"I'm an Apple apologist" Yes. I for one find it very impressive that you are able to type so coherently while living in the dark environment that is Steve Job's rectum. And for the love of Pete, I hope you are on a wireless connection.
Not sure how you got that I was advocating MSSQL. I was just defending it against being called crappy software, because it isn't crappy.
Regarding scalability, depends on how far you want it to scale. I have used MSSQL at the corporate level (before I started using Oracle exclusively, and one of the reasons was scalability.) On a large, data intensive website with 5000 users MSSQL held up pretty darn well. Not sure how many concurrent users I had on average at the time.
From my experience, there are a few key things that kill MSSQL: 1) lack of good query tuning metrics. yes, the set statistics family of options exists but is just OK, 2) lack of an SGA, and 3) compared to Oracle, dreadful index performance. MSSQL cannot touch Oracle's B-Tree indexes. All of these things contribute greatly to query speed, and that means that the DB is able to process more stuff, which means better scalability.
At the enterprise level, I would use Oracle hands down. dozens, hundreds, etc of concurrent users, no problem at all. Oracle is great, just pray that you never have to upgrade to a new version on a production application. I think the first thing Oracle teaches its DBAs is "Every problem is the Application's fault.", even though the application hasn't changed, and only the DB version has. Can you tell I have recently endured an upgrade? I am still bitter. But I still prefer Oracle. At home, if I were setting up my own server, would MSSQL work well? Sure. Oracle would be nice, but I am no Oracle DBA. And if you aren't an Oracle DBA, then you have no business pretending to be one. But do you need Oracle on your personal web setup? Well, do you have a dedicated DB server in your house? That's some serious firepower. Really, how many concurrent users do you think your blog site that nobody cares about or your Clay Aiken fan site or your site featuring rare paperclips would get? One? Two?
Scalability is only a concern for MSSQL where you expect some serious scaling. Otherwise, it is just fine when, and here's the key, when used for the right sized job.
On a personal note, your post was quite hard to understand. Two words for you: preview button! One more: proofread!
MSFT has made some stupid software. One need only point to IE6 and Frontpage, and playsforsure nails it.
Putting SQL Server on your list is stupid, and I call you on that. I use MS SQL every day, as well as Oracle. I prefer Oracle (Oracle kicks everyones' butt, including MySQL's), but MSSQL isn't bad. A lot of it has to do with your configuration, and your database design. I have developed many websites and applications that use MSSQL, and every performance problem I have had has been due to bad indexing, design flaws caused by cruft, etc. That said, a site running on a well design Oracle database is noticeably faster than one running on a well design MSSQL database.
Yes, I see your benchmarks. I hate benchmarks. Virtually any Vendor can point to a benchmark in which his product excels. Software benchmarks are a bit like EPA mileage on your car; highly theoretical and totally unrelated to the real world. Come on now.
Not trying to create a flamewar over databases here. Which database you prefer is highly subjective. If I were to set up my own web server, though, I would use MySQL ONLY because it's free. From my *real world* experience, MySQL and MS SQL are quite similar in terms of performance. No benchmarks, just real world experience. And there is nothing like real world experience to tell you how something performs in the real world.
Saying MySQL is leaps and bound better than MSSQL is subjective at best. Putting MSSQL on a list of crappy software is a bit irresponsible.
First, to answer your challenge: Internet Explorer. IE6 is the stupidest piece of crap ever invented. I mean that, seriously. MSFT has in some areas propelled the industry forward by leaps and bounds, even if by using underhanded tactics. But one could legitimately argue that IE6 has kept the web in the standards-free dark ages. My hatred for IE6 cannot be expressed in words.
Now, I am gonna veer OT: It's a good thing I browse/. with a +5 bonus on Trolls and Flamebait. I get some laughs that way.
But here I see a post that simply disagrees with the groupthink modded Troll? Shame on you, mods. Someone else made a very similar point, just a little later and was modded +5 insightful.
Looking at the user's post history I do see that he has some trolls. But this post doesn't appear to be a troll or flamebait. OP raises some legitimate points.
Many templates on the web *are* really bad, but a quick visit to alistapart.com or csszengarden.com will give you some decent ones.
If you are one of those dweebs who just takes web templates without understanding how they work, then yes, you might not find the four column layout with double headers and pie menus that you so desperately think you need.
But, if you use those templates as I suspect they were intended, namely, to look at how they work, you can make your own design. Things like negative margins, auto margins, etc, may not be readily apparent if you have never seen them in use. But once you see them in practice, you should get all kinds of ideas on how to make them work for you.
If you want to be the sort of person who understands how these templates work, download them and play with the CSS. See what breaks it, see what makes it tick. That is how you become conversant with loads of neat CSS tricks. Pretty soon, you won't need those templates.
Agreed, the Boeing engineers for this project may have no need to know what happens, but you never know...might that data prove useful for other applications of the material?
I am no engineer (software engineer doesn't count, I know), but I'd think you'd want to test things to failure, of course where practical (as in not with a new bridge or building). If for no other reason than you have to learn all kinds of interesting things from breaking things, no?
Maybe that notion falls apart (pun intended!) in the real, non-software, world. But if a programmer says "that'll never happen, no need to test that!" I guarantee you someone will break it once it goes to production. The only way to test software is to shake and break.
Yeah, I have always wondered why software that you DL and install on Linux (like stuff you can't find or get from the Multiverse for whatever reason) doesn't come with a little script that invokes apt-get, yum, ports, or the equivalent for whatever distro you have. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
The guy you replied to was a stupid troll, probably some pre-pubescent dork who looks at llama pr0n all day long. Truly, you wasted your time replying to him.
If you can get past the troll, the bad grammar, and the general idiocy, there lies one, and I mean just one, good point: While you and I may appreciate the command line's power, or the ease of apt-get, etc...how do most people install software on Windows? They download it and run the setup file from their desktop. That's how I do it. I don't think I have ever been able to install programs that simply on my Ubuntu box.
Yes, I find it easy to type "sudo apt-get install xxxxx" but let's face it, not everyone is gonna do that. Even when people make legitimate, well worded, polite comments here or elsewhere complaining about the perceived difficulty of installing software, invariably someone provides a little bash script or command to perform the desired function. Trouble is, these types of replies miss the point entirely. At best, the person who posts them is trying to be helpful but just doesn't get that many people are scared of the CLI. At worst, he is trying to be an arrogant jerk. I hope you wouldn't have replied that way if the poster had actually voiced his concern in a proper way. Those kinds of replies reinforce the negative stereotypes about the F/OSS community.
"Just ask the audiophiles over at head-fi." So you are saying that you let some guys who probably work nights at best buy tell you what sounds good? Do you think the iPod is inferior because they say so? Have you ever actually listened to one?
I am sick of self-proclaimed audiophiles yapping and complaining about lossy codecs and the "absolutely unbearable" sound of portable music players. You and those of your ilk are missing the point.
I don't think anybody, *anybody*, is comparing an iPod to a $5000 home stereo system. But since you can't lug that around with you on the subway or to the gym, you have to choose something portable. Guess what? It's like many things in life, a *gasp* trade off! First, I seriously doubt many of the so-called audiophiles here can really hear anything anyway. You sound like a bunch of tone-deaf nerds with an inferiority complex, desperately searching for an angle, some way to trash talk something. Second, if you absolutely *cannot* stand the sound of a lossy file format played on a tiny device because you can't hear that one part in your favorite song where the engineer at the mixing board is taking a drag from his cigarette, then DON'T BUY ONE.
That said, I have a nano and a shuffle. I can tell a distinct difference between the nano and the shuffle. The nano sounds good enough, and it's my main device, but the shuffle has MUCH better sound. The first time I ever put it on I played some Thievery Corp, and the bass was so crystalline I could have been convinced that someone was parked in front of my house with a loud sub playing in their car. This with the default earbuds. I guess there is one feature I wish for on my iPod nano: the shuffle's audio circuitry.
I thought your post was very good, insightful, if you will. But then you trundled out this old saw "given that it's [iPod] technically inferior to products from rivals"
I am sick of hearing this. Technically inferior? Why, because it doesn't have worthless features like wi-fi or an FM tuner?
Sure there are ways to improve the iPod, but all in all, it is very well designed. Apple seems to have the sadly unique ability to choose a relatively small set of options and make them all the right options. I have had an iPod for two years now, and I have never wished for features that don't exist (with the possible exception of an easily replaceable battery.)
Not sure which screen reader you had to write for, but I had to write something for JAWS. It's amazing how much working with a different user-agent, or at least an extension to a user-agent, teaches you.
Ah, good clean semantic markup! I even turned off CSS in Firefox and it was still readable, which is the gold standard in my mind. For maximum accessibility and compatibility, you have the right approach. Everyone, and I mean everyone, can read about Elizabethan Seadogs! Good show.
Agreed about use of javascript, to a point. Javascript is a nicety for validation, but of course you cannot trust it for critical validation. The thing that makes me just LOVE javascript is AJAX. I guess, working on an intranet I can safely assume everyone is going to be using a browser that allows javascript (though of course some use that to justify writing horrid IE-markup). The few who use Blackberries, well...
Some of the things I am asked to write at work really require ajax because they are so stinkin data intensive. It's so nice to be able to get a JSON object and build html elements using javascript instead of having to make the web server do that and then send it to the browser. Yikes.
If I had sites on the public net, I'd still use AJAX depending on the audience. Maybe not as much as I do at work, and I would allow non javascript users to see a simplified version of the page. But AJAX can, when done right, enhance the user experience. Just ask the people who can use my site to drag and drop a list to re-order it instead of having to type a number in dozens of inputs and then press submit, while my server gets the crap beat out of it (you know, with the 65 update queries made to the table to set the order for each item).
I just wish I had something to show you in return for your nice link. Oh well...
I agree with you 100%. I write things the same way and I never fear browser upgrades. Unless it's IE, just because IE is friggin' retarded. But standards are great news for things like (x)html and css.
I did just learn, though, that user agents (specifically the browser on blackberries) dont't do javascript. Who knew? Not me! It's not like I have one. So, while your pages might work just fine, if you have javascript (you do use AJAX, right?) it won't work. Bummer.
Like you, I am not as concerned how my pages will look on the iPhone as I am how will my ajax stuff work (if at all)? At least most of what I do is at work on the intranet. But that is a good question, how will the iPhone play with javascript? Very well, I hope.
"Now as far as this thing in St Louis, having lived there for 25 years, there is alot of crying foul by the Black community over the treatment and racial profiling by police."
I live in St Louis too. A couple of years ago I was visiting a friend in North St Louis (Grand & St Louis Ave), in what is admittedly a very bad part of town. It was at night, and I was pulled over.
The police officer (who was black) pulled me over for no reason other than I was a white guy in the hood at night. He looked at my driver's license, which said I lived in Kirkwood (which is a upper-middle class suburb) and immediately assumed I was there to buy drugs. That I can deal with. What really angered me was the extremely rude way I was treated. He was rude, condescending, and when I asked him for his badge number, he told me "That's none of your f******* business." After he searched my car and called my friend who I was just visiting to confirm my story, he let me go with no apology whatsoever.
If black people have to deal with that on even a somewhat regular basis, or even once a decade, I can understand the anger. There is nothing so demoralizing as being unjustly treated like a criminal. Especially when there is absolutely NO evidence to support such a claim except for your being the wrong color in the wrong part of town at the wrong time of day. Especially when you are a taxpayer who pays the salary of the police officer.
In another instance, one of my friends who is black went out for an early morning run. He lives in North StL. He saw a man leaving a break-in, house alarm blaring, etc. The police came and took the man into custody. He discreetly approached the police out of view of the man they were taking into arrest and told the police that he had indeed committed the crime. Care to guess what the police did? They brought the criminal right up to my friend and asked him "is this the man you saw leaving the house?". Now, tell me: would you tell on a criminal, to his face, who was operating RIGHT THERE in your neighborhood where you and your family live? Chances are, the guy knows where you live! What would you do? How would you feel?
I know both are just anecdote. But I write this to make a point: You shouldn't be so sure people are crying foul for no reason. The majority of police are good people, I am sure. But it only takes a few bad ones to piss off a lot of people.
Maybe. Like I said, I knew what he was trying to say.
Asynchronous is one of those words like inflammable. If you think about it too long, your brain hurts. Asynchronous means things not happening at the same time. Thus people cannot collaborate on a document at the same time. Of course, in computing, asynchronous takes on a different meaning, though it essentially means the same thing only on a very small scale, which in turn allows more instant updates / refreshes, which flips the definition.
He should have just said that Sharepoint allows people to work together interactively on a document. Plain speech doesn't make you sound dumb. It takes a sharp mind to take complex concepts and make them simple and easily understood. Any idiot can take complex things (or for the bigger idiot, simple things) and make them complex. Which brings me back to software vendors and buzzwords...
"don't let the technology ABUSE you." In Soviet Russia, you ABUSE technology, and technology USE you!!
To put it another way, for a million pounds I'd take my phone (and I actually have a phone I don't wanna smash, a nice Moto L6) and boil it in fetid elephant dung, run it through a meat grinder, and feed it to a goat.
To get rid of my pager using aforementioned method? I'd pay a million pounds!
I blame software vendors. I had a guy pitching MS Sharepoint to my group at work. He touted one of the virtues of Sharepoint as allowing "asynchronous collaboration". Of course we all know what he was trying to say, but to me that means MS Word: when someone has it locked for editing nobody else can open the copy and save it. That's asynchronous collaboration, right? Stupid vendors.
fair enough, I dunno for sure. Like I said, I have POTS.
Don't you still need some kind of appliance, though, to use it? You don't just pick up your co-ax cable and talk into it! Someone replied to you talking about a router...and that's kind of my point: that's another failure point. A $20 telephone is a lot simpler and less failure prone than a router or a PC or whatever, IMO.
Last July in St Louis, we had a major power outage after some freak storms. Some areas of the metro area (poorer ones, of course) were without power for up to eight days. Yes, eight days. Cable was out for longer in some cases.
The telco Central Offices of course use DC power, and they have backup generators. Not sure why their lines survived (underground perhaps), but the one thing that worked for most people was phone service. You may hate the telcos, but it's hard to disagree with high availability.
I use AT&T DSL, and it works great. I didn't pay any installation fee. And it doesn't cost nearly what cable does.
Besides, your statement that anyone with a clue uses VOIP is a little ridiculous. Like all blanket statements, it's absolutely false:D
Seriously, why do you say that? Personally, I prefer POTS to VOIP. If nothing else, POTS has proven reliability. It's certainly much simpler than VOIP. When it comes to essentials like telephone service, the simpler the better; it has fewer failure points. How could you possibly argue that something that relies on a high speed internet connection and a working PC is better than a simple POTS line and then imply that anyone who has POTS is clueless?
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm an Apple apologist"
Yes. I for one find it very impressive that you are able to type so coherently while living in the dark environment that is Steve Job's rectum. And for the love of Pete, I hope you are on a wireless connection.
Not sure how you got that I was advocating MSSQL. I was just defending it against being called crappy software, because it isn't crappy.
Regarding scalability, depends on how far you want it to scale. I have used MSSQL at the corporate level (before I started using Oracle exclusively, and one of the reasons was scalability.) On a large, data intensive website with 5000 users MSSQL held up pretty darn well. Not sure how many concurrent users I had on average at the time.
From my experience, there are a few key things that kill MSSQL: 1) lack of good query tuning metrics. yes, the set statistics family of options exists but is just OK, 2) lack of an SGA, and 3) compared to Oracle, dreadful index performance. MSSQL cannot touch Oracle's B-Tree indexes. All of these things contribute greatly to query speed, and that means that the DB is able to process more stuff, which means better scalability.
At the enterprise level, I would use Oracle hands down. dozens, hundreds, etc of concurrent users, no problem at all. Oracle is great, just pray that you never have to upgrade to a new version on a production application. I think the first thing Oracle teaches its DBAs is "Every problem is the Application's fault.", even though the application hasn't changed, and only the DB version has. Can you tell I have recently endured an upgrade? I am still bitter. But I still prefer Oracle.
At home, if I were setting up my own server, would MSSQL work well? Sure. Oracle would be nice, but I am no Oracle DBA. And if you aren't an Oracle DBA, then you have no business pretending to be one. But do you need Oracle on your personal web setup? Well, do you have a dedicated DB server in your house? That's some serious firepower. Really, how many concurrent users do you think your blog site that nobody cares about or your Clay Aiken fan site or your site featuring rare paperclips would get? One? Two?
Scalability is only a concern for MSSQL where you expect some serious scaling. Otherwise, it is just fine when, and here's the key, when used for the right sized job.
On a personal note, your post was quite hard to understand. Two words for you: preview button! One more: proofread!
Wow, forget to take the blue pill or something? Did you swallow your tongue?
Conniption fits are all the rage these days!
MSFT has made some stupid software. One need only point to IE6 and Frontpage, and playsforsure nails it.
Putting SQL Server on your list is stupid, and I call you on that. I use MS SQL every day, as well as Oracle. I prefer Oracle (Oracle kicks everyones' butt, including MySQL's), but MSSQL isn't bad. A lot of it has to do with your configuration, and your database design. I have developed many websites and applications that use MSSQL, and every performance problem I have had has been due to bad indexing, design flaws caused by cruft, etc. That said, a site running on a well design Oracle database is noticeably faster than one running on a well design MSSQL database.
Yes, I see your benchmarks. I hate benchmarks. Virtually any Vendor can point to a benchmark in which his product excels. Software benchmarks are a bit like EPA mileage on your car; highly theoretical and totally unrelated to the real world. Come on now.
Not trying to create a flamewar over databases here. Which database you prefer is highly subjective. If I were to set up my own web server, though, I would use MySQL ONLY because it's free. From my *real world* experience, MySQL and MS SQL are quite similar in terms of performance. No benchmarks, just real world experience. And there is nothing like real world experience to tell you how something performs in the real world.
Saying MySQL is leaps and bound better than MSSQL is subjective at best. Putting MSSQL on a list of crappy software is a bit irresponsible.
First, to answer your challenge:
/. with a +5 bonus on Trolls and Flamebait. I get some laughs that way.
Internet Explorer. IE6 is the stupidest piece of crap ever invented. I mean that, seriously. MSFT has in some areas propelled the industry forward by leaps and bounds, even if by using underhanded tactics. But one could legitimately argue that IE6 has kept the web in the standards-free dark ages. My hatred for IE6 cannot be expressed in words.
Now, I am gonna veer OT:
It's a good thing I browse
But here I see a post that simply disagrees with the groupthink modded Troll? Shame on you, mods. Someone else made a very similar point, just a little later and was modded +5 insightful.
Looking at the user's post history I do see that he has some trolls. But this post doesn't appear to be a troll or flamebait. OP raises some legitimate points.
At first I thought it read "Bill Gates drops A number two".
I though "man, is this a slow news day or what?!" and "Did he flush?"
I guess it's time to get some sleep. Or stop smoking crack. Either way.
"Star Control III"
Is that a typo? Did you mean Star Control II? I hope?
Now, *that* is the best game ever. The open-sourced version Ur Quan Masters is even better.
Many templates on the web *are* really bad, but a quick visit to alistapart.com or csszengarden.com will give you some decent ones.
If you are one of those dweebs who just takes web templates without understanding how they work, then yes, you might not find the four column layout with double headers and pie menus that you so desperately think you need.
But, if you use those templates as I suspect they were intended, namely, to look at how they work, you can make your own design. Things like negative margins, auto margins, etc, may not be readily apparent if you have never seen them in use. But once you see them in practice, you should get all kinds of ideas on how to make them work for you.
If you want to be the sort of person who understands how these templates work, download them and play with the CSS. See what breaks it, see what makes it tick. That is how you become conversant with loads of neat CSS tricks. Pretty soon, you won't need those templates.
Interesting post...
Agreed, the Boeing engineers for this project may have no need to know what happens, but you never know...might that data prove useful for other applications of the material?
I am no engineer (software engineer doesn't count, I know), but I'd think you'd want to test things to failure, of course where practical (as in not with a new bridge or building). If for no other reason than you have to learn all kinds of interesting things from breaking things, no?
Maybe that notion falls apart (pun intended!) in the real, non-software, world. But if a programmer says "that'll never happen, no need to test that!" I guarantee you someone will break it once it goes to production. The only way to test software is to shake and break.
Yeah, I have always wondered why software that you DL and install on Linux (like stuff you can't find or get from the Multiverse for whatever reason) doesn't come with a little script that invokes apt-get, yum, ports, or the equivalent for whatever distro you have. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
The guy you replied to was a stupid troll, probably some pre-pubescent dork who looks at llama pr0n all day long. Truly, you wasted your time replying to him.
If you can get past the troll, the bad grammar, and the general idiocy, there lies one, and I mean just one, good point: While you and I may appreciate the command line's power, or the ease of apt-get, etc...how do most people install software on Windows? They download it and run the setup file from their desktop. That's how I do it. I don't think I have ever been able to install programs that simply on my Ubuntu box.
Yes, I find it easy to type "sudo apt-get install xxxxx" but let's face it, not everyone is gonna do that. Even when people make legitimate, well worded, polite comments here or elsewhere complaining about the perceived difficulty of installing software, invariably someone provides a little bash script or command to perform the desired function. Trouble is, these types of replies miss the point entirely. At best, the person who posts them is trying to be helpful but just doesn't get that many people are scared of the CLI. At worst, he is trying to be an arrogant jerk. I hope you wouldn't have replied that way if the poster had actually voiced his concern in a proper way. Those kinds of replies reinforce the negative stereotypes about the F/OSS community.
I don't usually reply to AC. In this case I will.
"Just ask the audiophiles over at head-fi."
So you are saying that you let some guys who probably work nights at best buy tell you what sounds good? Do you think the iPod is inferior because they say so? Have you ever actually listened to one?
I am sick of self-proclaimed audiophiles yapping and complaining about lossy codecs and the "absolutely unbearable" sound of portable music players. You and those of your ilk are missing the point.
I don't think anybody, *anybody*, is comparing an iPod to a $5000 home stereo system. But since you can't lug that around with you on the subway or to the gym, you have to choose something portable. Guess what? It's like many things in life, a *gasp* trade off! First, I seriously doubt many of the so-called audiophiles here can really hear anything anyway. You sound like a bunch of tone-deaf nerds with an inferiority complex, desperately searching for an angle, some way to trash talk something. Second, if you absolutely *cannot* stand the sound of a lossy file format played on a tiny device because you can't hear that one part in your favorite song where the engineer at the mixing board is taking a drag from his cigarette, then DON'T BUY ONE.
That said, I have a nano and a shuffle. I can tell a distinct difference between the nano and the shuffle. The nano sounds good enough, and it's my main device, but the shuffle has MUCH better sound. The first time I ever put it on I played some Thievery Corp, and the bass was so crystalline I could have been convinced that someone was parked in front of my house with a loud sub playing in their car. This with the default earbuds. I guess there is one feature I wish for on my iPod nano: the shuffle's audio circuitry.
"Nobody says that"
Yeah, you'd think. But did you read the post I replied to? That wasn't the first time I have seen someone here write that.
I thought your post was very good, insightful, if you will. But then you trundled out this old saw
"given that it's [iPod] technically inferior to products from rivals"
I am sick of hearing this. Technically inferior? Why, because it doesn't have worthless features like wi-fi or an FM tuner?
Sure there are ways to improve the iPod, but all in all, it is very well designed. Apple seems to have the sadly unique ability to choose a relatively small set of options and make them all the right options. I have had an iPod for two years now, and I have never wished for features that don't exist (with the possible exception of an easily replaceable battery.)
Not sure which screen reader you had to write for, but I had to write something for JAWS. It's amazing how much working with a different user-agent, or at least an extension to a user-agent, teaches you.
Ah, good clean semantic markup! I even turned off CSS in Firefox and it was still readable, which is the gold standard in my mind. For maximum accessibility and compatibility, you have the right approach. Everyone, and I mean everyone, can read about Elizabethan Seadogs! Good show.
Agreed about use of javascript, to a point. Javascript is a nicety for validation, but of course you cannot trust it for critical validation. The thing that makes me just LOVE javascript is AJAX. I guess, working on an intranet I can safely assume everyone is going to be using a browser that allows javascript (though of course some use that to justify writing horrid IE-markup). The few who use Blackberries, well...
Some of the things I am asked to write at work really require ajax because they are so stinkin data intensive. It's so nice to be able to get a JSON object and build html elements using javascript instead of having to make the web server do that and then send it to the browser. Yikes.
If I had sites on the public net, I'd still use AJAX depending on the audience. Maybe not as much as I do at work, and I would allow non javascript users to see a simplified version of the page. But AJAX can, when done right, enhance the user experience. Just ask the people who can use my site to drag and drop a list to re-order it instead of having to type a number in dozens of inputs and then press submit, while my server gets the crap beat out of it (you know, with the 65 update queries made to the table to set the order for each item).
I just wish I had something to show you in return for your nice link. Oh well...
I agree with you 100%. I write things the same way and I never fear browser upgrades. Unless it's IE, just because IE is friggin' retarded. But standards are great news for things like (x)html and css.
I did just learn, though, that user agents (specifically the browser on blackberries) dont't do javascript. Who knew? Not me! It's not like I have one. So, while your pages might work just fine, if you have javascript (you do use AJAX, right?) it won't work. Bummer.
Like you, I am not as concerned how my pages will look on the iPhone as I am how will my ajax stuff work (if at all)? At least most of what I do is at work on the intranet. But that is a good question, how will the iPhone play with javascript? Very well, I hope.
"Now as far as this thing in St Louis, having lived there for 25 years, there is alot of crying foul by the Black community over the treatment and racial profiling by police."
I live in St Louis too. A couple of years ago I was visiting a friend in North St Louis (Grand & St Louis Ave), in what is admittedly a very bad part of town. It was at night, and I was pulled over.
The police officer (who was black) pulled me over for no reason other than I was a white guy in the hood at night. He looked at my driver's license, which said I lived in Kirkwood (which is a upper-middle class suburb) and immediately assumed I was there to buy drugs. That I can deal with. What really angered me was the extremely rude way I was treated. He was rude, condescending, and when I asked him for his badge number, he told me "That's none of your f******* business." After he searched my car and called my friend who I was just visiting to confirm my story, he let me go with no apology whatsoever.
If black people have to deal with that on even a somewhat regular basis, or even once a decade, I can understand the anger. There is nothing so demoralizing as being unjustly treated like a criminal. Especially when there is absolutely NO evidence to support such a claim except for your being the wrong color in the wrong part of town at the wrong time of day. Especially when you are a taxpayer who pays the salary of the police officer.
In another instance, one of my friends who is black went out for an early morning run. He lives in North StL. He saw a man leaving a break-in, house alarm blaring, etc. The police came and took the man into custody. He discreetly approached the police out of view of the man they were taking into arrest and told the police that he had indeed committed the crime. Care to guess what the police did? They brought the criminal right up to my friend and asked him "is this the man you saw leaving the house?". Now, tell me: would you tell on a criminal, to his face, who was operating RIGHT THERE in your neighborhood where you and your family live? Chances are, the guy knows where you live! What would you do? How would you feel?
I know both are just anecdote. But I write this to make a point: You shouldn't be so sure people are crying foul for no reason. The majority of police are good people, I am sure. But it only takes a few bad ones to piss off a lot of people.
Maybe. Like I said, I knew what he was trying to say.
Asynchronous is one of those words like inflammable. If you think about it too long, your brain hurts. Asynchronous means things not happening at the same time. Thus people cannot collaborate on a document at the same time. Of course, in computing, asynchronous takes on a different meaning, though it essentially means the same thing only on a very small scale, which in turn allows more instant updates / refreshes, which flips the definition.
He should have just said that Sharepoint allows people to work together interactively on a document. Plain speech doesn't make you sound dumb. It takes a sharp mind to take complex concepts and make them simple and easily understood. Any idiot can take complex things (or for the bigger idiot, simple things) and make them complex. Which brings me back to software vendors and buzzwords...
Today? I would have called him on it. Sharepoint competes with something I have developed, and that would make me very inclined to zap him.
Then? Sadly, no. I was a bit less cynical then. It has become a running joke at work, though. Chicken, I know.
"don't let the technology ABUSE you."
In Soviet Russia, you ABUSE technology, and technology USE you!!
To put it another way, for a million pounds I'd take my phone (and I actually have a phone I don't wanna smash, a nice Moto L6) and boil it in fetid elephant dung, run it through a meat grinder, and feed it to a goat.
To get rid of my pager using aforementioned method? I'd pay a million pounds!
You insensitive clod! I'm a wooly mammoth!
Come to think of it, I have been feeling a bit randy as of late. Thirsty, too.
I blame software vendors. I had a guy pitching MS Sharepoint to my group at work. He touted one of the virtues of Sharepoint as allowing "asynchronous collaboration". Of course we all know what he was trying to say, but to me that means MS Word: when someone has it locked for editing nobody else can open the copy and save it. That's asynchronous collaboration, right? Stupid vendors.
fair enough, I dunno for sure. Like I said, I have POTS.
Don't you still need some kind of appliance, though, to use it? You don't just pick up your co-ax cable and talk into it! Someone replied to you talking about a router...and that's kind of my point: that's another failure point. A $20 telephone is a lot simpler and less failure prone than a router or a PC or whatever, IMO.
Last July in St Louis, we had a major power outage after some freak storms. Some areas of the metro area (poorer ones, of course) were without power for up to eight days. Yes, eight days. Cable was out for longer in some cases.
The telco Central Offices of course use DC power, and they have backup generators. Not sure why their lines survived (underground perhaps), but the one thing that worked for most people was phone service. You may hate the telcos, but it's hard to disagree with high availability.
* shrugs *
:D
I use AT&T DSL, and it works great. I didn't pay any installation fee. And it doesn't cost nearly what cable does.
Besides, your statement that anyone with a clue uses VOIP is a little ridiculous. Like all blanket statements, it's absolutely false
Seriously, why do you say that? Personally, I prefer POTS to VOIP. If nothing else, POTS has proven reliability. It's certainly much simpler than VOIP. When it comes to essentials like telephone service, the simpler the better; it has fewer failure points. How could you possibly argue that something that relies on a high speed internet connection and a working PC is better than a simple POTS line and then imply that anyone who has POTS is clueless?