Modded 0? I thought this was at least mildly funny.

How true.

We're selfish because we don't want to take your money to support our needs or our pet social causes, and because we don't want to force you to be anything you don't want to be. I feel such a deep sense of shame washing over me right now...

Actually, deregulation ALONG WITH removal of all protectionism, bailouts, juicy government contracts, favorable (targeted) legislation, etc. would go a long way toward evening the scales between small companies and large companies.

Big companies can always find a lawyer to help them through the regulation minefield, plus they can always pay off a congressman or two to make people look the other way.

Honestly, big companies love big government, and they love bureaucracy, because THAT is what ensures their continued existence. Do you really think the Big 3 auto makers would still be in existence today if they had to function in a competitive market?

Agreed. I'm not much for IDEs, but for text editors my two favorite choices are

Windows:
- UltraEdit (very nice SSH/SFTP integration)

Linux:
- Kate (KDE Advanced Text Editor) using KDE's fish://user@server/path/to protocol

Also, both support column-mode editing, which is my other non-negotiable.

HTML was never intended to be an application language, just a document presentation one. And rather than develop an additional language to embed real application elements, we've spent the past 10 years trying to turn a hammer into a screwdriver.

Mozilla tried to present a workable solution in the form of XUL, which actually gives web developers a real GUI toolkit to work with. The world pretty much ignored or misused it, sadly. (Although I have to admit early XUL implementation was pretty buggy and limited). At present, XUL is mainly used to create Firefox extensions, but even there we see a movement away from that to HTML.

Be that as it may, you have to admit that there are things web apps deliver that the traditional client-side program couldn't. Will we ever see a good marriage of the two? I suppose it's possible, but for the near future I foresee more and more of this 'papering over'; layering frameworks on top of suboptimal core technology in order for developers to at least achieve some sanity.

Perhaps you can clear something up for me: It was my understanding that in developer mode, you have a complete Linux environment, command line and all. Doesn't that mean you can compile C and C++ code to run on the Pre? Of course I know that the UI has to be handled through HTML/JS, but is it possible for the UI to talk to back-end components running as compiled code?

Amazing things happen when people actually interact with people, instead of faceless organizations. "Feedback" does indeed happen without organizatiions, although some of the better charities often do provide you with personal messages from the people whose lives you affect (something we are extremely unlikely ever to see from a government bureaucracy). In fact, I would argue that the bigger and more official the organization (and the greater the level of government enforcement) the more likely the feedback is to be negative rather than positive. In a world where people are forced to give at fear of punishment, the more likely they are to resent the act of giving and to find any means of escape.

Also, the bigger the bureaucracy, the more likely that the greater percentage of any dollar extracted from you will go to support the bureacracy rather than support the supposed end recipient.

Of course I feel an obligation, which is why I donate money to help those in need. We libertarians tend to draw the line at enforcement, though, believing that in a truly civil society force is only used to stop those who would use force on others. It's called the principle of non-initiation of force.

A truly civil society can only exist when enough people of goodwill make free choices to help others. The whole struggle should be in the convincing of others to do good, rather than in expecting a strong-arm government to make us good. Enforcement of such has never worked, and the more you enforce, the less civil the society becomes.

No, that's sensible system design. Core is /usr, and has a wealth of system-level programs and utilities, but application software goes in /usr/local. Bash is not the FreeBSD default terminal software; tcsh is. Perl is not a core system scripting language, but it is of course needed for many tasks once you start extending the system in different directions. And /usr/local is not (as in Linux) a little tacked-on directory with nothing in it. it is a very thoroughly laid-out directory tree with everything in a sensible place. Once I moved from Linux to FreeBSD, I loved how everything was in a consistent and unsurprising location.

Yikes! But thanks for the info. You really don't use the onClick or other event handlers at all? Or do you just mean you don't reference them externally via element.onXXX?

Life would be so much better without IE6, but unfortunately it is still the standard rollout in a many large companies.

Yes, I've been considering moving all HTML rendering to the browser, but some apps that work that way tend to annoy me. A lot of the things that used to be taken for granted in web interaction start changing when you work that way. The back button won't work, you can't bookmark anything, and of course the inevitable memory leaks mean your browser memory footprint threatens to take over the desktop.

I really don't see what was so bad about the old per-page request/response model. For about 95% of what people need to do in web applications, it is just fine. Of course there are things that AJAX solves, but I try to solve everything I can before that. For example, all this fancy new stuff in Slashdot here doesn't seem to enhance usability more than a fraction over the old method.

I wrote a lightweight document management app and after thinking it through, rejected AJAX and went with a REST-ish approach. It was very nice to realize that anyone could bookmark a document, or send the URL to someone else (Of course, access controls made sure the recipient was logged in and had permission to view the document).

(In thinking about it, I realize that AJAX could work as a nice helper to a REST system, so you can send realtime feedback, such as "User [x] is trying update this document. Would you like to view the changes or save a copy?".)

Yes, too bad that Mozilla's XUL didn't take off. It was clunky and frustrating in some ways, but at least you had a real suite of widgets and controls with decent event-handling behavior.

Your thoughtfulness should at least rate a 2 or a 3.

I actually like the idea of preserving 'document-oriented' HTML, which is an endangered species.

As for the server-side JS question, I am still on the fence; just trying to examine and evaluate.

Server-side and client-side have different needs, sure, but that's more a question of the interpreter infrastructure and libraries than the language itself. Although, I do like the idea of manipulating documents with jQuery or somesuch on both the client and server side. Building HTML documents by concatenating strings or outputting at random places in code (ex. 90% of the PHP code out there) is a horrendous idea that should have died in the 90s. For any PHP work these days I use phpQuery along with a good caching library, so I can work with document semantics on the server side. I get 100% valid HTML output and I can manipulate any part of the document I want before output without ridiculous regex acrobatics or other buggy half-baked HTML parsing libraries.

How is Javascript closure evaluation monumentally broken? (Not being sarcastic, just curious)

Yes, delete will mull the value of an array element but leave the index. To remove an array element, use splice(), which removes AND returns the indexed element in question:

js> arr = [4,5,6,7];
4,5,6,7
js> print(arr.splice(2));
6
js> print(arr);
4,5,7
js> delete arr[1];
true
js> print(arr);
4,,7

Why is parent modded troll? Like it or not, it is at least a somewhat substantive argument.