Printing: Another Advantage of CSS
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CSS for the LDP?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think it goes without saying that Linux folks should embrace CSS. It's sort of a no-brainer. That being said, another advantage is style-sheets for different media. In particular, LDP pages are likely to be printed (I printed one the other night for a Linux install where I didn't have a live Internet connection), and even with all the problems, a smart designer can make very nice print stylesheets that use serif fonts (not so good on screen, very good on paper from a readability standpoint), add banners that print on each page, etc. This assumes a well-structured document that the CSS is styling, but that's a big advantage.
Ted Waitt did the same thing at Gateway three or four years ago, to pursue his interests in sexual violence prevention and equitable access to technology. Oddly enough I work on both of those, and have had the chance to meet him several times. Waitt's intelligence and money have helped in these areas, and I can only hope that Michael Dell might think about doing something similar.
Okay, y'all, I know I'm ringing in on this late, and it's 6:00am without any sleep for me, so I might come off as brusque. Everybody says "I'm not a graphic designer, but..." Well, I actually am a graphic designer.
The GIMP may, someday, be as good as Photoshop. Right now, it's not even close. Photoshop's interface is so polished and so wise, and its tools are so powerful but easily accessible, that all of these debates about the GIMP are frivolous. I've used both extensively, and for anything other than fucking around, there's no comparison.
I will pay $600 for a program as powerful as Photoshop. But, I'd really like to have Photoshop (without the use of CrossoverOffice) run on my Linux desktop machine. I can boot into Windows or I can walk to my Win98 box to run Photoshop, but it's frustrating not to have Photoshop accessible when I'm doing other sorts of serious work.
What I think graphic designers who want to use Linux should do is lobby Adobe to make PS available on Linux. I would pay, and I know others who would, too.
Yeah, you're right by the Rock n' Bowl. I had a pretty serious bike accident over there in the summer and a fellow from Lathrop homes helped me out big time. I'm in Humboldt Park. Anyway, the gentrification of the city is incredibly depressing, just as you say. I also think that you're exactly correct about single family homeowners. The changes in the city are not just screwing the exceptionally poor, they are also hurting working lower middle class types. It actually makes the term "gentrification" more apt -- the transformation is towards a large urban gentry.
Well, I'm ranting now, too. Why don't you contact me: eads-AT-invisibleinstitute.com. I'd be curious what you do for a living, since you obviously care very much about the changes in the city, and without some of the gooey liberal BS that people tend to invoke when talking about this stuff. Two more things. One, what's also scary is that Chicago's urban "renewal," if sucessful, will likely guide urban policy all over the country. Second, I feel like Chicago is becoming more like cities have been historically: a rich "inner city" with shanty towns at the geographical margins.
I agree about needing to see it to see that it exists. Now that I'm grad school, I'm meeting a lot of the people who are actually driving this process along intentionally, which is odd. I worry that despite spending my money at local businesses, hanging out with my neighbors, learning Spanish, etc, that just by being white I'm encouraging others to move to Humboldt Park who won't in the least make an effort to figure out what it means to be a good neighbor here.
Hey, that was a very thoughtful reply. I'm curious where you are -- it sounds a lot like the west side, near UIC. I might even know the Escalade you're talking about.
I probably spoke too decisively about the presence of patrol cars and cops, but I know that in the south side housing project where I work, it certainly works better to stop the drug trade than other methods. I think the difference is that in more dispersed residential areas that tactic doesn't work. And certainly, it has a lot of potential for abuse.
I agree about the revenue. The cops in Chicago are interested in doing things primarily on the criteria of how much money it makes. This is a big problem in public housing. Lots of drug dealers have told me about getting stopped by the cops, having their money "confiscated" and then let go.
But, like you said with the truck thing, it's part of life in Chicago. Same thing with "trucks" on Lake Shore Drive. I got pulled over in my friend's small pickup and told that I'd be given a $500 ticket if I kept driving on Lake Shore and pointed to a sign that made it clear that enormous semis were not permitted). At which point I asked why he wasn't pulling over all those Lincoln Navigators and Grand Cherokees that were streaming past us. "Those aren't trucks, you dumb prick."
Anyway, I feel your pain. I wonder how many other US cities have such bad policing. It doesn't seem like SF, Seattle, Pittsburgh, or Portland (cities I've spent some time in during the last year) are nearly as bad.
I live in Chicago, and wanted to respond to several comments I've seen in this discussion and to the article. I also live in one "ghetto" and work in another, which are famous hotspots for police activity.
First, their IT infrastructure claims to make policing more effective. As several have pointed out, correlation is not causation. As a further addendum to that, several other forces are at play which could be responsible for the drop in crime: gentrification, relocation of public housing residents (many of whom are going to the suburbs and beyond), and what seems to be a few more jobs at the low-wage end of the spectrum. Basically, you'd have to try to control for a) new, affluent residents of "crime-ridden" neighborhoods making more calls, b) how relocation of public housing residents (many of whom are involved in criminal activity that ranges from peddling to drug dealing and gangbanging) is tranforming crime (I'd guess, but I don't know, that drug arrests and such are down, because murders and rapes are most definitely going strong in Chicago), and how job creation for poor folks is also reducing some of the crime.
Secondly, lots of people have immediately argued that this IT infrastructure is a good thing and that Slashdot police-bashing is a Bad Thing.
Further, a good IT infrastructure cannot mitigate the effect of the completely shitty policies that keep good police from being effective in certain situations. Many of my friends on the police force lament the way that resources are deployed and policy works in handling drug-related crime, because the police necessarily tip their hand in busts, allowing the worst criminals to get away and leaving a couple of poor drug-addicted saps (not exactly the folks who marshall significant resources to get heroin and crack into the city and into the neighborhoods) for the police to nab.
Finally, and this is absolutely significant to this award, the Chicago police have often argued that their job is NOT crime deterrance or prevention, but crime reponse. Therefore, in several cases of police brutality and misconduct, the police claimed that they knew that crime was likely to occur in the places they raided or severely beat (killed in one instance, raped in another) innocent people, but that they couldn't just show up in order to deter the crime, because then the crime wouldn't happen. If the police are serious about deterring crime in Chicago, then the CLEAR system needs to be used in conjunction with pre-emptive prevention policies. These are things like simply stationing officers in cars in places they know (probably know even better with this new system, though it doesn't take a genius) lots of drug dealing happens, a stunningly effective and rarely used technique compared to the-chase-folks-around-yelling-"nigger"-and-then beating-them-up-without-an-arrest-but-pocketing-th eir-cash technique.
I'm not trolling. I believe in strong, effective policing. But that's so far from what I see in Chicago that congratulating them for an IT infrastructure that reduces costs and makes the police more "effective" is laughable compared to their abhorable behavior on a daily basis.
I know I'm posting late, but in Chicago, you've got a couple options:
PCs for schools -- this organization, quite poorly named, a wonderful recycling and training center. I'm mentioning this before my shameless plug precisely because they're probably the better recipient of a general donation. Ask for Willie Cade.
My group, the Invisible Institute. I work in the housing projects, and we give out lots of PCs and Macs to families who live in public housing. We're not so formal about things, but the computers are assured to go people who desperately need them, and who live near-Third World conditions and I install a lot of the systems we give to folks with Linux.
Eerie Neighborhood House -- these folks are awesome, and they always need computers.
The CUIP (I think) program at the University of Chicago, which does computer work with Chicago public schools. Google for "Ben Lorch" and "university of chicago"
The really arrogant folks are those who use models to predict global weather 50 years from now, even when they limit their 'predictions' to general high temperature 'averages' for regions like North America or Africa. Such dire 'Global Warming' predictions are fueled not by valid math models, because none exist, but by their political agenda.
Out of pure curiosity (I don't have a dog in the global warming fight), what makes it impossible to find long-term trends in a chaotic system? For example, in my undergrad dynamics course, I numerically simulated a chaotic system of two pendulums whose bobs were linked by a spring and which could be driven, damped, or run fricitionless. In the low damping case particularly, you could predict the outlines of what would happen very well by idealizing some of the trickiness out of the system, but the local behavior was not amenable to such analysis. The system would do all sorts of crazy stuff in short time intervals (1/10th of second or so) but we could still quite accurately predict the stopping time, and the envelope of the motion. You could even plot the more-idealized trajectory and the less idealized trajectory in phase space, and see how the less-idealized trajectory deviated in locally significant but globally insignifcant ways around the more-idealized trajectory.
It is possible but not necessary for chaotic systems to exhibit locally unpredictable behavior (which is unpredictable in principle) and still find solutions for more idealized models that are accurate for long-term behavior. Given that, I'd be curious what literature and theory backs up your assertion that the long-term mathematical models predicting global warming are corrupt. I'm perfectly willing to assent to the claim that the "science" employed here is self-serving, propagandistic, and intentionally ignores its own fatal flaws (intelligent design comes to mind as an example of this, another politically charged area of science), but the chaotic behavior of the weather system at a temporally and spatially local level (as has been demonstrated all over the place) in principle does not preclude the possibility of long term prediction of a trend such as global warming. To argue that it does, you must actually show what models are employed by the global warming partisans, what theories preclude the efficacy of their models, and on what empirical basis.
I both disagree and agree. Making something easier to do (doing certain advanced tasks in this case) may not confer more control per se, but it does confer more power precisely because it makes certain things easier. In the case of Gentoo, I think the extra power it grants is a little overrated. You have to know a helluva lot to make it work only incrementally faster on your hardware than many less sexy distros. That's not a bad thing, but I think the famous Gentoo zealotry has much more to do with the idea of Gentoo than the way it goes more often than not in actual practice.
In other news, MEPIS looks cool. In general, LiveCD distros are nice because they let Linux-phobes try out Linux without utterly rearranging their technological lives right away--I think my girlfriend is going to make the switch after I gave her a Knoppix disk, and choice in LiveCDs, as choice always does, has its advantages and disadvantages.
This is a case where a useful critique of Netcraft's methodology could be made, and the survey (and the statements from Port80) instead is flatly ludicrous.
What's frustrating is that this is not a partisan issue. It's a question of what tools people are using to do what jobs in the world of web serving, and, by extension, what that means for the web as a whole.
In addition to all the other complaints about Port80's crappy methodology, it seems relevant to point out that in the world of the web, sites with relatively little traffic can have a powerful impact individually in the "real world", and have a powerful effect in combination with each other (witness the blogging phenomenon). Ignoring low-traffic sites assumes that low traffic is tantmount to irrelevance. But if lots of low traffic sites with some sort of significant impact on whatever level are using Apache, then we might want to ask why that would be. Port80's method stinks.
Heck, maybe even Unix vs Microsoft. Because then we can use MacOS X to beat all the
Windows zealots.
I'm a strong advocate of and adherent to free and open source software. I don't think the issue is beating Windows zealots in any sense.
In my estimation, what's important isn't an ideology but an orientation to software use and development. Assuming that a utilitarian perspective applies to software development, and assuming you buy in to some limited form of democratic values, it software use and development consists in creating and using tools that effectively do a job while upholding values of widespread social good via transparency, diversity of choice, an appropriate level of propriety, and reasonable cost. If this applies anywhere the most strongly, it is probably to operating systems.
To tie it back in to what just happened: it's astonishingly principled of the Debian team to admit the compromise and carefully proceed. This is what the software world needs, forget the zealots of any stripe and all the noise they make.
I ain't no genius, but I'm pretty handy with Linux. My server recently suffered a motherboard failure, and since I had to crack the box and do lots of work on it anyway, I decided to give up on RH 7.3 and go to Debian for stability and security. After having heard how nasty the installer was, I was relatively impressed with how easily it went. I used one of the LiveCD installers packaged by the Debian team members. It was *much* smoother than the Gentoo install I did recently on a home system.
Anyway, I'm not going to diss efforts to make a better installer, but I didn't find Debian installation to be as bad as folks have told me it would be, and the distro itself is just lovely once working.
Re:Are you fsking kidding me?
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ALA 3 Goes Online
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· Score: 2, Interesting
No, that's not a good reason. If I find the text too wide for comfort (and I often do), I *gasp* narrow the window.
On the other hand, not all users are going to be apt to do this and it's a courtesy to have the default behavior be the most readable on the most screens. Anyway, the techniques I described use max-width and an IE specific technique to accomplish the same in the CSS, which means that, unlike ALA, you can always narrow the window as much as you'd like. You can see it in action: http://www.viewfromhaiti.org.
Certainly, it's just as bad as using all the IE hacks for other CSS behaviors that people have come up with, but no worse.
Try to be a little more civil.
Re:Are you fsking kidding me?
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ALA 3 Goes Online
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Regarding fixed width designs: There are good reasons to use fixed width designs. The primary good reason to fix the width is that readers tend to suffer more-than-usual fatigue reading lines beyond the 65-80 character range. But there are much more elegant ways to go about doing this than what ALA is doing, and what's more, Zeldman has even linked to sites that explain the techniques.
Regarding the ALA redesign and Zeldman's design in general: It kinda sucks, for reasons everybody has mentioned. The guy knows the technical side of doing it very well, and knows how to explain the technical side in a way that's eerily clear and concise. But his aesthetic and design choices leave something to be desired.
One of the problems here is that there's a sacrifice going on here -- the do-anything-for-validation sacrifice. So what if a technique that should validate (such as some of the techniques to cut line length to aid in readability) in reality doesn't? And more specifically, I think that the XHTML side of the validation should be the more important. The CSS part is trickier business, and lots of hacks are needed, but the point is that the document structure should be coherent, as simple as possible, and reflect the content of the document, and that's what the XHTML does.
Some improvement! Patches to BIND aren't the answer. Verisign need to be made to stop breaking the internet.
There's been this silly thread in this conversation that stakes out two sides. Either a) fix anti-social, monopolistic behavior with technology, or b) fix it with laws and legal action. This is a moronic dichotomy. A technological solution mitigates the immediate problem while the lawyers have time to file their briefs and sort out the damage done. A combination of technical solutions and legal action is a possibility and even a sometimes a Good Thing, not some binary choice.
I can understand Google having too many blogs in their search results in most cases. What about cases involving technical questions, such as web design, where the blogs are the best place to look and should be dominating the search results?
I run a website (The View From The Ground) that uses an email newsletter that monitors what the city, police, and other agencies are doing in Chicago public housing (the projects) because there is absolutely no public accountability. We don't spam, don't release our email list to anybody. We're very disciplined about the privacy of our list.
We've thought about going to RSS, but there are big advantages to using an email newsletter for such a purpose.
While our email publication is "unwelcome" in places like the police department in the sense that they rarely like what we have to say, everyone from top administrators to low level officers read it because it scares them. There have already been several successful lawsuits and many major news stories (in the Chicago locals like the Tribune and Sun-Times and some nationals like the New York Times) that generate public scrutiny.
Now, imagine people at the police department or the Chicago Housing Authority, whose technical proficiency is often, uh, lacking, setting up an RSS reader and subscribing to our feed in order to receive our publication. Further, email is easy to forward, and we often get feedback that reveals a long and sordid chain of forwards until it reaches the person in question. We have received amusing lawsuit threats (one from a major company president for "deflamation") with such histories attached. RSS feeds don't have the same forward-ability as email.
Not all email that is received in a spirit of hostility is spam, and sometimes, even if the receiver hates the message, they have to read it. But that's only if they get it. RSS significantly raises the barrier of entry, particularly for people without lots of Net savvy.
This isn't not to say we're not working on implementing RSS. We are, and expect it to dominate the friendly/sympathetic side of our distribution list once we implement it as a distribution method this fall.
The point is that email is still a killer application of the Internet for distributing journalistic content, and that RSS and email can coexist in a mutually beneficial way.
I hate to say it, but the only way we'd become RSS exclusive would be if the next version of IE (which may not appear for years) ships with a super-easy RSS feed reader because almost every city agency in Chicago is MS-exclusive. Until then, we'll do both.
I just want to say... Heironymouscoward has managed to make all the points and more that I wanted to make when I read that crazy rant. Good job -- it's nice to see a calm, reasoned post on Slashdot.
Good reviews ask questions beyond the book in question, ask questions the book doesn't ask. They shouldn't just describe the book or say "it's good" or "it's not-so-good" (except that few Slashdot reviews ever say that anyway), they should inform the reading of the book and set the stage for discussion about the book.
I'm sorry, but the Slashdot editors need to improve their criteria for reviews. With some prodding, I think the author of this review could've written a fine review, but this is just mediocre.
What I'd really like to understand the dynamics of the stigma attached to comic books--the stereotype that they're artless, pulpy, and read by pimply teenaged males. I know this stigma isn't applied as much by elitist types to the work of people like Art Spiegelman. But as an artistic/literary venture, I think comics are still scoffed at more than they should be. This is probably why most of the recent movie adaptations lose the essential tensions and Cold War backdrop of the classic Marvel comics and become big SFX spectacles. I think understanding this stigma could also help people aspiring to create video/computer games that can be described as artistic.
Does anyone have thoughts on this? I'd especially like to hear from people who are involved in the debates described in the review and people with good knowledge of comic book history.
Mr. or Ms. Coward is on to something here. Competition drives open source development teams, but, ideally, the competition doesn't drive them into head to head battles in the end, but drives them into different niches.
For my part, I run a site on top of MySQL. I started using it as a newbie to Linux RDBMSes. It's never going to be so big that I'll need to run anything else. However, I've got a new project on the horizon where Postgres is the perfect solution. The best thing is that in a Linux environment, there's much less lock-in than in other environments, so you aren't forced to be a partisan about things like this.
Geopolitically, a global power grid distributes risk and there are good reasons, hypothetically, to do so, particularly for mitigating the extremism that leads to violence. For example, if Iran, which has moderate tendencies, joins the grid, it would have a strong incentive to itself quash extermism precisely because if Iranian terrorists go Allah Mode in a place like France and try to knock out infrastructure, moderate Iranians, who make up the majority of the population, may suffer as well.
The problem is that the major global powers have not indicated that they are willing to obey or respect any international law or organization. In Rwanda, France, who has lately championed the use of the UN in Iraq, aided and abetted the genocidal army over and against the UN force working in the region to save a few beleagured Rwandans. The United States has similarly revealed little or no inclination to respect the UN or other international "decision" making bodies on critical issues.
Lately I've felt as if advocating isolationism makes some sense, and this power grid idea is a example of why: it seems likely that, like the U.N. and like a great deal of international law, the major powers will disingenuously support such structures for a variety of reasons (appearances, genuinely felt convictions and ideals, gains in prestige and power). Unfortunately, unlike the U.N., where flaunting it just means that geopolitics is like geopolitics without a UN, an international power grid is physical, and dependence on it and control of it could become dangerous and unwieldy.
I know it's been said already a great deal, but I want to state it clearly: among other things, I'm a graphic designer and use Photoshop all friggin' day. I run a Linux webserver for my web sites and have a couple Linux boxes around the house and in my office for file sharing, server testing, etc and the single biggest reason I haven't given up Windows on my desktop is precisely because I need Photoshop all friggin' day. However, this put the final nails in the Windows coffin.
Nobody I know who does serious graphic design takes the GIMP seriously. I believe this has to do with the GIMP's awful interface, limited (with respect to Photoshop) feature set, Photoshop's name recognition, and the widespread support for Photoshop.
Graphic designers who do it for the love, from my experience, tend to be like me in that in that they are open minded about the OS they use and share the values of the open source and free software movement to a significant extent precisely because of the creative and moral nature of good graphic design--beauty and social importance are values with a premium for many graphic designers. And, as everybody knows, supporting Microsoft with our money may actually have negative social consequences for the 99% of our society that brushes up to information technology every now and then. Because of this many good graphic designers could be persuaded to make the move to Linux.
Here's the final point, and it's really the kicker: the Mac gained and retained a lot of prestige precisely because it was the graphics platform of choice for so long and a great deal of that had to do with Photoshop. Even though graphic design users make up a small part of the population of software users relative to people who word-process and write email, almost anyone familiar with technology used to know that the Macintosh was a) expensive and b) capable of and almost exclusively used by professionals to create beautiful graphics. This helped keep Apple's reputation going even when things were going to hell in a handbasket for everything Apple-related. For whatever reason, use for professional graphics carries prestige that use for professional servers doesn't even though both are critical uses of technology. Now, what if almost everyone who monkies around on a computer heard about this Linux thing and heard that Linux was a) cheap, b) getting much easier to use and c) capable of and used by a large number of professionals to create beautiful graphics?
I work in Chicago's housing projects and have taught lots of little and big courses on computer skills.
What I've learned is that teaching a class in any given application is 1% of the work of teaching people how to use computers. What's most important, in my experience, is providing space and time for motivated people to just keeping banging away and learning new things. The great fallacy of many computer technology centers is that they are closed to the possibility of letting people goof around for a couple hours, when that's exactly what teaches folks.
When I started working on resume writing with some folks in the projects I work at, I was really disappointed that they couldn't remember anything I'd told them, etc. Now, three years later, a couple of those folks have home computers, write lots of email, are good typists, know how to use spreadsheets, etc. Persistence, time, and self-exploration and discovery are what teach lasting technology skills.
Lastly, it's important to remember that you should be trying to teach computing principles. One of my aforementioned buddies has been able to quickly pick up all sorts of other computing skills because he digs on the principles of how computers work, networking works, etc. I think that should be a goal.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it goes without saying that Linux folks should embrace CSS. It's sort of a no-brainer. That being said, another advantage is style-sheets for different media. In particular, LDP pages are likely to be printed (I printed one the other night for a Linux install where I didn't have a live Internet connection), and even with all the problems, a smart designer can make very nice print stylesheets that use serif fonts (not so good on screen, very good on paper from a readability standpoint), add banners that print on each page, etc. This assumes a well-structured document that the CSS is styling, but that's a big advantage.
Ted Waitt did the same thing at Gateway three or four years ago, to pursue his interests in sexual violence prevention and equitable access to technology. Oddly enough I work on both of those, and have had the chance to meet him several times. Waitt's intelligence and money have helped in these areas, and I can only hope that Michael Dell might think about doing something similar.
Okay, y'all, I know I'm ringing in on this late, and it's 6:00am without any sleep for me, so I might come off as brusque. Everybody says "I'm not a graphic designer, but..." Well, I actually am a graphic designer.
The GIMP may, someday, be as good as Photoshop. Right now, it's not even close. Photoshop's interface is so polished and so wise, and its tools are so powerful but easily accessible, that all of these debates about the GIMP are frivolous. I've used both extensively, and for anything other than fucking around, there's no comparison.
I will pay $600 for a program as powerful as Photoshop. But, I'd really like to have Photoshop (without the use of CrossoverOffice) run on my Linux desktop machine. I can boot into Windows or I can walk to my Win98 box to run Photoshop, but it's frustrating not to have Photoshop accessible when I'm doing other sorts of serious work.
What I think graphic designers who want to use Linux should do is lobby Adobe to make PS available on Linux. I would pay, and I know others who would, too.
Yeah, you're right by the Rock n' Bowl. I had a pretty serious bike accident over there in the summer and a fellow from Lathrop homes helped me out big time. I'm in Humboldt Park. Anyway, the gentrification of the city is incredibly depressing, just as you say. I also think that you're exactly correct about single family homeowners. The changes in the city are not just screwing the exceptionally poor, they are also hurting working lower middle class types. It actually makes the term "gentrification" more apt -- the transformation is towards a large urban gentry.
Well, I'm ranting now, too. Why don't you contact me: eads-AT-invisibleinstitute.com. I'd be curious what you do for a living, since you obviously care very much about the changes in the city, and without some of the gooey liberal BS that people tend to invoke when talking about this stuff. Two more things. One, what's also scary is that Chicago's urban "renewal," if sucessful, will likely guide urban policy all over the country. Second, I feel like Chicago is becoming more like cities have been historically: a rich "inner city" with shanty towns at the geographical margins.
I agree about needing to see it to see that it exists. Now that I'm grad school, I'm meeting a lot of the people who are actually driving this process along intentionally, which is odd. I worry that despite spending my money at local businesses, hanging out with my neighbors, learning Spanish, etc, that just by being white I'm encouraging others to move to Humboldt Park who won't in the least make an effort to figure out what it means to be a good neighbor here.
Hey, that was a very thoughtful reply. I'm curious where you are -- it sounds a lot like the west side, near UIC. I might even know the Escalade you're talking about.
I probably spoke too decisively about the presence of patrol cars and cops, but I know that in the south side housing project where I work, it certainly works better to stop the drug trade than other methods. I think the difference is that in more dispersed residential areas that tactic doesn't work. And certainly, it has a lot of potential for abuse.
I agree about the revenue. The cops in Chicago are interested in doing things primarily on the criteria of how much money it makes. This is a big problem in public housing. Lots of drug dealers have told me about getting stopped by the cops, having their money "confiscated" and then let go.
But, like you said with the truck thing, it's part of life in Chicago. Same thing with "trucks" on Lake Shore Drive. I got pulled over in my friend's small pickup and told that I'd be given a $500 ticket if I kept driving on Lake Shore and pointed to a sign that made it clear that enormous semis were not permitted). At which point I asked why he wasn't pulling over all those Lincoln Navigators and Grand Cherokees that were streaming past us. "Those aren't trucks, you dumb prick."
Anyway, I feel your pain. I wonder how many other US cities have such bad policing. It doesn't seem like SF, Seattle, Pittsburgh, or Portland (cities I've spent some time in during the last year) are nearly as bad.
I live in Chicago, and wanted to respond to several comments I've seen in this discussion and to the article. I also live in one "ghetto" and work in another, which are famous hotspots for police activity.
First, their IT infrastructure claims to make policing more effective. As several have pointed out, correlation is not causation. As a further addendum to that, several other forces are at play which could be responsible for the drop in crime: gentrification, relocation of public housing residents (many of whom are going to the suburbs and beyond), and what seems to be a few more jobs at the low-wage end of the spectrum. Basically, you'd have to try to control for a) new, affluent residents of "crime-ridden" neighborhoods making more calls, b) how relocation of public housing residents (many of whom are involved in criminal activity that ranges from peddling to drug dealing and gangbanging) is tranforming crime (I'd guess, but I don't know, that drug arrests and such are down, because murders and rapes are most definitely going strong in Chicago), and how job creation for poor folks is also reducing some of the crime.
Secondly, lots of people have immediately argued that this IT infrastructure is a good thing and that Slashdot police-bashing is a Bad Thing.
In Chicago, police corruption and brutality is systematic at the highest levels, pervasive, and shocking.
Further, a good IT infrastructure cannot mitigate the effect of the completely shitty policies that keep good police from being effective in certain situations. Many of my friends on the police force lament the way that resources are deployed and policy works in handling drug-related crime, because the police necessarily tip their hand in busts, allowing the worst criminals to get away and leaving a couple of poor drug-addicted saps (not exactly the folks who marshall significant resources to get heroin and crack into the city and into the neighborhoods) for the police to nab.
Finally, and this is absolutely significant to this award, the Chicago police have often argued that their job is NOT crime deterrance or prevention, but crime reponse. Therefore, in several cases of police brutality and misconduct, the police claimed that they knew that crime was likely to occur in the places they raided or severely beat (killed in one instance, raped in another) innocent people, but that they couldn't just show up in order to deter the crime, because then the crime wouldn't happen. If the police are serious about deterring crime in Chicago, then the CLEAR system needs to be used in conjunction with pre-emptive prevention policies. These are things like simply stationing officers in cars in places they know (probably know even better with this new system, though it doesn't take a genius) lots of drug dealing happens, a stunningly effective and rarely used technique compared to the-chase-folks-around-yelling-"nigger"-and-then beating-them-up-without-an-arrest-but-pocketing-th eir-cash technique.
I'm not trolling. I believe in strong, effective policing. But that's so far from what I see in Chicago that congratulating them for an IT infrastructure that reduces costs and makes the police more "effective" is laughable compared to their abhorable behavior on a daily basis.
I know I'm posting late, but in Chicago, you've got a couple options:
Out of pure curiosity (I don't have a dog in the global warming fight), what makes it impossible to find long-term trends in a chaotic system? For example, in my undergrad dynamics course, I numerically simulated a chaotic system of two pendulums whose bobs were linked by a spring and which could be driven, damped, or run fricitionless. In the low damping case particularly, you could predict the outlines of what would happen very well by idealizing some of the trickiness out of the system, but the local behavior was not amenable to such analysis. The system would do all sorts of crazy stuff in short time intervals (1/10th of second or so) but we could still quite accurately predict the stopping time, and the envelope of the motion. You could even plot the more-idealized trajectory and the less idealized trajectory in phase space, and see how the less-idealized trajectory deviated in locally significant but globally insignifcant ways around the more-idealized trajectory.
It is possible but not necessary for chaotic systems to exhibit locally unpredictable behavior (which is unpredictable in principle) and still find solutions for more idealized models that are accurate for long-term behavior. Given that, I'd be curious what literature and theory backs up your assertion that the long-term mathematical models predicting global warming are corrupt. I'm perfectly willing to assent to the claim that the "science" employed here is self-serving, propagandistic, and intentionally ignores its own fatal flaws (intelligent design comes to mind as an example of this, another politically charged area of science), but the chaotic behavior of the weather system at a temporally and spatially local level (as has been demonstrated all over the place) in principle does not preclude the possibility of long term prediction of a trend such as global warming. To argue that it does, you must actually show what models are employed by the global warming partisans, what theories preclude the efficacy of their models, and on what empirical basis.
I both disagree and agree. Making something easier to do (doing certain advanced tasks in this case) may not confer more control per se, but it does confer more power precisely because it makes certain things easier. In the case of Gentoo, I think the extra power it grants is a little overrated. You have to know a helluva lot to make it work only incrementally faster on your hardware than many less sexy distros. That's not a bad thing, but I think the famous Gentoo zealotry has much more to do with the idea of Gentoo than the way it goes more often than not in actual practice.
In other news, MEPIS looks cool. In general, LiveCD distros are nice because they let Linux-phobes try out Linux without utterly rearranging their technological lives right away--I think my girlfriend is going to make the switch after I gave her a Knoppix disk, and choice in LiveCDs, as choice always does, has its advantages and disadvantages.
This is a case where a useful critique of Netcraft's methodology could be made, and the survey (and the statements from Port80) instead is flatly ludicrous.
What's frustrating is that this is not a partisan issue. It's a question of what tools people are using to do what jobs in the world of web serving, and, by extension, what that means for the web as a whole.
In addition to all the other complaints about Port80's crappy methodology, it seems relevant to point out that in the world of the web, sites with relatively little traffic can have a powerful impact individually in the "real world", and have a powerful effect in combination with each other (witness the blogging phenomenon). Ignoring low-traffic sites assumes that low traffic is tantmount to irrelevance. But if lots of low traffic sites with some sort of significant impact on whatever level are using Apache, then we might want to ask why that would be. Port80's method stinks.
I'm a strong advocate of and adherent to free and open source software. I don't think the issue is beating Windows zealots in any sense.
In my estimation, what's important isn't an ideology but an orientation to software use and development. Assuming that a utilitarian perspective applies to software development, and assuming you buy in to some limited form of democratic values, it software use and development consists in creating and using tools that effectively do a job while upholding values of widespread social good via transparency, diversity of choice, an appropriate level of propriety, and reasonable cost. If this applies anywhere the most strongly, it is probably to operating systems.
To tie it back in to what just happened: it's astonishingly principled of the Debian team to admit the compromise and carefully proceed. This is what the software world needs, forget the zealots of any stripe and all the noise they make.
I ain't no genius, but I'm pretty handy with Linux. My server recently suffered a motherboard failure, and since I had to crack the box and do lots of work on it anyway, I decided to give up on RH 7.3 and go to Debian for stability and security. After having heard how nasty the installer was, I was relatively impressed with how easily it went. I used one of the LiveCD installers packaged by the Debian team members. It was *much* smoother than the Gentoo install I did recently on a home system.
Anyway, I'm not going to diss efforts to make a better installer, but I didn't find Debian installation to be as bad as folks have told me it would be, and the distro itself is just lovely once working.
No, that's not a good reason. If I find the text too wide for comfort (and I often do), I *gasp* narrow the window.
On the other hand, not all users are going to be apt to do this and it's a courtesy to have the default behavior be the most readable on the most screens. Anyway, the techniques I described use max-width and an IE specific technique to accomplish the same in the CSS, which means that, unlike ALA, you can always narrow the window as much as you'd like. You can see it in action: http://www.viewfromhaiti.org.
Certainly, it's just as bad as using all the IE hacks for other CSS behaviors that people have come up with, but no worse.
Try to be a little more civil.
Regarding fixed width designs: There are good reasons to use fixed width designs. The primary good reason to fix the width is that readers tend to suffer more-than-usual fatigue reading lines beyond the 65-80 character range. But there are much more elegant ways to go about doing this than what ALA is doing, and what's more, Zeldman has even linked to sites that explain the techniques.
Regarding the ALA redesign and Zeldman's design in general: It kinda sucks, for reasons everybody has mentioned. The guy knows the technical side of doing it very well, and knows how to explain the technical side in a way that's eerily clear and concise. But his aesthetic and design choices leave something to be desired.
One of the problems here is that there's a sacrifice going on here -- the do-anything-for-validation sacrifice. So what if a technique that should validate (such as some of the techniques to cut line length to aid in readability) in reality doesn't? And more specifically, I think that the XHTML side of the validation should be the more important. The CSS part is trickier business, and lots of hacks are needed, but the point is that the document structure should be coherent, as simple as possible, and reflect the content of the document, and that's what the XHTML does.
Some improvement! Patches to BIND aren't the answer. Verisign need to be made to stop breaking the internet.
There's been this silly thread in this conversation that stakes out two sides. Either a) fix anti-social, monopolistic behavior with technology, or b) fix it with laws and legal action. This is a moronic dichotomy. A technological solution mitigates the immediate problem while the lawyers have time to file their briefs and sort out the damage done. A combination of technical solutions and legal action is a possibility and even a sometimes a Good Thing, not some binary choice.
I can understand Google having too many blogs in their search results in most cases. What about cases involving technical questions, such as web design, where the blogs are the best place to look and should be dominating the search results?
I run a website (The View From The Ground) that uses an email newsletter that monitors what the city, police, and other agencies are doing in Chicago public housing (the projects) because there is absolutely no public accountability. We don't spam, don't release our email list to anybody. We're very disciplined about the privacy of our list.
We've thought about going to RSS, but there are big advantages to using an email newsletter for such a purpose.
While our email publication is "unwelcome" in places like the police department in the sense that they rarely like what we have to say, everyone from top administrators to low level officers read it because it scares them. There have already been several successful lawsuits and many major news stories (in the Chicago locals like the Tribune and Sun-Times and some nationals like the New York Times) that generate public scrutiny.
Now, imagine people at the police department or the Chicago Housing Authority, whose technical proficiency is often, uh, lacking, setting up an RSS reader and subscribing to our feed in order to receive our publication. Further, email is easy to forward, and we often get feedback that reveals a long and sordid chain of forwards until it reaches the person in question. We have received amusing lawsuit threats (one from a major company president for "deflamation") with such histories attached. RSS feeds don't have the same forward-ability as email.
Not all email that is received in a spirit of hostility is spam, and sometimes, even if the receiver hates the message, they have to read it. But that's only if they get it. RSS significantly raises the barrier of entry, particularly for people without lots of Net savvy.
This isn't not to say we're not working on implementing RSS. We are, and expect it to dominate the friendly/sympathetic side of our distribution list once we implement it as a distribution method this fall.
The point is that email is still a killer application of the Internet for distributing journalistic content, and that RSS and email can coexist in a mutually beneficial way.
I hate to say it, but the only way we'd become RSS exclusive would be if the next version of IE (which may not appear for years) ships with a super-easy RSS feed reader because almost every city agency in Chicago is MS-exclusive. Until then, we'll do both.
I just want to say... Heironymouscoward has managed to make all the points and more that I wanted to make when I read that crazy rant. Good job -- it's nice to see a calm, reasoned post on Slashdot.
Good reviews ask questions beyond the book in question, ask questions the book doesn't ask. They shouldn't just describe the book or say "it's good" or "it's not-so-good" (except that few Slashdot reviews ever say that anyway), they should inform the reading of the book and set the stage for discussion about the book.
I'm sorry, but the Slashdot editors need to improve their criteria for reviews. With some prodding, I think the author of this review could've written a fine review, but this is just mediocre.
What I'd really like to understand the dynamics of the stigma attached to comic books--the stereotype that they're artless, pulpy, and read by pimply teenaged males. I know this stigma isn't applied as much by elitist types to the work of people like Art Spiegelman. But as an artistic/literary venture, I think comics are still scoffed at more than they should be. This is probably why most of the recent movie adaptations lose the essential tensions and Cold War backdrop of the classic Marvel comics and become big SFX spectacles. I think understanding this stigma could also help people aspiring to create video/computer games that can be described as artistic.
Does anyone have thoughts on this? I'd especially like to hear from people who are involved in the debates described in the review and people with good knowledge of comic book history.
Mr. or Ms. Coward is on to something here. Competition drives open source development teams, but, ideally, the competition doesn't drive them into head to head battles in the end, but drives them into different niches.
For my part, I run a site on top of MySQL. I started using it as a newbie to Linux RDBMSes. It's never going to be so big that I'll need to run anything else. However, I've got a new project on the horizon where Postgres is the perfect solution. The best thing is that in a Linux environment, there's much less lock-in than in other environments, so you aren't forced to be a partisan about things like this.
Bah, that's just the beginning:
Mid-morning smoke break... mid-morning chat with the lady in the front office... mid-morning SCO story...
Lunch sandwich... lunch salad... lunch SCO story...
Lost in afternoon work and deadlines... dinner chat with roommate... four or five evening SCO stories.
Geopolitically, a global power grid distributes risk and there are good reasons, hypothetically, to do so, particularly for mitigating the extremism that leads to violence. For example, if Iran, which has moderate tendencies, joins the grid, it would have a strong incentive to itself quash extermism precisely because if Iranian terrorists go Allah Mode in a place like France and try to knock out infrastructure, moderate Iranians, who make up the majority of the population, may suffer as well.
The problem is that the major global powers have not indicated that they are willing to obey or respect any international law or organization. In Rwanda, France, who has lately championed the use of the UN in Iraq, aided and abetted the genocidal army over and against the UN force working in the region to save a few beleagured Rwandans. The United States has similarly revealed little or no inclination to respect the UN or other international "decision" making bodies on critical issues.
Lately I've felt as if advocating isolationism makes some sense, and this power grid idea is a example of why: it seems likely that, like the U.N. and like a great deal of international law, the major powers will disingenuously support such structures for a variety of reasons (appearances, genuinely felt convictions and ideals, gains in prestige and power). Unfortunately, unlike the U.N., where flaunting it just means that geopolitics is like geopolitics without a UN, an international power grid is physical, and dependence on it and control of it could become dangerous and unwieldy.
I know it's been said already a great deal, but I want to state it clearly: among other things, I'm a graphic designer and use Photoshop all friggin' day. I run a Linux webserver for my web sites and have a couple Linux boxes around the house and in my office for file sharing, server testing, etc and the single biggest reason I haven't given up Windows on my desktop is precisely because I need Photoshop all friggin' day. However, this put the final nails in the Windows coffin.
Nobody I know who does serious graphic design takes the GIMP seriously. I believe this has to do with the GIMP's awful interface, limited (with respect to Photoshop) feature set, Photoshop's name recognition, and the widespread support for Photoshop.
Graphic designers who do it for the love, from my experience, tend to be like me in that in that they are open minded about the OS they use and share the values of the open source and free software movement to a significant extent precisely because of the creative and moral nature of good graphic design--beauty and social importance are values with a premium for many graphic designers. And, as everybody knows, supporting Microsoft with our money may actually have negative social consequences for the 99% of our society that brushes up to information technology every now and then. Because of this many good graphic designers could be persuaded to make the move to Linux.
Here's the final point, and it's really the kicker: the Mac gained and retained a lot of prestige precisely because it was the graphics platform of choice for so long and a great deal of that had to do with Photoshop. Even though graphic design users make up a small part of the population of software users relative to people who word-process and write email, almost anyone familiar with technology used to know that the Macintosh was a) expensive and b) capable of and almost exclusively used by professionals to create beautiful graphics. This helped keep Apple's reputation going even when things were going to hell in a handbasket for everything Apple-related. For whatever reason, use for professional graphics carries prestige that use for professional servers doesn't even though both are critical uses of technology. Now, what if almost everyone who monkies around on a computer heard about this Linux thing and heard that Linux was a) cheap, b) getting much easier to use and c) capable of and used by a large number of professionals to create beautiful graphics?
I work in Chicago's housing projects and have taught lots of little and big courses on computer skills.
What I've learned is that teaching a class in any given application is 1% of the work of teaching people how to use computers. What's most important, in my experience, is providing space and time for motivated people to just keeping banging away and learning new things. The great fallacy of many computer technology centers is that they are closed to the possibility of letting people goof around for a couple hours, when that's exactly what teaches folks.
When I started working on resume writing with some folks in the projects I work at, I was really disappointed that they couldn't remember anything I'd told them, etc. Now, three years later, a couple of those folks have home computers, write lots of email, are good typists, know how to use spreadsheets, etc. Persistence, time, and self-exploration and discovery are what teach lasting technology skills.
Lastly, it's important to remember that you should be trying to teach computing principles. One of my aforementioned buddies has been able to quickly pick up all sorts of other computing skills because he digs on the principles of how computers work, networking works, etc. I think that should be a goal.