The only thing I get from Googling those products is that they can be used to test web applications. Nothing about them being able to test that the label of a button is misleading-- I'm pretty confident in saying that that test will *never* be automated, at least not until we have A.I. that can think exactly like a human can.
I think you were trying to respond to my other post on this topic, which does involve testing web apps. In which case: you may be right. Our company used JSUnit before we decided to just throw it out the window, because of code-bloat issues. We install our code on client websites, so we try to be as respectful as possible to their bandwidth. Since removing the test framework-related code, the obfuscated Javascript is literally half its former size, with more features.
I posted further up the thread, but to re-iterate: you're entirely correct. TDD is 100% useless for testing any code with a user interface. If your entire job is writing business logic code buried deep inside an accounting program, then I'm sure TDD is the best thing since sliced bread. But you have to realize it doesn't work for every situation, or even many situations.
And hell, entire technologies. Try writing useful tests for the Javascript layer web-application sometime. Ugh. There are "tools" out there, but none of them allow you to, for example, mock-up a "Window" object with a particular set of properties (say, a ridiculously high DocHeight.) You end up writing all your actual code in stub functions that do nothing except abstract the browser objects to make them testable. It's a ridiculous waste of time and bloating of code.
Not to mention that TDD is utterly useless for finding UI issues, assuming your code has a UI. There's no testing suite on earth that'll be able to tell you "the terminology on this button label is misleading."
Now if you don't have a UI, maybe you don't care. But a significant amount of software does.
Maybe I'm a retard, but aren't there these things in the oceans called "ships?" Since ships are currently well-capable of avoiding collisions with other (moving) ships, I'd imagine that ships would avoid collisions with this stationary platform in a similar manner.
Yeah! You can get ripped-off by an entirely NEW and DIFFERENT energy industry, once you learn that this car is nothing but vaporware and there isn't a hydrogen refueling station within 500 miles of you!
The business model of making carts that can be rented for 20 years is the exact opposite of the current car industry's business model: the car industry of today makes cars that are not exactly reliable and long lasting. They don't have any interest to, because they want you to buy a new car every 5 to 10 years. They also want to make a ton of money from spare part sales.
Oh, come on. Cars now are more reliable than they have been in the entire history of the industry.
My 2004 PT Cruiser is still in pristine condition, an equivalent 70s car would already be rusting in places at this point. It only needs an oil change every 5000 miles to keep running indefinitely. So far the only part of the car I've replaced are the tires. (Well, and the oil filter if you count that.)
I think the general philosophy on motorcycles (at least here in the US) is, "hah! Good luck, buddy... please wear a helmet so we don't have to spend too long hosing off the freeway." That's why they have a special license, and the "safety" factor is made very clear.
Introducing bigger cars into the market is a zero sum game for car safety, and a net safety loss for pedestrians. This car would be safe enough without all those SUV's.
So... what you're saying is that when this car hits the road, all existing SUVs will instantly disappear? And vans, those are about the same size. And don't forget the entire freight trucking industry! Wow! They aren't charging enough for it!
Or are you just living in some crazy fantasy-world that has nothing to do with the one we're in?
(The point is that the car is unsafe *now*, not in your weird fantasy world where no vehicle larger than a Geo Metro is ever seen.)
What I'm saying is that you're espousing a feature that's *already been discontinued*. Asking "hey will this feature still work?" is dumb when it already doesn't work in the latest release.
I guess, all I'm asking is, please realize that XP is not the latest Windows release.
You could try not being a paranoid nutjob, for starters.
You got the paranoid nutjob punctuation rules nailed, at least. Now all you need is a wall-of-text website with dubious color choices and randomized font styles.
I suppose the silver lining is that we'll still be able to open any old Explorer window (you know, the file manager thingy, not IE) and just type a URL there. IE is too deeply tied into Windows to really remove it altogether; my guess is that the only change will be the disappearance of the blue "e" icon.
They've already de-coupled that particular feature in Vista. Not because of the "monopoly" crap, but so they could run IE in a sandbox environment for security purposes. Typing a URL in an explorer bar now just opens the URL in your default browser, instead of turning the explorer window into an IE window.
(Come on, people Vista was released OVER TWO YEARS AGO, please update the rhetoric.)
How do you know they're "shills" and not actual human beings with their own opinions?
Or do you just decree anybody who disagrees with you must be a "shill." There's no possible way anybody could genuinely disagree without being paid for it!
I see the tag damnedifyoudodamnedifyoudont, but I think the tag damnedbecauseyoudid is more appropriate. Do you not put a suspected thief on trial because he put down the TV he was stealing when the policeman stared right at him?
On trial for what? Criminal touching of a television?
He didn't steal the TV. It doesn't matter *why* he didn't steal it, but the simple fact is that he didn't. So... no trial. No crime was even committed. Your analogy is the worst thing ever.
EU want MS to include a choice in the Win7 installer that gives a user the choise to install either EI, Firefox or Opera. Instead MS just went out to remove the choice of having a brower entirely.
That's the worst idea I ever heard. Hey, I just wrote a browser called BlakeyBrowse, how do I get in on this gravy train? It's a wrapper around MSHTML, but mine includes 15 animated ads on every page load! Since it's built into the Windows installer, and customers don't understand this choice when they make it, I'll get thousands of installs even though it's a piece of shit. Woo!
Why should Microsoft have to support Firefox and Opera? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life.
Even if Microsoft is forced to stop their anti-competitive practises they still don't give the user the choice of a different browser.
Microsoft *never took that away* from the user. Ever. Nothing EVER stopped you from installing Mosaic, or Netscape, or Opera, or Firefox, or Safari. Never in the history of Microsoft have they taken away the "choice of a different browser."
You're either completely full of shit, or completely delusional. I don't know which.
I hope they'll bleed. And stop whining about the EU only wanting to make money because their fines are a tiny drop in the financial ocean.
The only press we in the US see about the EU summarizes as: * EU sues highly-successful American company for dubious reasons, imposes gigantic fines.
And rebranding can make a big difference-- look at the recent success of Bing, for instance.
Bing is, technically, far superior to Live Search. It's not just a re-branding.
(With one exception: people raving about Bing's image search UI obviously never used Live Image Search, which is nearly identical UI-wise. Bing still returns better, more relevant, results though.)
Wow, I'm having flashbacks to when the first Xbox came out and people were saying it was doomed in Japan because its case was too big. As is the extra inch on the Xbox was just enough so it wouldn't fit through the door, or some shit. (Given, the original Xbox didn't do well in Japan, but I don't think it's physical size had anything to do with it.)
Now you're telling me that in the UK apartments (flats) are so small, apparently, that people with 36" TVs have to sit no more than 2' from the screen? Yeah, right. I know bullshit when I smell it.
The simple fact is that anybody who has a decent-sized TV in a comfortable-to-view location has enough space to use Natal. (Or Wii, or Sony's Eyetoy, since your argument applies equally to those.)
No, your missing the point. It has already been established that F5 is NOT a standard refresh button.
Did you even read my post? The thrust of which was "it doesn't fucking matter which key is the standard for refresh?"
Yes, there are people too stupid to push the right button. Just because some program came along and started using the Lock Application button as their non-standard key for refresh does not make Notes wrong. You are falling for the old 'The first way I saw it must be the "right" way.' mentality.
If I, a human being, hit F5 and it wastes my time doing something I don't want it to do, then yes that is Notes' problem.
And you're falling for the "it's Ok for the software to be obnoxious now because 15 years ago that behavior wasn't obnoxious" mentality. Since we're making up mentalities. Yes, you're right: Notes had F5 first. Here's a news-flash: I don't give a shit.
BTW, the argument "Notes isn't that bad because it does the same thing it did in 1992" is... well, retarded. Notes is a good product because it doesn't change with the times? So I guess, in your opinion, Photoshop would be an *better* product if they removed layer groups? Since it didn't have those ten years ago... right? And GIMP would be awesome if every single possible command was in a right-click menu (it would be too generous to call it a "contextual menu"), because that's how old versions of GIMP were? Oh, and damn Microsoft for removing Active Desktop!
That would be due to two VERY good reasons. One is that Notes predates security on the desktop. They implemented locking because back before your your obviously limited time, 'locking' Windows wasn't security.
So Notes still has its own locking feature... why? Because the spec is append-only? Because if they removed it, it might make Notes less bloated? Because Notes fans love it when people hit F5 and accidentally lock their email program because then they have an excuse to give a lecture on history?
Again, a product that doesn't change with the times is a crappy product.
You also make a point to have the software run the same on all platforms.
I know; that's why the usability sucks ass on *all* the platforms it runs on. That's an anti-feature, not a feature.
Here's a tip: if Firefox ran the same on OS X as it does on Windows, nobody would ever use it on OS X. Ask the OpenOffice guys how many Mac users they had before they finally made it at least pretend to be a Mac application. Hell, even Microsoft had to learn that lesson the hard way with Word 6.
Now take that a step further. Not only does Notes look like a bad port on OS X, it actually somehow manages to look like a bad port *even on the most popular OS on the planet* Windows. That takes an almost legendary amount of incompetence and contempt for your users.
So, now it isn't that it doesn't follow the standard?
No, my point is that the standard doesn't fucking matter.
It is amazing that you are seriously arguing that because there is a group of people who blindly press a function key that has no standard function, people who know what the buttons they press do must be robots.
Do you have any reading comprehension skills at all? Are you running some kind of crazy proxy that completely alters my Slashdot posts in some mysterious way?
There's two points here:
1) Human beings using Lotus Notes frequently hit F5 expecting it to do a certain thing. Notes doesn't do that thing, but, in fact, does something completely different.
2) Lotus Notes was built by people who have absolutely no conception of how actual human beings behave when using software. I jokingly referred to these people as "robots", ha ha ha.
There is a difference between 'standard', and 'I've use other programs that don't match your key bindings'. Given that many of the many of the most used PC software applications in the world use F9, and many popular but less used applications use F5, the only rational conclusion is that F5 is NOT the standard. Clearly the standard is that it is F9 or F5. If Notes disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, F5 would still not be the standard, as MS Office still uses F9.
You're missing the point. The point isn't that F5 didn't refresh, it's that it didn't refresh and, additionally, forced you to log-in again from scratch. If it just didn't work, like in Outlook, nobody would be complaining. People complain because not only does it not work, but it wastes an incredible amount of their time in the process.
And on that note: why the hell does Notes need its own "lock workstation" command when the OS it's running in has one? They go *out of the way* to make their product more obnoxious.
The second point is regardless of the "standardness" of it, there exists a large population of people who expect F5 to refresh their email list. These people exist: fact. It doesn't matter why they exist, nor does it matter what the standard for refresh is. Lotus Notes needs to run in the real world, with real users, who really exist. It's not used by robots (although it seems to be designed and defended by robots, or at least humans who have no clue how to make things usable for other humans.)
Christ, this is the second post. It's not 1998 anymore. You can get updates using a control panel since at least Windows 2000 (and I'm pretty sure Windows 98 had that feature as well.) Please update your anti-Microsoft FUD for the current decade, thank you.
That's because so many first-party and third-party applications rely on it. Steam, Valve's game download service, makes extensive use of it, for example. The Windows Sidebar does, as well.
In any case, IE isn't nearly as dangerous in Vista or Windows 7 because of the sandbox environment it runs in. Your big worry, as it has been since IE7/Vista combination came out, is insecure plug-ins like Flash or Java providing an open freeway for viruses to get on your computer.
What year is it in your little world, 2000? Critical updates have been delivered via control panel applet/service since, what, Windows 2000 at least. Non-critical ones can be easily downloaded using Firefox, or any browser you'd like to name.
Vista (and possibly XP; I haven't had XP in awhile) even let you select the non-critical ones from the same control panel as the critical ones, so there's absolutely zero reason to use IE to get updates. Not that there has been one in ages, anyway.
They're not required to put the source on the web, just to provide it when requested. (And even then, only by paying customers, i.e. customers who have the compiled version.) Have you called up someone at Palm and requested it yet?
Slashdot Mirror
Huh?
The only thing I get from Googling those products is that they can be used to test web applications. Nothing about them being able to test that the label of a button is misleading-- I'm pretty confident in saying that that test will *never* be automated, at least not until we have A.I. that can think exactly like a human can.
I think you were trying to respond to my other post on this topic, which does involve testing web apps. In which case: you may be right. Our company used JSUnit before we decided to just throw it out the window, because of code-bloat issues. We install our code on client websites, so we try to be as respectful as possible to their bandwidth. Since removing the test framework-related code, the obfuscated Javascript is literally half its former size, with more features.
I posted further up the thread, but to re-iterate: you're entirely correct. TDD is 100% useless for testing any code with a user interface. If your entire job is writing business logic code buried deep inside an accounting program, then I'm sure TDD is the best thing since sliced bread. But you have to realize it doesn't work for every situation, or even many situations.
And hell, entire technologies. Try writing useful tests for the Javascript layer web-application sometime. Ugh. There are "tools" out there, but none of them allow you to, for example, mock-up a "Window" object with a particular set of properties (say, a ridiculously high DocHeight.) You end up writing all your actual code in stub functions that do nothing except abstract the browser objects to make them testable. It's a ridiculous waste of time and bloating of code.
Not to mention that TDD is utterly useless for finding UI issues, assuming your code has a UI. There's no testing suite on earth that'll be able to tell you "the terminology on this button label is misleading."
Now if you don't have a UI, maybe you don't care. But a significant amount of software does.
Maybe I'm a retard, but aren't there these things in the oceans called "ships?" Since ships are currently well-capable of avoiding collisions with other (moving) ships, I'd imagine that ships would avoid collisions with this stationary platform in a similar manner.
Yeah! You can get ripped-off by an entirely NEW and DIFFERENT energy industry, once you learn that this car is nothing but vaporware and there isn't a hydrogen refueling station within 500 miles of you!
The business model of making carts that can be rented for 20 years is the exact opposite of the current car industry's business model: the car industry of today makes cars that are not exactly reliable and long lasting. They don't have any interest to, because they want you to buy a new car every 5 to 10 years. They also want to make a ton of money from spare part sales.
Oh, come on. Cars now are more reliable than they have been in the entire history of the industry.
My 2004 PT Cruiser is still in pristine condition, an equivalent 70s car would already be rusting in places at this point. It only needs an oil change every 5000 miles to keep running indefinitely. So far the only part of the car I've replaced are the tires. (Well, and the oil filter if you count that.)
Do they even bother to crash test motorcycles?
I think the general philosophy on motorcycles (at least here in the US) is, "hah! Good luck, buddy... please wear a helmet so we don't have to spend too long hosing off the freeway." That's why they have a special license, and the "safety" factor is made very clear.
Introducing bigger cars into the market is a zero sum game for car safety, and a net safety loss for pedestrians.
This car would be safe enough without all those SUV's.
So... what you're saying is that when this car hits the road, all existing SUVs will instantly disappear? And vans, those are about the same size. And don't forget the entire freight trucking industry! Wow! They aren't charging enough for it!
Or are you just living in some crazy fantasy-world that has nothing to do with the one we're in?
(The point is that the car is unsafe *now*, not in your weird fantasy world where no vehicle larger than a Geo Metro is ever seen.)
What I'm saying is that you're espousing a feature that's *already been discontinued*. Asking "hey will this feature still work?" is dumb when it already doesn't work in the latest release.
I guess, all I'm asking is, please realize that XP is not the latest Windows release.
Besides, it's obvious that SAP's real enemy is its users.
You could try not being a paranoid nutjob, for starters.
You got the paranoid nutjob punctuation rules nailed, at least. Now all you need is a wall-of-text website with dubious color choices and randomized font styles.
Oh wait, you got that covered: http://www.tropicalcoder.com/BrokenInternet.htm
I'll let you get back to your time cube theories, then.
I suppose the silver lining is that we'll still be able to open any old Explorer window (you know, the file manager thingy, not IE) and just type a URL there. IE is too deeply tied into Windows to really remove it altogether; my guess is that the only change will be the disappearance of the blue "e" icon.
They've already de-coupled that particular feature in Vista. Not because of the "monopoly" crap, but so they could run IE in a sandbox environment for security purposes. Typing a URL in an explorer bar now just opens the URL in your default browser, instead of turning the explorer window into an IE window.
(Come on, people Vista was released OVER TWO YEARS AGO, please update the rhetoric.)
How do you know they're "shills" and not actual human beings with their own opinions?
Or do you just decree anybody who disagrees with you must be a "shill." There's no possible way anybody could genuinely disagree without being paid for it!
I see the tag damnedifyoudodamnedifyoudont, but I think the tag damnedbecauseyoudid is more appropriate. Do you not put a suspected thief on trial because he put down the TV he was stealing when the policeman stared right at him?
On trial for what? Criminal touching of a television?
He didn't steal the TV. It doesn't matter *why* he didn't steal it, but the simple fact is that he didn't. So... no trial. No crime was even committed. Your analogy is the worst thing ever.
EU want MS to include a choice in the Win7 installer that gives a user the choise to install either EI, Firefox or Opera. Instead MS just went out to remove the choice of having a brower entirely.
That's the worst idea I ever heard. Hey, I just wrote a browser called BlakeyBrowse, how do I get in on this gravy train? It's a wrapper around MSHTML, but mine includes 15 animated ads on every page load! Since it's built into the Windows installer, and customers don't understand this choice when they make it, I'll get thousands of installs even though it's a piece of shit. Woo!
Why should Microsoft have to support Firefox and Opera? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life.
Even if Microsoft is forced to stop their anti-competitive practises they still don't give the user the choice of a different browser.
Microsoft *never took that away* from the user. Ever. Nothing EVER stopped you from installing Mosaic, or Netscape, or Opera, or Firefox, or Safari. Never in the history of Microsoft have they taken away the "choice of a different browser."
You're either completely full of shit, or completely delusional. I don't know which.
I hope they'll bleed. And stop whining about the EU only wanting to make money because their fines are a tiny drop in the financial ocean.
The only press we in the US see about the EU summarizes as:
* EU sues highly-successful American company for dubious reasons, imposes gigantic fines.
What are we supposed to believe the motive is?
And rebranding can make a big difference-- look at the recent success of Bing, for instance.
Bing is, technically, far superior to Live Search. It's not just a re-branding.
(With one exception: people raving about Bing's image search UI obviously never used Live Image Search, which is nearly identical UI-wise. Bing still returns better, more relevant, results though.)
Wow, I'm having flashbacks to when the first Xbox came out and people were saying it was doomed in Japan because its case was too big. As is the extra inch on the Xbox was just enough so it wouldn't fit through the door, or some shit. (Given, the original Xbox didn't do well in Japan, but I don't think it's physical size had anything to do with it.)
Now you're telling me that in the UK apartments (flats) are so small, apparently, that people with 36" TVs have to sit no more than 2' from the screen? Yeah, right. I know bullshit when I smell it.
The simple fact is that anybody who has a decent-sized TV in a comfortable-to-view location has enough space to use Natal. (Or Wii, or Sony's Eyetoy, since your argument applies equally to those.)
No, your missing the point. It has already been established that F5 is NOT a standard refresh button.
Did you even read my post? The thrust of which was "it doesn't fucking matter which key is the standard for refresh?"
Yes, there are people too stupid to push the right button. Just because some program came along and started using the Lock Application button as their non-standard key for refresh does not make Notes wrong. You are falling for the old 'The first way I saw it must be the "right" way.' mentality.
If I, a human being, hit F5 and it wastes my time doing something I don't want it to do, then yes that is Notes' problem.
And you're falling for the "it's Ok for the software to be obnoxious now because 15 years ago that behavior wasn't obnoxious" mentality. Since we're making up mentalities. Yes, you're right: Notes had F5 first. Here's a news-flash: I don't give a shit.
BTW, the argument "Notes isn't that bad because it does the same thing it did in 1992" is... well, retarded. Notes is a good product because it doesn't change with the times? So I guess, in your opinion, Photoshop would be an *better* product if they removed layer groups? Since it didn't have those ten years ago... right? And GIMP would be awesome if every single possible command was in a right-click menu (it would be too generous to call it a "contextual menu"), because that's how old versions of GIMP were? Oh, and damn Microsoft for removing Active Desktop!
That would be due to two VERY good reasons. One is that Notes predates security on the desktop. They implemented locking because back before your your obviously limited time, 'locking' Windows wasn't security.
Does Notes even run on Windows versions that don't have a real lock mechanism? Let's check. The answer is: http://notes.unl.edu/newnotes2/requirements.shtml FUCK NO.
So Notes still has its own locking feature... why? Because the spec is append-only? Because if they removed it, it might make Notes less bloated? Because Notes fans love it when people hit F5 and accidentally lock their email program because then they have an excuse to give a lecture on history?
Again, a product that doesn't change with the times is a crappy product.
You also make a point to have the software run the same on all platforms.
I know; that's why the usability sucks ass on *all* the platforms it runs on. That's an anti-feature, not a feature.
Here's a tip: if Firefox ran the same on OS X as it does on Windows, nobody would ever use it on OS X. Ask the OpenOffice guys how many Mac users they had before they finally made it at least pretend to be a Mac application. Hell, even Microsoft had to learn that lesson the hard way with Word 6.
Now take that a step further. Not only does Notes look like a bad port on OS X, it actually somehow manages to look like a bad port *even on the most popular OS on the planet* Windows. That takes an almost legendary amount of incompetence and contempt for your users.
So, now it isn't that it doesn't follow the standard?
No, my point is that the standard doesn't fucking matter.
It is amazing that you are seriously arguing that because there is a group of people who blindly press a function key that has no standard function, people who know what the buttons they press do must be robots.
Do you have any reading comprehension skills at all? Are you running some kind of crazy proxy that completely alters my Slashdot posts in some mysterious way?
There's two points here:
1) Human beings using Lotus Notes frequently hit F5 expecting it to do a certain thing. Notes doesn't do that thing, but, in fact, does something completely different.
2) Lotus Notes was built by people who have absolutely no conception of how actual human beings behave when using software. I jokingly referred to these people as "robots", ha ha ha.
Your argument makes as much sense as say
There is a difference between 'standard', and 'I've use other programs that don't match your key bindings'. Given that many of the many of the most used PC software applications in the world use F9, and many popular but less used applications use F5, the only rational conclusion is that F5 is NOT the standard. Clearly the standard is that it is F9 or F5. If Notes disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, F5 would still not be the standard, as MS Office still uses F9.
You're missing the point. The point isn't that F5 didn't refresh, it's that it didn't refresh and, additionally, forced you to log-in again from scratch. If it just didn't work, like in Outlook, nobody would be complaining. People complain because not only does it not work, but it wastes an incredible amount of their time in the process.
And on that note: why the hell does Notes need its own "lock workstation" command when the OS it's running in has one? They go *out of the way* to make their product more obnoxious.
The second point is regardless of the "standardness" of it, there exists a large population of people who expect F5 to refresh their email list. These people exist: fact. It doesn't matter why they exist, nor does it matter what the standard for refresh is. Lotus Notes needs to run in the real world, with real users, who really exist. It's not used by robots (although it seems to be designed and defended by robots, or at least humans who have no clue how to make things usable for other humans.)
Christ, this is the second post. It's not 1998 anymore. You can get updates using a control panel since at least Windows 2000 (and I'm pretty sure Windows 98 had that feature as well.) Please update your anti-Microsoft FUD for the current decade, thank you.
That's because so many first-party and third-party applications rely on it. Steam, Valve's game download service, makes extensive use of it, for example. The Windows Sidebar does, as well.
In any case, IE isn't nearly as dangerous in Vista or Windows 7 because of the sandbox environment it runs in. Your big worry, as it has been since IE7/Vista combination came out, is insecure plug-ins like Flash or Java providing an open freeway for viruses to get on your computer.
What year is it in your little world, 2000? Critical updates have been delivered via control panel applet/service since, what, Windows 2000 at least. Non-critical ones can be easily downloaded using Firefox, or any browser you'd like to name.
Vista (and possibly XP; I haven't had XP in awhile) even let you select the non-critical ones from the same control panel as the critical ones, so there's absolutely zero reason to use IE to get updates. Not that there has been one in ages, anyway.
I'm not sure, but I might have been making a joke... just maybe.
They're not required to put the source on the web, just to provide it when requested. (And even then, only by paying customers, i.e. customers who have the compiled version.) Have you called up someone at Palm and requested it yet?
Out of curiousity, what voodoo do you have to do? Also, what version of Windows are you using?
I might have just lucked out in my selection of USB wifi, but I've never had any problems in XP or Vista with it.