"I liked the site better when it didn't rely on Javascript at all: back when all the comment boxes worked without a hitch, and there weren't so many clever little popups that don't work half the time."
Given your UID you've been around almost as long as I have. There is the option of using the Classic Discussion System in your preferences. I find it does a decent job of being old school enough for us "get off my lawn" types. In fact, this is the one thing I like about/. and why I continue to read it. It hasn't changed a ton in the last 11 years I've been reading it. Yes they've added things like moderation (good) and tags (ugh), but with the Classic layout settings it feels mostly the same as it ever did, which I like.
I agree though, when I look at the site with the new bells and whistles I cringe. It's absolutely unusable for me.
If you're running on OS X, you don't need adblock for any browser. GlimmerBlocker will do the same thing and is usable by any browser you want since it's just a proxy.
"My guess is, they want broad statistics like the most popular domains visited, maybe even traffic patterns of which domains people tend to go to after which other domains."
I'd go further. Given the announcement of Chrome OS, I wouldn't doubt they want to test a huge number of DNS requests and tweak the system to be as fast as possible to speed up Chrome. Google knows latency is an issue with web apps, and is trying to do all they can to reduce this. I think this is just another step in that direction.
"A cardiac surgeon doesn't know much otolaryngology; an EE doesn't know much about steam turbines; a personal injury lawyer isn't going to be much help with your corporate takeover."
Thus why I often use the phrase "A proctologist wouldn't do the job of a brain surgeon unless he had his head up his ass".
People may like generic terms, but it's not hard to educate them on the differences relatively easily if you just compare it to things they're already familiar with.
Well, FWIW, for the project I was working on, FF was too slow to be acceptable for public use. Whether it was really 3x slower or not I don't know, but it was a considerable decline in performance from using Chrome. I have no doubt that in some other environment (with a different usage than what I was using it for) FF could very well be faster.
Didn't know about the SunSpider fix/non-release. Good to know.
"What with all this AJAX and Javascript stuff out on the web these days, what IE badly needs is a really good Javascript engine."
It really does. I've been working on an interactive touchscreen kiosk for work, and decided to go the JS route in the browser since it's what I know. As such I wanted to know the relative JS performance of the various browsers out there. I used the SunSpider benchmark to test them. Here were the results (smaller numbers are better):
Two things surprised me here. One is that Chrome and Safari are 3x faster than FF. I was going to use FF for my kiosk until I saw this. The other is the abysmal performance of IE. When you are 15x slower than two of your rivals that is just horrible. As it is I used Chrome for my project and couldn't be happier.
Chrome is just faster, as is Safari (funny, they both use Webkit). In my experience they can both be up to 3x faster than FF in doing JS related tasks. This is especially apparent to me as I build a touchscreen kiosk for my company. It's fairly interactive with the JS, but always seemed sluggish in practice. I assumed it was just an underpowered machine (running Vista), until I tried it in Chrome. It was like night and day.
I still love FF, but if you're trying to push the envelope online a bit, then a browser like Chrome is going to make you smile a lot more.
"If I had to choose between IQ and work ethic, the work ethic would win out every time."
When I was in 8th grade one of my teachers pulled me aside at the end of the year. He said I was one of the smartest kids he'd ever taught, but that if I wanted to get anywhere in High School and beyond, I would need to learn to apply myself. He pointed out a girl in my class who got straight A's, but said really, she wasn't particularly bright, she just worked her ass off. This surprised me, I just assumed she was really smart.
When people tell kids at a young age they're really smart I think at times it does them a disservice. I was told that so much I didn't feel like I needed to have a good work ethic to achieve things. Things came easy to me, so they always would right? Wrong. Once you actually do hit a stumbling block, it can be devastating. While the kid who has worked his butt of his entire life just plows right through it like he has everything else. Ability is meaningless without application.
"While this begs the question of why you changed it in to that in the first place"
No, it really doesn't. The fact that a user *can* change it is the only thing that matters. This is the issue with many (not all) devs in general. Say something they wrote isn't easy or is unintuitive and instead of fixing it they say "well nobody with a brain would do that" or "if they don't know how to figure it out then too bad for them". These are not valid comebacks.
I get that most devs are analytical and if there is at least one way to do something then it's "good enough". But UI's are subjective and as such just because there is a way to perform a given task in your software it does not mean that there isn't a better way to do the same thing for a larger number of people. When we say "the user experience sucks" we're not saying *you* as a dev suck. We're saying we simply want a better experience. This is something many designers learn early on (we create designs and get shot down on them all the time), but something many devs seem to never fully grasp.
Or better, for PARC to sue SPARC. At least they're the same industry, "sound similar", use all caps in the name, etc. But that's right, it's just easier to go after the little guy.
Disclaimer, I work for a large contemporary art museum in New Media. We deal with this stuff all of the time and it's something I have an interest in (obviously). The answer for you is there is no tried and true method for archiving digital media. Every arts institution struggles with this, especially when it relates to computational or internet enabled or social media works of art. There are various opinions on what it even *means* to archive some of this stuff and there are varying degrees of opinions out there about all of it.
That said, several things you can do to help yourself. One, any museum worth their salt and who actually wants to acquire your work will work with you to get it in the format they are most comfortable with. New Media art tends to have varying requirements on what needs to be in place to replicate it, what that means, how it works, etc. A museum putting your work into their collection should work with you to define those things and how to keep it working and usable for the long term. That is the museum's *job*.
Second, if you want it to last you need to have original source material. Almost 100% of the time that is what the museum will want. If it's a video they do not want a compressed DVD, they'd rather have the uncompressed DV files or 35mm film if they can get it. If it's an application they want the app, the hardware used to run it, the docs used to create it, etc. Sure, you don't have to give these things up if you don't want to, but you can bet the museum will want as much of the original source and documentation of it as they can get. This will help them down the line when they need to convert the original into yet-another-new-format, and help them catalog the work for later generations of staff (and viewers for that matter, meta data is gold).
Basically, let the museum help you, that's what they're there for. In the meantime, backup, backup, backup, until such time as you have your work acquired by a professional institution.
Inciteful as the statement is, it's true... There's no way it can be false. A browser containing IE's engine *and* WebKit has all the security holes from both, and all the security holes gained in pushing one into the other.
It's also true for any plug in you use in IE. I'm curious if MS would say the same about Flash, Java, etc? Because they all introduce their own security problems in IE in a similar way as Chrome Frame. The fact that MS is singling out Chrome Frame says more about how MS feels about Google than it does about the security of their browser.
has anyone come out and said it flat out won't work?
No, and you're right. All Adobe said is they're not going to test CS3 in 10.6. This doesn't mean it won't work, it just means they're not bothering to test whether it does or not. Nobody is really going to know until Friday, but people with dev builds say it runs with some minor bugs. Really though, CS3 is buggy enough I doubt it'll be much of a deterrent.
Is you can't turn off SMS on the iPhone. At least I haven't found out how. I don't particularly like SMS, it costs me money to receive texts, and I have an flippin iPhone, why would I need it when I can email, IM, tweet, etc? Yet here we have an SMS back door and the only solution is to shut down the entire phone because there's no way to disable SMS by itself.
Most of my friends from work go to their doctor whenever they have a cold. Its fucking ridiculous and it needs to stop, but it wont stop until people take responsibility for their own.
What's ridiculous is health care is the one industry where people really have no idea what anything *costs*. When I go to get my car fixed I'm at least given a quote on what it will be. Every other industry lets you know ahead of time what things will cost *before* you take the plunge. Why is health care any different?
As much as I hate my HSA insurance, at least most of the money I pay out is coming from my pocket, which means I need to be more cognizant of when I seek medical attention. However when I actually do need it, there's nothing to tell me what is the cheapest (or most reasonable) option. I'm shooting in the dark hoping that I don't get stuck with a huge bill just because I have a simple sinus infection.
If we actually had prices associated with procedures, and rates for medical labor, I think we'd go a long way to started to understand as a nation how much money we're wasting on useless stuff.
Seriously, that's an incredulous omission to make, nevermind the fact that the poll itself was conducted a month ago. It is in these past two weeks that voter's opinion would better reflect their voting preferences, you know, after the actual presidential debates.
Also, in Iran you get only 30 days to actually campaign. This poll was taken right at the start of campaigning. Of course the current Pres will fare better in the polls then, more people are familiar with his platform.
Are these couple of stations you speak of major network affiliates for a large metro area or a local community college station?
For me these are major networks in a large metro area. That said, all they are showing now are PSA's on the DTV switch (most likely for those who haven't made the switch and don't know WTF is going on). But they certainly are still transmitting on analog.
As much as you like to believe religion is being forced on you, it's not.
The entire point of every religion is to convert as many people to it as possible. Why do you think we indoctrinate children into religion? Why are there missionaries? Why do I get random strangers at my door trying to teach me the way of [insert holy person here]?
If you want to believe in your god fine, by all means do so. But don't act like [insert religion here] isn't trying to convert every person on the planet. That's the entire point of every religion!
Exactly. Radios were cool in their time. But what does it give you in the internet age that a chat room or forum doesn't?
An ad hoc emergency communication network when your precious internet, cell phone, etc, fails (see 9/11, Katrina, etc). It may seem old hat, but these "uncool" radios and the people who operate them can help save lives when all hell breaks loose.
"Giorgio Maone (creator of NoScript) relies to a certain extent on ad revenue on his websites, without which he may spend less time working on the extension."
He could use a little less time to spend working on it. I swear every time I launch Firefox there's a new version to download. I don't need every single minor change that's added to the plugin. However, given this news I wouldn't be surprised if this was just a way to make people go to his site more often (and thus see ads) since every time it updates it takes you to the plugin site.
Were adblock and flashblock available for Safari or Chrome (and I believe this is in development for Chrome), and were Chrome available as a Mac version, I would stop using Firefox overnight.
Adblock has been available for Safari for years now. You can get it here:
You sound a lot like I did when I was nearing graduation over a decade ago (the things you describe really haven't really changed all that much). And while you might think you know a lot, trust me that you have a lot to learn, the first of which is probably a little humility. It goes a long way.
Slashdot Mirror
"I liked the site better when it didn't rely on Javascript at all: back when all the comment boxes worked without a hitch, and there weren't so many clever little popups that don't work half the time."
Given your UID you've been around almost as long as I have. There is the option of using the Classic Discussion System in your preferences. I find it does a decent job of being old school enough for us "get off my lawn" types. In fact, this is the one thing I like about /. and why I continue to read it. It hasn't changed a ton in the last 11 years I've been reading it. Yes they've added things like moderation (good) and tags (ugh), but with the Classic layout settings it feels mostly the same as it ever did, which I like.
I agree though, when I look at the site with the new bells and whistles I cringe. It's absolutely unusable for me.
If you're running on OS X, you don't need adblock for any browser. GlimmerBlocker will do the same thing and is usable by any browser you want since it's just a proxy.
"My guess is, they want broad statistics like the most popular domains visited, maybe even traffic patterns of which domains people tend to go to after which other domains."
I'd go further. Given the announcement of Chrome OS, I wouldn't doubt they want to test a huge number of DNS requests and tweak the system to be as fast as possible to speed up Chrome. Google knows latency is an issue with web apps, and is trying to do all they can to reduce this. I think this is just another step in that direction.
"A cardiac surgeon doesn't know much otolaryngology; an EE doesn't know much about steam turbines; a personal injury lawyer isn't going to be much help with your corporate takeover."
Thus why I often use the phrase "A proctologist wouldn't do the job of a brain surgeon unless he had his head up his ass".
People may like generic terms, but it's not hard to educate them on the differences relatively easily if you just compare it to things they're already familiar with.
Well, FWIW, for the project I was working on, FF was too slow to be acceptable for public use. Whether it was really 3x slower or not I don't know, but it was a considerable decline in performance from using Chrome. I have no doubt that in some other environment (with a different usage than what I was using it for) FF could very well be faster.
Didn't know about the SunSpider fix/non-release. Good to know.
"What with all this AJAX and Javascript stuff out on the web these days, what IE badly needs is a really good Javascript engine."
It really does. I've been working on an interactive touchscreen kiosk for work, and decided to go the JS route in the browser since it's what I know. As such I wanted to know the relative JS performance of the various browsers out there. I used the SunSpider benchmark to test them. Here were the results (smaller numbers are better):
Safari 4.04 (482)
Chrome 4.0b (518)
FF 3.5 (1502)
IE8 (7773)
Two things surprised me here. One is that Chrome and Safari are 3x faster than FF. I was going to use FF for my kiosk until I saw this. The other is the abysmal performance of IE. When you are 15x slower than two of your rivals that is just horrible. As it is I used Chrome for my project and couldn't be happier.
Chrome is just faster, as is Safari (funny, they both use Webkit). In my experience they can both be up to 3x faster than FF in doing JS related tasks. This is especially apparent to me as I build a touchscreen kiosk for my company. It's fairly interactive with the JS, but always seemed sluggish in practice. I assumed it was just an underpowered machine (running Vista), until I tried it in Chrome. It was like night and day.
I still love FF, but if you're trying to push the envelope online a bit, then a browser like Chrome is going to make you smile a lot more.
"If I had to choose between IQ and work ethic, the work ethic would win out every time."
When I was in 8th grade one of my teachers pulled me aside at the end of the year. He said I was one of the smartest kids he'd ever taught, but that if I wanted to get anywhere in High School and beyond, I would need to learn to apply myself. He pointed out a girl in my class who got straight A's, but said really, she wasn't particularly bright, she just worked her ass off. This surprised me, I just assumed she was really smart.
When people tell kids at a young age they're really smart I think at times it does them a disservice. I was told that so much I didn't feel like I needed to have a good work ethic to achieve things. Things came easy to me, so they always would right? Wrong. Once you actually do hit a stumbling block, it can be devastating. While the kid who has worked his butt of his entire life just plows right through it like he has everything else. Ability is meaningless without application.
"While this begs the question of why you changed it in to that in the first place"
No, it really doesn't. The fact that a user *can* change it is the only thing that matters. This is the issue with many (not all) devs in general. Say something they wrote isn't easy or is unintuitive and instead of fixing it they say "well nobody with a brain would do that" or "if they don't know how to figure it out then too bad for them". These are not valid comebacks.
I get that most devs are analytical and if there is at least one way to do something then it's "good enough". But UI's are subjective and as such just because there is a way to perform a given task in your software it does not mean that there isn't a better way to do the same thing for a larger number of people. When we say "the user experience sucks" we're not saying *you* as a dev suck. We're saying we simply want a better experience. This is something many designers learn early on (we create designs and get shot down on them all the time), but something many devs seem to never fully grasp.
Or better, for PARC to sue SPARC. At least they're the same industry, "sound similar", use all caps in the name, etc. But that's right, it's just easier to go after the little guy.
Disclaimer, I work for a large contemporary art museum in New Media. We deal with this stuff all of the time and it's something I have an interest in (obviously). The answer for you is there is no tried and true method for archiving digital media. Every arts institution struggles with this, especially when it relates to computational or internet enabled or social media works of art. There are various opinions on what it even *means* to archive some of this stuff and there are varying degrees of opinions out there about all of it.
That said, several things you can do to help yourself. One, any museum worth their salt and who actually wants to acquire your work will work with you to get it in the format they are most comfortable with. New Media art tends to have varying requirements on what needs to be in place to replicate it, what that means, how it works, etc. A museum putting your work into their collection should work with you to define those things and how to keep it working and usable for the long term. That is the museum's *job*.
Second, if you want it to last you need to have original source material. Almost 100% of the time that is what the museum will want. If it's a video they do not want a compressed DVD, they'd rather have the uncompressed DV files or 35mm film if they can get it. If it's an application they want the app, the hardware used to run it, the docs used to create it, etc. Sure, you don't have to give these things up if you don't want to, but you can bet the museum will want as much of the original source and documentation of it as they can get. This will help them down the line when they need to convert the original into yet-another-new-format, and help them catalog the work for later generations of staff (and viewers for that matter, meta data is gold).
Basically, let the museum help you, that's what they're there for. In the meantime, backup, backup, backup, until such time as you have your work acquired by a professional institution.
Inciteful as the statement is, it's true... There's no way it can be false. A browser containing IE's engine *and* WebKit has all the security holes from both, and all the security holes gained in pushing one into the other.
It's also true for any plug in you use in IE. I'm curious if MS would say the same about Flash, Java, etc? Because they all introduce their own security problems in IE in a similar way as Chrome Frame. The fact that MS is singling out Chrome Frame says more about how MS feels about Google than it does about the security of their browser.
has anyone come out and said it flat out won't work?
No, and you're right. All Adobe said is they're not going to test CS3 in 10.6. This doesn't mean it won't work, it just means they're not bothering to test whether it does or not. Nobody is really going to know until Friday, but people with dev builds say it runs with some minor bugs. Really though, CS3 is buggy enough I doubt it'll be much of a deterrent.
I think the appropriate comic for this is here:
http://www.crispygamer.com/comics/ding/ding-2008-05-29.aspx
Is you can't turn off SMS on the iPhone. At least I haven't found out how. I don't particularly like SMS, it costs me money to receive texts, and I have an flippin iPhone, why would I need it when I can email, IM, tweet, etc? Yet here we have an SMS back door and the only solution is to shut down the entire phone because there's no way to disable SMS by itself.
My site doesn't see much of a difference either. 175,000 visits per month and here's the change in browser usage from May to July:
IE: -0.91%
FF: -0.13%
Safari: +1.15%
Chrome: +0.32%
Most of my friends from work go to their doctor whenever they have a cold. Its fucking ridiculous and it needs to stop, but it wont stop until people take responsibility for their own.
What's ridiculous is health care is the one industry where people really have no idea what anything *costs*. When I go to get my car fixed I'm at least given a quote on what it will be. Every other industry lets you know ahead of time what things will cost *before* you take the plunge. Why is health care any different?
As much as I hate my HSA insurance, at least most of the money I pay out is coming from my pocket, which means I need to be more cognizant of when I seek medical attention. However when I actually do need it, there's nothing to tell me what is the cheapest (or most reasonable) option. I'm shooting in the dark hoping that I don't get stuck with a huge bill just because I have a simple sinus infection.
If we actually had prices associated with procedures, and rates for medical labor, I think we'd go a long way to started to understand as a nation how much money we're wasting on useless stuff.
Seriously, that's an incredulous omission to make, nevermind the fact that the poll itself was conducted a month ago. It is in these past two weeks that voter's opinion would better reflect their voting preferences, you know, after the actual presidential debates.
Also, in Iran you get only 30 days to actually campaign. This poll was taken right at the start of campaigning. Of course the current Pres will fare better in the polls then, more people are familiar with his platform.
Are these couple of stations you speak of major network affiliates for a large metro area or a local community college station?
For me these are major networks in a large metro area. That said, all they are showing now are PSA's on the DTV switch (most likely for those who haven't made the switch and don't know WTF is going on). But they certainly are still transmitting on analog.
The problem is there are large companies locked into that piece of ****. It will cost them loads to move on from there.
Evolve or die.
As much as you like to believe religion is being forced on you, it's not.
The entire point of every religion is to convert as many people to it as possible. Why do you think we indoctrinate children into religion? Why are there missionaries? Why do I get random strangers at my door trying to teach me the way of [insert holy person here]?
If you want to believe in your god fine, by all means do so. But don't act like [insert religion here] isn't trying to convert every person on the planet. That's the entire point of every religion!
Exactly. Radios were cool in their time. But what does it give you in the internet age that a chat room or forum doesn't?
An ad hoc emergency communication network when your precious internet, cell phone, etc, fails (see 9/11, Katrina, etc). It may seem old hat, but these "uncool" radios and the people who operate them can help save lives when all hell breaks loose.
"Giorgio Maone (creator of NoScript) relies to a certain extent on ad revenue on his websites, without which he may spend less time working on the extension."
He could use a little less time to spend working on it. I swear every time I launch Firefox there's a new version to download. I don't need every single minor change that's added to the plugin. However, given this news I wouldn't be surprised if this was just a way to make people go to his site more often (and thus see ads) since every time it updates it takes you to the plugin site.
Were adblock and flashblock available for Safari or Chrome (and I believe this is in development for Chrome), and were Chrome available as a Mac version, I would stop using Firefox overnight.
Adblock has been available for Safari for years now. You can get it here:
http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/
A Flash block addon for Safari is also available:
http://hetima.com/safari/stand-e.html
While Safari doesn't have the same ease of plug-in support as Firefox, there's enough for most people who want to make the switch.
You sound a lot like I did when I was nearing graduation over a decade ago (the things you describe really haven't really changed all that much). And while you might think you know a lot, trust me that you have a lot to learn, the first of which is probably a little humility. It goes a long way.