This is a very different world from the one in which IE6 rose to dominance. We're in no way in a Webkit monoculture right now – Trident and Gecko aren't going anywhere any time soon!
Specifically addressing Opera: the smaller-audience engines that have had their chance but not done much with it should be left behind, making room for new small players to step in and take the reins. I can't wait to see some new players in this space.
> Rails 2 introduced a new default session storage, CookieStore. CookieStore saves the session hash directly in a cookie on the client-side. The server retrieves the session hash from the cookie and eliminates the need for a session id. That will greatly increase the speed of the application, but it is a controversial storage option and you have to think about the security implications of it:
It's plenty secure in the sense that you can't forge a session. It's not secure in the sense that the data is inaccessible if you know how to base64 decode a cookie.
If you're using cookie sessions, you should know better than to store sensitive information in the session.
That's a successful version of the Pyramid story. NT had been developed alongside OT (or whatever the old tech kernel was called).
They wrote a new system in tandem with maintaining the old one and when it was mature enough, swapped out old for new. This pattern is very commonplace.
NT was created in parallel, and run in parallel for a long time. Eventually the benefits of NT outweighed the 9x kernel, and computers were fast enough that the extra overhead was acceptable. 9x was EOLed and XP went with the NT kernel.
They were two different products that ended up converging enough that sharing code made sense.
If there is any lesson from OS X and Windows, I think you've hit on it, exactly. The way to replace isn't to stop one and start another – instead, you need to build in parallel and have a smart migration plan.
Yes, but they had been developing the NT product line for years, so it wasn't a full start over. Then they had the Windows 2000 release which was their first stab at a "merged" kernel for desktop and pro/server. XP was the full cutover after Windows 2000 validated that it'd work.
Zsh has an autocorrect feature that suggests different spellings of your command if it can't find anything exactly matching it. I'm sure that I recall hearing of similar functionality available for bash, too.
Also, recent versions of Ubuntu include shell aliases that will search for packages related to missing commands. I'm sure that if you don't use Ubuntu, you could rip this functionality out and port it to whatever packaging system you use.
