I'll just throw in my $0.02 with a lot of other posters and say that (X)HTML, CSS, and PHP is all you really need to know to do some really nice hobby-level pages (and even some pages you get paid to build - throw in some MySQL and you're really rolling).
I recommend using a good text editor (Textpad is the editor of choice at my workplace, for all sorts of coding, web and otherwise) to write your code. You'll learn a lot more (and end up with much better, cleaner code) being right down in the code instead of relying on some layout program that auto-generates code.
Just be prepared for an unbelievable amount of frustration when you start trying to do anything with CSS - every browser's implementation of CSS is broken (in different and incompatible ways), so even the simplest design you dream up will require a lot of hair pulling to actually implement so that it looks right in, say, IE and Firefox. That's far and away the worst, most frustrating part of building websites with CSS. If browsers implemented the specification consistently and correctly, CSS would be outstanding, but they don't, so it'll leave you a broken shell of a man.
I think maybe the problem is that you're an arrogant dumbass who can't follow simple directions. I've been to Ikea three times - once to an established store in the LA area, twice to the newly-opened madhouse in Atlanta. Their "system" seems pretty straightforward and obvious to me:
1. Ride the escalator all the way to the top floor WITHOUT A CART. The top floor is mostly display for the furniture. You can use one of those yellow bags to carry any incidental items you see that you want. You write down the code numbers for the items you want.
2. When you get to the bottom floor, you can get a cart. That's where all the small items like kitchen stuff, picture frames, etc. is.
3. Go through the warehouse area and pick up the large items you wrote down on the top floor.
4. Check out.
It's clever and straightforward. Since the rest of the "sheep" and "cows" didn't seem to have a problem dealing with the store, maybe the problem's not with the store...
Very much agreed with the parent. I work in a lab with a raised floor that we took over when they moved some mainframes and communications equipment out, back in the late 80s. It's pretty much a total mess - I spent a solid couple of weeks last year pulling out thousands of feet of unconnected abandoned cable and vacuuming out all manner of nastiness.
You're better off with some overhead trays or some good on-the-floor cable channels, combined with some well-planned wiring. It's really no fun at all dragging cables around under a raised floor.
Definitely. I often take meeting notes at work with paper and pencil (which have a whole lot better performance than the Tablet PC my boss tries to use for the same purpose), and then transcribe them later.
Not only do I end up with much better notes because of the transcription/elaboration pass, but I'm also much more familiar with the material because of the repetition.
If you've absolutely got to have electronic notes, this is a far better (and more cost effective) way to go than buying a tablet.
We've got three Compaq tablets at work, and they suck. They're painfully underpowered, even with a 1 GHz Transmeta processor. They crash CONSTANTLY, and when they're not crashing, you have to battle with them to get them to awake from hibernation, or to get the screen to maintain the proper orientation.
Tablet PCs seem to be a decent idea that's as yet poorly implemented. You're much better off spending the money on a good laptop.
My first car was a 1986 Fiero GT. (The first year with the "fastback" body style, which looked way better than the original version.) The car had a 2.8L V6 in it, and weighed very little. It was quite peppy for the money. I LOVED that car-the styling was ahead of its time, for sure. I think they still look pretty good today.
I got the car in 1986, and drove it until 1995. The only problems I had with it were recurring catalytic converter clog-ups (had the converter replaced a couple of times). The thing finally died after I got sideswiped by an RV on the freeway and spun backwards into the median wall, busting the transaxle. The car had about 160,000 miles on it and still looked and ran great.
I have to stick up for Turok 2; I really, really liked it. Now, true, I do believe I cheated to beat the final boss (infinite lives, I think, because the game in general did have a lot of cheap deaths, like falling off of narrow platforms while trying to make nigh-impossible jumps), but I generally found the game to be a lot of fun. Large, well-designed levels that looked pretty cool, reasonably creative gameplay, nice weapons, good graphics and sound-I've played a lot worse games than Turok 2. (Like Turok 3, for instance.)
(I will grant that the game needed a lot more save points.:-)
I have a Masters in transportation engineering (a civil engineering specialty), though my practice is a bit rusty at this point because I've mostly been a programmer for the last 10 years.:-)
It's not so much the amount of iron that you need as it is the configuration. You need a loop of some sort to trigger the things, and it doesn't take a very big one. The frame of a car works, obviously, but we used a piece of plywood that was about 3 feet square with a length of wire run around the outside of it in our lab work when I was in school. Motorcycles certainly shouldn't be a problem, and bikes should usually work, if the sensitivity is set correctly AND the loop is actually functional.
The loops can fail easily and frequently, and are often never repaired. There's a fallback timing pattern that keeps things moving when the traffic-responsiveness fails, though there had to be some additional problem in the case you describe.
Are you using Win2K or WinXP? The backup program included in those versions of the OS, while somewhat clunky, is fairly full featured. You can do incremental backups and stuff like that, which should cut down on the amount of stuff you're burning every day.
The file that is generated by Windows Backup apparently isn't compressed, so you can zip it up and save a good bit of space. If that still won't fit on a CD, I'm not entirely sure what to do. Will something like WinZip span CDs the way you used to be able to span floppies with PKZip? I've honestly never had to deal with that particular problem before...
Back in my dorm in the early 90s, when a few of us had such blazing machines as a 386-25 and a 486-66, we played the hell out of Stunts. We had two primary modes of play.
One, we had built a special speed track that let you exploit a bit of a bug that would max out your speed at some ridiculous, otherwise unattainable value (the exploit had something to do with catching some air and tapping your brakes, or somesuch), and then scream around the track. We took turns shaving hundredths of a second off each others times.
Two, we built tracks that facilitated getting the most ridiculous crash animations. Max out your speed as above, and run up a ramp with a couple of wheels off the track, and watch the 2 minute, car flying 2 miles into the air crash animation ensue.:-)
JRjr
I'm with you. I don't watch a LOT of TV (probably about 5 or 6 hours a week of shows that I watch every week, plus a random few minutes of baseball or football). A few years ago, I simply bought a second VCR, and set them to record everything I watch every week (some time slots overlapped), whether I'm actually home to watch the shows or not. THAT "changed my life," and I don't really need a Tivo for that. I never have to worry about rushing home to watch something, I can skip commercials, and I don't have to remember to set up the VCR to tape stuff every day, because it's all already set.
I don't guess I'm the Tivo target audience, because I don't watch all that much TV, I NEVER "graze" for new stuff to watch (I watch what I watch, and that's it), and I don't even use the VCR+ feature of my VCR (I prefer to just set the time to + and - 5 minutes around the time the show airs and leave it at that).
I don't like the idea of having to pay a monthly service charge (or an extra $250 for the lifetime service) for the programming guide, not only because I don't need or want it, but also because I'd be pretty hacked off were the company to discontinue the service in the future. I don't like the idea of having to plug my VCR up to a phone line, if only because I have enough wire in my life already (broadband would make it slightly more appealling).
I do like the recording medium (I'm all for getting rid of videotapes). And while some of the features (pause live TV being foremost) are nifty, they really aren't anything that I NEED or WANT enough to justify buying one of the things.
If I could leave the thing unplugged from any data connection and just use it like a plain old dumb VCR on which I set the timer manually, I might be interested in buying one when my current VCR dies, but other than that, I'm just not all that interested.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll just throw in my $0.02 with a lot of other posters and say that (X)HTML, CSS, and PHP is all you really need to know to do some really nice hobby-level pages (and even some pages you get paid to build - throw in some MySQL and you're really rolling).
I recommend using a good text editor (Textpad is the editor of choice at my workplace, for all sorts of coding, web and otherwise) to write your code. You'll learn a lot more (and end up with much better, cleaner code) being right down in the code instead of relying on some layout program that auto-generates code.
Just be prepared for an unbelievable amount of frustration when you start trying to do anything with CSS - every browser's implementation of CSS is broken (in different and incompatible ways), so even the simplest design you dream up will require a lot of hair pulling to actually implement so that it looks right in, say, IE and Firefox. That's far and away the worst, most frustrating part of building websites with CSS. If browsers implemented the specification consistently and correctly, CSS would be outstanding, but they don't, so it'll leave you a broken shell of a man.
JRjr
Wow, what a rebel, fighting against the conformity and oppression in...IKEA. Fight the good fight, my man!
JRjr
I think maybe the problem is that you're an arrogant dumbass who can't follow simple directions. I've been to Ikea three times - once to an established store in the LA area, twice to the newly-opened madhouse in Atlanta. Their "system" seems pretty straightforward and obvious to me:
1. Ride the escalator all the way to the top floor WITHOUT A CART. The top floor is mostly display for the furniture. You can use one of those yellow bags to carry any incidental items you see that you want. You write down the code numbers for the items you want.
2. When you get to the bottom floor, you can get a cart. That's where all the small items like kitchen stuff, picture frames, etc. is.
3. Go through the warehouse area and pick up the large items you wrote down on the top floor.
4. Check out.
It's clever and straightforward. Since the rest of the "sheep" and "cows" didn't seem to have a problem dealing with the store, maybe the problem's not with the store...
JRjr
Very much agreed with the parent. I work in a lab with a raised floor that we took over when they moved some mainframes and communications equipment out, back in the late 80s. It's pretty much a total mess - I spent a solid couple of weeks last year pulling out thousands of feet of unconnected abandoned cable and vacuuming out all manner of nastiness.
You're better off with some overhead trays or some good on-the-floor cable channels, combined with some well-planned wiring. It's really no fun at all dragging cables around under a raised floor.
JRjr
I'm guessing you didn't read the article, which stated on the first page why Deus Ex and similar games weren't included.
JRjr
Definitely. I often take meeting notes at work with paper and pencil (which have a whole lot better performance than the Tablet PC my boss tries to use for the same purpose), and then transcribe them later.
Not only do I end up with much better notes because of the transcription/elaboration pass, but I'm also much more familiar with the material because of the repetition.
If you've absolutely got to have electronic notes, this is a far better (and more cost effective) way to go than buying a tablet.
JRjr
We've got three Compaq tablets at work, and they suck. They're painfully underpowered, even with a 1 GHz Transmeta processor. They crash CONSTANTLY, and when they're not crashing, you have to battle with them to get them to awake from hibernation, or to get the screen to maintain the proper orientation.
Tablet PCs seem to be a decent idea that's as yet poorly implemented. You're much better off spending the money on a good laptop.
_H_itch_H_iker's _G_uide to the _G_alaxy. See, two Hs and two Gs. Clever.
JRjr
My first car was a 1986 Fiero GT. (The first year with the "fastback" body style, which looked way better than the original version.) The car had a 2.8L V6 in it, and weighed very little. It was quite peppy for the money. I LOVED that car-the styling was ahead of its time, for sure. I think they still look pretty good today.
I got the car in 1986, and drove it until 1995. The only problems I had with it were recurring catalytic converter clog-ups (had the converter replaced a couple of times). The thing finally died after I got sideswiped by an RV on the freeway and spun backwards into the median wall, busting the transaxle. The car had about 160,000 miles on it and still looked and ran great.
JRjr
I have to stick up for Turok 2; I really, really liked it. Now, true, I do believe I cheated to beat the final boss (infinite lives, I think, because the game in general did have a lot of cheap deaths, like falling off of narrow platforms while trying to make nigh-impossible jumps), but I generally found the game to be a lot of fun. Large, well-designed levels that looked pretty cool, reasonably creative gameplay, nice weapons, good graphics and sound-I've played a lot worse games than Turok 2. (Like Turok 3, for instance.)
:-)
(I will grant that the game needed a lot more save points.
JRjr
I have a Masters in transportation engineering (a civil engineering specialty), though my practice is a bit rusty at this point because I've mostly been a programmer for the last 10 years. :-)
It's not so much the amount of iron that you need as it is the configuration. You need a loop of some sort to trigger the things, and it doesn't take a very big one. The frame of a car works, obviously, but we used a piece of plywood that was about 3 feet square with a length of wire run around the outside of it in our lab work when I was in school. Motorcycles certainly shouldn't be a problem, and bikes should usually work, if the sensitivity is set correctly AND the loop is actually functional.
The loops can fail easily and frequently, and are often never repaired. There's a fallback timing pattern that keeps things moving when the traffic-responsiveness fails, though there had to be some additional problem in the case you describe.
JRjr
Are you using Win2K or WinXP? The backup program included in those versions of the OS, while somewhat clunky, is fairly full featured. You can do incremental backups and stuff like that, which should cut down on the amount of stuff you're burning every day.
The file that is generated by Windows Backup apparently isn't compressed, so you can zip it up and save a good bit of space. If that still won't fit on a CD, I'm not entirely sure what to do. Will something like WinZip span CDs the way you used to be able to span floppies with PKZip? I've honestly never had to deal with that particular problem before...
JRjr
THRILLHO!
JRjr
Back in my dorm in the early 90s, when a few of us had such blazing machines as a 386-25 and a 486-66, we played the hell out of Stunts. We had two primary modes of play. One, we had built a special speed track that let you exploit a bit of a bug that would max out your speed at some ridiculous, otherwise unattainable value (the exploit had something to do with catching some air and tapping your brakes, or somesuch), and then scream around the track. We took turns shaving hundredths of a second off each others times. Two, we built tracks that facilitated getting the most ridiculous crash animations. Max out your speed as above, and run up a ramp with a couple of wheels off the track, and watch the 2 minute, car flying 2 miles into the air crash animation ensue. :-)
JRjr
I'm with you. I don't watch a LOT of TV (probably about 5 or 6 hours a week of shows that I watch every week, plus a random few minutes of baseball or football). A few years ago, I simply bought a second VCR, and set them to record everything I watch every week (some time slots overlapped), whether I'm actually home to watch the shows or not. THAT "changed my life," and I don't really need a Tivo for that. I never have to worry about rushing home to watch something, I can skip commercials, and I don't have to remember to set up the VCR to tape stuff every day, because it's all already set.
I don't guess I'm the Tivo target audience, because I don't watch all that much TV, I NEVER "graze" for new stuff to watch (I watch what I watch, and that's it), and I don't even use the VCR+ feature of my VCR (I prefer to just set the time to + and - 5 minutes around the time the show airs and leave it at that).
I don't like the idea of having to pay a monthly service charge (or an extra $250 for the lifetime service) for the programming guide, not only because I don't need or want it, but also because I'd be pretty hacked off were the company to discontinue the service in the future. I don't like the idea of having to plug my VCR up to a phone line, if only because I have enough wire in my life already (broadband would make it slightly more appealling).
I do like the recording medium (I'm all for getting rid of videotapes). And while some of the features (pause live TV being foremost) are nifty, they really aren't anything that I NEED or WANT enough to justify buying one of the things.
If I could leave the thing unplugged from any data connection and just use it like a plain old dumb VCR on which I set the timer manually, I might be interested in buying one when my current VCR dies, but other than that, I'm just not all that interested.
JRjr