"I sez 2 him, ur 1337. he sez ty & kept reading./. lol!"
Seems like it would be really easy for me to give that a zero. My fakie 1337 speak isn't even obscure enough to pass a 1337 speak test let alone an english test... dang!
Even monkey jobs can't always be replaced with computers. I bet even some jobs would be better off assigned to monkeys instead of computers. Ford tried to replace all the monkeys in a car plant with robots. Basically it failed because even a monkey at minimum wage will say "oh, these little pieces are off, I better not weld here," the robot will just weld the hell out of it because it doesn't recognize the pieces aren't exactly in front of it's arm. So just because it's IT workers complaining, which is most of the Slashdot crowd anyway, doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about.
How about a word processor that will automatically correct me when I type "the" instead of "the"? I mean THE. THE THE THE. T-E-H, there. Oh wait, they already have that, and it's the most annoying feature ever. When you get computer that think they know what's best for you, bad things are going to happen. Even with something as simple as TEH. Imagine if it was advanced things like too many processes, think how much of an obscure problem it would be for a novice user to track down when they really do want too many processes? Anyway, I think it's a bad idea.
Sorry if trying to turn it into a private discussion offended you. I just thought it would be a heck of a lot easier than keeping track of all these posts. I would gladly post any exchanges up on a website, but email is more convenient for me. The urls would also make more sense if sent to you via email. Although I'm generally very open with the site (like posting my stats, quite a few on the server have them behind passwords).
I agree with your point about clients having higher bandwidth charges, and the importance of keeping site visits cheap for them.
The deal with gzip is they were toying with gzip directives and disabled it for a week or so. During the week I saw the bandwidth go way up and posted my experience in trying to reduce the bandwidth until gzip was turned back on. The reason I keep referring to that experience is because it's a fairly objective view of changing things to CSS and the consequences. I'll gladly take a look at the experience of anyone else that runs a site with moderate traffic and did a similar html revision.
The reasons I have been told so far for using a Zeldman like approach is accessibility and ease of changing elements on both the server and client, those reasons I "get." Bandwidth savings has often seemed like a latent function.
Posting the search rankings was a response to someone who thought slashdot was a big deal for traffic, when Yahoo has been at the top of my referrer list since we were posted, with google only topped once by slashdot.
Please don't think I don't appreciate your comments, but I do think there are better forums for this. I'll gladly go along with any method you choose, but I'd prefer email or IRC.
I post with +1 because Slashdot has it enabled by default, the faq says I've earned it through good posting, and also that I can get modded down if people don't agree that my post is deserving of it (which is fine with me). I can turn it off for this thread.
While yes, that can make a pretty big difference with uncompressed html, it makes little difference when gzip gets back in the game. The first parts, getting rid of newlines, is handled by mod_gzip. Our average page view was 5K for a 37K page. So take any change of your and divide it by 7, because that's about all the difference it's going to make. 38% now becomes 5-6%. Which hey, for my time I might as well. But if you look at other posts around this thread, that accounts for less than a buck a year. Also take a look at my post under the really long post, it shows what I like to do with layouts. The site has multiple developers and the current revision was done by bkenoah.
I agree with the px part, that's probably ignorance on my part, I will look into it. Thanks for taking the time to help me out.
I agree with most of your points, but I just want to follow up on some of your uncertainties. I'm the only one on the design team that works almost exclusively in CSS. The current design on the site wasn't made by me, the old one wasn't either. I just got the old one and got rid of all the redundant font tags and made pretty classes out of them, I also made it external so hopefully those few KBs would be cached. You can get a better idea of my CSS style by going to a css layout version of our current design or my not close to being done SVG site. Which has a very clean body.
You're right about the switch to CSS not really being a problem with older browsers. The change was to pretty basic CSS and worked fine in all browsers. Although it still wasn't *exactly* what the old version looked like (text a couple points off here and there).
I won't argue that 3-4% is not bad if you're paying very large sums of money. But as I pointed out 3-4% is only 40megs. We pay $10 for 10 gigs of transfer and the account on the machine. So 40 megs is less than 5 cents. Hardly anything compared to the 400% difference of having gzip turned off. And Yahoo probably has no more than 100 times the traffic we do, and they probably get better deals on bulk bandwidth. So less than $4 a day for 3-4% saved on bandwidth. Less than the cost of a very good web designer. The difference in costs for both of our sites is still negligible I think.
Feel free to email me at monkeyman at oswd.org if you want to discuss it more.
It's the same company. With mod_gzip we are able to host 30,000 some odd pages a day at only 250 megs or so (or we used to, before this new design). So it's currently just hosting on a $10/month virtual host type account. So they don't charge per gig, and their only policy for going over the quota (which we easily passed after a week with no gzip) is to terminate the account. So they ate the cost basically. If they tried to charge more it wouldn't have been paid. But we're a decent customer, heck, I even tracked down the gzip problem myself and told their sysadmin. They gave me no reason for the gzip being turned off, here's their reply:
Hi,
Yes, mod_gzip was temporarily turned off. It will be turned back on shortly. We apologize for the problem.
The mail server I admin doesn't get blamed as being an open realy, and it doesn't use authentification either. It just makes sure your IP address is from one of our customers. If you're using our mail server and you're not one of our customers for internet, use the smtp server of your provider, or go through our web mail. But this guy should do more to protect his relay.
I know it's a joke, but the traffic from slashdot is pretty small compared to Yahoo! listings (only a year and a half after being suggested), and on the first page for the google search term "web design". Also, the bandwidth issue was just a mod_gzip problem. It quadrupled our bandwidth usage basically.
I got browser stats from TheCounter. Although if you take a look at some of my older stats that have browser grouping, it shows the same thing. 76% IE and 16% mozilla. But my site is somewhat open source oriented and likewise have higher mozilla stats. TheCounter serves up a hell of a lot more stats than you or I though. Somewhere around 372,889,422 pages. Or about what slashdot gets in 6-10 months.
I don't know where you get your stats, but it's 8% that don't use IE. I agree the book looks like a joke though. Take this quote for example:
The irony is that no one beside Yahoo's management cares what Yahoo looks like. The site's tremendous success is due to the service it provides, not to the beauty of its visual design (which is non-existent).
I just want to know, what part of this makes it obsolete? That it uses html work arounds, looks right, or is a great service?
Then he goes on to complain about this extra html causes huge bandwidth charges, which I can assure you are negligible, even over millions of page views. If you take a look at my August statistics, on the 22nd you can see the sysadmin disabling mod_gzip. On the 28th, you can see me panicking about bandwidth and switching our old font tags to CSS. You can see the page views are about the same as the 27th, but the bandwidth goes from 871megs to 838megs. 40 megs is a very small difference for possibly breaking browsers that don't support CSS! Seeing as the bandwidth for a site like Yahoo is bought in bulk, even a gig of difference a day wouldn't be that much. And this is with mod_gzip turned off, that 40 meg gap would be turned to nothing if it was on. With yahoo, most of their bandwidth is in news images and content anyway, not their design. So I wouldn't recommend taking the time to read his book, or even the sample chapter, it's bogus for sure.
Changing our foreign policy in the wake of an attack will only provoke more attacks. Learn a little about the evolution of terrorist attacks. When terrorists took Israel's Olympic team hostage, they didn't listen to demands, they tried to gun them down. The terrorists murdered the team, but all support for their cause was lost. That type of terrorist attack has stopped. It was only recently that they started suicide bombings, and then saying "here I am, come and get me." Which is supposed to frustrate and anger the population into changning their policy. Want more terrorists attacks? Prove that the method they're using works. I think the voters should have more say in our government than terrorist fanatics.
No way, I'd rather Joe Blow's server go down than waste google's bandwidth. Google doesn't have any ads on their cache pages. Slashdot should setup their own caching, or pay for a caching service, if they want to link it from the main page.
Do you think that Joe Blow (stupid american), that apparantly doesn't even know metric, is going to be able to understand signifigance of a 1 kilometer telescope? I mean, I know my metric conversions and can put it in feet and miles, but it still doesn't mean shit because I don't know jack about telescopes. All 1 kilometer means to me is "it's big".
I'm a web developer and need to get to refernce sites, my terminal, and a testing window. So I'm not always in a browser window and like to access things from the taskbar directly. Which is why I don't use tabs. But to avoid making a mess I much prefer KDE's (it's also in Widnows XP now) taskbar groups.
It's obviously going to be taken. The closest you are going to get is AboutMyE-sexCentralOnline.info once this squatter lets go of it. Don't register many domains do ya?;-)
Oh man, I know it's a joke, but it's very close to the real thing. I work for a domain reseller/hosting company and we currently get our domains through opensrs at reseller prices. Before opensrs we were using verisign, they charged us the typical $35 a year, and they ache every time we transfer a domain. They first called us and asked us pretty please to stop transfering domains. We basically laughed at them and told them we'd transfer back as soon as they could offer a cheaper price. I mean, it's a pretty simple service. Then came the shirts. They sent us a t-shirt for most of our domains that hadn't been transfered. We got some hemp ones, ones we didn't know or care we had. I'd much rather have a verisign shirt I can jog in and thrash instead of e-xxxcentral.com or whatever russian bride domain we might have registered over the years. And then the other day I call from Verisign *VIP* services. And the person reading the script said that we were valuble to the company. I tried to get them to voicemail because my boss didn't want to talk to them.
That sounds helpful, but still, I see no technological difference between the for-profit ISP I work for and your coop. We did all our work using none of the documents found on your website and had the same result. Is there anything you had to do differently, anything you had find out on your own? Or is it basically a for-profit setup that's owned by the community?
I work for a small ISP that went through all the same issues as you. We had to become a CLEC, install our own DSLAM in a Qwest central office, and are currently going through IMA. So what I'm saying is your internet setup looks totally independent of whether it's an Internet Coop or a for profit company. Is there a technology advantage to making it a coop, or is it purely financial?
They should call it "Patriot Homeland Security", and then dump food packages on us to make us happy. I could sure go for some pop-tarts right now, mmmmboy.
The problem Cliff is experiencing appears to be unintentional jostling of the stop (off) button, so careful how you position it when you run.
The Rio has a hold switch that's relatively hard to switch that will turn off all the buttons. That way you can stick it in your pocket and bump it around all you want and there's no issues.
Some software blows up on dates at other times. I'm aware of some old DEC software (don't worry... you're NOT using it... it's single user!) that keeps the date year as a 5 bit offset from 1972. Let's see... 1972+31=2003, so it blows up in 2004. Probably, tho, the display-a-year routine isn't written to handle beyond 31-dec-99, since no one expects that RT11 (oops, now I said it) will still be used then. I hope. --------- Join the (Hopefully) Great Usenet Blackout 4/11/1985
Alright, so maybe that wasn't in there. But wouldn't it just suck if someone 15 years from now posts a story about a 15 year old slashdot post to a huge newsite and all the people laugh at what huge dorks we were?
There should be a checklist of rights taken away by a EULA, and then have a client that will check software you're installing. So before you do your shopping, you can check the database with certain checkboxes, and choose from the list of returns. Or maybe do it on a point system (like SpamAssassin for EULAs). If a large enough userbase was formed that sales hurt enough by having an overly restrictive EULA, then it might be able to persuade some companies to change their EULA to something more reasonable. You might even be able to get past any copyright issues about publishing the EULA if you don't publish the text of it, just the checklist.
Bah, you could have said the same thing about mp3 4 years ago. "Is that a CD?" (you probably could have said the same thing about CDs too, but I won't) "No, it's mp3" "What is an mp3?" "Mpeg layer 3, it's compressed audio" "Oh, aren't those illegal?" "Some of them, not all of them" "Oh, then can I have some?" "Sure".... "I put it in my CD player and it didn't work." "No, you need an mp3 player" [continues]
Those were back in the days when you got all your mp3s searhing on altavista and doing http transfers. Even before the ratio FTP servers. It was hardcore.
Slashdot Mirror
How can they have problems grading the paper?
./. lol!"
... dang!
"I sez 2 him, ur 1337. he sez ty & kept reading
Seems like it would be really easy for me to give that a zero. My fakie 1337 speak isn't even obscure enough to pass a 1337 speak test let alone an english test
Even monkey jobs can't always be replaced with computers. I bet even some jobs would be better off assigned to monkeys instead of computers. Ford tried to replace all the monkeys in a car plant with robots. Basically it failed because even a monkey at minimum wage will say "oh, these little pieces are off, I better not weld here," the robot will just weld the hell out of it because it doesn't recognize the pieces aren't exactly in front of it's arm. So just because it's IT workers complaining, which is most of the Slashdot crowd anyway, doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about.
How about a word processor that will automatically correct me when I type "the" instead of "the"? I mean THE. THE THE THE. T-E-H, there. Oh wait, they already have that, and it's the most annoying feature ever. When you get computer that think they know what's best for you, bad things are going to happen. Even with something as simple as TEH. Imagine if it was advanced things like too many processes, think how much of an obscure problem it would be for a novice user to track down when they really do want too many processes? Anyway, I think it's a bad idea.
Sorry if trying to turn it into a private discussion offended you. I just thought it would be a heck of a lot easier than keeping track of all these posts. I would gladly post any exchanges up on a website, but email is more convenient for me. The urls would also make more sense if sent to you via email. Although I'm generally very open with the site (like posting my stats, quite a few on the server have them behind passwords).
I agree with your point about clients having higher bandwidth charges, and the importance of keeping site visits cheap for them.
The deal with gzip is they were toying with gzip directives and disabled it for a week or so. During the week I saw the bandwidth go way up and posted my experience in trying to reduce the bandwidth until gzip was turned back on. The reason I keep referring to that experience is because it's a fairly objective view of changing things to CSS and the consequences. I'll gladly take a look at the experience of anyone else that runs a site with moderate traffic and did a similar html revision.
The reasons I have been told so far for using a Zeldman like approach is accessibility and ease of changing elements on both the server and client, those reasons I "get." Bandwidth savings has often seemed like a latent function.
Posting the search rankings was a response to someone who thought slashdot was a big deal for traffic, when Yahoo has been at the top of my referrer list since we were posted, with google only topped once by slashdot.
Please don't think I don't appreciate your comments, but I do think there are better forums for this. I'll gladly go along with any method you choose, but I'd prefer email or IRC.
I post with +1 because Slashdot has it enabled by default, the faq says I've earned it through good posting, and also that I can get modded down if people don't agree that my post is deserving of it (which is fine with me). I can turn it off for this thread.
While yes, that can make a pretty big difference with uncompressed html, it makes little difference when gzip gets back in the game. The first parts, getting rid of newlines, is handled by mod_gzip. Our average page view was 5K for a 37K page. So take any change of your and divide it by 7, because that's about all the difference it's going to make. 38% now becomes 5-6%. Which hey, for my time I might as well. But if you look at other posts around this thread, that accounts for less than a buck a year. Also take a look at my post under the really long post, it shows what I like to do with layouts. The site has multiple developers and the current revision was done by bkenoah.
I agree with the px part, that's probably ignorance on my part, I will look into it. Thanks for taking the time to help me out.
I agree with most of your points, but I just want to follow up on some of your uncertainties. I'm the only one on the design team that works almost exclusively in CSS. The current design on the site wasn't made by me, the old one wasn't either. I just got the old one and got rid of all the redundant font tags and made pretty classes out of them, I also made it external so hopefully those few KBs would be cached. You can get a better idea of my CSS style by going to a css layout version of our current design or my not close to being done SVG site. Which has a very clean body.
You're right about the switch to CSS not really being a problem with older browsers. The change was to pretty basic CSS and worked fine in all browsers. Although it still wasn't *exactly* what the old version looked like (text a couple points off here and there).
I won't argue that 3-4% is not bad if you're paying very large sums of money. But as I pointed out 3-4% is only 40megs. We pay $10 for 10 gigs of transfer and the account on the machine. So 40 megs is less than 5 cents. Hardly anything compared to the 400% difference of having gzip turned off. And Yahoo probably has no more than 100 times the traffic we do, and they probably get better deals on bulk bandwidth. So less than $4 a day for 3-4% saved on bandwidth. Less than the cost of a very good web designer. The difference in costs for both of our sites is still negligible I think.
Feel free to email me at monkeyman at oswd.org if you want to discuss it more.
It's the same company. With mod_gzip we are able to host 30,000 some odd pages a day at only 250 megs or so (or we used to, before this new design). So it's currently just hosting on a $10/month virtual host type account. So they don't charge per gig, and their only policy for going over the quota (which we easily passed after a week with no gzip) is to terminate the account. So they ate the cost basically. If they tried to charge more it wouldn't have been paid. But we're a decent customer, heck, I even tracked down the gzip problem myself and told their sysadmin. They gave me no reason for the gzip being turned off, here's their reply:
Hi,
Yes, mod_gzip was temporarily turned off. It will be turned back on shortly. We apologize for the problem.
The mail server I admin doesn't get blamed as being an open realy, and it doesn't use authentification either. It just makes sure your IP address is from one of our customers. If you're using our mail server and you're not one of our customers for internet, use the smtp server of your provider, or go through our web mail. But this guy should do more to protect his relay.
I know it's a joke, but the traffic from slashdot is pretty small compared to Yahoo! listings (only a year and a half after being suggested), and on the first page for the google search term "web design". Also, the bandwidth issue was just a mod_gzip problem. It quadrupled our bandwidth usage basically.
I got browser stats from TheCounter. Although if you take a look at some of my older stats that have browser grouping, it shows the same thing. 76% IE and 16% mozilla. But my site is somewhat open source oriented and likewise have higher mozilla stats. TheCounter serves up a hell of a lot more stats than you or I though. Somewhere around 372,889,422 pages. Or about what slashdot gets in 6-10 months.
I don't know where you get your stats, but it's 8% that don't use IE. I agree the book looks like a joke though. Take this quote for example:
The irony is that no one beside Yahoo's management cares what Yahoo looks like. The site's tremendous success is due to the service it provides, not to the beauty of its visual design (which is non-existent).
I just want to know, what part of this makes it obsolete? That it uses html work arounds, looks right, or is a great service?
Then he goes on to complain about this extra html causes huge bandwidth charges, which I can assure you are negligible, even over millions of page views. If you take a look at my August statistics, on the 22nd you can see the sysadmin disabling mod_gzip. On the 28th, you can see me panicking about bandwidth and switching our old font tags to CSS. You can see the page views are about the same as the 27th, but the bandwidth goes from 871megs to 838megs. 40 megs is a very small difference for possibly breaking browsers that don't support CSS! Seeing as the bandwidth for a site like Yahoo is bought in bulk, even a gig of difference a day wouldn't be that much. And this is with mod_gzip turned off, that 40 meg gap would be turned to nothing if it was on. With yahoo, most of their bandwidth is in news images and content anyway, not their design. So I wouldn't recommend taking the time to read his book, or even the sample chapter, it's bogus for sure.
Changing our foreign policy in the wake of an attack will only provoke more attacks. Learn a little about the evolution of terrorist attacks. When terrorists took Israel's Olympic team hostage, they didn't listen to demands, they tried to gun them down. The terrorists murdered the team, but all support for their cause was lost. That type of terrorist attack has stopped. It was only recently that they started suicide bombings, and then saying "here I am, come and get me." Which is supposed to frustrate and anger the population into changning their policy. Want more terrorists attacks? Prove that the method they're using works. I think the voters should have more say in our government than terrorist fanatics.
No way, I'd rather Joe Blow's server go down than waste google's bandwidth. Google doesn't have any ads on their cache pages. Slashdot should setup their own caching, or pay for a caching service, if they want to link it from the main page.
Do you think that Joe Blow (stupid american), that apparantly doesn't even know metric, is going to be able to understand signifigance of a 1 kilometer telescope? I mean, I know my metric conversions and can put it in feet and miles, but it still doesn't mean shit because I don't know jack about telescopes. All 1 kilometer means to me is "it's big".
I'm a web developer and need to get to refernce sites, my terminal, and a testing window. So I'm not always in a browser window and like to access things from the taskbar directly. Which is why I don't use tabs. But to avoid making a mess I much prefer KDE's (it's also in Widnows XP now) taskbar groups.
It's obviously going to be taken. The closest you are going to get is AboutMyE-sexCentralOnline.info once this squatter lets go of it. Don't register many domains do ya? ;-)
Oh man, I know it's a joke, but it's very close to the real thing. I work for a domain reseller/hosting company and we currently get our domains through opensrs at reseller prices. Before opensrs we were using verisign, they charged us the typical $35 a year, and they ache every time we transfer a domain. They first called us and asked us pretty please to stop transfering domains. We basically laughed at them and told them we'd transfer back as soon as they could offer a cheaper price. I mean, it's a pretty simple service. Then came the shirts. They sent us a t-shirt for most of our domains that hadn't been transfered. We got some hemp ones, ones we didn't know or care we had. I'd much rather have a verisign shirt I can jog in and thrash instead of e-xxxcentral.com or whatever russian bride domain we might have registered over the years. And then the other day I call from Verisign *VIP* services. And the person reading the script said that we were valuble to the company. I tried to get them to voicemail because my boss didn't want to talk to them.
That sounds helpful, but still, I see no technological difference between the for-profit ISP I work for and your coop. We did all our work using none of the documents found on your website and had the same result. Is there anything you had to do differently, anything you had find out on your own? Or is it basically a for-profit setup that's owned by the community?
I work for a small ISP that went through all the same issues as you. We had to become a CLEC, install our own DSLAM in a Qwest central office, and are currently going through IMA. So what I'm saying is your internet setup looks totally independent of whether it's an Internet Coop or a for profit company. Is there a technology advantage to making it a coop, or is it purely financial?
They should call it "Patriot Homeland Security", and then dump food packages on us to make us happy. I could sure go for some pop-tarts right now, mmmmboy.
The problem Cliff is experiencing appears to be unintentional jostling of the stop (off) button, so careful how you position it when you run.
The Rio has a hold switch that's relatively hard to switch that will turn off all the buttons. That way you can stick it in your pocket and bump it around all you want and there's no issues.
Check this one out (my emphasis added):
Some software blows up on dates at other times. I'm aware of some old
DEC software (don't worry... you're NOT using it... it's single user!)
that keeps the date year as a 5 bit offset from 1972. Let's see...
1972+31=2003, so it blows up in 2004. Probably, tho, the display-a-year
routine isn't written to handle beyond 31-dec-99, since no one expects
that RT11 (oops, now I said it) will still be used then. I hope.
---------
Join the (Hopefully) Great Usenet Blackout 4/11/1985
Alright, so maybe that wasn't in there. But wouldn't it just suck if someone 15 years from now posts a story about a 15 year old slashdot post to a huge newsite and all the people laugh at what huge dorks we were?
There should be a checklist of rights taken away by a EULA, and then have a client that will check software you're installing. So before you do your shopping, you can check the database with certain checkboxes, and choose from the list of returns. Or maybe do it on a point system (like SpamAssassin for EULAs). If a large enough userbase was formed that sales hurt enough by having an overly restrictive EULA, then it might be able to persuade some companies to change their EULA to something more reasonable. You might even be able to get past any copyright issues about publishing the EULA if you don't publish the text of it, just the checklist.
Yeah, what's really bad is I put I in 17,000 instead of 1 in 17,000, glad no one noticed that.
Bah, you could have said the same thing about mp3 4 years ago. ....
"Is that a CD?" (you probably could have said the same thing about CDs too, but I won't)
"No, it's mp3"
"What is an mp3?"
"Mpeg layer 3, it's compressed audio"
"Oh, aren't those illegal?"
"Some of them, not all of them"
"Oh, then can I have some?"
"Sure"
"I put it in my CD player and it didn't work."
"No, you need an mp3 player"
[continues]
Those were back in the days when you got all your mp3s searhing on altavista and doing http transfers. Even before the ratio FTP servers. It was hardcore.