if we stomach the punishment of this guy for the ddos attack, in the name of fairness and morality, do we not destroy scientology for doing far worse on multiple occasions?
if someone makes an unreadable page, no one will read it
that's all the consequences that are needed
there is no need for a standards body to stand there poopooing them. in short, compulsory adherence to standards is some sort of game that has no real value in increasing the quality of the internet, but merely an exclusionary principle that serves to reduce webpage quantity, and some kinds of quality that fall outside of a narrow standard
its useless and pointless, to emphasize standards, when they are still evolving. until they stop evolving, let the mess be, in spite of your psychological compulsion to order things. it gets in the way of innovation
your html teacher is explaining how to make tables
you tell your teacher its a straightjacket, that you'd rather work with nested divs, and describe the divs' styles in external files, for easy changeups
"but that's not standard" the teacher replies
yes, positive, useful, helpful creation is not standard
an emphasis on adherence to standards is the path to technological stagnation
do you honestly expect raising the barrier of entry to webpage publication will result in a better web? no, it will result in a smaller web, of dreary sameness. i applaud the hobbyist who knows nothing and starts churning out what you perceive as crap design. he's creating
the value of the web is in its noisy cacophony of creation, not its fascist adherence to some page standard
life is messy. deal with it, or go grow a small little moustache
its early in the age of the locomotive, and there are 5 different track gauges. the engineers who have to retrofit 5 different track gauges onto their railcar design are obviously perturbed by this. it will 30 more years before one track gauge is standard. thats the flipside to innovation
you can prevent little boys from breaking windows. but there is nothing you will ever do that will make technological innovation a clean and orderly and standardized process
in 20 years, all browsers will render the same. until then, stop looking a gift horse in the mouth. you are mistaking the irreducibly messy process of innovation with common vandalism. you fail at choosing the right parable
of course new stuff is built on what comes before. but that observation of yours doesn't banish messiness. in fact it neatly describes the nature of the mess: weird random accretions on what works fine and is standard
it would be better if i could fly by flapping my arms. it would be better if i had a billion dollars. none of which describe reality, nor have you. innovation does not proceed in the way you describe. its messy. wouldn't it be neat if innovation were clean and standardized? yeah, of course. except it never will be, so what you say is pointless
a bunch of random crap being flung on the wall, having no idea what will stick. and out of the mess comes... us, homo sapiens
do you think that the guy who took an obscure ms outlook component and used it to do partial refreshes of webpages knew he was creating ajax? could you, in the late 1990s, have looked at what that guy was doing and you would have perceived with absolute omniscient clarity such a groundbreaking innovation? could he even?
there is no purposeful effort, its blind fumbling. progress is nothing more than a mistake at first, that is recognized eventually to be better than the "right" way to do things. its like asking if fleming knew what he was doing when he screwed up a bacterial culture and discovered penicillin
simply put: your understanding of what innovation is is flawed. innovation very much is a process of people having no idea what they are doing. those messy fools you perceive are like that guy working for cern 20 years ago spending WAY too much time with markup (aka, tim berners-lee). you think he knew what he was doing? you think he woke up and said "i'm going to pave today the way for perhaps the most earthshattering form of media mankind has yet invented"? no, he was just trying to share research. nothing purposeful about what his work did.
"Most of the people don't know what they're doing, and they're certainly not innovating."
the invention of the internet was EXACTLY that: a bunch of people, in small steps, having no idea what they were doing, and innovating. innovation is the exact opposite of how you perceive it
as for what i put faith in, yes, absolutely, i put faith in people at large to innovate, as a group. on an individual basis, 99% of them are idiots. but there is absolutely no way you, me, or anyone else can differentiate between insane ramblings of an idiot, and the next great technological innovation. because neither of us, nor anyone, is omniscient
so you respect the mess, because you have some humility about where you really are in the process. you don't have control over it. no one does. or at least, you should learn that humility
better analogy: in the early days of the railroad, there were many different track gauges. this made life hell for railroad car engineers who had to retrofit all of their designs. eventually, one gauge won out and standardization took place
and there WERE a lot of car crashes in the early days of automobiles due to reasons that would be stupid today. and there WERE a lot of cases of botulism in the early days of canning
the point is, in the early days of technology, there is no standardization. innovation leads, standardizaiton follows, consolidating. not the other way around
the chaos you see me advocating is rather the chaos i see as simply an inevitable part of the process of innovation and technological creation. its unavoidable, and you don't standardize it up front, you standardize it later. your entire perspective on the issue is wrong and backwards
i am recognizing chaos is undeniably part of the mix. we are still innovating in markup. what do you think ajax is doing to how webpages are customarily handled, in a fundamental way? you think we've figured out html and css and that's it, end of story, no further changes?
this is what i know about chaos, and what you must learn: standards do not lead, and then innovation follows. no, messy innovation leads, and standards follow behind, consolidating
the chaos you perceive is the creative ferment that makes the entire internet as we know it possible. its not some junk and noise, its the process of creation. it is more important than standards
1. a webpage is not a c program. a c program HAS to be anal retentive to work. out of millions of lines, one misplaced ascii character and the whole thing is mud. a webpage meanwhile is just a bit of aesthetic markup, it can degrade, it can degrade heavily, and it is still worth something
2. you're complaining about different track gauges in the dawn of the age of railroads. i would expect that engineers who had to build rail cars a century and a half ago would complain about customizing every car for 5 different gauges. however, that's the way innovation works, its messy. standards do not get in front of innovation, innovation leads and standards trails behind, consolidating. now, today, all track gauges are standardized. and, in a decade or two or more, all webpage markup will be standardized. but not while we're still innovating in that area in the time we exist in: its still the dawn of the internet in 2008. so your complaints and your perspective are perfunctory and premature, outside of an understanding of proper historical context. they would be true uttered in 30 years time, but your words are not true today
about the hobbyist tinkerers who used a microsoft outlook component to do partial page refreshes, eventually creating what we now know as ajax?
hobbyists are not brain dead morons following the pack. they lead the pack
in fact, those overly obsessed with standards compliance represent a sort of brittle, uncreative mind that is in fact the brain dead morons who trail at the bottom of the pack. everything must be in a straightjacket, or they can't deal
creativity trumps all of your observations. standards follow innovation, not the other way around
and some guy told you tables were frustrating to work with, and instead why not put everything in nested divs, and describe the different classes of styles of the different divs in an external file, so as to effect easy modification of rendering in one change rather than going into every td element and changing the test alignment to left rather than center, for example, would you have deducted points for not following the standard way to render tables?
if not, you understand my point about the proper relationship between messiness, innovation, and standards
in 30 years you would be dead on. but the web and its standards are still evolving. as such, messiness reigns, and is a sign of creative ferment, which is a good thing
you're like a guy complaining that the different railroad companies all use a different track gauge so you have to keep retrofitting the rail cars you build
i'm sorry progress is messy. but there are no standards, because the web is still evolving. standards cannot get in front of innovation. standards must naturally follow behind innovation, and consolidate
in 30 years, maybe it will be all the same, and then your complaints would have some validity. but right now, your complaints are hollow, because you simply don't understand the historical context in which your job exists. you work in an evolving, fluid specialty. you're not a plumber, working in a field that has existed since the romans, and all the pipe sizes are standardized
so stop complaining. what you complain about is completely unavoidable, and is the flip negative side of a much greater positive that makes your job even possible: technological innovation and creation
i think the most effective use of the android kill switch to dramatic effect was in "The Measure Of A Man" episode of The Next Generation, where Riker has to prosecute Data in court, and prove he is a slave machine, not a sentient being. Riker uses the android kill switch to abruptly deactivate Data while he is on the witness stand, famously saying "Pinocchio is broken; its strings have been cut." It's much better use of the android kill switch than that later episode where...
1. jpeg is a old cold hard standard. its not evolving. additionally, its a very limited spec: it involves static images. no more. the web is anything goes, anything you can write up in an sgml flavor, encode, and stuff into http, standards constantly evolving. comparing jpeg to the web is like comparing a carrot to the entire vegetable kingdom. orders of magnitude of difference in dimensions of description
2. lots of the coolest stuff you can do with webpages involve things that are far outside any standards. like ajax. or howabout youtube: enocding videos as flash. these are things that evolved on their own, outside of any standards committee. in fact, they used proprietary technology from microsoft and adobe at first. not only that, they used proprietary technology in innovative ways that the technology wasn't meant for. microsoft's early ajax-like code was meant to be an outlook extension. adobe's flash was meant to describe simple animations, not video encoding. but if one appreciated the power of the idea of ajax or video encoding in flash early, and wanted to play with it, as a hobbyist, you could. and why shouldn't they? a hobbyist is supposed to wait for standards to keep up? a hobbyist is supposed to wait until someone writes a brain dead point and click interface before tinkering? you think the web is better without youtube or google maps? of course you don't. but that's what your jpeg allegory is trying to tell us about standards and the still evolving web
what innovation means, and how its fits into the picture, and how innovation works, has nothing to do with standards. on the contrary, its the thematic opposite of standards compliance. innovation comes first, and then a long time later, standards comes along and consolidated the best practices that were discovered as innovative technologies move from the cutting edge into mainstream mundane use
what you don't do is get in front of innovation, and write standards for it before people innovate. that's insane. no one is so omniscient as to know what the next great leap forward on the web will be, and when it will happen, and what format it will first manifest itself in. no one says "i'm going to write the spec for encoding video on a webpage before it happens, and everyone is going to fall in line behind me, and everyone is going to use brain dead point and click interfaces to make that happen." actually, some people did try to do that. look up vrml (virtual reality markup language) from the mid90s, amongst many other examples, of standards trying to come before innovation. it doesn't work. its not how technology evolves
but this is what you expect us to appreciate if your jpeg allegory is supposed to be instructive to us about the relationship between the jpeg spec and webpage specs
1. the web is still evolving, the standards keep changing. no pressing need to lock things in 2. it is superior design to have a browser that gracefully degrades rather than being and brittle and refusing to render everytime someone forgets to close a <p> element. not simply because of nonstandard pages, but for a whole host of other reasons, including handling partial transmissions 3. the strength of the web is open participation, low barrier to entry. hobbyists should publish, and this is a good sign. hobbyists should not expected to be anal retentive standards zealots
complete standards compliance should always be low on the web because this is a sign of a HEALTHY internet, because it means nonprofessionals are contributing content. this is always a good thing, this what made the internet a powerful nw form of media in the first place. if ever there were some sort of gatekeeper organization or rigorous technical specification that enforced standards compliance, you would raise the barrier to entry onto the web by regular joes. you would reduce the variety of the web, make it more monoclonal, and hurt a vibrant ocmmunity
low standards compliance is not only a complete nonissue and not a problem, its a good sign. the lower standards compliance is, the better for us all
make believe the electoral college was completely wiped away. make believe every other flaw you see in the voting process were wiped away. it's one direct vote for the president, no modifications or tweaks that you currently hide behind
now, in such a system, you encounter someone who says "i'm not going to vote, because so many people are going to vote for obama anyways, he's going to win anyways, so my vote doesn't matter"
i'm going to borrow that phrase from you, that's hilarious, thanks;-)
however right or wrong you comments are (and i agree with most of what you said) it just makes resistance to mandating the change to ipv6 even less potent: its not so hard, you insist. well then good! lets bank your assertions
because in reality, my pointing out that ipv6 has to be mandated (or, rather, to qualify your comments, that the death of ipv4 has to be mandated) has less to do with technical truths than with human psychological truths
so i concede all of your technical points, regardless of their truthfulness or not. for one, because you are mostly right, but mostly because my point about human psychology is the real meat of my observation
Slashdot Mirror
you don't understand what motivates them
religious bigotry is bottomless pit of slime which constantly renews
all you need is arrogance and a feeling of superiority
and then "god" gives you the right to kill subhumans
subhumans are anyone who doesn't believe as you do
we don't want them shut down
let them communicate openly. then track the fuckers. now their communication is more hidden, and thus our knowledge of what's going on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology)
scientology standard operating procedure
if we stomach the punishment of this guy for the ddos attack, in the name of fairness and morality, do we not destroy scientology for doing far worse on multiple occasions?
such as fair game, you would consider it your moral duty to destroy scientology for being the freedom destroying fungal growth that it is
the unattainable is unknown
http://zombo.com/
welcome to zombo.com
welcome to zombo.com!
if someone makes an unreadable page, no one will read it
that's all the consequences that are needed
there is no need for a standards body to stand there poopooing them. in short, compulsory adherence to standards is some sort of game that has no real value in increasing the quality of the internet, but merely an exclusionary principle that serves to reduce webpage quantity, and some kinds of quality that fall outside of a narrow standard
its useless and pointless, to emphasize standards, when they are still evolving. until they stop evolving, let the mess be, in spite of your psychological compulsion to order things. it gets in the way of innovation
your html teacher is explaining how to make tables
you tell your teacher its a straightjacket, that you'd rather work with nested divs, and describe the divs' styles in external files, for easy changeups
"but that's not standard" the teacher replies
yes, positive, useful, helpful creation is not standard
an emphasis on adherence to standards is the path to technological stagnation
do you honestly expect raising the barrier of entry to webpage publication will result in a better web? no, it will result in a smaller web, of dreary sameness. i applaud the hobbyist who knows nothing and starts churning out what you perceive as crap design. he's creating
the value of the web is in its noisy cacophony of creation, not its fascist adherence to some page standard
life is messy. deal with it, or go grow a small little moustache
its early in the age of the locomotive, and there are 5 different track gauges. the engineers who have to retrofit 5 different track gauges onto their railcar design are obviously perturbed by this. it will 30 more years before one track gauge is standard. thats the flipside to innovation
you can prevent little boys from breaking windows. but there is nothing you will ever do that will make technological innovation a clean and orderly and standardized process
in 20 years, all browsers will render the same. until then, stop looking a gift horse in the mouth. you are mistaking the irreducibly messy process of innovation with common vandalism. you fail at choosing the right parable
of course new stuff is built on what comes before. but that observation of yours doesn't banish messiness. in fact it neatly describes the nature of the mess: weird random accretions on what works fine and is standard
it would be better if i could fly by flapping my arms. it would be better if i had a billion dollars. none of which describe reality, nor have you. innovation does not proceed in the way you describe. its messy. wouldn't it be neat if innovation were clean and standardized? yeah, of course. except it never will be, so what you say is pointless
a bunch of random crap being flung on the wall, having no idea what will stick. and out of the mess comes... us, homo sapiens
do you think that the guy who took an obscure ms outlook component and used it to do partial refreshes of webpages knew he was creating ajax? could you, in the late 1990s, have looked at what that guy was doing and you would have perceived with absolute omniscient clarity such a groundbreaking innovation? could he even?
there is no purposeful effort, its blind fumbling. progress is nothing more than a mistake at first, that is recognized eventually to be better than the "right" way to do things. its like asking if fleming knew what he was doing when he screwed up a bacterial culture and discovered penicillin
simply put: your understanding of what innovation is is flawed. innovation very much is a process of people having no idea what they are doing. those messy fools you perceive are like that guy working for cern 20 years ago spending WAY too much time with markup (aka, tim berners-lee). you think he knew what he was doing? you think he woke up and said "i'm going to pave today the way for perhaps the most earthshattering form of media mankind has yet invented"? no, he was just trying to share research. nothing purposeful about what his work did.
"Most of the people don't know what they're doing, and they're certainly not innovating."
the invention of the internet was EXACTLY that: a bunch of people, in small steps, having no idea what they were doing, and innovating. innovation is the exact opposite of how you perceive it
as for what i put faith in, yes, absolutely, i put faith in people at large to innovate, as a group. on an individual basis, 99% of them are idiots. but there is absolutely no way you, me, or anyone else can differentiate between insane ramblings of an idiot, and the next great technological innovation. because neither of us, nor anyone, is omniscient
so you respect the mess, because you have some humility about where you really are in the process. you don't have control over it. no one does. or at least, you should learn that humility
better analogy: in the early days of the railroad, there were many different track gauges. this made life hell for railroad car engineers who had to retrofit all of their designs. eventually, one gauge won out and standardization took place
and there WERE a lot of car crashes in the early days of automobiles due to reasons that would be stupid today. and there WERE a lot of cases of botulism in the early days of canning
the point is, in the early days of technology, there is no standardization. innovation leads, standardizaiton follows, consolidating. not the other way around
the chaos you see me advocating is rather the chaos i see as simply an inevitable part of the process of innovation and technological creation. its unavoidable, and you don't standardize it up front, you standardize it later. your entire perspective on the issue is wrong and backwards
i am recognizing chaos is undeniably part of the mix. we are still innovating in markup. what do you think ajax is doing to how webpages are customarily handled, in a fundamental way? you think we've figured out html and css and that's it, end of story, no further changes?
this is what i know about chaos, and what you must learn: standards do not lead, and then innovation follows. no, messy innovation leads, and standards follow behind, consolidating
the chaos you perceive is the creative ferment that makes the entire internet as we know it possible. its not some junk and noise, its the process of creation. it is more important than standards
1. a webpage is not a c program. a c program HAS to be anal retentive to work. out of millions of lines, one misplaced ascii character and the whole thing is mud. a webpage meanwhile is just a bit of aesthetic markup, it can degrade, it can degrade heavily, and it is still worth something
2. you're complaining about different track gauges in the dawn of the age of railroads. i would expect that engineers who had to build rail cars a century and a half ago would complain about customizing every car for 5 different gauges. however, that's the way innovation works, its messy. standards do not get in front of innovation, innovation leads and standards trails behind, consolidating. now, today, all track gauges are standardized. and, in a decade or two or more, all webpage markup will be standardized. but not while we're still innovating in that area in the time we exist in: its still the dawn of the internet in 2008. so your complaints and your perspective are perfunctory and premature, outside of an understanding of proper historical context. they would be true uttered in 30 years time, but your words are not true today
about the hobbyist tinkerers who used a microsoft outlook component to do partial page refreshes, eventually creating what we now know as ajax?
hobbyists are not brain dead morons following the pack. they lead the pack
in fact, those overly obsessed with standards compliance represent a sort of brittle, uncreative mind that is in fact the brain dead morons who trail at the bottom of the pack. everything must be in a straightjacket, or they can't deal
creativity trumps all of your observations. standards follow innovation, not the other way around
and some guy told you tables were frustrating to work with, and instead why not put everything in nested divs, and describe the different classes of styles of the different divs in an external file, so as to effect easy modification of rendering in one change rather than going into every td element and changing the test alignment to left rather than center, for example, would you have deducted points for not following the standard way to render tables?
if not, you understand my point about the proper relationship between messiness, innovation, and standards
in 30 years you would be dead on. but the web and its standards are still evolving. as such, messiness reigns, and is a sign of creative ferment, which is a good thing
is more commonly known as innovation
you're like a guy complaining that the different railroad companies all use a different track gauge so you have to keep retrofitting the rail cars you build
i'm sorry progress is messy. but there are no standards, because the web is still evolving. standards cannot get in front of innovation. standards must naturally follow behind innovation, and consolidate
in 30 years, maybe it will be all the same, and then your complaints would have some validity. but right now, your complaints are hollow, because you simply don't understand the historical context in which your job exists. you work in an evolving, fluid specialty. you're not a plumber, working in a field that has existed since the romans, and all the pipe sizes are standardized
so stop complaining. what you complain about is completely unavoidable, and is the flip negative side of a much greater positive that makes your job even possible: technological innovation and creation
i think the most effective use of the android kill switch to dramatic effect was in "The Measure Of A Man" episode of The Next Generation, where Riker has to prosecute Data in court, and prove he is a slave machine, not a sentient being. Riker uses the android kill switch to abruptly deactivate Data while he is on the witness stand, famously saying "Pinocchio is broken; its strings have been cut." It's much better use of the android kill switch than that later episode where...
wait...
what are we talking about?
you wouldn't have a job. you would be fired and replaced by a point and click interface your clueless boss would use
do not belittle browser incompatibility, it keeps you employed. it means you have special rare expensive expertise, rather than common cheap expertise
1. jpeg is a old cold hard standard. its not evolving. additionally, its a very limited spec: it involves static images. no more. the web is anything goes, anything you can write up in an sgml flavor, encode, and stuff into http, standards constantly evolving. comparing jpeg to the web is like comparing a carrot to the entire vegetable kingdom. orders of magnitude of difference in dimensions of description
2. lots of the coolest stuff you can do with webpages involve things that are far outside any standards. like ajax. or howabout youtube: enocding videos as flash. these are things that evolved on their own, outside of any standards committee. in fact, they used proprietary technology from microsoft and adobe at first. not only that, they used proprietary technology in innovative ways that the technology wasn't meant for. microsoft's early ajax-like code was meant to be an outlook extension. adobe's flash was meant to describe simple animations, not video encoding. but if one appreciated the power of the idea of ajax or video encoding in flash early, and wanted to play with it, as a hobbyist, you could. and why shouldn't they? a hobbyist is supposed to wait for standards to keep up? a hobbyist is supposed to wait until someone writes a brain dead point and click interface before tinkering? you think the web is better without youtube or google maps? of course you don't. but that's what your jpeg allegory is trying to tell us about standards and the still evolving web
what innovation means, and how its fits into the picture, and how innovation works, has nothing to do with standards. on the contrary, its the thematic opposite of standards compliance. innovation comes first, and then a long time later, standards comes along and consolidated the best practices that were discovered as innovative technologies move from the cutting edge into mainstream mundane use
what you don't do is get in front of innovation, and write standards for it before people innovate. that's insane. no one is so omniscient as to know what the next great leap forward on the web will be, and when it will happen, and what format it will first manifest itself in. no one says "i'm going to write the spec for encoding video on a webpage before it happens, and everyone is going to fall in line behind me, and everyone is going to use brain dead point and click interfaces to make that happen." actually, some people did try to do that. look up vrml (virtual reality markup language) from the mid90s, amongst many other examples, of standards trying to come before innovation. it doesn't work. its not how technology evolves
but this is what you expect us to appreciate if your jpeg allegory is supposed to be instructive to us about the relationship between the jpeg spec and webpage specs
1. the web is still evolving, the standards keep changing. no pressing need to lock things in
2. it is superior design to have a browser that gracefully degrades rather than being and brittle and refusing to render everytime someone forgets to close a <p> element. not simply because of nonstandard pages, but for a whole host of other reasons, including handling partial transmissions
3. the strength of the web is open participation, low barrier to entry. hobbyists should publish, and this is a good sign. hobbyists should not expected to be anal retentive standards zealots
complete standards compliance should always be low on the web because this is a sign of a HEALTHY internet, because it means nonprofessionals are contributing content. this is always a good thing, this what made the internet a powerful nw form of media in the first place. if ever there were some sort of gatekeeper organization or rigorous technical specification that enforced standards compliance, you would raise the barrier to entry onto the web by regular joes. you would reduce the variety of the web, make it more monoclonal, and hurt a vibrant ocmmunity
low standards compliance is not only a complete nonissue and not a problem, its a good sign. the lower standards compliance is, the better for us all
oo oo aa aaa aaaaa
snort
oo ooooo
make believe the electoral college was completely wiped away. make believe every other flaw you see in the voting process were wiped away. it's one direct vote for the president, no modifications or tweaks that you currently hide behind
now, in such a system, you encounter someone who says "i'm not going to vote, because so many people are going to vote for obama anyways, he's going to win anyways, so my vote doesn't matter"
what would you say to such a person?
logic and reason have come
i'm going to borrow that phrase from you, that's hilarious, thanks ;-)
however right or wrong you comments are (and i agree with most of what you said) it just makes resistance to mandating the change to ipv6 even less potent: its not so hard, you insist. well then good! lets bank your assertions
because in reality, my pointing out that ipv6 has to be mandated (or, rather, to qualify your comments, that the death of ipv4 has to be mandated) has less to do with technical truths than with human psychological truths
so i concede all of your technical points, regardless of their truthfulness or not. for one, because you are mostly right, but mostly because my point about human psychology is the real meat of my observation