To check to see if data is there? Post is defined as returning the control and it's associated data, even if the data is null, well with one glaring exception.
And if you want to go deeper into how badly the DOM was conceived, why isn't a text area are an input element? It is used to capture multi-line text input all the time, we have both used exactly that way. But if in JavaScript you want to ripple through all the input controls, guess what text area's do not show up. DOM has serious problems that need to be fixed and everyone is utterly focused on video for fucks sake, that is why HTML/CSS/Javascript are not fit for application development and that why an Application Browser is being built.
Hmmm lets see.... How about returning "1" or "0"... Or perhaps "t" or "f", "T" or "F", "y" or "n"
In your terms why not just ONLY return the defined controls that have actual data in them?
How many CPU cycles does isset() consume?
In php parlance I have to invoke two functions, $_POST[] and isset(), how much more additional overhead is required? In a single instance it is more then likely negligible, but if I have 1000 users all hitting the same server, what is the additional overhead? IMHO that is the problem with programmers these days, they want to spend time being "clever" rather then making sure their code is complete and correct.
The point is, I defined the control in the form and the control reference and its data should be returned. In lots of instances the form elements are ordered to match the database columns they originate from so a simple routine like:
$queryText = "insert into [table name] values(";
foreach($_POST as $k => $v){
queryText.= "'". $v."',";
}
queryText.=")";
builds the query string and you are set to go, but since the UA does not return the check boxes that are unchecked the query will fail on "Not enough values". So instead of using check boxes we use radio buttons. They take up more screen space, the make you have to have more html, but it makes very fast updates possible with a minimal amount of code. In one for loop with one line of string concatenation you have a query ready to be sanitized before it is passed onto the database server.
Now this technique does cause problems if anything on the back end or the script generating the form changes but it illustrates my point quite clearly.
The UA must return all control references along with their data in either a post or get scenario. Remember, the absence of data does not equal another given state of data. 1 == true, 0 == false and absence means something else entirely, false != absence.
This is analogous to getting people who don't normally do data to understand that null != 0! The fact that a database element such as monhtly_income being 0.0 is NOT the same as monthly_income being null. 0.0 indicates a value is present null indicates that a value was never recorded.
Because I shouldn't have to. The fucking control EXISTS in the form and its value should fucking be returned, just like any other control! Really I want to find the little biotch who decided this was "clever" and beat their ass!
The Application Browser will install in user space, require no system privileges, maintain its own lib's and dll's in its own directory space and more importantly it will be lightweight, fast and very very small. It will stay the hell out of the windows registry and stay the hell out of the etc directory. It will keep everything it needs local.
I am not "nostalgic" about the benefits of client-server apps, they are what business needs for head-down handling of data in a manner that does not require a 50,000 line mashup of javascript, html, xhtml, xml and bloody css.
Browser implementations are worse then inconsistent, they are insane. One does it just every so slightly different then the other and your app fails in the land of the web browser.
But not to worry, the project for the application browser has begun. It will present a clean well defined environment for an application to run on any platform consistently without the insanity of html/css.
Define a control in your source and it will appear where you want it and it will be a native control, regardless of it being instantiated on Gnome, KDE, Cocoa or Windows.
Both MDI and SDI applications will be supported.
Authentication will be certificate based as well as by name and password.
The web is far from unified and 15 minutes poking around the web will show you just how unified it is not, site to site page to page things fall apart as far as consistency and uniformity.
The DOM is still a mess, it is slow and browsers to not take having their inner-html poked at very well at all.
AJAX aka httpRequest is lousy because you cannot control what the bloody user does. Run it synch and the users complain it freezes up the browser, run it asynch and the back button can destroy the entire context of what you are doing and completely invalidate whatever data you have fetched at that moment in the middle of fetching it and no one has found a way around that so you have to count on the user not being stupid ( good luck with that one ).
A Modal dialogs are required from time to time but unfortunately the javascript alert function is so horrible that you can't even change its font, much less make it bold or even change the graphic.
We have to wait until version fucking 5 to be able to tell a forms field it is required and maybe prevent the submit method from firing?!?!?! And until 5 is ubiquitous we cannot even count on that. But hey who knows they might actually get it together enough by then to actually transmit the fact that a check box is NOT bloody checked instead of having to either do kludges like hidden fields or have to write backend code to check to see which ones didn't come back!"
Personally I want a reliable, predictable and more importantly a controllable application browser that does not have some ding dong browsing some virus ridden, malware delivering web site finding yet another vulnerability to go across sessions to rape the mission critial data the user is "working" on while they are watching porn.
The bottom line is this. With vagaries of browsers, apache, jvm's, servlet enigines and the like it is a monumental pin in the ass to develop "applications" for the web. And as hard as they try it is just never going to work as well as something presents native controls, using native interfaces and talks directly to the data source not through 5 different application frameworks.
The WC3 is getting a CEO that was the CTO at Novell. Crap-fucking-tastic!
Yeah this is the same idiot that pushed Novell in the direction of self destruction along with the Idiot of a CEO who is more then likely going to get a hell of a golden parachute when Elliot takes Novell apart and scatters it to the 4 winds.
While I used to only think that the WC3 was worthless, now I am completely convinced.
What, exactly, is wrong about "position: absolute; left: 100px; top: 200px"? How is it any different from Delphi?
If ONLY all the browsers implemented this the same. Each rendering engine handles them subtly differently and that is true from version x of a particular browser to version y.
If ONLY the the WC3 knew the difference between an internal margin and an external one.
If ONLY the html spec was not such a fucking security nightmare
Ok so you are stating to sound like a troll, but I will respond.
The whole point of this is so that the application container looks EXACTLY like like the native platform, not some piece of swimming crap that some script kiddie put together.
On windows, the controls look like WINDOWS. Each is slightly different from say Windows 2000 to XP to Vista to 7 but they are a consistent look and feel across the windows platform.
On OSX aka the Mac, the controls look like COCOA they are a consistent look and feel.
On KED or GNOME aka Linux, the controls look like KED or Gnome and have a consistent look and feel.
And as to your notes about CSS being trivial to do absolute positioning in? Yeah, been down that road and I aint going down again because it sucks.
CSS has its place, but designing a portable application tool aint one of them. CSS was obviously not designed by programmers because it is one of the most asshat structures to come down the pike in a long long time and that is the problem with "designers" specing out shit when they really have no clue about what it takes to realize that in code. You ever looked at the code to keep a CSS tree of any consequence from turning into to so much gibberish? I have, and the shit you have to go through makes designing software to go to mars look like child's play.
As to your assertion about colors, design standards, yadda yadda yadda. EVERY company publishes a set of best practices, MS, Apple, IBM, SUB, Oracle, HP you name em, but they all boil down to a set of things that make for a pretty universal interface. Unfortunately most web asshats ignore all that and build crap and call it an "application". Since they are more interested in building "eye candy" then they are in getting work done, which is, uhmm, what business does and since I am going to create this for, wait for it.... business I am sticking with the native desktop of the target platform.
Trying to mix the two is pure stupidity because they are 180 degrees apart in intent and implementation.
In an APP system it is very simple. The main windows inherits NOTHING from the desktop, it stands alone. The application SDI or MDI withing that window. Within that application window you do whatever you please, and it the application window resizes you get scroll bars and that is what they are for.
Right now, as it stands, in a browser to get a pretty standard 1 to many database presentation with the many side having tabs who's content is behind or in front of other tabs, when someone selects a background tab you either have to rebuild the entire page, rely on the Z-Index (which everyone implements in the same way, right??) and transparent DIVS that overlay each other, or you have to go blasting through the document, re-arranging and hiding all sorts of elements and then stuff the documents inner-html with data which is particularly slow. Want a good example? just use/. as when the post gets big, like this one, it can take quite a while to repaint all this crap and they use a synchronism ajax call and jquery to re-factor the entire page, which leads to the browser thinking/. is no longer responding and inviting you to kill the script. If you try asynchronously you are just inviting disaster when click-happy users start clicking all over the place while you are waiting for a server response to the last click. Arrrg, it is insane!
Sometimes you want a user to pay attention to the system instead of their Facebook page and so your ONLY recourse is a JS alert box. It is so PRIMITIVE that you cannot even make the font bold or even change the font for that matter. Actual modal dialog boxes in Windows, Cocoa, KDE or Gnome can at least be presented with minimal font decoration and if you don't like that, hell you can build your own MODAL dialog.
A text rendering tool is a text rendering tool and an application rendering tool is an application rendering tool and the two are not the same, not even closely related and the just PURE fucking kludges they have put in the HTML spec are quickly collapsing on themselves and becoming more of a pain in the ass to use then they are worth.
A form builder in ANYTHING besides HTML draws the control at position X,Y, no if and or buts about it.
An Application window, by DEFAULT contains the application. I dont care if you resize or whatever, the APPLICATION DESIGNER desides what font to use and what font SIZE to display it in, you can change every other font to Dingbats or any other bizarro world thing you want, but if the appliaction does NOT inherit the font of the parent, it stays put, end of story.
This is for business not for some flash loading, movie playing, 3d game playing interface. You want that then by all means stick to the insanity that is HTML/CSS/DOM because as a business platform it just sucks and if there was anything else, TRUST me they would be abandoning browser based interfaces in droves.
Well now there is going to be because after 4 full versions of HTML and 2 full versions of CSS it still is not suited for business applications.
Many will say, but wait, HTML 5 is our savior!!!! HTML 5 is NOT implemented by anyone yet and neither is CSS 3. Right now they are arguing about playing VIDEOS instead of doing the little things like making sure the UA actually RETURNS the fact that a check box is NOT fucking checked!!!!!!
Why do you think MS came up with ActiveX, why do you think Sun came up with Java Applets, because they wanted to? To get around the limitations of HTML/CSS/DOC/JS and if you have any other reasoning, then wrong answer, -5!
I have said it before and many other posts and now I am tired of saying it so am just going to build it. The browser neds to understand TWO top level tags, <HTML> and <APP> and have drasticaly different behavior for each. And since the WC3 is about as useful as a wet paper bag and browser developers are SO very open to new ideas it is time to take action.
It will be small, open source and it will do what business needs it to do, it will present data to be considered, edited and saved without having to worry about the vagaries of the UA.
No that is NOT what he means. I know exactly what he means.
What he wants is a application presentation program. This is a very simple concept and it is a very easy program to write and I am going to do it.
Take for instance Delphi. Delphi has a rather nice object library that you can build a very nice application in and do everything you could possibly want.
Now it's X-Platform counter part is Lazarus which is intern backed by FPC.
Don't link the pascal dialect? There is QT for the C / C++ fans which has been recently open sourced.
In either one of those I can write a very tiny program that will do the following:
Take a text stream, parse it and end of with a beautifully laid out GUI Screen to do Data Entry, handle text, etc.
Use native GUI elements from the platform it is being run on ( Cocoa, Windows, KDE, Gnome ) and they ALL look like native apps thus making the user feel comfortable AND they know how to use all the native shortcuts out of the gate.
Lock it down HARD!!! Since the "Source" is pure text and you don't have to deliver massive amounts of layout gibberish it is very small, very clear and can be delivered encrypted and signed.
Because the application engine does not have to try and figure out every possible permutation off things like CSS and HTML it will be screaming fast.
A form painter can be built or use the native one. No CSS, No HTML just "I put this component at X,Y and that is where it is at run time. No having divs nested 10 deep JUST to get things to line up correctly!
Things like QT and Delphi or Lazarus are completely object oriented libraries already and have stood the test of time, so making contextual behavior is quite simple. The portion that must be written as a method in response to an event will be interpreted and again is contained in the application file.
Well ok, if the iron particles heat up that's fine it melts the solder. But after that I can't see them adding anything in the way of strength since last I knew, a solder joint was a Covalent Bond, not a mechanical one.
Anyone know if you can get a covalent bond between iron and tin/silver? The whole connection is based on the covalent bond between copper and silver/lead/tin. Not being a chemist I am not sure if these things matter or not.
Now the other part is, how does one keep said iron particles from getting between the pad and the lead? You want the thinnest solder joint between the two actual surfaces so if the iron particles ( yes I know they are small ) get between would that not weaken the actual bond itself?
Look there is no BEST approach. Tape is going to be your most reliable bet. Someone will ALWAYS be able to read your tapes. I have sent off tapes for drives that have been out of manufacture for 10 years to a data house that has you guessed it, the drive in question, in operating condition.
Buy two drives, buy GOOD software to do the backups.
Put the tape drive into a machine and get it configured ( I recommend linux ) and then use the config recording tool ( this spews forth all the config information of the machine so that should you have to re-build the machine you have the config that works ) and then do your backups as you will.
Once you are happy that it works AND you have done a backup and then a RESTORE to test the backup, take the tape drive out and put it back into it's original box, along with the little silica gel packet ( if you can find more of them toss the in the box as well ) and seal the box.
Now take the other drive and put it in your machine and do a backup AND a restore. If all works perfectly then take the drive that is no sealed back into its box and put it someplace very safe along with the config information and a copy of the backup software along with it's serial number, activation code / whatever documentation came with it.
I have to agree with you there. USB has just too damn many strange things that have to happen to even get the thing to work. I have written some USB code and I can say, with authority, that USB just sucks.
There really aren't any. Serial is the lowest of the common denominators. The only thing that could possibly replace it would something as equally simple and robust and these days, making things simple and robust seems to have gone the way of the dodo.
think Ethernet is the real replacement. A little TFT or Telnet server / client is really trivial to write. This can (and often has been done) in firmware. For example, most (all?) home Ethernet and wireless routers dont have a serial port. Their management is over Ethernet - works great.
This is all well and good provided you have a functioning IP stack, if you don't you may as well just throw the thing in the trash. How many software layers does it take to make that mini web server work?
I can plug ANY Cisco router into a serial port, launch one of a dozen terminal programs and I can actually see the boot loader starting the system up. THAT is valuable functionality.
As we all know in an ideal world the switch ( aka the Gate, Well, PN Junction whatevah ) would simply present either infinite resistance or infinite conductivity and nothing in between but since that is pretty much impossible we are stuck with what we have.
Optics is where the future is, not in electron gates. Ideally there would be a light source ( a single source ) that would provide the signaling for all the components. This was done with mechanical gates, but that still involved the use of electrons to move the microscopic mirrors and production defects counts are still beyond a reasonable level.
The issue is going to come down to being able to control light at the photon level and direct it as required with the smallest amount of energy we can get away with.
Here is something to throw into your brain:
Take a gate, in it's simplest form it controls the flow of light. Now how about we make that gate powered by the signal eg: the light itself powers the the gate and the intelligence is controlled by the individual photon stream.
Design a specific set of components ( each in the NM size ) so a simple add circuit sits completely dormant, no power to it. Suddenly we need to add two numbers. The light source hits the entry point, the light then energizes the entry point. Now individual photons are the instructions ( very simple ones ) that tell it to add the following stream. The device then feeds light to the rest of the circuit and then it takes two different photon streams performs the add and sends the result of ( or back as a photon stream ) and when it is done the light source diverts someplace else and the gate circuit is once again dormant and draws zero (0) power.
First of all, congratulations on taking charge of your life and deciding to learn a new and potentially valuable skill!
Java is a decent place to start, but Java is quite a lot like scripting. You never get down to the hardware, almost everything is done for you. By know you should understand the basics of looping and branching so do yourself a favor and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Now here is what I suggest. Go find an OLD computer someplace, perhaps a 386 or something like that and get a copy of DOS of some flavor. Pick up a book on C ( I recommend K&R ) and a book on assembler ( beginners level. Lean some low level coding. You might also pick up a used copy of "Data Structures, Algorithms, and program style using C" by Korsh and Garret
I recommend this so you can have a decent understanding of how the machine works. Hi level coding in Java has many many degree's of separation from the actual hardware and IMHO a lot of "programmers" never learn this stuff and in doing so never really understand whats going on and so are lost when things don't really act like they expect.
Understanding how the machine works will serve you well as you progress.
Once again, we have the guy writing the spec or at least the maintainer working for a company with a HUGE vested interest in its outcome.
Sorry, but this is no different from MS, IBM or Oracle trying to define how things are going to work and doing it in their best interest.
Gears was invented to address the hideous short comings of the DOM, and now they think that HTML 5 is the magic pill?!
Read the HTML 5 spec. It is a rewrite of all the other equally hideous HTML specifications.
No one, not Google, not the WC3 is doing ANYTHING to fix all the stupidity that is the DOM, HTML and CSS.
We need to just call it a day on the current state of all of them and start over.
We need to stop having wars about tables -v- divs and things like What is a construction element and what is a cosmetic element and will CSS effect that part of DOM or not.
Microsoft was right in a lot of their decisions about how IE would work and present information to the browser user, but as usual they did in the most asshat manner possible and therefor they were wrong, but a lot of their concepts were spot on.
People keep trying to turn a text rendering program into what is essentially database UI where you can define fields and bind them to data sources. The combination of the two is absolutely insane and should be stopped right now.
The Browser makers should take a lesson from from from Delphi and VB and just implement a forms painter with objects that handle all the use input and stop trying to build all this crap out of a really really awful mashup of HTML, Javascript and CSS because while it might kinda sorta work, it works like crap.
A grid control should be implemented that is data aware ( local storage whatevah ) that can properly handle the concept of records instead of having to do all the stupidity you have to do now.
You want an application UI then build it like one and stop all this insanity of mixing them together.
I have said it before and I will say it again, there should be two top tags, <HTML> and <APP> and each one tells the browser to do two very different things.
Slashdot Mirror
Read much?
...you have a query ready to be sanitized before it is passed onto the database server.
To check to see if data is there? Post is defined as returning the control and it's associated data, even if the data is null, well with one glaring exception.
And if you want to go deeper into how badly the DOM was conceived, why isn't a text area are an input element? It is used to capture multi-line text input all the time, we have both used exactly that way. But if in JavaScript you want to ripple through all the input controls, guess what text area's do not show up. DOM has serious problems that need to be fixed and everyone is utterly focused on video for fucks sake, that is why HTML/CSS/Javascript are not fit for application development and that why an Application Browser is being built.
Hmmm lets see.... How about returning "1" or "0"... Or perhaps "t" or "f", "T" or "F", "y" or "n"
In your terms why not just ONLY return the defined controls that have actual data in them?
How many CPU cycles does isset() consume?
In php parlance I have to invoke two functions, $_POST[] and isset(), how much more additional overhead is required? In a single instance it is more then likely negligible, but if I have 1000 users all hitting the same server, what is the additional overhead? IMHO that is the problem with programmers these days, they want to spend time being "clever" rather then making sure their code is complete and correct.
The point is, I defined the control in the form and the control reference and its data should be returned. In lots of instances the form elements are ordered to match the database columns they originate from so a simple routine like:
$queryText = "insert into [table name] values("; .= "'". $v ."',"; .=")";
foreach($_POST as $k => $v){
queryText
}
queryText
builds the query string and you are set to go, but since the UA does not return the check boxes that are unchecked the query will fail on "Not enough values". So instead of using check boxes we use radio buttons. They take up more screen space, the make you have to have more html, but it makes very fast updates possible with a minimal amount of code. In one for loop with one line of string concatenation you have a query ready to be sanitized before it is passed onto the database server.
Now this technique does cause problems if anything on the back end or the script generating the form changes but it illustrates my point quite clearly.
The UA must return all control references along with their data in either a post or get scenario. Remember, the absence of data does not equal another given state of data. 1 == true, 0 == false and absence means something else entirely, false != absence.
This is analogous to getting people who don't normally do data to understand that null != 0! The fact that a database element such as monhtly_income being 0.0 is NOT the same as monthly_income being null. 0.0 indicates a value is present null indicates that a value was never recorded.
Because I shouldn't have to. The fucking control EXISTS in the form and its value should fucking be returned, just like any other control! Really I want to find the little biotch who decided this was "clever" and beat their ass!
Damn and here I am with no mod points. +10^6 insightfull!!!!! You GO boy!
Yes, I could also burn my own eyes out with a cutting torch but why would I want to!
The Application Browser will install in user space, require no system privileges, maintain its own lib's and dll's in its own directory space and more importantly it will be lightweight, fast and very very small. It will stay the hell out of the windows registry and stay the hell out of the etc directory. It will keep everything it needs local.
I am not "nostalgic" about the benefits of client-server apps, they are what business needs for head-down handling of data in a manner that does not require a 50,000 line mashup of javascript, html, xhtml, xml and bloody css.
Browser implementations are worse then inconsistent, they are insane. One does it just every so slightly different then the other and your app fails in the land of the web browser.
But not to worry, the project for the application browser has begun. It will present a clean well defined environment for an application to run on any platform consistently without the insanity of html/css.
Define a control in your source and it will appear where you want it and it will be a native control, regardless of it being instantiated on Gnome, KDE, Cocoa or Windows.
Both MDI and SDI applications will be supported.
Authentication will be certificate based as well as by name and password.
The web is far from unified and 15 minutes poking around the web will show you just how unified it is not, site to site page to page things fall apart as far as consistency and uniformity.
The DOM is still a mess, it is slow and browsers to not take having their inner-html poked at very well at all.
AJAX aka httpRequest is lousy because you cannot control what the bloody user does. Run it synch and the users complain it freezes up the browser, run it asynch and the back button can destroy the entire context of what you are doing and completely invalidate whatever data you have fetched at that moment in the middle of fetching it and no one has found a way around that so you have to count on the user not being stupid ( good luck with that one ).
A Modal dialogs are required from time to time but unfortunately the javascript alert function is so horrible that you can't even change its font, much less make it bold or even change the graphic.
We have to wait until version fucking 5 to be able to tell a forms field it is required and maybe prevent the submit method from firing?!?!?! And until 5 is ubiquitous we cannot even count on that. But hey who knows they might actually get it together enough by then to actually transmit the fact that a check box is NOT bloody checked instead of having to either do kludges like hidden fields or have to write backend code to check to see which ones didn't come back!"
Personally I want a reliable, predictable and more importantly a controllable application browser that does not have some ding dong browsing some virus ridden, malware delivering web site finding yet another vulnerability to go across sessions to rape the mission critial data the user is "working" on while they are watching porn.
The bottom line is this. With vagaries of browsers, apache, jvm's, servlet enigines and the like it is a monumental pin in the ass to develop "applications" for the web. And as hard as they try it is just never going to work as well as something presents native controls, using native interfaces and talks directly to the data source not through 5 different application frameworks.
If you want to scale without limits and have the money to pay for it buy Oracle.
If you want to scale with a few limits, but don't have any money get Postgres
If you want to play around and write some of the most stupid syntax on the face of the earth then play with any of the afore mentioned text databases.
The WC3 is getting a CEO that was the CTO at Novell. Crap-fucking-tastic!
Yeah this is the same idiot that pushed Novell in the direction of self destruction along with the Idiot of a CEO who is more then likely going to get a hell of a golden parachute when Elliot takes Novell apart and scatters it to the 4 winds.
While I used to only think that the WC3 was worthless, now I am completely convinced.
What, exactly, is wrong about "position: absolute; left: 100px; top: 200px"? How is it any different from Delphi?
If ONLY all the browsers implemented this the same. Each rendering engine handles them subtly differently and that is true from version x of a particular browser to version y.
If ONLY the the WC3 knew the difference between an internal margin and an external one.
If ONLY the html spec was not such a fucking security nightmare
If ONLY, if ONLY if Only.......
Ok so you are stating to sound like a troll, but I will respond.
The whole point of this is so that the application container looks EXACTLY like like the native platform, not some piece of swimming crap that some script kiddie put together.
On windows, the controls look like WINDOWS. Each is slightly different from say Windows 2000 to XP to Vista to 7 but they are a consistent look and feel across the windows platform.
On OSX aka the Mac, the controls look like COCOA they are a consistent look and feel.
On KED or GNOME aka Linux, the controls look like KED or Gnome and have a consistent look and feel.
And as to your notes about CSS being trivial to do absolute positioning in? Yeah, been down that road and I aint going down again because it sucks.
CSS has its place, but designing a portable application tool aint one of them. CSS was obviously not designed by programmers because it is one of the most asshat structures to come down the pike in a long long time and that is the problem with "designers" specing out shit when they really have no clue about what it takes to realize that in code. You ever looked at the code to keep a CSS tree of any consequence from turning into to so much gibberish? I have, and the shit you have to go through makes designing software to go to mars look like child's play.
As to your assertion about colors, design standards, yadda yadda yadda. EVERY company publishes a set of best practices, MS, Apple, IBM, SUB, Oracle, HP you name em, but they all boil down to a set of things that make for a pretty universal interface. Unfortunately most web asshats ignore all that and build crap and call it an "application". Since they are more interested in building "eye candy" then they are in getting work done, which is, uhmm, what business does and since I am going to create this for, wait for it.... business I am sticking with the native desktop of the target platform.
Trying to mix the two is pure stupidity because they are 180 degrees apart in intent and implementation.
In an APP system it is very simple. The main windows inherits NOTHING from the desktop, it stands alone. The application SDI or MDI withing that window. Within that application window you do whatever you please, and it the application window resizes you get scroll bars and that is what they are for.
Right now, as it stands, in a browser to get a pretty standard 1 to many database presentation with the many side having tabs who's content is behind or in front of other tabs, when someone selects a background tab you either have to rebuild the entire page, rely on the Z-Index (which everyone implements in the same way, right??) and transparent DIVS that overlay each other, or you have to go blasting through the document, re-arranging and hiding all sorts of elements and then stuff the documents inner-html with data which is particularly slow. Want a good example? just use /. as when the post gets big, like this one, it can take quite a while to repaint all this crap and they use a synchronism ajax call and jquery to re-factor the entire page, which leads to the browser thinking /. is no longer responding and inviting you to kill the script. If you try asynchronously you are just inviting disaster when click-happy users start clicking all over the place while you are waiting for a server response to the last click. Arrrg, it is insane!
Sometimes you want a user to pay attention to the system instead of their Facebook page and so your ONLY recourse is a JS alert box. It is so PRIMITIVE that you cannot even make the font bold or even change the font for that matter. Actual modal dialog boxes in Windows, Cocoa, KDE or Gnome can at least be presented with minimal font decoration and if you don't like that, hell you can build your own MODAL dialog.
A text rendering tool is a text rendering tool and an application rendering tool is an application rendering tool and the two are not the same, not even closely related and the just PURE fucking kludges they have put in the HTML spec are quickly collapsing on themselves and becoming more of a pain in the ass to use then they are worth.
A form builder in ANYTHING besides HTML draws the control at position X,Y, no if and or buts about it.
An Application window, by DEFAULT contains the application. I dont care if you resize or whatever, the APPLICATION DESIGNER desides what font to use and what font SIZE to display it in, you can change every other font to Dingbats or any other bizarro world thing you want, but if the appliaction does NOT inherit the font of the parent, it stays put, end of story.
This is for business not for some flash loading, movie playing, 3d game playing interface. You want that then by all means stick to the insanity that is HTML/CSS/DOM because as a business platform it just sucks and if there was anything else, TRUST me they would be abandoning browser based interfaces in droves.
Well now there is going to be because after 4 full versions of HTML and 2 full versions of CSS it still is not suited for business applications.
Many will say, but wait, HTML 5 is our savior!!!! HTML 5 is NOT implemented by anyone yet and neither is CSS 3. Right now they are arguing about playing VIDEOS instead of doing the little things like making sure the UA actually RETURNS the fact that a check box is NOT fucking checked!!!!!!
Why do you think MS came up with ActiveX, why do you think Sun came up with Java Applets, because they wanted to? To get around the limitations of HTML/CSS/DOC/JS and if you have any other reasoning, then wrong answer, -5!
I have said it before and many other posts and now I am tired of saying it so am just going to build it. The browser neds to understand TWO top level tags, <HTML> and <APP> and have drasticaly different behavior for each. And since the WC3 is about as useful as a wet paper bag and browser developers are SO very open to new ideas it is time to take action.
It will be small, open source and it will do what business needs it to do, it will present data to be considered, edited and saved without having to worry about the vagaries of the UA.
No that is NOT what he means. I know exactly what he means.
What he wants is a application presentation program. This is a very simple concept and it is a very easy program to write and I am going to do it.
Take for instance Delphi. Delphi has a rather nice object library that you can build a very nice application in and do everything you could possibly want.
Now it's X-Platform counter part is Lazarus which is intern backed by FPC.
Don't link the pascal dialect? There is QT for the C / C++ fans which has been recently open sourced.
In either one of those I can write a very tiny program that will do the following:
Things like QT and Delphi or Lazarus are completely object oriented libraries already and have stood the test of time, so making contextual behavior is quite simple. The portion that must be written as a method in response to an event will be interpreted and again is contained in the application file.
Google for it. It is a pretty up to date list of all the undesirable IP ranges and your attempts will go way down.
Most recently they added 1.0.0.0 :)
Well ok, if the iron particles heat up that's fine it melts the solder. But after that I can't see them adding anything in the way of strength since last I knew, a solder joint was a Covalent Bond, not a mechanical one.
Anyone know if you can get a covalent bond between iron and tin/silver? The whole connection is based on the covalent bond between copper and silver/lead/tin. Not being a chemist I am not sure if these things matter or not.
Now the other part is, how does one keep said iron particles from getting between the pad and the lead? You want the thinnest solder joint between the two actual surfaces so if the iron particles ( yes I know they are small ) get between would that not weaken the actual bond itself?
Nope no prison for them, just take them out back of the courthouse and put a bullet in each ones head. Simple, done and over with.
Those people disrupt and financially ruin thousands of peoples lives, fuck em.
Look there is no BEST approach. Tape is going to be your most reliable bet. Someone will ALWAYS be able to read your tapes. I have sent off tapes for drives that have been out of manufacture for 10 years to a data house that has you guessed it, the drive in question, in operating condition.
Buy two drives, buy GOOD software to do the backups.
Put the tape drive into a machine and get it configured ( I recommend linux ) and then use the config recording tool ( this spews forth all the config information of the machine so that should you have to re-build the machine you have the config that works ) and then do your backups as you will.
Once you are happy that it works AND you have done a backup and then a RESTORE to test the backup, take the tape drive out and put it back into it's original box, along with the little silica gel packet ( if you can find more of them toss the in the box as well ) and seal the box.
Now take the other drive and put it in your machine and do a backup AND a restore. If all works perfectly then take the drive that is no sealed back into its box and put it someplace very safe along with the config information and a copy of the backup software along with it's serial number, activation code / whatever documentation came with it.
I have to agree with you there. USB has just too damn many strange things that have to happen to even get the thing to work. I have written some USB code and I can say, with authority, that USB just sucks.
There really aren't any. Serial is the lowest of the common denominators. The only thing that could possibly replace it would something as equally simple and robust and these days, making things simple and robust seems to have gone the way of the dodo.
think Ethernet is the real replacement. A little TFT or Telnet server / client is really trivial to write. This can (and often has been done) in firmware. For example, most (all?) home Ethernet and wireless routers dont have a serial port. Their management is over Ethernet - works great.
This is all well and good provided you have a functioning IP stack, if you don't you may as well just throw the thing in the trash. How many software layers does it take to make that mini web server work?
I can plug ANY Cisco router into a serial port, launch one of a dozen terminal programs and I can actually see the boot loader starting the system up. THAT is valuable functionality.
As we all know in an ideal world the switch ( aka the Gate, Well, PN Junction whatevah ) would simply present either infinite resistance or infinite conductivity and nothing in between but since that is pretty much impossible we are stuck with what we have.
Optics is where the future is, not in electron gates. Ideally there would be a light source ( a single source ) that would provide the signaling for all the components. This was done with mechanical gates, but that still involved the use of electrons to move the microscopic mirrors and production defects counts are still beyond a reasonable level.
The issue is going to come down to being able to control light at the photon level and direct it as required with the smallest amount of energy we can get away with.
Here is something to throw into your brain:
Take a gate, in it's simplest form it controls the flow of light. Now how about we make that gate powered by the signal eg: the light itself powers the the gate and the intelligence is controlled by the individual photon stream.
Design a specific set of components ( each in the NM size ) so a simple add circuit sits completely dormant, no power to it. Suddenly we need to add two numbers. The light source hits the entry point, the light then energizes the entry point. Now individual photons are the instructions ( very simple ones ) that tell it to add the following stream. The device then feeds light to the rest of the circuit and then it takes two different photon streams performs the add and sends the result of ( or back as a photon stream ) and when it is done the light source diverts someplace else and the gate circuit is once again dormant and draws zero (0) power.
First of all, congratulations on taking charge of your life and deciding to learn a new and potentially valuable skill!
Java is a decent place to start, but Java is quite a lot like scripting. You never get down to the hardware, almost everything is done for you. By know you should understand the basics of looping and branching so do yourself a favor and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Now here is what I suggest. Go find an OLD computer someplace, perhaps a 386 or something like that and get a copy of DOS of some flavor. Pick up a book on C ( I recommend K&R ) and a book on assembler ( beginners level. Lean some low level coding. You might also pick up a used copy of "Data Structures, Algorithms, and program style using C" by Korsh and Garret
I recommend this so you can have a decent understanding of how the machine works. Hi level coding in Java has many many degree's of separation from the actual hardware and IMHO a lot of "programmers" never learn this stuff and in doing so never really understand whats going on and so are lost when things don't really act like they expect.
Understanding how the machine works will serve you well as you progress.
Once again, we have the guy writing the spec or at least the maintainer working for a company with a HUGE vested interest in its outcome.
Sorry, but this is no different from MS, IBM or Oracle trying to define how things are going to work and doing it in their best interest.
Gears was invented to address the hideous short comings of the DOM, and now they think that HTML 5 is the magic pill?!
Read the HTML 5 spec. It is a rewrite of all the other equally hideous HTML specifications.
No one, not Google, not the WC3 is doing ANYTHING to fix all the stupidity that is the DOM, HTML and CSS.
We need to just call it a day on the current state of all of them and start over.
We need to stop having wars about tables -v- divs and things like What is a construction element and what is a cosmetic element and will CSS effect that part of DOM or not.
Microsoft was right in a lot of their decisions about how IE would work and present information to the browser user, but as usual they did in the most asshat manner possible and therefor they were wrong, but a lot of their concepts were spot on.
People keep trying to turn a text rendering program into what is essentially database UI where you can define fields and bind them to data sources. The combination of the two is absolutely insane and should be stopped right now.
The Browser makers should take a lesson from from from Delphi and VB and just implement a forms painter with objects that handle all the use input and stop trying to build all this crap out of a really really awful mashup of HTML, Javascript and CSS because while it might kinda sorta work, it works like crap.
A grid control should be implemented that is data aware ( local storage whatevah ) that can properly handle the concept of records instead of having to do all the stupidity you have to do now.
You want an application UI then build it like one and stop all this insanity of mixing them together.
I have said it before and I will say it again, there should be two top tags, <HTML> and <APP> and each one tells the browser to do two very different things.