MS was pooh-poohing the Internet. Windows 95 was going to ignore the Internet-- the Internet wasn't important. However, Bill Gates realized the importance of the Internet, and singlehandedly turned the company attitude around. He "got it".
Almost. BillG and MS still don't "get" the internet. If they did, they'd have fixed mshtml.dll a long time ago. They want to control the internet... a big difference. Remember, the "software ecosystem" only applies to Windows.
An onion pretty much describes the MS security model. Take a core, wrap some layers around it, then add more annoying layers to protect the existing layers. And not every layer has to be from the same kind of onion.
Coding practices can only get security so far... MS needs to revamp their security design.
This list is about making games more real, which doesn't necessarily mean better. There more to it, such as balance, game play, user interface, premise, and plot.
I'd still rather play NetHack than any MMO game, and I enjoy the early Final Fantasy games more than the later ones.
There are so many worthless niche channels out there that skate by because everyone pays for them, but no one watches them. Who in their right mind would specifically subscribe to the Game Show Channel, the Reality TV channel, or any home shopping channel?
Plus, it might have added benefits:
Putting G4 out of its misery
Teaching SciFi a lesson about canceling all their good series.
Seasonal subscriptions (ie, I would only want FX when Rescue ME is on) would probably throw cable into utter chaos. The cable companies know this, and it's probably why they'll fight it, unless they can convince the FCC to allow some outrageous fee structure for subscription changes, like you can only change once a year, in [random month that makes it not worth doing, based on previous viewing habits], otherwise there's a $5 fee per channel added or removed.
Do not belong at GenCon for the same reason WOTC, WizKids, GW, and all the other vendors who do belong at GenCon don't belong at E3 or CES to peddle their non-electronic products.
The last of my 8 trips to GenCon was 2003, and even then the video games ate up 20% of the vendor hall. I can't imagine there was much space left for the small tabletop publishers this year.
Aside from creationist mumbo-jumbo being taught in public schools, a candidate's religious beliefs (or lack thereof) is a non-issue. It distracts from all the real issues, like*:
Government corruption
Corporate power and lobbyists
Health care
The economy
Dismantling of the Constitution and destruction of civil rights
If you want to ask a real question, ask "How do you fix this country, so that it returns to being a democracy of, for, and by the people?"
The machine thrives on nonsense like asking the candidates' religious views. It's a giant troll, stop feeding it.
* Not necessarily in order of importance
The system doesn't want anyone to get ahead
on
Failing Our Geniuses
·
· Score: 1
The American education system isn't designed to educate anyone, it's designed to produce subservient, unthinking consumers.
Money is spent on developmentally disabled kids out of sympathy/pity.
Money isn't spent on gifted kids because the system fears that they might actually learn something, or learn to question things, and become disruptive (either in school, or later in society).
Walk into any high school and ask the history teachers why the War of 1812 was fought. I bet 99% of them will give some non-reasoning answer like "because the British attacked us," rather than the real answer: Britain was trying to keep American hemp out of France, in order to cripple the French navy.
If the kids were taught this, they may realize that hemp == marijuana and begin to question the War on Drugs, or the government in general. There are countless similar examples.
PS: I am not a pot smoker, I just have an interest in history.
I have ZERO sympathy for the cable racketeers. Rates increase at 6 times the rate of inflation. Digital cable looks worse than analog (I know an over-compressed mpeg stream when I see it). The customer service is crap. Their technicians are morons.
Where I am, Comcast likes to screw up their DHCP servers about every 6 weeks, usually on a Sunday. Once, the customer service rep (imagine the George Carlin bit) insists on sending a truck out to check the lines. Tuesday when he showed up, I told him he was on a wild goose chase.
The next time, it took them 68 hours to figure out how to get their DHCP servers to hand out real IP addresses, rather than 192.168.0.* addresses.
I mean seriously, WTF?
When I had Sprint DSL in Vegas I was 3000 feet from the CO (it was great), but had the unfortunate luck of being plugged into a DSLAM that had taken a massive power surge. That I can understand as a source of my woes, but not the fact that it took them well over a year to replace it.
Like so many before, "spending time with his family" is a polite lie. Just because he's leaving his official post doesn't mean he won't still be pulling the puppet strings from backstage.
HTML5 should be dropped, and just develop XHTML5. Imroper/lazy nesting and optionally closed tags are the crutch of "designers" who rely on overly helpful browsers and sloppy WYSIWYGS to do their jobs for them.
Do you trust a mechanic who, after working on your car, gives you your keys and a pile of "extra" parts that he found on your car that "weren't necessary"? Get back in there and put the rest of the head bolts back on, bub.
The fact that the HTML5 tagset is getting silly is a separate issue.
PHP (or any other scripting language) is a too much of a niche to be very relevant here. As long as enterprise-critical projects (like Samba) are moving to GPL3, and Novell is targeting the enterprise, then the new GPL will be tested... hopefully soon.
Always was, always will be. After decades, there is no agreed upon methodology for tracking the effectiveness of marketing dollars in the real world. The internet should make it easier, right? Perhaps, until people learn how to filter the internet. Doubleclick never sees me, because I have
0.0.0.0 *.doubleclick.net
in my hosts file, along with 37,000 other crap sites. I also add "*urchin\.js" to my custom filters in FilterSetG, so AdSense doesn't see me. I suspect other Slashdotters take similar measures.
If a good click through rate on a banner ad is less than 1%, and only about 1% of clicks result in a sale, then the value of that banner to the advertiser is only.01% of it's cost (yes, I know AdSense works differently, but it has its own pitfalls). Pathetic, isn't it?
It makes you wonder how poorly traditional media ads actually perform.
Banner ads, I'm pretty sure, are the first time advertisers have ever been able to measure the returns on ad dollars. Some company spends $20k for a full page ad in a magazine, how much of that came back in sales? No one knows. So just to me sure they don't lose sales, the company continues to buy ads, following some rough percentage of revenues. Demographics is the closest thing marketers have to concrete data... it basically says not to buy ads in Ladies' Home Journal if you're selling vintage car parts. Even then, demographics measures potential returns before the fact, not actual returns after the fact. So, advertising is a wild goose chase based on assumptions, and no one does, or can, really know what's going on.
The internet should be a wake up call for advertisers to the fact that their marketing budgets are being overinflated by... (wait for it) the ad agencies and marketing firms. Sadly no one will realize this, because the foxes are in charge of the henhouse, and claim everyone will fall to ruin otherwise.
Generally, people don't want the crap in the ads, and would rather not even see the ads. Horrible conversion rates prove this. The scariest part of Minority Report, other than the nanny-state concept of "pre-crime", is the level of advertising present everywhere in the film, targeted at individuals with laser-like precision. It got that way because the public allowed it to happen.
The simplest way to fix advertising is to remove all imperative and presumptuous statements from them. No more "Call now!", "You need...", "But wait, there's more!" obnoxious mind games. I'm not calling, I don't need your shit, and I'm not waiting for you to yell at me some more.
After achieving a quality product, the article states, Microsoft's big goal with 7 is to recapture a regular release schedule for their operating system product.
Ian Hickson (whose site you link to) is one of the ringleaders of HTML5: of course he considers XHTML harmful. Very much like MS considering ODF or GPL3 harmful.
Neither HTML nor XHTML contain browser specific extensions; the browser vendors implement these of their own accord.
Sorry, the US has no official national language, English is the de facto national language. All 67 (IIRC) attempts to make English the official language have failed.
I will never understand why HTML5 gains momentum while XHTML2 has become shunned. The page describing diffrences between HTML4 and HTML5 is chock full of "WTF?" moments: presentational tags coming back from the grave, new tags that fill niches narrower than a human hair, and new attributes that are simply bizarre. The ping attribute is so ripe for abuse (by marketers) that I can't even begin to describe how bad of a design decision it is. Other structural problems (such as the dl element's lack of internal organization) remain unaddressed.
XHTML may not have been developed that way everyone wants now, but it is a victim of circumstance: IE doesn't handle the application/xhtml+xml mime type at all. Is this the fault of the original XHTML working group? No, the blame for that lies at Microsoft's feet.
XHTML2 has elegant solutions which HTML5 eschews in favor of bloating its tag set. The role attribute could replace half a dozen or more of the new special purpose HTML5 tags. Adding href and src to nearly all the tags is another stroke of genius.
In a world which has embraced XML, why should the most public-facing specification of the W3C make XML compliance optional? Tag soup is for idiots, just like babushka tables. Some claim that XHTML was never embraced by developers. Which developers do they mean: the ones who have read and understand the standards, or the WYSIWYG monkeys who couldn't write a valid "Hello, world!" paragraph by hand if their lives depended on it?
I find it appalling that the W3C has allowed this usurpation to happen. And nothing against Chris Wilson personally, but him as the working group chair will probably have dire consequences eventually.
Because politicians get into politics to gain power for themselves, not to perform the public service they were elected to do.
Congresscritters are paid a good salary, but it's still a pittance compared to the diamond-encrusted carrots K street lobbyists dangle in front of their noses every day.
I did several consecutive speed tests last year (I'm on Comcast in Sacramento), and the results were erratic at best.
Over the course of about an hour, 20 tests said my bandwidth ranged between 3Mbps and 24Mbps (all to the same server, average was about 9Mbps), and I pay for 8Mbps.
... because they are clueless asshats. My original contract is a printed web page. How do I know this? Because they didn't even bother to turn off headers & footers for printing, so there's a nice http:// URL at the top. Not over SSL, and they must have sent my personal info unencrypted over the internet at least 6 times during the sign up process. Sadly, I didn't notice this until a few weeks later when I was shuffling papers around.
I'm convinced the T stands for tard, and I can get an IQ boost by picking just about any other carrier. I'm going with Sprint because almost everyone I call is on Sprint.
Also, whoever it was at Tard-Mobile that decided is was a good idea to have a 19 year old valley girl record the voice menu for the account services (balance, minutes remaining, etc) should be forced to watch Clueless until their ears bleed and rot away. I don't call the damn service because every sentence starts with "So, okay...". I swear I can hear gum chewing.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost. BillG and MS still don't "get" the internet. If they did, they'd have fixed mshtml.dll a long time ago. They want to control the internet... a big difference. Remember, the "software ecosystem" only applies to Windows.
An onion pretty much describes the MS security model. Take a core, wrap some layers around it, then add more annoying layers to protect the existing layers. And not every layer has to be from the same kind of onion.
Coding practices can only get security so far... MS needs to revamp their security design.
This list is about making games more real, which doesn't necessarily mean better. There more to it, such as balance, game play, user interface, premise, and plot.
I'd still rather play NetHack than any MMO game, and I enjoy the early Final Fantasy games more than the later ones.
Register with usernames that include CEMENT (CE, ME, NT). I'm sure someone will get creative with it.
Anyone tried variations on distro names yet?
In a way, it would.
There are so many worthless niche channels out there that skate by because everyone pays for them, but no one watches them. Who in their right mind would specifically subscribe to the Game Show Channel, the Reality TV channel, or any home shopping channel?
Plus, it might have added benefits:
Seasonal subscriptions (ie, I would only want FX when Rescue ME is on) would probably throw cable into utter chaos. The cable companies know this, and it's probably why they'll fight it, unless they can convince the FCC to allow some outrageous fee structure for subscription changes, like you can only change once a year, in [random month that makes it not worth doing, based on previous viewing habits], otherwise there's a $5 fee per channel added or removed.
Do not belong at GenCon for the same reason WOTC, WizKids, GW, and all the other vendors who do belong at GenCon don't belong at E3 or CES to peddle their non-electronic products.
The last of my 8 trips to GenCon was 2003, and even then the video games ate up 20% of the vendor hall. I can't imagine there was much space left for the small tabletop publishers this year.
Aside from creationist mumbo-jumbo being taught in public schools, a candidate's religious beliefs (or lack thereof) is a non-issue. It distracts from all the real issues, like*:
If you want to ask a real question, ask "How do you fix this country, so that it returns to being a democracy of, for, and by the people?"
The machine thrives on nonsense like asking the candidates' religious views. It's a giant troll, stop feeding it.
* Not necessarily in order of importance
The American education system isn't designed to educate anyone, it's designed to produce subservient, unthinking consumers.
Money is spent on developmentally disabled kids out of sympathy/pity.
Money isn't spent on gifted kids because the system fears that they might actually learn something, or learn to question things, and become disruptive (either in school, or later in society).
Walk into any high school and ask the history teachers why the War of 1812 was fought. I bet 99% of them will give some non-reasoning answer like "because the British attacked us," rather than the real answer: Britain was trying to keep American hemp out of France, in order to cripple the French navy.
If the kids were taught this, they may realize that hemp == marijuana and begin to question the War on Drugs, or the government in general. There are countless similar examples.
PS: I am not a pot smoker, I just have an interest in history.
The Gator^H^H^H^H^HClaria business plan.
I have ZERO sympathy for the cable racketeers. Rates increase at 6 times the rate of inflation. Digital cable looks worse than analog (I know an over-compressed mpeg stream when I see it). The customer service is crap. Their technicians are morons.
Where I am, Comcast likes to screw up their DHCP servers about every 6 weeks, usually on a Sunday. Once, the customer service rep (imagine the George Carlin bit) insists on sending a truck out to check the lines. Tuesday when he showed up, I told him he was on a wild goose chase.
The next time, it took them 68 hours to figure out how to get their DHCP servers to hand out real IP addresses, rather than 192.168.0.* addresses.
I mean seriously, WTF?
When I had Sprint DSL in Vegas I was 3000 feet from the CO (it was great), but had the unfortunate luck of being plugged into a DSLAM that had taken a massive power surge. That I can understand as a source of my woes, but not the fact that it took them well over a year to replace it.
This move doesn't make any sense. Just when the Bushites need him the most, he "quits"? Here's a list of reasons why this is bizarre:
Like so many before, "spending time with his family" is a polite lie. Just because he's leaving his official post doesn't mean he won't still be pulling the puppet strings from backstage.
Something else, really big, is going on.
Once again, those seven little letters get left out of a "standards" article: d-e f-a-c-t-o.
HTML5 should be dropped, and just develop XHTML5. Imroper/lazy nesting and optionally closed tags are the crutch of "designers" who rely on overly helpful browsers and sloppy WYSIWYGS to do their jobs for them.
Do you trust a mechanic who, after working on your car, gives you your keys and a pile of "extra" parts that he found on your car that "weren't necessary"? Get back in there and put the rest of the head bolts back on, bub.
The fact that the HTML5 tagset is getting silly is a separate issue.
"HTML 5 Tagspace Gets More Bloat"
Most of these new tags are ridiculous and doomed to obscurity because they pander to niches narrower than the average paper cut.
Why not do something constructive like design rich form widgets or fix the <dl> element (instead of cloning it as <dialog>)?
PHP (or any other scripting language) is a too much of a niche to be very relevant here. As long as enterprise-critical projects (like Samba) are moving to GPL3, and Novell is targeting the enterprise, then the new GPL will be tested... hopefully soon.
Moderation: +1 Pre-Norman English History reference
Always was, always will be. After decades, there is no agreed upon methodology for tracking the effectiveness of marketing dollars in the real world. The internet should make it easier, right? Perhaps, until people learn how to filter the internet. Doubleclick never sees me, because I have
in my hosts file, along with 37,000 other crap sites. I also add "*urchin\.js" to my custom filters in FilterSetG, so AdSense doesn't see me. I suspect other Slashdotters take similar measures.
If a good click through rate on a banner ad is less than 1%, and only about 1% of clicks result in a sale, then the value of that banner to the advertiser is only .01% of it's cost (yes, I know AdSense works differently, but it has its own pitfalls). Pathetic, isn't it?
It makes you wonder how poorly traditional media ads actually perform.
Banner ads, I'm pretty sure, are the first time advertisers have ever been able to measure the returns on ad dollars. Some company spends $20k for a full page ad in a magazine, how much of that came back in sales? No one knows. So just to me sure they don't lose sales, the company continues to buy ads, following some rough percentage of revenues. Demographics is the closest thing marketers have to concrete data... it basically says not to buy ads in Ladies' Home Journal if you're selling vintage car parts. Even then, demographics measures potential returns before the fact, not actual returns after the fact. So, advertising is a wild goose chase based on assumptions, and no one does, or can, really know what's going on.
The internet should be a wake up call for advertisers to the fact that their marketing budgets are being overinflated by... (wait for it) the ad agencies and marketing firms. Sadly no one will realize this, because the foxes are in charge of the henhouse, and claim everyone will fall to ruin otherwise.
Generally, people don't want the crap in the ads, and would rather not even see the ads. Horrible conversion rates prove this. The scariest part of Minority Report, other than the nanny-state concept of "pre-crime", is the level of advertising present everywhere in the film, targeted at individuals with laser-like precision. It got that way because the public allowed it to happen.
The simplest way to fix advertising is to remove all imperative and presumptuous statements from them. No more "Call now!", "You need...", "But wait, there's more!" obnoxious mind games. I'm not calling, I don't need your shit, and I'm not waiting for you to yell at me some more.
Infinite time is a regular release schedule?
Ian Hickson (whose site you link to) is one of the ringleaders of HTML5: of course he considers XHTML harmful. Very much like MS considering ODF or GPL3 harmful.
Neither HTML nor XHTML contain browser specific extensions; the browser vendors implement these of their own accord.
Sorry, the US has no official national language, English is the de facto national language. All 67 (IIRC) attempts to make English the official language have failed.
I will never understand why HTML5 gains momentum while XHTML2 has become shunned. The page describing diffrences between HTML4 and HTML5 is chock full of "WTF?" moments: presentational tags coming back from the grave, new tags that fill niches narrower than a human hair, and new attributes that are simply bizarre. The ping attribute is so ripe for abuse (by marketers) that I can't even begin to describe how bad of a design decision it is. Other structural problems (such as the dl element's lack of internal organization) remain unaddressed.
XHTML may not have been developed that way everyone wants now, but it is a victim of circumstance: IE doesn't handle the application/xhtml+xml mime type at all. Is this the fault of the original XHTML working group? No, the blame for that lies at Microsoft's feet.
XHTML2 has elegant solutions which HTML5 eschews in favor of bloating its tag set. The role attribute could replace half a dozen or more of the new special purpose HTML5 tags. Adding href and src to nearly all the tags is another stroke of genius.
In a world which has embraced XML, why should the most public-facing specification of the W3C make XML compliance optional? Tag soup is for idiots, just like babushka tables. Some claim that XHTML was never embraced by developers. Which developers do they mean: the ones who have read and understand the standards, or the WYSIWYG monkeys who couldn't write a valid "Hello, world!" paragraph by hand if their lives depended on it?
I find it appalling that the W3C has allowed this usurpation to happen. And nothing against Chris Wilson personally, but him as the working group chair will probably have dire consequences eventually.
SuperEULA: able to transform customers into pirates with a single click!
(Ninjas of the world, beware)
Because politicians get into politics to gain power for themselves, not to perform the public service they were elected to do.
Congresscritters are paid a good salary, but it's still a pittance compared to the diamond-encrusted carrots K street lobbyists dangle in front of their noses every day.
I did several consecutive speed tests last year (I'm on Comcast in Sacramento), and the results were erratic at best.
Over the course of about an hour, 20 tests said my bandwidth ranged between 3Mbps and 24Mbps (all to the same server, average was about 9Mbps), and I pay for 8Mbps.
In a word, it's Comcastic!
... because they are clueless asshats. My original contract is a printed web page. How do I know this? Because they didn't even bother to turn off headers & footers for printing, so there's a nice http:// URL at the top. Not over SSL, and they must have sent my personal info unencrypted over the internet at least 6 times during the sign up process. Sadly, I didn't notice this until a few weeks later when I was shuffling papers around.
I'm convinced the T stands for tard, and I can get an IQ boost by picking just about any other carrier. I'm going with Sprint because almost everyone I call is on Sprint.
Also, whoever it was at Tard-Mobile that decided is was a good idea to have a 19 year old valley girl record the voice menu for the account services (balance, minutes remaining, etc) should be forced to watch Clueless until their ears bleed and rot away. I don't call the damn service because every sentence starts with "So, okay...". I swear I can hear gum chewing.