Wow! I'm going to make up unrealistic anti-Microsoft stories and post them too with absolutely no supporting evidence!
7 years ago I was working as a dog walker in Seattle. One day Bill Gates pulled over in his limo and proceeded to kick every single dog in the ribcage while yelling "what's the frequency, Kenneth!?" repeatedly. Then he pulled an infant out of a nearby stroller and use it as a step to get back in his limo! The End.
I read your link. It's good stuff, the problem is that I've had such terrible experiences with Java over the past few years, it's not enough to get me to install it. Maybe in a few more years, maybe, if sites start using it. But probably still not.
Compare the experience to RealPlayer. Or what Adobe's rapidly doing with Adobe Reader. If your software is crappy for a long amount of time, you'll lose your audience. Even if you then proceed to fix the major problems with your software, there are a lot of people who will never come back. Java's already lost the web, I think mostly because of Sun's clunkiness and Microsoft's implemention being shucked from XP, and it's not coming back. Sorry Sun, but you had your chance, much like RealPlayer did.
No kidding. The latest version of Flash can almost be considered a war crime. Hey Adobe: if your application takes more than 30 seconds to show a DIALOG BOX, you've failed monumentally. (And I thought Flash 8 had a bad UI!)
I have a different question to ask? Why do so many web sites requite scripting in the first place? It is one thing to provided reduced functionality if the client does not support scripting (by default I do not run javascript, java, Flash, etc), but why require it? I don't care about the neat media and am quite willing skip it and conserve my bandwidth.
You represent about 0.1% of the web by keeping JS and Flash turned off. You can't really expect websites to cater to that 0.1% with the other 99.9% can work with their page just fine-- and so can you by checking a box in an option dialog.
I agree with you that problems should be worked out in the framework of CSS, but you gotta wonder about people who design a layout language that doesn't even support COLUMNS without weird hacks. What kind of content was it intended to style? I mean, did the CSS standards committee never open a newspaper once in their life? The fact that it took until 3.0 to get columns, and it'll take another 5 years for all browsers to support it, it's just crazy.
The current Javascript has a lot of bad bits, though.
How come IE uses "innerText" and Firefox uses "textContent"? Right there is a little compatibility function nearly every single Javascript in the world needs to write to work correctly.
Why is there no "GetElementsByClassName?" Another function nearly every Javascript needs.
How come the various "geometry"-returning functions have some baffling results? How come it's so hard to answer basic questions like, "did the user scroll to the bottom of the webpage?" What the hell is a "userAgent" anyway? Does the measure of it include toolbars? Status bar? How come the screen functions return different results for IE and Firefox on multiple-monitor systems? How come the screen functions don't even *support* multiple-monitor systems?
Why does Firefox insert blank text nodes into the DOM while IE doesn't?
How come my Javascript can't tell if a TextArea has text selected or not?
How come the internationalization features suck so much?
Why does "XMLHttpRequest" have such a strange name? Are acronyms supposed to be in all-caps or not, because that function shows it both ways.
There are a hundred problems, not necessarily with Javascript, but with Javascript's interaction with the DOM and browser. I think it's clear that both IE and Mozilla are right in that *something* needs to be done. Whether it's a new language or a new direction for JS, I dunno. (I like the language itself, for the record.)
When's the last time you saw a Java applet on a serious commercial website?
Java's dead on the web. Sun had a chance for awhile there, but Flash pretty much killed them off. That said, I think Java is in many ways preferable to AJAX for building web apps, I just don't see it happening in this current environment. That the Java runtime on Windows is a really crummy piece of software doesn't help.
Just curious, why were you so excited to tell me I'm wrong, and act like a doof about it "Is it inconceivable that you're wrong?" I was just asking a question. Sheesh.
Sorry I wasn't really trying to be a jerk.
Your question is kind of of the form, "I thought that the sky was neon yellow. How come so many people are asying the sky is blue?" The obvious answer is, "well, you thought wrong."
New Safari with spell check, because in case you ahve not noticed, I can't spell worth beans.
Safari has always had spell-check on OS X, even the 1.0 version. (I don't believe the Windows version of Safari has spell-check, and I'm too lazy to open it up and check...)
I thought Leopard was mainly changes to Finder and bundled apps, nothing core to the kernel that would cause apps to be unable to print or interfere with video. Does anyone know if there is some common cause to these issues?
It's inconceivable that you're wrong?
Seriously, though, Apple made a ton of internal changes, mostly future-proofing for things like resolution independence, compatibility with many-core and 64-bit CPUs, in fact 64-bitting everything (and announcing that the entire Carbon API is basically deprecated-- I'm sure Adobe loves that news.) Everything involving Classic is deprecated.
There were lots of internal changes that could break apps, in other words.
Remember System 7.0? People get upset about bricking an iPhone, remember bricking your entire OS because you had the audacity to drag a font out of the Fonts folder?
At the same time, Apple is a reminder that non free will software always depend on the free software world and will always have problems.
Non-free-will software? What is that, software you're forced to use while some jack-booted thug holds a gun to your forehead? I don't think we have any non-free-will software in the US.
More seriously, I have no clue what this is supposed to mean. Non-free software will always depend on free software? Explain DOS, Mac OS Classic, OS/2, Netware, etc. (Actually Netware probably does depend on some free software.)
Upgrades of Debian are always smooth and lossless.
With all apologies to Baghdad Bob:
"I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide [at their keyboards]. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly."
An investigation was launched into whether they were sock puppets!? WTF is happening over there are Wikipedia. Before you reply, you better make sure I'm not a paper plate bean shaker-- you wouldn't want to leak valuable intel to our kindergarten craft project overlords.
Except there's nothing that requires computers to operate in base-2. Early electronic computers (the kind used to aim nukes and such) were analog. Early programmable computers operated in base-10. A future computer based on nanotubes, or lasers going through crystals or whatever advancement is "5 years out" could do something entirely different, who knows?
(Are huckabee and guilanni really pro-life or pro-choice?...
I translated Guilanni's response to mean: "I personally am against abortion, but I also don't believe the government should make it illegal." He could have have phrased it much more clearly, though-- if that is actually what he meant, it's actually kind of refreshing to have an candidate answer with "well I believe X, but what I believe isn't important, I'll act in the interest of the nation."
That said, his constant obsession with 9/11 is turning me off very quickly.
If the ESRB is going to bend to the whims of a few noisy people, we're not actually any better off.
No, we are better off because the ESRB's system, like the MPAA's, is *voluntary.*
That is, if I produce a video game and I don't want it to get rated, I don't have to get it rated. If my video game is rated AO-21-OMG then I can still it, the government won't clamp down on it and force me to throw it in the trash can.
The counter-argument to that is since major retailers can choose to not sell un-rated games, or games rated as too offensive, it amounts to "censorship." I think that's a bogus argument, because it's ignoring the thousands of small retailers with no such policy (just as there are thousands of theaters that will show movies un-rated by the MPAA), and it ignores the possibility of Internet distribution.
I'd much rather have corporations in control than the government for two reasons: 1) Corporations act on customer desires much more quickly 2) Once the government puts their hand in a pot, it never, ever, ever comes out
Yeah, but, again, how is that any different than any other content industry? (Sans books for some reason.)
You have to submit your movie to the MPAA, if you get an NC-17 rating it's basically commercially dead and you either stick to your guns and have a very limited release, or you re-edit the film to hit an R rating. Right? If you don't get it rated at all, well, then no theater is going to carry it and you're in the same boat.
The ESRB is a lot better than the alternative, and I'm pissed that Rockstar is cutting off their nose to spite their face. It's in Rockstar's best interest to support the ESRB, because I can guarantee that if the government takes over, you're not going to see anything even close to the level of Manhunt on shelves.
I know that the Slashdot way of thinking is "we hate all censorship" but in this case you need to set that aside for the greater good.
Possibly, but that's just an indicator that the MPAA is doing a crappy job of rating movies and the ESRB is doing a better job of rating games, isn't it? The fact that a movie like Saw, or my personal favorite example Scary Movie (which had a scene where a guy is killed by being stabbed in the head by a dildo) is getting an R rating is an entirely different issue.
Or my less offensive example, how the movie Whale Rider (an great and inspirational film that all kids/teens should see) was rated PG-13 because in one scene there is an object that may or may not be a pipe, which may or may not have been used to smoke marijuana out-of-focus in the background. (Seriously! That's the "drug reference" mentioned by the MPAA.) PG-13 puts the movie out of the age range of it's core audience, assuming parents followed the ratings to-the-letter. It's ridiculous.
But anyway, yes. I personally believe: 1) The ESRB is doing a pretty good job. They have a couple black marks (rating Halo 2 too high IMO; rating Oblivion initially too low), but in general they've been doing a much better job than the MPAA for movies. 2) The ESRB is, by far, the lesser of two evils. If the ESRB ceases to exist, or if they fail to do maintain confidence among customers, the alternative (and only alternative) is *government control* of games. That's a far worse result than Rockstar losing a few sales due to hard-to-find AO titles, and I hope that Rockstar recognizes that.
Hell, if Hillary gets elected, we'll be in a full-on fight to keep the government out of games regardless of how well the ESRB's doing.
I think Oblivion should have been rated Mature from the start. The naked skin excuse was pretty weak, but re-rating the game to be more accurate I don't see as a big deal... except that it's a pain for retailers who have to stick stickers on all the boxes.
If Halo 2 gets a Mature for fantasy combat against aliens, then Oblivion with realistic combat against other humans definitely deserves Mature.
Rockstar was faced with an injustice in the first place. Cry me a fucking river.
Elaborate please?
Rockstar is just in the exact same position as every company that makes movies, video games, or CDs. (For some reason, books don't have a rating system-- American Psycho should be an AO.) Maybe you consider that an "injustice", but there's nothing unique about this case, is there?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! I'm going to make up unrealistic anti-Microsoft stories and post them too with absolutely no supporting evidence!
7 years ago I was working as a dog walker in Seattle. One day Bill Gates pulled over in his limo and proceeded to kick every single dog in the ribcage while yelling "what's the frequency, Kenneth!?" repeatedly. Then he pulled an infant out of a nearby stroller and use it as a step to get back in his limo! The End.
I read your link. It's good stuff, the problem is that I've had such terrible experiences with Java over the past few years, it's not enough to get me to install it. Maybe in a few more years, maybe, if sites start using it. But probably still not.
Compare the experience to RealPlayer. Or what Adobe's rapidly doing with Adobe Reader. If your software is crappy for a long amount of time, you'll lose your audience. Even if you then proceed to fix the major problems with your software, there are a lot of people who will never come back. Java's already lost the web, I think mostly because of Sun's clunkiness and Microsoft's implemention being shucked from XP, and it's not coming back. Sorry Sun, but you had your chance, much like RealPlayer did.
No kidding. The latest version of Flash can almost be considered a war crime. Hey Adobe: if your application takes more than 30 seconds to show a DIALOG BOX, you've failed monumentally. (And I thought Flash 8 had a bad UI!)
I have a different question to ask? Why do so many web sites requite scripting in the first place? It is one thing to provided reduced functionality if the client does not support scripting (by default I do not run javascript, java, Flash, etc), but why require it? I don't care about the neat media and am quite willing skip it and conserve my bandwidth.
You represent about 0.1% of the web by keeping JS and Flash turned off. You can't really expect websites to cater to that 0.1% with the other 99.9% can work with their page just fine-- and so can you by checking a box in an option dialog.
I agree with you that problems should be worked out in the framework of CSS, but you gotta wonder about people who design a layout language that doesn't even support COLUMNS without weird hacks. What kind of content was it intended to style? I mean, did the CSS standards committee never open a newspaper once in their life? The fact that it took until 3.0 to get columns, and it'll take another 5 years for all browsers to support it, it's just crazy.
The current Javascript has a lot of bad bits, though.
How come IE uses "innerText" and Firefox uses "textContent"? Right there is a little compatibility function nearly every single Javascript in the world needs to write to work correctly.
Why is there no "GetElementsByClassName?" Another function nearly every Javascript needs.
How come the various "geometry"-returning functions have some baffling results? How come it's so hard to answer basic questions like, "did the user scroll to the bottom of the webpage?" What the hell is a "userAgent" anyway? Does the measure of it include toolbars? Status bar? How come the screen functions return different results for IE and Firefox on multiple-monitor systems? How come the screen functions don't even *support* multiple-monitor systems?
Why does Firefox insert blank text nodes into the DOM while IE doesn't?
How come my Javascript can't tell if a TextArea has text selected or not?
How come the internationalization features suck so much?
Why does "XMLHttpRequest" have such a strange name? Are acronyms supposed to be in all-caps or not, because that function shows it both ways.
There are a hundred problems, not necessarily with Javascript, but with Javascript's interaction with the DOM and browser. I think it's clear that both IE and Mozilla are right in that *something* needs to be done. Whether it's a new language or a new direction for JS, I dunno. (I like the language itself, for the record.)
When's the last time you saw a Java applet on a serious commercial website?
Java's dead on the web. Sun had a chance for awhile there, but Flash pretty much killed them off. That said, I think Java is in many ways preferable to AJAX for building web apps, I just don't see it happening in this current environment. That the Java runtime on Windows is a really crummy piece of software doesn't help.
Just curious, why were you so excited to tell me I'm wrong, and act like a doof about it "Is it inconceivable that you're wrong?" I was just asking a question. Sheesh.
Sorry I wasn't really trying to be a jerk.
Your question is kind of of the form, "I thought that the sky was neon yellow. How come so many people are asying the sky is blue?" The obvious answer is, "well, you thought wrong."
New Safari with spell check, because in case you ahve not noticed, I can't spell worth beans.
Safari has always had spell-check on OS X, even the 1.0 version. (I don't believe the Windows version of Safari has spell-check, and I'm too lazy to open it up and check...)
I thought Leopard was mainly changes to Finder and bundled apps, nothing core to the kernel that would cause apps to be unable to print or interfere with video. Does anyone know if there is some common cause to these issues?
It's inconceivable that you're wrong?
Seriously, though, Apple made a ton of internal changes, mostly future-proofing for things like resolution independence, compatibility with many-core and 64-bit CPUs, in fact 64-bitting everything (and announcing that the entire Carbon API is basically deprecated-- I'm sure Adobe loves that news.) Everything involving Classic is deprecated.
There were lots of internal changes that could break apps, in other words.
Feh, short-timer!
Remember System 7.0? People get upset about bricking an iPhone, remember bricking your entire OS because you had the audacity to drag a font out of the Fonts folder?
That's a pretty shaky foundation to say that "all OSes depend on..." equates to "all OSes borrow a couple ideas from..."
I really don't care, I just have to call out BS claims when I see them.
Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard? I had no idea it could be applied for this purpose!
At the same time, Apple is a reminder that non free will software always depend on the free software world and will always have problems.
Non-free-will software? What is that, software you're forced to use while some jack-booted thug holds a gun to your forehead? I don't think we have any non-free-will software in the US.
More seriously, I have no clue what this is supposed to mean. Non-free software will always depend on free software? Explain DOS, Mac OS Classic, OS/2, Netware, etc. (Actually Netware probably does depend on some free software.)
Upgrades of Debian are always smooth and lossless.
With all apologies to Baghdad Bob:
"I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide [at their keyboards]. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly."
An investigation was launched into whether they were sock puppets!? WTF is happening over there are Wikipedia. Before you reply, you better make sure I'm not a paper plate bean shaker-- you wouldn't want to leak valuable intel to our kindergarten craft project overlords.
Except there's nothing that requires computers to operate in base-2. Early electronic computers (the kind used to aim nukes and such) were analog. Early programmable computers operated in base-10. A future computer based on nanotubes, or lasers going through crystals or whatever advancement is "5 years out" could do something entirely different, who knows?
I agree that "kibibyte" sounds moronic, though.
The problem is that a 2^k organization of bytes is fundamental to the way computers operate.
Not my computer! I'm writing this post on ENIAC.
(Are huckabee and guilanni really pro-life or pro-choice?...
I translated Guilanni's response to mean: "I personally am against abortion, but I also don't believe the government should make it illegal." He could have have phrased it much more clearly, though-- if that is actually what he meant, it's actually kind of refreshing to have an candidate answer with "well I believe X, but what I believe isn't important, I'll act in the interest of the nation."
That said, his constant obsession with 9/11 is turning me off very quickly.
If the ESRB is going to bend to the whims of a few noisy people, we're not actually any better off.
No, we are better off because the ESRB's system, like the MPAA's, is *voluntary.*
That is, if I produce a video game and I don't want it to get rated, I don't have to get it rated. If my video game is rated AO-21-OMG then I can still it, the government won't clamp down on it and force me to throw it in the trash can.
The counter-argument to that is since major retailers can choose to not sell un-rated games, or games rated as too offensive, it amounts to "censorship." I think that's a bogus argument, because it's ignoring the thousands of small retailers with no such policy (just as there are thousands of theaters that will show movies un-rated by the MPAA), and it ignores the possibility of Internet distribution.
I'd much rather have corporations in control than the government for two reasons:
1) Corporations act on customer desires much more quickly
2) Once the government puts their hand in a pot, it never, ever, ever comes out
Yeah, but, again, how is that any different than any other content industry? (Sans books for some reason.)
You have to submit your movie to the MPAA, if you get an NC-17 rating it's basically commercially dead and you either stick to your guns and have a very limited release, or you re-edit the film to hit an R rating. Right? If you don't get it rated at all, well, then no theater is going to carry it and you're in the same boat.
No, I have an understanding and it's this:
The ESRB is a lot better than the alternative, and I'm pissed that Rockstar is cutting off their nose to spite their face. It's in Rockstar's best interest to support the ESRB, because I can guarantee that if the government takes over, you're not going to see anything even close to the level of Manhunt on shelves.
I know that the Slashdot way of thinking is "we hate all censorship" but in this case you need to set that aside for the greater good.
Possibly, but that's just an indicator that the MPAA is doing a crappy job of rating movies and the ESRB is doing a better job of rating games, isn't it? The fact that a movie like Saw, or my personal favorite example Scary Movie (which had a scene where a guy is killed by being stabbed in the head by a dildo) is getting an R rating is an entirely different issue.
Or my less offensive example, how the movie Whale Rider (an great and inspirational film that all kids/teens should see) was rated PG-13 because in one scene there is an object that may or may not be a pipe, which may or may not have been used to smoke marijuana out-of-focus in the background. (Seriously! That's the "drug reference" mentioned by the MPAA.) PG-13 puts the movie out of the age range of it's core audience, assuming parents followed the ratings to-the-letter. It's ridiculous.
But anyway, yes. I personally believe:
1) The ESRB is doing a pretty good job. They have a couple black marks (rating Halo 2 too high IMO; rating Oblivion initially too low), but in general they've been doing a much better job than the MPAA for movies.
2) The ESRB is, by far, the lesser of two evils. If the ESRB ceases to exist, or if they fail to do maintain confidence among customers, the alternative (and only alternative) is *government control* of games. That's a far worse result than Rockstar losing a few sales due to hard-to-find AO titles, and I hope that Rockstar recognizes that.
Hell, if Hillary gets elected, we'll be in a full-on fight to keep the government out of games regardless of how well the ESRB's doing.
Yeah, but Sheriff John Brunell says that if you buy the HD carbon nanotube for a bit more, you can get extra stations between the stations!
I think Oblivion should have been rated Mature from the start. The naked skin excuse was pretty weak, but re-rating the game to be more accurate I don't see as a big deal... except that it's a pain for retailers who have to stick stickers on all the boxes.
If Halo 2 gets a Mature for fantasy combat against aliens, then Oblivion with realistic combat against other humans definitely deserves Mature.
Rockstar was faced with an injustice in the first place. Cry me a fucking river.
Elaborate please?
Rockstar is just in the exact same position as every company that makes movies, video games, or CDs. (For some reason, books don't have a rating system-- American Psycho should be an AO.) Maybe you consider that an "injustice", but there's nothing unique about this case, is there?