For the same reason a court probably will one of these days: because with the historical actions on this site, they could reasonably be expected to know it was likely to happen, and should therefore have taken reasonable actions to prevent it.
If it is copyright infringement to rip an article verbatim and post it on another site, then why hasn't someone sued Google for its "cache" feature?
That's a fair question, and one that comes up repeatedly.
The best explanation I've seen so far is that no-one wants to risk the test case, on either side. There is a strong case that Google's cache, the Wayback Machine, the Google Groups archive of Usenet, and various other on-line archives are in blatant violation of copyright law as it applies in many countries and under international agreements. The only defence they're going to have when someone does try it on is a series of arguments based on fair use provisions (which not every jurisdiction agrees on) and acting for the public good, in that they arguably provide a useful service.
In opposition to that, there are numerous potentially damaging side-effects of these sites, which are easy to overlook unless you've been the victim -- for example, if you're Salon and you fold due to lack of advertising and/or subscription revenue because some smart-ass posts your new article over on/. every time you write one.
It's just a case waiting to happen, and as someone who's discussed this issue in some detail on several occasions, I think the outcome should be clear, both morally and according to the law as it applies in most places. I certainly wouldn't want to hold Google stock when the verdict was announced...
I am not forced to program using an OO style in C++ if I want to. It still has C as a subset.
It also has, for example, reasonable support for generic programming (at least when combined with a good expression template library), which is very much more powerful than anything in C, yet has nothing at all to do with OO. Just because a lot of people use C++ without bothering to learn it properly doesn't mean you should be influenced by them and try to make everything OK.
The same goes for your "C++ does not fix the main problems of C" argument: C++ does provide tools and idioms that very much address the major shortcomings of C, not least higher level tools to replace arrays and pointers almost universally. I don't see how you can possibly claim that C++ isn't an improvement in this respect; it's worth switching for the RAII idiom alone!
Regarding C++ being much more suitable for large programs due to being more modular, well, not really. Besides namespaces, there isn't much that C++ can do and C cannot in that respect.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that one, then. I think classes and templates both provide an extra tool for abstraction that can overcome a lot of nasty design issues in C. You don't have to use them, but they're each useful in a wide range of situations.
The Linux kernel has 3 million lines of code and is written in C, with some pieces of assembly here and there. So here is one successful example for you. There are more.
I'm not claiming you can't write good code in C, I'm just suggesting that you can often write code to achieve the same result faster or with fewer bugs in other languages.
That said, I'm not sure citing one of the few "shining beacons" in the open source world helps your case. You're talking about a project architected by one of the most talented software developers on the planet, contributed to by many of the most enthusiastic and skilled programmers in the business, and supported financially by several of the commercial success stories of the OSS world. That combination would have produced a good result in any language; C is just the tool that was most familiar to those who were doing the job. And of course, C was pretty much designed for writing the UNIX operating system, so it's a particularly natural candidate for a UNIX variant, no?
Given how you seem to look at things, I can understand that you'd prefer C to C++, and of course there's nothing wrong with that. I'm all for using the right tool for the job, and familiarity and mindset are big factors in what's "right".
However, I feel obliged to "defend" C++ a little in light of your comments. No-one is forcing you to use the OO features in C++, and indeed many of the language's key architects have written at length on how one of C++'s big strengths is that you aren't constrained to a single programming paradigm.
That said, I have worked on relatively large projects (millions of lines) in C++, where a fairly heavily OO design was used, and it certainly has its moments. You don't see a lot of this with toy projects of a few thousand lines, but when serious scalability becomes an issue, good use of modular programming really tells, and C++ provides many more tools to support modular programming than C does. I was working on almost entirely back-end code, BTW; this wasn't GUI stuff, but low-level instrument control and some reasonably intricate maths. As with anything, object-oriented (or simply object-based) design has its place. Use it when it helps, and leave it when it doesn't. But your claim that OO is not a productive paradigm for most things seems to be totally unfounded. Similarly, the "sloppy coding" you mention is far more associated with Java or C# than C++: the latter allows you to put code inside or outside class declarations, as you see fit.
Finally, you're right on the money that most of the problems with C are due to low-level issues like buffer over-runs and pointer problems, but to claim that C++ is hardly an improvement betrays a lack of experience. Several of the basic idioms in C++ evolved precisely to overcome these limitations, and with some basic knowledge of good programming technique (I'm not talking guru, I'm talking having read just one or two good books) you should never have any of these low-level problems. C++ is a world ahead of C in this respect, and always has been; it's one of the major benefits of switching.
Read this [link] and then tell be you still think Java is slow.
I didn't say Java was slow; modern Java is effectively a compiled language with similar features to C++, and so you'd expect that ultimately they will have similar performance for much realistic processing. The quality of implmentation (how good the static optimizer is in C++, or how efficient the GC is in Java, for example) is likely to be the deciding factor in the long run; a good optimising compiler can produce code several times faster than a bad one, even using the same language, and the differences between Java and C++ are probably well within those error bounds for most purposes by now.
I was simply pointing out that the benchmarks to which the OP appeared to be referring -- which, unlike some of the ones you cited, were very short code fragments -- were flawed as a basis for comparing the speed of code produced by different languages.
If you're thinking of the same study I am, then as usual, it was deeply flawed. Performance on small code fragments exercising specific areas of a language in repetitive ways is rarely a good basis for benchmarking, and the fact that nearly all language comparisons seem to fall into that category tells you something about how much an average language comparison based on benchmarks is worth.
Actually, I'd wager Java inlines more code. C++ won't inline code across functional boundaries - if you compile x.cc and y.cc then it won't inline a call in x.cc to y.cc (you get the basic picture).
I'm sorry, but that's simply not true.
For a start, optimisation across function boundaries is perfectly possible in C++. Microsoft's latest C++ compiler has a "whole program optimization" option that does exactly that, amongst other non-local tricks.
Also, the generic algorithms in C++ naturally allow far more effective in-lining than the alternatives you'd get in C or Java. The sort<> algorithm, which naturally incorporates the ordering test into the sort code and can then optimize further, is the standard example. And as with any other technology, effective optimization of generic C++ code has been a while coming, but it's improving all the time.
If you're going to highlight some advances in Java technology, you'll look less foolish if you don't compare it with five-year-old C++.:-)
Sometimes if you have a good business justification, it is smooth sailing, if you are just whining because you think they are interfering with your "personal freedom" you might want to look at your definition of "viable employment".
That depends. Some of us value the personal freedom to be able to receive occasional time-sensitive calls, at work or otherwise. I don't log it as work time on my timesheet, and I don't expect my employer to question the odd five- or ten-minute break if something comes up. If an employer is whining just because my personal freedom is interfering with their owning my soul all day, they might want to look at their definition of "viable employees". I am not a machine, and I wouldn't work for someone who wanted to treat me like one.
That's debatable. His web site used to be pretty good: it featured informative essays on useful subjects, and was something I visited every couple of weeks to check out the new material. Sadly, in the past couple of years, he seems to have degenerated into self-promotional rants with little real content, relying more on links to his previous work than on any new material. His current Alertbox, for example, contains around 20 links, but every one of them is to another NN Group page.
His web site is also, frankly, ugly as hell (not to mention still managing to violate some of his own cherished principles: the search button links to a separate page to enter the search terms, for example). Why does his site have no graphics? Because its design is boring, that's why. If he put as much faith in proper studies of how clients respond as he claims, he'd know that users are prepared to wait a few seconds for a page to load, easily long enough for a few little graphics to download even over a modem. He'd also know that a good design leads the human eye around the page, and that graphics can play a big role in that, while long pieces with lots of headings but no clear structure (like his homepage) are bad for intuitive navigation and scanning.
I'm sorry to dig at someone I once considered enlightened and informative, but you gotta tell it like it is. Ironically, it was Jakob himself who once pointed out that readers dislike clearly unbalanced and self-promoting content on the web, and tend to skip it.
I work in print and setting type on paper and setting type on the web are COMPLETELY different. With type on the web you're limited to 2 or 3 typefaces. That's it. So what good is a course in typography going to do you?
Well, aside from the minor details that
graphics and headers often use different typefaces and aren't limited to "web safe" fonts
intranets running on local systems can use any fonts the sysadmins install on those systems
embedding fonts is possible for web pages anyway
there is more to typography than typeface design
I dunno. But I'd stick to working in print if I were you, because you don't appear to know a whole lot about web design.
I want a course that teaches me graphics manipulation, layout and usability. I want it in a strong espresso shot of a month tuition max, not spread over a lazy year. Do such courses exist?
Honestly? No. Good web design requires a wide range of skills, some general design and some more specific to the medium. It would take you far longer than a month to get to a standard where you could do it professionally, and any course claiming to teach it to you in the format you describe is almost certainly a fraud.
However, the good news is that there are a surprisingly large number of good web sites about various aspects of web design. Rather than giving lots of specific URLs, I'll mention a few keywords to start your searches below. The design community generally links well, so read a few of the top search results, and follow the links from a site you're reading to related sites on similar subjects. You'll find some themes and suggestions recur frequently; those are your basics.
Do you know the basic principles of graphic design -- contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity -- and what they mean? If not, you really need to start here.
Next up, you'll need some knowledge of how to use shape and colour. Subjects you might like to explore include:
the emotional response evoked by simple shapes, such as rectangles, triangles, circles and stars, and by strong colours, particularly black, white and the primary colours in various schemes; note that these responses often vary with the part of the world you're in;
choosing a colour scheme of complementary colours, and various colour wheels you can use to help identify complementary or clashing colours;
using full colour, one or two spot colours, greyscale or pure black and white;
making good use of whitespace.
Now that you've got some basic graphic design knowledge under your belt, you'll want to know something about typography. This is a complete subject all of its own, but at the very least, you'll need to understand the various aspects of typeface design. As with colour, you'll then need to explore how to choose fonts that work well together, and the emotional response various fonts are going to evoke. It's also important to know about legibility, particularly when you're talking about designing for the screen: a typefact that looks beautiful on paper might be hideously difficult to read on a typical 96dpi computer monitor.
Another basic skill I'd list for a graphic designer looking at web work is fluid design. On paper, you can fix the layout, make sure everything lines up nicely, choose your font sizes and graphic positions. On a web site, you can't (or rather, you probably shouldn't).
Finally, an additional skill that's much over-used but can be helpful is dynamic content, by which I mean things like DHTML, Flash and client-side scripting. As a back-end developer, I'm sure you're aware of the many uses for dynamic content on the server side, but here I'm talking about common things like menu interfaces, guidance when filling in forms, and so on.
Next up, as I'm sure you're aware from your original question, is the issue of usability. Again, this is a bit of a world unto itself: it's not what's easy to look at, it's what's easy to work with. This is perhaps the most under-rated skill of web designers, and is frequently the difference between a showy site and a really good one.
A related issue is accessibility, which is about how easily disadvantaged people such as the blind or partially-sighted can interact with your sight. Again, this is a large topic, though a little common sense and courtesy often goes a long way. Note that there are increasing legal obligations on some site designers in this respect.
Back in the real world, real people have to do interior decoration, cleaning, and shopping themselves. And they also have to do design themselves because they can't charge it to someone else.
But they're not doing someone else's interior decoration, cleaning, and shopping, and then charging them for the privilege.
You're quite right that basic design knowledge, as with the basics of almost any field, can be learned by someone willing to put a reasonably small but still significant amount of effort into it. It's enough to stop someone getting it Really, Really Wrong(TM).
I'm what you might call an amateur web designer, in that I've spent quite a few hours (hundreds, not half a dozen) over the years exploring things like visual design (colours, alignment, etc.), fluid page design, typography, usability, and so forth. I like to believe that the web sites I've designed, for example a couple I've done for clubs I belong to, have a respectable design and good usability as a result.
However, I wouldn't want to do professional web design. If nothing else, there is obviously a difference between understanding the principles and having enough experience to apply them well in practice. I suspect that difference is the key point the original post was trying to make: people at any firm that's done a lot of back end web design have probably had some exposure to HTML and so on, but if they're smart, they'll know their strengths and limitations, and look for outside help to overcome the limitations.
We are engineers...we don't like dealing with people.:)
I like dealing with tedious-to-navigate telephone menu systems and web sites that tell me I don't exist because their "state-of-the-art" software can't quite recognise the correct form of my mail address a whole lot less.
Because of [Microsoft's] monopoly, you have to upgrade eventually.
Microsoft wish this was the case. Unfortunately for them, it's simply not true. Check out how much of their large customer base is still using a version of Office and/or Windows that's at least one generation behind, and for a real kick, check how many places still use Office 97 or NT4. IIRC, major hardware sellers like Dell have shelved plans to stop selling anything but Windows XP on new PCs, after several Big Clients(TM) said they wanted the corporate standard Win2K instead.
If you don't buy into SA, the individual upgrades later will cost you much, much more.
<obvious> Um... What individual upgrades? </obvious>
Anyone providing or buying services ought to insist on a written contract that both parties sign. Then, there's no question of consequences if someone doesn't pay within 30 days, etc.
But one of the key parts of any contract is compensation. If one side isn't getting anything, then in most legal worlds, there is no contract.
The guy's demands for continued service may have been... excessive... but as far as I can see, he wasn't getting paid anything and there seems to have been no useful contract. Hence he should have been free to walk away, and the police should have been equally free to turn his offer down and do something else instead. I don't quite see how asking for money to do something in future is extortion just because you've been doing voluntarily in the past.
Can you prove that general sorting cannot be less than O(n log n)? This is fundamental. If you can't do it, you do not know computer science. (Flip side of coin: if you can, then you are at least heading the right direction).
Well, you might not be any good at complexity theory, but that's hardly the same thing. Computer science is a broad subject, and anyone who can tell me in 2004 that "computer science" is just a narrow mathematical specialisation is academic in every sense of the word.
(And yes, I do have an academic background in CS, and yes, I can prove the standard limit on sorting.)
A hobbyist tinkering in the garage does not a scientist make. Put out a publication comparing your methods with other known methods. Give theoretical upper and lower bounds on run time, memory usage, jitter, etc. Criticize yourself and explain the defects in your methods. Submit it to peer scrutiny. That's science.
No, that's academia, which is not at all the same thing.
Anyone doing 'serious' web design is going to use a 'serious' WYSIWYG web design tool
FWIW most people I know who do "serious" web design don't use any of the big name WYSIWYG tools at all. Some colleagues and I recently redesigned our club's web site. We're not Amazon or Google, but we get hundreds of hits a day, and have probably 50+ major pages. To make the site easy to maintain, particularly when some of the input data is incorporated into multiple pages, we decided to set up the source data as XML, then use XSLT to convert it to XHTML and provide that with CSS formatting on the live site.
We used nothing but a text editor, and a range of browsers for previewing, the whole time. When you're working with this sort of site, all the WYSIWYG editors in the world aren't as useful as well-formatted, systematically constructed text files.
The thing is, we're probably not the people Composer is aimed at. If I were a non-technical guy just wanting to set up my own home page for my friends or to get my CV on-line...
What other benefit besides native browser support will SVG have to use against Flash?
I've never really used Flash much. How easy is it to generate graphical content on-the-fly?
With a text-based description language like SVG, it would be pretty easy to have your server-side scripts generate custom graphics on demand. For example, a web form that results in a database query could give back not only a table of results, but also a graph showing the data, without any need to generate custom back-end graphics on the server and then make the user download a larger image file that will only ever be used once.
Apologies if I read too much into your post, but you seem to be equating a university's actions to protect itself legally with calling all its students (and by implication, you) criminal. There's a world of difference: the university is acknowledging the undeniable reality that some of its students are breaking the law, and taking steps to stop itself suffering as a result.
Now, that's only a slur on you if you're one of those students. If you're not, there are more constructive things you can do than stamp your foot righteously and screw up your academic career by moving mid-course, starting with offering the university authorities options that address the problem but are more supportive of legitimate users.
If they want students to stop using p2p, they had better get their act together and put together a good looking package.
[...]
Nothing in that article really defines what they intend to do with real infringement, I think people assume far too much when somebody cries p2p. As a student of IU, I also know that treating their students as criminals will cause issues. I'd just assume go elsewhere to finish my schooling if they start doing that.
I'm sorry, but your post was a bit naive on several levels.
Firstly, given that this is currently a serious issue for all universities, where will you go when all the universities adopt a policy of banning P2P, because there was a real problem and to cover themselves legally they blocked everything?
Perhaps more seriously, why are you choosing where to study based on its provision of P2P facilities? There are rather more important criteria in choosing where to gain the knowledge and experience that sets you up for the rest of your life than whether you can download the latest Eminem track as an MP3, or even (dare I say it?) whether you can download the latest ISOs of your favourite Linux distribution.
I know where you're coming from, but try not to mistake a university attempting to cover itself legally against a perceived threat as some sort of personal attack.
Ok, so far you've mentioned file sharing... where's the illegal part?
I was going to mod you (-1, Troll) -- and I very rarely mod negatively -- but I thought a reply would be more constructive.
The problem with your post and the attitude it implies is that, while you make a good point that there are legitimate uses of P2P, you're ignoring the big problem. It is clear that a lot of P2P use, by students or otherwise, is for illegal (or at best dubious) purposes. If you make smart-ass comments and don't address the real issue, the universities will, because they have to cover themselves legally.
Please understand that if covering themselves means banning all P2P to avoid being sued into oblivion, including the few percent of P2P transfers that are legal, then they will do it, and those who used it legitimately will suffer. Such is the price you pay for being a smart-ass and trying to laugh off a problem that the authorities take seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
For the same reason a court probably will one of these days: because with the historical actions on this site, they could reasonably be expected to know it was likely to happen, and should therefore have taken reasonable actions to prevent it.
That's a fair question, and one that comes up repeatedly.
The best explanation I've seen so far is that no-one wants to risk the test case, on either side. There is a strong case that Google's cache, the Wayback Machine, the Google Groups archive of Usenet, and various other on-line archives are in blatant violation of copyright law as it applies in many countries and under international agreements. The only defence they're going to have when someone does try it on is a series of arguments based on fair use provisions (which not every jurisdiction agrees on) and acting for the public good, in that they arguably provide a useful service.
In opposition to that, there are numerous potentially damaging side-effects of these sites, which are easy to overlook unless you've been the victim -- for example, if you're Salon and you fold due to lack of advertising and/or subscription revenue because some smart-ass posts your new article over on /. every time you write one.
It's just a case waiting to happen, and as someone who's discussed this issue in some detail on several occasions, I think the outcome should be clear, both morally and according to the law as it applies in most places. I certainly wouldn't want to hold Google stock when the verdict was announced...
It also has, for example, reasonable support for generic programming (at least when combined with a good expression template library), which is very much more powerful than anything in C, yet has nothing at all to do with OO. Just because a lot of people use C++ without bothering to learn it properly doesn't mean you should be influenced by them and try to make everything OK.
The same goes for your "C++ does not fix the main problems of C" argument: C++ does provide tools and idioms that very much address the major shortcomings of C, not least higher level tools to replace arrays and pointers almost universally. I don't see how you can possibly claim that C++ isn't an improvement in this respect; it's worth switching for the RAII idiom alone!
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that one, then. I think classes and templates both provide an extra tool for abstraction that can overcome a lot of nasty design issues in C. You don't have to use them, but they're each useful in a wide range of situations.
I'm not claiming you can't write good code in C, I'm just suggesting that you can often write code to achieve the same result faster or with fewer bugs in other languages.
That said, I'm not sure citing one of the few "shining beacons" in the open source world helps your case. You're talking about a project architected by one of the most talented software developers on the planet, contributed to by many of the most enthusiastic and skilled programmers in the business, and supported financially by several of the commercial success stories of the OSS world. That combination would have produced a good result in any language; C is just the tool that was most familiar to those who were doing the job. And of course, C was pretty much designed for writing the UNIX operating system, so it's a particularly natural candidate for a UNIX variant, no?
Given how you seem to look at things, I can understand that you'd prefer C to C++, and of course there's nothing wrong with that. I'm all for using the right tool for the job, and familiarity and mindset are big factors in what's "right".
However, I feel obliged to "defend" C++ a little in light of your comments. No-one is forcing you to use the OO features in C++, and indeed many of the language's key architects have written at length on how one of C++'s big strengths is that you aren't constrained to a single programming paradigm.
That said, I have worked on relatively large projects (millions of lines) in C++, where a fairly heavily OO design was used, and it certainly has its moments. You don't see a lot of this with toy projects of a few thousand lines, but when serious scalability becomes an issue, good use of modular programming really tells, and C++ provides many more tools to support modular programming than C does. I was working on almost entirely back-end code, BTW; this wasn't GUI stuff, but low-level instrument control and some reasonably intricate maths. As with anything, object-oriented (or simply object-based) design has its place. Use it when it helps, and leave it when it doesn't. But your claim that OO is not a productive paradigm for most things seems to be totally unfounded. Similarly, the "sloppy coding" you mention is far more associated with Java or C# than C++: the latter allows you to put code inside or outside class declarations, as you see fit.
Finally, you're right on the money that most of the problems with C are due to low-level issues like buffer over-runs and pointer problems, but to claim that C++ is hardly an improvement betrays a lack of experience. Several of the basic idioms in C++ evolved precisely to overcome these limitations, and with some basic knowledge of good programming technique (I'm not talking guru, I'm talking having read just one or two good books) you should never have any of these low-level problems. C++ is a world ahead of C in this respect, and always has been; it's one of the major benefits of switching.
I didn't say Java was slow; modern Java is effectively a compiled language with similar features to C++, and so you'd expect that ultimately they will have similar performance for much realistic processing. The quality of implmentation (how good the static optimizer is in C++, or how efficient the GC is in Java, for example) is likely to be the deciding factor in the long run; a good optimising compiler can produce code several times faster than a bad one, even using the same language, and the differences between Java and C++ are probably well within those error bounds for most purposes by now.
I was simply pointing out that the benchmarks to which the OP appeared to be referring -- which, unlike some of the ones you cited, were very short code fragments -- were flawed as a basis for comparing the speed of code produced by different languages.
I think you're missing the point. What you wrote is a feature comparison, not a comparison of the results (functionality) you can achieve.
If you wanted to, you could write an interpreter to do any of the above in C. Such is the power of a low-level language.
Of course, it would just take more time and effort than using many of the alternatives. Such is the limitation of a low-level language.
So can I. I've programmed C for years.
But I could do it with half as many bugs in C++, or write it five times faster in Haskell.
If you're thinking of the same study I am, then as usual, it was deeply flawed. Performance on small code fragments exercising specific areas of a language in repetitive ways is rarely a good basis for benchmarking, and the fact that nearly all language comparisons seem to fall into that category tells you something about how much an average language comparison based on benchmarks is worth.
Oh, it was a joke... D'oh... :o)
I'm sorry, but that's simply not true.
For a start, optimisation across function boundaries is perfectly possible in C++. Microsoft's latest C++ compiler has a "whole program optimization" option that does exactly that, amongst other non-local tricks.
Also, the generic algorithms in C++ naturally allow far more effective in-lining than the alternatives you'd get in C or Java. The sort<> algorithm, which naturally incorporates the ordering test into the sort code and can then optimize further, is the standard example. And as with any other technology, effective optimization of generic C++ code has been a while coming, but it's improving all the time.
If you're going to highlight some advances in Java technology, you'll look less foolish if you don't compare it with five-year-old C++. :-)
That depends. Some of us value the personal freedom to be able to receive occasional time-sensitive calls, at work or otherwise. I don't log it as work time on my timesheet, and I don't expect my employer to question the odd five- or ten-minute break if something comes up. If an employer is whining just because my personal freedom is interfering with their owning my soul all day, they might want to look at their definition of "viable employees". I am not a machine, and I wouldn't work for someone who wanted to treat me like one.
That's debatable. His web site used to be pretty good: it featured informative essays on useful subjects, and was something I visited every couple of weeks to check out the new material. Sadly, in the past couple of years, he seems to have degenerated into self-promotional rants with little real content, relying more on links to his previous work than on any new material. His current Alertbox, for example, contains around 20 links, but every one of them is to another NN Group page.
His web site is also, frankly, ugly as hell (not to mention still managing to violate some of his own cherished principles: the search button links to a separate page to enter the search terms, for example). Why does his site have no graphics? Because its design is boring, that's why. If he put as much faith in proper studies of how clients respond as he claims, he'd know that users are prepared to wait a few seconds for a page to load, easily long enough for a few little graphics to download even over a modem. He'd also know that a good design leads the human eye around the page, and that graphics can play a big role in that, while long pieces with lots of headings but no clear structure (like his homepage) are bad for intuitive navigation and scanning.
I'm sorry to dig at someone I once considered enlightened and informative, but you gotta tell it like it is. Ironically, it was Jakob himself who once pointed out that readers dislike clearly unbalanced and self-promoting content on the web, and tend to skip it.
Well, aside from the minor details that
- graphics and headers often use different typefaces and aren't limited to "web safe" fonts
- intranets running on local systems can use any fonts the sysadmins install on those systems
- embedding fonts is possible for web pages anyway
- there is more to typography than typeface design
I dunno. But I'd stick to working in print if I were you, because you don't appear to know a whole lot about web design.Honestly? No. Good web design requires a wide range of skills, some general design and some more specific to the medium. It would take you far longer than a month to get to a standard where you could do it professionally, and any course claiming to teach it to you in the format you describe is almost certainly a fraud.
However, the good news is that there are a surprisingly large number of good web sites about various aspects of web design. Rather than giving lots of specific URLs, I'll mention a few keywords to start your searches below. The design community generally links well, so read a few of the top search results, and follow the links from a site you're reading to related sites on similar subjects. You'll find some themes and suggestions recur frequently; those are your basics.
Do you know the basic principles of graphic design -- contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity -- and what they mean? If not, you really need to start here.
Next up, you'll need some knowledge of how to use shape and colour. Subjects you might like to explore include:
Now that you've got some basic graphic design knowledge under your belt, you'll want to know something about typography. This is a complete subject all of its own, but at the very least, you'll need to understand the various aspects of typeface design. As with colour, you'll then need to explore how to choose fonts that work well together, and the emotional response various fonts are going to evoke. It's also important to know about legibility, particularly when you're talking about designing for the screen: a typefact that looks beautiful on paper might be hideously difficult to read on a typical 96dpi computer monitor.
Another basic skill I'd list for a graphic designer looking at web work is fluid design. On paper, you can fix the layout, make sure everything lines up nicely, choose your font sizes and graphic positions. On a web site, you can't (or rather, you probably shouldn't).
Finally, an additional skill that's much over-used but can be helpful is dynamic content, by which I mean things like DHTML, Flash and client-side scripting. As a back-end developer, I'm sure you're aware of the many uses for dynamic content on the server side, but here I'm talking about common things like menu interfaces, guidance when filling in forms, and so on.
Next up, as I'm sure you're aware from your original question, is the issue of usability. Again, this is a bit of a world unto itself: it's not what's easy to look at, it's what's easy to work with. This is perhaps the most under-rated skill of web designers, and is frequently the difference between a showy site and a really good one.
A related issue is accessibility, which is about how easily disadvantaged people such as the blind or partially-sighted can interact with your sight. Again, this is a large topic, though a little common sense and courtesy often goes a long way. Note that there are increasing legal obligations on some site designers in this respect.
Once you've done all of that, you c
But they're not doing someone else's interior decoration, cleaning, and shopping, and then charging them for the privilege.
You're quite right that basic design knowledge, as with the basics of almost any field, can be learned by someone willing to put a reasonably small but still significant amount of effort into it. It's enough to stop someone getting it Really, Really Wrong(TM).
I'm what you might call an amateur web designer, in that I've spent quite a few hours (hundreds, not half a dozen) over the years exploring things like visual design (colours, alignment, etc.), fluid page design, typography, usability, and so forth. I like to believe that the web sites I've designed, for example a couple I've done for clubs I belong to, have a respectable design and good usability as a result.
However, I wouldn't want to do professional web design. If nothing else, there is obviously a difference between understanding the principles and having enough experience to apply them well in practice. I suspect that difference is the key point the original post was trying to make: people at any firm that's done a lot of back end web design have probably had some exposure to HTML and so on, but if they're smart, they'll know their strengths and limitations, and look for outside help to overcome the limitations.
I like dealing with tedious-to-navigate telephone menu systems and web sites that tell me I don't exist because their "state-of-the-art" software can't quite recognise the correct form of my mail address a whole lot less.
Be careful; there have been several test cases about "deep linking", and I'm not sure they've all gone in favour of the linker.
Microsoft wish this was the case. Unfortunately for them, it's simply not true. Check out how much of their large customer base is still using a version of Office and/or Windows that's at least one generation behind, and for a real kick, check how many places still use Office 97 or NT4. IIRC, major hardware sellers like Dell have shelved plans to stop selling anything but Windows XP on new PCs, after several Big Clients(TM) said they wanted the corporate standard Win2K instead.
<obvious> Um... What individual upgrades? </obvious>
But in Capitalist America, when your Linux breaks, SCO sues YOU.
Sorry, couldn't resist. :o)
But one of the key parts of any contract is compensation. If one side isn't getting anything, then in most legal worlds, there is no contract.
The guy's demands for continued service may have been... excessive... but as far as I can see, he wasn't getting paid anything and there seems to have been no useful contract. Hence he should have been free to walk away, and the police should have been equally free to turn his offer down and do something else instead. I don't quite see how asking for money to do something in future is extortion just because you've been doing voluntarily in the past.
Well, you might not be any good at complexity theory, but that's hardly the same thing. Computer science is a broad subject, and anyone who can tell me in 2004 that "computer science" is just a narrow mathematical specialisation is academic in every sense of the word.
(And yes, I do have an academic background in CS, and yes, I can prove the standard limit on sorting.)
No, that's academia, which is not at all the same thing.
FWIW most people I know who do "serious" web design don't use any of the big name WYSIWYG tools at all. Some colleagues and I recently redesigned our club's web site. We're not Amazon or Google, but we get hundreds of hits a day, and have probably 50+ major pages. To make the site easy to maintain, particularly when some of the input data is incorporated into multiple pages, we decided to set up the source data as XML, then use XSLT to convert it to XHTML and provide that with CSS formatting on the live site.
We used nothing but a text editor, and a range of browsers for previewing, the whole time. When you're working with this sort of site, all the WYSIWYG editors in the world aren't as useful as well-formatted, systematically constructed text files.
The thing is, we're probably not the people Composer is aimed at. If I were a non-technical guy just wanting to set up my own home page for my friends or to get my CV on-line...
I've never really used Flash much. How easy is it to generate graphical content on-the-fly?
With a text-based description language like SVG, it would be pretty easy to have your server-side scripts generate custom graphics on demand. For example, a web form that results in a database query could give back not only a table of results, but also a graph showing the data, without any need to generate custom back-end graphics on the server and then make the user download a larger image file that will only ever be used once.
Apologies if I read too much into your post, but you seem to be equating a university's actions to protect itself legally with calling all its students (and by implication, you) criminal. There's a world of difference: the university is acknowledging the undeniable reality that some of its students are breaking the law, and taking steps to stop itself suffering as a result.
Now, that's only a slur on you if you're one of those students. If you're not, there are more constructive things you can do than stamp your foot righteously and screw up your academic career by moving mid-course, starting with offering the university authorities options that address the problem but are more supportive of legitimate users.
I'm sorry, but your post was a bit naive on several levels.
Firstly, given that this is currently a serious issue for all universities, where will you go when all the universities adopt a policy of banning P2P, because there was a real problem and to cover themselves legally they blocked everything?
Perhaps more seriously, why are you choosing where to study based on its provision of P2P facilities? There are rather more important criteria in choosing where to gain the knowledge and experience that sets you up for the rest of your life than whether you can download the latest Eminem track as an MP3, or even (dare I say it?) whether you can download the latest ISOs of your favourite Linux distribution.
I know where you're coming from, but try not to mistake a university attempting to cover itself legally against a perceived threat as some sort of personal attack.
I was going to mod you (-1, Troll) -- and I very rarely mod negatively -- but I thought a reply would be more constructive.
The problem with your post and the attitude it implies is that, while you make a good point that there are legitimate uses of P2P, you're ignoring the big problem. It is clear that a lot of P2P use, by students or otherwise, is for illegal (or at best dubious) purposes. If you make smart-ass comments and don't address the real issue, the universities will, because they have to cover themselves legally.
Please understand that if covering themselves means banning all P2P to avoid being sued into oblivion, including the few percent of P2P transfers that are legal, then they will do it, and those who used it legitimately will suffer. Such is the price you pay for being a smart-ass and trying to laugh off a problem that the authorities take seriously.