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Comment Re:Quit Using JavaScript! (Score 1) 90

You can do a lot with just HTML and CSS, but you're a bit small minded if you can't think of applications that need interactivity beyond basic HTML components.

And you obviously didn't RTFA, because their approach is about defending from security vulnerabilities on the server itself. Are we to stop using executable code on the server too?

Comment Learn by example (Score 1) 306

Learning a framework (or any language or library) from scratch by reading documentation, or writing new applications by yourself, is doing it the hard way.

If you want to use a library of code, you have to understand the mindset/philosophy of the programmer behind it. If you don't, you're just going to be fighting it by re-writing or doing things in the most inefficient way possible.

I would recommend finding a well-regarded application that uses that framework and discover how it structures itself around it. See how it handles things like data, events and UI. Maybe it goes well with other libraries? If you still can't make heads or tails of what's going on, then maybe the example you picked is too big :-)

Try not to immediately discount a framework if you don't understand it at first. If it's popular, it must be doing something right.

Comment Re:following a changing spec list (Score 1) 473

What, you believe in the waterfall development model? An iterative process is the only way to go.

Developing software is not like building a skyscraper. You can very easily turn your design upside down at any time, and you're going to miss opportunities for better features if you blindly follow some original plan. Of course it can come at the cost of time, but it's the manager's job to make these business decisions.

Comment Re:'learn chinese' (Score 2) 562

My wife is Chinese, and I've visited her family who live around Shanghai.

Her parents and grandparents only speak Shanghainese, and thus can't read or write. This isn't because Mandarin is "too hard", but because their generation never had a proper education, and they don't really encourage the elderly to reeducate themselves.

My wife's generation grew up speaking Shanghainese, but then learnt Mandarin at school.

The new generation of kids know enough Shanghainese to understand their grandparents, but they don't want to speak it. Their parents commonly speak Mandarin, and they're being taught Mandarin from the earliest levels of school. Within a couple generations it wouldn't surprise me if Shanghainese becomes an endangered language.

The government seems to have a very successful campaign to move everyone to Mandarin, and they are also actively trying to prevent English from penetrating too deep into Chinese culture. If China can maintain its position as a superpower then Mandarin will definitely become a necessary language for international business.

Comment Re:Key patents controlled by Blackberry (Score 1) 282

Big endian makes a lot of sense when sorting in left-to-right languages. You need to look at the most significant bits first, and then finally sort on the smallest.

There's nothing wrong with writing numbers from most-significant to least, but English is inconsistent with how it writes everything else. Addresses are little endian, and dates are either little endian D/M/Y or the bonkers American M/D/Y.

I'm learning Chinese, and its beautifully consistent. Numbers, dates, addresses are all written (and spoken) in largest-to-smallest order. Even peoples names are big-endian because they put the surname first. You can't get better than this for sorting data.

Comment Re:ASCII Art CAPTCHA for the Win (Score 1) 558

I think you miss the point of the original article. A blind user will find it impossible to register on your website.

For my sign-up page, I replaced the image CAPTCHA with a text box labelled "Enter the text 'I am not a spammer'". This solved my spam problems, but neither of our solutions would work if our websites became popular and spammers decided to specifically target us.

Comment Re:life-long updates (Score 3, Funny) 687

Most amusing (and effective) DRM I ever saw was actually a fairly loose and easily broken copy protection scheme

I did this with my game. The code that checked the cd-key was easily bypassed, but that code also fixed a critical bug that happened on level 10. It was funny that we had people coming to our support forum asking for help, and we could easily call them out as pirates!

We actually manage to convince one of them to buy the game properly.

Comment Re:Exceptions in C++ (Score 1) 536

I agree, I love the way RAII works with exceptions in C++. It's just a shame most people still learn C++ as "C with classes".

C#'s IDisposable and using statement are probably the best you're going to get in a nondeterministic garbage collected language though, so I wouldn't complain about that.

Java can go die in a fire.

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