It's not "we made sure to be compliant", as most people do with standards, its "we're doing the absolute minimum to try to meet compliance".
Sort of like spending the extra effort to identify where in the HTML box model there is enough ambiguity that Microsoft can do things differently than everyone else, and still claim to meet the standard?
I mean, that must have taken a lot more study than just looking at how all the other browsers were implementing the standard, and doing the same thing.
It is the largest and broadest source of information that has ever been available, any where, any time. It gives access to any of 2.25 million articles at incredible speed: it takes many times longer to phrase the Google query that identifies the relevant article than it does to fetch the text.
Are the contents accurate?
That's the wrong question.
Are the contents useful?
You bet they are, if you understand the context and know how to critically assess what you read. As with any encyclopedia, the most valuable parts of the articles are the references and citations to other works. Through those, a discerning reader can learn the major features of an unfamiliar field. Additionally, the Wikipedia article itself is a pretty good indicator of what the well informed non-expert believes he knows about any field. This is important: it wasn't so long ago that expensive surveys were the only tools for assessing lay knowledge about a field.
Wikipedia is not authoritative. That does not diminish its value. For various reasons no encyclopedic collection is an authority on any subject (other than itself, and even that is often time-limited).
Even then, you may have an interesting theory about efficiency of design when under long-term pressure, but how the heck do you apply it to more ephemeral cultural components like religion or etiquette?
I won't touch the "religion" stuff since it would quickly get into 6 million dead in the Holocaust or 4 million to 9 million dead during the Burning Times, and this is without even going outside European history of civilized behavior. Netiquette: Godwin rules— this area is out of bounds.
With regard to "etiquette", in Western America there is a very strong correlation between the decrease in courtesy shown to strangers and the decrease in carrying pistols. On the East Coast of America, the decrease in courtesy occurred earlier, and correlates with an increase in local laws that prohibited dueling.
So there is a body of evidence that suggests that etiquette is related to the use of technology. Etiquette is a set of traits whose expression depends on design factors that are influenced by cultural Darwinism (but not necessarily in a direct way; there seems to be a "left hand path" that is frequently followed).
natural selection would roughly translate in this instance to the plans for boats which are well-suited for their environment surviving long enough to be taught to younger planners while those less well-suited are forgotten before they are taught to anyone.
Fixed that for you.
I happen to agree with the corrected version. Especially in this instance, since an aspiring apprentice boat builder would seek training from the guy whose boats survived the really bad storms, and shun the builder whose boats sink if they go outside the lagoon.
Nearly half the women in Portland are lesbians too!
Actually, I didn't make that last line up.:(
Actually, Portland is also home to one of the largest populations of persons who are in the process of altering their gender. At Saturday Market, First Thursday in the Pearl or Last Thursday on Alberta Street, or any afternoon on NW 23rd Avenue or SE Hawthorn, you can count several representatives of more than half a dozen distinctly different genders in fifteen minutes.
Oregon has places that everyone should visit. Such as Seaside (ask about the exploding whale). The Falls at Oregon City (stay upwind of the paper factory). The Interstate Highways through Portland and Eugene are always good for hours of radio entertainment during the weekday commuting times. So do bring your tourist dollars. But you will want to leave before the rains set in, because it takes years to learn how to manage your personal crop of bodily mildew, and that learning experience is not pleasant for the student or anyone in proximity with a working nose.
I thought they had mostly gone from growing cotton to growing Monsanto GM corn, as feedstock for the ethanol fuel trade. That's a very green way of taking 7 calories of petrochemicals in the form of fertilizers and diesel fuel to produce about 1 calorie of ethanol to add to the gas tanks of American automobiles.
That is going to turn around the global warming crisis, and it also gives our petrochemical industries something worthwhile to do.
when comments have a different font, like the parent, is it because of the browser they're using to post or have they taken the time to add the font code to prove they are somehow superior to everyone else?
Neither. But closer to the second one.
The only allowed tags are listed at the bottom of the page when you are entering a comment. <font> is not on that short list. This is a Good Thing.
The teletype font, <tt>, is there so that code and other inclusions can be typographically set off from the comment text itself. But of course as soon as you do something like that, there will be people with less mature brains and juvenile ego structures who will misuse the convention. Usually in an effort to say to the world that "I am a unique individual, just like all you other guys". Generally speaking, these artifacts of juvenile thinking disappear as increases in experience are converted to wisdom points by the GameMaster.
However we are talking here on slashdot, where time and again it has been demonstrated that we need to make a distinction between coders who have ten years of experience, and codemonkeys who have one year of experience that they have repeated ten times.
New sig better?
--
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
I thought the old sig was pretty good. Say, you might be the person who could answer this for me (it's a question that's been bugging me for about 30 long seconds since I came across it here )
What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?
Oh, never mind. I just found the answer: You can't cross a vector with a scalar.
I really didn't think there would be any interest in the actual history of the doggerel, but these posts are proving me wrong. This is what I remember:
The phrase first came into vogue in the early days of Windows 95.
Windows is a 32-bit shell references the structure of the first release of Win95, when MS was supporting continued use of some DOS based 3rd party software. At that time, they still had to support products from Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland, and AutoCAD to be viable in the business market.
for a 16-bit extension a reference to the 16 bit API which was still in the core of Win95. Much of this was written in 8086 assembly language (16 bit operations), which is a superset of the 8080 assembly language (8 bit operations).
to an 8-bit operating system the boot loader, and initially most of the DOS, was 8080 code carried in, I believe, because this was the only way to provide compatibility for legacy DOS applications that had been running on Win3.x (breaking custom GWBasic programs that had been written before Windows would have pissed off the VARs-- who were an important part of Ballmer's "Developers"). In those early years, most of us regarded the book Undocumented DOS as a necessary bible: to make things work, we often had to call internal DOS routines directly.
designed for a 4-bit microprocessor the 8080 that launched the whole IBM PC industry was an extension of the 4004 calculator chip that Intel developed in the early 1970s
by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. These phrases need no further elucidation.
You know, for a long time I've thought that I would never again be able to use that old quote, and then this opportunity came up... and I thought, what the hell, looks like a good enough fit and most slashdotters are too young to remember it from back in the day... so I went and posted it.
And then you come along and just ruin it. Just. Ruin. It. With all your solid facts and historical accuracies. I hope it made you happy. <sniff>
As regards to your sig, I still think that you should thank whatever gods there be that you have no real phobia.
Why even sell a 64bit machine if they're going to hobble it to 32 bit operation?
Because they can?
In a related matter, is this quote from an earlier day still appropriate?
Windows is a 32-bit shell for a 16-bit extension to an 8-bit operating system designed for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.
You raise some excellent points. But may I gently remind you that this is a small business with a one person IT department. It is not yet at a point where it can hire the work out, or even realistically assess how much work there is and what it would cost to hire it done.
To paraphrase the original request, TFA asks "What can I do to develop whatever latent design talents I might have?"
That is the question I addressed. Not whether this approach is the best possible for this particular business. Not whether developing latent design talent on its existing staff is a good or bad strategy for any given business. Simply this: what is it that someone with a strong IT background can do to learn a bit about graphics design work?
It could be that author of TFA finds a new career as an internationally acclaimed graphics designer, because he has talent he didn't know about just oozing out of his pores. It could be that he has no talent for it at all.
But even if has no talent, his boss has made a good business decision, for after a few weeks of study this guy is going to know enough to interview prospective GD contractors and at least identify the outright charlatans before they waste too much precious interview time. He will probably also be able identify those GDs who can communicate well enough about what they do that they would have some long term value for the company. This guy is working for a shrewd boss.
Note that I am VERY LOUDLY NOT SAYING anything about GD talent. Talent is immaterial in this situation as in many other business situations. What matters is whether the finished web site affects its intended audience in the way the business intended. Whether that happens through award-winning talent or with a lackluster appearance that is made up for with other strengths doesn't matter.
BTW, author of TFA missed a trick here. He should have used a unique moniker when he posted this to Slashdot rather than going anonymously. Then he could have done a follow-up article in 2 or 3 months, saying "this is what we've done, what do you guys think of it?" and gotten a nice spike in web traffic...
And it's because of people doing this that stuff gets tightened down and in the end, its not the thieving bastards who suffer but the rest of us who pay for what we use instead of stealing it.
Well... it's more like from the beginning, not in the end.
Basically its just another example of how even elegant code is unnecessarily costly when used to stupid purpose. Trying to prop up a 1989 business model with the likes of WGA, DRM, etc is just stupid. Find another business model. It isn't like there is some worldwide shortage of them.
You can use a color wheel to find complementary colors, but which color do you start with, and which color scheme do you use? There are no right answers, so you still need some sort of non-rational decision making skills.
I have yet to meet an engineer who was incapable of using non-rational decision making tools in the non-engineering aspects of their life. So this wouldn't be a problem, being as how this part of web design is non-rational. (According to parent post.)
I think the big difference is in the way the graphics designer and the engineer would present their findings to the boss.
The graphics designer would tend to use phrases like "we want to use warm colors and rounded borders so the customers feel safe and secure about our support..."
The engineer is more likely to say "I've surveyed our competition, and the companies in the upper quartile for improved revenues from sales consistently use reddish earth tones with quarter-rounded borders on their web pages..."
Both have gotten to the same place: one through gut intuition; the other through a weird alchemy of web spiders, Perl analysis of captured style sheets, and esoteric manipulations with pivot tables. Both processes are equally non-rational. One simply uses more numbers than the other.
Nobody's saying they should hire a designer to be on staff.
I did overstate your position in the post I was responding to. Sorry about that.
But actually quite a number of posters have said that they should hire a graphics designer, including several who are suggesting that the graphics designer should be making all the strategic decisions about the company's web presence.
Yet the point remains that any company with a one man IT department will get a better return on their investment by using whatever money they might spend on contracting out all the design work on other parts of their infrastructure. (Useability studies come to mind.) Especially as they have someone on board already who has expressed an interest in learning a bit about design. If the product they are selling is a good one, there is no need for a company to have a bang-up stellar website... they just need to avoid the worst mistakes. And believe it or not, a lowly IT professional can actually learn enough to do that.
The true graphics design artisans out there maybe should think about putting together a guild that could certify that their members know a little bit about what they do. And that could also do some kind of policing of all the nut cases who call themselves graphics designers because they took a term at Art School before they flunked out through the Weed Effect; or they diligently studied the use of the outdated copy of PhotoShop that their brother-in-law's cousin's friend gave to them last Summer; or back in the dotcom day, they had a job in a place that had a website and they wore their hair in a ponytail.
The argument presented in parent post would be a tad more convincing if there had been an occasional HTML tag embedded in the content. Like maybe a <p> every few hundred words or so.
One can't have a reasoned argument with an irrational mind. Arguing the merits of different approaches to web page design when in a state of abject cluelessness about the use of HTML seems pretty irrational.
Microsoft's rise was meteoric. Since its captain has not done what is needed to attain orbital velocity, it is going to come down like a meteor as well. Hopefully it will mostly burn up on descent and not impact the real world too badly.
There is nothing particularly esoteric or artistically sensitive about using a color wheel to find a complementary color scheme, or applying the rule of threes to layout. Mere engineers can in fact use many principles of graphic design yet keep themselves solidly grounded, without soaring into the rarified heights of Art.
The graphics designer has many valuable things to offer the world. But after reading the comments on this thread, I am of the strong opinion that an objective and realistic view of his professional contributions to commerce is not one of these things.
This business has one person who does everything from providing basic PC and network support to web site development and database administration.
Expecting them to hire a graphics designer is as unrealistic as... well, as unrealistic as many of the ideas that graphics designers dream up. They'll need to grow big enough to hire on more technical and engineering staff before they can even think about the expenses of adding a graphics designer to the team.
While parent post is not untrue, it comes across as a self-serving piece written by a graphics designer who needs to convince the world that he has much value to add to someone else's web site engineering. I don't know that is the case, but that is the appearance the words convey.
Graphics design is not all about Mysterious Talent: there are some basic rules that can be learned and applied by anyone. Conforming to these rules will add "punch" to your web pages, whether you understand the reasons for them or not. Use of them will not of itself get you any artistic awards, but since they can be translated into your daily work with CSS on layout and color, they can be applied without increasing your operating expenses. Which appears to be what the boss wants. It seems very unlikely that the boss is going to add the cost of a contract with a graphics design artist to the company's overhead. The goal is clear: take what has been done and make it better. Don't throw it away and reconstruct with someone else's template. Grow what's already done into a more pleasing form.
Google for "color theory" and "graphic composition": those are the two basic fields you need to look at.
Under color theory, look for discussions of
the color wheel,
monochromatic color schemes,
tinted, shaded, and muddied colors (going toward browns or earth colors)
complementary colors,
use of contrasting colors,
color temperature (warm colors vs cool colors)
You'll come across other terms as you go through this material: check them out too
Under composition, look for discussions of
basics of visual perception (how the eye scans an image) and how to guide that
rule of thirds
golden rectangles
use of circles
use of intersecting diagonals
active and passive shapes
check out the other terms you stumble upon as you go through this list
What you probably want to do is to find some formula that will work for the web site, can be applied throughout it (helps with "branding" by providing the user with a constant, reliable theme), and can be followed pretty much as a recipe (without you needing to remember what the rules are or why this set of details works). A $20 set of watercolors, or even a box of crayons, can help in exploring and gathering comments on initial drafts of the presentation. The end result will probably be mostly CSS snippets you can treat as black boxes.
Another excellent resource is an artist supply store that caters to newbies and hobbyists: it will have books on beginning watercolor or acrylic painting that will go over this material, and it should have a clerk or two who are helpful.
What makes you think their market value will drop?
Yahoo is in the process of rolling out Web 2.0 products that are of interest to businesses who are looking for an alternative to the costs of Vista. Its short term prospects are quite favorable. Yahoo has also been one of the beneficiaries of the Redmond brain drain: their pool of talent may be deeper and wider than ever before. They also have a longer history of web site and mail group hosting than anyone else I can think of, so they've got a lot of applicable experience for Web 2.0 activities.
It's pretty obvious that one of the reasons MS wants to buy them is because Yahoo is about to emerge as yet another serious competitor for Microsoft's core products. Who needs Vista and MS Office 2007 if all the core business work is being done through your favorite browser (on your choice of OS) interacting with your Yahoo-hosted databases and web sites?
Pi is, in fact, equal to neither of those numbers, nor to 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510. It is an irrational number for which any representation in digits is an approximation.
So all contemporary engineering and technology, anything using circles or cycles in any measurable way, is based on an irrational concept. Which is to say that all of Western Civilization's proudest accomplishments are basically irrational.
I'm required to introduce someone who is going to present a miniworkshop on using Office-07 (pronounced "Oh fuss ought seven") at our staff meeting later this month. So I thought I'd check on whether the 65535 bug had been fixed yet, using one of the Vista workstations with Office-07 on it.
The answer is: paying out 850 monthly stipends of $77.10 each will cost us, not $65,535.00 like it would have with Excel 2003, and not $100,000.00 like it used to with Excel 2007 a few short weeks ago, but now the incredibly low cost of $0.00. In fact, payouts between $77.00 and $77.90 would all cost us exactly nothing.
And the above zero-sum game is stable for perhaps 15 minutes before all those answers change to something else.
We will be recommending to all our staff that they continue to use Excel 2003 until we tell them that Excel 2007 is working correctly.
All three of those options work. M$ isn't any of them
No. "M$" is a perfectly cromulent disambiguation. Otherwise, we would have trouble distinguishing between
MS==Metric System
MS==Multiple Sclerosis
MS==Mississippi (the state)
MS==Manuscript
MS==Master of Science
And the list goes on and on...
But in contemporary global society, there is only one M$.
Slashdot Mirror
Sort of like spending the extra effort to identify where in the HTML box model there is enough ambiguity that Microsoft can do things differently than everyone else, and still claim to meet the standard?
I mean, that must have taken a lot more study than just looking at how all the other browsers were implementing the standard, and doing the same thing.
You bet I take Wikipedia seriously.
It is the largest and broadest source of information that has ever been available, any where, any time. It gives access to any of 2.25 million articles at incredible speed: it takes many times longer to phrase the Google query that identifies the relevant article than it does to fetch the text.
Are the contents accurate?
That's the wrong question.
Are the contents useful?
You bet they are, if you understand the context and know how to critically assess what you read. As with any encyclopedia, the most valuable parts of the articles are the references and citations to other works. Through those, a discerning reader can learn the major features of an unfamiliar field. Additionally, the Wikipedia article itself is a pretty good indicator of what the well informed non-expert believes he knows about any field. This is important: it wasn't so long ago that expensive surveys were the only tools for assessing lay knowledge about a field.
Wikipedia is not authoritative. That does not diminish its value. For various reasons no encyclopedic collection is an authority on any subject (other than itself, and even that is often time-limited).
I won't touch the "religion" stuff since it would quickly get into 6 million dead in the Holocaust or 4 million to 9 million dead during the Burning Times, and this is without even going outside European history of civilized behavior. Netiquette: Godwin rules— this area is out of bounds.
With regard to "etiquette", in Western America there is a very strong correlation between the decrease in courtesy shown to strangers and the decrease in carrying pistols. On the East Coast of America, the decrease in courtesy occurred earlier, and correlates with an increase in local laws that prohibited dueling.
So there is a body of evidence that suggests that etiquette is related to the use of technology. Etiquette is a set of traits whose expression depends on design factors that are influenced by cultural Darwinism (but not necessarily in a direct way; there seems to be a "left hand path" that is frequently followed).
Fixed that for you.
I happen to agree with the corrected version. Especially in this instance, since an aspiring apprentice boat builder would seek training from the guy whose boats survived the really bad storms, and shun the builder whose boats sink if they go outside the lagoon.
Actually, I didn't make that last line up.
Actually, Portland is also home to one of the largest populations of persons who are in the process of altering their gender. At Saturday Market, First Thursday in the Pearl or Last Thursday on Alberta Street, or any afternoon on NW 23rd Avenue or SE Hawthorn, you can count several representatives of more than half a dozen distinctly different genders in fifteen minutes.
Oregon has places that everyone should visit. Such as Seaside (ask about the exploding whale). The Falls at Oregon City (stay upwind of the paper factory). The Interstate Highways through Portland and Eugene are always good for hours of radio entertainment during the weekday commuting times. So do bring your tourist dollars. But you will want to leave before the rains set in, because it takes years to learn how to manage your personal crop of bodily mildew, and that learning experience is not pleasant for the student or anyone in proximity with a working nose.
I thought they had mostly gone from growing cotton to growing Monsanto GM corn, as feedstock for the ethanol fuel trade. That's a very green way of taking 7 calories of petrochemicals in the form of fertilizers and diesel fuel to produce about 1 calorie of ethanol to add to the gas tanks of American automobiles.
That is going to turn around the global warming crisis, and it also gives our petrochemical industries something worthwhile to do.
Neither. But closer to the second one.
The only allowed tags are listed at the bottom of the page when you are entering a comment. <font> is not on that short list. This is a Good Thing.
The teletype font, <tt>, is there so that code and other inclusions can be typographically set off from the comment text itself. But of course as soon as you do something like that, there will be people with less mature brains and juvenile ego structures who will misuse the convention. Usually in an effort to say to the world that "I am a unique individual, just like all you other guys". Generally speaking, these artifacts of juvenile thinking disappear as increases in experience are converted to wisdom points by the GameMaster.
However we are talking here on slashdot, where time and again it has been demonstrated that we need to make a distinction between coders who have ten years of experience, and codemonkeys who have one year of experience that they have repeated ten times.
--
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
I thought the old sig was pretty good. Say, you might be the person who could answer this for me (it's a question that's been bugging me for about 30 long seconds since I came across it here )
What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?
Oh, never mind. I just found the answer: You can't cross a vector with a scalar.
I really didn't think there would be any interest in the actual history of the doggerel, but these posts are proving me wrong. This is what I remember:
The phrase first came into vogue in the early days of Windows 95.
Windows is a 32-bit shell references the structure of the first release of Win95, when MS was supporting continued use of some DOS based 3rd party software. At that time, they still had to support products from Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland, and AutoCAD to be viable in the business market.
for a 16-bit extension a reference to the 16 bit API which was still in the core of Win95. Much of this was written in 8086 assembly language (16 bit operations), which is a superset of the 8080 assembly language (8 bit operations).
to an 8-bit operating system the boot loader, and initially most of the DOS, was 8080 code carried in, I believe, because this was the only way to provide compatibility for legacy DOS applications that had been running on Win3.x (breaking custom GWBasic programs that had been written before Windows would have pissed off the VARs-- who were an important part of Ballmer's "Developers"). In those early years, most of us regarded the book Undocumented DOS as a necessary bible: to make things work, we often had to call internal DOS routines directly.
designed for a 4-bit microprocessor the 8080 that launched the whole IBM PC industry was an extension of the 4004 calculator chip that Intel developed in the early 1970s
by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. These phrases need no further elucidation.
You know, for a long time I've thought that I would never again be able to use that old quote, and then this opportunity came up... and I thought, what the hell, looks like a good enough fit and most slashdotters are too young to remember it from back in the day... so I went and posted it.
And then you come along and just ruin it. Just. Ruin. It. With all your solid facts and historical accuracies. I hope it made you happy. <sniff>
As regards to your sig, I still think that you should thank whatever gods there be that you have no real phobia.
Because they can?
In a related matter, is this quote from an earlier day still appropriate?
Windows is a 32-bit shell for a 16-bit extension to an 8-bit operating system designed for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.
You raise some excellent points. But may I gently remind you that this is a small business with a one person IT department. It is not yet at a point where it can hire the work out, or even realistically assess how much work there is and what it would cost to hire it done.
To paraphrase the original request, TFA asks "What can I do to develop whatever latent design talents I might have?"
That is the question I addressed. Not whether this approach is the best possible for this particular business. Not whether developing latent design talent on its existing staff is a good or bad strategy for any given business. Simply this: what is it that someone with a strong IT background can do to learn a bit about graphics design work?
It could be that author of TFA finds a new career as an internationally acclaimed graphics designer, because he has talent he didn't know about just oozing out of his pores. It could be that he has no talent for it at all.
But even if has no talent, his boss has made a good business decision, for after a few weeks of study this guy is going to know enough to interview prospective GD contractors and at least identify the outright charlatans before they waste too much precious interview time. He will probably also be able identify those GDs who can communicate well enough about what they do that they would have some long term value for the company. This guy is working for a shrewd boss.
Note that I am VERY LOUDLY NOT SAYING anything about GD talent. Talent is immaterial in this situation as in many other business situations. What matters is whether the finished web site affects its intended audience in the way the business intended. Whether that happens through award-winning talent or with a lackluster appearance that is made up for with other strengths doesn't matter.
BTW, author of TFA missed a trick here. He should have used a unique moniker when he posted this to Slashdot rather than going anonymously. Then he could have done a follow-up article in 2 or 3 months, saying "this is what we've done, what do you guys think of it?" and gotten a nice spike in web traffic...
Well... it's more like from the beginning, not in the end.
Basically its just another example of how even elegant code is unnecessarily costly when used to stupid purpose. Trying to prop up a 1989 business model with the likes of WGA, DRM, etc is just stupid. Find another business model. It isn't like there is some worldwide shortage of them.
I have yet to meet an engineer who was incapable of using non-rational decision making tools in the non-engineering aspects of their life. So this wouldn't be a problem, being as how this part of web design is non-rational. (According to parent post.)
I think the big difference is in the way the graphics designer and the engineer would present their findings to the boss.
The graphics designer would tend to use phrases like "we want to use warm colors and rounded borders so the customers feel safe and secure about our support..."
The engineer is more likely to say "I've surveyed our competition, and the companies in the upper quartile for improved revenues from sales consistently use reddish earth tones with quarter-rounded borders on their web pages..."
Both have gotten to the same place: one through gut intuition; the other through a weird alchemy of web spiders, Perl analysis of captured style sheets, and esoteric manipulations with pivot tables. Both processes are equally non-rational. One simply uses more numbers than the other.
I did overstate your position in the post I was responding to. Sorry about that.
But actually quite a number of posters have said that they should hire a graphics designer, including several who are suggesting that the graphics designer should be making all the strategic decisions about the company's web presence.
Yet the point remains that any company with a one man IT department will get a better return on their investment by using whatever money they might spend on contracting out all the design work on other parts of their infrastructure. (Useability studies come to mind.) Especially as they have someone on board already who has expressed an interest in learning a bit about design. If the product they are selling is a good one, there is no need for a company to have a bang-up stellar website... they just need to avoid the worst mistakes. And believe it or not, a lowly IT professional can actually learn enough to do that.
The true graphics design artisans out there maybe should think about putting together a guild that could certify that their members know a little bit about what they do. And that could also do some kind of policing of all the nut cases who call themselves graphics designers because they took a term at Art School before they flunked out through the Weed Effect; or they diligently studied the use of the outdated copy of PhotoShop that their brother-in-law's cousin's friend gave to them last Summer; or back in the dotcom day, they had a job in a place that had a website and they wore their hair in a ponytail.
The argument presented in parent post would be a tad more convincing if there had been an occasional HTML tag embedded in the content. Like maybe a <p> every few hundred words or so.
One can't have a reasoned argument with an irrational mind. Arguing the merits of different approaches to web page design when in a state of abject cluelessness about the use of HTML seems pretty irrational.
Microsoft's rise was meteoric. Since its captain has not done what is needed to attain orbital velocity, it is going to come down like a meteor as well. Hopefully it will mostly burn up on descent and not impact the real world too badly.
There is nothing particularly esoteric or artistically sensitive about using a color wheel to find a complementary color scheme, or applying the rule of threes to layout. Mere engineers can in fact use many principles of graphic design yet keep themselves solidly grounded, without soaring into the rarified heights of Art.
The graphics designer has many valuable things to offer the world. But after reading the comments on this thread, I am of the strong opinion that an objective and realistic view of his professional contributions to commerce is not one of these things.
This business has one person who does everything from providing basic PC and network support to web site development and database administration.
Expecting them to hire a graphics designer is as unrealistic as... well, as unrealistic as many of the ideas that graphics designers dream up. They'll need to grow big enough to hire on more technical and engineering staff before they can even think about the expenses of adding a graphics designer to the team.
While parent post is not untrue, it comes across as a self-serving piece written by a graphics designer who needs to convince the world that he has much value to add to someone else's web site engineering. I don't know that is the case, but that is the appearance the words convey.
Graphics design is not all about Mysterious Talent: there are some basic rules that can be learned and applied by anyone. Conforming to these rules will add "punch" to your web pages, whether you understand the reasons for them or not. Use of them will not of itself get you any artistic awards, but since they can be translated into your daily work with CSS on layout and color, they can be applied without increasing your operating expenses. Which appears to be what the boss wants. It seems very unlikely that the boss is going to add the cost of a contract with a graphics design artist to the company's overhead. The goal is clear: take what has been done and make it better. Don't throw it away and reconstruct with someone else's template. Grow what's already done into a more pleasing form.
Google for "color theory" and "graphic composition": those are the two basic fields you need to look at.
Under color theory, look for discussions of
Under composition, look for discussions of
What you probably want to do is to find some formula that will work for the web site, can be applied throughout it (helps with "branding" by providing the user with a constant, reliable theme), and can be followed pretty much as a recipe (without you needing to remember what the rules are or why this set of details works). A $20 set of watercolors, or even a box of crayons, can help in exploring and gathering comments on initial drafts of the presentation. The end result will probably be mostly CSS snippets you can treat as black boxes.
Another excellent resource is an artist supply store that caters to newbies and hobbyists: it will have books on beginning watercolor or acrylic painting that will go over this material, and it should have a clerk or two who are helpful.
What makes you think their market value will drop?
Yahoo is in the process of rolling out Web 2.0 products that are of interest to businesses who are looking for an alternative to the costs of Vista. Its short term prospects are quite favorable. Yahoo has also been one of the beneficiaries of the Redmond brain drain: their pool of talent may be deeper and wider than ever before. They also have a longer history of web site and mail group hosting than anyone else I can think of, so they've got a lot of applicable experience for Web 2.0 activities.
It's pretty obvious that one of the reasons MS wants to buy them is because Yahoo is about to emerge as yet another serious competitor for Microsoft's core products. Who needs Vista and MS Office 2007 if all the core business work is being done through your favorite browser (on your choice of OS) interacting with your Yahoo-hosted databases and web sites?
Take comfort in the fact that you don't have a real phobia.
So all contemporary engineering and technology, anything using circles or cycles in any measurable way, is based on an irrational concept. Which is to say that all of Western Civilization's proudest accomplishments are basically irrational.
That's a good thing to keep in mind.
This seems to be a feature of Excel 2007.
I'm required to introduce someone who is going to present a miniworkshop on using Office-07 (pronounced "Oh fuss ought seven") at our staff meeting later this month. So I thought I'd check on whether the 65535 bug had been fixed yet, using one of the Vista workstations with Office-07 on it.
The answer is: paying out 850 monthly stipends of $77.10 each will cost us, not $65,535.00 like it would have with Excel 2003, and not $100,000.00 like it used to with Excel 2007 a few short weeks ago, but now the incredibly low cost of $0.00. In fact, payouts between $77.00 and $77.90 would all cost us exactly nothing.
And the above zero-sum game is stable for perhaps 15 minutes before all those answers change to something else.
We will be recommending to all our staff that they continue to use Excel 2003 until we tell them that Excel 2007 is working correctly.
Look, you have a few choices:
- You can type Microsoft like a normal non-cretin
- You can type the stock-ticker abbreviation, MSFT
- You can type the accepted acronym, MS
All three of those options work. M$ isn't any of themNo. "M$" is a perfectly cromulent disambiguation. Otherwise, we would have trouble distinguishing between
MS==Metric System
MS==Multiple Sclerosis
MS==Mississippi (the state)
MS==Manuscript
MS==Master of Science
And the list goes on and on...
But in contemporary global society, there is only one M$.