That money and energy might be better spend elsewhere.
I hope you're not suggesting some sort of government "investment" strategy. It isn't necessary. As the price of production goes up, so goes the price of petroleum. As the price of petroleum goes up, other energy sources become cheaper by comparison. That money will be spent elsewhere--you don't need a political movement for it to happen.
As oil demand outstrips production, the market will naturally signal that there is an imbalance and prices are that signal. We're getting a warning light right now, and people will naturally start conserving.
Really, environmentalists ought to be cheering. This price rise will hopefully eat into the popularity of SUVs in the US and elsewhere. Hybrids will look a lot better, as will more reasonably-sized cars in general. Other forms of power generation will look better. This is possibly phase one of the end of fossil fuels.
If you didn't meant that, apologies. But there are clearly some people freaking out in other comments who need the reminder.
I work with 1000+ page CMS-based sites, with input being drawn from HTML widgets, hand-coding, and lots and lots of cut and paste from frigging Word, as well as the standards-compliant templates that I create.
If you have a complex site, just changing the CSS can have unforeseen consequences (particularly with inheritance). If you have atomic HTML, it's much more predictable because the scope of each change is better known. Since I'm working from templates, one such change can be replicated several hundred times with just one edit.
Hold both by one hand and try to read it. Doesn't matter on what side, bottom or top. U.S. Letter stays straight at your average letter or copier paper weight, but A4 will fold, making it hard to read.
Now you see why, despite having lived in Europe, I loathe A4 paper. I'm sorry guys, measure it in Metric if you like, but U.S. Letter is simply more practical.
And how come there are almost no header or paragraph tags? A non-CSS user agent would be cast adrift in a sea of non-semantic tags, all of equal importance. I shudder to think of a disabled user trying to navigate through it.
I don't know who you are to tell us this, but as one who has spent a couple of years doing CSS layouts and has not a single table on my personal home page, I can tell you that CSS positioning has some pretty severe limitations, generally in terms of cost of implementation. I find your five-to-fifty ratio reversed when I actually measured it.
Or do you like pulling generalizations like "an extra five minutes of design headache" out of your ass?
But who am I to tell you that? Why don't you try competing with offshore HTML coders and see for yourself how many minutes there are and how much they save or don't save you?
The truth is that given the state of IE, cross-browser semantic XHTML and CSS is damned hard, and frequently requires compromises like ESPN's above (though honestly I don't nest identical-width tables anymore, and I move the widths to CSS). It's no shame to use tools like CSS where appropriate, and use something else when it's more appropriate--especially when time and money are not infinite.
Well, I experience it. I'd say just about anybody who checks their work mail from home where they've configured IMAP is going to be affected. That may not be over 50%, or even 20%, but I'd think it's fairly common.
There is a workaround, if you have access to the certificate (say, you're friends with your sysadmin, which you should be):
Accepting a mailserver SSL certificate permanently 1) open Keychain Access (it's in "Utilities") 2) select the menu item: File--Add Keychain... 3) navigate to/System/Library/Keychains/ 4) select X509Anchors and click 'Open' 5) close Keychain Access 6) copy the.pem certificate file from your server to your local machine. 7) open the finder and navigate to where you copied the file 8) double click it 9) import into X509Anchors 10) quit Keychain Access and restart Mail - it shouldn't ask for you to accept the certificate anymore
Businesses are supposed to just sell you a quality product at a fair price. They don't always do it. Government is supposed to look out for you. It very often doesn't.
However, government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Businesses don't.
If every government bureaucrat were a selfless automaton inveighing against bad meat and enforcing fire codes instead of a rent-seeking paper-shuffler interested in not getting blamed for anything until retirement directed by rent-seeking politicians hell-bent on reshaping the world to fit their own preconceptions, your criticism of my answer would make sense. Unfortunately, a quick scan of the papers doesn't support your case, unless you consider invading Iraq some sort of regulatory action.
So do it. Really, I'm serious. I keep hearing "Windows is targetted because it's bigger, not because it's less secure," but I haven't seen a Mac virus in five or more years (SevenDust was the last I remember, exploited a flaw in Quicktime on OS 9). I've yet to hear of a Linux/Unix virus.
So prove it. Write one. You don't even have to release it, just do a barricaded demo between two networked computers and write a paper for peer review.
'Till I see an exploit, I'm not going to stop saying "get a Mac" every time somebody gripes about viruses/worms.
Funny, I don't remember the last world environmental conference having a stipulation that one must take non-flying public transportation to arrive there. He must be writing this on a boat on his way to the Rio Climate Change conference...still.
Compared to the principles of UI design. Sometimes that means good X apps, sometimes it's Mac OS apps, sometimes it's Be OS apps, sometimes it's a Java app, sometimes even a Windows app. Whenever an app has good UI, it doen't suck.
I'm not saying that X apps are the be-all of UI design, far from it--just that if Windows is allegedly characterized by user-focus as opposed to programmer-focus, Windows comes up short to its own standard. And I'm talking about Windows apps generally, not just the OS itself or Microsoft apps.
Well, anyway, in Ukraine, USAID sponsored a project at a Democratic Senator's insistance that used the same process to decontaminate radioactive milk from the Chernobyl area. No shit. It evolved from technology to decontaminate water, and the problem was that the polymers that bound the bonding molecule and the magnetic molecule would degrade in milk. It also bound with lots of other things, not just the radioactive part, because milk is chemically complex compared to water and a straight application of the water technology wouldn't work.
Oh, and once they processed the milk sufficiently to get it decontaminated, it cost 6 to 12 times as much as a gallon of imported milk.
Obivously, they've been working on this technology and hopefully the one "entreprenuer" isn't out there trying to apply this to everything under the sun. Fortunately that Senator has retired.
In a well-run shop, a good PM is worth a dozen engineers, never mind coders.
Even in a poorly run shop, a good PM is worth 2 or 3 coders. However, a good engineer is similarly rare, and worth 30 or 40 average, as opposed to good, PMs.
Face it, most PMs are glorified clerks. And yes, most programmers are just coders. The fact is that being a typical programmer requires more skill than being a typical PM. Programmers almost universally understand schedules, resources, and budgets, even if they couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper bag. PMs do not understand what a functions, objects, or design. You can promote a programmer to become a PM. This happens a lot. The opposite almost never happens.
This is because your AVERAGE, as opposed to GOOD, PM is merely a coordinator, not a manager. They take requirements, hand them to engineers for design and estimates, request resources, propose schedules, and talk to the client. This is quite a job, but it doesn't require years of training to do it at all. Being a secretary also requires a lot of hard work and the ability to multitask, but hard work does not equate to high skill levels.
However, PMs are viewed as managers because the traditional job assignments pass through them. To upper management, someone who passes orders to others is a manager. They (in a few cases, correctly) view themselves as skilled, and those below them as less skilled or less experienced. It follows that a professor of Organizational Management will view things as heirarchical down to the chain where the work gets done. After all, if the secretary who types the memo is less skilled than the manager who dictates it, then the programmer who executes the problem given to them by the PM must similarly be less skilled.
So comparing a GOOD PM to an average coder only obfuscates the fundamental organizational bias the good professor demonstrates. Comparing a typical PM to a typical programmer gets at the root of why programmers feel organizationally slighted.
Let none of what I have said suggest that I don't view GOOD PMs as worth their weight in platinum, or that I think that even being an average PM doesn't take work.
Try reading what I wrote--I explicitly said the 13th tribe was like the JEWS who are not Mormon, at least at last count they hadn't all been converted.
PS--Israel claimed to find the 13th tribe in Ethiopia. Go read some history yourself.
In the earlier one, the Cylons were just mad at humans. That's all we knew. Why? Nobody knew. What was their history? Nobody knew.
Yeah, nobody knew...unless you, you know, watched the first three episodes.
Cylons had been a reptilian race that created robots as slaves--the robots had themselves a revolution, and were bending everybody to their order, but in a weird bit of synchretism (sp?) kept the name "Cylon". Humans were the only power that hadn't bowed down before them, and they'd been fighting on and off for the better part of a thousand years.
So they hit on a peace conference, and then sucker-punched everybody with the fleet away at the signing ceremonies. The Cylons, much as Hitler and with the Jews, were determined to exterminate every last remnant of this troublesome race. Like the Mormons, the Humans took a wagon train to the promised land. Like the Jews, they were looking for the missing 13th tribe to fill their ranks and enable them to stand up to the cylons and hit back.
It was also very influenced by the self-perception of America in the wake of Vietnam. 60's idealism was dead, the Soviets were on the move, and the US was very much the underdog as the Sovs broke treaty after treaty (ABM, SALT I, etc. etc.). How different a world we live in.
Anyway, the backstory was told in the first movie and in repeats as the first three episodes. But if you missed that, then yes, take it as read that robots hate humans, commence plot.
If you need to compare it to something, compare it to 'Quartz' - and I don't see people jumping on Apple for replacing SVG or Flash by using the PDF based Quartz engine.
Sure. Because it's PDF-based and PDF is a...wait for it...STANDARD.
Also Apple's not trying to tie it into the Web as another poster notes elsewhere.
Now, if Micro$oft were attempting to redo their entire interface in SVG, you'd hear raves about it with a few cautious twitters that they might be subtlely embracing (gack) and extending (ughn) again, and our backsides might be in danger.
Now that they have a 90% similar standard, we KNOW they are embracing (ouch) and extending (hey, that's an exit, not an entrance, buddy) and our backsides are, well, screwed.
I like bandwidth savings but I am really curious: are any blind people (let's face it; we're not talking about "accessible" for paraplegics or the deaf) read Slashdot?
And do you do it with a reader that doesn't interface directly with IE's rendering engine rather than reading the HTML directly?
Despite running some very information-centric sites, I have yet to see a confirmed assistive technology surfing my site in the logs--yes, I know all about spoofing, which is why I ask...you'd think that some of them, given the Biblical proclamations about standards liberating the handicapped that come from ALA, would just be a HTML-slurpers that give a unique identifier to logs and simply break on IE-only sites.
So, any of you out there? Is the site unusable on JAWS or some such? I want real blind people who use it every day rather than somebody who once listened to JAWS read it in a lab or academic setting.
Slashdot Mirror
That money and energy might be better spend elsewhere.
I hope you're not suggesting some sort of government "investment" strategy. It isn't necessary. As the price of production goes up, so goes the price of petroleum. As the price of petroleum goes up, other energy sources become cheaper by comparison. That money will be spent elsewhere--you don't need a political movement for it to happen.
As oil demand outstrips production, the market will naturally signal that there is an imbalance and prices are that signal. We're getting a warning light right now, and people will naturally start conserving.
Really, environmentalists ought to be cheering. This price rise will hopefully eat into the popularity of SUVs in the US and elsewhere. Hybrids will look a lot better, as will more reasonably-sized cars in general. Other forms of power generation will look better. This is possibly phase one of the end of fossil fuels.
If you didn't meant that, apologies. But there are clearly some people freaking out in other comments who need the reminder.
I work with 1000+ page CMS-based sites, with input being drawn from HTML widgets, hand-coding, and lots and lots of cut and paste from frigging Word, as well as the standards-compliant templates that I create.
If you have a complex site, just changing the CSS can have unforeseen consequences (particularly with inheritance). If you have atomic HTML, it's much more predictable because the scope of each change is better known. Since I'm working from templates, one such change can be replicated several hundred times with just one edit.
Same result, far less time than CSS.
Hold both by one hand and try to read it. Doesn't matter on what side, bottom or top. U.S. Letter stays straight at your average letter or copier paper weight, but A4 will fold, making it hard to read.
Now you see why, despite having lived in Europe, I loathe A4 paper. I'm sorry guys, measure it in Metric if you like, but U.S. Letter is simply more practical.
Uh, ESPN doesn't use tables for layout?
To quote from their home page:
<table width="230" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td><table width="230" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
And how come there are almost no header or paragraph tags? A non-CSS user agent would be cast adrift in a sea of non-semantic tags, all of equal importance. I shudder to think of a disabled user trying to navigate through it.
I don't know who you are to tell us this, but as one who has spent a couple of years doing CSS layouts and has not a single table on my personal home page, I can tell you that CSS positioning has some pretty severe limitations, generally in terms of cost of implementation. I find your five-to-fifty ratio reversed when I actually measured it.
Or do you like pulling generalizations like "an extra five minutes of design headache" out of your ass?
But who am I to tell you that? Why don't you try competing with offshore HTML coders and see for yourself how many minutes there are and how much they save or don't save you?
The truth is that given the state of IE, cross-browser semantic XHTML and CSS is damned hard, and frequently requires compromises like ESPN's above (though honestly I don't nest identical-width tables anymore, and I move the widths to CSS). It's no shame to use tools like CSS where appropriate, and use something else when it's more appropriate--especially when time and money are not infinite.
On a related note, 'Sedna' is a really good name for an HMO, but a really _horrible_ name for a planet!
And, of course, we already know that it's Mondas.
Well, I experience it. I'd say just about anybody who checks their work mail from home where they've configured IMAP is going to be affected. That may not be over 50%, or even 20%, but I'd think it's fairly common.
/System/Library/Keychains/ .pem certificate file from your server to your local machine.
There is a workaround, if you have access to the certificate (say, you're friends with your sysadmin, which you should be):
Accepting a mailserver SSL certificate permanently
1) open Keychain Access (it's in "Utilities")
2) select the menu item: File--Add Keychain...
3) navigate to
4) select X509Anchors and click 'Open'
5) close Keychain Access
6) copy the
7) open the finder and navigate to where you copied the file
8) double click it
9) import into X509Anchors
10) quit Keychain Access and restart Mail - it shouldn't ask for you to accept the certificate anymore
Businesses are supposed to just sell you a quality product at a fair price. They don't always do it. Government is supposed to look out for you. It very often doesn't.
However, government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Businesses don't.
If every government bureaucrat were a selfless automaton inveighing against bad meat and enforcing fire codes instead of a rent-seeking paper-shuffler interested in not getting blamed for anything until retirement directed by rent-seeking politicians hell-bent on reshaping the world to fit their own preconceptions, your criticism of my answer would make sense. Unfortunately, a quick scan of the papers doesn't support your case, unless you consider invading Iraq some sort of regulatory action.
Uh, businesses can't jail county officials or you.
This is why we need severe limitations on the power of government despite what bureaucrats and Democrats and Republicans would have you believe.
So do it. Really, I'm serious. I keep hearing "Windows is targetted because it's bigger, not because it's less secure," but I haven't seen a Mac virus in five or more years (SevenDust was the last I remember, exploited a flaw in Quicktime on OS 9). I've yet to hear of a Linux/Unix virus.
So prove it. Write one. You don't even have to release it, just do a barricaded demo between two networked computers and write a paper for peer review.
'Till I see an exploit, I'm not going to stop saying "get a Mac" every time somebody gripes about viruses/worms.
Of course, you can't make the dumbass in the movie theater turn his off.
You can if you hit him hard enough.
With his own phone.
Actually, I think Shatner might make the perfect Vogon. The part doesn't call for...subtlety.
I don't take advice from a dude who uses "creamy texture" and "welcomed by the back of my throat" in the same sentence.
I take it you're not a fan of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," then.
Funny, I don't remember the last world environmental conference having a stipulation that one must take non-flying public transportation to arrive there. He must be writing this on a boat on his way to the Rio Climate Change conference...still.
Compared to the principles of UI design. Sometimes that means good X apps, sometimes it's Mac OS apps, sometimes it's Be OS apps, sometimes it's a Java app, sometimes even a Windows app. Whenever an app has good UI, it doen't suck.
I'm not saying that X apps are the be-all of UI design, far from it--just that if Windows is allegedly characterized by user-focus as opposed to programmer-focus, Windows comes up short to its own standard. And I'm talking about Windows apps generally, not just the OS itself or Microsoft apps.
Joel's theoretical explanation for the divide hinges on the user--his thesis? Windows programmers care about users, UNIX programmers don't.
My immediate reaction was, "If so, how come Windows programs have suck sucky UI most of the time?"
A colleage of mine had an insightful comment, "Windows programmers don't program for the user; they program for the buyer."
I think that explains more about Windows from MS to the end-VBScript-monkey than anything else.
Real Life.. It's a hoot, I suggest you disconnect for a while and try it out.
Yeah, war, terrorism, women rejecting you, going uphill is work, getting killed doesn't result in a respawn...I can see the appeal.
How about magnetic milk?
Well, anyway, in Ukraine, USAID sponsored a project at a Democratic Senator's insistance that used the same process to decontaminate radioactive milk from the Chernobyl area. No shit. It evolved from technology to decontaminate water, and the problem was that the polymers that bound the bonding molecule and the magnetic molecule would degrade in milk. It also bound with lots of other things, not just the radioactive part, because milk is chemically complex compared to water and a straight application of the water technology wouldn't work.
Oh, and once they processed the milk sufficiently to get it decontaminated, it cost 6 to 12 times as much as a gallon of imported milk.
Obivously, they've been working on this technology and hopefully the one "entreprenuer" isn't out there trying to apply this to everything under the sun. Fortunately that Senator has retired.
In a well-run shop, a good PM is worth a dozen engineers, never mind coders.
Even in a poorly run shop, a good PM is worth 2 or 3 coders. However, a good engineer is similarly rare, and worth 30 or 40 average, as opposed to good, PMs.
Face it, most PMs are glorified clerks. And yes, most programmers are just coders. The fact is that being a typical programmer requires more skill than being a typical PM. Programmers almost universally understand schedules, resources, and budgets, even if they couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper bag. PMs do not understand what a functions, objects, or design. You can promote a programmer to become a PM. This happens a lot. The opposite almost never happens.
This is because your AVERAGE, as opposed to GOOD, PM is merely a coordinator, not a manager. They take requirements, hand them to engineers for design and estimates, request resources, propose schedules, and talk to the client. This is quite a job, but it doesn't require years of training to do it at all. Being a secretary also requires a lot of hard work and the ability to multitask, but hard work does not equate to high skill levels.
However, PMs are viewed as managers because the traditional job assignments pass through them. To upper management, someone who passes orders to others is a manager. They (in a few cases, correctly) view themselves as skilled, and those below them as less skilled or less experienced. It follows that a professor of Organizational Management will view things as heirarchical down to the chain where the work gets done. After all, if the secretary who types the memo is less skilled than the manager who dictates it, then the programmer who executes the problem given to them by the PM must similarly be less skilled.
So comparing a GOOD PM to an average coder only obfuscates the fundamental organizational bias the good professor demonstrates. Comparing a typical PM to a typical programmer gets at the root of why programmers feel organizationally slighted.
Let none of what I have said suggest that I don't view GOOD PMs as worth their weight in platinum, or that I think that even being an average PM doesn't take work.
Try reading what I wrote--I explicitly said the 13th tribe was like the JEWS who are not Mormon, at least at last count they hadn't all been converted.
PS--Israel claimed to find the 13th tribe in Ethiopia. Go read some history yourself.
In the earlier one, the Cylons were just mad at humans. That's all we knew. Why? Nobody knew. What was their history? Nobody knew.
Yeah, nobody knew...unless you, you know, watched the first three episodes.
Cylons had been a reptilian race that created robots as slaves--the robots had themselves a revolution, and were bending everybody to their order, but in a weird bit of synchretism (sp?) kept the name "Cylon". Humans were the only power that hadn't bowed down before them, and they'd been fighting on and off for the better part of a thousand years.
So they hit on a peace conference, and then sucker-punched everybody with the fleet away at the signing ceremonies. The Cylons, much as Hitler and with the Jews, were determined to exterminate every last remnant of this troublesome race. Like the Mormons, the Humans took a wagon train to the promised land. Like the Jews, they were looking for the missing 13th tribe to fill their ranks and enable them to stand up to the cylons and hit back.
It was also very influenced by the self-perception of America in the wake of Vietnam. 60's idealism was dead, the Soviets were on the move, and the US was very much the underdog as the Sovs broke treaty after treaty (ABM, SALT I, etc. etc.). How different a world we live in.
Anyway, the backstory was told in the first movie and in repeats as the first three episodes. But if you missed that, then yes, take it as read that robots hate humans, commence plot.
Come on guys, lets keep the standards high, and use solid arguments in place of trying to sling mud at the RIAA.
Yeah, except those didn't work. So I'm voting for old grannies and pre-teens.
Seriously, that's the target audience of Apple's .Mac. It integrates with the apps that they already use on the machine.
Since iBlog comes with it, you get a blog of sorts, too.
I'm not a fan of it, and use Moveable Type for mine, but as you say, I'm a geek and not the target audience.
I know, Apples are expensive, blah blah blah.
If you need to compare it to something, compare it to 'Quartz' - and I don't see people jumping on Apple for replacing SVG or Flash by using the PDF based Quartz engine.
Sure. Because it's PDF-based and PDF is a...wait for it...STANDARD.
Also Apple's not trying to tie it into the Web as another poster notes elsewhere.
Now, if Micro$oft were attempting to redo their entire interface in SVG, you'd hear raves about it with a few cautious twitters that they might be subtlely embracing (gack) and extending (ughn) again, and our backsides might be in danger.
Now that they have a 90% similar standard, we KNOW they are embracing (ouch) and extending (hey, that's an exit, not an entrance, buddy) and our backsides are, well, screwed.
I like bandwidth savings but I am really curious: are any blind people (let's face it; we're not talking about "accessible" for paraplegics or the deaf) read Slashdot?
And do you do it with a reader that doesn't interface directly with IE's rendering engine rather than reading the HTML directly?
Despite running some very information-centric sites, I have yet to see a confirmed assistive technology surfing my site in the logs--yes, I know all about spoofing, which is why I ask...you'd think that some of them, given the Biblical proclamations about standards liberating the handicapped that come from ALA, would just be a HTML-slurpers that give a unique identifier to logs and simply break on IE-only sites.
So, any of you out there? Is the site unusable on JAWS or some such? I want real blind people who use it every day rather than somebody who once listened to JAWS read it in a lab or academic setting.
My wife is the classic soccer mom, van and all, and has been modifying config files
By definition, this is not a classic soccer mom.
If you don't believe me, get some of her fellow moms from soccer practice and give a command line and ask them to install Slackware.
Or give them a DOS prompt and ask them to do anything.
Or give them Windows and ask them to go download, install, and run Mozilla.
This will educate you in ways those of us who didn't get a geek with breasts for a wife cannot.