Design should _always_ be about making the content more accessible, and many good designers know this. The goal is not to get people to notice the design, any more than the goal of filmmaking is to get people to notice the cinematography. They're both important tools used to enhance the content, and they can be done well or poorly; but most times that they rise to the forefront of your attention, they're failing.
It's only fops like this guy that go to great lengths to attract attention to themselves that give design a bad name. Don't fall for it, and don't conclude that all design is useless (or even unimportant) just because this one guy's a grandstanding sod.
Uh, I don't know which "they" you've been listening to, but the actual copyright holders have been extremely vociferous in their assertions that it's illegal. They often tend to express this viewpoint in Cease and Desist letters, settlements, and lawsuits. (And in case they "they" you had in mind was the courts, so far as I know every one of said suits has been found clearly in favor of the copyright holder.)
If you wish to make an argument that it's not unethical to share television with bittorrent and similar, you can give it a go. But the question of whether it's illegal is absolutely settled.
Um, yes, I'm quite aware that that complaint came from ABC's affiliates; I don't believe I ever suggested that it was one of ABC's competitors, which would make a whole different kind of nonsense .
Those affiliates are the ones that currently provide a distribution channel for the content ABC creates. In the itvs, ABC has found an additional distribution channel, and the affiliates are whining that they might not make money on this other deal--despite contributing nothing to it. This is "rude" of ABC only in the same way that choosing a different vendor for any service is. It might not go over well at a tea party, but it's perfectly normal for a business relationship.
The joking-but-valid analogy holds: I'm sure FedEx gets grumpy if companies start using distribution methods that rely on them less, but that doesn't mean that said companies are doing anything wrong.
What was ABC thinking, doing something as offensive and inexcusable as making content available to consumers in a more convenient yet still-lucrative form? Absolutely unforgivable!
Really, this seems like a very self-regulating situation. If consumers enjoy and respond to this offering, then both content producers and consumers have a great new option, and neither one of them owes previous distribution channels a damn thing. If people don't care for the new format, then existing distribution channels continue to maintain their position and profits.
Obviously this has a strong chance of being a bad deal for advertising-driven distribution in the long term. But even if it is, the notion that content producers had any obligation to avoid it out of mere politeness is absurd.
I wonder when we'll see FedEx and UPS complaining that offering software for download--rather than shipping CDs--was a very rude thing for the software industry to begin doing without so much as a by-your-leave.
Overall, I still find Google maps pretty unimpressive. There's exactly one interesting trick, being able to drag-scroll around. But that's only interesting as long as it actually works, which appears to be a pretty small portion of the time. It invariably just stops responding at all after a small amount of use--often before display the first search query at all.
Similarly, yes, the print function often decides to do nothing but redraw the screen. And the searching on location by name is still wackily unpredictable; I've never yet found a phrase to describe an intersection of two streets that will cause it to reliably know what I mean.
And, of course, it breaks completely in the absence of ecmascript, which clearly makes it Not The Web. If it doesn't work with a pure simple html client, then it doesn't belong on the net.
The only good news is that Yahoo's maps continue to actually work elegantly and reliably. My most-preferred browser is w3m, with which Yahoo maps works perfectly. In the unlikely event that Google ever decides to design interfaces that are consistent with the basic design of the web, I'll try it out. But until then, none for me, thanks.
"Looking cool" is pointless if it interferes with productivity. Even if it's just sending an email to a friend, today's GUIs offer far too much distraction.
If an interface has been designed well, things which happen to look cool do so only secondarily to adding clarity and functionality.
For example, macosx windows have dropshadows that give the appearance of visual depth, causing the focused window to appear to stand out from the others. Could the focused window simply have been made hot pink, to further clarify which it is? Sure, but seeing that flash around every time you changed focus would be distracting. Working with your brain's normal spatial perception to focus your attention in ways of which you're probably not consciously aware is much more elegant and efficient.
I can't look at the project page right now (but it sure is an intuitive 404!), but if their focus is on thought-out interaction design along these lines, rather than just mimicking Windows, some real progress stands to be made.
Certainly I do run into shareware items that seem absurdly overpriced for what they do; those I don't buy.
But overall, I'm pretty okay with the idea of contributing modest sums to small developers making handy little tools. It doesn't take a whole lot for a thingy to make my life twenty bucks better. And if giving those twenty bucks to some developer returns the favor, and makes him more likely to write the next life-enriching thingy, I'm all in favor of it. I have a mild preference for open-source development models just for communal bugfixing, but in practice I find that closed-source development produces at least as much of the software that I actually find good and useful.
As to the relative costs of small shareware and big commercial titles... Well, the economics of software is wacky. That $50 game will sell five million copies, whereas the $40 shareware tool will sell a few dozen or hundred, probably amounting to much less money per person behind it. And I've found that if I have problems with or suggestions for that $40 piece of shareware, I can send mail to the developer and most likely get a meaningful response--not something that's as likely with that $50 game.
I wanted the best of the current mini-macs.... And as a result, I do feel cheated.
I suppose you would, but I have to admit that your selection criteria strike me as a bit irrational. Why do you care about what anyone else is getting, rather than just what product you're receiving for your money? If I have a faster computer, how does that make yours slower?
You could also say that Apple has given some of it's customers less than what they paid for. The older model should be available at a reduced price considering the new and improved model is out.
Sure, you could say that. You'd just be making shit up, but you could say it.
Objects (especially computers!) do not have absolute, objective values. The value of an item or service varies with the situation and context, and often from one individual to another. Trying to dictate what something "should" be sold for with any kind of moral authority is just silly. There's no such animal.
Value is defined only by the point at which people decide something is worthwhile to them; they then express this by actually buying the thing. If a person has decided that $599 is a worthwhile price for a 1.42GHz g4, then it is worth that to them. If they then get a 1.42GHz g4 for their $599, they are not being cheated.
I bet in your heart you know it's wrong. Just look in there once in a while, and throw out that apple core, okay?
Telling people who disagree with you what they "really" believe is a tactic worthy of cheap trolling, not genuine discussion. It is not--I hope--worthy of you.
I cannot recommend CodeTek's VirtualDesktop highly enough. It's the best multiple desktop implementation I've seen on any platform.
Yes, it does cost $20-$40. But if free software isn't a religious issue for you, and you use your computer anywhere near as much as I use mine, it's unquestionably worthwhile. I think the unlicensed version is limited to two desktops, so you can try it out and see how you like it before paying for full functionality.
(Astute readers may notice that I've plugged this product on apple.slashdot discussions before. No, I'm not a shill for the company; I just really really like the product, and it's hard to not mention it when someone's asking for exactly what it does.)
I am truly impressed by the vasty deeps of non-information presented by those sites.
The GEWar site says nothing but, "You are not logged in. You must be registered and logged in to play." Um, play what? Why would I register for something without even the tiniest hint about what it actually is and why I'd care?
The googleearthgame site at least makes the pretense of providing information, but interestingly manages to not actually say anything at all. For example, it has a "how to play" link, but all that page gives you is:
A new online reality game where players face extreme challenges and face their worst fears all while trying to beat the GameMaster.
Using Google Earth placemarks and web pages, we've created the world's biggest interactive game.
In order to beat the GameMaster, you must follow the clues and utilize the Checkpoint feature to move ahead.
This sounds like a cheesy television commercial, and fails to provide any information whatsoever about, as the name so deceptively offered, "how to play." What exactly does this following clues entail? What "checkpoint feature" is this? What does the game actually involve doing?
Never forget that the objective of Islam, apart from the destruction of Christianity and Israel, is to establish every country as a Muslim state, including the US. If that has to mean "death to the infidels", then so be it.
That's so many kinds of wrong that it's sort of hard to know where to start.
The most fundamental problem is the idea that Islam is a homogenous hivemind with goals. Like any other religion with an extensive scripture, the Koran is a jumbled mess of self-contradictory ravings. So yes, you can find sections of it that advocate killing all infidels... and you can find other sections of it that clearly state that other monotheistic religions are valid and to be respected, and that their scriptures are different subsets of a super-scripture that resides in heaven, on completely even ground with the Koran.
With such a dense and self-contradictory canon, it's possible to find scriptural backup for absolutely any position whatsoever. It seems hard to lay all the fault at the feet of a religion whose docs mostly come to one big semantic null.
As an interesting analogy, Deuteronomy 13:13-19 exhorts that if a Christian or Jew finds that a single person of any town worships a god other than Abraham's, every person and animal in the town must be killed, the whole town razed by fire, and never rebuilt.
In light of that, do you feel that it's a reasonable characterization to say that the "objective" of all Christians and Jews is to murder every non-Christian/Jew on earth and destroy all their cities? And that nuclear weapons would actually suit the bill very nicely? So clearly everyone in the world should be terrified of every Christian or Jew, because every single one of them constantly marches toward this goal in lockstep unity?
Except that there aren't dozens of camps of "car accidents" being trained up in the Middle East with the sole purpose of "happenning" one day in the US.
...
Don't kid yourself. If there was no national security and all Americans had the liberties they think they somehow deserve, these terrorists would jump at the opportunity and bring down the delicate infastructure in a matter of months.
The problem is that the current approach to "national security" is not a sustainable one.
The formation of suicide bombers requires two things: hate and hopelessness. To have a steady supply of them, you need a large body of people who: believe that their lives have been substantially worsened by, eg, the US, and; in fact feel that their lives are so awful that they have nothing better to do with them than to kill themselves in a grand gesture.
The problem with the current approach is that it creates these conditions pretty effectively. Every time the US bombs a town or kidnaps someone, they leave behind a new set of people whose friends and relatives have a pretty unshakable grievance against the US, and whose lives are made poorer by needing to rebuild their bombed homes without their friends' help. Suddenly a new set of people who would never have considered being suicide bombers are now a big step closer to the day when the decide it's the only thing left to them.
Hm. I was using these numbers: 2750 killed in the World Trade Center/Pentagon attack, 50,000 per year killed in car accidents, and a span of fifty years instead of 25 (off the top of my head notion of how long cars have been a fairly common commodity, calling the increase in population and safety standards a wash, and handily avoiding the question of whether Pearl Harbor should be counted). I also don't see any reason that car accident fault is part of this discussion (unless you want to get into the topic of terrorism fault, which will get ugly and pointless right quick). That got me to:
echo $((2750.0/(50000*50))) 0.0011000000000000001...which, now that I've had caffeine, is clearly 0.1% percent, not 0.001%.
So okay, the ratio is less steep than I first suggested, and I apologize for the inadvertent exaggeration. But I'm pretty willing to stand by the notion that anything that's astoundingly less likely to kill you than your average commute to work is simply not a big enough threat that it's worth abridging anyone's rights. Of course one does want to prevent all deaths, but in a case where the actual risk is so incredibly small, it's very easy indeed to propose a cure that's worse than the disease.
I said, "it works, but the price is too high." You rebutted, "you're wrong, it works!"
Really? How? You're going to make the statement, you should be required to back it up.
Okay, how about I back it up by saying: "I have much greater fear of living in a society where it's a crime to be male, or young, or dark-skinned, or muslim, than a society that suffers very rare and mild terrorist attacks. (Killing Americans at 0.001% the rate of common car accidents.)"
Spending money randomly searching those 80 year old grannies rather than targeting groups that actually ARE engaging in terrorisim is not only wasteful, it's stupid and it compromises our security and it's disingenious to claim otherwise.
I didn't claim otherwise. I claimed that security from terrorism is not the most important goal for a society. Historically speaking, security from ones own government is a much more difficult commodity to acquire and maintain.
Even if we grant for sake of argument that all would-be terrorists are Arab Muslim males between 15 and 35 years of age (a preposterous claim, but we'll use it as an example), that is critically different from accepting that all Arab Muslim males between 15 and 35 years of age are would-be terrorists. Punishing the inoocent for sake of expediency is a far more insidious crime, and one that needs to be approached with much greater concern, than mere terrorism.
I think "random" searches are never random -- people get targetted.
I certainly hope so.
You shouldn't.
It's tempting, because profiling based upon race, gender, age, religion, and political affiliation are effective measures for combatting crime from specific and known types of person. For example, men are a couple orders of magnitude more likely to commit any violent crime than women are, so at first glance it seems to make sense to focus all your investigative efforts on men; it'll yield the most bang for you enforcement buck, right?
It works, but the price is too high. I have much greater fear of living in a society where it's a crime to be male, or young, or dark-skinned, or muslim, than a society that suffers very rare and mild terrorist attacks. (Killing Americans at 0.001% the rate of common car accidents.)
...or having sloppy focus... Or proper virtual desktops...
I can't live without good virtual desktops myself, and I've been really happy with the (unfortunately-named) CodeTek VirtualDesktop. It's actually a better virtual desktop implementation that I ever found in any X11 window manager, and it can do focus-follows-mouse.
(Yeah, it costs a few bucks. If the whole notion of paying money for software isn't antithetical to your religion, then the amount of time you spend using it will make the price completely negligible.)
... and yes, you can tweak finder to go there to but not without non-free software...
Hm. I'm missing the non-free software involved in typing "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE".
I am impressed that it works, I have tried many times to get Fink and the gang working with Tiger and I have borked on each and every occasion.
Really? I guess I don't know who all the gang are, but I've been using Fink and Tiger together since the day Tiger was released, without even actually needing to upgrade it.
Or there's the beautiful "open" command: open/etc/
("open" does whatever doubleclicking on its argument[s] would do. eg, if it's an application it launches it, if it's a document it launches the owning application and opens it, if it's a directory it opens it in a Finder window. It's one of the great examples of gui/cli synthesis that osx does uniquely well. Much like pbcopy/pbpaste: cli interfaces to the clipboard, something I wanted in linux for years.)
That's what happens when someone writes a browser to get around the crappiness we see on the Web.
The crappiness continues to increase until it cannot be escaped? Yeah.
Can Links really not use the stylesheet to do something useful with the content?
Links, and lynx, and w3m (which I use), and some phone/pda browsers, some screen-readers for the sight-impaired, and many older but still-good browsers do not support or use CSS at all. Making the new slash a fantastic example of failing completely to design sites to degrade gracefully in the face of client diversity.
So here's the key to all good web design, and indeed the design of the web itself: degrade gracefully.
Not every client will be using a browser that supports CSS. (Whether you think they should or not is not relevant, so you can skip all the grandstanding about how people should all "upgrade" to what you like and is appropriate to your circumstances.) Given that, it's vital to ensure that your design works properly and smoothly in such an environment.
The most obvious way in which neo-slash fails that goal is that the content is included in the worst possible order, and relies on CSS to rearrange it into something usable. Without CSS, I get to scroll past pages and pages of nav and sidebars before I get to the actual content of any page.
So this would be a great time to 1) fix your crap to be much more broadly usable, and 2) actually test stuff properly in the future before pushing it live.
Slashdot Mirror
Design should _always_ be about making the content more accessible, and many good designers know this. The goal is not to get people to notice the design, any more than the goal of filmmaking is to get people to notice the cinematography. They're both important tools used to enhance the content, and they can be done well or poorly; but most times that they rise to the forefront of your attention, they're failing.
It's only fops like this guy that go to great lengths to attract attention to themselves that give design a bad name. Don't fall for it, and don't conclude that all design is useless (or even unimportant) just because this one guy's a grandstanding sod.
If you wish to make an argument that it's not unethical to share television with bittorrent and similar, you can give it a go. But the question of whether it's illegal is absolutely settled.
Um, yes, I'm quite aware that that complaint came from ABC's affiliates; I don't believe I ever suggested that it was one of ABC's competitors, which would make a whole different kind of nonsense .
Those affiliates are the ones that currently provide a distribution channel for the content ABC creates. In the itvs, ABC has found an additional distribution channel, and the affiliates are whining that they might not make money on this other deal--despite contributing nothing to it. This is "rude" of ABC only in the same way that choosing a different vendor for any service is. It might not go over well at a tea party, but it's perfectly normal for a business relationship.
The joking-but-valid analogy holds: I'm sure FedEx gets grumpy if companies start using distribution methods that rely on them less, but that doesn't mean that said companies are doing anything wrong.
What was ABC thinking, doing something as offensive and inexcusable as making content available to consumers in a more convenient yet still-lucrative form? Absolutely unforgivable!
Really, this seems like a very self-regulating situation. If consumers enjoy and respond to this offering, then both content producers and consumers have a great new option, and neither one of them owes previous distribution channels a damn thing. If people don't care for the new format, then existing distribution channels continue to maintain their position and profits.
Obviously this has a strong chance of being a bad deal for advertising-driven distribution in the long term. But even if it is, the notion that content producers had any obligation to avoid it out of mere politeness is absurd.
I wonder when we'll see FedEx and UPS complaining that offering software for download--rather than shipping CDs--was a very rude thing for the software industry to begin doing without so much as a by-your-leave.
Similarly, yes, the print function often decides to do nothing but redraw the screen. And the searching on location by name is still wackily unpredictable; I've never yet found a phrase to describe an intersection of two streets that will cause it to reliably know what I mean.
And, of course, it breaks completely in the absence of ecmascript, which clearly makes it Not The Web. If it doesn't work with a pure simple html client, then it doesn't belong on the net.
The only good news is that Yahoo's maps continue to actually work elegantly and reliably. My most-preferred browser is w3m, with which Yahoo maps works perfectly. In the unlikely event that Google ever decides to design interfaces that are consistent with the basic design of the web, I'll try it out. But until then, none for me, thanks.
User interaction design has precious little to do with themes and icon sets.
For example, macosx windows have dropshadows that give the appearance of visual depth, causing the focused window to appear to stand out from the others. Could the focused window simply have been made hot pink, to further clarify which it is? Sure, but seeing that flash around every time you changed focus would be distracting. Working with your brain's normal spatial perception to focus your attention in ways of which you're probably not consciously aware is much more elegant and efficient.
I can't look at the project page right now (but it sure is an intuitive 404!), but if their focus is on thought-out interaction design along these lines, rather than just mimicking Windows, some real progress stands to be made.
Certainly I do run into shareware items that seem absurdly overpriced for what they do; those I don't buy.
But overall, I'm pretty okay with the idea of contributing modest sums to small developers making handy little tools. It doesn't take a whole lot for a thingy to make my life twenty bucks better. And if giving those twenty bucks to some developer returns the favor, and makes him more likely to write the next life-enriching thingy, I'm all in favor of it. I have a mild preference for open-source development models just for communal bugfixing, but in practice I find that closed-source development produces at least as much of the software that I actually find good and useful.
As to the relative costs of small shareware and big commercial titles... Well, the economics of software is wacky. That $50 game will sell five million copies, whereas the $40 shareware tool will sell a few dozen or hundred, probably amounting to much less money per person behind it. And I've found that if I have problems with or suggestions for that $40 piece of shareware, I can send mail to the developer and most likely get a meaningful response--not something that's as likely with that $50 game.
Objects (especially computers!) do not have absolute, objective values. The value of an item or service varies with the situation and context, and often from one individual to another. Trying to dictate what something "should" be sold for with any kind of moral authority is just silly. There's no such animal.
Value is defined only by the point at which people decide something is worthwhile to them; they then express this by actually buying the thing. If a person has decided that $599 is a worthwhile price for a 1.42GHz g4, then it is worth that to them. If they then get a 1.42GHz g4 for their $599, they are not being cheated.
Telling people who disagree with you what they "really" believe is a tactic worthy of cheap trolling, not genuine discussion. It is not--I hope--worthy of you.Yes, it does cost $20-$40. But if free software isn't a religious issue for you, and you use your computer anywhere near as much as I use mine, it's unquestionably worthwhile. I think the unlicensed version is limited to two desktops, so you can try it out and see how you like it before paying for full functionality.
(Astute readers may notice that I've plugged this product on apple.slashdot discussions before. No, I'm not a shill for the company; I just really really like the product, and it's hard to not mention it when someone's asking for exactly what it does.)
The GEWar site says nothing but, "You are not logged in. You must be registered and logged in to play." Um, play what? Why would I register for something without even the tiniest hint about what it actually is and why I'd care?
The googleearthgame site at least makes the pretense of providing information, but interestingly manages to not actually say anything at all. For example, it has a "how to play" link, but all that page gives you is:
This sounds like a cheesy television commercial, and fails to provide any information whatsoever about, as the name so deceptively offered, "how to play." What exactly does this following clues entail? What "checkpoint feature" is this? What does the game actually involve doing?Isn't it a little early in the morning for racism?
The most fundamental problem is the idea that Islam is a homogenous hivemind with goals. Like any other religion with an extensive scripture, the Koran is a jumbled mess of self-contradictory ravings. So yes, you can find sections of it that advocate killing all infidels... and you can find other sections of it that clearly state that other monotheistic religions are valid and to be respected, and that their scriptures are different subsets of a super-scripture that resides in heaven, on completely even ground with the Koran.
With such a dense and self-contradictory canon, it's possible to find scriptural backup for absolutely any position whatsoever. It seems hard to lay all the fault at the feet of a religion whose docs mostly come to one big semantic null.
As an interesting analogy, Deuteronomy 13:13-19 exhorts that if a Christian or Jew finds that a single person of any town worships a god other than Abraham's, every person and animal in the town must be killed, the whole town razed by fire, and never rebuilt.
In light of that, do you feel that it's a reasonable characterization to say that the "objective" of all Christians and Jews is to murder every non-Christian/Jew on earth and destroy all their cities? And that nuclear weapons would actually suit the bill very nicely? So clearly everyone in the world should be terrified of every Christian or Jew, because every single one of them constantly marches toward this goal in lockstep unity?
The problem is that the current approach to "national security" is not a sustainable one.The formation of suicide bombers requires two things: hate and hopelessness. To have a steady supply of them, you need a large body of people who: believe that their lives have been substantially worsened by, eg, the US, and; in fact feel that their lives are so awful that they have nothing better to do with them than to kill themselves in a grand gesture.
The problem with the current approach is that it creates these conditions pretty effectively. Every time the US bombs a town or kidnaps someone, they leave behind a new set of people whose friends and relatives have a pretty unshakable grievance against the US, and whose lives are made poorer by needing to rebuild their bombed homes without their friends' help. Suddenly a new set of people who would never have considered being suicide bombers are now a big step closer to the day when the decide it's the only thing left to them.
Hm. I was using these numbers: 2750 killed in the World Trade Center/Pentagon attack, 50,000 per year killed in car accidents, and a span of fifty years instead of 25 (off the top of my head notion of how long cars have been a fairly common commodity, calling the increase in population and safety standards a wash, and handily avoiding the question of whether Pearl Harbor should be counted). I also don't see any reason that car accident fault is part of this discussion (unless you want to get into the topic of terrorism fault, which will get ugly and pointless right quick). That got me to:
...which, now that I've had caffeine, is clearly 0.1% percent, not 0.001%.
echo $((2750.0/(50000*50)))
0.0011000000000000001
So okay, the ratio is less steep than I first suggested, and I apologize for the inadvertent exaggeration. But I'm pretty willing to stand by the notion that anything that's astoundingly less likely to kill you than your average commute to work is simply not a big enough threat that it's worth abridging anyone's rights. Of course one does want to prevent all deaths, but in a case where the actual risk is so incredibly small, it's very easy indeed to propose a cure that's worse than the disease.
Even if we grant for sake of argument that all would-be terrorists are Arab Muslim males between 15 and 35 years of age (a preposterous claim, but we'll use it as an example), that is critically different from accepting that all Arab Muslim males between 15 and 35 years of age are would-be terrorists. Punishing the inoocent for sake of expediency is a far more insidious crime, and one that needs to be approached with much greater concern, than mere terrorism.
It's tempting, because profiling based upon race, gender, age, religion, and political affiliation are effective measures for combatting crime from specific and known types of person. For example, men are a couple orders of magnitude more likely to commit any violent crime than women are, so at first glance it seems to make sense to focus all your investigative efforts on men; it'll yield the most bang for you enforcement buck, right?
It works, but the price is too high. I have much greater fear of living in a society where it's a crime to be male, or young, or dark-skinned, or muslim, than a society that suffers very rare and mild terrorist attacks. (Killing Americans at 0.001% the rate of common car accidents.)
(Yeah, it costs a few bucks. If the whole notion of paying money for software isn't antithetical to your religion, then the amount of time you spend using it will make the price completely negligible.)
Or there's the beautiful "open" command: open /etc/
("open" does whatever doubleclicking on its argument[s] would do. eg, if it's an application it launches it, if it's a document it launches the owning application and opens it, if it's a directory it opens it in a Finder window. It's one of the great examples of gui/cli synthesis that osx does uniquely well. Much like pbcopy/pbpaste: cli interfaces to the clipboard, something I wanted in linux for years.)
So here's the key to all good web design, and indeed the design of the web itself: degrade gracefully.
Not every client will be using a browser that supports CSS. (Whether you think they should or not is not relevant, so you can skip all the grandstanding about how people should all "upgrade" to what you like and is appropriate to your circumstances.) Given that, it's vital to ensure that your design works properly and smoothly in such an environment.
The most obvious way in which neo-slash fails that goal is that the content is included in the worst possible order, and relies on CSS to rearrange it into something usable. Without CSS, I get to scroll past pages and pages of nav and sidebars before I get to the actual content of any page.
So this would be a great time to 1) fix your crap to be much more broadly usable, and 2) actually test stuff properly in the future before pushing it live.
Well, here's me giving up on the idea that you're capable of--or at least interested in--a meaningful discussion instead of infantile name-calling.