Well aside from the irony of recommending a source a government has a hand in, on a government hostile site.
Except you won't find a site more critical of government than the BBC. When the government lied about weapons of mass destruction, who called them on it? Hint: it wasn't the commercial media.
The newspapers are too trapped in the old paradigm of finding news and deciding what to write about. Instead they should open up the flood gates and let the readers decide what they want to hear about. While that idea will sound horridly scary to editors who's job it normally is to pick stories, allowing your users the interactive choice will increase readership.
If papers aren't getting money from registration, donations OR ad viewings, why is anyone expecting them to give a shit about improving their online offerings? Frankly, this seems like a no-brainer to me. If I were a newspaper up against this kind of freeloader mentality, I'd just tell online viewers to shove it.
That's right: no registration, no donations, no adverts. Do you think they 'don't give a shit'?
Of course they give a shit. They may not give much shit about people who come in from abroad, but they care about people coming in from the UK, because without our continued support they won't get their license fee renewed. You may call it 'socialism' if you want to, but it works - the world gets a high quality, relatively unbiased and incorruptible news source because it's overall trustworthiness makes the people of Britain happy to pick up the tab. No commercial news source could do this.
That being said, look at what online publishers have to deal with: non-uniformity. HTML is very powerful, but we still can't guarantee that an article will look as nice on everyone else's monitor as it does on the publisher's. Digital fonts still have a VERY long way to go versus paper printed ones -- kerning and other newspaper processes are not as easy to perform in HTML.
This really isn't a problem, and never was. And until people brought up on traditional media understand it isn't a problem, they won't use the Web effectively. Disclosure: I am a fully qualified offset litho machine operator.
Yes, OK, the Web can't do in terms of consistency of image what an offset litho machine can do. But what the Web can do is not worse than what an offset litho machine can do; it's far, far better. The Web can render your content in the reader's preferred font at the reader's preferred font size - the size your reader is comfortable with, finds easy to use. Do not dictate to your user - he knows how good his eyesight is, you don't.
Being obsessed with precise layout - the sort of problem which means that the BBC's site can never use more than a third of the width of my desktop display, but is unreadable on my phone because of sideways scrolling - is failing to understand and to exploit the medium. If you can't design your site templates to reflow gracefully to make use of the reader's screen and the reader's preferences, you have fundamentally failed.
My only "solutions" I've come up with is to dump the browser entirely and offer "newspaper skins" for another type of Internet program: something that grabs raw articles from RSS or other feeds, displays them in the format YOU want to read them in, and even print them out newspaper-style. It isn't a great solution since it would require another app on devices that already are being app-downsized. RSS is key in this situation, but I don't think the RSS reader is the best way to display the information.
Your computer already has an application on it designed to do precisely this. It's called a 'Web Browser'.
I've recently been in correspondence with Bruce Morgan of Microsoft's IE7 team about their continued, misleading use of theproduct identifier 'Mozilla/4.0' in their user-agent string. He was unapologetic, unrepentent and wholly unprepared to consider changing it. The gorilla not only intends to continue to misbehave, it's perfectly happy for everyone to know it's misbehaving.
Which I've now done, and the location should be obvious to any moderately sentient being. However, please be kind and get your copy from archive.org, because they've got shedloads more bandwidth than I have.
To those people who say 'there's no point' for one reason and another, the point is that if people get used to the idea that the only thing you achieve by taking down something like this is a whole raft of mirrors, we'll see far fewer such takedowns.
From where I've just downloaded it so that I can mirror it (but not until the Slashdot feeding frenzy has died down, I don't want to slaughter my own servers).
As I am not and never have been a party to the 'Bluetooth License Agreement', and since the list is copyright Marcel Holtmann, not the Bluetooth SIG, I think they can go whistle about asking me to take it down.
Why don't you - all of you - do the same? Remember to get all of
This may not be relevant to those of you who work in large data centres, but for those of us in smaller shops with a few servers in a small rack, being able to fit a more powerful server into less space is useful.
Lesson Learned: Use Open Source, and Encrypt... Please work to make the system secure, even from government intrusion.
You've missed the point.
They're not analysing what you're saying. They're analysing who you're saying it to. It's the connections they're looking at, not the content. Encrypt all you like, they don't care.
This sort of large scale analysis of interpersonal communications is exactly what the European Parliament has just passed into law. The Bush Administration may actually be doing it, but at least they're keeping it secret and pretending they aren't. At least they know it's shameful and immoral, and counter to the ideals of a free society.
I've been using Java since 1996, and it's served me well. But Sun are being way to proprietary about lots of bits of the language and libraries, and it isn't really an open source system. Same is true of C#, no better, not significantly worse. It's also really wrong to think of these as two different languages - they're/much/ more similar than dialects of LISP, for example.
This is not a troll, it's a serious question from someone who's about to start a major db-driven web app.
OK, everyone knows Java's a nonstarter these days. Ack, why did they kill it with Swing instead of a decent lightweight GUI...
If you're writing a web app, Swing is an irrelevance. You won't be needing it and it won't get in your way. Java remains an excellent choice for serious web apps which you're going to want to maintain later. I agree with you that Swing is a horrible mess, but as someone who only writes web apps it doesn't wory me at all.
The car was tracked on the camera network (it already partly works), but as it had been hired in his name the police arrested him instead of hunting down the gang.
As this network becomes more widely known, this is going to become more common - gangs will bully and blackmail people with no criminal record into hiring cars, and may even, to prevent them going to the policeabduct or kill them.
And, of course, criminals will habitually carry several sets of false number plates, so that they can change the 'identity' of their vehicle several times in the course of a journey.
(And yes, I know you should allow your email package to display HTML with remote images, but people do and this is the main technique phishers use to make their messages look legitimate.)
Exactly.
And that is exactly why people like eBay, banks, etc should never send mail which embeds remote images, and, ideally, should never send HTML formatted mail at all (or, probably, any other format more complex than plain text).
I'm glad that you've always had the luxury of design web sites that look good no matter how big (or small) the browser viewport is. I don't.
Yes you do. Either you're just lazy, or you're too gutless to tell the management/customer that they're wrong. Seriously, not a flame. If an engineer who was designing a bridge let the customer talk them into removing some vital support on the basis that '... it looks ugly with that girder there...', you wouldn't call that engineer very professional. You are just as unprofessional when you let your manager or customer talk you into a design which looks good on their screen, but you know won't work well on others.
Why should you specify pixel dimensions on images?
Personally, I wouldn't (except perhaps in special cases where I was trying to get a complex page to lay out faster); but I don't consider it wrong to do so. I look forward to the day when most Web images are scalable vector graphics and, uhhmmm, scale. Nicely, and on all devices then in common use.
If you weren't writing flexible web design ten years ago, you
should have been. There's nothing new in it; and indeed, much of what
is being suggested in this article is still bad old inflexible
design, which will still break badly on devices which you did
not expect.
never — never — use absolute (pixel)
dimensions for anything other than images. You don't know how many
pixels wide the screen you're addressing is. The browser at the far
end does, though, and if you get out of its way and let it do it's job
intelligently, it will.
bashing Wikipedia is the cool thing to do at the moment.
Yup, as this thread shows. But when you look at someofthekooks^Wpeoplewho are doing it, is makes you think...
The truth is, though, that any good idea that is successful is going to get bashed by the spiteful, the petty, the self-obsessed, and the paranoid. Wikipedia has to show that it's doing something positive about the vandalism/sabotage issue, but apart from that it would be better to just ignore the idiots.
Wikipedia's been under some pretty harsh pressure lately. Orlowski's articles in the Register have been referred to here already; when I replied to Orlowski he responded with an unrelated allegation that Wikipedia had become a haven for pædophiles.
Quite a lot of people evidently don't like Wikipedia; partly, of course, because its rapid growth is making waves and it promises to grow into an extremely influential (and consequently powerful) source of 'knowledge', but also, I suspect, because 'Jimbo' Wales simply gets up some people's noses.
...and now I'm back cutting code. I prefer it (and I'm better at it). If you want to program past fifty, in the UK anyway, you probably need to go self employed. I doubt anyone would give me a job doing this now, but as I'm allergic to bosses anyway this is not a problem.
That Orlowski has gone off on one isn't actually very
surprising. Andrew Orlowski is an Internet journalist who gets paid to
write on (and about) the Internet. He writes for The Register, a
British website which has developed a reputation for edgy and
controversial journalism. It lives not only by reporting on the
ephemeral phenomena the Internet throws up, but also by attacking the
emerging centres of power of the information age. Andrew Orlowski is,
on occasion, just as attacking of Oracle, of Microsoft and of Google
as he now is of Wikipedia.
A quick Google (if you'll excuse me, Mr Orlowski) is sufficient to
demonstrate that Mr Orlowski is a good thing. He puts people's backs
up. The first page of hits shows us
Andrew Orlowski, Sloppy Journalist or Bold Faced Liar?
Andrew Orlowski is a hack
Noted Register troll Andrew Orlowski
This gives us a feel for Orlowski's standing in the Internet
community: of his reputation. Orlowski is a gadfly. Someone who winds
up so many people can't be all bad; particularly when you consider who
he winds up. We need journalists prepared to confront the new
powerful.
And the person behind Wikipedia, James Wales (he'd rather I called him
'Jimmy' or 'Jimbo' - so much more cuddly, don't you know?) is an
unlikely hero. He made his first fortune as a futures trader, but then
went into the Internet porn business, and also ran websites which
'scraped' content from other websites and added advertising, using
their content under his branding to drive revenue into his pocket.
Futures trading is considered respectable under capitalism; and I am
in no position to criticise people who create porn. But content
stealing is sleazy in anyone's book (ironically, Wikipedia itself must
now be the most screen-scraped site on the Internet).
Furthermore, it's easy to paint Wales as an egotist. Again, I'm in no
position to criticise someone who has his own website, or runs his own
'blog' (hideous neologism). But Wikipedia has an entry on Wales, as
does WikiMedia, as does WikiQuote... Wales repeatedly describes himself
as the 'founder' of Wikipedia, and emphasises his own role to the
exclusion of all others:
'About two years before I founded Wikipedia I had founded another
project called Nupedia. It was based upon the same concept as
Wikipedia, which was that it was a freely licensed encyclopedia that
was written by volunteers. Unfortunately, we didn't use the Wiki
software and it was a very top down model, which ultimately wasn't
very successful. It was difficult to manage and when all was said and
done, it wasn't very much fun for the volunteers. We found the Wiki
editing software and began using that, which turned out to be quite a
success.'
There seems no doubt that the money behind Wikipedia is his. But he
seems to find it easy to forget the contribution of (e.g.) Larry Sanger, who
apparently did most of the work and seems to have done a lot of the
creative thinking.
And, of course, Wikipedia does, at present, have a problem. It is too
easy for ill-intentioned or merely mindlessly destructive people to
edit articles on Wikipedia, as the Seigenthaler incident amply
demonstrates. And in the particular (rather unusual) circumstances of
the Seigenthaler incident, where the saboteur edited the article from a machine
on a fixed IP address, Orlowski is correct in observing that requiring
editors to log in, rather than showing their IP address, actually
reduces transparency.
Nevertheless, Orlowski is wrong to attack Wikipedia. Wikipedia is far
more than the ego vehicle of James Wales. It is an experiment. It is
new. It has got teething troubles. This is normal. It is nevertheless
at the very least a most interesting experiment, and it is also,
already, a very useful resource - albeit one which should be used with
some caution.
In mounting a defence of Wikipedia I will start with the main thrust
of Orlowski's recent article, and go on to m
Slashdot Mirror
So nothing very significant, no.
Except you won't find a site more critical of government than the BBC. When the government lied about weapons of mass destruction, who called them on it? Hint: it wasn't the commercial media.
Ok, you definitely want to read this.
Ever been to the BBC's news website?
That's right: no registration, no donations, no adverts. Do you think they 'don't give a shit'?
Of course they give a shit. They may not give much shit about people who come in from abroad, but they care about people coming in from the UK, because without our continued support they won't get their license fee renewed. You may call it 'socialism' if you want to, but it works - the world gets a high quality, relatively unbiased and incorruptible news source because it's overall trustworthiness makes the people of Britain happy to pick up the tab. No commercial news source could do this.
This really isn't a problem, and never was. And until people brought up on traditional media understand it isn't a problem, they won't use the Web effectively. Disclosure: I am a fully qualified offset litho machine operator.
Yes, OK, the Web can't do in terms of consistency of image what an offset litho machine can do. But what the Web can do is not worse than what an offset litho machine can do; it's far, far better. The Web can render your content in the reader's preferred font at the reader's preferred font size - the size your reader is comfortable with, finds easy to use. Do not dictate to your user - he knows how good his eyesight is, you don't.
Being obsessed with precise layout - the sort of problem which means that the BBC's site can never use more than a third of the width of my desktop display, but is unreadable on my phone because of sideways scrolling - is failing to understand and to exploit the medium. If you can't design your site templates to reflow gracefully to make use of the reader's screen and the reader's preferences, you have fundamentally failed.
Your computer already has an application on it designed to do precisely this. It's called a 'Web Browser'.
For what it's worth, if you're interested you might want to look here.
Two things:
In summary, Microsoft is behaving as badly as ever: the very opposite of good corporate citizens.
Which I've now done, and the location should be obvious to any moderately sentient being. However, please be kind and get your copy from archive.org, because they've got shedloads more bandwidth than I have.
To those people who say 'there's no point' for one reason and another, the point is that if people get used to the idea that the only thing you achieve by taking down something like this is a whole raft of mirrors, we'll see far fewer such takedowns.
From where I've just downloaded it so that I can mirror it (but not until the Slashdot feeding frenzy has died down, I don't want to slaughter my own servers).
As I am not and never have been a party to the 'Bluetooth License Agreement', and since the list is copyright Marcel Holtmann, not the Bluetooth SIG, I think they can go whistle about asking me to take it down.
Why don't you - all of you - do the same? Remember to get all of
This may not be relevant to those of you who work in large data centres, but for those of us in smaller shops with a few servers in a small rack, being able to fit a more powerful server into less space is useful.
Comment is superfluous.
You've missed the point.
They're not analysing what you're saying. They're analysing who you're saying it to. It's the connections they're looking at, not the content. Encrypt all you like, they don't care.
This sort of large scale analysis of interpersonal communications is exactly what the European Parliament has just passed into law. The Bush Administration may actually be doing it, but at least they're keeping it secret and pretending they aren't. At least they know it's shameful and immoral, and counter to the ideals of a free society.
I agree.
I've been using Java since 1996, and it's served me well. But Sun are being way to proprietary about lots of bits of the language and libraries, and it isn't really an open source system. Same is true of C#, no better, not significantly worse. It's also really wrong to think of these as two different languages - they're /much/ more similar than dialects of LISP, for example.
If you're writing a web app, Swing is an irrelevance. You won't be needing it and it won't get in your way. Java remains an excellent choice for serious web apps which you're going to want to maintain later. I agree with you that Swing is a horrible mess, but as someone who only writes web apps it doesn't wory me at all.
When a police woman was recently shot dead in Bradford, the gang who were responsible had bullied a man into hiring a car in his name. The man went to the police before the murder had been committed, but the police just filed his complaint and didn't link it to the murder until too late.
The car was tracked on the camera network (it already partly works), but as it had been hired in his name the police arrested him instead of hunting down the gang.
As this network becomes more widely known, this is going to become more common - gangs will bully and blackmail people with no criminal record into hiring cars, and may even, to prevent them going to the policeabduct or kill them.
And, of course, criminals will habitually carry several sets of false number plates, so that they can change the 'identity' of their vehicle several times in the course of a journey.
Google already had a network for its messaging client. It's called 'the Internet'. You may have heard of it.
Exactly.
And that is exactly why people like eBay, banks, etc should never send mail which embeds remote images, and, ideally, should never send HTML formatted mail at all (or, probably, any other format more complex than plain text).
Yes you do. Either you're just lazy, or you're too gutless to tell the management/customer that they're wrong. Seriously, not a flame. If an engineer who was designing a bridge let the customer talk them into removing some vital support on the basis that '... it looks ugly with that girder there...', you wouldn't call that engineer very professional. You are just as unprofessional when you let your manager or customer talk you into a design which looks good on their screen, but you know won't work well on others.
Personally, I wouldn't (except perhaps in special cases where I was trying to get a complex page to lay out faster); but I don't consider it wrong to do so. I look forward to the day when most Web images are scalable vector graphics and, uhhmmm, scale. Nicely, and on all devices then in common use.
If you weren't writing flexible web design ten years ago, you should have been. There's nothing new in it; and indeed, much of what is being suggested in this article is still bad old inflexible design, which will still break badly on devices which you did not expect.
never — never — use absolute (pixel) dimensions for anything other than images. You don't know how many pixels wide the screen you're addressing is. The browser at the far end does, though, and if you get out of its way and let it do it's job intelligently, it will.
Yup, as this thread shows. But when you look at some of the kooks^Wpeople who are doing it, is makes you think...
The truth is, though, that any good idea that is successful is going to get bashed by the spiteful, the petty, the self-obsessed, and the paranoid. Wikipedia has to show that it's doing something positive about the vandalism/sabotage issue, but apart from that it would be better to just ignore the idiots.
Wikipedia's been under some pretty harsh pressure lately. Orlowski's articles in the Register have been referred to here already; when I replied to Orlowski he responded with an unrelated allegation that Wikipedia had become a haven for pædophiles.
Quite a lot of people evidently don't like Wikipedia; partly, of course, because its rapid growth is making waves and it promises to grow into an extremely influential (and consequently powerful) source of 'knowledge', but also, I suspect, because 'Jimbo' Wales simply gets up some people's noses.
...and now I'm back cutting code. I prefer it (and I'm better at it). If you want to program past fifty, in the UK anyway, you probably need to go self employed. I doubt anyone would give me a job doing this now, but as I'm allergic to bosses anyway this is not a problem.
That Orlowski has gone off on one isn't actually very surprising. Andrew Orlowski is an Internet journalist who gets paid to write on (and about) the Internet. He writes for The Register, a British website which has developed a reputation for edgy and controversial journalism. It lives not only by reporting on the ephemeral phenomena the Internet throws up, but also by attacking the emerging centres of power of the information age. Andrew Orlowski is, on occasion, just as attacking of Oracle, of Microsoft and of Google as he now is of Wikipedia.
A quick Google (if you'll excuse me, Mr Orlowski) is sufficient to demonstrate that Mr Orlowski is a good thing. He puts people's backs up. The first page of hits shows us
This gives us a feel for Orlowski's standing in the Internet community: of his reputation. Orlowski is a gadfly. Someone who winds up so many people can't be all bad; particularly when you consider who he winds up. We need journalists prepared to confront the new powerful.
And the person behind Wikipedia, James Wales (he'd rather I called him 'Jimmy' or 'Jimbo' - so much more cuddly, don't you know?) is an unlikely hero. He made his first fortune as a futures trader, but then went into the Internet porn business, and also ran websites which 'scraped' content from other websites and added advertising, using their content under his branding to drive revenue into his pocket.
Futures trading is considered respectable under capitalism; and I am in no position to criticise people who create porn. But content stealing is sleazy in anyone's book (ironically, Wikipedia itself must now be the most screen-scraped site on the Internet).
Furthermore, it's easy to paint Wales as an egotist. Again, I'm in no position to criticise someone who has his own website, or runs his own 'blog' (hideous neologism). But Wikipedia has an entry on Wales, as does WikiMedia, as does WikiQuote... Wales repeatedly describes himself as the 'founder' of Wikipedia, and emphasises his own role to the exclusion of all others:
There seems no doubt that the money behind Wikipedia is his. But he seems to find it easy to forget the contribution of (e.g.) Larry Sanger, who apparently did most of the work and seems to have done a lot of the creative thinking.
And, of course, Wikipedia does, at present, have a problem. It is too easy for ill-intentioned or merely mindlessly destructive people to edit articles on Wikipedia, as the Seigenthaler incident amply demonstrates. And in the particular (rather unusual) circumstances of the Seigenthaler incident, where the saboteur edited the article from a machine on a fixed IP address, Orlowski is correct in observing that requiring editors to log in, rather than showing their IP address, actually reduces transparency.
Nevertheless, Orlowski is wrong to attack Wikipedia. Wikipedia is far more than the ego vehicle of James Wales. It is an experiment. It is new. It has got teething troubles. This is normal. It is nevertheless at the very least a most interesting experiment, and it is also, already, a very useful resource - albeit one which should be used with some caution.
In mounting a defence of Wikipedia I will start with the main thrust of Orlowski's recent article, and go on to m