This just got much clearer in Python3, all string literals are now Unicode by default, making it much easier to code internationalized programs in Python.
There is an "Explicit Unicode Literal" (u"string"), to make it easier for library authors to run their libs in one codebase on Python 2 and Python 3. (In Python 3 "string" is the same as u"string")
Codecs are in their own modules, like for example base64, where they belong.
The confusions seems to be with Python 2, Python 3 has fixed it, so move on.
This is a disgrace for New Zealand and as a European this whole ordeal has warned me plenty to not do any business there ever.
The US who were obviously the ones in charge of NZ police and general "law" enforcement are another story. The world police has done their will again. Without thinking, without logic, without sense, but Hollywood money behind them.
The way this has been handled has been disgraceful, but this is a ridiculous reaction. I am a New Zealander (now in SF) so I'm biased, but New Zealand is a peaceful country [1], frequently rated as one of the least corrupt [2], with excellent freedom of press [3], and is relatively easy place to do business [4].
This is most certainly not normal or accepted in NZ, and in case you missed it, the courts have ruled it was not legal, have asked the US to back up claims, and have not extradited Dotcom.
I don't know, and I suspect that the task of tracking down definitively and conclusively exactly what the conditions are when I can and cannot read things would be lengthy and relatively unrewarding.
I have better things to do than play "hunt the foible" on Google.
In my experience, the conditions are pretty much as described.
If Google knows you have an account because of tracking devices, they require you to log in because you are more salable.
If you're anonymous, you're more salable if they just show you the content.
In so far as I recall, originally G+ wouldn't show content without javascript turned on - i.e. the price of content was to allow Google to track you more closely.
Nope, not without logging in. Probably need to clear cookies or something. But in any case, the grandparents are not lying or stupid afaict so stop downvoting them.
You are wrong. If you have previously logged into a Google+ account, but are not logged in, you are blocked from seeing the article w/o logging in.
To circumvent, you can put your browser into Private or Incognito browsing, and you can then read the post w/o logging in. (Which also logs you out of HN, so you can't comment or vote.)
So, for any of the HN audience with G+ accounts but who don't surf "logged in", a login is required unless the user takes extra steps (EDIT: such as incognito or child comment's noscript approach).
I have a G+ account. I don't surf "logged in." A login is not required for me to view the content. I suspect this is because surfing "not logged in" is not the starting point for improving my surfing experiences. The starting point is noscript.
Actually, there are situations in which you get a G+ login prompt. An incognito window solves it, but it's annoying. Google Groups does the same thing.
I am absolutely sure that a change on the desktop market is coming and that open source operating systems will gain a nice percentage of the market share, if not the majority thereof.
But this change will be a lot slower than we would like it to be. It'll come, but it'll take some time.
We saw similar changes in the browser and the phone markets recently, it went faster there because it's an easier change for non-technical users.
It's rather great that the floodgate is now open and that open source is slowly overtaking their proprietary software and operating system counterparts. It's also a fact though that Microsoft and surely others are trying to close them again, one approach is the "secure boot" nonsense for example. One can only hope (and of course, work on open source whenever possible) that they won't succeed in that.
This is EXACTLY the same argument when Vista came out, which was a subpar release, and yet another "Year of The Linux Desktop" was not upon us then nor is it now. This was also the same argument when XP came out. I remember the slashdot kiddies saying "Its Win2000 with fisher price colors! Mandrake will be the new desktop." Err, okay. I love FOSS, but the idea that Joe Sixpack is switching to Ubuntu because the start button is missing is a little overblown.
I'm begining to feel sorry for MS's Windows product. Its a damned if you/damned if you don't scenario. If they don't innovate and do something different then they'll be criticized for being stale. When they do innovate they're criticized for confusing users and not sticking with the same tired WIMP formula.
I get it, these critics are biased, but lets at least wait until the RTM gets in the hands of users before we call it a disaster. It might very well work out for MS. Win8 went from a joke on these forums to a brave OS after the MS surface announcement. Public opinion is quite fickle isn't it?
I agree with most of the article, but the "The Ubuntu Unity failure" was only a temporary one.
The author says it got better, but in reality Unity already overtook Windows' UI and it will overtake Apples UI with one of its next iterations.
As a younger (though not that young) developer I have to agree that using MS developer tools is the wrong way of doing things for most new software, not all of them though, it sure has its uses. But I am strongly against proprietary software that only runs on one OS as that will only lose you business. Even the game platform Steam seems to have gotten to that point, a Linux port is on its way.
The great thing about propietary software and one OS (Windows specifically, OS X too though) is people using those operating systems expect to pay for their software. I'd love to come out with a Linux version of my software, but I'd then be competing with 10 free versions, and worse, a mindset that expects everything to be free. I gotta eat!
There is definitely a hunger in the Linux community for quality commercial applications in areas where open source has not traditionally managed to perform so well (Image/Video editing, games etc).
You would certainly have limited luck trying sell a C compiler or package manager to Linux users for sure, but there are certainly areas (including some developer tools)where there could be a market.
If you released (say) an image editor for Windows and Mac you are competing with Photoshop as well as countless other programs, whereas if you release for Linux you may have less potential users (although there are still an estimated 30 million) but you are competing with The Gimp.
There is a subset of Linux users who would never consider any commercial software, but this is pretty small percentage, at least that is certainly what Valve is banking on.
Mac users do expect to pay for software sure, but Windows users? Not so much since Windows seems to be the platform with the highest piracy as well as countless horrible "freeware" programs.
If you released (say) an image editor for Windows and Mac you are competing with Photoshop as well as countless other programs, whereas if you release for Linux you may have less potential users (although there are still an estimated 30 million) but you are competing with The Gimp.
Thanks for that -- a bit surprising really (current stats show Linux users out giving the other two). Is that because they are more willing to pay for software as Linux goes mainstream, or desperate for games? (honest question)
This is the same issue with mobile development that the author seems to be pushing everyone towards. Your app might really be worth $50, but guess what... you'll be selling it for $0.99 or you won't be selling it at all.
> I agree with most of the article, but the "The Ubuntu Unity failure" was only a temporary one.
Absolutely. Unity in 12.04 is very solid. There's still a lack of settings options, but I don't think that warrants the whole thing being called a "failure".
As long as Microsoft will not implement the same features, in a similar time frame and in a compatible way as the other browser vendors they should be blamed and shamed.
The article says IE9 is a damn good browser without qualifying why they think that it is, I respectfully disagree.
As long as Microsoft will not implement the same features, in a similar time frame and in a compatible way as the other browser vendors they should be blamed and shamed.
First Microsoft thinks HTML is too limited and creates new APIs which gets turned into drafts, which in turn gets standardized, albeit slightly differently from how Microsoft did it in the first place.
They get to choose to break all sites written for this API while still in draft, or get to break the standard. Whatever they do, people curse them for it.
Microsoft then says "You know. We get it. That sucked. We created that situation. It was our fault. Next time around, we wont mess around with draft-specifications in a release browser, luring people into prematurely using non-final specifications in production web-sites".
And now everyone hates Microsoft for being slow.
Evidently, as long as your name is "Microsoft", everything you do will be wrong, either it is a) pushing the limits, b) implementing the drafts, c) being compatible with deployed code, d) being compatible with the negotiated specification or e) waiting for the specification to be finalized.
Can someone please point me to the option f) which makes everyone happy?
If we held Google, Mozilla etc to these same super-hypocritical standards, I'm pretty sure everyone would just stop making web-browsers, since all you got for it was hell from ungrateful bastards.
You have no sympathy for the fact that they've done the right thing in rebuilding the browser from the ground up to prevent future problems which has been what's slowing them up?
From an engineering perspective this is absolutely the right thing to have done, something technologists would have encouraged them to do at the time in the long term interest of the product. It has short term draw backs (some constraints on functionality in the current version) but was the best decision for the product and, given that IE as the default browser on Windows will always have a significant market share for the web in general, for the web in general.
Sure, say that it's not as good as Firefox and Chrome right now but "blamed and shamed"? It feels to me as if you're coming pretty close to beating up on someone for doing the right thing.
They are behind the other vendors as a result of decisions they made in the past. They make my job more difficult daily and make the web worse for millions of people.
The decision not to provide an upgrade path beyond IE8 on XP has been a particular road-block in getting people onto better rendering engines.
Of course I'm glad they are improving but ideally I'd rather they got out of the browser game entirely.
Your job is being made more difficult by using non-final HTML draft-specifications in production web-sites and relying on them to work in all browsers before the spec is finalized.
That is your choice. You made that problem yourself.
That's just silly. Since the changes wrought by WHATWG to the standardisation process it's become obvious we can start using a lot of this stuff in parallel with the progress to a final published spec. Are you seriously saying that nothing in the specs is meant to be implemented until 2013 or whenever the final date is?
Instead of starting over and building another browser rendering engine from scratch, they could have switched to Webkit, putting their development cycles to better use contributing to a mature, stable, Open Source browser. Thereby improving the web for everyone, and making their browser the better for it. Why is it commendable that they had such an opportunity and instead decided to re-invent the wheel (again)?
I agree. The speed at Chrome and Firefox are evolving is mind-boggling. There's WebGL, WebRTC, new Audio APIs, transitions, css filters and it feels like every other week there's something new that isn't just implemented but actually pushed out to the user. Microsoft is nowhere close to that.
There's WebGL, WebRTC, new Audio APIs, transitions, css filters and it feels like every other week there's something new that isn't just implemented but actually pushed out to the user
And all that before any of the features has been standardized and finalized.
And now we hate MSIE for in the past doing what Chrome is doing now while at the same time we hate the current MSIE for being what we demanded MSIE to be in the past.
Mindboggling indeed. Sounds like Chrome is the new MSIE to me.
Agreed. Microsoft is on a much slower development pace than Chrome and Mozilla, which theoretically shouldn't affect how how many features they build in the next version that comes a year later.
I mean let's say Chrome implements 1 major feature every 6 weeks, so that's 8 major features they add in a whole year for Chrome. So even if Microsoft doesn't update their browser every 6 weeks, but only once a year or once every 2 years, that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a similar amount of new features in the new version. But instead, they have significantly fewer. Even in IE10 there are a lot of things missing that have already been implemented in Chrome and Firefox, or are about to, and since they are not coming in IE, that means devs will have to wait another 2 years or more for them to arrive in IE11.
That's actually a really good analogy. And the GP is right. There should definitely be some laws to prohibit these kinds of things that Facebook is attempting (doing), now that electronic mail/communication is becoming standard.
There is an "Explicit Unicode Literal" (u"string"), to make it easier for library authors to run their libs in one codebase on Python 2 and Python 3. (In Python 3 "string" is the same as u"string")
Codecs are in their own modules, like for example base64, where they belong.
The confusions seems to be with Python 2, Python 3 has fixed it, so move on.