In the UK distance selling regulations mean the buyer has a cooling off period of several weeks during which time they can return the goods and get a refund. Not sure how this works with downloads, but since no money has changed hands I would say the suppliers claim is tenuous at best.
I believe Abraham Lincoln once said: "I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts."
I think that ordinary people are capable of considering the rights of minorities, just as our current MPs are. Unless you are suggesting that a career polititian (perhaps corrupt and gaming the system) somehow is more qualified to understand minority issues - somehow I doubt it. I suspect that without the attendant risk of corruption we might see better decisions being made.
This is quite likely. According to one statistic I read 5% of Americans claim to have been abducted by aliens. That is more than 10 million abductions.
There is no such thing as Truth. We all cling to illusions. You just think your illusion is superior to theirs.
Gah, or course there is, it's just that none of us know all of it.
I used to have this debate with a former college lecturer all the time. He postulated that what was true for me ("my truth") was not necessarily true for him ("his truth"). While at the time we could never agree, in hindsight I realised that we were struggling not over concepts, but semantics. I think he was simply using the wrong word. He was talking about "perception" not "truth".
If not talking about perception, then we needed a new word to replace what "truth" used to mean.
There is surely a "reality", dare I use that word to describe the nitty gritty infinitesimal detail of what is actually happening, did happen and will happen. This "reality" is the truth. Meanwhile we theorise, we experiment, we test, we observe and record our "perception" of what happens in "reality". Our perception, and the "reality" may not be the same.
Nevertheless, it remains the quest of countless scientists, detectives, school teachers etc., religious or not, to try to understand the truth, the "reality".
Science does believe in truth and keeps searching for a 'grand unification theory' to explain everything in the universe? Religious people believe in truth and seek to obtain it from God. And scientists who are also religious no doubt do both.
So I argue, YES, there is such a thing as truth. Many people are looking for it in their own way. Just because our perception is limited, does not mean it is not there.
Let's not confuse "perception" and "reality". The truth is out there.
Too right, it's not about the royalty checks, it's about killing the competition.
Take "Lindows" for example. Microsoft had 2 reasons for wanting to
clean them out:
They are Linux
Their brand "Lindows" sounded too much like "Windows"
So Microsoft take them to court in the USA over the brand name, and "Lindows"
wins. So instead of gracefully accepting defeat, Microsoft take "Lindows" to
court in a bunch of other countries, and due to lack of funds to pay lawyers
for so many cases "Lindows" has no choice but to give in - they won the case
in the US, but can't afford to defend their position against one of the richest
coorporations in the world. You will now find "Lindows" under the new name "Linspire".
Can this tactic work for other things...?
How curious that this should be picked as a target for such a law change. There is surely a legal distinction between *Correct use* and *Abuse*.
Manufacture of firearms is not illegal, in fact fireing a firearm is not illegal. Homicide however *is* illegal.
The logic that prompts this call about P2P seems to say, "If this technology can be used illegally, then we should make the technology illegal".
If true, this logic has more important problems to solve. For example:
* Close the whole internet down and make it's use illegal because of illegal spam, hate sites, and evil and illegal sites that promote other human misery, that cause more problems and misery than any form of media piracy.
* Outlaw the use of the Motor Car because they have been used for homicide, robberies, manslaughter... a whole host of other crimes worse than media piracy.
But while we know of the problems with those technologies, we know that outlawing them will not solve the root of the problems.
So why pick on P2P? and not some major carriers or contributors of Manslaughter, Homicide or worse???
Because someone has an axe to grind..? And it's not the public interest axe.
In the UK (no doubt other countries to) we have certain statutory rights regarding our purchases.
If a product is found to be "not of merchantable quality" we can get a refund. But as far as I know, unless using the product as intended causes injury or death, or other specific arrangements are in place, there is no comeback other than a full refund of the price paid, or a replacement item.
The issue with the EULA is that other arrangements might be in place, the kind that limit our rights to gain compensation possibly? I dont really know, they are too long an convuluted to be worth the agravation of decoding into plain english.
It may be that the only choice we have is to *not buy* Microsoft. After all, if the product doesn't work, why buy it?
"But we often have no alternative" I hear you say. And while that may be true, it will only show that while Microsoft products may be full of holes, no one else has done better - or we would have bought that instead.
I guess the real problem is that Microsoft really does hold the strong market position, and we just can't fight it hard enough.
From my point of view, I have no particular loyalty to Microsoft, except that virtually *all* of the software I need for my job has been released only for Windows or Mac OS. I don't have a Mac so I have to have Windows to do my job.
Why I can't get the software I need for Linux is pretty obvious (and here is where Open Source really is doing microsoft a favour), the Software companies are protected by the fact that Windows is closed source. If they start releasing their goods to linux, how long before all their code is ripped off in the name of GPL and Open Source, because they happened to need a GPL library to make their stuff work? Not my idea of a good business move. It also may not be a good business move for those companies, as Linux Desktop users probably still don't represent a large enough market to be worth investment in porting the software.
Role on the day when I can get all the software I need on Linux.
But to build the site that achieves it's aim you have to know a bit about your audience, and also how far you. your budget, your deadlines are prepared to go for accessibility.
If we don't give a monkies for PDA users or webphone users, perhaps because they represent only 0.25% of the available market we are targeting, then we are working under a different set of priorities and site building constraints than a projects whose market is 20% PDA or Webphone.
Again, does the site achieve it's aim, if it does, it's a success.
Ha ha ha ha, At least it's a W3C compliant solid block of text;-)
Techies have also invented preservation of carriage returns
in the text area field when submitted, they also invented JavaScript inserting
of such formatting tags you mention, at the click of a button. More advanced
is HTMLarea an in browser WYSIWYG editor. All can be made to degrade
nicely for different browsers and operating systems if you really try. They
might not all be fully W3C compliant, but W3C is not a good excuse for being
archaic;-). If we all waited for the rule book innovation would be slow indeed
(and often is).
From a commercial point of view I have to design for users who are not techies,
and often barely computer literate. These users care nothing for stretchiness
of site, their criticism or enjoyment of a website barely goes beyond was
it easy to use? or did they accomplish what they wanted? With
such design problems as these you don't have time to teach the user a system
new to them, or educate them in the background technology of the web, it just
has to be intuitive and natural - that can often mean more graphics, and heavier
code than many techies would approve of. But ultimately you have
a site with more idiot proof usability.
Though that is a very good case in point you raised. As a slashdot newbie,
the fine details of having to manually mark up line breaks was lost on me -
until too late. I had expected the line breaks I returned in my
reply to be preserved. After all, that is quite a common feature on other forums.
So I learn the hard way, don't loose any sleep over it, but think, that
could have been made more obvious.
Another font, a different colour, a heading like Instructions
on a different background colour, clearer instruction like You must format
your text to preserve paragraphs, would have made it all stand out, and
become immediately obvious though I was in a rush and in no mood to read every
bit of text to decipher how it works (thats humans, a good design tries to pre-empt
such things - standards or not).
It's one of those designer/artist issues, concerned about visual
appearance. In this case not because it will *look* better or impress our fellow
designers, but because it will be more user friendly and communicate faster.
Once again there is more to a website than content and standards.
Perhaps the difference in Artist and Techie views
comes from their background, Programmers come from a background where they are
required to learn a new language to work and decipher code (text) as they work,
and so deciphering websites without graphical helps is quite acceptable to them,
while designers are concerned with symbols, images, shape and colour to communicate
and so have a view point in that direction. No one is right, so
long as the target audience is serviced effectively.
In jest of course, but on a reality note, I have heard of print designers hacking the source code of pagemaker (I think) EPS's to change them to other formats.
One to think about, as SVG develops, will there really be much difference between what can be done with a PDF and what can be done with complex HTML/CSS/Scripting?
Thats a good point, PDF is both scalable, and proportionally fixed.
Let's hand the web over to Adobe, and we can all sleep easier in our beds knowing that our sites will be both visually attractive and technically sound enough to be readable on screen or printed x50,000 on a Litho press.
If the HTML/CSS/Scripting combination gets much more complex, Postscript programming will seem a doddle.
I fully concur with many points made so far, both with the "Pro Standards" and the "Pro Designer" groups.
Really it's a matter of pragmatism. All websites are designed with a purpose in mind. The real measure if success is not whether the site adheres to the standards, or whether the site is aesthetically innovative. Hardly.
Does the site do what it was intended to do? Then it's a success, and all the arguments can go jump out of the window.
What I have seen in the threads is a battle between "techies" and "artists". But the fact remains, and my professional experience has taught me, that we need each other. One person commented that is it rare to find a programmer (who knows the standards) who is also an artist.
"Artists" weep and mock at sites made by programmers alone. Why? Because they lack imagination, vibrancy, and visual appeal, they use Times New Roman to excess, the sites are allowed to stretch to the point that scientifically calculated typographic rules about readbility are broken (note: readability and legibility are two different things - how many "techies" knew that?).
"Techies" weep and mock at sites made by designers only. Why? Because they put form before standards, they put prettiness as their first aim and engineering last. They restrict and hold back on resolution because they think it looks good, and force you to "waste" most of your screen size and Standards are utterly unknown to them, (if dreamweaver don't do it, the designer won't produce it).
The fact is that good web design requires adherence to many standards, only a fraction of which are covered by W3C. There are rules to visual appearance, layout, typography (readbility, legibility, meaning etc...), colour, photography, information heirarchy, semantics, the list goes on and on and on...
Do the "techies" even know what an artist or designer means by each of those things?
While the designer - alone - almost never produces the perfect site (to W3C standards), does the programmer - alone - produce the mainstream consumer marketable site more frequently? I think not.
We need to expand our view of the web world. No one group has ever got it completely right. To win takes co-operation.
I take the analogy of motor engineering. It's a good analogy, because it is about producing a consumer product that requires both aesthetic and technical excellence. The team involves many different kinds of expert, each highly qualified in their field, but no one expert can style, design, build, test destrucively, test non-destructively, ammend the style and design, rebuild, then advertise and market the product.
It takes team work, and that requires respect between team members.
I wold suggest it is the same with wb design. Each team member is vital, each skill cannot be done without.
At the end of the day both "artists" and "techies" come under the business thumb, so what becomes the right "business" decision, is usually the one that we will all end up going with - which brings us right back to the beginning - the site that achieves it's purpose is the successful one - and all the arguments can jump out the window.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK distance selling regulations mean the buyer has a cooling off period of several weeks during which time they can return the goods and get a refund. Not sure how this works with downloads, but since no money has changed hands I would say the suppliers claim is tenuous at best.
I believe Abraham Lincoln once said: "I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts."
I think that ordinary people are capable of considering the rights of minorities, just as our current MPs are. Unless you are suggesting that a career polititian (perhaps corrupt and gaming the system) somehow is more qualified to understand minority issues - somehow I doubt it. I suspect that without the attendant risk of corruption we might see better decisions being made.
This is quite likely. According to one statistic I read 5% of Americans claim to have been abducted by aliens. That is more than 10 million abductions.
How big is the average assylum in the US?
I think they were Gimped in.
There is no such thing as Truth. We all cling to illusions. You just think your illusion is superior to theirs.
Gah, or course there is, it's just that none of us know all of it.
I used to have this debate with a former college lecturer all the time. He postulated that what was true for me ("my truth") was not necessarily true for him ("his truth"). While at the time we could never agree, in hindsight I realised that we were struggling not over concepts, but semantics. I think he was simply using the wrong word. He was talking about "perception" not "truth".
If not talking about perception, then we needed a new word to replace what "truth" used to mean.
There is surely a "reality", dare I use that word to describe the nitty gritty infinitesimal detail of what is actually happening, did happen and will happen. This "reality" is the truth. Meanwhile we theorise, we experiment, we test, we observe and record our "perception" of what happens in "reality". Our perception, and the "reality" may not be the same.
Nevertheless, it remains the quest of countless scientists, detectives, school teachers etc., religious or not, to try to understand the truth, the "reality".
Science does believe in truth and keeps searching for a 'grand unification theory' to explain everything in the universe? Religious people believe in truth and seek to obtain it from God. And scientists who are also religious no doubt do both.
So I argue, YES, there is such a thing as truth. Many people are looking for it in their own way. Just because our perception is limited, does not mean it is not there.
Let's not confuse "perception" and "reality". The truth is out there.
Too right, it's not about the royalty checks, it's about killing the competition.
Take "Lindows" for example. Microsoft had 2 reasons for wanting to clean them out:
So Microsoft take them to court in the USA over the brand name, and "Lindows" wins. So instead of gracefully accepting defeat, Microsoft take "Lindows" to court in a bunch of other countries, and due to lack of funds to pay lawyers for so many cases "Lindows" has no choice but to give in - they won the case in the US, but can't afford to defend their position against one of the richest coorporations in the world. You will now find "Lindows" under the new name "Linspire". Can this tactic work for other things...?
How curious that this should be picked as a target for such a law change. There is surely a legal distinction between *Correct use* and *Abuse*.
Manufacture of firearms is not illegal, in fact fireing a firearm is not illegal. Homicide however *is* illegal.
The logic that prompts this call about P2P seems to say, "If this technology can be used illegally, then we should make the technology illegal".
If true, this logic has more important problems to solve. For example:
* Close the whole internet down and make it's use illegal because of illegal spam, hate sites, and evil and illegal sites that promote other human misery, that cause more problems and misery than any form of media piracy.
* Outlaw the use of the Motor Car because they have been used for homicide, robberies, manslaughter... a whole host of other crimes worse than media piracy.
But while we know of the problems with those technologies, we know that outlawing them will not solve the root of the problems.
So why pick on P2P? and not some major carriers or contributors of Manslaughter, Homicide or worse???
Because someone has an axe to grind..? And it's not the public interest axe.
In the UK (no doubt other countries to) we have certain statutory rights regarding our purchases.
If a product is found to be "not of merchantable quality" we can get a refund. But as far as I know, unless using the product as intended causes injury or death, or other specific arrangements are in place, there is no comeback other than a full refund of the price paid, or a replacement item.
The issue with the EULA is that other arrangements might be in place, the kind that limit our rights to gain compensation possibly? I dont really know, they are too long an convuluted to be worth the agravation of decoding into plain english.
It may be that the only choice we have is to *not buy* Microsoft. After all, if the product doesn't work, why buy it?
"But we often have no alternative" I hear you say. And while that may be true, it will only show that while Microsoft products may be full of holes, no one else has done better - or we would have bought that instead.
I guess the real problem is that Microsoft really does hold the strong market position, and we just can't fight it hard enough.
From my point of view, I have no particular loyalty to Microsoft, except that virtually *all* of the software I need for my job has been released only for Windows or Mac OS. I don't have a Mac so I have to have Windows to do my job.
Why I can't get the software I need for Linux is pretty obvious (and here is where Open Source really is doing microsoft a favour), the Software companies are protected by the fact that Windows is closed source. If they start releasing their goods to linux, how long before all their code is ripped off in the name of GPL and Open Source, because they happened to need a GPL library to make their stuff work? Not my idea of a good business move. It also may not be a good business move for those companies, as Linux Desktop users probably still don't represent a large enough market to be worth investment in porting the software.
Role on the day when I can get all the software I need on Linux.
Absolutely. no argument with that.
But to build the site that achieves it's aim you have to know a bit about your audience, and also how far you. your budget, your deadlines are prepared to go for accessibility.
If we don't give a monkies for PDA users or webphone users, perhaps because they represent only 0.25% of the available market we are targeting, then we are working under a different set of priorities and site building constraints than a projects whose market is 20% PDA or Webphone.
Again, does the site achieve it's aim, if it does, it's a success.
Yeah, they want to keep their customer base "private" from competitors :)
Get those blinkers on lads, another volley of Gmail is coming over...
And there's another thing, I select "HTML Formatted", but it never accepted my
.Would that be a "Techie" or "Artist" problem?
We live and learn :-D
Ha ha ha ha, At least it's a W3C compliant solid block of text ;-)
Techies have also invented preservation of carriage returns in the text area field when submitted, they also invented JavaScript inserting of such formatting tags you mention, at the click of a button. More advanced is HTMLarea an in browser WYSIWYG editor. All can be made to degrade nicely for different browsers and operating systems if you really try. They might not all be fully W3C compliant, but W3C is not a good excuse for being archaic ;-). If we all waited for the rule book innovation would be slow indeed
(and often is).
From a commercial point of view I have to design for users who are not techies, and often barely computer literate. These users care nothing for stretchiness of site, their criticism or enjoyment of a website barely goes beyond was it easy to use? or did they accomplish what they wanted? With such design problems as these you don't have time to teach the user a system new to them, or educate them in the background technology of the web, it just has to be intuitive and natural - that can often mean more graphics, and heavier code than many techies would approve of. But ultimately you have a site with more idiot proof usability.
Though that is a very good case in point you raised. As a slashdot newbie, the fine details of having to manually mark up line breaks was lost on me - until too late. I had expected the line breaks I returned in my reply to be preserved. After all, that is quite a common feature on other forums. So I learn the hard way, don't loose any sleep over it, but think, that could have been made more obvious.
Another font, a different colour, a heading like Instructions on a different background colour, clearer instruction like You must format your text to preserve paragraphs, would have made it all stand out, and become immediately obvious though I was in a rush and in no mood to read every bit of text to decipher how it works (thats humans, a good design tries to pre-empt such things - standards or not).
It's one of those designer/artist issues, concerned about visual appearance. In this case not because it will *look* better or impress our fellow designers, but because it will be more user friendly and communicate faster. Once again there is more to a website than content and standards.
Perhaps the difference in Artist and Techie views comes from their background, Programmers come from a background where they are required to learn a new language to work and decipher code (text) as they work, and so deciphering websites without graphical helps is quite acceptable to them, while designers are concerned with symbols, images, shape and colour to communicate and so have a view point in that direction. No one is right, so long as the target audience is serviced effectively.
Interesting :-D
Ha ha ha,
In jest of course, but on a reality note, I have heard of print designers hacking the source code of pagemaker (I think) EPS's to change them to other formats.
One to think about, as SVG develops, will there really be much difference between what can be done with a PDF and what can be done with complex HTML/CSS/Scripting?
Thats a good point, PDF is both scalable, and proportionally fixed.
Let's hand the web over to Adobe, and we can all sleep easier in our beds knowing that our sites will be both visually attractive and technically sound enough to be readable on screen or printed x50,000 on a Litho press.
If the HTML/CSS/Scripting combination gets much more complex, Postscript programming will seem a doddle.
I fully concur with many points made so far, both with the "Pro Standards" and the "Pro Designer" groups. Really it's a matter of pragmatism. All websites are designed with a purpose in mind. The real measure if success is not whether the site adheres to the standards, or whether the site is aesthetically innovative. Hardly. Does the site do what it was intended to do? Then it's a success, and all the arguments can go jump out of the window. What I have seen in the threads is a battle between "techies" and "artists". But the fact remains, and my professional experience has taught me, that we need each other. One person commented that is it rare to find a programmer (who knows the standards) who is also an artist. "Artists" weep and mock at sites made by programmers alone. Why? Because they lack imagination, vibrancy, and visual appeal, they use Times New Roman to excess, the sites are allowed to stretch to the point that scientifically calculated typographic rules about readbility are broken (note: readability and legibility are two different things - how many "techies" knew that?). "Techies" weep and mock at sites made by designers only. Why? Because they put form before standards, they put prettiness as their first aim and engineering last. They restrict and hold back on resolution because they think it looks good, and force you to "waste" most of your screen size and Standards are utterly unknown to them, (if dreamweaver don't do it, the designer won't produce it). The fact is that good web design requires adherence to many standards, only a fraction of which are covered by W3C. There are rules to visual appearance, layout, typography (readbility, legibility, meaning etc...), colour, photography, information heirarchy, semantics, the list goes on and on and on... Do the "techies" even know what an artist or designer means by each of those things? While the designer - alone - almost never produces the perfect site (to W3C standards), does the programmer - alone - produce the mainstream consumer marketable site more frequently? I think not. We need to expand our view of the web world. No one group has ever got it completely right. To win takes co-operation. I take the analogy of motor engineering. It's a good analogy, because it is about producing a consumer product that requires both aesthetic and technical excellence. The team involves many different kinds of expert, each highly qualified in their field, but no one expert can style, design, build, test destrucively, test non-destructively, ammend the style and design, rebuild, then advertise and market the product. It takes team work, and that requires respect between team members. I wold suggest it is the same with wb design. Each team member is vital, each skill cannot be done without. At the end of the day both "artists" and "techies" come under the business thumb, so what becomes the right "business" decision, is usually the one that we will all end up going with - which brings us right back to the beginning - the site that achieves it's purpose is the successful one - and all the arguments can jump out the window.