For example, at least in western regions where top-to-bottom representation of lingual content is the norm
Is there anywhere else in the world where top-to-bottom representation of content ISN'T the norm? Obviously right-to-left is fairly common (Arabic and derived scripts), Chinese can occasionally have a kind of modern boustrophedon with right-to-left and left-to-right, a few (traditional Mongolian) is vertical columns of top-to-bottom in left-to-right order, etc.
I said probably because I obviously don't have any numbers to back my statements up, and I doubt they exist. I do think people--in general--run into iDevice dock connector devices far more often than devices that suport, well, anything else.
There have been over 300 million iPods alone sold. 110 million plus iphones. 40 million iphones. Every single one uses the same dock connector. It may not be a standard, but it's pretty ubiquitous. Many cars have iPod dock options. As I said in my other post, almost every single hotel I've stayed at in the 2-3 years has had an iDock alarm clock (Marriotts mostly, FWIW). In terms of 3rd party device for support non-iDevices, does such a thing even exist?
I think you missed the point. I agree with the GP--greeks ARE the biggest fanboys on the planet. Geeks are by definition obsessive about such things (and I don't mean geek chic assholes). Think of this--how damn trivial is iOS vs Android? How trivial is it if a random person on the Internets decides to get a Samsung Galaxy S II instead of an iPhone (or a Bionic, or whatever). But you will find thousands of posts where people make it sound like someone who uses a different cellphone might as well be Hitler!
The way I see it, if your average geek takes a geekish liking in something, ALMOST BY definition they take a geekish disliking to something else. You like linux (presumably), you hate Apple. Great, now come up with reasons. Many geeks seem to like to think they are special, but it's pure human nature and tribalism and partisanship. It just seems unbelievably petty when random Internet peoples get so emotionally involved and worked up over cellphones and consumer devices.
Even amongst audiophiles, how many people really get anything out of having lossless on portable music devices? I know there is a hardy subset who travels with professional grade headsets and headphone amps, but do any of them use iDevices? From the last time I peaked into the audiophile world, pretty much ALL portable devices were scorned...
Honestly, who gives a shit if the connector on one end isn't a mini-usb. iPhones/iPods/iPads support USB bus connections. Every hotel I've stayed at in the last 2-3 years just about has had an alarm clock with an Apple dock connector, so, I'm actually getting more utility out of the proprietary connector than you are with a standard (I've never even seen an alarm clock that has a USB plug). But again, who really gives a shit? You can get a new cable for like $3. I can see getting one's panties in a twist over DRM (though gone for years from music) or what not, but a cord--that is probably for most people even more ubiquitous than mini/micro-USB? Sheesh.
I appreciate your point of view, but I think the OP is conflating the two issues. I completely agree with you that CSS is at the mercy of good or bad HTML. CSS Zen Garden shows what kind of presentation magic you can do with well structured HTML.
Remember back when people talked about "the semantic web"? A lot of it was dreamer bunk and stuff that is not likely to be implemented ever, but I think at some degree, it transfers to just simple HTML. If you have a list of something, put it in an ol or ul. Even if you don't want to display anything approximating what a standard bulleted ul list looks like. Structure documents with divs for logical sections, proper heading usage, etc. Just because HTML sometimes (Frequently) fails to be written in a smart or logical way, CSS still does a decent job, imho.
I agree it would be neat if HTML/CSS had some header/footer functionality, or maybe even basic templating support, but templates are so advanced in PHP, Python, Ruby, etc--even Apache has server side includes.
I guess I really don't see that much to worry about it. I'm sure some day we will run out of oil. I don't think that will be in my lifetime, and I hope to see at least past 2060. America has--even over the last 5 years!--dramatically lowered usage. Battery technology is improving, solar is improving, wind is improving. If I had to bet, I would think that within 50 years we'll have algae or some other biological process for making oil/gas. I could be wrong, but I would bet!
What makes you think that estimates of newly retrievable oil/gas from fracking or tar sands are "batshit insane"?
I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, but CSS is far, far more powerful than you seem to think. Check out this site to see what can be done without changing a single line of HTML:
Also, if you're still writing php spaghetti code, I would highly suggest you check out some modern templating engines. They will make your life so much easier. I don't use PHP that often anymore, but I understand Smarty is still popular.
Hey, you might not want to bet on that so far! Some analysts speculate America could be largely energy independent in just 5-10 years thanks to new extraction techniques. America today imports far less than we did even 5 years ago.
Or do you happen to know someone who has a device running Honeycomb and was able to follow up on the legal requirement that the source be made available to them?
I haven't followed Google's behavior with the Android source code that closely, but what legal requirement are you talking about? I thought Android was Apache licensed?
I think you missed the point entirely. All of those sites are largely discrete domains of information. Like it or not, we're past the stage of Internet names coming and going in a year. Almost every single site I visit now is owned by a large corporation (slashdot included). To many people, facebook and amazon might as well be the Internet in its entirety.
As an example, if I want a generator, I'm just going to go to Amazon--twitter, yelp, etc would be useless). If I want to find a video of something, a cartoon jingle, etc, I'm not going to go anywhere but youtube. Google, of course, is still very useful and still doing VERY well (I explicitly said this in my post). I am 100% sure that the way people search now is very different than 10 years ago. At its core, what people use search for is very different. It's almost ironic -- google is used today almost like yahoo of the past, where you would drill down into arranged categories. Due to the changing nature of search, I would bet if somebody wrote a search engine that did nothing but index the top, say, 20 sites on the web, for most people, the change would be irrelevant. Maybe even improved!
I made an argument similar to this several years ago.
When google first hit the market, search was a BIG deal on the Internet. Whether hosted at random geocities, edu sites, random.coms, etc, information was very dispersed. Nowadays, things are so much more centralized. If I want to find something on the web, chances are it's at wikipedia, facebook, youtube, flickr, or amazon (or yelp, twitter, tumblr, livejournal, etc). Probably 90% of the time, I use google like a bookmarks bar--I know exactly where I want to go, I just use google as a shortcut.
Google has done a fantastic job of avoiding pitfalls though (and has consumed sites like youtube), so who knows. They're obviously rolling in cash and doing just fine. I would not at all be surprised to see a continued decline in the importance of search, however.
Republicans have a higher proportion of married people and parents than democrats. That might contribute to their higher happiness levels.
On slashdot I've previously been cited statistics that show parents are actually -- at all stages of life -- unhappier than non-parents. I'm a new parent (2-year-old) and that doesn't match my experience, but again, anecdotal...
Another might be the urban/rural split. Urban dwellers are more likely democrat, and also more likely miserable. I noted a while ago that democrats are more likely to launch into profanity on a bulletin board than republicans... I eventually decided that it has nothing to do with politics, but just a side effect of democrats being generally more urban and younger.
I've always thought city dwellers seem miserable, but apparently some people like the urban lifestyle. I would mostly agree about profanity / getting really upset on messageboards seems dominated by leftists, but have you noticed on news sites that now use facebook for comments? It's unbelievable how racist, classist, sexist, hateful, etc people will be -- on the record with their real name and picture! It definitely spans the political spectrum too. Unbelievable.
Not that I put much store in such things, but studies and surveys show your statement is totally backwards--republicans (or, more specifically, conservatives) tend to be happier than democrats (liberals):
On a purely anecdotal level, I would say that I would categorize more of my conservative friends as "happy people" than I would my liberal friends. There are of course dozens of exceptions, and, like I said, I don't put much store in this stuff anyway (especially non-scientific anecdotal).
Yeah, I haven't even bothered to complain as I figured their response to you would be typical... If we do decide to re-up with AT&T, I figure I'll try to get a free microcell out of it. Seems crazy that they want to SELL you something so that you can use your own Internet service to get the bare minimum service level from them.
AT&T has an app like that called "Mark the Spot" (or something like that). I've put in dozens of reports (as have other people I know) from a highly developed part of my city that has terrible reception (-90 to -100 outside my house, -100+ inside the house, occasionally lose service in the middle of the house). Result over the last 3 years--nil.
Oh really? because iTunes was a 78MB download for me. But then there was an additional (almost) 1GB of data for a Lion stability update and a Lion recovery update. So, he's probably counting the entire set of updates
That's swell, except the statement that iTunes is a 700mb download is still false. He clarified that he meant the iOS firmware download--makes perfect sense.
Lion seems to be very resistive to deleting things. I've had difficulty deleting apps on Lion on more than one occassion
He clarified he was trying to delete a limited permissions app from a stack. I haven't tried, but it seems that's all the issue was.
MAC OS just works, right? So why does he need to use the CLI?
If you read what I wrote (the same thing you quoted) I said "If you're not comfortable with GUI instructions." I personally have a terminal window open almost constantly on my laptop.
That is true, except when it isn't. I've had my iPhone 3G not respond to the double button press. I didn't have to wait for the battery to drain, but it did take 5-10 minutes for the watchdog to kick in.
The DFU mode instructions not working (which I personally have not experienced, but do believe you have) in no way means that "the Apple official way" is to just let the battery drain.
Come on, I don't think my post was unreasonable? I explained my points, kept things limited in scope, didn't swear or insult etc. Is it the reference to hoping the OP wasn't a troll that made you annoyed with my post?
Oh crap, you're right, that was supposed to read "the iOS update," which is 700MB. I
Fair enough... the iOS download IS a big download. For a real clusterf*ck -- Apple makes anybody who buys Xcode off the App Store download the whole thing. 4gb. When 4.0.1 came out a week or so after release, everybody had to download 4gb AGAIN. How dumb.
Only works in Finder. I was trying to do it from the Applications stack in the Dock, because you can do that with apps you've installed yourself. Doing it that way just silently fails.
Interesting. I think that's just due to the permissions on the iTunes app (which you should be able to change--not sure if they "stick"). I don't use stacks so I've never encountered this.
Can I ask you a question? Why do you get worked up and insulting about what phones other people choose to use? I don't know if it's partly due to the Internet, but I'm getting so damn tired of everybody being so polarized about EVERYTHING. Politics...phone choice...etc. I'm not naive, I know that people have always (and will always) care -- violently! -- about dumb crap, but come on. Is it really worth it in the case of phones??
Slashdot Mirror
For example, at least in western regions where top-to-bottom representation of lingual content is the norm
Is there anywhere else in the world where top-to-bottom representation of content ISN'T the norm? Obviously right-to-left is fairly common (Arabic and derived scripts), Chinese can occasionally have a kind of modern boustrophedon with right-to-left and left-to-right, a few (traditional Mongolian) is vertical columns of top-to-bottom in left-to-right order, etc.
Does anything go, eg, bottom to top?
I said probably because I obviously don't have any numbers to back my statements up, and I doubt they exist. I do think people--in general--run into iDevice dock connector devices far more often than devices that suport, well, anything else.
There have been over 300 million iPods alone sold. 110 million plus iphones. 40 million iphones. Every single one uses the same dock connector. It may not be a standard, but it's pretty ubiquitous. Many cars have iPod dock options. As I said in my other post, almost every single hotel I've stayed at in the 2-3 years has had an iDock alarm clock (Marriotts mostly, FWIW). In terms of 3rd party device for support non-iDevices, does such a thing even exist?
I think you missed the point. I agree with the GP--greeks ARE the biggest fanboys on the planet. Geeks are by definition obsessive about such things (and I don't mean geek chic assholes). Think of this--how damn trivial is iOS vs Android? How trivial is it if a random person on the Internets decides to get a Samsung Galaxy S II instead of an iPhone (or a Bionic, or whatever). But you will find thousands of posts where people make it sound like someone who uses a different cellphone might as well be Hitler!
The way I see it, if your average geek takes a geekish liking in something, ALMOST BY definition they take a geekish disliking to something else. You like linux (presumably), you hate Apple. Great, now come up with reasons. Many geeks seem to like to think they are special, but it's pure human nature and tribalism and partisanship. It just seems unbelievably petty when random Internet peoples get so emotionally involved and worked up over cellphones and consumer devices.
Even amongst audiophiles, how many people really get anything out of having lossless on portable music devices? I know there is a hardy subset who travels with professional grade headsets and headphone amps, but do any of them use iDevices? From the last time I peaked into the audiophile world, pretty much ALL portable devices were scorned...
Honestly, who gives a shit if the connector on one end isn't a mini-usb. iPhones/iPods/iPads support USB bus connections. Every hotel I've stayed at in the last 2-3 years just about has had an alarm clock with an Apple dock connector, so, I'm actually getting more utility out of the proprietary connector than you are with a standard (I've never even seen an alarm clock that has a USB plug). But again, who really gives a shit? You can get a new cable for like $3. I can see getting one's panties in a twist over DRM (though gone for years from music) or what not, but a cord--that is probably for most people even more ubiquitous than mini/micro-USB? Sheesh.
I appreciate your point of view, but I think the OP is conflating the two issues. I completely agree with you that CSS is at the mercy of good or bad HTML. CSS Zen Garden shows what kind of presentation magic you can do with well structured HTML.
Remember back when people talked about "the semantic web"? A lot of it was dreamer bunk and stuff that is not likely to be implemented ever, but I think at some degree, it transfers to just simple HTML. If you have a list of something, put it in an ol or ul. Even if you don't want to display anything approximating what a standard bulleted ul list looks like. Structure documents with divs for logical sections, proper heading usage, etc. Just because HTML sometimes (Frequently) fails to be written in a smart or logical way, CSS still does a decent job, imho.
I agree it would be neat if HTML/CSS had some header/footer functionality, or maybe even basic templating support, but templates are so advanced in PHP, Python, Ruby, etc--even Apache has server side includes.
I guess I really don't see that much to worry about it. I'm sure some day we will run out of oil. I don't think that will be in my lifetime, and I hope to see at least past 2060. America has--even over the last 5 years!--dramatically lowered usage. Battery technology is improving, solar is improving, wind is improving. If I had to bet, I would think that within 50 years we'll have algae or some other biological process for making oil/gas. I could be wrong, but I would bet!
What makes you think that estimates of newly retrievable oil/gas from fracking or tar sands are "batshit insane"?
I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, but CSS is far, far more powerful than you seem to think. Check out this site to see what can be done without changing a single line of HTML:
http://www.csszengarden.com/
Also, if you're still writing php spaghetti code, I would highly suggest you check out some modern templating engines. They will make your life so much easier. I don't use PHP that often anymore, but I understand Smarty is still popular.
Hey, you might not want to bet on that so far! Some analysts speculate America could be largely energy independent in just 5-10 years thanks to new extraction techniques. America today imports far less than we did even 5 years ago.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8844646/World-power-swings-back-to-America.html
You mad bro?
That's an EXCELLENT reference, and I agree!
Or do you happen to know someone who has a device running Honeycomb and was able to follow up on the legal requirement that the source be made available to them?
I haven't followed Google's behavior with the Android source code that closely, but what legal requirement are you talking about? I thought Android was Apache licensed?
I think you missed the point entirely. All of those sites are largely discrete domains of information. Like it or not, we're past the stage of Internet names coming and going in a year. Almost every single site I visit now is owned by a large corporation (slashdot included). To many people, facebook and amazon might as well be the Internet in its entirety.
As an example, if I want a generator, I'm just going to go to Amazon--twitter, yelp, etc would be useless). If I want to find a video of something, a cartoon jingle, etc, I'm not going to go anywhere but youtube. Google, of course, is still very useful and still doing VERY well (I explicitly said this in my post). I am 100% sure that the way people search now is very different than 10 years ago. At its core, what people use search for is very different. It's almost ironic -- google is used today almost like yahoo of the past, where you would drill down into arranged categories. Due to the changing nature of search, I would bet if somebody wrote a search engine that did nothing but index the top, say, 20 sites on the web, for most people, the change would be irrelevant. Maybe even improved!
I made an argument similar to this several years ago.
When google first hit the market, search was a BIG deal on the Internet. Whether hosted at random geocities, edu sites, random .coms, etc, information was very dispersed. Nowadays, things are so much more centralized. If I want to find something on the web, chances are it's at wikipedia, facebook, youtube, flickr, or amazon (or yelp, twitter, tumblr, livejournal, etc). Probably 90% of the time, I use google like a bookmarks bar--I know exactly where I want to go, I just use google as a shortcut.
Google has done a fantastic job of avoiding pitfalls though (and has consumed sites like youtube), so who knows. They're obviously rolling in cash and doing just fine. I would not at all be surprised to see a continued decline in the importance of search, however.
In case you didn't see it, another poster in this thread found it:
http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/RNGS/2011/AUG/PATENT_CI.jpg
Thanks! That's exactly the one I was looking for.
If companies suing each other over patent issues leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you might want to just abstain from using cellphones at all.
This is a year old (I had seen a more recent one, but can't find it now): http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/11/mobile-patent-lawsuits/
Republicans have a higher proportion of married people and parents than democrats. That might contribute to their higher happiness levels.
On slashdot I've previously been cited statistics that show parents are actually -- at all stages of life -- unhappier than non-parents. I'm a new parent (2-year-old) and that doesn't match my experience, but again, anecdotal...
Another might be the urban/rural split. Urban dwellers are more likely democrat, and also more likely miserable. I noted a while ago that democrats are more likely to launch into profanity on a bulletin board than republicans... I eventually decided that it has nothing to do with politics, but just a side effect of democrats being generally more urban and younger.
I've always thought city dwellers seem miserable, but apparently some people like the urban lifestyle. I would mostly agree about profanity / getting really upset on messageboards seems dominated by leftists, but have you noticed on news sites that now use facebook for comments? It's unbelievable how racist, classist, sexist, hateful, etc people will be -- on the record with their real name and picture! It definitely spans the political spectrum too. Unbelievable.
Not that I put much store in such things, but studies and surveys show your statement is totally backwards--republicans (or, more specifically, conservatives) tend to be happier than democrats (liberals):
http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/04/23/conservatives-are-happier-than-liberals-discuss/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=BABCDEA5-D180-499B-094168CBE5442468
On a purely anecdotal level, I would say that I would categorize more of my conservative friends as "happy people" than I would my liberal friends. There are of course dozens of exceptions, and, like I said, I don't put much store in this stuff anyway (especially non-scientific anecdotal).
Yeah, I haven't even bothered to complain as I figured their response to you would be typical... If we do decide to re-up with AT&T, I figure I'll try to get a free microcell out of it. Seems crazy that they want to SELL you something so that you can use your own Internet service to get the bare minimum service level from them.
Yup, it's the equivalent of the "close doors" button on many elevators. It's just there to make people feel better.
AT&T has an app like that called "Mark the Spot" (or something like that). I've put in dozens of reports (as have other people I know) from a highly developed part of my city that has terrible reception (-90 to -100 outside my house, -100+ inside the house, occasionally lose service in the middle of the house). Result over the last 3 years--nil.
Oh really? because iTunes was a 78MB download for me. But then there was an additional (almost) 1GB of data for a Lion stability update and a Lion recovery update. So, he's probably counting the entire set of updates
That's swell, except the statement that iTunes is a 700mb download is still false. He clarified that he meant the iOS firmware download--makes perfect sense.
Lion seems to be very resistive to deleting things. I've had difficulty deleting apps on Lion on more than one occassion
He clarified he was trying to delete a limited permissions app from a stack. I haven't tried, but it seems that's all the issue was.
MAC OS just works, right? So why does he need to use the CLI?
If you read what I wrote (the same thing you quoted) I said "If you're not comfortable with GUI instructions." I personally have a terminal window open almost constantly on my laptop.
That is true, except when it isn't. I've had my iPhone 3G not respond to the double button press. I didn't have to wait for the battery to drain, but it did take 5-10 minutes for the watchdog to kick in.
The DFU mode instructions not working (which I personally have not experienced, but do believe you have) in no way means that "the Apple official way" is to just let the battery drain.
Come on, I don't think my post was unreasonable? I explained my points, kept things limited in scope, didn't swear or insult etc. Is it the reference to hoping the OP wasn't a troll that made you annoyed with my post?
Oh crap, you're right, that was supposed to read "the iOS update," which is 700MB. I
Fair enough... the iOS download IS a big download. For a real clusterf*ck -- Apple makes anybody who buys Xcode off the App Store download the whole thing. 4gb. When 4.0.1 came out a week or so after release, everybody had to download 4gb AGAIN. How dumb.
Only works in Finder. I was trying to do it from the Applications stack in the Dock, because you can do that with apps you've installed yourself. Doing it that way just silently fails.
Interesting. I think that's just due to the permissions on the iTunes app (which you should be able to change--not sure if they "stick"). I don't use stacks so I've never encountered this.
Can I ask you a question? Why do you get worked up and insulting about what phones other people choose to use? I don't know if it's partly due to the Internet, but I'm getting so damn tired of everybody being so polarized about EVERYTHING. Politics...phone choice...etc. I'm not naive, I know that people have always (and will always) care -- violently! -- about dumb crap, but come on. Is it really worth it in the case of phones??