Since there's little interest, there's little hope a "Standard" way will come about.
There's little hope that another standard will come out, but since we already have one, that's not really necessary.
There's absolutely no good reason why a website should sniff the user-agent string to determine which page to serve. Instead, the page should use CSS layout and make use of the CSS handheld media type. This allows the provider to make intelligent decisions about which page to serve. The provider will know what type of network (3G, etc) the user is on and can use that information to serve the correct page. The provider will know whether the user is on an unlimited data plan and can use that information to serve the correct page. The provider will know what model phone is connecting to their network and can use that information to serve the correct page (technically, the website operator could do this too based on extensive parsing of the user-agent string, but it doesn't sound like any of the upset web developers were doing that).
In short, the website should simply present two options to the user-agent, whether that user-agent is the actual phone or a provider proxy. It's up to someone with more information about the capabilities of the display device to decide which one to use.
It's not difficult to see that we're talking about the Constitution of the United States of America, rather than the "Constitution of the Earth".
I think you're looking at this backwards. The constitution of the United States of America outlines how the US government will function. By extension, it governs how the US government behaves, both in this country and abroad.
You are correct that it is not the Constitution of Earth. It does not govern how the governments of other countries behave. It also does not govern how US citizens will be treated by other governments. By guaranteeing the right of Habeas Corpus, it's guaranteeing that right to all of its own prisoners, not all of its own citizens.
You're also correct that the purpose is important. The constitution clearly laid out a system of checks and balances. There was clearly a recognition of the fact that unfettered power will lead to abuses of power. It was made clear that because of this, it was necessary to have separate bodies of government each tasked with different aims/goals.
This is what makes it so important that some other body of government have oversight about when it is acceptable to hold enemy combatants. Those who advocate giving the right of Habeas Corpus to all prisoners of the US government are not advocating letting these people go. They're advocating that, at a minimum, a member of the Judicial branch have the ability to prevent possible abuses of power. If there is a legitimate case for holding these people and a legitimate reason why their trial cannot take place immediately, then any reasonable judge should rule that the actions taken are legitimate. But that ruling of legitimacy must take place.
I think that's "market saturation". Different concept.
No, it's critical mass. I stated that quite clearly. See here for what that means.
I'm not arguing that anything is bad. What I'm saying is that it's hard to compete with eBay because sellers want to sell on the network with the most buyers and buyers want to browse where there is the largest selection from sellers. eBay's momentum is entirely self-sustaining now. All they have to do is not allow their system to degrade or provide their users with a reason to leave and it will be almost impossible for anyone to compete with them directly without serving a niche market.
It's the same with MySpace and YouTube. People don't use them because they're the best, they use them because everyone they know uses them.
And I never said that the GP used the term vendor lock-in correctly, I simply said that you were looking at his/her exact words instead of the meaning behind those words. And that meaning was that, like Microsoft's OS dominance, switching from TCP/IP and the current internet will be next to impossible since the replacement wouldn't be able to access the mass amounts of stuff and the mass number of people that are currently connected to the original internet.
However, taking Microsoft as an example only muddies the waters. Their monopoly is in part due to critical mass, but also due, in-part, to anti-competitive practices (vendor lock-in). This is why I listed other examples that were more clearly examples of critical mass rather than vendor lock-in.
And incidentally, TCP/IP may not cost money, but it is an integral part of things that do cost money. Broadband internet access and internet hosting are both services that you pay money for. It's these services that are hard to switch away from. They are the interfaces between the customer and the product. If TCP/IP can be swapped out without changing those interface, the transition away from it could be seamless. But a switch to an internet host or ISP that doesn't access the current internet will be a very hard sell.
The more apropos example would have been eBay, MySpace or YouTube. In all those cases, people use it because other people use it. It's incredibly difficult for competitors to emerge because the appeal of such sites is specifically tied to the rest of the people using it. With the possible exception of eBay, it's not hard to build a better version of any of those services...many have. But pretty much all competitors to those products have had to target specific niche demographics because the general community has already chosen the product they want to use.
I think you're looking at the vendor lock-in term a bit myopically...the GP was pretty clearly using it as a synonym for critical mass. And, in a way, the Windows OS dominance is the same thing. People use Windows because everyone else uses Windows. This makes websites and software companies only support Windows. Similarly, any internet, however improved, will be next to useless without the hoards of users and websites that the current internet connects.
Yes, money you hoard devalues at a long term average of about 4% per year. And that's a good thing - it's better for the economy to have money actively invested rather than sitting in a mattress.
Yes, a somewhat inflationary economy is a good thing. And if it were only 4% per year, that would be manageable, though ideally it should be a bit lower.
But the parent poster was right that the current administration has created a wildly inflationary economy which is just as dangerous as a deflationary economy. If you watch the trends in currency exchange, you'll notice that the dollar has been losing roughly 10% per year to the euro and pound. This is no doubt due to the massive amount of debt being incurred for the war in Iraq/Afganistan. As an investor, I've stopped investing in the US markets. Even what are considered to be good returns aren't as much as sitting on euros and pounds. An offshore savings account earning 1% per year will likely have out-performed most portfolios of investors in the US, and at a significantly lower (read: zero) risk.
What would be interesting is not whether $60 games are becoming the norm but whether games are getting more expensive in Britain and Europe since their currencies are inflating at a much slower rate. The numbers in the US are merely adjusting for the decline of the dollar.
Google is being entirely consistent. In one case, they argued that there should be more H1-Bs so that they can hire more qualified people. The other, came in response to questions from analysts that wanted to know why Google's net profits only increased $204m (to $925) while gross profits rose $1.41b to $3.87b. Quick math will show that the gross grew by a much larger percentage than the net. Analysts have gotten so used to Google thoroughly beating expectations that when their net results only met expectations, they wanted an explanation. Google gave it to them, saying that they hired lots of people. Nowhere did they say that they hired too many people or that they shouldn't have hired those people.
The two messages can be combined to give the message that Google wants to hire even more people which will hurt their numbers in the near term but lead to a healthier and more profitable company in the future. There's nothing inconsistent about that message.
And some hopeless retard actually said "socialism is a bad idea"
I know it wasn't your assertion, but I'll comment anyways.
I'm sick and tired of people equating universal health care as socialism. It's not. It's one of many things that just don't work well when privatized. Things like fire fighters, policemen, road construction and last-mile telephone/cable are all things that create a huge mess when multiple businesses compete. We've realized this and granted either a monopoly to some company or made the service provider a government entity. Does this make us socialist? You'd be hard pressed to find even the most die-hard capitalist to argue that these services be de-regulated and allow competition from multiple companies.
Health care is just another one of these types of services. If we went with a universal health care system, a generation from now people would view health care just as they view the services listed above today. It would simply make sense to them. There would be no socialist connotation. This would especially be the case if we went the regulated monopoly route. IIRC, a while ago the CEO of BCBS of California proposed a universal health care program for all Californians. His claim was that his company could provide care for all patients with the money that is currently being spent on health care. The red tape really does cost us that much.
The other aspect of the universal health care that I wish got more attention is that it would be an incredible boon to American businesses. If the burden for paying for health care was removed from the employer, our companies could compete on equal footing against foreign companies who don't pay for the health care of their employees currently. I've wondered for a while now why those companies don't stand up against the companies in the health care industry who spend all that money lobbying against universal health care. Shouldn't the whole of businesses outside the health care field be able to bring to bear more influence in Washington than those that profit from the current system?
This makes the Slashdot title even more incorrect since the mummy of Ramses I has been identified since Tut Ankh Amon's mummy was discovered.
That mummy was sold to a tourist in the mid 1800's and eventually made it's way to a small museum near Niagra Falls. Only recently was it realized that what was assumed to be little more than a side-show attraction was actually a royal mummy.
It may not be possible to turn back the clock and live as we used to, but it is possible to pay more attention to the way in which we interact with machines.
For instance, we're seeing increasingly larger incidences of depression in today's society. For many people, this is their body's reaction to the increased levels of stress that we feel in every-day life. Evolutionarily speaking, the chemicals in our bodies that are created and released during stressful conditions have a specific use. It's incredibly useful when you're fleeing some life-threatening situation that you have more energy and think clearer than normal. But that same mechanism is meant to be used sparingly, and not constantly as is often the case for people using today's technology. Basically, lots of the stuff we use these days creates the illusion of peril and our bodies react accordingly.
We don't have to stop using technology, but it would be useful to study how the interaction with new technology affects people. Rather than simply coming up with some wonder drug that will treat the symptoms/consequences of our new interactions, we should be devoting increasingly larger amounts of study into how we interact with these new technologies and how we can better adapt them to working with us. The current mindset seems to be that humans should adapt to technology. But as technology advances, we should be striving to reverse that situation.
In short, we don't need to be luddites, we just need to realize that there is an ounce of truth in that belief.
The comment you were originally replying to was specifically talking about web applications. Only a fool would believe that a traditional client-server application wouldn't outperform a web application in nearly every metric except for two, the ease of client installation and the development time. The comment you were replying to was assuming that one of those two metrics was required.
GMail is a web-based email system. That is its purpose. Sure, it allows traditional mail protocols, but for most users the web-based nature is the reason they use it. Having access to your mail from any internet-connected computer is a powerful feature that no client-server application has. Nowhere in my comment did I make any assertion that AJAX would out-perform POP or IMAP...that's just silly. As is the fact that you'd even bring up that subject.
You might have had a point if the original post had been railing about web applications in general as they have proliferated the amount of information passed over HTTP, but he was specifically railing against AJAX applications. In that context, I still standby my earlier comments that your post appeared grossly uninformed. Given your thorough explanation, I now realize that you just didn't read the comments closely enough to realize the context in which you were posting.
As long as the app doesn't do stupid stuff like make requests to the server on each key press, an well-designed AJAX application will result in significantly less traffic. XML might not be a lightweight representation of data, but neither is (X)HTML. If you're talking about simply encoding data, XML will be far more efficient than XHTML, even when marked up semantically so that it can be styled with CSS. Regardless, both formats compress down extremely well with gzip compression. And JSON (which I believe GWT uses) is even more efficient still.
The one thing that is true about AJAX applications is that they often make many small HTTP requests rather than fewer larger request. But so long as the client and server both support keepalives and http pipelining, this difference is irrelevant. It's a shame that pipelining isn't enabled by default on modern browsers since I've yet to encounter a server that doesn't handle it correctly.
AJAX isn't the panacea or the bogeyman that proponents and detractors portray it as. It has it's uses and weaknesses. It just requires that developers are smart enough to realize it is just one of many tools made available to them. The adage remains the same. Use the right tool for the job.
Your comment makes me believe that you've never had to think about these issues when designing a real-world application. You've no doubt done zero real-world tests to see what the difference in traffic comes out to (our logs show AJAX saving us considerable bandwidth...we've basically halved our bandwidth per user since AJAXifying our site). Hell, you're probably one of those tinfoil-hat-browse-the-web-with-javascript-turned- off types and are just upset that the web is becoming less and less accessible to you.
It's only in the U.S., where farmers are inexplicably Hell-bent on growing corn or nothing...
The reason farmers grow corn isn't inexplicable, it's because the U.S. government inexplicably pays them money to do so. Even that is explainable considering the impact of ADM's lobbying power.
It sounds kind of funny to say, but in order to get drinks that taste good, we have to fix the whole "campaign finance" hole in our democratic process.
The whole review misses what I believe is the point of the release entirely. They approach it from the point of view of a user who would be using it as their default browser. But I don't think Apple is really trying to win significant market share on PC browsers.
What they do want, however, is for developers to test their pages in Safari, not just FF and IE. Until the release, many developers used the fact that they couldn't run Safari on their development platform as a reason for not testing in Safari. Since Safari's CSS rendering is very compliant, most pages that render well in FF also render well in Safari. But Safari's JavaScript engine has a lot of quirks that developers won't catch unless they actually test in Safari. With the proliferation of AJAX-enabled sites out there, it's becoming more common for Mac Safari users to hit pages that just don't work for them. This is what Apple is trying to prevent.
But now that Safari is available in Windows (and hopefully Linux will follow), developers can easily test that their pages will work for Mac Safari users, even if they don't choose Safari as their default browser. This release many have lots of warts, but it's plenty good enough to fire up a couple of times a day to make sure that a specific site works.
7) Boo-hoo, I don't generate tax revenue. Hear the violins?
This one's my favourite, because it's absolutely right
While technically correct, this argument doesn't take into account that the money doesn't just disappear, it gets spent on other things. It's discretionary spending money that, for the most part, won't be just dumped into a savings account. If people aren't paying for music, they'll spend that same money on movies, electronics and other things that do generate tax revenues and do create jobs.
Exactly. If you write an application that requires a DTD (or XSD for that matter) to parse an XML document, include that file as part of the software. The XML processing code should intercept entity references and load them from the local copy. Not only does this make your application more reliable, it also makes it faster.
Public hosting of schema documents should not be for application use where the application knows ahead of time what kind of document it will be parsing (like the RSS situation). In all likelihood, a change to that schema document will cause an error in the XML parsing anyway, since the parser isn't expecting new or changed elements.
Public hosting of documents should be reserved for editors that create XML documents that must comply with a given format. This allows XML authors to validate their documents against the schema, but nothing breaks when the publicly-hosted document becomes unavailable.
I had a chance to attend a meeting with Toyota's CEO during a recent business school trip to Japan and the way he talked about his company's future was very inspirational.
He said that they've spent a lot of R&D on alternative fuel sources, and cited the example of how they've worked with the Brazilian government to produce cars that run on ethanol made from sugar. He also mentioned that they were exploring cross licensing their hybrid technology which, by almost all accounts, is the most advanced of any automaker, with other companies that have more expertise in engine technologies for some alternative fuels (like diesel...IIRC, he mentioned that they've worked with Isuzu on diesel-powered engines).
Toyota simply views hybrid technology as an enabler for any fuel source to achieve higher mileage. I'm actually somewhat surprised that they're not targeting the 100% number earlier than 2020 since all but 3 of the vehicles in their corporate showroom (the ones they're going to be selling in Japan in 2008) were hybrids. But perhaps the most inspirational thing I took from that meeting was when he talked about how much R&D they're putting into recycling cars. He said that every car they sell is 97% recyclable, though I'm not sure how much they're able to take from older cars. As far as I've read, the whole hybrid movement isn't really all that helpful from an environmental perspective if you end up with large quantities of batteries that wear out after ~10 years.
All in all, I thought his vision for the company was very responsible, both from the perspective of investors in his company and from an environmental perspective. He also seemed like a genuinely nice guy...even cracking a few jokes during his speech.
FYI...get Cable or, better yet, Satellite. FSC has a ton of Premiership games live and they also replay games both in their entirety as well as with less-significant portions edited out. It's a bit tougher to catch Serie A, Bundesliga or La Liga games, but GolTV does show some of those games as well. DirecTV used to have a package similar to Sunday Ticket or Extra Innings that would allow subscribers to see almost all premiership games, though they don't offer it any more...instead they offer Setanta Sports Network which has all sorts of European sports.
However, as a Juve fan, you may want to go with Dish Network. For $12/mo you can get RAI International, which should give you a ton of Serie A games (which should include Juve, since they're moving back up after this season).
I can sympathize with Americans that can't get enough Premiership coverage, because I'm in the same boat (I've been a Liverpool fan for over 20 years), but the Premiership has made a reasonable effort to reach out to the American market. Considering just how much money is at stake in the European market alone, I don't think they're acting all that unreasonably.
Math is not patentable. Software is nothing but a computer-understandable representation of math.
You're really over-generalizing here. Mathematical concepts cannot be patented. The computer-understandable representation of math is not a representation of mathematical concepts but rather the application of those concepts. Applying math for a non-abstract purpose is, and should be, patentable.
A software patent however does not involve such a computer-understandable representation, it merely covers the idea.
Software patents often encompass much more than just an idea. There is often a significant amount of research inherent in the patented algorithm.
Take for example the mp3 algorithm. There are many individual components to the algorithm that are fundamental mathematical concepts and shouldn't be patentable, even if they were discovered today ((F)FTs, for example). However the algorithm is the result of a lot of testing to determine which information can be dropped from a raw audio sample without significantly impacting how human beings hear that sound (waaaaay over-simplifying here, but the full details are beyond the scope of this discussion). The innovation is not in discovering those fundamental mathematical concepts, but in realizing how they can be applied to real-world problems. Removing protection for this type of work would be a serious mistake.
However it would also be a serious mistake to allow over-broad patents. In the same example, if the approved patent were for "a method of compressing a raw audio sample by removing elements that have little effect on the resulting sound," then the original work on mp3 would preclude similar work into AAC, OGG and all the other codecs that accomplish a similar task using a different means and there would be no innovation in that area.
There is a balance that needs to be struck between those who believe that software patents shouldn't be granted and those that believe that 1-click is a valid innovation. The only solution to strike that balance is to ensure that patent examiners are knowledgeable and thorough enough to discern when there is true innovation in the patent they're approving. It may be the case that granting no software patents is less destructive in the interim that allowing overly-broad patents, but it is far from the most ideal situation.
Meaning that if you ever plan to do anything with threads, stick with Vector. In fact, always stick with Vector.
The problem with this logic is that the synchronization provided by the Vector class is, at best, useless. At worst, it's a recipe for disaster.
The Problem is that the synchronization is applied at the method level. That means there's nothing to stop invocations of different methods from both attempting to update the same data inside the vector at the same time, which can cause bugs that are almost impossible to track down.
The GP was correct...if you need synchronization, use and array list and either declare it to be synchronized or access it within a synchronized block. The Vector and Hashtable classes really have no place in code that doesn't need to compile under ancient versions of Java.
The Brazil example is a good illustration of what makes the DST change so annoying.
I live in California, so I'm on pacific time. Brazil's major cities are, IIRC, two time zones ahead of eastern time. So if I know the time in California, how do I figure out the time in Brazil? Well, I have to know what day of the year it is. It's 5 time zones ahead of me, but it can either 5 hours ahead during the times of the year when the US has switched its time and Brazil hasn't yet switched theirs. Or it can be 4 (US summer) or 6 (Brazilian summer) if both have switched.
If we got rid of this nonsense, Brazil would be 5 hours ahead. Period.
The Java test is also similarly flawed. I got all but one of the questions right, but for most of the ones that asked the right way, the real answer should have been "none of the above". For instance, they asked one question about preventing a user from embedding their session id in a link sent via email that is then sent to the victim who clicks on it and then logs in, thereby giving access to the client that initialized the session. Their best answer (and the one they considered correct) was to establish a new session at login time. But what wasn't said was that allowing the session id to be any part of the URI is a stupid idea to begin with. One of the first things we always do when we install Tomcat or an other J2EE server is to restrict the session id to a secure session cookie. It's never written to disk, required to be sent only over SSL and should never make it into any URI. Accepting a session id from the URI is just stupid.
That and they asked a number of stupid questions like which layer validation should be responsible for validation. While I picked the one they wanted (the middle tier), each level needs to perform its own level of validation. The front-end needs to validate that the request was made the way the form would have made it (i.e. the supplied parameters include all expected parameters and only those expected parameters. The middle tier then needs to perform validation based on business rules for the application. Lastly, the data tier needs to perform canonical validation to prevent data that is not valid in any context from being sent to the database.
What if AMD sued you because you bought an Intel chip?
That's not exactly what's going on here. There's obviously a bit of history here. It's more akin to asking:
What if some large entity produced a long list of selection criteria and then asked suppliers to submit bids and supporting documentation, no doubt costing real man hours of the companies submitting bids? At that point, the large entity chose one supplier without any feedback to either the chosen supplier or those suppliers not chosen.
That's more what's going on here. I doubt Diebold has any reasonable expectation that the purchasing decision will be overturned. What they really want is access to the state's documents explaining why the state chose their competitor so they can address their weaknesses before they're asked for bids on other contracts. Given the effort that goes into the bidding process for these kinds of Government contracts, what they're asking for isn't all that unreasonable. But thanks to the screwiness of the US legal system, they can't just ask for something reasonable and expect to get it. They must ask for something entirely unreasonable and then demand the reasonable request as a means of supporting the unreasonable request. My guess is that Diebold's discovery motion will either be granted or denied at which point the suit will be dropped.
Slashdot Mirror
There's absolutely no good reason why a website should sniff the user-agent string to determine which page to serve. Instead, the page should use CSS layout and make use of the CSS handheld media type. This allows the provider to make intelligent decisions about which page to serve. The provider will know what type of network (3G, etc) the user is on and can use that information to serve the correct page. The provider will know whether the user is on an unlimited data plan and can use that information to serve the correct page. The provider will know what model phone is connecting to their network and can use that information to serve the correct page (technically, the website operator could do this too based on extensive parsing of the user-agent string, but it doesn't sound like any of the upset web developers were doing that).
In short, the website should simply present two options to the user-agent, whether that user-agent is the actual phone or a provider proxy. It's up to someone with more information about the capabilities of the display device to decide which one to use.
You are correct that it is not the Constitution of Earth. It does not govern how the governments of other countries behave. It also does not govern how US citizens will be treated by other governments. By guaranteeing the right of Habeas Corpus, it's guaranteeing that right to all of its own prisoners, not all of its own citizens.
You're also correct that the purpose is important. The constitution clearly laid out a system of checks and balances. There was clearly a recognition of the fact that unfettered power will lead to abuses of power. It was made clear that because of this, it was necessary to have separate bodies of government each tasked with different aims/goals.
This is what makes it so important that some other body of government have oversight about when it is acceptable to hold enemy combatants. Those who advocate giving the right of Habeas Corpus to all prisoners of the US government are not advocating letting these people go. They're advocating that, at a minimum, a member of the Judicial branch have the ability to prevent possible abuses of power. If there is a legitimate case for holding these people and a legitimate reason why their trial cannot take place immediately, then any reasonable judge should rule that the actions taken are legitimate. But that ruling of legitimacy must take place.
I'm not arguing that anything is bad. What I'm saying is that it's hard to compete with eBay because sellers want to sell on the network with the most buyers and buyers want to browse where there is the largest selection from sellers. eBay's momentum is entirely self-sustaining now. All they have to do is not allow their system to degrade or provide their users with a reason to leave and it will be almost impossible for anyone to compete with them directly without serving a niche market.
It's the same with MySpace and YouTube. People don't use them because they're the best, they use them because everyone they know uses them.
And I never said that the GP used the term vendor lock-in correctly, I simply said that you were looking at his/her exact words instead of the meaning behind those words. And that meaning was that, like Microsoft's OS dominance, switching from TCP/IP and the current internet will be next to impossible since the replacement wouldn't be able to access the mass amounts of stuff and the mass number of people that are currently connected to the original internet.
However, taking Microsoft as an example only muddies the waters. Their monopoly is in part due to critical mass, but also due, in-part, to anti-competitive practices (vendor lock-in). This is why I listed other examples that were more clearly examples of critical mass rather than vendor lock-in.
And incidentally, TCP/IP may not cost money, but it is an integral part of things that do cost money. Broadband internet access and internet hosting are both services that you pay money for. It's these services that are hard to switch away from. They are the interfaces between the customer and the product. If TCP/IP can be swapped out without changing those interface, the transition away from it could be seamless. But a switch to an internet host or ISP that doesn't access the current internet will be a very hard sell.
The more apropos example would have been eBay, MySpace or YouTube. In all those cases, people use it because other people use it. It's incredibly difficult for competitors to emerge because the appeal of such sites is specifically tied to the rest of the people using it. With the possible exception of eBay, it's not hard to build a better version of any of those services...many have. But pretty much all competitors to those products have had to target specific niche demographics because the general community has already chosen the product they want to use.
I think you're looking at the vendor lock-in term a bit myopically...the GP was pretty clearly using it as a synonym for critical mass. And, in a way, the Windows OS dominance is the same thing. People use Windows because everyone else uses Windows. This makes websites and software companies only support Windows. Similarly, any internet, however improved, will be next to useless without the hoards of users and websites that the current internet connects.
But the parent poster was right that the current administration has created a wildly inflationary economy which is just as dangerous as a deflationary economy. If you watch the trends in currency exchange, you'll notice that the dollar has been losing roughly 10% per year to the euro and pound. This is no doubt due to the massive amount of debt being incurred for the war in Iraq/Afganistan. As an investor, I've stopped investing in the US markets. Even what are considered to be good returns aren't as much as sitting on euros and pounds. An offshore savings account earning 1% per year will likely have out-performed most portfolios of investors in the US, and at a significantly lower (read: zero) risk.
What would be interesting is not whether $60 games are becoming the norm but whether games are getting more expensive in Britain and Europe since their currencies are inflating at a much slower rate. The numbers in the US are merely adjusting for the decline of the dollar.
Google is being entirely consistent. In one case, they argued that there should be more H1-Bs so that they can hire more qualified people. The other, came in response to questions from analysts that wanted to know why Google's net profits only increased $204m (to $925) while gross profits rose $1.41b to $3.87b. Quick math will show that the gross grew by a much larger percentage than the net. Analysts have gotten so used to Google thoroughly beating expectations that when their net results only met expectations, they wanted an explanation. Google gave it to them, saying that they hired lots of people. Nowhere did they say that they hired too many people or that they shouldn't have hired those people.
The two messages can be combined to give the message that Google wants to hire even more people which will hurt their numbers in the near term but lead to a healthier and more profitable company in the future. There's nothing inconsistent about that message.
I'm sick and tired of people equating universal health care as socialism. It's not. It's one of many things that just don't work well when privatized. Things like fire fighters, policemen, road construction and last-mile telephone/cable are all things that create a huge mess when multiple businesses compete. We've realized this and granted either a monopoly to some company or made the service provider a government entity. Does this make us socialist? You'd be hard pressed to find even the most die-hard capitalist to argue that these services be de-regulated and allow competition from multiple companies.
Health care is just another one of these types of services. If we went with a universal health care system, a generation from now people would view health care just as they view the services listed above today. It would simply make sense to them. There would be no socialist connotation. This would especially be the case if we went the regulated monopoly route. IIRC, a while ago the CEO of BCBS of California proposed a universal health care program for all Californians. His claim was that his company could provide care for all patients with the money that is currently being spent on health care. The red tape really does cost us that much.
The other aspect of the universal health care that I wish got more attention is that it would be an incredible boon to American businesses. If the burden for paying for health care was removed from the employer, our companies could compete on equal footing against foreign companies who don't pay for the health care of their employees currently. I've wondered for a while now why those companies don't stand up against the companies in the health care industry who spend all that money lobbying against universal health care. Shouldn't the whole of businesses outside the health care field be able to bring to bear more influence in Washington than those that profit from the current system?
This makes the Slashdot title even more incorrect since the mummy of Ramses I has been identified since Tut Ankh Amon's mummy was discovered.
That mummy was sold to a tourist in the mid 1800's and eventually made it's way to a small museum near Niagra Falls. Only recently was it realized that what was assumed to be little more than a side-show attraction was actually a royal mummy.
It may not be possible to turn back the clock and live as we used to, but it is possible to pay more attention to the way in which we interact with machines.
For instance, we're seeing increasingly larger incidences of depression in today's society. For many people, this is their body's reaction to the increased levels of stress that we feel in every-day life. Evolutionarily speaking, the chemicals in our bodies that are created and released during stressful conditions have a specific use. It's incredibly useful when you're fleeing some life-threatening situation that you have more energy and think clearer than normal. But that same mechanism is meant to be used sparingly, and not constantly as is often the case for people using today's technology. Basically, lots of the stuff we use these days creates the illusion of peril and our bodies react accordingly.
We don't have to stop using technology, but it would be useful to study how the interaction with new technology affects people. Rather than simply coming up with some wonder drug that will treat the symptoms/consequences of our new interactions, we should be devoting increasingly larger amounts of study into how we interact with these new technologies and how we can better adapt them to working with us. The current mindset seems to be that humans should adapt to technology. But as technology advances, we should be striving to reverse that situation.
In short, we don't need to be luddites, we just need to realize that there is an ounce of truth in that belief.
The comment you were originally replying to was specifically talking about web applications. Only a fool would believe that a traditional client-server application wouldn't outperform a web application in nearly every metric except for two, the ease of client installation and the development time. The comment you were replying to was assuming that one of those two metrics was required.
GMail is a web-based email system. That is its purpose. Sure, it allows traditional mail protocols, but for most users the web-based nature is the reason they use it. Having access to your mail from any internet-connected computer is a powerful feature that no client-server application has. Nowhere in my comment did I make any assertion that AJAX would out-perform POP or IMAP...that's just silly. As is the fact that you'd even bring up that subject.
You might have had a point if the original post had been railing about web applications in general as they have proliferated the amount of information passed over HTTP, but he was specifically railing against AJAX applications. In that context, I still standby my earlier comments that your post appeared grossly uninformed. Given your thorough explanation, I now realize that you just didn't read the comments closely enough to realize the context in which you were posting.
As long as the app doesn't do stupid stuff like make requests to the server on each key press, an well-designed AJAX application will result in significantly less traffic. XML might not be a lightweight representation of data, but neither is (X)HTML. If you're talking about simply encoding data, XML will be far more efficient than XHTML, even when marked up semantically so that it can be styled with CSS. Regardless, both formats compress down extremely well with gzip compression. And JSON (which I believe GWT uses) is even more efficient still.
- off types and are just upset that the web is becoming less and less accessible to you.
The one thing that is true about AJAX applications is that they often make many small HTTP requests rather than fewer larger request. But so long as the client and server both support keepalives and http pipelining, this difference is irrelevant. It's a shame that pipelining isn't enabled by default on modern browsers since I've yet to encounter a server that doesn't handle it correctly.
AJAX isn't the panacea or the bogeyman that proponents and detractors portray it as. It has it's uses and weaknesses. It just requires that developers are smart enough to realize it is just one of many tools made available to them. The adage remains the same. Use the right tool for the job.
Your comment makes me believe that you've never had to think about these issues when designing a real-world application. You've no doubt done zero real-world tests to see what the difference in traffic comes out to (our logs show AJAX saving us considerable bandwidth...we've basically halved our bandwidth per user since AJAXifying our site). Hell, you're probably one of those tinfoil-hat-browse-the-web-with-javascript-turned
It sounds kind of funny to say, but in order to get drinks that taste good, we have to fix the whole "campaign finance" hole in our democratic process.
The whole review misses what I believe is the point of the release entirely. They approach it from the point of view of a user who would be using it as their default browser. But I don't think Apple is really trying to win significant market share on PC browsers.
What they do want, however, is for developers to test their pages in Safari, not just FF and IE. Until the release, many developers used the fact that they couldn't run Safari on their development platform as a reason for not testing in Safari. Since Safari's CSS rendering is very compliant, most pages that render well in FF also render well in Safari. But Safari's JavaScript engine has a lot of quirks that developers won't catch unless they actually test in Safari. With the proliferation of AJAX-enabled sites out there, it's becoming more common for Mac Safari users to hit pages that just don't work for them. This is what Apple is trying to prevent.
But now that Safari is available in Windows (and hopefully Linux will follow), developers can easily test that their pages will work for Mac Safari users, even if they don't choose Safari as their default browser. This release many have lots of warts, but it's plenty good enough to fire up a couple of times a day to make sure that a specific site works.
Exactly. If you write an application that requires a DTD (or XSD for that matter) to parse an XML document, include that file as part of the software. The XML processing code should intercept entity references and load them from the local copy. Not only does this make your application more reliable, it also makes it faster.
Public hosting of schema documents should not be for application use where the application knows ahead of time what kind of document it will be parsing (like the RSS situation). In all likelihood, a change to that schema document will cause an error in the XML parsing anyway, since the parser isn't expecting new or changed elements.
Public hosting of documents should be reserved for editors that create XML documents that must comply with a given format. This allows XML authors to validate their documents against the schema, but nothing breaks when the publicly-hosted document becomes unavailable.
I had a chance to attend a meeting with Toyota's CEO during a recent business school trip to Japan and the way he talked about his company's future was very inspirational.
He said that they've spent a lot of R&D on alternative fuel sources, and cited the example of how they've worked with the Brazilian government to produce cars that run on ethanol made from sugar. He also mentioned that they were exploring cross licensing their hybrid technology which, by almost all accounts, is the most advanced of any automaker, with other companies that have more expertise in engine technologies for some alternative fuels (like diesel...IIRC, he mentioned that they've worked with Isuzu on diesel-powered engines).
Toyota simply views hybrid technology as an enabler for any fuel source to achieve higher mileage. I'm actually somewhat surprised that they're not targeting the 100% number earlier than 2020 since all but 3 of the vehicles in their corporate showroom (the ones they're going to be selling in Japan in 2008) were hybrids. But perhaps the most inspirational thing I took from that meeting was when he talked about how much R&D they're putting into recycling cars. He said that every car they sell is 97% recyclable, though I'm not sure how much they're able to take from older cars. As far as I've read, the whole hybrid movement isn't really all that helpful from an environmental perspective if you end up with large quantities of batteries that wear out after ~10 years.
All in all, I thought his vision for the company was very responsible, both from the perspective of investors in his company and from an environmental perspective. He also seemed like a genuinely nice guy...even cracking a few jokes during his speech.
FYI...get Cable or, better yet, Satellite. FSC has a ton of Premiership games live and they also replay games both in their entirety as well as with less-significant portions edited out. It's a bit tougher to catch Serie A, Bundesliga or La Liga games, but GolTV does show some of those games as well. DirecTV used to have a package similar to Sunday Ticket or Extra Innings that would allow subscribers to see almost all premiership games, though they don't offer it any more...instead they offer Setanta Sports Network which has all sorts of European sports.
However, as a Juve fan, you may want to go with Dish Network. For $12/mo you can get RAI International, which should give you a ton of Serie A games (which should include Juve, since they're moving back up after this season).
I can sympathize with Americans that can't get enough Premiership coverage, because I'm in the same boat (I've been a Liverpool fan for over 20 years), but the Premiership has made a reasonable effort to reach out to the American market. Considering just how much money is at stake in the European market alone, I don't think they're acting all that unreasonably.
Take for example the mp3 algorithm. There are many individual components to the algorithm that are fundamental mathematical concepts and shouldn't be patentable, even if they were discovered today ((F)FTs, for example). However the algorithm is the result of a lot of testing to determine which information can be dropped from a raw audio sample without significantly impacting how human beings hear that sound (waaaaay over-simplifying here, but the full details are beyond the scope of this discussion). The innovation is not in discovering those fundamental mathematical concepts, but in realizing how they can be applied to real-world problems. Removing protection for this type of work would be a serious mistake.
However it would also be a serious mistake to allow over-broad patents. In the same example, if the approved patent were for "a method of compressing a raw audio sample by removing elements that have little effect on the resulting sound," then the original work on mp3 would preclude similar work into AAC, OGG and all the other codecs that accomplish a similar task using a different means and there would be no innovation in that area.
There is a balance that needs to be struck between those who believe that software patents shouldn't be granted and those that believe that 1-click is a valid innovation. The only solution to strike that balance is to ensure that patent examiners are knowledgeable and thorough enough to discern when there is true innovation in the patent they're approving. It may be the case that granting no software patents is less destructive in the interim that allowing overly-broad patents, but it is far from the most ideal situation.
The Problem is that the synchronization is applied at the method level. That means there's nothing to stop invocations of different methods from both attempting to update the same data inside the vector at the same time, which can cause bugs that are almost impossible to track down.
The GP was correct...if you need synchronization, use and array list and either declare it to be synchronized or access it within a synchronized block. The Vector and Hashtable classes really have no place in code that doesn't need to compile under ancient versions of Java.
The Brazil example is a good illustration of what makes the DST change so annoying.
I live in California, so I'm on pacific time. Brazil's major cities are, IIRC, two time zones ahead of eastern time. So if I know the time in California, how do I figure out the time in Brazil? Well, I have to know what day of the year it is. It's 5 time zones ahead of me, but it can either 5 hours ahead during the times of the year when the US has switched its time and Brazil hasn't yet switched theirs. Or it can be 4 (US summer) or 6 (Brazilian summer) if both have switched.
If we got rid of this nonsense, Brazil would be 5 hours ahead. Period.
The Java test is also similarly flawed. I got all but one of the questions right, but for most of the ones that asked the right way, the real answer should have been "none of the above". For instance, they asked one question about preventing a user from embedding their session id in a link sent via email that is then sent to the victim who clicks on it and then logs in, thereby giving access to the client that initialized the session. Their best answer (and the one they considered correct) was to establish a new session at login time. But what wasn't said was that allowing the session id to be any part of the URI is a stupid idea to begin with. One of the first things we always do when we install Tomcat or an other J2EE server is to restrict the session id to a secure session cookie. It's never written to disk, required to be sent only over SSL and should never make it into any URI. Accepting a session id from the URI is just stupid.
That and they asked a number of stupid questions like which layer validation should be responsible for validation. While I picked the one they wanted (the middle tier), each level needs to perform its own level of validation. The front-end needs to validate that the request was made the way the form would have made it (i.e. the supplied parameters include all expected parameters and only those expected parameters. The middle tier then needs to perform validation based on business rules for the application. Lastly, the data tier needs to perform canonical validation to prevent data that is not valid in any context from being sent to the database.
All in all, not impressed.
Your last name isn't Bauer, is it?
What if some large entity produced a long list of selection criteria and then asked suppliers to submit bids and supporting documentation, no doubt costing real man hours of the companies submitting bids? At that point, the large entity chose one supplier without any feedback to either the chosen supplier or those suppliers not chosen.
That's more what's going on here. I doubt Diebold has any reasonable expectation that the purchasing decision will be overturned. What they really want is access to the state's documents explaining why the state chose their competitor so they can address their weaknesses before they're asked for bids on other contracts. Given the effort that goes into the bidding process for these kinds of Government contracts, what they're asking for isn't all that unreasonable. But thanks to the screwiness of the US legal system, they can't just ask for something reasonable and expect to get it. They must ask for something entirely unreasonable and then demand the reasonable request as a means of supporting the unreasonable request. My guess is that Diebold's discovery motion will either be granted or denied at which point the suit will be dropped.