Well I'll assume with the JavaScript part you are referring to Anonymous Coward and the jQuery part you are referring to me.
For the project I am currently assigned to, I use jQuery for full-fledged AJAX, lots of client-side logic and a lot of DOM manipulation - pretty much as heavy as it gets with JavaScript, in short. I've also really used Dojo and gave Prototype, Mootools and ExtJS a short spin and prefer jQuery over any of them.
Note that even though I bash disabling JavaScript here, these projects I work on do actually support browsing without JavaScript for the public parts (ie those parts of the site you do not have to be registered for) so it still works with perfectly with Google and other search engines. Depending on the browser they will still look good or totally FUBAR'd, but the content is perfectly indexable by spiderbots.
Oh really? JavaScript is not that hard to get to work correctly cross browser. I spent a LOT more time changing CSS things to work nicely than I do on JavaScript and I do use a lot of JavaScript. If you use a decent JavaScript toolkit, like for example jQuery, it's even faster and you hardly have to worry about it at all.
For any nice advanced stuff you simply have to use JavaScript, and that's what it's there for. You want to disable JavaScript? That's fine by me, but you WILL be missing out. Really, what's next, catering to people who don't have CSS? Sure there are a lot of people who think sites should still work and look readable without CSS, but really, that depends on the market segment of the website. You can't make rich websites without CSS and JavaScript. Simple. Not every site can get away with looking like Google.com, it depends on the target audience and the content.
First off IE6 is not tested, while it is still the most used browser. Also Opera 9.5 is not ready, it has so many bugs it just isn't funny anymore. Many sites break that worked fine in Opera 9.2.
But let's get to the good stuff. Yes in pure JavaScript like this, IE might be faster than Firefox. But in real world situations it clearly isn't. There is no test done on layout manipulation (and such) using JavaScript. Internet Explorer is notoriously horrible at this, especially if you use it combination with PNG's with alphachannel or complex CSS. Not to mention if you have to use JavaScript hacks because of IE6's lack of CSS support for the simplest things.
Funny is also how almost all JavaScript library speed tests I've seen put Internet Explorer far behind the others.
In 'real world' JavaScript performance Opera and Safari would be the winners, where I'd choose Safari as absolute winner, as Opera gains a lot of redrawing speed by cutting corners it should not cut which often result in display corruption (ie, the type that goes away when you force a redraw by minimizing and then maximizing the window again, or moving another window over Opera and then away again). Quite a bit behind in speed after Safari and Opera would be Firefox, followed even further back by Internet Explorer.
As a developer I still prefer Firefox for development though. Webkit is awesome, but the Safari GUI just plain sucks. Opera... hmm, I like it on my mobile devices, but it's just too weird for the desktop (what, textarea's don't even support scrolltop? wth!)
As a web development professional (and long before that a software development professional) I can feel the pain of most people who are complaining here. I must say I do not feel the same about IE7 as a lot of others here feel though. Sure it isn't perfect, but I hardly spend time fixing things for IE7. For IE6, that is another story though. Now I must admit I have written my own build system that automates a lot of tasks for me, and it also includes creating IE-compatible CSS files for a lot of common CSS hacks (read: the ones I use) that can be included with a conditional comment. This saves me quite some time. But still, for the design I am handed, if you would take the FF2 front-end development time as 100%, I'd add 35% for IE6, 5% for IE7, 5% for Opera and 5% for Safari. Development is obviously done in FF as this has the best developers tools.
To be honest, I've run into so many quirks in all 4 major browsers alike (IE/FF/Opera/Safari) that I'd almost say I hate them all. As someone on IRC said a few days ago: I hate IE 1 MS, and I hate all the others several milliMS, but I don't love any of them.
IE7 still has issues with PNG's (just use AIL as in IE6, it works better, it's actually faster, and you have to do that for IE6 anyway), you can't use fading effects on text because of the cleartype issues and developers tools are just not nearly as good as their FF counterparts.
In the other hand, I've been playing with FF3 (and posting bug reports like crazy) and it breaks. It really really breaks. FF3b may pass the ACID2 test, but that's about all it passes. It has broken pretty much all the complicated sites I've tried in it. Sure it's a beta, and a lot of issues will be resolved, I just wouldn't be surprised if FF3 final still breaks a lot.
Opera, yeah, let's talk about Opera. The latest Opera is worse than FF3b. 9.2 is totally bugridden. It seems that every bug I run into, I upgrade to a newer Opera (every month or two) and it's fixed. Sure this says a lot for how hard the Opera guys are working and fixing things, but it's till bad. Opera 9.5b? I'm surprised to find it in that quirksmode comparison. According to that page it does lots of things it doesn't actually do - or only does half. Again, 9.5 breaks, and it breaks bad. They even had the nerve to 'fix' the mousewheel to now use - and + indices as the other browsers do. That's a good thing, if it weren't for the fact that pretty much all mousewheel JS depends on Opera doing it the other way around. Should we talk about all the redraw bugs Opera suffers from? Seriously it's amazing how may artefacts you see on screen that disappear by minimizing/maximizing (and other such operations that force the window to completely redraw). These are not really HTML/CSS rendering errors, it's just redraw code where corners have been cut that shouldn't have been. Sure it's fast, but if this is the price you pay....
Safari? Oh yeah Safari. It's bitchingly fast. Too bad the rest of the interface is slow as a dog. Really, who came up with the 'sliding' message box animation? Yeah there's an error, oh, hey, let me just wait 7 seconds on a really stupid animation that's not even anti aliased just so I can click OK. Webkit good. Safari interface bad. And it has LOTS of quirks as well (and I'm talking about v3 here, not v2, that's a horror of biblical proportions by itself).
Just saying. IE7 isn't 'the doggs bollocks', but neither are the other browsers. And with the betas of FF3 and Opera 9.5 I'm almost scared for the future, it doesn't look well so far, but at least there's hope in those departments.
Which brings me to my real point. Conditional comments. Sure, they may be bad practise, and yeah, they bloat. In the meantime, in the REAL WORLD, things need to be fixed. I can't sell to a client that we can't do something correctly cross-browser or it takes XXXX more hours because of quirk A in browser B that simply cannot be fixed without a bunch of javascript that does the SAME THING as a conditional comment would, but EVEN LESS mainta
Yeah, because if you want to do something difficult, going the standards way works
Every decent webdeveloper knows there are lots of differences between Opera, WebKit and Gecko (leaving IE out here on purpose). Going 100% standard is not going to fix that. Not saying people shouldn't follow standard, they should, but it's not a one-stop solution. Browsers should support the standards as well, which is difficult, because even though the standards are _well_-defined, they are not _perfectly_-defined.
I for one, as a webdeveloper, test everything in at least Opera 9, Safari 3, FF1.5, FF2, IE6 and IE7. Only very minor issues with Opera and WebKit are being overlooked (some small things just cannot be fixed without insane JS based solutions). Seriously, how many browsers must I cope with as developer? Where is the line? I personally think everything should just work on anything, but such is not reality, now matter how much effort you put into it.
I have to agree. I've been using Windows Mobile on the PocketPC for several phones now, it may not be perfect, but it's very nice. The TyTN II ofcourse at this time being the creme de la creme in WM phones (if the battery life was longer, there was a decent DDRaw driver and it had a VGA screen, I'd say the phone itself was perfect)
I've seen the iPhone, I've played with it, and honestly, I don't see what the fuss is about. It's not a phone for serious business, it's a toy. A WM device gives you office productivity when you're mobile. As one of the founders of a tech start-up I can honestly say I could not do without it. Syncing all my outlook things with the phone, accessibility to my mail everywhere, tethering, GPS, GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA, full QWERTY keyboard, if needed open office documents on the go, and when I want it is almost trivial to develop my own applications for it.
I almost feel sorry to say this, but the only thing that comes even close to WM is Symbian. Symbian is a bit faster and energy efficient, but it just doesn't offer the same level of applications and compatibility.
To:parent:, I've not had a lock-up on my Kaiser in a long time. Don't run Batti, tweak with KaiserTweak (shameless plug) and if you're feeling adventurous, go to xda-developers.com , get the HTC rom and throw away all your AT&T muck.
(Chainfire @ XDA-Dev)
You will have to forgive me for it being 7 AM, I may not be as irrational as normal;)
How did this guy get a job as writer for the "Business Technology" of "The Wall Street Journal" ? It's fairly obvious he doesn't know anything about technology. Open? I do not really expect the gPhone to be open to consumers like a linux PC is open to it's user. A bit more customizable then Windows Mobile, likely, but not anywhere near OpenMoko. The point it seems he is trying to make is that the phone is open in the way that everyone can make software for it. HTC makes devices running Windows Mobile I have absolutely no trouble writing applications for. And indeed, Windows Mobile isn't really open, but if you take a stroll down PPC hacker lane, you'll find that very little is sacred and most things (outside of normal application scope) are not that hard to tap into. It would not be difficult (at least for me, and I'm not a _seasoned_ WM developer) to write virus like or security breaching applications for those phones, and they've been around for what, 5 or 6 years now?
I guess (and purely a guess, as I haven't even been to the US) for you Americans the real problem is BlackBerry. It steals a lot of the thunder of the current top of the line mobile phones, because it offers similar functionality (be it in an outdated, obsolete and rediculously expensive way), but it is one of the dominant brands. Over here in Europe, where I live, carriers are nice, and everybody and their grandma has a WM-PPC; if not their primary pub-phone, then their work-related phone. I'd be surprised if 1 out of a 100 even ever heard of BlackBerry:)
In the context of TFA, there is nothing new or even relatively new to the gPhone. I would almost go as far as to say there is nothing 'new' about the gPhone at all - yeah, let's get a bunch of companies together and form and alliance with all the control, then call it open, while it probably isn't really open for end-users, just for the buzz-factor. It's not like we don't have enough 'open' mobile device alliances already. And Google really does seem to be becoming the new microsoft, it's eerie! I Not that I think Windows Mobile is the best thing since sliced bread, performance/power wise it's way lacking compared to Symbian, but nevertheless, it is a really nice platform.
Obligatory OpenMoko disclaimer; sure OpenMoko may be the shit, but the device simple doesn't fit my hardware needs. It's so horribly two years ago.
Seriously, sometimes I wonder what people do to get so 'infected'. Aside from tracking cookies, neither Kaspersky, AdAware nor Spybot S&D has reported any infection in about 8 years (it was ofcourse not always those products). 'Shitlist' email from people you don't know, don't open attachments, don't go to shady sites, get behind a NAT and/or run a decent firewall, and you're pretty safe.
Very good, and very easy
on
Learning jQuery
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I have used other javascript libraries like Dojo and YUI in the past, but I fell in love with jQuery after a day of playing with it. It's lean and it's mean. I was by no means very good in JavaScript when I started with it (though I did have a lot of experience in other programming languages), but jQuery was really easy to grasp. Then after a few weeks, after reading lots of code for jQuery plugins and the like, I found I knew a hell of a lot of rediculous details and (seemingly) 'quirks' (that are really cool features) about JavaScript. By now I find JavaScript actually a nice language to code in, all because of jQuery! (Seriously, I tried the same with YUI and Dojo and just got a headaches) Best JavaScript framework I have ever used, even if I disagree with JohnResig about what important features all the time;)
I have a HTC TyTN II which has 3.5G and it's wonderful. Ping is usually around 80ms, vs the 30ms I get on my landline, for servers on the AIX. Speed is incredible. No, I've never used EDGE (they pretty much went straight from GPRS to UMTS here, skipping EDGE). The point is, there is nothing wrong with 3.5G, the latency is more than good enough for usage in a phone. If you would use it as data connection for your PC, it might be less than perfect, but I doubt you could play an FPS better over EDGE with it's slow ass connection speed, even if the ping is a bit lower:)
In other words, the dudes point are irrelevant, even if they were true:)
Ontopic, your calling deflate zlib would be confusing as well, as zlib is also the name of the library that implements gzip and zlib RFC's (and is likely to be the library that is used in most servers as well as browsers). Aside from the headers and footers, gzip and zlib are identical, and any differences between the compressed streams are caused by different (default) settings/parameters.
"No, the main difference between both formats is that gzip (the format) is more popular because gzip (the program) is popular. And you can easily use the gzip program to pre-compress the static contents on your server so that it does not have to do it on-the-fly all the time."
That is not entirely correct either. Yes gzip (the program) is very popular and easy to use in the way describe, but this is not the only reason and certainly not the most important reason gzip is used over deflate. Deflate would be the format of choice, were it not that the first number of servers and clients supporting deflate did not do so in the same way. Some servers sent 'raw' deflate data while others sent zlib, and some clients expected raw while others expected zlib. This became apparent rather quickly and everybody soon switched to gzip only, since that was implemented correctly on both sides. By now, probably all browsers can cope with both raw and full zlib deflate, but the switch has been made, and indeed, the gzip program does make things easier; the few bytes difference does not justify a switch back these days, and shouldn't be done either way for compatibility reasons.
I have read a large number of excerpts (one for every paragraph) of this book in response to a mention of this book in the #jquery IRC channel. A few people were very much anticipating this book. A lot of discussion followed on some of the subjects. Ofcourse, this book makes some very good points, like how the front-end speed is important and only partially dependant on server response times. I will not go into the specifics (I could write a book myself:D), but some things, you might think the author is smoking crack.
I have looked at the book again now, and there seem to have been some changes. For example, there were only 13 rules when I was reviewing those before. Now there are 14. As one example, ETags were advised to not be used at all (IIRC, my biggest WTF about the book - if used correctly, ETags are marvellous things and compliment 'expires' very nicely), instead of the current 'only use if done correctly'. Some other things are nigh impossible to do correctly crossbrowser (think ETag + GZIP combo in IE6, AJAX caching in IE7, etc). To be honest, I found pretty much all of this stuff being WebDevelopment 101. If you're not at the level that you should be able to figure most of these things out for yourself, you probably won't be able to put them into practise anyway, and you should not be in a place where you are responsible for these things.
I might pick up this book just to read it again, see about the changes and read the full chapters, just to hear the 'other side of the story', but IMHO this book isn't worth it. In all honesty, the only thing I got out of it so far that I didn't know is the performance toll CSS expressions take (all expressions are literally re-evaluated at every mouse move), but I hardly used those anyways (only to fix IE6 bugs), and in response have written a jQuery plugin that does the required work at only the wanted times (and I've told you this now, so no need to buy the book).
My conclusion, based solely on the fairly large number if excerpts I've read is: if you're a beginner, keep this book off for a while. If you're past the beginner stage but your pages are strangly sluggish, this book is for you. If you've been around, you already know all this stuff.
Well this was a couple of years ago, and I don't _exactly_ remember (aside from it taking hours, and in the end calling Wolfram), but IIRC it had to do with there being several sets of keys used for multiple steps in the registration process, with never an indicator which set you needed, and that generated a new bunch of keys that had to be put into Mathematica itself. Apparently, the installer / license manager / whatever could do most of this stuff automatically, but that failed everytime for some reason, so everything had to be done manually. After that experience (there were a fair number of my fellow students who had the same 'experience') we just started downloading and using illegal versions:) Much easier.
You got to be kidding me - Mathematice the best system? I've never had so much crap from a program I tried to install (yes, fully legal, university license, you tend to get one when studying astrophysics). And not just the first time. Every upgrade, every time I got a new PC, etc. Absolutely HORRID system. If it wasn't Mathematica but a program that has real alternatives, I would ditch it immediately and never look back.
Heh, that is interesting. Ofcourse RemObjects have always made interesting things since they came about:) Seriously, thanks for the heads up. I don't develop desktop applications anymore (moved on) though, I mainly use Delphi to write simple tools these days (which is where FPC comes in, I might like the Delphi 7 IDE better then Lazarus, but I really compile everything with FPC for multiple platforms, and most is 'unix style' command line tools now). As for.NET, aside from your post being interesting, I think I will stick to C#. Anders Hejlsberg has done a marvellous job at it and I love it almost as much as OP (though I haven't spent enough time with it due to other requirements) - for some relatively quick and dirty stuff though, FPC still rules and will continue to.
FreePascal has come a long way, and at least for me, it's a very valuable tool. I may not be exactly the target audience, but I prefer Object Pascal over C(++) any day for many reasons, and FPC has been my sidekick ever since Delphi did it's magic trick of fading into obscurity and uselessness. Lazarus needs some more work though, but it's getting there. Hell, if I had the time to spare, I'd contribute myself (sadly, I don't). "Good work" and thanks to the guys that made it all happen!
Can't say I'm surprised about these results. As a webdeveloper who does a lot of JavaScript, my experience is that Internet Explorer is horribly slow with rendering, javascript (in general) and DOM manipulation. IE7 seems to be slightly faster than IE6, but it's still fairly useless in those areas. Firefox (my personal browser of choice) is quite a bit faster, "fast enough" even. Testing in Opera usually leaves me surprised by it's speed, though there is something seriously wrong with it's rendering engine (not content, but strange lines when scrolling and such).
What absolutely baffles me though, is that Safari isn't listed. It will never be my browser of choice, as Safari for Windows has a bunch of annoying interface quirks, and I just don't like how it looks. BUT, the speed of Safari, I wouldn't be surprised if it's twice as fast as even Opera. In some areas that is, it doesn't really feel like pages render faster, but at least the speed of anything you do in script is simply insane!
MP3 reduces the file size a lot by lossy compression that eliminates sounds you cannot hear (it's not like the Fraunhofer institute is filled with fools, you know). Lower bitrates will take away more parts you can indeed hear, but a high bitrate VBR MP3, at least _I_ cannot distinguish from the original. I must admit here, ofcourse, that I don't listen to classical music, and it is said the difference is heard best with that. However, there are a lot of things to consider. Sure you can listen to MP3's on your cheap-ass player with cheap-ass earbuds and complain it sounds like crap. Compare that to a high-end soundcard and Sennheisers, that makes a very big difference. I wonder if these people complain about losing half their data when they ZIP files. They should remember, it's not the size the matters, it's how you use it:)
A way to control torrents on my PC from my cell? I've never been able to do that with any torrent client that had a web interface. Or just the torrent client through a shell. Or any of a number of remote desktop apps that exists for the cell..
For God's sake, we've even been able to download torrents on the actual phone for quite a while now, even that is old news.
1) While it's certainly true that many techies are bad business persons and vice versa, the opposite is not rare. It's not as common as bread, but from the people I know and deal with, it's certainly not rare. Though it does seem more common for techies to be relatively good business people than the other way around.
2 & 3) Oh come off your high horse already, I've done (and still am doing) quite a bit of both web development as well as software development. I come from a software development background myself, there really isn't that big a difference in the two when you get down to it. Binaries? Pft. 1980 called, they want their prejudice back! Fair enough, the UI element is completely different, but the server side and client side can be looked upon much as libraries and applications. That is, unless you're building "grandma's picture book of wrinkled kittens". If anything, software development is actually a lot easier, since the API's are usually very well documented and the quirk factor is much lower than with web development. There's more 'tinkertime' with web development. As for you point of UI's, that what you've got designers for. I've worked with very good designers on several occasions (a good designer is somebody good with visuals, good with making those intuitive, and knows enough about the tech stuff to deliver things how YOU need them) and the results have been terrific. These gems of design are hard to find though, sadly.
Really, you should get with the times. It's not 1998 anymore. That being said, I do agree with you that businesses with too lax conditions and too high salaries are NOT doing themselves and the rest of the business a favor.
Christ, you have to upgrade to IE7 just to get transparent PNGs to work correctly (unless you work around it). Yeah, if only transparent PNGs worked correctly in IE7, that would be true.
To list 3 of the (for me) most annoying issues with transparent PNGs in IE7 (I can probably think of about 10):
1) Transparent PNGs (image tag, not background) of 1x? can rotate CCW 90 degrees for no apparent reason. This will cause other transparent PNGs to not be shown at random (some will, some wont). (NB: This seems to be a Vista specific IE7 problem, it does not happen on XP SP2)
2) Same PNG construct as (1) absolutely positioned with height 100% may result in a random height (usually in the 100k-px), results vary with every refresh. This can really mess up a page. (Does not happen with non-transparent PNGs)
3) You cannot use the Alpha filter (shame on MS for not implementing CSS::opacity in IE7 in the first place) on transparent PNGs in IE7 natively, unless the element that has the Alpha filter applied (which may or not be the IMG element or any other element with the transparent PNG as background) - or any other element between that element and the one displaying the PNG - has a non-transparent background-color or background-image. The result is that any pixel which is not fully transparent or fully opaque, will become black. The workaround? Don't use the PNG 'IE7-native', use the AlphaImageLoader filter instead (this and Alpha filter together, make websites need a special style sheet for IE6 AND IE7, apart from the style sheet for real browsers).
In my experience, it's best to simply treat IE7 exactly the same as IE6 for PNG images, at least then you know it works. (In other words, if you're planning to do anything neat, dont use IE7s 'native' PNG, just use AIL as with IE6, it actually works better)
Let's just face it. IE is a disease. Newer versions may fix some things, but I truely believe that every new IE version just adds another style sheet with accompanying conditional comments, and IE will never really work as any of the 'real' browsers. I wish the IE dev team would just pull something like: HTML document has doctype ? use-webkit : use IE6-engine. At least then the web would be able to move forward. I for one are sick and tired of building something for FF, having it work in every other browser on every other platform I have access to, but having to make significant changes (i.e., add special stylesheets and javascript) to support IE6 and even 7. Sure, 7 has LESS issues than 6, but it's still a piece of crap code that should never have been released.
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Well I'll assume with the JavaScript part you are referring to Anonymous Coward and the jQuery part you are referring to me.
For the project I am currently assigned to, I use jQuery for full-fledged AJAX, lots of client-side logic and a lot of DOM manipulation - pretty much as heavy as it gets with JavaScript, in short. I've also really used Dojo and gave Prototype, Mootools and ExtJS a short spin and prefer jQuery over any of them.
Note that even though I bash disabling JavaScript here, these projects I work on do actually support browsing without JavaScript for the public parts (ie those parts of the site you do not have to be registered for) so it still works with perfectly with Google and other search engines. Depending on the browser they will still look good or totally FUBAR'd, but the content is perfectly indexable by spiderbots.
Oh really? JavaScript is not that hard to get to work correctly cross browser. I spent a LOT more time changing CSS things to work nicely than I do on JavaScript and I do use a lot of JavaScript. If you use a decent JavaScript toolkit, like for example jQuery, it's even faster and you hardly have to worry about it at all. For any nice advanced stuff you simply have to use JavaScript, and that's what it's there for. You want to disable JavaScript? That's fine by me, but you WILL be missing out. Really, what's next, catering to people who don't have CSS? Sure there are a lot of people who think sites should still work and look readable without CSS, but really, that depends on the market segment of the website. You can't make rich websites without CSS and JavaScript. Simple. Not every site can get away with looking like Google.com, it depends on the target audience and the content.
What an absolutely horrible speed test.
First off IE6 is not tested, while it is still the most used browser. Also Opera 9.5 is not ready, it has so many bugs it just isn't funny anymore. Many sites break that worked fine in Opera 9.2.
But let's get to the good stuff. Yes in pure JavaScript like this, IE might be faster than Firefox. But in real world situations it clearly isn't. There is no test done on layout manipulation (and such) using JavaScript. Internet Explorer is notoriously horrible at this, especially if you use it combination with PNG's with alphachannel or complex CSS. Not to mention if you have to use JavaScript hacks because of IE6's lack of CSS support for the simplest things.
Funny is also how almost all JavaScript library speed tests I've seen put Internet Explorer far behind the others.
In 'real world' JavaScript performance Opera and Safari would be the winners, where I'd choose Safari as absolute winner, as Opera gains a lot of redrawing speed by cutting corners it should not cut which often result in display corruption (ie, the type that goes away when you force a redraw by minimizing and then maximizing the window again, or moving another window over Opera and then away again). Quite a bit behind in speed after Safari and Opera would be Firefox, followed even further back by Internet Explorer.
As a developer I still prefer Firefox for development though. Webkit is awesome, but the Safari GUI just plain sucks. Opera... hmm, I like it on my mobile devices, but it's just too weird for the desktop (what, textarea's don't even support scrolltop? wth!)
As a web development professional (and long before that a software development professional) I can feel the pain of most people who are complaining here. I must say I do not feel the same about IE7 as a lot of others here feel though. Sure it isn't perfect, but I hardly spend time fixing things for IE7. For IE6, that is another story though. Now I must admit I have written my own build system that automates a lot of tasks for me, and it also includes creating IE-compatible CSS files for a lot of common CSS hacks (read: the ones I use) that can be included with a conditional comment. This saves me quite some time. But still, for the design I am handed, if you would take the FF2 front-end development time as 100%, I'd add 35% for IE6, 5% for IE7, 5% for Opera and 5% for Safari. Development is obviously done in FF as this has the best developers tools.
To be honest, I've run into so many quirks in all 4 major browsers alike (IE/FF/Opera/Safari) that I'd almost say I hate them all. As someone on IRC said a few days ago: I hate IE 1 MS, and I hate all the others several milliMS, but I don't love any of them.
IE7 still has issues with PNG's (just use AIL as in IE6, it works better, it's actually faster, and you have to do that for IE6 anyway), you can't use fading effects on text because of the cleartype issues and developers tools are just not nearly as good as their FF counterparts.
In the other hand, I've been playing with FF3 (and posting bug reports like crazy) and it breaks. It really really breaks. FF3b may pass the ACID2 test, but that's about all it passes. It has broken pretty much all the complicated sites I've tried in it. Sure it's a beta, and a lot of issues will be resolved, I just wouldn't be surprised if FF3 final still breaks a lot.
Opera, yeah, let's talk about Opera. The latest Opera is worse than FF3b. 9.2 is totally bugridden. It seems that every bug I run into, I upgrade to a newer Opera (every month or two) and it's fixed. Sure this says a lot for how hard the Opera guys are working and fixing things, but it's till bad. Opera 9.5b? I'm surprised to find it in that quirksmode comparison. According to that page it does lots of things it doesn't actually do - or only does half. Again, 9.5 breaks, and it breaks bad. They even had the nerve to 'fix' the mousewheel to now use - and + indices as the other browsers do. That's a good thing, if it weren't for the fact that pretty much all mousewheel JS depends on Opera doing it the other way around. Should we talk about all the redraw bugs Opera suffers from? Seriously it's amazing how may artefacts you see on screen that disappear by minimizing/maximizing (and other such operations that force the window to completely redraw). These are not really HTML/CSS rendering errors, it's just redraw code where corners have been cut that shouldn't have been. Sure it's fast, but if this is the price you pay....
Safari? Oh yeah Safari. It's bitchingly fast. Too bad the rest of the interface is slow as a dog. Really, who came up with the 'sliding' message box animation? Yeah there's an error, oh, hey, let me just wait 7 seconds on a really stupid animation that's not even anti aliased just so I can click OK. Webkit good. Safari interface bad. And it has LOTS of quirks as well (and I'm talking about v3 here, not v2, that's a horror of biblical proportions by itself).
Just saying. IE7 isn't 'the doggs bollocks', but neither are the other browsers. And with the betas of FF3 and Opera 9.5 I'm almost scared for the future, it doesn't look well so far, but at least there's hope in those departments.
Which brings me to my real point. Conditional comments. Sure, they may be bad practise, and yeah, they bloat. In the meantime, in the REAL WORLD, things need to be fixed. I can't sell to a client that we can't do something correctly cross-browser or it takes XXXX more hours because of quirk A in browser B that simply cannot be fixed without a bunch of javascript that does the SAME THING as a conditional comment would, but EVEN LESS mainta
Yeah, because if you want to do something difficult, going the standards way works
Every decent webdeveloper knows there are lots of differences between Opera, WebKit and Gecko (leaving IE out here on purpose). Going 100% standard is not going to fix that. Not saying people shouldn't follow standard, they should, but it's not a one-stop solution. Browsers should support the standards as well, which is difficult, because even though the standards are _well_-defined, they are not _perfectly_-defined.
I for one, as a webdeveloper, test everything in at least Opera 9, Safari 3, FF1.5, FF2, IE6 and IE7. Only very minor issues with Opera and WebKit are being overlooked (some small things just cannot be fixed without insane JS based solutions). Seriously, how many browsers must I cope with as developer? Where is the line? I personally think everything should just work on anything, but such is not reality, now matter how much effort you put into it.
I have to agree. I've been using Windows Mobile on the PocketPC for several phones now, it may not be perfect, but it's very nice. The TyTN II ofcourse at this time being the creme de la creme in WM phones (if the battery life was longer, there was a decent DDRaw driver and it had a VGA screen, I'd say the phone itself was perfect) I've seen the iPhone, I've played with it, and honestly, I don't see what the fuss is about. It's not a phone for serious business, it's a toy. A WM device gives you office productivity when you're mobile. As one of the founders of a tech start-up I can honestly say I could not do without it. Syncing all my outlook things with the phone, accessibility to my mail everywhere, tethering, GPS, GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA, full QWERTY keyboard, if needed open office documents on the go, and when I want it is almost trivial to develop my own applications for it. I almost feel sorry to say this, but the only thing that comes even close to WM is Symbian. Symbian is a bit faster and energy efficient, but it just doesn't offer the same level of applications and compatibility. To :parent:, I've not had a lock-up on my Kaiser in a long time. Don't run Batti, tweak with KaiserTweak (shameless plug) and if you're feeling adventurous, go to xda-developers.com , get the HTC rom and throw away all your AT&T muck.
(Chainfire @ XDA-Dev)
You will have to forgive me for it being 7 AM, I may not be as irrational as normal ;)
:)
How did this guy get a job as writer for the "Business Technology" of "The Wall Street Journal" ? It's fairly obvious he doesn't know anything about technology. Open? I do not really expect the gPhone to be open to consumers like a linux PC is open to it's user. A bit more customizable then Windows Mobile, likely, but not anywhere near OpenMoko. The point it seems he is trying to make is that the phone is open in the way that everyone can make software for it. HTC makes devices running Windows Mobile I have absolutely no trouble writing applications for. And indeed, Windows Mobile isn't really open, but if you take a stroll down PPC hacker lane, you'll find that very little is sacred and most things (outside of normal application scope) are not that hard to tap into. It would not be difficult (at least for me, and I'm not a _seasoned_ WM developer) to write virus like or security breaching applications for those phones, and they've been around for what, 5 or 6 years now?
I guess (and purely a guess, as I haven't even been to the US) for you Americans the real problem is BlackBerry. It steals a lot of the thunder of the current top of the line mobile phones, because it offers similar functionality (be it in an outdated, obsolete and rediculously expensive way), but it is one of the dominant brands. Over here in Europe, where I live, carriers are nice, and everybody and their grandma has a WM-PPC; if not their primary pub-phone, then their work-related phone. I'd be surprised if 1 out of a 100 even ever heard of BlackBerry
In the context of TFA, there is nothing new or even relatively new to the gPhone. I would almost go as far as to say there is nothing 'new' about the gPhone at all - yeah, let's get a bunch of companies together and form and alliance with all the control, then call it open, while it probably isn't really open for end-users, just for the buzz-factor. It's not like we don't have enough 'open' mobile device alliances already. And Google really does seem to be becoming the new microsoft, it's eerie! I Not that I think Windows Mobile is the best thing since sliced bread, performance/power wise it's way lacking compared to Symbian, but nevertheless, it is a really nice platform.
Obligatory OpenMoko disclaimer; sure OpenMoko may be the shit, but the device simple doesn't fit my hardware needs. It's so horribly two years ago.
Seriously, sometimes I wonder what people do to get so 'infected'. Aside from tracking cookies, neither Kaspersky, AdAware nor Spybot S&D has reported any infection in about 8 years (it was ofcourse not always those products). 'Shitlist' email from people you don't know, don't open attachments, don't go to shady sites, get behind a NAT and/or run a decent firewall, and you're pretty safe.
I have used other javascript libraries like Dojo and YUI in the past, but I fell in love with jQuery after a day of playing with it. It's lean and it's mean. I was by no means very good in JavaScript when I started with it (though I did have a lot of experience in other programming languages), but jQuery was really easy to grasp. Then after a few weeks, after reading lots of code for jQuery plugins and the like, I found I knew a hell of a lot of rediculous details and (seemingly) 'quirks' (that are really cool features) about JavaScript. By now I find JavaScript actually a nice language to code in, all because of jQuery! (Seriously, I tried the same with YUI and Dojo and just got a headaches) Best JavaScript framework I have ever used, even if I disagree with JohnResig about what important features all the time ;)
I guess pigeons will be next. Woe is ye, oh little beasties of high capacity and ludicrous latency!
I have a HTC TyTN II which has 3.5G and it's wonderful. Ping is usually around 80ms, vs the 30ms I get on my landline, for servers on the AIX. Speed is incredible. No, I've never used EDGE (they pretty much went straight from GPRS to UMTS here, skipping EDGE). The point is, there is nothing wrong with 3.5G, the latency is more than good enough for usage in a phone. If you would use it as data connection for your PC, it might be less than perfect, but I doubt you could play an FPS better over EDGE with it's slow ass connection speed, even if the ping is a bit lower :)
In other words, the dudes point are irrelevant, even if they were true :)
As I said before, the author 'is on crack' :)
Ontopic, your calling deflate zlib would be confusing as well, as zlib is also the name of the library that implements gzip and zlib RFC's (and is likely to be the library that is used in most servers as well as browsers). Aside from the headers and footers, gzip and zlib are identical, and any differences between the compressed streams are caused by different (default) settings/parameters.
"No, the main difference between both formats is that gzip (the format) is more popular because gzip (the program) is popular. And you can easily use the gzip program to pre-compress the static contents on your server so that it does not have to do it on-the-fly all the time."
That is not entirely correct either. Yes gzip (the program) is very popular and easy to use in the way describe, but this is not the only reason and certainly not the most important reason gzip is used over deflate. Deflate would be the format of choice, were it not that the first number of servers and clients supporting deflate did not do so in the same way. Some servers sent 'raw' deflate data while others sent zlib, and some clients expected raw while others expected zlib. This became apparent rather quickly and everybody soon switched to gzip only, since that was implemented correctly on both sides. By now, probably all browsers can cope with both raw and full zlib deflate, but the switch has been made, and indeed, the gzip program does make things easier; the few bytes difference does not justify a switch back these days, and shouldn't be done either way for compatibility reasons.
I have read a large number of excerpts (one for every paragraph) of this book in response to a mention of this book in the #jquery IRC channel. A few people were very much anticipating this book. A lot of discussion followed on some of the subjects. Ofcourse, this book makes some very good points, like how the front-end speed is important and only partially dependant on server response times. I will not go into the specifics (I could write a book myself :D), but some things, you might think the author is smoking crack.
I have looked at the book again now, and there seem to have been some changes. For example, there were only 13 rules when I was reviewing those before. Now there are 14. As one example, ETags were advised to not be used at all (IIRC, my biggest WTF about the book - if used correctly, ETags are marvellous things and compliment 'expires' very nicely), instead of the current 'only use if done correctly'. Some other things are nigh impossible to do correctly crossbrowser (think ETag + GZIP combo in IE6, AJAX caching in IE7, etc). To be honest, I found pretty much all of this stuff being WebDevelopment 101. If you're not at the level that you should be able to figure most of these things out for yourself, you probably won't be able to put them into practise anyway, and you should not be in a place where you are responsible for these things.
I might pick up this book just to read it again, see about the changes and read the full chapters, just to hear the 'other side of the story', but IMHO this book isn't worth it. In all honesty, the only thing I got out of it so far that I didn't know is the performance toll CSS expressions take (all expressions are literally re-evaluated at every mouse move), but I hardly used those anyways (only to fix IE6 bugs), and in response have written a jQuery plugin that does the required work at only the wanted times (and I've told you this now, so no need to buy the book).
My conclusion, based solely on the fairly large number if excerpts I've read is: if you're a beginner, keep this book off for a while. If you're past the beginner stage but your pages are strangly sluggish, this book is for you. If you've been around, you already know all this stuff.
Anyone else see an obvious mistake here? :D
Well this was a couple of years ago, and I don't _exactly_ remember (aside from it taking hours, and in the end calling Wolfram), but IIRC it had to do with there being several sets of keys used for multiple steps in the registration process, with never an indicator which set you needed, and that generated a new bunch of keys that had to be put into Mathematica itself. Apparently, the installer / license manager / whatever could do most of this stuff automatically, but that failed everytime for some reason, so everything had to be done manually. After that experience (there were a fair number of my fellow students who had the same 'experience') we just started downloading and using illegal versions :) Much easier.
You got to be kidding me - Mathematice the best system? I've never had so much crap from a program I tried to install (yes, fully legal, university license, you tend to get one when studying astrophysics). And not just the first time. Every upgrade, every time I got a new PC, etc. Absolutely HORRID system. If it wasn't Mathematica but a program that has real alternatives, I would ditch it immediately and never look back.
Heh, that is interesting. Ofcourse RemObjects have always made interesting things since they came about :) Seriously, thanks for the heads up. I don't develop desktop applications anymore (moved on) though, I mainly use Delphi to write simple tools these days (which is where FPC comes in, I might like the Delphi 7 IDE better then Lazarus, but I really compile everything with FPC for multiple platforms, and most is 'unix style' command line tools now). As for .NET, aside from your post being interesting, I think I will stick to C#. Anders Hejlsberg has done a marvellous job at it and I love it almost as much as OP (though I haven't spent enough time with it due to other requirements) - for some relatively quick and dirty stuff though, FPC still rules and will continue to.
FreePascal has come a long way, and at least for me, it's a very valuable tool. I may not be exactly the target audience, but I prefer Object Pascal over C(++) any day for many reasons, and FPC has been my sidekick ever since Delphi did it's magic trick of fading into obscurity and uselessness. Lazarus needs some more work though, but it's getting there. Hell, if I had the time to spare, I'd contribute myself (sadly, I don't). "Good work" and thanks to the guys that made it all happen!
Can't say I'm surprised about these results. As a webdeveloper who does a lot of JavaScript, my experience is that Internet Explorer is horribly slow with rendering, javascript (in general) and DOM manipulation. IE7 seems to be slightly faster than IE6, but it's still fairly useless in those areas. Firefox (my personal browser of choice) is quite a bit faster, "fast enough" even. Testing in Opera usually leaves me surprised by it's speed, though there is something seriously wrong with it's rendering engine (not content, but strange lines when scrolling and such).
What absolutely baffles me though, is that Safari isn't listed. It will never be my browser of choice, as Safari for Windows has a bunch of annoying interface quirks, and I just don't like how it looks. BUT, the speed of Safari, I wouldn't be surprised if it's twice as fast as even Opera. In some areas that is, it doesn't really feel like pages render faster, but at least the speed of anything you do in script is simply insane!
No, it does not.
:)
MP3 reduces the file size a lot by lossy compression that eliminates sounds you cannot hear (it's not like the Fraunhofer institute is filled with fools, you know). Lower bitrates will take away more parts you can indeed hear, but a high bitrate VBR MP3, at least _I_ cannot distinguish from the original. I must admit here, ofcourse, that I don't listen to classical music, and it is said the difference is heard best with that. However, there are a lot of things to consider. Sure you can listen to MP3's on your cheap-ass player with cheap-ass earbuds and complain it sounds like crap. Compare that to a high-end soundcard and Sennheisers, that makes a very big difference. I wonder if these people complain about losing half their data when they ZIP files. They should remember, it's not the size the matters, it's how you use it
You would probably explode ;)
This was news years ago.
A way to control torrents on my PC from my cell? I've never been able to do that with any torrent client that had a web interface. Or just the torrent client through a shell. Or any of a number of remote desktop apps that exists for the cell..
For God's sake, we've even been able to download torrents on the actual phone for quite a while now, even that is old news.
Besides, who uses torrents anyways? Usenet FTW!
1) While it's certainly true that many techies are bad business persons and vice versa, the opposite is not rare. It's not as common as bread, but from the people I know and deal with, it's certainly not rare. Though it does seem more common for techies to be relatively good business people than the other way around.
2 & 3) Oh come off your high horse already, I've done (and still am doing) quite a bit of both web development as well as software development. I come from a software development background myself, there really isn't that big a difference in the two when you get down to it. Binaries? Pft. 1980 called, they want their prejudice back! Fair enough, the UI element is completely different, but the server side and client side can be looked upon much as libraries and applications. That is, unless you're building "grandma's picture book of wrinkled kittens". If anything, software development is actually a lot easier, since the API's are usually very well documented and the quirk factor is much lower than with web development. There's more 'tinkertime' with web development. As for you point of UI's, that what you've got designers for. I've worked with very good designers on several occasions (a good designer is somebody good with visuals, good with making those intuitive, and knows enough about the tech stuff to deliver things how YOU need them) and the results have been terrific. These gems of design are hard to find though, sadly.
Really, you should get with the times. It's not 1998 anymore. That being said, I do agree with you that businesses with too lax conditions and too high salaries are NOT doing themselves and the rest of the business a favor.
To list 3 of the (for me) most annoying issues with transparent PNGs in IE7 (I can probably think of about 10):
1) Transparent PNGs (image tag, not background) of 1x? can rotate CCW 90 degrees for no apparent reason. This will cause other transparent PNGs to not be shown at random (some will, some wont). (NB: This seems to be a Vista specific IE7 problem, it does not happen on XP SP2)
2) Same PNG construct as (1) absolutely positioned with height 100% may result in a random height (usually in the 100k-px), results vary with every refresh. This can really mess up a page. (Does not happen with non-transparent PNGs)
3) You cannot use the Alpha filter (shame on MS for not implementing CSS::opacity in IE7 in the first place) on transparent PNGs in IE7 natively, unless the element that has the Alpha filter applied (which may or not be the IMG element or any other element with the transparent PNG as background) - or any other element between that element and the one displaying the PNG - has a non-transparent background-color or background-image. The result is that any pixel which is not fully transparent or fully opaque, will become black. The workaround? Don't use the PNG 'IE7-native', use the AlphaImageLoader filter instead (this and Alpha filter together, make websites need a special style sheet for IE6 AND IE7, apart from the style sheet for real browsers).
Read http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/26/41226
In my experience, it's best to simply treat IE7 exactly the same as IE6 for PNG images, at least then you know it works. (In other words, if you're planning to do anything neat, dont use IE7s 'native' PNG, just use AIL as with IE6, it actually works better)
Let's just face it. IE is a disease. Newer versions may fix some things, but I truely believe that every new IE version just adds another style sheet with accompanying conditional comments, and IE will never really work as any of the 'real' browsers. I wish the IE dev team would just pull something like: HTML document has doctype ? use-webkit : use IE6-engine. At least then the web would be able to move forward. I for one are sick and tired of building something for FF, having it work in every other browser on every other platform I have access to, but having to make significant changes (i.e., add special stylesheets and javascript) to support IE6 and even 7. Sure, 7 has LESS issues than 6, but it's still a piece of crap code that should never have been released.
Screw them, the Latex Babes of Estros is what it's all about!