If you're going to legislate something, then legislate the use of memory safe programming languages and proof carrying code. Security problems would be mostly solved, and software would have fewer bugs overall to boot.
That'd drive up the cost of software development. People write buggy, insecure code because it's fast and cheap, and that's all the end user is willing to pay for.
They should decide what features to use by looking at the browser usage of their user community and making their own cost/benefit calculations.
I'm involved with a site that's 44% IE6-8. We've even got a vocal (albeit tiny) set of users running IE6 on Windows 2000 or older, which means they don't even have the full set of IE6 service packs (only XP and newer got anything more recent than IE6 SP1).
I'd really like to see ICANN create a TLD limited to banking sites and online stores
Define "online store". The line between a "legitimate" online store and an illegitimate one is a thin one indeed. If the rules for certification are too strict, you hinder cottage industry (and their are thousands of tiny, one-man ecommerce sites out there). If the rules are too lax, scammers won't have any trouble registering domains.
And lastly, how do you know that the guy controlling the WiFi AP in the coffee shop you're sitting in hasn't hijacked all traffic to *.onlinestore? The only protection against that would be HTTPS. And if HTTPS works, then you don't need the special TLD in the first place.
'app' is very different from an 'application'... they are distinct terms, and one is not merely shorthand for the other.
The term "Killer App" predates the iPhone by decades. And it referred to what you call "applications". Spreadsheets were a "killer app". Historically, "app" has absolutely been used primarly as shorthand for "application".
However, Apple and Google are definitely trying to use App in a new and specific way in their recent advertising.
As to TFS:
Here, you'll find dozens of 'apps' to install and run directly from a handy icon on the browser's home screen. Except, these aren't 'apps' at all. They're websites
If you read the article, the big boys have no problem with this
Word on the street is Zynga spent months fighting it, and threatened to leave facebook entirely -- that's why they launched http://www.farmville.com/ Of course, both Zynga and Facebook would take a huge profit hit without each other, so the odds of a divorce were always slim.
Auto mechanics could find good use out of this technology as well. No need to drop the tools and/or get the console all greasy
All the mechanics I've seen just cover their keyboards in plastic. Cheap, simple and reliable. Trying to replace 50 cents worth of plastic with hundreds of dollars worth of electronics would be an uphill battle.
It's the same thing that kept IE's stranglehold around for so long, especially when IE was on the Mac, so there wasn't even a cross platform argument.
IE on the mac was still in many ways a distinct platform. It used a completely different, mac-only rendering engine from the windows version, and had numerous other distinct features... and bugs.
I did own an Agfa Photo Kiosk. It didn't have an AV by default and it ran "Windows XP embedded edition" that prevented me from installing an AV (installers didn't allow me to do an install.). I saved a raw image of the hard disk for safety and allowed it to infect customers. It was a security nightmare. Viruses had their way into the machine, but AV software didn't
Well, that seems easy enough to fix: write a virus that installs antivirus software.
All the MagSafe supplies I've owned broke after a few months after the pins got stuck into the plug.
I've had the same problem. Exposure to humidity can rapidly lead to corrosion, which causes the spring-loaded pins to fail. Then you've got no contact. I've had 2 or 3 magsafe connectors fail on me in this way in the last year.
In some ways, this is the lesser of two evils; it's much better for the brick-end of the connection to fail, than the connector inside the laptop itself -- which is how my last HP laptop died.
. I am lucky if I get 50m accuracy. While my A-GPS can get down to 3m. (Oh, and if anyone of you know a service that requires no further hardware, and can get down below 50 cm [ideally below 10cm], please contact me!:)
As I brought up on the mailing list months ago when I was trying to make my case, of the books in the top 10 search results for PHP on Amazon, 5 or 6 of them, including the book by Rasmus himself (wrote PHP originally), use the ereg functions in their examples. So you can imagine that there are lots of people out there learning basic search functions out there that will be going away in the next major version. This is not good.
When has using a book that's more than 1 major revision behind ever been a good idea? A MySQL 3 book proved pretty worthless when MySQL 4 came out. And MySQL 5 adds all kinds of stuff that MySQL 4 books don't cover.
I just threw out my java books from college because they covered java 1.2.
That's just how it is with programming books. Major language releases make them obsolete.
And really, that's kind of how it should be. If a small group of people really really cares about something, and the rest of us don't care too much, it's basic social wisdom to compromise in favor of the people who really do care.
The KKK feels awfully strongly about limiting the rights of non-whites. On the other hand, I (and, I suspect, millions of other Americans) am a strong believer in equal rights, but I'm not nearly as emphatic about it -- I wouldn't engage in the sorts of terrorism the KKK has been known to in years past. "Basic social wisdom" is then to compromise in the favor of the KKK?
Democracy should not mean giving the reins to those with the loudest voice. But that certainly would explain the dismal state of gay rights in this country.
Sure, being able to click and drag an online map was neat when it first came out, but faster than clicking an arrow in the corner? Not for me... I'd rather have it move in whole, consistent, step sizes. And faster? Hell no! I sit around waiting several seconds for Google maps to load up, prompt after prompt to "keep waiting" or else any address you type in will get munged.
Wow. How's the weather back in 1998?
I've got a PC that I built for $300 in 2008, and two macbooks (the bottom of the line models. Not the Pro). They're all behind a perfectly average comcast cable modem. Running Google Chrome, google maps loads just as fast as any desktop app, on any and all of 'em. This is not a bleeding edge setup.
So... Is it your Pentium 2, or your 9600 baud modem that's holding you back?
You're right... AJAX doesn't run great on systems built before the turn of the century. If you don't like it, pick up a system that has more than 64 meg of ram. You have every right not to upgrade, but if you choose not to, you have no right to bitch.
The "everything should run on my Windows 95 machine" mindset drives me nuts. I bet driving your Model T on the interstate isn't much fun either.
Software development is creative work. "8 hours of programming" probably doesn't consist of 8 hours of typing. And if it does, you're either an incredibly productive programmer, or an incredibly inept programmer
How would you pay a poet by the hour? Does he only get paid for the hours where his pen is actually touching paper?
Why don't all car radio setups come with a line-in jack? Even many of the aftermarket ones don't have them (on the front, at least). Such a cheap part, and yet so many people use their ipods via FM tuner or tape adapter.
My cheap-ass '06 Toyota Scion came with one, standard. They also offered an iPod dock kit for a couple hundred bucks more.
The people who play these games are, as a blogger recently put it, addicted to fake achievement. They want to fill the bar over and over again, level up, and unlock the next item.
It's really not that baffling. People like winning. The actual value of the "win" is often unimportant.
SAE J1772 maxes out at 16.8 kW according to the wikipedia article you linked. It takes 3.5 hours to charge a tesla roadster at that wattage. If you want to charge your Tesla in 15 minutes, you're gonna need 14 times as much juice.
I can see why the Japanese might not be satisfied with that standard.
If you find yourself in a car of any brand where the engine is accelerating without command, put the car in neutral (your engine will be fine, as the engine computer has several "rev limiters" built-in)
I had an accelerator cable stick on me in a Dodge Caravan, years ago. I can't help but to think back to that every time I read how some Toyota owners have ended up in accidents as a result of this issue. In my experience, it wasn't that hard to address the problem safely.
In my case, the problem was really the result of poor maintenance on my part -- the accelerator cable passes above the battery, and I'd let the battery leak so badly, a mound of crystalized acid built up and was rubbing against the cable. To make matters worse, I was driving the POS 120 miles a day.
Finally, one day on the highway, I pressed the gas, let off, and the damn thing kept accelerating. The cable had stuck. While I'd imagine downshifting comes naturally if you've driven a manual, I've never driven anything other than an automatic in my life. Fortunately, my father had taught me to downshift when descending steep grades, rather than ride the breaks. As a result, I had the presence of mind to downshift, and pull off at the next off-ramp.
In retrospect, I probably should have immediately brought the thing to a complete stop on the shoulder and had it towed, but I actually managed to navigate several blocks and stop lights shifting between first and neutral. Parked it at a Chevron that had an attached garage.
I suppose my purpose in relating this is twofold: first it provides real world confirmation of your advice. Secondly, I suppose it serves as a reason for anyone teaching someone to drive to also teach them about the concept of "engine breaking". That extra bit of knowledge probably saved me from ending up in a high speed collision.
Sony allowed Betamax to carry porn, and have (or rather had) a whole library to prove it. Playboy, swimsuits, unmentionable stuff - it was all available on Betamax
Unmentionable? On slashdot? More taboo than goatse?
Well NO WONDER no one was buying betamax porn! Once you've seen volumes 1 - 5, "Meatspin: Volume 6" just isn't worth $49.95.
The only item to fix was the version of the web server was just one behind current. The changelog indicated that it was to fix a vulnerability on a different platform, so it was completely unrelated to us...
After opening the firewall to them, and changing the version number on the web server (there were reasons we couldn't do the trivial upgrade), we passed with flying colors.
For them, they were interested in the version numbers handed off by the server, not what they actually were. For example, if it was Apache, we could have it report Apache version 9.9.9, and that would have made us pass on that part without fail for years.
For anyone who isn't familiar with this stuff, there are reasons beyond those stated by the OP that make this "apache version number must be current" policy moronic.
There are the obvious, stated ones:
1. You can just change the version number apache reports
2. The latest version may not fix anything meaningful
3. The latest version may actually introduce problems
Another, less obvious reason this is stupid:
4. Distributions like Debian and Redhat release a single version of apache, and then continue to use it for months or years, backporting security patches ASAP. So your version number may *say* you're 12 months behind on patches, but in reality, you're only 12 months behind on functional changes; you've basically got all the bleeding-edge security patches, assuming you're keeping current with the distro-provided packages.
And of course, if you build from source, you may be doing the exact same sort of backporting yourself.
I wonder, could you? If you broke the polarizing glasses they give you in two, and put one lens over each of two cameras, mounted a specific distance apart?
I suppose maybe the result might be too lossy to achieve a workable 3d effect. And of course, projecting the resulting recordings would have its own challenges.
I just considered it a movie. No more. There are a lot of people drawing parallels between the RDA and $group_in_authority and the Na'vi and $persecuted_group. However, I'm sure with any popular movie which isn't using the same stale IP as before, this could be put into place. People alluded the Empire in Star Wars to groups in real life when that debuted.
Yeah, I never understood why people compared star wars to WWII. I mean, sure, the "bad guys'" troops are called storm troopers, and Darth Vader orders acts of genocide.
That's clearly nothing like Nazi Germany, which also coincidentally had troops called stormtroopers (in English), while Adolf Hitler ordered acts of genocide.
How could anyone possibly compare the two?...Damn near all themes in science fiction are drawn from present day events, or history. As a child, I too liked to see sci-fi as stories that had no meaningful connection with real life. As an adult, I now see the connections everywhere.
Also, the fact remains that there are links out there that point to "http://www.rosettacode.org/w/index.php?something_or_other", not all of those links will (or can) change, and I would be an absolute fool to knowingly break them, if I want people to visit RCo via referral traffic.
That can be resolved with a single, simple apache rewrite rule.
Continuing to support www. -- if only by rewrite rule -- is unfortunately a necessary evil presently. If it isn't "www.*.com", the technically unsavvy majority doesn't understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
That'd drive up the cost of software development. People write buggy, insecure code because it's fast and cheap, and that's all the end user is willing to pay for.
I'm involved with a site that's 44% IE6-8. We've even got a vocal (albeit tiny) set of users running IE6 on Windows 2000 or older, which means they don't even have the full set of IE6 service packs (only XP and newer got anything more recent than IE6 SP1).
It's delightful.
Define "online store". The line between a "legitimate" online store and an illegitimate one is a thin one indeed. If the rules for certification are too strict, you hinder cottage industry (and their are thousands of tiny, one-man ecommerce sites out there). If the rules are too lax, scammers won't have any trouble registering domains.
And of course, many people still won't know the difference between http://legitimate.onlinestore/ and http://legitimate.onlinestore.mallicious.com/
And lastly, how do you know that the guy controlling the WiFi AP in the coffee shop you're sitting in hasn't hijacked all traffic to *.onlinestore? The only protection against that would be HTTPS. And if HTTPS works, then you don't need the special TLD in the first place.
The term "Killer App" predates the iPhone by decades. And it referred to what you call "applications". Spreadsheets were a "killer app". Historically, "app" has absolutely been used primarly as shorthand for "application".
However, Apple and Google are definitely trying to use App in a new and specific way in their recent advertising.
As to TFS:
Never heard the term "web app[lication]"?
Word on the street is Zynga spent months fighting it, and threatened to leave facebook entirely -- that's why they launched http://www.farmville.com/ Of course, both Zynga and Facebook would take a huge profit hit without each other, so the odds of a divorce were always slim.
In fact, here's some evidence that the fight was bitter indeed
Everyone has a problem with someone taking 30% of the revenue. Lord knows Zynga's other payment processors never charged that much.
All the mechanics I've seen just cover their keyboards in plastic. Cheap, simple and reliable. Trying to replace 50 cents worth of plastic with hundreds of dollars worth of electronics would be an uphill battle.
As others have mentioned, in several ways, it's similar to Dwarf Fortress, and Horde.
Also, the MMO "A Tale In The Desert" is very similar, and in many ways, has far more depth.
It combines these aspects to create something unique, for sure. But it's more evolutionary than revolutionary.
IE on the mac was still in many ways a distinct platform. It used a completely different, mac-only rendering engine from the windows version, and had numerous other distinct features... and bugs.
Well, that seems easy enough to fix: write a virus that installs antivirus software.
You're welcome.
I've had the same problem. Exposure to humidity can rapidly lead to corrosion, which causes the spring-loaded pins to fail. Then you've got no contact. I've had 2 or 3 magsafe connectors fail on me in this way in the last year.
In some ways, this is the lesser of two evils; it's much better for the brick-end of the connection to fail, than the connector inside the laptop itself -- which is how my last HP laptop died.
Building guided missiles on the cheap, eh?
Collecting data isn't (necessarily) evil. Abusing it is.
For example, google's well known for finding web pages that were intended to be private, but never properly locked down -- phpmyadmin installations, router admin pages with no passwords, etc.
Finding those things isn't evil. Were google to, say, forcibly install software on every unsecured router their crawlers found, *that* would be evil.
Are they being evil? Maybe. But data collection itself isn't necessarily evil.
When has using a book that's more than 1 major revision behind ever been a good idea? A MySQL 3 book proved pretty worthless when MySQL 4 came out. And MySQL 5 adds all kinds of stuff that MySQL 4 books don't cover.
I just threw out my java books from college because they covered java 1.2.
That's just how it is with programming books. Major language releases make them obsolete.
The KKK feels awfully strongly about limiting the rights of non-whites. On the other hand, I (and, I suspect, millions of other Americans) am a strong believer in equal rights, but I'm not nearly as emphatic about it -- I wouldn't engage in the sorts of terrorism the KKK has been known to in years past. "Basic social wisdom" is then to compromise in the favor of the KKK?
Democracy should not mean giving the reins to those with the loudest voice. But that certainly would explain the dismal state of gay rights in this country.
Wow. How's the weather back in 1998?
I've got a PC that I built for $300 in 2008, and two macbooks (the bottom of the line models. Not the Pro). They're all behind a perfectly average comcast cable modem. Running Google Chrome, google maps loads just as fast as any desktop app, on any and all of 'em. This is not a bleeding edge setup.
So... Is it your Pentium 2, or your 9600 baud modem that's holding you back?
You're right... AJAX doesn't run great on systems built before the turn of the century. If you don't like it, pick up a system that has more than 64 meg of ram. You have every right not to upgrade, but if you choose not to, you have no right to bitch.
The "everything should run on my Windows 95 machine" mindset drives me nuts. I bet driving your Model T on the interstate isn't much fun either.
Software development is creative work. "8 hours of programming" probably doesn't consist of 8 hours of typing. And if it does, you're either an incredibly productive programmer, or an incredibly inept programmer
How would you pay a poet by the hour? Does he only get paid for the hours where his pen is actually touching paper?
My cheap-ass '06 Toyota Scion came with one, standard. They also offered an iPod dock kit for a couple hundred bucks more.
The people who play these games are, as a blogger recently put it, addicted to fake achievement. They want to fill the bar over and over again, level up, and unlock the next item.
It's really not that baffling. People like winning. The actual value of the "win" is often unimportant.
SAE J1772 maxes out at 16.8 kW according to the wikipedia article you linked. It takes 3.5 hours to charge a tesla roadster at that wattage. If you want to charge your Tesla in 15 minutes, you're gonna need 14 times as much juice.
I can see why the Japanese might not be satisfied with that standard.
I had an accelerator cable stick on me in a Dodge Caravan, years ago. I can't help but to think back to that every time I read how some Toyota owners have ended up in accidents as a result of this issue. In my experience, it wasn't that hard to address the problem safely.
In my case, the problem was really the result of poor maintenance on my part -- the accelerator cable passes above the battery, and I'd let the battery leak so badly, a mound of crystalized acid built up and was rubbing against the cable. To make matters worse, I was driving the POS 120 miles a day.
Finally, one day on the highway, I pressed the gas, let off, and the damn thing kept accelerating. The cable had stuck. While I'd imagine downshifting comes naturally if you've driven a manual, I've never driven anything other than an automatic in my life. Fortunately, my father had taught me to downshift when descending steep grades, rather than ride the breaks. As a result, I had the presence of mind to downshift, and pull off at the next off-ramp.
In retrospect, I probably should have immediately brought the thing to a complete stop on the shoulder and had it towed, but I actually managed to navigate several blocks and stop lights shifting between first and neutral. Parked it at a Chevron that had an attached garage.
I suppose my purpose in relating this is twofold: first it provides real world confirmation of your advice. Secondly, I suppose it serves as a reason for anyone teaching someone to drive to also teach them about the concept of "engine breaking". That extra bit of knowledge probably saved me from ending up in a high speed collision.
Unmentionable? On slashdot? More taboo than goatse?
Well NO WONDER no one was buying betamax porn! Once you've seen volumes 1 - 5, "Meatspin: Volume 6" just isn't worth $49.95.
For anyone who isn't familiar with this stuff, there are reasons beyond those stated by the OP that make this "apache version number must be current" policy moronic.
There are the obvious, stated ones:
1. You can just change the version number apache reports
2. The latest version may not fix anything meaningful
3. The latest version may actually introduce problems
Another, less obvious reason this is stupid:
4. Distributions like Debian and Redhat release a single version of apache, and then continue to use it for months or years, backporting security patches ASAP. So your version number may *say* you're 12 months behind on patches, but in reality, you're only 12 months behind on functional changes; you've basically got all the bleeding-edge security patches, assuming you're keeping current with the distro-provided packages.
And of course, if you build from source, you may be doing the exact same sort of backporting yourself.
I wonder, could you? If you broke the polarizing glasses they give you in two, and put one lens over each of two cameras, mounted a specific distance apart?
I suppose maybe the result might be too lossy to achieve a workable 3d effect. And of course, projecting the resulting recordings would have its own challenges.
Yeah, I never understood why people compared star wars to WWII. I mean, sure, the "bad guys'" troops are called storm troopers, and Darth Vader orders acts of genocide.
That's clearly nothing like Nazi Germany, which also coincidentally had troops called stormtroopers (in English), while Adolf Hitler ordered acts of genocide.
How could anyone possibly compare the two? ...Damn near all themes in science fiction are drawn from present day events, or history. As a child, I too liked to see sci-fi as stories that had no meaningful connection with real life. As an adult, I now see the connections everywhere.
That can be resolved with a single, simple apache rewrite rule.
Continuing to support www. -- if only by rewrite rule -- is unfortunately a necessary evil presently. If it isn't "www.*.com", the technically unsavvy majority doesn't understand it.