PRT's are not novel, they've been an engineering pipe dream for at least 60 years. There was a similar design effort in the 1970s in Paris that was the subject of an excellent book by Bruno Latour called Aramis. TFA says that PRT have been previous unworkable for "a variety of reasons, including the cost of the initial systems and the difficulty of integrating them into existing cities". The Paris project got all the way to physical prototypes, built sections of track, etc., and one of Latour's conclusions is that the PRT concept is itself unworkable. It lives in an inflexible no man's land between private vehicles and mass transit: passengers can't go where they want because the system has tracks and shared "pods", and engineers can't scale it how they want because the vehicles don't have flexible open space inside to cram in more passengers during busy times. Lose-lose, all around.
Not so: you will in fact see corporate logos on athletes' gear, but it will be only logos from companies that have paid gonzo bucks for their logos to be shown exclusive of the competition. E.g, there will be Adidas but no Nike, Coke but no Pepsi, and so on. This is why the Olympics are worth so much to advertisers: it's a sharply controlled media environment where sponsors pay for a very expensive dead zone around their messages.
Oh, and can we get some ninjas to fucking kill Flash. Seriously, I shouldn't need a bunch of script blocking and flash blocking extensions just to be able to browse the fucking intarwebs without having a seizure.
Why not just remove the plug-in? Your browser may continue to work fine without it, or flashblock.
When CDs or vinyl were the only way of getting music, the "non-classics" generally commanded a higher price: ordinary record stores wouldn't have shelf space for obscure stuff, so it was necessary to search specialty shops for imports and rarities, for which you paid a premium. It was the well-marketed top 40 pop music and steadily-selling classics that were manufactured in great quantities, distributed far and wide, and went on sale first.
Of course, in a stores like iTunes where shelf space (really "search" space) is effectively infinite, storage capacity is free, and network transmission costs are equal in cost regardless of artist popularity, prices will tend to equalize. There's no logical argument to be made for tiered pricing, unless they can figure out a way to introduce artificial scarcity into the market as they're doing with DRM.
Bad will? Bad will? What bad will. You walk into any music store and ask a random person buying CD's if they like or dislike the RIAA, they are going to look at you blankly.
Walk into any music store, and all you'll see is the leftover rubes who haven't yet figured out how to operate bittorrent or itunes. Of course they'll stare at you blankly.
As a nonprofit, it doesn't have the need to downplay competition, and thus can present more non-biased information.
I agree that WIkipedia has less of an incentive to present biased information, but I don't think it's because non-profits have no need to downplay competition. WP requires money and attention to work, and competes for these limited resources against other projects. They just happen to be at the top of the heap, so *not mentioning* the competition promotes the perception that they're in a class of their own.
Double click isn't a "normal" browser interaction. I've been using browsers since "1.0", and it would never occur to me to double click something on a web page. This is the worst temptation of Ajax, btw: duplicating or poorly imitating desktop interactions such as windows, drag & drop, or double-clicking in a page-based medium where they make no sense. Using Ajax to speed screen updates makes sense, but introducing new behaviors that can't be emulated with a page reload does not.
This may be easier than you think - a friend recently attempted to remove a bunch of black marks from his report, and found that it was a smoother process than he had anticipated. Apparently, if you contest something on your report and give a convincing reason, your creditors are contacted for their side of the story. If they fail to respond within a set period of time (30 days? 60 days?), you win.
The API changes a lot, very fast. This is not good. From PHP 3.0 to 4.0 things break and new stuff gets added so fast some sites have to keep using PHP 3 in order to avoid spending many hours recoding old code. Now PHP 5 is a new language altogether.
Fast??? PHP 4 was released 5 1/2 years ago. PHP 5 was released 1 year ago. 4 1/2 years of stability is hardly what I'd call "fast", and I was using PHP all that time with no major language-driven changes to my code needed. Even now, PHP 4 is the most widely-deployed version of the language by far. Contrast this to RoR, which has seen dozens of app-breaking changes in the past year alone, primarily because it hasn't reached 1.0 and is still being heavily modified.
Well, it's not C, but the Python Challenge is an excellent multilevel programming riddle. Each level builds upon discoveries from previous levels, and encourages deep exploration of the Python library. I got about 1/3 of the way through before being stumped and running out of time to devote to it, but I bet it'd be super fun with a team working on it.
So what's the difference between the creative commons and saying "Copyright 2005 me, all rights reserved except reproduction for non-commercial use."
The difference is that "Copyright 2005 me, all rights reserved except reproduction for non-commercial use." is less legally-precise than this, CC's "legal code" version of this. Your short version is a pointer to their long version that happens to be much more defensible in courts worldwide.
Documents belong on a file server or some kind of a Web based document management system.
Perhaps, but this is a great a example of technology being bent to serve the needs of its users. It may be ultimately more productive to modify a mail server to more easily handle this form of folk file storage, than to force users to adapt themselves to the IT department. I expect that a huge market is waiting for the first group to elegantly merge file storage and mail accessibility in this way.
2) Urbanization: Cities are the largest contributors to localized pollution. Air quality, sewage overflows, and general griminess ooze from cities. I don't see how environmentalists could come around to see how cities are beneficial to the environment.
The fact that they are localized is the point of the argument.
If you graph pollution over area, a place like manhattan obviously generates significantly more waste than a small town or suburb. But if you divide that by population density, dense cities actually come out ahead! People in cities like SF or NYC live in smaller homes with more efficient heating, rely on public transportation or walking to get around, and focus resource delivery and consumption onto a very small area. Compare that to your typical suburb, where the average family's environmental footprint is a lot bigger.
3) Genetically-engineered organisms: Knee jerk reactions defines the environmental movement. If they haven't listened to real science thus far, what will convince them otherwise?
RTFA: The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces--romanticism and science--that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.
I'm guessing the northern route (he's stopping in Iceland) is a lot shorter.
Re:I think you're arguing for me, not against me
on
The CSS Anthology
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· Score: 1
I think that the decision to use the semantic approach from the beginning is a *religious* decision, not a *technical* decision.
Perhaps... but I've been in the position of having to re-approach old markup numerous times, and it's pretty much always been a lifesaver to have consistent, meaningful style rules. Actually, one of the best bits of advice I've yet seen on CSS is to take it one step further, and have separate stylesheets that control font, color, and layout. I've found this to be significantly more sanity-preserving.
Those types of questions didn't apply in this case.... It's just the color of the box and doesn't necessarily have to imply anything else than what just happens to look good with the other colors on the page.
Okay, but what about the rest? Font, line spacing, border style, margins, padding? Surely these weren't also decided on an ad-hoc basis? If they were, I don't envy you the maintenance of this site in the future.
I don't buy it. In my last job, I heard a lot of, "Use the gray box there" (as opposed to the red, green, or gold boxes which were used elsewhere). The box that surrounded the area was never indicatedt o be "important," or regarding an "author" or "defintion." They wanted it to be gray.
It helps if the semantic approach is used from the beginning. If you're in a maintenance position where site components are already defined by their color rather than their meaning, then there's not much you can do about it. The point is that these things should be considered before the production process starts, when designers are coming up with a visual language for the project. At that point, the question isn't about CSS selectors or style sheet names, it's about what those styles mean: is gold new stuff? Does red indicate breaking news? Should headlines be in sans-serif bold? etc.
When redesign-time comes, you get to reap the benefits of changing just the stylesheets instead of grepping through the whole site looking for "blue". Check out this awesome writeup from Dunstan Orchard, who had to redesign the entire Mozilla Europe site without touching most of the HTML.
Read up on selectors (short guide, quick read).
What you're doing could be rewritten as "a.blue, span.blue, div#back { color: blue; }" as one commenter said, but more importantly, you should be naming things semantically, as another commenter hinted at. Which is to say, "blue" is a terrible class name, while "important" or "author" or "definition" or whatever are good ones, because they mean something. Your stylesheets will be a lot easier to understand if they are filled with gems like ".definition { color: blue; }".
Y'know what'd be better - Apple putting the (presumably patented, since we haven't seen it on anyone else's hardware) iPod scroll wheel into a keyboard or even on a standalone USB panel. As several have said, it's more usable than anything else because you can scroll long lists without repeatedly removing your finger. Physically grasping and moving a Griffin Powermate involves reconfiguring the way you're moving your hands and they can't be continuously spun as easily as the iPod wheel.
For wacom-type tablets or powerbooks/iBooks with a touchpad, this could be implemented in software.
Slashdot Mirror
PRT's are not novel, they've been an engineering pipe dream for at least 60 years. There was a similar design effort in the 1970s in Paris that was the subject of an excellent book by Bruno Latour called Aramis. TFA says that PRT have been previous unworkable for "a variety of reasons, including the cost of the initial systems and the difficulty of integrating them into existing cities". The Paris project got all the way to physical prototypes, built sections of track, etc., and one of Latour's conclusions is that the PRT concept is itself unworkable. It lives in an inflexible no man's land between private vehicles and mass transit: passengers can't go where they want because the system has tracks and shared "pods", and engineers can't scale it how they want because the vehicles don't have flexible open space inside to cram in more passengers during busy times. Lose-lose, all around.
Not so: you will in fact see corporate logos on athletes' gear, but it will be only logos from companies that have paid gonzo bucks for their logos to be shown exclusive of the competition. E.g, there will be Adidas but no Nike, Coke but no Pepsi, and so on. This is why the Olympics are worth so much to advertisers: it's a sharply controlled media environment where sponsors pay for a very expensive dead zone around their messages.
When CDs or vinyl were the only way of getting music, the "non-classics" generally commanded a higher price: ordinary record stores wouldn't have shelf space for obscure stuff, so it was necessary to search specialty shops for imports and rarities, for which you paid a premium. It was the well-marketed top 40 pop music and steadily-selling classics that were manufactured in great quantities, distributed far and wide, and went on sale first. Of course, in a stores like iTunes where shelf space (really "search" space) is effectively infinite, storage capacity is free, and network transmission costs are equal in cost regardless of artist popularity, prices will tend to equalize. There's no logical argument to be made for tiered pricing, unless they can figure out a way to introduce artificial scarcity into the market as they're doing with DRM.
Amen, seriously. Thanks.
Walk into any music store, and all you'll see is the leftover rubes who haven't yet figured out how to operate bittorrent or itunes. Of course they'll stare at you blankly.
Unlike San Francisco, your subway runs past 1am, and densely covers most of the city. I'd trade in a heartbeat.
I agree that WIkipedia has less of an incentive to present biased information, but I don't think it's because non-profits have no need to downplay competition. WP requires money and attention to work, and competes for these limited resources against other projects. They just happen to be at the top of the heap, so *not mentioning* the competition promotes the perception that they're in a class of their own.
Double click isn't a "normal" browser interaction. I've been using browsers since "1.0", and it would never occur to me to double click something on a web page. This is the worst temptation of Ajax, btw: duplicating or poorly imitating desktop interactions such as windows, drag & drop, or double-clicking in a page-based medium where they make no sense. Using Ajax to speed screen updates makes sense, but introducing new behaviors that can't be emulated with a page reload does not.
I don't think all those people are evenly-distributed thoughout Sweden.
And it makes a hissing sound: "csssssssssss...."
This may be easier than you think - a friend recently attempted to remove a bunch of black marks from his report, and found that it was a smoother process than he had anticipated. Apparently, if you contest something on your report and give a convincing reason, your creditors are contacted for their side of the story. If they fail to respond within a set period of time (30 days? 60 days?), you win.
Fast??? PHP 4 was released 5 1/2 years ago. PHP 5 was released 1 year ago. 4 1/2 years of stability is hardly what I'd call "fast", and I was using PHP all that time with no major language-driven changes to my code needed. Even now, PHP 4 is the most widely-deployed version of the language by far. Contrast this to RoR, which has seen dozens of app-breaking changes in the past year alone, primarily because it hasn't reached 1.0 and is still being heavily modified.
Well, it's not C, but the Python Challenge is an excellent multilevel programming riddle. Each level builds upon discoveries from previous levels, and encourages deep exploration of the Python library. I got about 1/3 of the way through before being stumped and running out of time to devote to it, but I bet it'd be super fun with a team working on it.
The difference is that "Copyright 2005 me, all rights reserved except reproduction for non-commercial use." is less legally-precise than this, CC's "legal code" version of this. Your short version is a pointer to their long version that happens to be much more defensible in courts worldwide.
Perhaps, but this is a great a example of technology being bent to serve the needs of its users. It may be ultimately more productive to modify a mail server to more easily handle this form of folk file storage, than to force users to adapt themselves to the IT department. I expect that a huge market is waiting for the first group to elegantly merge file storage and mail accessibility in this way.
Fundrace.org
The fact that they are localized is the point of the argument.
If you graph pollution over area, a place like manhattan obviously generates significantly more waste than a small town or suburb. But if you divide that by population density, dense cities actually come out ahead! People in cities like SF or NYC live in smaller homes with more efficient heating, rely on public transportation or walking to get around, and focus resource delivery and consumption onto a very small area. Compare that to your typical suburb, where the average family's environmental footprint is a lot bigger.
RTFA: The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces--romanticism and science--that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.
I'm guessing the northern route (he's stopping in Iceland) is a lot shorter.
Perhaps ... but I've been in the position of having to re-approach old markup numerous times, and it's pretty much always been a lifesaver to have consistent, meaningful style rules. Actually, one of the best bits of advice I've yet seen on CSS is to take it one step further, and have separate stylesheets that control font, color, and layout. I've found this to be significantly more sanity-preserving.
Okay, but what about the rest? Font, line spacing, border style, margins, padding? Surely these weren't also decided on an ad-hoc basis? If they were, I don't envy you the maintenance of this site in the future.
It helps if the semantic approach is used from the beginning. If you're in a maintenance position where site components are already defined by their color rather than their meaning, then there's not much you can do about it. The point is that these things should be considered before the production process starts, when designers are coming up with a visual language for the project. At that point, the question isn't about CSS selectors or style sheet names, it's about what those styles mean: is gold new stuff? Does red indicate breaking news? Should headlines be in sans-serif bold? etc.
When redesign-time comes, you get to reap the benefits of changing just the stylesheets instead of grepping through the whole site looking for "blue". Check out this awesome writeup from Dunstan Orchard, who had to redesign the entire Mozilla Europe site without touching most of the HTML.
Read up on selectors (short guide, quick read). What you're doing could be rewritten as "a.blue, span.blue, div#back { color: blue; }" as one commenter said, but more importantly, you should be naming things semantically, as another commenter hinted at. Which is to say, "blue" is a terrible class name, while "important" or "author" or "definition" or whatever are good ones, because they mean something. Your stylesheets will be a lot easier to understand if they are filled with gems like ".definition { color: blue; }".
Couple days late, but I just finished banging out a lightweight PHP implementation of JSON.
I've been a happy user of City Carshare (http://citycarshare.org/) in San Francisco / Oakland for over two years - great service, really convenient.
For wacom-type tablets or powerbooks/iBooks with a touchpad, this could be implemented in software.