What's with all the TLA acronyms in these two posts?
Is there something I should LOL out loud about?
Now, 'scuse me, I'm going to go get some KFC chicken so I can stay healthy.
I don't think this would be a problem. If you already own the website, then you already can change the URL at will to anything you want.
The only reason this would be a bigger issue is XSS attacks - but those are already have way more important concerns than just spoofing the URL.
Personally, I would love it. It would make it much easier to merge the mobile/AJAX/static structures of the website, allow end-users to access the same bookmarks from multiple devices, and provide a much cleaner look than we already have.
Currently, the real issue with AJAX-webapp links is that the server never gets the hash (fragment) portion of the URL. This makes it hard to serve the correct page to a mobile device, and completely impossible if the device does not support JavaScript.
two or three OS revisions (10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard and possibly 10.4 Tiger)
Someone mentioned below that they are planning to support OpenCL (assuming they didn't mean simply OpenGL). If that is the case, I wonder if they will only support Snow Leopard. This provides several benefits:
Only one OS to worry about (for now).
Significantly limits the OS features that need to be supported, since Snow Leopard only runs on a subset of Macs. (i.e.: 64-bit support is required for Snow Leopard.)
Guarantees newer hardware (no issues with old computers running slowly).
And most importantly, guarantees Intel / i586 processors, seriously reducing the complexity of targeting PowerPC computers as well.
If that is true, they will probably disappoint quite a few Mac users, who haven't upgraded for one reason or another.
I've decided that I will never design a website that supports IE6, but instead will only server up this rudimentary (if nice-looking) style sheet. As long as your website is standards-based, compliant, and content-oriented, this CSS file works great. You do, however, have to include some of those annoying <!-- [if lt IE 7]>...<![endif]--> tags.
For web apps, which are more complex, then I use a browser sniff and redirect IE6 users away. I don't care how "bad" or "evil" it is. It's better, to me, for users to know why a page doesn't work, than see a partially loaded page or pile of garbage.
I would ask, why would you even allow password-based logins to your server?
Step ONE for me when setting up a new server is to configure SSH keys for a user account, and disable any kind of login other than key-based.
(Step two is moving SSH off of port 22 to some other port, but that's more to keep script kiddies from trying to brute force their way in even when passwords are disabled!)
Not to support Comcast, or anything, but the easy solution has always been: if you need business-connection quality, buy a business connection!
I have Charter. Some people have trouble with them. However, I never have. I've always had a business connection through them. I get 10Mbps up, 1Mbps down, with excellent customer support, and a static IP; I pay just under $100/month for this connection.
I'm sure you can get faster or cheaper connections elsewhere, but here's the kicker: they don't care if I saturate my bandwidth 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They've told me so, I believe it's part of the contract I signed to get the service. I've never had a problem saturating my connection, any time of day or night. (Note, this connection is in a residential neighborhood.)
The real issue, as many have said, is that they just should not be able to lie about "unlimited" service when they are not providing it. They should be required to provide a minimum up and down speed, state the maximum up and down speed, and explicitly define the total data transfer allotted per month. Then, if the cheap-o plan doesn't work for you, you can upgrade to the next level.
And if you want unlimited data transfer, or the ability to host a server, then you need a business connection. Because that's what a business connection is for!
I think the only way the Hyperion Cantos could make out of book form would be a long-running serial. Something with a really decent production team, that allowed each character time to build up the story.
Of course, one major problem with that is these stories are fairly depressing. Especially the 5 framed stories in Hyperion. Nothing good happens to anyone, really.*
(And then they are apparently planning on making a single movie out of Illium and Olympos, probably two of the most confusing [and amazing] stories I have ever read. I truly don't understand how that book could be made into a movie.)
-----
* I just received Hyperion and Fall for Christmas, and I'm currently re-reading Fall of Hyperion. I had completely forgotten how the end of the first book just hangs there!
Well, it's alittle overdone, but I think you put alot more thought into your post than was necessary. I mean, he probably started just alittle bit at a time, then added alittle more, then alittle more.
Eventually, well, there was just alot going on, but it really is alot cooler than the original.
I'm not trying to pick a fight, but I disagree (a little).
I recently was replaying Shadow of the Colossus. To me, there is a game that exemplifies art. It was beautiful to watch, immersive, playing it was unlike anything I had played before, and the story was deep and dramatic. (It even ended on a sad note for those who believe that anything that makes you happy can't be art.)
Forcing someone to play through an hour of boring, everyday tasks is less than art. It's not even very creative (in my opinion). How many movies and books and other things have been made that focus on everyday things?
Or, for that matter, how many games already been made where the user gets to choose between decisions (Black-and-White, Fate [I think], that one with the biological superhero)? Every time, while the game is interesting, the decision making process is hampered by the vary fact that a game is limited to what the designers have already though up. Currently, decision-based games are more like choose-your-own-adventure books. The decisions are more thrown in to add "replay value" than to truly give the user choices. (Save the baby, or let it die? Play it twice, to see the different cut-scenes! Yay, more hours of gameplay...)
The gaming medium as art has to be more than just taking a movie or book and slapping lame controls on it. That's like doing a crayon drawing in oils, and calling it art. It needs to incorporate what makes games different than the other mediums.
When I read the (mostly vague) descriptions of the game in the article, all I could think of was that the author summed up the game early on:
You'll be doing many mundane things: turning lights on and off, cooking dinner, taking a shower. In fact, the first hour of the game seems to exist only to show you how normal your life as an architect and a father is. In that time I did some work, played with my kids, and helped my wife around the house.
After watching me playing the game, my real-life wife made pointed out that I could have actually done some work, helped her around the house, and then played with my kids in the time I had just spent with Heavy Rain. I didn't have a good counter-argument.
(Emphasis Mine)
I'm aware that there is more to the game than this, but I think what makes a video game interesting is the way it abstracts you from the real world. How is this game going to abstract mundane details of everyday life in a way that isn't just boring? It's too bad the author didn't expand on any more details.
There really isn't anything in this review that makes me think the game shows promise, despite the Slashvertisment's summary.
Every other non-FOSS software house tells you what you can and can't do with "your" copy, too.
Actually, a lot of FOSS tell you what you can and can't do, just as well. For example: with GPL, you can't modify the application, and release the new version under a different license.
As pointed out above, copyright is a large part of the reason the current FOSS software community currently works.
Even BSD licensed software requires that you include a copy of the license, and you can't use the original developer(s) names to endorse the new ones.
While I agree with the need for this for desktop applications, there are some real issues with it for web sites. Namely, lining up graphics.
Anyone who develops intelligently already tries to define all measurements in ems. Ems are resolution independent, and have great accuracy (3 decimal places).
However, if you want to develop any relatively complex visual design, you will end up with slices, and those slices must line up perfectly. Except, when using relative measurements and scaled graphics, it doesn't always work out. Many sites when scaled end up having weird graphic glitches, especially when using CSS sprites.
The solution is several-fold:
We need to get the CSS border-image working in every browser. This single-handedly could change the ability for designers to work with more advanced layouts. (We wouldn't even need box-shadow anymore, since an all-black alpha-transparent PNG is very, very small, even if it is huge pixel-wise.)
We also need better layout components in (X)HTML. Currently, the only way to build a web app is with tons of JavaScript manually performing layout. It feels like I am developing code for the late 1990s. We need boxes we can layout using relative positioning, that takes into account both width and height of the parent component. The box model has some incredibly frustrating choices — like basing the width of a box on the contents, excluding border, padding, and margin — that make pure CSS solutions effectively impossible.
Another big issue, for now, is the size of alpha-transparent PNG images. If these were more reasonable, it would be easier to design in a res-independent manner. Bug as of now, any image that has color often ends up in the 25K+ range. Add a handful of these in, and you can make a page load very slowly. The only solution for this, sadly, is ensuring that everyone has access to true high-speed internet.
Sometimes I get the most frustrated because the W3C specs are always so overcomplicated. Look at border-radius, for example. I would guess that 99% of the use of this would be to simply specify a single radius. Usually the designer just wants to soften the corner of a box. However, the spec includes elliptical corners, which has to significantly complicate the design of it. It also doesn't specify (I believe) that the content inside should be clipped automatically, leading to useless designs where interior components stick out past the radius. (At least, that's what happens in FF, which isn't 100% compatible.) Of course, with border-image, we once again don't need border-radius as much.
Of course, with IE9 only just now supporting border-radius, and Opera not supporting it yet at all, we'll probably not see more advanced CSS+HTML-only interfaces for another 5-10 years. By then, who knows what we'll be working on!
For those who don't know, removing the "/index.cfm/*", "/index.aspx/*", "index.php/*", etc is a simple mod_rewrite rule on any Apache server, and I'm certain there are easy fixes on other servers.
Any decent web dev should be setting that up first, before even thinking about developing a website. Then you can easily change technologies later while maintaining your URLs.
You should never be able to see the technology of a website in the URL. At a minimum, rewrite blah.html to your actual server technology.
As far as Twitter is concerned, the limit on number of characters is due to phone texting — not just their own system.
<rant>Of course, I can't stand Twitter or the twats that use it, but at least I can usually just ignore it.</rant>
Also, as a joke, this is the current URL I am at:
tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/14/184256/URL-Shorteners-Get-Some-Backup?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
I doubt very much they made more with this experiment than before.
Based on the charts / average price paid from the article, they made about $115,129 (probably about a hundred more, I skipped really low data points) on 56,714 sales. They admitted that they lost money on every sale below $0.30, and they had to pay up to 13% to PayPal in fees even when they made money.
I think for any game to have made 56,000 sales (which implies as many as 56,000 new customers to support), but only bring in a little over $100K, that's not a great revenue, unless you are using the iPhone / other app store model.
To look at it another way, at $20 per copy, they only had to sell around 5700 copies, and the profit margin should be significantly higher without Paypal fees.
To help define the quality product that is Lotus Notes, my wife had cancer, and decided to name her tumor "Lotus Notes". (She does not work in IT.) She even has shirts and a baseball cap her family had made for her that have the words "Lotus Notes" in a circle with a big slash through them. She wore the shirts to many of the chemo treatments.
When I was looking to switch from Windows to Macs nearly two years ago, I needed two computers: a workstation for me, and a laptop for my wife. The workstation was fairly easy (they only make one Mac Pro, and I am really happy with it).
However, when we were trying to decide which Mac laptop to get for my wife, the Apple store kid who was actually willing to talk to me was trying his hardest to get us into a normal MacBook. I wanted the MacBook Pro for various performance reasons (since I would be borrowing it and wanted to run graphics apps on it), and my wife disliked the fact that the plastic MB had really frickin' sharp edges.
Despite the fact that we wanted to blow something like 35% more money on the MBP, the Mac reps repeatedly tried to push us into the cheaper computer. (They also denied the sharp edges, which you can easily go online and find reports and photos of user's wrists having bruises and cuts. But that's probably the RDF working.)
But I totally agree that the sales people are annoyingly pretentious. (The good thing, if you are just browsing, is they rarely bother you.)
Anyway my point, if there is anything at all, is that at least one person had them trying sell a cheaper model. That appeared to be repeated throughout the store and with different products when I listened in on other sales pitches.
What would you prefer, that this be rushed through without planning, server load testing, and figuring out exactly how it interacts with existing services?
Slashdot Mirror
What's with all the TLA acronyms in these two posts? Is there something I should LOL out loud about? Now, 'scuse me, I'm going to go get some KFC chicken so I can stay healthy.
I don't think this would be a problem. If you already own the website, then you already can change the URL at will to anything you want.
The only reason this would be a bigger issue is XSS attacks - but those are already have way more important concerns than just spoofing the URL.
Personally, I would love it. It would make it much easier to merge the mobile/AJAX/static structures of the website, allow end-users to access the same bookmarks from multiple devices, and provide a much cleaner look than we already have.
Currently, the real issue with AJAX-webapp links is that the server never gets the hash (fragment) portion of the URL. This makes it hard to serve the correct page to a mobile device, and completely impossible if the device does not support JavaScript.
two or three OS revisions (10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard and possibly 10.4 Tiger)
Someone mentioned below that they are planning to support OpenCL (assuming they didn't mean simply OpenGL). If that is the case, I wonder if they will only support Snow Leopard. This provides several benefits:
If that is true, they will probably disappoint quite a few Mac users, who haven't upgraded for one reason or another.
Of course, Apple will be happy about it... ;-)
BSD will never work on the desktop! It's far too Unixy.
Now, excuse me as I get back to work on my user-friendly Mac.
Now that would at least have made sense in Dean Koontz's Frankenstein books!
(Of course, I'm probably the only person on Earth who read all three books of that series...)
For basic websites, I highly recommend Universal IE6 CSS.
I've decided that I will never design a website that supports IE6, but instead will only server up this rudimentary (if nice-looking) style sheet. As long as your website is standards-based, compliant, and content-oriented, this CSS file works great. You do, however, have to include some of those annoying <!-- [if lt IE 7]>...<![endif]--> tags.
For web apps, which are more complex, then I use a browser sniff and redirect IE6 users away. I don't care how "bad" or "evil" it is. It's better, to me, for users to know why a page doesn't work, than see a partially loaded page or pile of garbage.
Man, nostalgia used to be so much better in the past!
I would ask, why would you even allow password-based logins to your server?
Step ONE for me when setting up a new server is to configure SSH keys for a user account, and disable any kind of login other than key-based.
(Step two is moving SSH off of port 22 to some other port, but that's more to keep script kiddies from trying to brute force their way in even when passwords are disabled!)
It's funny to me that everytime someone posts a whoosh retort, they bottom post.
If the joke or sarcasm is going over their head, shouldn't you, just this once, top post?
Not to support Comcast, or anything, but the easy solution has always been: if you need business-connection quality, buy a business connection!
I have Charter. Some people have trouble with them. However, I never have. I've always had a business connection through them. I get 10Mbps up, 1Mbps down, with excellent customer support, and a static IP; I pay just under $100/month for this connection.
I'm sure you can get faster or cheaper connections elsewhere, but here's the kicker: they don't care if I saturate my bandwidth 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They've told me so, I believe it's part of the contract I signed to get the service. I've never had a problem saturating my connection, any time of day or night. (Note, this connection is in a residential neighborhood.)
The real issue, as many have said, is that they just should not be able to lie about "unlimited" service when they are not providing it. They should be required to provide a minimum up and down speed, state the maximum up and down speed, and explicitly define the total data transfer allotted per month. Then, if the cheap-o plan doesn't work for you, you can upgrade to the next level.
And if you want unlimited data transfer, or the ability to host a server, then you need a business connection. Because that's what a business connection is for!
Worse than talk, supposedly they are planning on making a single movie out of both Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. There are at least 6 or 7 tales told in those two books, each one would almost be capable of filling 2 hours.
I think the only way the Hyperion Cantos could make out of book form would be a long-running serial. Something with a really decent production team, that allowed each character time to build up the story.
Of course, one major problem with that is these stories are fairly depressing. Especially the 5 framed stories in Hyperion. Nothing good happens to anyone, really.*
(And then they are apparently planning on making a single movie out of Illium and Olympos, probably two of the most confusing [and amazing] stories I have ever read. I truly don't understand how that book could be made into a movie.)
-----
* I just received Hyperion and Fall for Christmas, and I'm currently re-reading Fall of Hyperion. I had completely forgotten how the end of the first book just hangs there!
(That hurt to write.)
Well, it's alittle overdone, but I think you put alot more thought into your post than was necessary. I mean, he probably started just alittle bit at a time, then added alittle more, then alittle more.
Eventually, well, there was just alot going on, but it really is alot cooler than the original.
:-)
I'm not trying to pick a fight, but I disagree (a little).
I recently was replaying Shadow of the Colossus. To me, there is a game that exemplifies art. It was beautiful to watch, immersive, playing it was unlike anything I had played before, and the story was deep and dramatic. (It even ended on a sad note for those who believe that anything that makes you happy can't be art.)
Forcing someone to play through an hour of boring, everyday tasks is less than art. It's not even very creative (in my opinion). How many movies and books and other things have been made that focus on everyday things?
Or, for that matter, how many games already been made where the user gets to choose between decisions (Black-and-White, Fate [I think], that one with the biological superhero)? Every time, while the game is interesting, the decision making process is hampered by the vary fact that a game is limited to what the designers have already though up. Currently, decision-based games are more like choose-your-own-adventure books. The decisions are more thrown in to add "replay value" than to truly give the user choices. (Save the baby, or let it die? Play it twice, to see the different cut-scenes! Yay, more hours of gameplay...)
The gaming medium as art has to be more than just taking a movie or book and slapping lame controls on it. That's like doing a crayon drawing in oils, and calling it art. It needs to incorporate what makes games different than the other mediums.
When I read the (mostly vague) descriptions of the game in the article, all I could think of was that the author summed up the game early on:
You'll be doing many mundane things: turning lights on and off, cooking dinner, taking a shower. In fact, the first hour of the game seems to exist only to show you how normal your life as an architect and a father is. In that time I did some work, played with my kids, and helped my wife around the house.
After watching me playing the game, my real-life wife made pointed out that I could have actually done some work, helped her around the house, and then played with my kids in the time I had just spent with Heavy Rain. I didn't have a good counter-argument.
(Emphasis Mine)
I'm aware that there is more to the game than this, but I think what makes a video game interesting is the way it abstracts you from the real world. How is this game going to abstract mundane details of everyday life in a way that isn't just boring? It's too bad the author didn't expand on any more details.
There really isn't anything in this review that makes me think the game shows promise, despite the Slashvertisment's summary.
Every other non-FOSS software house tells you what you can and can't do with "your" copy, too.
Actually, a lot of FOSS tell you what you can and can't do, just as well. For example: with GPL, you can't modify the application, and release the new version under a different license.
As pointed out above, copyright is a large part of the reason the current FOSS software community currently works.
Even BSD licensed software requires that you include a copy of the license, and you can't use the original developer(s) names to endorse the new ones.
Who else read that as:
Yahoo !== Bing
Which, technically is still true, but is kind of the opposite of the intended comment!
While I agree with the need for this for desktop applications, there are some real issues with it for web sites. Namely, lining up graphics.
Anyone who develops intelligently already tries to define all measurements in ems. Ems are resolution independent, and have great accuracy (3 decimal places).
However, if you want to develop any relatively complex visual design, you will end up with slices, and those slices must line up perfectly. Except, when using relative measurements and scaled graphics, it doesn't always work out. Many sites when scaled end up having weird graphic glitches, especially when using CSS sprites.
The solution is several-fold:
Sometimes I get the most frustrated because the W3C specs are always so overcomplicated. Look at border-radius, for example. I would guess that 99% of the use of this would be to simply specify a single radius. Usually the designer just wants to soften the corner of a box. However, the spec includes elliptical corners, which has to significantly complicate the design of it. It also doesn't specify (I believe) that the content inside should be clipped automatically, leading to useless designs where interior components stick out past the radius. (At least, that's what happens in FF, which isn't 100% compatible.) Of course, with border-image, we once again don't need border-radius as much.
Of course, with IE9 only just now supporting border-radius, and Opera not supporting it yet at all, we'll probably not see more advanced CSS+HTML-only interfaces for another 5-10 years. By then, who knows what we'll be working on!
I completely agree, but I have two comments:
For those who don't know, removing the "/index.cfm/*", "/index.aspx/*", "index.php/*", etc is a simple mod_rewrite rule on any Apache server, and I'm certain there are easy fixes on other servers.
Any decent web dev should be setting that up first, before even thinking about developing a website. Then you can easily change technologies later while maintaining your URLs.
You should never be able to see the technology of a website in the URL. At a minimum, rewrite blah.html to your actual server technology.
<rant>Of course, I can't stand Twitter or the twats that use it, but at least I can usually just ignore it.</rant>
Also, as a joke, this is the current URL I am at:
tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/14/184256/URL-Shorteners-Get-Some-Backup?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
niiice... :-)
I doubt very much they made more with this experiment than before.
Based on the charts / average price paid from the article, they made about $115,129 (probably about a hundred more, I skipped really low data points) on 56,714 sales. They admitted that they lost money on every sale below $0.30, and they had to pay up to 13% to PayPal in fees even when they made money.
I think for any game to have made 56,000 sales (which implies as many as 56,000 new customers to support), but only bring in a little over $100K, that's not a great revenue, unless you are using the iPhone / other app store model.
To look at it another way, at $20 per copy, they only had to sell around 5700 copies, and the profit margin should be significantly higher without Paypal fees.
"Oh no Teller, I'm out of Pie!
"You have pie, however, so give me some of your pie.
"You see, Teller, we're not taking pie from you, we're giving pie to me. That's fair, right?"
Repeats until there is no more pie left, including for Teller
"Now we have no pie! I know, let's go find someone else who does have pie, and make them give both of us some of their pie!"
-- Penn Jillette, Penn & Teller's Bullshit!
Pardon my paraphrasing...
Ha! Sadly, yes! Which is why wearing the anti LN shirt is probably not terribly wise!
To help define the quality product that is Lotus Notes, my wife had cancer, and decided to name her tumor "Lotus Notes". (She does not work in IT.) She even has shirts and a baseball cap her family had made for her that have the words "Lotus Notes" in a circle with a big slash through them. She wore the shirts to many of the chemo treatments.
And she still occasionally wears them to work.
(She recovered, and is doing fine, if you care.)
Just to relate a slightly different experience:
When I was looking to switch from Windows to Macs nearly two years ago, I needed two computers: a workstation for me, and a laptop for my wife. The workstation was fairly easy (they only make one Mac Pro, and I am really happy with it).
However, when we were trying to decide which Mac laptop to get for my wife, the Apple store kid who was actually willing to talk to me was trying his hardest to get us into a normal MacBook. I wanted the MacBook Pro for various performance reasons (since I would be borrowing it and wanted to run graphics apps on it), and my wife disliked the fact that the plastic MB had really frickin' sharp edges.
Despite the fact that we wanted to blow something like 35% more money on the MBP, the Mac reps repeatedly tried to push us into the cheaper computer. (They also denied the sharp edges, which you can easily go online and find reports and photos of user's wrists having bruises and cuts. But that's probably the RDF working.)
But I totally agree that the sales people are annoyingly pretentious. (The good thing, if you are just browsing, is they rarely bother you.)
Anyway my point, if there is anything at all, is that at least one person had them trying sell a cheaper model. That appeared to be repeated throughout the store and with different products when I listened in on other sales pitches.
What would you prefer, that this be rushed through without planning, server load testing, and figuring out exactly how it interacts with existing services?
Or, when it is released, that is works?
Both!