I submitted this as news to OSNews the other day, lemme just quote what I said there:
The truly absurd part is that Sparkfun is made up of two real words - and their biggest part of the claim is about the root word "Spark" - so... because they've trademarked a bunch of things with their made up "Sparc" acronym, nobody can use the real word "spark" anymore?... and to think I thought the whole SyFy malarkey was absurd.
Wonder who they'll go after next... Sony for using "PlayStation" because they have "SparcStation" previously trademarked? AMD64 becuase "Sparc64" predates it?
Oh wait, those companies would be big enough to be able to afford to fight back. I wonder if SparkFun has pockets deep enough.
Well, Microsoft has launched their 'new' search engine... Here's my initial impressions.
They have missed all the lessons Google has taught us about making search SIMPLE and accessable. In fact, they have done the exact same thing in terms of bloated graphics, annoying scripts and reliance on "ain't it neat" technologies that KILLED ask.com
First load it takes forever loading some sort of background image, said image makes reading the text in the little side-bar difficult to read. Likewise the white on grey text outside their little search area is also below accessability norms in terms of contrast, the white heading texts below the image and then the menu line in the 'footer' being the worst offenders - I hope they enjoy their fines from the UK on the accessability grounds - The search box with it's akilter uneven spacing looks like a rendering error. That the results are left justified but fixed width is annoying since the width they choose is a bit too narrow.
Brand new website and the markup is malformed. This isn't the traditional validation errors you can ignore like empty alt tags, but geniune "the designer doesn't even know HTML" errors like block-level elements inside inline-level ones. This extends to the filesizes where there's 31k of markup being used to deliver 400 BYTES of content, improperly linked stylesheets, and javascript that by all indications serves no good fathomable purpose - much less the lack of graceful degredation when javascript is disabled.
It also appears that in Opera the page never finishes loading from links to files that don't even exist. Since the page is overly reliant upon javascript this means onload never fires - just brilliant. I'm seeing four different broken layouts in four different browsers...
The search results? Look like every other search engine - from fifteen years ago. Reminds me of altavista back in the day. While google has upped the ante adding the ability to white-list and black-list pages from their results, it looks like M$ has simply added tracking javascripts around all links on what is little more than a overglorified half-assed rehash of what search engines have been putting online for the better part of the past decade and a half. I think their use of (broken) scripting is supposed to help them cater the results based on what people click on - but since you don't know if the page ACTUALLY has what you want until you visit it, that's not exactly going to help tune results any.
The site is entirely typical of what I've come to expect from Microsoft so far as web technologies are concerned, which is to say it is plainly evident the people they have writing websites have no clue how to actually DO SO!!! Much like the new "live mail" this half-assed broken bloated codebase with the half-assed broken skin that doesn't even meet accessability norms should not be impressing anyone, and if anything should be resulting in people getting fired. If anything, it's an embarassment to the company of monumental proportions... but then we're talking about the company who's site for their web design tool "Web Expression" has a broken layout on Large font/120dpi systems.
Color me unimpressed.
The ONLY reason it's seeing any sort of ranking spike is launch fever - I can't see anyone finding a good reason to actually stick with it apart from joe sixpack too stupid to know anything about the internet apart from clicking on the big blue E and having it go to MSN.COM
Basically we're now throwing strategic security out the window too - BRILLIANT.
First we let soldiers blog and e-mail from an occupation zone, and now this. I'm sorry, but having the source code to milspec equipment being OSS is NOT a step in the right direction. But then, COTS itself is a bit #DDD for military application - see WinCE crashing a wobbly goblin, or the whole Aegis NT fubar. OSS might not crash as often or in the same way as COTS - but I don't even want to THINK what vulnerabilites hackers could exploit when given access to the source code because some OSS project got used on milspec hardware. If it is to be considered COTS, it should be rejected for those same reasons.
I know the WWII generation has faded from our ranks and is now fading from memory as well, but are we to forget the lessons learned as well? Loose lips sink ships? Don't murder men with idle words? Do these phrases ring any bells? There's a REASON for military secrecy, and it has nothing to do with the evil bullshit your tin-hat wearing leftist pussies claim. It is about saving lives and defeating the enemy.
We are so badly underestimating our enemies in regards to operational, strategic and logistic security, and it is now only a matter of time before it costs lives, if it has not already.
SHAME on the people running todays military if this is their idea of genius... and double shame on all of you praising it.
Re:And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT!
on
Slashdot's Vastu
·
· Score: 1
Actually, the structure is messed because I forgot slashdot tries to make the HTML be html, instead of defaulting to normal text... Been about four to five YEARS since I last posted here.
Re:And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT!
on
Slashdot's Vastu
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
ANYONE who does web coding should see right through this bullshit - a simple examination of the jokers website
http://www.webvastu.com/
Should send up warning signs to ANY but the greenest of nubes.
The 'three piece' image (WHY the hell do people do this?!?) isn't compatable with Opera or Safari... the three 'section boxes' to the right of the image have some of the ugliest formatting I've seen (It's called side padding - use it! At the same time cut back on the top/bottom, that looks like crap)...
The site renders as a crappy little stripe justified left (Much like wired, it's not bad enough having a shitbox amatuer fixed width layout, but for crying out loud center the damned thing)... fixed px sized fonts that are too small to be useful to 'large font' users... (anything LESS than 12px needs a brick upside the head, and I'm hesitant to go below 'EGA fonts' - 14px)
and the validator chokes on the doctype... Seriously whiskey tango foxtrot is this nonsense:
Wow, I wish I'd thought of finding some whack-job eastern art form to use as justification for a lack of knowing how to design a website... My BULLSHIT alarm hasn't gone off this hardcore since I first heard of "Web 2.0"... and much like Web 2.0, Penn and Teller could easily devote 30 minutes to this one.
it fish-eyes badly, doesn't have collision detection yet, and a bunch of other things... but the math is way faster.
Since his is raycasting, the use of CANVAS really shouldn't be neccessary, just position images across the screen and scale them horizontally, then it would have textures.
Slashdot Mirror
I submitted this as news to OSNews the other day, lemme just quote what I said there:
The truly absurd part is that Sparkfun is made up of two real words - and their biggest part of the claim is about the root word "Spark" - so... because they've trademarked a bunch of things with their made up "Sparc" acronym, nobody can use the real word "spark" anymore? ... and to think I thought the whole SyFy malarkey was absurd.
Wonder who they'll go after next... Sony for using "PlayStation" because they have "SparcStation" previously trademarked? AMD64 becuase "Sparc64" predates it?
Oh wait, those companies would be big enough to be able to afford to fight back. I wonder if SparkFun has pockets deep enough.
Well, Microsoft has launched their 'new' search engine... Here's my initial impressions.
They have missed all the lessons Google has taught us about making search SIMPLE and accessable. In fact, they have done the exact same thing in terms of bloated graphics, annoying scripts and reliance on "ain't it neat" technologies that KILLED ask.com
First load it takes forever loading some sort of background image, said image makes reading the text in the little side-bar difficult to read. Likewise the white on grey text outside their little search area is also below accessability norms in terms of contrast, the white heading texts below the image and then the menu line in the 'footer' being the worst offenders - I hope they enjoy their fines from the UK on the accessability grounds - The search box with it's akilter uneven spacing looks like a rendering error. That the results are left justified but fixed width is annoying since the width they choose is a bit too narrow.
Brand new website and the markup is malformed. This isn't the traditional validation errors you can ignore like empty alt tags, but geniune "the designer doesn't even know HTML" errors like block-level elements inside inline-level ones. This extends to the filesizes where there's 31k of markup being used to deliver 400 BYTES of content, improperly linked stylesheets, and javascript that by all indications serves no good fathomable purpose - much less the lack of graceful degredation when javascript is disabled.
It also appears that in Opera the page never finishes loading from links to files that don't even exist. Since the page is overly reliant upon javascript this means onload never fires - just brilliant. I'm seeing four different broken layouts in four different browsers...
The search results? Look like every other search engine - from fifteen years ago. Reminds me of altavista back in the day. While google has upped the ante adding the ability to white-list and black-list pages from their results, it looks like M$ has simply added tracking javascripts around all links on what is little more than a overglorified half-assed rehash of what search engines have been putting online for the better part of the past decade and a half. I think their use of (broken) scripting is supposed to help them cater the results based on what people click on - but since you don't know if the page ACTUALLY has what you want until you visit it, that's not exactly going to help tune results any.
The site is entirely typical of what I've come to expect from Microsoft so far as web technologies are concerned, which is to say it is plainly evident the people they have writing websites have no clue how to actually DO SO!!! Much like the new "live mail" this half-assed broken bloated codebase with the half-assed broken skin that doesn't even meet accessability norms should not be impressing anyone, and if anything should be resulting in people getting fired. If anything, it's an embarassment to the company of monumental proportions... but then we're talking about the company who's site for their web design tool "Web Expression" has a broken layout on Large font/120dpi systems.
Color me unimpressed. The ONLY reason it's seeing any sort of ranking spike is launch fever - I can't see anyone finding a good reason to actually stick with it apart from joe sixpack too stupid to know anything about the internet apart from clicking on the big blue E and having it go to MSN.COM
Basically we're now throwing strategic security out the window too - BRILLIANT. First we let soldiers blog and e-mail from an occupation zone, and now this. I'm sorry, but having the source code to milspec equipment being OSS is NOT a step in the right direction. But then, COTS itself is a bit #DDD for military application - see WinCE crashing a wobbly goblin, or the whole Aegis NT fubar. OSS might not crash as often or in the same way as COTS - but I don't even want to THINK what vulnerabilites hackers could exploit when given access to the source code because some OSS project got used on milspec hardware. If it is to be considered COTS, it should be rejected for those same reasons. I know the WWII generation has faded from our ranks and is now fading from memory as well, but are we to forget the lessons learned as well? Loose lips sink ships? Don't murder men with idle words? Do these phrases ring any bells? There's a REASON for military secrecy, and it has nothing to do with the evil bullshit your tin-hat wearing leftist pussies claim. It is about saving lives and defeating the enemy. We are so badly underestimating our enemies in regards to operational, strategic and logistic security, and it is now only a matter of time before it costs lives, if it has not already. SHAME on the people running todays military if this is their idea of genius... and double shame on all of you praising it.
Actually, the structure is messed because I forgot slashdot tries to make the HTML be html, instead of defaulting to normal text... Been about four to five YEARS since I last posted here.
ANYONE who does web coding should see right through this bullshit - a simple examination of the jokers website http://www.webvastu.com/ Should send up warning signs to ANY but the greenest of nubes. The 'three piece' image (WHY the hell do people do this?!?) isn't compatable with Opera or Safari... the three 'section boxes' to the right of the image have some of the ugliest formatting I've seen (It's called side padding - use it! At the same time cut back on the top/bottom, that looks like crap)... The site renders as a crappy little stripe justified left (Much like wired, it's not bad enough having a shitbox amatuer fixed width layout, but for crying out loud center the damned thing)... fixed px sized fonts that are too small to be useful to 'large font' users... (anything LESS than 12px needs a brick upside the head, and I'm hesitant to go below 'EGA fonts' - 14px) and the validator chokes on the doctype... Seriously whiskey tango foxtrot is this nonsense: Wow, I wish I'd thought of finding some whack-job eastern art form to use as justification for a lack of knowing how to design a website... My BULLSHIT alarm hasn't gone off this hardcore since I first heard of "Web 2.0" ... and much like Web 2.0, Penn and Teller could easily devote 30 minutes to this one.
I've been working on something similar for some time, without resorting to any browser specific objects like the CANVAS tag.
mine does 3d just like how the characters in Wolf3D worked (not the walls). You put mine and his together...
http://battletech.hopto.org/mechproject/game.html
it fish-eyes badly, doesn't have collision detection yet, and a bunch of other things... but the math is way faster. Since his is raycasting, the use of CANVAS really shouldn't be neccessary, just position images across the screen and scale them horizontally, then it would have textures.