosened the shackles of a generation of web developers.
Just read John Grisham's http://www.amazon.com/Broker-John-Grisham/dp/0385510454 The Broker which is based on this idea, only the hackers are Pakistani. They all got killed in the book.
All of them? Inside the same book? They must have been very small....
"Its syntax is very forgiving, and there are lots of ways to do most things"
That's probably why it's so commonly known as a write-only language. "Forgiving syntax" in particular usually leads to someone sitting around later trying to figure out WTF is going on.
One could - quite validly - say the same about the English Language.
Now, I'll grant programming and spoken/written languages don't overlap perfectly with one another. That's why languages like LISP have such elegance; what they're designed to express is something far more abstracted and formalised in nature. It's possible to conceive of a complex structure and accompanying set of behaviours and properties simply by scanning a screenful of LISP, but English is narrative in nature. You don't scan across; you scan from top to bottom.
It's possible to write bad unreadable code in anything, but it's just so much easier in Perl that I shudder anytime I get asked to look at someone elses Perl code. That has NEVER been a good experience.
Perl can be difficult to grok, but it can be elegant as well. I've experienced revulsion looking at Perl code before, but never so consistently as with ASP and PHP. These are languages (and I use that term loosely) that simply cannot be made pretty.
In the right hands, Perl can be as elegant and expressive (and opaque, and efficient) as Shakespearean English. Argue however you like, the same is not true of many other languages. Python has clarity and simplicity. It's truly an engineer's language. LISP, as I've said, is beautiful in the same way architecture can be beautiful: taken as a whole, rather than a story. I didn't understand the appeal of Ruby until I learned that its inventor is Japanese. Then it all became clear. What seemed like awkward, nearly backward syntactical constructions suddenly made sense.
In other words, horses for courses. But arguing that Perl is not readable in its very nature is like arguing that English in incomprehensible based entirely on watching Jersey Shore.
He was probably the only person they could find who spoke Welsh.
Actually, it's Dylan Thomas. If anyone actually spoke Welsh, they'd realise that he's saying, 'I sing to you now of the pretty milk town down the dingle where a milk maid coos to her swain. By the time we arrive her heart will have lofted like a swan, leaving the lost little lad consumed and forgotten as the lilac by the goat. Mind the gap.'
Some one corret this! :
Okay: Someone correct this:
Don't say 'fake' - that's a misrepresentation. I've used a pseudonym online since 1997. It's no more fake than the names Mark Twain, George Orwell or George Eliot. It's simply a Japanese wall (I.e. paper thin) that allows people to judge the merits of what I write without judging the person who wrote them.
I won't. say you're wrong, but I will say that building asynchronous apps using CRUD and the like is remarkably easy. I have friends who swear by Django, so I'm not blind to its appeal. Mojolicious has different areas of emphasis and the things it does, it does exceptionally well. URL handling in Mojo is simple and elegant, but I simply don't know enough about Django's input validation to comment.
For my part, I find it remarkably easy to implement RPC calls, CRUD especially, using this framework. Go to CPAN, read the Mojolicious::Lite exampes and decide for yourself whether it's worth your while.
Because clearly what we need is _yet another_ way to develop web applications.
Frankly, yes. As long as we're advancing and improving, yeah, it always makes sense to keep trying new approaches. I'm using Mojolicious for two apps currently in development. One of them was already in progress using other modules, bit with the Mojolicious::Lite module, I was able to cut my code base nearly in half.
I'll tell you what - why don't.you try it first, then complain about it if you still don't like it.
I've spent the last few weeks meeting with numerous judges and magistrates. The very first rule of Talking To Judges is that you DO NOT challenge the judge. You present your evidence and hope that you've got one that knows how to reason (most do) . When the lawyer replied "not at this distance..." he was doing the right thing.
The UI is pretty damn clear, but it won't stop users from making stupid mistakes.
The UI may be clear, clean and simple. But that doesn't mean it's not shit.
Yegge's point about a default font size is dear to my heart. While I had perfect vision a decade ago, I've been growing progressively farther-sighted over the last five years. Being unable to change the default font size in a browser is a deal-breaker to me. It angers me because someone had to decide to take the feature OUT. I mean, setting a default font size is one of the first things you configure into a browser, and exposing the value to make it user-changeable is trivially easy. But no, some eagle-eyed boy scout decided that it wasn't necessary.
The same goes for the G+ Android app. The number of things missing from it frustrate me virtually every single time I want to use it. I've been reduced to treating it as a glorified RSS feed for the half-dozen half-interesting Silicon Valley bloggingheads that still use it.
These same criticisms can be made about dozens of other products and companies. But I'm with Yegge - Google is one company that can and SHOULD do better.
Oh for fuck's sake, you know why the photographers laugh and joke with the protesters? It's so they don't get their heads kicked in when people start to panic, and so the protesters don't think they're undercover cops recording the events. Yes, photography is subjective - that's kind of the point. But try to bear in mind that the camera recording the photographers is subjective, too.
No more (and no less) distorted than the view through a gun sight. Having used both, I prefer the camera.
What else would you expect a publisher to put on the cover?
One of the things I liked about my copy of 'The Wasp Factory' was that about half the reviews said it was the best first novel in years while the other half said it was the most appalling novel they'd ever seen. I've often wondered how many of them were actually real.
Given that it actually is one of the best - and most appalling[*] - novels in a generation, I'd say all of them were real.
[*] Appalling in the older sense of 'so ghastly it induced a pallor on my face' (i.e. terrifying).
They're probably only 10 people, anyway.
I was one of the '10' the last time this happened.
I was living in Iqaluit at the time, but was actually in flight to Pond Inlet at the northern tip of Baffin Island when the outage occurred. It was a very bizarre feeling to arrive in one of the most remote communities in the world and find I'd stepped back in time by a century.
Telephone, TV, and most other means of communications simply stopped. But people in the Arctic are adaptable. They don't last long if they aren't. Emergency communications were hopped from airport-to-pilot-to-ground from the hamlet (It's a LONG way from any other habitation). We hunkered down, and yes, politely waited for news.
As the wikipedia link indicates, we waited for days while the local telco flew technicians across the territory to reposition their dishes and get services running.
It was the experience of living in a remote location - close to the technological edge, as it were - that led me to drop what I was doing a few years later and leave for the South Pacific, where I live today. (Also: When I left Iqaluit, I promised myself I'd never be cold again.) I live in a country with only satellite service, and have worked for the last 8 years helping to improve communications here.
(Not so) amusingly, about a year and a half after I arrived, the satellite providing service to our region suffered catastrophic failure. I was able to use my experience in the Arctic to help convince people here of the dangers of relying on a single source of data communications. We should be getting a submarine cable in 2012-13, and once that happens, I just might be able to rely on Internet again.
So, some politicos are going to investigate. They'll wave a magic wand of approval, or they'll wave a magic wand of disapproval.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that's not a wand they're waving....
Okay, okay, I missed the bit about expanding 3G networks in developing countries.
But it's still Captain Obviousness, and I'm still pissed that I got suckered into wasting my time reading this.
Tragically, it's not as obvious as it might seem to us geeks. In Papua New Guinea there are 55 thousand Facebook subscribers. 50 thousand of them access the Internet exclusively through their phones. But government is so blind to the incipient demand that they actively promote some of the highest Internet prices in the world. Reports like this are quite useful to those of us trying to make people realise that Internet + smart phone actually means something to the development of a nation.
When the heck did this expectation creep into peoples brains that any new social network must be the ultimate vehicle for social justice for all the oppressed people of the world
When people started to get the idea that our collective online behaviour should resemble our real-life behaviour.
In the past, bars and taverns, public parks, private halls and countless other meeting places were commonly used to organise groups for all kinds of purposes from politics to sports. Now, it's true that the landlord had the right to object to what you talked about, but the vast majority didn't. More to the point, if they recorded everything each person said, stored it in perpetuity and shared with with the authorities... well, we had names for people like that.
Now Google is saying one and all are welcome, that they'll make it easier to stay in touch with all of your friends, but if you're from Iran, or if you've been stalked, or if you are just a little drunk and careless, then caveat scriptor.
Yes, that's their right. Nobody is denying that. But just because they can do something doesn't mean they should, or that they're right to do it. Google keeps trying to tell people that what they're doing is uncontroversial, but that's simply not true. Google isn't keeping to 'real life' standards concerning names, they're creating an entirely unprecedented level of exposure for everyone who uses their service:
So can we please stop pretending there's nothing unusual happening here? You're welcome to ridicule those who object, but at least have the courtesy to accept that this is not just empty whinging. People have legitimate concerns and criticisms here.
An optional service that is tied to other optional services. You mad about your free optional services bro?
Just because being your friend is optional doesn't mean you're not acting like an asshole.
Rob or Steve Jobs? Hmmm
Wait! What! Commander Taco is the new Apple CEO?!?
Hi, "hassle" rhymes with "castle" but is spelled differently. Your helpful grammar Ally.
Nono, you're mistaken. It's from an old Hippie saying:
A man's comb is his hastle.
It's a game of chicken, where Google says, ok, lay off my pals that are making Android phones, or you have to sue, us, too-- and you don't REALLY want to do that, do you?
Why on earth would anyone be forced to sue Google if they didn't want to?
Well, it's a question of position. If $LITIGANT sues all the other Android makers but not Googorola, then Google wins market share because its costs are lower (no patent license fees / litigation costs / etc.). Android is diminished, but survives, and worse, Google profits more, not less. If the goal is to make Google suffer by making Android more expensive to use, then eventually, you'll have to go after them.
And the longer they wait, the more Google can learn from $LITIGANT's prior suits and gear up to defend itself -or attack $LITIGANT- more effectively.
But the real benefit comes from Motorola's own patent portfolio. If Google chooses, it can sign a NATO-style alliance with other Android makers, stating in effect that an attack on one is an attack on all of them. With patents covering some of the most basic aspects of mobile technology in its possession, Google can make it very attractive for $LITIGANT to not only leave Google alone, but to leave all the other Android makers alone, too.