IMHO, the best part of the article was in the comments at the bottom: "Tooth & Nail has a christmas sale-$2,$3,$5 & $8 cds!"
Thanks, Jordan from Kuwait! You reminded me that there's an independent label whose music (except for Danielson - worst. song. ever.) I enjoy that I should support.
Actually, not all old usenet posts are in the Google archive. Trust me, when I first heard about that archive I raced over there to see whether posts I made in certain forums of questionable repute back in college had been archived. Fortunately, all they've got are my old posts to alt.ascii-art. So either there are entire forums missing, or there's something wrong with my search parameters. At any rate, if I can't find myself, I'm not too worried about anyone else doing so.
We got a HP 4600dn color laser printer in our office 2 weeks ago. After a lot of fiddling with drivers and such, I have given up on the idea that it will ever print reliable color. I am not the only person who feels this way; many others in the HP online forum and other places report the same problem with color output on this printer (most of the time, it prints colors about 3 shades lighter than they should be). Basically, the 4600dn is good enough for printing out office documents for office workers. As a graphic designer who wants our research group's logo to print as gold and not pale beige, it is nearly worthless to me.
To sum up, I don't think this printer belongs in the category of "good products".
I'm not suggesting you ignore 10% of your audience. As a Mac user, I realize that alienating any significant minority group is a bad idea! I was just questioning whether there are that many sites out there that have a huge number of older browser users, such that you should let them dictate your design strategy instead of merely making your site accessible to them.
Is table-less design the future? Good question. I think it has to be determined on a site by site basis. Zeldman wrote a good article on the danger of getting rid of tables altogether.
First, I would have the owner of the "average site" in question check their site logs. In both my personal and work sites (which serve very different audiences), version 4 browsers became a less than 10% minority over a year ago. IE 5 dominates, IE 6 and Mozilla-based browsers are gaining ground, and the percentage of Netscape 4 users continues to shrink.
By the way, you can have a site that's still "table-based" and yet complies with standards. All the table tags exist in the latest W3C specs. Accessibility can still be achieved with a table-based layout.
If you need more ammo to convince a boss or client that building to standards is wise, go to MACCAWS (Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards) to get some ammo for your argument.
Increasingly, people are using non-computer devices (cell phones, PDA's) to browse web sites. What alternative devices are disabled people using, and how are they using them in ways web developers might not have considered (e.g. voice browser in cell phone)?
Mozilla.org recommends upgrading to 1.01, especially if you're not interested in being a 1.2 early adopter. I also had problems with 1.0 crashing on Win2K, but since installing the.01 patch, it's been smooth sailing.
Oh dear. Thanks for the heads up. Our research group actually does DARPA-funded IT research, and now I will be prepared to refuse when my boss comes to me and says, "Isn't this a great logo? Can you put it on the proposal we're sending?"
OTOH, I'm not too crazy about this Poindexter-headed initiative in the first place, so if they're constantly harrassed by a mob of paranoid conspiracy theorists, so much the better. Maybe we should write up a grant proposal to create them a new logo!
That a gold-fringed flag in a courtroom denotes jurisdiction is pure conspiracy-theorist myth. Falls into the same category as anything printed in the Weekly World News.
Or consider E3. I've seen people lie, cheat, and steal to get into that conference because it's where companies debut cool new games and let you try them out. Back when Comdex and E3 were both in Atlanta, I went to Comdex because I had to for work, but I went to E3 because I wanted to (even worked as a booth bunny once to gain entrance). The atmosphere of each show is totally different: Comdex is business occasionally masquerading as fun, E3 is fun occasionally masquerading as business.
The only thing I've ever got out of attending COMDEX is a horrible flu.
You must not have been trying hard enough. I managed to score a plastic slinky, a stress ball, and a T-shirt that says "WAN Downtime is not an option!"
A friend of mine is a middle-school teacher. She has a boy in her class named, no joke, "Aire Jordan". If parents insist on giving their kids names like this, what are you gonna do?
From the article: "Everybody is onboard. Linux is now the preferred OS for animation and special effects." I'm curious to know how many copies of DeCSS are floating around on the studios' production machines.
I remember hearing dozens of radio ads for Riffage a few years back. I never visited the site because it didn't sound like it would appeal to me, but I had always assumed it went out of business like everyone else running over-hyped ads for.coms in '99. It's interesting to hear that it hung around.
I think this becomes even more pronounced as people use a greater variety of devices to manage information. Even people who know that the computer on their desk runs Windows XP may not realize their cell phone or TV cable box has an OS, too. The trick is, really, to make it irrelevant enough that information access is only restricted by the ability of the device to render or use it in some form. (Will stop while I'm ahead... too much rambling.)
That was pretty funny! "We rely on the courts and antitrust laws to keep Microsoft from abusing its enormous power." Hee! And I rely on my fellow citizens to elect the most trustworthy, responsible people for public office.
Having worked on part of their site, I am not surprised. The technology we used to build the section I worked on (not the part you're having trouble with, so I can't speak to that specifically) followed standards (XML, XSLT, HTML 4), so it should work with various browsers well. However, I got the impression that the higher-ups managing the project were not nearly so concerned with the technology used, or whether it met standards. They just wanted to make sure the site was secure, and worked in X testing environments. So, depending on the vendor who built that part of the site, you could get different results. I believe the company I worked for at the time built a good chunk of their site, but since they no longer exist, I can't say for sure.
FWIW, Bank of America's site seems to work fine with Mozilla.
Unfortunately, not all of their site does. There's a part of their site called EAGLS (forget what the acronym stands for) that does not work on any MacOS browser. Our university's Mac User Group has a whole list of workarounds specifically for that site just so people can access their information. Every few months someone asks about it on the MUG listserv. (As an aside, I actually worked on that site at one point, and I can tell you that there's no good reason for it to boot out Mac users, it's just some brain-dead filter someone put in that kicks them out.)
I spent a hellish month in Birmingham working on part of the Lloyds TSB site. From a project management perspective, it was a nightmare. Technologically, it was one of the coolest projects I've ever worked on (lots of XML/XSLT). Seeing the Register write, "Clear winner and kudos goes to Lloyds TSB," it makes me feel that perhaps it was worth the stress, the bad coffee, the long hours, the skanky hotels, and the endless meetings, after all. It seems like what we built not only worked in the real world, it worked well.
On a related note, Microsoft is running a "Ms. M.o.X.i.e." contest for women who use Office X for MacOS X. As an example on the contest page, they profile fashion designer and Seinfeld-ex Shoshanna Lowenstein. The winner of the Ms. MoXie contest gets $10,000 and a new iMac.
Just goes to show, sometimes MS's truth is stranger than its fiction.
Thank you! This is exactly what I was thinking. We had this happen in our research group this morning and our sysadmin is out sick today. None of us were stupid enough to actually click on the message, but it disturbed us, and we want to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Installing a personal firewall will likely mean facing The Wrath of the Sysadmin when he returns Monday. But looking at other posts, it seems like disabling Windows Messaging is a fairly good solution.
Frankly, I'm surprised this happened to us since our group has its own full-time Sysadmin who makes sure our little corner of the campus network is secure and up-to-date with patches, and is ruthless about security on our individual computers. As a result, most other campus Internet problems don't affect us, except when the main router goes down or a cable gets sliced or something like that. So I have trouble believing that this was caused by a lax configuration of Win2K.
Re:Our Parents are the evil fucks, not us
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 1
no generation ever engaged in as much excess, or stripped their descendents of as much freedom and constitutional protection, not to mention financially mortgaging their children's future with unprecendented government deficits... than did the generation of our parents.
Actually, the children of those who fought in the Civil War might disagree with that. Especially in the South, where that generation grew up under the economic hardships of Reconstruction.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you, just saying it could be worse: at least our parents haven't ripped the country to shreds waging war on each other (yet). (I'm also not saying that the outcome of the Civil War was ultimately bad, just that living in its aftermath wasn't easy.)
Actually, the internet has given politicians the ability to communicate directly with the world, not just their constituents, via their web sites and email. Not that they couldn't send out newsletters before, but email newsletters are more cost-effective.
Case in point: Back when I lived in NC, I signed up to be on my Senator's email mailing list. Even though I've moved to another state, I still get the messages, which include info like when he'll be appearing on various news shows and what cities in NC he'll be visiting that week.
I think it's the ability to get out timely information like that where the internet beats out traditional media. Newspapers and snail mail are more expensive and slower, TV and radio are here-and-gone so if you didn't write that information down, too bad. The internet is uniquely fast and long-lasting.
The letters have no relation with any script, from anywhere at any time
I'll take your word for it, since I have not studied this manuscript. However, I noticed that the letters look very similar to the modern-day Arabic alphabet, although the writing seems to go left-to-right instead of right-to-left. I wonder if the Arabic alphabet was an influence on the person who created this code?
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, the best part of the article was in the comments at the bottom:
"Tooth & Nail has a christmas sale-$2,$3,$5 & $8 cds!"
Thanks, Jordan from Kuwait! You reminded me that there's an independent label whose music (except for Danielson - worst. song. ever.) I enjoy that I should support.
Actually, not all old usenet posts are in the Google archive. Trust me, when I first heard about that archive I raced over there to see whether posts I made in certain forums of questionable repute back in college had been archived. Fortunately, all they've got are my old posts to alt.ascii-art. So either there are entire forums missing, or there's something wrong with my search parameters. At any rate, if I can't find myself, I'm not too worried about anyone else doing so.
high-end HP printers (4xxx series)
We got a HP 4600dn color laser printer in our office 2 weeks ago. After a lot of fiddling with drivers and such, I have given up on the idea that it will ever print reliable color. I am not the only person who feels this way; many others in the HP online forum and other places report the same problem with color output on this printer (most of the time, it prints colors about 3 shades lighter than they should be). Basically, the 4600dn is good enough for printing out office documents for office workers. As a graphic designer who wants our research group's logo to print as gold and not pale beige, it is nearly worthless to me.
To sum up, I don't think this printer belongs in the category of "good products".
I'm not suggesting you ignore 10% of your audience. As a Mac user, I realize that alienating any significant minority group is a bad idea! I was just questioning whether there are that many sites out there that have a huge number of older browser users, such that you should let them dictate your design strategy instead of merely making your site accessible to them.
Is table-less design the future? Good question. I think it has to be determined on a site by site basis. Zeldman wrote a good article on the danger of getting rid of tables altogether.
First, I would have the owner of the "average site" in question check their site logs. In both my personal and work sites (which serve very different audiences), version 4 browsers became a less than 10% minority over a year ago. IE 5 dominates, IE 6 and Mozilla-based browsers are gaining ground, and the percentage of Netscape 4 users continues to shrink.
By the way, you can have a site that's still "table-based" and yet complies with standards. All the table tags exist in the latest W3C specs. Accessibility can still be achieved with a table-based layout.
If you need more ammo to convince a boss or client that building to standards is wise, go to MACCAWS (Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards) to get some ammo for your argument.
Increasingly, people are using non-computer devices (cell phones, PDA's) to browse web sites. What alternative devices are disabled people using, and how are they using them in ways web developers might not have considered (e.g. voice browser in cell phone)?
Mozilla.org recommends upgrading to 1.01, especially if you're not interested in being a 1.2 early adopter. I also had problems with 1.0 crashing on Win2K, but since installing the .01 patch, it's been smooth sailing.
Oh dear. Thanks for the heads up. Our research group actually does DARPA-funded IT research, and now I will be prepared to refuse when my boss comes to me and says, "Isn't this a great logo? Can you put it on the proposal we're sending?"
OTOH, I'm not too crazy about this Poindexter-headed initiative in the first place, so if they're constantly harrassed by a mob of paranoid conspiracy theorists, so much the better. Maybe we should write up a grant proposal to create them a new logo!
That a gold-fringed flag in a courtroom denotes jurisdiction is pure conspiracy-theorist myth. Falls into the same category as anything printed in the Weekly World News.
There are easier to read explanations of the flag myth, but this is the only one I could find on short notice: http://www.militia-watchdog.org/suss4.htm#fringe
Or consider E3. I've seen people lie, cheat, and steal to get into that conference because it's where companies debut cool new games and let you try them out. Back when Comdex and E3 were both in Atlanta, I went to Comdex because I had to for work, but I went to E3 because I wanted to (even worked as a booth bunny once to gain entrance). The atmosphere of each show is totally different: Comdex is business occasionally masquerading as fun, E3 is fun occasionally masquerading as business.
According to the E3 web site, 60,000 people attended in 2002.
The only thing I've ever got out of attending COMDEX is a horrible flu.
You must not have been trying hard enough. I managed to score a plastic slinky, a stress ball, and a T-shirt that says "WAN Downtime is not an option!"
A friend of mine is a middle-school teacher. She has a boy in her class named, no joke, "Aire Jordan". If parents insist on giving their kids names like this, what are you gonna do?
From the article: "Everybody is onboard. Linux is now the preferred OS for animation and special effects."
I'm curious to know how many copies of DeCSS are floating around on the studios' production machines.
I remember hearing dozens of radio ads for Riffage a few years back. I never visited the site because it didn't sound like it would appeal to me, but I had always assumed it went out of business like everyone else running over-hyped ads for .coms in '99. It's interesting to hear that it hung around.
I think this becomes even more pronounced as people use a greater variety of devices to manage information. Even people who know that the computer on their desk runs Windows XP may not realize their cell phone or TV cable box has an OS, too. The trick is, really, to make it irrelevant enough that information access is only restricted by the ability of the device to render or use it in some form.
(Will stop while I'm ahead... too much rambling.)
Actually, that sounds a lot like Sherlock for MacOS. It lets you search for any information, anywhere, in just about any format.
That was pretty funny!
"We rely on the courts and antitrust laws to keep Microsoft from abusing its enormous power."
Hee! And I rely on my fellow citizens to elect the most trustworthy, responsible people for public office.
Having worked on part of their site, I am not surprised. The technology we used to build the section I worked on (not the part you're having trouble with, so I can't speak to that specifically) followed standards (XML, XSLT, HTML 4), so it should work with various browsers well. However, I got the impression that the higher-ups managing the project were not nearly so concerned with the technology used, or whether it met standards. They just wanted to make sure the site was secure, and worked in X testing environments. So, depending on the vendor who built that part of the site, you could get different results. I believe the company I worked for at the time built a good chunk of their site, but since they no longer exist, I can't say for sure.
FWIW, Bank of America's site seems to work fine with Mozilla.
Unfortunately, not all of their site does. There's a part of their site called EAGLS (forget what the acronym stands for) that does not work on any MacOS browser. Our university's Mac User Group has a whole list of workarounds specifically for that site just so people can access their information. Every few months someone asks about it on the MUG listserv. (As an aside, I actually worked on that site at one point, and I can tell you that there's no good reason for it to boot out Mac users, it's just some brain-dead filter someone put in that kicks them out.)
I spent a hellish month in Birmingham working on part of the Lloyds TSB site. From a project management perspective, it was a nightmare. Technologically, it was one of the coolest projects I've ever worked on (lots of XML/XSLT). Seeing the Register write, "Clear winner and kudos goes to Lloyds TSB," it makes me feel that perhaps it was worth the stress, the bad coffee, the long hours, the skanky hotels, and the endless meetings, after all. It seems like what we built not only worked in the real world, it worked well.
On a related note, Microsoft is running a "Ms. M.o.X.i.e." contest for women who use Office X for MacOS X. As an example on the contest page, they profile fashion designer and Seinfeld-ex Shoshanna Lowenstein. The winner of the Ms. MoXie contest gets $10,000 and a new iMac.
Just goes to show, sometimes MS's truth is stranger than its fiction.
Thank you! This is exactly what I was thinking. We had this happen in our research group this morning and our sysadmin is out sick today. None of us were stupid enough to actually click on the message, but it disturbed us, and we want to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Installing a personal firewall will likely mean facing The Wrath of the Sysadmin when he returns Monday. But looking at other posts, it seems like disabling Windows Messaging is a fairly good solution.
Frankly, I'm surprised this happened to us since our group has its own full-time Sysadmin who makes sure our little corner of the campus network is secure and up-to-date with patches, and is ruthless about security on our individual computers. As a result, most other campus Internet problems don't affect us, except when the main router goes down or a cable gets sliced or something like that. So I have trouble believing that this was caused by a lax configuration of Win2K.
no generation ever engaged in as much excess, or stripped their descendents of as much freedom and constitutional protection, not to mention financially mortgaging their children's future with unprecendented government deficits... than did the generation of our parents.
Actually, the children of those who fought in the Civil War might disagree with that. Especially in the South, where that generation grew up under the economic hardships of Reconstruction.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you, just saying it could be worse: at least our parents haven't ripped the country to shreds waging war on each other (yet). (I'm also not saying that the outcome of the Civil War was ultimately bad, just that living in its aftermath wasn't easy.)
Actually, the internet has given politicians the ability to communicate directly with the world, not just their constituents, via their web sites and email. Not that they couldn't send out newsletters before, but email newsletters are more cost-effective.
Case in point: Back when I lived in NC, I signed up to be on my Senator's email mailing list. Even though I've moved to another state, I still get the messages, which include info like when he'll be appearing on various news shows and what cities in NC he'll be visiting that week.
I think it's the ability to get out timely information like that where the internet beats out traditional media. Newspapers and snail mail are more expensive and slower, TV and radio are here-and-gone so if you didn't write that information down, too bad. The internet is uniquely fast and long-lasting.
The letters have no relation with any script, from anywhere at any time
I'll take your word for it, since I have not studied this manuscript. However, I noticed that the letters look very similar to the modern-day Arabic alphabet, although the writing seems to go left-to-right instead of right-to-left. I wonder if the Arabic alphabet was an influence on the person who created this code?