Exactly his point here. my.yahoo.com was innovative for its time, and patents are supposed to last 20 years, right? So according to the legal system in place, the public should use my.yahoo.com till around 2020.
I agree, what could really be any other purpose for patents? Is a judge going to say, 10 years into a patent, "well, our process thought this was novel 10 years ago, but it doesn't seem so novel to me now"?
The problem is that this 20-year term makes no sense in software, if the public wants to use the latest and greatest thing.
No, because non-obviousness is judged according to the time in which the thing was invented. Was it non-obvious in 2000? If it was, its patent remains intact, even if it seem obvious now.
And I'll point out that novelty and non-obviousness are two different things in the context of patents. The majority of software patents seem to fail the latter the majority of the time. Novelty is more of a wash.
This is why I stick with Rails; for the mindshare. There are many reasons to be critical of Rails, but the bottom line is that other people generously contribute work like this on a regular basis, making me instantly more valuable to employers or clients.
This is a good point, and it's one of the main reasons I prefer open source in general: this is true for almost all fairly active open source projects. However, I'm not sure how this differentiates Rails from some of the other popular web frameworks.
Rails is now pretty old (in tech years) and one reason for active participation and contribution to the community is that the Rails team continues promote forward movement in the framework. So Rails is also always new.
A lot of the stuff people moan about (e.g. lack of backwards compatibility and constant breaking changes) is also what keeps it fresh. It's not hard to introduce new best practices because the old ones are continually tossed out. This can't be said for a lot of open source projects that value stability over change. (For some projects, stability is rightfully more important).
Apple doesn't want one of these presidential hopefuls to start campaigning on the platform that the second largest US company needs to start creating jobs in the US.
My browser does 10,000 operations / second with innerHTML, and 15,000 operations / second with DOM. In every ajax application I've ever made, this is negligible, compared to latency, server processing time, and downloading time.
I guess this saves you 1ms for every 30 elements you create? I'm sure there are some cases I'm missing where this might make more of an impact, but from my understanding of the article, this looks like a pretty small improvement.
Keep in mind, not everybody is running a desktop browser with that sort of cpu horsepower behind it.
Half of the iPhones ever sold - something like 80 million devices - are pre iPhone 4. There are a lot of low end Android devices on the market _right now_ with worse browser performance than an iPhone 3 (I've got a <6month old Huawei U8110 here as an example). Sure, top-end Android devices compare well against an iPhone4S (I'm pretty impressed with the Galaxy SII I've got here), but the bulk of Android devices in the wild are not late-model-top-end devices.
I had to drop an entire development branch from a project late last year due to insufficient performance of mobile device on-handset ajax. (We fell back to on-server html rendering and innerHTML updates, and even _that_ is annoyingly slow to me on low-end phones.)
And unless you have gathered data showing otherwise, this _probably_ really does apply to you. I was collecting some mobile use data last week - across ~70 websites that I've got Google Analytics access to, the average mobile visits was 14%, and the peak was just over 28%. This was across a range of markets and a variety of levels of "mobile friendliness" of the web design. (Biggest and probably most obvious takeaways from that exercise: B2B sites are a standard deviation or more below average for mobile visits, personal/leisure B2C sites up to one or two SD's above average. 80+% of mobile visits exit on a page with contact details - a phone# or address.)
In mobile HTML5 apps _everything_ matters. I spent a significant amount of time building HTML5 apps that mirrored native UI almost perfectly and the primary issue with such an interface was that loading took forever the first time you open the page/app (but was natively-fast thereafter). If you're caching the app offline then JS performance (and moreso CSS performance) quickly become the bottleneck in app usability (because of the huge startup costs of setting up the page on the order of 10 seconds for something your desktop loads instantly).
Doesn't every website that gets used by the unwashed masses eventually have to deal with this problem? How does facebook or youtube deal with it? How did AOL deal with it?
Is the issue just that Reddit is run by a smaller team than these larger companies?
Facebook is obviously thriving as a business but arousing indignation and ire over their policies, which ban breastfeeding photos but allow hate speech.
So I woud say they have decided to live woth a certain ongoing level of shitstorming as a cost of doing buiness.
Youtube handles it via whack-a-mole. A friend of mine used to work in their community dept, and would tell horror stories about the things she'd see people put up.
My heart goes out to the censors who have to deal with user submissions (as opposed to network censors). I can only blanch at the job that people who manage Google Image Search have to deal with.
I fully agree with this. CSS set the web back years with it's inability to handle simple layout. The W3C organization is run by representatives of major corporations, and the standards take years to roll out.
I agree, what could really be any other purpose for patents? Is a judge going to say, 10 years into a patent, "well, our process thought this was novel 10 years ago, but it doesn't seem so novel to me now"?
The problem is that this 20-year term makes no sense in software, if the public wants to use the latest and greatest thing.