I don't know about you, but long battery life to me would be a killer app. I think that the standard six hours or less shows a peculiar lack of any progress. Sure, I can go to a coffee shop with my laptop. But I can't relax at a coffee shop with my laptop. How long will a smart-phone CPU with a notebook-sized battery last, I wonder?
I also consider a boot time of less than 10 seconds a killer app. The standard 45 seconds or more that even Windows XP (old) on my Core 2 Duo (new) gives me is baffling after 25 years of the PC. (Really, its more like two minutes before it is really ready to give me attention.) If my computer shuts down in two seconds and boots in three, l wouldn't plan my morning around it: "Time to make coffee --- no, wait, start the computer before you make coffee, then it will be ready at the same time."
Security is also a killer app. Encrypted home directory + read-only root + twin root partitions + a lot of other things = a lot more peace of mind. What if my laptop is stolen? Well, at least they're not going to find anything on it. My house guest is asking me if he can borrow my laptop. If it's a Windows laptop, I (but admittedly not the average user) will do a quick mental check --- do I have anything private on it that he might see? Is he going to accidentally download a virus on it? Etc. Sure, I can do things so that it will be less of a problem, but it's a lot easier if the computer already is set up as much as Chrome OS is for sharing.
Now that I look at them, what do these things all have in common? A less-stressed user experience. I don't have to think as much as I used to about taking care of my computer. Sure, it won't run Final Cut Pro. But I say, you should have made these the priorities --- at least with some --- any of your models. Get battery life, boot speed, and security to where you would have expected to be in the 21st century. Then branch out to fancy applications. Which is exactly what will probably happen. Browsers are only getting abler.
The Closure Library has a lot of useful-looking classes and functions, like for working with Arrays, Dates, or the URL. They're divided into short files, so that you can use just the parts you want and not have to download one big file.
jQuery has definitely been a great library, especially at finding things in the DOM. And I think its API for handling events is easier (definitely less to type) than this. But it doesn't have all of the things that this has --- short helpers that probably I would end up writing on my own (and already have started to).
I'm also interested in the UI Widgets like an Autocomplete text field. I've been waiting for the jQuery UI team to finish that one widget for months, but for some reason their development is so slow!
Standard Disclaimer about JavaScript:
1. JavaScript is a nice language.
2. Writing JavaScript to work in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera is a nightmare like no other.
3. Mainly it boils down to writing JavaScript to work in (A) Internet Explorer and in (B) browsers that are not Internet Explorer.
4. The "core" JavaScript is really nice: dynamic typing, super-short syntax for hash tables, arrays, regular expressions; dot-chaining of members and methods.
5. The browser API, or "DOM", part of JavaScript is different in IE than in the rest, and this, I think, is the main reason it's a pain. But jQuery and other libraries smooth this over.
Like has been said, watch the Google Video "JavaScript: the Good Parts" to elaborate on this. And if you hate JavaScript but are forced to write it and haven't read JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, it's the best book on JavaScript and one of the best O'Reilly books period.
Most enterprise-class SSDs today also use a general purpose field programmable gate array (FPGA) controllers as opposed to Pliant's custom controller
Seems like the same massive advantage of an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) over general processors and even FPGAs that I see in video compression, a field I keep tabs on.
At one time I had wondered why a $100 camcorder could encode video in real-time, when my seemingly much more powerful desktop took hours. Answer: ASIC.
Some of you may be thinking, "Well, duh," but I am not an electrical engineer and thought it was intriguing when I first found out about ASICs.
Browser app doesn't have to mean networked, if you have Google Gears.
Browser app doesn't have to mean slower, if you have Native Client.
As someone once said, the web browser is the most successfully distributed virtual machine. As a four-year web developer, I can't think of any non-web app you couldn't match with a web app, at least if you have the aforementioned extensions. And a web app has the advantage of (1) smoother upgrades, (2) easier networking, when you do need it, and (3) easier programming, thanks to interpreted, multiplatform, widely used languages.
I read the mailing list post by Microsoft. The overall impression is Microsoft mainly pouring cold water on the HTML 5 spec.
Why are they posting these objections just now? These tags appeared in the first official draft on the W3's web site a year and a half ago.
Let's review what we know about Microsoft:
1. If they could sell us paper plates for $1,000 each, they would.
2. If their browser held 99% market share, they would completely ignore this spec.
I can see how a programmer who has read a lot about "semantic purity" might think the new tags are superfluous. But is Microsoft a company known for its pursuit of elegance and academic purity? Its post is just plain rude. This late in the game, and so full of negativity (disguised as "questions"), it's the sign of a company grumpily giving in.
Now, about the alleged superfluity of the tags, you might as well call all tags but one, a generic <div> tag, superfluous. Just use one tag, and add classes to it (<div class="paragraph">, <div class="heading">.
<aside> has the same effect as <div class="aside"> but with the benefit to the programmer of less typing, and the benefit of the web of more uniformity (instead of <div class="aside">, <div class="marginalia">, and <div class="tangent"> in different web sites).
For a while I drank the "semantic" Kool-Aid. It has a point, but like most dogmas, taken to an extreme, it approaches absurdity. After a while, I returned to the table.
. . . "To page this person, press 5." Page this person!? Oh, sorry, I didn't realize this was 1980! "When you have finished recording, you may hang up." Oh, really!? So glad you mentioned that! I would have stayed on the line forever!
Thanks, David Pogue. For a while, I thought I was crazy, because I never heard anyone else complain about this. Maybe it bothers me more than others because I've been a technical writer, where I spent a lot of time cutting out bluster and pompous formality.
Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go expect common sense when money is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...
You can write a program that runs in a web browser but does not store its data in the cloud. Use HTML + JavaScript + Google Gears (or HTML5 offline storage), and you essentially have a Desktop app.
Yes, JavaScript is slower, because it is interpreted, not compiled. But the race among web browsers for faster JavaScript has closed the gap. Witness, Chrome Expriments for some fun demos of the surprising things a browser can do.
Yes, JavaScript has been known to be hard to deal with. But that is almost completely because of different implementations by different browsers. Actually, the fault is almost entirely Internet Explorer. The difference between writing JavaScript for Chrome and Safari and Firefox is tiny compared to the difference between them and Internet Explorer. Even IE 7 and 8 continue to botch things that others have down.
But the jQuery library (and others) have smoothed a lot of those inconsistencies and given JavaScript programmers a more uniform API (thank you, those who have worked on these!).
JavaScript as a programming language is actually quite nice and elegant --- the way you write objects and arrays and the dot notation for calling methods and how everything is an object --- it looks a lot like Python.
Your email address will almost certainly get out. If not by a spambot then through an unscrupulous merchant.
That's why spam filtering is better than email hiding. Gmail's spam filter, for example, is very good. I get spam in my Inbox about once a quarter.
Google's job is to turn human-readable pages into machine-searchable pages. So it will always seek to expand what it can read: images, Flash, JavaScript, etc.
It's best not to hide in the direction that technology is advancing.
eTapestry is web based and looked good, at least a few years ago when I worked at one. I never used it, but I read their stuff and it looked pretty good.
A little of both. Portion size is key. I search for functions and classes but not whole frameworks.
For example, as a web programmer, I love jQuery, to simplify my JavaScript. And sometimes I copy a PHP function or class when I need to do something complicated, like translate HTML to wiki mark-up.
But the requirements for each project is so irregular that customizing a one-size-fits-all PHP framework would be the same amount of work yet result in all this extra code, I think.
"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events," he says. "That's just what creationists say can't happen."
No, that's what mathematicians say can't happen. If two things must both happen, and each as a millionth of a chance, then the chance that they both will happen is a million times a million. Add up all the occurences needed, and you quickly approach statistical impossibility.
After 31,500 generations, the bacteria developed the ability metabolize citrate. 31,500 human generations (I'm guessing 20 years each) is 630,000 years. Half a million years for such a simple trait compared to, say, the eye or lung. At that rate, would we develop anything like our bodies in the time frame evolutionists give us?
Neither. Use good search (like Gmail).
I use Gmail, and I have never tagged a single message, and I have always been able to find the message I want on the first search.
A search engine basically adds tags to files. If you have a good search engine, then you won't have to add tags by hand.
I doubt Explorer or Firefox ever follow the URL. The visitors most likely are web spiders.
Mainstream web browsers do not validate pages. They do notice the Doctype declaration at the top of your page, but use it only to choose a rendering mode: old 1990s ("quirks mode") or "standards" mode. The two modes are only slightly different and have to do with the font size of tables, width calculation of block-level elements, etc.
- a web page with no doctype gets rendered in quirks mode
- a web page with one of the doctypes usually gets rendered in standards mode
There are other details that those who are interested in can Google for -- Firefox actually has three rendering modes: quirks, almost-standards, and standards mode. But even then, it is based on a regular-expression match on the doctype, not by following the URL at the end of it.
lots of other animals have almost the same eye structure except it's the right way around
Actually, all vertebrates have this "outside-in" eye. And there's more to than it's just because the optic nerve gets in the way. Like I said, there are resources. For example: On the Design of the Vertebrate Retina.
The human eye itself is one of my favorite examples of why a designer is unlikely
And the human eye itself is one of my favorite examples of why a designer is likely. Thousands of engineers over the course of more than one hundred years have yet to make a camera that competes with the eye in its combination of resolution, sensitivity, exposure latitude, agility, and size.
I think even if the argument is kept to what can be seen, creationism comes out first. There are plenty of resources for those willing. But you have to be willing.
Here's the problem for evolutionists. If someone wishes not to believe in a god, evolution is the only "resort." (And I mean "resort" in a bad way. I still think it does not hold water.) However, evolutionists have always claimed that you can believe in evolution and god or just evolution. It's up to you. So it seems to me that those who wish, for lifestyle reasons, to be atheists, that they are not unbiased about evolution.
Don't forget, intellectual property is _not_ a natural right. It is an artificial right to stimulate invention. Read the Constitution.
The very phrase is flawed. Intellectual (thought) property (ownership). An impossibility.
So, I used to think that a copyright holder was infringed if anyone did anything that decreased the amount of money that the holder made. But that is not even the intent of the law. The law itself admits that it is a balance -- a balance of encouraging people to publish stuff (copyright) and letting the people not be too encumbered (fair use).
For example, whistling a tune while walking down the street is, according to the letter of the law, a public performance. Videotaping your kid's birthday party at Chucky Cheese while Puff the Magic Dragon plays over the speakers is technically creating a derivative work.
My point is, there is a balance. "Intellectual property" is an invention itself, to stimulate invention, publication.
The judge should weigh how much Youtube scares authors, creators, artists from publishing their stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you, but long battery life to me would be a killer app. I think that the standard six hours or less shows a peculiar lack of any progress. Sure, I can go to a coffee shop with my laptop. But I can't relax at a coffee shop with my laptop. How long will a smart-phone CPU with a notebook-sized battery last, I wonder?
I also consider a boot time of less than 10 seconds a killer app. The standard 45 seconds or more that even Windows XP (old) on my Core 2 Duo (new) gives me is baffling after 25 years of the PC. (Really, its more like two minutes before it is really ready to give me attention.) If my computer shuts down in two seconds and boots in three, l wouldn't plan my morning around it: "Time to make coffee --- no, wait, start the computer before you make coffee, then it will be ready at the same time."
Security is also a killer app. Encrypted home directory + read-only root + twin root partitions + a lot of other things = a lot more peace of mind. What if my laptop is stolen? Well, at least they're not going to find anything on it. My house guest is asking me if he can borrow my laptop. If it's a Windows laptop, I (but admittedly not the average user) will do a quick mental check --- do I have anything private on it that he might see? Is he going to accidentally download a virus on it? Etc. Sure, I can do things so that it will be less of a problem, but it's a lot easier if the computer already is set up as much as Chrome OS is for sharing.
Now that I look at them, what do these things all have in common? A less-stressed user experience. I don't have to think as much as I used to about taking care of my computer. Sure, it won't run Final Cut Pro. But I say, you should have made these the priorities --- at least with some --- any of your models. Get battery life, boot speed, and security to where you would have expected to be in the 21st century. Then branch out to fancy applications. Which is exactly what will probably happen. Browsers are only getting abler.
Doh! I can't run Chrome, so I wasn't fast enough to make the first post!
The Closure Library has a lot of useful-looking classes and functions, like for working with Arrays, Dates, or the URL. They're divided into short files, so that you can use just the parts you want and not have to download one big file.
jQuery has definitely been a great library, especially at finding things in the DOM. And I think its API for handling events is easier (definitely less to type) than this. But it doesn't have all of the things that this has --- short helpers that probably I would end up writing on my own (and already have started to).
I'm also interested in the UI Widgets like an Autocomplete text field. I've been waiting for the jQuery UI team to finish that one widget for months, but for some reason their development is so slow!
Standard Disclaimer about JavaScript:
Like has been said, watch the Google Video "JavaScript: the Good Parts" to elaborate on this. And if you hate JavaScript but are forced to write it and haven't read JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, it's the best book on JavaScript and one of the best O'Reilly books period.
If the bank sent me such a document, and it was by paper mail instead of email, would the judge order my house burned down?
Seems like the same massive advantage of an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) over general processors and even FPGAs that I see in video compression, a field I keep tabs on.
At one time I had wondered why a $100 camcorder could encode video in real-time, when my seemingly much more powerful desktop took hours. Answer: ASIC.
Some of you may be thinking, "Well, duh," but I am not an electrical engineer and thought it was intriguing when I first found out about ASICs.
This is awful.
Browser app doesn't have to mean networked, if you have Google Gears.
Browser app doesn't have to mean slower, if you have Native Client.
As someone once said, the web browser is the most successfully distributed virtual machine. As a four-year web developer, I can't think of any non-web app you couldn't match with a web app, at least if you have the aforementioned extensions. And a web app has the advantage of (1) smoother upgrades, (2) easier networking, when you do need it, and (3) easier programming, thanks to interpreted, multiplatform, widely used languages.
I read the mailing list post by Microsoft. The overall impression is Microsoft mainly pouring cold water on the HTML 5 spec.
Why are they posting these objections just now? These tags appeared in the first official draft on the W3's web site a year and a half ago.
Let's review what we know about Microsoft:
1. If they could sell us paper plates for $1,000 each, they would.
2. If their browser held 99% market share, they would completely ignore this spec.
I can see how a programmer who has read a lot about "semantic purity" might think the new tags are superfluous. But is Microsoft a company known for its pursuit of elegance and academic purity? Its post is just plain rude. This late in the game, and so full of negativity (disguised as "questions"), it's the sign of a company grumpily giving in.
Now, about the alleged superfluity of the tags, you might as well call all tags but one, a generic <div> tag, superfluous. Just use one tag, and add classes to it (<div class="paragraph">, <div class="heading">.
<aside> has the same effect as <div class="aside"> but with the benefit to the programmer of less typing, and the benefit of the web of more uniformity (instead of <div class="aside">, <div class="marginalia">, and <div class="tangent"> in different web sites).
For a while I drank the "semantic" Kool-Aid. It has a point, but like most dogmas, taken to an extreme, it approaches absurdity. After a while, I returned to the table.
Thanks, David Pogue. For a while, I thought I was crazy, because I never heard anyone else complain about this. Maybe it bothers me more than others because I've been a technical writer, where I spent a lot of time cutting out bluster and pompous formality.
Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go expect common sense when money is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...
What is "the right thing?" He works for a company with the priority to rake in cash. It's "right" in his boss' eyes, I'm sure.
"To rake in cash" is "the priority" for thieves. A thief steals because money has a higher priority than justice.
It is not right for money to be the number-one priority, even for a company, even a public one.
You can write a program that runs in a web browser but does not store its data in the cloud. Use HTML + JavaScript + Google Gears (or HTML5 offline storage), and you essentially have a Desktop app.
Yes, JavaScript is slower, because it is interpreted, not compiled. But the race among web browsers for faster JavaScript has closed the gap. Witness, Chrome Expriments for some fun demos of the surprising things a browser can do.
Yes, JavaScript has been known to be hard to deal with. But that is almost completely because of different implementations by different browsers. Actually, the fault is almost entirely Internet Explorer. The difference between writing JavaScript for Chrome and Safari and Firefox is tiny compared to the difference between them and Internet Explorer. Even IE 7 and 8 continue to botch things that others have down.
But the jQuery library (and others) have smoothed a lot of those inconsistencies and given JavaScript programmers a more uniform API (thank you, those who have worked on these!).
JavaScript as a programming language is actually quite nice and elegant --- the way you write objects and arrays and the dot notation for calling methods and how everything is an object --- it looks a lot like Python.
Your email address will almost certainly get out. If not by a spambot then through an unscrupulous merchant.
That's why spam filtering is better than email hiding. Gmail's spam filter, for example, is very good. I get spam in my Inbox about once a quarter.
Google's job is to turn human-readable pages into machine-searchable pages. So it will always seek to expand what it can read: images, Flash, JavaScript, etc.
It's best not to hide in the direction that technology is advancing.
eTapestry is web based and looked good, at least a few years ago when I worked at one. I never used it, but I read their stuff and it looked pretty good.
Thank God!
Can you even compare ARM processors to x86's by clock speed or transistor count?
A little of both. Portion size is key. I search for functions and classes but not whole frameworks.
For example, as a web programmer, I love jQuery, to simplify my JavaScript. And sometimes I copy a PHP function or class when I need to do something complicated, like translate HTML to wiki mark-up.
But the requirements for each project is so irregular that customizing a one-size-fits-all PHP framework would be the same amount of work yet result in all this extra code, I think.
From the article:
No, that's what mathematicians say can't happen. If two things must both happen, and each as a millionth of a chance, then the chance that they both will happen is a million times a million. Add up all the occurences needed, and you quickly approach statistical impossibility.
After 31,500 generations, the bacteria developed the ability metabolize citrate. 31,500 human generations (I'm guessing 20 years each) is 630,000 years. Half a million years for such a simple trait compared to, say, the eye or lung. At that rate, would we develop anything like our bodies in the time frame evolutionists give us?
Neither. Use good search (like Gmail). I use Gmail, and I have never tagged a single message, and I have always been able to find the message I want on the first search. A search engine basically adds tags to files. If you have a good search engine, then you won't have to add tags by hand.
I don't know what is more sad, the theory of evolution or those who believe in it.
I have always hated Microsoft.
I doubt Explorer or Firefox ever follow the URL. The visitors most likely are web spiders.
Mainstream web browsers do not validate pages. They do notice the Doctype declaration at the top of your page, but use it only to choose a rendering mode: old 1990s ("quirks mode") or "standards" mode. The two modes are only slightly different and have to do with the font size of tables, width calculation of block-level elements, etc.
- a web page with no doctype gets rendered in quirks mode
- a web page with one of the doctypes usually gets rendered in standards mode
There are other details that those who are interested in can Google for -- Firefox actually has three rendering modes: quirks, almost-standards, and standards mode. But even then, it is based on a regular-expression match on the doctype, not by following the URL at the end of it.
lots of other animals have almost the same eye structure except it's the right way around
Actually, all vertebrates have this "outside-in" eye. And there's more to than it's just because the optic nerve gets in the way. Like I said, there are resources. For example: On the Design of the Vertebrate Retina.
The human eye itself is one of my favorite examples of why a designer is unlikely
And the human eye itself is one of my favorite examples of why a designer is likely. Thousands of engineers over the course of more than one hundred years have yet to make a camera that competes with the eye in its combination of resolution, sensitivity, exposure latitude, agility, and size.
I think even if the argument is kept to what can be seen, creationism comes out first. There are plenty of resources for those willing. But you have to be willing.
Here's the problem for evolutionists. If someone wishes not to believe in a god, evolution is the only "resort." (And I mean "resort" in a bad way. I still think it does not hold water.) However, evolutionists have always claimed that you can believe in evolution and god or just evolution. It's up to you. So it seems to me that those who wish, for lifestyle reasons, to be atheists, that they are not unbiased about evolution.
Don't forget, intellectual property is _not_ a natural right. It is an artificial right to stimulate invention. Read the Constitution.
The very phrase is flawed. Intellectual (thought) property (ownership). An impossibility.
So, I used to think that a copyright holder was infringed if anyone did anything that decreased the amount of money that the holder made. But that is not even the intent of the law. The law itself admits that it is a balance -- a balance of encouraging people to publish stuff (copyright) and letting the people not be too encumbered (fair use).
For example, whistling a tune while walking down the street is, according to the letter of the law, a public performance. Videotaping your kid's birthday party at Chucky Cheese while Puff the Magic Dragon plays over the speakers is technically creating a derivative work.
My point is, there is a balance. "Intellectual property" is an invention itself, to stimulate invention, publication.
The judge should weigh how much Youtube scares authors, creators, artists from publishing their stuff.