Organized civil disobedience is a method by which a vocal minority can exert its views over a majority, regardless of what the majority feels about it.
Well, sometimes the majority is wrong. If the majority was always right we'd all be married to Harrison Ford or Jennifer Aniston.
The evolution of an idea from a minority opinion to a majority opinion can start with small protests. It's the best way.
Yes, it's time for civil disobedience to undergo a revival. I say go for it. Break the rules. Break the law. Pick your side and fight. Civil disobedience is about choosing to violate the law because sometimes being criminal is the right thing to do. Are you worried about a record, a news story, your picture in the paper, what your in-laws will think? Don't. We're all criminals waiting to be caught. Being arrested isn't a sin. It's not an automatic black mark. Being arrested can be more powerful than voting. The law is the law until it isn't the law any more. Don't sigh and submit. You don't have to. Don't accept what you've been handed. Fight it. Rebel. Then write letters about it, post fliers, mail pamphlets. Hammer on the doors with battering rams, with your fists, with your head. Prove them wrong. Upset the apple cart, overturn the outhouse, barricade the bridges. Get some guts, some spine, some gumption, some chutzpah. You are privileged to burn the flag on the courthouse steps, to march without a permit, to chain yourself to the trees, to stand in front of the tank, to haul salt from the beaches to the people. You are entitled to tell everyone exactly what you're thinking. Civil disobedience means small battles standing proxy for large wars. By God, don't just stand there.
Consider the other possibilities of highly accurate GPS, some of these already in place in various forms.
1. Digital travel guides that automatically load the information for the landmarks near you. You could adjust the scale, so if you're standing at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue in New York you might get entries for the US, New York State, New York City, Manhattan, Times Square, the Zipper, or Achmed's newsstand on the corner.
2. You're an architectural student. You've got video goggles and a strap-on computer (not rod-shaped, people). You walk around the city seeing what is an exact digital representation of what you would ordinarily see, all in 3D, except you can choose to view the steel structure, cut-aways, the 33rd floor, the bedrock, textural details, or even a time-lapse video of the building being constructed. All live, on the fly, on the street. As you walk, the video adjusts. Buildings could be marked with little icons at the entrance to indicate their compatibility with the technology.
3. Big-ass games of blind man's bluff. Cover your eyes with a backwards ski mask. Turn on the speaking function of your GPS device. Have it give you instructions on how to get where you're going.
4. Real-time traffic monitoring: in a dense city, GPS devices could be installed in municipal vehicles. Time and rate of those autos could be reported via other radio link to central computer, redistributed to everyone else's GPS and overlaid on a map telling them where the best routes might be found. Of course, this might turn into infinite game theory iterations.
5. Auto-tuning of radios (kind of like RDS) to your favorite type of preset music choices. GPS devices don't have to be attached to maps and expensive equipment.
6. An excellent source of new stats for golf aficionados: GPS in golf balls. How far off, exactly, was he? This, of course, goes well with my idea for a transparent basketball with a camera and transmitter inside.
No, It's A Third Thing
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 2
The real reason Boo.com failed is this:
Right now, Boo.com is the worst user experience on the planet.
Flash-based, it forces far too many long downloads, slow page redraws and a pathetic user experience that provides layers upon layers of interactivity to even reach a product. On a dial-up connection it is completely unusuable; on a fat pipe, it's barely so. The addition of unbelievable amounts of javascript and frames mean that even the fastest computer will see speed hits on other simultaneous functions.
Finally, the products are completely lack-luster. I can buy similar (or the same) items at faster sites any day of the week, usually for less money.
In web-design circles and advertising agencies here in New York City, Boo.com is a running gag, the place you say people worked when they're horrible at their job.
A fakir in India a long time ago travelled from town to town putting on a performance. He had the ability to speak nearly all of India's 400 or more tongues fluently, as if he was born to them. He would stand in the center of town and challenge passers-by:
"Win a piece of gold! I can speak any language in the world! I challenge you to stump me! Price of playing is a hand-full of rice. Nobody has stumped me yet! And you can win ten pieces of gold if you can tell me the language I learned at my mother's breast. One hand-full of rice only!"
And eventually, people would pay their handful of rice, and try a few words of the language their old grandmother taught them when they were young. The fakir always responded in kind, usually with a clever bit of poetry or doggerel, so he not only won, but was amusing and soon gathered a crowd. Then the old grandmothers themselves would come out, speaking languages out of the mountains, or from across the sea, or sacred tongues they had been taught on the sly by past lovers. The fakir spoke them all!
Then one day he landed in a little town in Andra Pradesh where lived a clever little farmer who had a small rice paddy and two oxen. He was very successful but had never been educated. The farmer listened to the fakir tease and win and flirt with the crowd. And he considered the matter.
At the end of the day, when the fakir was about to wrap it up and move on, the farmer spoke to him and said, "Please, stay with my family tonight. You are a very educated man and I think we may learn a thing or two from you."
The fakir of course accepted and they spent the night eating bowls of rice and drinking wine and rice beer and laughing at each other's stories.
That night as the village was sleeping, the farmer rose from his mat where he had been resting but not sleeping. He padded down to the river and drew a deep bucket of water. He hauled it back to the tent and threw it on his guest.
"Aiiieeee! Oh Shiva!" The fakir called these out in his birth tongue, a language from people far up the Ganges. "Why have you done this? Are we not friends?" he asked the farmer.
The farmer replied, "Last night I fed you my rice. More than a handful by my count. And now I seek the ten gold coins in return. For the language you speak is..." and he named the language.
The fakir laughed and laughed. "You are the first! No one else knew the trick, because they forgot a simple truth: we are what we were when we were in the houses of our mothers. We can build on top, but we cannot remove the foundation."
...........
The Internet will be like the world: each community using its own dialect, language, patois, lingo, argot, code or jargon. There will be a lingua franca. Now it's English. In 100 years it might be Spanish or Mandarin.
That is how languages go. They resist control. They change despite language Academies. They remain static despite invented words and languages. They persist. They are uncontainable. They resist attention and inattention. They rebel.
Until the Internet is a Mother, a father, a schoolyard chum, there will never be an accepted universal, Internet-only language. Never. For that is how languages are taken to heart.
Why stop? Why not have as many root-level domains as possible? It is technically feasible, is it not? I care not a whit if it costs people money. Everything costs money.
As a matter of fact, although RealNames sucks like Manchester United, why not just get rid of any sort of significance to the root levels and allow sentence-like-structures. Web sites could be full words separated like dots like some email addresses.
So "rob.eats.pooh" would not be owned, necessarily, by the same people who own "winne.the.pooh."
[I'm sure I'm about to hear from a) Manchester United fans: I love you blokes. Please lighten up and tell the boys to stop mucking about, b), some technical wizard who will have 16 good reasons my plan is not feasible and will be happy to trade email for a week about it]
I'm a stone cold geek! I got that hacker instinct running around in my thick Mac head, and I got your computer right here, buddy. It's an Apple PowerBook G3 running PowerPC Linux. Whooop!
I run Virtual PC just so I can rape and pillage in Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 client, as well as Mac OS 9 and PowerPC Linux. I mate them like dogs in heat in July. I do it for fun, not cause I have to. I can play Tetris on every one of them, and I my high scores show up at the bank. Duke Nukem licked my boots. I'm about to add a RedHat partition, and I've got MachTen in a box on a shelf just panting to join the gangbang.
I flip around from OS to OS like a Vegas master dealing blackjack. I do what I want where I want any way I please. I compose a document using AbiSoft Word, or ApplixWare, or Microsoft Word, or ClarisWorks, or in VI (God bless the simple things in life). I've got 17 graphics programs, 18 web browsers, 41 apps capable of serving web pages, 10 text editors, 7 shells, and one goddam processor. And the machine weighs seven pounds. I can send email from 19 different programs, and just for the hell of it, I can first bounce it through 14 accounts on three planets. I can read your reply, translate it into French and post it on the web in Chinese. My computer sings to me.
I can jam my baby, my rocket, in the middle of two ten-thousand-node networks and have it act as a router, a bridge, an end-node or a firewall. My machine does IP masquerading like a Halloween ball. I can grep like a mofo, find just the true-life Pantone color you're looking for, and visit your dirtbag Windows-only web site just so I can send you nasty email and jam your mailbox with stories of the Craig Shergold and free trips to Disneyland. I eat Lithium Ion batteries for breakfast and chew NiCad cells to calm my stomach.
My machine is the best of breed. It's got hybrid vigor. You can take your fancy-pants, out-of-the-box, turn key solutions and spread them on the grass, 'cause they ain't nothing but manure.
[With thanks and respect to Mike Fink and Mark Twain.]
Two of the simplest but most widespread problems with viewing foreign language web sites, particularly in non-Roman character sets, are when the language is not specified in a metatag or the font face *is* specified in HTML.
The first problem has been described elsewhere on this page, but deserves reiteration: specifying the encoding language in HTML can allow the correct font, language script and character set to be used automatically by the browser without scripting on the server end. On my Mac, for example, this would allow the Haaretz newspaper site to come up automatically in Hebrew (having chosen the correct language script and font for me). I would not have to manually choose the settings. Good examples of where this is not done but should be are the Yahoo! Asian sites. The only way my browser knows I'm looking at Korean text on Yahoo! Korea is because I choose it; the HTML pages are not encoded to tell my browser this.
Scripting to determine what preferred language is chosen in the browser is, in my opinion, the hallmark of a great multi-language site. The second hallmark is a link on every page to switch to another language at will.
A similar item happens in bad email programs: they do not specify the character encoding in the header. One of the nicest things about a great email program is that when I get, say, a Japanese-encoded email, even if the words themselves are English (by using the Roman characters built into the Japanese encoding group), it kicks in the Japanese character entry and editing system automatically. It recognizes it, as it should.
Intentionally *not* specifying font face is equally important. If I want to view web site in Hebrew or Arabic, a ridiculous number of the sites require that I download the particular font they have specified in their HTML. This is preposterous. Language encoding, used properly, might mean never having to download another font again.
As for graphics in lieu of foreign fonts: avoid it any way you can. It makes copying and pasting near-impossible. (I once had to do it this way: I saved the GIF image to my hard drive, converted it to TIFF and ran it through and optical character recognition program, then cleaned it up manually. A huge waste of my time).
John Travolta, cult aside, has long overstayed his welcome. I'm sick of him and his stupid hand-flicking gestures (half borrowed from Andrew Dice Clay, half from Nicolas Cage), his squinty eyes, his rubber-lipped inarticulation, the lifts in his shoes.
I'm not saying Jon's information is not correct. However, if Jon wants his stories to have credibility, he should avoid quoting their stories.
WorldNet Daily is one of those sites that conveniently leaves out important, mitigating information; that often posts articles without factual attribution, references, bibliographies, footnotes or nationally recognized experts or sources (other than self-recognized); that seems to rewrite articles appearing elsewhere and to claim them as its own; that in an admittedly common American tradition, weaves bias, prejudice and preference throughout everything posted.
WorldNet Daily's work amounts to unsubstantiated and ad hominem attacks with little separation of fact and opinion. Its suppositions are often wishful thinking and rumor, its claims are incredible and unlikely. It allows its "sources" to use WorldNet daily as a propagation machine for narrow agendas without tempering or anodyne or balance.
I would disrecommend using it as any kind of support for a story.
Less-developed countries are adopting the same approach to computing and the internet that they have applied to other expensive information wave technologies: they pool community resources and install them as public services.
In Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela (and probably other Latin American countries), it is common to see phone centers for making long distance calls: room full of small booths, with on-site operators to connect the calls, which are paid for at the time of the call. (An odd side effect of the phones centers is that in certain Latino/Hispanic communities in the US, you still see these phone centers, even though people may have phones at home; they're used to them, and the aggregate billing rates are cheaper).
Not everyone has phones in these countries not necessarily because the individuals can't afford them, but because it may be too cost prohibitive for the state phone company to install the lines. The same applies to Internet: it's cheaper to aggregate the service in order to reduce costs per capita.
Now these phone centers are playing host to Internet services as well, used to communicate with relatives in other countries as well as intra-country. And since, as so many Americans seeme to forget, even developing countries all have wealthy and technologically advanced citizens, they are applying the technologies as suits their culture. These are the people, whatever their politics or precarious position at the top of the heap, that lead the advancement into new technologies. It is also common in tourist areas to find Internet cafes, usually run by First Worlders of the broadest definition.
As odd as it sounds, an advantage to being an underdeveloped country is that a nation can skip the outdated interval technologies and jump straight to the latest. They can, for example, skip land lines, POTS, hard wires. The move to cellular phones in Ecuador and Colombia, for example, has leaped in such ways as to help circumvent the irregular and inconsistent land-line services. In parts of Latin America (which is largely my only area of experience) it has been tradition for radio stations to send out personal messages to listeners in their broadcast area. Not "Feliz Cumpleaños" but "Pedro, please meet us on Tuesday in Riobamba" or "Maria, your sister is sick. Could you come to take care of her for a few days?" Cell phones now help circumvent the pecularities of geography that had cause problems with laying physical lines.
Assuming costs can be consolidated, I see a huge market for wireless Internet in underdeveloped countries, particularly in mountainous regions like the Andes. This is their future.
I don't know if the porting story is true, but Mac OS Rumors has a spotty record. Many of its leads often seem to be lifted from elsewhere, the rumor reliability is poor, and usually so late as to be useless, besides which its articles are so filled with bogus predictions using words such as "likely", "possibly", "predicted", and longs chains of if-then scenarios as to completely obliterate any authoritative source that might have passed a true lead on in the first place.
They need to learn to do written math, not speak English.
English is not the only answer. It may not even by AN answer.
[Regarding programming in other than English: programmers are learning English only to program, not to create "an open flow of English." They're certainly not learning it merely to browse the web.]
What, in the name of God or whoever's in charge, do you people think is happening in Japan and China? Do you actually think users or even programmers there are all learning English? They're using their mother tongues! Chinese in all of its variations! Japanese! They even play games in those foreign languges. It's happening all over the world.
It will be the same in India. You need only port the system, apps and manuals. Programmers will do and learn what they have to to master their trade.
Indians do not need to learn English. They may not even need to learn to use computers. But once they use the new machines, they'll begin creating their own content, the same way all non-English-speaking nations have. Just seven short years ago it was impossible to find more than a handful of pages in any but a few Romance languages. Now look at it. Have you people visited, say, http://kr.yahoo.com/, lately? Or http://www.wanado.fr/?
Teaching English to the the poor and powerless is a mistake. I visited Ecuador a couple of years ago. One of my acquaintances there ran a program in a school for homeless children, teaching them English. They couldn't read. Couldn't do written math. They had little clothing. They worked from sun-up to sun-down scrambling to shine shoes. And they had no homes. What use is English to them, except to talk to condescending tourists? Wouldn't that money and time have been better spent on permanent homes?
Apple's Mac OS 9 has full support at no cost for Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarti, as well as Unicode, 8-bit characters, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Korean, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic and Cyrillic language systems. You merely need to locate the installer on the OS 9 system disk.
This, however, is only the first step: applications need localization, too.
It's called "control-click," same as the second button on a Windows machine. Control-click on the QuickTime movie you're viewing and, voila, it offers you a chance to save the movie to disk.
I feel compelled to point out, grisly unwarranted death aside, that Phil Hartman's voice and acting talents were so pathetic that they can be duplicated by drawing back the corners of your mouth and talking like a closeted Top 40 disk jockey.
1. Digital broadcasters will all opt for multiple low-res channels as opposed to one high-res channel.
2. Digital cable companies will compress channels into the high-lossy realm. We'll have more infomercials than ever; there won't be the content to fill all those channels for quite some time
3. Digital to analog converters will be a huge business. Most people will keep their analog televisions during the next decade.
4. Digital television will succeed greasest as an add-on card to personal computers using flat screen monitors. These computers will be hooked up to cable, not an antenna.
Sure it's difficult for content providers, but I want choice!
Give it to me every way you can: Real, Windows Media, QuickTime, MP3, Shockwave, Speak and Spell, Two Cans and String. I use them all, try them all, like them all for their particular subtleties.
The person who makes an on-the-fly encoder/server for multiple formats will make a bloody killing. And the first client to handle all formats will win that race, too.
Okay, maybe not every browser. But you get my point.
Fox has a fairly large website. When you spend all that time developing (content), you make mistakes.
A. But on the opening page? The first thing people see? B. Any competent designer should know about the faulty Javascript diagnostics. C. Large sites usually boil down to a finite number of templates with different copy dumped in, so it's really not that much work to test everything. It's not one guy in his basement doing sites like Fox's. It's a team.
I experience a lot of pages that pop up telling me I need to get the flash plugin when I do have it installed and working (even Macromedia's own pages do this), but most of the time you can at least cancel and see any non-flash content.
See, this is wrong. I believe it should never happen. And I don't know what Web you're surfing, but when I get the crappy download-the-plugin message, I almost always get shunted to some lame cul-de-sac content. I want to see the Flash content (at least the first time), not the half-articulate message with snide, critical subtext.
Put a small flash movie on the first page which just loads the front page of the flashed site. Auto refresh in 3 seconds or so to the non-flashed site.
That might work: but what about sites in which the primary content is Flash?
I just want to comment for the umpteenth time in the umpteenth place: web designers should not be using the canned Javascript code that is supposed to diagnose whether a user has Flash/Shockwave installed. It comes with the entire range of Macromedia Flash/Shockwave products and is available in various places around the web
That diagnostic code is faulty. It does not work properly. It misdiagnoses. It's wrong. It comes up with bogus download-the-plugin messages and/or shuts out zillions of users (like me) who actually have the plugin. It makes you look like a chump and your site look half-assed.
What you should do, if you're using Flash/Shockwave in your site design, is leave out the diagnostic code and let that dumb little you-don't-have-the-plugin icon show up for the tiny handful of users that don't have it. You can offer those three or four people a link nearby for a non-Flash/Shortwave version of your site. Dump the diagnostic code.
It's so strange to me that a site which spends thousands to look good doesn't test the project on every platform, every browser. Lame.
No Cites, Sources, Proof, History
on
Dumb Laws
·
· Score: 1
It's truly a dumb site. Where are the cites for these laws? Quoted statutes? Court cases? Newspaper articles? Historical perspectives?
Where, in short, is the proof?
I suspect most of these so-called "dumb laws" are nothing more than a collection of those stupid messages that people used to send around all the time (oh, wait--people are still doing that).
And like most of the crap that gets forwarded from here to eternity, I suspect these laws are fake or gross minterpretations of the truth.
Not a very funny site, and not deserving of Slashdot traffic at all. Wield that traffic wand lightly, Rob!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sometimes the majority is wrong. If the majority was always right we'd all be married to Harrison Ford or Jennifer Aniston.
The evolution of an idea from a minority opinion to a majority opinion can start with small protests. It's the best way.
Yes, it's time for civil disobedience to undergo a revival. I say go for it. Break the rules. Break the law. Pick your side and fight. Civil disobedience is about choosing to violate the law because sometimes being criminal is the right thing to do. Are you worried about a record, a news story, your picture in the paper, what your in-laws will think? Don't. We're all criminals waiting to be caught. Being arrested isn't a sin. It's not an automatic black mark. Being arrested can be more powerful than voting. The law is the law until it isn't the law any more. Don't sigh and submit. You don't have to. Don't accept what you've been handed. Fight it. Rebel. Then write letters about it, post fliers, mail pamphlets. Hammer on the doors with battering rams, with your fists, with your head. Prove them wrong. Upset the apple cart, overturn the outhouse, barricade the bridges. Get some guts, some spine, some gumption, some chutzpah. You are privileged to burn the flag on the courthouse steps, to march without a permit, to chain yourself to the trees, to stand in front of the tank, to haul salt from the beaches to the people. You are entitled to tell everyone exactly what you're thinking. Civil disobedience means small battles standing proxy for large wars. By God, don't just stand there.
Consider the other possibilities of highly accurate GPS, some of these already in place in various forms.
1. Digital travel guides that automatically load the information for the landmarks near you. You could adjust the scale, so if you're standing at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue in New York you might get entries for the US, New York State, New York City, Manhattan, Times Square, the Zipper, or Achmed's newsstand on the corner.
2. You're an architectural student. You've got video goggles and a strap-on computer (not rod-shaped, people). You walk around the city seeing what is an exact digital representation of what you would ordinarily see, all in 3D, except you can choose to view the steel structure, cut-aways, the 33rd floor, the bedrock, textural details, or even a time-lapse video of the building being constructed. All live, on the fly, on the street. As you walk, the video adjusts. Buildings could be marked with little icons at the entrance to indicate their compatibility with the technology.
3. Big-ass games of blind man's bluff. Cover your eyes with a backwards ski mask. Turn on the speaking function of your GPS device. Have it give you instructions on how to get where you're going.
4. Real-time traffic monitoring: in a dense city, GPS devices could be installed in municipal vehicles. Time and rate of those autos could be reported via other radio link to central computer, redistributed to everyone else's GPS and overlaid on a map telling them where the best routes might be found. Of course, this might turn into infinite game theory iterations.
5. Auto-tuning of radios (kind of like RDS) to your favorite type of preset music choices. GPS devices don't have to be attached to maps and expensive equipment.
6. An excellent source of new stats for golf aficionados: GPS in golf balls. How far off, exactly, was he? This, of course, goes well with my idea for a transparent basketball with a camera and transmitter inside.
The real reason Boo.com failed is this:
Right now, Boo.com is the worst user experience on the planet.
Flash-based, it forces far too many long downloads, slow page redraws and a pathetic user experience that provides layers upon layers of interactivity to even reach a product. On a dial-up connection it is completely unusuable; on a fat pipe, it's barely so. The addition of unbelievable amounts of javascript and frames mean that even the fastest computer will see speed hits on other simultaneous functions.
Finally, the products are completely lack-luster. I can buy similar (or the same) items at faster sites any day of the week, usually for less money.
In web-design circles and advertising agencies here in New York City, Boo.com is a running gag, the place you say people worked when they're horrible at their job.
Boo.com deserves to fail.
I'm reminded of a story that applies here.
A fakir in India a long time ago travelled from town to town putting on a performance. He had the ability to speak nearly all of India's 400 or more tongues fluently, as if he was born to them. He would stand in the center of town and challenge passers-by:
"Win a piece of gold! I can speak any language in the world! I challenge you to stump me! Price of playing is a hand-full of rice. Nobody has stumped me yet! And you can win ten pieces of gold if you can tell me the language I learned at my mother's breast. One hand-full of rice only!"
And eventually, people would pay their handful of rice, and try a few words of the language their old grandmother taught them when they were young. The fakir always responded in kind, usually with a clever bit of poetry or doggerel, so he not only won, but was amusing and soon gathered a crowd. Then the old grandmothers themselves would come out, speaking languages out of the mountains, or from across the sea, or sacred tongues they had been taught on the sly by past lovers. The fakir spoke them all!
Then one day he landed in a little town in Andra Pradesh where lived a clever little farmer who had a small rice paddy and two oxen. He was very successful but had never been educated. The farmer listened to the fakir tease and win and flirt with the crowd. And he considered the matter.
At the end of the day, when the fakir was about to wrap it up and move on, the farmer spoke to him and said, "Please, stay with my family tonight. You are a very educated man and I think we may learn a thing or two from you."
The fakir of course accepted and they spent the night eating bowls of rice and drinking wine and rice beer and laughing at each other's stories.
That night as the village was sleeping, the farmer rose from his mat where he had been resting but not sleeping. He padded down to the river and drew a deep bucket of water. He hauled it back to the tent and threw it on his guest.
"Aiiieeee! Oh Shiva!" The fakir called these out in his birth tongue, a language from people far up the Ganges. "Why have you done this? Are we not friends?" he asked the farmer.
The farmer replied, "Last night I fed you my rice. More than a handful by my count. And now I seek the ten gold coins in return. For the language you speak is..." and he named the language.
The fakir laughed and laughed. "You are the first! No one else knew the trick, because they forgot a simple truth: we are what we were when we were in the houses of our mothers. We can build on top, but we cannot remove the foundation."
...........
The Internet will be like the world: each community using its own dialect, language, patois, lingo, argot, code or jargon. There will be a lingua franca. Now it's English. In 100 years it might be Spanish or Mandarin.
That is how languages go. They resist control. They change despite language Academies. They remain static despite invented words and languages. They persist. They are uncontainable. They resist attention and inattention. They rebel.
Until the Internet is a Mother, a father, a schoolyard chum, there will never be an accepted universal, Internet-only language. Never. For that is how languages are taken to heart.
Why stop? Why not have as many root-level domains as possible? It is technically feasible, is it not? I care not a whit if it costs people money. Everything costs money.
As a matter of fact, although RealNames sucks like Manchester United, why not just get rid of any sort of significance to the root levels and allow sentence-like-structures. Web sites could be full words separated like dots like some email addresses.
So "rob.eats.pooh" would not be owned, necessarily, by the same people who own "winne.the.pooh."
[I'm sure I'm about to hear from a) Manchester United fans: I love you blokes. Please lighten up and tell the boys to stop mucking about, b), some technical wizard who will have 16 good reasons my plan is not feasible and will be happy to trade email for a week about it]
I'm a stone cold geek! I got that hacker instinct running around in my thick Mac head, and I got your computer right here, buddy. It's an Apple PowerBook G3 running PowerPC Linux. Whooop!
I run Virtual PC just so I can rape and pillage in Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 client, as well as Mac OS 9 and PowerPC Linux. I mate them like dogs in heat in July. I do it for fun, not cause I have to. I can play Tetris on every one of them, and I my high scores show up at the bank. Duke Nukem licked my boots. I'm about to add a RedHat partition, and I've got MachTen in a box on a shelf just panting to join the gangbang.
I flip around from OS to OS like a Vegas master dealing blackjack. I do what I want where I want any way I please. I compose a document using AbiSoft Word, or ApplixWare, or Microsoft Word, or ClarisWorks, or in VI (God bless the simple things in life). I've got 17 graphics programs, 18 web browsers, 41 apps capable of serving web pages, 10 text editors, 7 shells, and one goddam processor. And the machine weighs seven pounds. I can send email from 19 different programs, and just for the hell of it, I can first bounce it through 14 accounts on three planets. I can read your reply, translate it into French and post it on the web in Chinese. My computer sings to me.
I can jam my baby, my rocket, in the middle of two ten-thousand-node networks and have it act as a router, a bridge, an end-node or a firewall. My machine does IP masquerading like a Halloween ball. I can grep like a mofo, find just the true-life Pantone color you're looking for, and visit your dirtbag Windows-only web site just so I can send you nasty email and jam your mailbox with stories of the Craig Shergold and free trips to Disneyland. I eat Lithium Ion batteries for breakfast and chew NiCad cells to calm my stomach.
My machine is the best of breed. It's got hybrid vigor. You can take your fancy-pants, out-of-the-box, turn key solutions and spread them on the grass, 'cause they ain't nothing but manure.
[With thanks and respect to Mike Fink and Mark Twain.]
Two of the simplest but most widespread problems with viewing foreign language web sites, particularly in non-Roman character sets, are when the language is not specified in a metatag or the font face *is* specified in HTML.
The first problem has been described elsewhere on this page, but deserves reiteration: specifying the encoding language in HTML can allow the correct font, language script and character set to be used automatically by the browser without scripting on the server end. On my Mac, for example, this would allow the Haaretz newspaper site to come up automatically in Hebrew (having chosen the correct language script and font for me). I would not have to manually choose the settings. Good examples of where this is not done but should be are the Yahoo! Asian sites. The only way my browser knows I'm looking at Korean text on Yahoo! Korea is because I choose it; the HTML pages are not encoded to tell my browser this.
Scripting to determine what preferred language is chosen in the browser is, in my opinion, the hallmark of a great multi-language site. The second hallmark is a link on every page to switch to another language at will.
A similar item happens in bad email programs: they do not specify the character encoding in the header. One of the nicest things about a great email program is that when I get, say, a Japanese-encoded email, even if the words themselves are English (by using the Roman characters built into the Japanese encoding group), it kicks in the Japanese character entry and editing system automatically. It recognizes it, as it should.
Intentionally *not* specifying font face is equally important. If I want to view web site in Hebrew or Arabic, a ridiculous number of the sites require that I download the particular font they have specified in their HTML. This is preposterous. Language encoding, used properly, might mean never having to download another font again.
As for graphics in lieu of foreign fonts: avoid it any way you can. It makes copying and pasting near-impossible. (I once had to do it this way: I saved the GIF image to my hard drive, converted it to TIFF and ran it through and optical character recognition program, then cleaned it up manually. A huge waste of my time).
John Travolta, cult aside, has long overstayed his welcome. I'm sick of him and his stupid hand-flicking gestures (half borrowed from Andrew Dice Clay, half from Nicolas Cage), his squinty eyes, his rubber-lipped inarticulation, the lifts in his shoes.
John: please leave now.
I'm not saying Jon's information is not correct. However, if Jon wants his stories to have credibility, he should avoid quoting their stories.
WorldNet Daily is one of those sites that conveniently leaves out important, mitigating information; that often posts articles without factual attribution, references, bibliographies, footnotes or nationally recognized experts or sources (other than self-recognized); that seems to rewrite articles appearing elsewhere and to claim them as its own; that in an admittedly common American tradition, weaves bias, prejudice and preference throughout everything posted.
WorldNet Daily's work amounts to unsubstantiated and ad hominem attacks with little separation of fact and opinion. Its suppositions are often wishful thinking and rumor, its claims are incredible and unlikely. It allows its "sources" to use WorldNet daily as a propagation machine for narrow agendas without tempering or anodyne or balance.
I would disrecommend using it as any kind of support for a story.
He didn't say Apple was first, he said they "defined" open source. It means they were a great example of it. Read, please, before posting (RPBP).
Less-developed countries are adopting the same approach to computing and the internet that they have applied to other expensive information wave technologies: they pool community resources and install them as public services.
In Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela (and probably other Latin American countries), it is common to see phone centers for making long distance calls: room full of small booths, with on-site operators to connect the calls, which are paid for at the time of the call. (An odd side effect of the phones centers is that in certain Latino/Hispanic communities in the US, you still see these phone centers, even though people may have phones at home; they're used to them, and the aggregate billing rates are cheaper).
Not everyone has phones in these countries not necessarily because the individuals can't afford them, but because it may be too cost prohibitive for the state phone company to install the lines. The same applies to Internet: it's cheaper to aggregate the service in order to reduce costs per capita.
Now these phone centers are playing host to Internet services as well, used to communicate with relatives in other countries as well as intra-country. And since, as so many Americans seeme to forget, even developing countries all have wealthy and technologically advanced citizens, they are applying the technologies as suits their culture. These are the people, whatever their politics or precarious position at the top of the heap, that lead the advancement into new technologies. It is also common in tourist areas to find Internet cafes, usually run by First Worlders of the broadest definition.
As odd as it sounds, an advantage to being an underdeveloped country is that a nation can skip the outdated interval technologies and jump straight to the latest. They can, for example, skip land lines, POTS, hard wires. The move to cellular phones in Ecuador and Colombia, for example, has leaped in such ways as to help circumvent the irregular and inconsistent land-line services. In parts of Latin America (which is largely my only area of experience) it has been tradition for radio stations to send out personal messages to listeners in their broadcast area. Not "Feliz Cumpleaños" but "Pedro, please meet us on Tuesday in Riobamba" or "Maria, your sister is sick. Could you come to take care of her for a few days?" Cell phones now help circumvent the pecularities of geography that had cause problems with laying physical lines.
Assuming costs can be consolidated, I see a huge market for wireless Internet in underdeveloped countries, particularly in mountainous regions like the Andes. This is their future.
At Amazon
I don't know if the porting story is true, but Mac OS Rumors has a spotty record. Many of its leads often seem to be lifted from elsewhere, the rumor reliability is poor, and usually so late as to be useless, besides which its articles are so filled with bogus predictions using words such as "likely", "possibly", "predicted", and longs chains of if-then scenarios as to completely obliterate any authoritative source that might have passed a true lead on in the first place.
You will be issued one grain of salt apiece.
They need to learn to read, not speak English.
They need to learn to do written math, not speak English.
English is not the only answer. It may not even by AN answer.
[Regarding programming in other than English: programmers are learning English only to program, not to create "an open flow of English." They're certainly not learning it merely to browse the web.]
Cows are not sacred to all of India, kid. Only certain religions.
What, in the name of God or whoever's in charge, do you people think is happening in Japan and China? Do you actually think users or even programmers there are all learning English? They're using their mother tongues! Chinese in all of its variations! Japanese! They even play games in those foreign languges. It's happening all over the world.
It will be the same in India. You need only port the system, apps and manuals. Programmers will do and learn what they have to to master their trade.
Indians do not need to learn English. They may not even need to learn to use computers. But once they use the new machines, they'll begin creating their own content, the same way all non-English-speaking nations have. Just seven short years ago it was impossible to find more than a handful of pages in any but a few Romance languages. Now look at it. Have you people visited, say, http://kr.yahoo.com/, lately? Or http://www.wanado.fr/?
Teaching English to the the poor and powerless is a mistake. I visited Ecuador a couple of years ago. One of my acquaintances there ran a program in a school for homeless children, teaching them English. They couldn't read. Couldn't do written math. They had little clothing. They worked from sun-up to sun-down scrambling to shine shoes. And they had no homes. What use is English to them, except to talk to condescending tourists? Wouldn't that money and time have been better spent on permanent homes?
Apple's Mac OS 9 has full support at no cost for Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarti, as well as Unicode, 8-bit characters, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Korean, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic and Cyrillic language systems. You merely need to locate the installer on the OS 9 system disk.
This, however, is only the first step: applications need localization, too.
It's called "control-click," same as the second button on a Windows machine. Control-click on the QuickTime movie you're viewing and, voila, it offers you a chance to save the movie to disk.
This, however, is after you've paid for it.
I feel compelled to point out, grisly unwarranted death aside, that Phil Hartman's voice and acting talents were so pathetic that they can be duplicated by drawing back the corners of your mouth and talking like a closeted Top 40 disk jockey.
My guesses:
1. Digital broadcasters will all opt for multiple low-res channels as opposed to one high-res channel.
2. Digital cable companies will compress channels into the high-lossy realm. We'll have more infomercials than ever; there won't be the content to fill all those channels for quite some time
3. Digital to analog converters will be a huge business. Most people will keep their analog televisions during the next decade.
4. Digital television will succeed greasest as an add-on card to personal computers using flat screen monitors. These computers will be hooked up to cable, not an antenna.
Give it to me every way you can: Real, Windows Media, QuickTime, MP3, Shockwave, Speak and Spell, Two Cans and String. I use them all, try them all, like them all for their particular subtleties.
The person who makes an on-the-fly encoder/server for multiple formats will make a bloody killing. And the first client to handle all formats will win that race, too.
Fox has a fairly large website. When you spend all that time developing (content), you make mistakes.
A. But on the opening page? The first thing people see? B. Any competent designer should know about the faulty Javascript diagnostics. C. Large sites usually boil down to a finite number of templates with different copy dumped in, so it's really not that much work to test everything. It's not one guy in his basement doing sites like Fox's. It's a team.
I experience a lot of pages that pop up telling me I need to get the flash plugin when I do have it installed and working (even Macromedia's own pages do this), but most of the time you can at least cancel and see any non-flash content.
See, this is wrong. I believe it should never happen. And I don't know what Web you're surfing, but when I get the crappy download-the-plugin message, I almost always get shunted to some lame cul-de-sac content. I want to see the Flash content (at least the first time), not the half-articulate message with snide, critical subtext.
Put a small flash movie on the first page which just loads the front page of the flashed site. Auto refresh in 3 seconds or so to the non-flashed site.
That might work: but what about sites in which the primary content is Flash?
I just want to comment for the umpteenth time in the umpteenth place: web designers should not be using the canned Javascript code that is supposed to diagnose whether a user has Flash/Shockwave installed. It comes with the entire range of Macromedia Flash/Shockwave products and is available in various places around the web
That diagnostic code is faulty. It does not work properly. It misdiagnoses. It's wrong. It comes up with bogus download-the-plugin messages and/or shuts out zillions of users (like me) who actually have the plugin. It makes you look like a chump and your site look half-assed.
What you should do, if you're using Flash/Shockwave in your site design, is leave out the diagnostic code and let that dumb little you-don't-have-the-plugin icon show up for the tiny handful of users that don't have it. You can offer those three or four people a link nearby for a non-Flash/Shortwave version of your site. Dump the diagnostic code.
It's so strange to me that a site which spends thousands to look good doesn't test the project on every platform, every browser. Lame.
It's truly a dumb site. Where are the cites for these laws? Quoted statutes? Court cases? Newspaper articles? Historical perspectives?
Where, in short, is the proof?
I suspect most of these so-called "dumb laws" are nothing more than a collection of those stupid messages that people used to send around all the time (oh, wait--people are still doing that).
And like most of the crap that gets forwarded from here to eternity, I suspect these laws are fake or gross minterpretations of the truth.
Not a very funny site, and not deserving of Slashdot traffic at all. Wield that traffic wand lightly, Rob!