dextorious

"""("Their coming" would suggest a correction to "They're coming")'""

How about: "Her relatives would visit us for Christmas. Their coming filled us with dread!"

"""The sentence contains misspelled words."""

No, it contains correctly spelled words used in place of other desired words.

"I sea your eyes", "I she your eyes"

If you want to correct these kind of errors, you must now a lot about natural language. Also, the above are trivial cases. There are tons of edge cases and far more difficult distinctions. Here's an amusing one, that can lead to "Microsoft paperclip" like interactions:

"I gave him the new pink dress as a present" => "I gave her the new pink dress as a present"

No, idiotic spell-checker, I do mean him. My friend is a cross-dresser, shut up and let me type.

Such a spellchecker would also be useless for poetry. And if you find poetry obscure, so it doesn't really matter, then such a spellchecker would also be useless for irony. Suddenly, you lose all the hipsters from your potential users (except if they start using it ironically).

Anyway, no spell checker in widespread use attempts this --and it's probably a very hard nut to crack, and probably uncrackable in the general case.

"""I think it's perfectly reasonable to define "spelling checker" to include mere non-word detectors. """

Sure it is (reasonable).

You just cannot go around acting as if such a definition is already widespread, established in tech discussions, and followed by spell checkers.

I mean the whole tone and the other arguments of the parent comment. Skipped them, much?

"""That's hardly a rant. It's just the long story of MS vs. the "viral" open source / free software."""

That's hardly a story.

Company wants you to use their products instead of OSS/whatever alternatives. News at 11.

No, he has not. "sql server" is just the product's name, it's not a generic category of servers.

We call the generic category "SQL Server" belongs to: database servers, or relational database servers.

No one uses "sql server" for something besides naming that specific MS product.

"""This is just sugar coating for the crap they're covering."""

Yes, please, do reduce an elaborate article discussing technical and business trade-offs into a silly anti-MS rant that wouldn't be out of place in Slashdot circa 1999 for us.

Well, re: tinfoil, you'll have to admit that turning js off is a little on the tinfoil side...

What's the supposed benefit of breaking 80% of the modern web?

Using lower resources?

Sites not "tracking" you with cookies?

Better security?

"""It seems the author of that article doesn't know that spell checking, translating and understanding text are actually major features of pretty new software, too. """

Actually it seems that everybody reading the article got the same WRONG impression.

The author full well knows what it takes to do a i18n full-featured spell checker.

That is BESIDE the point.

What he says is that doing a basic (lame ass) spell-checker in the 80s used to be a MAJOR undertaking, and now, doing EXACTLY THE SAME is trivial.

His point is not about spell-checking.

It's about modern OS, language, CPU, HD and memory conveniences, vs what one had to deal with in the olden days.

You keep using this word "spelling". I don't think it means what you think it means.

This is GRAMMAR checking, or at least grammar-assisted spell checking.

Very few, if any, shipping mainstream spelling correctors do that.

"""Oprah has practically become a saint, for opening a school that graduates ~100 students a year. Foxconn provides hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with the money they need to send their kids to school, and they are practically the devil incarnate. It's complicated."""

How good of Foxconn. If only they didn't make ten times the money or more off of each migrant worker while forcing him to work in shitty conditions capitalizing on the fact that they are kind of the only game in town and/or have agreements with fellow factory owners to keep the wages down/conditions bad...

Say that to e.e. cummings' face!

"""Most software are outdated after a couple of years."""

You'd be surprised. Tons of code runs in production, even in the latest of shiny systems, that was written 10 and 20 and 30 years ago -- either in whole or in parts, refactored etc.

From 1986's NeXT OS that is now OS X Lion and iOS 5, to Bill Joy's TCP/IP, to Emacs.

And tons of enterprise/banking/financial/military systems use ancient code, even 70's COBOL...

Probably found some book or magazine about programming in some cruise ship...

Well, flexible enough so that it can refactored to something else later != framework-level abstractions.

It could just be as simple: just don't make an untangleable mess out of it.

To be frank, I also expected to mainly get downvotes from my spur of the moment response.

But the gist of what I was trying to convey is:

It's 2011. The web is inherently tied with javascript.

(The "progressive enhancement" thing in respect to lack of javascript doesn't hold after Ajax and the so-called "Web 2.0", ie since 2005).

Turning js off AND using a left-field browser, is probably pushing it too far, and you don't really get to complain about broken functionality after that.

Opera && javascript turned off == I don't care about this "web" thing.

So, I, for one, don't exactly care about what happened in your tin-foil crazy edge case.

"""Other cases I can think of are systems where high-throughput or low latency are major requirements but there aren't many of those."""

Actually, I haven't met many cases of systems were high-throughput or low latency are NOT major requirements.

Sure, you can wait for your admin script to do something for half an hour, if it means you get to write it in, say, Python, over some faster language. But you don't want to wait for most things, including most end user software. Here's a list people complain all the time about the slowness of:

1) text editors, programmer editors etc. 2) spreadsheets 3) media players 4) compile times 5) image editing programs 6) web pages/apps 7) mobile apps 8) games 9) file managers 10) IDEs 11) video/multimedia editing 12) sound editing 13) word processors 14) window management 15) databases 16) ftp 17) file management 18) asset management 19) browsers

If there's a program for something, there are people complaining it's slow/bloated.

"""because MySQL is sadly /not/ a correct implementation, while PostgreSQL is"""

Of SQL maybe, but of Relational Algrebra/Set Theory, neither PostgreSQL is.

"""I'm sure this can be modeled mathematically, but I'm not convinced this would help."""

Why would a mathematically modeled system of key-value observing would not help? For one, it would enable one to prove and examine all kinds of assumptions about the model working correctly.

""" If I'm passionate about painting and don't care about having a family, then I'm going to paint. I'm not obligated to have a family just because it's a social norm."""

And this attitude is exactly what the parent commenter was ranting about.

Especially if you DO have a family, and it's more like "I don't have to care for my family over my business just because it's a social norm".

"""Since most programs can be broken down into a set of components I believe it should be relatively easy to parallellize the workload."""

The "easy" part of your phrase, is the one key misconception that project managers have since the beginning of software engineering. The mythical man-month and peopleware anyone?

"""Yes, it's very easy to add an accessor later. But then you'll most likely have to edit every line of code that accessed the now-defunct member variable. Your IDE may make this easy, but I'd still prefer not to have to do it."""

Easy is an understatement. It's 2-3 clicks away in Eclipse.

No, I most certainly don't.

"""Well no, because the job doesn't end when it's "done"."""

By definition, it does.

"""In the earliest versions of the game, blocks were all basically homogenous cubes of some material, so they didn't need to be oriented. Later, blocks were added that did need to be rotated in various ways (...)"""

So you are suggesting that they should have set up a system to allow that from the beginning.

Have you sat and thought how adding things like that could delay the initial release?

Also, have you sat and thought that if the initial release was not successful at the marketplace, all that extra work would have been in vain?

[downvote? Thanks, parent]

Just build what you need at the time, and make it flexible enough so that it can be refactored to something else later.

Though doubt it would made one iota of difference.

Eleemosyne => "Eleos" (mercy) and "syne" (the status/state of), the whole meaning "charity" or "having mercy" in general.

Well, yeah, those competitors could (leverage Google's OSS against it).

But an open source community, outside of some company control, not as easily if at all.

Take for example Mozilla/Firefox.

Well, didn't it do very well, and in many places, won over IE? It did. But it did it:

(1) Starting with the branding/product/code made by a huge (at the time) company (Netscape).

(2) Having mostly people from said company working on the Mozilla version.

(3) When Netscape died, it almost took Mozilla with it.

(4) Firefox revived the interest in the browser big time, but Firefox lives on a $100M a year Google subsidy.

Would Firefox still be worked at a competitive pace without Google's money?

I seriously doubt it.

""" The critical piece of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is the extinguish, and by being opensource that isn't possible."""

It's entirely possible.

A project that's open source but has 90% of the dev team, and especially the major players working for a parent company, it's not a "community" project.

And being a community project is what people most want when they root for open source software.

For one, the parent company, by simply hiring tons of developers, has the say in how the project is run and what it's roadmap is.

On top of this, it's extremely difficult or almost impossible to fork such a project. The fact that you have the LEGAL/LICENSING capability to fork it means nothing. What's important is the TECHNICAL/COMMUNITY viability of a fork.

You mean their office is "the shit"!