I'd suggest port blocking 80 for any computer that is detected running a web browser, but that might prevent some percentage of legitimate work.
Do you mean web *server*?
The vast, vast, vast majority of companies are going to need port 80 (and 443) opened. I don't know the last time you stepped into a corporate environment, Taco, but that's how you do your timecard, put your vacation time on the calendar, sometimes how you answer email even.
I work in a paperless office... at least, there's no paper *required* by the office. (Obviously people can write on paper if they want to, or print things out.)
We're a web advertising company in Seattle (I know, turn the hate on) so we're pretty progressive. But it's not as if the paperless office never happened anywhere... I work in one.
What does Time Machine do different than System Restore?
I'm wagering (not 100% sure) that System Restore would also have been able to repair the parent's issue, it sounds like he didn't bother to try it before reformatting. But it definitely can replace lost system DLL files.
The jury's job is to decide if the law was broken. Period. They don't get to "make allowances" for how nice people are, they get zero say in the sentencing.
I had a similar experience where I had to vote guilty to a guy who I don't believe deserved the punishment the court would be required to hand down, but there was nothing else I could do... he did break the letter of the law.
I'm curious, what would you advise clients about SilverLight???
I really, really want it to catch on, since it's completely superior to Flash in every possible way. (Even ActionScript 3 doesn't hold a candle.) I'd love to be able to develop on it and have my apps work on as many browsers as Flash apps.
But at the moment, adoption is too slow. The sites Microsoft was using to try to drive adoption generally have switched back to Flash, sadly enough.
Not only that, but Microsoft has been discouraging the use of ActiveX as much as everybody else... they've done absolutely nothing to improve it in ages, other than the required security patches. They've moved all their own sites off of it. (Except perhaps Windows Live-- it was still using ActiveX as of about a year ago.)
If their developers were actually good, they'd know that ActiveX is a dead, dead, dead technology-- dead to users, dead to developers, dead to its inventor. It's dead.
I'd recommend you switch to a bank/broker with good software developers, but sadly I don't think such a beast exists. For some reason, some industries (financial, healthcare, insurance) just can not get their shit together when it comes to technology... someone should study that.
If I could control the HTML of the site, why would I bother with a bookmarklet in the first place?:)
Of course, I don't even control the HTML of the site normally-- our product is just a Javascript that customers put on their site without our having any access to it. The bookmarklet lets me give demos using their actual site instead of having to demo it on a mock-up, it's much more convincing that way.
Again, this is all one of the many scenarios the W3C never imagined when creating the standards.
Wow, you're exactly the kind of full-of-yourself holier-than-thou douchebag web developer I'm talking about. Thanks for the vivid example to back me up.
Dude, you're an asshole, you're producing buggy code that, like it or not, you'll have to eventually fix, and you're pissing off all your users and many of your co-workers. Get the fuck over yourself, using IE isn't like having bowel cancer, it's just another piece of software.
The IE related tools are inferior,
Visual Studio is a hundred times better than Firebug for debugging Javascript. (And even the free Express versions can be used in this way, so no need to buy anything.)
I will say that Firebug is better for diving down into the DOM and tweaking stuff, though. (Although I haven't much experience on the built-in DOM inspector on IE8... can anybody speak to how well it works?)
the browser itself is inferior
Really? Because it's got process separation, which is more than Firefox has going for it. And when IE9 comes out, its JS performance will be on-par with Firefox too... so there's two major areas where IE is demonstrably *not* inferior.
If more developers ignored IE, fewer users would consider it the one and only browser.
No they wouldn't, they'd just leave your website and go elsewhere. And given your attitude, I'd say you deserve to lose the business.
Why wouldn't it work in Safari/Chrome? W3Cschools says it's supported in all major browsers except Firefox (which is no longer true; Firefox supports it as of version 3.6).
At the time I was puzzling over this, nothing supported it but IE. It's great that other browsers are finally starting to say, "hey, wait, I guess some of the stuff Microsoft did isn't so bad after-all!"
But the fact that this fucking useful readyState still has a "No" in the W3C column pisses me off to no end... what is the W3C even *for*, other than getting in the way of useful features propagating to all browsers?
A) is actually a good idea, and could work... it would require some modifications, but it'd work.
If the editors paid a tenth as much attention to the story as the commentators did, I'll be pissed that they're giving this bozo even more traffic as a reward for passing bullshit off as fact.
Since they don't, I'll instead just have to remain pissed that the editors don't pay a tenth as much attention as the commentators do.
Hint for Slashdotters: anything posted by the Exo Performance Network is pure bullshit. Don't believe a syllable without independent verification.
That might work in IE and Firefox and probably Opera (although I'm pretty sure I tried readyState in Firefox before and it didn't work... maybe I should go back and re-test that-- might depend on which rendering mode the browser's in, too.) But that still leaves Safari and Chrome out in the cold.
If that works, the *only* reason it works in Firefox is because readyState is something they swallowed their pride on and implemented due to its usefulness, not its presence in the W3C standards. There's no standards-compliant way to do what I need. If Firefox (and other W3C-strict browsers) would swallow their pride on a few other IE-isms, it would make my job a lot easier.
The reason this came up is that I was adapting some old IE-only Javascript, and I came across this and thought to myself, "huh, I wonder what the standards-compliant way of finding the page's load status is" only to find out... there is none!
The last 4 jobs I've had all tested on the current version of Firefox (most devs actually used FF during dev)
This is another gripe of mine. I have the same problem with web designers around here, I've tried explaining to them that they'd have a MUCH easier time of it if they gave up their prejudices for awhile and just did the dev on IE. (Or both.) Instead, I get sites delivered to me with extremely obvious and blatant flaws in IE... they don't even bother to glance at the site in another browser.
Just irritating. Look, I know Firebug is pretty cool, but then again so is DOM Toolbar in IE. And if you have Visual Studio installed, Javascript debugging in IE is pretty good too. Just swallow your pride and use it.
The last 4 jobs I've had all tested on the current version of Firefox (most devs actually used FF during dev) , the latest version of Safari in the last 3, and IE, fortunately, only versions 7 and 8.
Yah, I'm dropping IE6 in the next version of our Javascript, but that's probably 6 months out. Since the current version already supports IE 5.5 and 6, there's no point in breaking it on purpose.
All that's relevant is, it does stuff that requires the DOM to be fully-loaded. The only "better way" I can think of is adding a flag to the bookmarklet that says, "hey, you're on an already loaded page!" But that doesn't work because the bookmarklet could be run before the page is done loading.
All the experts I've talked to have basically said, "hm, yeah no browsers but IE support that." Maybe true.
Depends on the type of app. For a GUI app, OS X is significantly more different from Windows than IE6 is from Chrome. There are cross-platform libraries that mitigate this, but most are extremely buggy on any platform other than its "native" one.
If you're using a really good cross-platform environment, for example RealBasic, at best I'd say the testing would be on-par with a web app.
For a CLI app, OS differences are trivial. And of course, nothing us cross-platform with iPhone OS, it's a mutant right now.
I mean, CSS (IMO at least) was completely useless for serious website development until version 3, when it finally gained columns. *Columns!!* One of the most fundamental page layout concepts, and CSS didn't get it until version 3.0! Sure, you could make a box with a dotted top border and a dashed bottom border, but you can't make two fucking columns without workarounds. It still doesn't have math, making simple constructs like "5px + 3em" impossible. (You can't do the math at design-time because you don't know what an "em" is until run-time.)
Frankly, I have no problems with browser makers extending the standards when the standards suck... especially DOM.
For example, I've written a Javascript tag that does cool things to a webpage and can be either included on the page HTML itself, or can be loaded through a bookmarklet. The problem is, IE is the *only* browser that lets this script ask if the page is fully loaded if the script is dropped on the page after the page is loaded. All the more W3C-compliant browsers only let you install a handler on the Load or Pageshow event... if that event's already fired, you're fucked, since it never fires twice. The (completely retarded) work-around is to have my JS actually search the DOM tree to find a script tag including itself for non-IE browsers.
This is one of those cases where the Microsoft engineers who wrote their particular extension of DOM were *much better* at writing the standard than the W3C was, since they anticipated and compensated for a use case the W3C apparently didn't even bother thinking about.
Also: would it kill the W3C-compliant browsers to add "innerText" to DOM? Just alias it to "textContent." Or to alias attachEvent to addEventListener? You'd get massive compatibility wins for adding it and it would take like 10 minutes of work. If the W3C were smart, they'd just add those into the standards anyway since so many sites already use them. (Whoever came up with textContent when innerHTML already existed should be smacked.)
It's going to be a long time until the average web developer gets to "let's test on Opera!" Unless they have a rich customer using it that they happen to know about. Right now, you're still lucky if they test on IE 6-8, Firefox 2-3 and Safari 2-4... I'd guess 90% of web developers don't even do that, and that's what I (personally) consider the bare minimum.
Of course if you want to do the IE and Safari tests properly, you need a VM for each browser, since IE and Safari versions don't play nice alongside newer IE versions. And to get multiple Firefox versions you have to do a bit of user profile dickery, and even when you've done that it doesn't work quite 100% right... so really, for "simplicity", we just use a VM for every browser except the most current.
To add to the confusion, you can't even test on older versions of Chrome even if you want to, because Google claims since Chrome auto-updates itself, it's literally impossible for someone to be running a year-old version-- yeah, right, Google! I'm sure angels will begin farting out software updates to modem users any day now!
The first was cramming every single character into the movie, that's what made it substandard. It had moments.
My favorite is the second, Beast with a Billion Backs-- the ending is genuinely sad, and that appeals to me. (You can probably tell some of my favorite episodes too.) Also, it has the scene where Wornstrom and the Professor are demonstrating how the portal lets living beings through but not robots, and end up throwing a cute puppy out the window. That scene rocks. "Play time *is* fun time!"
Last time I bought an HP (and I'll never make that mistake again) it came with a kitchen sink installed too. If that wasn't bad enough, they even installed the crapware on the recovery disk that shipped with it-- I had to borrow a clean Windows CD from a friend and reinstall to make it even slightly usable. (Fortunately, the OEM number worked fine with the clean Windows CD.)
But anyway. Java's nothing but a security hole now. Like you said, practically no sites require it, the odds of a normal consumer coming across an application that requires it are pretty remove, and it's just as bloated and ugly as ever.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd suggest port blocking 80 for any computer that is detected running a web browser, but that might prevent some percentage of legitimate work.
Do you mean web *server*?
The vast, vast, vast majority of companies are going to need port 80 (and 443) opened. I don't know the last time you stepped into a corporate environment, Taco, but that's how you do your timecard, put your vacation time on the calendar, sometimes how you answer email even.
How is this Windows' fault exactly? Third-party makes an anti-virus program, third-party doesn't bother to test an update, anti-virus breaks Windows.
Lessee, the *user* bought the program. The *user* installed it with Admin permissions. The *third-party* put in a buggy update.
But you're blaming the OS somehow?
I work in a paperless office... at least, there's no paper *required* by the office. (Obviously people can write on paper if they want to, or print things out.)
We're a web advertising company in Seattle (I know, turn the hate on) so we're pretty progressive. But it's not as if the paperless office never happened anywhere... I work in one.
Look, I know this is Slashdot and we like bashing Microsoft but... what the hell?
Don't you mean, "sent BitDefender a 64-bit version of Vista and Windows 7?" Or are you making a joke going way over my head?
What does Microsoft have to do with a bug in BitDefender?
What does Time Machine do different than System Restore?
I'm wagering (not 100% sure) that System Restore would also have been able to repair the parent's issue, it sounds like he didn't bother to try it before reformatting. But it definitely can replace lost system DLL files.
I'm guessing you've never served on a jury.
The jury's job is to decide if the law was broken. Period. They don't get to "make allowances" for how nice people are, they get zero say in the sentencing.
I had a similar experience where I had to vote guilty to a guy who I don't believe deserved the punishment the court would be required to hand down, but there was nothing else I could do... he did break the letter of the law.
I'm curious, what would you advise clients about SilverLight???
I really, really want it to catch on, since it's completely superior to Flash in every possible way. (Even ActionScript 3 doesn't hold a candle.) I'd love to be able to develop on it and have my apps work on as many browsers as Flash apps.
But at the moment, adoption is too slow. The sites Microsoft was using to try to drive adoption generally have switched back to Flash, sadly enough.
Thank you.
Not only that, but Microsoft has been discouraging the use of ActiveX as much as everybody else... they've done absolutely nothing to improve it in ages, other than the required security patches. They've moved all their own sites off of it. (Except perhaps Windows Live-- it was still using ActiveX as of about a year ago.)
If their developers were actually good, they'd know that ActiveX is a dead, dead, dead technology-- dead to users, dead to developers, dead to its inventor. It's dead.
I'd recommend you switch to a bank/broker with good software developers, but sadly I don't think such a beast exists. For some reason, some industries (financial, healthcare, insurance) just can not get their shit together when it comes to technology... someone should study that.
You don't have the right to ignore laws you don't agree with.
Sorry
People seem to confused the "freedom" "slavery" continuum with the "privacy" "openness" continuum.
There's no contradiction in Facebook being build using free software, and then being completely open with people's data.
If I could control the HTML of the site, why would I bother with a bookmarklet in the first place? :)
Of course, I don't even control the HTML of the site normally-- our product is just a Javascript that customers put on their site without our having any access to it. The bookmarklet lets me give demos using their actual site instead of having to demo it on a mock-up, it's much more convincing that way.
Again, this is all one of the many scenarios the W3C never imagined when creating the standards.
Wow, you're exactly the kind of full-of-yourself holier-than-thou douchebag web developer I'm talking about. Thanks for the vivid example to back me up.
Dude, you're an asshole, you're producing buggy code that, like it or not, you'll have to eventually fix, and you're pissing off all your users and many of your co-workers. Get the fuck over yourself, using IE isn't like having bowel cancer, it's just another piece of software.
The IE related tools are inferior,
Visual Studio is a hundred times better than Firebug for debugging Javascript. (And even the free Express versions can be used in this way, so no need to buy anything.)
I will say that Firebug is better for diving down into the DOM and tweaking stuff, though. (Although I haven't much experience on the built-in DOM inspector on IE8... can anybody speak to how well it works?)
the browser itself is inferior
Really? Because it's got process separation, which is more than Firefox has going for it. And when IE9 comes out, its JS performance will be on-par with Firefox too... so there's two major areas where IE is demonstrably *not* inferior.
If more developers ignored IE, fewer users would consider it the one and only browser.
No they wouldn't, they'd just leave your website and go elsewhere. And given your attitude, I'd say you deserve to lose the business.
Why wouldn't it work in Safari/Chrome? W3Cschools says it's supported in all major browsers except Firefox (which is no longer true; Firefox supports it as of version 3.6).
At the time I was puzzling over this, nothing supported it but IE. It's great that other browsers are finally starting to say, "hey, wait, I guess some of the stuff Microsoft did isn't so bad after-all!"
But the fact that this fucking useful readyState still has a "No" in the W3C column pisses me off to no end... what is the W3C even *for*, other than getting in the way of useful features propagating to all browsers?
A) is actually a good idea, and could work... it would require some modifications, but it'd work.
Thanks for the tip.
If the editors paid a tenth as much attention to the story as the commentators did, I'll be pissed that they're giving this bozo even more traffic as a reward for passing bullshit off as fact.
Since they don't, I'll instead just have to remain pissed that the editors don't pay a tenth as much attention as the commentators do.
Hint for Slashdotters: anything posted by the Exo Performance Network is pure bullshit. Don't believe a syllable without independent verification.
That might work in IE and Firefox and probably Opera (although I'm pretty sure I tried readyState in Firefox before and it didn't work... maybe I should go back and re-test that-- might depend on which rendering mode the browser's in, too.) But that still leaves Safari and Chrome out in the cold.
If that works, the *only* reason it works in Firefox is because readyState is something they swallowed their pride on and implemented due to its usefulness, not its presence in the W3C standards. There's no standards-compliant way to do what I need. If Firefox (and other W3C-strict browsers) would swallow their pride on a few other IE-isms, it would make my job a lot easier.
The reason this came up is that I was adapting some old IE-only Javascript, and I came across this and thought to myself, "huh, I wonder what the standards-compliant way of finding the page's load status is" only to find out... there is none!
The last 4 jobs I've had all tested on the current version of Firefox (most devs actually used FF during dev)
This is another gripe of mine. I have the same problem with web designers around here, I've tried explaining to them that they'd have a MUCH easier time of it if they gave up their prejudices for awhile and just did the dev on IE. (Or both.) Instead, I get sites delivered to me with extremely obvious and blatant flaws in IE... they don't even bother to glance at the site in another browser.
Just irritating. Look, I know Firebug is pretty cool, but then again so is DOM Toolbar in IE. And if you have Visual Studio installed, Javascript debugging in IE is pretty good too. Just swallow your pride and use it.
The last 4 jobs I've had all tested on the current version of Firefox (most devs actually used FF during dev) , the latest version of Safari in the last 3, and IE, fortunately, only versions 7 and 8.
Yah, I'm dropping IE6 in the next version of our Javascript, but that's probably 6 months out. Since the current version already supports IE 5.5 and 6, there's no point in breaking it on purpose.
All that's relevant is, it does stuff that requires the DOM to be fully-loaded. The only "better way" I can think of is adding a flag to the bookmarklet that says, "hey, you're on an already loaded page!" But that doesn't work because the bookmarklet could be run before the page is done loading.
All the experts I've talked to have basically said, "hm, yeah no browsers but IE support that." Maybe true.
If you know of a better way, please let me know.
Depends on the type of app. For a GUI app, OS X is significantly more different from Windows than IE6 is from Chrome. There are cross-platform libraries that mitigate this, but most are extremely buggy on any platform other than its "native" one.
If you're using a really good cross-platform environment, for example RealBasic, at best I'd say the testing would be on-par with a web app.
For a CLI app, OS differences are trivial. And of course, nothing us cross-platform with iPhone OS, it's a mutant right now.
Well, the standards do suck ass.
I mean, CSS (IMO at least) was completely useless for serious website development until version 3, when it finally gained columns. *Columns!!* One of the most fundamental page layout concepts, and CSS didn't get it until version 3.0! Sure, you could make a box with a dotted top border and a dashed bottom border, but you can't make two fucking columns without workarounds. It still doesn't have math, making simple constructs like "5px + 3em" impossible. (You can't do the math at design-time because you don't know what an "em" is until run-time.)
Frankly, I have no problems with browser makers extending the standards when the standards suck... especially DOM.
For example, I've written a Javascript tag that does cool things to a webpage and can be either included on the page HTML itself, or can be loaded through a bookmarklet. The problem is, IE is the *only* browser that lets this script ask if the page is fully loaded if the script is dropped on the page after the page is loaded. All the more W3C-compliant browsers only let you install a handler on the Load or Pageshow event... if that event's already fired, you're fucked, since it never fires twice. The (completely retarded) work-around is to have my JS actually search the DOM tree to find a script tag including itself for non-IE browsers.
This is one of those cases where the Microsoft engineers who wrote their particular extension of DOM were *much better* at writing the standard than the W3C was, since they anticipated and compensated for a use case the W3C apparently didn't even bother thinking about.
Also: would it kill the W3C-compliant browsers to add "innerText" to DOM? Just alias it to "textContent." Or to alias attachEvent to addEventListener? You'd get massive compatibility wins for adding it and it would take like 10 minutes of work. If the W3C were smart, they'd just add those into the standards anyway since so many sites already use them. (Whoever came up with textContent when innerHTML already existed should be smacked.)
It's going to be a long time until the average web developer gets to "let's test on Opera!" Unless they have a rich customer using it that they happen to know about. Right now, you're still lucky if they test on IE 6-8, Firefox 2-3 and Safari 2-4... I'd guess 90% of web developers don't even do that, and that's what I (personally) consider the bare minimum.
Of course if you want to do the IE and Safari tests properly, you need a VM for each browser, since IE and Safari versions don't play nice alongside newer IE versions. And to get multiple Firefox versions you have to do a bit of user profile dickery, and even when you've done that it doesn't work quite 100% right... so really, for "simplicity", we just use a VM for every browser except the most current.
To add to the confusion, you can't even test on older versions of Chrome even if you want to, because Google claims since Chrome auto-updates itself, it's literally impossible for someone to be running a year-old version-- yeah, right, Google! I'm sure angels will begin farting out software updates to modem users any day now!
The first was cramming every single character into the movie, that's what made it substandard. It had moments.
My favorite is the second, Beast with a Billion Backs-- the ending is genuinely sad, and that appeals to me. (You can probably tell some of my favorite episodes too.) Also, it has the scene where Wornstrom and the Professor are demonstrating how the portal lets living beings through but not robots, and end up throwing a cute puppy out the window. That scene rocks. "Play time *is* fun time!"
Why would you use VNC? Microsoft's RDC is so much better, and available for most (if not all) popular OSes.
Plus, since it locks the computer being remote-controlled and encrypts everything, it's much safer than VNC to boot.
Gandhi and King taught non-violent resistance, but you can win against human beings. You can't win against a profit motive.
Superman could!!!
Last time I bought an HP (and I'll never make that mistake again) it came with a kitchen sink installed too. If that wasn't bad enough, they even installed the crapware on the recovery disk that shipped with it-- I had to borrow a clean Windows CD from a friend and reinstall to make it even slightly usable. (Fortunately, the OEM number worked fine with the clean Windows CD.)
But anyway. Java's nothing but a security hole now. Like you said, practically no sites require it, the odds of a normal consumer coming across an application that requires it are pretty remove, and it's just as bloated and ugly as ever.
Haha. Nobody has Java installed, either... that's the worst "fallback" ever.