Muh... if *you* remembered junior school science, then you would recall that petroleum is a non-renewable resource. The fears of dwindling supplies, which has in turned fueled speculation, is one of the major causes (if not _the_ cause) of the spike in gas prices. So while increasing supply would most certainly reduce the price of gas, it is really in our best interest to reduce our demand instead. There are lots of alternatives to electricity generation other than petroleum and natural gas, and reducing usage of automotive transportation is fairly easy for most poeple to do... easier than drilling for oil in Anwar.
Either I'm not seeing a different thread that you are replying to, or I just don't understand the relevance of what you are saying. This article is about a JavaScript MVC framework - there isn't really a vendor lock-in to speak of.
Compile Time Type Checking
JavaScript 2.0 components can request to be compiled in strict mode. This will test the integrity of several key aspects before execution. A partial list of these checks includes:
Static type checking
Verification that referenced names are known
Checks for illegal assignments to constants
Insures that comparisons are only made between valid types
Awesome. JavaScript needs constants - it's the big missing piece as far as types. And I personally love static type checking. Waaaay easier to debug... As someone who does hardcore "OOP" in JavaScript, I'm excited by the prospect of these changes, even if they are years away from being implemented by all browsers.
It's a good time to be a web developer. All those mom-and-pop businesses who got a one-shot deal on their websites are gonna need some help when it "no longer works in IE." This is going to be the Y2K of web development, and I'm gonna be there to ca$h in!
You might want to check out Jash, which is a cross-browser debugging tool. The guy doesn't seem like he works on it anymore, but it works in IE7, IE6, Safari, FF, Opera, whatever. It's just a bookmarklet, so it doesn't have the proxy stuff that Firebug can do. I use Jash and Charles as a proxy (or Fiddler, whatever strikes the mood). Firebug still wins out, but it's nice having this one to use in IE.
Microsoft doesn't want to produce a standards-compliant browser. It doesn't want to produce a standards-compliant anything. It is only interested in furthering its monopoly by lock-in. I think one of the lead IE developers is on the W3C, no? At any rate, I remember watching a video on the Yahoo UI site in which four developers - one from IE, Opera, Firefox, and Safari - talked about their browsers and web development in general.
I remember the IE guy lamenting on how many quirks they had to maintain support for, and I think part of that is what is keeping them from pushing forward. IE was _the_ browser, with no real competition, when Netscape collapsed. The web was basically written for it before Firefox became widely used. There was quite a long period of time there when IE had no real competition, and thus no driving force to improve or standardize their browser. Also, much of IE was written before there were standards in place.
My theory? They are up to their ears in technical debt and spaghetti code and everyone is to scared to change any of the code.
overall, i think the american public is left feeling ashamed of the problems they see on the ISS, instead of being proud of the accomplishment because they don't really comprehend just how insane the Apollo successes were, and how ahead of their time they were Hmm.... I don't think Americans are ashamed per se, I think we just don't know what the hell NASA is up to anymore. We never hear about anything until the media tells us, and of course "no gnus is good gnus" as the saying goes.
Back in the Apollo days, there was a great President who kindled our interest in space (Kennedy) and there was a big bad Gorilla in the room (Russia). Now, the big bad Gorilla in the room is our President, so we're kinda busy figuring what the hell to do with our country.
The problem with Ajax is that it's based off of JavaScript, which is clunky, bloated, and insecure.
I don't agree with you on one single point here.
There is nothing insecure about JavaScript. The insecurity is in your web app running on the server, your browser's JavaScript interpreter, or the OS you are using.
I don't even know what clunky means. Maybe what you are trying to say is that JavaScript is slow. Well, it's not that slow. Browser rendering is slow. That is pretty much what causes JavaScript to seem slow. You can test this by profiling code that does and doesn't interact with the DOM.
Please, look at the libraries that have been developed for JavaScript and tell me it is bloated again. My problem with JavaScript is quite the opposite - it has too few native features. So many frameworks try to make up for this by providing more methods on native types like Array, on the DOM, or for Ajax or DHTML. God, languages like PHP have every damned function to do with an array that you could ever imagine. Not JavaScript. You get about 10 methods and that's it - you're on your own. I just don't see how it is bloated.
IMO JavaScript is just junk. JavaScript needs a replacement/upgrade or whatever
Excellent observation, backed by irrefutable evidence. Now I know why major players like Yahoo and Google shouldn't have used JavaScript to do thinks like Google Maps or Yahoo Mail. God, what a bunch of retards. Say, why don't you go and write a replacement, and then get the [however many] browsers to implement it? Surely your implementation will be perfect, will be adopted by every browser, and will be interpreted the same way by every browser.
Please, learn JavaScript. It's fun. You will like it. Just because there are 1,000,000 idiots writing "My First JavaScript" doesn't mean that JavaScript sucks. It means that it is easy to learn. And that is true, to a point.
I'm surprised at the number of geezers who really think that using JavaScript or Flash on a web page is bad. I work at a web company, and there are some "web 1.0" holdouts there who are totally lost with client-side programming. They've been doing Cold Fusion, Perl, C++, and Java all their lives and think that a plain text-based website is awesome. They also believe that UI guys don't know shit about programming. Well guess what - I'm a UI guy, and I make as much if not more money than the average server-side programmer or "software developer." Why? Because what I do is all about first impressions. Think about it: is a plain text website really good enough for a Fortune 500 company? It might have been good for your BBS in 1991, but that was then and this is now. Huge reputations are at stake, and they are not going to be trusted to people who are in denial about the fact that the web industry is changing.
Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.
Anyone who has done heavy work in JavaScript can attest to it's modularity; in fact, it is a very beautiful, expressive, and misunderstood language. Some folks claim that it is not object-oriented - but that is simply not true. It supports inheritance, static members, etc. - you just have to conceptualize them differently.
I hesitate to trust the output or business logic of a program that "compiles" in javascript from another language, even if it is something so similar syntactically as Java is. I guess if you don't know JavaScript and you're uncomfortable with browser quirks, and you are a Java person, then this framework is for you. Bad news, though - you'll still need to figure out CSS, and that is a mind-fuck in and of itself.
Fiddler for Windows - http://www.fiddlertool.com/ - and Charles for Mac OSX - http://www.xk72.com/charles/ - are debugging proxies. Very easy to use, and both allow you to throttle bandwidth to something lower than what you are using. Charles has a native way to do it, but I think you either have to program or download a new "rule" for Fiddler in order to throttle. Anyway, both are extremely valuable for solving a multitude of problems, not just throttling bandwidth.
At least in the UK it is socially acceptable to criticise the government. If you do that in the US you're commie terrorist traitor that wants americans to die
I'm an American, and I love our country. I HATE OUR GOVERNMENT, though, and GEORGE BUSH IS A C$&*SUCKER. And nobody can do anything to me for saying so.
I for one think its time to just scratch HTML as it currently exists and scratch CSS right along with it, and come up with something that actualy works smoothly and works as designed!
I'll grant you that, yes, there are some limitations and frustrations with CSS. But to scrap it entirely is nonsense - why start over from scratch, when CSS 2 and 3 are actually steps in the right direction? The newer specifications for CSS contain much more power and control over layout and style. The problem is not with CSS 1, it's mostly with getting browser makers to implement a bug-free and consistent engine for CSS (think IE).
Basic fundemental layout strategies like Areas, Menus, Images, scrolling, layers and all the primitives sould be part and parsle of an HTML-Like specifcation, not an add-on cludge like CSS.
According to you. According to some others, HTML should get farther away from that crud (think XHTML). And if you ask me, I think they are right. I'd rather have HTML become more objective. I shouldn't have to remove pre-defined styles from HTML elements with CSS (like one has to with unordered lists, which have margins, padding, layout, and list-styles by default).
If you are passionate and want to have a say in the direction of HTML / CSS, you could join the w3. It's a joke, but hey...
Further I'm not even convinced that speeding is that dangerous, drink/drug driving is far more likely to result in a fatal accident - and I have met people who do just that for fun.
When I was sixteen, my friend of the same age was speeding down a winding road, crashed head-on into a tree, and was killed instantly. He was "straight-edge" - i.e. no drugs or drinking. He just liked to speed and did it all the time. This device will succeed IMHO if it prevents just one other teen from such a death.
A credit rating can only be held over your head if you insist on living on credit.
I agree with the spirit of what you're saying; unfortunately, it's becoming less and less practical to ignore your credit score. For example:
An auto insurance company can charge you more $$ per month after finding out you have a bad credit score.
A credit card company can jack up your interest rate after finding out that you paid some other lender late, even just one time. They get that info from your credit report.
An employer can reject your application in favor of another applicant with a better credit score.
A mortgage or auto loan company can deny your loan application because of your credit history.
A landlord can deny your rental application based on your credit score.
Increasingly, credit scores are seen not just as a summary of your financial history, but as a judgement of your character. If you have bad credit, you could be without a car or car insurance, a job, and a home (at least here in America). It's much, much too serious of a thing to just ignore and pretend like it doesn't exist...
get_safe_input($string) could be a function that reads in from the user, fixes it up, and returns the safe string.
Because I am forgetful and can't always remember to do something like this, I've gone as far as writing a function in a common include file that loops through $_REQUEST and sanitizes everything in it. As you probably know, $_REQUEST contains $_POST, $_GET, and $_SESSION. Then I would just use $_REQUEST for any input.
A function like this can take care of properly sanitizing / escaping string input automatically. Even if you do something like this, though, you still need to validate input that is of a specific type (email address, file upload, zip code, etc).
In the "serious" coding community, it seems like JavaScript and PHP suffer from the same image problem. Both languages are great once you get to know them (and both have their problems). It seems like the image problem comes mostly from the fact that both are easy to tinker with, and as such, lots of amateurs (who don't yet have experience with stuff like security) are able to hit the ground running with their first php/mysql or javascript web app.
The USA seems still stuck at the point where your rights and protection are determined by whether you can hire a posse to fight for them. Only now it's the more expensive lawyers with ties and briefcases, instead of desperados with sombreros and Winchester guns. Most of the rest of the world moved over to more efficient model of having a centralized "police" equivalent.
Actually, we have offices in every state here in America, run by state / federal governments, to aid consumers with problems like these.
It's not America's fault that this guy is ignorant of their existence. A 2 second google search would have revealed this to him. Maybe that's the problem with America - we turn to Slashdot for legal advice.
We're all forgetting about one massize cache of energy on our planet - American flab. Think of all the energy put into growing and/or producing the food that Americans have eaten to excess. If all (able-bodied) Americans were required to spend an hour or two a day on a power-generating bike, we could use up our "stored energy" [cough] and have a renewable, "green" power supply! Two birds with one stone. Let's face it - our calorie intake couldn't be any higher, even if we DID exercize a lot.
that would be a very bad thing. The magnetosphere currently protects our planet from the solar wind. A significantly weakened magnetic field would allow the solar wind to ionize Earth's atmosphere and carry it off into space (read this NASA webpage for more info). Needless to say, that would be very bad. Polarity reversals have occurred frequently in Earth's history, and some argue that they coincide with mass extinction events.
The worry is that by making information available everywhere, Google might soon be able to tell Wal-Mart shoppers if better bargains are available nearby.
What they really should be worried about is workers finding out that other companies actually pay living wages and provide good health coverage, unlike Walmart.
The atmosphere would do a good job shielding you from radiation, the climate would be more moderate, and if you had to protect crops from the atmosphere still, the greenhouses would be much lighter if you didn't have to have them pressurized.
This may sound easy to you [cough], but it's not so easy as you think! Unlike Earth, Mars has no organized magnetic field. The magnetic field on Earth prevents much of the solar wind from destroying the ozone layer in our atmosphere, which as I'm sure you know, is the layer of our atmosphere that is the most important in blocking ultraviolet radiation.
Clearly, it's not as easy as just increasing the atmospheric density on Mars, but that would certainly be a start.
That's great unless they start sticking advertisements all over the place with it...
Hah! Anyone who knows Second Life will know that it is already saturated with advertising. The problem is not advertising from the "first life" economy, but advertising from "companies" in the Second Life economy. Tringo, anyone?
More likely, I see people linking to their real-life websites from their virtual homes or stores. There are already some pretty cool web / Second Life integrations, such as the ability to purchase and deposit virtual money into your Second Life account from the web, or to buy virtual goods in real time on the web.
Also, this integration may allow people experienced with javascript and web application development to do some interesting things in SL (even though SL has its own scripting language already).
Their motive isn't to give you better quality pictures or (God forbid!) more choice. They want to force everybody to switch to digital because only digital technologies support strong DRM restrictions.
As long as people still have vaccuum tube televisions, there will have to be an analog signal going into their televisions. There will need to be an Digital to Analog Converter somewhere in the mix. In this case, they're talking about forcing people to buy some sort of DAC to hook up to their antennae. The signal going into the back of the T.V. will, by necessity, be analog - so you can still hook up whatever device you want to between the ADC and the T.V., and no one will know the difference.
In the past (long before computers) confidential and valuable information or posessions were stored by trusted sources. Banks, legal firms, certain museums, etc... They all were more than capable of protecting valuable information or posessions from theft. The occasional break in would happen, but not anywhere near the frequency that we see computer systems being compromised
Exactly - and might I add that, until people begin to realize that it is as expensive to safely retain confidential information as it is to clean up the mess after a huge breach as this one, we'll continue to have this problem.
Why isn't this happening? Because it's not profitable enough. There isn't enough demand for this kind of system yet, and there won't be demand until the businesses are made to acknowledge that these kinds of break ins are unacceptable.
In my book, there are two ways to get US Businesses to follow your will:
Apply legislation forbidding or changing a behavior
Pressure pocketbooks through negative consumer feedback or negative mass-media
...both of which, by the way, are possible. Look at how much McDonalds has changed its image since the Supersize Me movie came out...
Slashdot Mirror
Muh... if *you* remembered junior school science, then you would recall that petroleum is a non-renewable resource. The fears of dwindling supplies, which has in turned fueled speculation, is one of the major causes (if not _the_ cause) of the spike in gas prices. So while increasing supply would most certainly reduce the price of gas, it is really in our best interest to reduce our demand instead. There are lots of alternatives to electricity generation other than petroleum and natural gas, and reducing usage of automotive transportation is fairly easy for most poeple to do... easier than drilling for oil in Anwar.
Either I'm not seeing a different thread that you are replying to, or I just don't understand the relevance of what you are saying. This article is about a JavaScript MVC framework - there isn't really a vendor lock-in to speak of.
It's a good time to be a web developer. All those mom-and-pop businesses who got a one-shot deal on their websites are gonna need some help when it "no longer works in IE." This is going to be the Y2K of web development, and I'm gonna be there to ca$h in!
You might want to check out Jash, which is a cross-browser debugging tool. The guy doesn't seem like he works on it anymore, but it works in IE7, IE6, Safari, FF, Opera, whatever. It's just a bookmarklet, so it doesn't have the proxy stuff that Firebug can do. I use Jash and Charles as a proxy (or Fiddler, whatever strikes the mood). Firebug still wins out, but it's nice having this one to use in IE.
I remember the IE guy lamenting on how many quirks they had to maintain support for, and I think part of that is what is keeping them from pushing forward. IE was _the_ browser, with no real competition, when Netscape collapsed. The web was basically written for it before Firefox became widely used. There was quite a long period of time there when IE had no real competition, and thus no driving force to improve or standardize their browser. Also, much of IE was written before there were standards in place.
My theory? They are up to their ears in technical debt and spaghetti code and everyone is to scared to change any of the code.
Back in the Apollo days, there was a great President who kindled our interest in space (Kennedy) and there was a big bad Gorilla in the room (Russia). Now, the big bad Gorilla in the room is our President, so we're kinda busy figuring what the hell to do with our country.
I'm surprised at the number of geezers who really think that using JavaScript or Flash on a web page is bad. I work at a web company, and there are some "web 1.0" holdouts there who are totally lost with client-side programming. They've been doing Cold Fusion, Perl, C++, and Java all their lives and think that a plain text-based website is awesome. They also believe that UI guys don't know shit about programming. Well guess what - I'm a UI guy, and I make as much if not more money than the average server-side programmer or "software developer." Why? Because what I do is all about first impressions. Think about it: is a plain text website really good enough for a Fortune 500 company? It might have been good for your BBS in 1991, but that was then and this is now. Huge reputations are at stake, and they are not going to be trusted to people who are in denial about the fact that the web industry is changing.
Fiddler for Windows - http://www.fiddlertool.com/ - and Charles for Mac OSX - http://www.xk72.com/charles/ - are debugging proxies. Very easy to use, and both allow you to throttle bandwidth to something lower than what you are using. Charles has a native way to do it, but I think you either have to program or download a new "rule" for Fiddler in order to throttle. Anyway, both are extremely valuable for solving a multitude of problems, not just throttling bandwidth.
I'll grant you that, yes, there are some limitations and frustrations with CSS. But to scrap it entirely is nonsense - why start over from scratch, when CSS 2 and 3 are actually steps in the right direction? The newer specifications for CSS contain much more power and control over layout and style. The problem is not with CSS 1, it's mostly with getting browser makers to implement a bug-free and consistent engine for CSS (think IE).
According to you. According to some others, HTML should get farther away from that crud (think XHTML). And if you ask me, I think they are right. I'd rather have HTML become more objective. I shouldn't have to remove pre-defined styles from HTML elements with CSS (like one has to with unordered lists, which have margins, padding, layout, and list-styles by default).
If you are passionate and want to have a say in the direction of HTML / CSS, you could join the w3. It's a joke, but hey...
I agree with the spirit of what you're saying; unfortunately, it's becoming less and less practical to ignore your credit score. For example:
Increasingly, credit scores are seen not just as a summary of your financial history, but as a judgement of your character. If you have bad credit, you could be without a car or car insurance, a job, and a home (at least here in America). It's much, much too serious of a thing to just ignore and pretend like it doesn't exist...
get_safe_input($string) could be a function that reads in from the user, fixes it up, and returns the safe string.
Because I am forgetful and can't always remember to do something like this, I've gone as far as writing a function in a common include file that loops through $_REQUEST and sanitizes everything in it. As you probably know, $_REQUEST contains $_POST, $_GET, and $_SESSION. Then I would just use $_REQUEST for any input.
A function like this can take care of properly sanitizing / escaping string input automatically. Even if you do something like this, though, you still need to validate input that is of a specific type (email address, file upload, zip code, etc).
In the "serious" coding community, it seems like JavaScript and PHP suffer from the same image problem. Both languages are great once you get to know them (and both have their problems). It seems like the image problem comes mostly from the fact that both are easy to tinker with, and as such, lots of amateurs (who don't yet have experience with stuff like security) are able to hit the ground running with their first php/mysql or javascript web app.
And believe it or not, the web hasn't changed too much since then.
Hey, I know you -- you're the guy at work who insists on doing everything in Perl!
The USA seems still stuck at the point where your rights and protection are determined by whether you can hire a posse to fight for them. Only now it's the more expensive lawyers with ties and briefcases, instead of desperados with sombreros and Winchester guns. Most of the rest of the world moved over to more efficient model of having a centralized "police" equivalent.
Actually, we have offices in every state here in America, run by state / federal governments, to aid consumers with problems like these.
It's not America's fault that this guy is ignorant of their existence. A 2 second google search would have revealed this to him. Maybe that's the problem with America - we turn to Slashdot for legal advice.Also, dude, you watch too much American TV.
We're all forgetting about one massize cache of energy on our planet - American flab. Think of all the energy put into growing and/or producing the food that Americans have eaten to excess. If all (able-bodied) Americans were required to spend an hour or two a day on a power-generating bike, we could use up our "stored energy" [cough] and have a renewable, "green" power supply! Two birds with one stone. Let's face it - our calorie intake couldn't be any higher, even if we DID exercize a lot.
that would be a very bad thing. The magnetosphere currently protects our planet from the solar wind. A significantly weakened magnetic field would allow the solar wind to ionize Earth's atmosphere and carry it off into space (read this NASA webpage for more info). Needless to say, that would be very bad. Polarity reversals have occurred frequently in Earth's history, and some argue that they coincide with mass extinction events.
The worry is that by making information available everywhere, Google might soon be able to tell Wal-Mart shoppers if better bargains are available nearby.
What they really should be worried about is workers finding out that other companies actually pay living wages and provide good health coverage, unlike Walmart.
Clearly, it's not as easy as just increasing the atmospheric density on Mars, but that would certainly be a start.
More likely, I see people linking to their real-life websites from their virtual homes or stores. There are already some pretty cool web / Second Life integrations, such as the ability to purchase and deposit virtual money into your Second Life account from the web, or to buy virtual goods in real time on the web.
Also, this integration may allow people experienced with javascript and web application development to do some interesting things in SL (even though SL has its own scripting language already).