Joel on Software: "By installing Java, you will be able to experience the power of Java"
joelonsoftware.com
joelonsoftware.com
* 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.
I'd like to think that I am generally attractive from a programming language's point of view and such a dialog box wouls only reinforce this belief.
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.
;)
Is that better?
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.
"Java Loves You"
Although Joel's writing a post about omitting needless words, I think this sentence needs an additional word.
Sometimes I wonder if blogs could use a "typo alert" button.
s/just up/just shut up/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.
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.
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!
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.
I get a ton of spam via the GitHub web interface. It is really annoying.
(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?)
"would you like to install the free Yahoo Toolbar with The Java". (cut of prematurely).
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.
Now, if you are tempted to say something like "the inmates are running the asylum" in Sun's case that may very well be true: http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/santaclara/agn.htm :-)
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.