My parents didn't monitor my BBS/internet access and I didn't have a problem either.
It's not the internet access. That's not the problem. We're focusing on the wrong thing.
We need to ask why kids like Megan take the things being said so hard that they feel suicide is the only way out. Why is it many kids are teased on playgrounds around the world every day and very very very few of them ever follow through with such a drastic action.
It seems as if what a person perceives as their public image is more important than how they feel about themselves; or that maybe the two are seen as one and the same. If so, why?
The internet isn't the problem here, it was just the medium used to deliver the message. Legislate the internet and the medium changes to text messages. Legislate any electronic communication and it becomes rumors shared on the playground and gossiping behind peoples backs (wow, how 20th century).
If I follow along the street, every day, shouting insults at them and taunting them I'm sure the police will find a way to arrest me on charges of harrasment and disorderly conduct and so on. Why wouldn't these apply to online instances? Is it a federal/state thing and the internet makes these situations a bit gray?
If you've got HD DVDs then it seems quite logical you already own the hardware to play HD DVDs. And now that HD DVD is "dead", who will want to buy your used hardware? So if the hardware isn't going away any time soon, and you've got the HD DVDs, why bother with conversion?
Perhaps 20 years from now when that HD DVD player dies you might wish to take these steps to convert your discs to a format that's playable on your Blu-ray drive, but by then we'll probably be on yet another format and the whole process will be pointless.
It'd be nice to see HD DVD producers setup some sort of exchange program where you can turn in your HD DVD disc for a Blu-ray equivalent. Probably won't happen though.
So given the broad definition of ISP that's been used in other areas of law it would seem colleges and universities would fall under this throttling ban as well.
That's going to really suck.
File sharing eats a very large majority of bandwidth for many colleges and without some form of throttling access to resources for other purposes (e.g. college business, student research, and incoming traffic to college resources like websites and distributed computing services) would be seriously hindered.
If Comcast is having similar issues then I can see why they do throttling and would support them. If you don't like it switch providers. That'll hurt Comcast where it really counts for them: their wallets.
What's the likelihood this smell comes from propellants used by the shuttle and soyuz? Seems to me since his only interaction with this smell is from spacesuits that have only had contact with the "air" around the outside of the ISS.
We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 5.0 has been released. Among the new features are the ability to encrypt a system partition or entire system drive (i.e. a drive where Windows is installed) with pre-boot authentication, pipelined operations increasing read/write speed by up to 100%, Mac OS X version, graphical interface for the Linux version, XTS mode, SHA-512, and more.
After four years of development, during which millions of people downloaded a copy of TrueCrypt, it is the only open-source disk encryption software that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The newly implemented ability to encrypt system partitions and system drives provides the highest level of security and privacy, as all files, including any temporary files that Windows and applications create on system drives (typically, without the user's knowledge or consent), swap files, etc., are permanently encrypted. Large amounts of potentially sensitive data that Windows records, such as the names and locations of files opened by the user, applications that the user runs, etc., are always permanently encrypted as well. For more information, please see http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=version-history
I can't find anything in terms of documentation on Wikia, but it appears Wikia search is blocking sites on Wikipedia's blacklist from being listed in the search engine. I've pulled a few examples from the blacklist and searched for them and have yet to receive any results on any of those searches.
Can anyone confirm or refute this? Maybe it's just because the Wikia is in alpha it hasn't indexed much yet?
If this is the case I'd probably steer clear of Wikia; I'm not sure I ant my search results to be filtered like that.
Doctypes are there to provide extensibility. You can develop a parser that has no understanding of what markup language you're using by as long as it can interpret the doctype it will at least understand what bits of your markup are "code" and which bits are "content". This means a parser built today would work 20 years from now assuming you don't muck things up by doing stupid things like, say, removing the doctype. Now that 20 year old parser won't work because it has no clue what "version X" is because it was built with version 1.
tags do not specify a type or language.
This man needs to read up on his HTML spec. The type attribute exists specifically for this purpose.
Furthermore, limiting web pages to a single scripting language won't actually work. You'll, at the very least, have different versions of ECMAScript. What happens when an old function is discovered to be insecure and removed from a future version? What about backwards compatibility. You don't solve the problem, you're just change the look of the problem.
Also this completely ignores things like Flash, JAVA, and whatever other, future embedded objects people put into their web pages that will also be capable of executing scripts.
No more framesets, frames, or iframes.
Absolutely correct. Good luck pushing the idea. The web is awash in high-profile sites making heavy (ab)use of frames.
Modules
I will hold off on this for now. But the short of it is it may be a bit better than frames, but you're not solving all the security issues frames present. Especially if you want things like current AJAX applications to keep working.
The default CSS content needs to be standardized.
Dead. Fucking. Wrong. The browser should not be driving style. Style is subjective. Everyone has their own opinion. Let everyone make their own opinion a reality rather than forcing yours on everyone else.
Instead the current approach should remain. This is where web developers create their own baseline stylesheet that sets padding and margins and such on block elements and leading/kerning/etc on text elements. The real fix here is to add a pseudoselector to CSS that lets you address all block elements. Something like *:block { margin: 1em 0; } would be perfect. It'd cut down on the size of these "baseline" stylesheets from dozens of lines to only a few. It would also allow stylesheets to grow with HTML as new elements are introduced into the markup. Then a 10 year old stylesheet will still apply those margins to block elements even if the original author had no knowledge that we'd someday have a element.
The only character encoding permitted in HTML 5 is UTF-8.
Nice idea. Problematic with backwards compatibility. But if you do this CSS and any other external text files (Javascript) also has to have UTF-8 encoding. Mixing encoding types will actually break some browsers. The impact this decision would have on other technologies probably hasn't been thought through all the way.
Browsers should not perform heroics to try to make bad content displayable
This is less an issue with HTML and more an issue of browser implementation. Talk to Microsoft, Oracle, Firefox, Apple, etc. about this. Again, this is a backwards compatibility.
The tag form is allowed, but not required for
or.
This is not entirely true. First, the empty tag form we know now is a result of the move to XHTML and the need to conform to XML specs. The XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype allows non-closed tags like and , but 1.0 Strict and 1.1 do require it, making those unclosed tags invalid.
Custom HTML tags have always been allowed in HTML.
Dead. Fucking. Wrong.
Because when the clever web developer uses to wrap and style data derived from a chart in his webpage he's not thinking 10 years down the road when we do get a real tag, at
what is the impetus for us to jump on the Blockbuster bandwagon?
unless BB undercuts the Netflix price scheme one way or the other, the only advantage they have is the physical store. the stores allow for impulse renting. no wait time. for those times when a rainy day cancels evening plans or someone mentions a movie you've got to see asap you've got a physical store to rent the movie you need right then and there.
If your design depends on fonts being a particular size in order to lay out other elements or to have things "above the fold", you're doing it wrong.
You're just about right.
Part of the problem is that more than two-thirds of websites currently being maintained out there are doing it wrong. Furthermore many designers don't want to do it right because it requires them to give up fine control over typography and layout. This is especially true for people that started out in the print business and are transitioning to web development.
The other part of the problem is that the "above the fold" concept actually does work to a degree with web pages. In the 90s you had people who didn't understand the concept of scrolling down to see the rest of the page before moving on. Today you've got people so use to instant-information that if they can't immediately find what they're looking for they hop off to another page. This doesn't apply to everyone and websites will draw different audiences (think kids on myspace versus parents evaluating colleges as an example), some more prone to this drive-by browsing than others, so YMMV.
If you accept this "above the fold" concept applies to your audience then you might shrink your default font size down a bit to try and fit more content onto the page. (Yes, different resolutions = different "above the fold" area, but you can design for the majority resolution of your users, typically 1024x768)
And this sort of compromise in layout design, which I call soft-alignment, is something many designers, even those that do it right, will put into use to cater to the majority (humans without visual handicaps using a modern browser on a high resolution color monitor). This allows the majority to enjoy the site as intended while not breaking the usefulness or functionality of the website for those users who fall outside that majority.
Not everyone will have these fonts; not for a long time, anyways. Browsers will then instead use the default sans serif font (Helvetica or Arial typically). Pages viewed in Arial or Helvetica that were intended for Calibri will, at least, not look good and, at worst, be completely unreadable.
Why?
Calibri (which is the one font in the group certain to become the choice of future web developers) has a different size than, say, Arial. A 1em or 12pt or 14px tall Calibri character is going to actually be smaller than the same sized Arial character. The reason is due to the design of the font and the font's leading.
A page set at 100% (default) font size that looks good in Calibri will look oversized in Arial or Helvetica. Furthermore any sort of soft-alignments between texts or text and other page elements will break. For example the content you expect to appear "above the fold" or appear shorter than an image you've got aligned to the right will now be pushed below the fold or below the height of the image, creating an page layout for someone using a stock browser.
Let's take a shot in the dark here. Now these fonts are installed as part of Office 2007. They're part of Vista. They're not part of XP unless you either have Office 2007 or the 2007 compatibility pack installed. Let's say 5% of all internet browsing computers are Vista and 75% are XP. How many of those 75% have Office 2007 or the compatibility pack (which isn't automatically downloaded via windows update, requiring the user go and download it). I think a more than fair value is that 25% of those 75% have Office 2007 or the compatibility pack installed. That equals out to about 25% of all computer users have Calibri support right now. If you design with Calibri you're ignoring 75% of your user base.
In 3-5 years that number, I believe, will drastically increase to the point where the majority will support Calibri. But not now. So don't design with it.
The problem with TrueCrypt, and I use it, is that the is no key recovery or remote management faculty. IOW, if you forget the passphrase (and/or lose the keyfile) your data is gone forever. This is considered unacceptable in many organizations, which is why they have this key recovery faculty.
Then there's the private user who doesn't need the extra features. More features means more code means more places for bugs and vulnerabilities to hide. For those users, TrueCrypt and GPG fit perfectly.
If you forget your password you lose or data. This is a problem? Hell, I consider that a feature. If I can't get at my data I can at least be comfortable in the knowledge that nobody else can get at it either.
Actually, just some kind of format plug-in support. Almost all my music is Ogg because that's what I rip it as. This makes my choice of portable players quite limited to the few that natively support or those that have been hacked to include Ogg.
I'm not saying Apple need spend time to build support for 20 different formats.. just provide a means for end-users to add their own format plug-ins. The community will surely take it upon themselves to develop their own plug-ins to support their format(s) of choice.
The iPod Touch looks pretty. Inclusion of WiFi is sweet too. I'd have already pre-ordered if not for the whole format support issue, which is a deal breaker for me. Maybe I'll just switch cell providers next year and get an iPhone if the price comes further down.
The page on OUP's website that the Rust is on about is located here. As you can plainly see on the right-hand of the screen this document is available, FOR FREE, in PDF format. In fact, here's a direct link to said PDF on OUP's website.
What Rust's complaint is about is the "Request Permissions" link under the "Services" menu on the left-side of the page. It apparently opens to a third party website which OUP, it appears, uses to calculate charges for different uses of papers published through OUP.
My guess here is a bit of poor programming for the OUP website. The document is clearly CC and it's free to download, but the copyright.com website doesn't appear to know this, so it's providing pricing on publishing the article. Maybe OUP needs to look into this matter, but the fact remains that the paper is online, freely accessible through OUP to anyone, and clearly listed as being released under CC licensing.
Then don't launch space shuttles. Send supplies up in unmanned craft like the Soyuz. Use robotic arms to install new equipment and design the fittings in such a way that humans need not spacewalk to finalize connections.
Furthermore, this isn't just media overhype. The engineers at the Johnson Space Center have asked for the repairs to be made. They were overruled. Sound familiar?
And yet even furthermore, as has already been pointed out, such a repair would provide very valuable data on the effectiveness of the as yet untested repair methods NASA has developed for such situations. That data would be put to good use in the continuing development of procedures for repairing the shuttle in flight, thus decreasing the risk involved in future repairs and increasing chance of mission success.
And why wouldn't NASA want to perform steps that only increase the chance of a successful landing?
Poker has elements of chance. Chess does not. You can play the odds to help minimize the risk of chance, but it's still there. That one two or even 5 games resulted in a win for side A versus side B is pretty much meaningless. With chance involved you really need to conduct this sort of experiment over thousands, if not millions of games, to even begin to get a handle on if there really is a "better" player in the computer code.
You can flip a coin 5 times and all 5 might be heads... doesn't mean that heads will always win. That's chance. That's poker, even if the pros and the weekend wannabes try to argue otherwise.
Isn't it a bit like "spam"? Someone comes along and calls junk mail spam and the next thing you know everyone uses the word to denote junk e-mail rather than the meat product. And Hormel tried (and still does in some ways) to get people off the term? How many of you really care about your (non)use of the word "spam"?
And so it is with "hacker". Public doesn't give a shit. You say hacker and they know "bad computer guy". Just like "spam" is "bad e-mail".
And like I'd say to Hormel, just give it up. The fight is long since lost.
There's little difference here between remote controlled vehicles and vehicles controlled from the cockpit. Both rely on some form of communications between vehicle and controller. Both rely on computers in the vehicle to interpret and respond to the commands of the controller.
Perhaps the remote controlled vehicle has the added vulnerability that the line of communications from controller to vehicle is more open to attack or breakdown. That may require some form of pre-set instructions on the vehicle side to handle a loss of communication (IE return to base, self destruct, etc.), but that's about as autonomous as they get.
Could it malfunction and start dropping missiles? Sure, but so could the computer on an F-22. (Although I doubt either is likely to happen. There's sure to be a million layers of fail-safes.. well... I'd like to hope there are.)
Anyways. Point is that there's little, if any, increase in risk in the use of drones versus conventional military aircraft. They're both still being operated by a human.
Camera control isn't as available as it is with WoW. Can't control both camera and where you walk with just the mouse.
As for the visuals, I think they're trying too hard to be realistic looking, which in turn makes it feel all the more awkward. Think the Final Fantasy movie. They looked human, but certain movements and facial features looked just wrong and it made things a bit uncomfortable. Same here. This is one area where Blizzard got things right. Don't try to be too realistic. Be a bit cartoony. Players have an easier time adjusting and identifying with their character.
Seriously. Don't play. If these MMOs saw a significant drop in its users due to this sort of thing I think they'd work to find some creative solutions for the problem pretty quickly. As it is, that doesn't appear to be happening. Even the author, rather than quit, is going to stick around and try to clean things up.
So either the problem isn't really that bad or the author gets entertainment out of acting as moral police and (en)forcing their moral views on others and would prefer it this way to begin with.
Are YOU kidding? Actually there's better hierarchy there than most sites. Look at the use of heading tags. You've got an obvious structure from a top h1 down to individual sections head by h4 tags.
It's impossible to get an instant snapshot of the available content sections because the section headers scroll off ("below the fold")
"Below the fold"? Seriously? What is this, 1990s when the web was considered no different than print media? Scrolling, especially with the spread of mouses that have scroll buttons, is a trivial task. Furthermore the very concept of "above the fold" doesn't work for web pages. Users can have literally ANY resolution on their screen. From PDAs that are going to only show a few sentences to large 21" monitors that will show the whole damn page on half the height of its screen.
and there's no top level navigation
Top level navigation isn't needed on sites with very simple site architecture. Go back and look at the site. What links are you going to put into this top level navigation?
Section headings are the same size as the body type, so I can't easily discern where sections begin and end
use of color to provide a means of describing hierarchy is bad design. You're ignoring people who are blind or color blind as they won't receive that information. Using plain heading tags (as he does) allows the client to decide how the information of page hierarchy is conveyed to the user. In your case it's simply large and bold text. To a blind person their screen reader might increase volume or accent the titles and to a color blind person the large and bold text will stand out even for them.
You and Nielsen seem to promote this idea that having no sense for design (information OR graphic) somehow actually *increases* usability.
It's not a lack of design sense, it's a sense that not every client of your web page is can see, hear, and has a large resolution screen. If you really wanted to critique Nielsen's site you should go after him for the use of poorly contrasting background colors for his columns or the fact that he uses two columns instead of one. From that extrapolate that there is clearly room for a developer to create pages that work for any client, but have enhancements for the larger user base (visually and audibly unencumbered humans with computers at a minimum of 1024x768 resolution). Then go one to ask why hasn't Nielsen done more for that user base.
Halo is like the Porsche 911. The next incarnation will feature a few new tricks to give the die-hards something to talk about, but to the average Joe they just look like the same thing over and over. If you've played one Halo you know what the experience is going to be like for all the others. It's just being tweaked a bit here and there to improve the performance.
Bungie is the Porsche of the gaming world.
Miyamoto seems to look for something new with each game. Trying to find new ways to engage the user. He comes at each one with a flair and a passion. He's not doing the same thing over and over. Some games work. Some don't. But you do have a wide variety of games to choose from that caters to your particular interests.
Miyamoto (Nintendo) is the Ferrari of the gaming world.
Rounding out the analogy Blizzard is the TVR of the gaming world. Love-it or hate-it design, completely insane and riddled with problems, yet you can't help but keep playing.
What about malicious sites (fake login pages) that disallow indexing/crawling via meta tags or robots.txt. If Google still searches/indexes that page then they break the rules for crawlers/bots and how does that reflect on them?
Also, what about content that's delivered on pages that require you to login first (poral, message boards, etc..). These are areas a crawler is not going to get to and completely miss.
Going back to the fake login pages bit, unless Google can index every site every day these fake login pages will be up and down long before the crawler reaches them.
The speed with which web-based worms, fake logins, viruses, etc.. spread is probably far far greater than the cycle time for Google to crawl the malicious site in question.
Where I could see some real value here is in using Google to detect vulnerabilities in existing sites (publicly available documents with sensitive information like CCs, open directories with long lists of mp3s or large videos, simple phrases that indicate some web vandal has hit the site like "X was here" or "hacked/owned/pwnd by X" etc. Focus on giving web developers a tool to evaluate their own site from a security perspective rather than worrying about the end user. Google's infrastructure really isn't built to work like that.
Slashdot Mirror
My parents didn't monitor my BBS/internet access and I didn't have a problem either.
It's not the internet access. That's not the problem. We're focusing on the wrong thing.
We need to ask why kids like Megan take the things being said so hard that they feel suicide is the only way out. Why is it many kids are teased on playgrounds around the world every day and very very very few of them ever follow through with such a drastic action.
It seems as if what a person perceives as their public image is more important than how they feel about themselves; or that maybe the two are seen as one and the same. If so, why?
The internet isn't the problem here, it was just the medium used to deliver the message. Legislate the internet and the medium changes to text messages. Legislate any electronic communication and it becomes rumors shared on the playground and gossiping behind peoples backs (wow, how 20th century).
If I follow along the street, every day, shouting insults at them and taunting them I'm sure the police will find a way to arrest me on charges of harrasment and disorderly conduct and so on. Why wouldn't these apply to online instances? Is it a federal/state thing and the internet makes these situations a bit gray?
If you've got HD DVDs then it seems quite logical you already own the hardware to play HD DVDs. And now that HD DVD is "dead", who will want to buy your used hardware? So if the hardware isn't going away any time soon, and you've got the HD DVDs, why bother with conversion?
Perhaps 20 years from now when that HD DVD player dies you might wish to take these steps to convert your discs to a format that's playable on your Blu-ray drive, but by then we'll probably be on yet another format and the whole process will be pointless.
It'd be nice to see HD DVD producers setup some sort of exchange program where you can turn in your HD DVD disc for a Blu-ray equivalent. Probably won't happen though.
So given the broad definition of ISP that's been used in other areas of law it would seem colleges and universities would fall under this throttling ban as well.
That's going to really suck.
File sharing eats a very large majority of bandwidth for many colleges and without some form of throttling access to resources for other purposes (e.g. college business, student research, and incoming traffic to college resources like websites and distributed computing services) would be seriously hindered.
If Comcast is having similar issues then I can see why they do throttling and would support them. If you don't like it switch providers. That'll hurt Comcast where it really counts for them: their wallets.
What's the likelihood this smell comes from propellants used by the shuttle and soyuz? Seems to me since his only interaction with this smell is from spacesuits that have only had contact with the "air" around the outside of the ISS.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/truecrypt/
Press release here.
We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 5.0 has been released. Among the new features are the ability to encrypt a system partition or entire system drive (i.e. a drive where Windows is installed) with pre-boot authentication, pipelined operations increasing read/write speed by up to 100%, Mac OS X version, graphical interface for the Linux version, XTS mode, SHA-512, and more.
After four years of development, during which millions of people downloaded a copy of TrueCrypt, it is the only open-source disk encryption software that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The newly implemented ability to encrypt system partitions and system drives provides the highest level of security and privacy, as all files, including any temporary files that Windows and applications create on system drives (typically, without the user's knowledge or consent), swap files, etc., are permanently encrypted. Large amounts of potentially sensitive data that Windows records, such as the names and locations of files opened by the user, applications that the user runs, etc., are always permanently encrypted as well. For more information, please see http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=version-history
I can't find anything in terms of documentation on Wikia, but it appears Wikia search is blocking sites on Wikipedia's blacklist from being listed in the search engine. I've pulled a few examples from the blacklist and searched for them and have yet to receive any results on any of those searches.
Can anyone confirm or refute this? Maybe it's just because the Wikia is in alpha it hasn't indexed much yet?
If this is the case I'd probably steer clear of Wikia; I'm not sure I ant my search results to be filtered like that.
No more doctypes.
.
Doctypes are there to provide extensibility. You can develop a parser that has no understanding of what markup language you're using by as long as it can interpret the doctype it will at least understand what bits of your markup are "code" and which bits are "content". This means a parser built today would work 20 years from now assuming you don't muck things up by doing stupid things like, say, removing the doctype. Now that 20 year old parser won't work because it has no clue what "version X" is because it was built with version 1.
tags do not specify a type or language.
This man needs to read up on his HTML spec. The type attribute exists specifically for this purpose.
Furthermore, limiting web pages to a single scripting language won't actually work. You'll, at the very least, have different versions of ECMAScript. What happens when an old function is discovered to be insecure and removed from a future version? What about backwards compatibility. You don't solve the problem, you're just change the look of the problem.
Also this completely ignores things like Flash, JAVA, and whatever other, future embedded objects people put into their web pages that will also be capable of executing scripts.
No more framesets, frames, or iframes.
Absolutely correct. Good luck pushing the idea. The web is awash in high-profile sites making heavy (ab)use of frames.
Modules
I will hold off on this for now. But the short of it is it may be a bit better than frames, but you're not solving all the security issues frames present. Especially if you want things like current AJAX applications to keep working.
The default CSS content needs to be standardized.
Dead. Fucking. Wrong. The browser should not be driving style. Style is subjective. Everyone has their own opinion. Let everyone make their own opinion a reality rather than forcing yours on everyone else.
Instead the current approach should remain. This is where web developers create their own baseline stylesheet that sets padding and margins and such on block elements and leading/kerning/etc on text elements. The real fix here is to add a pseudoselector to CSS that lets you address all block elements. Something like *:block { margin: 1em 0; } would be perfect. It'd cut down on the size of these "baseline" stylesheets from dozens of lines to only a few. It would also allow stylesheets to grow with HTML as new elements are introduced into the markup. Then a 10 year old stylesheet will still apply those margins to block elements even if the original author had no knowledge that we'd someday have a element.
The only character encoding permitted in HTML 5 is UTF-8.
Nice idea. Problematic with backwards compatibility. But if you do this CSS and any other external text files (Javascript) also has to have UTF-8 encoding. Mixing encoding types will actually break some browsers. The impact this decision would have on other technologies probably hasn't been thought through all the way.
Browsers should not perform heroics to try to make bad content displayable
This is less an issue with HTML and more an issue of browser implementation. Talk to Microsoft, Oracle, Firefox, Apple, etc. about this. Again, this is a backwards compatibility.
The tag form is allowed, but not required for
or
This is not entirely true. First, the empty tag form we know now is a result of the move to XHTML and the need to conform to XML specs. The XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype allows non-closed tags like and
, but 1.0 Strict and 1.1 do require it, making those unclosed tags invalid.
Custom HTML tags have always been allowed in HTML.
Dead. Fucking. Wrong.
Because when the clever web developer uses to wrap and style data derived from a chart in his webpage he's not thinking 10 years down the road when we do get a real tag, at
Haven't seen or heard anything specific to online privacy. I'd be willing to be it's low on the list of issues for most.
I'd guess Dennis Kucinich given his website statements regarding the Patriot Act and other government policies that deal with (directly or indirectly) an individual's privacy. I would expect that view extends to the online world.
what is the impetus for us to jump on the Blockbuster bandwagon?
unless BB undercuts the Netflix price scheme one way or the other, the only advantage they have is the physical store. the stores allow for impulse renting. no wait time. for those times when a rainy day cancels evening plans or someone mentions a movie you've got to see asap you've got a physical store to rent the movie you need right then and there.
a small group at best.
netflix has it locked.
If your design depends on fonts being a particular size in order to lay out other elements or to have things "above the fold", you're doing it wrong.
You're just about right.
Part of the problem is that more than two-thirds of websites currently being maintained out there are doing it wrong. Furthermore many designers don't want to do it right because it requires them to give up fine control over typography and layout. This is especially true for people that started out in the print business and are transitioning to web development.
The other part of the problem is that the "above the fold" concept actually does work to a degree with web pages. In the 90s you had people who didn't understand the concept of scrolling down to see the rest of the page before moving on. Today you've got people so use to instant-information that if they can't immediately find what they're looking for they hop off to another page. This doesn't apply to everyone and websites will draw different audiences (think kids on myspace versus parents evaluating colleges as an example), some more prone to this drive-by browsing than others, so YMMV.
If you accept this "above the fold" concept applies to your audience then you might shrink your default font size down a bit to try and fit more content onto the page. (Yes, different resolutions = different "above the fold" area, but you can design for the majority resolution of your users, typically 1024x768)
And this sort of compromise in layout design, which I call soft-alignment, is something many designers, even those that do it right, will put into use to cater to the majority (humans without visual handicaps using a modern browser on a high resolution color monitor). This allows the majority to enjoy the site as intended while not breaking the usefulness or functionality of the website for those users who fall outside that majority.
I've ranted about this before.
Not everyone will have these fonts; not for a long time, anyways. Browsers will then instead use the default sans serif font (Helvetica or Arial typically). Pages viewed in Arial or Helvetica that were intended for Calibri will, at least, not look good and, at worst, be completely unreadable.
Why?
Calibri (which is the one font in the group certain to become the choice of future web developers) has a different size than, say, Arial. A 1em or 12pt or 14px tall Calibri character is going to actually be smaller than the same sized Arial character. The reason is due to the design of the font and the font's leading.
A page set at 100% (default) font size that looks good in Calibri will look oversized in Arial or Helvetica. Furthermore any sort of soft-alignments between texts or text and other page elements will break. For example the content you expect to appear "above the fold" or appear shorter than an image you've got aligned to the right will now be pushed below the fold or below the height of the image, creating an page layout for someone using a stock browser.
Let's take a shot in the dark here. Now these fonts are installed as part of Office 2007. They're part of Vista. They're not part of XP unless you either have Office 2007 or the 2007 compatibility pack installed. Let's say 5% of all internet browsing computers are Vista and 75% are XP. How many of those 75% have Office 2007 or the compatibility pack (which isn't automatically downloaded via windows update, requiring the user go and download it). I think a more than fair value is that 25% of those 75% have Office 2007 or the compatibility pack installed. That equals out to about 25% of all computer users have Calibri support right now. If you design with Calibri you're ignoring 75% of your user base.
In 3-5 years that number, I believe, will drastically increase to the point where the majority will support Calibri. But not now. So don't design with it.
The problem with TrueCrypt, and I use it, is that the is no key recovery or remote management faculty. IOW, if you forget the passphrase (and/or lose the keyfile) your data is gone forever. This is considered unacceptable in many organizations, which is why they have this key recovery faculty.
Then there's the private user who doesn't need the extra features. More features means more code means more places for bugs and vulnerabilities to hide. For those users, TrueCrypt and GPG fit perfectly.
If you forget your password you lose or data. This is a problem? Hell, I consider that a feature. If I can't get at my data I can at least be comfortable in the knowledge that nobody else can get at it either.
and i wonder how many of those visitors are a result of raids from other websites. it is a popular place to go harass users.
Actually, just some kind of format plug-in support. Almost all my music is Ogg because that's what I rip it as. This makes my choice of portable players quite limited to the few that natively support or those that have been hacked to include Ogg.
I'm not saying Apple need spend time to build support for 20 different formats.. just provide a means for end-users to add their own format plug-ins. The community will surely take it upon themselves to develop their own plug-ins to support their format(s) of choice.
The iPod Touch looks pretty. Inclusion of WiFi is sweet too. I'd have already pre-ordered if not for the whole format support issue, which is a deal breaker for me. Maybe I'll just switch cell providers next year and get an iPhone if the price comes further down.
The page on OUP's website that the Rust is on about is located here. As you can plainly see on the right-hand of the screen this document is available, FOR FREE, in PDF format. In fact, here's a direct link to said PDF on OUP's website.
What Rust's complaint is about is the "Request Permissions" link under the "Services" menu on the left-side of the page. It apparently opens to a third party website which OUP, it appears, uses to calculate charges for different uses of papers published through OUP.
My guess here is a bit of poor programming for the OUP website. The document is clearly CC and it's free to download, but the copyright.com website doesn't appear to know this, so it's providing pricing on publishing the article. Maybe OUP needs to look into this matter, but the fact remains that the paper is online, freely accessible through OUP to anyone, and clearly listed as being released under CC licensing.
Rust is really making a lot of fuss over nothing.
You always do the least risky thing that is safe.
Then don't launch space shuttles. Send supplies up in unmanned craft like the Soyuz. Use robotic arms to install new equipment and design the fittings in such a way that humans need not spacewalk to finalize connections.
Furthermore, this isn't just media overhype. The engineers at the Johnson Space Center have asked for the repairs to be made. They were overruled. Sound familiar?
And yet even furthermore, as has already been pointed out, such a repair would provide very valuable data on the effectiveness of the as yet untested repair methods NASA has developed for such situations. That data would be put to good use in the continuing development of procedures for repairing the shuttle in flight, thus decreasing the risk involved in future repairs and increasing chance of mission success.
And why wouldn't NASA want to perform steps that only increase the chance of a successful landing?
There's every reason to perform this repair.
Poker has elements of chance. Chess does not. You can play the odds to help minimize the risk of chance, but it's still there. That one two or even 5 games resulted in a win for side A versus side B is pretty much meaningless. With chance involved you really need to conduct this sort of experiment over thousands, if not millions of games, to even begin to get a handle on if there really is a "better" player in the computer code.
You can flip a coin 5 times and all 5 might be heads... doesn't mean that heads will always win. That's chance. That's poker, even if the pros and the weekend wannabes try to argue otherwise.
Isn't it a bit like "spam"? Someone comes along and calls junk mail spam and the next thing you know everyone uses the word to denote junk e-mail rather than the meat product. And Hormel tried (and still does in some ways) to get people off the term? How many of you really care about your (non)use of the word "spam"?
And so it is with "hacker". Public doesn't give a shit. You say hacker and they know "bad computer guy". Just like "spam" is "bad e-mail".
And like I'd say to Hormel, just give it up. The fight is long since lost.
So it goes.
There's little difference here between remote controlled vehicles and vehicles controlled from the cockpit. Both rely on some form of communications between vehicle and controller. Both rely on computers in the vehicle to interpret and respond to the commands of the controller.
.. well... I'd like to hope there are.)
Perhaps the remote controlled vehicle has the added vulnerability that the line of communications from controller to vehicle is more open to attack or breakdown. That may require some form of pre-set instructions on the vehicle side to handle a loss of communication (IE return to base, self destruct, etc.), but that's about as autonomous as they get.
Could it malfunction and start dropping missiles? Sure, but so could the computer on an F-22. (Although I doubt either is likely to happen. There's sure to be a million layers of fail-safes
Anyways. Point is that there's little, if any, increase in risk in the use of drones versus conventional military aircraft. They're both still being operated by a human.
Camera control isn't as available as it is with WoW. Can't control both camera and where you walk with just the mouse.
As for the visuals, I think they're trying too hard to be realistic looking, which in turn makes it feel all the more awkward. Think the Final Fantasy movie. They looked human, but certain movements and facial features looked just wrong and it made things a bit uncomfortable. Same here. This is one area where Blizzard got things right. Don't try to be too realistic. Be a bit cartoony. Players have an easier time adjusting and identifying with their character.
Seriously. Don't play. If these MMOs saw a significant drop in its users due to this sort of thing I think they'd work to find some creative solutions for the problem pretty quickly. As it is, that doesn't appear to be happening. Even the author, rather than quit, is going to stick around and try to clean things up.
So either the problem isn't really that bad or the author gets entertainment out of acting as moral police and (en)forcing their moral views on others and would prefer it this way to begin with.
There is almost NO hierarchy.
Are YOU kidding? Actually there's better hierarchy there than most sites. Look at the use of heading tags. You've got an obvious structure from a top h1 down to individual sections head by h4 tags.
It's impossible to get an instant snapshot of the available content sections because the section headers scroll off ("below the fold")
"Below the fold"? Seriously? What is this, 1990s when the web was considered no different than print media? Scrolling, especially with the spread of mouses that have scroll buttons, is a trivial task. Furthermore the very concept of "above the fold" doesn't work for web pages. Users can have literally ANY resolution on their screen. From PDAs that are going to only show a few sentences to large 21" monitors that will show the whole damn page on half the height of its screen.
and there's no top level navigation
Top level navigation isn't needed on sites with very simple site architecture. Go back and look at the site. What links are you going to put into this top level navigation?
Section headings are the same size as the body type, so I can't easily discern where sections begin and end
use of color to provide a means of describing hierarchy is bad design. You're ignoring people who are blind or color blind as they won't receive that information. Using plain heading tags (as he does) allows the client to decide how the information of page hierarchy is conveyed to the user. In your case it's simply large and bold text. To a blind person their screen reader might increase volume or accent the titles and to a color blind person the large and bold text will stand out even for them.
You and Nielsen seem to promote this idea that having no sense for design (information OR graphic) somehow actually *increases* usability.
It's not a lack of design sense, it's a sense that not every client of your web page is can see, hear, and has a large resolution screen. If you really wanted to critique Nielsen's site you should go after him for the use of poorly contrasting background colors for his columns or the fact that he uses two columns instead of one. From that extrapolate that there is clearly room for a developer to create pages that work for any client, but have enhancements for the larger user base (visually and audibly unencumbered humans with computers at a minimum of 1024x768 resolution). Then go one to ask why hasn't Nielsen done more for that user base.
Halo is like the Porsche 911. The next incarnation will feature a few new tricks to give the die-hards something to talk about, but to the average Joe they just look like the same thing over and over. If you've played one Halo you know what the experience is going to be like for all the others. It's just being tweaked a bit here and there to improve the performance.
Bungie is the Porsche of the gaming world.
Miyamoto seems to look for something new with each game. Trying to find new ways to engage the user. He comes at each one with a flair and a passion. He's not doing the same thing over and over. Some games work. Some don't. But you do have a wide variety of games to choose from that caters to your particular interests.
Miyamoto (Nintendo) is the Ferrari of the gaming world.
Rounding out the analogy Blizzard is the TVR of the gaming world. Love-it or hate-it design, completely insane and riddled with problems, yet you can't help but keep playing.
What about malicious sites (fake login pages) that disallow indexing/crawling via meta tags or robots.txt. If Google still searches/indexes that page then they break the rules for crawlers/bots and how does that reflect on them?
Also, what about content that's delivered on pages that require you to login first (poral, message boards, etc..). These are areas a crawler is not going to get to and completely miss.
Going back to the fake login pages bit, unless Google can index every site every day these fake login pages will be up and down long before the crawler reaches them.
The speed with which web-based worms, fake logins, viruses, etc.. spread is probably far far greater than the cycle time for Google to crawl the malicious site in question.
Where I could see some real value here is in using Google to detect vulnerabilities in existing sites (publicly available documents with sensitive information like CCs, open directories with long lists of mp3s or large videos, simple phrases that indicate some web vandal has hit the site like "X was here" or "hacked/owned/pwnd by X" etc. Focus on giving web developers a tool to evaluate their own site from a security perspective rather than worrying about the end user. Google's infrastructure really isn't built to work like that.