This appears to be a defensive maneuver in Apple's litigation with Lodesys. You obviously didn't read the article so I'll quote part of it here:
"The idea is, in general, very similar to the Lodsys patent, however, it is much more specific. If Apple was granted the rights to the patent, both sides could easily challenge each other's patents. The question, of course, would also be what Apple would do, if this patent is granted, about Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry developers? Most likely nothing, as there are countless iOS developers who offer their apps for multiple platforms and Apple may not have an interest in upsetting them."
Apple has plenty interest in nobbling the Amazon Kindle, though. If that move would deliver value for shareholders, they'd be remiss to not use the patent aggressively over its lifetime.
Maybe the attempt to patent this is just to draw out prior art, submitted by objectors, that could then be turned against Lodsys even if it torpedoes their own application.
I bought one of these machines around that time for a design company I was interning at. It's an Intergraph, obviously I have no idea which model. These machines were built to order, so it could have anything in there. That multimedia keyboard brings back memories, prolly the worst $100 I ever spent.
This machine would be running WinNT 3 or 4, most definitely not the MIPS build.
Did you actually play with the url? It pulls in the dependencies in one file, in any order. The genius part is that it's creating cached custom dependencies for each page that could potentially be shared by other pages. This is the most efficient dependency management approach I've seen. For sites that could have hundreds to thousands of pages, css/js asset & dependency management is so critical.
Something doesn't need to be difficult to implement to be extremely useful.
If you like that idea, you might want to take a look at library I am developing in my free time.
The idea is that you specify things you need (for example Mootools:Core and Mootools:More:FormValidation) and dependency manager pulls the required code with dependencies in correct order. It is in ruby, though (rack middleware + standalone packager).
They should have been working on these issues a long time ago. I think they are far more important than many of the new features that came with v5. The only thing holding many of us back from using FF is the memory issue. Good thing the FB debugger is so awesome, because that's the only thing that keeps bringing me back at this point.
You imply there is a direct choice between working on one feature vs another. In reality not everyone can work on every aspect of a project. Plus it's a free software project. Contributors will work on whatever is important to them/their company.
Amusingly enough, Firebug has significant memory usage/leak issues and most users are much better off using it in another profile to keep down memory usage.
So true. Getting the speed up again is a major feature, it can't be delayed so long. FF4 already disappointed a lot in actually working a lot slower (on my machines, at least). So slow that I had to switch to Chrome, actually.
I didn't know what went wrong in their meetings, but not focusing on speed definitely was one of the worst decisions, they could have made. I hope they don't continue making big mistakes like that.
I use both. I find that sometimes one or the other will display some weird traceback, or worse, silently fail. Now my first reaction to a problem that isn't obvious is to switch debugger.
Sadly I think the world of Javascript debugging still has some way to go...
For me FB is better for prototypin code. You have the expanded console that allows me to write code quickly on pages that I may not have direct access to (like production pages). I feel like I'm using a text editor. Webkit debugger is much more limited in this regard.
IMO, yes. Maybe it's that I was on Chromium on GNU/Linux, and not Chrome proper, but I found the chrome dev tools to be buggy, and a little incomplete, like as-of-yet unpolished FB clone.
I also agree with every single one of the author's points. I've had an Android device since the day the G1 launched. Today I have the G2.
First off, for both devices I needed to run cyanogen mod. The devices were completely unusable for me without it. The only acceptable Android devices are the Nexus' or ones with custom roms.
I have not purchased an iPhone, but I do have a 3g touch and an iPad 2. I have to say, I believe Apple's multitasking is vastly superior to Androids. The reason being is stability. "Real" multitasking is great and all, but if you can't make it stable then it just plain sucks. My experience is that apps open in the background frequently FC, take up too much memory and slow the device down. Sometimes finding the errant process is near impossible and forces me to reboot.
Apple's suspend style multitasking ALWAYS ensures that every app is getting the full resources of the device. The other day I was playing Dead Space on the ipad and downloading 6 other apps I just bought... the game never hiccuped, slowed don't or degraded in any noticeable way. I see why some people don't care for it, but for me the benefit in performance makes it vastly superior. On the topic of downloading, I could have 50 apps queued up in the app store and it will never fail. The android fucking market always fucks up the downloads. It's completely maddening.
Dealing with device support just plan blows. Nvidia has their own freaking market for their 'optimized' games. Netflix is rolling out only on select devices because they don't know how the fuck it will work on everything out there- fortunately the G2 was supported early. Amazon has the best market by far, but I still don't know how the hell to use it.
Talking about openness... I have to install cyanogenmod to get any semblance of open, and that's not even the case. Recently someone had a patch to spoof a phones personal data so that apps that steal your info and sell it would be grabbing junk. It appears that Cyanogen is playing nice and not including the patch to not piss off Google and the carriers. This is only as open as what the carriers and google will put up with. It's no different than jailbreaking the iphone (aside from that fact that you can actually build "some of" android from the source, but what normal person can do that?).
In the end I still have an android device for one simple reason... economics. I'm on t-mobile and my rates are far below att & verizon. I got my g2 for free as well. I tether my data connection (to the iPad) with no issues. Even though the G2 kinda sucks, it is good enough. Justifying paying $299 for a 32gb iphone and paying the jacked up rates of verizon comes down to simply not caring enough for a gadget. The iPad is a phenomenal value, the iPhone just isn't. I'll re-evaluate the situation when my contract ends in a year and a half. For now I'll be content with amazing turn-by-turn gps, decent browser, tethering, a few 3rd party apps and a pretty good phone experience- it's the best value out there. Boils down to taking a dirt cheap "7" over an expensive "10".
My brother, who is a novice programmer, picked up the rails basics in a couple weeks (with some help, of course). He was able to create the app he set out to, going from zero experience to a fully functioning app in 2 months.
If you are having trouble with rails, it's for two possible reasons... 1) you won't accept that it's opinionated software and throw out your preconceptions or 2) you're just not trying hard enough. The amount of books, screencasts, tutorials, podcasts out there for rails is just insane. I'm completely jealous these things weren't around in '06 when I started.
I agree strongly with the Author's issues with presenting history in this manner. History is a living document of clues that are merely interpreted by us- very little is fact.
I've been studying Egyptology for about 6 years now and it's amazing what perspectives have changed in that time. We're even starting to see stories now that are challenging the "Out of Africa" theory. Whenever I hear a teacher/lecturer describe something historical as fact, it makes me cringe because so much is left to interpretation.
Khan doing history in this manner is dangerous. But at the same time, the ways our schools do history is dangerous as well. Presenting singular perspectives and presenting them as fact only breeds misinformation.
I believe khan academy is superb for math and sciences, especially for quick overviews of concepts. But the format is absolutely terrible for presenting historical topics. Understanding history requires reading from many resources and coming to logical conclusions. A copy/paste job from wikipedia is simply pathetic.
