Oh for gods sake, what is it with coders and graphics? Just because you can't get taught artistic ability in a course, all coders seem to treat it with suspicion and fear. You can learn artistic technique, yes, but not ability. But please stop treating it like voodoo.
It is perfectly possible to produce a graphically appealing site at under 30k, compatible with everything and its cousin, and still be easy on the eyes.
And the fact is, if he did produce such a site, he would be slapped back to the shop, and probably fired too. And rightfully so. Plain text websites are just lazy design, in my opinion. I mean, how many browsers can't deal with a background colour, a few DIVs, and borders? Back to your VAX machine, you.
Heh, "grossly undermilitarised." I like that. So there is now a standard for militarisation, beneath which a country is undermilitarised?
Europe, as a whole, does not feel the need to go strutting around the world, pretending it is still an imperial power (cough UK cough), and thus has exactly zero need for any kind of a large standing army. This money is channeled into better areas, like anything except the military.
Besides, is your major force going to roll over the horizon out of the blue? The difference between the EU and China is that given that two weeks warning, it could very effectively scale up its defences to knock back any invader, hard. China OTOH couldn't stop a halfway determined power given two decades warning, never mind two weeks.
Much is made of the countless hordes of the Chinese population, and the 1 billion number is bandied about in evidence of this. I fail to see why this is relevant on a global scale.
For example, the EU has over half that population, and it is a population that is better fed, better educated, better equipped, and better armed than the Chinese are ever likely to be, with an industrial, commercial, and technological infrastructure that is literally centuries ahead of China. India has a population near to China, and no one fears their global conquest aspirations. And the US could wipe China off the map with one tenth of their conventional forces.
Besides, these measures are not indicative of a government with the ability to threaten other powers. They are indicative of a government that is clinging desperately to power, always on the verge of total collapse. Their invasions of neighbouring countries does not show anything but the overweening aspiration of a third world country to be recognised as a global power.
Sadly, I fear you may be mistaken in this. While information technology is the great liberator, it is also the great automator, making processing of masses of information a trivial task.
Whatever code words or l337 sp33k are being used need only be entered into the algorithms once, and the database for the entire country is updated. True insurgents will bypass this with ease, of course, but the purpose of this initiative is not to catch true insurgents. It is to control the people of China.
IT is like any other tool-it can be used for good or bad. And in this case, its power is being displayed in its ability for fine-grained control of the population, to a degree that Orwell only dreamed of...
Okay IANAQM, but is there no way to check if a particle had changed state, while not in fact observing what that state is? Sort of like seeing light relecting from a surface, and not knowing whether it is from a flashlight or a curtain being pulled back? More observing secondary effects than the effect itself. The type and characteristics of the effect wouldn't be important, merely that there is one. Any one. Like knowing that changes in one particle will cause changes in neighbouring or linked particles, watching them resolve, and leaving the primary quantum link untouched...
If you could do this it would be extremely trivial to set up a communication system that could handle anything digital, from compiling to television transmissions.
Also, as an added bonus, if I get this right, you could also set up a relay to handle near-infinite amounts of different communications simultaneously, limited only by the mechanisms for observing state change...
Yeah still alive and well, the email addy on the Nuatech site is valid, or contact me at "ronan" "ta" "nuatech.com"
I tried to call up the number there on Friday but couldn't get through, and we then had a long weekend... let me know as soon as possible so and we'll hammer out the details. I'll also de-obfuscate your own email address and try reach you there.
Heheh... to enter the realm of wild speculation here, there is another Irish legend (much earlier than the sea raiders one) that tells of an island ruled by wise bronze dragons.
Hardly conclusive evidence for intelligent dinosaurs, especially as most of these stories were passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation for thousands of years, but worth mentioning all the same...
Yeah I followed up the information on the "mysterious sea peoples" mentioned in the BBC article, apparently a crowd of raiders that made short work of most of the civilistions in the area at that period, and I was immediately struck by the similarities between stories of them and some very ancient Irish legends.
These talk about a people called the "Fomors" (or various other names) who were also known as the "Sea Demons" from the south, who enslaved Ireland for a period, before being defeated by a coalition of tribes. The leader of these fomors was apparently one "Balor of the evil eye", whose giant evil eye could apparently turn men to ash on the battlefield with its "gaze like the sun". He was beaten by one of the warlords of the time, and the story goes that the destruction of the eye caused a great explosion, the area around which was accursed for hundreds of years afterwards.
There are other bits and pieces like that, but it really makes you wonder...
I have Mozilla, Opera, and Netscape on my machine, but the question really is why can this "protest page" only be seen by IE users? Are they not protesting to the users of other web browsers?
Ah I'm using IE 6 in English (One of the disadvantages of having a web design company is that you have to see the web in the same way as 90% of your customers and visitors, heheh)...
Yeah I thought that was specific to organising events in Brussels, like protests and lobbying, as the title of the page indicates. I'll give it a blast sure...
I also found this other link buried at the bottom of the page
to a mailing list
, the mysteriously titled project Parl mailing list, but I got no response as of yet. I'll try it again I think...
Interestingly, the FFII website is also closed as a protest against software patents. Isn't that kinda shooting yourself in the foot in this situation? A redirect exists, but the link from the protest page goes to a 404.
Well I would be glad to help them out of their spot, free gratis (own a successful web design company), if they would respond to any of the efforts I have made to contact them!
I noticed that there was no Irish branch of the FFII on the last slashdot story about this issue (maybe thats changed since, I don't know), so I also tried to reach them regarding setting up a local branch over here.
No response whatsoever. I couldn't even get through on the phone lines! I don't know what sort of an operation they are running, but so far I have to say I am less than impressed. If they think they can divert the beaurocratic juggernaut that is the EU with anything less than cohesive organisation and directed efforts, they are sadly mistaken.
Beh, like most things, I'll just have to go ahead and do it myself...
Re:"If you run a busy creative design business"
on
Fix a Troubled Mac
·
· Score: 1
Yup just to second this one, I do run a busy creative design business, and we don't use one single mac. Not a one. We have 22 windows boxes and a couple of linux-based fileservers running, as well as a web hosting machine.
Cost wise, maintenance wise, performance wise, you simply get better value from your off the shelf machines if you treat them right. If I want to pay fifty grand for an aesthetically pleasing appearance, I'll get plastic surgery.
This is an extreme end of the scale you're talking about here, but funny you should mention that...
My own father retired from being a police officer six years ago, at age sixty, started his own business as a taxi driver, overcame insane obstacles (including government deregulation that changed the value of his taxi license from 50000 to 5000 very early on), and is currently the third largest taxi operator in town, with no signs of slowing down.
I will NEVER write people off because of a number on their birth certificate. And with medicine extending lifespan and improving health for the elderly at an enormous pace, I suggest you consider adopting a similar viewpoint.
Sorry, this first point here is a crock of Sh*t. Speaking as an employer myself, I will ALWAYS take more experienced people, whatever their age, over younger types. It makes solid economic sense to do so. Less problems on all sides.
If I decided to take on younger people, the only reason I can imagine I would do so would be to milk them for everything they're worth, and then discard them for the next generation of suckers. And that is what is happening right now in India.
Ya thats what I was referring to... So far no response from my emails to the FFII though... I had to laugh, when my sales crew heard about this, the first question they asked was "can we get a patent on web design?"
What about this one... I run a small web and software design shop in Ireland, and frankly, I was a little confused about the whole "software patents are bad" thing.
Until, that is, I read the thread earlier about there being a patent on "ordering things across the web via credit card", among others. Now the issues are far more clear, and I can see how, with one fell swoop, the owner of this patent can wipe me and 99% of the companies like me off the map.
So I'm going to let them all know.
In my town alone, there are over thirty companies and individuals in the web design business alone, never mind the software houses, and I would bet that they are as much in the dark as I was. I guarantee you that is about to change.
I might even go so far as to propose a single organisation to lobby for change, with representatives from each group. If one such exists, it certainly hasn't been doing its job.
I will also be writing to my current MEP, and all of the incumbents, with a very simple, clear outline of my position and the views against it, as well as the steps I am taking to rectify the situation. I will not, however, be enclosing a cheque or any financial campaign contributions.
AFAIK, monopolies are, in legal fact, illegal. One private entity is generally not legally allowed (for any length of time at any rate) to fully control an entire market.
Or providing police or justice systems?
Umm, the government does all this? While the government is a de facto monopoly, it is not only tolerated by the populace, it is in fact supported by them. Because they control it, however indirectly. Private companies have only got to be accountable to the laws of the day, however and sometimes not even then (see Enron for further details).
Should we abolish all copyrights & patents?
Who was talking about copyrights and patents? I just made the point that monopolies are bad and eventually hit a brick wall. Welcome to the wonderful world of trans national filesharing.
Regardless of whether or not the RIAA and co want to maintain their own business model, no matter how good or bad it may be, they are about to discover that sometimes things change, without them ever lifting a finger.
Sorry, I can't let this slide - its nowhere near the equivalent of asking for one segment of an orange. Its more like asking for the one or two segments that aren't rotten or sour to the taste. And yes, if I want it without peel, then that is what I will pay for.
Because in a capitalistic society, demand drives production, not the other way around. The only situation where this is not true is where a monopoly controls the market, a situation which is -rightly- illegal. How it perserveres in the States is a testament to the rules by which financial aid can be supplied to political candidates, and the overwhelming control of the media by the suppliers.
Ah the whole point is moot anyway, the RIAA and their ilk are going head to head with human nature... If I can get it for free, I will not pay for it. Not neccessarily my personal perspective, but really the only logical choice for most people.
Corporations outsource workers to save money. The average person saves money by not buying songs. The right, wrong, and long term consequences of these decisions matters not a whit to the decision makers.
This is great, I wrote a couple of articles in the newspapers about it myself here... Thank god is all I can say.
I have nothing against modernisation of voting systems, but there has to be some kind of accountability, and the government was going ahead without either a paper trail or a poll...
Hopefully we'll see a little more open source code too...
Sorry to reply to my own post, by its Piri Reis, not Piraeus, a town in Greece... Heres an excerpt from a reasonable article in
Pravda
Medieval maps show Antarctica without an ice cap or partially covered with ice. The precision of the 16th century cartographers was very high and even surprising. Their data surpassed the technical possibilities even of the late Middle Ages (for example, the determination of the longitude of a relief within one minute). This level was reached by mankind in the late 18th century, while in some cases, the 20th...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh for gods sake, what is it with coders and graphics? Just because you can't get taught artistic ability in a course, all coders seem to treat it with suspicion and fear. You can learn artistic technique, yes, but not ability. But please stop treating it like voodoo.
It is perfectly possible to produce a graphically appealing site at under 30k, compatible with everything and its cousin, and still be easy on the eyes.
And the fact is, if he did produce such a site, he would be slapped back to the shop, and probably fired too. And rightfully so. Plain text websites are just lazy design, in my opinion. I mean, how many browsers can't deal with a background colour, a few DIVs, and borders? Back to your VAX machine, you.
Heh, "grossly undermilitarised." I like that. So there is now a standard for militarisation, beneath which a country is undermilitarised?
Europe, as a whole, does not feel the need to go strutting around the world, pretending it is still an imperial power (cough UK cough), and thus has exactly zero need for any kind of a large standing army. This money is channeled into better areas, like anything except the military.
Besides, is your major force going to roll over the horizon out of the blue? The difference between the EU and China is that given that two weeks warning, it could very effectively scale up its defences to knock back any invader, hard. China OTOH couldn't stop a halfway determined power given two decades warning, never mind two weeks.
Much is made of the countless hordes of the Chinese population, and the 1 billion number is bandied about in evidence of this. I fail to see why this is relevant on a global scale.
For example, the EU has over half that population, and it is a population that is better fed, better educated, better equipped, and better armed than the Chinese are ever likely to be, with an industrial, commercial, and technological infrastructure that is literally centuries ahead of China. India has a population near to China, and no one fears their global conquest aspirations. And the US could wipe China off the map with one tenth of their conventional forces.
Besides, these measures are not indicative of a government with the ability to threaten other powers. They are indicative of a government that is clinging desperately to power, always on the verge of total collapse. Their invasions of neighbouring countries does not show anything but the overweening aspiration of a third world country to be recognised as a global power.
Sadly, I fear you may be mistaken in this. While information technology is the great liberator, it is also the great automator, making processing of masses of information a trivial task.
Whatever code words or l337 sp33k are being used need only be entered into the algorithms once, and the database for the entire country is updated. True insurgents will bypass this with ease, of course, but the purpose of this initiative is not to catch true insurgents. It is to control the people of China.
IT is like any other tool-it can be used for good or bad. And in this case, its power is being displayed in its ability for fine-grained control of the population, to a degree that Orwell only dreamed of...
Ia Ia Cthulu Fthagn!!
Okay IANAQM, but is there no way to check if a particle had changed state, while not in fact observing what that state is? Sort of like seeing light relecting from a surface, and not knowing whether it is from a flashlight or a curtain being pulled back? More observing secondary effects than the effect itself. The type and characteristics of the effect wouldn't be important, merely that there is one. Any one. Like knowing that changes in one particle will cause changes in neighbouring or linked particles, watching them resolve, and leaving the primary quantum link untouched...
If you could do this it would be extremely trivial to set up a communication system that could handle anything digital, from compiling to television transmissions.
Also, as an added bonus, if I get this right, you could also set up a relay to handle near-infinite amounts of different communications simultaneously, limited only by the mechanisms for observing state change...
Yeah still alive and well, the email addy on the Nuatech site is valid, or contact me at "ronan" "ta" "nuatech.com"
I tried to call up the number there on Friday but couldn't get through, and we then had a long weekend... let me know as soon as possible so and we'll hammer out the details. I'll also de-obfuscate your own email address and try reach you there.
Heheh... to enter the realm of wild speculation here, there is another Irish legend (much earlier than the sea raiders one) that tells of an island ruled by wise bronze dragons.
Hardly conclusive evidence for intelligent dinosaurs, especially as most of these stories were passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation for thousands of years, but worth mentioning all the same...
Yeah I followed up the information on the "mysterious sea peoples" mentioned in the BBC article, apparently a crowd of raiders that made short work of most of the civilistions in the area at that period, and I was immediately struck by the similarities between stories of them and some very ancient Irish legends.
These talk about a people called the "Fomors" (or various other names) who were also known as the "Sea Demons" from the south, who enslaved Ireland for a period, before being defeated by a coalition of tribes. The leader of these fomors was apparently one "Balor of the evil eye", whose giant evil eye could apparently turn men to ash on the battlefield with its "gaze like the sun". He was beaten by one of the warlords of the time, and the story goes that the destruction of the eye caused a great explosion, the area around which was accursed for hundreds of years afterwards.
There are other bits and pieces like that, but it really makes you wonder...
Hi Holger, great I'll get in touch with you either by phone or IRC so...
I have Mozilla, Opera, and Netscape on my machine, but the question really is why can this "protest page" only be seen by IE users? Are they not protesting to the users of other web browsers?
Ah I'm using IE 6 in English (One of the disadvantages of having a web design company is that you have to see the web in the same way as 90% of your customers and visitors, heheh)...
That is strange... maybe they have some sort of location- or browswer-specific redirect? Hmmm...
Verbatim quote from the front page of www.ffii.org...
This page is closed.
Big letters.
The first link on the page takes you to a 404. The second takes you into the site, as does waiting 15 seconds.
Yeah I thought that was specific to organising events in Brussels, like protests and lobbying, as the title of the page indicates. I'll give it a blast sure...
I also found this other link buried at the bottom of the page to a mailing list , the mysteriously titled project Parl mailing list, but I got no response as of yet. I'll try it again I think...
Interestingly, the FFII website is also closed as a protest against software patents. Isn't that kinda shooting yourself in the foot in this situation? A redirect exists, but the link from the protest page goes to a 404.
Well I would be glad to help them out of their spot, free gratis (own a successful web design company), if they would respond to any of the efforts I have made to contact them!
I noticed that there was no Irish branch of the FFII on the last slashdot story about this issue (maybe thats changed since, I don't know), so I also tried to reach them regarding setting up a local branch over here.
No response whatsoever. I couldn't even get through on the phone lines! I don't know what sort of an operation they are running, but so far I have to say I am less than impressed. If they think they can divert the beaurocratic juggernaut that is the EU with anything less than cohesive organisation and directed efforts, they are sadly mistaken.
Beh, like most things, I'll just have to go ahead and do it myself...
Yup just to second this one, I do run a busy creative design business, and we don't use one single mac. Not a one. We have 22 windows boxes and a couple of linux-based fileservers running, as well as a web hosting machine.
Cost wise, maintenance wise, performance wise, you simply get better value from your off the shelf machines if you treat them right. If I want to pay fifty grand for an aesthetically pleasing appearance, I'll get plastic surgery.
This is an extreme end of the scale you're talking about here, but funny you should mention that...
My own father retired from being a police officer six years ago, at age sixty, started his own business as a taxi driver, overcame insane obstacles (including government deregulation that changed the value of his taxi license from 50000 to 5000 very early on), and is currently the third largest taxi operator in town, with no signs of slowing down.
I will NEVER write people off because of a number on their birth certificate. And with medicine extending lifespan and improving health for the elderly at an enormous pace, I suggest you consider adopting a similar viewpoint.
Sorry, this first point here is a crock of Sh*t. Speaking as an employer myself, I will ALWAYS take more experienced people, whatever their age, over younger types. It makes solid economic sense to do so. Less problems on all sides.
If I decided to take on younger people, the only reason I can imagine I would do so would be to milk them for everything they're worth, and then discard them for the next generation of suckers. And that is what is happening right now in India.
Ya thats what I was referring to... So far no response from my emails to the FFII though... I had to laugh, when my sales crew heard about this, the first question they asked was "can we get a patent on web design?"
Ah marketroids...
What about this one... I run a small web and software design shop in Ireland, and frankly, I was a little confused about the whole "software patents are bad" thing.
Until, that is, I read the thread earlier about there being a patent on "ordering things across the web via credit card", among others. Now the issues are far more clear, and I can see how, with one fell swoop, the owner of this patent can wipe me and 99% of the companies like me off the map.
So I'm going to let them all know.
In my town alone, there are over thirty companies and individuals in the web design business alone, never mind the software houses, and I would bet that they are as much in the dark as I was. I guarantee you that is about to change.
I might even go so far as to propose a single organisation to lobby for change, with representatives from each group. If one such exists, it certainly hasn't been doing its job.
I will also be writing to my current MEP, and all of the incumbents, with a very simple, clear outline of my position and the views against it, as well as the steps I am taking to rectify the situation. I will not, however, be enclosing a cheque or any financial campaign contributions.
monopolies are NOT illegal
AFAIK, monopolies are, in legal fact, illegal. One private entity is generally not legally allowed (for any length of time at any rate) to fully control an entire market.
Or providing police or justice systems?
Umm, the government does all this? While the government is a de facto monopoly, it is not only tolerated by the populace, it is in fact supported by them. Because they control it, however indirectly. Private companies have only got to be accountable to the laws of the day, however and sometimes not even then (see Enron for further details).
Should we abolish all copyrights & patents?
Who was talking about copyrights and patents? I just made the point that monopolies are bad and eventually hit a brick wall. Welcome to the wonderful world of trans national filesharing.
Regardless of whether or not the RIAA and co want to maintain their own business model, no matter how good or bad it may be, they are about to discover that sometimes things change, without them ever lifting a finger.
Sorry, I can't let this slide - its nowhere near the equivalent of asking for one segment of an orange. Its more like asking for the one or two segments that aren't rotten or sour to the taste. And yes, if I want it without peel, then that is what I will pay for.
Because in a capitalistic society, demand drives production, not the other way around. The only situation where this is not true is where a monopoly controls the market, a situation which is -rightly- illegal. How it perserveres in the States is a testament to the rules by which financial aid can be supplied to political candidates, and the overwhelming control of the media by the suppliers.
Ah the whole point is moot anyway, the RIAA and their ilk are going head to head with human nature... If I can get it for free, I will not pay for it. Not neccessarily my personal perspective, but really the only logical choice for most people.
Corporations outsource workers to save money. The average person saves money by not buying songs. The right, wrong, and long term consequences of these decisions matters not a whit to the decision makers.
This is great, I wrote a couple of articles in the newspapers about it myself here... Thank god is all I can say. I have nothing against modernisation of voting systems, but there has to be some kind of accountability, and the government was going ahead without either a paper trail or a poll...
Hopefully we'll see a little more open source code too...
Sorry to reply to my own post, by its Piri Reis, not Piraeus, a town in Greece... Heres an excerpt from a reasonable article in Pravda
Medieval maps show Antarctica without an ice cap or partially covered with ice. The precision of the 16th century cartographers was very high and even surprising. Their data surpassed the technical possibilities even of the late Middle Ages (for example, the determination of the longitude of a relief within one minute). This level was reached by mankind in the late 18th century, while in some cases, the 20th...
Thank you, caffeine...