Plus, of course, I won't get it to play most of today's downloaded video files anyways while my Mandrake 10.1 box plays it fine without me having had to install or configure ANYTHING, out of the box and without codec downloads......but then people tend to upload moviez in crappy formats and encodings anywhere, so it really isn't interesing to those of us with a day job to download stuff from Kazaa or whatnot and figuring out some hours (and some more hours of rerendering or whatever) how to burn this shit to a DVD to actually WATCH it. I don't have time for such shit, I have a job and a family with kids. And if I can get to watch the movie for a buck as a rental then there is pretty much no point in downloading at all. Even the DSL and power cost doesn't amortize, so it's even stupid. I know people who shell out more that 200 EUR per month for their shiny 5 or 10/2 Mbit ADSL flat rate they use to leech moviez of questionable quality which needs hours of computing to be watchable at all. And they never wonder how many DVDs, CDs or even iTMS tracks for their iPod that would buy them a month.
I'm pretty comfortable with the situation because I just don't see parents downloading movies or mp3s very much (because of the aforementioned reasons). It's mostly kids, which also explains that anything would be encoded with the new codec of the week which you can only download from this russian web site full of porn banners. Adults just don't install anything from such a site on their machine. Okay, *clueful* adults don't do this. But I digress.
So the downloading is pretty much taking place between minors who don't have much monetary power left today anyways (cost for mobile phone usually taking up all the money left, or more). And the adults would rather go to the cinema and leave kids and dog home with a friend or family member and have a nice evening for themselves. So at last in the Real World(TM), downloading isn't hurting record companies much. Their problem is that they made music so much into a 'product' with low life span that it seems stupid to even try to follow the stream by actually *buying* the stuff. If it's only exciting and 'new' for at most two or three weeks, why bother? It gets played to death on the radio and music television all day and starts to annoy you even before it disappears to be replaced by the next 'new' and 'best' song.
The music industry better sooner than later comprehend this. Quick reaction to this fact by offering something that is interesting to the generation between 25 and 35, the time when people usually buy the most music and videos (at least in my vicinity), they could actually make money, all by offering a product the market wants. Insert obligatory PROFIT!!! joke here.
Hey, these are my grandchildren. They were raised by one of my children who was raised by me and who, therefore, has been greatly exposed to my attitude towards many of those complex social and technological issues the net gives us. I doubt they'll ask me such a stupid question at all.
Or so I hope, my children are both still quite young, and after all they're unique individuals anyway, so anything might happen. Maybe they even don't develop any interest for computers, and I sure won't be pressing them into it for we all know how shitty working with computers is most of the time in the Real World(TM) for most of the people.
But I digress. Back in the old days in CompuServe, there was a time when they were checking ID and not allowing people to 'join' without. Only real names were allowed and set by CIS according to your ID. That was actually a Good Thing. I talked to Al Gore and can say for sure that it was him. That was back in 1994. Heck, I even talked to Douglas Adams and can be sure it was really him. (His style was very characteristic anyways, which was great fun.) If someone stalked or harassed you, you'd simply submit his message or mail to the CIS sysops and they'd take care of it, even banning people for continued harassing. They usually couldn't rejoin CIS without a change of ID (see above).
Those were Great Times. There was a very friendly atmosphere. There was no spam. I say it again so that it can sink into your conscious mind. There. Was. No. Spam. I remember years of email without a single spam. I remember finding the first one really odd (it was the notorious Svetlana stuff, Russian brides for sale) and thinking that this is so pointless that it won't be successful and dying out. The problem was only beginning when they opened their system to the Internet in around 1995. The restrictive access was a good thing.
So actually, to finally get back on topic, things aren't that easy. "Freedom and chaos" aren't inherently good, it's a *lot* more complex. Accountability would solve almost all of the problems we have today. Think about spam. Think about DDoS. Think about the social consequences. Hell, even think of arbritary things like ecommerce, it would be secure for both sides. The back side, of course, stays the surveillance scenario everyone of us fears. I am German. I for sure don't want to live in a country ruled by all-knowing totalitarists, my grandparents told me enough about it.
Which closes the circle. I really need recovery. *goes off to de.alt.sysadmin.recovery*
Yeah, but hey, you can easily change the EXIF metadata to whatever you like. I actually use this to find out whether my local photo print service looks at the data. My EXIF information on everything I let them print says the images are copyrighted and the copyright holder is to be contacted at http://www.tubgirl.com/.
(Note: I'm not picking on you, I want to make a point, and your post just triggers the rant of the day.)
Ladies, Gentlemen,
Only on/. can this get modded +2, Insightful. I want you to take a walk with me, out there to that 'real world' they all talk about.
I'm with you that HTTP isn't the right tool for the job. I personally still loathe sending files around via email. But people don't care. And there's no reason they should have to. The Internet is about interoperation, remember? We might not like the implications, (I know I don't), but it still is the goal we all are trying to accomplish, for whatever reason. (I'm in it for the fame, the coke and the whores, of course, but YMMV. And BTW, I like that guy's propeller hat.)
But, Ladies and Gentlemen, I digress.
Let's take the OP's example of the photo gallery sites. Being a long-time web application programmer, I always wonder why you have to jump through hoops to let people upload folders and folders of stuff (and to display an accurate progress bar). Yes, I know how to do it and we use self-written PHP classes for that. That's not the point. The point is that there is no point in forcing people to use (or worse, install) another piece of software just because the stupid shits who write those browsers just won't implement *basic* file selection dialogs. I mean in Windows you have a fully capable file browser (copy, rename, delete, etc.) on any open dialog except for that of the Web browser. WTF? It's trivial to implement what to do with the input of such a file open dialog, yet it's not done. Maybe it's just too hard to code up a HTTP upload for more than one file. You can do it with a few lines of PHP, but maybe it's impossible to code up in C++ or whatever people use these days, what do I know.
Maybe I'm just putting in that sarcasm because just today I once again had to explain to a client why people just can't upload a bunch of point-of-sale material using "the normal Windows file open thingy" but have to disable the pop-up blocking for our site so that our 'faked' upload dialog could appear. Because, of course, our 'dialog' should not be in the browser window, but "just like any other open thingy in Windows". It went like this:
(Curtain opens. Loud Circus Clown music. An ape wearing a fez drives around the conference room in a miniature formula one car.)
"We want a Windows-like file open dialog in a new window" - "Okay, disable pop-up blocking just for the site then" - "No, why?" - "Because we have to open a *new* *window* from the *browser*." - "No, we won't." (Blank stare.) - "Okay, we'll have to hack something up that fools your pop-up blocker then." - "No, you won't, it violates this security policy here that says that none of our IT security countermeasures are allowed to be circumvented. Pop-up blocking is a vital part of our IT security strategy."
(Narrator: Which explicitly and per policy allows sending.EXE and.PIF files via email which, as you assume correctly, also bypass the AV scan on the mail server by policy because some executive couldn't get some file transferred. We are talking about a major automotive company.)
- "Then we have to do it in the browser window. The users don't care and we can design it to nicely fit into the web corporate identity guidelines which enforces your brand in the user's minds."
(Narrator: This usually works. "Getting the brand enforced", preferably "in the target demography", is one of the remaining silver bullets if you work in advertising. That'll sell about anything. Usually.)
- "No, we want a window."
(Curtain closes. The ape crashes out of the window, burning. Music stops.)
It's the same in advertising, MacOS 9 is *everywhere*. We have been planning the transition for three years now, but our pilot machines, some used by DTP people, some by creatives, some by administrative staff, always show us that OSX just isn't practical, there's too much that doesn't work. We're now testing 10.4 and I thought this time it's good enough for production, when the vendor of our workflow software announced today they won't go for a 10.4 port of their software as they've sunk EUR 500.000 into a working 10.3 port and the support from Apple sucks not only ass, but literally GOATSE. Yes, we're looking for a replacement, but that's a DB with ten years of archives and file history and you don't replace that quickly. So I guess it'll be early next year until we're ready for OSX.
Mind you, I love my new TiBook with 10.4, but I lead the IT department, so my usage of the machine differs greatly from what our regular staff does (Photoshop, XPress, Illustrator, FreeHand, Acrobat, all using *lots* of fonts and *huge* images). I'd love to switch the company over, but it just won't work out right now. So I can only hope Apple gets their shit together before the old machines that can still run OS9 at all (newer machines won't run it exclusively, only Classic under OSX, because of an artificial firmware restriction) start falling apart.
OTOH it was a quite brilliant and subtle move of the author to make it so destructive.
1) It naturally limits its growth by taking its hosts offline. 2) It makes sure it's going to be a blast, not a neverending wave like Code Red (of which we still get some infection attempts every week). 3) This makes it ultimately *less* dangerous than most current worms. 4) It has written WATCH DIS, YOU ARE SO OWNED WHEN I DECIDE TO RELEASE THE REAL ONE all over it. Most people don't seem to get this. Believe me, the people making a living from IT security are getting it. Those who don't won't be there after the next one which will *not* limit its growth, but instead adapts a more biological approach. Most security flaws aren't patched for weeks or months, so you have a reasonable timeframe in which you can slowly grow a starting population if you're being a good boy and just sending some queries for new victims with the normal boosts of internet traffic on your host.
I personally find this a *very* elegant approach.
As we're talking about it, to me all of this stuff still is amateur crap. I mean hey, look at it. They immediately catch everyone's attention. They saturate pipes, they hog ressources. They're too loud. They spread fast enough to be detected. They can be easily grepped off the network. (When I wrote assembler back in the early 80s, there were several illegal opcodes which did essentially the same and were just not documented, so you can obfuscate anything by randomly exchanging the illegal opcodes of every instruction before passing it on to the next host, so if you also have the option to mask as legitimate traffic... you can write the payload ahead of time and just wait for some holes that are likely not patched for a while, put them in an off you go. I could go on and on, but the point is, today's worms and virii are just amateur crap, like the first attempts of mankind to build airplanes.
Then again, I'm quite sure there at least some 'skilled' people out there just calmly develop their high-end worms and work at cross-platform compatibility for building multi-million-machine bot nets just because. Maybe something like this is out already, behaving like a good boy and waiting to wake up. I find this a very interesting thing to watch, as it *will* eventually happen.
I just hope that I won't be hit too hard when it comes. Until then, remember that if your data is valuable to you, always backup, and also on removable media (and yes, copy that stuff to new media every once in a year). Yes, I'm talking of your more than 10000 pictures of the family and kids, and all that email you love to keep around from 1990.
Actually, that is a pretty simple one. Everything you remember is saved in your brain physically. If you find a way to scan the exact, complete physical state of the brain at a certain point of time, including the exact motion/strength/direction etc. of the neural signals, save that, and make it 'physical' again, e.g. with those electronics-building yoghurt bacteria from TFA, and 'boot' it, it would be exactly you, with all your stored memories, experiences etc.
The hard point of this is, of course, that mofo Heisenberg fucks it all up. You cannot observe the position and motion of anything at the same time. You'd end up with a fucked up copied brain because you don't know how exactly the electric signals running the brain were going at the time of the scan, and I believe uniform or random neural signals would likely be a quite unpleasant experience.
I remember reading a headline on some magazine that claimed Heisenberg had been disproved, but I didn't buy it and I am too lazy to Google. Feedback on this is greatly appreciated.
That's actually a nice feature, albeit one for which there are free alternatives. If it's the only feature keeping you on DW, you might want to google for those. A good keyword is 'demoronizer'. I haven't tried any of those because we always had DW at work and my friends don't send me FP messes, so there was never the need for me.
I know you're winking, but... even though I program since the early 80's and am quite used to CLIs and terminal-based/pure-text editors, I never got to the point where I could force myself to really evaluate both vi and emacs and become proficient with one of them. I am just to lazy to find out how the FUCK I make it work the same via PuTTY and Konsole, and after a few days of not using it, I'll have forgotten WTF is this 'meta' key that's not on my keyboard. It doesn't matter though, because my human RAM deletes the whole keyboard shortcuts after a few hours anyways. Maybe I've just learnt too many shortcut schemes in this life already.
And vi, well, I can remember this one::wq. I use it whenever I forgot to change $EDITOR on some stupid FreeBSD server at work and some command leaves me with an editor that won't let me edit just because I always forget how to switch modes. I admit using ee where possible. And yes, I feel a bit dirty about it.
If you have some nice ways of memorizing any of the above, please share. I can still remember most of the basic commands in Turbo Basic 1.0 (^K-B/^K-K anyone?), but I'd be damned if I could remember how to operate vi or emacs.
Being a professional webworker for more than 8 years now, I agree with you from experience, but actually I don't think you can blame Macromedia.
I will not say anything at all about Flash because two camps who BOTH don't get it will start the usual pointless discussion. Flash is rarely used for what it's great at, visualizing data, and plagues us with wildly unnecessary and annoying l33t-masturbation stuff instead.
Dreamweaver itself is indeed a powerful timesaver in the hands of an experienced XHTML/CSS guy. If you look at it closely, you'll find that it is a very nice graphical frontend to HTML itself, with a great set of shortcuts so that you almost don't have to touch the mouse at all. The palettes just provide access to the most commonly needed attributes of the element you're working on. If you leave all those nasty "behaviours", "timelines" and whatnow alone, it produces nicely readable and well-formed code. I'm using Dreamweaver since the early betas, and even back then this was the case. I tend to think that this was an initial design goal behind DW.
The bad comes from the 'designers' who are taught print design at the universities and apply them to the Web, using all the nutty clicky-pointy tools that produce JS-laden horror cabinet of non-standards-compliance they dare to call "HTML". It's a classical PEBKAC. Look at it this way - if DW didn't have those features, GoLive would've taken over long ago and we don't want THIS to happen. IMNSHO the only thing worse would be Frontpage. At least the guys at Macromedia didn't invent bogus HTML extensions because they were incapable of providing a proper metadata infrastructure, like Adobe did.
(I'm not a fanboy though, I just use what works best at the moment for the things I do. If someone shows me how to reproduce this "Apply Source Formatting" feature from DW in Kate/KDevelop and how to synchronize sites like in DW, I'm switching my machine at work from Win2K with DW to KDevelop/nvu on FreeBSD tomorrow, because it better fits the things I do nowadays. It will then match my setup at home.)
While we're at it, SEO is, was and always will be BS, just like the whole Internet Advertising Myth which after nearly a decade of documented failure still isn't debunked. Duh.
When he made the script he never realized until afterwards that multiplying six and nine was not in fact 42.
What a pity, I'm quite disappointed now. I always thought that the question and answer mismatched because of the replacement of the original humans with those phone sanitizers, basically replacing a whole 'component' of the computer which is Earth in THHGTTG.
I work in an advertising agency. I used to be a creative, but moved to the IT department because I couldn't stand the stupidity of those 'professionals'. You wouldn't believe what bullshit seemingly completely intelligent and nice people will send to you. "Word images" are routine (you say "please send me that image you have used in your image brochure" and they send you a.doc with the embedded image. Anyone who knows a better way than printing the.doc to Distiller with Print settings and opening that in Photoshop, please come up with it.)
Hell, I've been sent a completely designed and layouted 32 page manual for a complex online media application including images and videos, in EXCEL. I guess to a businesswoman with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
(That file is still being passed around as a curiosity between people in the field.)
I won't get into clients sending images in 72dpi and 70x140 pixels to be used as a background on an 18/1 (the standard billboard format here in Germany). I like it best that they *all* act like it's your fault that it simply is not usable for being printed at that size. Actually, that helps me to practice my kindness, like some strange Buddhist excercise. Not being drawn down by stupidity is a valuable gift that needs lots of training.
"Sir, there is a hidden message in that text you've read to me for the third time now."
Now, take the data and put up some nice animations, archive the first 100 articles or so and put it into some nice database to mine for interesting stuff. Should not be too hard to script together the data gathering, you can already start fetching stuff while developing the functionality and frontend.
Someone wanna join? This cries 'distributed database'...;)
I don't think that the story itself is special at all, because that's not what Romeo & Juliet is about - it's about brilliant use of language as a medium that still works today, hundreds of years after these works have been written. As a professional writer, I admire the unique style and depth of the language. The story itself is trivial. How it's told is not. I don't think much of what we write today can still be read and made sense of in 100-200 years.
I guess you're talking about Romeo + Juliet, which in my opinion is the best adaption of Shakespeare I've ever seen. It transported the story to a 'modern' stage, yet conserved the timelessness of the original by doing so in a rather abstract way, using visually and metaphorically *very* rich imagery. It does a very good job of telling the story, and while I think that Leo di Caprio is one of the worst actors around, Shakespeare's brilliant dialogs brought out some nice acting I'd never have expected from him, ever.
I might be sounding like a fanboy, but actually I've seen *so many* interpretations of R+J, most of them either terrible or simply not getting the spirit of the original, that the movie to me really stood out. I hadn't seen it when it came out because I found the trailers so horrible (plus, or rather minus, it starred Leo), but a few years later a girl-friend took me out to watch it without telling me beforehand. (A sinister plan as she knew *exactly* why I hadn't seen it.) I left the cinema pleasantly surprised.
Mind to share your criticism of the movie? I greatly admire Shakespeare's works, and if more people decide to do such intelligent adaptions of material which is that old, more power to them. I might even bear watching some hours of JLo or Ben Affleck or whomever.
Geez, that would ROCK! Would have to be careful though that my children don't catch me playing that. I guess telling them that violence never solves anything might lose some of its authority.
You also have NOT been nominated to police the thoughts and minds of America's youth, and thank heavens you haven't, because I fear the results.
First off, you are really a drama queen. We're not talking about 'thought police', we are talking about telling kids how to write correctly.
Second, your youth (and mine, being 30) was dramatically different from the youth that the kids today have, with the Internet present and available everywhere. Kids need supervision and parenting. This doesn't mean playing the dictator, it means giving children a frame of acceptable behaviour for them to measure and build their *own* frame in the process.
Third, if kids contact me using 1337, they'll have to live with my mocking with them. It gives them the opportunity to reflect on why I find that sort of communication unacceptable. My own kids grow up with the principle that opinions should always be voiced and discussed. It teaches them to defend their POV, and it teaches them they'd better have a reason for most of the things they do in life. If you think now that I'm a terrible father, you probably don't have kids on your own and don't know how much one loves them (I do). The purpose isn't to make their lives hard, it's to encourage them in becoming themselves.
Getting back on-topic, one's native language is something that should be valued. For me, it is on par with other parenting goals as teaching my kids good manners - basic stuff.
Actually, on CompuServe we used , not *g*. Some of my friends from back then still use it, but it's mostly distinct because most forums either discard it because "HTML is not allowed", or it's being posted as-is which means no one will see it because the browser ignores the 'unknown tag', which is the expected behaviour.
I miss the old CompuServe days when everyone needed to be logged on with their real name (you had to prove your identity) and there were actually intelligent people online who were worth the online time, at what was it in the beginning, $9.60/h? I talked to Al Gore and Douglas Adams, and could be sure it was them. A higher executive once told me proudly that the only person allowed to use a fake name was the POTUS (a pity he didn't tell me the name the POTUS used, I'd have had some questions). That was in 1995, before the rules where changed and the prices dropped, resulting in the first of many waves of idiots to
GO SYSOP was nice, lots of free software sponsored by the companies (like WinZip, Winfax, Symantec stuff...), to be legally used by anyone who managed forums. Ah, these were the times. I always liked how entering the legendary virtual-world-style WorldsAway would be accomplished by GO AWAY. What a pity that WA sucked to bad.
> You are not allowed to talk on cell phone on the commuter trains.
Now there's an interesting idea. Why is this? Here in Germany it's forbidden to use a mobile while driving a car for obvious reasons (people simply ignore it and talk anyway or, worse, write SMS which technically *isn't* forbidden), but I can't think of a reason why you should ban talking on the phone being a passenger on a train.
Read my post again. It's exactly what I said. The OP is correct, no one cares for IE. It's being tested against, but no longer being coded for. What was your point again?
And FWIW, in this context it's well relevant whom I work for, because those make up a significant part of market share in building web sites (at least in Europe, don't know or care about the US), which means my observations are pretty representative of the market.
The IE only pages are already disappearing, and actually my perspective on this is not that it happens because of Moz/FF, but because every new IE release introduces more incompatibilities with old versions and people are fed up with kludging up their HTML when they can just rebuild it and have it work everywhere in half the time which is required for debugging all those stupid side effects.
This is not +4, Insightful, because the OP is correct. Amongst others, I work for BBDO, TBWA, Publicis and RSCG, and none of those care much for IE, because if you have designers who understand the medium, it's easy to build nice (==compliant) XHTML/CSS which renders just fine everywhere. Most problems derive from graphics-laden sites sketched up in Photoshop (or even worse, XPress or Freehand) by aging print designers which require nonsensical pixel-perfect rendering and are demanded to be built "exactly like the layout!". Broken design, broken result.
I might add that of course there are many huge players in the field who still travel the 'optimized for IE' road and build shitty stuff which just renders in one or two versions of IE (rendering of CSS changed severely in some areas between IE 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0). But those who understand what they do, produce good quality. The IE only pages are already disappearing, and actually my perspective on this is not that it happens because every new IE release introduces more incompatibilities with old versions and people are fed up with kludging up their HTML when they can just rebuild it and have it work everywhere in half the time which is required for debugging all those stupid side effects. Look at Google Maps as an example. Doesn't look very 'optimized for IE' to me.
(I only talk about professional web design. I refuse to discuss the HTML practices of hobbyists, they'll build broken pages until browsers refuse to display them completely (won't happen), and frankly shouldn't be bothered with such discussions. Let them play with it, maybe some of them get enough out of it to learn how to do it the right way later.)
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Plus, of course, I won't get it to play most of today's downloaded video files anyways while my Mandrake 10.1 box plays it fine without me having had to install or configure ANYTHING, out of the box and without codec downloads... ...but then people tend to upload moviez in crappy formats and encodings anywhere, so it really isn't interesing to those of us with a day job to download stuff from Kazaa or whatnot and figuring out some hours (and some more hours of rerendering or whatever) how to burn this shit to a DVD to actually WATCH it. I don't have time for such shit, I have a job and a family with kids. And if I can get to watch the movie for a buck as a rental then there is pretty much no point in downloading at all. Even the DSL and power cost doesn't amortize, so it's even stupid. I know people who shell out more that 200 EUR per month for their shiny 5 or 10/2 Mbit ADSL flat rate they use to leech moviez of questionable quality which needs hours of computing to be watchable at all. And they never wonder how many DVDs, CDs or even iTMS tracks for their iPod that would buy them a month.
I'm pretty comfortable with the situation because I just don't see parents downloading movies or mp3s very much (because of the aforementioned reasons). It's mostly kids, which also explains that anything would be encoded with the new codec of the week which you can only download from this russian web site full of porn banners. Adults just don't install anything from such a site on their machine. Okay, *clueful* adults don't do this. But I digress.
So the downloading is pretty much taking place between minors who don't have much monetary power left today anyways (cost for mobile phone usually taking up all the money left, or more). And the adults would rather go to the cinema and leave kids and dog home with a friend or family member and have a nice evening for themselves. So at last in the Real World(TM), downloading isn't hurting record companies much. Their problem is that they made music so much into a 'product' with low life span that it seems stupid to even try to follow the stream by actually *buying* the stuff. If it's only exciting and 'new' for at most two or three weeks, why bother? It gets played to death on the radio and music television all day and starts to annoy you even before it disappears to be replaced by the next 'new' and 'best' song.
The music industry better sooner than later comprehend this. Quick reaction to this fact by offering something that is interesting to the generation between 25 and 35, the time when people usually buy the most music and videos (at least in my vicinity), they could actually make money, all by offering a product the market wants. Insert obligatory PROFIT!!! joke here.
Hey, these are my grandchildren. They were raised by one of my children who was raised by me and who, therefore, has been greatly exposed to my attitude towards many of those complex social and technological issues the net gives us. I doubt they'll ask me such a stupid question at all.
Or so I hope, my children are both still quite young, and after all they're unique individuals anyway, so anything might happen. Maybe they even don't develop any interest for computers, and I sure won't be pressing them into it for we all know how shitty working with computers is most of the time in the Real World(TM) for most of the people.
But I digress. Back in the old days in CompuServe, there was a time when they were checking ID and not allowing people to 'join' without. Only real names were allowed and set by CIS according to your ID. That was actually a Good Thing. I talked to Al Gore and can say for sure that it was him. That was back in 1994. Heck, I even talked to Douglas Adams and can be sure it was really him. (His style was very characteristic anyways, which was great fun.) If someone stalked or harassed you, you'd simply submit his message or mail to the CIS sysops and they'd take care of it, even banning people for continued harassing. They usually couldn't rejoin CIS without a change of ID (see above).
Those were Great Times. There was a very friendly atmosphere. There was no spam. I say it again so that it can sink into your conscious mind. There. Was. No. Spam. I remember years of email without a single spam. I remember finding the first one really odd (it was the notorious Svetlana stuff, Russian brides for sale) and thinking that this is so pointless that it won't be successful and dying out. The problem was only beginning when they opened their system to the Internet in around 1995. The restrictive access was a good thing.
So actually, to finally get back on topic, things aren't that easy. "Freedom and chaos" aren't inherently good, it's a *lot* more complex. Accountability would solve almost all of the problems we have today. Think about spam. Think about DDoS. Think about the social consequences. Hell, even think of arbritary things like ecommerce, it would be secure for both sides. The back side, of course, stays the surveillance scenario everyone of us fears. I am German. I for sure don't want to live in a country ruled by all-knowing totalitarists, my grandparents told me enough about it.
Which closes the circle. I really need recovery. *goes off to de.alt.sysadmin.recovery*
It's not "human dignity can't be taken away", it's
The dignity of men is unimpeachable.
Makes quite a difference to me as a German.
Yeah, but hey, you can easily change the EXIF metadata to whatever you like. I actually use this to find out whether my local photo print service looks at the data. My EXIF information on everything I let them print says the images are copyrighted and the copyright holder is to be contacted at http://www.tubgirl.com/.
I'll know when they look for sure.
Ladies, Gentlemen,
Only on
I'm with you that HTTP isn't the right tool for the job. I personally still loathe sending files around via email. But people don't care. And there's no reason they should have to. The Internet is about interoperation, remember? We might not like the implications, (I know I don't), but it still is the goal we all are trying to accomplish, for whatever reason. (I'm in it for the fame, the coke and the whores, of course, but YMMV. And BTW, I like that guy's propeller hat.)
But, Ladies and Gentlemen, I digress.
Let's take the OP's example of the photo gallery sites. Being a long-time web application programmer, I always wonder why you have to jump through hoops to let people upload folders and folders of stuff (and to display an accurate progress bar). Yes, I know how to do it and we use self-written PHP classes for that. That's not the point. The point is that there is no point in forcing people to use (or worse, install) another piece of software just because the stupid shits who write those browsers just won't implement *basic* file selection dialogs. I mean in Windows you have a fully capable file browser (copy, rename, delete, etc.) on any open dialog except for that of the Web browser. WTF? It's trivial to implement what to do with the input of such a file open dialog, yet it's not done. Maybe it's just too hard to code up a HTTP upload for more than one file. You can do it with a few lines of PHP, but maybe it's impossible to code up in C++ or whatever people use these days, what do I know.
Maybe I'm just putting in that sarcasm because just today I once again had to explain to a client why people just can't upload a bunch of point-of-sale material using "the normal Windows file open thingy" but have to disable the pop-up blocking for our site so that our 'faked' upload dialog could appear. Because, of course, our 'dialog' should not be in the browser window, but "just like any other open thingy in Windows". It went like this:
(If you wonder why I didn't go
It's the same in advertising, MacOS 9 is *everywhere*. We have been planning the transition for three years now, but our pilot machines, some used by DTP people, some by creatives, some by administrative staff, always show us that OSX just isn't practical, there's too much that doesn't work. We're now testing 10.4 and I thought this time it's good enough for production, when the vendor of our workflow software announced today they won't go for a 10.4 port of their software as they've sunk EUR 500.000 into a working 10.3 port and the support from Apple sucks not only ass, but literally GOATSE. Yes, we're looking for a replacement, but that's a DB with ten years of archives and file history and you don't replace that quickly. So I guess it'll be early next year until we're ready for OSX.
Mind you, I love my new TiBook with 10.4, but I lead the IT department, so my usage of the machine differs greatly from what our regular staff does (Photoshop, XPress, Illustrator, FreeHand, Acrobat, all using *lots* of fonts and *huge* images). I'd love to switch the company over, but it just won't work out right now. So I can only hope Apple gets their shit together before the old machines that can still run OS9 at all (newer machines won't run it exclusively, only Classic under OSX, because of an artificial firmware restriction) start falling apart.
OTOH it was a quite brilliant and subtle move of the author to make it so destructive.
1) It naturally limits its growth by taking its hosts offline.
2) It makes sure it's going to be a blast, not a neverending wave like Code Red (of which we still get some infection attempts every week).
3) This makes it ultimately *less* dangerous than most current worms.
4) It has written WATCH DIS, YOU ARE SO OWNED WHEN I DECIDE TO RELEASE THE REAL ONE all over it. Most people don't seem to get this. Believe me, the people making a living from IT security are getting it. Those who don't won't be there after the next one which will *not* limit its growth, but instead adapts a more biological approach. Most security flaws aren't patched for weeks or months, so you have a reasonable timeframe in which you can slowly grow a starting population if you're being a good boy and just sending some queries for new victims with the normal boosts of internet traffic on your host.
I personally find this a *very* elegant approach.
As we're talking about it, to me all of this stuff still is amateur crap. I mean hey, look at it. They immediately catch everyone's attention. They saturate pipes, they hog ressources. They're too loud. They spread fast enough to be detected. They can be easily grepped off the network. (When I wrote assembler back in the early 80s, there were several illegal opcodes which did essentially the same and were just not documented, so you can obfuscate anything by randomly exchanging the illegal opcodes of every instruction before passing it on to the next host, so if you also have the option to mask as legitimate traffic... you can write the payload ahead of time and just wait for some holes that are likely not patched for a while, put them in an off you go. I could go on and on, but the point is, today's worms and virii are just amateur crap, like the first attempts of mankind to build airplanes.
Then again, I'm quite sure there at least some 'skilled' people out there just calmly develop their high-end worms and work at cross-platform compatibility for building multi-million-machine bot nets just because. Maybe something like this is out already, behaving like a good boy and waiting to wake up. I find this a very interesting thing to watch, as it *will* eventually happen.
I just hope that I won't be hit too hard when it comes. Until then, remember that if your data is valuable to you, always backup, and also on removable media (and yes, copy that stuff to new media every once in a year). Yes, I'm talking of your more than 10000 pictures of the family and kids, and all that email you love to keep around from 1990.
Actually, that is a pretty simple one. Everything you remember is saved in your brain physically. If you find a way to scan the exact, complete physical state of the brain at a certain point of time, including the exact motion/strength/direction etc. of the neural signals, save that, and make it 'physical' again, e.g. with those electronics-building yoghurt bacteria from TFA, and 'boot' it, it would be exactly you, with all your stored memories, experiences etc.
The hard point of this is, of course, that mofo Heisenberg fucks it all up. You cannot observe the position and motion of anything at the same time. You'd end up with a fucked up copied brain because you don't know how exactly the electric signals running the brain were going at the time of the scan, and I believe uniform or random neural signals would likely be a quite unpleasant experience.
I remember reading a headline on some magazine that claimed Heisenberg had been disproved, but I didn't buy it and I am too lazy to Google. Feedback on this is greatly appreciated.
Where can I apply for playing the hero?
That's actually a nice feature, albeit one for which there are free alternatives. If it's the only feature keeping you on DW, you might want to google for those. A good keyword is 'demoronizer'. I haven't tried any of those because we always had DW at work and my friends don't send me FP messes, so there was never the need for me.
I know you're winking, but... even though I program since the early 80's and am quite used to CLIs and terminal-based/pure-text editors, I never got to the point where I could force myself to really evaluate both vi and emacs and become proficient with one of them. I am just to lazy to find out how the FUCK I make it work the same via PuTTY and Konsole, and after a few days of not using it, I'll have forgotten WTF is this 'meta' key that's not on my keyboard. It doesn't matter though, because my human RAM deletes the whole keyboard shortcuts after a few hours anyways. Maybe I've just learnt too many shortcut schemes in this life already.
:wq. I use it whenever I forgot to change $EDITOR on some stupid FreeBSD server at work and some command leaves me with an editor that won't let me edit just because I always forget how to switch modes. I admit using ee where possible. And yes, I feel a bit dirty about it.
And vi, well, I can remember this one:
If you have some nice ways of memorizing any of the above, please share. I can still remember most of the basic commands in Turbo Basic 1.0 (^K-B/^K-K anyone?), but I'd be damned if I could remember how to operate vi or emacs.
Being a professional webworker for more than 8 years now, I agree with you from experience, but actually I don't think you can blame Macromedia.
I will not say anything at all about Flash because two camps who BOTH don't get it will start the usual pointless discussion. Flash is rarely used for what it's great at, visualizing data, and plagues us with wildly unnecessary and annoying l33t-masturbation stuff instead.
Dreamweaver itself is indeed a powerful timesaver in the hands of an experienced XHTML/CSS guy. If you look at it closely, you'll find that it is a very nice graphical frontend to HTML itself, with a great set of shortcuts so that you almost don't have to touch the mouse at all. The palettes just provide access to the most commonly needed attributes of the element you're working on. If you leave all those nasty "behaviours", "timelines" and whatnow alone, it produces nicely readable and well-formed code. I'm using Dreamweaver since the early betas, and even back then this was the case. I tend to think that this was an initial design goal behind DW.
The bad comes from the 'designers' who are taught print design at the universities and apply them to the Web, using all the nutty clicky-pointy tools that produce JS-laden horror cabinet of non-standards-compliance they dare to call "HTML". It's a classical PEBKAC. Look at it this way - if DW didn't have those features, GoLive would've taken over long ago and we don't want THIS to happen. IMNSHO the only thing worse would be Frontpage. At least the guys at Macromedia didn't invent bogus HTML extensions because they were incapable of providing a proper metadata infrastructure, like Adobe did.
(I'm not a fanboy though, I just use what works best at the moment for the things I do. If someone shows me how to reproduce this "Apply Source Formatting" feature from DW in Kate/KDevelop and how to synchronize sites like in DW, I'm switching my machine at work from Win2K with DW to KDevelop/nvu on FreeBSD tomorrow, because it better fits the things I do nowadays. It will then match my setup at home.)
While we're at it, SEO is, was and always will be BS, just like the whole Internet Advertising Myth which after nearly a decade of documented failure still isn't debunked. Duh.
Come on. That one is easy.
grep "[Pp]ublic [Ss]erver" serverlist.lst
Hordes of Lamers for your humiliation needs.
When he made the script he never realized until afterwards that multiplying six and nine was not in fact 42.
What a pity, I'm quite disappointed now. I always thought that the question and answer mismatched because of the replacement of the original humans with those phone sanitizers, basically replacing a whole 'component' of the computer which is Earth in THHGTTG.
Heck. I thought of this passage as brilliant.
I work in an advertising agency. I used to be a creative, but moved to the IT department because I couldn't stand the stupidity of those 'professionals'. You wouldn't believe what bullshit seemingly completely intelligent and nice people will send to you. "Word images" are routine (you say "please send me that image you have used in your image brochure" and they send you a .doc with the embedded image. Anyone who knows a better way than printing the .doc to Distiller with Print settings and opening that in Photoshop, please come up with it.)
;)
Hell, I've been sent a completely designed and layouted 32 page manual for a complex online media application including images and videos, in EXCEL. I guess to a businesswoman with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
(That file is still being passed around as a curiosity between people in the field.)
I won't get into clients sending images in 72dpi and 70x140 pixels to be used as a background on an 18/1 (the standard billboard format here in Germany). I like it best that they *all* act like it's your fault that it simply is not usable for being printed at that size. Actually, that helps me to practice my kindness, like some strange Buddhist excercise. Not being drawn down by stupidity is a valuable gift that needs lots of training.
"Sir, there is a hidden message in that text you've read to me for the third time now."
Call it a Zen Fight Club.
Now, take the data and put up some nice animations, archive the first 100 articles or so and put it into some nice database to mine for interesting stuff. Should not be too hard to script together the data gathering, you can already start fetching stuff while developing the functionality and frontend.
;)
Someone wanna join? This cries 'distributed database'...
I don't think that the story itself is special at all, because that's not what Romeo & Juliet is about - it's about brilliant use of language as a medium that still works today, hundreds of years after these works have been written. As a professional writer, I admire the unique style and depth of the language. The story itself is trivial. How it's told is not. I don't think much of what we write today can still be read and made sense of in 100-200 years.
reinvent Shakespeare
I guess you're talking about Romeo + Juliet, which in my opinion is the best adaption of Shakespeare I've ever seen. It transported the story to a 'modern' stage, yet conserved the timelessness of the original by doing so in a rather abstract way, using visually and metaphorically *very* rich imagery. It does a very good job of telling the story, and while I think that Leo di Caprio is one of the worst actors around, Shakespeare's brilliant dialogs brought out some nice acting I'd never have expected from him, ever.
I might be sounding like a fanboy, but actually I've seen *so many* interpretations of R+J, most of them either terrible or simply not getting the spirit of the original, that the movie to me really stood out. I hadn't seen it when it came out because I found the trailers so horrible (plus, or rather minus, it starred Leo), but a few years later a girl-friend took me out to watch it without telling me beforehand. (A sinister plan as she knew *exactly* why I hadn't seen it.) I left the cinema pleasantly surprised.
Mind to share your criticism of the movie? I greatly admire Shakespeare's works, and if more people decide to do such intelligent adaptions of material which is that old, more power to them. I might even bear watching some hours of JLo or Ben Affleck or whomever.
Geez, that would ROCK! Would have to be careful though that my children don't catch me playing that. I guess telling them that violence never solves anything might lose some of its authority.
First off, you are really a drama queen. We're not talking about 'thought police', we are talking about telling kids how to write correctly.
Second, your youth (and mine, being 30) was dramatically different from the youth that the kids today have, with the Internet present and available everywhere. Kids need supervision and parenting. This doesn't mean playing the dictator, it means giving children a frame of acceptable behaviour for them to measure and build their *own* frame in the process.
Third, if kids contact me using 1337, they'll have to live with my mocking with them. It gives them the opportunity to reflect on why I find that sort of communication unacceptable. My own kids grow up with the principle that opinions should always be voiced and discussed. It teaches them to defend their POV, and it teaches them they'd better have a reason for most of the things they do in life. If you think now that I'm a terrible father, you probably don't have kids on your own and don't know how much one loves them (I do). The purpose isn't to make their lives hard, it's to encourage them in becoming themselves.
Getting back on-topic, one's native language is something that should be valued. For me, it is on par with other parenting goals as teaching my kids good manners - basic stuff.
Actually, on CompuServe we used , not *g*. Some of my friends from back then still use it, but it's mostly distinct because most forums either discard it because "HTML is not allowed", or it's being posted as-is which means no one will see it because the browser ignores the 'unknown tag', which is the expected behaviour.
I miss the old CompuServe days when everyone needed to be logged on with their real name (you had to prove your identity) and there were actually intelligent people online who were worth the online time, at what was it in the beginning, $9.60/h? I talked to Al Gore and Douglas Adams, and could be sure it was them. A higher executive once told me proudly that the only person allowed to use a fake name was the POTUS (a pity he didn't tell me the name the POTUS used, I'd have had some questions). That was in 1995, before the rules where changed and the prices dropped, resulting in the first of many waves of idiots to
GO SYSOP was nice, lots of free software sponsored by the companies (like WinZip, Winfax, Symantec stuff...), to be legally used by anyone who managed forums. Ah, these were the times. I always liked how entering the legendary virtual-world-style WorldsAway would be accomplished by GO AWAY. What a pity that WA sucked to bad.
100531,3420 / Ex-WizOp.
> You are not allowed to talk on cell phone on the commuter trains.
Now there's an interesting idea. Why is this? Here in Germany it's forbidden to use a mobile while driving a car for obvious reasons (people simply ignore it and talk anyway or, worse, write SMS which technically *isn't* forbidden), but I can't think of a reason why you should ban talking on the phone being a passenger on a train.
Can you tell more about this?
Read my post again. It's exactly what I said. The OP is correct, no one cares for IE. It's being tested against, but no longer being coded for. What was your point again?
And FWIW, in this context it's well relevant whom I work for, because those make up a significant part of market share in building web sites (at least in Europe, don't know or care about the US), which means my observations are pretty representative of the market.
Aw, shit. Preview, preview, preview.
I meant to write:
The IE only pages are already disappearing, and actually my perspective on this is not that it happens because of Moz/FF, but because every new IE release introduces more incompatibilities with old versions and people are fed up with kludging up their HTML when they can just rebuild it and have it work everywhere in half the time which is required for debugging all those stupid side effects.
This is not +4, Insightful, because the OP is correct. Amongst others, I work for BBDO, TBWA, Publicis and RSCG, and none of those care much for IE, because if you have designers who understand the medium, it's easy to build nice (==compliant) XHTML/CSS which renders just fine everywhere. Most problems derive from graphics-laden sites sketched up in Photoshop (or even worse, XPress or Freehand) by aging print designers which require nonsensical pixel-perfect rendering and are demanded to be built "exactly like the layout!". Broken design, broken result.
I might add that of course there are many huge players in the field who still travel the 'optimized for IE' road and build shitty stuff which just renders in one or two versions of IE (rendering of CSS changed severely in some areas between IE 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0). But those who understand what they do, produce good quality. The IE only pages are already disappearing, and actually my perspective on this is not that it happens because every new IE release introduces more incompatibilities with old versions and people are fed up with kludging up their HTML when they can just rebuild it and have it work everywhere in half the time which is required for debugging all those stupid side effects. Look at Google Maps as an example. Doesn't look very 'optimized for IE' to me.
(I only talk about professional web design. I refuse to discuss the HTML practices of hobbyists, they'll build broken pages until browsers refuse to display them completely (won't happen), and frankly shouldn't be bothered with such discussions. Let them play with it, maybe some of them get enough out of it to learn how to do it the right way later.)