Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Firefox

Best Browser For Using Complex Web Applications? 347

Posted by timothy from the fatal-error-encountered dept.
yanyan writes "I'm fairly new to the field of web application development. Currently I'm working on a big online ticketing system for passage and freight for a local shipping company. It's a one-man show and the system is written in Ruby and uses Rails. Aside from the requisite functionality of creating bookings the system must also print reports and tickets, and this is where I've discovered (the hard way) that most, if not all, browsers fall short. I've had to switch from Firefox 3.6.3 to Opera 10.53 because of a major printing bug in Firefox, but the latest stable Opera is also giving me its own share of problems. To complicate things, an earlier version of Opera (10.10) doesn't appear to have 10.53's printing problems, but I'm wary. What browsers and specific versions do you end up deploying for use with big, complex web apps that include printing? Also consider CSS accuracy and consistency."
Open Source

Microsoft's CoApp To Help OSS Development, Deployment 293

Posted by timothy from the meet-the-world's-biggest-foss-vendor dept.
badpazzword writes "Microsoft employee Garrett Serack announces he has received the green light to work full time on CoApp, an .msi-based package management system aiming to bring a wholly native toolchain for OSS development and deployment. This will hopefully bring more open source software on Windows, which will bring OSS to more users, testers and developers. Serack is following the comments at Ars Technica, so he might also follow them here. The launchpad project is already up."
Books

Amazon Caves To Publishers On eBook Pricing 236

Posted by Soulskill from the bowing-to-ipressure dept.
AusPublishingWorker writes "With the iPad arriving on the scene, it seems that Amazon is feeling the pressure on eBook pricing from publishers. ITNews reports that Amazon has agreed to deals with both Harper Collins and Simon and Schuster which would allow the companies to select their own prices rather than the default US$9.99 price tag. Given the recent deal with Macmillan, it seems likely that we'll be seeing eBook prices moving up towards $14.99 in the near future."
Java

The Struggle To Keep Java Relevant 667

Posted by timothy from the onions-on-your-belt dept.
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions Oracle's ability to revive interest in Java in the wake of Oracle VP Jeet Kaul's announcement at EclipseCon that he would 'like to see people with piercings doing Java programming.' 'If Kaul is hoping Java will once again attract youthful, cutting-edge developers, as it did when it debuted in 1995, [Kaul] may be in for a long wait,' McAllister writes. 'Java has evolved from a groundbreaking, revolutionary language platform to something closer to a modern-day version of Cobol.' And, as McAllister sees it, 'Nothing screams "get off my lawn" like a language controlled by Oracle, the world's largest enterprise software vendor. The chances that Java can attract the mohawks-and-tattoos set today seem slimmer than ever.'"
Science

First Collisions At the LHC 256

Posted by CmdrTaco from the make-sure-the-world-is-still-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "At 1:06 p.m. Central European Summer Time (CEST) today, the first protons collided at 7 TeV in the Large Hadron Collider. These first collisions, recorded by the LHC experiments, mark the start of the LHC's research program."
Bug

The Economics of Perfect Software 201

Posted by Soulskill from the done-versus-done-ish dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This article takes the interesting perspective that leaving bugs in software is good — little ones, at least. This quote is particularly insightful: 'How do you know whether a bug is big or little? Think about who's going to hit it, and how mad they'll be when they do. If a user who goes through three levels of menus, opens an advanced configuration window, checks three checkboxes, and hits the 'A' key gets a weird error message for his trouble, that's a little bug. It's buried deep, and when the user hits it, he says 'huh,' clicks a button, and then goes on his merry way. If your program crashes on launch for a common setup, though, that's a big bug. Lots of people will hit it, and they will all be pissed. ... The cost of fixing all the bugs in your program and then being sure you fixed them all is way too high compared to the cost of having a few users hit some bugs they won't care about."
GUI

5 Reasons Tablets Suck, and You Won't Buy One 553

Posted by timothy from the for-some-values-of-you dept.
Crazzaper writes "When the iPad was announced, a lot of people who didn't care about tablets came out to bash Apple's new device. These same people said 'I would have bought it if it had a full OS,' but in reality full OS tablets existed before the iPad rumors even started. This article gives an interesting perspective on why this happened, and argues that there's five big reasons why more powerful tablets exists but no one cares."

Comment Middle Class gets hammered, not the poor (Score 1) 452

by sadler121 (#31306192) Attached to: US Gov't. Ending Its Hands-Off-the-Internet Stance

In the US the poor 20% of the population have nothing.

The poor in the US have Medicare. It's the middle class that gets screwed when they get layed off or fired. COBRA is too expensive to pay for, and they are ineligible for Medicare. If you have a pre-existing condition your even more screwed, as you have to find a job ASAP because no private insurance will cover you. You can't start your own company, because you have a pre-existing condition and no insurance company will touch you.

If your poor, more importantly if your a young girl in a poverty area, the best way to be provided for is to get pregnant. The goverment opens up it's coffers to support you.

So it's not the poor who don't have anything, they get covered, it's all about the Middle Class. They get screwed.

Slashdot Top Deals

"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." -- Dave Barry

Close