-Hey is this where you get the windows for free? -Yes it is. do you have your pirate copy? -Yup! Look, this is a stolen code. -Good. TO THE FLOOR, NOW!!! CUFF HIM!
I had contracts for 3 months and they moved me to 6-month contracts.
Maybe my case is particular, but since i'm the only web developer around, and there isn't a replacement...:D So I feel like non-expendable (hee hee). Well i feel like Peter Parker. "With a great power comes yadda yadda."
But I don't live in the US, so I really don't know how is it there. But still, 3 or 6 months as contractor is much better than 3 or 6 months unemployed. In the meantime, if there's nothing to do, you could do those 1-day or 1-week jobs posted on the web. Like http://www.php-freelancers.com/.
Yeah, you got inches, whose measurement is based on some dunnowhatisit, and the feet, which you have to use a table to convert to inches, and of course, the yard, the mile... the lbs, the fluid oz, the quarter, which is a quarter of a galon (and not exactly a liter)...
<sarcasm>Yeah, americans are very GOOD at simplifying things!</sarcasm>
We're not signing onto Kyoto because it exempts nations termed as "developing".
Great, so who's giving the developing nations the means to clean their pollution? It's DEVELOPED nations' technology that they're using after all.
Who invented the steam machine powered by coal? Who invented the internal combustion engine? Who invented the CFC's which destroy the ozone layer? Who invented the non-biodegradable plastic wrap which created gigantic garbage dumps? Who began to anihilate species on masse just to get economical advantage? Who invented the dangerous chemicals that are poured onto rivers and oceans?
Well the developed nations, of course. DOH! So if a nation can reduce its levels of pollution, it's the developed nations alright. If you put the obligation on ALL countries, the developed nations will OBVIOUSLY have an economical advantage, because they'll be the first to comply with the standards. Why? Because they got the MONEY in the first place.
The developed nations started this whole pollution mess.
So this is my message to the developed nations (specially the US) on behalf of the Kyoto protocol.
You just stated the main problem with unemployment.
Companies do NOT care about making this a better country, or helping in the process of training employees.
They just see a huge dollar sign when they read a resume. For the just-graduated guys searching for a job... well, good luck, suckers!
(Employers ARE lucky unemployed people aren't turned into some kind of sudden murderers. But if companies aren't doing their job (which is MAKING jobs for the SOCIETY), are they really needed after all?
The main problem that I see, at least in the web development field, is that employers in big companies think only in commercial stuff - like Microsoft, Sun Java, and lots of super-extra-extreme-high-tech that NOBODY knows. On the other hand, many qualified programmers use Linux (not windows), Apache (not IIS), C++ (not Visual Basic), Python or PHP (not ASP.NET unless they're doing Mono).
In my country there's a huge demand of J2EE developers, while the large amounts of PHP programmers are left in the dust. And no, companies are NOT willing to spend a freaking dime in training new programmers in Weblogic, peoplesoft or similar stuff that requires thousands of dollars to get trained in. (Heck if they won't spend, who's gonna spend in training? The very unemployed who DON'T have money to train?)
Another example I've seen is a high corporate who constantly has problems with his WinME (yes, M-E) machine. He won't upgrade to XP because of the "high learning curve" (WTF?).
So is it the programmers' fault that companies won't find (fingers-quote) "qualified" employees? I'd rather say it's your typical Peter principle.
So, unless CEO's ACTUALLY listen to us, they're not gonna find eficient employees for the things they want.
These "ultra-thin" CRT's are not THAT ultra. And they're not the bleeding edge technology that Samsung has been working on.
According to Technology Review (pdf; Google HTML Version here), Samsung plans to start distributing nanotech (yes, you heard it right, nanotech) based displays by the end of 2006.
Replacing the bulky CRT with an array of millions of carbon nanotubes, these displays will require much less energy to work, and will be as thin as LCD-based displays - and hopefully will be much more eye-friendly than their CRT counterparts.
Now *THAT* is Samsung's secret weapon. Don't be impressed by a substancial, but still incremental improvement such as adjusting a CRT to be thinner.
My opinion is that this advancement in thin CRT's is just a preparation for what's coming.
(CNN theme plays) (begin transmission) November 17, 2104.
(Female Reporter speaks) Today there have been found the remains of a human settlement about a hundred years old, on the coldest spot of the earth, in an area that historians call "Antarctica". How the people in there managed to survive is a mystery. Is this another archaeological find, like the lost city of Atlantis?
--- update ---
We've now found more about this human settlement. Apparently there was a group who wanted to break some world record.
(Camera returns to the studio) That's right, Chris. I guess humans keep trying to do the impossible, for reasons we can't understand.
For martian news, this is Ken Brockman. (end of transmission)
It's not only Netscape. The W3C screwed up, too!
on
Netscape Reborn?
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps things should've been different if XHTML had been thought of originally.
Mosaic / Netscape were SGML browsers (with incomplete SGML support, mind you). Problem is that SGML is a horrid thing to behold: It's the DTD that defines if a tag is self-closing or not (like the <br> tag), not the structure of the document itself (like in <br/>). So, this leads us to: TAG SOUP!
XML on the other hand, is and always has been a tree-structured markup language.
Maybe I'm wrong, but any amateur programmer could program an XML parser now, it's not that difficult. The only exceptions to be taken are the comment and cdata sections (and the occasional used server-side). The rest is opening,closing and complete tags.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I got the feeling that IE processed tags in a somewhat tree-structured way, and that's what made it be a blazingly fast renderer.
So, Netscape's not the only one to blame. The W3C group ditched away some very good ideas that would have made the web a much better thing. Like the include tag, for example. They ditched it because SGML provided a way (entities) to include stuff. But it was so complex that NOBODY COULD IMPLEMENT IT. SGML was a big monster, alright. AFAIK only one man implemented an SGML parsing library, and that's James Clark.
So we could blame all the fault on AOL, MS or the original netscape programmers. But the W3 owes us, too.
Let me quote a post on the W3C discussion, dated May 1995.
This is why we need <INCLUDE> tags. It's time we thought about the future,
as in 5-10 years from now -- not next week. The internet's bandwidth will grow, and the speed of computers will increase. We needn't worry about network traffic or display times.
We need to concern ourselves with the future and the maturation of HTML.
Steve
PS: This "since 2 requests have to be made" thing bugs me, because it's obvious there's a lack of understanding about HTML/HTTP here. Each page generates multiple requests to begin with, if it has images. Each image is a request. That image doesn't have to be at the same site as the page. So many requests are *already* being made; an tag wouldn't particularly add any.
So, 10 years have passed and the net's full of horrid tables, absolutely-positioned div's, and much, much tag soup. Netscape simply couldn't adapt itself to the increasing complexity of HTML pages.
But, and I think i'm not the only one who thinks so, the W3 could have made things MUCH simpler for us. Both users and programmers.
You're right. Netscape is dead.
on
Netscape Reborn?
·
· Score: 1
Now that I think of it... wasn't it Netscape the one that crashed on massively nested tables? Had very slow rendering? Poor CSS support?
I still remember the dark times of hand-coding for NS4.x, and using javascript browser-sniffers *shudders*.
As Insightful. Would teach a lot to those uber-geeks who expect everyone to match their IQ.
What about multi-tier?
on
Holub on Patterns
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
If it wasn't for OOP, we probably couldn't have reached multi-tier approach to programming. Yes, I know, Java sux. But not OOP in itself.
I program in PHP, and without OOP, I wouldn't be able to use very nifty template classes which simplify my web job, not minutes or hours, but days.
The problem with OOP is that if you don't know best-use practices and think before writing (i.e. use UML), you're sure to make a bloody mess.
Think of OOP as 3D as procedural programming was 2D. A building in 3D is certainly more astounding than a 2D plane. But a maze in 3D is much scarier than a 2D maze.
It's not that OOP is "worse" than procedural programming. It just allows more powerful designs (either good or bad).
Here's a sitepoint article that might just help.
on
Art Tips For Programmers?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Try Sitepoint. is a very good web design site. At first there were only technical articles, but they added an art column, and now they got their art and design newsletter.
Actually there are archaeological ruins that point to the Great Flood.
Some deposits in the bottom of the black sea discover fossils of animals that only lived in non-sea water. This points to a huge lake existing many meters below sea-level, in a time where water was very scarse. At a point, the water level increased, and the sea flooded this zone. (Human bones which confirm this have been found)
Later, the tale of the great flood was written in an ancient babylonian text called the Epic of Gilgamesh. When the jews were captured by Babylon, they learned this account, and incorporated it into the book of Genesis.
There are only three people in the world who know the Coca Cola formula. They're not allowed to flight at the same time, nor be closer than N miles from each other.
Now If only the people at the WTC used this elemental backup method.
My favorite: The steel beam on the laptop
on
Creative Data Loss
·
· Score: 1
While a large office was being constructed, a steel beam fell on a laptop that contained the plans for the building.
Opera's web standards support is flawed. Period. DOM-compliant Javascript that works PERFECTLY with IE or Mozilla, blows on Opera.
Also, Try to open an XML page with XSLT stylesheet on Opera. Heck! It doesn't work. Wanna know why? Check their STUPID logic for rejecting XSLT. Apparently they confused XML+XSLT (great) with XSL-FO (horrible), and provided neither.
XSLT *was* the future. No more fighting for table rendering etc. You just displayed an xml webpage, and the browser would add ALL the necessary markup. *Instant* templating. Client side.
Just think about HOW MUCH BANDWIDTH could've been saved by using XSLT.
But Nobody will ever DARE to use xslt on their website, guess why. Because Opera doesn't support it and NEVER WILL.
Thanks a lot, Opera. Your stupidity contributed to stalling the web for another 10 years.
Obviously the open source movement is disrupting the status quo... Because some people began doing something as a legacy to the world (Linux, Mozilla...)
So where will the revenues come from, if people choose everything for free?
Companies need to realize they must stop charging for products that people already use for free. It's not like if the big companies can improve a browser and make an infomercial about it.
Maybe this is like the Industrial Revolution in reverse. Before, workers lost their jobs because their services were replaced by products (machinery). And now companies are seeing their profits going away with open source. So the only way they can make profit is training people who will use or improve the open source products. And that would mean depending on people again, and not products *cough* windows *cough*.
Maybe it's time companies start focusing on services again. i.e. tailor-made software. Or setting up a website (the tools are free (OSS), the configuration and customization are not.
What I'm seeing here is another one of those movements Marx told about... the lower classes fighting against the upper ones, and succeeding.
I personally used WordPerfect. It had a WONDERFUL styles management. I knew where a style began, and where it ended. Underline, italics, etc. It was perfectly marked on the screen. Wysiwyg wasn't a real need... that's what the preview button was for, after all.
I'm sure Wordperfect would have excelled in exporting to HTML format.
MS Word, on the other hand... well you know the story.
I guess this was the REAL reason for MS to launch windows. Not to provide a Multitasking environment, but to provide an environment they could CONTROL. The software market was being populated by non-microsoft products. Word, Lotus, QEMM386, etc. With Windows, Microsoft could bundle software and have complete advantage over the competition.
Slashdot Mirror
-Hey is this where you get the windows for free?
-Yes it is. do you have your pirate copy?
-Yup! Look, this is a stolen code.
-Good. TO THE FLOOR, NOW!!! CUFF HIM!
What about his letter to the European Union about patents?
If that's not influencial, then I wonder what influencial means.
I had contracts for 3 months and they moved me to 6-month contracts.
:D So I feel like non-expendable (hee hee). Well i feel like Peter Parker. "With a great power comes yadda yadda."
Maybe my case is particular, but since i'm the only web developer around, and there isn't a replacement...
But I don't live in the US, so I really don't know how is it there. But still, 3 or 6 months as contractor is much better than 3 or 6 months unemployed. In the meantime, if there's nothing to do, you could do those 1-day or 1-week jobs posted on the web. Like http://www.php-freelancers.com/.
"The evil Google displays copyrighted images". Well of course they do, DOH!!!
Yeah, you got inches, whose measurement is based on some dunnowhatisit, and the feet, which you have to use a table to convert to inches, and of course, the yard, the mile... the lbs, the fluid oz, the quarter, which is a quarter of a galon (and not exactly a liter)...
<sarcasm>Yeah, americans are very GOOD at simplifying things!</sarcasm>
This is why it wasn't posted as "Software news", but as an "Ask slashdot" story.
On the other hand, I do feel annoyed about that extensive memory hog of Firefox. Hope they get that fixed soon.
Great, so who's giving the developing nations the means to clean their pollution? It's DEVELOPED nations' technology that they're using after all.
Who invented the steam machine powered by coal?
Who invented the internal combustion engine?
Who invented the CFC's which destroy the ozone layer?
Who invented the non-biodegradable plastic wrap which created gigantic garbage dumps?
Who began to anihilate species on masse just to get economical advantage?
Who invented the dangerous chemicals that are poured onto rivers and oceans?
Well the developed nations, of course. DOH!
So if a nation can reduce its levels of pollution, it's the developed nations alright. If you put the obligation on ALL countries, the developed nations will OBVIOUSLY have an economical advantage, because they'll be the first to comply with the standards. Why? Because they got the MONEY in the first place.
The developed nations started this whole pollution mess.
So this is my message to the developed nations (specially the US) on behalf of the Kyoto protocol.
You broke it?
YOU fix it.
Well I don't know about you guys, but the least thing I want is Microsoft products gaining more popularity.
Still, those pivot things do look nifty.
You just stated the main problem with unemployment.
Companies do NOT care about making this a better country, or helping in the process of training employees.
They just see a huge dollar sign when they read a resume. For the just-graduated guys searching for a job... well, good luck, suckers!
(Employers ARE lucky unemployed people aren't turned into some kind of sudden murderers. But if companies aren't doing their job (which is MAKING jobs for the SOCIETY), are they really needed after all?
The main problem that I see, at least in the web development field, is that employers in big companies think only in commercial stuff - like Microsoft, Sun Java, and lots of super-extra-extreme-high-tech that NOBODY knows. On the other hand, many qualified programmers use Linux (not windows), Apache (not IIS), C++ (not Visual Basic), Python or PHP (not ASP.NET unless they're doing Mono).
In my country there's a huge demand of J2EE developers, while the large amounts of PHP programmers are left in the dust. And no, companies are NOT willing to spend a freaking dime in training new programmers in Weblogic, peoplesoft or similar stuff that requires thousands of dollars to get trained in. (Heck if they won't spend, who's gonna spend in training? The very unemployed who DON'T have money to train?)
Another example I've seen is a high corporate who constantly has problems with his WinME (yes, M-E) machine. He won't upgrade to XP because of the "high learning curve" (WTF?).
So is it the programmers' fault that companies won't find (fingers-quote) "qualified" employees? I'd rather say it's your typical Peter principle.
So, unless CEO's ACTUALLY listen to us, they're not gonna find eficient employees for the things they want.
My 2-cents.
These "ultra-thin" CRT's are not THAT ultra. And they're not the bleeding edge technology that Samsung has been working on.
According to Technology Review (pdf; Google HTML Version here), Samsung plans to start distributing nanotech (yes, you heard it right, nanotech) based displays by the end of 2006.
Replacing the bulky CRT with an array of millions of carbon nanotubes, these displays will require much less energy to work, and will be as thin as LCD-based displays - and hopefully will be much more eye-friendly than their CRT counterparts.
Now *THAT* is Samsung's secret weapon. Don't be impressed by a substancial, but still incremental improvement such as adjusting a CRT to be thinner.
My opinion is that this advancement in thin CRT's is just a preparation for what's coming.
and not millions of notes saying "I'm going to kill you", or "you took away my job you "Q/=()$%" or simply "screw you".
By the way, what's his e-mail, anyway? *evil grin* I wonder if posting his e-mail on slashdot would be a bad idea at all... MUAHAHAHAHAHAH!
*sighs* Oh well, it was funny while it lasted. *combs himself*
(CNN theme plays)
(begin transmission)
November 17, 2104.
(Female Reporter speaks) Today there have been found the remains of a human settlement about a hundred years old, on the coldest spot of the earth, in an area that historians call "Antarctica". How the people in there managed to survive is a mystery. Is this another archaeological find, like the lost city of Atlantis?
--- update ---
We've now found more about this human settlement. Apparently there was a group who wanted to break some world record.
(Camera returns to the studio)
That's right, Chris. I guess humans keep trying to do the impossible, for reasons we can't understand.
For martian news, this is Ken Brockman.
(end of transmission)
Mosaic / Netscape were SGML browsers (with incomplete SGML support, mind you). Problem is that SGML is a horrid thing to behold: It's the DTD that defines if a tag is self-closing or not (like the <br> tag), not the structure of the document itself (like in <br/>). So, this leads us to: TAG SOUP!
XML on the other hand, is and always has been a tree-structured markup language.
Maybe I'm wrong, but any amateur programmer could program an XML parser now, it's not that difficult. The only exceptions to be taken are the comment and cdata sections (and the occasional used server-side). The rest is opening,closing and complete tags.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I got the feeling that IE processed tags in a somewhat tree-structured way, and that's what made it be a blazingly fast renderer.
So, Netscape's not the only one to blame. The W3C group ditched away some very good ideas that would have made the web a much better thing. Like the include tag, for example. They ditched it because SGML provided a way (entities) to include stuff. But it was so complex that NOBODY COULD IMPLEMENT IT. SGML was a big monster, alright. AFAIK only one man implemented an SGML parsing library, and that's James Clark.
So we could blame all the fault on AOL, MS or the original netscape programmers. But the W3 owes us, too.
Let me quote a post on the W3C discussion, dated May 1995.
(Source: W3C mailing list)
So, 10 years have passed and the net's full of horrid tables, absolutely-positioned div's, and much, much tag soup. Netscape simply couldn't adapt itself to the increasing complexity of HTML pages.
But, and I think i'm not the only one who thinks so, the W3 could have made things MUCH simpler for us. Both users and programmers.
Now that I think of it... wasn't it Netscape the one that crashed on massively nested tables? Had very slow rendering? Poor CSS support?
I still remember the dark times of hand-coding for NS4.x, and using javascript browser-sniffers *shudders*.
But that time's over. The king is dead.
Long live the King!
It's funny, but also insightful (when will the slashcoders learn? Perhaps it's time to dump perl altoget - *bzzt* offtopic alert - oh nevermind.
As Insightful. Would teach a lot to those uber-geeks who expect everyone to match their IQ.
If it wasn't for OOP, we probably couldn't have reached multi-tier approach to programming. Yes, I know, Java sux. But not OOP in itself.
I program in PHP, and without OOP, I wouldn't be able to use very nifty template classes which simplify my web job, not minutes or hours, but days.
The problem with OOP is that if you don't know best-use practices and think before writing (i.e. use UML), you're sure to make a bloody mess.
Think of OOP as 3D as procedural programming was 2D. A building in 3D is certainly more astounding than a 2D plane. But a maze in 3D is much scarier than a 2D maze.
It's not that OOP is "worse" than procedural programming. It just allows more powerful designs (either good or bad).
Try Sitepoint. is a very good web design site. At first there were only technical articles, but they added an art column, and now they got their art and design newsletter.
Here's the article: Good designers copy, great designers steal. Two thumbs up for that one. They even give you examples of how to do it right.
Might wanna try.
Actually there are archaeological ruins that point to the Great Flood.
Some deposits in the bottom of the black sea discover fossils of animals that only lived in non-sea water. This points to a huge lake existing many meters below sea-level, in a time where water was very scarse. At a point, the water level increased, and the sea flooded this zone. (Human bones which confirm this have been found)
Later, the tale of the great flood was written in an ancient babylonian text called the Epic of Gilgamesh. When the jews were captured by Babylon, they learned this account, and incorporated it into the book of Genesis.
Here's a National Geographic article about it. There's a Discovery channel brief, too.
Frankly, both tales, Atlantis and the Great Flood, look very interesting to me, from an archaeological point of view.
There are only three people in the world who know the Coca Cola formula. They're not allowed to flight at the same time, nor be closer than N miles from each other.
Now If only the people at the WTC used this elemental backup method.
While a large office was being constructed, a steel beam fell on a laptop that contained the plans for the building.
Now, THAT's what I call self-destruction!
Opera's web standards support is flawed. Period. DOM-compliant Javascript that works PERFECTLY with IE or Mozilla, blows on Opera.
Also, Try to open an XML page with XSLT stylesheet on Opera. Heck! It doesn't work. Wanna know why? Check their STUPID logic for rejecting XSLT. Apparently they confused XML+XSLT (great) with XSL-FO (horrible), and provided neither.
XSLT *was* the future. No more fighting for table rendering etc. You just displayed an xml webpage, and the browser would add ALL the necessary markup. *Instant* templating. Client side.
Just think about HOW MUCH BANDWIDTH could've been saved by using XSLT.
But Nobody will ever DARE to use xslt on their website, guess why. Because Opera doesn't support it and NEVER WILL.
Thanks a lot, Opera. Your stupidity contributed to stalling the web for another 10 years.
Obviously the open source movement is disrupting the status quo... Because some people began doing something as a legacy to the world (Linux, Mozilla...)
So where will the revenues come from, if people choose everything for free?
Companies need to realize they must stop charging for products that people already use for free. It's not like if the big companies can improve a browser and make an infomercial about it.
Maybe this is like the Industrial Revolution in reverse. Before, workers lost their jobs because their services were replaced by products (machinery). And now companies are seeing their profits going away with open source. So the only way they can make profit is training people who will use or improve the open source products. And that would mean depending on people again, and not products *cough* windows *cough*.
Maybe it's time companies start focusing on services again. i.e. tailor-made software. Or setting up a website (the tools are free (OSS), the configuration and customization are not.
What I'm seeing here is another one of those movements Marx told about... the lower classes fighting against the upper ones, and succeeding.
I personally used WordPerfect. It had a WONDERFUL styles management. I knew where a style began, and where it ended. Underline, italics, etc. It was perfectly marked on the screen. Wysiwyg wasn't a real need... that's what the preview button was for, after all.
I'm sure Wordperfect would have excelled in exporting to HTML format.
MS Word, on the other hand... well you know the story.
I guess this was the REAL reason for MS to launch windows. Not to provide a Multitasking environment, but to provide an environment they could CONTROL. The software market was being populated by non-microsoft products. Word, Lotus, QEMM386, etc. With Windows, Microsoft could bundle software and have complete advantage over the competition.