Australia seems to have this "blindly voting senators" idea a bit better than the rest of us.
Australia:
Australian residents eligible to vote a chance to vote in on-line polls for every piece of legislation that comes to the Senate. The senator will then blindly vote in accordance with the majority. The party has no position on anything until it is voted on.
Rest of capitalist, democratic world:
Large corporations who have enough money can buy votes for every piece of legislation that comes to the Senate. The senator will then blindly vote in accordance with the money. The party has no position on anything until it is bought.
Not really. Someone is handing out free t-shirts. Do you question it or do you assume they have some legitimate reason to be handing them out? Personally, I assume something would be done about them if it wasn't legit and so take one (as long as it's not someone off-loading a load of crappy charts pop t-shirts).
Also, as with the RIAA and 'theft' of digital music, there's a difference between "someone just gave us a physical item that could be stolen" and "someone offered us the rights to an address that has an audit trail so that it can be returned to the 'correct' owner if necessary".
The difference between blogging and news...
on
Blog Action Day
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The difference between blogging and news is that the mainstream media who make the news know about grammar.
...my humble contribution amongst the hundreds of thousands is entitled individual action is not enough.
Aren't titles supposed to be quoted and capitalised? How do the bloggers hope to get anywhere without basic grammar like that?
Oh, I forgot, it is teh interwebs so you don't have to write properly to think you have a point. In fact there may even be an inverse correlation between grammar and blogger's perceived importance of blog post.
Huh? URLs weren't meant to be exposed? I thought the whole point was that they were easier to remember (and more transportable as a side effect) than plain IP addresses.
If you did away with the address bar then how would you easily know where you were and that you hadn't suddenly been pushed to another site? Or how would you know what to enter into the popup box next time you wanted to visit the site, especially when you were visiting another computer?
Does that mean that it's bad of apps like Windows Explorer, Konqueror and Nautilus to show an address bar as well, because people should 'bookmark' their favourite places and work from there? (Not sure how good a support Windows Explorer has for it, but Nautilus is good for bookmarked locations)
Because your country is important? Why does the.com have to be the main site, why not buy the.com when you're international and have it as a landing page for either your investors while the ccTLD is for the general public of that country? (which is the best way I've seen people use the.com/.co.uk combo -.com for investors and corporate information,.co.uk for the shop and related pages)
As for "almost every company" dreaming of being global, there's a number of small companies I've seen who stand no chance of being global because they're just another service provider. They hardly even cover out of the county (which, in the UK, isn't often a huge area). So why do they go for.com instead of.co.uk?
Erm, maybe with the phishing and similar then the difference is that you're getting ripped off, tricked and exploited by persons unknown as opposed to highly paid criminals...sorry, 'politicians';)
Compiz Fusion does have some advantages that aren't just bells and whistles: Expose-style "show me the windows" so you can see what's in different applications and which you really want, negative and ADD modes, fading so that only your most prominent window is catching your attention, a widgets layer so you can have things easily accessible but not on any desktop, screen annotation, window grouping/tabbing,...
Okay, so most people put it in for "I can make my windows do silly transitions", and it would be better if more functionality were added instead, but the eye candy can be the basis for functionality as well:)
Oh dear, that screws Namibia, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Montenegro out of their TLDs from the first six alone!:D Plus one is already in existence, so you've got the first six TLDs with four taken by nations and one that's already there.
I'd be careful. Slashdot would probably then end up on a TLD with a load of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_fiction]gay porn story[/url] sites;)
It's worrying what you find out people write when your wife is involved in Harry Potter fanfiction 8|
Personally I think.com should be for international companies/entities, with local companies using local domains. In that case.asia would be great for companies who cover the whole of Asia, but aren't known outside it. Quite why.uk is available to everyone I don't know:\
Unfortunately it would probably get to the point where someone wants a ".africanorthamericaasia" TLD because they're active in all three, but someone else thinks that ".africaeuropeasia" would be better because that's where they cover.
The other reason is probably also that an individual is more likely to roll over and pay the extortion, sorry, "out of court settlement" money, where as a company is more likely to fight it (or call bankruptcy and try to vanish without a trace).
Call me cynical, but why else would they pick on the little guy other than they're the easier target? It's just standard predator practice. Lets hope someone patented it!
That's not SEO, that's SEM (Search Engine Manipulation - I've patented that version of the acronym). SEO involves optimising a site rather than making it completely different for normal users is manipulation and 'blackhat' tactics. It would be interesting, if a little off-putting, if someone has successfully scammed Google to such a great extent through simple cloaking.
As for the suggestion of a different user agent, I guess it'd be simple enough to either do a reverse lookup and see if it contains "google" or log the range of Google's IPs. I'd have thought Google would have thought of that, but they can't have too many ways that they check with Googlebot not showing up as Googlebot that can't be traced back to them or eventually discovered and made redundant.
Yeah, I think "not hosted anywhere" is somewhat of a simplification for "actually hosted somewhere but never show any content to a normal user because they redirect you to another domain instead". While it might fly for a complete non-techy, I wouldn't have thought/. would have too many people believing in responses from machines that don't exist.
Then what if the user only wants the lead, the TOC, and one or two sections? Should the user have to pay per kilobyte for the whole article, which will typically be much more expensive on a mobile connection than on a wired or fixed wireless connection?
No, they shouldn't have to download all of it and pay for 100KB. What should happen is that if there is demand for the ability to download just the lead then Wikipedia should have special URLs for them as "/wiki/article" and "/wiki/article_lead" are two different resources with two different purposes (one is to give you all of the details, the other is to just summarise it).
And what about the pictures? If a photo in an article is 500 pixels wide, what use is sending all 500 pixels upon the initial page load to a device whose screen is 256x192 pixels?
If there's an image that large embedded in a Wikipedia page and not linked then someone needs shooting. If it is any other page then I'd hope that either the browser doesn't automatically download any and all images or else the user knows what to expect when hitting random pages on the Net with a mobile phone where they pay by the KB.
But that's beside the point. The original response was that text, not a Wiki article with images etc, would display perfectly fine on both a mobile phone display and an uber-widescreen monitor (with or without the use of CSS).
That's sheer amount of text, not size (which normally means font size, which can be controlled by the phone). I'm sure 100KB of Encyclopedia text would display fine on a small screen, just the same as how 1KB of text would.
If the user is going to an Encyclopedia page then they probably want lots of information (because that's what encyclopedias give you). If they want lots of information and they're on a small screen then they should know they'll need to scroll. If they know they need to scroll then 100KB of properly laid out Encyclopedia data (with anchors) should display fine and the user should be happy. If they want a big encyclopedia article and get the website saying "oh, you're a mobile therefore I'll give you the ten-word definition with no detail as if I was a dictionary" then they'd not be getting what they asked for.
Google.com: 2037 bytes of HTML Google.com/m: 1436 bytes of HTML
For all of the extra links, that's not a lot of difference at the base HTML level.
As for it being a "mobile portal page", isn't that a different page to a "Google search home page for showing off Google's various capabilities"? If it is then it should have a different URL and not be UA dependent. After all, what's to stop someone who is non-portable or on a laptop wanting things like weather automatically added in without having to to an iGoogle page?
Yes, you could replace "Google search home page for showing off Google's various capabilities" with "mobile portal page" for mobile users accessing "http://www.google.com/", but the better solution would be for a URL to be a uniform locator for a given resource where the resource stays constant and that resource is then designed so it will degrade for any platform.
You wouldn't want the building at a street address to be a bookshop if you asked about it in a library and a bakery if you asked about it in a restaurant, would you? So why should google.com be "Google search home page for showing off Google's various capabilities" from a desktop and "mobile portal page" from a mobile?
TBH I'd be appalled if any of my sites had a page anywhere near 100KB for the 'required' downloads (HTML and CSS file but not CSS background images, which wouldn't be "fundamentally required" images).
As for CSS on a mobile phone: 1) surely that means that XHTML and CSS is an even better combination, since the mobile will see the <link> tag and be able to ignore it because it is typed as "text/css" and it knows it can't handle it. It will then be able to just load and display the HTML, and 2) The last phone I bought was three years ago now, and it was bottom of the line (£30) then. The only reason I bought it was because it was about as cheap as buying a battery for my older phone. Yes, the new phone has Internet access (probably WAP) but I've never wanted to be ripped off by the rates they charge so I've never used it. All I know is that newer phones can use Opera Mini, I don't bother looking at what functionality that might include.
Google may give you a different site, but what I was saying is why should they need to? If your mobile browser can handle text and input boxes then why should Google need to serve it anything different as long as it is properly designed?
Yeah, Flash is a special case of the "large thing to download as web content" but it was the one that worked best for "great big thing that you need to download".
As an alternative, take dowfiles.com (and probably the whole FileFront network). Even if they coded to standards and used HTML without tables and CSS for all styling then they'd still have a 55KB header image and a total of 166KB of images to load. That means just using standards still won't make all sites mobile-compatible.
Not a web developer? IMO it shows he is a web developer and he's one who thinks about XHTML/CSS. For content that can be displayed on both then how about text? Whether it's widescreen or phone display then text should display fine. Have a page serve up content including:
then along with some CSS the content can be identical for all user agents and each user agent can decide which styles they want to support and hence adapt it. If you're on a mobile then you might want to ignore the background image and the right-floating of the menu, but keep those attributes on the desktop browser, and so the user agent is adapting the content to the constraints of the display.
The problem is that even if you code to W3C standard (which I do) using XHTML and CSS or whatever then you can still have a heavy page that is standards compliant but takes an age to load due to what you cram into it. At the simplest level then you could have a standards compliant site that uses Flash for part of it. With the (admittedly poor) idea of "serve depending on user agent" then you can serve simple content to the phone and have it work but a purely standards compliant site wouldn't help there.
Yes, the standards should fix most of the issue in that it should degrade well to a phone display etc, but it won't solve everything.
Because humans have an in-built obsession with patterns. It's the same as why we often see two pairs of two objects and not one group of four, or two groups of two and a single one rather than five. The human mind makes use of patterns and finds patterns in things. By knowing the Nth whatever then we get to look for patterns.
Well, what I really meant was: "If only politicians could do what the people want, rather than what the people 'need'." i.e. what the Politicians think we need, which is basically what they want.
That and the subtext of "like Politicians are ever going to do what people want because what we want can often not really be what we want and is less likely to be what we need and what works well in a multi-national environment, but of course people can't see it that way".
Don't you just hate it when the subtext is longer than the message?
Slashdot Mirror
Australia:
Rest of capitalist, democratic world:
Perhaps a bit of a cynical view?
Not really. Someone is handing out free t-shirts. Do you question it or do you assume they have some legitimate reason to be handing them out? Personally, I assume something would be done about them if it wasn't legit and so take one (as long as it's not someone off-loading a load of crappy charts pop t-shirts).
Also, as with the RIAA and 'theft' of digital music, there's a difference between "someone just gave us a physical item that could be stolen" and "someone offered us the rights to an address that has an audit trail so that it can be returned to the 'correct' owner if necessary".
Aren't titles supposed to be quoted and capitalised? How do the bloggers hope to get anywhere without basic grammar like that?
Oh, I forgot, it is teh interwebs so you don't have to write properly to think you have a point. In fact there may even be an inverse correlation between grammar and blogger's perceived importance of blog post.
Huh? URLs weren't meant to be exposed? I thought the whole point was that they were easier to remember (and more transportable as a side effect) than plain IP addresses.
If you did away with the address bar then how would you easily know where you were and that you hadn't suddenly been pushed to another site? Or how would you know what to enter into the popup box next time you wanted to visit the site, especially when you were visiting another computer?
Does that mean that it's bad of apps like Windows Explorer, Konqueror and Nautilus to show an address bar as well, because people should 'bookmark' their favourite places and work from there? (Not sure how good a support Windows Explorer has for it, but Nautilus is good for bookmarked locations)
Because your country is important? Why does the .com have to be the main site, why not buy the .com when you're international and have it as a landing page for either your investors while the ccTLD is for the general public of that country? (which is the best way I've seen people use the .com/.co.uk combo - .com for investors and corporate information, .co.uk for the shop and related pages)
.com instead of .co.uk?
As for "almost every company" dreaming of being global, there's a number of small companies I've seen who stand no chance of being global because they're just another service provider. They hardly even cover out of the county (which, in the UK, isn't often a huge area). So why do they go for
Erm, maybe with the phishing and similar then the difference is that you're getting ripped off, tricked and exploited by persons unknown as opposed to highly paid criminals...sorry, 'politicians' ;)
Compiz Fusion does have some advantages that aren't just bells and whistles: Expose-style "show me the windows" so you can see what's in different applications and which you really want, negative and ADD modes, fading so that only your most prominent window is catching your attention, a widgets layer so you can have things easily accessible but not on any desktop, screen annotation, window grouping/tabbing,...
:)
Okay, so most people put it in for "I can make my windows do silly transitions", and it would be better if more functionality were added instead, but the eye candy can be the basis for functionality as well
Oh dear, that screws Namibia, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Montenegro out of their TLDs from the first six alone! :D Plus one is already in existence, so you've got the first six TLDs with four taken by nations and one that's already there.
I'd be careful. Slashdot would probably then end up on a TLD with a load of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_fiction]gay porn story[/url] sites ;)
It's worrying what you find out people write when your wife is involved in Harry Potter fanfiction 8|
Personally I think .com should be for international companies/entities, with local companies using local domains. In that case .asia would be great for companies who cover the whole of Asia, but aren't known outside it. Quite why .uk is available to everyone I don't know :\
Unfortunately it would probably get to the point where someone wants a ".africanorthamericaasia" TLD because they're active in all three, but someone else thinks that ".africaeuropeasia" would be better because that's where they cover.
The other reason is probably also that an individual is more likely to roll over and pay the extortion, sorry, "out of court settlement" money, where as a company is more likely to fight it (or call bankruptcy and try to vanish without a trace).
Call me cynical, but why else would they pick on the little guy other than they're the easier target? It's just standard predator practice. Lets hope someone patented it!
It's an irony because the article is going "oh no, bad spammers" and the advert is going "buy your cheap software and become a big bad spammer here!"
I wonder whether some of the software lets you spam Google's listings easily? Perhaps that's how it was achieved?
That's not SEO, that's SEM (Search Engine Manipulation - I've patented that version of the acronym). SEO involves optimising a site rather than making it completely different for normal users is manipulation and 'blackhat' tactics. It would be interesting, if a little off-putting, if someone has successfully scammed Google to such a great extent through simple cloaking.
As for the suggestion of a different user agent, I guess it'd be simple enough to either do a reverse lookup and see if it contains "google" or log the range of Google's IPs. I'd have thought Google would have thought of that, but they can't have too many ways that they check with Googlebot not showing up as Googlebot that can't be traced back to them or eventually discovered and made redundant.
Yeah, I think "not hosted anywhere" is somewhat of a simplification for "actually hosted somewhere but never show any content to a normal user because they redirect you to another domain instead". While it might fly for a complete non-techy, I wouldn't have thought /. would have too many people believing in responses from machines that don't exist.
No, they shouldn't have to download all of it and pay for 100KB. What should happen is that if there is demand for the ability to download just the lead then Wikipedia should have special URLs for them as "/wiki/article" and "/wiki/article_lead" are two different resources with two different purposes (one is to give you all of the details, the other is to just summarise it).
If there's an image that large embedded in a Wikipedia page and not linked then someone needs shooting. If it is any other page then I'd hope that either the browser doesn't automatically download any and all images or else the user knows what to expect when hitting random pages on the Net with a mobile phone where they pay by the KB.
But that's beside the point. The original response was that text, not a Wiki article with images etc, would display perfectly fine on both a mobile phone display and an uber-widescreen monitor (with or without the use of CSS).
That's sheer amount of text, not size (which normally means font size, which can be controlled by the phone). I'm sure 100KB of Encyclopedia text would display fine on a small screen, just the same as how 1KB of text would.
If the user is going to an Encyclopedia page then they probably want lots of information (because that's what encyclopedias give you). If they want lots of information and they're on a small screen then they should know they'll need to scroll. If they know they need to scroll then 100KB of properly laid out Encyclopedia data (with anchors) should display fine and the user should be happy. If they want a big encyclopedia article and get the website saying "oh, you're a mobile therefore I'll give you the ten-word definition with no detail as if I was a dictionary" then they'd not be getting what they asked for.
Google.com: 2037 bytes of HTML
Google.com/m: 1436 bytes of HTML
For all of the extra links, that's not a lot of difference at the base HTML level.
As for it being a "mobile portal page", isn't that a different page to a "Google search home page for showing off Google's various capabilities"? If it is then it should have a different URL and not be UA dependent. After all, what's to stop someone who is non-portable or on a laptop wanting things like weather automatically added in without having to to an iGoogle page?
Yes, you could replace "Google search home page for showing off Google's various capabilities" with "mobile portal page" for mobile users accessing "http://www.google.com/", but the better solution would be for a URL to be a uniform locator for a given resource where the resource stays constant and that resource is then designed so it will degrade for any platform.
You wouldn't want the building at a street address to be a bookshop if you asked about it in a library and a bakery if you asked about it in a restaurant, would you? So why should google.com be "Google search home page for showing off Google's various capabilities" from a desktop and "mobile portal page" from a mobile?
TBH I'd be appalled if any of my sites had a page anywhere near 100KB for the 'required' downloads (HTML and CSS file but not CSS background images, which wouldn't be "fundamentally required" images).
As for CSS on a mobile phone: 1) surely that means that XHTML and CSS is an even better combination, since the mobile will see the <link> tag and be able to ignore it because it is typed as "text/css" and it knows it can't handle it. It will then be able to just load and display the HTML, and 2) The last phone I bought was three years ago now, and it was bottom of the line (£30) then. The only reason I bought it was because it was about as cheap as buying a battery for my older phone. Yes, the new phone has Internet access (probably WAP) but I've never wanted to be ripped off by the rates they charge so I've never used it. All I know is that newer phones can use Opera Mini, I don't bother looking at what functionality that might include.
Google may give you a different site, but what I was saying is why should they need to? If your mobile browser can handle text and input boxes then why should Google need to serve it anything different as long as it is properly designed?
Yeah, Flash is a special case of the "large thing to download as web content" but it was the one that worked best for "great big thing that you need to download".
As an alternative, take dowfiles.com (and probably the whole FileFront network). Even if they coded to standards and used HTML without tables and CSS for all styling then they'd still have a 55KB header image and a total of 166KB of images to load. That means just using standards still won't make all sites mobile-compatible.
Not a web developer? IMO it shows he is a web developer and he's one who thinks about XHTML/CSS. For content that can be displayed on both then how about text? Whether it's widescreen or phone display then text should display fine. Have a page serve up content including:
...
<h1>Page title</h1>
<div class="menuFloatedRight">
<h2>Menu</h2>
</div>
<div class="contentWithBackgroundImage">
<h2 class="headerWithBackgroundImage">Some header</h2>
<p class="intro">Some paragraph of introduction</p>
<p>Main article goes here.</p>
<p>And here...</p>
</div>
then along with some CSS the content can be identical for all user agents and each user agent can decide which styles they want to support and hence adapt it. If you're on a mobile then you might want to ignore the background image and the right-floating of the menu, but keep those attributes on the desktop browser, and so the user agent is adapting the content to the constraints of the display.
The problem is that even if you code to W3C standard (which I do) using XHTML and CSS or whatever then you can still have a heavy page that is standards compliant but takes an age to load due to what you cram into it. At the simplest level then you could have a standards compliant site that uses Flash for part of it. With the (admittedly poor) idea of "serve depending on user agent" then you can serve simple content to the phone and have it work but a purely standards compliant site wouldn't help there.
Yes, the standards should fix most of the issue in that it should degrade well to a phone display etc, but it won't solve everything.
Because humans have an in-built obsession with patterns. It's the same as why we often see two pairs of two objects and not one group of four, or two groups of two and a single one rather than five. The human mind makes use of patterns and finds patterns in things. By knowing the Nth whatever then we get to look for patterns.
Or something like that.
That depends on the encoding - either 72 characters in ASCII or UTF-8 or 36 characters if they go for the more multi-lingual friendly UTF-16.
Either way, something about that length is likely to be a stub and not a 'real' article.
Well, what I really meant was: "If only politicians could do what the people want, rather than what the people 'need'." i.e. what the Politicians think we need, which is basically what they want.
That and the subtext of "like Politicians are ever going to do what people want because what we want can often not really be what we want and is less likely to be what we need and what works well in a multi-national environment, but of course people can't see it that way".
Don't you just hate it when the subtext is longer than the message?