Way back in the mists of history -- figure the mid-'90s, give or take an IPO or two -- I used to do some odd bits of print design for a blindness-related non-profit here on the East Coast. One day, when conversation turned to the org's web presence, they mentioned how they had been quite deliberate in "oversizing" everything on their site to cater to users with failing eyesight -- mostly the elderly, as it turns out. Taking a look at the site today, it appears that not much has changed, so I guess the philosophy must still be working for them.
Mind you, this was a destination with an already assumed audience of seniors/others with vision problems. Should the same thinking be carried over to a more general-interest site that caters largely to a 50+ demographic (wine, opera, public radio/TV)?* Sure. Perhaps in not so drastic a manner as that first example, but hey, it never hurts to remember that those users most likely to need oversized type/graphics -- seniors -- are also the ones are least likely to understand client-side fixes like text-zoom and adjusting monitor resolution.*
My best guess is that some clearly marked CSS controls on the page might be the best compromise between wanting a clean, elegant design and offering maximum readability to users. Worth thinking about, at least...
*This and all other groundless generalizations in this post are the property of the Poster. And Major League Baseball.
Subscribers now see stories posted on Slashdot from The Mysterious Past! These stories are recognizable by the familiar green title bar and the addition of a time stamp set several years after the publication the item being reviewed. Subscribers will be able to avoid the rush and read the links long after everyone else.
(Okay, I kid, I kid. K&K is a wonderful book and it's nice to see it getting some love on Slashdot, but the late timing of the review *does* strike me as a bit odd...)
I use my Mac OS X constantly and I've never run into any problem that looks remotely like this. They're on crack.
In defense of the howling crackheads -- erm, Adobe -- this bug has been a verifiable and hugely annoying problem among my agency's art directors for a while now. The option and shift keys -- used in Illustrator for drag-copying and constraining to angles, respectively -- would stop responding at random times, requiring a full log out to clear things up again. (Judging from the technote, the fact that we often need to access SMB servers during the day might have something to do with it.)
Frustrating in the middle of a deadline push, to say the least...
There was a story on BBC over the weekend reporting that the new Bond flick earned a record $70 million from product placement fees (mainly for the gadgets, cars, etc) -- the highest ever for a motion picture. They make no bones about the film pretty much being 2-hour advertisement.
And sometimes I feel like providing GPS coordinates for my mailing address and an MP3 of modulated tones for my phone number, but that doesn't mean I should be accomodated in most cases.
Poorly implemented validation, to my mind, would be not letting someone use hyphens in their credit card number or rejecting any and all zip codes that don't include a zip-plus. Asking that Jennifer 8 or The Symbol Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince partake of the alphabet every once in a blue moon, on the other hand, seems like a rather reasonable request.
No, no, no... the scary part is that the CD our German friend was writing EMI about in the first place was Toto's "Through the Looking Glass".
If overly stringent copy protection means there's one less person in the world listening to Toto cover "House of the Rising Sun", can it really be all bad?
(1) There are often very legitimate reasons for needing to send someone a file over 5MB; not everyone's trafficing in hi-res pictures of Aunt Sally eating rhubarb pie. In advertising, for instance, legitimate presentation documents bound for a client can bloat up in size very quickly. Which leads us into the next (and more important) issue...
(2) You not only have to educate your users in the fine art of using FTP, but the clients to whom those users are sending files in the first place. Trust me, if Company X just spent $10 million to have an agency develop an ad campaign for them, the last thing they'd want to get back for their money is a long lecture on the proper use of various file transfer techniques from the local techie.
It's a service economy out there, and if you don't provide in a manner that's convenient for the client, you get serviced (in the most painful Oz sense of the word.)
I have the right to refuse to contribute to their campaign...
No. You don't.
(1) A well-established system of matching funds already exists within the electoral system. Any party-based candidate who qualifies, including that Klansman, Communist, or Nazi, can have their campaign funded in part by your tax dollars.
(2) More generally, you have no power to control how or on what your taxes are spent. (Other than the occasional referendum and, indirectly, by electing representatives who reflect your values.) I not only disagree with, but find morally repugnant, some of the U.S.'s current big-stick approaches to foreign policy. But this gives me no right to withhold my taxes from those efforts. (Although some have tried in the past...)
(3) Limit the powers of the government and someone else steps in to fill that power vacuum. Guess who? Big business and those special interest groups you mentioned. Unless you're in a Capra movie, in which case Jimmy Stewart will step up to bat.
Blizzard Entertainment has put up gameplay trailers for their upcoming console title...
Yup -- just so long as by "upcoming" you mean well over a year from now. More likely two years, given Blizzard's track record on meeting projected shipping dates...
So I'm reading through that list of books which I'm certainly not downloading the background as I type this -- *cough* -- and I noticed Mein Kampf is on the list of copyright-extended titles. The first question that pops into my head is: "Who's getting the royalty checks on that nowadays?"
Just a thought, but would it be possible to get around this by "selling" the DVD to the cafe customer at full retail price (i.e., a deposit), then allow them to "return" it two hours later? You'd then give them a full refund -- minus a small restocking charge (i.e., your fee). For those two hours, that DVD was legally their property, and they were privately viewing it in youer kiosk. No harm, no foul. *whistle*
(This is all moot, of course. The MPAA would still sue you to Weehawken and back. But hey, it's fun to dream...)
what hellhole do you people live in that CD's cost 18 dollars?
New York City, baby -- hellhole to the stars.
If I were to go to any of the major reatil outlets here and buy a regular CD (not on sale, not part of a specially reduced back catalog series), yes, it would cost me $17.99 or $18.99 pre-tax. Prices get a little better if you visit a more independently minded retailer, but the selection sometimes suffers. (Stocked titles are often more ecletic, and if your idea of "eclectic" doesn't match the owner's idea of "eclectic", yer out of luck.)
I wouldn't presume to say that the Big Apple is an accurate representation of the music market as a whole, but those prices the parent mentioned are indeed a reality for those of us in urban markets.
...so that I can see the scene where Galadriel dispenses her gifts
Erm... you might be thinking of the Late-Nite Cinemax cut of the film there, slugger. Galadriel won't be "dispensing her gifts" to anyone this time 'round. Particularly not to Gimli. What do you think this is, the Howard Stern show?
Granted, your post may not be actively racist, but it's certainly judgmental. For all you know, that 'large group of blacks' might be sitting there thinking, "Wow, that large group of whites up front must really hate this movie. They're so quiet; they don't seem to be getting into it at all." Everything depends on your point of view.
Heck, if I let things like a little audience participation bother me, I wouldn't be able to see a movie anywhere here in NYC.
Anonymous Coward writes 'There is a beautiful modern OS that has surfaced on the Microsoft site, and the homepage of someone who's just switched. More and more of these converts are around lately... pretty incredible."
Ish gotsh yer syhnergy right s'here, barkeep
on
Web Hospices?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
While the "web incubator" was invented in the 90's, why has no one adopted a similar model for the 00's?"
We've already have. It's called the Rodeo Bar -- Manhattan, down on 27th. Good music, cheap booze, and a few hundred of us dotcom victims all drinking away our unemployment checks, waiting for the job market to open up again.
Or was that not the type of collaborative model you were looking for?
Fine, fine -- I'll be the one to club the baby seal. Yes, I do doubt the claim and the statistics used to back it up. Here's why:
The RAINN release cites this NCPA study as the source for those "expected sentence" stats. What the release omitted, however, was the NCPA's definition of "expected sentence," which reads as follows:
"The best overall measure of the potential cost to a criminal of committing crimes is 'expected punishment.' Roughly speaking, expected punishment is the number of days in prison a typical criminal can expect to serve per crime,
as determined by the probabilities of being apprehended, prosecuted, convicted and going to prison, and the median months served for each crime.
Rape has long been considered an under-reported crime that's tough to prosecute (often ending up as a 'he-said, she-said' situation at trial). When all this gets averaged into the derived "expected sentence," you end up with a number that looks far skimpier than the actual sentences handed down to convicted rapists.
As for the unweighted numbers? Here's some data from a US DoJ report, which combines first- and second-degree rape:
The average sentence for criminals convicted of rape in the United States (and released in 1992) is 117 months. The average time served is 65 months, which equates to 56 percent of the actual sentence served.
Still leinent by many standards, but not nearly the disaster that the RAINN release makes it out to be.
Among some of the reforms sought, is higher fees for the initial processing fee, higher fees for more than 20 claims, higher fees for the more work the examiners have to do (lower fees for less work and fewer claims), 2000 more examiners, and required continued relevance of the examiner in their field (certification and re-certification)
Sorry fellas -- I've already pre-emptively patented all those reforms. Try again.
Here's a old, old joke that has more than a little truth to it:
Q: When do you need a lawyer?
A: When you're talking to a lawyer.
Which is to say, if you ever need to deal with someone else's attorney in any offical capacity, no matter how trivial, you're best served by having your own on-call as well.
Yet as recent public demonstrations have shown us (for example those against war, the IMF and the World Bank) in our modern-day society it is increasingly difficult, ineffective, and even dangerous for citizens to exercise their democratic rights to assembly and free-speech.
I don't even know where to begin. That statement shows such an ignorance of U.S. (not to mention world) history that I feel like crawling back under my quilt and calling it an early day.
Let me be blunt: you are spoiled. To even attempt a comparison between the timid crowd control at IMF meetings and -- oh, I don't know, the entirety of the civil rights and labor movements in the U.S.? -- is naive. To suggest that the current state of affairs is somehow worse is laughable.
Tell you what -- I'm going to start an counter technology to Votester. It'll be called Cluester. Instead of spamming [pick a boogeyman] with P2P email, it'll bombard pampered activists with copies of Zinn's "People's History of the U.S." And the more people who join in, the more copies we can send out.
Seriously. Some people need to be reminded there was a world before CNN.
P.S. - Don't get me wrong; I'm all for civil disobedience where appropriate. I plan to be down in D.C. along with everyone else for next month's march against the U.S.'s Iraq policy. And I recognize there clearly remain a great many opressive regimes throughout the world. But it just hurts my teeth when people don't recognize how far they've come as they survey the distance left to go.
Today's favorite: Biotechnology advances will radically transform our world and our bodies.
Mr. Thurow says higher IQs and more beautiful children will be among the benefits of biotech advances. "For the first time in history, people will be able to change themselves," he says.
Will someone please make sure that Christopher Walken is in the balcony with a rifle at this guy's next public speech?
Slashdot Mirror
Way back in the mists of history -- figure the mid-'90s, give or take an IPO or two -- I used to do some odd bits of print design for a blindness-related non-profit here on the East Coast. One day, when conversation turned to the org's web presence, they mentioned how they had been quite deliberate in "oversizing" everything on their site to cater to users with failing eyesight -- mostly the elderly, as it turns out. Taking a look at the site today, it appears that not much has changed, so I guess the philosophy must still be working for them.
Mind you, this was a destination with an already assumed audience of seniors/others with vision problems. Should the same thinking be carried over to a more general-interest site that caters largely to a 50+ demographic (wine, opera, public radio/TV)?* Sure. Perhaps in not so drastic a manner as that first example, but hey, it never hurts to remember that those users most likely to need oversized type/graphics -- seniors -- are also the ones are least likely to understand client-side fixes like text-zoom and adjusting monitor resolution.*
My best guess is that some clearly marked CSS controls on the page might be the best compromise between wanting a clean, elegant design and offering maximum readability to users. Worth thinking about, at least...
*This and all other groundless generalizations in this post are the property of the Poster. And Major League Baseball.
Subscribers now see stories posted on Slashdot from The Mysterious Past! These stories are recognizable by the familiar green title bar and the addition of a time stamp set several years after the publication the item being reviewed. Subscribers will be able to avoid the rush and read the links long after everyone else.
(Okay, I kid, I kid. K&K is a wonderful book and it's nice to see it getting some love on Slashdot, but the late timing of the review *does* strike me as a bit odd...)
I use my Mac OS X constantly and I've never run into any problem that looks remotely like this. They're on crack.
In defense of the howling crackheads -- erm, Adobe -- this bug has been a verifiable and hugely annoying problem among my agency's art directors for a while now. The option and shift keys -- used in Illustrator for drag-copying and constraining to angles, respectively -- would stop responding at random times, requiring a full log out to clear things up again. (Judging from the technote, the fact that we often need to access SMB servers during the day might have something to do with it.)
Frustrating in the middle of a deadline push, to say the least...
There was a story on BBC over the weekend reporting that the new Bond flick earned a record $70 million from product placement fees (mainly for the gadgets, cars, etc) -- the highest ever for a motion picture. They make no bones about the film pretty much being 2-hour advertisement.
Poorly implemented validation, to my mind, would be not letting someone use hyphens in their credit card number or rejecting any and all zip codes that don't include a zip-plus. Asking that Jennifer 8 or The Symbol Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince partake of the alphabet every once in a blue moon, on the other hand, seems like a rather reasonable request.
If overly stringent copy protection means there's one less person in the world listening to Toto cover "House of the Rising Sun", can it really be all bad?
(1) There are often very legitimate reasons for needing to send someone a file over 5MB; not everyone's trafficing in hi-res pictures of Aunt Sally eating rhubarb pie. In advertising, for instance, legitimate presentation documents bound for a client can bloat up in size very quickly. Which leads us into the next (and more important) issue...
(2) You not only have to educate your users in the fine art of using FTP, but the clients to whom those users are sending files in the first place. Trust me, if Company X just spent $10 million to have an agency develop an ad campaign for them, the last thing they'd want to get back for their money is a long lecture on the proper use of various file transfer techniques from the local techie.
It's a service economy out there, and if you don't provide in a manner that's convenient for the client, you get serviced (in the most painful Oz sense of the word.)
(1) A well-established system of matching funds already exists within the electoral system. Any party-based candidate who qualifies, including that Klansman, Communist, or Nazi, can have their campaign funded in part by your tax dollars.
(2) More generally, you have no power to control how or on what your taxes are spent. (Other than the occasional referendum and, indirectly, by electing representatives who reflect your values.) I not only disagree with, but find morally repugnant, some of the U.S.'s current big-stick approaches to foreign policy. But this gives me no right to withhold my taxes from those efforts. (Although some have tried in the past...)
(3) Limit the powers of the government and someone else steps in to fill that power vacuum. Guess who? Big business and those special interest groups you mentioned. Unless you're in a Capra movie, in which case Jimmy Stewart will step up to bat.
Then a Slashdot poster happened by and said, "Dude, you're eating cake that someone dropped on the ground. What the hell is wrong with you people?!"
So I'm reading through that list of books which I'm certainly not downloading the background as I type this -- *cough* -- and I noticed Mein Kampf is on the list of copyright-extended titles. The first question that pops into my head is: "Who's getting the royalty checks on that nowadays?"
(This is all moot, of course. The MPAA would still sue you to Weehawken and back. But hey, it's fun to dream...)
Not to rain on your parade, but that's not so much a "claim to fame" as it is a "claim ticket from the pawnshop two blocks down the street from fame."
If I were to go to any of the major reatil outlets here and buy a regular CD (not on sale, not part of a specially reduced back catalog series), yes, it would cost me $17.99 or $18.99 pre-tax. Prices get a little better if you visit a more independently minded retailer, but the selection sometimes suffers. (Stocked titles are often more ecletic, and if your idea of "eclectic" doesn't match the owner's idea of "eclectic", yer out of luck.)
I wouldn't presume to say that the Big Apple is an accurate representation of the music market as a whole, but those prices the parent mentioned are indeed a reality for those of us in urban markets.
Heck, if I let things like a little audience participation bother me, I wouldn't be able to see a movie anywhere here in NYC.
Anonymous Coward writes 'There is a beautiful modern OS that has surfaced on the Microsoft site, and the homepage of someone who's just switched. More and more of these converts are around lately... pretty incredible."
Or was that not the type of collaborative model you were looking for?
As for the unweighted numbers? Here's some data from a US DoJ report, which combines first- and second-degree rape:
Still leinent by many standards, but not nearly the disaster that the RAINN release makes it out to be.Q: When do you need a lawyer?
A: When you're talking to a lawyer.
Which is to say, if you ever need to deal with someone else's attorney in any offical capacity, no matter how trivial, you're best served by having your own on-call as well.
Let me be blunt: you are spoiled. To even attempt a comparison between the timid crowd control at IMF meetings and -- oh, I don't know, the entirety of the civil rights and labor movements in the U.S.? -- is naive. To suggest that the current state of affairs is somehow worse is laughable.
Tell you what -- I'm going to start an counter technology to Votester. It'll be called Cluester. Instead of spamming [pick a boogeyman] with P2P email, it'll bombard pampered activists with copies of Zinn's "People's History of the U.S." And the more people who join in, the more copies we can send out.
Seriously. Some people need to be reminded there was a world before CNN.
P.S. - Don't get me wrong; I'm all for civil disobedience where appropriate. I plan to be down in D.C. along with everyone else for next month's march against the U.S.'s Iraq policy. And I recognize there clearly remain a great many opressive regimes throughout the world. But it just hurts my teeth when people don't recognize how far they've come as they survey the distance left to go.
Those lil' checkboxes are there in the preferences for a reason. Feel free to use 'em.
Thanks!
The Management