Ok, let's analyze this "burn:" Instances of "Joel on Software" on the linked page:
* Header image that states "Joel On Software" and links to the homepage. This is a common website device. One
* Another text link before the article title. Ok, this one seems extraneous. Though since the first is an image, this is more SEO friendly. Two
* Not mentioned anywhere in the article.
* The footer contains another link. Again, this isn't really irregular. Three
* The email for the author of the article. Would it satisfy you if Joel had used another domain for his email address? Four
So there are a grand total of 4 appearances on that particular page, and with the exception (maybe) of one, none are spammy.
Did you come into this discussion solely to diss the author? Joel was pointing out something inane in a wizard dialog box, and you essentially call him a hypocrite.
True, although as swilliams pointed out, your comment was borderline retarded. My guess is you have a tendency to dismiss Joel Spolsky out of hand, and have long since stopped bothering yourself to reason about your hatred.
Yes I assumed this, and I can understand where the sentiment is coming from. But if it's a comment that is still imparting an opinion/viewpoint, i.e., it is actually saying something, then I think a little editorial freedom in terms of the commenter's on-topic humour should not be seen as dragging the site down towards digg/reddit etc.
I actually wouldn't have bothered even replying to the guys comment except that this is an issue that has irked me about this site for a while. Humour - by and large and in the right proportion - gratifies my (and I think many people's) "intellectual curiosity". Some here should take a chill pill when it comes to being the humour police.
I'm not sure. Are you trying to say that your original comment was somewhat tounge-in-cheek and I misunderstood because of my lack of familiarity with your "OoO" emoticon? If so, then yes it is better, thank you. If not, then no it isn't.
Your comment stated that you would have felt better if the Java installer had said something different, in particular less; so I said the same thing about your comment. It was sort of an ill conceived parody, you understand. In conjunction with feigned shock (the "OoO,") at your apparent linguasexuality, I thought it was pretty funny. Seems I was wrong, or just too vague.
Yet only once in the body (well, the info paragraph at the bottom). All other references are actually part of the page itself. Futhermore, the info paragraph is probably boilerplate, dropping the times he "mentioned" his blog title down to zero. I wouldnt say that was the pot calling the kettle black in any way, shape, or form.
I found it particularly amusing that after seeing "Joel on Software" in the title here on news.yc, "joelonsoftware.com" after the title, and "Joel on Software" twice on the page before the article, the first words after the article itself were "You’re reading Joel on Software". I had to scan the entire page to see if he's spoofing Sun's behavior.
Very clever spoof of Joel on Software. You've captured his unintentional irony perfectly. Now that I've seen "Joel on Software" 7 times in this thread, I can't help but think "Joel on Software" when I see "Joel," "on," or "Software."
great idea, not a full-blown comment, but a small link (like "flag") that gives room for a one line description. Most typos are pretty short, and are covered by something like the below. Even if the description happened to be ambiguous, it would be enough of a heads up for the blogger to find it. I'd think it's not attractive enough to spammers to warrant a captcha.
What I have in mind would be a direct message to the author, not a public message. That should further discourage spammers -- I imagine they're not particularly interested in sending spam to one blogger at a time.
You might want to have some feedback that informs a person who is about to report a typo that 4 or 5 other people have already reported a typo on a given post. That might help discourage the phenomenon where a single typo generates a flood of 10,000 helpful reports.
Yes, I meant a direct message too - like a flag - because it would discourage spammers. I didn't unpack it, so it was ambiguous.
I'm not sure if the "10,000" reports would happen; have to try it and see. It's probably more like bug-reports, or 37signal's "feature requests" (that they read and throw out). And, if you fix the typo, the reports stop. :-) It's hard to judge, but I think you'd have to be massively popular to get even one or two typo reports. But I don't know: need to do the experiment.
Maybe a lower-cost solution would be just to add "prompting" text next to the comment box, something like: "typo corrections are welcome", to encourage people.
Typo reports (bug reports?) aren't that common: for example, I made a comment on a typo to Tim O'Reilly's recent blog - but no one else had.
The problem is that grammar flames are socially awkward. They've got a bad reputation on the web that goes way back to Usenet days. To issue one is kind of like telling someone that they've got some food on their face. But it's worse, because on the web you can't whisper: By default your criticism is preserved forever, smack in the middle of what's supposed to be a conversation about something other than grammar. Unless the author takes the trouble to delete some comments -- which is an extra step, and which can also sometimes be socially awkward, since comment deletion is generally reserved for trolls.
I wouldn't have bothered correcting this one if I hadn't been able to make a lame joke at the same time.
I agree that a feature to fix this might well not have enough utility to be worthwhile, which is perhaps why nobody's built it yet!
I hadn't thought of that aspect. Being public makes it worse. Personally, I've always appreciated feedback on a website - but in a discussion, I agree it's a diversion that undermines the message (and is annoying). Commenting on blogs are sort of in between those two (really, a discussion if the blogger also comments, as they often do).
Some kind of threaded comments might help. e.g. on reddit, you can compress the joke-thread and the pun-thread, to get to the on-topic commentary. A "typo thread"? Or an explicit "typo" tag (which you could hide from the public, and so disable captcha, if you wanted).
But I haven't seen threaded comments on blogs - maybe they aren't needed? It seems an obvious idea to try.
Given the JVM startup times, shouldn't it say "Please Wait.............Java Loves You". Ha ha...ooops not really actually funny at all. I'll leave it though. Sorry.
(I'm not bitter, I just had to restart tomcat over 50 times today. It has its upside: 12145ms x 50, enough time to read a couple of items on hacker news. I wonder how much this post will cost Sun? There will probably be a bug in their tracker by morning. Maybe Joel's just making an issue out of these little things so their bug tracking will be overwhelmed and they'll have to turn to FogBugz?)
Well, it has been pointed out before, but this is just too funny. I hadn't looked at joel's site for some time and I had to check some other posts to tell whether the blurbs under the real posts were there for humorous reasons or whether they were an actual part of the page template. Unfortunately the latter is true. He could just put "Joel loves developers."
What's there sounds like the same kind of marketing department cool-aid that the poor engineers at Sun are forced to put in their installers.
Why should users ever install a VM? Why couldn't Java be distributed as a meta-environment where the right version just downloads and installs itself, and a particular application only sees the most recent available version of the runtime environment that it can run against?
meta-environment? That's basically what a VM is in the first place. As for the automatic download-install, linux package managers will already do that for you. Of course, not for web apps, but who wants a web app telling their computer to download and install a program???
So why not add another level of meta? Why should the user even have to go to the package manager? If the user has stumbled across an app for which she/he doesn't have the right VM+runtime, why do they have to do any more than wait for the download to happen?
OS X has a mechanism such that a program only sees the versions of system libraries that it needs. There's no reason why Java couldn't have one as well.
We programmers may not like a web app telling the computer to download and install a program. The average user would rather have the system do it for them -- just so long as they don't have to worry about anything they don't understand.
That's exactly what the package manager does. If you install a program that needs the JVM, it will automatically download and install it. Can you elaborate on what you mean by "another level of meta"?
You're talking about ordinary desktop applications. For that, a package manager like dpkg and apt-get will work just fine. I thought that the article was talking about applets, which aren't meant to be permanently installed on the local machine. However, they have a dependency on a Java runtime which is installed there. If the designers of Java were a little more forward thinking, they wouldn't have created this dependency. The desktop JRE would be managed by whatever mechanism on the machine, but the applet JRE would be managed separately. The entire thing could be managed by a program implemented in just about any programming language. Let's say it's the 1st version of the JRE. Combine this with a mechanism that effectively sandboxes an applet with whichever version of the JRE it needs or is most compatible with, and at worst, a user will be notified that they need to wait for a download.
In this regard, the designers of Java were thinking like programmers and not thinking of naive end users. Flash does a better job in this regard.
/application only sees the most recent available version of the runtime environment that it can run against/
Please, never implement something like this. It's hard enough to validate an app against one set of software versions. I can't think of a single time when implying forward compatibility worked right. DLL Hell on windows, and any time your libraries got upgraded while in the middle of a dev cycle in maven, just makes things hurt.
Just let the application's metadata (e.g. jar manifest) indicate what it wants, and give it exactly that. If we want efficiency, we'll delta-encode different versions against each other. When automated testing is implemented widely enough, and well enough, for us to trust forward compatibility without human intervention, then we can go down that route.
Actually, what you just said is exactly what I'm thinking about. There's no need to depend on forward compatibility, and you would be able to set metadata like "Requires exactly XX.YY.ZZ" Not all applets will be as stringent as that.
Also note that each applet is sandboxed with whatever version of the JRE the system it decides it needs. This gets you out of "DLL Hell." If the metadata is specified correctly, it will be as if the system were custom configured just for the applet. (Actually, there could be multiple applets, and they'd all think the world were made just for them!)
I wince everytime I see something like this pop up. The JVM is an awesome piece of technology, and the Java language is a good replacement for C++ in a lot of cases. There's also a neat little ecosystem of alternative JVM languages sprouting up.
Unfortunately, it's hampered by Sun's TERRIBLE marketing and crappy design on things like the installer. I'm glad they finally open-sourced Java, as it gives us the option to fork the platform instead of constantly worrying that Sun's going to screw it up.
<sarcasm>
Why do we have previews in movie theaters before the movie starts? The screen could just be black until the main feature begins. Or, the screen could just read "There are other movies coming out" that would pretty much say the same thing.
</sarcasm>
nah, its more a preview that goes as such: "Check out this movie! Critics love this movie! Come see this movie! It has action, romance, comedy! If you watch this movie, you will know how much you like it!"
Because it's the standard installer on Windows and the one that millions of people who just want to use some Java-based funcationality on some website are directed to?
