On the other hand, the Oracle peculiarity about '' and NULL although aesthetically ugly, has almost no practical importance.
Sez you. I've seen tons of Oracle databases that are forced to use a surrogate value for '', since the language DB has no support for it. I mean, true, the workaround is there, but it's one of those "why should you *have* to work around it?" things that drives me batty.
But the software stack thing is true, too. Regardless of the DB quality, I'd rather stab red-hot steel spikes into my eyeballs than work with OracleApps again. Ugh.
Ok, then ignore the hardware stuff and respond to the stuff about stagging and ROI. Which is really the most important point... Linux could support every single little widget ever made ever, but if it's more expensive to run then it's a non-starter. And, hey, guess what? Your salary costs go into the "running expense" bucket, so take that into account.
(Most Linux fans do not. Instead they get distracted by other things, like pointing out how much hardware it supports. Hell, look at this thread.)
I've never, in my entire career, seen a corporate laptop running Citrix. Usually it's just a AD-connected Windows install with a VPN application to securely connect to the home office.
The JS engine's optimizer should see exactly ZERO differences in the generated code. The addition of an explicit "return" vs an implicit "return" is absolutely proof this is not optimization trickery.
Absolute is an extremely strong word. It could simply mean there's a bug in IE's JS parser, so that it produces different results with the return than it does without.
I mean, this is a useless conversation, because obviously you drew your ONLY POSSIBLE CONCLUSION long before you even bothered to think even slightly about the evidence. It's obvious from your posts that you have such a mouth-foaming blind rage towards Microsoft, you'd never give them a fair shake in a million years.
In other words, the ONLY POSSIBLE CONCLUSION is exactly as I depicted and exactly as IE troll moderators are working so hard to hide via their false, trollish moderations.
I honestly think you're paranoid, and need help. At the very least, you need to turn off your computer for a few hours. They're not all out to get you, man.
Excuse me for drawing the only possible conclusion and stating it here. Silly me for assuming readers of a technology centric website would be able to reach the same, obvious, and sole conclusion.
Dude. I considered the exact same evidence you did, and drew a different conclusion. As did the person who *actually ran the tests* (let me remind you, the source for all of this doesn't accuse Microsoft of cheating.) Maybe you should relax a bit, take a deep breath, and think, "hm, maybe there is more than one conclusion to be drawn..."
Basically, if you did not reach said conclusion, slashdot is over your head. And the moderators are fucking insane. Offtopic this for completely on topic posts. And flaimbait that for polite replies.
Fucking troll moderators and showing their stupidity like crazy today - as is the slashdot reading/posting population.
Well, make sure you call them stupid and swear a lot. That's almost certainly going to help.
Ok, I can't speak for the grandparent, but I read the whole thing. The blog entry mentions it with kind of a "huh, that's odd" attitude-- it definitely doesn't accuse Microsoft of cheating. Nor do any of the comments. So I think you're blowing it out of proportion.
Look, if Microsoft wanted to cheat on a benchmark, would they: 1) Only bother to add the cheat in to a single small test out of hundreds 2) Make the result instant, or close to it, instead of a realistic execution time, thus making it easy to detect?
No, of course not. What you're looking at is a bug, either in the test, or in IE9.
It doesn't help that the entire rest of the blog article focuses on: 1) How crappy these benchmarks are 2) How they don't take into-account caching, which is exactly the kind of thing that could produce a 1ms response when you're expecting a 20ms response
Maybe the only "problem" is that IE's JS engine saw though the test, said, "hm, this code doesn't do jack" and skipped it.
In other words, they are throwing more hardware at the problem (graphics cards AND multiple processor cores) instead of actually producing a faster or more resource efficient browser. Anyone else read that the same way?
And you would be happier, of course, if Microsoft ignored potential avenues for making their product faster? "They actually used the full capacity of my computer to make their product faster! THOSE FIENDS!"
There are worse languages than JavaScript to write applications with. Heck, with a few minor additions (namespaces, standard library), JavaScript could be at least as good a platform as PHP, Ruby or Python.
It goes along with the policy of not allowing children to purchase beer, cigarettes, adult magazines or toys, certain weapons, etc.
Policy. Not law.
Store policy.
Stores can already refuse to sell the product to anybody they want to, that doesn't change. What these people are trying to do is pass a *law* that says the *government* must enforce the restriction... this is more strict than the movie industry, the comics industry, the printing industry. (Hell, the printing industry doesn't have jack right now-- any 10-year-old can walk into a bookstore and buy American Psycho.)
Point being, I have no problem with any kind of voluntary policy covering violent video games. These already exist. These are already sufficient, as the voluntary policies covering R-rated movies are sufficient. There's no reason the video game industry should have a law where no other industry does.
I found jury duty a nice break from normal, boring, work. I got paid at the same rate, plus the commute was shorter. Plus a little stipend for lunch, $50 IIRC for three days of service. There are some boring patches of waiting, but nothing a laptop or book can't solve.
Of course, the problem in my state is that if you're chosen Foreman of a jury, your name goes down on the record of the verdict. We don't have anonymous juries... so that's a little disconcerting if you help to put someone away, and he can find your actual name trivially.
I can sue you for defamation in the US for pretty much anything. Doesn't mean I'll win.
Except he wasn't being sued by an individual, he was being brought before a government-run tribunal. Under an extremely flimsy pretext, I might add-- they pretty much *had* to dismiss the claims, as they would have been roasted before an actual court. (Arguably, this means the system works, but on the other hand, if a real court can examine the claims, why is this quasi-legal tribunal involved at all? Why does it exist at all, except to stomp all over free speech?)
They all do, if you configure them to. Using the default configuration? None of them do.
Note that this virus is mostly affecting people running a 2001 OS (Windows XP), not a 2010 OS (Windows 7). Vista and Windows 7 users are pretty well-protected from this virus, using the default configuration.
(Of course you weaseled around that one by saying "in use in 2010", but I felt it was only fair to point it out anyway. Hell, Windows 3.11 is "in use in 2010".)
#2b, Fundamental freedoms: "Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:... freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;"
Seriously, man, China has Freedom of Speech too, in their constitution. Canada seems to respect its version as well as China respects theirs.
I'm not saying that the US is perfect, but Freedom of Speech is defined by a nation's *actions*, not by the words an important document. Canada can have 10,000 paragraphs about freedom of speech, but the instant they prosecute Mclean's magazine, their reputation goes down the crapper.
It's a pity you couldn't manifest all of this moral outage when we were funding and arming those Islamic extremists to fight the Rooskies.
Are you saying that if we contribute to causing a problem, we *should not* contribute to solving that same problem?
In my opinion, the fact that we were partially responsible for creating Saddam's regime and the Taliban's rise to power makes it even *more* crucial that we do everything in our power to combat that evil.
Look at the differences between the Orange Box version of Team Fortress 2 and the PC version.
Wha? The Orange Box *is* the PC version. It's also the name of the console versions. Are you saying that if I bought the Orange Box on PC, it has different features than buying Team Fortress 2 alone?
Man is Slashdot the largest collection of conservative whiny techies in the world or is it just me?
It's not just you.
I like the term "tech luddites," which sounds like a contradiction until you start reading Slashdot comments. They're enthusiastic about tech, not because they like trying new things, but they like complaining about how the new things aren't as good as things were in 1988.
UAC was introduced to make this as annoying as possible to get developers to stop doing this. Surprise, it didn't work!
Sure it has. I only know of a single program that hasn't yet fixed it's "pointless UAC" errors. Every other program I use that had UAC errors when Vista came out is patched now.
Maybe my experience isn't typical, but I think at the bare minimum you have to admit it's helping.
That's just the same old numbers argument... when really it is way easier to compromise a Windows box than just about any other OS around.
Can you prove that? OS X seems to be the first to fall, any time there's a OS compromising competition...
If the situation were reversed and the alternative OSes still retained their level of security I do not think you would see the same level of threats as you do with Windows.
We'll never know, until the situation reverses itself. Until then, it's pretty damned hypothetical.
But, remember, you don't just get the computer savvy Windows users, you get the naive ones as well. Are the other OSes nearly as good at handling naive users? I doubt it-- they haven't *had* to be. (Except OS X.)
That is of course assuming the increased number of users using alternative OSes do not do stupid shit like run as root or change login users to have root level access.
Haha! If you assume that, then Windows would be just as secure as everything else!
IE9 is just another attempt at catching up, it's pretty feeble when a browser thats "coming soon" is only going to be "on-par" with whats already available, and will be behind what everyone else has coming soon.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion. I just wish people wouldn't gripe about a browser not implementing unfinished standards, that's all I was saying.
If you want the web to move faster, you gotta get the W3C off their asses, and you gotta get corporations to upgrade their intranets. Those are the two main problems with the web right now-- griping about IE is not the answer.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, the Oracle peculiarity about '' and NULL although aesthetically ugly, has almost no practical importance.
Sez you. I've seen tons of Oracle databases that are forced to use a surrogate value for '', since the language DB has no support for it. I mean, true, the workaround is there, but it's one of those "why should you *have* to work around it?" things that drives me batty.
But the software stack thing is true, too. Regardless of the DB quality, I'd rather stab red-hot steel spikes into my eyeballs than work with OracleApps again. Ugh.
At least MS SQL Server can tell the difference between '' and (null).
Ok, then ignore the hardware stuff and respond to the stuff about stagging and ROI. Which is really the most important point... Linux could support every single little widget ever made ever, but if it's more expensive to run then it's a non-starter. And, hey, guess what? Your salary costs go into the "running expense" bucket, so take that into account.
(Most Linux fans do not. Instead they get distracted by other things, like pointing out how much hardware it supports. Hell, look at this thread.)
I've never, in my entire career, seen a corporate laptop running Citrix. Usually it's just a AD-connected Windows install with a VPN application to securely connect to the home office.
Not sure how much snark is in your post, so apologies if this is a whoosh.
The goal here is to *save* money. You can buy a decent PC (and servers) with all the Microsoft licenses for less than the Mac hardware alone.
I recall the last time Stallman visited Argentina, he spent more time with politicians than with programmers.
Wow. We've had some bad diplomats in the past but... wow. The cake has been taken.
Every time I think there's a new low for Slashdot, I compare it to this article: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/2259257
So far, I don't think that article's been beat.
The JS engine's optimizer should see exactly ZERO differences in the generated code. The addition of an explicit "return" vs an implicit "return" is absolutely proof this is not optimization trickery.
Absolute is an extremely strong word. It could simply mean there's a bug in IE's JS parser, so that it produces different results with the return than it does without.
I mean, this is a useless conversation, because obviously you drew your ONLY POSSIBLE CONCLUSION long before you even bothered to think even slightly about the evidence. It's obvious from your posts that you have such a mouth-foaming blind rage towards Microsoft, you'd never give them a fair shake in a million years.
In other words, the ONLY POSSIBLE CONCLUSION is exactly as I depicted and exactly as IE troll moderators are working so hard to hide via their false, trollish moderations.
I honestly think you're paranoid, and need help. At the very least, you need to turn off your computer for a few hours. They're not all out to get you, man.
Excuse me for drawing the only possible conclusion and stating it here. Silly me for assuming readers of a technology centric website would be able to reach the same, obvious, and sole conclusion.
Dude. I considered the exact same evidence you did, and drew a different conclusion. As did the person who *actually ran the tests* (let me remind you, the source for all of this doesn't accuse Microsoft of cheating.) Maybe you should relax a bit, take a deep breath, and think, "hm, maybe there is more than one conclusion to be drawn..."
Basically, if you did not reach said conclusion, slashdot is over your head. And the moderators are fucking insane. Offtopic this for completely on topic posts. And flaimbait that for polite replies.
Fucking troll moderators and showing their stupidity like crazy today - as is the slashdot reading/posting population.
Well, make sure you call them stupid and swear a lot. That's almost certainly going to help.
Ok, I can't speak for the grandparent, but I read the whole thing. The blog entry mentions it with kind of a "huh, that's odd" attitude-- it definitely doesn't accuse Microsoft of cheating. Nor do any of the comments. So I think you're blowing it out of proportion.
Look, if Microsoft wanted to cheat on a benchmark, would they:
1) Only bother to add the cheat in to a single small test out of hundreds
2) Make the result instant, or close to it, instead of a realistic execution time, thus making it easy to detect?
No, of course not. What you're looking at is a bug, either in the test, or in IE9.
It doesn't help that the entire rest of the blog article focuses on:
1) How crappy these benchmarks are
2) How they don't take into-account caching, which is exactly the kind of thing that could produce a 1ms response when you're expecting a 20ms response
Maybe the only "problem" is that IE's JS engine saw though the test, said, "hm, this code doesn't do jack" and skipped it.
In other words, they are throwing more hardware at the problem (graphics cards AND multiple processor cores) instead of actually producing a faster or more resource efficient browser. Anyone else read that the same way?
And you would be happier, of course, if Microsoft ignored potential avenues for making their product faster? "They actually used the full capacity of my computer to make their product faster! THOSE FIENDS!"
There are worse languages than JavaScript to write applications with. Heck, with a few minor additions (namespaces, standard library), JavaScript could be at least as good a platform as PHP, Ruby or Python.
It goes along with the policy of not allowing children to purchase beer, cigarettes, adult magazines or toys, certain weapons, etc.
Policy. Not law.
Store policy.
Stores can already refuse to sell the product to anybody they want to, that doesn't change. What these people are trying to do is pass a *law* that says the *government* must enforce the restriction... this is more strict than the movie industry, the comics industry, the printing industry. (Hell, the printing industry doesn't have jack right now-- any 10-year-old can walk into a bookstore and buy American Psycho.)
Point being, I have no problem with any kind of voluntary policy covering violent video games. These already exist. These are already sufficient, as the voluntary policies covering R-rated movies are sufficient. There's no reason the video game industry should have a law where no other industry does.
Of course, the same issue was present in the original Windows XP that shipped with the machine.
Really? Microsoft went through a lot of trouble to ensure everything in XP was "safe" (not cut-off) on a 800x600 monitor.
I found jury duty a nice break from normal, boring, work. I got paid at the same rate, plus the commute was shorter. Plus a little stipend for lunch, $50 IIRC for three days of service. There are some boring patches of waiting, but nothing a laptop or book can't solve.
Of course, the problem in my state is that if you're chosen Foreman of a jury, your name goes down on the record of the verdict. We don't have anonymous juries... so that's a little disconcerting if you help to put someone away, and he can find your actual name trivially.
I can sue you for defamation in the US for pretty much anything. Doesn't mean I'll win.
Except he wasn't being sued by an individual, he was being brought before a government-run tribunal. Under an extremely flimsy pretext, I might add-- they pretty much *had* to dismiss the claims, as they would have been roasted before an actual court. (Arguably, this means the system works, but on the other hand, if a real court can examine the claims, why is this quasi-legal tribunal involved at all? Why does it exist at all, except to stomp all over free speech?)
They all do, if you configure them to. Using the default configuration? None of them do.
Note that this virus is mostly affecting people running a 2001 OS (Windows XP), not a 2010 OS (Windows 7). Vista and Windows 7 users are pretty well-protected from this virus, using the default configuration.
(Of course you weaseled around that one by saying "in use in 2010", but I felt it was only fair to point it out anyway. Hell, Windows 3.11 is "in use in 2010".)
#2b, Fundamental freedoms: "Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:... freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;"
Unless you're Mark Steyn.
Seriously, man, China has Freedom of Speech too, in their constitution. Canada seems to respect its version as well as China respects theirs.
I'm not saying that the US is perfect, but Freedom of Speech is defined by a nation's *actions*, not by the words an important document. Canada can have 10,000 paragraphs about freedom of speech, but the instant they prosecute Mclean's magazine, their reputation goes down the crapper.
It's a pity you couldn't manifest all of this moral outage when we were funding and arming those Islamic extremists to fight the Rooskies.
Are you saying that if we contribute to causing a problem, we *should not* contribute to solving that same problem?
In my opinion, the fact that we were partially responsible for creating Saddam's regime and the Taliban's rise to power makes it even *more* crucial that we do everything in our power to combat that evil.
Look at the differences between the Orange Box version of Team Fortress 2 and the PC version.
Wha? The Orange Box *is* the PC version. It's also the name of the console versions. Are you saying that if I bought the Orange Box on PC, it has different features than buying Team Fortress 2 alone?
Or... what the fuck are you saying?
Ambitious teacher filing for grants. Of course, that doesn't explain who handed the grant money over...
Man is Slashdot the largest collection of conservative whiny techies in the world or is it just me?
It's not just you.
I like the term "tech luddites," which sounds like a contradiction until you start reading Slashdot comments. They're enthusiastic about tech, not because they like trying new things, but they like complaining about how the new things aren't as good as things were in 1988.
UAC was introduced to make this as annoying as possible to get developers to stop doing this. Surprise, it didn't work!
Sure it has. I only know of a single program that hasn't yet fixed it's "pointless UAC" errors. Every other program I use that had UAC errors when Vista came out is patched now.
Maybe my experience isn't typical, but I think at the bare minimum you have to admit it's helping.
That's just the same old numbers argument... when really it is way easier to compromise a Windows box than just about any other OS around.
Can you prove that? OS X seems to be the first to fall, any time there's a OS compromising competition...
If the situation were reversed and the alternative OSes still retained their level of security I do not think you would see the same level of threats as you do with Windows.
We'll never know, until the situation reverses itself. Until then, it's pretty damned hypothetical.
But, remember, you don't just get the computer savvy Windows users, you get the naive ones as well. Are the other OSes nearly as good at handling naive users? I doubt it-- they haven't *had* to be. (Except OS X.)
That is of course assuming the increased number of users using alternative OSes do not do stupid shit like run as root or change login users to have root level access.
Haha! If you assume that, then Windows would be just as secure as everything else!
IE9 is just another attempt at catching up, it's pretty feeble when a browser thats "coming soon" is only going to be "on-par" with whats already available, and will be behind what everyone else has coming soon.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion. I just wish people wouldn't gripe about a browser not implementing unfinished standards, that's all I was saying.
If you want the web to move faster, you gotta get the W3C off their asses, and you gotta get corporations to upgrade their intranets. Those are the two main problems with the web right now-- griping about IE is not the answer.