So let ME get this straight: I get paid nothing for my work on jQuery, where we clean up behind all the major browsers so that people don't need to wait months or years for bugs to be fixed. We also report these bugs to the appropriate vendors with clear test cases; as you can imagine we get our share of crappy bug reports and don't want to do that to these guys. You would also like me to donate more time to become an expert at Webkit to the point where I can fix these bugs immediately on their side, despite the fact that several major well-funded companies (Google, Apple, BlackBerry, and now Opera) are paying people to (NOT) fix these bugs. Sorry, but one unpaid volunteer open-source job is enough for me.
I would love for all the WebKit contributors to get together and say, "We'll show that guy! HAHA we fixed all your bugs so THERE!" There are rumors, however, that Opera is laying off 200 engineers and I seriously doubt they'll keep a large staff of people on fixing WebKit bugs. I've emailed Peter Kasting privately and think he is sincere in trying to get some of these fixed though.
Whatever the problems of Windows itself, the fact is that PC hardware makers haven't done a very good job of producing attractive and functional systems. I am in a situation where I have to run Windows and I want some non-Apple hardware. What systems out there aren't consumer-grade crap? Perhaps the Thinkpad Carbon X1 is nice for example, but I ordered one in early December and have yet to receive it due to "quality control problems" according to Lenovo.
What are you specifically worried about? Dell is still using jQuery 1.2 on their site from 2007, and it seems to work. So in 2014, something will break in the (supported) 1.9 version that the jQuery team refuses to fix, but you can't upgrade to 2.1? Can you say what that something might be?
True, Walmart.com will have IE 6/7/8 visitors for years to come, but there are plenty of places where someone might be using jQuery but not need IE 6/7/8 support. It could be a cutting-edge public web site, a desktop app using an embedded HTML rendering engine, or a mobile app where oldIE doesn't matter. You can either use jQuery 1.9 for now, or use graceful degradation to give those people a really basic experience and a nudge to upgrade.
As far as bugs and quirks go, a lot of the ones in IE6 and IE7 are also present in IE8. In specific, things like eating HTML5 tags, the lack of true opacity support and the proprietary IE event model that used attachEvent instead of addEventListener. There's quite a bit of code in jQuery to deal with IE event issues, for example the lack of a bubbling change event. IE8 managed to plug some memory leaks and wasn't as bizarre with the "attroperties" issue as IE7 was, but they still have a lot of sins in common.
I thought that trash at the curb was considered as being out in public view. Someone can drive by and throw your trash into their truck for further inspection. After all, you were going to throw it away and it was going to end up in a landfill or incinerator.
What next? "Is it time to wash your car? With all the sludge and dirt on the roads these days, cars get a lot of grime on them. When is the right time to was your car, and what should you use?"
I know I'd never see something this lame on Reddit or Digg.
Wow, quite a resume there. He will be difficult to replace. For that matter, he will be difficult to ereg_replace, eregi_replace, mb_ereg_replace, mb_eregi_replace, preg_replace, str_replace, or str_ireplace.
Did anyone view source on that Dvorak column? Classic 1998 HTML, with a table-based layout and dozens of spacer gifs. No wonder Dvorak can't learn CSS.
No doubt there is some component of incompetence involved, but it's more than that. For example, Overture has a long history of "melting pot" ad placement, even before they Yahoo acquisition. Their advertisers are told about the good neighborhoods where the ads will be seen (Yahoo Search, for example) but not the bad ones (spyware, warez sites). Overture advertisers have no way to "opt out" of any segment of advertising.
Yep, measuring handset attenuation would be pretty tricky. Since signals are weaker inside a building, which is where people often go when it rains, you'd expect to see a signal dropoff on rainy days. But it wouldn't necessarily be directly related to the rain intensity at that moment.
What you should be asking is, "What useful purpose does this software serve?" If it's not doing anything useful for you, the user and owner of the computer, then teminate it. Why have it use up memory and disk space for no reason?
Clearly with specs like this it's not going to run any heavy-duty apps, so I would think a typical application would be to run a browser and web/intranet apps to keep the client footprint small. Instead of a 40GB drive, why not put 2GB of flash onto the board formatted as a file system, and make the spinning drive optional? That would reduce power consumption and increase reliability.
It's true, the US still consumes a disproportionate share of energy, epecially considering that we are outsourcing all our energy-intensive manufacturing to China. That's because oil is still way too cheap. There's no reason to optimize the use of a commodity that's cheap.
As long as small-penised men are still buying Hummers and soccer moms are buying Expeditions, oil is too cheap. As long as business are saying, "Hey we just have to pay the increase and pass it along because it's the cost of doing business," rather than thinking about ways to reduce and optimize their energy use, oil is too cheap.
We need gas at $5 a gallon for a year or two to change those habits. In the process, $5 gas will also bring sanity to commuting patterns and solve the problem of building new roads. And it won't be the end of the world, our economy will survive and adapt the way it did in the late 1970s.
This article seems to have been written around Ben Edelman's recent research about Yahoo ad fraud. Why not link to the original instead of BusinessWeek? Ben's pages don't have the popunder or other ads that BW offers, but most would consider that to be a blessing.
The Brookman Affirmation is definitely an fascinating read. They got hold of plenty of internal emails that totally nail these guys. From the account in that pdf it seems like their CTO Dan Doman was trying to warn these guys they had stepped over the line but the money was talking a lot louder. For example, when they put in an Add/Remove entry their revenue went down, so of course they took it back out. They had some distributors that requested Add/Remove entries so they would put them in and then stealth-remove them after a few days. When they changed the minimum time between popups from 1 minute to 2 minutes their revenue dropped by 15 percent, so they moved it back and eventually they dropped it down to 45 seconds! Their internal emails bragged about how hard it was to remove the software. These guys knew exactly what they were doing.
The Direct Revenue response is basically "We did nothing wrong, and besides we're not doing it anymore." So people shouldn't be punished for past crimes?
"Because vbscript works with excel, word, access - learning vb gets you to work with almost every microsoft product from asp server scripting to making vb6 windows applications to client side vbscript coding to office to scripting for other apps. "
But guess what--Javascript can do all those things as well. The whole idea of COM was that the calling convention is accessable to any language, unlike the insular world of Java. I have written lots of Windows Script Host scripts in Javascript and have done a whole ASP site in Javascript. It's especially nice because you use the same language on both the client and server side of a web app. And don't tell me you use VBScript for client scripting, at least don't say that out loud here on Slashdot.
Baloney. Bandwidth is not the problem. Comcast's upload cap is 384kb, which is enough for at least two good VoIP calls at once, if nothing else is using the link. It's possible that Comcast is doing traffic shaping to curb people they feel are bandwidth hogs. After all, "unlimited" does not really mean unlimited. You'll never see them admit that though.
Years ago, relief organizations drilled wells in India and Pakistan to provide clean disease-free water to the poor populations. Indeed, it did reduce the levels of illness and was hailed as a public health victory. Unfortunately, it turned out that this underground water had high levels of arsenic that poisoned the people over time. Now they are seeing high levels of skin, lung, liver, kidney and bladder cancer. So let's hope things go better this time.
Don't let Microsoft off the hook that easily. Most of the problems I've seen with this IE7 beta aren't the "we messed up the implementation" variety. They are the "we still don't support all of CSS" variety.
Microsoft has eliminated several bugs that made it easy to identify IE6 and apply hacks to the CSS. For example, the "* html" selector let you apply CSS rules just for IE because it's ignored by standards-compliant browsers. Now IE7 ignores that too. However, the need for hacks is still there. IE7 still does not implement several important CSS features that necessitated the hacks in the first place, such as min-height.
If Microsoft were to decide that this beta was "close enough" or even if it fixes just the minimum number of things to keep major sites from breaking, that's not going to help. Designers will end up needing an entirely different set of hacks to make up for the fact that IE7 is *still* not a complete CSS2 implementation.
I wish they had looked at DOCTYPES, that would have told us a lot. But even so, you don't know whether there are a few large sites that put out really bad (X)HTML, or a lot of little sites. That makes a difference. The little sites, especially the rarely-changed little sites, are not the ones that drive the desire for improved standards. It's the new and growing sites like deli.cio.us and reddit or the services like Google Maps that need new and better ways of doing things.
My point was that Microsoft has tied their technology advances to OS releases. Those now happen every five years or so. If they maintain that stance, we won't see CSS3, ECMA2, E4X (or IE8 that may use them) for six years or more in Vienna/Blackcomb or whatever code name they are calling it today.
Yes, the IE7 team has done a good job in getting things fixed as they have, but a lot of that is fixing the five-year backlog of IE6 bugs and catching up to Firefox. Microsoft is an important player in both the standards process and the deployment of these technologies, their lack of urgency ensures that important standards won't be finished or widely deployed for many years to come.
Our approach for cryptography was and is to support a pluggable model and enable replacement in our platform in a broad sense. IE and IIS depend on the platform (OS) cryptography capabilities, so adding this capability was an operating system change vs. a change in the browser, as was the case with Mozilla
Uh oh, now we can see the transitive difficulty of having IE "built into the OS". IE depends on OS components ==> the OS components don't exist or haven't been upgraded ==> new platform features or upgrades only happen with a new OS ==> the user must wait for Vista.
When Vista ships it will have been more than five years since the last OS upgrade, Windows XP. Yet IE7 will not include CSS3 compliance or ECMAScript 2.0 and E4X. By Nash's definition these are platform components and not part of IE. Does that mean we will have to wait for the OS after Vista before we see these things in IE8?
Before you say "IE7 runs on XP", yes but that's only because Microsoft has decided to back-port the HTML rendering engine updates they are going to put in Vista. Make no mistake, IE7 is driven by Vista's needs and schedule. IE7 will stay in beta all during 2006 because there's no way they will nail it down until Vista is done.
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I'm the author.
So let ME get this straight: I get paid nothing for my work on jQuery, where we clean up behind all the major browsers so that people don't need to wait months or years for bugs to be fixed. We also report these bugs to the appropriate vendors with clear test cases; as you can imagine we get our share of crappy bug reports and don't want to do that to these guys. You would also like me to donate more time to become an expert at Webkit to the point where I can fix these bugs immediately on their side, despite the fact that several major well-funded companies (Google, Apple, BlackBerry, and now Opera) are paying people to (NOT) fix these bugs. Sorry, but one unpaid volunteer open-source job is enough for me.
I would love for all the WebKit contributors to get together and say, "We'll show that guy! HAHA we fixed all your bugs so THERE!" There are rumors, however, that Opera is laying off 200 engineers and I seriously doubt they'll keep a large staff of people on fixing WebKit bugs. I've emailed Peter Kasting privately and think he is sincere in trying to get some of these fixed though.
Whatever the problems of Windows itself, the fact is that PC hardware makers haven't done a very good job of producing attractive and functional systems. I am in a situation where I have to run Windows and I want some non-Apple hardware. What systems out there aren't consumer-grade crap? Perhaps the Thinkpad Carbon X1 is nice for example, but I ordered one in early December and have yet to receive it due to "quality control problems" according to Lenovo.
Conditional comments do exactly that. There is an example in the jQuery blog post.
What are you specifically worried about? Dell is still using jQuery 1.2 on their site from 2007, and it seems to work. So in 2014, something will break in the (supported) 1.9 version that the jQuery team refuses to fix, but you can't upgrade to 2.1? Can you say what that something might be?
True, Walmart.com will have IE 6/7/8 visitors for years to come, but there are plenty of places where someone might be using jQuery but not need IE 6/7/8 support. It could be a cutting-edge public web site, a desktop app using an embedded HTML rendering engine, or a mobile app where oldIE doesn't matter. You can either use jQuery 1.9 for now, or use graceful degradation to give those people a really basic experience and a nudge to upgrade.
As far as bugs and quirks go, a lot of the ones in IE6 and IE7 are also present in IE8. In specific, things like eating HTML5 tags, the lack of true opacity support and the proprietary IE event model that used attachEvent instead of addEventListener. There's quite a bit of code in jQuery to deal with IE event issues, for example the lack of a bubbling change event. IE8 managed to plug some memory leaks and wasn't as bizarre with the "attroperties" issue as IE7 was, but they still have a lot of sins in common.
I thought that trash at the curb was considered as being out in public view. Someone can drive by and throw your trash into their truck for further inspection. After all, you were going to throw it away and it was going to end up in a landfill or incinerator.
Ah, here you go.
What next? "Is it time to wash your car? With all the sludge and dirt on the roads these days, cars get a lot of grime on them. When is the right time to was your car, and what should you use?"
I know I'd never see something this lame on Reddit or Digg.
Solution: Snakes on a Plane!
Wow, quite a resume there. He will be difficult to replace. For that matter, he will be difficult to ereg_replace, eregi_replace, mb_ereg_replace, mb_eregi_replace, preg_replace, str_replace, or str_ireplace.
Did anyone view source on that Dvorak column? Classic 1998 HTML, with a table-based layout and dozens of spacer gifs. No wonder Dvorak can't learn CSS.
No doubt there is some component of incompetence involved, but it's more than that. For example, Overture has a long history of "melting pot" ad placement, even before they Yahoo acquisition. Their advertisers are told about the good neighborhoods where the ads will be seen (Yahoo Search, for example) but not the bad ones (spyware, warez sites). Overture advertisers have no way to "opt out" of any segment of advertising.
Yep, measuring handset attenuation would be pretty tricky. Since signals are weaker inside a building, which is where people often go when it rains, you'd expect to see a signal dropoff on rainy days. But it wouldn't necessarily be directly related to the rain intensity at that moment.
What you should be asking is, "What useful purpose does this software serve?" If it's not doing anything useful for you, the user and owner of the computer, then teminate it. Why have it use up memory and disk space for no reason?
Clearly with specs like this it's not going to run any heavy-duty apps, so I would think a typical application would be to run a browser and web/intranet apps to keep the client footprint small. Instead of a 40GB drive, why not put 2GB of flash onto the board formatted as a file system, and make the spinning drive optional? That would reduce power consumption and increase reliability.
It's true, the US still consumes a disproportionate share of energy, epecially considering that we are outsourcing all our energy-intensive manufacturing to China. That's because oil is still way too cheap. There's no reason to optimize the use of a commodity that's cheap.
As long as small-penised men are still buying Hummers and soccer moms are buying Expeditions, oil is too cheap. As long as business are saying, "Hey we just have to pay the increase and pass it along because it's the cost of doing business," rather than thinking about ways to reduce and optimize their energy use, oil is too cheap.
We need gas at $5 a gallon for a year or two to change those habits. In the process, $5 gas will also bring sanity to commuting patterns and solve the problem of building new roads. And it won't be the end of the world, our economy will survive and adapt the way it did in the late 1970s.
This article seems to have been written around Ben Edelman's recent research about Yahoo ad fraud. Why not link to the original instead of BusinessWeek? Ben's pages don't have the popunder or other ads that BW offers, but most would consider that to be a blessing.
The Brookman Affirmation is definitely an fascinating read. They got hold of plenty of internal emails that totally nail these guys. From the account in that pdf it seems like their CTO Dan Doman was trying to warn these guys they had stepped over the line but the money was talking a lot louder. For example, when they put in an Add/Remove entry their revenue went down, so of course they took it back out. They had some distributors that requested Add/Remove entries so they would put them in and then stealth-remove them after a few days. When they changed the minimum time between popups from 1 minute to 2 minutes their revenue dropped by 15 percent, so they moved it back and eventually they dropped it down to 45 seconds! Their internal emails bragged about how hard it was to remove the software. These guys knew exactly what they were doing.
The Direct Revenue response is basically "We did nothing wrong, and besides we're not doing it anymore." So people shouldn't be punished for past crimes?
"Because vbscript works with excel, word, access - learning vb gets you to work with almost every microsoft product from asp server scripting to making vb6 windows applications to client side vbscript coding to office to scripting for other apps. "
But guess what--Javascript can do all those things as well. The whole idea of COM was that the calling convention is accessable to any language, unlike the insular world of Java. I have written lots of Windows Script Host scripts in Javascript and have done a whole ASP site in Javascript. It's especially nice because you use the same language on both the client and server side of a web app. And don't tell me you use VBScript for client scripting, at least don't say that out loud here on Slashdot.
Baloney. Bandwidth is not the problem. Comcast's upload cap is 384kb, which is enough for at least two good VoIP calls at once, if nothing else is using the link. It's possible that Comcast is doing traffic shaping to curb people they feel are bandwidth hogs. After all, "unlimited" does not really mean unlimited. You'll never see them admit that though.
Years ago, relief organizations drilled wells in India and Pakistan to provide clean disease-free water to the poor populations. Indeed, it did reduce the levels of illness and was hailed as a public health victory. Unfortunately, it turned out that this underground water had high levels of arsenic that poisoned the people over time. Now they are seeing high levels of skin, lung, liver, kidney and bladder cancer. So let's hope things go better this time.
Don't let Microsoft off the hook that easily. Most of the problems I've seen with this IE7 beta aren't the "we messed up the implementation" variety. They are the "we still don't support all of CSS" variety.
Microsoft has eliminated several bugs that made it easy to identify IE6 and apply hacks to the CSS. For example, the "* html" selector let you apply CSS rules just for IE because it's ignored by standards-compliant browsers. Now IE7 ignores that too. However, the need for hacks is still there. IE7 still does not implement several important CSS features that necessitated the hacks in the first place, such as min-height.
If Microsoft were to decide that this beta was "close enough" or even if it fixes just the minimum number of things to keep major sites from breaking, that's not going to help. Designers will end up needing an entirely different set of hacks to make up for the fact that IE7 is *still* not a complete CSS2 implementation.
When you first glance at this data I would agree with you:
Google stats on 1 billion web pages.
IE users: You need SVG support to see the graphs. (Hint: Firefox supports SVG.)
I wish they had looked at DOCTYPES, that would have told us a lot. But even so, you don't know whether there are a few large sites that put out really bad (X)HTML, or a lot of little sites. That makes a difference. The little sites, especially the rarely-changed little sites, are not the ones that drive the desire for improved standards. It's the new and growing sites like deli.cio.us and reddit or the services like Google Maps that need new and better ways of doing things.
My point was that Microsoft has tied their technology advances to OS releases. Those now happen every five years or so. If they maintain that stance, we won't see CSS3, ECMA2, E4X (or IE8 that may use them) for six years or more in Vienna/Blackcomb or whatever code name they are calling it today.
Yes, the IE7 team has done a good job in getting things fixed as they have, but a lot of that is fixing the five-year backlog of IE6 bugs and catching up to Firefox. Microsoft is an important player in both the standards process and the deployment of these technologies, their lack of urgency ensures that important standards won't be finished or widely deployed for many years to come.
When Vista ships it will have been more than five years since the last OS upgrade, Windows XP. Yet IE7 will not include CSS3 compliance or ECMAScript 2.0 and E4X. By Nash's definition these are platform components and not part of IE. Does that mean we will have to wait for the OS after Vista before we see these things in IE8?
Before you say "IE7 runs on XP", yes but that's only because Microsoft has decided to back-port the HTML rendering engine updates they are going to put in Vista. Make no mistake, IE7 is driven by Vista's needs and schedule. IE7 will stay in beta all during 2006 because there's no way they will nail it down until Vista is done.