Closer To The Ideal

It is impossible to keep up with all the new technologies that came out over the last year, especially one’s that I probably won’t ever use. I admit, I was confused, till now, regarding Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, JavaFX. Apparently these were all aimed at the same basic market, the same one that Google Gears aims at: ????????building applications that have a front-end that lives and runs as a desktop app, but pulls data from the web. I’m pleased to now at least understand what all these are about. I can’t see myself building this kind of software in the near future, so I guess I can ignore these technologies. If I do end up doing this kind of software, I’m sure I’ll use Google Gears, simply because I already have some slight introduction to the Google API.

We are using a new Hewlett Packard machine running Windows Vista. The machine has 3 gigs of RAM - the stuff of science fiction circa 1990. Dual core Athalon processors, 2.6 GHz. The machine is two months old.

I right-click on the Desktop. From the context menu that appears, I choose “New”, then “Folder”. Then I type in the name of the new folder. Then I hit “Enter”.

Explorer becomes unresponsive while it creates the new folder. Counting slowly, I am able to count to 48 before Explorer comes back to life. 48 seconds to create a new folder. On a Mac, circa 1991, using System 7, I recall this same task taking from .5 seconds to maybe 2 seconds when things were bad. On a Unix machine, circa 1980, my guess is that the mkdir command took about .1 seconds to execute.

I am recreating a folder that I just deleted, and perhaps there is some kind of memory of the old folder that is causing problems. Whatever the reason, this is bad programming.

Windows Vista is a unmitigated disaster. No one should buy this product ever. And no company should be legally alowed to sell it.

Via Sam Ruby, we are pointed to this in the comments at Intertwingly:

Btw, if you want CSS rules to apply to unknown elements in IE, you just have to do document.createElement(elementName). This somehow lets the CSS engine know that elements with that name exist.

This could be a viable strategy for using HTML5 and styling the results in IE, even if IE does not support certain tags.

 Yes, that is a broken image link on the Microsoft website (I hit refresh a few times and it was still there). Ironically, the page is talking about a new technique for debugging.

Part of what is becoming a continuing series on the subject of broken web pages.

Stumbled upon this and found it interesting:

Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.

Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.