You know, you're absolutely right. But it's far worse than you may realize. I picked up an actual, paper copy of Forbes the other day, and wouldn't you know it: It was full of ads, too. Every single two-page spread had some kind of ad on it, and some of the ads filled entire pages all by themselves! What an incredible waste of paper.
as long as you use simple CSS, you'll get the same result in a lot of browsers
So much for the "standard," huh?
Look, I guess I was unclear or something. We have these massive and baffling standards, standards that overlap, standards that contradict, standards that no mere mortal could possibly understand. Nobody conforms to them. Your solution? "Just use very simple CSS." Um. Bad solution. Bad! Go lay down!
Better solution: Take a moment to wonder if, maybe, it's the standards themselves that suck. If nobody but nobody complies with them, maybe it's not a compliance problem as much as it is a problem at the head end. Ya know?
And no, the differences most certainly are not "extremely small" compared to the old days. In the old days, it was a matter of whole features that either worked or didn't. And guess what? The HTML format was designed to fail gracefully. So if you went to a Web page that used some feature your browser didn't support, you just didn't see that part of the page. Everything else worked.
But now we're fucking with the box model. Now we're fucking with the way things are actually drawn on the page. Not which parts are drawn and which are ignored, but rather how things are drawn. When you give a browser a basic instruction, like "make this box 300 pixels wide," and the browser responds by making the box 302 pixels wide because somebody misinterpreted the baffling, bewildering spec, that's not a "very small problem." That's a massive fuck-up.
It's been a slow news day. If the increasingly inaptly named "editors" don't generate a certain minimum number of page views per day, they go on short rations.
The "c" in "CDATA" stands for "character." It's technically supposed to include character data encoded in the document's character set.
Can you put arbitrary bytes into a "CDATA" section? Sure, prolly. But there are people out there who get paid by the hour to cook up new standards for stuff we'd already figured out. You don't want them to have to go out and get real jobs, do you?
NO [ right...NO] browser fully conforms to CSS standards
Which kinda makes one question whether having such so-called "standards" is really worth all the trouble.
Amazingly, HTML compatibility was easier before it was "standards" this and "standards" that. There were certain constructs that only worked in certain browsers, sure, but we didn't have the god-awful mess of supposed-tos and should-nots that we have today.
It seems to me, from a distant perspective, that the problem with Web standards isn't that nobody adheres to them. It's that they're really shitty standards.
While I'm sure there are some people out there who think the idea of an acronym that means itself is just the funniest thing ever, the gnu (the "g" is silent; it's pronounced "nu") is one of two species of African antelopes. They have big heads, long tails and horns. They smell fairly terrible, but they're really very beautiful...as long as they're downwind.
Like I say, I'm sure there are some people who think the old "it's an acronym" joke is a real knee-slapper. But it's kind of a shame that the people who chose to name their organization after a beautiful animal turned around and dissed that animal by trying to define its name.
Once back in the office we have several dual 1.25 Ghz G4 towers and a couple dual 2Ghz powermac g5's for final rendering. These machines were each between 6k and 12k.
Between "6k and 12k" what? I doubt you're talking about US dollars, because those sound like $3,000 - $6,000 machines when bought new.
Unfortunately, technology has not yet allowed Apple to hook the 30" Cinema Display up to the Mac mini. So the possibility of combining the largest computer monitor in the world with the smallest Mac in the world is still just out of reach.
Um. Duh. Maya requires a three-button mouse. So does Shake, I think. But of the 35-million-or-so Mac users, I'm pretty confident when I say that the number of them who use Maya or Shake is small by comparison.
That's kind of the point, you see? The Mac is designed, from the ground up, to be easy to use. Throwing a control device that wouldn't look out of place in the cockpit of a fighter jet is not part of "easy to use." Hence, one button, four gestures: click, click-and-drag, double-click, click-and-hold. That's it.
It is all a Big Lie...It's all style over substance crap
You know, there are a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing.
the single button that forces her to memorize somekey+mouseclick to do basic things the rest of us do with the right mouse button
Things like what?
If we're not talking about pro applications like Shake or Maya, I can think of exactly one thing that requires a control-click. And I'm fairly certain that it's not something most people use very often.
AI attacks a human fleet by compromising its network and subverting its computers -- Battlestar Galactica or Fire Upon the Deep?
"A rag-tag band of locals come together to fight oppression by a ruthless foreign power -- the American Revolution or Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo?"
If you think that "Battlestar Galactica" and "A Fire Upon the Deep" are even superficially similar, then you either haven't seen the TV show or you haven't read the book.
No, I understood your point, but I guess I just didn't express my answer very clearly.
It seems to me that "Babylon 5" wasn't a drama at all, but rather a melodrama. "Galactica," on the other hand, deliberately eschews melodrama in favor of characterization.
That's a good example of how the writing in the old show was just nuts. Adama was the captain of a space-going aircraft carrier cum battleship, but he was also a member of some kind of mysterious ruling body, like a tribal elder or something.
Is it any wonder that Moore decided to split the character up into a military component (Adama) and a political one (Roslin)?
"Battlestar Galactica" is not similar to "Babylon 5." I say this not as an expert, because I think I probably watched maybe two entire episodes of "Babylon 5" in my life, but the differences are self-evident.
In "Battlestar Galactica," there are no aliens at all. The galaxy is a barren and rocky place, devoid of life. During the entire first season of the show, the Colonials find exactly one planet with life on it...and it turns out to be a place they came from, not one they're going to.
"Battlestar Galactica" is not mystical at all, in any way. Religion is an important theme, but it's not fuzzy, spiritual religion. It's very concrete, practical, "God is love" religion, in the case of the cylons, or a sort of non-practicing-Catholic vibe in the case of the Colonials.
The "Galactica" story is not epic. It's not big. It's very personal. Some of the best moments of the show's first season involve individual characters in their racks. Rarely do you see more than two or three characters interact at one time. There is an underlying theme of prophecy and destiny, but the few characters who believe it are considered by their companions to be crazy. Literally. Like, hallucinating, delusional, in need of medication, insane.
But more important, there are no good guys on the show. By the end of the season, every single character has fucked up in at least one major and permanent way. Nobody gets it right all the time. They just do the best they can and hope. And, not infrequently, pray.
"Babylon 5" was high-minded and rarefied and, in my opinion, pretty unapproachable. "Galactica" is intimate and grounded.
If you're looking for "Babylon 5," you'll probably be disappointed. You never know, though. You might find that, for your personal taste, a show that's the exact opposite of "Babylon 5" might be pretty darned good.
An officer doesn't get promoted for doing something. An officer gets promoted when he or she is deemed ready to take on the responsibilities that come with the next rung on the ladder of advancement. You never, ever get promoted just for being a badass.
Which is really where "Stargate" gets it wrong. They promoted Carter twice but didn't change her job once. To be fair, however, "Star Trek" screwed this up too when they took Worf from being... what was it, a Lt. to a Lt. Cmdr.? He got a promotion but stayed in the same job. That would never happen, for obvious reasons. After a promotion, you're always moved to a new job, either aboard your ship or (more often) on another ship. Because it's unreasonable to expect somebody to go to work one day with his peers and to show up at work the next day and start bossing around the guys he was goofing off with the day before.
In the case of Carter, her competence would probably work against her instead of for her. Since she's so incredibly good at her job and shows evidently no interest in career advancement, she would probably be passed over for promotion rather than fast-tracked.
In my opinion, some of the best episodes of that series are "Darmok," "The Inner Light," "The Perfect Mate" and my personal favorite of all, "Family."
You know, after writing this last night, I finally got the brilliant idea of looking it up. Guess who wrote "Family," the episode that I personally consider to be the finest hour of TV that "The Next Generation" ever put on the air?
(Actually, I take that back. It was pretty cool when they did it on "St. Elsewhere." But that's because it was a series finale and they got to break all the rules. Ditto "Newhart." But all those other times: fucking lame.)
Tell me, if we took the excess skin away from Galactica, would it still be as good? My answer is "Yes."
Then you might be having some kind of problem with your brain. You should get that checked out.
Look, there's Baltar, right? Baltar is not a mustache-twirling traitor. He's a malignant narcissist. That's his character. Six is leading him around by his gonads. Without that aspect of the story, Baltar has no purpose. He's not evil, so he's not going to go off and do bad things on his own initiative. He's being manipulated into doing bad things by a woman.
If that's never happened to you, count yourself lucky. Or start dating more. Or both. Whatever.
Sex is an important part of life. I mean, it just is. It's important like food and water are important. If it didn't come up in a show like this, it would be conspicuous by its absence. But in this case, the writers have chosen to use sex in some very specific ways that drive the story: Six and Baltar, Boomer and Tyrol, Other Boomer and Helo. Later in the season, there's even some sex-related stuff that ends up creating character tension between Starbuck and Apollo. (No, they do not end up in bed together. It's not that simple.)
The point is that sex is a thing that happens, and it affects people. It makes people do things. It drives stories. Sex for the sake of sex is gratuitous. Sex that's included in the story because it's what would happen under those circumstances and because how people react to it drives the plot isn't gratuitous. It's called "writing."
The problem with "The Year of Hell," apart from the third-grade title, was the fact that the whole business boiled down to, "It was all just a dream."
It was fucking lame when they did it on "Dallas," it was fucking lame when they did it on "St. Elsewhere," it was fucking lame when they did it on "Voyager," and it was fucking lame last week when they did it on "Enterprise."
Most importantly, the characters' lives suck just as hard as less than 50k refugees fleeing their homeworlds from the relentless attack of mechanical killing machines should.
If you're curious, by the end of the season the precise total is 47,886. Maybe 47,885. We'll have to wait until the next season to find out.
No, I don't keep track of this. The show itself does. There's a whiteboard in the President's office that's kept updated with an attention to continuity that frankly boggles my mind.
Did they finally start doing some character development in the fourth season?
As a matter of fact, they did! There was some really neat character development with Hoshi just last week.
Unfortunately, it was applied with a sledgehammer, and it happened in an episode that was poisoned by the twin clichés of the science-fiction universe, the Big Speech About How Great Humanity Is To The Advanced Aliens Who Despite Being All But Omnipotent Seem To Be A Little Stupid, and the Reset Button That Makes Everything That Happened In Acts Two And Three Go Away.
I'm a modestly well-read guy, but...what the ever-lovin' hell does "Galactica" have to do with Vernor Vinge?
That point aside, I think you're mistaken. In my opinion, if it's a combination of anything, it's a combination of a very few elements of the original "Galactica" premise, "Black Hawk Down," and 9/11.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, you're absolutely right. But it's far worse than you may realize. I picked up an actual, paper copy of Forbes the other day, and wouldn't you know it: It was full of ads, too. Every single two-page spread had some kind of ad on it, and some of the ads filled entire pages all by themselves! What an incredible waste of paper.
Ahem.
as long as you use simple CSS, you'll get the same result in a lot of browsers
So much for the "standard," huh?
Look, I guess I was unclear or something. We have these massive and baffling standards, standards that overlap, standards that contradict, standards that no mere mortal could possibly understand. Nobody conforms to them. Your solution? "Just use very simple CSS." Um. Bad solution. Bad! Go lay down!
Better solution: Take a moment to wonder if, maybe, it's the standards themselves that suck. If nobody but nobody complies with them, maybe it's not a compliance problem as much as it is a problem at the head end. Ya know?
And no, the differences most certainly are not "extremely small" compared to the old days. In the old days, it was a matter of whole features that either worked or didn't. And guess what? The HTML format was designed to fail gracefully. So if you went to a Web page that used some feature your browser didn't support, you just didn't see that part of the page. Everything else worked.
But now we're fucking with the box model. Now we're fucking with the way things are actually drawn on the page. Not which parts are drawn and which are ignored, but rather how things are drawn. When you give a browser a basic instruction, like "make this box 300 pixels wide," and the browser responds by making the box 302 pixels wide because somebody misinterpreted the baffling, bewildering spec, that's not a "very small problem." That's a massive fuck-up.
It's been a slow news day. If the increasingly inaptly named "editors" don't generate a certain minimum number of page views per day, they go on short rations.
Haven't the foggiest idea what your post was intended to mean, or what it had to do with mine. Got any clarity, brother? Spare a spot of illumination?
The "c" in "CDATA" stands for "character." It's technically supposed to include character data encoded in the document's character set.
Can you put arbitrary bytes into a "CDATA" section? Sure, prolly. But there are people out there who get paid by the hour to cook up new standards for stuff we'd already figured out. You don't want them to have to go out and get real jobs, do you?
NO [ right...NO] browser fully conforms to CSS standards
Which kinda makes one question whether having such so-called "standards" is really worth all the trouble.
Amazingly, HTML compatibility was easier before it was "standards" this and "standards" that. There were certain constructs that only worked in certain browsers, sure, but we didn't have the god-awful mess of supposed-tos and should-nots that we have today.
It seems to me, from a distant perspective, that the problem with Web standards isn't that nobody adheres to them. It's that they're really shitty standards.
While I'm sure there are some people out there who think the idea of an acronym that means itself is just the funniest thing ever, the gnu (the "g" is silent; it's pronounced "nu") is one of two species of African antelopes. They have big heads, long tails and horns. They smell fairly terrible, but they're really very beautiful ...as long as they're downwind.
Like I say, I'm sure there are some people who think the old "it's an acronym" joke is a real knee-slapper. But it's kind of a shame that the people who chose to name their organization after a beautiful animal turned around and dissed that animal by trying to define its name.
Um, isnt "hard-fightin', hard-lovin', rootin'-tootin' action" exactly what new BSG tries to be?
Nope. There's practically no action, no gratuitous womanizing. It's a very quiet, personal drama punctuated with some pretty spectacular moments.
Once back in the office we have several dual 1.25 Ghz G4 towers and a couple dual 2Ghz powermac g5's for final rendering. These machines were each between 6k and 12k.
Between "6k and 12k" what? I doubt you're talking about US dollars, because those sound like $3,000 - $6,000 machines when bought new.
Unfortunately, technology has not yet allowed Apple to hook the 30" Cinema Display up to the Mac mini. So the possibility of combining the largest computer monitor in the world with the smallest Mac in the world is still just out of reach.
Um. Duh. Maya requires a three-button mouse. So does Shake, I think. But of the 35-million-or-so Mac users, I'm pretty confident when I say that the number of them who use Maya or Shake is small by comparison.
...It's all style over substance crap
That's kind of the point, you see? The Mac is designed, from the ground up, to be easy to use. Throwing a control device that wouldn't look out of place in the cockpit of a fighter jet is not part of "easy to use." Hence, one button, four gestures: click, click-and-drag, double-click, click-and-hold. That's it.
It is all a Big Lie
You know, there are a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing.
the single button that forces her to memorize somekey+mouseclick to do basic things the rest of us do with the right mouse button
Things like what?
If we're not talking about pro applications like Shake or Maya, I can think of exactly one thing that requires a control-click. And I'm fairly certain that it's not something most people use very often.
AI attacks a human fleet by compromising its network and subverting its computers -- Battlestar Galactica or Fire Upon the Deep?
"A rag-tag band of locals come together to fight oppression by a ruthless foreign power -- the American Revolution or Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo?"
If you think that "Battlestar Galactica" and "A Fire Upon the Deep" are even superficially similar, then you either haven't seen the TV show or you haven't read the book.
No, I understood your point, but I guess I just didn't express my answer very clearly.
It seems to me that "Babylon 5" wasn't a drama at all, but rather a melodrama. "Galactica," on the other hand, deliberately eschews melodrama in favor of characterization.
you should lay off the crack pipe
Way to make friends on the Internet. Seriously, man, you should write a book.
That's a good example of how the writing in the old show was just nuts. Adama was the captain of a space-going aircraft carrier cum battleship, but he was also a member of some kind of mysterious ruling body, like a tribal elder or something.
Is it any wonder that Moore decided to split the character up into a military component (Adama) and a political one (Roslin)?
"Battlestar Galactica" is not similar to "Babylon 5." I say this not as an expert, because I think I probably watched maybe two entire episodes of "Babylon 5" in my life, but the differences are self-evident.
...and it turns out to be a place they came from, not one they're going to.
In "Battlestar Galactica," there are no aliens at all. The galaxy is a barren and rocky place, devoid of life. During the entire first season of the show, the Colonials find exactly one planet with life on it
"Battlestar Galactica" is not mystical at all, in any way. Religion is an important theme, but it's not fuzzy, spiritual religion. It's very concrete, practical, "God is love" religion, in the case of the cylons, or a sort of non-practicing-Catholic vibe in the case of the Colonials.
The "Galactica" story is not epic. It's not big. It's very personal. Some of the best moments of the show's first season involve individual characters in their racks. Rarely do you see more than two or three characters interact at one time. There is an underlying theme of prophecy and destiny, but the few characters who believe it are considered by their companions to be crazy. Literally. Like, hallucinating, delusional, in need of medication, insane.
But more important, there are no good guys on the show. By the end of the season, every single character has fucked up in at least one major and permanent way. Nobody gets it right all the time. They just do the best they can and hope. And, not infrequently, pray.
"Babylon 5" was high-minded and rarefied and, in my opinion, pretty unapproachable. "Galactica" is intimate and grounded.
If you're looking for "Babylon 5," you'll probably be disappointed. You never know, though. You might find that, for your personal taste, a show that's the exact opposite of "Babylon 5" might be pretty darned good.
An officer doesn't get promoted for doing something. An officer gets promoted when he or she is deemed ready to take on the responsibilities that come with the next rung on the ladder of advancement. You never, ever get promoted just for being a badass.
... what was it, a Lt. to a Lt. Cmdr.? He got a promotion but stayed in the same job. That would never happen, for obvious reasons. After a promotion, you're always moved to a new job, either aboard your ship or (more often) on another ship. Because it's unreasonable to expect somebody to go to work one day with his peers and to show up at work the next day and start bossing around the guys he was goofing off with the day before.
Which is really where "Stargate" gets it wrong. They promoted Carter twice but didn't change her job once. To be fair, however, "Star Trek" screwed this up too when they took Worf from being
In the case of Carter, her competence would probably work against her instead of for her. Since she's so incredibly good at her job and shows evidently no interest in career advancement, she would probably be passed over for promotion rather than fast-tracked.
In my opinion, some of the best episodes of that series are "Darmok," "The Inner Light," "The Perfect Mate" and my personal favorite of all, "Family."
You know, after writing this last night, I finally got the brilliant idea of looking it up. Guess who wrote "Family," the episode that I personally consider to be the finest hour of TV that "The Next Generation" ever put on the air?
(Actually, I take that back. It was pretty cool when they did it on "St. Elsewhere." But that's because it was a series finale and they got to break all the rules. Ditto "Newhart." But all those other times: fucking lame.)
Tell me, if we took the excess skin away from Galactica, would it still be as good? My answer is "Yes."
Then you might be having some kind of problem with your brain. You should get that checked out.
Look, there's Baltar, right? Baltar is not a mustache-twirling traitor. He's a malignant narcissist. That's his character. Six is leading him around by his gonads. Without that aspect of the story, Baltar has no purpose. He's not evil, so he's not going to go off and do bad things on his own initiative. He's being manipulated into doing bad things by a woman.
If that's never happened to you, count yourself lucky. Or start dating more. Or both. Whatever.
Sex is an important part of life. I mean, it just is. It's important like food and water are important. If it didn't come up in a show like this, it would be conspicuous by its absence. But in this case, the writers have chosen to use sex in some very specific ways that drive the story: Six and Baltar, Boomer and Tyrol, Other Boomer and Helo. Later in the season, there's even some sex-related stuff that ends up creating character tension between Starbuck and Apollo. (No, they do not end up in bed together. It's not that simple.)
The point is that sex is a thing that happens, and it affects people. It makes people do things. It drives stories. Sex for the sake of sex is gratuitous. Sex that's included in the story because it's what would happen under those circumstances and because how people react to it drives the plot isn't gratuitous. It's called "writing."
The problem with "The Year of Hell," apart from the third-grade title, was the fact that the whole business boiled down to, "It was all just a dream."
It was fucking lame when they did it on "Dallas," it was fucking lame when they did it on "St. Elsewhere," it was fucking lame when they did it on "Voyager," and it was fucking lame last week when they did it on "Enterprise."
Most importantly, the characters' lives suck just as hard as less than 50k refugees fleeing their homeworlds from the relentless attack of mechanical killing machines should.
If you're curious, by the end of the season the precise total is 47,886. Maybe 47,885. We'll have to wait until the next season to find out.
No, I don't keep track of this. The show itself does. There's a whiteboard in the President's office that's kept updated with an attention to continuity that frankly boggles my mind.
Did they finally start doing some character development in the fourth season?
As a matter of fact, they did! There was some really neat character development with Hoshi just last week.
Unfortunately, it was applied with a sledgehammer, and it happened in an episode that was poisoned by the twin clichés of the science-fiction universe, the Big Speech About How Great Humanity Is To The Advanced Aliens Who Despite Being All But Omnipotent Seem To Be A Little Stupid, and the Reset Button That Makes Everything That Happened In Acts Two And Three Go Away.
I'm a modestly well-read guy, but ...what the ever-lovin' hell does "Galactica" have to do with Vernor Vinge?
That point aside, I think you're mistaken. In my opinion, if it's a combination of anything, it's a combination of a very few elements of the original "Galactica" premise, "Black Hawk Down," and 9/11.