(I bet a lot of people thought Tom Cruise was normal before he started jumping on Oprah's couch.)
Actually I think the dude has serious issues. Normally he'd be on some sort of drug and seeing a psychiatrist. Unfortunately he's in Scientology, and that means auditing which is probably not a good idea for people with mental health issues, a ban on seeing psychiatrists or taking medication. Plus Scientologists are supposed to disconnect from friends and family outside the group. And they suck money out of their members pretty effectively.
Given that Scientology probably attracts people who are a bit unsure of themselves to start with and you have a recipe for crazy.
So it's sort of ironic to see him behaving in a manic way and ranting about the benefits of Scientology, because if he wasn't in it he'd probably have more money, no audit sessions and would be able to shop around psychiatrists until he found one that could help him.
Sigh. Whenever we have these "we only seem weird to you cretinous neurotypicals because we're geniuses" circle jerks the sloppy spelling and grammar really starts to grate.
And actually it's completely back to front. We socially lazy people are good at programming because we have lots and lots of free time that the regular folks spend being sociable.
If it promotes the use a bit of competition for faster processors in cellphones it is a good thing. For far too long people have been making underpowered devices with fat OSs.
If your website is so plain as to look like something from the HTML 3.0 days, well, that's not too good either from the marketing/corporate image point of view... But without having seen the website in question it's hard to tell.
The website is retro, but the company does deal with rather retro technologies. Certainly I've had people say they like it because it is so low tech.
I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying. My company's website doesn't use CSS - it's just HTML. So turning off stylesheets has no effect. So it looks the same with styles turned off.
Now for mobile, usability and indexing this is good. On the other hand I'm using the browser's default stylesheet so the site is a bit ugly.
I've found that if you take a look at your site without css enabled (in Firefox, View -> Page Style -> No Style), if the site looks good and is functional, then you'll be "ok" on mobile phones. If your site looks horrible, then you should probably not consider yourself a web developer...
I checked the my company's website - the only website I maintain these days - and it looks exactly the same if I do this. I still can't decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
A long time ago someone paid me to work on a web based booking system. We used ASP and MSSQL on the server to generate the pages. Now back then we had a rule everything must be validated on the server because that was the only place we could trust.
I actually had a down level version of the page that was pure HTML that would work on a IE 3.0 (like I say this was a long time ago) which I didn't trust to do anything more complex than that. There was also Javascript for form validation but I only served that to a browser that I knew supported it.
You have no idea what you're talking about, yet you just butt in the discussion like the OP. There are things like design patterns, test driven development, usability testing, etc. that make up a great application that looks and feels nice and is easy to use.
What about accessibility? If your website is not usable with Lynx, most likely it is not usable with a screen reader. That means blind people can't use it.
Ensure that pages are accessible even when newer technologies are not supported or are turned off.
Although content developers are encouraged to use new technologies that solve problems raised by existing technologies, they should know how to make their pages still work with older browsers and people who choose to turn off features.
Checkpoints:
6.1 Organize documents so they may be read without style sheets. For example, when an HTML document is rendered without associated style sheets, it must still be possible to read the document. [Priority 1] When content is organized logically, it will be rendered in a meaningful order when style sheets are turned off or not supported.
6.2 Ensure that equivalents for dynamic content are updated when the dynamic content changes. [Priority 1]
6.3 Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported. If this is not possible, provide equivalent information on an alternative accessible page. [Priority 1] For example, ensure that links that trigger scripts work when scripts are turned off or not supported (e.g., do not use "javascript:" as the link target). If it is not possible to make the page usable without scripts, provide a text equivalent with the NOSCRIPT element, or use a server-side script instead of a client-side script, or provide an alternative accessible page as per checkpoint 11.4. Refer also to guideline 1.
6.4 For scripts and applets, ensure that event handlers are input device-independent. [Priority 2] Refer to the definition of device independence.
6.5 Ensure that dynamic content is accessible or provide an alternative presentation or page. [Priority 2]
For example, in HTML, use NOFRAMES at the end of each frameset. For some applications, server-side scripts may be more accessible than client-side scripts.
Use CSS as it was meant to be used, and stop using javascript and flash where they are unnecessary, and your sites will work just fine on mobile devices. Oh, that's hard? Sorry, your crap tools which produce shit code you don't understand don't impress me.
Can't agree with this more. CSS is fine if you want to make things look better on browsers that support it. Still there are many, many browsers that don't support it running on mobile devices. Hell blind people use a screen reader that definitely does not support CSS - a good test for screen reader support is seeing if your website is usable on a text browser like Lynx. You can't depend on CSS for layout unless you exclude all these.
Not everyone in the world uses Firefox, just like not everyone uses IE. Even if IE6 disappeared you still can't assume that everyone has a browser with CSS support. So if you use it to make things look better on compatible browsers that's fair enough. If you make a website that is unusable without it, you're excluding more than just IE6 users.
I see what you mean, but there are a lot of people middle managers who are "good enough", usually compared to the likely alternatives. Most people know this and will even cover up their few mistakes.
Basically it's a self interest thing. If you know your boss will get replaced by someone truly ghastly should they get fired you're going to stop that happening. My guess is the OP is in the "good enough" category from the way he writes about things. Of course he could be a deeply deluded sociopath who is unaware that he is loathed by a significant percentage of his team.
Without characters, you don't have story, and at best you get rotten shit like Star Wars Episode 1.
And not just Episode 1.
"George, you can type this shit, but you sure can't say it." Harrison Ford to George Lucas on the Star Wars script.
Actually I've always thought Sci Fi is a guilty pleasure even if the technobabble occasionally makes you wince. Hell I liked SG1 even though it was acting as a cliche list long before tvtropes was around. Allegedly Amanda Tapping originally said she would quit rather than read the famously awful line about her being an effective member of the team despite her 'genitalia being on the inside of her body'. And face it, people all around the world laughed winced when that was broadcast.
In the UK if you said "liar, liar, pants on fire" to an RIAA like organisation they could sue you for libel unless you could prove that every single employee had burning pants. OK, I'm exaggerating but UK libel law absolutely sucks. It basically allows the rich and powerful to stop the poor and powerless from criticizing them. And of course that is exactly what it is designed for.
In fact Singapore only need to take UK libel law and ignore the unwritten rule that the government won't sue the opposition for libel and that is enough for the Prime Minister to be able to silence criticism there. Now the UK government doesn't do that, but if you get screwed by some RIAA like company and mention it on your blog they will most likely threaten you with libel and try to intimidate you into shutting up. Your ISPs might yank the page at that point too.
Occasionally I find that I really don't like a certain track, so I will make a ripped CD with the offending track removed, but that's another matter. It's still (IMO) worth paying for the redundant data to get decent sound. Of course, there are some labels that offer uncompressed tracks separately (Magnatune, for instance), and good for them...
I DON'T KNOW WHAT PEOPLE ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT. THE COMPRESSED VERSIONS SOUND FINE TO ME. WHAT? CAN YOU SPEAK UP A BIT!
Levy also ruled that the RIAA, which has sued 30,000 individuals, was not a vexatious litigant, shooting down Beckerman's counter-complaint against his courtroom opponents. "Plaintiffs have doggedly pursued their copyright infringement claim, but I find no evidence of undue vexatiousness or ill motive on their part," Levy wrote.
Mind you, I do wonder if outing NewYorkCountryLawyer's identity here might be a bad idea. It means that an RIAA staffer will now be reading every post he made looking for a sentence they can use against him.
> Now I think these guys are spouting buzzwords. But if you want to process 100 PB of data on
Yeah, a high profile work interrupt came in at that point and unfortunately scrambled my slashdot post composing process. What I meant to say was
"Now I think these guys are spouting buzzwords. But if you want to process 100 PB of data on a Google like cluster of machines the way you do it is very different from 100 KB or even 100 MB on single processor machine.
Of course small systems have their own challenges - I've written code in C for very crippled embedded systems where even 100 KB is hard to process because you can't rely on keeping more than a few KB in RAM at any one time.
In between of course there's an easy case where you don't need to worry too much about scaling to multiple processors and you can fit everything in memory.
Now University only teaches you the easy case and worse it teaches you to sneer at the techniques you need to solve the difficult cases (very big or very small) as hacks. Of course it would be nice if we could all write single threaded code on systems with enough memory to make things easy, but the reality is that hardware to do that is too expensive for small embedded systems and not possible to build for the Google case."
That's not true. The way you solve the problem changes radically depending on the amount of data you have. Consider
100 KB - You could use the dumbest algorithm imaginable and the slowest processor and everything is fine.
100 MB - most embedded systems can happily manage it. A desktop system can easily, even in a rather inefficient language. Algorithms are important.
100 GB - Big ass server - you'd definitely want to make sure you were using an efficient language and had an algorithm that scaled well, certainly to 2 processors and most likely to 4 processors. Probably should be 64 bit for efficiency.
100 PB+ You'd want a Google like system with lots of nodes. Actually I think at this point the code would look nothing like the 10 MB case. I remember someone saying that Google is "just a hash table". Now I think that misses the point. Google has invented things like Map/Reduce and has custom file systems. They've also spent a lot of time trying to cut costs by studying the effects of temperature on failure rates.
Now I think these guys are spouting buzzwords. But if you want to process 100PB of data on
I think modding people Troll is the/. equivalent of smacking dogs on the nose with a rolled up newspaper when they defecate in the apartment. I.e. it's just a way to stop them doing it again. Clearly no one wants to read "Why not use Java?!" in these sorts of discussions. Now you can't explain to a dog why indoor defecation is bad, just like you can't explain to Java programmers why Java is just a bad idea. Still shit in the apartment and posts advocating Java is not something which you need to tolerate.
The only thing i get from this is "My life sucks, I hate my job so much ill publicly state i don't code when i don't have to. Oh and here... a pelican eating a rabbit."
why else would he submit it.
I know i don't program all the time in my spare time, i play wow, Crysis, and maybe go outside(OMG RLY?) but today must of been REALLY slow.
I think it's a plea for help from timothy. All the rich Slashdotters have gone out jet skiing, partying with movie stars or snorting coke out of hookers' cleavages and forgot to loosen his chain so he can get hot pockets and mountain dew from the kitchen.
Luckily they don't bother to read between the lines of his submissions, otherwise he'd be due for a whippin' when they get back.
Because it's vitally important to show filthy Linux users how much more advanced the graphics are than what they're used to and then stop them playing it.
I always use IE to download Opera. So it doesn't really matter if it is outdated. To me the ballot screen is a silly requirement - most people don't know enough to vote, and there is the risk of malware ridden browsers getting onto it. People who do know enough to vote can already download an alternative browser and use that instead.
> Actually I wasn't trying to, but apparently I did
Actually the a good troll is indistinguishable from someone asking a question with a known answer.
> So the best way to secure the area around where your gate lets out is to scout with a UAV first, then, if hostile, aim a huge magnetron into the gate, since the bad guys on the other end can't possibly come through...
Actually there was an episode where someone aimed a particle beam at a gate.
Oh and by the way photon torpedoes are warp-driven vessels filled with antimatter - they don't pass through the ship when they impact, even though they are traveling at warp speed.
That's because they recombobulate the warp field phase dynamic tensors.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, it was shown moving over a perfectly flat tabletop. Not quite the images of terror I was expecting. Call it how it is.
Daleks could only move over flat surfaces too.
(I bet a lot of people thought Tom Cruise was normal before he started jumping on Oprah's couch.)
Actually I think the dude has serious issues. Normally he'd be on some sort of drug and seeing a psychiatrist. Unfortunately he's in Scientology, and that means auditing which is probably not a good idea for people with mental health issues, a ban on seeing psychiatrists or taking medication. Plus Scientologists are supposed to disconnect from friends and family outside the group. And they suck money out of their members pretty effectively.
Given that Scientology probably attracts people who are a bit unsure of themselves to start with and you have a recipe for crazy.
So it's sort of ironic to see him behaving in a manic way and ranting about the benefits of Scientology, because if he wasn't in it he'd probably have more money, no audit sessions and would be able to shop around psychiatrists until he found one that could help him.
terratory
Sigh. Whenever we have these "we only seem weird to you cretinous neurotypicals because we're geniuses" circle jerks the sloppy spelling and grammar really starts to grate.
And actually it's completely back to front. We socially lazy people are good at programming because we have lots and lots of free time that the regular folks spend being sociable.
If it promotes the use a bit of competition for faster processors in cellphones it is a good thing. For far too long people have been making underpowered devices with fat OSs.
If your website is so plain as to look like something from the HTML 3.0 days, well, that's not too good either from the marketing/corporate image point of view... But without having seen the website in question it's hard to tell.
The website is retro, but the company does deal with rather retro technologies. Certainly I've had people say they like it because it is so low tech.
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/
That being said I could add some CSS to make it look more modern on browsers that support it.
I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying. My company's website doesn't use CSS - it's just HTML. So turning off stylesheets has no effect. So it looks the same with styles turned off.
Now for mobile, usability and indexing this is good. On the other hand I'm using the browser's default stylesheet so the site is a bit ugly.
I've found that if you take a look at your site without css enabled (in Firefox, View -> Page Style -> No Style), if the site looks good and is functional, then you'll be "ok" on mobile phones. If your site looks horrible, then you should probably not consider yourself a web developer...
I checked the my company's website - the only website I maintain these days - and it looks exactly the same if I do this. I still can't decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
A long time ago someone paid me to work on a web based booking system. We used ASP and MSSQL on the server to generate the pages. Now back then we had a rule everything must be validated on the server because that was the only place we could trust.
I actually had a down level version of the page that was pure HTML that would work on a IE 3.0 (like I say this was a long time ago) which I didn't trust to do anything more complex than that. There was also Javascript for form validation but I only served that to a browser that I knew supported it.
You have no idea what you're talking about, yet you just butt in the discussion like the OP. There are things like design patterns, test driven development, usability testing, etc. that make up a great application that looks and feels nice and is easy to use.
What about accessibility? If your website is not usable with Lynx, most likely it is not usable with a screen reader. That means blind people can't use it.
Actually W3C guidelines say
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#gl-new-technologies
Ensure that pages are accessible even when newer technologies are not supported or are turned off.
Although content developers are encouraged to use new technologies that solve problems raised by existing technologies, they should know how to make their pages still work with older browsers and people who choose to turn off features.
Checkpoints:
6.1 Organize documents so they may be read without style sheets. For example, when an HTML document is rendered without associated style sheets, it must still be possible to read the document. [Priority 1]
When content is organized logically, it will be rendered in a meaningful order when style sheets are turned off or not supported.
6.2 Ensure that equivalents for dynamic content are updated when the dynamic content changes. [Priority 1]
6.3 Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported. If this is not possible, provide equivalent information on an alternative accessible page. [Priority 1]
For example, ensure that links that trigger scripts work when scripts are turned off or not supported (e.g., do not use "javascript:" as the link target). If it is not possible to make the page usable without scripts, provide a text equivalent with the NOSCRIPT element, or use a server-side script instead of a client-side script, or provide an alternative accessible page as per checkpoint 11.4. Refer also to guideline 1.
6.4 For scripts and applets, ensure that event handlers are input device-independent. [Priority 2]
Refer to the definition of device independence.
6.5 Ensure that dynamic content is accessible or provide an alternative presentation or page. [Priority 2]
For example, in HTML, use NOFRAMES at the end of each frameset. For some applications, server-side scripts may be more accessible than client-side scripts.
Use CSS as it was meant to be used, and stop using javascript and flash where they are unnecessary, and your sites will work just fine on mobile devices. Oh, that's hard? Sorry, your crap tools which produce shit code you don't understand don't impress me.
Can't agree with this more. CSS is fine if you want to make things look better on browsers that support it. Still there are many, many browsers that don't support it running on mobile devices. Hell blind people use a screen reader that definitely does not support CSS - a good test for screen reader support is seeing if your website is usable on a text browser like Lynx. You can't depend on CSS for layout unless you exclude all these.
Not everyone in the world uses Firefox, just like not everyone uses IE. Even if IE6 disappeared you still can't assume that everyone has a browser with CSS support. So if you use it to make things look better on compatible browsers that's fair enough. If you make a website that is unusable without it, you're excluding more than just IE6 users.
I see what you mean, but there are a lot of people middle managers who are "good enough", usually compared to the likely alternatives. Most people know this and will even cover up their few mistakes.
Basically it's a self interest thing. If you know your boss will get replaced by someone truly ghastly should they get fired you're going to stop that happening. My guess is the OP is in the "good enough" category from the way he writes about things. Of course he could be a deeply deluded sociopath who is unaware that he is loathed by a significant percentage of his team.
Without characters, you don't have story, and at best you get rotten shit like Star Wars Episode 1.
And not just Episode 1.
"George, you can type this shit, but you sure can't say it."
Harrison Ford to George Lucas on the Star Wars script.
Actually I've always thought Sci Fi is a guilty pleasure even if the technobabble occasionally makes you wince. Hell I liked SG1 even though it was acting as a cliche list long before tvtropes was around. Allegedly Amanda Tapping originally said she would quit rather than read the famously awful line about her being an effective member of the team despite her 'genitalia being on the inside of her body'. And face it, people all around the world laughed winced when that was broadcast.
In the UK if you said "liar, liar, pants on fire" to an RIAA like organisation they could sue you for libel unless you could prove that every single employee had burning pants. OK, I'm exaggerating but UK libel law absolutely sucks. It basically allows the rich and powerful to stop the poor and powerless from criticizing them. And of course that is exactly what it is designed for.
In fact Singapore only need to take UK libel law and ignore the unwritten rule that the government won't sue the opposition for libel and that is enough for the Prime Minister to be able to silence criticism there. Now the UK government doesn't do that, but if you get screwed by some RIAA like company and mention it on your blog they will most likely threaten you with libel and try to intimidate you into shutting up. Your ISPs might yank the page at that point too.
Occasionally I find that I really don't like a certain track, so I will make a ripped CD with the offending track removed, but that's another matter. It's still (IMO) worth paying for the redundant data to get decent sound. Of course, there are some labels that offer uncompressed tracks separately (Magnatune, for instance), and good for them...
I DON'T KNOW WHAT PEOPLE ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT. THE COMPRESSED VERSIONS SOUND FINE TO ME. WHAT? CAN YOU SPEAK UP A BIT!
Actually the Judge ruled that the RIAA was not a vexatious litigant either
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/magistrate-clears-blogger-riaa-of-vexatious-charges/
Levy also ruled that the RIAA, which has sued 30,000 individuals, was not a vexatious litigant, shooting down Beckerman's counter-complaint against his courtroom opponents. "Plaintiffs have doggedly pursued their copyright infringement claim, but I find no evidence of undue vexatiousness or ill motive on their part," Levy wrote.
Mind you, I do wonder if outing NewYorkCountryLawyer's identity here might be a bad idea. It means that an RIAA staffer will now be reading every post he made looking for a sentence they can use against him.
> Now I think these guys are spouting buzzwords. But if you want to process 100 PB of data on
Yeah, a high profile work interrupt came in at that point and unfortunately scrambled my slashdot post composing process. What I meant to say was
"Now I think these guys are spouting buzzwords. But if you want to process 100 PB of data on a Google like cluster of machines the way you do it is very different from 100 KB or even 100 MB on single processor machine.
Of course small systems have their own challenges - I've written code in C for very crippled embedded systems where even 100 KB is hard to process because you can't rely on keeping more than a few KB in RAM at any one time.
In between of course there's an easy case where you don't need to worry too much about scaling to multiple processors and you can fit everything in memory.
Now University only teaches you the easy case and worse it teaches you to sneer at the techniques you need to solve the difficult cases (very big or very small) as hacks. Of course it would be nice if we could all write single threaded code on systems with enough memory to make things easy, but the reality is that hardware to do that is too expensive for small embedded systems and not possible to build for the Google case."
That's not true. The way you solve the problem changes radically depending on the amount of data you have. Consider
100 KB - You could use the dumbest algorithm imaginable and the slowest processor and everything is fine.
100 MB - most embedded systems can happily manage it. A desktop system can easily, even in a rather inefficient language. Algorithms are important.
100 GB - Big ass server - you'd definitely want to make sure you were using an efficient language and had an algorithm that scaled well, certainly to 2 processors and most likely to 4 processors. Probably should be 64 bit for efficiency.
100 PB+ You'd want a Google like system with lots of nodes. Actually I think at this point the code would look nothing like the 10 MB case. I remember someone saying that Google is "just a hash table". Now I think that misses the point. Google has invented things like Map/Reduce and has custom file systems. They've also spent a lot of time trying to cut costs by studying the effects of temperature on failure rates.
Now I think these guys are spouting buzzwords. But if you want to process 100PB of data on
I think modding people Troll is the /. equivalent of smacking dogs on the nose with a rolled up newspaper when they defecate in the apartment. I.e. it's just a way to stop them doing it again. Clearly no one wants to read "Why not use Java?!" in these sorts of discussions. Now you can't explain to a dog why indoor defecation is bad, just like you can't explain to Java programmers why Java is just a bad idea. Still shit in the apartment and posts advocating Java is not something which you need to tolerate.
The only thing i get from this is "My life sucks, I hate my job so much ill publicly state i don't code when i don't have to. Oh and here... a pelican eating a rabbit."
why else would he submit it.
I know i don't program all the time in my spare time, i play wow, Crysis, and maybe go outside(OMG RLY?) but today must of been REALLY slow.
I think it's a plea for help from timothy. All the rich Slashdotters have gone out jet skiing, partying with movie stars or snorting coke out of hookers' cleavages and forgot to loosen his chain so he can get hot pockets and mountain dew from the kitchen.
Luckily they don't bother to read between the lines of his submissions, otherwise he'd be due for a whippin' when they get back.
Because it's vitally important to show filthy Linux users how much more advanced the graphics are than what they're used to and then stop them playing it.
I always use IE to download Opera. So it doesn't really matter if it is outdated. To me the ballot screen is a silly requirement - most people don't know enough to vote, and there is the risk of malware ridden browsers getting onto it. People who do know enough to vote can already download an alternative browser and use that instead.
> Actually I wasn't trying to, but apparently I did
Actually the a good troll is indistinguishable from someone asking a question with a known answer.
> So the best way to secure the area around where your gate lets out is to scout with a UAV first, then, if hostile, aim a huge magnetron into the gate, since the bad guys on the other end can't possibly come through...
Actually there was an episode where someone aimed a particle beam at a gate.
> Couldn't they just open the new gate to any planet with a good atmosphere and just top up the ship with breathable air?
Now this, THIS is how to troll slashdot...
Why not just watch the guy from Doom blowing apart demons as a TV show?
If you can cast Summer Glau as the Doom guy I reckon you'd get that idea green lit.
Oh and by the way photon torpedoes are warp-driven vessels filled with antimatter - they don't pass through the ship when they impact, even though they are traveling at warp speed.
That's because they recombobulate the warp field phase dynamic tensors.