Re:Parents choose their baby's name
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 0, Redundant
If he's still in the NYPD he must be good at bullshitting Internal Affairs.
Re:Parents choose their baby's name
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 2, Funny
Like that is common here. Sheesh.
Re:Ah, the era of homepages
on
Jurassic Web
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· Score: 4, Funny
They were all on geocities then. Now they're all on facebook/myspace.
Yep. Those awful 90's Geocitites user-generated content pages get my vote for worst use of disk space EVAH. Here's my resume (identical to every 90's college student CIS rez) here's my girlfriend (identical to every 90's college student g/f pics), here' my Honda Civic (ditto), here's pics of my g/f's cats.
=Smidge=
They were literally the same pictures. For disk space reasons they only had a few pictures of girlfriends/cat/civics and they just generate a page by picking one of each at random. Most people had so little individuality that they didn't notice.
Actually he was talking about the Guardian, Independent, and so on. I think it applies to all UK printed media, except maybe the Economist on a good day. I think the share prices are accurate too.
Everyone knows the tabloids are crap, but it's sort of worrying that almost all the 'quality' papers are too. And BBC journalist have the "make up story by talking to people at home, take a short trip abroad for credibility" disease too.
That's not true. If there were no journalists the bloggers would just analyse and aggregate the analysis and aggregation of the other bloggers, like in video feedback.
Actually most journalists pretty much do this anyway.
My Dad stayed in Japan for a few months and liked it enormously. Now the UK media always runs the same sort of "weird Japan" stories. He pointed out that with most stories in the UK media about Japan you can tell that they flew to Japan, stayed in a hotel for a night or so, went to the bar and maybe a shopping district and went home. So the point is the weird Japan stuff is something they learned about back in the UK, probably by reading stories from other UK journalists on the internet. They're much to lazy to go and discover anything during their trip. The stories are pretty much analogous to video feedback.
And actually most of the stories in the UK are like this - they find out about conventional wisdom from the UK media and write a story about it. Not much reality gets mixed in.
I think you've missed the point of my post. I'm not saying the users are dumb, it's that they point out the obvious. Like a bad UI, or a fiddly install process. Developers don't notice that - either they've been looking past those problems for months because they want to fix stuff under the hood, or they remember it when it was worse. If you stare at crap every day, you get used to it. The users have a fresh perspective, and they can point out it is crap.
And it's funny you should mention Linux package managers. My contention actually is that you need a manager who is not a developer or at least understands non developers to point this stuff out. And you need paid customers who can pressure the managers financially if that doesn't work by threatening not to buy stuff. Otherwise it's just a bunch of developers patting each other on the back and turning out something no one apart from them uses. Like the Suse package manager.
No it doesn't. With software development the default is that software developers have great fun refactoring, improving architecture and so on. And they produce something which is appalling for usability. If you ever worked inside a software comapany you know how much work it is to be able to even build the latest code. From the perspective of developers once it builds and there aren't any showstopper bugs, everything is fine.
Users see things differently - if the install process is hard, they'll stop using the software. If the GUI is ugly or hard to use, they'll stop using it. Word of mouth will kill new sales. The product will die. If all you have is programmers on the same level, either they'll learn to love the product or they'll leave. If users complain, it's because they're too dumb to understand why the limitations are there.
The point of Bill's email is that he tries new products and tries to make these 'dumb user' type critiques of it. You need to do that with Microsoft products - people who use them don't love them unconditionally like Mac or Linux users, they barely tolerate them.
I read that in Operation Crevice they thought that web based emails could not be intercepted if they were saved in Drafts rather than sent. Needless to say this isn't the case.
Actually I sort of wonder about jihaadi websites recruiting people to fight in Iraq/Afghanistan too. Soon after 9/11 a lot of websites were shutdown. It's not impossible that all the ones left are either working for the intelligence services or bugged by them. Certainly lots of people going to fight abroad seem to get picked up by allied intelligence services.
In an odd sort of way, being able to intercept people who actually want to use force against the liberal system allows you to let them keep walking around. It's a bit like virtualisation - if you know you can catch all the attempts to bring down the system, you can leave people free to everyone try, which is sort of the point of a free society. And it's not like there aren't checks and balances - Parliament has to approve the laws and juries have to approve the convictions. And the media is free to point out if the convictions are unjust.
Of course, having non virtualisable things like Skype messes this scheme up. But look at the big picture here - historically free societies that don't protect themselves against their internal enemies got replaced with much less liberal societies. It seems like you have a choice between stable tyranny, and or a democracy that protects itself. Anarchy is just a gateway state to tyranny, it is not a model for a stable society.
On May 1, 2008, Adobe dropped its licensing restrictions on the SWF format specifications, as part of the Open Screen Project. However, Rob Savoye, a member of the Gnash development team, has pointed to some parts of the Flash format which remain closed.
However if you follow the link
After such ringing endorsements, the response in the free Flash community makes for an almost comical contrast. "Our reaction is pretty much, 'Ho-hum,'" said Rob Savoye, lead developer for the Gnash project, which is creating a free Flash player. "It's a really good thing when corporations figure out that being more open to the community is important but, at the same time, it's not a huge deal."
Similarly, Benjamin Otte, project lead at Swfdec, which is developing a library for rendering Flash animations, remarks that, "The Open Screen Project sounded more like an attempt at building mind share for Flash-like technology than any technical consortium."
This seems a bit churlish to me, to say the least.
One reason for the lack of excitement over the project in the free software world is that it omits "huge amounts" of information needed for a complete implementation of Flash. In particular, Savoye points out that the announcement contains no mention of the Real Time Messaging Protocol(RTMP) that is required for the Flash media server. Nor does it mention the Sorenson Spark Codec that is used for video encoding in Flash 6 and 7, and remains the choice of some users still for Flash video because other formats convert easily to it. Both may be encumbered by patents but, without them, the information that Adobe has released is of limited use.
Just as important, what Adobe released is not new to the free Flash community. "Pretty much all of that stuff was known," Otte says. Savoye agrees, remarking, "We figured that all out years ago, or we wouldn't have gotten as far along as we have." Moreover, although Gnash and Swfdec are clean room implementations -- that is, developed without the aid of any information from Adobe -- Savoye suggests that, "Most of this documentation, if we really wanted it, has already leaked out on the Internet years ago."
So they haven't released all the codecs and protocols the Flash platform uses. In the Sorenson case they probably couldn't even if they wanted to, because they licensed it from someone else. And it still seems like you could write a flash player based on the documents they released.
99% seems an ambitious estimate. 64-bit Flash, for example, is still in testing, and many distributions still do not include it. What about the myriad CPU architectures used in embedded devices? Different browsers? Different operating systems?
Perhaps if it were an open standard, it could be more widely supported, instead of supported only on those platforms selected by Adobe.
Not really. 64 bit Windows can run 32 bit browsers. Flash comes in both 32 and 64 bit forms for Linux.
Well, no you don't. The ATA command set allows multiple sector writes. Most filesystems will use a cluster size that is bigger than one sector. In that case you're very close to having a sector size that isn't 512 bytes.
It's not impossible to make a page that works in IE6. Still it's a good thing that you explain up front that you don't want to do that so they can go and find someone else who does. I'm sure there are a lots of people in China, India or Russia who would be quite happy to make a website that works on browser that even now is number 2 in popularity. E.g. see here
>And, by the way, your email address is easily harvestable, they (those who care) read and decode it from an image just fine. It has been done for at least a year now, and was the precursor to the breaking of many CAPTCHAs out there.
You can output the email with javascript. It will go on the page as text, but will be decoded first from an encoded string with a key, and inserted in the document on the fly. I am not aware of any robots that do Javascript, so they will not operate the script, although they will sweep through it, looking for addresses.
The idea is that modern browsers with JS get a clickable mailto link, old browsers get an unclickable link and the actual email address doesn't appear anywhere in the source code to defeat dumb harvesting.
Of course it would be no problem to harvest this email address. Thing is they'd need to write some code to do it, and that code would only work with my page. That isn't worth their time - they'd be better off breaking the captcha on something important.
In a sense it doesn't matter much if they do, I had my email address unobfuscated for ages and I'm presumably on most spam lists. This address has industrial strength spam blocking anyhow, it's designed to be public and hence spammed. Back in the old days before I had spam blocking, I do think the obfuscation helped.
I've read about CSS. And you're right, it's not complicated. But it doesn't add anything to your site apart from empty bling. That's no crime but the real problem is that CSS support varies across browsers. If you want to do cross platform CSS, you need to test on each browser and make sure you degrade gracefully on downlevel ones like IE6.
If the semantic content is really separate from the presentation as you claim you should be able to just show the semantic content to people on IE6 and skip the presentation, i.e. don't send IE6 users a stylesheet. You could white list the Firefox beta you test on for your kewl web 2.0 effects and serve the rest of us plain html.
When I see campaigns like this I can tell that the people using CSS either don't understand this or are more interested in passive aggressive political lecturing of their users than solving the problems they are paid to solve, which in this case is making a website that is accessible regardless of browser.
I use Opera, which is usually ahead of FF on standards support, but I don't really care if you serve me plain html too, since bleeding edge CSS bullshit always seems to broken, even when I try it on IE/the latest Firefox release/the latest Firefox beta which is presumably what the developer tested it on, if they tested it at all.
Your boss doesn't care if you do CSS bullshit. He does care if your CSS bullshit is used an excuse for not supporting browsers other than Firefox. And if you don't agree, please leave web page design up to the millions of Chinese and Indians who are happy to make pages work on IE and willing to work for far less than you.
Slashdot Mirror
If he's still in the NYPD he must be good at bullshitting Internal Affairs.
Like that is common here. Sheesh.
They were all on geocities then. Now they're all on facebook/myspace.
Yep. Those awful 90's Geocitites user-generated content pages get my vote for worst use of disk space EVAH. Here's my resume (identical to every 90's college student CIS rez) here's my girlfriend (identical to every 90's college student g/f pics), here' my Honda Civic (ditto), here's pics of my g/f's cats.
=Smidge=
They were literally the same pictures. For disk space reasons they only had a few pictures of girlfriends/cat/civics and they just generate a page by picking one of each at random. Most people had so little individuality that they didn't notice.
If he prefers Vista to XP he'd probably like Suse or Linspire more than Ubuntu.
Or even longer if you can get the Federal Government to bail you out.
It's not a Godwin if you don't mention the name of Chancellor of Germany between 1933 and 1945.
Is that the sound the pendant made as it swung back and forth in the classic Edward Allen Pooh story "The Pendant and the Pit?"
Time and time again, even with ie8, they have shown themselves inept at producing quality, standards-oriented software.
Yeah, and the worst thing is that it sells so well.
They have changed things.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=default+browser+site%3Asupport.microsoft.com%2Fkb&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=
e.g.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/810649
This a fix for bundled applications launching Internet Explorer instead of the default web browser, which is user selectable.
Actually he was talking about the Guardian, Independent, and so on. I think it applies to all UK printed media, except maybe the Economist on a good day. I think the share prices are accurate too.
Everyone knows the tabloids are crap, but it's sort of worrying that almost all the 'quality' papers are too. And BBC journalist have the "make up story by talking to people at home, take a short trip abroad for credibility" disease too.
That's not true. If there were no journalists the bloggers would just analyse and aggregate the analysis and aggregation of the other bloggers, like in video feedback.
Actually most journalists pretty much do this anyway.
My Dad stayed in Japan for a few months and liked it enormously. Now the UK media always runs the same sort of "weird Japan" stories. He pointed out that with most stories in the UK media about Japan you can tell that they flew to Japan, stayed in a hotel for a night or so, went to the bar and maybe a shopping district and went home. So the point is the weird Japan stuff is something they learned about back in the UK, probably by reading stories from other UK journalists on the internet. They're much to lazy to go and discover anything during their trip. The stories are pretty much analogous to video feedback.
And actually most of the stories in the UK are like this - they find out about conventional wisdom from the UK media and write a story about it. Not much reality gets mixed in.
bgsound and script tags in html emails.
Just saying.
Hey, this department is pod people. The soulless lifeless automatons are in the next corridor.
Yeah, if he'd killed them he wouldn't have had this problem.
I think you've missed the point of my post. I'm not saying the users are dumb, it's that they point out the obvious. Like a bad UI, or a fiddly install process. Developers don't notice that - either they've been looking past those problems for months because they want to fix stuff under the hood, or they remember it when it was worse. If you stare at crap every day, you get used to it. The users have a fresh perspective, and they can point out it is crap.
And it's funny you should mention Linux package managers. My contention actually is that you need a manager who is not a developer or at least understands non developers to point this stuff out. And you need paid customers who can pressure the managers financially if that doesn't work by threatening not to buy stuff. Otherwise it's just a bunch of developers patting each other on the back and turning out something no one apart from them uses. Like the Suse package manager.
No it doesn't. With software development the default is that software developers have great fun refactoring, improving architecture and so on. And they produce something which is appalling for usability. If you ever worked inside a software comapany you know how much work it is to be able to even build the latest code. From the perspective of developers once it builds and there aren't any showstopper bugs, everything is fine.
Users see things differently - if the install process is hard, they'll stop using the software. If the GUI is ugly or hard to use, they'll stop using it. Word of mouth will kill new sales. The product will die. If all you have is programmers on the same level, either they'll learn to love the product or they'll leave. If users complain, it's because they're too dumb to understand why the limitations are there.
The point of Bill's email is that he tries new products and tries to make these 'dumb user' type critiques of it. You need to do that with Microsoft products - people who use them don't love them unconditionally like Mac or Linux users, they barely tolerate them.
I think you're overestimating the terrorists. At least in the UK they try to make explosives and mess it up, try to ram a building with a car without checking the bollard spacing, and so on.
I read that in Operation Crevice they thought that web based emails could not be intercepted if they were saved in Drafts rather than sent. Needless to say this isn't the case.
Actually I sort of wonder about jihaadi websites recruiting people to fight in Iraq/Afghanistan too. Soon after 9/11 a lot of websites were shutdown. It's not impossible that all the ones left are either working for the intelligence services or bugged by them. Certainly lots of people going to fight abroad seem to get picked up by allied intelligence services.
In an odd sort of way, being able to intercept people who actually want to use force against the liberal system allows you to let them keep walking around. It's a bit like virtualisation - if you know you can catch all the attempts to bring down the system, you can leave people free to everyone try, which is sort of the point of a free society. And it's not like there aren't checks and balances - Parliament has to approve the laws and juries have to approve the convictions. And the media is free to point out if the convictions are unjust.
Of course, having non virtualisable things like Skype messes this scheme up. But look at the big picture here - historically free societies that don't protect themselves against their internal enemies got replaced with much less liberal societies. It seems like you have a choice between stable tyranny, and or a democracy that protects itself. Anarchy is just a gateway state to tyranny, it is not a model for a stable society.
Flash comes in both 32 and 64 bit forms for Linux.
64-bit is an alpha release, though (tested against "Ubuntu 8 and Fedora 11", one of which doesn't even exist).
It's not that open; you can't read the spec without agreeing not to make anything that emits SWF files.
This seems to imply that it is open
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=539834&cid=23261860
Wikipedia says that
On May 1, 2008, Adobe dropped its licensing restrictions on the SWF format specifications, as part of the Open Screen Project. However, Rob Savoye, a member of the Gnash development team, has pointed to some parts of the Flash format which remain closed.
However if you follow the link
After such ringing endorsements, the response in the free Flash community makes for an almost comical contrast. "Our reaction is pretty much, 'Ho-hum,'" said Rob Savoye, lead developer for the Gnash project, which is creating a free Flash player. "It's a really good thing when corporations figure out that being more open to the community is important but, at the same time, it's not a huge deal."
Similarly, Benjamin Otte, project lead at Swfdec, which is developing a library for rendering Flash animations, remarks that, "The Open Screen Project sounded more like an attempt at building mind share for Flash-like technology than any technical consortium."
This seems a bit churlish to me, to say the least.
One reason for the lack of excitement over the project in the free software world is that it omits "huge amounts" of information needed for a complete implementation of Flash. In particular, Savoye points out that the announcement contains no mention of the Real Time Messaging Protocol(RTMP) that is required for the Flash media server. Nor does it mention the Sorenson Spark Codec that is used for video encoding in Flash 6 and 7, and remains the choice of some users still for Flash video because other formats convert easily to it. Both may be encumbered by patents but, without them, the information that Adobe has released is of limited use.
Just as important, what Adobe released is not new to the free Flash community. "Pretty much all of that stuff was known," Otte says. Savoye agrees, remarking, "We figured that all out years ago, or we wouldn't have gotten as far along as we have." Moreover, although Gnash and Swfdec are clean room implementations -- that is, developed without the aid of any information from Adobe -- Savoye suggests that, "Most of this documentation, if we really wanted it, has already leaked out on the Internet years ago."
So they haven't released all the codecs and protocols the Flash platform uses. In the Sorenson case they probably couldn't even if they wanted to, because they licensed it from someone else. And it still seems like you could write a flash player based on the documents they released.
99% seems an ambitious estimate. 64-bit Flash, for example, is still in testing, and many distributions still do not include it. What about the myriad CPU architectures used in embedded devices? Different browsers? Different operating systems?
Perhaps if it were an open standard, it could be more widely supported, instead of supported only on those platforms selected by Adobe.
Not really. 64 bit Windows can run 32 bit browsers. Flash comes in both 32 and 64 bit forms for Linux.
If you look here
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8
Windows 88.26%
Mac 9.93%
Linux 0.83%
Add them up and you get just over 99%
Anyhow it is open swfdec and Gnash exist. And Adobe offers Flashlite for embedded platforms.
Well, no you don't. The ATA command set allows multiple sector writes. Most filesystems will use a cluster size that is bigger than one sector. In that case you're very close to having a sector size that isn't 512 bytes.
CHS disappeared ages ago. The maximum device supported was ~8 Gbyte (1023 cylinders * 255 heads * 63 sectors * 512 bytes)
There are ATA commands to determing SSD geometry - erase unit size and so on. You can mark sectors as unused too, which helps with wear levelling.
It's not impossible to make a page that works in IE6. Still it's a good thing that you explain up front that you don't want to do that so they can go and find someone else who does. I'm sure there are a lots of people in China, India or Russia who would be quite happy to make a website that works on browser that even now is number 2 in popularity. E.g. see here
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2009/February/browser.php
1. MSIE 7.x (42%)
2. MSIE 6.x (34%)
3. FireFox (17%)
4. Safari (4%)
5. Opera x.x (1%)
I bet they'll do it for less than you charge too.
>And, by the way, your email address is easily harvestable, they (those who care) read and decode it from an image just fine. It has been done for at least a year now, and was the precursor to the breaking of many CAPTCHAs out there.
You can output the email with javascript. It will go on the page as text, but will be decoded first from an encoded string with a key, and inserted in the document on the fly. I am not aware of any robots that do Javascript, so they will not operate the script, although they will sweep through it, looking for addresses.
Here's my code
The idea is that modern browsers with JS get a clickable mailto link, old browsers get an unclickable link and the actual email address doesn't appear anywhere in the source code to defeat dumb harvesting.
Of course it would be no problem to harvest this email address. Thing is they'd need to write some code to do it, and that code would only work with my page. That isn't worth their time - they'd be better off breaking the captcha on something important.
In a sense it doesn't matter much if they do, I had my email address unobfuscated for ages and I'm presumably on most spam lists. This address has industrial strength spam blocking anyhow, it's designed to be public and hence spammed. Back in the old days before I had spam blocking, I do think the obfuscation helped.
I've read about CSS. And you're right, it's not complicated. But it doesn't add anything to your site apart from empty bling. That's no crime but the real problem is that CSS support varies across browsers. If you want to do cross platform CSS, you need to test on each browser and make sure you degrade gracefully on downlevel ones like IE6.
If the semantic content is really separate from the presentation as you claim you should be able to just show the semantic content to people on IE6 and skip the presentation, i.e. don't send IE6 users a stylesheet. You could white list the Firefox beta you test on for your kewl web 2.0 effects and serve the rest of us plain html.
When I see campaigns like this I can tell that the people using CSS either don't understand this or are more interested in passive aggressive political lecturing of their users than solving the problems they are paid to solve, which in this case is making a website that is accessible regardless of browser.
I use Opera, which is usually ahead of FF on standards support, but I don't really care if you serve me plain html too, since bleeding edge CSS bullshit always seems to broken, even when I try it on IE/the latest Firefox release/the latest Firefox beta which is presumably what the developer tested it on, if they tested it at all.
Your boss doesn't care if you do CSS bullshit. He does care if your CSS bullshit is used an excuse for not supporting browsers other than Firefox. And if you don't agree, please leave web page design up to the millions of Chinese and Indians who are happy to make pages work on IE and willing to work for far less than you.