Paypal is deep in it, as well. I have to re-post my comment from yesterday's ebay discussion, as it's all too fitting:
Well, it happens here in the US too. There are plenty of stories regading people being put on the 'do not fly' list due to circumstances like this as well.
Not only in the US. Paypal did this to me [slashdot.org] in January 2005, because I have an arab last name. My first name isn't even anything like "Sahir", it's Jerome and I live in Germany, and all I've ever used my account for is buying stuff like DVDs und subscribing to online services. Now if that ain't suspicious...
The paranoia policies effect more than just the US, they have global effects since we are constantly dealing with US companies. I might add that I was blocked because someone with my last name was on some terrorist list issued by the Bank of England. I don't want to know what other financial disadvantages this could have for me in the future.
In fact, here's the mail they sent me after I sent in a complaint:
Thank you for contacting PayPal.
Access to your PayPal account has been denied because your name is similar to or a match to an entry on the Bank of England List. This measure is unrelated to your management of your PayPal account. We are required to further verify your identity. In order to regain access to your account, please provide the following documentation:
1. A copy of a government issued photograph identification (i.e. passport, driver's license).
2. A copy of a utility bill verifying your address.
3. A copy of a document verifying your date and place of birth.
And I'm supposed to send this to some place in Omaha. I don't intend to provide them with such personal information. I'm not going to be a marionette to paranoia, so no more business from me.
Well, it happens here in the US too. There are plenty of stories regading people being put on the 'do not fly' list due to circumstances like this as well.
Not only in the US. Paypal did this to me in January 2005, because I have an arab last name. My first name isn't even anything like "Sahir", it's Jerome and I live in Germany, and all I've ever used my account for is buying stuff like DVDs und subscribing to online services. Now if that ain't suspicious...
The paranoia policies effect more than just the US, they have global effects since we are constantly dealing with US companies. I might add that I was blocked because someone with my last name was on some terrorist list issued by the Bank of England. I don't want to know what other financial disadvantages this could have for me in the future.
In fact, here's the mail they sent me after I sent in a complaint:
Thank you for contacting PayPal.
Access to your PayPal account has been denied because your name is similar to or a match to an entry on the Bank of England List. This measure is unrelated to your management of your PayPal account. We are required to further verify your identity. In order to regain access to your account, please provide the following documentation:
1. A copy of a government issued photograph identification (i.e. passport, driver's license).
2. A copy of a utility bill verifying your address.
3. A copy of a document verifying your date and place of birth.
And I'm supposed to send this to some place in Omaha. I don't intend to provide them with such personal information. I'm not going to be a marionette to paranoia, so no more business from me.
If all you care for is streaming, try last.fm. It's free for anyone to use, and it's perfect for discovering new artists since it recommends bands based on your listening habits. It even lets you adjust the recommendations via a popularity-slider, which is great if you're more into lesser known bands. Every user gets several custom radio streams of their own (that anyone can listen to, and you can listen to theirs), and subscribers get a few more. There are all kinds of neat features, like tag-radio, social groups, editable artist wikis, etc.
I'm glad to see someone finally budding into PayPal's monopoly. It's unfortunate that it's Google, as they already know enough about me that I don't need to be handing them my buying habits as well, but they are currently the only ones I can see with enough market power to actually be a relevant player. I just hope that once they have disarmed PayPal a bit, the market will become more open and will welcome more alternatives. This is probably a bit utopian but one can always hope.
I've experienced first hand what happens when you have one monopolist controlling a large portion of the online market. Since my last name is apparently the same as some arab terrorist's name (apparently your name makes you a potential criminal nowadays), PayPal completely blocked my account, and it's become quite a nuisance. I'm glad I didn't have any credit on that account or PayPal would have my money in a stronghold (this should be illegal but that's a different story...). I don't have a credit card and don't plan on getting one, so I can only shop on websites that debit directly off my bank account, which usually means only shopping within Germany. Good to see some more international choices popping up.
On the other hand it's usually more trouble to get things looking right in IE6 than to get things looking right in even old versions of Firefox and Opera.
True, styling for IE6 is a pain. However, since reading "On Having Layout" I've been having a noticeably easier time. It's a bit longer but it's definately worth the read. I've been able to cut down on crazy browser hacks significantly since learning about the height: 1% trick.
Oh, and getting IE 5.5 compatibility is basically just styling for IE6 with a few added box model hacks, so I usually spend the extra 5 minutes it takes at the end to get it done. Makes your major customer -- whose corporate IT infrastructure still specifies IE5.5 as a standard -- happy, too. Yes, they still exist.
Yeah, I'd like to thank Håkon for taking the time to answer my question, but it's not really the answer I was looking for.
position: fixed will stick a footer to the bottom of the viewport, but not to the bottom of a page (perhaps I am not using the correct terminology). That means that if the content is longer than the viewport, the footer will just overlap the content and stay put, while the content beneath it will continue to flow and scroll. What I meant was a footer that will always be at the bottom of a page "in dependance of the content" (as I mentioned). That means, it's at the bottom of a viewport until the content gets larger, which would then push down the footer accordingly. The lack of such a feature is the reason faux columns and hacks like the "One True Layout - Equal Height Columns" exist. I'm sure Håkon is very busy but perhaps he could spare a little more time to look at the examples I linked to in my initial question to get a picture of what exactly I am talking about.
The examples I mentioned work perfectly via tables without the browser knowing the exact height of a page. I know CSS works fundamentally differently but there must be a way to emulate the behavior?
I agree, it's quite a hack and not very elegant, but it does work for now. CSS needs much better support to do this kind of stuff without such trickery.
As a developer who works with CSS every day, I find one complication that continues to bother me in my daily work. Support for CSS has always been good on the horizontal scope, but vertical positioning has always been quite complicated. Alone the procedure to affix a footer to the bottom of a screen in dependance of the amount of content is unnecessarily difficult, spawning hackish solutions such as "footerStickAlt". Centering an object in the dead center of a page also requires strange procedures such as this one, which still aren't ideal (try making the viewport really small). The old table method provided much easier methods for this. What are your thoughts on this and do you see improvement following in future CSS revisions?
I am an avid Firefox user but I have always been impressed with the speedy interface Opera offers, despite all the extra features they put in. And from release to release, they manage to simplify the interface more and more. The options menu is no longer the scary mess it used to be, I suppose they are learning from Firefox's success. They may be adding a lot of stuff in that people would consider bloatware, but they manage to add it in a way that the browser doesn't seem to be suffering from it one bit. Take into consideration the constant advancement of the rendering engine and the unusually wide spectrum of platforms it supports and you've got quite a good browser.
I'd also like to hear your reasoning for complaining about the built-in BitTorrent client. After all, downloading is one basic feature of a browser, so why not jump in at exactly that point and help advance the system to a more server-friendly standard. Most common users don't know about Azureus and uTorrent and whatnot, so I think it's a good way to introduce the protocol to a wider audience.
Excellently said, I'm actually going to bookmark this post. It's sad to see how such a large mass of people can be mucked about with. Everyone seems to have forgotten that the government is not superior to us, but (should be) our elected representatives. No president and no police officer is superior to me, actually I pay these people good money to protect my rights, but all they do is tromp about on them. Who in their right mind would keep an employee in their company that not only doesn't do the job they are being paid for, but goes and steals from the register? Sometimes I feel "we the people" need to storm the White House, jail the criminals calling themselves "government" and start over again.
That's strange. I've never had any troubles with EE. I just log in and see the full solution, and more often than not, the answers help solve the problem. The time I registered, it was as simple and free as signing up for an account on Slashdot or anywhere else. It seems they force new users to subscribe now? That's a shame...
The German punk band WIZO did this a while ago. They claim to be the first to do it.
From their site:
"WIZO-STICK-EP" is the first USB-Memory-Stick from a band, that comes already packed with songs and lots of other data for the use on your computer. You' ll get:
- five brandnew Songs as high quality MP3s,
- one exclusive "live in Japan video clip" (only available on the "STICK-EP"!),
- loads of funny WIZO pics,
- the lyrics to all songs, including chords for guitar,
- one great photo contest (sorry, only in german!),
- cool multimedia menu for your web browser!
The price is 15.90€. I don't know the current USB-stick prices but that doesn't sound bad, especially since it has the band's branding which is relevant to their fans. A more detailed page can be found here (in German).
I know that I really miss the middle-click behaviour on emails when using Firefox and Thunderbird.
Firefox offers a very similar function. Set the following option and any links you click in your email client (or any other app, for that matter) will open in a new tab (provided Firefox is set as your default browser).
Tools > Options > Advanced > Tabbed Browsing > "a new tab in the most recent window"
Firefox is displaying the site just as it was meant. IE is breaking the layout due to its lack of support of the CSS max-width rule. It's supported by every other modern browser.
But users don't care for that, I know, and what counts isn't the technical proof but the impression the site leaves on Joe Sixpack.
Any professional typographer will tell you the way Firefox interprets the site is much user-friendlier. Text lines should not be too wide or it will make reading more difficult. This is a common problem with most liquid layouts and max-width would be the perfect solution to the problem if IE supported it. While I agree that Mozilla should have used a work-around to make it display the same everywhere, I can understand the idea behind using standards-compliant CSS and like this demonstrating Firefox's superiority. Your comment, however, shows that this probably isn't working for a lot of people.
The main reason is that they want the viewer to see the film as soon as possible after clicking without having to wait too long. It's all about interaction and on-the-fly functionality. Technologies such as AJAX have their foundations on this principle.
Streaming formats start playing right away (after shortly buffering) and continue to download while the user is already viewing the film. IIRC, for AVI files (because you mentioned xvid) you need to have the complete file to view it. MPG can be viewed without being complete but I don't know enough about it to comment on its streaming capabilites. The Quicktime format seems to have a nice combination of both streaming capabilites and downloadability. Any open source alternatives that behave like this?
I can understand the motivation for streaming content on news sites, trying to be at the bleeding edge, getting the information to you faster, faster, faster. It also works in favor of the viewer: why would I want to wait ages when I am worried sick and want to see what is going on in the area my relatives are currently in (e.g. Katrina disaster)? It's also a way to simplify your site... just click and watch, saves you the hassle of having to choose a download folder, navigating to it, opening it in your player of choice and deleting it afterwards. 4 steps or 1 click?
I was concerned about these spam mails reaching me despite being addressed to someone else. After all, if that were possible, you would have quite some privacy issues, right?
I sent Google a support request and this is the reply I got:
Hello,
Thank you for your message.
If you receive a message and don't see your email address in the 'To:' or 'Cc:' fields of the header, the sender has mailed you a 'blind carbon
copy,' or 'Bcc:.' Please note that the 'Bcc:' field is not displayed in the header of received messages. This means that you won't see your email
address at the top of any message you receive as a blind carbon copy.
"Can your PHP/MySQL CMS handle a Slashdotting?
A little while ago I was curious about how well Mambo would stand up against Post-Nuke under a Slashdotting. The results of that little test can be found here but I decided to refine and expand it a little which is what lead to this test."
Moments later, after a few refreshes: "This site is temporarily unavailable. Please notify the System Administrator."
You're not teaching them anything. If you want to teach the ignorant, you should provide an explanation rather than throwing incoherent stuff at them. The average spyware-infested user doesn't even know what spyware is, let alone how to remove it, or why they should even bother.
1) Think up cool name for game
2) Open sourceforge project
3) wait for programmers and artists to come write it for you
4) ??
I really don't see the problem with that model. Why would you dump a good idea just because you can't program it yourself? What's wrong with simply directing a project logistically (because I assume this is the one thing almost everyone does when opening a project)?
Slashdot Mirror
Paypal is deep in it, as well. I have to re-post my comment from yesterday's ebay discussion, as it's all too fitting:
Not only in the US. Paypal did this to me [slashdot.org] in January 2005, because I have an arab last name. My first name isn't even anything like "Sahir", it's Jerome and I live in Germany, and all I've ever used my account for is buying stuff like DVDs und subscribing to online services. Now if that ain't suspicious...
The paranoia policies effect more than just the US, they have global effects since we are constantly dealing with US companies. I might add that I was blocked because someone with my last name was on some terrorist list issued by the Bank of England. I don't want to know what other financial disadvantages this could have for me in the future.
In fact, here's the mail they sent me after I sent in a complaint:
And I'm supposed to send this to some place in Omaha. I don't intend to provide them with such personal information. I'm not going to be a marionette to paranoia, so no more business from me.
Not only in the US. Paypal did this to me in January 2005, because I have an arab last name. My first name isn't even anything like "Sahir", it's Jerome and I live in Germany, and all I've ever used my account for is buying stuff like DVDs und subscribing to online services. Now if that ain't suspicious...
The paranoia policies effect more than just the US, they have global effects since we are constantly dealing with US companies. I might add that I was blocked because someone with my last name was on some terrorist list issued by the Bank of England. I don't want to know what other financial disadvantages this could have for me in the future.
In fact, here's the mail they sent me after I sent in a complaint:
And I'm supposed to send this to some place in Omaha. I don't intend to provide them with such personal information. I'm not going to be a marionette to paranoia, so no more business from me.
If all you care for is streaming, try last.fm. It's free for anyone to use, and it's perfect for discovering new artists since it recommends bands based on your listening habits. It even lets you adjust the recommendations via a popularity-slider, which is great if you're more into lesser known bands. Every user gets several custom radio streams of their own (that anyone can listen to, and you can listen to theirs), and subscribers get a few more. There are all kinds of neat features, like tag-radio, social groups, editable artist wikis, etc.
I'm glad to see someone finally budding into PayPal's monopoly. It's unfortunate that it's Google, as they already know enough about me that I don't need to be handing them my buying habits as well, but they are currently the only ones I can see with enough market power to actually be a relevant player. I just hope that once they have disarmed PayPal a bit, the market will become more open and will welcome more alternatives. This is probably a bit utopian but one can always hope.
I've experienced first hand what happens when you have one monopolist controlling a large portion of the online market. Since my last name is apparently the same as some arab terrorist's name (apparently your name makes you a potential criminal nowadays), PayPal completely blocked my account, and it's become quite a nuisance. I'm glad I didn't have any credit on that account or PayPal would have my money in a stronghold (this should be illegal but that's a different story...). I don't have a credit card and don't plan on getting one, so I can only shop on websites that debit directly off my bank account, which usually means only shopping within Germany. Good to see some more international choices popping up.
True, styling for IE6 is a pain. However, since reading "On Having Layout" I've been having a noticeably easier time. It's a bit longer but it's definately worth the read. I've been able to cut down on crazy browser hacks significantly since learning about the height: 1% trick.
Oh, and getting IE 5.5 compatibility is basically just styling for IE6 with a few added box model hacks, so I usually spend the extra 5 minutes it takes at the end to get it done. Makes your major customer -- whose corporate IT infrastructure still specifies IE5.5 as a standard -- happy, too. Yes, they still exist.
Yeah, I'd like to thank Håkon for taking the time to answer my question, but it's not really the answer I was looking for.
position: fixed will stick a footer to the bottom of the viewport, but not to the bottom of a page (perhaps I am not using the correct terminology). That means that if the content is longer than the viewport, the footer will just overlap the content and stay put, while the content beneath it will continue to flow and scroll. What I meant was a footer that will always be at the bottom of a page "in dependance of the content" (as I mentioned). That means, it's at the bottom of a viewport until the content gets larger, which would then push down the footer accordingly. The lack of such a feature is the reason faux columns and hacks like the "One True Layout - Equal Height Columns" exist. I'm sure Håkon is very busy but perhaps he could spare a little more time to look at the examples I linked to in my initial question to get a picture of what exactly I am talking about.
The examples I mentioned work perfectly via tables without the browser knowing the exact height of a page. I know CSS works fundamentally differently but there must be a way to emulate the behavior?
I agree, it's quite a hack and not very elegant, but it does work for now. CSS needs much better support to do this kind of stuff without such trickery.
By using the One True Layout method.
As a developer who works with CSS every day, I find one complication that continues to bother me in my daily work. Support for CSS has always been good on the horizontal scope, but vertical positioning has always been quite complicated. Alone the procedure to affix a footer to the bottom of a screen in dependance of the amount of content is unnecessarily difficult, spawning hackish solutions such as "footerStickAlt". Centering an object in the dead center of a page also requires strange procedures such as this one, which still aren't ideal (try making the viewport really small). The old table method provided much easier methods for this. What are your thoughts on this and do you see improvement following in future CSS revisions?
"Sounds like"...? Have you actually tried it?
I am an avid Firefox user but I have always been impressed with the speedy interface Opera offers, despite all the extra features they put in. And from release to release, they manage to simplify the interface more and more. The options menu is no longer the scary mess it used to be, I suppose they are learning from Firefox's success. They may be adding a lot of stuff in that people would consider bloatware, but they manage to add it in a way that the browser doesn't seem to be suffering from it one bit. Take into consideration the constant advancement of the rendering engine and the unusually wide spectrum of platforms it supports and you've got quite a good browser.
I'd also like to hear your reasoning for complaining about the built-in BitTorrent client. After all, downloading is one basic feature of a browser, so why not jump in at exactly that point and help advance the system to a more server-friendly standard. Most common users don't know about Azureus and uTorrent and whatnot, so I think it's a good way to introduce the protocol to a wider audience.
Excellently said, I'm actually going to bookmark this post. It's sad to see how such a large mass of people can be mucked about with. Everyone seems to have forgotten that the government is not superior to us, but (should be) our elected representatives. No president and no police officer is superior to me, actually I pay these people good money to protect my rights, but all they do is tromp about on them. Who in their right mind would keep an employee in their company that not only doesn't do the job they are being paid for, but goes and steals from the register? Sometimes I feel "we the people" need to storm the White House, jail the criminals calling themselves "government" and start over again.
That's strange. I've never had any troubles with EE. I just log in and see the full solution, and more often than not, the answers help solve the problem. The time I registered, it was as simple and free as signing up for an account on Slashdot or anywhere else. It seems they force new users to subscribe now? That's a shame...
You mean something like Songbird? :)
I'm not sure that's true. According to an article on the Wall Street Journal, they rewrote Vista from scratch.
The German punk band WIZO did this a while ago. They claim to be the first to do it.
From their site:
"WIZO-STICK-EP" is the first USB-Memory-Stick from a band, that comes already packed with songs and lots of other data for the use on your computer. You' ll get:
- five brandnew Songs as high quality MP3s,
- one exclusive "live in Japan video clip" (only available on the "STICK-EP"!),
- loads of funny WIZO pics,
- the lyrics to all songs, including chords for guitar,
- one great photo contest (sorry, only in german!),
- cool multimedia menu for your web browser!
The price is 15.90€. I don't know the current USB-stick prices but that doesn't sound bad, especially since it has the band's branding which is relevant to their fans. A more detailed page can be found here (in German).
Firefox offers a very similar function. Set the following option and any links you click in your email client (or any other app, for that matter) will open in a new tab (provided Firefox is set as your default browser).
Tools > Options > Advanced > Tabbed Browsing > "a new tab in the most recent window"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Em_(typography)
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
-- Benjamin Franklin (allegedly)
Firefox is displaying the site just as it was meant. IE is breaking the layout due to its lack of support of the CSS max-width rule. It's supported by every other modern browser.
But users don't care for that, I know, and what counts isn't the technical proof but the impression the site leaves on Joe Sixpack.
Any professional typographer will tell you the way Firefox interprets the site is much user-friendlier. Text lines should not be too wide or it will make reading more difficult. This is a common problem with most liquid layouts and max-width would be the perfect solution to the problem if IE supported it. While I agree that Mozilla should have used a work-around to make it display the same everywhere, I can understand the idea behind using standards-compliant CSS and like this demonstrating Firefox's superiority. Your comment, however, shows that this probably isn't working for a lot of people.
The main reason is that they want the viewer to see the film as soon as possible after clicking without having to wait too long. It's all about interaction and on-the-fly functionality. Technologies such as AJAX have their foundations on this principle.
Streaming formats start playing right away (after shortly buffering) and continue to download while the user is already viewing the film. IIRC, for AVI files (because you mentioned xvid) you need to have the complete file to view it. MPG can be viewed without being complete but I don't know enough about it to comment on its streaming capabilites. The Quicktime format seems to have a nice combination of both streaming capabilites and downloadability. Any open source alternatives that behave like this?
I can understand the motivation for streaming content on news sites, trying to be at the bleeding edge, getting the information to you faster, faster, faster. It also works in favor of the viewer: why would I want to wait ages when I am worried sick and want to see what is going on in the area my relatives are currently in (e.g. Katrina disaster)? It's also a way to simplify your site... just click and watch, saves you the hassle of having to choose a download folder, navigating to it, opening it in your player of choice and deleting it afterwards. 4 steps or 1 click?
I was concerned about these spam mails reaching me despite being addressed to someone else. After all, if that were possible, you would have quite some privacy issues, right?
I sent Google a support request and this is the reply I got:
Right off the Mambo front page:
Moments later, after a few refreshes: "This site is temporarily unavailable. Please notify the System Administrator."
You're not teaching them anything. If you want to teach the ignorant, you should provide an explanation rather than throwing incoherent stuff at them. The average spyware-infested user doesn't even know what spyware is, let alone how to remove it, or why they should even bother.
1) Think up cool name for game
2) Open sourceforge project
3) wait for programmers and artists to come write it for you
4) ??
I really don't see the problem with that model. Why would you dump a good idea just because you can't program it yourself?
What's wrong with simply directing a project logistically (because I assume this is the one thing almost everyone does when opening a project)?
Sounds to me like a business plan for emacs. I mean, they've already got the OS (with a nifty built in text editor). ;)