Just get a hold of one of the sleazoid bulk mailer apps and start spraying email in all direction. I can guarantee your service will be terminated in less than a day with no long phone calls...
I did something similar years ago after encountering a similar problem with an old ISP (now no longer in business, guess that just about sums it up). After being repeatedly put on hold then disconnected when attempting to cancel I thought I'd take matters into my own hands...
A few choice newsgroup articles spelling out my experience (massively crossposted to generate complaints), running a bot to post random text to their sales@ and abuse@ addresses for a few hours and the finale - plastering (possibly illegal) pornography all over my personal web space and I was soon disconnected:-)
Obviously not the route to go down if you ever intend using an ISP again, but... well... I didn't;-)
Damn right! I've played video games since I could reach the coin-slot on a Pacman machine. I'd love to meet some of the people making these unfounded allegations linking the games to violence. I'd give them such a savage beating they'd never say it again! Let's see how they'd like a few smart bombs up their asses! I'll frag the lot of them! Kill them, kill them all!!!AAARRGGHHHHHHH!!!
Solaris is actually a very good OS for a workstation. Its X implementation is really fast. Granted, the window manger they ship completely blows, but nobody in their right mind would ever user CDE anyhow.
Hmm, I was forced to use an Ultra 10 (400mhz) for a while a year or so ago when my box developed a motherboard fault, and it was so bad that I was literally driven to using a windows NT machine, and opening ssh sessions to the Sun machine. The interface (CDE) was horrifically ugly and clunky, like a bad video game from the 70's. 3D (not that I actually needed it but I saw the 3D badge on the front of the Sun's case) was at best pedestrian and Java compile times obviously slower than a low-end intel box. Even dragging windows across the desktop would leave a strange cyan trail as it failed to redraw fast enough, scrolling a browser page pegged the CPU etc. It made me wonder if if these machines employ ANY hardware acceleration?
To be honest, if my first experience of a Linux desktop had been that bad I doubt I'd have become interested in OS. I've seen some fairly slow Linux machines, but even the cheapest kit I've worked with (those that had X installed) performed much better than that Ultra 10. Suns seem decent enough servers, but as a workstation, forget it...
I feel like the guy in "Clockwork orange"s cinema scene sometimes. Some faceless corporation forcing me to mentally download the soul-crushing, eye-glazing video sludge before I have the honour of the option of watching something I'd be interested in.
Trailers before the film on videos were bad enough. I mean, who wants to watch the same old trailers for films that probably ended up in a bargain bin before the theatre seats were cold? I learned to beat them though, setting the tape conter to 0 as the film started, then rewinding back to that point.
Now we have the same happening with DVDs.
I rented "Series 7: The contenders" (bad film, BTW) and had to endure at least 5 minutes of ads and company logos with no option to fast forward as the film crippled my player. In fact, after the film finished, I had to watch the f*cking ads again before I could get back to the damned menu! I can't remember the films being advertised, as it was obscured by the red mist of rage, and the culprits should be glad: I'm f*cked if I'd want to rent or buy another DVD from the same outfit with the same "freedom of choice" I was allowed there!
Your typical games player has spent at least some time in arcades and fairgrounds, places you're very unlikely to see the word "Microsoft" on a machine. The names Sega and Nintendo are extremely well known and instantly identifiable with games, hence players have historically bought their consoles in droves.
Enter Sony, they may not have had any presence in the arcades, but by producing TVs, audio and video gear the name has long been associated with pretty decent electronics gear. The massive amount of money they spent promoting the Playstation brand doubtless lit the flame that eventually engulfed their competitors - by promoting the PS as a "cool" item, kids, teens and adults felt embarrassed admitting to owning Nintendo and Sega gear, so the exodus continued.
What of the image of Microsoft? To most people Microsoft=Office computer software that crashes. Not a good starting point, is it? The problem is that this image has prevailed for years and years and it's going to be VERY difficult to shake this view. "If their office stuff crashes, their games stuff will probably crash" must be in the minds of many potential customers.
I certainly wouldn't buy an X-box - I already have a PC. If I want a console, I'll buy Sony or Nintendo. The console market has never been able to support 3 brands, (Atari vs Intellivision, Atari vs Nintendo, Nintendo vs Sega, Sega vs Playstation, Nintendo vs Playstation). And for those claiming MS will just pour money in, don't forget that both Nintendo and Sony have been in this business for a long time, and both have huge cash reserves to throw at this market. Nintendo only do one thing: games and game related products, Microsoft have fingers in many pies, so their $40billion must be sliced between them - they're obviously going to pour more into their established products.
No, I'm thinking it'll be a two horse race with Sony maybe winning out due to the DVD playing advantage of their box. I can see MS migrating into interactive TV type stuff rather than pure games...
I think one reason people are not bothering to change settings on their yahoo mail accounts is that they're often used as a trash account anyway, and rarely if ever checked. I use one for this purpose and only ever check it if I need to confirm receipt of an email. Same with hotmail. So I've never botherered changing it, if it fills with spam, who cares?
Anyone sending me mail from a yahoo, hotmail or msn.com account goes straight to the spambox.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Why not add speed limiters to cars, just as they're added to trucks and busses? In fact the limiters should be variable, controlled by the zone the vehicle is in (ie, in a 30 limit, the car could not exceed 30).
Think of the benefits:
1. Less idiots barreling along at 120 in their BMWs with a mobile phone clamped to their ears.
2. Less accidents in town centres.
3. Insurance costs (might) be lowered as car theft and high-speed chases led by pimply-faced 13 year olds would drop radically!
Of course, on a racetrack, or other off-highway road the limiter would be set to the cars maximum speed. This idea won't win votes though, so I doubt you'll ever see it happen any time soon...
I always though that this site was a truly inspired idea! For anyone who hasn't been there, you just put some godawful long URL in there, and it translates it to a reasonably small URL (the URL actually goes to their server, then is redirected to the real site after a couple of seconds). No adverts, simple to use, works great!
(No, I don't have anything to do with running the site:-)
(see this report of a test on a 733-MHz Linux system for details on mstone) run on the mainframe.
Yes, it's a word document. You'd think anyone writing an article for a Linux targetted site would at least check or convert the document to something everyone can read...
I guess everyone has different tastes, otherwise there would only be one distro out there. Personally I've bought SuSE twice, and absolutely hated it (I bought it the second time as I thought it must have improved and I like to show a bit of support for the Linux distro makers).
Anyway, the last time (can't remember the version, but it was the end of last year), it installed easily enough, but/var/log/messages was growing by the second due to module/USB and other problems with the laptop it was on. Memory usage was ridiculous, thrashing the swap file when idle. Using Yast2, well, I don't know how I managed to resist the urge to throw the laptop out of the window waiting *minutes* for it to update simple network settings. I'd always used RH before and after the SuSE episodes, and I'll never use another SuSE distro, or have it anywhere near any machines I administer. Sure, the problems probably could have been solved with a few days work, but RH installed and worked great on the same hardware out of the box. No waiting around for Yast, no swap thrashing or any of the other multitude of problems.
Maybe it was just me, but I like to think I'm pretty handy with a command prompt and know my way around a *nix box and that was the worst experience of my dot.life. I've always used KDE as my desktop with RH, VERY rarely using Gnome, so people claiming RH is Gnome-centric are just plain wrong...
It's cool to carry a tiny laptop around...
on
Sony PCG-U1
·
· Score: 1
...but not so cool to have to lug a huge pair of bottle-bottom glasses to have to wear to see the screen! 1024x768 on a 6.4" screen?! I thought the smaller (normal) Vaios were a bit hard on the eyes, but this!...
From the article: MS IE inserts the following line in all saved pages , so you can always find out where the page came from.
IE also uses that line in its "security" (yeah, it's unusual to see IE and security in one sentence without the word "flaw" in there I know) settings. If you have a frameset for example with two pages with different saved from lines, any attempt by one to access the other (usually via javascript) will result in a security violation error. Removing the line stops this behaviour. This is actually a good thing, now if only they could fix the other 6,000,000 or so problems...
If any of our politicians (in the UK) had a 10th of this guy's technological awareness, debating skill, backbone, or even a desire to do what's best for our economy rather than bending over for the Microsoft shafting I might actually bother voting.
As it is though, our lot are nothing but a bunch of self-serving, hypocrytical gluttons, who'll always take the easiest/most lucrative route. It's nice to hear from someone in politics who's not a complete asshole!
I often respond to spam. If there's a link to a website, be it the spammer's customer or a "remove" form I make it a point to pay the site a visit. In fact I don't just visit once, nope. I've set up a couple of javascript form-filling scripts to post garbage into their forms and reload their pages constantly!
I submitted 1.5 million "remove" requests to the last spam site I visited, and the current favourite "jdsdiagnostics" has send me over a gig of their bandwidth so far as I have 15 scripts loading their front page constantly into minimised windows.
If everyone did this it would drive them offline - how could they pay for a site serving 1000GB or more per week?! Many people on here have DSL or greater, just suck their bandwidth dry!!
I must admit that I freaked when I first saw "Boss 1" in the churchyard. The way it lumbers about with the screaching ghost faces swarming out of its body was pretty un-nerving.
I was kind of dreading the second set of catacombs too, it really did get my heart racing (lights off, sound on headphones).
I pissed off my neightours with it one night. I was happily blasting away with my headphones on, but I'd forgotten to switch the main speakers off (I have a really big amp+speaker setup on the PC), and I only realised when I decided to take a break after like 2 hours, and after taking the headphones off I could still hear the music. This was at 2AM:-)
Why on Earth would a store be "beaming credit card numbers about" with no though to security? Seems they've opened themselves to a wave of court cases and possible fraud. Then again, every time you give your card to a waiter or till operator there's a chance the underpaid employee will be stealing the details via a personal "swiper". There was a programme on UK tv recently discussing this widespread fraud...
Of course, by resizing a partition you can always have the machines boot into Linux with no signs of the MS OS until the gestapo have cleared off to hassle someone else. It's not that difficult for anyone to do and means they can spend an extra few months migrating to a better OS a bit more smoothly...
No, blame the tool. When you author in HTML, you don't need to do anything to get that functionality. In Flash, it's another item on the TODO list.
Riiight... Maybe I should throw out my computer too huh? Since it doesn't write the software for me, instead it's left it on the TODO list... Can you resize the text? Sure, you can zoom, but I've seen sites that disable most of the context menu functions. Some people can't read itsy bitsy teensy weensy fonts, you know.
Hang on a minute! A few lines ago you were moaning about having to add a line of script to emulate the back button, yet NOW you're complaining that some authors take the time to add extra code to disable the context menu (which I've never seen anywhere, BTW and didn't think possible but haven't checked). Most browsers will allow you to work around those issues by overriding certain (poort) choices made by the HTML author.
Yep, you can switch off stylesheets which often completely wreaks everything else on the page (in fact I remember that NS4 actually does this for you if you disable javascript!). If a font size has been set using CSS with IE4/5/6, you have to disable CSS to resize it as it won't respond to the fontsize menu.
However, I just leave an unreadable site - if the author can't be bothered to test the site out, I can't be bothered to jump through hoops to use it. This goes for Flash and HTML. Bad design is possible using either platform, but there's a hell of a lot more of it created in HTML, as any fool with a text editor can slap something up on Geocities.
Right. The carpenter (web developer) is using the wrong tool (Flash). He should be using the right tool--HTML.
I can't think of many appropriate applications for Flash. HTML provides content, Java applets provide interactivity, when necessary. Flash is unnecessary bulk and fluf.
It depends on the site. A site showing animated cartoons is going to look a tad dull in HTML. A web application (Oddpost for instance) is much easier to make cross browser using flash than dHTML (I use both, BTW but I don't have the crash-happy Java runtime installed on any browser on any platform).
Obviously any art/design oriented site will benefit from Flash, as it's a creative outlet. An artist or designer will find it much easier and faster to put something together using a visual tool than learning Java or dHTML before fighting against a compiler or scripting engine. Or maybe you think no-one should use Photoshop either, and instead learn how to poke hex values into the display RAM to create an image. Not everyone is just looking for grey pages full of facts you know...
Flash was designed to display animated vector graphics, and to allow client-side interfaces with XML sockets to act as applications. It does this very well. Sure it's been abused by many sites in the past, but the days of the "Skip Intro" wastage are hopefully numbered.
I'm sorry but I feel compelled to respond to this. I'm not saying Flash is the best idea for this guy's site, I have no idea what he intends to do but: 1) I can't use the BACK button to get back one step.
Blame the author. It's simple to add the same functionality to the Flash movie (it can call javascript which in turn would call history.back()). 2) I can't search text with the browsers search function.
Again, there's nothing to stop a flash movie searching itself. There is a DOM, and scripting is always active (obviously). 3) I can't resize the browser window to my comfort and have the content resized as well.
This is just wrong. Depending upon the parameters used in the embed/object tags, a movie can be resizable, or of fixed dimensions (like java). 4) I have to learn how to use each and every site because everybody uses a different user interface (preferably using tiny fonts and tiny scrolling windows to display large amounts of text).
Hardly flash's fault! When I browse with my linux box I often come across html only sites with unreadable text, broken javascript and other multimedia elements that don't work. If anything, flash helps sites to be more accessable across platforms. 5) Murphy's Law: interesting sites always require the latest flash plugin, which unfortunately is not yet available for your platform.
Which platform do you use, exactly? I've yet to encounter a site I can't browse with Linux, Windows or even my Mac. I'm pretty sure I used to do just fine with a Solaris box too... 6) Murphy's 2nd Law: if you have the required plugin version it will crash your browser.
I've never seen flash crash my browser. It seems pretty stable on the 24hr a day information kiosks and set-top boxes I've used it on too.
It's true that flash isn't suitable for everything, although Flash MX has added a few very useful features, but it's not so bad really.
Java applets however, are my personal pet hate. I haven't had java enabled in a browser for years as it seemed to crash everything I ever tried it on, so now sites that STILL use lame java buttons for simple rollover effects are simply unusable to me.
Since it's illegal to give a public performance of a CD, DVD, video or Record, and even the people of the RIAA may possibly have been invited to parties in their youth (bit of a stretch with them, I know), it would be true to say they they have all commited offences against the companies they're representing!
I really think this point would go down well in any court cases - just asking any member of the RIAA present if they'd ever been to a party, ever watched a video round a friend's house or borrowed a CD in the past. I doubt any of them could claim to have not "committed an offence" in this way, without purgering(sp?) themselves...
Slashdot Mirror
Just get a hold of one of the sleazoid bulk mailer apps and start spraying email in all direction. I can guarantee your service will be terminated in less than a day with no long phone calls...
:-)
;-)
I did something similar years ago after encountering a similar problem with an old ISP (now no longer in business, guess that just about sums it up). After being repeatedly put on hold then disconnected when attempting to cancel I thought I'd take matters into my own hands...
A few choice newsgroup articles spelling out my experience (massively crossposted to generate complaints), running a bot to post random text to their sales@ and abuse@ addresses for a few hours and the finale - plastering (possibly illegal) pornography all over my personal web space and I was soon disconnected
Obviously not the route to go down if you ever intend using an ISP again, but... well... I didn't
leads to violent children is bogus.
Damn right! I've played video games since I could reach the coin-slot on a Pacman machine. I'd love to meet some of the people making these unfounded allegations linking the games to violence. I'd give them such a savage beating they'd never say it again! Let's see how they'd like a few smart bombs up their asses! I'll frag the lot of them! Kill them, kill them all!!!AAARRGGHHHHHHH!!!
;-)
HOSTNAME: mofo, OS: SOLARIS 9.2, MACHINE TYPE: Z69000 , USER: bofh
MEMORY: 64326GB, SWAP: 52376GB, PROCESSORS: 5800 2.5GHZ, DISK: Fibre Channel Raid 593271GB
Yeah we've had one of these for a few years now. They make great routers/firewalls to keep our REAL machines free for the serious work...
Solaris is actually a very good OS for a workstation. Its X implementation is really fast. Granted, the window manger they ship completely blows, but nobody in their right mind would ever user CDE anyhow.
Hmm, I was forced to use an Ultra 10 (400mhz) for a while a year or so ago when my box developed a motherboard fault, and it was so bad that I was literally driven to using a windows NT machine, and opening ssh sessions to the Sun machine. The interface (CDE) was horrifically ugly and clunky, like a bad video game from the 70's. 3D (not that I actually needed it but I saw the 3D badge on the front of the Sun's case) was at best pedestrian and Java compile times obviously slower than a low-end intel box. Even dragging windows across the desktop would leave a strange cyan trail as it failed to redraw fast enough, scrolling a browser page pegged the CPU etc. It made me wonder if if these machines employ ANY hardware acceleration?
To be honest, if my first experience of a Linux desktop had been that bad I doubt I'd have become interested in OS. I've seen some fairly slow Linux machines, but even the cheapest kit I've worked with (those that had X installed) performed much better than that Ultra 10. Suns seem decent enough servers, but as a workstation, forget it...
I feel like the guy in "Clockwork orange"s cinema scene sometimes. Some faceless corporation forcing me to mentally download the soul-crushing, eye-glazing video sludge before I have the honour of the option of watching something I'd be interested in.
Trailers before the film on videos were bad enough. I mean, who wants to watch the same old trailers for films that probably ended up in a bargain bin before the theatre seats were cold? I learned to beat them though, setting the tape conter to 0 as the film started, then rewinding back to that point.
Now we have the same happening with DVDs.
I rented "Series 7: The contenders" (bad film, BTW) and had to endure at least 5 minutes of ads and company logos with no option to fast forward as the film crippled my player. In fact, after the film finished, I had to watch the f*cking ads again before I could get back to the damned menu! I can't remember the films being advertised, as it was obscured by the red mist of rage, and the culprits should be glad: I'm f*cked if I'd want to rent or buy another DVD from the same outfit with the same "freedom of choice" I was allowed there!
<rant over>
Your typical games player has spent at least some time in arcades and fairgrounds, places you're very unlikely to see the word "Microsoft" on a machine. The names Sega and Nintendo are extremely well known and instantly identifiable with games, hence players have historically bought their consoles in droves.
Enter Sony, they may not have had any presence in the arcades, but by producing TVs, audio and video gear the name has long been associated with pretty decent electronics gear. The massive amount of money they spent promoting the Playstation brand doubtless lit the flame that eventually engulfed their competitors - by promoting the PS as a "cool" item, kids, teens and adults felt embarrassed admitting to owning Nintendo and Sega gear, so the exodus continued.
What of the image of Microsoft? To most people Microsoft=Office computer software that crashes. Not a good starting point, is it? The problem is that this image has prevailed for years and years and it's going to be VERY difficult to shake this view. "If their office stuff crashes, their games stuff will probably crash" must be in the minds of many potential customers.
I certainly wouldn't buy an X-box - I already have a PC. If I want a console, I'll buy Sony or Nintendo. The console market has never been able to support 3 brands, (Atari vs Intellivision, Atari vs Nintendo, Nintendo vs Sega, Sega vs Playstation, Nintendo vs Playstation). And for those claiming MS will just pour money in, don't forget that both Nintendo and Sony have been in this business for a long time, and both have huge cash reserves to throw at this market. Nintendo only do one thing: games and game related products, Microsoft have fingers in many pies, so their $40billion must be sliced between them - they're obviously going to pour more into their established products.
No, I'm thinking it'll be a two horse race with Sony maybe winning out due to the DVD playing advantage of their box. I can see MS migrating into interactive TV type stuff rather than pure games...
I think one reason people are not bothering to change settings on their yahoo mail accounts is that they're often used as a trash account anyway, and rarely if ever checked. I use one for this purpose and only ever check it if I need to confirm receipt of an email. Same with hotmail. So I've never botherered changing it, if it fills with spam, who cares?
Anyone sending me mail from a yahoo, hotmail or msn.com account goes straight to the spambox.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Why not add speed limiters to cars, just as they're added to trucks and busses? In fact the limiters should be variable, controlled by the zone the vehicle is in (ie, in a 30 limit, the car could not exceed 30).
Think of the benefits:
1. Less idiots barreling along at 120 in their BMWs with a mobile phone clamped to their ears.
2. Less accidents in town centres.
3. Insurance costs (might) be lowered as car theft and high-speed chases led by pimply-faced 13 year olds would drop radically!
Of course, on a racetrack, or other off-highway road the limiter would be set to the cars maximum speed. This idea won't win votes though, so I doubt you'll ever see it happen any time soon...
I always though that this site was a truly inspired idea! For anyone who hasn't been there, you just put some godawful long URL in there, and it translates it to a reasonably small URL (the URL actually goes to their server, then is redirected to the real site after a couple of seconds). No adverts, simple to use, works great!
:-)
(No, I don't have anything to do with running the site
(see this report of a test on a 733-MHz Linux system for details on mstone) run on the mainframe.
Yes, it's a word document. You'd think anyone writing an article for a Linux targetted site would at least check or convert the document to something everyone can read...
I guess everyone has different tastes, otherwise there would only be one distro out there. Personally I've bought SuSE twice, and absolutely hated it (I bought it the second time as I thought it must have improved and I like to show a bit of support for the Linux distro makers).
/var/log/messages was growing by the second due to module/USB and other problems with the laptop it was on. Memory usage was ridiculous, thrashing the swap file when idle. Using Yast2, well, I don't know how I managed to resist the urge to throw the laptop out of the window waiting *minutes* for it to update simple network settings. I'd always used RH before and after the SuSE episodes, and I'll never use another SuSE distro, or have it anywhere near any machines I administer. Sure, the problems probably could have been solved with a few days work, but RH installed and worked great on the same hardware out of the box. No waiting around for Yast, no swap thrashing or any of the other multitude of problems.
Anyway, the last time (can't remember the version, but it was the end of last year), it installed easily enough, but
Maybe it was just me, but I like to think I'm pretty handy with a command prompt and know my way around a *nix box and that was the worst experience of my dot.life. I've always used KDE as my desktop with RH, VERY rarely using Gnome, so people claiming RH is Gnome-centric are just plain wrong...
...but not so cool to have to lug a huge pair of bottle-bottom glasses to have to wear to see the screen! 1024x768 on a 6.4" screen?! I thought the smaller (normal) Vaios were a bit hard on the eyes, but this!...
From the article:
MS IE inserts the following line in all saved pages , so you can always find out where the page came from.
IE also uses that line in its "security" (yeah, it's unusual to see IE and security in one sentence without the word "flaw" in there I know) settings. If you have a frameset for example with two pages with different saved from lines, any attempt by one to access the other (usually via javascript) will result in a security violation error. Removing the line stops this behaviour. This is actually a good thing, now if only they could fix the other 6,000,000 or so problems...
If any of our politicians (in the UK) had a 10th of this guy's technological awareness, debating skill, backbone, or even a desire to do what's best for our economy rather than bending over for the Microsoft shafting I might actually bother voting.
As it is though, our lot are nothing but a bunch of self-serving, hypocrytical gluttons, who'll always take the easiest/most lucrative route. It's nice to hear from someone in politics who's not a complete asshole!
I often respond to spam. If there's a link to a website, be it the spammer's customer or a "remove" form I make it a point to pay the site a visit. In fact I don't just visit once, nope. I've set up a couple of javascript form-filling scripts to post garbage into their forms and reload their pages constantly!
I submitted 1.5 million "remove" requests to the last spam site I visited, and the current favourite "jdsdiagnostics" has send me over a gig of their bandwidth so far as I have 15 scripts loading their front page constantly into minimised windows.
If everyone did this it would drive them offline - how could they pay for a site serving 1000GB or more per week?! Many people on here have DSL or greater, just suck their bandwidth dry!!
I must admit that I freaked when I first saw "Boss 1" in the churchyard. The way it lumbers about with the screaching ghost faces swarming out of its body was pretty un-nerving.
:-)
I was kind of dreading the second set of catacombs too, it really did get my heart racing (lights off, sound on headphones).
I pissed off my neightours with it one night. I was happily blasting away with my headphones on, but I'd forgotten to switch the main speakers off (I have a really big amp+speaker setup on the PC), and I only realised when I decided to take a break after like 2 hours, and after taking the headphones off I could still hear the music. This was at 2AM
I've always thought it to be inconvenient, but if this is true maybe more people will purposely disable their cards in such a fashion.
??? How would this be more secure. The same data will still be transmitted, it's just a different entry method!
Why on Earth would a store be "beaming credit card numbers about" with no though to security? Seems they've opened themselves to a wave of court cases and possible fraud. Then again, every time you give your card to a waiter or till operator there's a chance the underpaid employee will be stealing the details via a personal "swiper". There was a programme on UK tv recently discussing this widespread fraud...
What audience are they targetting with language like that?
Apple users? After all, they buy IT equipment based on whether its case is covered in polkadot or flower patterns...
(BTW, I own a Mac
Of course, by resizing a partition you can always have the machines boot into Linux with no signs of the MS OS until the gestapo have cleared off to hassle someone else. It's not that difficult for anyone to do and means they can spend an extra few months migrating to a better OS a bit more smoothly...
Creativity - if you don't have this, then neither coding nor writing will succeed.
Erm, not to burst your bubble here, but didn't Jon Katz write a novel?
:-)
No, blame the tool. When you author in HTML, you don't need to do anything to get that functionality. In Flash, it's another item on the TODO list.
Riiight... Maybe I should throw out my computer too huh? Since it doesn't write the software for me, instead it's left it on the TODO list...
Can you resize the text? Sure, you can zoom, but I've seen sites that disable most of the context menu functions. Some people can't read itsy bitsy teensy weensy fonts, you know.
Hang on a minute! A few lines ago you were moaning about having to add a line of script to emulate the back button, yet NOW you're complaining that some authors take the time to add extra code to disable the context menu (which I've never seen anywhere, BTW and didn't think possible but haven't checked).
Most browsers will allow you to work around those issues by overriding certain (poort) choices made by the HTML author.
Yep, you can switch off stylesheets which often completely wreaks everything else on the page (in fact I remember that NS4 actually does this for you if you disable javascript!). If a font size has been set using CSS with IE4/5/6, you have to disable CSS to resize it as it won't respond to the fontsize menu.
However, I just leave an unreadable site - if the author can't be bothered to test the site out, I can't be bothered to jump through hoops to use it. This goes for Flash and HTML. Bad design is possible using either platform, but there's a hell of a lot more of it created in HTML, as any fool with a text editor can slap something up on Geocities.
Right. The carpenter (web developer) is using the wrong tool (Flash). He should be using the right tool--HTML.
I can't think of many appropriate applications for Flash. HTML provides content, Java applets provide interactivity, when necessary. Flash is unnecessary bulk and fluf.
It depends on the site. A site showing animated cartoons is going to look a tad dull in HTML. A web application (Oddpost for instance) is much easier to make cross browser using flash than dHTML (I use both, BTW but I don't have the crash-happy Java runtime installed on any browser on any platform).
Obviously any art/design oriented site will benefit from Flash, as it's a creative outlet. An artist or designer will find it much easier and faster to put something together using a visual tool than learning Java or dHTML before fighting against a compiler or scripting engine.
Or maybe you think no-one should use Photoshop either, and instead learn how to poke hex values into the display RAM to create an image. Not everyone is just looking for grey pages full of facts you know...
Flash was designed to display animated vector graphics, and to allow client-side interfaces with XML sockets to act as applications. It does this very well. Sure it's been abused by many sites in the past, but the days of the "Skip Intro" wastage are hopefully numbered.
I'm sorry but I feel compelled to respond to this. I'm not saying Flash is the best idea for this guy's site, I have no idea what he intends to do but:
1) I can't use the BACK button to get back one step.
Blame the author. It's simple to add the same functionality to the Flash movie (it can call javascript which in turn would call history.back()).
2) I can't search text with the browsers search function.
Again, there's nothing to stop a flash movie searching itself. There is a DOM, and scripting is always active (obviously).
3) I can't resize the browser window to my comfort and have the content resized as well.
This is just wrong. Depending upon the parameters used in the embed/object tags, a movie can be resizable, or of fixed dimensions (like java).
4) I have to learn how to use each and every site because everybody uses a different user interface (preferably using tiny fonts and tiny scrolling windows to display large amounts of text).
Hardly flash's fault! When I browse with my linux box I often come across html only sites with unreadable text, broken javascript and other multimedia elements that don't work. If anything, flash helps sites to be more accessable across platforms.
5) Murphy's Law: interesting sites always require the latest flash plugin, which unfortunately is not yet available for your platform.
Which platform do you use, exactly? I've yet to encounter a site I can't browse with Linux, Windows or even my Mac. I'm pretty sure I used to do just fine with a Solaris box too...
6) Murphy's 2nd Law: if you have the required plugin version it will crash your browser.
I've never seen flash crash my browser. It seems pretty stable on the 24hr a day information kiosks and set-top boxes I've used it on too.
It's true that flash isn't suitable for everything, although Flash MX has added a few very useful features, but it's not so bad really.
Java applets however, are my personal pet hate. I haven't had java enabled in a browser for years as it seemed to crash everything I ever tried it on, so now sites that STILL use lame java buttons for simple rollover effects are simply unusable to me.
Since it's illegal to give a public performance of a CD, DVD, video or Record, and even the people of the RIAA may possibly have been invited to parties in their youth (bit of a stretch with them, I know), it would be true to say they they have all commited offences against the companies they're representing!
I really think this point would go down well in any court cases - just asking any member of the RIAA present if they'd ever been to a party, ever watched a video round a friend's house or borrowed a CD in the past. I doubt any of them could claim to have not "committed an offence" in this way, without purgering(sp?) themselves...