uh, she works at a Law firm, Legal Secretary and has quite a life all on her own. She's just not a typical modern American woman... she enjoys doing nice things for people (including her husband)...
She bakes cookies for my work, sends flowers when someone has an accident, organizes extended family holiday events, while being pregnant with our second child.
She doesn't panic when I don't call ahead, she just lets me know what I missed out on...
I agree and disagree... I would love to see this rocket the Flash sites industry AND bump up the game.... with serious developers taking active notice of the platform.
Flash can do whatever you want it to do. It can be rock solid or it can be a house of cards. Either depends on the developers and architects who build it. I love Flash but I hate having to develop 2 sites (1 for the engines and 1 for people). Even if I make the Flash version meet 508 compliance with transcripts, tab indexes, control key support, fully searchable (within flash) content... yes you can do it, up until now (and even still I'm not convinced yet)... it would not be indexed properly by Google, so we still have to make a separate HTML version....
Luckily I architect Flash sites that run off a CMS and pull in assets and content dynamically using platform targeted templates, so the content only has to be updated in 1 place and then is provisioned to: Flash, Flash Lite, HTML, Mobile XHTML and WML and automagically gets added to in-Flash search indexes, and is added to a deep-linking script on the fly as the site is loaded from the CMS. Oh yeah, it also gets tagged with Google Analytics code snippets for tracking purposes...
Now i have an argument for dropping full support for HTML and only include a standard "This site requires Flash", since Flash still has 98% adoption worldwide, despite those who refuse to use it.
I use both Flash and Javascript/DOM scripting for sites I build. I pick the right tool for the job.
When a site just needs a little extra punch I go with JQuery (personal favorite for all things Javascript). When it needs to be a front end to an application I use ExtJS (awesome UI controls and great support for JSON data structures and templating)
When a site needs to be truly animated though, with characters moving around and video integration with content... Flash is the only way to go. I can stream audio and video, synch it with XML cuepoints, map it to a 3D surface and let the user interact with the results - tweak the audio using a waveform UI or sliders to mess with the video RGB/effects/transformations, etc. I can even embed a physics engine and give objects gravity, velocity and mass so they can interact with each other and the user.
Uh... you have to do this in HTML as well... it's just that people have already incorporated it into their workflow, whereas for Flash there are still a lot of developers who don't know how to do it.
Think about what HTML sites would be like if everything was in one page. AKA MySpace pages....
This is how most current Flash sites are. They don't architect them, they 'Design' them.... so you end up with one big page and no bookmarks or other ways to programmatically access the content.
That's not a problem with Flash... that was a dumb move on the company to let someone hide their employees contact info that way.... if I had done it, I would have tied it to a database/CMS and provided an autosuggest search box at the bottom, then highlighted the photo/person when an individual was selected from the search and showed their contact info in a selectable text box below.... with a button to download their vCard.
The only problem with Flash is that the lowest common denominator is much less accessible both to humans and computers than an html page... even the worst html page is searchable by the browser.
Uhh... there are now several ways for flash developers to allow deep linking in to flash... it uses a hash and directory structure with javascript to pass the url into flash, which then auto loads or skips to the content being requested.
This is not new, it's been around for 2 years now.
This section of the site lets you upload a photo, morph it using a displacement map filter to either spherize or pinch the photo.. don't forget to zoom in on the good part... then you can email the results with a message to anyone. (yes we collect your info, but it's a candy company... your choice).
Depends... what happens if you were to not arrive home? 5 minutes go by, then 10 then 20... when do you call/text to say "uhh running late" or do you just ignore the other person waiting for you.... who may have been hoping to get dinner started or to reheat something for you or light the candles, run the shower or any number of romantic gestures?
My wife loves to know when I'll be home and traffic can be very unpredictable. I don't really know if I'm going to be home soon until about 5 minutes away.
I can send a text message while waiting at the offramp light... takes about 5 seconds.
A conversation on the other hand can go for minutes without even getting to the important part.
Uh... you didn't learn evolutionary theory then... you learned some bastardized version of it. Best go look it up on Wikipedia if you want to find out what you didn't learn.
Ever been stuck in traffic for 30 minutes on a freeway, going 2 MPH?
You can read a book, eat a burger and write out a 2 page email with absolutely no concern for the cars around you.... there's no where to go and nobody can go fast enough to even dent your car much less cause an accident.
With some people, once they have you talking they think it's time to tell a story... for 10 minutes. Texting prevents this type of thing from happening. You get in, get the info you need and get out.
Phone call:
A) Hey, I'll be home in 5 min.
B( OK, let me tell you all about my day.....
A) (10 minutes later)... yeah I've been in the driveway for 5 minutes while you've been talking.
We could either start with an expensive engineering project like a dome... or we could just throw a bunch of microbes at it and see what happens.
First of course we should find out if anything already lives there... if so, then a dome would be the best option.. preferably a completely contained inner space, so as not to contaminate the ground soil.
We'd need to incinerate all waste as well... rather than dumping it. Keeping Mars from becoming contaminated with Earth life is going to be really expensive once we are ready to do in person research.
Ever wonder how early humans discovered medicinal qualities of plants? They didn't use models and scientific method... they used vast amounts of trial and error results. Then they used prediction based on what they had learned to narrow down what kind of plants to try out next. They didn't understand the underlying mechanisms and test out new findings based on that type of model... they used cheap and dirty statistics and record keeping.
This is just an extension of what humans have been doing to discover new correlations, for our entire history... just faster.
I come up with theories all the time based on cross-referenced science articles. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to test any of them, so the best I could do is blog about it - but then I'd join the ranks of the armchair scientists out there and that just seems lame, for now.
One day I'll come across a community that accepts crack pot ideas as the basis for experimentation... lets the community vote on which ones to carry out and takes small donations to fund the projects... then I'll submit my ideas. Hmmm... sounds like a fun community, off to Google to see if one exists already.
Hey another quicklook fan.... God I love being able to preview an Excel document without having to open Excel... and you can look at multiple pages of the workbook too! such a time saver when you just need to look up some number or reference a spec.
Yeah... there were too many pros to 10.5 for me to worry about the buggy Spaces (which I still don't use) or any of the other minor issues.
SO rather we'll give him excuses to commit further crimes and send him somewhere he can learn how to be a REAL criminal?
It's a downward spiral when you take a smart kid and remove him from society so that the only choice left for him is to seek his fortune outside of accepted societal pathways. A low intelligence person may never be able to do much more than struggle... but a kid like this will just seek new ways to beat the system without getting caught.... leading to more exploits.. and yes he'll get caught again eventually but how much damage will he cause in between.
Better to harness him with hard work and challenging goals - with a clear reward waiting for him at the end of it.
I'd rather see a kid like this have to go into the military than to send him to prison. In fact I think any kid (male or female) should be enlisted for 4 years service in lieu of conviction for a crime like this (non-violent). If they are under age, they should have to go to a military run school and then serve 2 years. They would all have an option to enroll in University after with deferred payment or with a scholarship if they do well enough.
Violent criminals of this age need to go to a rehab clinic where they can get counseling... they learned violence from somewhere and need to be rehabilitated to society before we can trust them in any scenario.
BTW new age typically means giving hugs and positive verbal comments.... and seeking answers in crystals or zen meditation... I advocate a much tougher solution... with the burden on society to fix the problems we've allowed to happen, through poverty, lack of opportunity and general neglect.
Parents, teachers... not enough info to say whom, but someone failed him...
We shouldn't be asking whether 38 years is too long, too harsh OR even if what he did is a crime... we should be asking WHY this kid felt the need to do this.
I suspect that he felt cheated. He's probably pretty intelligent and yet for whatever reason (lack of english skills, poor home environment... maybe just the fact that he recently immigrated and there are just so many extra obstacles in his way) he was not able to make good grades.
It sounds like he needed a tutor or some additional after school instruction but his parents were too proud to request it (or he was too proud to accept it) and as a consequence he didn't have enough quality time to devote to his studies.
Just as likely he was used to doing this in whatever country he came from and did not believe he would be caught, so didn't spend any time studying as he planned to simply change the grades later, like he did the other 3 years before moving to the US.
uh.. slightly off topic, but your employer doesn't "make" $90/hr off your time... they have to pay the receptionists, the HR people, the cleaning crews, the lease on your office space, utilities, etc.. anything that doesn't have a "charge-out" rate, aka overhead. They are probably very happy if they end up with $10/hr from your productive time (assuming that you're actually productive).
I'm only commenting so that youngsters don't get the idea that their employers are making bank off their backs... (in aggregate they do, but on an individual basis it's not that much).
Uh... ever used a OSS language or library to create something really cool? Did you just hand it out immediately to anyone who glanced your way? Probably not... you probably enjoyed the attention for a little while, then doled it out when you had everything packaged up nice and pretty so nobody would know that you hadn't quite cleaned up your fancy pants code before announcing it.
Same is true with Apple. They often keep things closed or at least private until they are ready for general consumption.... ie: well documented APIs, community tools in place, a stable codebase, etc.
NDAs work just fine with OSS... you don't have to publicly announce what you are *planning* to do with OSS.
The less technically literate are typical very good at social networking... they have to be, it's their only option, so... they just ask their technically literate friends to copy it for them.
Surprisingly however, those whom you think are not technically literate are very likely to know how to do this type of thing. Movies, Music, Entertainment in general is *their thing*... so they actually take the time to learn how to get at it. They just aren't interested in *how it works*, as long as it works.
Don't forget about China... they still haven't recovered from their own "singularity" - way back in the 1400s when everything was so damn good for them that they just said "to hell with the rest of the world"... stopped all their trade and closed their borders... and the rest of the world said "fine, we'll just keep going without you"
Actually Vista is a result of early Spore beta testing... they put Windows ME in to the game and ran it in simulation mode for 7 years... Vista is what came out, though apparently there were several variations (Home, Professional, Business, Ultimate)
Slashdot Mirror
uh, she works at a Law firm, Legal Secretary and has quite a life all on her own. She's just not a typical modern American woman... she enjoys doing nice things for people (including her husband)...
She bakes cookies for my work, sends flowers when someone has an accident, organizes extended family holiday events, while being pregnant with our second child.
She doesn't panic when I don't call ahead, she just lets me know what I missed out on...
I agree and disagree... I would love to see this rocket the Flash sites industry AND bump up the game.... with serious developers taking active notice of the platform.
Flash can do whatever you want it to do. It can be rock solid or it can be a house of cards. Either depends on the developers and architects who build it. I love Flash but I hate having to develop 2 sites (1 for the engines and 1 for people). Even if I make the Flash version meet 508 compliance with transcripts, tab indexes, control key support, fully searchable (within flash) content... yes you can do it, up until now (and even still I'm not convinced yet)... it would not be indexed properly by Google, so we still have to make a separate HTML version....
Luckily I architect Flash sites that run off a CMS and pull in assets and content dynamically using platform targeted templates, so the content only has to be updated in 1 place and then is provisioned to: Flash, Flash Lite, HTML, Mobile XHTML and WML and automagically gets added to in-Flash search indexes, and is added to a deep-linking script on the fly as the site is loaded from the CMS. Oh yeah, it also gets tagged with Google Analytics code snippets for tracking purposes...
Now i have an argument for dropping full support for HTML and only include a standard "This site requires Flash", since Flash still has 98% adoption worldwide, despite those who refuse to use it.
I use both Flash and Javascript/DOM scripting for sites I build. I pick the right tool for the job.
When a site just needs a little extra punch I go with JQuery (personal favorite for all things Javascript). When it needs to be a front end to an application I use ExtJS (awesome UI controls and great support for JSON data structures and templating)
When a site needs to be truly animated though, with characters moving around and video integration with content... Flash is the only way to go. I can stream audio and video, synch it with XML cuepoints, map it to a 3D surface and let the user interact with the results - tweak the audio using a waveform UI or sliders to mess with the video RGB/effects/transformations, etc. I can even embed a physics engine and give objects gravity, velocity and mass so they can interact with each other and the user.
You can't do that with anything else.
Uh... you have to do this in HTML as well... it's just that people have already incorporated it into their workflow, whereas for Flash there are still a lot of developers who don't know how to do it.
Think about what HTML sites would be like if everything was in one page. AKA MySpace pages....
This is how most current Flash sites are. They don't architect them, they 'Design' them.... so you end up with one big page and no bookmarks or other ways to programmatically access the content.
Here you go:
Deep linking for flash and ajax
That's not a problem with Flash... that was a dumb move on the company to let someone hide their employees contact info that way.... if I had done it, I would have tied it to a database/CMS and provided an autosuggest search box at the bottom, then highlighted the photo/person when an individual was selected from the search and showed their contact info in a selectable text box below.... with a button to download their vCard.
The only problem with Flash is that the lowest common denominator is much less accessible both to humans and computers than an html page... even the worst html page is searchable by the browser.
Uhh... there are now several ways for flash developers to allow deep linking in to flash... it uses a hash and directory structure with javascript to pass the url into flash, which then auto loads or skips to the content being requested.
This is not new, it's been around for 2 years now.
Here's a site I built in just such a fashion:
http://www.soursweetgone.com/flash/#/friends/punk-a-friend/
This section of the site lets you upload a photo, morph it using a displacement map filter to either spherize or pinch the photo.. don't forget to zoom in on the good part... then you can email the results with a message to anyone. (yes we collect your info, but it's a candy company... your choice).
Depends... what happens if you were to not arrive home? 5 minutes go by, then 10 then 20... when do you call/text to say "uhh running late" or do you just ignore the other person waiting for you.... who may have been hoping to get dinner started or to reheat something for you or light the candles, run the shower or any number of romantic gestures?
My wife loves to know when I'll be home and traffic can be very unpredictable. I don't really know if I'm going to be home soon until about 5 minutes away.
I can send a text message while waiting at the offramp light... takes about 5 seconds.
A conversation on the other hand can go for minutes without even getting to the important part.
Kind of like /. posts.
$5/year for all domains (that's what I pay, YMMV).
Jessica is that you? I knew you were a geek.
Uh... you didn't learn evolutionary theory then... you learned some bastardized version of it. Best go look it up on Wikipedia if you want to find out what you didn't learn.
Ever been stuck in traffic for 30 minutes on a freeway, going 2 MPH?
You can read a book, eat a burger and write out a 2 page email with absolutely no concern for the cars around you.... there's no where to go and nobody can go fast enough to even dent your car much less cause an accident.
With some people, once they have you talking they think it's time to tell a story... for 10 minutes. Texting prevents this type of thing from happening. You get in, get the info you need and get out.
Phone call:
A) Hey, I'll be home in 5 min.
B( OK, let me tell you all about my day.....
A) (10 minutes later) ... yeah I've been in the driveway for 5 minutes while you've been talking.
Text:
A) I'll be home in 5
B) OK
*done*
took him 5 minutes to die...
that doesn't work for ie6 testing there are rendering differences. I tried it for awhile and still had to test on a real copy to see all the quirks.
A better solution was using a vm.
We could either start with an expensive engineering project like a dome... or we could just throw a bunch of microbes at it and see what happens.
First of course we should find out if anything already lives there... if so, then a dome would be the best option.. preferably a completely contained inner space, so as not to contaminate the ground soil.
We'd need to incinerate all waste as well... rather than dumping it. Keeping Mars from becoming contaminated with Earth life is going to be really expensive once we are ready to do in person research.
Ever wonder how early humans discovered medicinal qualities of plants? They didn't use models and scientific method... they used vast amounts of trial and error results. Then they used prediction based on what they had learned to narrow down what kind of plants to try out next. They didn't understand the underlying mechanisms and test out new findings based on that type of model... they used cheap and dirty statistics and record keeping.
This is just an extension of what humans have been doing to discover new correlations, for our entire history... just faster.
I come up with theories all the time based on cross-referenced science articles. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to test any of them, so the best I could do is blog about it - but then I'd join the ranks of the armchair scientists out there and that just seems lame, for now.
One day I'll come across a community that accepts crack pot ideas as the basis for experimentation... lets the community vote on which ones to carry out and takes small donations to fund the projects... then I'll submit my ideas. Hmmm... sounds like a fun community, off to Google to see if one exists already.
Hey another quicklook fan.... God I love being able to preview an Excel document without having to open Excel... and you can look at multiple pages of the workbook too! such a time saver when you just need to look up some number or reference a spec.
Yeah... there were too many pros to 10.5 for me to worry about the buggy Spaces (which I still don't use) or any of the other minor issues.
SO rather we'll give him excuses to commit further crimes and send him somewhere he can learn how to be a REAL criminal?
It's a downward spiral when you take a smart kid and remove him from society so that the only choice left for him is to seek his fortune outside of accepted societal pathways. A low intelligence person may never be able to do much more than struggle... but a kid like this will just seek new ways to beat the system without getting caught.... leading to more exploits.. and yes he'll get caught again eventually but how much damage will he cause in between.
Better to harness him with hard work and challenging goals - with a clear reward waiting for him at the end of it.
I'd rather see a kid like this have to go into the military than to send him to prison. In fact I think any kid (male or female) should be enlisted for 4 years service in lieu of conviction for a crime like this (non-violent). If they are under age, they should have to go to a military run school and then serve 2 years. They would all have an option to enroll in University after with deferred payment or with a scholarship if they do well enough.
Violent criminals of this age need to go to a rehab clinic where they can get counseling... they learned violence from somewhere and need to be rehabilitated to society before we can trust them in any scenario.
BTW new age typically means giving hugs and positive verbal comments.... and seeking answers in crystals or zen meditation... I advocate a much tougher solution... with the burden on society to fix the problems we've allowed to happen, through poverty, lack of opportunity and general neglect.
Parents, teachers... not enough info to say whom, but someone failed him...
We shouldn't be asking whether 38 years is too long, too harsh OR even if what he did is a crime... we should be asking WHY this kid felt the need to do this.
I suspect that he felt cheated. He's probably pretty intelligent and yet for whatever reason (lack of english skills, poor home environment... maybe just the fact that he recently immigrated and there are just so many extra obstacles in his way) he was not able to make good grades.
It sounds like he needed a tutor or some additional after school instruction but his parents were too proud to request it (or he was too proud to accept it) and as a consequence he didn't have enough quality time to devote to his studies.
Just as likely he was used to doing this in whatever country he came from and did not believe he would be caught, so didn't spend any time studying as he planned to simply change the grades later, like he did the other 3 years before moving to the US.
Really the whole story is just sad.
uh.. slightly off topic, but your employer doesn't "make" $90/hr off your time... they have to pay the receptionists, the HR people, the cleaning crews, the lease on your office space, utilities, etc.. anything that doesn't have a "charge-out" rate, aka overhead. They are probably very happy if they end up with $10/hr from your productive time (assuming that you're actually productive).
I'm only commenting so that youngsters don't get the idea that their employers are making bank off their backs... (in aggregate they do, but on an individual basis it's not that much).
Uh... ever used a OSS language or library to create something really cool? Did you just hand it out immediately to anyone who glanced your way? Probably not... you probably enjoyed the attention for a little while, then doled it out when you had everything packaged up nice and pretty so nobody would know that you hadn't quite cleaned up your fancy pants code before announcing it.
Same is true with Apple. They often keep things closed or at least private until they are ready for general consumption.... ie: well documented APIs, community tools in place, a stable codebase, etc.
NDAs work just fine with OSS... you don't have to publicly announce what you are *planning* to do with OSS.
The less technically literate are typical very good at social networking... they have to be, it's their only option, so... they just ask their technically literate friends to copy it for them.
Surprisingly however, those whom you think are not technically literate are very likely to know how to do this type of thing. Movies, Music, Entertainment in general is *their thing*... so they actually take the time to learn how to get at it. They just aren't interested in *how it works*, as long as it works.
Don't forget about China... they still haven't recovered from their own "singularity" - way back in the 1400s when everything was so damn good for them that they just said "to hell with the rest of the world"... stopped all their trade and closed their borders... and the rest of the world said "fine, we'll just keep going without you"
Actually Vista is a result of early Spore beta testing... they put Windows ME in to the game and ran it in simulation mode for 7 years... Vista is what came out, though apparently there were several variations (Home, Professional, Business, Ultimate)