None - darkness is a feature.

Also, if you think the web is screwed up, try writing desktop applications for OS X, Linux, and Windows. Good luck with that. You won't even get to writing code before going mental just trying to decipher which APIs are considered current and what language to use. Have fun doing any of the following: 1. Using a single language in all cases, even if it is something like Java that's supposed just work everywhere. 2. Sorting out what menu shortcuts to use and quasi-standards on them. 3. Integrating with the various taskbars. 4. Working on past versions as well as newer versions of the OS. 5. Making an installer that doesn't suck. 6. Providing updates. 7. Working with/around some of the "features" of each system. Gotta love the way Win7 automatically makes dialogs show up behind the current window, that's just so awesome. As much as the web may be frustrating as all hell, it pales in comparison to the wrist-slitting exercise of writing desktop applications of even the smallest semblance of quality. Really, the only truly badass, "where's a cliff to fling myself off of?" part of web design is using CSS.

You also get problems submitting forms when you make your own javascript function called submit(), and try to set the form to call it on submission. So I'm not surprised about the id thing :)

Is this new and different thing in addition to the original file checking? If so, without knowing anything about the architecture, I'd be inclined to say if this new operation is really that different from the original, then just make a totally different set of code to handle that new job, but package it up in the same project. Make an initial entry point that just takes in a file and an operation to perform, and it just sends the file to the existing code or the new code, depending on the operation. You can add any number of different operations that are arbitrarily different from each other using separate sets of code. Being web-based, you can just have different web pages for different operations.

Greg Hall greghall@bantling.me

I don't care so much about the language as everything else. When Java first came out, I finally had a system to write graphical desktop applications on different systems without a ton of BS. Sure people joked about AWT being "write once, debug everywhere", but compared to everything else it was light years ahead. I had libraries that actually worked - on average, I could not compile a C library, so who knows if it did what I wanted or not. I had really simple database access, network access, all the stuff I had wanted and couldn't seem to get. I was like a kid in a candy store. This is the problem with C - not the language, but the lack of something akin to the JSR process, where standard libraries for all sorts of useful things are created. I'd be the first guy to say that Java programmers love to go overboard and make a Rube Goldberg library for everything with 59 layers of abstraction, whereas C programmers tend towards minimal libraries that do just what's needed and no more. But then those C programmers love macros and other things that make the code hard to understand, and they need systems like autoconf and ports trees to actually get their libraries to even compile on different platforms. Six of one, half dozen of the other. So I still love Java for all it provides. The language is overly complicated, and generics are by far the singular worst - and completely unnecessary - feature. When I saw all these new script languages cropping up, I thought, well what about the library for database access, for generating spreadsheets, PDFs, reports, images, etc? I failed to see why I'd want to switch to something shiny and new that is clearly less capable just because the language was simpler. Years later, I see people moving back to Java because they had scalability problems, or problems like this author described with something fundamentally wrong buried deep in the guts of the system. And I still don't see much in the way of database libraries and other things. I have a chuckle when I read about such things. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm sure there are other languages that have a great set of libraries for useful stuff, I'm sure .Net can likely do a lot of the things I need. But would I be any better off with another language? I don't think so. And I can use other languages through the ScriptManager anyway, while retaining access to all the libraries Java offers.

I'm not a hater of anything, but I generally dislike online services, be it FB or anything else, because: a) They appear and disappear at random. You never know when something you like is suddenly gone. b) When they disappear, you typically get a very short window to grab your data, if you want it and it's your only copy. c) Privacy policies change at will. d) UIs change at will. It is easy to say that if you're not paying, then you're not the target, just the product. But this implies that if you were paying, then your voice should be important. That leads to two questions: 1) Are paid services really any better, or do they just do the same stuff anyway? 2) If there is no option to pay, then how do you get a service that is what you want, where you are the target and not the product? I don't want to be a product, I want a service that is useful to me. I don't find it useful to me for random changes in UI or anything else. I don't need and don't want services I can't rely on. As a result, I use very few online services. Most of the stuff that crops up, I just don't care, any more than I care about the lastest javascript framework of the hour. For some services, like email, I want services that are like a wrench - it was a 15mm silver wrench 5 years ago, and it's a 15mm silver wrench today. Same colour, sits in the same box, does the same thing. Why on earth do I need new shiny features in my email? It's such a basic thing, it should rarely change. Sometimes things are done just right. A great example of doing it right is online banking. You pay for your online banking thru fees, you are the target, your feedback actually goes into the next version. They do a big change maybe once every 3-5 years, and otherwise stay the same, it's more like a desktop boxed product. And that upgrade is actually better by any reasonable definition, not just shiny and cool and glittery. This is exactly what I want - I'm just paying bills and tracking my expenses, the same stuff I was doing 5 years go with online banking. And I don't get damned ads pestering me every frigging visit. For free services, I like CP for the same reasons. I just use it to follow articles on the news section about quasi-programming related stuff. Works pretty much the same as it did when I started, get a list of articles, pick a few, read them. Why is it so hard to find more services like this? Why do they all have to obsess over glittery coolness and one-upping each other like schoolyard children? I don't give a s**t about the la

Believe it or not, hot water freezes faster than cold water. It sounds totally dumbass, but it's true. This is a well-known phenomenon that has been noted over the centuries by multiple people. Recently, someone came up with a plausible explanation why (see https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/d8a2f611e853[^]) And yes, some places in the world (like Alaksa) are cold enough for hot water to freeze before it hits the ground. You can easily din youtube videos of this by obvious amateurs who wouldn't know what Photoshop was if it introduced itself. So it is believable.