What's the fuss all about?
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 2
Actually, that the EC is fair/unfair, good/not good is a moot point. It's the law of the land, and it can't be changed for this election. Maybe it's appropriate to change for the next election cycle in 2004, though I don't think so.
1. brianvan is correct -- the EC acts as a check/balance to keep the more populous states from electing a President by themselves. It's similar (in spirit, if not in action) to a weighted vote system with run-offs.
2. I think our Founding Fathers who designed this system were pretty smart guys, who thought about this carefully. They had a similar (if smaller in scale) setup then: some populous urban states and less populous rural states. I'm not ready to say that some AC yahoo posting to Slashdot (including my own self) is smarter than Jefferson and Co.
3. The EC system gives more data than a pure popular vote. You get one set of data from the popular vote and one set of data from a winner-take-all state EC vote (here's a map of the US -- these states went for Bush, these went for Gore), and an EC vote (similar to state-by-state, 300 for Gore, 240 for Bush).
4. It does give 3rd parties a chance to make an impact. The Libertarians could campain heavily in North & South Dakota and come up with 6 EC votes. That puts them in the spotlight, from which they can build on in the next election. In a close race like this years, it could be very significant -- and would at least drive the 2 parties to adopt some of the 3rd party's principles.
Is it perfect? Well, no. And any other solution we come up with will also be flawed. Since this solution was devised when there weren't any truly "established" parties (I'm talking 100 years of ingrained political hackery), I have a bit more faith in it than one re-designed from some ad-hockery dominated by two truly established parties.
And I'd like to add, the fact that Gore is screaming "Do over! Do over!" like a petulant 6-year-old does more to diminish him, in my mind. Sure he has documented lies and half-truths, just as Bush has documented verbal boners (God, I hope that doesn't become criminal -- I'd be doing 20-years-to-life). Both of them are so unpalatable to me -- which is why I voted Libertarian.
Last point -- the fact that we are so concerned about who/which party is in power troubles me. If Government was little more than a convenience to protect the borders and deliver the mail, and not the Fount of Everything Good and Holy (as it seems to be now), we'd be better off, and less likely to worry over who gets elected. We could just elect those people willing to suspend their normal lives for 4 years to keep the White House warm and termite-free, rather than power-hungry politicos who think their "vision" of the country's future is the best.
(in other words, would you rather have George Bush/Al Gore running 30% of the country's business, or that nice retired guy next door (ex-Army, who keeps his yard mowed and weeded) keeping watch over.01%?)
Just kidding -- I really liked GoldenEye (and I'm definitely NOT a FPS kinda guy) and now Perfect Dark. They were/are smoother and more playable (and more fun, to me) than Doom/Quake/et.al.
Of course, the most powerful PC I own is the P-133 laptop. But since it runs FBSD, it works just fine for me (but no good for FPSs)
Give me a mouse over those damn controllers any day for a FPS.
I liken this to the mouse/trackball debate -- I like trackballs, some people hate them. The analog stick on an N64 controller works great for me, while it just doesn't click with some people.
Okay, that's a little smart-alecky, but really, all it takes is One Good Game, and people will buy the Indrema to play it. Think of all the people who went out and dropped $2K on a computer back in the early 90s to play Doom (they claimed it was for "working at home and stuff, mostly for the kids to learn about computers", but it was Dad blasting demons to bits at 2am).
One good game. The N64 has been riding the wave of GoldenEye and (now) Perfect Dark for a long time now. Without those two games (and of course Mario and Zelda), the N64 would be a paperweight.
One good game. Not a port or a repeat or a clone, but a True-Blue Killer App. With the Indrema being open, it has a good chance to do it, two.
I dunno why, but I find that term, "userland", to take on a completely different meaning when you're talking about pacemakers and heart monitors. "We put the user back in userland".
I think I've been working with Oracle too long today -- my sanity is beginning to slip.
I've heard a lot of "not Bush!" comments on/. and in GIS, but no reason. Apparently Taco hates Bush because he hates Bush.
Really facinating...
I don't like Bush, I don't like Gore, I don't like Nader, I don't like Buchannan, and I LIKE Harry Browne -- and, believe it or not, I can articulate the reasons why I like/dislike them. Taco seems to be against Bush because, I dunno, somebody he knows said that Bush is an idiot, and he bought it hook, line and sinker.
Makes you wonder why he started using Linux... is it because he found it to be stable, fun, powerful, etc., or because it became "cool"?
See, the government is here to help the little people get ahead in life when they might be down on their luck, or handed a pair of duces in life's Poker Game.
Using the tax law to spread the wealth around a bit and keeping it from being clumped together is a good thing. You know how all those kids who inherit million$ always hoard it and never spend it on things and possessions.
This is a vital role for the government. Another vital role for the government is to protect those kids who may not have caring parents, and as such we NEED filters in our public schools' Internet access to keep them from viewing porn or learning about how to make a bomb.
We also need to protect the elderly from being ripped off by monitoring all lines of communication for scam artists and thugs. It would be helpful if we could do this with email and websites as well, so that we can watch for terrorists while we're at it.
Hey, here's another idea! You can shampoo my crotch! Government always does things badly, no matter how well intentioned. Rose and Milt Freideman described it best when they explained the four (and only four) ways to spend money:
You spend your money on yourself
This is how middle aged men shop for Porches. You get exactly what you want at the lowest price.
You spend other people's money on yourself
This is how second-wives of middle-aged Porche drivers shop at Neiman-Marcus. You get exactly what you want, but don't care about the price.
You spend your money on other people
This is why kids get underwear for Christmas. You get a good price, but don't care as much as to whether you're pleasing the recipient.
You spend other people's money on other people
Government spending of tax revenues falls into this category, and NOBODY gives a good Goddamn as to the price or quality or neccessity.
You can do whatever you want with your money when you die, I don't care. DON'T, however, use a gun (Government) to take mine.
the only difference for her would be concern that she's being a burden and occupying all of your free
time.
Not too many years ago, that idea wouldn't have even popped into your head. It was as unthinkable as drilling holes in your own head. Family was (and still should be, IMO) everything. My Granny wouldn't think about being a burden, because she wouldn't be a burden. She's family.
It's still somewhat prevalent here in the South (not nearly what it used to be), and the Philipinos have us beat like all get out -- family over there is way at the top of the list of Important Things.
We don't have tight families anymore (witness our spectacular divorce rate and the pseudo-prestige given single parents). Dunno when or how exactly this happened (for conveniece I like to blame the Boomer generation), but it's a shame that it did happen.
As for those who don't have anyone to support them, there used to be charity houses where they could go and be cared for. I know, you're thinking how horrible those were or could be. When I was younger, I used to play my cello for the residents of Government-run retirement homes. Trust me -- I know of which I speak -- those are just as bad if not worse.
I think we're already in dependancy -- take a look at how many people depend on the State to provide something for them
Here in Mississippi, we're trumpeting about how many kids we've signed up for the CHIP program. Is this something to be proud of? How many kids have become, in a sense, wards of the State? 25,000 at last count, and there aren't all that many people in Mississippi. 25,000 is a goodly portion of the population.
If that isn't enough, how many of our aged depend on Social Security and Medicare for their food and medicine? I have no clue. My grandmother is on Social Security, and I hate it. If i didn't have to cough up nearly 50% of my income (self-employed), I'd be more than able (and willing -- my grandmother is an 85 year old hacker in her own way) to help care for her. As it is, I live hand to mouth myself (nope, no health insurance -- but then, I'm pretty healthy) and can't bear supporting somebody else.
Dependancy (I would argue) is equivalent to slavery anyway. Dependancy on a person is bad enough -- dependancy on a faceless State is horrible. It's equivalent to being a stand of trees or a ditch on Federal land. You're owned by the State and used by the State, but not cared for by the State because, after all, you're just property with no value.
I'm just about ready to leave this country and move to a Caribbean island where the laws are lax (I'm thinking the Turks and Caicos). Sure I like my fast Internet connection, but when confronted with the choice between freedom and nerdliness... I'll be the first to choose running a dive shop over hacking Tcl anyday.
It works so well. If you took 3% of the defence budget and tripled the education spending, do you know what you'd get? More administrators. More education foundations like the NEA. More stuff....
BUT LESS LEARNING!
Money isn't the problem. Oh, sure there are some schools with money problems, mostly inner-city, predominately black/hispanic schools. Do you know why they aren't getting money? I don't know -- maybe because the money is regulated from Washington?
Many public schools are flush with cash -- and they don't know how to spend it, so they spend it badly.
... resizes your browser window. So, I'm assuming it's a pr0n site, having never visited the thing before today.
Ye Gods and little fishes -- there ought to be a death penalty instigated against web sites that resize your browser window.
Look, people I like my browser windows just how they are. If you screw with them, I'll fix what you fungled and leave, never to return.
Not knowing anything about Boo, I can still say with 100% conviction why they haven't made it. Their home page (as of now, which indicates to me that they've always been like this) is a giant image. This means that it barely gets indexed by search engines. That means nobody's gonna find it.
The recent Ford/Firestone tire recall brought a similar problem to light - there was strong rumors that at one point, Firestone weighed the cost of a recall of the tires in the US to the cost of settling any wrongful death lawsuits that may come from the problem. As I said, that's a rumor, but that seems to be a bottom line for many companies nowaday
Here's a cheerful thought for the day. While excoriating "big corporations" for being heartless, mean-spirited assholes, keep this in mind. Firestone -- if they did run the numbers and decided that it's less money to pay wrongful deaths instead of recall -- is, in a way, forced to do so. If they don't, and just recall, they can be subjected to a shareholder lawsuit for not doing their due diligence.
It's a mean, mean world filled with vicious assholes. Picking on "big corporations" is great entertainment, because they are a legal-fiction of a person, not a real one, and it's easy to pick on somebody that doesn't really exist.
It allows frequency-hopping signals in the 2.4-GHz band to operate at
1, 3 or 5 MHz, with at least 15 non-overlapping channels spread out over a total span of 75
MHz. The average time of occupancy on any frequency shall not be greater than 0.4 seconds,
within a 30-second period. The maximum output power is 125 mW at 5 MHz, vs. the 200 mW
the HomeRF group had requested.
This mostly concerns the battle between HomeRF and 802.11, but does give some good info.
I don't like new laws, and if we can avoid creating new ones for the Digital Revolution, that's a Good Thing.
I don't like the "vandalism" arguments. That implies a monetary damage, which is difficult to determine. So how about trespassing? We have property laws and private property rights, correct? (Okay, we don't, not really. But theoretically we do)
So why can't crackers be convicted on tresspassing laws?
Even better -- use this in your personal bookmark toolbar. Add a new bookmark, and then use this as the URL:
javascript:q=document.getSelection();if(!q){void(q =prompt('Enter text to search using Google.',''))};if(q)location.href='http://www.goog le.com/search?client=googlet&q='+escape( q)
Now, if you highlight some text on a web page and hit the bookmark button, it takes you to Google and executes the search. If no text is highlighted, it brings up a dialog box and asks for the keywords.
Wish I could claim some kind of freak genetic abnormality that allows me to remember obscure stuff, but in reality, I fought with it for over a week trying to get Photoshop 5.5 to work as well as 5.0 did for me. It's hard to forget such pain.
I can agree with you, up to a point. Hey, I've pushed out my fair share of Shockwave/Javascript/1x1 pixel GIF sites myself. If the client wants it, I'll do it. I readily admit to being a whore.
(Tho I find your comment funny since I visited your home page. It looks pretty good to me.)
Which is better?
A site devoted to people suffering from AIDS that is tarted up with javascript, frames, and Flash that looks nice to some people, but atrocious to others, that takes 45 secs to load every page because everything is contained in one big TABLE?
A site devoted to people suffering from AIDS that is rat-simple HTML, where the most complicated tag is the unordered list, but allows people who are blind, almost blind, have physical dexterity problems, and everybody can see everything? And, because it's rat-simple, each page loads in a couple of secs (or streams out as received, cause it doesn't need to render the TABLE).
I maintain that it's better to aspire to B than to A. If you can add elements to B that brings it closer to A, but not leave a good portion of your audience in the cold, that's not a bad thing.
If you're Wired, you pump out the most eye-catching, fluff filled stuff you can. Your audience expects it. That's fine as well. You just have to accept the fact that I (and a few other people) will never visit your site because of the rotating buttons. I'll only visit because there's a good article.
Keeping content-as-King as a guiding principle means you can move faster, put more content up, and have a better, more popular site easier and cheaper.
I know your exact problem. Photoshop 5.5, right? Go to the RGB settings under Color Settings under the File menu. Change it to Monitor RGB or Adobe RGB 1998. Also turn off the embedding of a profile for RGB images.
Photoshop 5.5 has a lot of nice stuff, but fungling with my colors is a big bugaboo.
Old-timey graphic designer motto (which isn't taught in schools anymore, to judge by Wired and it's ilk):
No graphic design is better than bad graphic design
I'm kinda old-fogey about this. If it's black, you read it. If it's blue, you click on it. If it's grey, it's the background.
Jeez... If you're site is all about matching colors and transparent GIFs, you've got a brochureware site. Don't sweat it -- people will look at it once and never come back.
The above paraphrased: I have nothing substantial to add to this discussion, so I'll just wave my dick around a bit.
Read it again. I never claimed to be right, nor did I concede defeat. I admitted that he had a point, and then produced another of my own. It's called debate. It's fun, it's stimulating, and it can be productive. I've learned quite a bit since this thread started.
Wow... this is getting pretty ridiculous. Fun, but ridiculous.
Okay, to put it in perspective -- Apple Computer is at One Infinite Loop. The name of the street is Infinite Loop. This comes from way back in the day where the in-house Cray was said to be so fast that it could "run an infinite loop in 3 minutes" or words to that effect. Well, if it can run an infinite loop in 3 minutes, it's not an infinite loop by definition. It's hyperbole. Exaggeration for the sake of humor.
I think you're over-emphasizing precision at the expense of the humor. I'll grant you that in reality a 10 billion tick infinite loop is finite, if you'll grant me that my pathetic attempt at humor at least made you grin, just a bit. That's all I wanted, anyway.
Thanks for the tip. I will check him out. About the only philosophy I won't read is Plato. The Republic infuriated me so that I now set him on the shelf next to Danielle Steel.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that the EC is fair/unfair, good/not good is a moot point. It's the law of the land, and it can't be changed for this election. Maybe it's appropriate to change for the next election cycle in 2004, though I don't think so.
1. brianvan is correct -- the EC acts as a check/balance to keep the more populous states from electing a President by themselves. It's similar (in spirit, if not in action) to a weighted vote system with run-offs.
2. I think our Founding Fathers who designed this system were pretty smart guys, who thought about this carefully. They had a similar (if smaller in scale) setup then: some populous urban states and less populous rural states. I'm not ready to say that some AC yahoo posting to Slashdot (including my own self) is smarter than Jefferson and Co.
3. The EC system gives more data than a pure popular vote. You get one set of data from the popular vote and one set of data from a winner-take-all state EC vote (here's a map of the US -- these states went for Bush, these went for Gore), and an EC vote (similar to state-by-state, 300 for Gore, 240 for Bush).
4. It does give 3rd parties a chance to make an impact. The Libertarians could campain heavily in North & South Dakota and come up with 6 EC votes. That puts them in the spotlight, from which they can build on in the next election. In a close race like this years, it could be very significant -- and would at least drive the 2 parties to adopt some of the 3rd party's principles.
Is it perfect? Well, no. And any other solution we come up with will also be flawed. Since this solution was devised when there weren't any truly "established" parties (I'm talking 100 years of ingrained political hackery), I have a bit more faith in it than one re-designed from some ad-hockery dominated by two truly established parties.
And I'd like to add, the fact that Gore is screaming "Do over! Do over!" like a petulant 6-year-old does more to diminish him, in my mind. Sure he has documented lies and half-truths, just as Bush has documented verbal boners (God, I hope that doesn't become criminal -- I'd be doing 20-years-to-life). Both of them are so unpalatable to me -- which is why I voted Libertarian.
Last point -- the fact that we are so concerned about who/which party is in power troubles me. If Government was little more than a convenience to protect the borders and deliver the mail, and not the Fount of Everything Good and Holy (as it seems to be now), we'd be better off, and less likely to worry over who gets elected. We could just elect those people willing to suspend their normal lives for 4 years to keep the White House warm and termite-free, rather than power-hungry politicos who think their "vision" of the country's future is the best.
(in other words, would you rather have George Bush/Al Gore running 30% of the country's business, or that nice retired guy next door (ex-Army, who keeps his yard mowed and weeded) keeping watch over .01%?)
Yes! :)
Just kidding -- I really liked GoldenEye (and I'm definitely NOT a FPS kinda guy) and now Perfect Dark. They were/are smoother and more playable (and more fun, to me) than Doom/Quake/et.al.
Of course, the most powerful PC I own is the P-133 laptop. But since it runs FBSD, it works just fine for me (but no good for FPSs)
I liken this to the mouse/trackball debate -- I like trackballs, some people hate them. The analog stick on an N64 controller works great for me, while it just doesn't click with some people.
... will be Pong.
Okay, that's a little smart-alecky, but really, all it takes is One Good Game, and people will buy the Indrema to play it. Think of all the people who went out and dropped $2K on a computer back in the early 90s to play Doom (they claimed it was for "working at home and stuff, mostly for the kids to learn about computers", but it was Dad blasting demons to bits at 2am).
One good game. The N64 has been riding the wave of GoldenEye and (now) Perfect Dark for a long time now. Without those two games (and of course Mario and Zelda), the N64 would be a paperweight.
One good game. Not a port or a repeat or a clone, but a True-Blue Killer App. With the Indrema being open, it has a good chance to do it, two.
I dunno why, but I find that term, "userland", to take on a completely different meaning when you're talking about pacemakers and heart monitors. "We put the user back in userland".
I think I've been working with Oracle too long today -- my sanity is beginning to slip.
No, there is no point to this post.
I've heard a lot of "not Bush!" comments on /. and in GIS, but no reason. Apparently Taco hates Bush because he hates Bush.
Really facinating...
I don't like Bush, I don't like Gore, I don't like Nader, I don't like Buchannan, and I LIKE Harry Browne -- and, believe it or not, I can articulate the reasons why I like/dislike them. Taco seems to be against Bush because, I dunno, somebody he knows said that Bush is an idiot, and he bought it hook, line and sinker.
Makes you wonder why he started using Linux... is it because he found it to be stable, fun, powerful, etc., or because it became "cool"?
See, the government is here to help the little people get ahead in life when they might be down on their luck, or handed a pair of duces in life's Poker Game.
Using the tax law to spread the wealth around a bit and keeping it from being clumped together is a good thing. You know how all those kids who inherit million$ always hoard it and never spend it on things and possessions.
This is a vital role for the government. Another vital role for the government is to protect those kids who may not have caring parents, and as such we NEED filters in our public schools' Internet access to keep them from viewing porn or learning about how to make a bomb.
We also need to protect the elderly from being ripped off by monitoring all lines of communication for scam artists and thugs. It would be helpful if we could do this with email and websites as well, so that we can watch for terrorists while we're at it.
Hey, here's another idea! You can shampoo my crotch! Government always does things badly, no matter how well intentioned. Rose and Milt Freideman described it best when they explained the four (and only four) ways to spend money:
This is how middle aged men shop for Porches. You get exactly what you want at the lowest price.
This is how second-wives of middle-aged Porche drivers shop at Neiman-Marcus. You get exactly what you want, but don't care about the price.
This is why kids get underwear for Christmas. You get a good price, but don't care as much as to whether you're pleasing the recipient.
Government spending of tax revenues falls into this category, and NOBODY gives a good Goddamn as to the price or quality or neccessity.
You can do whatever you want with your money when you die, I don't care. DON'T, however, use a gun (Government) to take mine.
Not too many years ago, that idea wouldn't have even popped into your head. It was as unthinkable as drilling holes in your own head. Family was (and still should be, IMO) everything. My Granny wouldn't think about being a burden, because she wouldn't be a burden. She's family.
It's still somewhat prevalent here in the South (not nearly what it used to be), and the Philipinos have us beat like all get out -- family over there is way at the top of the list of Important Things.
We don't have tight families anymore (witness our spectacular divorce rate and the pseudo-prestige given single parents). Dunno when or how exactly this happened (for conveniece I like to blame the Boomer generation), but it's a shame that it did happen.
As for those who don't have anyone to support them, there used to be charity houses where they could go and be cared for. I know, you're thinking how horrible those were or could be. When I was younger, I used to play my cello for the residents of Government-run retirement homes. Trust me -- I know of which I speak -- those are just as bad if not worse.
I think we're already in dependancy -- take a look at how many people depend on the State to provide something for them
Here in Mississippi, we're trumpeting about how many kids we've signed up for the CHIP program. Is this something to be proud of? How many kids have become, in a sense, wards of the State? 25,000 at last count, and there aren't all that many people in Mississippi. 25,000 is a goodly portion of the population.
If that isn't enough, how many of our aged depend on Social Security and Medicare for their food and medicine? I have no clue. My grandmother is on Social Security, and I hate it. If i didn't have to cough up nearly 50% of my income (self-employed), I'd be more than able (and willing -- my grandmother is an 85 year old hacker in her own way) to help care for her. As it is, I live hand to mouth myself (nope, no health insurance -- but then, I'm pretty healthy) and can't bear supporting somebody else.
Dependancy (I would argue) is equivalent to slavery anyway. Dependancy on a person is bad enough -- dependancy on a faceless State is horrible. It's equivalent to being a stand of trees or a ditch on Federal land. You're owned by the State and used by the State, but not cared for by the State because, after all, you're just property with no value.
I'm just about ready to leave this country and move to a Caribbean island where the laws are lax (I'm thinking the Turks and Caicos). Sure I like my fast Internet connection, but when confronted with the choice between freedom and nerdliness... I'll be the first to choose running a dive shop over hacking Tcl anyday.
Tell me what you REALLY think, okay Taco?
It works so well. If you took 3% of the defence budget and tripled the education spending, do you know what you'd get? More administrators. More education foundations like the NEA. More stuff....
BUT LESS LEARNING!
Money isn't the problem. Oh, sure there are some schools with money problems, mostly inner-city, predominately black/hispanic schools. Do you know why they aren't getting money? I don't know -- maybe because the money is regulated from Washington?
Many public schools are flush with cash -- and they don't know how to spend it, so they spend it badly.
... resizes your browser window. So, I'm assuming it's a pr0n site, having never visited the thing before today.
Ye Gods and little fishes -- there ought to be a death penalty instigated against web sites that resize your browser window.
Look, people I like my browser windows just how they are. If you screw with them, I'll fix what you fungled and leave, never to return.
Not knowing anything about Boo, I can still say with 100% conviction why they haven't made it. Their home page (as of now, which indicates to me that they've always been like this) is a giant image. This means that it barely gets indexed by search engines. That means nobody's gonna find it.
Good riddance, IMO.
Here's a cheerful thought for the day. While excoriating "big corporations" for being heartless, mean-spirited assholes, keep this in mind. Firestone -- if they did run the numbers and decided that it's less money to pay wrongful deaths instead of recall -- is, in a way, forced to do so. If they don't, and just recall, they can be subjected to a shareholder lawsuit for not doing their due diligence.
It's a mean, mean world filled with vicious assholes. Picking on "big corporations" is great entertainment, because they are a legal-fiction of a person, not a real one, and it's easy to pick on somebody that doesn't really exist.
It's almost an exercise in navel-gazing, really.
What? I thought "as USA goes, as does the rest of the world!"?
Just kidding -- good point. Shoulda added that.
There's an EETimes article about it here. To sum up:
This mostly concerns the battle between HomeRF and 802.11, but does give some good info.
Bingo, you got it. 100% reflectivity mirrors are the Holy Grail. A high reflectivity mirror now is insanely expensive to make at a decent size.
You're idea is good, but the economics of it dictate that to do it would be just as expensive as building a big honkin' scope anyway.
I don't like new laws, and if we can avoid creating new ones for the Digital Revolution, that's a Good Thing.
I don't like the "vandalism" arguments. That implies a monetary damage, which is difficult to determine. So how about trespassing? We have property laws and private property rights, correct? (Okay, we don't, not really. But theoretically we do)
So why can't crackers be convicted on tresspassing laws?
Even better -- use this in your personal bookmark toolbar. Add a new bookmark, and then use this as the URL:
javascript:q=document.getSelection();if(!q){void(q =prompt('Enter text to search using Google.',''))};if(q)location.href='http://www.goog le.com/search?client=googlet&q='+escape( q)
Now, if you highlight some text on a web page and hit the bookmark button, it takes you to Google and executes the search. If no text is highlighted, it brings up a dialog box and asks for the keywords.
Very useful. I use it all the time.
Wish I could claim some kind of freak genetic abnormality that allows me to remember obscure stuff, but in reality, I fought with it for over a week trying to get Photoshop 5.5 to work as well as 5.0 did for me. It's hard to forget such pain.
I can agree with you, up to a point. Hey, I've pushed out my fair share of Shockwave/Javascript/1x1 pixel GIF sites myself. If the client wants it, I'll do it. I readily admit to being a whore.
(Tho I find your comment funny since I visited your home page. It looks pretty good to me.)
Which is better?
A site devoted to people suffering from AIDS that is tarted up with javascript, frames, and Flash that looks nice to some people, but atrocious to others, that takes 45 secs to load every page because everything is contained in one big TABLE?
A site devoted to people suffering from AIDS that is rat-simple HTML, where the most complicated tag is the unordered list, but allows people who are blind, almost blind, have physical dexterity problems, and everybody can see everything? And, because it's rat-simple, each page loads in a couple of secs (or streams out as received, cause it doesn't need to render the TABLE).
I maintain that it's better to aspire to B than to A. If you can add elements to B that brings it closer to A, but not leave a good portion of your audience in the cold, that's not a bad thing.
If you're Wired, you pump out the most eye-catching, fluff filled stuff you can. Your audience expects it. That's fine as well. You just have to accept the fact that I (and a few other people) will never visit your site because of the rotating buttons. I'll only visit because there's a good article.
Keeping content-as-King as a guiding principle means you can move faster, put more content up, and have a better, more popular site easier and cheaper.
That's just my opinion.
I know your exact problem. Photoshop 5.5, right? Go to the RGB settings under Color Settings under the File menu. Change it to Monitor RGB or Adobe RGB 1998. Also turn off the embedding of a profile for RGB images.
Photoshop 5.5 has a lot of nice stuff, but fungling with my colors is a big bugaboo.
Old-timey graphic designer motto (which isn't taught in schools anymore, to judge by Wired and it's ilk):
I'm kinda old-fogey about this. If it's black, you read it. If it's blue, you click on it. If it's grey, it's the background.
Jeez... If you're site is all about matching colors and transparent GIFs, you've got a brochureware site. Don't sweat it -- people will look at it once and never come back.
(Browsing Slashdot in "simple HTML mode"...)
Ummm... can you take my place in this discussion? You're better prepared than I.
Another good link... Ya know, if nothing else, Slashdot always manages to educate me.
The above paraphrased: I have nothing substantial to add to this discussion, so I'll just wave my dick around a bit.
Read it again. I never claimed to be right, nor did I concede defeat. I admitted that he had a point, and then produced another of my own. It's called debate. It's fun, it's stimulating, and it can be productive. I've learned quite a bit since this thread started.
You? There's your dick, waving around...
Wow... this is getting pretty ridiculous. Fun, but ridiculous.
Okay, to put it in perspective -- Apple Computer is at One Infinite Loop. The name of the street is Infinite Loop. This comes from way back in the day where the in-house Cray was said to be so fast that it could "run an infinite loop in 3 minutes" or words to that effect. Well, if it can run an infinite loop in 3 minutes, it's not an infinite loop by definition. It's hyperbole. Exaggeration for the sake of humor.
I think you're over-emphasizing precision at the expense of the humor. I'll grant you that in reality a 10 billion tick infinite loop is finite, if you'll grant me that my pathetic attempt at humor at least made you grin, just a bit. That's all I wanted, anyway.
Thanks for the tip. I will check him out. About the only philosophy I won't read is Plato. The Republic infuriated me so that I now set him on the shelf next to Danielle Steel. :)