I know what you're saying, but that's my exact point - HTML has no business being extended into dynamic activity. It's all hackery. And my warning is that it WILL collapse.
Adobe cooked up PostScript. Theoretically, you could "read" PS code. It was hard, but not impossible. Within a few years this PAGE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE was made simple and invisible by programs such as Illustrator, FreeHand, Fontographer, then Pagemaker and Quark as well as other apps that are gone and largely forgotten (ReadySetGo anyone?).
You place an element on a page. size it, etc. and you have NO contact with the code underneath, and frankly, you DON'T want to deal with it. It's messy and complicated.
Now, HTML was cooked up YEARS ago, and the closest we have to Pagemaker/Quark is Dreamweaver. Brilliant. And placing elements on a page is such a hack job between browsers that an entire industry of useless coders have sprung up to "take care of that" for us - CSS specialists who demand serious dollars to do something that shouldn't even be handled by humans. And WHY is this so?
1. Microsoft Their insistance on being non-public standard compliant and shoe-horning more crap into their browser and DOM for IE(x) has been a monstrous thorn in the side of web developers everywhere. At the same time, it is this incompatibility that gives CSS specialists and web designers/developers a job. Still, this is not a happy situation, and it is not going in a useful direction (HTML 5 will be gleefully ignored by Redmond, and the complexity of the resulting situation will only give more work to more CSS/AJAX specialists.
2. Fiefdoms The resulting incompatibilities that create the need for specialists actively works against finding automated solutions. If web design was reduced to the level of Adobe InDesign and web development was made as simple as visualBasic, then much of the "Web Industry" would disappear. Thousands would lose high paying jobs. I nreality, they (and this means YOU) are nothing but parasites subsisting on a faulty broken technology. Fix the technology and the cost of development would gradually collapse. Insisting that a web designer should know code would be seen as absurd as insisting that a type designer know how to read PostScript or raw TrueType instructions.
3. Flash et al. It seems much of the web started as one thing and ended up another.
Tables were built for tabular data, they soon became the structure by which a page was architected, as it put things in a specific place in page that was pretty much the same across browsers. And that is still the case. If I'm going "whip out" a page with a variety of elements arranged in the page, I'll use a table. It's faster and easier and it works. It's not as flexible or useful as CSS, but it works. With CSS, you spend huge amounts of time tweaking crap to appear across browsers. Still, Tables are old and not as flexible, and have been pressed into doing service they weren't designed for.
Same with CSS. It was developed to make things all purty-like. Now it's used for page layout and element placement - WAY beyond it's original mandate, which was taken from Desktop Publishing (stylesheets).
Flash was just a way to do spline based illustrations and animations on the web. When it was clear Flash could do much of the basics of what Director could do in a tiny fraction of the footprint, they began "directorfying" Flash, and shoehorned a Lingo into it, known as ActionScript. It is now a full blown frankensteinian disaster that is considered a "development platform", which is a cruel and misdirected hoax.
The examples are many and continuous. The "web" is a hack job. It is a slow moving train that has left the tracks (IE5 did that), and is slowly dying in its own complexity (of CSS, XHTML, AJAX, etc. hackery) as it rolls in excruciating slow motion off the cliff.
And now that the very livelihoods, mortgages, and private schools for the kids are DEPENDING on this complexity, the only logical conclusion is increased complexity, resulting in an ever higher range of exclusivity, casuistry, and sophistry. It will die, replaced by a lower context system, and when it does, a lot of people are going to get hurt. And, given the nature of the audience on/., it will mostly fall on their shoulders.
I could imagine Losev (four letters away from Loser) coming up with an obvious and brilliant idea. And he sits there and thinks - "This is SUCH A GREAT IDEA! I must contact the greatest mind in physics and see if he can confirm this great idea and perhaps GREAT THINGS will happen of it! Excellent!"
So he thinks - who is the greatest mind in physics? He asks his wife, Tonya -
"Olga, darling, I think I will contact EINSTEIN about my great glowing semiconductor idea!"
Olga replies, "Sure honey. He's really smart. And well connected, especially since they've been confirming his ideas left and right. sounds good to me!"
So, with great pride and hope, Losev licks the stamp on the letter and walks down the street to set it off. He holds it to his heart before he puts it in the post box, and makes a small hope that Einstein will see the beauty of his idea and help him, then with finality and hope, he puts the letter in the box.
Then he and Olga went to go boil some rats for dinner, because Russia in 1922 was a freakin' mess.
Imagine having to pay a buck or so EVERY TIME your sweet little girl wanted to see "Little Mermaid" or "Cinderella". Then compare that to how much it costs to BUY the DVD outright. No point to DivX, and all I would need would be to have to pay $6 in a weekend because poopsie-doodles wanted to see Bambi 8 times in two days...
Here's an interesting question: how long did it take for creatures to speciate after the Permian extinction? I wonder if there was the same amount of lag-time after that disaster...
do it all together - do it at once. FIGHT THEM BACK.
DO IT NOW. If not NOW, WHEN? When the next gov't puts a telescreen in your livingroom to make sure you do your morning exercises, or in the bathroom to make sure you brush your teeth every fucking day? Or, a la THX!!#*, you take your proper medications to keep you dull and compliant?
(fiction)
So, like, I copped a few joints up in the park, and I was floating around mid town fora while. Then I figured I'd skip downtown for a while. It was WAY too far to walk, so I get on the A train. And I sit down next to some stylin' dude with the Armani suit and gold cufflinks and stuff, and I'm wonderin' whatthe fuck is this asshole doing on the subway, but I figured - WHO KNOWS? He probably has some reason for sittin' in the stink with the rest of us. So, like he looks up and sees the Washington Square stop and like flips out and runs out of the subway.
Well, right next to me is this computer bag, that he left behind and I look inside and FUCK! The thing has JEWELS encrusted in it, and I'm thinkin' what kind of an asshole buys a jewel encrusted laptop - the stupid things go obsolete every few years! What a waste of money! But he did strike me as an asshole, and he DID leave me his laptop, so now I got this TOTALLY STYLIN' laptop. It's got BOODLES of RAM, I am totally stoked. finders keepers!
take their sorry asses out of the gene pool. The RIAA is made out of people. Real people with real families and friends, mortgages and cars. If they keep on with this nutty bullshit of prosecuting people because their business model is 50 years out of date, eventually some stupid lunatic is going to drive their old Camaro filled with explosives directly into their headquarters.
I can hear it now: "THOSE BASTARDS!!! They fucked up my daddy's life by suing my little sister because she DL'd some Britney when she was 8 years old! Now, I can't go to community college, because we're broke. FUCKERS! I've had it! I'm going on a jihad! I'm gonna fill up my old Camaro with explosives and drive right into their building and TAKE THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS OUT!!!! MY life is OVER! My family is RUINED! All because of their GREED! My body might be delivering DEATH to the RIAA, but MY MIND WILL BE LISTENING TO DOKKEN!!!!!"
He leaves behind a suicide note stating why he is doing this.
The RIAA is destroyed by his car bomb. The government declares it a "terrorist action".
The RIAA are the real terrorists.
Prosecuting a 10 year old. For crying out fucking loud. What a bunch of assholes.
someday, somebody desperate and angry enough... you reap what you sow.
It's sort of organised differently for me. distance from my chair is level of importance, and the top of the stack is most recent (z axis). Stuff to the left is newer, stuff to the right, older. After about a month, it's about 4 - 5 inches deep, so starting on the right and far away and deeply buried, I start dumping it into the recycler. Usally if it's on the far right corner of the desk, I usualyl don't even bother looking at it - it just goes straight in.
Stuff on the left, which is near the aisle I'm sitting at, is newer, and often has recent memos or snail mail or other recent crap. When I do my monthly recycle pitch, I go more carefully through that area. But usually it all ends up i nte recycler too. Then I have a "nice clean desk" for about a week, and then the accumulation begins anew.
heck - I don't even do that. After a month or so, the mounds of crap on my desk are all outmoded so, I just heave the whole kit and kaboodle into the can for recycling. Takes about 5 minutes.
so, I could spend 5 minutes every day, or 5 minutes a month. My desk can look like a pile of junk, or something out of an IKEA show room. I'll take the snowbank of paper...
I think they should leave the clocks alone. Period. When the daylight shifts over the year GET UP EARLIER by an hour or GET UP LATER by an hour. Each business and individual could do it on its own. So, instead of everyone getting to work at 9, they all have to get there at 8. Cost? Nothing.
Up in heaven, all those virgins are waiting for their murderous retard loverboys. And now we are DENYING them the love they deserve. Western society REALLY IS evil.
Frankly, I never understood what the big draw is for 72 virgins. Explaining and training young women to give the perfect blowjob is a time consuming waste of effort. (SWALLOW, DAMMIT!!!) Ugh. An eternity of lousy sex. A fate worse than death...
Thank you for revealing to me, and the rest of the planet the depth of your ignorance and stupidity.
If you don't want to read wikipedia, then perhaps these other sources will explain it all a bit more clearly.
Just type "libertarian socialism" into google and get yourself educated. As I said, think twice before you bloviate on this particular subject - of course, once would be an improvement. You pathetic retard.
Because I'm feeling charitable, click HERE and learn.
On the contrary, your inability to understand libertarian socialism indicates your complete lack of historical and political awareness, which leads me to believe you are likely one of those ditto brained "Libertarian" chowder heads.
A friend of mine gives his music and art away. Free.
He's a total lefty "libertarian socialist" (i.e. commie pinko mofo) but his music is really nice. You can download all his ambient electronic stuff HERE.
I've known him a long time. He told me he gives it away because making a living at avant-garde ambient electronic space music is pretty much impossible. clubs won't hire you to play out, and record companies aren't really interested, so after 20 years he figured, "why bother fighting these ass clowns"? He's into that "be the change you want to see" kind of thing (I'm much more mercenary and cynical than he is...) so he wants a world of "Free" so his creative world is "Free".
I'm working with him to process his imaging practice for download.
I also think he's out of his freakin' mind, but I think he also has a good view of the general situation. And I like his music. A lot of it is really nice for "background" ambient sound stuff.
CFLs regularly run at 20% of incandescent. These new incandescents are only 35% or so of normal incadescents, and they don't say anything about durability, where cfls are almost an order of magnitude better.
GE's just shitting their pants because of California and Australia working to ban the wasteful little buggers.
While it seems very likely that there were people in South America before the Clovis people, they were probably only there in very small numbers, whereas the Clovis people were clearly very numerous indeed and seem to be the first meaningful inhabitants.
FIRST MEANINGFUL INHABITANTS? What kind of crap is that?
"Hi. you got here hundreds of years earlier, and lead perfectly interesting and colourful lives, but because your rock banging techniques weren't as interesting to me as what followed on, you are not a meaningful inhabitant."
WTF?
Talk about cranio-rectal inversion, daaaang. You need a lesson or two in cultural awareness.
On the iBook G4, it only "mirrors" unless you use the magic AppleScript hack that gives you monitor spanning! I installed that hack about 3 hours after I bought my iBook G4... Use it every day. I have a 17 in flat panel running off my 12" ibook- plenty of real estate for me!
Slashdot Mirror
I know what you're saying, but that's my exact point - HTML has no business being extended into dynamic activity. It's all hackery. And my warning is that it WILL collapse.
You place an element on a page. size it, etc. and you have NO contact with the code underneath, and frankly, you DON'T want to deal with it. It's messy and complicated.
Now, HTML was cooked up YEARS ago, and the closest we have to Pagemaker/Quark is Dreamweaver. Brilliant. And placing elements on a page is such a hack job between browsers that an entire industry of useless coders have sprung up to "take care of that" for us - CSS specialists who demand serious dollars to do something that shouldn't even be handled by humans. And WHY is this so?
1. Microsoft Their insistance on being non-public standard compliant and shoe-horning more crap into their browser and DOM for IE(x) has been a monstrous thorn in the side of web developers everywhere. At the same time, it is this incompatibility that gives CSS specialists and web designers/developers a job. Still, this is not a happy situation, and it is not going in a useful direction (HTML 5 will be gleefully ignored by Redmond, and the complexity of the resulting situation will only give more work to more CSS/AJAX specialists.
2. Fiefdoms The resulting incompatibilities that create the need for specialists actively works against finding automated solutions. If web design was reduced to the level of Adobe InDesign and web development was made as simple as visualBasic, then much of the "Web Industry" would disappear. Thousands would lose high paying jobs. I nreality, they (and this means YOU) are nothing but parasites subsisting on a faulty broken technology. Fix the technology and the cost of development would gradually collapse. Insisting that a web designer should know code would be seen as absurd as insisting that a type designer know how to read PostScript or raw TrueType instructions.
3. Flash et al. It seems much of the web started as one thing and ended up another.
Tables were built for tabular data, they soon became the structure by which a page was architected, as it put things in a specific place in page that was pretty much the same across browsers. And that is still the case. If I'm going "whip out" a page with a variety of elements arranged in the page, I'll use a table. It's faster and easier and it works. It's not as flexible or useful as CSS, but it works. With CSS, you spend huge amounts of time tweaking crap to appear across browsers. Still, Tables are old and not as flexible, and have been pressed into doing service they weren't designed for.
Same with CSS. It was developed to make things all purty-like. Now it's used for page layout and element placement - WAY beyond it's original mandate, which was taken from Desktop Publishing (stylesheets).
Flash was just a way to do spline based illustrations and animations on the web. When it was clear Flash could do much of the basics of what Director could do in a tiny fraction of the footprint, they began "directorfying" Flash, and shoehorned a Lingo into it, known as ActionScript. It is now a full blown frankensteinian disaster that is considered a "development platform", which is a cruel and misdirected hoax.
The examples are many and continuous. The "web" is a hack job. It is a slow moving train that has left the tracks (IE5 did that), and is slowly dying in its own complexity (of CSS, XHTML, AJAX, etc. hackery) as it rolls in excruciating slow motion off the cliff.
And now that the very livelihoods, mortgages, and private schools for the kids are DEPENDING on this complexity, the only logical conclusion is increased complexity, resulting in an ever higher range of exclusivity, casuistry, and sophistry. It will die, replaced by a lower context system, and when it does, a lot of people are going to get hurt. And, given the nature of the audience on /., it will mostly fall on their shoulders.
RS
So he thinks - who is the greatest mind in physics? He asks his wife, Tonya -
"Olga, darling, I think I will contact EINSTEIN about my great glowing semiconductor idea!"
Olga replies, "Sure honey. He's really smart. And well connected, especially since they've been confirming his ideas left and right. sounds good to me!"
So, with great pride and hope, Losev licks the stamp on the letter and walks down the street to set it off. He holds it to his heart before he puts it in the post box, and makes a small hope that Einstein will see the beauty of his idea and help him, then with finality and hope, he puts the letter in the box.
Then he and Olga went to go boil some rats for dinner, because Russia in 1922 was a freakin' mess.
RS
RS
When will these dorks ever get a clue?
RS
DivX was a bad idea done poorly.
DivX the codec, now that's a different smoke...
RS
I recommend the following:
1. get rid of the crown. It's long over due. Join the post-medieval world.
2. GET A CONSTITUTION.
3. TAKE DOWN THE CAMERAS.
FITE DEM BACK!
RS
"eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee..."
RS
Here's an interesting question: how long did it take for creatures to speciate after the Permian extinction? I wonder if there was the same amount of lag-time after that disaster...
RS
do it all together - do it at once. FIGHT THEM BACK.
DO IT NOW. If not NOW, WHEN? When the next gov't puts a telescreen in your livingroom to make sure you do your morning exercises, or in the bathroom to make sure you brush your teeth every fucking day? Or, a la THX!!#*, you take your proper medications to keep you dull and compliant?
RISE UP NOW!!!
RS
Well, right next to me is this computer bag, that he left behind and I look inside and FUCK! The thing has JEWELS encrusted in it, and I'm thinkin' what kind of an asshole buys a jewel encrusted laptop - the stupid things go obsolete every few years! What a waste of money! But he did strike me as an asshole, and he DID leave me his laptop, so now I got this TOTALLY STYLIN' laptop. It's got BOODLES of RAM, I am totally stoked. finders keepers!
RS (/fiction)
I can hear it now: "THOSE BASTARDS!!! They fucked up my daddy's life by suing my little sister because she DL'd some Britney when she was 8 years old! Now, I can't go to community college, because we're broke. FUCKERS! I've had it! I'm going on a jihad! I'm gonna fill up my old Camaro with explosives and drive right into their building and TAKE THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS OUT!!!! MY life is OVER! My family is RUINED! All because of their GREED! My body might be delivering DEATH to the RIAA, but MY MIND WILL BE LISTENING TO DOKKEN!!!!!"
He leaves behind a suicide note stating why he is doing this.
The RIAA is destroyed by his car bomb. The government declares it a "terrorist action".
The RIAA are the real terrorists.
Prosecuting a 10 year old. For crying out fucking loud. What a bunch of assholes.
someday, somebody desperate and angry enough... you reap what you sow.
RS
There have been lots of GREAT scifi movies, and I would argue that some of them are among the most important films ever made.
RS
Stuff on the left, which is near the aisle I'm sitting at, is newer, and often has recent memos or snail mail or other recent crap. When I do my monthly recycle pitch, I go more carefully through that area. But usually it all ends up i nte recycler too. Then I have a "nice clean desk" for about a week, and then the accumulation begins anew.
sigh.
RS
so, I could spend 5 minutes every day, or 5 minutes a month. My desk can look like a pile of junk, or something out of an IKEA show room. I'll take the snowbank of paper...
Neat desks are the sign of an empty mind.
RS
RS
RS
Frankly, I never understood what the big draw is for 72 virgins. Explaining and training young women to give the perfect blowjob is a time consuming waste of effort. (SWALLOW, DAMMIT!!!) Ugh. An eternity of lousy sex. A fate worse than death...
RS
RS
If you don't want to read wikipedia, then perhaps these other sources will explain it all a bit more clearly.
Just type "libertarian socialism" into google and get yourself educated. As I said, think twice before you bloviate on this particular subject - of course, once would be an improvement. You pathetic retard.
Because I'm feeling charitable, click HERE and learn.
RS
For more on Libertarian Socialism, look HERE
I would ask you to think twice in this regard, although in your case, once would be a dramatic improvement.
RS
He's a total lefty "libertarian socialist" (i.e. commie pinko mofo) but his music is really nice. You can download all his ambient electronic stuff HERE.
I've known him a long time. He told me he gives it away because making a living at avant-garde ambient electronic space music is pretty much impossible. clubs won't hire you to play out, and record companies aren't really interested, so after 20 years he figured, "why bother fighting these ass clowns"? He's into that "be the change you want to see" kind of thing (I'm much more mercenary and cynical than he is...) so he wants a world of "Free" so his creative world is "Free".
I'm working with him to process his imaging practice for download.
I also think he's out of his freakin' mind, but I think he also has a good view of the general situation. And I like his music. A lot of it is really nice for "background" ambient sound stuff.
RS
GE's just shitting their pants because of California and Australia working to ban the wasteful little buggers.
RS
While it seems very likely that there were people in South America before the Clovis people, they were probably only there in very small numbers, whereas the Clovis people were clearly very numerous indeed and seem to be the first meaningful inhabitants.
FIRST MEANINGFUL INHABITANTS? What kind of crap is that?
"Hi. you got here hundreds of years earlier, and lead perfectly interesting and colourful lives, but because your rock banging techniques weren't as interesting to me as what followed on, you are not a meaningful inhabitant."
WTF?
Talk about cranio-rectal inversion, daaaang. You need a lesson or two in cultural awareness.
RS
Cheers!
RS