I guess it depends if we expect the exams to be about learning the foundations, or actually learning practical skills. If it's the former, the language isn't so important as they'll need to do a fair amount of learning on the job, if it's the latter then the language could be valuable experience prior to their first role. From personal experience, I'd rather universities taught the foundations and didn't try to instill a sense of practical knowledge, because most of the university graduates I interview who do have practical knowledge tend to have been taught bad or very outdated practice, and it's much harder to break them out of those practices and teach the right way than it is to teach someone who knows the underlying principles the right way from scratch. Until universities can keep up with the fast pace of "web languages", they should stick to ensuring students unerstand the theory above all.
Honestly, all that's needed is more transparency. There are times when I'm happy to buy something cheap and buggy because it's not mission critical and it saves a lot of money, there are other times when I need iron cast guarantees about the quality of the software. The fact that some vendors artificially inflate the claims of what their software can do is harmful to the industry as a whole - it devalues the better software which is forced to try and compete on an uneven playing field, it gives consumers the impression that all software is rubbish, it tarnishes the reputation of the companies making the false claims - just tell people what the software can and can't do and let them decide which is the best fit in budgetary terms and what compromises they're prepared to make and everyone will be better off (well, apart from the salesmen making the false claims I guess, but that's no great loss).
Yay, higher prices for software. What, you expected a lower bug rate without any added cost? At least now you won't have the option to buy software of current quality at a discount; you'll only be able to get the finest (at a higher price).
Of course you'll have the option to buy lower quality software at a discount price, all that will change is that the sales guy can no longer lie and tell you that it's actually high quality software at a discount price. If you're happy to buy buggy software and pay less for it then he shouldn't need to mislead you in the first place, and if this market exists then the people writing buggy software will continue to do so - for many people "good enough" is worth the discount.
Of course, because it's so difficult to confuse the layman with technical jargon - the layman always being so technically astute. Come on, there are dozens of ways in which the salesman could have spun a bad demonstration to alleviate the worries of the customer - maybe telling them that it's slow because it's running over the internet on a machine back at the office but it'll be quicker when it's installed locally, or that he's using an out of date version and the bugs aren't present in the new version, etc. - that's his job, and consumers shouldn't be made to suffer just because they had the misfortune of dealing with a particular proficient liar at the point of sale. I'm not a salesman but even I could come up with several plausible reasons to explain away a poor demonstration that the average consumer would buy. If this law didn't exist then it wouldn't be so reasonable to take these claims at face value and you'd expect them to explicitly request they be placed in the contract, and they'd be at fault if they failed to do so, but the fact is that the law does exist so it's entirely reasonable to take the claims at face value, knowing you have an established legal recourse if they turn out to be false. That's exactly why the law was formulated, to make such transactions more efficient without having to engage independent experts and legal representation every time you buy something.
SoGA requires a consideration - that needn't be cash, it could be in the form of a service or the transfer of some other goods or chattels, but the key point is someone just downloading a free piece of software does not automatically enter into a contract of sale, even if they have to agree to a EULA or similar before they use the software. Unless the user is giving something back to the developer, it's simply not a sale, and SoGA is very specific in that it can only apply to sales and can not be extended to gifts.
Arguably, even if you charged a fee for the use of your software, the disclaimer that it might or might not work could be enough to protect you - there is no implied fitness for purpose under the Act, it has to come from a specific claim, so unless you're making claims about the exact benefits of using your software, as a hobbyist you should be fine. As a business, selling a bespoke piece of software, you'll probably be bound by specific contract terms regarding a failure to deliver, so this only really applies to companies selling off the shelf solutions with wild claims that they can't meet, and in that case it's got to be a good thing for everyone.
1.1 This Act applies to contracts of sale of goods [...]
2.1 A contract of sale of goods is a contract by which the seller transfers or agrees to transfer the property in goods to the buyer for a money consideration, called the price.
So yes, giving it away does indeed bypass this law. In that case the only real remedy might be if your code is so unfit for purpose that it could be claimed to be negligent, but there are very strict rules and tests in place to establish negligence, and the finger of blame would more likely fall on the person who relied on your claims without testing them unless there were very special circumstances.
AC has hit the nail on the head - there's a reason that, for instance, a company might choose to pay MS a lot of money to use Bing maps in preference to the free solution from Google, and that reason is that they have a legally binding contract which includes accountability on both sides. If you're dealing with an alpha version of the code which is expected to have bugs and comes with no guarantee, that's fine so long as that's reasonably conveyed to the customer and they're happy to take the risk. If you tell the customer you're providing a mature solution that will do X, Y and Z and you're charging a premium for that, it's only right that the software vendors are accountable if it fails on any of those stated counts. If you're worried about getting sued, make it blatantly clear that there are potential flaws in the software - if that makes it harder to sell then either reduce the price or fix the flaws.
When the sun dies, all life on Earth will end. The only hope of surviving such an event is to discover a non-Earth non-Sun based energy source and travel to the stars. However, there might not be such an energy source, in which case the human species will end - the only questions are how and when.
It's perhaps typical human thinking to assume we'll be here in 5 billion years time considering "modern" humans have been around for, what, 200,000 of the Earth's already 5 billion year existence? If the sun running out of energy is ever our biggest worry, I think we'll have done pretty well as a species.
And what people seem to forget is, even though we all like to see MS as the evil overlords, they did some pretty pioneering stuff in the early landscape of commercial console online gaming with Live. Of course, as a first cut it's full of issues, and considering people can still play these older games using alternative community developed means, I don't see an issue with MS retiring that legacy service in order to improve their current offering. It's not like they've just arbritrarily set a limit on how long you can play online games, but similarly in the console world you can't expect them to support a system which was developed for a previous iteration of their platform indefinitely. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to bash MS, so I can't understand why so many people are jumping on this as a reason - should we really hold up the future development of online gaming so that 7 people can continue to play Halo 2 forever?
There are already "hacks and cracks" to get around the issue discussed in TFA. Even on PC I'd be surprised to see official support (in the form of running a server, they might still throw out the odd patch if enough people complain but even that's rare) on a product that was released 6 years ago. Most of the support comes from community developed tools and community maintained servers. I don't really see what the big fuss is about - sure if they did start reducing the expiry period I'd be the first to complain, but this was a game on the original XBOX, even the platform has been obsolete for years.
Just to add, I also have a half decent gaming rig which I also use to play TF2/CS:S and a handful of other stuff that just seems to feel more natural on the PC, but the vast majority of my gaming time is console now.
As an "idiot console gamer", I'm more than happy with the compromise. I play more SP than MP these days anyway (lack of time to learn maps and submit to multiple humiliations to learn the nuances of a game that I'd only get to play a couple of hours a week) and I rarely play old console games, I'll fire up a PC emulator if I need to play really old suff. For me, the trade-off of not having to deal with driver issues and patch issues and DRM issues and OS issues and the hardware arms race of constantly upgrading graphics cards, memory, cpu, etc means the minor inconvenience of only being able to play old games over a LAN (or with some hacking at that point, which would still be far less frequent than all the hacking I have to do to get things running well on a PC) is more than worth it. YMMV, of course. Now, if they started expiring games after only a couple of years I might feel more cheated by this.
On Linux (etc.) they could require that you download and install ffmpeg on your own time. That way, if ffmpeg gets sued out of existence, it's no skin of Mozilla's nose.
And if ffmpeg does get sued it, what, effectively kills Linux on the desktop?
Oh I don't disagree that Flash needs to die, this has been my standpoint for much of the last decade for numerous reasons (accessibility and indexability of sites even back before mobile devices and performance and security issues made it a hot topic). Nobody would be happier to see the back of it than me, for all the reasons you list and more, but the fact is that it's going to be around for a while yet anyway (there are too many people using browsers with zero HTML5 support), so it might be a good idea to reflect on what the best replacement is, from all perspectives, not just the "anything is better than this crap" perspective which assumes that nothing is potentially worse than this crap.
As for tying the tag to the format, I agree that theoretically it's easy to switch in another codec, but once most of the content on the web is using one format it will be a massive undertaking to switch. As you say, the image element isn't tied to any particular image format, but of the hundreds of image formats out there, how many does your browser support? and if it's more than 3, how many of those formats have widespread support/implementation on the web? My worry is we'll be tied to one codec just like we're tied to three image formats (actually, three is generous considering I still frequently have to struggle with IE6's lack of proper alpha transparency on.pngs even now), and at that point the H.264 licensing body can really turn the screws, if they so choose.
To expand on this one-word answer, they really are two different things. One lets you open a new page, the other lets you find a tab you've already opened - if you seriously have so many tabs open that you need a manager (and I quite often have in the region of 30-40 open), the last thing you want to do is use bookmarks to open more tabs with the same content. What I'd really like is some way to categorise tabs - I have much different requirements depending on which project I'm working on, or if I'm browsing for leisure/shopping, etc. It would be nice to say these 10 pages help me when working on project X, and these 7 on project Y, and these 12 on project Z, so let me assign a button to each group so I only have the relevant tabs running at any one time and can close the rest down without facing a nightmare when I need to restart them.
There is some real HMI theory behind this though. HMI studies show the less buttons and dynamic the interface the more people think and feel it is faster and more responsiveness even if nothing has changed at all. Give a user an interface with a lot of buttons or one with a few, the user perceives the one with less buttons even when the guts function at exactly the same speed.
They aren't trying to hide a problem but avoiding creating a false one. Gravitating towards a minimal interface also helps with mobile versions.
That all makes sense, but what people are pointing out is that it's not an either/or situation - they could do both - increase actual performance and perceived performance. The fact that their "super duper fast" update seems to be focused more on the latter suggests that they've pretty much given up on the former (since people have been complaining about performance since, what, version 1 now?) - note that Chrome manages to do both.
H.264 has already won, it's already used everywhere. The more they fight, the longer Flash video will survive. Does Adobe pay Mozilla or what?
Why is everyone so eager to suddenly replace one proprietary format for another? I'm not saying that h.264 is the wrong choice, it certainly seems better than the competition right now, but just because the licensing group are playing nice at the moment, don't assume they will always play nice. Maybe the right choice is to stick with Flash a little longer to further development on an open source alternative and Mozilla have got it right. I guess time will tell as h.264 looks pretty inevitable now, I just hope we're not having similar discussions in a few years about how we're shackled with it as a format and the people behind it are screwing everyone.
GP's point is that there are real performance gains that they could be making (Chrome doesn't just appear faster because of the interface, it is faster in benchmark tests), and while the UI is important, it's pretty telling that they're focusing on the UI changes rather than telling us about the fantastic performance gains they've made (kind of suggesting that they haven't).
Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem.
Just because an interface looks simple doesn't mean it looks faster. Who thinks like that? The "Speed holes" reference" above is quite right. Those UI designers either have been misquoted or are just complete fools.
What a simple interface means is that common tasks should be more obvious to do.
Don't give the users 100 options at once, especially things that only power-users use only once in a while. I'm not a fan of putting options in tabs and sub-menus, but sometimes it's the right thing to do.
Put the basic features at the beginning, the most obscure ones at the bottom. Put them in named groups such as "Basic", "Advanced" and "Expert" if necessary, so that non-technical users aren't afraid to mess with the basic ones, and advanced users don't waste time looking for what they need in the basic and advanced options.
I can only infer from their comment that what they actually mean is, for the regular user, a simple interface with as few options as possible will result in a faster experience (and they're right, if the user doesn't need to see all those menus, showing them will just add to confusion). What they skipped over is that there are a lot of power users of Firefox at the moment, who do need quick access to those menu items, and for them, removal will doubtless result in a slower, more frustrating user experience. The hidden message is, we're happy to frustrate our existing users to try and grab some market share. I can't say if that's a good or a bad thing (the more competition to IE the better, but as one of those existing users, I don't want my experience to become more frustrating).
Hopefully, if they do remove the menu bar, they'll at least take a leaf from IE's book (yes, I never thought I'd be saying that again) and have a single Alt press pop the menu back up so I don't waste time hunting down little used options.
h.264 and HTML5 aren't synonymous - HTML5 just provides a video container, the browser vendor decides what codecs to allow, so it's entirely possible to fully support HTML5 yet still have no h.264 support.
The killing is going to happen regardless of the actions of the gaming industry, but it would be nice if the games helped prepare and therefore save the lives of a few of our troops, non?
The games weren't intelligently designed...they evolved from earlier, simpler ape-like games. The real difficulty is in finding the so-called "missing link".
Slashdot Mirror
Oblig. 8Mb of RAM ought to be enough for anybody.
I guess it depends if we expect the exams to be about learning the foundations, or actually learning practical skills. If it's the former, the language isn't so important as they'll need to do a fair amount of learning on the job, if it's the latter then the language could be valuable experience prior to their first role. From personal experience, I'd rather universities taught the foundations and didn't try to instill a sense of practical knowledge, because most of the university graduates I interview who do have practical knowledge tend to have been taught bad or very outdated practice, and it's much harder to break them out of those practices and teach the right way than it is to teach someone who knows the underlying principles the right way from scratch. Until universities can keep up with the fast pace of "web languages", they should stick to ensuring students unerstand the theory above all.
Honestly, all that's needed is more transparency. There are times when I'm happy to buy something cheap and buggy because it's not mission critical and it saves a lot of money, there are other times when I need iron cast guarantees about the quality of the software. The fact that some vendors artificially inflate the claims of what their software can do is harmful to the industry as a whole - it devalues the better software which is forced to try and compete on an uneven playing field, it gives consumers the impression that all software is rubbish, it tarnishes the reputation of the companies making the false claims - just tell people what the software can and can't do and let them decide which is the best fit in budgetary terms and what compromises they're prepared to make and everyone will be better off (well, apart from the salesmen making the false claims I guess, but that's no great loss).
Yay, higher prices for software. What, you expected a lower bug rate without any added cost? At least now you won't have the option to buy software of current quality at a discount; you'll only be able to get the finest (at a higher price).
Of course you'll have the option to buy lower quality software at a discount price, all that will change is that the sales guy can no longer lie and tell you that it's actually high quality software at a discount price. If you're happy to buy buggy software and pay less for it then he shouldn't need to mislead you in the first place, and if this market exists then the people writing buggy software will continue to do so - for many people "good enough" is worth the discount.
Of course, because it's so difficult to confuse the layman with technical jargon - the layman always being so technically astute. Come on, there are dozens of ways in which the salesman could have spun a bad demonstration to alleviate the worries of the customer - maybe telling them that it's slow because it's running over the internet on a machine back at the office but it'll be quicker when it's installed locally, or that he's using an out of date version and the bugs aren't present in the new version, etc. - that's his job, and consumers shouldn't be made to suffer just because they had the misfortune of dealing with a particular proficient liar at the point of sale. I'm not a salesman but even I could come up with several plausible reasons to explain away a poor demonstration that the average consumer would buy. If this law didn't exist then it wouldn't be so reasonable to take these claims at face value and you'd expect them to explicitly request they be placed in the contract, and they'd be at fault if they failed to do so, but the fact is that the law does exist so it's entirely reasonable to take the claims at face value, knowing you have an established legal recourse if they turn out to be false. That's exactly why the law was formulated, to make such transactions more efficient without having to engage independent experts and legal representation every time you buy something.
SoGA requires a consideration - that needn't be cash, it could be in the form of a service or the transfer of some other goods or chattels, but the key point is someone just downloading a free piece of software does not automatically enter into a contract of sale, even if they have to agree to a EULA or similar before they use the software. Unless the user is giving something back to the developer, it's simply not a sale, and SoGA is very specific in that it can only apply to sales and can not be extended to gifts.
Arguably, even if you charged a fee for the use of your software, the disclaimer that it might or might not work could be enough to protect you - there is no implied fitness for purpose under the Act, it has to come from a specific claim, so unless you're making claims about the exact benefits of using your software, as a hobbyist you should be fine. As a business, selling a bespoke piece of software, you'll probably be bound by specific contract terms regarding a failure to deliver, so this only really applies to companies selling off the shelf solutions with wild claims that they can't meet, and in that case it's got to be a good thing for everyone.
From SoGA 1979:
So yes, giving it away does indeed bypass this law. In that case the only real remedy might be if your code is so unfit for purpose that it could be claimed to be negligent, but there are very strict rules and tests in place to establish negligence, and the finger of blame would more likely fall on the person who relied on your claims without testing them unless there were very special circumstances.
AC has hit the nail on the head - there's a reason that, for instance, a company might choose to pay MS a lot of money to use Bing maps in preference to the free solution from Google, and that reason is that they have a legally binding contract which includes accountability on both sides. If you're dealing with an alpha version of the code which is expected to have bugs and comes with no guarantee, that's fine so long as that's reasonably conveyed to the customer and they're happy to take the risk. If you tell the customer you're providing a mature solution that will do X, Y and Z and you're charging a premium for that, it's only right that the software vendors are accountable if it fails on any of those stated counts. If you're worried about getting sued, make it blatantly clear that there are potential flaws in the software - if that makes it harder to sell then either reduce the price or fix the flaws.
When the sun dies, all life on Earth will end. The only hope of surviving such an event is to discover a non-Earth non-Sun based energy source and travel to the stars. However, there might not be such an energy source, in which case the human species will end - the only questions are how and when.
It's perhaps typical human thinking to assume we'll be here in 5 billion years time considering "modern" humans have been around for, what, 200,000 of the Earth's already 5 billion year existence? If the sun running out of energy is ever our biggest worry, I think we'll have done pretty well as a species.
And what people seem to forget is, even though we all like to see MS as the evil overlords, they did some pretty pioneering stuff in the early landscape of commercial console online gaming with Live. Of course, as a first cut it's full of issues, and considering people can still play these older games using alternative community developed means, I don't see an issue with MS retiring that legacy service in order to improve their current offering. It's not like they've just arbritrarily set a limit on how long you can play online games, but similarly in the console world you can't expect them to support a system which was developed for a previous iteration of their platform indefinitely. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to bash MS, so I can't understand why so many people are jumping on this as a reason - should we really hold up the future development of online gaming so that 7 people can continue to play Halo 2 forever?
There are already "hacks and cracks" to get around the issue discussed in TFA. Even on PC I'd be surprised to see official support (in the form of running a server, they might still throw out the odd patch if enough people complain but even that's rare) on a product that was released 6 years ago. Most of the support comes from community developed tools and community maintained servers. I don't really see what the big fuss is about - sure if they did start reducing the expiry period I'd be the first to complain, but this was a game on the original XBOX, even the platform has been obsolete for years.
Just to add, I also have a half decent gaming rig which I also use to play TF2/CS:S and a handful of other stuff that just seems to feel more natural on the PC, but the vast majority of my gaming time is console now.
As an "idiot console gamer", I'm more than happy with the compromise. I play more SP than MP these days anyway (lack of time to learn maps and submit to multiple humiliations to learn the nuances of a game that I'd only get to play a couple of hours a week) and I rarely play old console games, I'll fire up a PC emulator if I need to play really old suff. For me, the trade-off of not having to deal with driver issues and patch issues and DRM issues and OS issues and the hardware arms race of constantly upgrading graphics cards, memory, cpu, etc means the minor inconvenience of only being able to play old games over a LAN (or with some hacking at that point, which would still be far less frequent than all the hacking I have to do to get things running well on a PC) is more than worth it. YMMV, of course. Now, if they started expiring games after only a couple of years I might feel more cheated by this.
On Linux (etc.) they could require that you download and install ffmpeg on your own time. That way, if ffmpeg gets sued out of existence, it's no skin of Mozilla's nose.
And if ffmpeg does get sued it, what, effectively kills Linux on the desktop?
Oh I don't disagree that Flash needs to die, this has been my standpoint for much of the last decade for numerous reasons (accessibility and indexability of sites even back before mobile devices and performance and security issues made it a hot topic). Nobody would be happier to see the back of it than me, for all the reasons you list and more, but the fact is that it's going to be around for a while yet anyway (there are too many people using browsers with zero HTML5 support), so it might be a good idea to reflect on what the best replacement is, from all perspectives, not just the "anything is better than this crap" perspective which assumes that nothing is potentially worse than this crap.
As for tying the tag to the format, I agree that theoretically it's easy to switch in another codec, but once most of the content on the web is using one format it will be a massive undertaking to switch. As you say, the image element isn't tied to any particular image format, but of the hundreds of image formats out there, how many does your browser support? and if it's more than 3, how many of those formats have widespread support/implementation on the web? My worry is we'll be tied to one codec just like we're tied to three image formats (actually, three is generous considering I still frequently have to struggle with IE6's lack of proper alpha transparency on .pngs even now), and at that point the H.264 licensing body can really turn the screws, if they so choose.
To expand on this one-word answer, they really are two different things. One lets you open a new page, the other lets you find a tab you've already opened - if you seriously have so many tabs open that you need a manager (and I quite often have in the region of 30-40 open), the last thing you want to do is use bookmarks to open more tabs with the same content. What I'd really like is some way to categorise tabs - I have much different requirements depending on which project I'm working on, or if I'm browsing for leisure/shopping, etc. It would be nice to say these 10 pages help me when working on project X, and these 7 on project Y, and these 12 on project Z, so let me assign a button to each group so I only have the relevant tabs running at any one time and can close the rest down without facing a nightmare when I need to restart them.
There is some real HMI theory behind this though. HMI studies show the less buttons and dynamic the interface the more people think and feel it is faster and more responsiveness even if nothing has changed at all. Give a user an interface with a lot of buttons or one with a few, the user perceives the one with less buttons even when the guts function at exactly the same speed.
They aren't trying to hide a problem but avoiding creating a false one. Gravitating towards a minimal interface also helps with mobile versions.
That all makes sense, but what people are pointing out is that it's not an either/or situation - they could do both - increase actual performance and perceived performance. The fact that their "super duper fast" update seems to be focused more on the latter suggests that they've pretty much given up on the former (since people have been complaining about performance since, what, version 1 now?) - note that Chrome manages to do both.
H.264 has already won, it's already used everywhere. The more they fight, the longer Flash video will survive. Does Adobe pay Mozilla or what?
Why is everyone so eager to suddenly replace one proprietary format for another? I'm not saying that h.264 is the wrong choice, it certainly seems better than the competition right now, but just because the licensing group are playing nice at the moment, don't assume they will always play nice. Maybe the right choice is to stick with Flash a little longer to further development on an open source alternative and Mozilla have got it right. I guess time will tell as h.264 looks pretty inevitable now, I just hope we're not having similar discussions in a few years about how we're shackled with it as a format and the people behind it are screwing everyone.
GP's point is that there are real performance gains that they could be making (Chrome doesn't just appear faster because of the interface, it is faster in benchmark tests), and while the UI is important, it's pretty telling that they're focusing on the UI changes rather than telling us about the fantastic performance gains they've made (kind of suggesting that they haven't).
Just because an interface looks simple doesn't mean it looks faster. Who thinks like that? The "Speed holes" reference" above is quite right. Those UI designers either have been misquoted or are just complete fools.
What a simple interface means is that common tasks should be more obvious to do.
Don't give the users 100 options at once, especially things that only power-users use only once in a while. I'm not a fan of putting options in tabs and sub-menus, but sometimes it's the right thing to do.
Put the basic features at the beginning, the most obscure ones at the bottom. Put them in named groups such as "Basic", "Advanced" and "Expert" if necessary, so that non-technical users aren't afraid to mess with the basic ones, and advanced users don't waste time looking for what they need in the basic and advanced options.
I can only infer from their comment that what they actually mean is, for the regular user, a simple interface with as few options as possible will result in a faster experience (and they're right, if the user doesn't need to see all those menus, showing them will just add to confusion). What they skipped over is that there are a lot of power users of Firefox at the moment, who do need quick access to those menu items, and for them, removal will doubtless result in a slower, more frustrating user experience. The hidden message is, we're happy to frustrate our existing users to try and grab some market share. I can't say if that's a good or a bad thing (the more competition to IE the better, but as one of those existing users, I don't want my experience to become more frustrating).
Hopefully, if they do remove the menu bar, they'll at least take a leaf from IE's book (yes, I never thought I'd be saying that again) and have a single Alt press pop the menu back up so I don't waste time hunting down little used options.
h.264 and HTML5 aren't synonymous - HTML5 just provides a video container, the browser vendor decides what codecs to allow, so it's entirely possible to fully support HTML5 yet still have no h.264 support.
The killing is going to happen regardless of the actions of the gaming industry, but it would be nice if the games helped prepare and therefore save the lives of a few of our troops, non?
The games weren't intelligently designed...they evolved from earlier, simpler ape-like games. The real difficulty is in finding the so-called "missing link".
Is it Donkey Kong?