WoW stops gay weddings? Hahahahahah. You can find pics of female night-elf on night-elf action all over the net, and I was actually in attendance of a gay wedding cerimony a few months back. It was mildly entertaining, and I was surprised how many other people were also in attendance.
... Of/. misnaming an article. I scanned through the rest of the posts, and couldn't believe no one else had commented on this yet. But from the topic, I was expecting an article more along the lines of, "Scientists prove evolution, through the creation of a fully functional mouse from 100,000 brain cells!"
That aside, it's always fun to read a flame war consisting of "Stop mistreating the poor, cute little mices!" vs. "U R dum, mice R dum, neener neener, we gonna inject us some brains!"
It seems the real ethical question is, do we value ALL life, or just human life, or should we weigh the two differently?
If one believes that humans have a soul (and animals do not) from this premise you could conclude that human life has greater inherrent value than animal life, and in a laisse faire sense, the loss of the happiness of a few animals is far outweighed by the increased happiness for humankind (except for the whining PETA's, of course).
If one believes that humans are equally of value as other animals, you still have the question, if you don't use animals for testing, what humans will you use for testing instead? If you believe in evolution, do you believe that humans have developed beyond other creatures, and should that give us preference on a rank of the species?
Once you have decided for a side of the major ethical question, there are of course a miriade of additional debates and arguments one could make, but you lose any common ground in which to argue with someone on the opposing side.
Since I have yet to see any tangible proof for souls (for the first argument), or a rational reason why humans aren't superior simply based on evolution (for the second argument), it really is entirely a matter of subjective personal preference which side you are on, and therefore all of the "you suck, i'm right" arguments on/. that I have seen thusfar are completely useless.
"In fact, design should be a process which includes the implementation of itself."
Nice quote. I agree with this wholeheartedly. The code isn't solely the design, but the implementation of the code should be considered a part of the design.
In theory, programming is the abstract representation of thoughts and ideas that are in turn an abstract representation of the real world. All code written is a beatiful articulation of those thoughts and ideas, and the meaning is found inherently "in the pudding."
In practice, the details and meaning are lost in the abstraction. I have spent too many hours trying to determine just WTF a fellow programmer's code is supposed to acomplish.
I will admit I am not the first to start writing lines of code before I ever write a thing on a napkin, whiteboard, or sacrificed trees. But design implied in the code alone will very rarely work in a group! It is almost always a necessity to comment your code, and is at best polite to document the design of your code in some surface manner. Code that is never accompanied by design is hardly maintainable or reusable.
It is true that Yahoo offers a greater number of services than google atm, but what practical features does Yahoo! mail offer that google mail doesn't? I also abandoned yahoo! maps as soon as I discovered that google was offering a greatly superior street map search.
It appears as if yahoo is making a desperate push to keep up with the big boys, and relying on the Open Source community to do the work for them.
There are a few questions that will need answering before the Open Source community will support Yahoo in this.
Will Yahoo make their source code and work freely available under the GPL or other Open Source licensing?
If the answer is no, I don't see the Open Source community submitting a hill of beans toward the benefit of Yahoo's IPO. If the answer is yes, how will this benefit Yahoo in competing with Microsoft and Google?
They just told us not to use our cellphones when fueling our cars... now they are telling us we will be pouring fuel into our cellphones? Sounds like a bad episode of Jackass to me.
Don't forget, if MS tries to change the browser market too much, they will be shooting themself in the foot as well. There are so many people out there who haven't upgraded since IE 5 and even IE 4 who will also be lost along with the users of Foxfire, Safari, etc.
As a web developer, it is annoying beyond belief to have to test all of your design code in a growing number of different browsers and versions.
Hey, I think improvements are great, as long as Microsoft focuses on becoming more compliant with CSS standards, etc. rather than trying to reinvent the wheel for a competitive edge.
Because "new and different" doesn't always mean "better".
Does anyone see the challenge of getting EVERYONE in the world to adopt SPF tactics to stop spam? There will always be back-water companies who have an SMTP server who WON'T have SPF initiated.
Will these servers be blocked by the rest of the world? At least initially, this seems hardly fair.
So the only problem this poses to spammers is to find a few of those domain names that don't incorporate SPF records, and *tada*, they have a new list of email domains to zombify.
I have had bad, bad experiences with T-Mobile phones. The reception sucks! And I live in the middle of Chicago. WTF.
I own a digital camera. It's a kickass digital camera. I don't need a crappy camera I'm never going to use on my phone.
I have a hard enough time getting away from my office, why do I want my boss knowing I can check my email while I am on the train, too?
And someone please tell me, why my signal dies whenever a wall, tree, closed window, etc gets between me and the cell tower that I can see across the street?!?
I worked for the IT dept at my Univ for all 4 years, and got to see the Mac contingent of our public labs diminish from 20 desktops in our main lab to half a dozen hidden in a back room in the basement of the art dept.
There were a few big issues that eventually caused the faze-out: 1. We lost our Mac support guy. The only one in our office who really knew the ins-and-outs of the old Mac OS graduated, so we had a hard time fixing issues when they arose. 2. Macs are _expensive_. Mac's usually are used for niche purposes for specific classes, and the profs weren't always prepared to figure in new software and maintinence costs into their budgets. 3. Our art dept. offered to move the Macs to a new lab... then upgrade them to G4's... but could only afford 6.
Since the majority of the sexually explicit spam originates from overseas, I would be very shocked if this manditory header regulation will help much in filtering out s-e spam.
Now, if we could just get them to add "BLONDE", "BRUNETTE", "REDHEAD", etc...
Microsoft's recent pending patent's have just been leaked:
Water - because they thought up h2o first, damnit!
Air - legally sold to the masses in convenient aluminum cans (i.e. Spaceballs)
Those sticky plastic tabs on new CD's - because obviously, only a true bastard (like Microsoft) could think up shit like that!
Thanks for the reply. I agree, in quite a few ways on my site I mimiced a lot of the common popular design that's out there. I played around with some different ideas, but the 3-column design seemed to give the best aesthetic balance and layout of content in comparison to other orientations I found. I also like having content tied to the top of the page, so if one or more columns are shorter than the other, they extend from the top of the page down.
To be honest, I think most CSS sites imitate that look mostly because that's what the cookie-cutter designers are selling these days, and people are too lazy to build their own. Again, I recognize I am partially shooting myself in the foot with that remark. Please forgive me, I was looking for a specific balance or "feng-shui".
You can actually use the same relative scaling that you may use for fonts when scaling images. I have to admit I haven't implemented this on my test site yet, but I have seen it done well, and I have worked with it enough in a test platform to know that it is possible to do.
Again, thanks for your feedback. Feel free to check back in on my site, since it tends to change faster than I can apply to the entire site (as you will be quick to notice if you took a peek at some of the buried pages of the site).
Up to a few weeks ago, I would have laughed at the idea of CSS being used in serious web design for anything other than simple color and theme coordination. On commerical sites, CSS seemed the exception to the rule, and I scoffed at sites that used and tags to layout their page.
But that was before I actually saw the power and wisdom of incorporating CSS.
I recently updated my personal test site to use full CSS for the structure and design, and was very pleased to learn about the two key benefits of CSS website design: structure and format.
Structure:
For ages my own coding methods involved nested table within nested table, until the complexity of my pages got so complex that a simple updates became a gamble of helping or shredding the resulting page. Nested tables are also nearly impossible to coordinate for pages that must be scalable for accessibility, or simply stretching the viewable resolution for more modern video display sizes. Tables were originally meant for one thing: formatting text data, not carrying the workload of page structure.
The truth is, it is much easier and precise to define a site's structure using CSS positioning. I am a minimist at heart when it comes to my source code, and CSS has not only helped to reduce clutter in my source code, but in most cases has reduced the source size by about 20%.
Format:
Using relative font sizes and design templates for formatting text not only makes universal page design easy, but it also makes browser loading faster, since CSS can be cached by local browsers while hard-coded or code includes must be reloaded every time the user clicks a link or refreshes the browser. That means reduced server load and increased load speeds for the user, too.
Now I realize, CSS is not the end-all and be-all of web design. There are some weaknesses, and the typical cross-browser support that needs to be worked out. But for the serious web designer, you can't ignore the elegance and the design concepts that make CSS a very powerful (and in some cases, superior) design tool.
If you are interested, the W3C site has some great CSS howto's and examples on replacing table-based structure on your site.
You have to admit, in the first season La Femme Nikita had some of the BEST coreographed action scenes to ever grace a Television series. The storyline actually possessed a level of intelligence above that of your average sea slug, too. Inconceivable.
Some of the later seasons began to drag, and they ditched the action sequences for some pretty lame soap-drama between the main characters, but all in all I was pretty sad to see that series go.
Slashdot Mirror
WoW stops gay weddings? Hahahahahah. You can find pics of female night-elf on night-elf action all over the net, and I was actually in attendance of a gay wedding cerimony a few months back. It was mildly entertaining, and I was surprised how many other people were also in attendance.
... Of /. misnaming an article. I scanned through the rest of the posts, and couldn't believe no one else had commented on this yet. But from the topic, I was expecting an article more along the lines of, "Scientists prove evolution, through the creation of a fully functional mouse from 100,000 brain cells!"
/. that I have seen thusfar are completely useless.
That aside, it's always fun to read a flame war consisting of "Stop mistreating the poor, cute little mices!" vs. "U R dum, mice R dum, neener neener, we gonna inject us some brains!"
It seems the real ethical question is, do we value ALL life, or just human life, or should we weigh the two differently?
If one believes that humans have a soul (and animals do not) from this premise you could conclude that human life has greater inherrent value than animal life, and in a laisse faire sense, the loss of the happiness of a few animals is far outweighed by the increased happiness for humankind (except for the whining PETA's, of course).
If one believes that humans are equally of value as other animals, you still have the question, if you don't use animals for testing, what humans will you use for testing instead? If you believe in evolution, do you believe that humans have developed beyond other creatures, and should that give us preference on a rank of the species?
Once you have decided for a side of the major ethical question, there are of course a miriade of additional debates and arguments one could make, but you lose any common ground in which to argue with someone on the opposing side.
Since I have yet to see any tangible proof for souls (for the first argument), or a rational reason why humans aren't superior simply based on evolution (for the second argument), it really is entirely a matter of subjective personal preference which side you are on, and therefore all of the "you suck, i'm right" arguments on
to get infinite pr0n? God, I love Linux!
"In fact, design should be a process which includes the implementation of itself."
Nice quote. I agree with this wholeheartedly. The code isn't solely the design, but the implementation of the code should be considered a part of the design.
Like the Tao, only in 1's and 0's.
In theory, programming is the abstract representation of thoughts and ideas that are in turn an abstract representation of the real world. All code written is a beatiful articulation of those thoughts and ideas, and the meaning is found inherently "in the pudding."
In practice, the details and meaning are lost in the abstraction. I have spent too many hours trying to determine just WTF a fellow programmer's code is supposed to acomplish.
I will admit I am not the first to start writing lines of code before I ever write a thing on a napkin, whiteboard, or sacrificed trees. But design implied in the code alone will very rarely work in a group! It is almost always a necessity to comment your code, and is at best polite to document the design of your code in some surface manner. Code that is never accompanied by design is hardly maintainable or reusable.
It is true that Yahoo offers a greater number of services than google atm, but what practical features does Yahoo! mail offer that google mail doesn't? I also abandoned yahoo! maps as soon as I discovered that google was offering a greatly superior street map search.
It appears as if yahoo is making a desperate push to keep up with the big boys, and relying on the Open Source community to do the work for them.
There are a few questions that will need answering before the Open Source community will support Yahoo in this.
Will Yahoo make their source code and work freely available under the GPL or other Open Source licensing?
If the answer is no, I don't see the Open Source community submitting a hill of beans toward the benefit of Yahoo's IPO.
If the answer is yes, how will this benefit Yahoo in competing with Microsoft and Google?
They just told us not to use our cellphones when fueling our cars... now they are telling us we will be pouring fuel into our cellphones? Sounds like a bad episode of Jackass to me.
'All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a regular basis due to...'
Did they forget to mention that IE didn't appear to crash any more than it normally does, regardless of malformed HTML?
Don't forget, if MS tries to change the browser market too much, they will be shooting themself in the foot as well. There are so many people out there who haven't upgraded since IE 5 and even IE 4 who will also be lost along with the users of Foxfire, Safari, etc.
As a web developer, it is annoying beyond belief to have to test all of your design code in a growing number of different browsers and versions.
Hey, I think improvements are great, as long as Microsoft focuses on becoming more compliant with CSS standards, etc. rather than trying to reinvent the wheel for a competitive edge.
Because "new and different" doesn't always mean "better".
I was tempted to link to story in my blog, but decided against it; I wouldn't want to incite the wrath of 'teh slashdot'.
Does anyone see the challenge of getting EVERYONE in the world to adopt SPF tactics to stop spam? There will always be back-water companies who have an SMTP server who WON'T have SPF initiated.
Will these servers be blocked by the rest of the world? At least initially, this seems hardly fair.
So the only problem this poses to spammers is to find a few of those domain names that don't incorporate SPF records, and *tada*, they have a new list of email domains to zombify.
I have had bad, bad experiences with T-Mobile phones. The reception sucks! And I live in the middle of Chicago. WTF. I own a digital camera. It's a kickass digital camera. I don't need a crappy camera I'm never going to use on my phone. I have a hard enough time getting away from my office, why do I want my boss knowing I can check my email while I am on the train, too? And someone please tell me, why my signal dies whenever a wall, tree, closed window, etc gets between me and the cell tower that I can see across the street?!?
I worked for the IT dept at my Univ for all 4 years, and got to see the Mac contingent of our public labs diminish from 20 desktops in our main lab to half a dozen hidden in a back room in the basement of the art dept.
There were a few big issues that eventually caused the faze-out:
1. We lost our Mac support guy. The only one in our office who really knew the ins-and-outs of the old Mac OS graduated, so we had a hard time fixing issues when they arose.
2. Macs are _expensive_. Mac's usually are used for niche purposes for specific classes, and the profs weren't always prepared to figure in new software and maintinence costs into their budgets.
3. Our art dept. offered to move the Macs to a new lab... then upgrade them to G4's... but could only afford 6.
Since the majority of the sexually explicit spam originates from overseas, I would be very shocked if this manditory header regulation will help much in filtering out s-e spam. Now, if we could just get them to add "BLONDE", "BRUNETTE", "REDHEAD", etc...
Microsoft's recent pending patent's have just been leaked:
Water - because they thought up h2o first, damnit!
Air - legally sold to the masses in convenient aluminum cans (i.e. Spaceballs)
Those sticky plastic tabs on new CD's - because obviously, only a true bastard (like Microsoft) could think up shit like that!
I am getting sick and tired of the RIAA. If they keep this up, the "good ol' days" of finding your tunes on Undernet will be making a comeback.
Hey, that almost looks functional for a Mac. Maybe they are starting to catch on that good looks don't always mean a good 'puter.
Psychotext,
Thanks for the reply. I agree, in quite a few ways on my site I mimiced a lot of the common popular design that's out there. I played around with some different ideas, but the 3-column design seemed to give the best aesthetic balance and layout of content in comparison to other orientations I found. I also like having content tied to the top of the page, so if one or more columns are shorter than the other, they extend from the top of the page down.
To be honest, I think most CSS sites imitate that look mostly because that's what the cookie-cutter designers are selling these days, and people are too lazy to build their own. Again, I recognize I am partially shooting myself in the foot with that remark. Please forgive me, I was looking for a specific balance or "feng-shui".
You can actually use the same relative scaling that you may use for fonts when scaling images. I have to admit I haven't implemented this on my test site yet, but I have seen it done well, and I have worked with it enough in a test platform to know that it is possible to do.
Again, thanks for your feedback. Feel free to check back in on my site, since it tends to change faster than I can apply to the entire site (as you will be quick to notice if you took a peek at some of the buried pages of the site).
Up to a few weeks ago, I would have laughed at the idea of CSS being used in serious web design for anything other than simple color and theme coordination. On commerical sites, CSS seemed the exception to the rule, and I scoffed at sites that used and tags to layout their page.
But that was before I actually saw the power and wisdom of incorporating CSS.
I recently updated my personal test site to use full CSS for the structure and design, and was very pleased to learn about the two key benefits of CSS website design: structure and format.
Structure:
For ages my own coding methods involved nested table within nested table, until the complexity of my pages got so complex that a simple updates became a gamble of helping or shredding the resulting page. Nested tables are also nearly impossible to coordinate for pages that must be scalable for accessibility, or simply stretching the viewable resolution for more modern video display sizes. Tables were originally meant for one thing: formatting text data, not carrying the workload of page structure. The truth is, it is much easier and precise to define a site's structure using CSS positioning. I am a minimist at heart when it comes to my source code, and CSS has not only helped to reduce clutter in my source code, but in most cases has reduced the source size by about 20%.
Format:
Using relative font sizes and design templates for formatting text not only makes universal page design easy, but it also makes browser loading faster, since CSS can be cached by local browsers while hard-coded or code includes must be reloaded every time the user clicks a link or refreshes the browser. That means reduced server load and increased load speeds for the user, too.
Now I realize, CSS is not the end-all and be-all of web design. There are some weaknesses, and the typical cross-browser support that needs to be worked out. But for the serious web designer, you can't ignore the elegance and the design concepts that make CSS a very powerful (and in some cases, superior) design tool.
If you are interested, the W3C site has some great CSS howto's and examples on replacing table-based structure on your site.
You have to admit, in the first season La Femme Nikita had some of the BEST coreographed action scenes to ever grace a Television series. The storyline actually possessed a level of intelligence above that of your average sea slug, too. Inconceivable. Some of the later seasons began to drag, and they ditched the action sequences for some pretty lame soap-drama between the main characters, but all in all I was pretty sad to see that series go.
"Listen to Alec Shrapnelpolski sing your favorite tunes, from The Rolling Stone's 40 Licks to Barbara Streistand Live...."
Power to The People!
Viva La Revolution!
I am definitely going to pick up a copy of Samba 3 by Example.
Does anyone know where I can get a copy of the TOSHARG that was mentioned as the technical resource?