171737
submission
heretic108 writes:
New Zealanders have long memories. So one year after Monty Python comedian John Cleese took a low swipe at the town of Palmerston North, the locals saw fit to get even, with the town council officially naming the local garbage dump after him.
158395
submission
heretic108 writes:
Just when we thought we'd seen some weird filesystems, a lone developer in New Zealand has developed and released to the public domain a FUSE Filesystem called XmlRpcFs — a Linux filesystem which allows users to mount a directory on a remote webserver, and gain full read/write access. XmlRpcFs uses a purely http transport, talking XML-RPC to a CGI script on the host, and makes the remote filesystem work transparently like a local directory. Security is still a work in progress, and the developer encourages users to remove the remote CGI script when not in use, and try to access it only via https. Nevertheless, this could be a boon for website developers who use cheap web hosts that don't provide any SSH, scp, rsync or nfs access.
29651
submission
heretic108 writes:
Following recent stories of Diebold voting machines' reluctance to accept Democrat votes, the CEO of Diebold, Wally O'Dell (who once declared that he would "'deliver' Ohio for President Bush", has abruptly resigned.
8441
submission
heretic108 writes:
As RIAs (or Rich Internet Applications, aka "Web 2.0") frameworks get more advanced, delivering a better user experience, browsers are needing to download more and more client-side code.
With some frameworks, there can be hundreds of kB to download before the user sees the page. Ok for broadband, just a couple of seconds, but for the 40-90% of users (depending on country) still on dialup this means up to a minute of latency before they see any content. This is enough to make most visitors give up and click elsewhere. Worse, many RIA frameworks don't degrade well if js is disabled.
One thing I've considered is a non-RIA page containing javascript which (1) displays a 'loading...' message and (2) redirects to the RIA version. With this, if the client has js disabled they can access the non-RIA version. Otherwise, they can wait for the RIA version to load.
What techniques are web developers using to balance the benefits of RIAs against the problems of latency and clients disabling javascript?
