Well, I guess you need to find out what's important to you and then take it from there. I would recommend "The Personal MBA" by Josh Kaufman. Before you run away in terror, it's not really a business book. Sure, it covers some business topics, but not in great detail. The idea behind this book is to briefly outline most concepts and principles that you'll encounter in a business setting. Each "topic" is about 1 page long, covering principles ranging from sales, marketing and finance through to leadership, management, psychology and personal development. The end result is a basic overview of just about topic you may encounter in your career. Each topic has a number of references which can be followed if you desire. I found this book quite interesting because it gave me some insight into the what the psychopaths running the company I work for are trying to achieve. It also gave me a starting point to further investigate a number of other topics.
Read this book to find out what other books you need to read.
Apart from that, I would also recommend:
Team Geek - Fitzpatrick, Collins-Sussman (really good book!)
Rework - 37 Signals
Being Geek - Michael Lopp (a lot of fluff in this one though)
Lean Startup - Eric Ries (if you're thinking of going it alone)
Actually, I think it's got less to do with the quality and more to do with actual usefulness.
Most professional photographers and many enthusiastic amateurs take photos that are going to end up being printed somewhere, be it a magazine, advert or just a picture on the wall. In that case, light fields aren't much help. Sure it could help you make sure your photos are tack sharp in post production, but most photographers with a bit of experience know how to do this anyway.
Another commenter said this will be good for facebook and I agree. Online is a great medium for these sorts of images(?) where people can click around the image and adjust the focus, although it could be used for evil as well as good, I'm sure. Once there are a few applications and codecs around for displaying these images I think it could really take off.
Well done to these guys for advancing the state of the art!
not trying to troll or anything. This is a serious attempt at being informative.
fubar = fucked up beyond all recognition (or something similar)
So the phrase "fubaring up my XP system by..." would be understood as "fucking up beyond all recognition up my XP system by..." which isn't quite correct. Please drop the extra "up".
I'd recommend trying Funambol. It's an open source sync server that works with SyncML. You can set up the server pretty easily on one of your work stations. There are sync clients for Evolution and just about every mobile phone. It has some short comings in that it doesn't support every single field in the various data types (contacts, calendar, events, notes) but for most people it's good enough.
For Christ's sake, why do you have to be so negative? How is this any different to normal library books? I think this is a great idea and could save a lot of people money especially when it comes to school/technical/reference books. It would probably kill the O'Reilly bookshelf.
I wish they'd start doing something like this but with music and movies. I know, it'll never happen.
I just tried it too. I noticed a definite improvement in performance across all apps. The music app still takes forever to launch but it's better than it was with spotlight enabled. I don't think I've ever used spotlight on my iPod so disabling was a small price to pay for a bit of extra performance and probably better battery life.
I agree with everything you've said but your post makes it sound like disabling spotlight doesn't help at all which might discourage people from trying this hack.
After all, many of Ballmer's minions have their wealth tied up in Microsoft stock options and it is quite disconcerting for them to look at a 10-year chart that shows the company's share price of $48.93 when Ballmer took over in January 2000 now down to $25.12. (for the math-challenged, that's a nearly 50 percent loss in value over the last decade).
If you'd invested some money in MS shares 10 years ago you'd be able to sell them for half the amount today. If I was a shareholder I'd be furious. Generally you'd expect to make some (even minor) capital gain on a stock like MS over that period.
I actually think they didn't go down that road because it would require admitting there is a problem and then having to take whatever legal heat comes along with that. There's this class action suit pending and giving out bumpers is pretty much an admission of guilt.
why should ALL students get charged for something that not all students are taking part in?
And why should a college have to choose between either spending money on enforcing someone else's copyrights or losing federal funding. Colleges aren't the only place where this goes on. This won't benefit anyone.
I also had Chris McDonald as a lecturer when I was at UWA several years ago and he was by far the best lecturer that I had in my time there. Just about everyone that took one of his courses would comment on how interesting and relevant his classes were. I'm not at all surprised speedwaystar is making the same comment.
Many people comment that Newscorp should be using robots.txt to stop Google from crawling their content, however, I think this is a little naive.
The beef that Murdoch has with Google isn't that Google is crawling their sites and providing search results, but that Google is aggregating their articles on Google News. Newscorp probably DOES want Google to crawl their site so people can search for news about the topic of the day and find it - hence the permissive robots.txt.
However, providing the headline and a decent chunk of the article probably cuts down a lot of the traffic that news websites would get if Google News was not there. This in turn reduces add revenue which is how a lot of news sites make their money.
I'm not saying I give a shit that the news sites are losing money. I'm just trying to offer some perspective.
If you have a car that has an automatic transmission, putting it into neutral while driving is a bad idea and it wouldn't surprise me if ALL automatics stopped the driver from doing so. The reason is that auto gearboxes have an oil pump that's driven by the engine. When you stop driving the gear box from the engine and start driving it from the wheels, the gear box quickly heats up and I suppose could even seize with potentially nasty consequences.
Try Googling "why can't i tow an automatic car" or something like that
The biggest problem I have with this whole debate is that, while there are plenty of people that are flat against the blacklist (for plenty of good reasons), nobody is offering any decent alternatives or trying to find a middle ground.
From what I understand, the main role of this filter is help parents police their kid's activities on the internet, which in principle, I'm all for. There's the secondary goal of preventing kiddie porn and other unsavory content from appearing too, but blocking it won't make it go away.
So why not an alternative? They could set up an opt-in system that allows parent's to decide what their kids see (and achieve their primary objective) and let the police go after the child pornographers (which they do already).
As an example: a custom, government subsidised router with a white list (Conroy can handle that) of a few thousand domains/url's should be enough for most parents. Any additional sites that the parent's want to allow can be added via a password controlled page on the router. One could also offer parents the ability to review pages that have been added recently in case they're dumb enough to let their kids figure out their password. I'm not the worlds best developer but I'm pretty sure that even I could implement something like that.
That way everyone wins:
the parents win: they can protect their kids.
Adults who want to look at porn win: it's an opt in system.
ISP's win: they don't have to deal with implementing this dumbass filter.
The government wins: they're protecting the kids and achieving their primary goal.
I'm know that they want to block ALL denied-classification content, but if you've spent a bit of time on the internet, you'd know that it's just not feasible. Why don't they make that a separate policy and at least get some benefit out of this.
While your post makes some good points about designing the back end of a website, it doesn't really address what the Smashing Book is actually about.
The book (I've read it) is a guide for freelance web designers/developers trying to design complete websites with a focus on outstanding graphic design. That's why they cover things like typography, color, usability, conversions and branding - clearly something your usenet poster isn't concerned with.
If you're looking for an "All in One Web/Graphic Design for Developers" style book, this is it. If you're happy making websites with poor usability and bad graphic design, that's fine too - the effort required to produce an excellent graphic design for a website can often take just as long as getting the site up and running.
Whether you like it or not, good graphic design is becoming an essential part of developing websites these days and producing a site with poor typography, color, layout and usability can be a huge factor in a users decision to use your site or not. If two websites offered roughly the same functionality, most users are going to go with the one that offers the most pleasing user experience (this is not only true for web design).
This book isn't for everyone. If you spend your time working on the back end then it's probably not for you. If you're an experienced Graphic Designer then there's probably not nothing new for you there. However, if you're starting out developing your own websites and you're interested in producing websites that provide a good user experience then Smashing book is a concise guide to some of the most important topics.
Sorry for the rant, but I just feel that there are so many developers out there who undervalue good design and dismiss it as "voodoo", that I had to pipe up.
back when I was young (early 2k's) I used to listen to a lot of dance music and go to the occasional rave. When I first started going to these gigs, I asked one of my friends why the DJ's used vinyl instead of CD's. She told me that, because the records are analog, you get much better quality sound. I asked a few other people and they all seemed to agree.
I was always a bit skeptical. How can you create electronic music, digitally, on computers etc and then claim that putting them on vinyl somehow magically improves the quality?
I've always thought that people buy vinyl because it's just a bit more romantic. Or they're fucking idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I guess you need to find out what's important to you and then take it from there. I would recommend "The Personal MBA" by Josh Kaufman. Before you run away in terror, it's not really a business book. Sure, it covers some business topics, but not in great detail. The idea behind this book is to briefly outline most concepts and principles that you'll encounter in a business setting. Each "topic" is about 1 page long, covering principles ranging from sales, marketing and finance through to leadership, management, psychology and personal development. The end result is a basic overview of just about topic you may encounter in your career. Each topic has a number of references which can be followed if you desire. I found this book quite interesting because it gave me some insight into the what the psychopaths running the company I work for are trying to achieve. It also gave me a starting point to further investigate a number of other topics.
Read this book to find out what other books you need to read.
Apart from that, I would also recommend:
Team Geek - Fitzpatrick, Collins-Sussman (really good book!)
Rework - 37 Signals
Being Geek - Michael Lopp (a lot of fluff in this one though)
Lean Startup - Eric Ries (if you're thinking of going it alone)
...you build your own free web browser and set your search engine as the default? Google don't have a monopoly on the browser market. Heul doch.
I know, right. It's as if the judges and politicians haven't been bought!
It's not fantastic at all!
Actually, I think it's got less to do with the quality and more to do with actual usefulness.
Most professional photographers and many enthusiastic amateurs take photos that are going to end up being printed somewhere, be it a magazine, advert or just a picture on the wall. In that case, light fields aren't much help. Sure it could help you make sure your photos are tack sharp in post production, but most photographers with a bit of experience know how to do this anyway.
Another commenter said this will be good for facebook and I agree. Online is a great medium for these sorts of images(?) where people can click around the image and adjust the focus, although it could be used for evil as well as good, I'm sure. Once there are a few applications and codecs around for displaying these images I think it could really take off.
Well done to these guys for advancing the state of the art!
not trying to troll or anything. This is a serious attempt at being informative.
fubar = fucked up beyond all recognition (or something similar)
So the phrase "fubaring up my XP system by..." would be understood as "fucking up beyond all recognition up my XP system by..." which isn't quite correct. Please drop the extra "up".
Good luck with your future fubaring's.
I'd recommend trying Funambol. It's an open source sync server that works with SyncML. You can set up the server pretty easily on one of your work stations. There are sync clients for Evolution and just about every mobile phone. It has some short comings in that it doesn't support every single field in the various data types (contacts, calendar, events, notes) but for most people it's good enough.
You have been eaten by a Grue
For Christ's sake, why do you have to be so negative? How is this any different to normal library books? I think this is a great idea and could save a lot of people money especially when it comes to school/technical/reference books. It would probably kill the O'Reilly bookshelf.
I wish they'd start doing something like this but with music and movies. I know, it'll never happen.
I just tried it too. I noticed a definite improvement in performance across all apps. The music app still takes forever to launch but it's better than it was with spotlight enabled. I don't think I've ever used spotlight on my iPod so disabling was a small price to pay for a bit of extra performance and probably better battery life.
I agree with everything you've said but your post makes it sound like disabling spotlight doesn't help at all which might discourage people from trying this hack.
I own a Macbook Pro, an iPod Touch and use iTunes, you insensitive clod!
If you'd invested some money in MS shares 10 years ago you'd be able to sell them for half the amount today. If I was a shareholder I'd be furious. Generally you'd expect to make some (even minor) capital gain on a stock like MS over that period.
I actually though most of it looked pretty good (in the cnet demo anyway) and I'd really like to see a bit of extra competition in this space.
But I just wanted to check: now that we all hate Apple, is it ok to like Microsoft stuff now?
Thanks for the link. Interesting stuff. I also found an excellent picture of a scale model
I actually think they didn't go down that road because it would require admitting there is a problem and then having to take whatever legal heat comes along with that. There's this class action suit pending and giving out bumpers is pretty much an admission of guilt.
why should ALL students get charged for something that not all students are taking part in?
And why should a college have to choose between either spending money on enforcing someone else's copyrights or losing federal funding. Colleges aren't the only place where this goes on. This won't benefit anyone.
... and don't forget the sunscreen
I also had Chris McDonald as a lecturer when I was at UWA several years ago and he was by far the best lecturer that I had in my time there. Just about everyone that took one of his courses would comment on how interesting and relevant his classes were. I'm not at all surprised speedwaystar is making the same comment.
Although, it is a bit of a brown noser comment...
It probably is, however, it might already be patented in Austria since that's where the Wiener Schnitzel was invented. Also the Wiener sausage.
Wien is the capital of Austria. It's called Vienna in English.
Many people comment that Newscorp should be using robots.txt to stop Google from crawling their content, however, I think this is a little naive.
The beef that Murdoch has with Google isn't that Google is crawling their sites and providing search results, but that Google is aggregating their articles on Google News. Newscorp probably DOES want Google to crawl their site so people can search for news about the topic of the day and find it - hence the permissive robots.txt.
However, providing the headline and a decent chunk of the article probably cuts down a lot of the traffic that news websites would get if Google News was not there. This in turn reduces add revenue which is how a lot of news sites make their money.
I'm not saying I give a shit that the news sites are losing money. I'm just trying to offer some perspective.
If you have a car that has an automatic transmission, putting it into neutral while driving is a bad idea and it wouldn't surprise me if ALL automatics stopped the driver from doing so. The reason is that auto gearboxes have an oil pump that's driven by the engine. When you stop driving the gear box from the engine and start driving it from the wheels, the gear box quickly heats up and I suppose could even seize with potentially nasty consequences.
Try Googling "why can't i tow an automatic car" or something like that
TFA says 1.3 TRILLION lb's. So add 6 zeros to the end of your estimate.
The biggest problem I have with this whole debate is that, while there are plenty of people that are flat against the blacklist (for plenty of good reasons), nobody is offering any decent alternatives or trying to find a middle ground.
From what I understand, the main role of this filter is help parents police their kid's activities on the internet, which in principle, I'm all for. There's the secondary goal of preventing kiddie porn and other unsavory content from appearing too, but blocking it won't make it go away.
So why not an alternative? They could set up an opt-in system that allows parent's to decide what their kids see (and achieve their primary objective) and let the police go after the child pornographers (which they do already).
As an example: a custom, government subsidised router with a white list (Conroy can handle that) of a few thousand domains/url's should be enough for most parents. Any additional sites that the parent's want to allow can be added via a password controlled page on the router. One could also offer parents the ability to review pages that have been added recently in case they're dumb enough to let their kids figure out their password. I'm not the worlds best developer but I'm pretty sure that even I could implement something like that.
That way everyone wins:
I'm know that they want to block ALL denied-classification content, but if you've spent a bit of time on the internet, you'd know that it's just not feasible. Why don't they make that a separate policy and at least get some benefit out of this.
While your post makes some good points about designing the back end of a website, it doesn't really address what the Smashing Book is actually about.
The book (I've read it) is a guide for freelance web designers/developers trying to design complete websites with a focus on outstanding graphic design. That's why they cover things like typography, color, usability, conversions and branding - clearly something your usenet poster isn't concerned with.
If you're looking for an "All in One Web/Graphic Design for Developers" style book, this is it. If you're happy making websites with poor usability and bad graphic design, that's fine too - the effort required to produce an excellent graphic design for a website can often take just as long as getting the site up and running.
Whether you like it or not, good graphic design is becoming an essential part of developing websites these days and producing a site with poor typography, color, layout and usability can be a huge factor in a users decision to use your site or not. If two websites offered roughly the same functionality, most users are going to go with the one that offers the most pleasing user experience (this is not only true for web design).
This book isn't for everyone. If you spend your time working on the back end then it's probably not for you. If you're an experienced Graphic Designer then there's probably not nothing new for you there. However, if you're starting out developing your own websites and you're interested in producing websites that provide a good user experience then Smashing book is a concise guide to some of the most important topics.
Sorry for the rant, but I just feel that there are so many developers out there who undervalue good design and dismiss it as "voodoo", that I had to pipe up.
back when I was young (early 2k's) I used to listen to a lot of dance music and go to the occasional rave. When I first started going to these gigs, I asked one of my friends why the DJ's used vinyl instead of CD's. She told me that, because the records are analog, you get much better quality sound. I asked a few other people and they all seemed to agree.
I was always a bit skeptical. How can you create electronic music, digitally, on computers etc and then claim that putting them on vinyl somehow magically improves the quality?
I've always thought that people buy vinyl because it's just a bit more romantic. Or they're fucking idiots.