I agree. I think that, while there is often a strong one-way correlation between nerds and smart people, the inverse is not necessarily true.
Bless yer heart, that's a great observation
The primary focus of the nerd-beating mentality is middle school, rather than high school, though even my 7th and 8th grade experience showed that being smart while acting like a normal human being went a long way. Usually the miscreants who got a kick out of torturing the abnormals were problems themselves, while the so-called popular crowd didn't really care either way - if you were a genuine human being with appreciable social skills, you were liked (or at least respected).
My hope is that when the Safari development team sees an issue with a site that has poorly coded pages, they contact the maintainer of the site rather than coding a work-around.
Interesting you should mention that - I believe that the Mozilla team has an explicitly defined standards evangelism crew, populated by such luminaries as Eric Meyer.
It's their job to find big-name sites that break in Mozilla due to non-compliance with w3c standards, and make direct contact with their webmasters to explain the benefits of coding to standards.
Apple should not "fix" sites that are optimized for IE - in the vaaaast majority of cases, such sites use ass-whacked HTML, your mother's activeX controls, and were built in FrontPage.
Apple should stick to its guns, and continue to work on STANDARDS COMPLIANCE for Safari, so that sites will work correctly in Saf/Moz/Konq/Op/etc. This will put pressure on MS to fix IE (as they have already started to do, thanks to Tantek Celik's excellent Tasman rendering engine for IE5/mac, and the standards compliance mode triggered via the presence of a legit DOCTYPE at the head of the file).
If you find a site that is *cough* "optimized" for MSIE, do the right thing, and notify the webmaster. I have done so on countless occasions with bank sites and the like, and often I get a response and eventual compliance in the long run.
On an off-topic note, I find humorous your apparent disdain for the legislature because it responds to corporate interests instead of the public, while at the same time advocating handing over those same problems to a judiciary that is even less democratic. Perhaps if America were a complete dictatorship this would satisfy you?
You're taking my words to a ridiculous extreme - I have no disdain for the legislature (though I do feel that it is singularly prone to abuse in a way that the judiciary is not), but I do think that "more laws" are rarely the solution to a legal problem. There is a reason this country has an interpretive judicial system: laws can be written in general terms, and their meaning or intent can be interpreted as it applies to specific circumstances. This system breaks down when the good of the public is not taken into account, for example in the above case, where industry consultants are called in to help draft legislation.
My original question was: was the public consulted when the law was being drafted, to the same degree that industry representatives were called in to help? If not, why not?
Why would you need ten respresentatives of the public to work out a compromise in a legal dispute between ISPs and Copyright holders?
Oh I don't know... maybe because the resulting law affects the public as much (if not moreso) than the industries who wrote it? Seriously, if this were just a legal dispute between two industries, we already have a mechanism for a dealing with that: a court system, and respect for legal precedent. New laws are rarely the solution to a problem, and typically the direct result of some serious wheel-greasin'.
"I was one of the 10 industry representatives who was there to draw up this law," said Sarah Deutsch, associate general counsel for Verizon. "There were five people from the telecom sector and five from the content sector -- and it was clearly our interpretation that the content would have to be on our network."
Why are industry people there in the first place, to draw up the law? Are they balanced by ten representatives of the public?
I never said I would like to see the desire removed - but if the economy hits the skids, or we see a greater equalization between the first and third worlds, the big car/house/bank account may simply cease to be an option, regardless of desire. I'm not making the argument that we need to embrace minimalism, but I am acknowledging the possibility that we might be forced to.
That's all.
CRUFT! (was: How's it feel to be a middle man?)
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
I don't see the doomsday scenerio you suggest, rather I see everybody competing on a more even basis and the worldwide standard of living improving
I can't mod you up, but I can reply.
It's a fact that when the playing field is levelled, not all parts of it stay high. We can only hope that the average standard of living continues to rise around the world. Personally, I don't think that a worsening economy here will be the doomsday scenario people predict; our society is carrying load of economic cruft that it could stand to do without: big homes, big cars, big insurance, big money all around. Very little of this is necessary or even necesarily desirable to the workings of a free, healthy society.
Some banks require user-agent spoofing* to work properly, but once I've got my foot in the door, everything seems to work great.
...
Well, I don't know if you consider the Dow Chemical Company [dow.com] in this category, but virtually every page is broken in Mozilla with Javascript code strewn across the screen; search forms, etc. don't work as a result.
You know, the simple way to help here is not to complain to/., it's to tell the people who work at the offending sites. Capital One blocked Mozilla for ages, and I made sure to complain - eventually they changed the policy, and when I was able to get into their site using Chimera I made sure to send a nice thank-you note and received a personal reply. There's actual human beings working on those things - word will get around if someone sends them a screen shot or quick explanation of the problem. This is especially true in the case of banks or other businesses, where your message is treated very seriously as a customer complaint. The only way to change policies that allow for shit sites like the Dow one to get built is to ensure that word gets to the superiors of the people building them. I'm a web developer in a corporate environment myself, and I know exactly how it goes when the client receives word that something doesn't work - we hear about bugs immediately.
Has anyone actually written a third-party app to access QuickTime?
This is probably not what you are looking for, but cycling 74's Max/MSP has had a number of built-in and external interfaces to quicktime available for years. Nato.0+55 was for years the drug of choice for artists wishing to control quicktime with musical or other input in a live performance context, but it has recently been supplanted by c74's own Jitter, an industrial-strength matrix math library which includes quicktime media and openGL control as part of the package. Both packages take full advantage of pretty much every feature of quicktime, include compositing, matrix transformations, and so on.
There is also the issue of bank loans to pay for new homes - it's my understanding that many banks are generally quite unwilling to lend money for, say, a dome-home or other unusual construction because they are perceived as "unsellable."
I find it sad that everytime a new technology such as this is developed, the first instinct of the marketing people tasked with selling it is to figure out a way to make it push ads into my perceptual environment, almost guaranteeing an initial cynical reaction..
A lot of awful movies could be salvaged by a good DVD version.
Perfect example: a correctional technical commentary for Hackers. "When evil hacker says 'set your computer to receive a file,' what he really means is..."
Why is it automatically assumed that high-tech is the solution to every public problem?
I just got back from visiting family in Wroclaw, Poland - the trams there are old, a little dilapidated, and date back to the 50's. But they work, dammit! There's track everywhere, trams run every few minutes, the network is extensive, and it's *cheap*. You can get anywhere you need to go in 15 minutes or less.
Slashdot Mirror
Bless yer heart, that's a great observation
The primary focus of the nerd-beating mentality is middle school, rather than high school, though even my 7th and 8th grade experience showed that being smart while acting like a normal human being went a long way. Usually the miscreants who got a kick out of torturing the abnormals were problems themselves, while the so-called popular crowd didn't really care either way - if you were a genuine human being with appreciable social skills, you were liked (or at least respected).
Konfabulator proved its worth when a coworker had to use the weather module to find out it was raining outside.
Cursed cubicles.
I did mention Konq. and Mozilla in the parent, FWIW.
Interesting you should mention that - I believe that the Mozilla team has an explicitly defined standards evangelism crew, populated by such luminaries as Eric Meyer.
It's their job to find big-name sites that break in Mozilla due to non-compliance with w3c standards, and make direct contact with their webmasters to explain the benefits of coding to standards.
Apple should not "fix" sites that are optimized for IE - in the vaaaast majority of cases, such sites use ass-whacked HTML, your mother's activeX controls, and were built in FrontPage.
Apple should stick to its guns, and continue to work on STANDARDS COMPLIANCE for Safari, so that sites will work correctly in Saf/Moz/Konq/Op/etc. This will put pressure on MS to fix IE (as they have already started to do, thanks to Tantek Celik's excellent Tasman rendering engine for IE5/mac, and the standards compliance mode triggered via the presence of a legit DOCTYPE at the head of the file).
If you find a site that is *cough* "optimized" for MSIE, do the right thing, and notify the webmaster. I have done so on countless occasions with bank sites and the like, and often I get a response and eventual compliance in the long run.
long live standards. good night.
Oh I don't know... maybe because the resulting law affects the public as much (if not moreso) than the industries who wrote it? Seriously, if this were just a legal dispute between two industries, we already have a mechanism for a dealing with that: a court system, and respect for legal precedent. New laws are rarely the solution to a problem, and typically the direct result of some serious wheel-greasin'.
Why are industry people there in the first place, to draw up the law? Are they balanced by ten representatives of the public?
I never said I would like to see the desire removed - but if the economy hits the skids, or we see a greater equalization between the first and third worlds, the big car/house/bank account may simply cease to be an option, regardless of desire. I'm not making the argument that we need to embrace minimalism, but I am acknowledging the possibility that we might be forced to.
That's all.
I don't see the doomsday scenerio you suggest, rather I see everybody competing on a more even basis and the worldwide standard of living improving
I can't mod you up, but I can reply.
It's a fact that when the playing field is levelled, not all parts of it stay high. We can only hope that the average standard of living continues to rise around the world. Personally, I don't think that a worsening economy here will be the doomsday scenario people predict; our society is carrying load of economic cruft that it could stand to do without: big homes, big cars, big insurance, big money all around. Very little of this is necessary or even necesarily desirable to the workings of a free, healthy society.
she's mainly worried about people selling tapes on EBay. How horrible. People VIEWING AN ACTORS FILMS! I'm sure that's the last thing he wanted.
Seems to me that she's mainly worried about having to earn her own living, instead of mooching off granddaddy.
Once all those manufacturing jobs are eliminated, it had better be cheaper, or no one will be left to buy it.
...
You know, the simple way to help here is not to complain to /., it's to tell the people who work at the offending sites. Capital One blocked Mozilla for ages, and I made sure to complain - eventually they changed the policy, and when I was able to get into their site using Chimera I made sure to send a nice thank-you note and received a personal reply. There's actual human beings working on those things - word will get around if someone sends them a screen shot or quick explanation of the problem. This is especially true in the case of banks or other businesses, where your message is treated very seriously as a customer complaint. The only way to change policies that allow for shit sites like the Dow one to get built is to ensure that word gets to the superiors of the people building them. I'm a web developer in a corporate environment myself, and I know exactly how it goes when the client receives word that something doesn't work - we hear about bugs immediately.
Has anyone actually written a third-party app to access QuickTime?
This is probably not what you are looking for, but cycling 74's Max/MSP has had a number of built-in and external interfaces to quicktime available for years. Nato.0+55 was for years the drug of choice for artists wishing to control quicktime with musical or other input in a live performance context, but it has recently been supplanted by c74's own Jitter, an industrial-strength matrix math library which includes quicktime media and openGL control as part of the package. Both packages take full advantage of pretty much every feature of quicktime, include compositing, matrix transformations, and so on.
"...it was headed up by a guy at Microsoft who pays attention to the standards set by the W3C..."
You're thinking of Tantek Celik.
PGP Corporation will soon be releasing military-grade gaffer's tape to address this concern.
There is also the issue of bank loans to pay for new homes - it's my understanding that many banks are generally quite unwilling to lend money for, say, a dome-home or other unusual construction because they are perceived as "unsellable."
I find it sad that everytime a new technology such as this is developed, the first instinct of the marketing people tasked with selling it is to figure out a way to make it push ads into my perceptual environment, almost guaranteeing an initial cynical reaction..
That's what the ALT attrbute is for: text that is parsed by robots and search engines in place of the image.
A lot of awful movies could be salvaged by a good DVD version.
Perfect example: a correctional technical commentary for Hackers. "When evil hacker says 'set your computer to receive a file,' what he really means is..."
The one on the reviewer's site is standards-compliant, though - big difference.
(disclaimer - I haven't run the page through a validator, but the body declaration alone is clean)
Why is it automatically assumed that high-tech is the solution to every public problem?
I just got back from visiting family in Wroclaw, Poland - the trams there are old, a little dilapidated, and date back to the 50's. But they work, dammit! There's track everywhere, trams run every few minutes, the network is extensive, and it's *cheap*. You can get anywhere you need to go in 15 minutes or less.