Singularity

It’s not the next Windows: Microsoft Research releases its Singularity source code for academic and non-commercial use, with hopes that a prototype operating system built to improve software dependability will foster inventive research.

Yay

I'm free!

Back to table based layouts?

Kevin Yank writes about the possibilities of using display:table when IE8 comes out. Personally, I don't see this being feasible for a good 3 years, seeing how IE6 is still a major browser despite IE7 being out for a while now.

Acid 3 is out

And safari 3 nightly is winning.

2 months later

Finally, the IE team made it official that they'll enable standards compliance mode by default in IE8.

Can someone remind me why the US is still in Iraq?

Apparently someone set fire to some luxury houses as a form of ecoterrorist protest.

I wonder what was the point of setting all of that smoke up into the atmosphere. I bet they used aerosols with ODS to draw the message on the sheet too <_<;

Wikileaks back online

I don't know about you, but I had never heard of wikileaks before the whole shutting down hubba-bubba. Apparently the judge reversed the order to take the domain offline because the press the action caused did the opposite of what he intended.

Nokia is getting Silverlight

With all the talks about how w3c standards compliance sucks on mobile platforms, could it be that the proprietary formats will end up becoming de facto standards all over again?

Vista cracked

Thanks for making the world a worse place, Pantheon.

Generics in Javascript

Apparently, there are talks about adding generics to Javascript.

I'm not sure why people would want generics in a dynamically-typed language.

Personally, I like:

var EmpList = []

over

var EmpList:List.<Employee> = new List.<Employee>();

The one thing I really dislike about static typed languages is this naive assumption that a language should restrict the "damage" a programmer can do. I think that's just plain bad design, because people end up relying on the software when it's really the programmer's job to unit-test their code in the first place.

Making generics invariant is just silly. In the EmpList example, writing

EmpList[0].bark()

is going to throw errors regardless of whether you have type constraints or not. This whole thing about object sniffing has been discussed enough times already and this sounds like a pompous version of the same thing. When you have no control over the environment where your code will run (e.g. a browser), you can't just go and do

var a = new List.<Array>([]);
a[0].forEach(doSomething);

At least they're suggesting an unambiguous token (".<"), instead of copying Java literally, so implementation should be a little less hellish, and thus, a little faster to parse through.